Traffic was sparse but slow-moving. The boulevard was split by a wide greenbelt median. The same mix of shops ran along the south side, ensconced in jewel-box Spanish Revival buildings and dwarfed by the rust-tinged Chinese pistachios H. Farmer Cathcart had planted long ago. Doctors, dentists . . . lots of orthodontists. Clothiers for both sexes offering styles that made Brooks Brothers seem New Wave. A profusion of dry cleaners, florists, interior decorators, banks, and brokerage houses. Three stationers in two blocks— suddenly that made sense. Plenty of Esq.’s and Ltd.’s and faux-Victorian nomenclature on the signs. Nowhere to eat or drink or stretch. Frequent signs directing the meandering tourist to the museum.
A Hispanic man in blue city-issue coveralls pushed an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner along the sidewalk. A few white-haired figures walked around him. Otherwise the streets were bare.
The haut monde approach to exurbia. Picture-perfect. Except for the sky, soot-streaked and dingy, clouding the foothills. Because money and connections couldn’t buck geography: Ocean winds blew the smog here and, trapped by the hills, it settled in for the long run. San Labrador air was poisonous 120 days a year.
Following Melissa’s directions, I drove six blocks past the commercial area, took the first left-turn break in the median, and got onto Cotswold Drive, a pine-canopied straightaway that began snaking and climbing a half-mile in. Cool shade and post-nuclear silence followed: L.A.’s usual dearth of humanity, but here it seemed more pronounced.
Because of the cars— the lack of them. Not a single vehicle at the curb. The NO PARKING AT ANY TIME enforced with Denver boots and predatory fines. Rising above the empty streets were big tile-roofed houses behind sloping lawns. They got bigger as the grade climbed.
The road split at the top of the hill: Essex Ridge to the west, Sussex Knoll to the east. No homes visible here, just two-story walls of green— eugenia and juniper and red-berried toyon backed by forests of oak, ginkgo, and liquidambar.
I lowered my speed and cruised until I finally saw it. Hand-carved pine gates on thick doweled posts capped with verdigrised iron— the kind of hard, waxed pine you see on Buddhist temples and the counters of sushi bars. The posts sided by iron fencing and twelve-foot hedge. The numeral “1” on the left arm of the gate, “0” on the right. To the left of the “1,” an electric eye and talk box.
I pulled up, reached out the driver’s window, and punched the button on the box.
Melissa’s voice came out of the speaker. “Dr. Delaware?”
“Hi, Melissa.”
“One second.”
A rumble and groan and the gates angled inward. I drove up a steep stone path that had been hosed down so recently the air was misty. Past regimentally planted fifty-foot incense cedars and a vacant guardhouse that could have housed a couple of middle-class families. Then another regiment of trees— a sky-blotting grove of Monterey pines that stretched for several moments before condescending to smaller cousins: gnarled, bonsailike cypress and mountain dogwood ringed with free-form clumps of purple rhododendron, white and pink camellia japonica.
A dark drive. The silence seemed heavier. I thought of Gina Dickinson making her way down here, alone. Gained a new appreciation for her affliction. And her progress.
The trees finally cleared and a stadium-sized lawn came into view— ryegrass so healthy-looking it could have been fresh sod, edged with circular beds of begonia and star jasmine. I saw flashes of light at the far west end, among the cypress. Movement, glints of metal. Two— no, three— khaki-clad men, too distant to be clearly discernible. Hernandez’s sons? I could see why he needed five.
The gardeners worked on the vegetation with hand clippers, barely breaking the silence with dull clicks. No air guns or power tools here. Another covenant? Or house rules?
The path ended in a perfectly semicircular drive backed by a pair of date palms. Between the knobby palm trunks, two flights of double-width Bouquet-Canyon stone steps flanked by wisteria-laced stone balustrades led to the house: peach-colored, three-storied, wide as a neighborhood.
What could have been simply monolithic grossness was merely monumental. And surprisingly pleasing to the eye, the visual flight piloted by fanciful turns of the architect’s pencil. Subtly shifting angles and elevations, a richness of detail. High, arched, leaded windows grilled with teal-green, neo-Moorish wrought-iron work. Balconies, verandas, dripstones, running molds, and mullions carved from mocha-colored limestone. A limestone colonnade on the east end. Spanish roof-tiles honeycombed with mosaic precision. Stained-glass cinquefoil insets placed with a contempt for synchrony but an unerring eye for balance.
Still, the very size of the place— and the solitude— was oppressive and sad. Like an empty museum. Nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to be phobic here.
I parked and got out. The gardener’s clicks were augmented by bird-squawks and breeze-rustle. I climbed the stairs, unable to imagine what it would have been like to grow up here, an only child.
The entry was big enough to accommodate a delivery truck: double doors of lacquered oak, trimmed with more verdigrised iron, each side divided into half a dozen raised panels. Carved into the panels were peasant scenes that evoked high-school Chaucer. They held my interest as I pressed the doorbell.
Two baritone chimes sounded; then the right door opened and Melissa stood there, wearing a white button-down shirt, pressed blue jeans, and white tennies: she looked tinier than ever. A doll in a dollhouse built to too large a scale.
