Murder in Pastel (15 page)

“Cosmo never showed it, did he?”

“
Virgin in Pastel
was never officially exhibited, but the critics who did see it generally viewed it as his best work.”

“Uh huh. Picture of a nude girl, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“What nude girl?”

“Huh?”

“Who was the model?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t know or won’t say?”

“I don’t know. No one knows. That’s part of the mystique.”

“Mystique?” Rankin snorted.
We don’t hold with none of that mystique crap ‘round these parts!

I tacked starboard. “The model has her back to the artist. You see only her blonde hair and her back. She’s sitting on scattered flower petals. The texture of her skin and her hair and the petals…it’s enchanting.”

The sheriff inspected me as though I stood revealed in my true rainbow colors. “Blonde hair? That woman painter, Michaela St. Martin, she has blonde hair. Could she have been the model?”

“What does it matter who the model was?”

He shrugged his powerful shoulders. “Just interesting. How much is that painting worth?”

“I don’t know. Millions, I guess.”

“That’s what Berkowitz says. You still claim you don’t want any part of that painting?”

There was no way Marshal Dillon here was ever going to understand. I tried anyway. “The painting disappeared with Cosmo. He may have sold it or he may have given it away. I don’t know. I don’t know that I have any claim on it.”

“That’s a mighty noble attitude.”

“I’d probably feel different if I were hard up for money.”

“Yeah, you’re pretty well set,” Rankin agreed. “Your old man left you a bundle and there’s money on your mother’s side.”

“Since you’ve been checking my financial records you’ve probably noticed I earn a decent living on my own.”

The sheriff took out his tobacco. “No need to get riled, sonny boy. I’m just doing my job.”

I leaned back against the rain-spotted hood of the Jeep and folded my arms. Rankin probably interpreted this as defensive body language. I felt defensive, even as I reminded myself there was nothing to worry about. My financial profile was solid citizen stuff. No huge debts, no mysterious deposits or withdrawals. I hardly even cheated on my taxes.

I asked, “Since you’re so interested in that painting, did you try to find out where the dresser it was found in came from originally?”

“Yep.” His mouth twitched at my surprise. “The people who sold it say they bought it a few years before at a secondhand store. They couldn’t remember which one. It was old, but it wasn’t an antique or a valuable piece. Cheap wood with brass lion-head pulls. Probably part of a set. Sound familiar?”

“No.”

He nodded as though this was what he expected me to say. “So, getting back to this lost masterpiece, maybe you don’t need the money, not that anybody minds a couple of extra million. You still might want that painting for personal reasons. ‘My father’s painting,’ you called it. Your old man painted it. It must mean something to you.”

“Not enough to steal it.”

“If someone did steal it, they couldn’t sell it around here. They’d have to try overseas or some place, right?”

“I guess.”

He reached into his uniform pocket and pulled out a colored envelope. “Like to explain this plane ticket to France?”

* * * * *

It took me twenty minutes to explain why I had purchased a plane ticket to France. Then I headed for the Berkowitzes’.

It was almost dark by the time I walked through the broken gate. The lights were on in the cottage. The smell of frying fish drifted through the open window.

Jen opened the door to my knock and recoiled. “You shouldn’t have come, Kyle. Vince will freak.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a little freaked myself. Where is he, Jen?”

“He’s not here,” she answered with an uneasy look over her shoulder.

“Then I’ll wait.”

“You can’t!” She sounded genuinely alarmed. “Vince thinks we’re having an affair, Kyle.”

I felt my jaw drop.

“Why does he think that, Jen?”

“Because I told him we were.”

If she had sounded defiant I probably would have strangled her, but she said it in a small voice, her eyes shiny with tears. With her hair in braids she looked about ten. She looked like she belonged in a little house on the prairie, not in an artists’ colony surrounded by thieves and murderers.

“
Why
for God’s sake?”

She gestured for me to hold my voice down, and then hissed, “Because I wanted to hurt him!”

“Did you want to hurt me?”

“No, of course not. I wanted Vince to feel what I felt when I found out about him and Brett.”

“Great, Jen, now you’ve got Vince gunning for me. He told the sheriff I stole the
Virgin
.” I swatted away a couple of moths circling the porch light.

