Double Image

by David Morrell

  “Randolph died two hours ago.”

  A chill started at Coltrane’s feet and went all the way to his scalp. “No. How . . . Yesterday . . .”

  “He put up a good front. His breathing got worse around three this morning. Even with the oxygen at its highest setting, he still had to fight for air.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I phoned for his doctor, but Randolph left strict instructions that he didn’t want to go to a hospital. All we could do was make him comfortable. By early afternoon, he was finally at peace.”

  “The camera.” Coltrane had difficulty getting his voice to work. “When did . . .”

  “We discussed it last evening. That’s also when he signed the photo-permission forms, which I assume your editor has by now, along with the prints. The project can go forward as planned. For some reason, Randolph thought it important that someone retrace his steps.”

  “I won’t let him down.”

  “He didn’t think you would. You’d be surprised how close he was beginning to feel toward you. ‘A fellow orphan’ is how he described you. I want to be sure you understand. Randolph found it almost impossible to speak near the end, but he managed an amazing effort to make me promise to tell you.”

  “Tell me?”

  “The camera is yours.”

  “. . . What?”

  “It’s not a loan. It’s a gift. I guess you could call it an inheritance.”

  19

  S O , WEIGHED DOWN WITH GRIEF , Coltrane brought Packard back to life. He couldn’t help thinking that way as he worked in the darkroom, a faint amber safelight over his head. Jennifer stood next to him, watching somberly as he used tongs to slide a sheet of photographic paper into a tray of developing solution. He stirred the solution. Briefly, the sheet remained blank. Then the magic took place, an image coming to life on the paper, a black-and-white picture of the old man gazing up.

  Jennifer wasn’t able to speak for a moment. “It’s fabulous.”

  Sorrow negated any tone of satisfaction that Coltrane might have felt. The odor of chemicals was bitter. “I took a dozen exposures, but this is the one I knew I wanted.”

  The image showed Packard looking shrunken in his pajamas and his housecoat, sitting in his wheelchair, the fireplace in the background. The aperture setting Coltrane had used had allowed him to keep that background in focus, specifically part of a burnt-out log in the hearth, the kind of symbolic detail that Packard had liked to use in his early work.

  “His eyes,” Jennifer said.

  Coltrane nodded. “The expression in them constantly changed—from arrogance to impatience to irony to amusement to calculation. But this particular expression was the one I wanted. Earlier, when he’d looked at the collection of his photos I brought for him to autograph, his eyes became sad. There wasn’t a hint of pride in his reaction to what he’d created. Instead, the only thing the photographs seemed to do was remind him of the passage of time.”

  “Did you have any trouble getting him to hold the book in his lap?”

  “Not at all. He told me, ‘I surrender myself .’”

  “So now we have a photograph of a fragile old man who happens to be a genius, inspecting the contents of one of his books. A photograph about a photographer and his photographs.”

  Coltrane’s voice was filled with melancholy. “His photos stayed the same, but he got older.”

  “But now he stays the same in this photo.”

  “I wonder what it’ll feel like, going where Packard did, doing what he did, trying to be him.”

  THREE

  1

  A PPROACHING THE B EVERLY H ILLS H OTEL , Coltrane steered left off Sunset Boulevard and headed up Benedict Canyon Drive. It was a little after eight Wednesday morning, the day after Packard’s funeral. Determined to start the project, he and Jennifer had set out early. They drove through the shade of towering palm trees, past expensive homes concealed behind meticulously trimmed hedges and tall house-hugging shrubs. The sky was clear and bright for a change, the clouds having moved on.

  “Don’t keep me in suspense. Which house is first on the list?” Jennifer asked.

  “Falcon Lair.” Coltrane wore his typical work clothes: leather hiking boots, jeans, and a navy sweatshirt.

  In contrast, Jennifer had an orange sweatshirt with a Southern California Magazine logo. Her short blond hair was tucked beneath a baseball cap, making her face look attractively boyish, reminding Coltrane of the movie actor she now mentioned. “Rudolph Valentino?”

