by Alan Russell
“You suppose?”
“Vincent can get very intense. But I know how to channel his stream.”
“What if someone didn’t know how to channel his stream?”
Goldilocks shrugged.
“When Vincent’s intense, what kind of demands does he make?”
“It depends on who he is at the moment.”
“I’ve heard that Vincent’s frightened some of his models. I’ve also heard he’s scared away some bed partners.”
“So what?”
“Has Vincent ever lost himself with you? Become so involved, so intense, you couldn’t reach him?”
Goldilocks wasn’t used to being unsettled. Her hand was unsteady when she pulled out a cigarette, or maybe she made it shake. Maybe she was that good an actress.
“What are you driving at?”
“Answer the question.”
She lit the cigarette, and inhaled. She blew the smoke at me. “He’s lost it a few times. But that just made it more exciting.”
“Tell me about those times.”
“Why should I?”
“To humor me.”
She inhaled her cigarette again, fully inflated her lungs, which drew every glance in the bar, then exhaled.
“A few times he got into a character he couldn’t release from too quickly.”
“Which translates into what?”
“Good times.”
“And?”
“Maybe I got thrown around a little.”
“Hit?”
“Some.”
“Injured?”
“I never needed to go to the hospital or anything . . . ”
“Hurt?”
“Maybe a little . . . ”
“So, he is dangerous. Probably unbalanced. Did he ever threaten to kill you?”
“It was all acting!”
Her shout turned every head. Goldilocks didn’t care.
“That’s all it was—acting.”
“But he did threaten you sometimes?”
“And I threatened him. It was spice. And cleaner than the mind games you’re playing now.”
Goldilocks finished her drink, and stamped out her cigarette. “I have to get back,” she said.
“I’ll walk you.”
“Don’t bother. And don’t call on me again about this case. It bores me. Not everybody’s a murderer, you know. Your little chippy is probably off somewhere having a good time.”
“I hope so,” I said, and I was sincere, but Goldilocks didn’t much give a damn about that. The scene called for her to walk off without a good-bye, and she played it to the hilt.
I didn’t really know what my cue was, so I paid attention to my drink, and started to make my notes. I ignored the low murmurs. I wrote down our dialogue as best I remembered, and thought back to what she had said about Vincent’s threats.
Spice, she had called them.
Sugar and spice, and everything nice. That’s what little girls are made of.
18
“IT’S GOOD TO HEAR your voice, Miss Tuntland.”
“And it’s rare to hear yours, Mr. Winter.”
Miss Tuntland’s rebuff wasn’t much of one. I knew I’d been short with her lately, not keeping her up to date with the case. She never liked to be left out.
“You wouldn’t believe the last few days.”
“Maybe I would if you told me about them.”
“How many ways are there to say ‘dead end’? I don’t happen to have my thesaurus handy.”
“Oh. And is Ellen Reardon a ‘dead end’?”
When you don’t have a ready retort, you go on the defensive. “How can a voice as sweet as yours have so many cynical edges?”
“Practice makes perfect.”
“I just finished meeting with Goldilocks. She was dressed like a spitting cobra and lived up to her outfit. I learned Vincent is a possibly dangerous kink. Part of the general trend.”
“Which is?”
“Which is not a pretty. Vincent doesn’t even head the list of kinks. Anita was sexually abused for years by her father, the esquire Terrence Walters.”
I listened to her sigh. It was real. Maybe I called her to hear those sighs. Maybe I needed to know there was one person in the world who really cared.
“And remember Kevin Bateson?”
“The photographer?’
“That and other things. One day he took the time to beat Anita, and her dignity wasn’t the only thing he stripped. And he was a friend. Should I tell you about another friend?”
“Yes.”
“Dr. William Henry Harrison. The esteemed and venerable Dr. Harrison. He lied about an injury Anita received at the Gorilla Project. He covered up her injury to protect his hairy babes. And I guess I shouldn’t forget mentioning another one of her friends—Joseph, poor Joseph. He grabbed her ear, hurt her, but at least he felt bad about it. I’m sure it was accidental, but I think Anita just saw it as one last betrayal. Couldn’t even count on Joseph her friend, Joseph the gorilla. She had learned not to trust humans, and that included herself. I don’t think she liked that, but she didn’t have a hell of a lot of good examples to learn from.”
“You don’t paint a very pretty picture.”
“Maybe it’s one I should suggest to Vincent. Maybe he could make a grand mural and call it The Revelations of Winter. He could show me in action over the past few days, sharing drinks with bag people and talking to confused models. Or maybe it should be paint by number. Follow the trail of Winter’s walks and talks and maybe you can piece together Anita’s body. But I’m rambling, aren’t I, Miss Tuntland? We’re not talking about a painting, we’re talking about a lot of dark corners. But there—that’s another idea. How about a display of a lot of dark corners, and Anita’s hands captioning what’s going on in sign language? Her hands are great explainers. You should have seen them explaining away in her nude photos. ‘Stop it,’ she kept signing. To her father, to Bateson, to Joseph even. Maybe that’s what she’d be signing to me now.”
