A Grave Talent (24 page)

"A quiet, residential area with private houses, trees, dead-end streets. Looks vulnerable, but the sort of place you can plaster with eyes and ears--"

"No."

"Casey--"

"It is not my house, Al. No."

"Where, then? My place? One bedroom, bald and open, a busy street, neighbors three feet away on both sides."

"A hotel."

"Oh, well, hey, how about putting her in the county jail, with a string of crumbs leading to her and a piece of twine tied to the door to slam it shut behind him? For Christ's sake, Casey, he's not stupid. Anything unnatural and he'll sit tight and wait for six months, a year. He's capable of it. It's got to be natural, as natural as having her go to the home of a friendly police officer to recuperate and be half-heartedly watched over, because the police don't really think he'll try again."

"How would he find her? I'm not exactly listed in the phone book."

"A judicious press leak, perhaps?"

"Oh, God, Al!" There was real pain in her voice, and he relented.

"Not your address, just a couple of vague hints."

"Al, no, please don't ask me to do this."

Hawkin did not answer. He looked at the precarious ash on his cigarette and reached for the decorative ashtray on the table. He concentrated on the ash for a moment longer, took a final draw on the stub, and proceeded to grind it out methodically, like an apothecary working a mortar and pestle. His face was without expression, and when he spoke it was in the manner of a recitation of facts.

"You are right, the house does not belong to you. The house you live in is owned by one Leonora Cooper, Ph.D., a practicing psychotherapist who specializes in art and artists, particularly among members of the gay community. She was at Cal the same time you were. You have rented a room in her house for the last twenty-one months. That is all I need to know about your home life." His hard blue eyes came up and drilled into her wide brown ones. "All I need to know," he repeated, "unless and until your home life begins to interfere with your work. Is that understood, Martinelli?"

"Understood, sir," she said. Her voice was even, but he was beginning to know her well enough to see the effort of control in her jaws and hands.

"Good. This is not an order, I have no right to do that, but I would like you to ask your housemate Lee if she would be willing to move into a hotel for a couple of weeks, at our expense, of course, to give this a try."

"She won't go."

"You'll ask?"

"All right, God damn it, yes, I'll ask. But she won't go."

She wouldn't. Kate knew without thinking that there was no way Lee would go while the painter of
Strawberry Fields
was under her roof.

She also knew that Hawkin was right, that the best trap for Lewis was one that looked like no trap. She looked up at him, and caught on his face the same expression she'd seen in the parking lot outside the restaurant--approval, sympathy, and an odd element of pride. It was gone in an instant, and he stood up.

"The last few days have put you behind, so I told Trujillo he was to be available for you today. He'll bring you up to date, not that there's that much to tell. I'm going up to Tyler's Road to have a chat with Tommy and a look 'round at Angie's but I'll be back by six. Feel like going to dinner? My treat. I'll even drive."

"Sounds great," she lied. Her appetite had been ground out by the hospital air, and she doubted she would feel like eating.

"Trujillo recommended a place."

She made an effort.

"Tofu enchiladas?"

The flash of his grin made the effort worthwhile.

"A first rate Italian place, he swears. I was hoping for some edible veal. Six o'clock, then? To be back by eight?"

"I'll be ready."

He walked to the door and paused with his hand on the knob.

"Thank you, Casey." He pulled the door open, and the sounds of the hospital drifted in.

"Al?" He looked back at her. "My friends call me Kate."

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Shortly before six Hawkin reappeared and swept Kate out by one of the lesser exits. He was in a strangely ebullient mood and hummed some vaguely familiar tune that she thought might be Bach or Beethoven, whom she tended to confuse, and ground the gears in Trujillo's sports car. They were seated in a quiet corner, draped with napkins the size of small tablecloths, and presented with three-foot-tall menus, a wine list the thickness of a novel, and a waiter who identified himself as Phil, who for the next three minutes proceeded to rattle off the day's specialties before he vanished into the gloom. Hawkin looked at Kate, and his lips twitched.

"Did you get that, Martinelli?"

"Something about pasta, and fish, I think."

"Right, I'll have the veal parmigiana."

The antipasto was good and they were hungry, Kate to her surprise, Hawkin because he loved to eat. The salad was served before the entree (chilled forks, a pepper grinder the length of Phil's arm), and Kate could stand it no longer.

"All right, Al, give. You've been clucking like a mother hen. What's up? You haven't found Lewis--you'd have told me that."

"No, not yet. But I've got the last pieces of the puzzle now. It's a nice, smooth picture, and I'm very glad to have that much."

"Your talk with Tommy Chesler this afternoon? It was successful?"

"The talk, plus a bit of honest-to-God, old-fashioned, snooping-about type detecting. I found a copy of this-- behind a hidden panel, can you believe it?--in some shelves in Lewis's cabin. Angie's cabin."

"This" was an issue of
Time
magazine from the previous summer. The copy Hawkin laid on the table was stamped with the name of the local library, and had a date-due card clipped inside the cover. The other was undoubtedly in the police lab.

