No Sign of Murder

by Alan Russell

  The hollow in my stomach didn’t fill on my way to Tiburon. It wasn’t relieved by the view, and the cozy little stores. I walked into Kevin Bateson’s studio, and the blonde receptionist didn’t try to say a halting word. Not even a peep. There was that kind of look on my face.

  Bateson was in back. He was by himself. He made the mistake of saying, “Hey,” and for that I pushed him out of the way. Hard. I walked into his office, and opened the appropriate filing cabinet. There were two Anita Walters folders. I lifted them both. One I had seen. The other was the birthday-suit variety.

  I scrutinized the photos one by one. Bateson had found a seat by that time, one near the door. He didn’t want to take any chances, and his was a wise decision. I finished looking at the pictures, then opened up Juliet’s sex-paper pictorial for Bateson to see.

  “Look familiar?”

  Bateson nodded.

  “Tell me about it.”

  Bateson didn’t answer right away. “You have five seconds to say something. Silence gets you the police.”

  “I’ve had those pictures for a while,” he said at about the one-second mark. He was a little sullen, and a little frightened. “They were just sitting here. I sold them to the paper around two months ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Money.”

  “How much were you paid for the pictures?”

  “Three hundred dollars.”

  “Three hundred dollars? That was your incentive?”

  He nodded. I pulled out my cell phone.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Calling the police,” I said. “They’ll want to know why a successful photographer is selling nude photos of a missing woman for about what it must have cost him to do the shoot.”

  His answers were coming a little more quickly now, and with a bit more truth. “It wasn’t for the money, not totally.

  “I thought she might see the pictures, might get mad enough to come out from wherever she was and see me. It was a way I thought I could reach her.”

  “When did you take the pictures?”

  “Early December.”

  “Had she posed nude for you before?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me about that session.”

  Bateson’s reluctance appeared again. “Maybe I should talk with an attorney.”

  “Fine. Tell him to be prepared to bail you out.”

  He clenched his hands. “It’s not that I really did anything wrong,” he said. “It’s not that way at all.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It was here. I was working late. I didn’t know she would be coming over. I never did.”

  “Do you know sign language?”

  “No.”

  “Then how’d you talk with her?”

  “She could always make her wishes known. Usually she didn’t need a pencil and paper. She made you understand.”

  “The last time we talked you said you hadn’t been intimate with her.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And I suppose you’re going to tell me these are just some artistic nude shots.”

  “No.”

  “Then why’d she take her clothes off?”

  He hesitated. “I asked her to.”

  I looked at him. “Pretend I can’t talk,” I said. “If Anita was giving you my look, what would she be saying?”

  “That I’m lying.”

  I nodded. “Very good. And what about this look?”

  “Tell the real story.”

  “You’ve convinced me you’re perceptive,” I said, “now make me a little more of a believer.”

  He took a breath, and when he exhaled decided to chance the truth. “It was late afternoon. Cleo, my receptionist, had left, but the place wasn’t locked up. Anita just appeared. I wasn’t expecting her, hadn’t seen her for three or four weeks, but there she was. Anita was like that. Showed up when you didn’t expect her. I was glad to see her, she knew that, but I told her I had to finish up what I was doing. I gave her a magazine, but Anita’s never been very good at waiting. She came over to see what I was doing, leaned on me and looked at some pictures I had taken.

  “Some of the shots were risqué. I had been commissioned to do a lingerie line, and Anita found that amusing. She practiced the poses of the models, parodied the parodies. Early on I laughed, but she became more and more of a pest. Then she turned into a tease. She unbuttoned some blouse buttons, and hiked up her skirt, mimicked some of the racier lingerie.”

  “But she didn’t take her clothes off?”

  “No. Just teased. And that was bad enough. It was a sore spot.”

  “Why?”

  “The fight we had—the one that broke us up—it was too close to that. We had a session where I shot some pictures of her in a bikini. I tried to get close to her, and she wouldn’t let me.”

  “You came on to her, and she rejected your advances.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She stopped your personal and professional relationship because of that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Read my look again.”

  Bateson didn’t even bother to look. He pouted, then finally answered. “You’re right. It wasn’t only my pass. It was what I said. She read my lips too well. I didn’t like being pushed away by her, so I told her she wasn’t that hot anyway, and that I could have a dozen of her anytime I wanted. I told her she was cold, and probably frigid. That got her mad. I apologized, but it didn’t do any good.”

  I lifted up the pictures he hadn’t wanted me to see. “That still doesn’t explain how you got her to pose for you this way.”

  He got the cornered look on his face again. Pretty boys like Bateson usually had things go their way. He had a smooth patter, good looks, a job where his nails never got dirty, and his hair stayed blow-dry fine. He wasn’t deep, wasn’t happy to be reminded that there had been a yesterday, and that he might have acted in a manner that went against the GQ style.

  “I got tired of the way she was mocking me . . . ”

  “What did you do?”

  “She started tossing the lingerie shots around the room. I told her to stop. But she wouldn’t.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I grabbed her . . . ”

  “Did you hit her?”