  “The sheik himself.”

  “I never understood why he called the place Falcon Lair.”

  “In the mid-twenties, Valentino’s second wife was trying to get the studio to let her supervise the production of one of his movies. The picture was called The Hooded Falcon. But she ran up costs so much that the studio canceled it. To make her feel better, Valentino named the mansion they were building in honor of the aborted project. They got divorced shortly afterward.”

  “And what happened to Valentino?”

  “When his wife left him, he threatened to blow his brains out. Instead, he bought tons of antique furniture—suits of armor and Moorish screens, crap like that. It was more than Falcon Lair would hold, but he managed to cram it all in there. In the end, he almost spent himself into bankruptcy. He worried about his career until he died at the age of thirty-one from a bleeding ulcer.”

  2

  P ACKARD ’ S MUCH - PRAISED PHOTOGRAPH OF F ALCON L AIR had been taken from a neighboring hilltop. It showed the thirteen-room mansion tiny in the distance, surrounded by a high white wall, perched on a flattened ridge, looking so isolated that it bore an intriguing resemblance to a Spanish monastery. None of the many hills beyond it had any houses on it, but tentaclelike roads predicted the invasion about to take place. On the bottom left of the photograph, amid exposed earth on one of the slopes, a developer’s sign announced BEVERLY TERRACE . The implication was clear. Soon the area would be filled with comparable estates. The remoteness that made the location attractive would be destroyed. As if commenting on the impending invasion, Packard had managed to capture a bird of prey hovering in the foreground.

  3

  N EAR THE TOP OF B ENEDICT C ANYON D RIVE , Coltrane chose a secluded street to the left and headed higher into the wooded hills. The neighborhood became increasingly deserted the more the houses looked expensive.

  “How do you know this is the way?” Jennifer asked.

  “I don’t. Monday, I bought a contour map and tried to orient it with Packard’s photo and a Beverly Hills street guide. Falcon Lair is on one of those bluffs to the right, so we have to go in the opposite direction to find the spot where Packard took the photograph.”

  Jennifer shook her head. “These streets weren’t here back then. There’s no way to tell which route Packard used.”

  “And all these trees cut off the view, so we don’t know where we are in relation to Falcon Lair.”

  Six hours later, dogged determination was all that kept them going. “This assignment needs an explorer, not a photographer,” Coltrane said as he steered onto yet another side street.

  Jennifer squirmed. “My rear end hurts. I feel as if I’ve driven to Vegas and back.” Empty coffee cups, along with scrunched-up junk-food wrappers, littered the floor of the passenger seat—from several bathroom trips to West Hollywood. “I bet I put on ten pounds.”

  “Maybe getting me to do this project was Packard’s idea of a practical joke.” Coltrane reached the crest of what seemed the hundredth side street and pointed toward a walled estate on the left. “Do you think this is where he took the photograph?”

  Jennifer glanced from the estate toward the barely glimpsed view to the right. “Let’s give it a try. Anything to get out and see if my legs still work.”

  A breeze smelled sweet. Despite the recent rain, Coltrane heard a lawn sprinkler.

  “Could be.” He studied the estate. It was higher than the street. In fact, it was on the highest spot a
round. “From inside, we might be able to see over the trees toward the opposite side of the canyon.”

  Jennifer checked her watch. “Ten after two. The light will soon be perfect.”

  “Yeah, maybe the day won’t be a total waste. Maybe I can still get some shots.”

  The rhododendron-lined driveway had a closed metal gate. A smaller closed gate had a sidewalk leading onto the property. An intercom was mounted on an ivy-covered wall.

  Coltrane pushed the button.

  “Hello?” A female voice, sounding tinny, came from the intercom.

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m a photographer for—”

  “You’re early.”

  Coltrane exchanged a puzzled look with Jennifer.

  “Excuse me, ma’am?” he said to the intercom.

  “You’re not supposed to be here until Saturday.”

  “Saturday?”

  “For our daughter’s wedding.”

