The Hanging

by Wendy Hornsby

  There was a general chuckling at that, and Holloway looked around as a schoolmarm intent on taking names might.

  “As I was saying,” Max continued, still smiling, speaking in a friendly tone, leaning back in his chair, folded hands resting on his belly. “If it is your intention to breach the terms of the institution’s binding commitment, exercising authority not granted to you by that institution, any action you take shall not enjoy the protection and shield of the institution. That is, you would be acting as a private citizen. And it would be as a private citizen that you and your counsel would then, necessarily, meet Mr. Miller and his counsel in court.”

  “Are you representing Ronald Miller?” Holloway asked.

  “Does Sly need representation?” Max asked pointedly. “So far, I am only here to take my niece to lunch, sir. If I run into the boy, I may ask him to come along; I’ve known him for years.”

  There was a moment of silence. All eyes were on Holloway, waiting.

  “Young Mr. Miller must have influential friends indeed, if he can afford your advice, sir.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Max said.

  “Park?” All heads turned toward Kate. “Are we agreed? The terms of the award remain as originally written, and there will be no attempt by you to alter them?”

  “We live in a democracy, do we not?” Holloway said brightly, sounding false.

  I glanced toward Kate and saw her wink at me. My dad, who taught physics at Cal, used to say that the college campus was still medieval in its structure: the faculty were like barons, linked to their serfs, the students, by a complex set of mutual obligations; the administration was the Vatican, external, and with an overblown notion of its authority. Democracy? Hardly. But when administrators got too full of themselves, now and then it helped to remind them that when a university student named Martin Luther rose up in protest he set the western world on its ear.

  “Park?” Kate waited until he looked at her. “Are we agreed?”

  He sighed, turned toward Hiram Chin, who so far had been a cipher in the meeting. I saw Chin nod, just the slightest forward movement of his head.

  Holloway still hesitated, but in the end, he said, “Of course.” Glaring at Lew he continued, “The work, attributed to Mr. Miller, will be installed as a permanent fixture of our lobby as described in the original award proffer.”

  “If I may,” Max said, addressing Holloway. “One more little thing.”

  “Sir?” Holloway said through clenched teeth.

  “The comment we heard here, questioning the authenticity of the work ascribed to Sly Miller, is scurrilous. If, after this meeting, anyone were to repeat that comment, either as gossip or as an assertion of fact, that act would be slander, and would be legally actionable.”

  Max looked at everyone around the table in turn. “Is that clear?”

  “My lips are sealed,” Lew said. “And yours, Park?”

  He nodded. “Anything else, Counselor?”

  “Not at the moment,” Max said, patting the breast pocket where two blue-jacketed legal notices waited, in case.

  “Thank you.” Kate then turned to Lew. “Then we’re finished?”

  “You betcha.” He gave Holloway the evil eye for good measure.

  “Joan, all cleared up?”

  “About Sly? Yes.”

  Kate turned to Holloway. “Thank you for your time, Park.”

  Everyone rose except Joan.

  Half-risen in his seat, Holloway saw her once again thrumming the edges of her file, and froze, puzzled.

  “Was there something else, Joan?” Holloway asked.

  “There is,” she said.

  She glanced at us as if making certain we were going. When Kate pointed at herself and raised a brow as if asking if she were needed, Joan shook her head and began taking papers out of the file and arranging them on the table in front of Holloway’s seat.

  As I left, I heard Joan say to the academic vice president, “No need for you to stay, either, Hiram. I want a word with Park, alone.”

  Chapter 4

  After the meeting, agreeing to skip lunch as we walked toward the student gallery to speak with Sly, my uncle watched me closely, as he had watched me for most of the last year, looking for emotional leaks.

  “It comes and goes, Max,” I said in response to the unspoken question. “Good days and bad. But I’m all right.”

  “Give it time, honey. It hasn’t even been a year. Just give it time.”

