“If you don’t like them, why do you sell them?” Frank asked.
The man shrugged. “I’m just the manager, not the owner,” he said. “Ours is not to reason why. Now, what can I do for you?”
Frank took out his badge.
The man looked surprised. “Police?”
Frank handed him a picture of Angelica. “Have you ever seen this girl?”
“Very pretty,” the man said, “but I’m afraid I’ve never seen her.” He laughed. “And believe me, if something like this came in, I’d notice.”
“She’s dead,” Frank said.
The laugh died away. “Oh, sorry.” He handed the picture back to Frank. “I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.”
“Are you sure you’ve never seen her?”
“Absolutely. Why?”
“She’s been seen in this area before, in the galleries on this street.”
“Not in this gallery,” the man said. “I don’t mean to be crude, but she does have a certain look a man is liable to notice.”
Frank put Angelica’s picture back in his pocket. “Okay, thanks.” He took Karen by the arm. “Let’s go.”
The next gallery was called the Hidden Agenda, and it was small and considerably more modest than the first.
“I’ve always liked this one,” Karen said as they walked through the front door. “It has a little bit of everything. It’s not as rigid as the one James and I own. But then, we have a rigid clientele.” She seemed to brighten as she glanced from here to there in the front room. “Look, that one’s by Edgar Benton,” she said. She walked over to it. “He’s very good.” She walked to the next painting. “And this one’s by Stirling Fox.”
“You know these people?” Frank asked.
“Slightly,” Karen said. “Stirling has a tendency to be reclusive. One hardly ever gets him to a party.” She shrugged. “It’s part of his persona.”
“And the other one?”
“Edgar’s more social. He’s been over to our house a few times.”
“Did he know Angelica?”
“Not that I know of,” Karen said. She stared at the painting. “He’s very intense in what he does.”
Frank looked at the painting. It was of a brilliant streak of light passing through a dark cloud. It was entitled Consummation.
“Does that look like it was painted by a very intense person?” Karen asked, as she continued to gaze at it.
“Yes,” Frank said.
“Well, that’s the way Edgar is,” Karen said casually. She turned quickly and walked into the adjoining room. A tall man in a brown double-breasted suit stood near the center of the room. Karen walked up to him immediately. “Hello, Philip,” she said.
“Hello, Karen,” the man said effusively. “So good to see you.” His eyes softened. “I heard about Angelica. So sorry.”
“You knew Angelica?” Frank asked.
“Yes,” Philip said. “I saw her off and on before she died.”
“Where?”
“Here in the gallery,” Philip told him. “She would come in and walk around for a while. I hadn’t seen her since she was a very little girl, and I’m sure she didn’t recognize me. I could tell she was going through a stage, so I didn’t introduce myself.”
“What do you mean?” Frank asked, as he showed the man his badge.
“Well, by the way she was dressed,” Philip explained. “Always something different. It was like she was in costume.” He looked back at Karen. “I really can’t tell you how sorry I am about what happened to her.”
“Did she come alone?” Frank asked.
“Yes.”
“And left alone?”
“Always left alone, as far as I can remember,” Philip said. “Are you making any progress in the investigation?”
“Some.”
Philip shook his head despairingly. “It’s terrible what can happen in this world, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Frank said, then suddenly realized that Karen had left the room.
He found her standing alone on the front porch of the gallery. She was staring up at the steadily darkening sky. “I’d like to believe that Angelica was up there somewhere, but I don’t.”
Frank draped his arm gently over her shoulder. “There’s only one more gallery, Karen. Then you can go to New York. You won’t hear from me again until I’ve found the man who killed her.”
Karen nodded slowly. “All right,” she said.
It was called the Broken Frame, and it was a small, neatly painted building, white with lavender shutters. Inside, the rooms were bright and well-lighted. A young woman in a wildly colored peasant dress greeted them at the door.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hello,” Frank said. He glanced about the room. The paintings were carefully arranged on the wall so as not to be crowded together. The colors were pastels, and they added their own delicate light to the interior of the room.
“Just browse all you want,” the woman said. “No pressure at the Broken Frame.”
Frank drew out his badge, then a picture of Angelica Devereaux. “Have you ever seen this girl?” he asked.
“Yes,” the woman said. “This is the girl who was found dead not far from here.”
“Her name was Angelica,” Frank said.
The woman continued to gaze at the photograph. “She never mentioned her name. She would just stand around. She never spoke to anyone.”
“Did she ever talk to you?”
“No,” the woman said. She looked at Karen. “You must be her sister. I can see the resemblance.”
Frank pointed to the picture. “Did she look like this in the picture?”
“Yes, just like this,” the woman told him. “Very fresh and beautiful. She wore lots of lace. High collars. She sometimes looked as if she’d walked right out of Gone With the Wind.”
“Did you ever see her with anyone?”
“No.”
“She was always alone?”
“Yes.”
“Did she ever leave with anyone?”
The woman smiled. “Lots of people tried to get her to leave with them. And, you know, sometimes, I think she liked that. She would sometimes throw one of those ‘come hither’ looks. But only at other women.”
