That evening while Rosemary talked enthusiastically about art, especially Belle’s, Chris just sat there looking at her with a wry smile. Later, more booze, and Chris confessed his disdain for most of the Laguna artists. He said they were worse than he’d feared. He said they could learn a lot from Belle, and from Art 101. He would consider her for a group show. You can imagine what that meant to her—it would be a huge leap in her career.
Starting then, Christopher began flirting with Belle more openly, as if he’d purchased her attention. He continued to treat Rosemary like something stuck to his shoe. I observed and tolerated this. For a while.
A month later, Chris came down without Rosemary and arranged to take Belle to dinner at a hot new restaurant in Newport Beach. Hip to this play, Belle and I decided she should go anyway. She did. Dinner was good. After, he said they should have port at the Four Seasons because they had a good list, so she followed him across town in her car. Of course after the port he invited her to his suite. Belle said she was spoken for and I wasn’t a half-bad guy, which, to tell the truth, was a higher opinion than I deserved. He blushed and smiled. After dessert he walked her across that nice lobby toward the valet and put an arm around her and whispered in her ear that her talent was nothing compared to her tits and ass, and she’d be better off selling trinket paintings to tourists in Laguna than having her work blown off the walls of the McFall by painters a thousand times better than she was, and he squeezed her butt and left her at the valet stand.
She told me all this when she came home that night, humiliated and furious.
I drove up to the Four Seasons and called Chris on the hotel phone, said I was Rudy the valet, and it looked as if somebody had keyed his Jag. Chris said, so what, it’s just a fuckin’ rental car, and I said, suit yourself, sir, but we either have to file a report with Newport Beach PD or get a sign-off from you so the rental agency won’t—
So Christopher Thomas, a take-charge guy, slammed down the room phone in my ear.
I bet myself it would take him less than two minutes to make the concierge desk. It took him a minute and a half. By the time he saw me, it was too late—I snagged him by his ear like a five-year-old and dragged him outside. Must have looked funny, a guy in a $2,000 cream silk suit led by the ear through the Four Seasons lobby, bent over, hands waving, whining about lawyers and damages and having me put back in prison for the rest of my life.
Outside, past the valet stand, I tripped him onto his back and held him there with my foot while I got Belle on the cell. I could feel his heart beating through my boot. I gave Chris the phone and told him he might want to apologize to my wife. On impulse I grabbed one of his ankles and dragged him through the flower bed that runs along the Four Seasons entryway, through the peonies and Iceland poppies and ranunculus and God knows what else that was planted there that week, Chris bouncing along, babbling away to Belle. I could hear her pleading with me to stop, but I wouldn’t. He made a fairly convincing apology. Security was there by then so I dropped his leg and grabbed my phone and backed away to my car with the rent-a-goon yapping on his walkie-talkie, his voice high and his eyes big, not much of an intimidator, and half an hour later I was home with Belle.
I should have felt a little bit better about the world but I didn’t.
So, you can imagine that the cops had some questions for me a year later when Chris’s body showed up in an iron maiden torture device housed in a Berlin museum.
Such as, where was I on the night he disappeared? (Twenty miles off the coast of San Francisco, coincidentally, hanging out with a friend.)
Such as, why had I assaulted Chris at the Four Seasons? (It seemed like the right thing to do.)
Such as, tell us about your time in Corcoran State Prison (a deuce for forgery and resisting arrest).
And who were my friends? And what about my job as a bouncer at a Laguna nightclub? And my relationship with Belle. That was the hardest thing for them to understand. How a con like me could win the heart of a woman like Belle—beautiful and kind and talented and hotly pursued. I told them the truth: I had no idea how.
That was true back then. Still is.
But Belle had a secret: a commitment she’d made to Rosemary. I knew that much. She told me it was better I didn’t know, and I didn’t push, I respected her wishes.