  “I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding.”

  “My God, don’t tell me you can’t be here for the wedding!” the woman said.

  “I don’t know anything about that. I work for Southern California Magazine and—”

  “Magazine? But I don’t want any magazines.”

  Jennifer started to giggle.

  “Ma’am, I’m not selling magazines. What I want to do is take some photographs of a house across—”

  “Photographs of our house? My husband will go insane. He hates anybody knowing anything about our private life. The last movie he produced was about Arab terrorists. He says, if they find out where we live, they’ll blow us up in our sleep.”

  Jennifer bent over, trying to stifle her laughter.

  “Ma’am, I have no intention of photographing your house. I want to photograph Rudolph Valentino’s house.”

  “Rudolph Valentino? You’re not making sense! For all I know, you’re a terrorist. Young man, I can see you from the house. If you don’t leave right now, I’m calling the police!”

  “Please, let me explain!”

  The intercom had been making a slight buzzing sound. Now it went dead.

  When Coltrane turned to Jennifer for moral support, he found her slumped on the curb, holding herself, laughing. “Only nineteen more houses to go,” she managed to say between guffaws. “At this rate, you’ll be done by next summer.”

  “Maybe not,” a voice said.

  4

  J ENNIFER STOPPED LAUGHING . They spun toward the gate, where an attractive, delicate-looking woman in her late twenties studied them. She was tall and slim, wearing tan slacks and a brown cardigan. Her arms were crossed. A kerchief covered her hair.

  “Are you really from Southern California Magazine?”

  Jennifer stood and showed her best winning smile, gesturing toward the logo on her sweatshirt. “Cross my heart.”

  “Just a second.” The woman reached through the bars on the gate and pressed the intercom.

  The tinny voice responded immediately. “Young man, I told you—”

  “Mother, don’t call the police. These people seem all right. I’m going to let them in.”

  “But—”

  The woman took her finger off the intercom’s button, then pressed numbers on a keypad on the other side of the gate, freeing an electronic lock. “You’re serious about photographing a house across the canyon, Mr. . . .”

  “Mitch Coltrane. This is my editor, Jennifer Lane.”

  “Diane Laramy.”

  They shook hands and stepped through the gate.

  “What’s this about Rudolph Valentino?”

  Coltrane explained the assignment as they climbed a smooth slanted lawn, stopping with their backs to a lemon tree at the hill’s highest point.

  “And there it is.” Jennifer sounded amazed. She showed Packard’s photograph to Diane, then pointed down toward a curving street of houses on an opposite but lower hill. One sprawling red-roofed structure stood slightly apart, perched on an eroded slope, solitary on a dead-end road. Its walls were still white. It still looked like a Spanish monastery. But there the similarity ended. The invasion that Packard’s photograph had predicted made Falcon Lair look besieged.

  “I was beginning to think this project couldn’t be done,” Coltrane said.

  “Eerie,” Diane said. “Looking at that photograph and then at the house, I feel as if I’m in the past and the present simultaneously.”

  “That’s the idea,” Coltrane said.

  He and Jennifer crisscrossed the hill, leaning this way and that, all the while comparing their view of Falcon Lair to the perspective in Packard’s photograph, trying to find the exact spot where Packard had set up his camera.

  Scraping his back against the lemon tree, Coltrane smiled. “Well, I’ll be . . . Yes. Right here.”

  “Let me see.” Jennifer hurried to Coltrane’s left.

  Bemused, Diane joined Coltrane on his right. He raised the photo so that it obscured the view, then lowered it, the Falcon Lair from the 1920s replaced by the Falcon Lair of the present.

  “It’s like a weird kind of double exposure,” Diane said. “This lemon tree wouldn’t have been here then.”

  “Or the lawn,” Jennifer added. “And obviously not your house.”

  “And none of these other houses.” Coltrane continued to raise and lower the photograph, the effect hypnotic.

  “So many years ago. Someone stood exactly where I’m standing now and took that picture.”