"Look at page seventy-two," he said, and stretched across to steal the candles from two neighboring tables so she could see.

It was the article on Eva Vaughn, the mysterious genius of the brush (as a caption read). The left-hand page showed three of her paintings, all from the New York show. The right-hand page held
Strawberry Fields
and the beginning of the article, which continued on page seventy-four with a discussion of the revival of art as psychological revelation and social criticism. A jazzy three-color bar graph, the bars represented by stylized brushes, illustrated the phenomenal rise in prices brought by works of living artists.

Hawkin reached across and flipped the page back to the beginning, then tapped one of the three reproductions, which showed two very small, grubby, naked children squatting on a dirt road, heads together, studying something on the ground between them. One of them looked vaguely familiar, and after a moment Kate realized it was Flower Underwood's little hellion who had dismantled pens and sprayed her with milk while she had tried to interview the mother.

"Tommy Chesler helped her crate this one up last June. In August this article came out, but Tommy didn't see it until October, up in Tyler's room. He stole the magazine--took me twenty minutes to convince him I wasn't going to arrest him--and kept it in his shack next to his bed. Three or four weeks later--he wasn't sure about the date, but it was before Thanksgiving and after the first rain, which for your information was from the twelfth to the fifteenth of November--his buddy Dodson saw it lying there, and Tommy, who was just bursting to tell somebody about his role in getting that picture into
Time
, told him all."

"And within two weeks the Jamesons were burgled and Tina Merrill was dead."

"Yes, indeed. He can move fast when he wants, but then we knew that already, didn't we? So you see the nice clear portrait of a two-bit punk who can't stand it when someone gets the better of him. As a child he kills dogs and cats when he's angry with the owners, and he ends up with getting the preacher's only daughter pregnant and then beating her up. He goes away for two years, I think to Mexico--his only decent grades when he went back to school were in Spanish--learning God knows what tricks and having himself tattooed along the way.

"For some reason, boredom probably, he decides to go back to Mama for a while and puts himself into a small-town high school to strut around. Where he meets Vaun. Little Vaunie, who falls for his charm and his recreational poisons until she decides she's had enough and three weeks later very mysteriously murders a child she's fond of."

"I wouldn't want to have to go to the D.A. with only that in my hand," Kate said unhappily, and saw the last of the day's ebullience fade from Hawkin's face.

"Couldn't you just see it in court? 'So, Inspector Hawkin, you would have the jury believe that Andrew Lewis let himself in through the back door of a house, strangled a strange child, undressed her, and arranged her body to look like it did in a painting, all to get back at the child's babysitter who had hurt his pride?' "

"But you think that's what happened."

He was saved from the immediate need to answer by the arrival of Phil with their entrees. The waiter arranged their plates and hovered over them until Hawkin glared at him and he slunk off, hurt. They each had taken several hungry mouthfuls before Hawkin answered her question, obliquely.

"I came across a study recently. It said that as many as a half a percent of all suspects charged with violent crimes are wrongly convicted. I can't believe that, but even if you reduce it by a factor of one hundred, that still leaves eight or ten every year.

"And you think Vaun Adams is one of those."

He sighed. "I'm afraid I do."

Both of them concentrated on the food for a while, although their pleasure was dulled. It was hard not to take a failure of the judicial system as a personal failure.

"So," Kate prompted.

"So Vaun goes through a mockery of a trial, is sent to prison, gets out, travels, ends up on Tyler's Road. He may have known she was here, or he may have come across her at the 'Faire' entirely by accident, but however it happened he found her there three years ago, and when she didn't recognize him because of the beard and the years and the hell she'd been through, he decided to stick around.

"It took him a few hours, but he found Angie that day, a simple, abandoned woman with a small child. She was charmed--God, I'm beginning to hate that word! And in no time at all there he was, living next door, unrecognized, to a woman he'd sent to prison. The one thing that strikes me as odd is that he stuck around Vaun for two years without doing much of anything, other than going off every few days to do some kind of work in the Bay Area. Probably something illegal."

"Tyler's Road would be very inconvenient, but plenty far enough from San Jose to make him feel safe."

"Maybe. At any rate, he plays this little game, living half a mile away, transporting her paintings--already crated--for her, but keeping away from her so her artist's eyes don't see who's under the beard. Until November, when all-trusting Tommy Chesler tells him that he helped box up the painting shown on page 72 of
Time
magazine, and Lewis realizes that little Vaunie isn't just making a few dollars out of her canvases, she's an internationally recognized artist whose paintings bring in five and six figures. It may have been the money that got to him, and the thought that if eighteen years before he'd played his cards right, he would now be in charge of that income. Maybe it was just the sheer effrontery of the woman, to become such a stunning success despite his efforts to crush her. Either way, his knack for a clever revenge comes into play, and he works out a way of first driving her around the bend, then destroying her reputation, and finally killing her, making it look like suicide."