  I looked away. Sometimes, if I was very busy, I might pass an entire hour without thinking about my husband, Mike. More and more, I found myself actually thinking about Mike rather than about my loss. And more often than not, lately, those memories made me happy.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you, Maggot,” Max said, using a family nickname. “And I know you’d never say, but how are you fixed? This temp job can’t be paying you much, and you have a daughter in college.”

  I patted his hand. “I’m fine, Max. I have Mike’s LAPD pension and some savings, I still get royalties and residuals from a few of my old documentaries, the network gave me a good buyout, and there’s always the prospect that one day we’ll get my mother’s French estate through probate. So don’t you worry about me.”

  “Worrying about you is what I do best,” he said as he opened the door of the student gallery in the campus arts complex and held it for me. “And Lord knows you’ve given me a fair ration of practice. But if you need—”

  “I love you, Max.” I kissed his cheek on my way through the door. “And I’m fine.”

  Sly, wearing his uniform (black T-shirt, black button-front Levis, black boots—he was trying for a three-day beard, but all he had produced was noticeable fuzz) was deep in conversation with a woman I did not recognize. He was pointing out something on the sculpture taking shape around a tall frame in the middle of the high-ceilinged room.

  The woman was somewhere north of middle-aged, and though she was tiny and pretty, there was something about her carriage that conveyed authority. She listened to Sly with a focus that was so intense that it was clear she was enormously interested in what he was telling her.

  As the door closed behind us, Max stopped to bat at something above his head. “A bird must have flown in with us.”

  He was looking around for the bird so he missed the little smile that passed between Sly and the woman when they turned to see who had come in.

  Eyes darting around the room, Max said, “Where is the damn thing?”

  “It’s a dove,” the woman told him. “A shadow from the past.”

  Max turned to her, his brows furrowed. She extended her hand.

  “I’m Bobbie Cusato. And you are Max Duchamps. Sly told me about you. Lovely to meet you.”

  “And you.” Max bowed slightly, a gesture left over from a recent visit to France. Mrs. Cusato was some years older than he, but he seemed quite taken with her. More interested in her, certainly, than he had been in Joan Givens.

  I recognized her name. She was one of the local movers and shakers, a community activist and fund-raiser. If I had ever imagined her in my mind’s eye, I would have expected a matron dripping with jewels and stiff with haughtiness. She was anything but. Beautifully but simply dressed in well-cut woolen slacks and a deep red sweater, there was a sparkle in her eyes that held promise for a lively sense of humor; she had tucked a bright red hibiscus flower behind one ear.

  “This is Maggie MacGowen,” Sly said, gesturing toward me with an upturned palm and a poise that would have made Miss Manners herself damn proud; my eyes welled up. “Maggie, Mrs. Cusato was on the award committee.”

  “Maggie, I’ve heard so much about you,” she said, offering her hand. “We have a mutual friend in Kate Tejeda. And of course, I know you from your television programs.”

  “Lovely to meet you, Mrs. Cusato,” I said.

  “Oh, please, call me Bobbie.”

  “So, Sly,” Max said, head thrown back, looking up at the sculpture that
very nearly reached the ceiling. “This is the beast?”

  “The beast,” Sly said, happily accepting the label.

  “Sly was explaining his work to me,” Bobbie said. “Last time I saw it, it was a sketch and a model and a color wheel. I knew it would be wonderful, but this...” She gestured toward the sculpture, still hardly assembled. “Beyond, far beyond, anything I could imagine.”

  I had to agree.

  Sly, who had no known history of his own, had been enthralled by a California History class he took with Kate, and by the golden, rolling hills that are the scenic backdrop of the campus that became his haven. His piece would be a graceful, kinetic cascade of ceramic tiles formed to represent the textures, colors and shapes of the hills, all of it strung together by an invisible system of slender steel cables. Among the hills, he incorporated design motifs from the various phases of the region’s past, beginning at the top with images painted by the Chumash in local caves a thousand years ago, followed by abstracted bits of Baroque and Mission architectural elements from the Spanish epoch. From there, a spill of red, white and green, the colors of the Mexican flag, morphed into the blue, channeled waters of the California Aqueduct that became a ribbon winding among glazed aluminum grills representing the perfectly groomed and plowed fields of local commercial agriculture in the modern era.