“It’s up to you, Belle,” I said. “You want to go to the memorial, pay your respects to Rosie, that’s good. The downside is the art-world phonies. But I’ll be your escort. I’ll be your man. I’ll mind my manners and dress real sharp. I’ll throw my coat over the San Francisco mud holes for you, and I’ll take you to good restaurants and I’ll make love to you any chance I get.”
“Business as usual.” She tried to smile but I could see the worry in her eyes.
“I’d rather stay home and spearfish. I missed a thirty-six-inch halibut yesterday, but I’ll go.”
“You’ve been brooding over that fish for about twenty-four hours, Don.” She smiled and shook her head. You look up beautiful smile in the dictionary, they show you a picture of Belle’s. “I need to go,” she said. “I made a promise. And I don’t have any trouble at all with Tony Olsen.”
I said nothing, tamping down my envy of a handsome billionaire my wife didn’t have any trouble with at all. I’m a jealous husband and I admit it. There was no real reason for me to humiliate Chris Thomas all those years ago, other than to smooth my ego, which had commanded me to make things right for Belle, to get her art shown, to make this McFall thing happen. When Chris rejected her, he became my enemy. So I escalated. It’s a prison thing. You escalate before you get escalated upon. My only regret when I got home that night from the Four Seasons was that I hadn’t escalated enough.
“We’ll take the truck,” I said.
“So you can dive Morro Bay and Point Arena.”
“That thought comes to mind.”
“And the Farallons?”
“I did that for Rusty.”
The Farallon Islands off San Francisco are the most dangerous place on earth to dive. They’re crawling with white sharks, the water is cold, the visibility is poor. Death can get its teeth into you before you even know what’s happening. If the sharks don’t get you, the currents will. The rocks are sharp as razors and there’s not even a place to moor a boat for landing. It reminded me of what I’d seen in the fucking art world—sharks and teeth.
Rusty was an old friend, a brave and sometimes crazy man who was still making his meager living diving for urchins in that lethal water. He saved my life at Corcoran, and I will do almost anything to save his. He is stuck with me for life, and I with him.
I went to the South Farallons with Rusty the day Christopher Thomas went missing. Rusty and I made the rugged crossing that night and dove for urchin in the morning. I was forty feet down when a white shark emerged from the unfathomable darkness, came at me, and veered back into the darkness. I remember his teeth, the swatch of underside white. I realized, again, that miracles happen daily. We got six hundred pounds that day, not too bad, better quality than the Japanese can find, top dollar for Rusty.
The cops found this story hard to believe. A felon’s alibi is rarely considered airtight, especially when corroborated by another felon.
“If you can survive the art snobs,” I said, “I can survive the Farallons.”
She looked at me, then went back to work on the canvas, a troubled look clouding her beautiful face.
We ate dinner outside that night in honor of the first day of summer, even though the clouds had deepened and brought a chill to the night. We’ve got an old picnic table in the backyard, set up under a coral tree. There’s a barbecue and a hammock. The kids, Jimmy and Elsa, were already inside working on the dishes and feeding scraps to the dogs. They don’t know about me yet. There will be a time for that. I could see them through the windows, standing in front of the kitchen sink in the yellow light, innocent, full of life and promise.
“You don’t have to go to San Francisco, you
know,” said Belle. “Those aren’t your people up there.”
“They’re not yours either.”
“It’s for Rosie. Only and purely. I made a promise.”
“If you go, I go. I might get to punch somebody out, make a scene. Get thrown in jail.”
Belle smiled and shook her head. “I’m giving you an out.”
“I don’t want an out.”
“I don’t mind if you see Rusty. I understand. But the Farallons spook me.”
“They spook everybody, even Rusty.”
“But he dives them anyway.”
“Yes.”
“And you do too, which spooks me even more.”
I looked at my wife, then out toward Laguna. The town was hidden beyond the hills, but I could see the glow of the city lights rising into the pale cloud cover. Down below us, the cars moved along Laguna Canyon Road, sending up a distant hiss.