Kate pulled the magazine back beside her plate, and with her left hand began to turn over its pages. She remembered it now. This article, like the one she had waded through in the glossy art magazine, was also bipartisan, divided into a pro and con. A reflection, no doubt, of the ambiguous attitude of the art world at large toward Eva Vaughn. A few phrases caught her eye, the names of Vermeer and Rembrandt again, and Berthe Morisot.

She glanced at the final paragraphs. The pro writer ended with:

In the thirteenth century the painter Cimabue happened across a young and untrained peasant boy sitting by the road drawing remarkable sheep on a stone. The child's name was Giotto. He went on to surpass his master, and it was his reworking of Gothic forms to include drama and human emotions that paved the way for the Renaissance and changed the face of European art forever. Now in the late twentieth century we have, appropriately enough, a woman, Eva Vaughn, coming to bring form and formalism back to abstract emotionalism. She has brought craft and the human heart back, in forms we thought to be drained empty, and even the most jaded are forced to see classical Realism with new eyes. Giotto's revolution came at the right time. It remains to be seen whether the vessel refilled by Ms. Vaughn can contain her.

On the other hand:

It is impossible to deny the sheer raw talent in these pictures. It is, however, a pity that such power has not been turned to saying something new, instead of a cautious, deliberate reworking of threadbare forms. Paul Klee once said that the more horrific the world, the more abstract its art. If we may apply that theory to the individual, when faced with the style of Eva Vaughn, one can only assume that the artist has led a very sheltered life indeed.

"Sheltered," Kate snorted.

"Ironic, isn't it? The rest of the article wasn't bad, but to end by quoting a man who obviously has no sense of history, and cap it off with a logical fallacy--I wonder if the writer'll be embarrassed when this thing breaks."

"It will break, won't it? It'll all be in print before the week is out."

"Bound to be. No more coffee, thanks." This last was to the waiter, who returned bearing a discreet little tray with two chocolate mints and the bill. It had been an unimaginative menu but a satisfying dinner, and after his preliminary burst of eloquence Phil had left them alone. Hawkin peeled several crushed bills apart and dropped them in the neighborhood of the tray, and looked at his watch.

"Quarter to eight. Hope she's awake. I'd like to sleep in my own bed tonight."

Vaun was drowsing on her pillows after the effort of a meal and bath, but her eyes snapped open when the two detectives walked in. Gerry Bruckner was sitting at the small corner table hunched over a neat stack of typescript with a pen in his hand. A fresh vase of roses, pink and yellow, glowed on the table next to him.

Kate was stunned at the change in the woman. She had been beautiful before, but now she was alive. The muscles of her gaunt face did not move as she watched them come toward her, glancing at Hawkin and then studying, absorbing, Kate; but her eyes, her startling blue eyes, brimmed over with life, filled to overflowing with vitality and awareness and the beauty of being alive.

"Thank you," she said to Kate. Her voice was husky but clear, and the force of the life behind those eyes made Kate want to turn away even as they held her and made her smile foolishly in response. There was nothing to be said to that, and eventually--in ten minutes? ten seconds?--Vaun released her and turned her gaze at Hawkin, who withstood it little better than Kate had.

Gerry Bruckner broke it, finally, when he came up to the bed and adjusted her pillows and rested his hand lightly on her head. She smiled at him, lovingly, and Hawkin cleared his throat.

"Are you feeling up to giving us a statement now, Miss Adams?"

"Of course," she said. Kate took out her notebook and dutifully recorded the details of what had very nearly been the last day of Vaun Adams's life.

There was nothing there. Yes, she had noticed a peculiar taste in the whiskey, but then she'd felt as if she was coming down with a cold, and that always made things taste odd. And yes, the heavy-duty antihistamines she'd taken had probably compounded the effects of drug and whiskey. No, she did not take chloral hydrate. She was a hypochondriac, sure, but drew the line at sleeping pills. No, she'd seen nothing out of place when she returned from her walk. No, she had not realized that Tony Dodson was Andy Lewis, but yes, she supposed it was possible, and that could account for the frisson of apprehension she occasionally experienced when coming on him unawares. She would have to think about it. No, she had not noticed that the painting of the young Andy Lewis had disappeared, but it had been in her studio at Uncle Red's farm in August, she was certain of that. No, she had done nothing very out of the ordinary that Friday, deliberately so, that being the only way to keep the fear at bay. The storm had helped distract her, and she spent the afternoon clearing up some branches, talking to various neighbors about their damage. Yes, she had seen Angie, but not Tony. And finally, yes, she had talked it over with Gerry, and though she did not wish to, she was willing to cooperate by being, in her words, the goat tethered out for the tiger. She looked to be on the verge of saying something else but changed her mind as the whole situation seemed suddenly to be more than she could deal with and exhaustion flooded in.

They left, with Bruckner speaking soothing words and stroking her clean hair, and drove home and slept in their own beds that night. Neither of them, incidentally, slept alone.