by Kelly Oliver
“His walls?” For crap’s sake Jesse, quit repeating everything the man says.
“I think he had one of Dmitry’s painting on his wall,” she finally managed to say.
“Dmitry Durchenko? The janitor? Are you sure?”
“Dmitry was an art student back in Russia. He paints when he’s on break. Recently he gave one of his paintings to Wolf.” She wondered where this was going.
“Describe the painting please.”
“If I can borrow your computer, I can show you,” Jessica said, forgetting the pistol hidden in her lap. “It’s a Kandinsky knock-off, Russian Expressionism.”
“Please explain.”
She tried to remember the lectures on Expressionism she’d slept through as a hung-over undergraduate at the University of Montana. “Russian expressionists tried to capture the emotional and spiritual levels of existence rather than the material or physical levels.”
“No, explain what you mean by knock-off. Is Mr. Durchenko selling forgeries?”
“Forgeries?” She’d never thought of Dmitry as a forger. He painted as a hobby, not to make money or swindle people with fake art. Dmitry wasn’t a crook. Then she remembered the note he’d left under the professor’s door. “YOU ARE NOT SAFE HERE.” Was it a warning or a threat?
“Just because an artist copies a painting, does that make him a forger?”
“Depends, does he sign these copies?” the detective asked.
Jessica shut her eyes to conjure one of Dmitry’s paintings.
It was lunchtime by the time Detective Cormier extended his hand, and said, “Call me if you have any more information.” Detective Cormier was holding the door open. “Would you like me to escort you out?” He gestured for her to exit. He’d been pensive during the interview, but his parting smile lit up the room. The gun was still between her thighs, so she couldn’t get up from her chair without it falling onto the floor. Hiding a weapon between your legs in a police station had to be a crime.
“Could I get another cup of tea first?” she asked, even though the first cup was still almost full.
“We’ll get it on the way out.” He waved his hand toward the hallway.
“I’m feeling a little lightheaded. Maybe you could get me some water instead?” Jessica put on her damsel in distress smile.
“Hold on. I’ll be right back with some more water.” Sure enough, the detective was not immune to her charms. She turned her head to watch him walk out of the office to the water fountain, and then glancing around, slipped the tiny gun back into her pocket, and stood up to go.
The detective was back in a few seconds with another cup of water.
“I only have one more question, Ms. James,” he said, staring straight at the offending pocket.
Chapter Seventeen
Even though it had been just a few days, it seemed like a month since Dmitry had set foot in Brentano Hall. Bunin whimpered as he locked him in the Escalade, and he could still hear the dog crying as he and Vanya sneaked into the building through the back door using his master key. Except for a faint glow floating into the hallway from the front porch light, the place was dark. Dmitry glanced around for signs of life in the dead house. Loneliness emanated from the antique wood, and he sensed no one was there. A house sounded, smelled, and felt different when someone, or something, was living in it.
Dmitry led his cousin up the stairs. This was going to be a delicate operation. Since his keys no longer worked, he needed Vanya to pick the professor’s lock, but then he needed him to go away so he could retrieve the paintings from beneath the floorboards without being seen. Vassily Kandinsky’s Fragment Number 2 for Composition VII, and Natalia Goncharova’s Gathering Apples. He’d always wondered why his mother had chosen those paintings when his father owned dozens of Russian masterpieces. Why these two in particular? She must have been trying to tell him something.
For the last two decades, he’d copied Kandinsky’s masterpiece over and over again, trying to decipher his mother’s secret message. In honor of his mother, he always painted a miniature Tiger Lily, just a wisp of orange with the tiniest of black freckles, in the corner of each of his copies.
In his mind, he’d clawed at Kandinsky’s canvas, picked off the paint, scoured every millimeter of cloth, traced and retraced its intractable forms. He even studied Kandinsky’s writings looking for clues. “The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching the keys, sets the soul vibrating.” Every time he gazed at the painting, he sensed Kandinsky’s masterful hand playing a concerto on his soul.
