Reilly 09 - Presumption of Death (35 page)

“Two Dos Equis,” Paul said, sliding onto the stool beside Nina. The beers appeared within seconds. “Four dollars,” the woman said.

“Excuse me,” Nina said. She put the cash on the counter. She looked, really looked, at the woman, trying to figure out how to approach her.

She was careworn, but chubby rather than haggard, her face soft, her eyes not stupid but not expecting trouble, her hair freshly styled and her jeans new. Nina liked her in the way that she liked the other mothers at Bob’s school, and she said, “We need to find someone pretty fast. He hangs out here a lot.”

“Oh, yeah? Who?”

“Coyote, Robert Johnson.”

“Sorry. I haven’t seen him in weeks.”

“Then his friend. A guy with paint all over his clothes and a gray beard.”

“Donnelly’s not Coyote’s friend. Who are you?”

“Good guys,” Paul said. “We’re the good guys.”

She smiled. “Glad to hear it. And now, who are you? Because if you want information, you have to give it.”

“We could ask someone else.”

“In this neighborhood, we watch out for each other. Nobody’s going to talk to you unless you explain your business.” Nina waited for Paul to make something up, as they had when they talked to the cowboys, but Paul had sized this lady up as too smart to bullshit.

He explained their business. He passed over his P.I. license. She examined it. Then she said, “He may not welcome you. Donnelly’s got some IRS problems.”

“Oh?”

“He’s famous. He’s a famous sculptor. He’d rather be a painter and that’s all he’s doing this year. Anyhoo, he needs privacy, but I’m afraid it gets out of hand.”

“Pit bulls?” Nina asked.

“No. Walls. The biggest walls and gate in the valley. But I could call him.”

“You have his number?”

“I’m his sister. My name’s Prem.”

“Ah. Hi, Prem.”

“Because from what you just told me, I don’t want Coyote to be there. If I didn’t have to mind the bar I’d go out with you. Yes, I’ll call him.” She picked up the phone and punched in some numbers, which Nina tried unsuccessfully to catch. Holding the receiver to her ear, she grimaced and shook her head.

“He’s gone,” she said.

“I hope that’s it,” Paul said.

“Listen, I’m coming with you. I know the code and I know him. Mr. van Wagoner?”

“Yeah?”

“You better be scaring me for nothing.” She took a handwritten sign that said BACK SOON, taped it to the door, and waited for them to follow her dusty Explorer out of the parking lot.

They drove off the main road onto a gravel road that became narrower and narrower, until they came to a metal electric gate ten feet high, with spikes at the top. The adobe wall on both sides displayed the same wicked-looking metal spikes. Oak branches inside had been carefully trimmed back.

At the entry stood a call box. Prem punched a button and leaned her head out the window, ready to shout into the box, but the box stayed mute. She punched in a number sequence next, and the gates creaked heavily open.

Inside, the forest continued, thick branches of olive-leafed oaks, and on the ground, in clumps along the drive, twining along the stumps and trunks, the glistening poison oak. Here and there Nina glimpsed strange bronze figures, much too tall and skinny to be human, performing private rites, leaning over, fallen, jumping, sitting on a branch. One of these sculptures peeked out from behind a tree near the car. The body was elongated and bronze, but the head was the bleached skull of some horned animal, teeth intact. It wore a porkpie hat.

Nina thought, not for the first time, what has modern art come to?

The artist’s home consisted of a series of adobe cubes piled haphazardly alongside each other, anchored by tall double Indonesian doors painted in garish gold leaf, reds, yellows, and greens. Brown shutters on all the windows, closed. Satellite dish, chimneys, tiled roof. Primitive stencils on the wall here and there. A million-dollar home, so altered that it would perhaps be unsellable.

“The garage door’s open,” Prem said. “The Jeep’s gone. Shit!”

She ran to the door and fumbled a key out of her bag, though Nina called “Wait!” She pushed open the door and disappeared inside.

“You ready?” Paul said to Nina, taking her hand. “You could stay outside.” She could see it in his face, the anxiety, the grim anticipation.

“I’m with you.” So they went in together.

Polished echoing floors, an almost-empty foyer. A sideboard, all the drawers pulled out. Place mats and tablecloths lying on the floor where they had been tossed.

