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leaning out the window, elbows on the sill, a cigarette dangling from his tight bps, like the lonely men you see looking out of tenement windows in the city. Even Magritte was done in gray, so that the painting resembled a black-and-white photograph. It was called he never read the surgeon general s report.
    I began to wander around the loft, just to get a feel for the space and to see where things were. I wanted Dashiell to take a look at things, too, the way dogs do, with their noses. So as I walked and he sniffed, every once in a while, I told him, “Smell it, good boy!” to let him know he wasn’t just being nosy, he was working. I never know what Dash will come up with, but I always know that it will be very different from what I can “see.” I put the kettle up, took out a big white mug, and found a box of Earl Grey tea bags. It was a cook’s kitchen—good equipment, lots of expensive, shiny copper-bottomed pots hanging above. There was no microwave, but there w as a Cuisinart and a professional-size mixer.
    Dash and I continued wandering while the kettle heated. Cliff’s bedroom, facing west, was high enough to get good light even though it faced the back of a building on Wooster Street. There was enough space for the light to filter down, enough to give the room a lovely cast, but not enough to blind you when you were trying to sleep. The bed, unmade, was a double, and the sheets and quilt were white, as were the walls, the floor, the rug, and the long, low painted dresser.
    There was a four-panel painting hanging over the bed, tilted up. In the first three panels there was a man asleep in a bed, in the very bed beueath the portrait, down to the last detail. Those three pictures were identical but for one detail, a slight change in the position of the head on the pillow, a dark head of hair poking out from the white quilt, the face not visible. In the last panel, the bed was rumpled and empty. Somehow I was sure the mysterious man was Louis Lane, that in this way, he did indeed sleep over.
    Above the dresser there was a smaller painting with a dark, brooding, and sexually suggestive look, a Diane Arbus—y portrait of two young boys, one on each side of the canvas. The empty space between the boys gave the portrait a palpable tension. Both boys looked ahead, at the viewer, as if unaware of each other. They were nude. The boy on the left was a cherubic-looking six- or seven-year-old, with large, apprehensive hazel eyes. The boy on the right, the older of the two, a ten- or eleven-year-old, had a lewd expression on his face. In the usual spot, it said les and mor.
    Cliff’s work was more intellectual than emotional, more Magritte than Matisse. Even the disturbing pieces had a coldness to them; they were either fascinating or clever but kept the viewer at a distance rather than embracing him, rather than bringing him into the painting or into the heart of the artist. Whatever emotion was visible was well controlled, as if the hurt could be displayed visually but without the accompanying feeling. I wondered how the work reflected the man, but it’s not possible to put together a person from the pieces of his life. You can’t even come close.
    At the side of the bed there was another Magritte, the Clifford kind, the chestnut-and-white dog flying over the rooftops of what appeared to be Paris, a basenji angel with creamy, feathered wings. I wondered if Louis had seen good boy, and if he had indeed been jealous of his demanding, adored rival.
    I opened the drawers of the nightstands and pawed through the dead man’s personal stuff— condoms, K-Y jelly, handcuffs, nothing unusual.
    I opened the closet and looked at the clothes, good-quality pants and jackets and lots of them, not the kind of clothes I’d expect to find in a poor artist’s closet. Jack, who dressed like a peacock when he wasn’t filling cavities (no pun intended, the man a dentist), had introduced me to designer clothes, and now I could tell