Every day, sitting alone in his janitor’s closet, he’d studied the colors in the painting until he saw them recreated on his eyelids at night. He listened to the sounds of the colors and sniffed their individual scents. He waited to be touched by their discrete wavelengths, to feel their singular vibrations. One day, he even licked the very corner of the painting to see if the taste of Kandinsky’s burnt orange might solve the mystery.
Now he prayed his beloved Kandinsky was still hidden under the floorboards in the professor’s office. Adrenaline racing through his veins, he bounded up the stairs, stopped in front of 24B, and removed the police tape, careful to preserve its glue so he could reattach it later.
”Did you bring your tools?” he asked his cousin.
“Sure, Coz.” Vanya took a small black pouch from his back pocket.
“Can you pick this lock?”
Vanya examined the lock, and then put the pouch back in his pocket.
“What’s wrong? Don’t you have the right tool?”
“Sure. Give me your wallet, Boss.” Vanya’s gold grill reflected the ambient light.
Dmitry frowned, then glanced around and lowered his voice, “Don’t forget. You owe me big little cousin. You burned down my damned house.”
“How many times do I have to tell you? That was an accident.” Vanya shook his head. “Hand over your wallet, chuvak.”
Dmitry handed him the wallet, thick with fringes of receipts and scraps of paper sticking out.
“Watch and learn, chuvak. Watch and learn.” Vanya pulled out one of the credit cards, slid it in between the lock and the frame, and the door popped open. It was ridiculous. The professor had his locks changed from the standard university security lock to this flimsy doorknob piece of crap. He may have been a brilliant scholar, but he didn’t have much common sense.
Dmitry pushed through the door, and then turned to his cousin, “Wait here and stand guard. I’ll just be a minute.” Once inside the office, he headed for the spot where he’d hidden the canister. Unfortunately, Vanya followed him in and closed the door behind them. Dmitry was half way across the room when a knocking sound stopped him.
When he motioned for his cousin to get behind the desk, Vanya ducked down to hide just as a skinny campus cop in a brown uniform pushed the office door open. When he saw Dmitry, the jumpy fellow pulled out his side arm and shouted, “Freeze! Hands above your head.”
Dmitry held his hands over his head and kept his eyes locked on the security guard to avoid giving away his cousin crouched right next to him behind the desk.
“What’s going on?” the guard asked, pointing his gun at Dmitry.
“I’m the janitor at Brentano,” he answered.
“Your name?”
“Durchenko.”
“Oh, Mr. Durchenko. Apologies,” the campus cop said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know it was you.” The guard was so flustered he couldn’t get his gun back in its holster. He was still fumbling with his pistol when he introduced himself.
“I’m Jimmy, a friend of your daughter Lolita.” When he was finished fumbling with his sidearm, the confused cop extended his hand, and Dmitry scooted around the desk to shake his hand. He sensed Lolita had something on this guy. Maybe like so many others, he was just another casualty to her beauty. “Do you need any help Mr. Durchenko? How’s Lolita?” the cop asked.
“We’re all fine. I’ll just
finish up cleaning in here and then I’ll be out of your way.”
“Give Lolita my best.” The gangly guard shook his hand again and turned to go. “I’ll just wait downstairs in case you need me.”
“That won’t be necessary.” As soon as the security guard left the room, Vanya sprang up from behind the desk, switchblade in hand.
“Calm down Vanya. He’s not a real cop.”
“Real enough, Boss.” His cousin tapped a cigarette out of the pack in his pocket, flipped it into his mouth, and lit it with his titanium lighter.
Scowling, Dmitry grabbed the cigarette out of his cousin’s mouth, pinched it out between his fingers, and stuffed it back into Vanya’s pocket.
“We’d better get out of here before that knuckle-head starts to wonder why I’m cleaning in the middle of the night.”
Kneeling on the floor, Dmitry pried up a floorboard with his life-saving carbide-tipped scraper. Groping around under the boards first with his right hand and then with his left, he cursed, “Blyad!”
“What’s wrong, Cousin?” Vanya asked.
“The canister is gone.”