“Stop it,” said Miss Tuntland.
I didn’t know whether she was repeating my words, or telling me to quit, but I decided hers was the voice of Anita, and so I did stop it. I was tired of the whole dirty thing, anyway.
“What are you going to do now?”
Miss Tuntland used her concerned voice, and it disarmed even my self-pity.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been presuming her death for the past few days. Maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe she did just up and leave.”
“And if she didn’t?”
“Not a hell of a lot of people seem to care either way.”
“Does that mean you’re giving up?”
“You know better than that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“I’m sweating out inspiration now. I thought I’d pant a little for you. Didn’t someone say investigation was ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration?”
“Thomas Alva Edison. And he said it about genius, not investigating. If I’m to believe the gospel according to Winter, investigating is ninety-nine percent desperation.”
“Which leaves me with a whole one percent to work on.”
“What are you and your percent going to do now?”
“This is the part in the conversation where I should break down, Miss Tuntland. Where I should tell you that this bloodhound has run out of scent. Where you’re supposed to pat me on the head and say, ‘Good doggie’ anyway. Tomorrow’s the first day I don’t have anyplace to go, no clues to follow up.”
“Good doggie,” she said. “Now shoo.”
“What?”
“It’s not the end of the world. Maybe you need to work on something else. Maybe you need a break.”
“That sounds familiar. I keep telling myself the same thing. I woke up this morning and said I wasn’t going to work on the case. Said I was just going to walk and breathe, but it didn’t work. I’m not ready to let go, not yet.”
“Even if you’re holding
a tiger’s tail?”
“Especially then.”
“You were probably a stubborn little boy.”
“No, I was smarter then. Better natured.”
“What happened to you?”
“I discovered there was no Tooth Fairy. No Santa Claus. And learned that love doesn’t conquer all, and hate doesn’t sustain you.”
“Is that a violin I hear playing over the line?”
“No. Muzak.”
“Thought so.”
“But I’m glad you heard the elevator ride out.”
“It wasn’t a very long ride. And I still think we’re going up.”
There was a little pause. Between the cuteness there had been real human openings. That’s always scary. I retreated from that border. “Thanks,” I said.
“I’m glad you called,” she said.
“So am I. But I never even asked you if there were any messages.”
“Just one. From a secret admirer. She said to take care.”
“If she calls back, tell her I will. And tell her the same.”
When you get a little warmth in your stomach, sometimes you get greedy, and want a little more. I sent my text out, and it didn’t take long before I was myself invited over to Ellen’s.
I stopped for a good bottle of wine, and didn’t spare either the expense or the gas. I was out of the City quickly, and onto the Bay Bridge. I careened around Lake Merritt, didn’t even stop to rubberneck the interesting birds that are usually there, and found a parking space near Ellen’s place. When I pushed her doorbell, I saw flashing lights strobe inside, but the show didn’t last long. She was at the door, and then in my arms. We didn’t waste words. There was a hunger in us that preceded decorum by about three million years.
Our lovemaking started quickly, but it wasn’t a dash we wanted, but a moment to never end. I entered her, and she entered me. At first, I tried to conduct our love. I moved my hands along her taut body, licked the sweat and dampness on her thighs, and kissed her nipples, but she could feel the orchestration in my movements, and she didn’t want that. It wasn’t a night for rote lovemaking, but for acting on what felt good. We followed impulses and feelings. We moved, and bucked, and cried, and neither of us could be sure who was pushing, and grabbing, and breathing, and moaning.
Unity, so hard to reach, and so brief, leaves suddenly. When the lights and flashes and shakes have finished, when the bed stops shaking and you’ve fallen to separate pillows, there is that return to self. Ellen’s consciousness came back a few seconds after mine. She didn’t try to rationalize, or verbalize; she just reached for me. It was better landing arm in arm, hugging and holding while all our tremors and twitches stopped. Our breathing slowed together. My arm was under her back, my hand resting on her warm breast. We pretended we weren’t really going to sleep, that we were just resting up for more fun and games, but it would have been anticlimactic to climb and fall from Everest more than once in a night, or maybe even a lifetime.
With her warmth at my side, I expected I’d find Ellen in my dreams, but dreams aren’t made that way. I slept deeply for a few hours, the slumber of death that comes after offering life, and on the path of the dead I found Anita. It was almost the same dream as before. Anita tried to tell me who murdered her, kept signing a name, and I yelled at her to speak.
“Goddammit!” I yelled. “Tell me the name.”
And her face, just as angry as her hands, signed back at me, cursing my stupidity probably, certainly.
I awoke back on the long path to nowhere. My hands were trembling, and I was cold.
It was very dark. I couldn’t see my hands in front of me, the hands I was trying to mold into the sign of her murderer. I thought about signing, about hand words, and how the deaf sometimes unconsciously signed. And I remembered that even the hearing who didn’t know sign language sometimes unconsciously signed. On Martha’s Vineyard they had done that.
Which reminded me of something. And then my breath left me. I shook Ellen, started yelling questions at her, then remembered to turn on the light.