  The piece was beautiful, subtle and complex. At a distance it would be a colorful, ever-moving organism. Up close, a mosaic of historic tableaux, each one exquisite by itself.

  Max was distracted as Sly explained his work.

  “Where’s that damn bird that flew in?”

  “The dove is an illusion, Max,” Sly said, grinning. “Or maybe it’s a ghost.”

  Max looked at him through narrowed eyes, not amused.

  “Optics, Max,” Sly said. He reached into the unfinished piece and tapped a tiny crystal. As the crystal moved, it picked up light and made the dove fly around the room.

  “That’s why I call it Palomas Eternas, Eternal Doves. People come, they go. But the birds are constant. Borderless. Eternal.”

  “It’s something, kid.” Max started on a circuit of the sculpture, comparing the series of sketches affixed to the wall with the work in progress. “It’s really something.”

  Sly followed him, answering questions, pointing out details.

  Bobbie moved a step closer to me as she watched Max and Sly. “Kate tells me you’re very close to Sly.” It sounded like a question. She was smiling, but I had a feeling that the smile was cover for something weighing on her.

  “I’ve known Sly since he was a little boy,” I said.

  “He thinks of you as family.”

  I smiled and nodded. “Mike and I, and our kids—his son, Michael, my daughter, Casey—were certainly the closest thing to family Sly had ever known.”

  Sometimes people questioned why Mike and I had not adopted Sly or taken him in as a foster child. The answer that I never bothered to give them, because it really was no one’s business but our own, was that when I took Sly in off the streets, his problems were larger than Mike and I knew how to handle.

  All the years that Sly was a ward of Los Angeles County, Mike watched over him, watched over Child Protective Services to make sure that Sly received everything he needed, and that he came to no harm. Mike had no authority to oversee Sly’s foster placements, or to drop in to visit without prior notice, but he did. He also had no authority to set up extra counseling sessions when Sly reached the county’s set quota, but he did that, too. Most kids in the System don’t have a Mike to look after them, but they all need one.

  Before Mike made detectives, he was an old-time LAPD street cop, a cowboy. Because of that experience, until the very end of his life he generally found ways to get things done, his way. If anyone with Child Protective Services took issue with Mike’s buttinski ways, they didn’t get very far with their grievance.

  Bobbie turned away from Max and Sly, who were on the far side of the gallery, to speak with me again.

  “Kate told me you were meeting with Park Holloway this afternoon to set him straight about the installation of Sly’s work.”

  “We met.”

  “It came out well?”

  “It did.”

  She glanced around to see where the men were.

  “I learned something very disturbing,” she said. “I thought that because you are so close to Sly...”

  I said, “Something about Sly?”

  “Only indirectly.” Again she checked to see where he was. My palms were sweaty and my heart raced; with Sly, you never knew what was coming next. She cleared her throat. I interrupted before she could say anything.

  “Bobbie, I know where we can get a cup of coffee.”

  “Let’s.” She took my elbow and we started walking.

  Lew Kaufman kept the makings for coffee in a small faculty lounge about halfway between his office and my studio. The room was well-used and ill-tended, furnished with mismatched chairs and an old Formica-topped kitchen table. Everything was spattered and smeared with representatives of every imaginable art medium: clay, paint, plaster, chalk and charcoal among them. The place smelled vaguely of turpentine. But the room was quiet and the coffeepot was a very good French press.

  While Bobbie searched for a chair with four intact legs, I filled and plugged in the kettle, ground some beans and measured them into the press. From the selection of mugs on the counter next to the sink, I found the two that were the least stained and rinsed them with kettle water when it began to steam.

