folk to vintage blues and jazz. There was a dresser and mirror flanked by two wardrobes, both filled with clothes.
Wherever Veil had gone, he was traveling light.
It struck me that, aside from the shards of personality that can always be extracted from a person's book and record collections, there was absolutely nothing
Once, soon after I'd met the painter, I'd asked him where he had been and what he had done before coming to New York City. His reply had been flat and simple; there was no offense intended, but his past, all of it, was something he preferred not to discuss. That had been fine with me. I'd liked Veil Kendry for who and what he was, and who and what he might once have been had been irrelevant to me. Indeed, after that initial conversation I hadn't given the matter further thought-until now, eleven years later, standing in this spiritually stripped cell.
Not bothering to glance at my watch because I knew it would only make me nauseated, I walked quickly to the desk and opened the middle drawer. Inside were invoices and receipts for art supplies, a checkbook, a few pens and pencils. There were no entries in the checkbook that seemed unusual, and there were no personal letters.
I closed that drawer, opened the single, deep drawer to the left. There was nothing in the front of the drawer, and as I bent over to look in the back my eye caught something mounted beneath the desk, high on a back leg: a switch. I hesitated just a moment, then reached back and flipped it. I heard a sharp click behind me, spun around, and saw that a section of the floor about the size of a door had popped up an inch or so.
At once excited by my discovery and embarrassed at just how far I was intruding into a very private man's private space and affairs, I walked quickly over to the raised section of floor, got down on my hands and knees. I pushed the panel back off its spring-loaded supports, grunted with surprise when I looked down into the hidden compartment, which was perhaps a foot and a half deep. There was a sharp odor of machine oil, and in one corner were bottles of gun oil, gun cleaning equipment, and a number of soft, oil-soaked rags. Around the edges of the compartment were brackets-now ominously empty-obviously intended to hold guns; judging from the configuration of the brackets, one of those weapons could well be a submachine gun.
At the bottom of the compartment, directly in the center, was a fairly large oil painting, obviously by Veil but painted in the kind of dark, rich, vibrant colors he had employed at the beginning of his career, but which he hadn't used for years. The style, the brushstrokes, were undeniably Veil's, but this painting was unlike any of his other work I had ever seen. To begin with, the single canvas was complete in itself and painted in a totally realistic style.
It was also jarring. In the painting, black-pajama-clad and uniformed Asiatics armed with carbines and semiautomatic weapons moved stealthily along a narrow trail winding through thick jungle growing over the foothills of a cloud-shrouded mountain range that rose in the distance. Hovering over the entire scene, rising over the misted mountains and suspended above the armed figures, was what could only be described as an angel, albeit a most unusual one. The suggestion of wings on its back and a halo around its head were composed of fire and dark smoke. The angel wore a long, flowing white robe covered with strange, mystical symbols colored magenta, crimson, and brown. Bullet-choked bandoleros crisscrossed the angel's chest, and he brandished a submachine gun. Long, thick yellow hair was whipped by a fierce wind that apparently affected nothing and nobody else in the painting. The angel had pale blue eyes, handsome features, unusually high cheekbones, and a strong chin. His lips were drawn back in a grimace of pain or rage, or both.
That long, yellow hair of the figure in the painting was now liberally streaked with gray, and the flesh over the high cheekbones was no longer stretched quite so taut; there were more shadows under the eyes that remained a kind of glacial blue, but the face was nevertheless unmistakably that of Veil Kendry as he must have looked more than twenty years before.
When I lightly touched the surface of the painting, I found it still tacky; it had been painted recently, within the past twenty-four hours. I gripped the canvas by the edges of its woooden stretch frame, carefully lifted it up and out. As I did so, I was startled to find a large, bulky manila envelope beneath it. My name, in black oil paint and written in Veil's familiar hand, was printed in large block letters across the face of the envelope.
Setting down the painting, I picked up the envelope, ripped open one end, and dumped the contents on the floor. A quick count with trembling fingers told me there was ten thousand dollars, in hundreds and fifties, spread out before me. I shook the envelope, but nothing else came out, and a look inside confirmed that the envelope was empty. There was no note.
After stuffing the money back into the envelope, I rose and hurried to the phone extension in the kitchen. This time I reached Garth at his apartment.
'Yo, brother.'
'Mongo, where the hell are you?'
'Veil's place.'
'What the hell are you doing there? You know, you just caught me; I was on my way out the door. Want to try and guess where I was going?'
'Garth, listen-'
'As a matter of fact, I was afraid I was going to be late for a very heavy lecture my brother is giving this morning to law enforcement people from all over the world. This brother of mine is supposed to be some kind of expert on serial murderers, which doesn't surprise me at all; loonies love him. Anyway, I'm very proud of this brother. There are a lot of cops from a lot of different places who arrived in town a few days early to see the sights, and I've been spending a lot of time getting drunk with them, bragging about my brother and telling them what a great speaker he is. By the way, do you plan to show up?'
'Just shut up and listen to me, Garth. This is more important.'
'I'm listening,' Garth said seriously. 'Are you all right?'
'I'm all right, but I've been here all night and Veil hasn't shown up. I'm almost certain he took off after someone winged a shot at him; there's a bullet hole in one of his windows.'
I paused for a moment, debating whether or not I should tell Garth now about the weapons Veil was undoubtedly carrying, decided that it would only cloud the more important issue. 'I told you that he left his loft open, with all the lights on. It felt all wrong, and that's why I stuck around. I found the bullet hole this morning.'
There was a pause, then: 'Explain to me the connection.'
'After I found the bullet hole, I started poking around the place. I got lucky and found a secret compartment. Inside, I found an oil painting and an envelope, addressed to me, with ten grand in cash inside.'
This time there was a much longer pause. 'Very strange, Mongo,' Garth said at last. 'Just like your friend.'
'I want you to forget about the lecture; I'll give you a blow-by-blow description tonight, over steak and whiskey sours. I'll take care of that business, but I'd like you to go down to the station house and file a missing persons report on Veil Kendry. Now.'
Garth thought about it. 'It's too soon,' he finally said. 'And you're not a relative. You have no legal standing to-'
'I'm his friend. He's in trouble, Garth.'
'Any signs of a struggle in the loft? Blood? Overturned furniture?'
'No,' I replied reluctantly.
'Then what's the problem? It wouldn't be the first time somebody went out, left the lights on, and forgot to lock the door.'
'You don't understand; you have to be here. I know he's in trouble.'
'You say. Kendry doesn't get in trouble; he gives it to other people.'
'I told you somebody took a shot at him. You don't seem to be taking that very seriously.'
'Wrong. The problem is that you don't know for certain that somebody took a shot at
'Garth-!'
'Did you find the bullet, or another hole where it hit?'
'Garth, the loft's big as a Goddamn football field.'
