“Oh, no,” Vaun looked up at them, with the gentle acceptance of finality in her face. “I said it must come to an end, and it shall. I will not paint again.”
27
It was a terrifying week. Vaun drifted through the house like a lost soul, her hands in her pockets. She slept a great deal during the day, although her light was often on in the night. She watched the television, sitting down to whatever channel it was tuned to, game shows, old movies, British dramas indiscriminately, and would get up and wander off upstairs at times that made it obvious that she was completely unaware of the machinations of the plot. Only a cartoon would hold her interest until it was broken by a commercial.
She did not go into Lee’s therapy rooms.
She ate automatically what was put on her plate, took part in conversations when she was addressed directly, seemed relaxed and good-humored about the necessary inconveniences. She even made a shy joke about being held prisoner for her own good.
Lee recognized it as one of the stages her terminally ill patients would go through on the way to the grave, and she grieved and she understood and she fought it with all her determination and skill, to absolutely no effect.
To Kate it was like watching an intelligent wild thing calmly gnaw off a trapped foot.
On Tuesday John Tyler came to the house. Kate was not quite sure how he had talked Hawkin into it, but he came in an unmarked SFPD car in the afternoon, still in ironed jeans and soft shoes but with a linen jacket as his nod to the formality of the city. No tie. His attitude too was more formal, and he drank a cup of coffee with the three women before following Vaun up the stairs to her room. They remained there all afternoon, their voices an occasional rhythm overhead, and when Tyler came down at dusk he was alone. He came to the door of the kitchen where Kate and Lee were talking as Lee stirred a pot. Lee saw him first.
“John, would you like some dinner? Just soup, almost ready.”
“I have to go soon. I told Anna I’d be home.”
“A glass of wine first?”
“That would be nice, thanks.” Kate got up and poured them each a glass.
“I’m glad you came,” Lee said. “She’s feeling lost, and far from home.”
“I don’t think that’s anything new for Vaun,” he said mildly. “She feels far from home in her own house. Vaun is one of the saddest ladies I know, and where she is or who’s with her doesn’t make much difference.”
“Oh, surely not. She has friends.”
“Vaun has friends, but as far as I know the only one to really touch her has been Gerry Bruckner, and he’s too central to her to be called a mere ‘friend.’”
“I met Gerry. I’d like to meet Angie, too. How is she?”
“Angie is the same, only more so. This latest has not helped her self-esteem any, as you can imagine. ‘A woman with worn hands and a hopeful heart,’ Anna called her in one of her more poetic moods. And she teams up with a woman whose hands are now still and whose heart is without hope. Somebody better kill that bastard,” he spat out. “I’d do it myself, I think, given the chance.”
“You knew, didn’t you?” Kate asked suddenly. “That Vaun was imprisoned for murdering a child?”
“Um. Well, yes, in fact, I did.”
“And you allowed her to move in.”
“I didn’t think she’d done it. No, that’s not strong enough: I knew she couldn’t have done it.”
“And in December, when Tina Merrill was found? Weren’t you just the least bit worried that you knew who had killed her, and after her the others?”
“No. I should have told you, that first day you came, but I couldn’t bring myself to cause her grief for nothing. And I knew she had not done it. And I was right.”
But not about Tony Dodson, Kate thought, and did not say.
“You mustn’t tell the press, or anyone else for that matter, that she is completely innocent. Not yet.” She tried to sound stern.
“I don’t talk about it at all. I find that’s usually best.”
He stayed another twenty minutes, and left in the police car.
It was, for the women in the house, a truly terrifying week.
Knowing that she was far from the center of action made the week even harder for Kate. It was given out, when anyone asked, that her injuries were keeping her away from duty but in truth she would have preferred to bleed to death rather than miss this part of the case.
