The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues Read Free Page B

painting said nothing about the lawyer, nothing about the artist. It was a slick and shallow illustration. Perhaps “slick” was more charitable than “third-rate,” or should she return to “trim”?
    “Ready for the last question?” Garson stepped back to squint at his canvas. “Now, in one word and only one word, describe. . . .”
    A bell rang. “Excuse me,” Dickory said. She hastened out of the studio and down the hall stairs, thankful that one of her duties was to open the front door to strangers.
    A little man in black scampered through the front door and into Mallomar’s apartment. His overcoat, over-long and overlarge, surrounded him like a carapace. Beady eyes darted suspiciously between his wide-brimmed hat and upturned collar. He seemed to move sideways, like a crab. No, “crab” sounded too threatening for that inconspicuous little shrimp.
    “Who was at the door?” Garson asked.
    “Shrimp,” Dickory replied.
    Garson nodded, intent on his canvas. “That’s the other new tenant.” Suddenly he spun around. “Did he tell you his name?”
    “No, not unless his name is Out-of-My-Way-Punk.”
    Garson threw back his head and crowed a cheer that sounded like “yee-ick-hooo,” then raced around his studio looking for something called a mahlstick. Thinking he had lost his senses, Dickory pretended to search.
    “Ah, here it is.” He walked toward her, holding the long aluminum rod with a balled end that easel painters use as a handrest when brushing in fine details. Raising the mahlstick high into the air, he brought it down with a light tap on Dickory’s shoulder. “Dickory Dock,” he announced solemnly, “I dub you Apprentice to Garson.”
    Dickory looked puzzled.
    “You’re hired, Dickory. The name of the little man you so accurately described is Shrimps Marinara.”

3
     
    Apprenticed and awarded the keys to the house, Dickory was set to the task of cleaning the taboret that stood next to the velvet-draped easel.
    “Roy G. Biv,” Garson said when he opened the taboret drawers to show her where the pigments were stored. That’s all he said: Roy G. Biv. He said nothing more about the artist who painted at that easel nor why the canvas was covered, and Dickory did not ask. That Roy G. Biv was an artist with messy working habits was obvious from the scruffy brushes stiff with paint and the haphazardly squeezed tubes that lay in disarray, uncapped and oozing, on the dirty cabinet top.
    Dickory found the matching cap for a tube of cadmium orange and screwed it on tightly, then Naples yellow, while Garson applied glaze upon glaze to the lawyer’s handsome face. Unlike Roy G. Biv, Garson was extremely neat; his working area, clean and well-organized.
    For the next several days Garson neither spoke nor acknowledged Dickory’s presence as he painted the uninspired portrait. Dickory capped and recapped the same tubes of cadmium orange and Naples yellow. Every evening she left the second taboret clean, only to return the following afternoon to a sticky, smeary mess.
    No stranger came to the door; the telephone did not ring. Except for Manny Mallomar swearing at Isaac Bickerstaffe, who was helping him move some heavy filing cabinets into the downstairs apartment, the afternoons were silent. Oppressively silent. At one point Dickory almost started a conversation with the manikin seated in the chair before her, the larger-than-life jockey in orange and yellow silks.
    Cadmium orange. Naples yellow. Roy G. Biv was painting the jockey, but she had yet to see either the artist or his canvas that was hidden under the velvet drape.
    Dickory did meet a familiar figure leaving the studio when she arrived one day—a balding, sour-faced man with blubbery lips. Only after some effort did she recognize him as the lawyer in Garson’s painting, who had come for his last sitting. His ugliness had been well-disguised by the artist’s brush.
    “What time is it, Dickory?”
    Surprised to hear Garson speak,