Chapter Eighteen
To her relief, the cute detective’s final question had been, “Do you need a ride home?” Shaken from the interrogation, Jessica waited outside the police station for Lolita to pick her up. The reflection of the setting sun off the steel tower across the street pierced her right temple and made her head hurt. In the saturated minutes she waited, the sky smoldered from a dusty violet and ignited into singed ocher.
The skyline transformed from a shining technological wonder shimmering on the horizon into a two-dimensional black façade pasted onto blood stained parchment paper. On another day, she would have walked down to the lake and back. Now, she stood in the same spot for what seemed like hours wondering if her mother was right when she said, “The city is full of big stack bullies either buying the blinds or giving air, who turn every decent hand into a bad beat.” Maybe her mother was right, she would be better off in Whitefish. If her mom had her way, Jessica would have been married by now with a beer-bellied husband, two kids and another on the way, living in a tin can next door in Alpine Vista trailer park.
Jessica thought of her last trip home almost a year ago. Her mom had gone into a tailspin, staying in bed for a week playing poker online, and gambling away money she didn’t have. Jessica had to force her to drink broth and tea to stay hydrated. She blamed her dad. Her mother hadn’t been the same since his death. If only he hadn’t given those hitchhikers a ride across Marias Pass during a blizzard.… She shuddered thinking about her dad’s mangled truck and all those kids on that burning bus. She fished in her pocket for Kleenex to wipe her tears, but all she found was the cold, hard gun.
Lolita pulled up with a thunderous roar, skidded to a stop, and then thrust a helmet at her.
“Here, put this on.” It looked more like a mixing bowl than protective headgear.
Glad she hadn’t gone commando, Jessica hiked up her dress and trying not to burn her calf on the exhaust pipe, carefully stretched a bare leg over the vibrating bike. She’d been burned too many times in the past.
“What the hell happened at the game?” Lolita yelled over the motorcycle’s rumbling. “Jack said you fainted. I told you not to drink, dammit.”
“I’m sorry Lol. I only had one.” Jessica’s voice was trembling as she fought back tears. “Then I blacked out.”
“You only had one drink?”
“I swear, only one. It was strange. I got dizzy all of a sudden and felt paralyzed, like I’d swallowed hemlock, and then I blacked out. I’m really sorry. I don’t know what happened.”
“Well, we’re going to find out. A Montana girl weaned on whiskey doesn’t pass out after one drink. Especially you! Maybe you were drugged.”
“Drugged? Why?”
The engine revved and Jessica reached out for her friend’s motorcycle jacket, grabbing onto one of its side-straps just in time to stop herself falling off the back of the bike. She wrapped her arms around Lolita’s slender waist and held on tight as her speed-demon friend weaved in and out of traffic across Lake Shore Drive. By the time they pulled up in front of The Rape Crisis Center, Jessica was as woozy as a ropin’ calf at a rodeo.
“Are you volunteering today? Can’t you take me home first,” Jessica whined. “Back to Brentano?”
“Come on.” Lolita hopped off the bike, and then pulled her off by the arm. “We’re going to see the SANE.”
“The who?”
“The Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner.”
“Why?” Too tired to resist, she staggered along as her friend led her inside.
Lolita greeted everyone by name as she dragged her down the narrow hallway. The stench of bleach and mold made her even dizzier, so she counted the cracks in the blistered linoleum floor to keep from fainting. Lolita by passed the check in window and pulled her through the vestibule and down another hallway into an examination room. When she pointed to a chair, Jessica collapsed into it. Then her friend opened a drawer, pulled out a paper gown, and said, “Put this on and sit down. I’ll be right back.”
She did as she was told. Why, she didn’t know. Wearing only the flimsy gown, she sat on the examination table shivering, waiting for god knows what. In a few minutes, her friend returned with a middle-aged woman in scrubs. “I think someone slipped her a mickey last night. Can you check her urine for rape drugs? And do a rape kit. She might have been sexually assaulted.”
No way. Her stomach flipped. “What? I wasn’t raped. I just drank too much.” A single tear sprouted from each eye. She’d messed up everything.