For it was now that the solid groundwork for an eventual prosecution was being laid, the jigsaw answers to all the questions locked into a tight, smooth picture for the District Attorney. Who? Andrew C. Lewis, alias Tony Dodson. What? Murder, of a peculiarly cold-blooded and thus inexplicable sort, murder not as an end, but as a means of building an elaborate and creative revenge. When? Could he be placed, by witnesses or evidence, near the relevant sites at the right times? Where? Now that was a good one. Where was Lewis on the days in question? Where did he go when he went ‘to work’? Where were the clothes and lunchbags and backpacks of the three girls? And most important, where was Lewis now? And finally, how? How did he get to the children, how did he spirit them away, how did he avoid attracting attention?
For all that week Kate had to live with the knowledge that the case was being investigated without her, and that knowledge made it hard to stay cheerful and calm and alert. Vaun drifted; Lee went out to clients in the hospitals or the hospices; Kate fretted and phoned for updates a dozen times a day; and Hawkin and Trujillo set out to get some answers.
For the past week Trujillo, ill-shaven, dressed in grimy black pants, hideous shoes with pointed toes, and a leather jacket that he had come to loathe, sat at the bar of the Golden Grill beneath the glowing skin of the woman on the barbecue and drank himself into an irritated ulcer. He got to know the regulars, he got to know that several of the regulars who were friends with the man they knew as “Tony Andrews” had been very scarce recently, and finally he got to know a flabby, pasty-looking kid with acne who appeared for the first time on Tuesday afternoon and who knew “Tony” well enough to have seen where he lived when he was in town.
The flabby kid knew little more than that. He was a hanger-on and had not actually been to “Tony’s” apartment but had only seen him come out of the place one morning, climb into his truck, and drive off. Trujillo invited the kid out of the bar, found the apartment house, and contacted Hawkin, and before too long they moved in with a large, heavily armed escort and a search warrant in Hawkin’s jacket pocket.
The apartment was empty. The resident manager produced a key and let them into Andy Lewis’s third persona.
It was a large apartment, furnished in tasteless luxury, up to and including a vast round bed with satin sheets and a well-stocked, padded leather wet bar in the living room. The prints of Andy Lewis/Tony Dodson/Tony Andrews were all over. Two other prints brought up the names of men with records for narcotics dealing. There was a canister of high-grade marijuana in the closet, a tin of hashish on a shelf, about fifty thousand dollars’ worth of heroin tightly packaged for the street in colorful balloons, and all the attendant paraphernalia. Later the lab was to find considerable cocaine dust in the carpets and furniture. There was one loaded shotgun in the coat closet near the door, a second one in the bedroom closet, and two loose forty-five-caliber bullets and traces of gun oil in the drawer of the bedside table.
The clothes in the bedroom’s oversized walk-in closet were clothes of two different men, though they were all the same size and all had the same dark hairs and black-brown beard hairs in them. To the left everything was arranged on wooden hangers: silk shirts, wool suits that made Trujillo whistle, a neatly filled stack of shallow shelves holding handmade Italian shoes. The clothing verged on the flashy, and Hawkin reflected that some of them must have looked a bit incongruous on a man with long hair and a full beard. On the right hung his Tyler’s Road clothes: old work jeans, worn flannel shirts, and denims, all on metal hangers with the paper of dry cleaners on them. An odd assortment of scu
ffed and grease-impregnated boots and tennis shoes lay in a tumble on the floor underneath.
There was also a painting.
It protruded slightly from behind the shoe shelves, and the frayed canvas at its back edges caught Hawkin’s eye. He pushed past Trujillo (who was still dressed as a bar rat and was fingering lapels enviously) and drew the canvas out to carry it into the light. At the window he turned it around, and there was Andy Lewis, just as Red Jameson had described him, half naked, slightly sweaty, a small sardonic smile on his lips, the narrow back of the chair thrusting up like some phallic structure under his chin, the dragon coiled on his upper arm.
Hawkin’s tired blue eyes traveled over the glossy surface, searching for the painting’s depths, and because he was looking for them, he found them. Most of Vaun’s better paintings had something behind the surface image, a hidden meaning that emerged only for the patient eye, and this was one of her very best. Red had not studied this one, Hawkin mused, had been too put off by the obvious surface meaning, or he would not have worried about his niece.