From somewhere to the right they heard a full-throated, anguished shriek. Nina’s eyes met Paul’s. He shook his head slightly. He held his gun in his right hand. Nina fell behind as they moved right, into a painting studio.

Canvases propped against the wall. A long scarred Gothic table down the center, covered with a tarp and tubes of oil paint, brushes, bottles, plates, cups, animal skulls, mirrors, dead flowers. And what were those vines in the watery glasses? Nina shrank back.

She looked at the pictures. He was painting poison oak, skulls, dead things, hyperrealistically. While her eyes raked the otherwise-empty room, a vision came to her of the interior of his mind, and she shrank from this too.

And yet. And yet, the brilliant light filtered through the shutters to stripe the concrete floor; the dead things lay passively, giving up their essence, at ease at last; the painting technique, so old-fashioned, brushless, jewel-colored, was so accomplished that the overall feeling she experienced was a sense of quiet and formality, the sense that only great painting can give. She thought of Hieronymus Bosch, Henri Rousseau, Vermeer.

No sound anywhere, now. Paul’s hand around hers tightened and he pulled her toward an arched doorway. Nina felt no fear, because of Paul, but also because in this world of deathly harmony she already knew what they would see and she already knew it would be quiet, unmoving. The jittery energy of danger had left.

Prem knelt in the kitchen, behind a prosaic butcher-block kitchen island, copper pots reflecting the shining stripes of light, knelt over a large bloodied creature on the floor. Nina saw hanks of hair, a pool of blood of the most saturated, purest red, with its tributary stream meandering down a slight declivity in the floor. A face covered in this scarlet paint, arms and legs akimbo; he must have been beaten to death. Paul stretched out an arm and stopped her.

“No farther,” he ordered. Then he moved gingerly in toward Prem, sobbing next to that bleeding head, and gently lifted her up and brought her back to Nina. Nina put her left arm around her and, with her right hand on the cell phone, punched 911.

27

T HE NIGHT BEFORE IN CACHAGUA HAD gone on too long. The police needed statements. Paul, evasive but tired, wasn’t his usual suave self and practically got himself arrested. She had played the tight-ass attorney to get him out of trouble. What they learned at the scene was that the artist was wealthy, had many fans, many detractors, and many possible killers.

She started off Tuesday morning sitting in her visitor’s chair in Paul’s office, laptop on her knees, listing the things she felt might be important to remember in her preparations for Wish’s preliminary hearing. On the wall she had pasted her hand-drawn map of Carmel Valley Village, showing the location of the fires and Siesta Court. Faint laughter filtered up from the Hog’s Breath.

Sandy, at Wish’s old desk, was reading the Monterey newspaper out loud, in between working on court papers they needed to file.

“Donnelly really was famous.”

“He’ll be more famous now,” Nina said shortly.

“The motive seems to be robbery. His sister said he often kept cash in the house. He was a lumpy-mattress type. Plus Coyote stole his Jeep. You’d think the highway patrol could pick out every Jeep in five hundred miles with helicopters.”

“I agree, fleeing in a Jeep is as desperate as dodging a taxi by running into a bus.”

“Says here, he was a bit of a recluse. Kinda like Stephen King. People knocking at his door toting bombs, wanting money.”

“He despised fame,” Nina said. “Unusually private type, but if you ask me, some of that was drug-induced paranoia.”

“So it might not be Coyote?”

“It’s Coyote. Has to be. We talk about Coyote, and Britta leaves me a note telling me to head for Donnelly’s if anything happens to her, and something happens to her. Then something happens to Donnelly. That’s what I explained to the homicide detective last night. Not that he appeared to be fully convinced, but he was interested.”

“How’s she doing? Britta Cowan?”

“When I called David Cowan this morning, he said they’ll bring her out of the coma in a couple more days. She’s going to make it. What did she do when she left me that day? How did she know he might try to rob Donnelly? I really need to talk to her.”

Unable to come to any useful conclusions, Nina and Sandy returned to their work. The clock on Paul’s desk ticked. He was out at the handicapped facility in Carmel Valley Village, interviewing the people there, and the phones were blessedly silent.

Nina began doodling names. Britta. Elizabeth Gold. Coyote. Danny. George Hill.