“Other women?”
“Yes,” the woman said. “She didn’t seem interested in men at all.”
Frank took out his notebook. “Did you ever see her talking to other women in the gallery?”
“No,” the woman said determinedly. “As I told you, she never talked to anyone.”
“But she seemed to concentrate on women?” Frank asked again.
“Absolutely,” the woman said. “It was strange. She would look at them with this odd glance, shy, but not really shy, if you know what I mean.”
Frank wrote it down. “How many times did you see her in here?”
“Three, maybe, four,” the woman said. She turned suddenly to Karen. “It’s just hit me, you must be Karen Devereaux.”
“Yes,” Karen said.
“We have two of your paintings,” the woman said happily. “I liked them so much, I bought them from another gallery.” She tugged Karen cheerfully into the adjoining room. “See,” she said. She pointed to a small, delicately rendered portrait of a man sitting in a wing chair, his hands folded neatly in his lap, a look of terrible, wounded concentration in his eyes.
“My father,” Karen said, almost in a whisper.
“And that one,” the woman added. She turned Karen slowly around to face the opposite wall.
“Oh, yes,” Karen said. A smile suddenly struggled to her lips.
The painting was of a vase of flowers. It was done in muted colors with a light, feathery brushstroke, and as Frank looked at it he could feel a kind of solemn pleasure flourishing in it, rising, against all odds, to claim its own bright space.
“I’ll take it,” he said, before he could stop himself.
Karen turned to him. “Don’t be silly, Frank,” she
said. “I’ll give you a painting.”
He looked at her somberly. “But I want this one,” he said.
The woman wrapped the painting while Frank asked her a few remaining questions. Then he picked it up carefully and took it to the car.
“Where are you going to hang it?” Karen asked.
“My apartment,” Frank told her, “it could use a touch of something nice.”
“Is it one of those drab, broken-down, private-eye sort of places?” Karen asked with a light smile.
“That’s about right.”
“How long have you lived there?”
“It feels like my whole life.”
She looked at him tenderly. “Take me there, and I’ll help you hang the painting.”
The dinginess of his apartment seemed even greater with Karen standing in the middle of it, but she didn’t seem to mind.
“It really is one of those private-eye places,” she said with a laugh.
“I told you.”
She walked to the middle of the room, then turned slowly, examining the walls. “Over there,” she said at last, “that would be the best place for it.”
Frank rifled through several cabinets before he found a nail. Then he hammered it into the wall, and together he and Karen lifted the painting onto it, then stepped back to take in the effect.
“Very nice,” Karen said. She looked at him. “It brightens the room.”
“Yes, it does.”
Karen continued to look at it for a moment, then walked over to the window, parted the blinds and peered out. “I was happy when I painted that,” she said.
Frank walked over to her. “You can tell you were,” he said.
The first wave of rain suddenly swept down over the city, and a gust blew it forcefully against the window pane.
“I want a storm,” Karen said, “I want a wild, booming storm.”
“Maybe you should paint one,” Frank said.
She turned toward him. “Do you think a single afternoon can make a difference?”
“For that afternoon, yes,” Frank said. And then he drew her into his arms.
24
It was late in the evening before Karen left, and as Frank sat on his sofa, staring at her painting, he could still feel the warmth of her body as it had clung to him hungrily hour after hour. She had talked once again of leaving this city full of ghosts, and as he continued to gaze at the painting, it struck him that she had not painted the flowers themselves, or the almost translucent blue vase that held them, but the airy ghosts of these things. It was as if she had been able to feel the slowly fading pulse of each leaf and petal, and it was this overall sense of steadily departing life which she had captured.
He had bought the painting because it was hers, and because he thought it might brighten the space around him. But now he could see nothing but its sorrowfulness, its mournful sense of departure and farewell.
He walked into the kitchen and fixed himself a quick meal of beans and nearly burnt bacon. He ate it with a single slice of white bread. It was a joyless, bachelor’s fare, he realized, and each mouthful tasted of a life that had itself turned utterly flavorless.
He returned to the living room and once again sat down on the sofa. He felt the need to view his life as some kind of whole, as if it could be captured in a single tone or color. But nothing held firm. Nothing but his work, his pursuit—however blind and full of error—of something which could be called justice, or at least, retribution. People had to pay for what they did, and he was one of the ones who made them pay. It was the badge which gave him the right to do that, and he suddenly found that he wanted to cling to it with all his remaining strength. Nothing could bring back Sarah or Angelica or Ollie Quinn, or any of the scores of others whose bodies lay torn and broken in his memory, but whose spirits still moved sleeplessly through him. They were more real to him than all the living who crowded the streets and buses. They lived more fully in his mind, and their flesh was warmer and more tangible. It bled and bled, as if the one great heart of all the unjustly dead still beat on through the ages, their cries still ringing out through time, heard like a low moan in the ground, or like a scream echoing above it.
