Murder in Pastel

by Josh Lanyon

  Ten years ago Cosmo Bari vanished, and with him, his legendary masterpiece, Virgin in Pastel. Since that day no one in the seaside art colony of Steeple Hill has heard from the eccentric painter.

  Surrounded by an extended family of Cosmo’s colorful compatriots, mystery writer Kyle Bari believes he has come to terms with being abandoned by his famous father, until the day Adam MacKinnon arrives with his new lover, the beautiful but poisonous, Brett.

  Brett has an unerring instinct for other people’s weak spots; soon the quiet colony is seething with hostility and suspicion as Brett hints he knows something about the missing artist.

  Kyle doesn’t take Brett seriously until the long lost Virgin in Pastel is discovered hidden in an antique dresser. A few days later the painting has vanished again—and Brett is dead. Murdered...

  Murder in Pastel

  January 2015

  Originally published under the pen name Colin Dunne

  Copyright (c) 2015 by Josh Lanyon

  Cover by Johanna Ollila

  Edited by Keren Reed

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from JustJoshin Publishing, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-1-937909-64-2

  Published in the United States of America

  JustJoshin Publishing, Inc.

  3053 Rancho Vista Blvd.

  Suite 116

  Palmdale, CA 93551

  www.joshlanyon.com

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Murder in Pastel

  Josh Lanyon

  Chapter One

  Bad dreams.

  Like your shadow, you never outgrow them. Waking in darkness, dry-mouthed and soaked in perspiration, heart banging away like a battered screen door…like the door to memory, blowing open then slamming back, no longer able to fasten tight…

  That June morning was like all the other times. It took a moment to remember where I was: to realize that the tangle of sheets was all that held me prisoner; that the dreamed hand knocking on my window was in reality the clack of wooden blinds in the dawn breeze.

  I lay there, watching the photographs on the dresser slowly materialize in the gray first light, like ghosts in the gloom. First my mother’s face, then my grandfather’s glowering disapproval, then my father’s rare grin.

  It’s always the same dream. That’s the one thing I do remember. The same dream which starts with a rap on the window, a soft insistent tapping—a sound that can’t be ignored, like someone whispering in your ear. In my dream, I get out of bed and cross to the window.

  The next thing I know, I am awake, drenched in sweat, with my heart thundering in my ears, the last terrifying images flickering through my brain: blood, a crescent moon, a woman’s face painted blue.

  The clock in the hall chimed once, six thirty. I threw off the quilt, found my Levi’s, pulled them on.

  It was cold for June. The salty bite of the damp air mingled with the perfume of flowers as I walked through the garden to the stairs leading down to the beach. I had the world to myself that gray morning, though we were past Memorial Day when the “summer folk” arrived. All down the coast highway, brightly hued umbrellas bloomed like giant flowers on decks; railings were draped with beach towels and swimsuits. Eventually the kids and dogs would find their way to our private beach. Then would follow a few weeks of the Sea and Ski crowd; of boom boxes and Frisbees and dune buggies, before our little corner of the universe was returned to us somewhat the worse for wear.

  I didn’t have to look across the meadow to Adam MacKinnon’s cottage to know he was back; I knew, because I’d watched his headlights coming down the road last night for the first time in ten years. I’d waited to see the lights go on in his cottage and I’d watched them go off again. It had taken me a long time to fall asleep.

  So it was a test of will not to look. I headed down the steps, as I had done nearly every morning of my life, bare feet scraping the sandy stone of the stairs built into the cliff.

  I hit the beach and started toward the water, the pale sand squinching through my toes. I unbuttoned my jeans, pop, pop, pop…

  A few feet from the tumbling green water, I stopped dead.

  Rising out of the waves, and striding toward me, was a man. A stranger. A perfect stranger: tall, golden, godlike. All that was missing was the giant oyster shell and winged attendants—the red Speedos were a nice touch though.

  “Hey,” he called over the ocean’s boom.

  “Hey,” I called back.

  If there was a lack of enthusiasm on my part—and I’m sure there was, because I knew by then who he had to be—it didn’t faze him.

  He strode right up to me as the waves sucked the sand out from under our feet. I was pleased to see he was a couple of inches shorter, though built like one of those International Male models.

  “Kyle, right?” he grinned whitely, and offered a hand. His skin was chilled from the surf, his grip of the manly-man variety. “Brett Hansen.”

  Mist rose like steam off the water. Goose bumps rose on my skin.

  “Glad to meet you,” I said, since I had to say something.

  “I’m Adam’s lover. Adam MacKinnon. You remember Adam?” He was still grinning, cat-green eyes sizing me up.

  “Yeah, sure.” It was kind of ridiculous. In maidenly modesty I clutched my Levi’s to me with one hand; he still held my other.

  “We’re here for the summer.”

  “I heard.”

  “Adam’s idea. Not mine. I’m just along for the ride.” He laughed. “If you know what I mean.”

  I thought I knew. I pulled my hand free.