Belle went to the house and came back with two snifters of cognac.
We walked up the road to a flat spot in the hills and looked down on the city.
“I wish it had never happened,” said Belle. “None of it. I wish it was over. But it isn’t. It never ends.”
“Then we’ll stay away.”
“We can’t. It’s cowardly. And I have to be there.”
It was a long drive but he’s found Laguna Canyon Road.
Now he follows the couple from a safe distance, watches as they cut across a large swath of land studded with wildflowers and sagebrush.
When they stop in front of a small outbuilding, he waits behind a tree, raises the binoculars to his eyes, turns and adjusts the lenses until everything snaps into focus—the woman’s face in close-up, blond hair, blue eyes.
He turns his attention to the man, focuses on the muscular arms, a blurry prison-type tattoo of a snake on his biceps, and wonders when the hell he will get out of there.
Binoculars back on the woman, the one who interests him. She knows something, this pretty woman with the worried, innocent face.
10
LORI ARMSTRONG
I’ve never been a morning person. But this morning I couldn’t wait for the muse to drag her lazy bum over here and sprinkle inspirational dust on me. The commission was due next week. I struggled with it but I absolutely could not miss the deadline. Despite assumptions associated with my chosen profession as an “arteest,” I’m not a go-with-the-flow kind of gal. I plan. I fret. With bills to pay I have a timetable to keep. Inspiration is a luxury I can’t afford.
In my younger years, I’d postulated that creativity didn’t hold normal office hours, nor did it owe allegiance to a singular space. I’d painted some of my best works in the dead of night, in a crappy apartment, no eye on the clock. Just me, paint, and canvas, locked in battle, the potential of the piece in my mind’s eye warring with reality—misshapen forms, mismatched colors, misaligned borders—which fed my frustration with the process but fueled my creative spirit to hold something tangible in my hands at the end of the fight.
My youthful idealism had been worn to a nub over years of feast and famine in the art world. Now with two kids to wake, coddle, and send to school, two dogs to pet, feed, and walk, plus a husband to tend much in the same manner as dogs and children, my middle-of-the-night painting sessions are as much a memory as the cramped apartment, the shrill sounds of sirens blaring outside my window, and the sickly bluish green fluorescent lighting that used to glow over my workstation. Gone too are the days of having to scrounge up items to pawn in order to buy another tube of Sennelier.
These days I bask in natural light pouring from the skylights above my workstation. In this dedicated “creative” space the younger me would’ve scoffed at, I’m treated to humid, salty ocean breezes wafting through the windows, rolls of canvas stacked against the wall, stretched in frames, draped across every horizontal surface, and dozens of tubes of paint in every hue imaginable. Still, in deference to my eco-consciousness—the only conviction left from my youth—they are environmentally friendly paints. I’ve got space and light and time—the latter at least until the school bus pulls up.
But I don’t have concord.
You think too much, Belle.
It made me smile to hear Don’s voice resonating inside my head. Don understands my neuroses better than anyone else. But he rarely lets me give in to them.
Even after managing to make a living as an artist for the past fifteen years, I still suffer from no-confidence days, when I’m reminded of harsh words from a decade past, words that slice my thin strip of confidence into a single frayed thread. On those bad days, my retreat to prove my critics wrong seems more like hiding than working.
Squinting at the blobs of paint on the canvas, I harkened back to the time I slaved feverishly, hoping to create a masterpiece that’d put me on the map—or at least on the wall of a successful art gallery. Rosemary had tried to give me that chance, despite her husband’s attempt to screw me over, in more ways than one.
The irony isn’t lost on me, trying to duplicate Waves 27 for this new commission, a moody piece that was perfectly suited to the tragedy, secrets, and lies surrounding the Thomases. Working on the painting brought back a coterie of memories, most painfully, my final visit with Rosemary in prison when we’d last spoken of Waves 27. And with the shadowy underpainting in front of me, and the implications of Tony Olsen’s invitation whirling in my head—knowing that the time had finally come, knowing what I was going to have to do—I was filled with a strange sense of foreboding.