  “He died on Sunday,” Coltrane said.

  Diane suddenly shivered.

  “Is something wrong?” Coltrane asked.

  “No. There’s just a chill in the air.”

  But Coltrane couldn’t help wondering if Diane had shivered for another reason. Her delicate features began to trouble him. Her skin was so translucent that he could see the hint of blue veins in her cheeks. Her eyes seemed sunken, possibly because she had lost a lot of weight. Her slacks and cardigan hung on her. Her kerchief covered her head so completely that he didn’t see any of her hair.

  “Well . . .” Coltrane felt awkward. “We’re taking up your time.”

  “No problem,” Diane said. “I’m enjoying this.”

  “Even so . . .” Coltrane studied the sky. “The light’s about as good as I can hope for. I’d better get started.”

  5

  W HEN HE AND J ENNIFER WENT BACK TO THE CAR TO GET THE camera, the tripod, and the bags of equipment, Diane insisted on helping, out of breath even though she carried only a small camera bag to the crest of the hill. Coltrane didn’t have time to think about the implications. He had only about two hours of effective light remaining and needed to hurry.

  It took almost fifteen minutes to get the heavy camera secured on the tripod. After that, he used a light meter, calculated the necessary shutter speed and aperture setting, chose a lens, poked his head beneath the black cloth at the rear of the camera, used the bellows to adjust the focus, and compared what he saw to Packard’s photograph. Getting everything lined up was more difficult than he had anticipated. After forty-five minutes of concentrating on an upside-down reversed image, he felt light-headed, as if he were upside down.

  He made twelve exposures, but he wasn’t satisfied. Framing the image to make its perspective identical to that in Packard’s photograph wasn’t going to produce a brilliant photograph, he realized. The result would merely be a visual trick. He had to build on what Packard had done, to find a metaphor equivalent to the bird of prey hovering over Falcon Lair.

  “Mitch?”

  Coltrane rubbed the back of his neck.

  “Mitch?”

  “Huh?” He turned toward Jennifer.

  “You haven’t moved in the last ten minutes. Are you all right?”

  “Just thinking.”

  “You’ve got only forty-five minutes of light,” Jennifer said.

  “Forty-five?” Startled, Coltrane checked his watch. He had lost more time then he realized.

  Yet
again, he poked his head beneath the black cloth at the rear of the camera. Earlier, when he and Jennifer had driven toward the estate, Coltrane had wondered, not seriously, if Packard had been playing a practical joke on him by suggesting this project. Now that idea struck him as being very serious. With one foot in the grave, had Packard been determined to show Coltrane—typical of all would-be Packards—that Coltrane didn’t have a hope of competing with him? Was this project the old man’s way of proving one last time how superior he was?

  “Mitch?”

  Coltrane noticed slight movement on the focusing screen. He heard a far-off echoing whump-whump-whump and peered up from the camera to search the sky, seeing that the movement was a distant whirling speck: a helicopter. He inserted an eight-by-ten-inch negative and grabbed the shutter release. “Come on,” he whispered tensely. He held his breath as the chopper’s glinting blades crossed the horizon.

  “Now.” He squeezed the shutter release.

  The camera clicked.

  He breathed out. Packard’s bird of prey had symbolized Valentino’s bad ending and the impending invasion of the land. Now a helicopter and all it symbolized about the mechanization of the twentieth century had taken the falcon’s place.

  “If that picture turns out the way I hope . . .” Coltrane watched the helicopter recede into the distance. “That was a one-time only chance. Even if another helicopter flies past, the odds are it’ll never be in the same spot as Packard’s falcon.”

  Jennifer studied the sky. “You’re losing the light faster than we expected.”

  “There might be enough for a couple more.”

  A soft voice asked, “Do you suppose . . .”

  Puzzled, Coltrane looked at Diane.

  “When you’re finished taking pictures of the house . . .” Diane hesitated.

  “Yes?”

  “Could you take one of me?”

  “Of course. It would be my pleasure.”

  “You’re sure I’m not imposing?”