  “I’d invite you up to breakfast but Adam doesn’t like company before he has his daily dose of poison.” His tongue touched his upper lip like he could taste the poison—or maybe it was my reaction that was so sweet.

  “Thanks anyway.” Wild horses, baby. I tossed my Levi’s to a patch of dry sand, my self-consciousness over.

  Hands on his hips, Hansen watched me retreat toward the surf.

  The shock of cold water, the sting of salt on my skin, felt good. Bracing. Thanks, I needed that! stuff. As I forged the first wave he called out, “See you around, scout!”

  I choked on a swallow of salt water.

  Scout.

  Striking out toward the point, I couldn’t resist one glance back to the shore. Brett and his Speedos sashayed toward the stairs in the cliff. He didn’t have to look back to know I was watching.

  * * * * *

  The path that leads from the back door of my cottage to Adam MacKinnon’s, rambles through a meadow waist-high in summer with white poppies and lupine. Beyond Adam’s cottage this same path disappears into the woods where Cosmo Bari, my father, vanished one soft summer’s eve ten years ago.

  My bedroom window offers a perfect view of Adam’s bedroom window. Not that there’s been anything to see for years. But that morning the blinds were up and the cottage windows glinted in the morning sun. A metallic-colored Acura NSX was parked i
n the front yard as though on display. These were the sole signs of life as I returned from my morning constitutional.

  I thanked God I was no longer a self-absorbed adolescent believing all the world watched me behind inscrutable windows.

  Someone was watching me however. Micky sat on my porch steps smoking a cigarette and tipping the ashes into my peonies.

  “You shouldn’t swim alone, kiddo,” she greeted me as I joined her on the porch.

  “Uh huh.” The morning sun felt like a warm hand on my bare back. I stared out at the blue haze of ocean beyond the pastel clouds of flowers. The fog had dissipated like a magician’s trick.

  Micky took another drag on her cigarette. “So. What did you think of Brad?”

  “Brett?”

  “Is that his name? Yes, he looks like a Brett. So?”

  “Young.”

  “How young? Younger than you?”

  “I’d say. Twenty, twenty-one.”

  “And?”

  I shrugged. “Like a Ralph Lauren ad. Chaps.”

  She gave one of those smoky laughs. “Leave it to you to think in terms of saddle sores. He’s a hustler. A New York City hustler.”

  I resisted the urge to echo New York City! like someone in a salsa commercial. “No way.”

  “Way,” said Micky, who’s fifty if she’s a day. “Joel knows him. In the Biblical sense. Joel introduced them.”

  “How come I never heard this before?”

  “It came out last night. Joel got drunk and spilled his guts. Literally and metaphorically.” She shook her silver head and tipped more ash into my garden.

  I studied Micky. She’s still a lovely woman, her long blonde hair now paled to silver, her sea-green eyes crinkled at the corners with laugh lines, her body still slim and lithe thanks to the yoga she insists would be better for my heart than swimming and hiking. I used to wonder if Micky—Michaela St. Martin to the art world—didn’t bury herself here in Steeple Hill because of some unrequited thing for Joel.

  I said finally, “They’ve been together a long time.”

  “Two years is a long time to you?”

  “I only mean, Adam must know. He’s not still hustling, right?”

  “Adam?”

  “Funny.”

  A humming bird darted in for a closer look, and then zipped away through the cigarette smoke. I expected to hear a tiny cough.

  “I’ve never seen Joel like that,” Micky commented.

  “Like what? Don’t tell me he’s still got a hard—yen for the guy?”

  “Is it so hard to believe?” She gave me a certain look, and I felt myself reddening. “Anyway, it sounded that way last night. It could have been the alcohol. He’s a melancholy drunk.”

  “In vino veritas?”

  “In six scotch and soda vomitus.” She looked up at the burned-blue sky. “Did he say how long they were staying for?”

  “The summer.”

  Silence while Micky puffed and brooded. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” she said at last.

  * * * * *

  It seems like ever since I moved back to Steeple Hill, people—Micky for one, Joel, even Jen Berkowitz—have helpfully pointed out that I have no life.

  My answer: Define “life.” Okay, maybe they do have a point. I get up the same time every morning, take my morning swim, sit at the computer all day, take my evening walk, and fall asleep reading around eleven o’clock. No wonder I have nightmares.

  I don’t think it’s really about the hours I keep. I’ve noticed that you can have your health, you can be successful in your career, you can be happy as the day is long, but if you’re not married, engaged or seeing someone eligible, your friends are concerned. It’s no different if you’re gay.

  Being gay in Steeple Hill is not easy. Sure, we’re only about two hours from San Francisco, but it might as well be two light-years. Different solar system entirely. The only other homosexual in a hundred mile radius is Joel. As we both live in the “artists’ colony,” I guess it confirms what the townsfolk say about us: fags and liberals. And that’s the nice stuff.