She was groggy. Her hearing aids were on the nightstand, and she fumbled with them, finally getting them in. At first, she couldn’t understand what I was asking. But I kept repeating the same question over and over.
“What is the sign for murderer?”
She showed me. It was a sign I had seen many times. And it told me who had murdered Anita.
19
I DIDN’T REALLY FEEL very smart. The answer had been in front of my eyes for a very long time. A deaf private investigator, any deaf person, would have seen it. Vincent had used everything but fireworks to announce his crime. With his hands he broadcast that he was a murderer, shouted out his admission in sign language.
And no one had heard him.
I had thought it affectation, or a tic, the movement of his index finger on his right hand, the pushing forward and slashing moving under his left palm. He carried his blood letter openly, and it made me wonder about Anita’s last moments. She must have known she was dying, and with her last strength signed at him, over and over, murderer—murderer—murderer. It was a curse she left on him, a curse that played on him, and made him unconsciously repeat her hand movements, and tell the world her last word.
But his announcement wasn’t the kind of evidence that would hold up in court. I drove to China Basin to find the kind of evidence that would.
“Okay, Anita,” I said, “where do I look?” But she didn’t answer. It wasn’t dreamtime yet So I listened to the hum of the car, and looked out at the darkness, and fiddled with the controls of my mind, changing station after station in search of the right information.
“About ten years ago he changed his name to Vincent. Everyone guesses the name comes from Vincent Van Gogh, but our Vincent doesn’t talk about it.”
“He fantasizes out loud, fantasizes about weird things.”
“He ejaculated into a cup and mixed his semen with red paint.”
“Vincent is a slave to art. It commands me.”
“He cut himself, quite deeply, and let his blood mix with the paint.”
“Two of your paintings interested me, Mr. Patchen.”
The unflappable Vincent had been bothered by those words. Why? He had provided witnesses who corroborated that he had paid Anita for the faucet handle and the cabinet door. But in my mind’s crystal test something wasn’t chiming right.
“Vincent can get very intense. But I know how to channel his stream.”
“Vincent needed her for evaluation purposes, needed someone without ears.”
“Sometimes he puts me off balance.”
“He’s lost it a few times. But that just made it more exciting.”
“Vincent doesn’t believe in waste. He likes his oddments. That’s what he calls them. He doesn’t believe in waste. 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 a use out of everything, even discards.”
I stopped. Something was trying to make itself heard. I drove along Townsend and again parked in front of Maxilla & Mandible. The night brought a phosphorescent glow to the bones, their whiteness standing out in the gloom. The darkness was more their element, which is not to say it made them look better. The hard edges of death aren’t sanitized in shadows like they are under decorator lights. They urged those who still had skin on their bones to keep walking.
Everything was quiet and dark, and my steps sounded overloud while I walked down the alleyway. There wasn’t even enough light to read the graffiti.
I circled around the back, walked to the long-deserted train tracks to make sure no one was around, then returned to the alley and Vincent’s loft.
The door wasn’t unlocked this time, and I didn’t have the patience to try and pick the locks. I took my coat off, broke a window, and got inside quickly. It would have been just my luck to have a chance black-and-white come along. Asking for my
license to be revoked meant I was playing with my pulse and not my mind. It wasn’t smart, but I told myself it was necessary.
My flashlight came out as I climbed the creaky stairs. In the back of my mind I regretted not carrying a gun in my trunk for just such an occasion, but I’ve never been really comfortable holding hardware. I came to the fire door, and shoved it open. It cried out for oiled tracks. I shone my light inside, took a few tentative steps, and decided more light would serve me better than caution. I found a wall switch.
I kicked around a lot of trash, and nosed about some corners, but I kept angling for the storage shed. On my last visit it had been clean and empty, had even smelled clean, and in the midst of all the refuse any cleanliness made me suspicious. A lock barred entry to the shed, a lock that resisted my efforts. I found some metal rods on the floor, made several misguided attempts with brute strength, then rigged up a fulcrum with the rods. Vincent was right. His oddments did have purpose. Aided by curses, physics, and a couple of hundred pounds, the lock finally gave.
There were twelve paintings in the shed. I brought them out to the light. All had been on display the weekend before. I wondered why these twelve had returned, while looking at them closely.
Maybe there is a sixth sense. Maybe sixth sense is nothing more than your unconscious mind knocking on your conscious with a message. But two of the twelve paintings I kept coming back to. I even remembered their titles from the show: I Need Her and The Plastic Surgeon’s Mistress.
I placed the paintings on top of the shed and looked at them side by side. There didn’t seem to be anything that tied them together, save their bizarreness. I turned them around, viewed them from different angles, close up and from a distance.
I Need Her kept drawing my attention. Maybe I was attracted to puns. It should have been titled I Knead Her. The hands were kneading the naked woman, the graphically naked woman without the head. I tested the pubic hairs, which looked so real, and they felt real. I wondered if they were Vincent’s contributions, or whether he had plucked them from a model.
“I Need Her.” I said the name out loud. It didn’t taste quite right, I said it again, a little more quickly. “I Need Her. INeedHer.”