“That’s not my fault!”

“Whose fault is it?”

“I don’t know. Yours.”

“Mine!”

Jen made frantic shushing motions. “Vince honestly believes you stole that painting, Kyle. He’s not just saying that. He thinks that you think you’ve got a right to it. He’s positive you took it. Brett told him you did.”

I opened my mouth but no words would come.

Something else did however. Vince charged out of the back room like Sir Lancelot out to rescue Lady Faire.

“I thought I recognized your voice!”

“I want to talk to you, Vince.”

“Get the hell out of my house!”

“Now, Vince!” Jenny protested.

Vince grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her away from me: seducer of women, slayer of men. “You can talk to my lawyer,” he told me.

“I didn’t take the damned painting.”

“MY damn painting, you goddamn liar. Mine, do you hear? My wife, my painting.”

“I didn’t take the painting and I don’t want your wife.”

“Bullshit! Now get out or I’ll throw you out.”

I got out. I wasn’t getting anywhere talking, and wrestling with Vince was going to be useless as well as humiliating.

* * * * *

I stopped by Micky’s cottage on the way back. She greeted me at the door in startling purple leopard leotards.

“Wow,” I said. “Cat Woman Lives.”

“I was just thinking about you, kiddo.”

I’d brought my bruised ego to the right place. Something soft and soothing was playing in the background: Chinese flutes and acoustic guitar. Masses of Paisley pillows were scattered across the checkerboard floor, and vanilla candles burned everywhere. It was like Betty Crocker had set up house in a Shaolin temple. The smell of vanilla and cigarettes blended with homey scents from the kitchen.

There were canvases everywhere, the overflow from Micky’s studio: gigantic alien-looking flowers, yellow frogs and lime-green salamanders.

I could feel my ruffled male ego smoothing back down as Micky wafted around, serving me coffee and cake. Her cat, Macavity, wound himself around my ankles, purring hello.

“I’ve come to the conclusion he’s gay,” Micky remarked, watching the cat making up to my socks.

“Isn’t everybody?” I took a muffin from the plate she offered. “Hey, pumpkin chocolate chip?”

“I used to make these for you when you were a kid. Remember?”

I bit in, licked the chocolate off my teeth. “I remember.” I swallowed. “Micky, Joel said you might still have a copy of the key to my house lying around.”

She stilled. “Joel said that?”

I didn’t understand her expression or her tone. “He said you used to take turns playing guardian angel after my father left.”

Micky relaxed. “Oh. That’s true.” She smiled. “You scared the hell out of me that summer, Kyle. You were so quiet. So frail. You scared Cosmo.”

“Right out of town.”

Her smile faded. “I didn’t understand that. I don’t to this day.” She stooped, picked up the cat and kissed its nose. “Who’s the bad boy that brought Mumsy a mouse for breakfast this morning?”

The cat meowed.

Curious, I probed, “What did you think I meant? Before, when I told you Joel said you had a key.”

Micky looked innocent. Not her style.

“What did you think I was asking?”

She shrugged, but it was half-hearted. “I’m surprised Brett didn’t fill you in—although I don’t know how the hell he found out.”

“Found out what?” I wondered if this was something I really wanted to hear. Not the stuff real detectives are made of, I guess.

Micky took a deep breath. “Cosmo gave me a key before your illness, Kyle.”

I set my coffee cup on the table. “What are you getting at?”

She turned pink. I had never seen Micky blush before, but I was seeing it now. “Cosmo and I were—uh—we were lovers actually.” She added hastily into my stunned silence, “This was before he married your mother. Before he came back here.”

Greenwich Time
. “So how could he give you a key to the cottage if you were lovers way back when?”

Micky’s color deepened. “After your mother died, Cosmo was lonely. And I was lonely.” She ran a hand through her long, silvery hair. “So, for a time, we were lonely together.”

I stared at her. It wasn’t that I was judging, so much as I was trying to make sense of it, with what I knew of both Micky and my father. It seemed so out of character for both of them.

