Murder in Pastel (22 page)

I was too tired to hide my agitation.

“It’s a rumor, Kyle. Gossip. No one actually accused Lipez.”

“So no one ever investigated?”

“Cosmo Bari has yet to be officially reported missing, let alone the victim of a homicide.”

Score one for the man in the cowboy boots.

“Why do people think my grandfather killed my father?”

“Guess they think he didn’t like him much.”

I must have looked as unamused as I felt.

The sheriff took out a chaw of tobacco.

“Well, sonny boy, the story is your grandfather threatened to kill your father, and that’s why he took off for New York.”

“But he came back and married my mother.”

“That’s true. Fourteen years later. But your grandfather didn’t forgive your daddy. When your mother died there was some wild talk. The story I heard was your grandfather punched your daddy right there at your mother’s graveside.”

I sat there blinking at him stupidly, trying to fit this jagged little piece into the 3D puzzle of my past. “Why?” I asked at last.

“Blamed him, I guess. Said he broke your momma’s heart.”

I didn’t want to ask the obvious next question, did not want to hear the answer. Sherlock would have asked. Marlowe, Poirot—hell, Miss Marple would have asked. I sealed my lips.

Rankin, seeing I did not want to play, chortled at his own private joke and dismissed me.

* * * * *

I woke with a scream echoing in my ears. My own scream.

Someone was grabbing me, hurting me. I fought back.

“Kyle! Wake up!
Kyle
—”

The darkness was a black blanket thrown over my head, but I recognized the voice, and that I was in bed.

I quit fighting.

“I’m awake. Let me go.”

Adam had me pinned to the mattress. He was breathing as hard as I was. He let go of my wrists, raised himself off of me. The springs of the mattress protested. A light came on. Silky rose-colored light.

I blinked up at the ceiling, trying to orient myself, when I saw Adam’s shadow come sliding across the wall as he turned back to me. Out of the corner of my eye it looked like a shadow-puppet ax falling toward me.

I flinched away throwing my arm up to ward him off.

“Kyle…” Adam sounded shocked. After a moment he reached out tentatively, as though he thought I might fight him off. “Are you okay now?” His hair was standing on end. I wasn’t surprised.

I tore my gaze from the wall where I was still watching for the ax shadow, and I nodded. “Sorry.” My vision focused on Adam’s left eye which looked red and puffy. “Adam, did I punch you?”

He put a hand to his cheekbone as though he hadn’t noticed. “You could have. You seemed to think you were fighting for your life.” He sounded grim. “Was it the nightmare again?”

“I don’t remember.” The dream was fading fast, like always. I was so tired I felt delirious. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to remember the things that had happened that evening. Drawing the covers over me, I turned on my side.

Adam put his hand on my shoulder. “Tell me what you dreamed.”

“I’m tired, Adam. I need to sleep.” I pulled away from him, and burrowed down into the pillows once more.

“You can sleep in a minute. What did you see?”

I threw myself on my back, scowling. “The same thing as last time. It’s always the same thing.” I laid my arm across my eyes. “What is this, the third degree? Turn the light off.”

He turned the light off. The darkness was soothing, like an ice pack on a headache.

I related the dream for Adam’s listening entertainment. He was silent till I finished speaking.

“Did you ever talk to anyone about this dream?”

“Like a shrink?”

“Like anyone.”

“No. You.”

“What do you think it means?”

“Nothing.” I tossed fretfully; the mattress coils squeaked as Adam avoided another collision. “It’s a night terror. It doesn’t mean anything.”

I could see moonlight shining off the profile of the nymph lamp beside the bed. The smiling face looked evil in the shadows. I closed my eyes.

“It must mean something. Maybe the images in your dream are symbols for something?”

Like the Dali dream sequence in
Spellbound
?

I said crabbily, “I’ve gone my entire life without knowing what this damn dream means. Can’t it wait one more night? I need to sleep.”

Silence.

Peace at last, I thought, and my nerves quit sizzling.

“Have you had these dreams your entire life? When did you start having them?”

I moaned. “I don’t
know
. I guess…when I went away to college.”