  “Not really. It was more like a push, or maybe a slap . . . ”

  “How many times did you hit her?”

  “Like I said, it was like a slap . . . ”

  “And then what?”

  “I said I had been nice to her for too long.”

  “She couldn’t hear. How did she know what you were saying?”

  “I held her head. I made her read my lips.”

  “And then what?”

  “She took off her clothes.”

  “Just like that?”

  “I might have encouraged her. But it wasn’t like she wasn’t doing it already. I heard how she was going around being an art model, so it’s not like it was any big deal. What’s the difference between art and photography anyway?”

  “Did she take her clothes off willingly?”

  “She was sort of in a daze.”

  “You slapped her silly, didn’t you?”

  “I was protecting my space. What you need to understand is she made a mess here.”

  “Are you telling me it was her idea to undress herself for you?”

  “I figured it was her way of saying she was sorry.”

  “Was she bleeding?”

  “We both had some scrapes.”

  “Of course, you cleaned that up for the pictures.”

  My sarcasm was lost on him. “Yeah.”

  I looked at the pictures, and I looked at Bateson. “What happened when you took these?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “She was sort of out of it.”

  “How out of it?”

  “It was like I wasn’t there.”

  I looked through the pictures in Bateson�
�s file. Something didn’t look right in them, not that I expected anything right could have come out of that session. Anita had been slapped around, and then set in front of a camera. Her eyes were as dead as they should have been, and her body as lifeless. But her hands bothered me. They were held up and out, like a tired beggar who knows alms won’t be forthcoming, but still instinctively reaches out a claw to a passerby. I kept looking at the photos. My first impression was wrong. It wasn’t that she looked like a supplicant. Not exactly. There was a better description, but one I kept falling short of making. I mulled over the shots for another minute, but the word, the answer, wasn’t there.

  “Tell me about these shots,” I said, showing Bateson three photos.

  He looked at them, smoothed an out of place hair. “They were early in the shoot,” he said. “She kept moving her hands.”

  “I thought you said she was out of it.”

  “She was.”

  “How’d you get her to stop with the hands?”

  “I asked her to drop them.”

  He read my disbelieving look. “I encouraged her with a few slaps to her hands,” he said.

  “What a gentleman.”

  “I overreacted. I let my anger get the best of me. That’s when I stopped the shoot and begged her forgiveness. I swear to God, that’s what I did.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Nothing at first. Then it was like Anita woke up. She slapped me, hard, and I took it. I wish she had slapped me a few more times, but she didn’t. She just looked at me with a lot of hate, and then she left.”

  “And you haven’t seen her since?”

  “Right.”

  My fists were clenched. I wanted to hit him. But I didn’t want to stoop to his level. I gathered up Anita’s portfolio, and walked out of the studio.

  Vanessa Darling was waiting in front of the restaurant. She was wearing a colored serape, and her reddish hair was pulled under a sailor’s cap. I almost walked by her before she caught my attention.

  I used one of the oldest lines in burlesque, which had thankfully died with vaudeville: “I almost didn’t recognize you with your clothes on.”

  Vanessa had the good sense to groan.

  The restaurant was crowded. We were seated next to the bus station, so we carried on most of our conversation over water glasses being filled. Since the place was also noisy, we found ourselves huddled together. It wasn’t sensual, just necessary. Early in our conversation Vanessa said that she was “living with her lover—Suzanne.” She didn’t say it to shock me, or warn me away, but just as an aside on her life.

  “My old lady’s an artist too,” she said. “I model for her, but don’t get paid.”

  “And probably don’t get smeared with paint.”

  Vanessa had been a model for a few years. She told me about some of the artists she had worked for, and admitted she had “a thing” for artists. Most of her lovers had been men, and most had been poor artists. I let her ramble for a while, and then I told her about my case. She had heard of Anita, but had never met her, and couldn’t add anything about her life that I didn’t already know.

  “So, tell me about the life of an art model, then,” I said.

  “It’s mostly a bitch,” said Vanessa. “The pay’s shitty, and you’ve always got to deal with artistic temperament. That’s not a made-up phrase.”

  “Like Vincent?” I asked.

  “You saw him in one of his intense moments.”

  “Is that what you call it?”

  “Sometimes he needs to do things like that for inspiration.”

  “Is that what he says?”

  “He says it facilitates his vision, or something like that.”

  “You looked scared.”

  “I was a little. He’s strong, and his hands are rough. It hurt when he rubbed the paint on me.”

  “Has he hurt you before? Scared you?”

  “I wouldn’t call it scared.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “Sometimes he puts me off balance.”

  “How often?”

  “Every few weeks.”

  “And what does he do?”

  “He likes different poses, sometimes difficult ones. And he’s so intense. He’ll yell at you if you can’t hold it.”

  “What else?”

  “I’ve heard some of his other models complain.”

  “And what do they say?”

  “They don’t like the way he talks sometimes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He doesn’t do it with me, just some of the girls.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “It’s—well, it’s like he fantasizes out loud. Fantasizes about weird things.”

  “Can you give me an example?”