Bang-bang-bang-bang ricocheted throughout the metal building as loud as gunshots. I jumped and whirled around, terrified I’d see something more menacing than spray cans of paint rolling across the floor after they’d been blown from the windowsill. A window I’d left open.
God. Spooked much, Belle?
Once I’d calmed down, a tiny bit of resentment arose. If I gave in to fear, I’d never accomplish anything—not what I’d promised Rosemary, not even the commission. So I propped the side door open to harness the lovely cross-breeze and took a deep breath.
Ha. There. Take that. I’m not afraid.
Leaving the cans where they fell, I gathered cleaning cloths soaked with linseed oil, wadded-up paper towels smeared with paint, and the spent, capless tubes of manganese blue and cinnabar green on my way to the garbage.
I lingered before the canvas, unhappy with the images, unhappy with myself. I was so lost in self-reproach that I didn’t sense the intruder until air whooshed past my cheek, followed a split second later by metal flashing in front of my face. I recognized my palette knife—oddly sharp due to Don’s whetstone skills—an instant before the edge was pressed into my neck. Then my left arm was chicken-winged behind my back, sending an excruciating shaft of pain from my wrist to my shoulders, which made me cry out.
“Don’t make another sound,” he said.
The man’s voice was cloaked with a deep rasp, soft as a whisper, but as deadly as the steel against my throat.
“Put your right hand all the way into the front pocket of your jeans. Slowly.”
I complied. I may have grown up on a ranch but I’m not exactly a scrapping tough girl. My mouth was bone-dry. My heart was jackhammering. My eyes watered like crazy. I could not pull enough air into my lungs.
He thickly whispered, “Good girl, Belle.”
He knows my name.
Oh, God. He knows my name.
I wondered if he could be one of Don’s former associates. I knew Don was an ex-con when I married him. As much as Don claims to be on the straight and narrow, I’ve suspected he’s stepped off the path a time or ten. Like any woman in love, I’ve overlooked his lapses.
The idea that he could be looking for Don made me blurt out, “Don’s not here.” Then it hit me what a stupid thing I’d done, admitting I was alone. “What do you want?”
“Answers.” He moved in behind me, so there was no chance I’d see his face. His body brushed mine in a way that caused my flesh to crawl.
/> “I know you went to see her.”
At first, I couldn’t understand whom he meant.
“Rosemary Thomas. You visited her the night before her execution.”
My mind frantically tried to make sense of what he was saying.
“You aren’t denying it,” he whispered.
When I swallowed, the metal of the blade seemed to move in closer to my throat. I croaked, “Yes, I met with her.”
His breath stirred my hair and his nose brushed the upper shell of my ear. “What did you talk about?”
“Nothing important.”
“Liar.” He jammed my arm higher up my back and I cried from the pain. “Try again.”
“We… ah… talked about children.”
“I don’t believe you. Tell me the truth.”
“I am. I’m telling you the truth.”
“You sure? So you and Rosemary just… talked.”
My “Yes” came out a frustrated hiss, similar to the whisper he used.
“You sure she didn’t give you something that night?”
God. How would he know? “Just advice.”
Evidently he wasn’t satisfied with my answer. He abruptly released my arm and with his free hand grabbed a handful of my hair as he jerked my head aside, brandishing the knife in front of my eyes. “You lie.”
“No. Please—”
He pressed the blade and my skin finally gave way. I gasped at the sharp sting.
“Tell me everything or the next one will hurt.”
What if I told him what Rosemary had given me? Would he let me live?
He’d kill me for sure. Probably messily. The image flashed before me, my body sprawled on the ground, eyes staring vacantly at the skylights, my neck sliced. Don or the kids would find my body. Or the dogs. In my mind I could almost hear their barking as they tried to rouse me.
No Rest for the Dead Page 11