She shrugged and said, “Some place, huh?”
“Very beautiful.”
She smiled, relieved. “My father designed it. He was an architect.”
The most she’d said about him in nine years. I wondered what else would emerge now that I’d made a house call.
She touched my elbow briefly, then drew it away.
“Come in,” she said. “Let me show you around.”
Around was a vast space crammed with treasures— an entry hall big enough for croquet, and at its rear a sinuous green marble staircase. Beyond the stairs, cavernous room after cavernous room— galleries built for display, vast and silent, indistinguishable from one another in terms of function. Cathedral and coffered ceilings, mirror-sheen paneling, tapestries, stained-glass skylights, kaleidoscopic Oriental and Aubusson rugs over floors of inlaid marble and hand-painted tile and French walnut parquet. So much sheen and opulence that my senses overloaded and I felt myself losing equilibrium.
I remembered feeling that way once before. Over twenty years ago. A college sophomore, backpacking solo across Europe on a second-class rail pass and $4 a day. Visiting the Vatican. Staring bug-eyed at gold-encrusted walls, the treasure-trove assembled in the name of God. Gradually pulling away from it and watching other tourists and Italian peasants visiting from the southern villages, gawking, too. The peasants never leaving a room before dropping coins in the alms boxes that stood near each door. . . .
Melissa was talking and pointing, a docent in her own home. We were in a book-lined, five-sided, windowless room. She indicated a spotlit painting over a mantel. “And this one’s a Goya. “The Duke of Montero on His Steed.’ Father bought it in Spain when art was much more reasonable. He wasn’t concerned with what was fashionable— this was considered a very minor Goya until just a few years ago; too decorative. Portraiture was dÉclassÉ. Now auction houses write us letters all the time. Father had the foresight to travel to England and brought back cartons of Pre-Raphaelites when everyone else thought they were just kitsch. Tiffany glass pieces, too, during the fifties, when the experts brushed those off as frivolous.”
“You know your stuff,” I said.
She blushed. “I was taught.”
“By Jacob?”
She nodded and looked away. “Anyway, I’m sure you’ve seen enough for one day.”
Turning heel, she began walking out of the room.
“Are you interested in art yourself?” I said.
“I don’t know much about it— not
the way Father or Jacob did. I do like things that are beautiful. If nobody gets hurt by it.”
“What do you mean?”
She frowned. We left the book-filled room, passed by the open door of another huge space, this one ceilinged with hand-painted walnut beams and backed with tall French doors. Beyond the glass was more lawn and forest and flowers, stone pathways, statuary, an amethyst-colored swimming pool, a sunken area, vine-topped and walled with dark-green tennis tarp under chain link. From the distance came the hollow thump of a ball bouncing.
A couple of hundred feet back, to the left of the court, was a long, low peach-colored building that resembled a stable: ten or so wooden doors, some of them ajar, backing a wide cobbled courtyard filled with gleaming, long-nosed antique automobiles. Amoeboid pools of water dotted the cobblestones. A figure in gray overalls bent over one of the cars, chamois in hand, buffing the flaring ruby-colored fender of a splendid piece of machinery. From the blower pipes, I guessed it was a Duesenberg and asked Melissa for confirmation.
“Yes,” she said, “that’s what it is,” and keeping her eyes straight ahead, she led me back through the art-filled caverns, toward the front of the house.
“I don’t know,” she said suddenly. “It just seems that so many things start off beautiful and turn hateful. It’s as if being beautiful can be a curse.”
I said, “McCloskey?”
She put both hands in the pockets of her jeans and gave an emphatic nod. “I’ve been thinking about him a lot.”
“More than before?”
“A lot more. Since we talked.” She stopped, turned to me, blinked hard. “Why would he come back, Dr. Delaware? What does he want?”
“Maybe nothing, Melissa. Maybe it means nothing. If anyone can find out, my friend can.”
“I hope so,” she said. “I certainly hope so. When can he start?”
“I’ll have him call you as soon as possible. His name is Milo Sturgis.”
“Good name,” she said. “Solid.”
“He’s a solid guy.”
We resumed walking. A big, broad woman in a white uniform was polishing a tabletop, feather duster in one hand, rag in the other. Open tin of paste wax near her knee. She turned her face slightly and our eyes met. Madeleine, grayer and wrinkled but still strong-looking. A grimace of recognition tightened her face; then she showed me her back and resumed her work.
Melissa and I stepped back into the entry hall. She headed for the green stairway. As she touched the handrail I said, “In terms of McCloskey, are you concerned about your own safety?”
“Mine?” she said, pausing with one foot on the first step. “Why should I be?”
“No reason. But you were just talking about beauty as a curse. Do you feel burdened or threatened by your own looks?”
“Me?” Her laughter was too quick, too loud. “Come on, Dr. D. Let’s go upstairs. I’ll show you beautiful.”