He took a bottle from the cupboard, returned to the sofa and took a long, slow drink. Its warmth moved down into him, and he could feel its comfort settling in. He started to take another, but stopped himself. He knew that if he took another, then he’d take another after that and still another, until the world grew hazy around him, and he would find himself on the floor in the morning, the stink of his own breath in his nose, and feeling so tightly wrapped in his own skin that he could hardly breathe without splitting open and spilling his insides across the plain wooden floor.
He put the bottle down on the little table beside the sofa and glanced up at the painting. The afternoon had stretched into the night, but nothing that had happened had convinced her not to go. She was leaving, like everything else, and so it seemed that only his work mattered. Everything else went away. Children and wives, and women who loved for a few sweet hours and then took planes to distant cities. The painting was right; everything lived in a certain stage of fading. What lasted was what you did, your work. Everything else was a phantom.
He reached for his notebook and started to go through it. He flipped one page, then another, his eyes combing each line intently, as if something might be drawn from even the most routine details. He noted the abandoned lot, the rusting car, the beautiful body laid out in its shallow grave. He read about guardians and trust funds, private schools and plays, dreams of acting and plans to leave for New York. One by one, the pages fell away. He read and read and read about a little girl’s room, a telephone that was used only once, a date, May 15. He read about pregnancy and a late-night ride through Grant Park. He parked with her again at the Cyclorama, then left with her and drove up and down some obscure street. Then he went with her to an alley and made love to her joylessly, and with a frantic anger. He searched her closet again, and found none of the clothes she’d been seen wearing at various places in the city. His finger moved through the neatly arranged skirts and blouses, still looking for the frilly laces and black velvets that were the costumes of her secret life. He talked to a dying painter once again, and then to the woman who had loved him futilely all her life. He listened to her song of art, to her efforts to find her artists certain dignified forms of work, touch-ups, restorations. He read again and again, until the words dissolved into one black line, and, at last, he fell asleep.
Thunder awakened him. It came from far away and lingered in the air, rolling heavily over the city in a deep baritone groan.
He walked to the window and looked out. It had stopped raining, but he could tell by the thick feel of the air that it was about to begin again, hard and heavy, a jungle torrent. He thought of the animals in the zoo at Grant Park, soaked in their thick fur, their eyes staring vacantly at the deserted grounds. He could feel his mind wandering through the zoo, then over the grassy knoll that bordered it, and across the wet swamp to where the Cyclorama rested with immense heaviness on the bare earth. He could see the rain-soaked area around the building, the sea of mud which no doubt now encircled the great granite edifice. That was the only place she had stopped that night, the only place she had lingered. She had pulled up to the storm fence, glancing occasionally into her rearview mirror, and then straight ahead again, her eyes fixed on the far corner of the building.
He released the blind and it clattered shut. Then he walked out onto his porch and peered out toward the park. He couldn’t see it from where he was, but he knew it was there, swept with rain, deserted except for the few homeless souls who clung to shelter beneath the enormous trees. Some of those same trees rose gracefully around the Cyclorama, and he could see Angelica as she sat beneath them, thinking of her next move. It had been to leave the park and ride up and down a particular street a few times and then drive directly to the alley. He tried to put all these things in their proper, sequential
order: stopped at the Cyclorama, waited for a few minutes, then drove to a street and went back and forth along it for a few minutes, and then, after that, headed for the alley. It seemed to Frank that Angelica had made her decision to go to the alley only after she had not been able to find what she was looking for on that street. But which street was it? He flipped through his notes, found Stan Doyle, Jr.’s phone number, and called him immediately.
“Hello?”
“Stan, this is Frank Clemons.”
“Oh,” the boy sputtered. “Yeah, right.”
“I need a little help.”
“Like what?”
“I want to drive you around the Grant Park area for a few minutes.”
“But I told you everything I knew.”
“I want you to show me exactly where you and Angelica went that night.”
The boy seemed to consider it for a moment. “Well, okay,” he said at last.
“I’ll pick you up in half an hour,” Frank said. He walked to his car, glancing back toward the house as he pulled himself in. Something stirred in him suddenly, and as he continued to look back at the old house, he realized that he had always sensed a strange grief all around it, as if some ancient wrong had seeped into it and was still there, absorbed into the woodwork, held there forever like a deep, abiding stain.
Stan ran hurriedly out to the car as Frank pulled into the driveway.
“My daddy’s due back tomorrow morning,” he said breathlessly. “I’ve been trying to clean up all the mess.”
“I’ll get you back pretty quick,” Frank said, as he steered the car back out into the street.
“I hope so. I’ve got a hell of a lot to do.”
“I just want to take you back over the route you went with Angelica that night,” Frank explained. “Maybe something will come together in your mind.”
“Yeah, okay,” Stan said. “No problem.”
It took nearly half an hour to get back to Grant Park. The long rains had cooled the air considerably, and the moisture on the leaves seemed almost icy beneath the streetlamps.
“I just want to retrace your movements that night,” Frank said, as he pulled the car over at the corner of Sydney and Boulevard. “She turned right at this corner, isn’t that what you said?”
Sacrificial Ground fc-1 Page 23
