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Steffie Does Art

by Marian Allen

The waterfront promenade was lit by street lights made to look like gaslights. The OG effect was rather spoiled by the multi-colored electric lights strung between them, but nobody in the crowd seemed to care. The holiday jollity continued, with only a relatively few people actually going into the newly opened art show, the reason for the celebration.

Steffie wouldn’t be going in. She had only come to pick up a trail. This where the young woman had been seen last. Seen before she had vanished. Before her father, working under the secret sponsorship of Steffie’s agency, had received a ransom call. Before he had received no second ransom call. Before he had received a call from the local police, giving him the message no parent should ever hear.

It had happened so fast, Steffie had hardly had time to begin looking for the girl, but this was where she had last been seen, and now Steffie was looking for someone else.

#

“Surely the police can handle it,” she had been told, and she agreed that they probably could. Any kidnappers sloppy enough to kill their victim before they got their payoff would be sloppy enough to be caught, sooner or later. Then, with any luck, they would be tried, convicted, and jailed.

Jail was too good for them.

#

Steffie had taken vacation days before she could be ordered to let it go. Now she had the scent and her vacation could really begin.

#

The beergarten was all but deserted this early in the day, although it was apparently beer o’clock for a few people. The two men at the corner table appeared to be grumbling at one another about something. The words “your fault” and “I told you” became more easily audible as the conversation progressed and the levels in their mugs descended.

One shushed the other and elbowed him. They looked across the patio and saw Steffie watching them.

She made no sign she had heard them. She made no sign she hadn’t.

#

At a roadside diner, two men at a window seat shoveled meatloaf and mashed potatoes into their maws, barely chewing before they swallowed.

In a car outside, Steffie watched them through binoculars.

The young woman had only been out of college for two years. She had showed great promise in sculpture and art criticism. She had been working in the graphic art department of a department store that was just getting big enough to need one and almost big enough to use an agency instead of one young woman. She had been calling her father for reassurance every time she got a call-back interview with a different potential employer. She had been working on an invitation-only month-long exhibit for an art gallery opening.

One of the men spotted Steffie. She had parked and angled her binoculars so the sun would flash off them. She had begun to wonder if they were blind or just supremely unobservant, but they had finally seen her.

By the time they had paid and come into the lot, she was gone.

#

Word came to her that the men were having trouble finding work. The people who usually hired them preferred to meet them in public places, where the employer could pretend he was sitting alone while they sat nearby and got their assignment out of the side of their employer’s mouth. They no longer wanted to get their assignments in public places, and they were not, by definition, the sort of men one wanted to meet in a lonely place.

Of course, they sometimes worked on personal projects. That was what the kidnapping had been. The professor, the father of the young woman they had taken, was reasonably well off, and the ransom demand had been one he could have met; not enough for them to retire on, but they didn’t intend to retire on it. Perhaps they had wanted new cars. Perhaps they had wanted fancy watches.

#

The floor of the casino was vast and the noise, though slightly softened by carpeting and careful acoustic design, was constant.

One man played blackjack. Steffie made sure he saw her watching him. The other man played roulette. When she vanished from the first man’s line of vision, she slid into the second man’s.

Steffie had seen the young woman’s picture. Pretty, with long, dark hair, large eyes, and a small but full mouth, she could have been fourteen or twenty-eight. Her smile had been brilliant.

The men left the casino through different doors at different times.

Steffie left after the second man.

The first man came up behind her, and they had her where they wanted her: in a lonely place.

#

The gallery director was shocked to find the young woman’s exhibit space occupied when she unlocked in the morning. They had left the space, occupied by the cages the young woman had installed before her disappearance, in place, a statement of her presence and her absence, a meaningful exhibit in its solidity and its emptiness.

Now, on the shelf inside each cage, stood a red clay head, remarkable in their reality despite the deliberate crudity of their execution.

A friend of the young woman – or perhaps her bereaved father – must have gone into her studio, retrieved the pieces she hadn’t had time to install, and brought them. Some employee must have let them in. Possibly the night watchman? It didn’t matter. The installation was brilliant.

It wasn’t until the end of the month that the smell leached through the clay.

The End

Possibly a bit obvious, but there it is.

MY PROMPT FOR TODAY: Photograph by Robbie Cheadle and the death of my favorite character in the K-drama Sara and I are watching, for which the killers didn’t pay with their lives. I promised Sara that Steffie would kill them today.

MA