“Since when do you pass out after one drink? I told you to watch out for Kurt Willis. He has a reputation for what’s now called “nonconsensual sex,” in other words, rape.” Lolita glowered at her.
As hard as she tried to stop from crying, what was just a trickle became a stream of tears running down her cheeks. Her friend sat down next to her and put her arm around her.
“Sweetie, I’m sorry. I should have known better than to let that quarterback asshole into the game.” She got up to get some tissues from the wall dispenser. “It’s not your fault,” she said, and then added under her breath, “but I told you not to drink.”
“What makes you think Kurt slipped me something?”
“First your symptoms. Second his reputation as a rapist. Third he’s the only one who didn’t text to ask about you. Even that megalomaniac Vance asked if you were okay.” She was counting each point on her fingers for emphasis as she went through the list.
The nurse finished the exam and then used a test-strip to check her urine. “The good news is there’s no sign of forced intercourse,” the nurse said. “The bad news is your urine tested positive for gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid, or GHB. The best news is you’re still alive. Large amounts of GHB can be fatal.”
“What’s GHB?” Jessica asked.
“Its street names are G, Georgia Home Boy, Goop, Liquid G,” the nurse said. “Along with Rohypnol or Roofies and Ketamine it’s a popular rape drug. GHB leaves the body quickly, so you’re lucky you came in when you did.”
“How did I get it?”
“It’s not a disease,” Lolita said. “Someone drugged you.”
“Did anyone offer you a drink? Was your drink in your possession at all times?” the nurse asked. “Did your drink taste salty?”
“I made my own drink. I might have left it on the bar while I was making everyone else’s cocktails. But all the guys were playing poker.” She wanted to sleep, even if it meant going back to the desk at Brentano Hall. She was so exhausted she could have slept propped up in a corner.
“What about Kurt? Could he have spiked your drink when you weren’t looking?” Lolita asked.
“No. He was playing cards.” She brought her hand to her mouth. “Unless…”
“Unless, what?” the women asked in unison.
“Unless it was Alexander? He was the only one not at the
card table. But why would he do that?” Her head was spinning.
“Alexander who?” the nurse asked.
“Alexander Le Blanc. He’s friends with Kurt. I can’t believe he’d drug me. I’m his T.A. Why would he do that?”
“We’re going to find out. Come on.” Lolita tossed Jessica her little black dress. “Right after we get you some real clothes.”
“And some food and sleep,” she begged.
“You got it sweetie. Let’s go.”
Jessica recognized that steely glint in her friend’s sage eyes. She was about to embark on some feminist revenge scheme, and there was no stopping her when she got the bit between her teeth.
“Hurry up,” Lolita barked over her shoulder as she pushed open the double doors with both hands and exited the clinic. Stumbling over her own sluggish feet trying to catch up, Jessica tripped and fell in the parking lot and skidded across the asphalt, arms outstretched in front of her. By the time she rolled over and sat up, both knees were red and oozing from a bad case of road-rash. Her knees stung like heck, and wiping tears from her face with the backs of her dirty hands, she wondered how she’d landed in this mess. Before she could finish picking the tiny rocks out of her palms, her friend grabbed her beneath each arm, lifted her up, set her back on her wobbly feet, and then half-carried her to the motorbike.
“Food, sleep, and a plan for revenge. Not necessarily in that order.” Lolita threw her long leg over the Harley. “Hold on.”
Chapter Nineteen
Although it was a cool evening, people were sitting outside under the giant sunflower above the blue awning of the Blind Faith Café, enjoying the first hint of summer. The bistro tables were full of shivering hipsters drinking cocktails, huddled in excited conversations over the noise of the busy street. Jessica reckoned she was safe in the familiar surroundings.
Colorful frosted cupcakes in the bakery case were harbor beacons beckoning her to shore. Whatever the ailment, these deceptively pretty pastries were the cure, from Calming Carrot Cupcakes spiked with St. John’s Wort, to Brainy Brownies containing Ginkgo Biloba, or Honey Heart Cookies laced with Horny Goat Weed. Combined with a steaming pot of Darjeeling tea, those treats were the antidote to even the worst nightmare.