10
The top of the landing was a twenty-foot rosette of black marble inlaid with a blue-and-yellow sunburst pattern. French provincial furniture hugged the walls, potbellied, bowlegged, almost obscene with marquetry. Renaissance paintings of the Sentimental School— cherubs, harps, religious agony— competed with flocked-velvet paper the color of old port. Foot-wide white molding and coving defined three hallway spokes. Two more women in white vacuumed the one on the right. The other corridors were dark and empty. More like a hotel than a museum. The sad, aimless ambience of a resort during the off-season.
Melissa turned onto the middle corridor and led me past five white panel doors adorned with black and gold cloisonnÉ knobs.
At the sixth, she stopped and knocked.
A voice from within said, “Yes?”
Melissa said, “Dr. Delaware’s here,” and opened the door.
I’d been ready for another megadose of grandeur but found myself in a small, simple room— a sitting area, no more than twelve feet square, painted dove-gray and lit by a single overhead milk-glass fixture.
A white door took up a quarter of the rear wall. The other walls were bare except for a single lithograph: A softly colored mother-and-child scene that had to be Cassatt. The print was centered over a rose-colored, gray-piped loveseat. A pine coffee table and two pine chairs created a conversation area. Bone-china coffee service on the table. Woman on the couch.
She stood and said, “Hello, Dr. Delaware. I’m Gina Ramp.”
Soft voice.
She came forward, her walk a curious mix of grace and awkwardness. The awkwardness was all above the neck— her head was held unnaturally high and tilted to one side, as if recoiling from a blow.
“Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Ramp.”
She took my hand, gave it a quick, gentle squeeze and let go.
She was tall— had at least eight inches on her daughter— and still model-slender, in a knee-length, long-sleeved dress of polished gray cotton. Front-buttoned to the neck. Patch pockets. Flat-heeled gray sandals. A plain gold wedding band on her free hand. Gold balls in her ears. No other jewelry. No perfume.
The hair was medium-blond and starting to silver. She wore it short and straight, brushed forward with feathered bangs. Boyish. Almost ascetic.
Her face was pale, oval, made for the camera. Strong, straight nose, firm chin, wide gray-blue eyes stippled with green. The pouty allure of an old studio photo replaced by something more mature. More relaxed. Slight surrender of contour, the merest sag at the seams. Smile lines, brow furrows, a suggestion of pouch at the junction of lips and cheek.
Forty-three years old, I knew from an old newspaper clipping, and she looked every day of it. Yet age had softened her beauty. Enhanced it, somehow.
She turned to her daughter and smiled. Lowered her head, almost ritualistically, and showed me the left side of her face.
Skin stretched tight, bone-white and glassy-smooth. Too smooth— the unhealthy sheen of fever-sweat. The jawline sharper than it should have been. Subtly skeletal, as if stripped of an underlying layer of musculature and refurbished with something artificial. Her left eye drooped, very slightly but noticeably, and the skin beneath it was scored with a dense network of white filaments. Scars that seemed to be floating just beneath the surface of her skin— a suspension of threadworms swimming in flesh-colored gelatin.
The neck-flesh just below the jaw was ruled with three ruddy stripes— as if she’d been slapped hard and the finger marks had lingered. The left side of her mouth was preternaturally straight, offering harsh counterpart to the weary eye and giving her smile a lopsided cast that projected an uninvited irony.
She shifted her head again. Her skin caught the light at a different angle, and took on the marbled look of a tea-soaked egg.
Off-kilter. Beauty defiled.
She said to Melissa, “Thank you, darling,” and gave a crooked smile. Part of the left side didn’t smile along.
I realized that— just for the moment— I’d blocked out Melissa’s presence. I turned, with a smile for her. She was staring at us, a hard, watchful look on her face. Suddenly, she turned up the corners of her mouth, forced herself to join in the smile-fest.
Her mother said, “Come here, baby,” and went to her, holding out her arms. Hugging her. Using her height to advantage, cradling, stroking Melissa’s long hair.
Melissa stepped back and looked at me, flushed.
Gina Ramp said, “I’ll be fine, baby. Go on.”
Melissa said, “Have fun,” in a voice on the verge of cracking. Gave one more look back and walked out.
Leaving the door open. Gina Ramp walked over and closed it.
“Please make yourself comfortable, Doctor,” she said, readjusting the tilt of her face so that only the good side was visible. She gestured toward the china service. “Coffee?”
“No, thanks.” I sat in one of the chairs. She returned to the loveseat. Sat perched at the edge, back straight, legs crossed at the ankles, hands in lap— the identical posture Melissa had adopted at my house yesterday.
&nbs
p; “So,” she said, smiling again. She leaned forward to adjust one of the teacups, spent more time at it than she had to.
I said, “Good to meet you, Mrs. Ramp.”
A pained look fought with the smile and won. “Finally?”
Before I could answer, she said, “I’m not a terrible person, Dr. Delaware.”
“Of course you aren’t,” I said. Too emphatically. It made her start and take a long look at me. Something about her— about this place— was screwing up my timing. I sat back and kept my mouth shut. She recrossed her legs and shifted her head, as if in response to stage direction. Showing me only her right profile. Stiff and defensively genteel, like a First Lady on a talk show.
Private Eyes Page 14