It was a caricature. Skillful, amazingly subtle for a teenaged artist, but it was a caricature. At first view it was the portrait of a young man with whom the artist was both in love and in lust. Gradually, however, the slight exaggerations asserted themselves, and soon Hawkin knew that she was not painting how she felt looking at Andy Lewis but rather how Andy Lewis imagined women in general felt looking at him. It was dated April.
Trujillo heard him laugh and emerged from the closet to come and look over his shoulder. He made an appreciative noise in his throat.
“Wish some lady would see me that way,” he commented.
“Do you?” Hawkin asked. A bustle in the hallway outside indicated the arrival of the prints and photograph crew, and he handed Trujillo the painting. “I want you to study this closely for a few minutes, and then tell me what you think. Be careful of it,” he added. “It’s worth more than you make in a year.”
Ten minutes later he came back and found a confused and troubled Trujillo sitting in a chair staring at the image of the young Lewis. He looked up at Hawkin.
“But, it’s…it’s cruel, isn’t it? She’s laughing at him. Making fun of him.”
Even Trujillo had seen it, then, given time and a hint. How long had it taken Andy Lewis to see the derision in it? Had it taken him, perhaps, until the month after it was painted? Had Vaun told him what she had really painted, when she broke up with him? Had Jemima Louise died because of this painting? And, indirectly, Tina Merrill and Amanda Bloom and Samantha Donaldson, and very nearly Vaun herself?
Suddenly Lee Cooper’s words came back to him: Vaun was “more likely to commit a devastating murder of someone’s self-image on canvas….” This painting was her weapon, the victim as yet quite unaware that the murderous blow had been struck. Hawkin could see that anyone knowing Lewis, and truly seeing this portrait, would never take the man seriously again. It spoke volumes about Lewis’s methods that he had not killed Vaun outright when he first realized what she had done. To Lewis, mere death was not sufficient revenge: hell must come first.
The apartment and its surroundings yielded no other immediately satisfying piece of evidence. The telephone answering machine gave out one succinct message: a man’s bass voice said, “Tony? This is Dan. We could use a hand if you’re free.” There was no way of telling when the message had been left, but the state of the refrigerator indicated it had been some days since anyone had been in residence, and as the day wore on the neighbors interviewed confirmed that the last anyone had seen of him was before the big storm.
There were no papers, no address books or scribbled telephone numbers, no letters in the mailbox addressed to anyone other than Occupant. The neighbors could describe only a few of his numerous guests, and the only vehicle any of them had seen him with was the old pickup currently sitting in Tyler’s metal shed.
That evening, Wednesday, Hawkin and Trujillo returned to the apartment house to catch the residents who had not been in during the day. It was tedious work, with little added to their meager store of information, until they rang the bell of number fifty-two. It was after nine o’clock, but the door was answered by a child of about ten or eleven with glossy black hair and a mouth full of braces, dressed in fuchsia-colored thermal pants and an oversized Minnie Mouse T-shirt. She peered at them gravely beneath the chain.
“Good evening, miss,” said Hawkin. “I wonder if I might speak to your mother or father?”
“I do not know how I would produce my father,” she said with considerable precision and an air of suffering fools, “but my mother may be available. May I tell her who’s calling?”
Hawkin identified himself and Trujillo to the child, who looked unimpressed. She started to open her mouth when she was interrupted by a woman’s voice from behind her.
“Who is it, Jules?”
The child stepped around so Hawkin could see her profile, which in another eight or ten years would be devastating.
“They claim,” she said, “to be policemen. I was about to ask them for some identification.”
“That is a very sensible idea, miss,” said Hawkin firmly in an effort to retain some sort of control. He pulled his ID out of his pocket for the forty-seventh time that day and flipped it open for the benefit of the eyes, on two levels now, that peered through the gap. The door shut, the chain rattled, and the door opened again to reveal the paradigm on which the future devastatrix was modeled.