  “Well, one girl I know, Tricia, said she was doing a painting with him once, I think it was called Salem Witch Trial, or something like that. And he had all the Puritans in black and wearing caps, and made them look like the witches and warlocks, while he had the real witch, or what was supposed to be the witch, looking normal. That’s when he started talking about witches, and asked Tricia what she would do if she was a witch. Then he started getting weird. He asked Tricia if she’d make love while riding her broomstick, and asked her how she’d enchant her lovers, and what she’d do with them. Then he started saying he knew what kind of spells she’d cast, and they were bizarre things. And she could see he was getting excited—physically, I mean. He was painting furiously, and all the while he turned to her and said stuff like, ‘Then you’d make the minister run naked through the pumpkin patch, make him act like he was in rut, wouldn’t you?’ Tricia said she was so scared she agreed to whatever he said.”

  “Why does anyone work for Vincent?”

  “He pays well. And he’s good. It’s sort of a status thing for models, who you’re working for. Everybody wants their piece of immortality.”

  “And that’s worth freezing in an unheated loft? Or getting tetanus from the filth on the floor? Haven’t any of the models ever complained about the mess in that place?”

  “Vincent doesn’t believe in waste. He likes his oddments. That’s what he calls them. He makes sculptures and decorative pieces from absolute junk, things just lying around. He’s got a thing against throwing stuff away. He’s kind of obsessed about getting use out of everything, even discards.”

  “How long have you been working for him?”

  “On and off for a year and a half.”

  “Do you know any of Vincent’s lovers?”

  “Yeah. A few of his models, but they didn’t make any big thing about it, and neither did Vincent. And then of course there’s Goldilocks.”

  “You know Goldilocks?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes I think she makes Vincent seem normal.”

  “Do you think Vincent and Anita were lovers?”

  “No one ever said anything, but I kinda doubt it. I remember someone said Anita was a tight ass.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  We talked for about a half hour longer than our food lasted, two figures huddling to hear, and maybe for a little warmth. I heard Vanessa’s opinions on life. They weren’t jaded, which was refreshing. She was a nice woman who seemed devoid of guile. I liked her openness, her bounce. She lived in a world where weird was normal. Maybe we all did. But it didn’t faze her.

  “Do you paint?” she finally asked me.

  “Only in water,” I said.

  “I like watercolors,” she said.

  “I do, too.”

  “Hey, if you hear of anyone who needs a model . . . ”

  “I’ll tell them they couldn’t do any better.”

  “And thanks for lunch. It was a trip.”

  We passed smiles, and then separated. I watched the wind tug at her serape, watched her hold firmly to her cap.

  It was a trip, she had said. A trip where, I wondered.

  14

  WHEN I CHECKED IN w
ith Miss Tuntland, I learned that Terrence Walters had not returned my call. It didn’t surprise me. My message had been premature, not to mention stupid. I was glad for two things: my message hadn’t been specific, and I had already cashed Tammy Walters’s check. Not too many employers like to be accused of child molestation, especially without tangible evidence. Terrence Walters might even give an aggrieved squawk to the Department of Consumer Affairs. Their watchdogs overlooked the Collection and Investigative Services, and had the right to take away an investigator’s license for a “crime of moral turpitude.”

  But moral turpitude wasn’t the major crime in question. It was murder. Even if my theory of child molestation fit, it wasn’t likely to help with the case I was working on. Anita’s possible abuse was just another windmill unless I believed her father had killed her. It wasn’t a theory I ruled out, but filicide didn’t seem Terrence Walters’s style. If Anita had threatened to expose his past sins, he probably would have found a way to discredit her, something far short of murder. And if he had killed Anita, I didn’t think he would have allowed his wife to hire a private investigator. Terrence Walters was too much of a thinker for that. He would have found a safer way to show his Piedmont neighbors his filial concern.

  I asked Miss Tuntland about my other calls. A long list of delayed professional calls were adding up. I kept putting off making those calls, knowing that they would bring on conferences and new deadlines.

  The day wasn’t much more than halfway over, but I was tired already. I decided a call to Tammy Walters was overdue, and I reached her at her cell number. I told her that I wanted to go over the work I’d done, and asked if we could meet. She agreed to my coming over the following day at three, and even said she looked forward to it. Politeness often gets in the way of truth.

  A series of texts to Ellen followed the call. Ellen wrote that she wanted me to come over for dinner, and I agreed to be there by seven.

  In the time remaining, I debated my best course of action, and decided on a long shot. Anita Walters’s last reported destination was the New Year’s celebration in North Beach. I wondered whether she ever made it. The authorities hadn’t made a determination one way or the other, had let that, and Anita, fall through the cracks.

  I wasn’t a stranger to the festivities. Every year the crowds grew so heavy that the police closed off Broadway and Columbus. It was the bedlam of the City trying to throw off its cares. People with horns and costumes and masks marched up and down the streets. Street performers abounded, and made for great spectator sport. The police almost made it a parade, the mounted police, the cavalry, marching up and down with their horses, a procession of order on a night of madness. If Anita had gone but that night, and her mother said she never missed the New Year’s festivities, she would have been just one of many celebrants.