  “You said you learned something disturbing?” I leaned against the sink, facing her, while I waited for the water to boil.

  She nodded, took some time before she spoke.

  “At the meeting with Park, did he agree that he had no authority to change the terms of the award?”

  “Reluctantly, but yes,” I said.

  “What Park tried to do was unconscionable. Even if he didn’t get away with it, the attempt was still a terrible insult to Sly.” She looked up at me. “How is Sly doing? I hesitated to ask him because I didn’t—I don’t—want to upset him.”

  “He was very hurt,” I said. “It still stings. But you can talk with him about it. The kid may be more resilient than you think.”

  She smiled as she said, “He’s very fond of you and your late husband, you know. And your son.”

  “Michael. My stepson, actually.”

  “He told me he had a room of his own at your house.”

  “He did until he got his own apartment in Anacapa. But he only ever stayed with us on weekends and school holidays.”

  “Where was his family?”

  The kettle whistled so I turned and busied myself pouring water over coffee grounds and fussing with the plunger. My friend Kate was very fond of Bobbie, had spoken of her several times. I knew that Bobbie’s influence was in no small part responsible for the selection of Sly’s sculpture. But what she was asking about Sly’s personal history was Sly’s story to tell, not mine.

  I placed a mug of coffee and a jar of powdered creamer on the table beside her and found a chair with at least three fairly stable legs and brought it to the table.

  I sat back and looked at her for a moment, collecting my thoughts before I said, “Sly has never known his biological family.”

  She declined the creamer—I didn’t blame her, it did look a bit chunky—and sipped her coffee, eyes focused on something far away. When she said, “Damn the man,” the words came from deep down inside; I knew to whom she referred. “He had no right.”

  Her pretty face was tight with indignation when she turned it toward me. “I knew Park was up to something, but I didn’t know what it was. And I should have guessed. He is such a schemer.”

  Bobbie rose and paced across the room, obviously upset. After a few deep breaths, a bit more composed, she came back and took her chair again. Setting her coffee aside, she leaned toward me.

  “In any community,” she said, “there are certain go-to
people, for money, for volunteers, for whatever. Kate and I are go-to’s whenever money is needed. Or, in this case, wanted. Park went to both of us last fall, after the committee had selected Sly’s work, and asked for us to contribute to a backup fund in case Sly failed to produce his piece; it is an ambitious work, even for a more experienced artist.”

  “What did you say to him?”

  “We said no, of course,” she said firmly. “It wasn’t a secret that Park was not pleased that Sly won the sculpture award. But it was just stupid of him to ask me for money for a runner-up award, so to speak.”

  “You weren’t worried that Sly could get the piece made?”

  “There was some concern among the committee about whether Sly could pull it off,” she said. “But Lew Kaufman, who sat on the committee, of course, assured everyone that Sly had the backing of the entire Art Department as well as access to all of its resources. Sly needed them, and he used them. His application was given weight because it would involve so many people across the campus.”

  “Does Holloway have something against Sly or Sly’s work?”

  “Not Sly specifically, no. Clearly, Park had a favorite candidate; he lobbied us to select him. But we chose Sly.”

  “Who did Holloway prefer?”

  “Franz von Wilde. According to Park he’s a fairly well-established artist from the Santa Barbara area. He has a relationship with a reputable gallery on State Street and has had his work exhibited in some regional art museums. And of course, he had once been a student here.”

  “Sly told me that Holloway wanted to display the work of a professional artist,” I said. “Was this von Wilde’s proposal to the committee of museum quality?”

  “Frankly, I thought it was ordinary,” she said. “Derivative. Belonged in someone’s backyard spouting water. And I said so. But Park, well,” she smiled grimly, “he could have been a used-car salesman. He said that the committee was biased toward Sly, which was true, and that his only interest was in seeing that the decision was fairly reached.”