Misreading my expression, Micky said defensively, “We didn’t do anything wrong, Kyle. Cosmo never loved anyone but your mother. We comforted each other. It was…comfortable, friendly. Sex, you know.”

“Yeah, I know about sex. It’s just
weird
.”

“It’s not
that
weird.”

“I don’t mean it that way. I never thought about—well—”

“Damn,” Micky said. “Damn, damn, damn. Somehow I knew this day would come. Frankly it’s a relief to have it out. Especially once that little shit Brett started hinting around. I wanted to tell you myself.” She added honestly, “If there wasn’t any way out of it.”

I processed this silently. Finally I asked, “Brett didn’t mention how he found out?”

“No. I don’t know how he knew, or why he was so interested, but he never stopped asking questions from the moment he arrived. He was at the library, the courthouse, digging away like a terrier.” Micky added shortly, “Who knows? Maybe Joel told him.”

Naturally, Joel would know too. It was truly unsettling to realize how little I knew about my father, about the people I regarded as my family. And though this decades-old secret was not a motive for murder, it started me wondering what other secrets Brett had uncovered.

“You have a queer look, kiddo,” Micky commented.

I gave her a rueful grin. “Not so surprising, is it?”

She laughed.

Chapter Eleven

T
he Cobbs’ car was parked outside Adam’s when I finally arrived home. A formal sympathy call, I deduced. Homemade pie and homespun sentiment. I wondered how Adam was holding up. It was hard to tell; he was not a guy to bleed in public.

I let myself in the front door and stared for a moment at the mirror over the fireplace, remembering when
Virgin in Pastel
hung there. Why had Brett lied? Could he have hidden the painting before he fell ill? Perhaps he had some idea of selling it later? Or perhaps he enjoyed watching Vince sweat bullets over it.

I thought about something my father read to me a long time ago. I think it was from an essay by Giorgio de Chirico on Metaphysical Art. The example was given of walking into a room where a man sat near a birdcage. There was a canary in the birdcage and paintings on the wall and books on a bookshelf—nothing weird or unsettling about any of that because memory connected the observer to the logic of whatever he witnessed in the room.

But say one had no memory and no logic with which to view the man, the birdcage, the paintings and the books? Without memory or logic, these everyday objects might seem terrifying and astonishing—or lovely and magical. Nothing in the room would have changed; the change would be in one’s self, in one’s viewing of the room from a different perspective.

For a moment I felt that I hovered near some discovery; the idea was there, out of reach, like a word tingling on the tip of your tongue. Then it was gone, memory or inspiration, the impression faded, and I was left staring into a mirror.

The Cobbs stayed long after dark. After they drove off down the highway, Adam went down to the beach. I don’t know how long he stayed there walking along the water’s edge. It was late when I carried a couple of Brett’s books upstairs and dug in for the night.

Outside the window I could hear crickets chirping; the blinds knocked against the sill, stirred by the salty night breeze. Beyond these sounds was the distant sigh of the sea.

I felt tired and depressed, jarred by the recognition that I was going to miss Brett—that I missed him already. And far from removing an obstacle in my path to Adam, Brett’s death seemed to have knocked over the safety barriers. Without them in place, neither of us quite knew how to treat the other.

Flipping through Brett’s copy of
Backtrack
, a newsprint clipping fell out. I turned it over and there was my own face staring up at me. It was a copy of an interview I’d done for Lambda Book Report two or three years ago. The photograph showed the spiked hair and razor stubble I’d favored back then, till my agent told me I looked like a disgruntled Boy Scout. Someone, Brett I suppose, had underlined part of a sentence:
…Bari, who still lives in
Steeple Hill
, California…

I stared at the underlined “Steeple Hill” and I remembered Adam saying it had been Brett’s idea to spend the summer here. I remembered Micky saying that Brett had been asking questions from the moment he arrived, that he had gone to the library, the courthouse. Why the courthouse? Records of Marriage? Death certificates? He had been looking for written proof. Proof of what?

I snapped out the light and sat behind the bars of moonlight listening to the crickets.

* * * * *

The blue woman, her mouth an open “O” but no sound coming out. Over her shoulder a crescent moon, old and tarnished. No…dipped in blood. Something else. Someone else…