Kisser (2010)

new arrivals.
    Ten minutes later he heard a hubbub from the other end of the room and turned to see a knot of people gathered around a picture. He wandered over to see what was happening and saw that the picture had been slashed from one corner to another. Apparently, straight razors were coming back into vogue, he thought.
    He looked around and saw Hildy Parsons and Derek Sharpe on the other side of the room, studiously looking away from the damaged painting.

15
    THEY SAT AT Stone’s favorite corner table at La Goulue, on Madison Avenue, sipping their drinks and looking at the menu. The waiter, a young Frenchwoman with a charming accent, came over, told them about the specials, and stood ready to take their order.
    Rita ordered sweetbreads and Dover sole, while Stone went for the haricots verts salad and the strip steak. He picked a bottle of Côtes du Rhône, the house red.
    “I know you want to know more about Derek Sharpe,” Rita said.
    “I’d like to hear anything you can tell me,” Stone replied. “I confess I don’t understand why women are attracted to him.”
    Rita sipped her wine while she thought about that. “I think it’s a combination of the bad-boy thing and the art, and I should place quotes around that.”
    “Not good, huh?”
    “He’s an abstract painter, the sort who looked at Jackson Pol lock’s stuff and thought he could do that. Do you remember a little documentary film called The Day of the Painter ?”
    “Refresh my memory.”
    “A fisherman lives in a shack on the shore. He sees some Pollocks in a magazine, so he buys some buckets of paint and a big sheet of plywood, puts it on the foreshore next to his shack, and paints it white with a roller. Then he stands on his deck a few feet above the plywood and spills dollops of paint onto the white surface of the plywood. Finally, he goes down to the foreshore with a power saw and cuts the plywood into smaller squares, then he sells them as abstract paintings.”
    “That’s a funny idea.”
    “That’s the kind of painter Mr. Sharpe is. If someone criticizes the work, then they just don’t have the artistic taste or mental capacity to appreciate it, and he raises the price.”
    “He actually gets galleries to show this stuff?”
    “No. When everybody turned him down, he hired a publicist to plant stories in the papers about him and then started selling out of his studio. He gets a prospective buyer down there, and he’s quite a good salesman, spewing gobbledygook about passion and genius, and people fall for it.”
    Their dinner arrived, and Stone tasted the wine.
    “Tell me about the drug rumors,” Stone said. “I suppose that’s what they are—rumors.”
    “Well, yes, but not entirely. I know someone who bought half a kilo of marijuana from him, and I’ve heard secondhand stories about his dealing in coke: not little bags, nothing smaller than an ounce, but as much as a kilo.”
    “Why has no one put the police onto him?”
    “The buyers are not going to turn him in—he’s their connection—and the nonbuyers don’t know about it, I guess.”
    Stone found Sharpe’s card in his pocket and looked at it. “That’s a pretty expensive part of SoHo these days, isn’t it?”
    “Yes, it is. Since I’ve been aware of him, he’s moved twice, both times to a bigger and better place. He bought the building he’s in now; he has a garage on the ground floor, his studio on the second, and his apartment on the third. He rents out the two floors above him.”
    “How did Hildy become involved with him?”
    “I’m not sure, but she probably met him at an opening much like tonight’s. That’s the sort of event where he does his trolling.”
    “What can you tell me about Hildy’s relationship with her father?”
    Rita sighed. “I love Philip, and I wish I could say that he’s the sweet, adoring, indulgent father and that Hildy is an ungrateful little shit, but it’s not really like that. Philip is an enclosed man, and he doesn’t let much into his life that isn’t art or people associated with it.”
    “He told me that he thought he had left too much of her upbringing to help,” Stone said.
    “That’s an understatement. After his wife died, he hardly saw Hildy. I doubt they had a meal together when she was between the ages of six and sixteen. Her grandmother hired the governesses, chose the schools, and complained about his parenting or lack thereof, but she never hauled him into court and tried to take