How to prove that Coyote set the fires without implicating Danny, and by further implication, Wish? She got out the autopsy report on Danny and studied it again, reread Wish’s story, thought again about the more than six thousand dollars in Coyote’s account, wondered again how Danny got his “tip.”
Tip
in quotes, because she wasn’t at all sure there had been any tip.

Now she started drawing little sketches of the objects surrounding this case-little sketches for little objects. A piece of paper with Twelve Points. A margarita glass. A cat, a concho belt, fire, cowboys, a little kid with his diapers hanging down, a Jeep, Danny’s flute…

She shook her head and tried again. Sandy had come over to get something and was looking at her paper.

“Why do you do that? I’ve seen you do that for every case. What does it do for you?”

“It’s how I think.”

“What about logic?”

“It’s never about logic, Sandy. It’s always about emotion.”

They tapped on their keyboards for a while. The phones rang a few times. Sandy dispensed with calls with her usual mixture of tact and ironhandedness. At lunch, they called an order down to the restaurant. Nina went down to pick up the food and breathe some of the cleansing fog into her lungs. They ate at their desks, communicating, as they often did, in a shorthand that pricked the silence like static.

“Those papers,” Nina would say.

“Done.”

“Did you call…?”

“Called at ten. Weren’t you listening? They say they’ll have the discovery papers couriered over this afternoon.”

“Wish wanted us to bring…”

“I took that stuff over last night.”

Nina asked a question that had been bothering her. “Sandy,” she said, biting into a pepper, “do you need a place to stay, or are you staying with that friend of yours who lives near here?”

“Staying at your place.”

“You are?” Nina struggled for neutrality. Had Paul invited her without saying? How in the world could they have any kind of a life with Sandy on the couch or in his precious den?

“Gotta say, those boys need me.”

Boys? Dustin and Tustin sprang into her mind’s eye. “You’re staying at the house Aunt Helen left me? In Wish’s room?”

“Like I said,” said Sandy. “Rent paid. Furnished. Except for a whole lot of dirty laundry, it’s empty, thanks to you.”

Was she teasing, or criticizing? With Sandy, Nina never knew. “Not for long, if we get our plans in order.”

“I’ve looked over your plans,” Sandy said, “and they remind me of the living room at your house in P.G.”

“It looked pretty neat the day I visited.”

“It would that day, yeah.”

Nina tried to imagine the Boyz confronted by Sandy and her luggage, trotting into their domain and taking over Wish’s private lair, but here was a situation where her imagination faltered. She was sorry to have missed the moment.

Back at the office, amid the group of phone messages was one from Elizabeth Gold. Nina called back immediately.

“I’d like to meet with you,” Elizabeth said. “Maybe I can help. You weren’t the only one at the party under false pretenses. I’m a trained sociologist. That’s why I was taping the party. I’ve been studying the Siesta Court Bunch for two years.”

“What can you tell me?” Nina said.

“I want to play the tape for you. I can come to your office.”

“Not a good idea. I’m tied up.”

“Then… how about tonight at my house? About eight? I’ll make tea.”

“I’ll be there.”

“You better take this one too,” Sandy said, her finger on the hold button on the phone.

Nina picked up the extension she had rigged on her table. “Hello?”

“Hi. It’s me.”

Across an ocean, flying over a continent, only slightly distorted by the thousands of miles between Stockholm, Sweden, and Carmel, California, the voice was almost instantly recognizable. “Hello, Kurt.”

“Nina.”

“It’s good to hear your voice.” Was it? She couldn’t tell how she felt. Kurt, so much part of her past, father of her only child, lived too far from her to do more than dance along the edges of her consciousness now and then.

“Same,” he said. “Listen, Nina. I’m sorry to spring this on you, but Bob… he’s impulsive. Like his mother.”

“Like his father,” she said, kidding, as Kurt had been, but wondering what he meant. “He’s okay?”

“Fine. I mean, he was fine last night when I saw him last.”

“What’s going on?”

“I told him to call you, but he said he just gets a recording. He wouldn’t leave a message. He’s on a kick.”

“Kurt, I’m trying to follow here.”

“Well, there’s news,” he said, an understatement, as it turned out.

When she hung up, Nina turned to Sandy and said, “Bob’s getting into the Monterey airport at three. I’m going to pick him up.”

“You want me to go?” She didn’t seem surprised.

“No. You have to get our motions over to the court by five.”