I had always assumed the nightmares were triggered by the stress of leaving the sheltered environment I’d grown up in, combined with fears about my health and my father’s desertion.

“You’re sure the dreams started in college?”

After Cosmo disappeared, that’s what he meant.

“Yes.”

“The images in your dream are probably symbols. If you understood what the symbols in the dream meant, they might not affect you so much.” The mattress dipped as he moved my way. He gathered me into his arms, his body accommodating the angles of mine, as though we had been lovers for years. He was thin but wiry; his arms surprisingly muscular. I rubbed my head against his chest. The soft hair tickled my cheek. I expelled a long breath.

Adam stroked my head, his fingers threading my hair as he thought aloud.

Held by him, stroked and petted, my muscles loosened, my body going slack and heavy. There’s nothing more trusting than falling asleep in someone’s arms. I listened to Adam from a safe distance.

“Maybe this woman represents your Anima, the embodiment of what’s feminine and emotional in you.”

I snickered at that. Like I wasn’t in touch with my feminine side?

Adam misread my amusement. “The emotional, intuitive, instinctive side of your nature,” he explained.

“Got it. So why is she blue?”

“I don’t know. What does this woman look like?”

I shrugged within the circle of his arms.

“Try to picture her.”

A woman. Young? Old? Hard to tell, hard to see past the expression of horror that froze her face. My heart sped up in a burst of fear. I growled, “I don’t know. Just…a woman.”

Adam’s Anima being fully integrated, he slid his hand down my back and gave my ass a reassuring squeeze. He changed direction. “The blood could refer to the blood of Christ; you know, the life of the spirit as well as the flesh.”

Some kind of religious experience? I wasn’t religious, why would the woman of my dreams be religious? “Maybe it’s just blood, Adam.”

“Is it a lot of blood? A bath of blood? That could represent baptism into maturity and manhood.”

“It’s a lot of blood.”

“It could be the fear of castration.”

“Shit—” I wriggled my hips more comfortably against his. “Where did you learn all this?”

“I read a book once. What was the other thing? She’s painted blue? Blue is celestial, heavenly. It could refer to spiritual energy or intellectual understanding.”

Adam used a lot of blue in his paintings. Azure skies, ultra-marine seas, robin’s eggs, lupine, electricity: the memory of Adam’s work centered me, tranquilized. I was starting to drowse.

“What else? A moon? Usually in a man’s dream the moon represents his Anima.”

“You’re building quite a case for latent homosexuality,” I mumbled, and buried my face in the space between his armpit and chest.

I don’t know what final interpretation Adam may have drawn from my dreams, because by then I was asleep once more.

* * * * *

In the morning I went to see Joel.

I found him breakfasting on his sun porch: eggs Benedict, turkey bacon and the ever-present pot of tea.

“Sit, dear boy. Have some breakfast.”

“Joel, I need to talk to you.”

Ignoring my protests, Joel rose and went to get me a plate. He was wearing pajamas, white with little red and green frogs; the frogs seemed to hop and leap across Joel’s slender frame as he walked inside.

I looked about myself incuriously. I knew this room as well as any in my own home. Bright sunlight poured through the glass roof upon the jungle of healthy green plants. Joel was an expert gardener, an expert cook, a connoisseur of art and tea and boys. There were several pastels of exotic adolescents in kimonos on the walls of his bedroom. I could still remember the excited, edgy feeling those pictures gave me as a youth.

Joel returned with my breakfast and poured tea from the clay Yixing pot into gleaming, white porcelain cups.

Tea is an art not a beverage with Joel. He claims there are healing, soothing properties in such whimsically named blends as Golden Water Turtle and Jasmine Pacifica. He can speak of pure varietals and tonic herbals as enthusiastically as properties of color and light, brushwork and composition.

“Now, what has you looking so troubled on this lovely morning?”

After I finished relating an account of my grandfather’s murder the night before, and Joel had finished expressing shock and horror, I said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot, dear boy.” Joel pushed his plate away as if his appetite had gone.

“Who modeled for
Virgin in Pastel
?”

“Why, I don’t know. No one knows.”

“Was it Micky?”