Ten pounds of gleaming blue-black hair balanced precariously on top of an oval face with brown in its genes and, intriguingly, golden-green eyes surrounded by eyelids that had been shaped somewhere in Asia. Damp tendrils curled gently around the collar of an ancient bathrobe like one that Hawkin’s grandfather used to wear, of a particularly gruesome shade of purple, mercifully faded. She had bare feet and heavy horn-rim glasses of the sort Cary Grant might have removed to reveal a secretary of hitherto unseen beauty, and Hawkin was very glad that he was standing in front of Trujillo because he knew that his own face would reveal nothing, despite his immediate and intense awareness that beneath the robe, the rest of her was every bit as bare as her feet. Trujillo might take a moment to regain control of his face.
“Good evening, Ms. Cameron,” he said coolly. “Sorry to bother you. We’re trying to find some information on one of your neighbors, and wonder if you might be able to help us?”
“Certainly. Come in.” She stood back and waved them into a room so utterly ordinary it might have come from a catalog of motel furniture, onto which had been strewn a solid layer of books, covering every flat surface—heavy books with dark leather bindings and titles in gold, gothic letters, in a number of languages. She gathered a few together to clear the second pair of the quartet of metal and vinyl chairs at the Formica table, then stacked the tomes onto the table and sat looking over them. She was not a short woman but looked small beneath the hair, within the robe, and behind the books.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to help much,” she said. She had a sweet, low voice, and not so much an accent as a careful precision and rhythm to her speech. “We’ve only been here since January, and I’m so rarely home, I haven’t had a chance to get to know my neighbors.”
A voice came from the sofa, accompanied by one foot waving in the air. Hawkin had all but forgotten the younger generation of this incredible race of genius-goddesses.
“My mother was recently appointed to the chair of medieval German literature at the university,” said the voice, and then volunteered, “I am going to practice criminal law.” Hawkin blanched at the thought of such a defense lawyer and hoped he would be retired before she came on the scene. Her head appeared over the back of the chintz. “Which neighbor?”
“Mr. Tony Andrews, in number thirty-four.” He dragged his attention back to the mother. “He’s been missing for some days, and his family is beginning to worry.”
The daughter snorted derisively.
“So they sent two high-
ranking officers out to look for a missing person?”
“Jules,” her mother began.
“Oh Mother, the police don’t do things that way, and besides, I’ve seen them both on the news. They’re working on that case of the little girls and the artist.”
The mother turned a look on Hawkin that made him feel like a student who had been caught in a bit of plagiarism.
“Is this true?” she asked.
“We do work on more than one case at once, sometimes,” Hawkin said, trying for sternness, but it sounded weak even to his own ears. He pulled himself together. “Mr. Andrews. Do you know him?”
“No, I don’t think—”
“Yes, Mother, we met him last month, don’t you remember? The day you were giving a paper in San Francisco and couldn’t get the car started.”
“Oh, yes, him. I had forgotten his name. Nice man.”
“He was not,” said Jules sternly.
“Well, I thought—”
“Pardon me, miss,” interrupted Trujillo. “Why did you think he was not nice?”
For a moment the child was at an obviously uncharacteristic loss for words. She quickly mustered her forces, but her answer was given with a chin raised in half-defiant embarrassment.
“I don’t have a reason, not really. Nothing concrete, I mean. It was simply an impression. I did not like the way he looked at my mother. It was,” she paused to choose a word. “It was speculative, without the earthy immediacy with which most men react to her.”
(Earthy immediacy? thought Hawkin, uncomfortably aware of the earthiness of his own first reaction to the woman. Where does this kid come from?)
“Jules!” her mother scolded. “You sound like a bad romance novel.”
“I thought it was a good phrase,” her daughter protested.
“It is inappropriate.”
“But accurate.” Accuracy was obviously the ultimate consideration in Jules Cameron’s life and, judging by the capitulation of her mother, it was a family trait.