  As artists’ colonies go, ours is pretty tame. Yet we’re still viewed skeptically by some of the town’s old-timers, despite the fact that my father grew up here and, starting with my father, the income per capita has verged embarrassingly on the bourgeois. Very little suffering for art goes on these days. Very little suffering, period. That’s okay. Fag though I am, I’m not into suffering much.

  I’d been at the computer for a couple of hours when the phone rang. It was Joel.

  “The Addison is holding an exhibition of Cosmo’s work.”

  “I know.”

  “They’ve asked me to speak opening night.”

  “I heard.”

  Joel Shimada was my father’s best friend. They started out together in the 1950s, doing the Greenwich Village Bohemian artist gig. Joel was the first one to earn the critics’ attention, but in the end Cosmo’s star eclipsed Joel’s.

  But Joel was gifted. He did a small oil of my father, age thirty, which hangs in the alcove in our dining room. It’s brilliant; like I remember Cosmo—unless my memories stem from that painting.

  Joel’s later stuff is in the style of Peter Samuelson; lush homoerotic studies. He was painting for himself; why not? Then he quit painting altogether and started writing, beginning with Greenwich Time, a colorful memoir about my father and their reckless youth. Thus Joel became the accepted expert on Cosmo. Cosmo. No last name. Like Rembrandt. All the world was on a first name basis with my father, thanks to Joel. A couple of years later Joel wrote a critical treatise on Cosmo’s work. Who better?

  The latest project was not going so well. He wanted my story. Son of Cosmo. I had declined. I kept declining. It made for some strained moments.

  “I think you should go,” Joel said.

  “I think not.”

  “They’ve invited you. You should go. When are you going to forgive him?”

  The psychological angle. That was new. Usually it’s all about my filial duty to keep the flame burning.

  “Forgive him? What the hell are you talking about, Joel? What is there to forgive? He went his own way from the time I was a kid. It’s all I knew. It’s all I expected—and don’t quote me either.”

  “If you don’t resent the way he walked out on you, then I really don’t understand why you continue to refuse to participate. It’s what Cosmo would want.”

  I guess Joel had been making stuff up about my father for so long he was starting to believe his own bullshit. I said, as mildly as I could, “Joel, I don’t want to argue with you.”

  “What did you say? I can hardly hear you.”

  “I don’t want to fight with you.”

  Silence followed my terse words.

  “Kyle, don’t get upset. Just consider it, all right?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Then don’t.”

  Another silence. I opened my mouth to say I had to get back to work. Joel rushed in nervously, “Have you spoken to Adam yet?”

  “No.” I was dismayed at the way my gut knotted at the unexpected mention of Adam’s name. I was over this, right? Surely this wasn’t going to be a problem? “Not yet.”

  “But he is back?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Micky says you met…Brett.”

  It was that naked pause before the name “Brett” that threw me. Was I supposed to know that Joel had history with Brett, or not?

  “I met him.”

  “I didn’t think Adam would bring him here. I would have thought some sensitivity…what do you think?”

  “About?”

  “Brett. How did he seem? Did he say why they were here?”

  “I only met him for a moment. Micky thinks Adam’s putting the house on the market.”

  “He wouldn’t have to come here for that.”

  “Maybe he wanted to see the place one last time.”

  “Maybe. Do you realize we’re all here together for the fir
st time since Cosmo—since your father—”

  “Went out for a pack of cigarettes?”

  Joel ignored my flippancy. “Are you going to the Berkowitzes’ soirée tomorrow?”

  “It depends on if I get any work done today.”

  “I suppose that’s a hint,” he huffed. “Well, fine.” He banged down the receiver.

  I sighed, considered ringing him back. But I decided I didn’t have energy for Joel’s emotional crisis—or even time for my own. I returned to my computer.

  I was thirteen when Adam MacKinnon moved into the cottage across the meadow. Originally the cottage belonged to Drake Trent who had been a silver screen heart throb in the 1940s, but was a paraplegic alcoholic by the ’70s when he rolled his wheelchair down the seventy-five narrow steps leading to the beach.

  Authorities listed Trent’s death as an accident, but everyone knew—even I knew—that he’d killed himself. Adam picked up the cottage and most of the furnishings in a state auction. Very practical. Cosmo’s friends and students weren’t known for their practicality.

  At the time Adam joined our merry band, he was twenty. He had a mane of curly black hair, a mustache and a Vandyke beard that gave him the look of a cavalier out of a Romantic painting by Gericault or Delacroix. He was tall and spare and beautiful. He wore a gold earring. He was the first openly gay man I had ever known, my “uncle” Joel not counting. No wonder I fell in love; I saw him every day for the next four years.

  Adam was cool about the puppy love. Maybe because I was Cosmo’s kid. Adam was one of my father’s students. The best. The brightest. Which was saying something, because my father didn’t suffer fools. He didn’t suffer anyone for long. Including me.

  After Cosmo split the last time, and I’d been packed off to Stanford, I lost touch with Adam. I didn’t lose track, because you can’t live in an artists’ colony where everyone eats, sleeps and drinks oil paint, and not hear about Adam MacKinnon from time to time.