Joel looked pained. “What a question. Why ask me? Ask Michaela.”

“I have asked her. She said she wasn’t.”

Joel gestured as though this answered all my doubts. “Why should she lie?”

“I don’t know. Who do you think was the model?”

Joel sat back, knees crossed; he had perfect posture, poised as a pin-up girl.

“I always thought the model was your mother.”

“My mother didn’t have blonde hair.”

“Dishwater blonde, but I was thinking more of her body. Kyria was tall and slim and graceful. It could have been a composite.”

“But Cosmo painted
Virgin
after she died.”

“Exactly. I think he painted it from memory. I don’t believe Virgin is any one woman and that’s why it’s so—so magical.” He gave a vague flip of his hand to emphasize the magic.

Maybe this was the answer.

As the leading expert on Cosmo Bari’s work and my father’s closest friend, I figured if anyone knew the model for
Virgin in Pastel
, it was Joel.

Glancing around the room, I noted the telescope on its aluminum tripod aimed at Adam’s verandah. I wondered if Joel ever directed that 90mm objective lens toward Adam’s bedroom window. Not a cozy notion. My gaze fell on a corner table nearly swallowed by a Sprengeri asparagus fern.

Something about that table seemed familiar. Why? It was an ordinary corner table, water-marked and battered from the years. It had a mock handle: a brass lion head with a ring through its mouth.

Why was that so familiar?

“More tea?”

I covered my cup with my hand. “No.”

“It’s decaf.”

“Thanks anyway.”

Where had I recently heard about a table with a decorative handle? When was the last time I had discussed furniture with anybody?

“How about another helping of these incredible eggs, dear boy? An excellent source of protein. And breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

Jenny had been refinishing an old piece of furniture and…

“What is it?” exclaimed Joel. “What’s wrong?”

I pointed to the table. I noticed abstractedly that my hand was shaking. “That’s part of a set. The dresser that Jenny found
Virgin in Pastel
in, that was part of the same set.”

There were a couple of reasonable explanations for this but Joel didn’t offer either of them. He stared at the table. He stared at me. His mouth worked soundlessly.

“You hid the
Virgin
in that chest, didn’t you?”

I was on my feet. Joel jumped up too, reaching for my arm. I yanked away.

“It’s not what you think.”

“What did you do, Joel? Did you kill him and steal the painting?”

Joel put his hand to his throat. “You can’t think—
No
, no! I didn’t kill him. I could never—”

“Don’t lie to me!”

“I-I’m not. I
loved
him. I could never k-kill—”

“But you stole the painting.”

Joel stared at me, tears streaming down his face. “I stole the painting,” he agreed.

Chapter Fifteen

“P
lease try to understand,” Joel pleaded.

I shook my head.

“I knew it,” I said. “I knew if you didn’t take the damn thing, you had to have noticed it was gone. You were standing in front of it all night.”

“No, no, no!” Joel gestured as though warding off the evil eye. “I didn’t have anything to do with the painting disappearing from Adam’s!”

“Don’t lie to me!”

“I’m not! Yes, I noticed it had gone, but I didn’t care. I was glad. If you didn’t want it, I didn’t care what happened to it. I never wanted to see that painting again.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Try to understand,” he repeated. “I was a different person then. Desperate. I had gambling debts—I was in hock up to my nuts. The people looking for me would have crippled me, broken my fingers one by one.”

I raised my face out of my hands (which I had been using to keep my head from blowing off my shoulders). Joel had been talking without pause for almost twenty minutes. It still didn’t make sense.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“But it’s
truuue
, dear boy.”

“Then why didn’t you sell the painting?”

“I…couldn’t. I
meant
to of course, but when it came down to it I kept waiting for Cos to come back.”

“Why did you hide it?”

“I was afraid. He didn’t come back. I thought it was because of me.”

“What are you
talking
about? How did you pay off your gambling debts if you didn’t sell
Virgin in Pastel
?”

“I sold everything else. I sold the brownstone, my collections. I mortgaged the cottage. It isn’t a secret. And then I wrote the book. I paid my debts and I—I learned my lesson. I’ve never gambled since. I don’t even buy Lotto tickets.”