Lesson In Red

by Maria Hummel

  “He had this sling he put Nathaniel in, and the kid would sleep while he typed,” said Ray. “The kid was a prodigious sleeper, a really contented child. I’ll give his mother credit for that. She stayed off everything while she was pregnant. It was the only advantage the kid got, though. And Willow.” Ray sounded deeply fond of his stepmother.

  I waited, pulling my seat belt loose from my shoulder, letting it slide back.

  “Anyway. Paris cookies,” he said, as if that summed things up.

  “What do you think happened to Calvin in L.A.?” I said.

  Ray tapped the steering wheel.

  “My brother was brilliant, but he didn’t have a lot of sense,” he said. “A couple of months before he died, he took his last bit of Yates stipend and went to London to interview people who’d known James Compton. He came back excited. He claimed he had ‘a whole new angle’ on Compton, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. He said I’d be ‘too much of a cop’ about it.”

  Soon after, Ray said, Calvin had traveled to L.A. to present part of his thesis on James Compton at a conference.

  “He called his son the first night, as promised,” said Ray. “The second night, he didn’t.”

  The third day Calvin was found dead in a hotel bathroom. “The forensics team couldn’t make much progress because of all the water. Whoever killed him took his laptop, a pair of pants, a pair of shoes, and a pillowcase.” Ray cleared his throat. “We think the pants and shoes were for the suspect to change into. The pillowcase to carry the killer’s bloodied clothes out. That meant we were looking for someone Cal’s size or smaller. He was five eleven, size ten in shoes. Narrows it down to over half of L.A.

  “Cal disdained owning a cell phone, so no calls or texts,” Ray continued. “He picked up his conference badge, did his panel, disappeared, and then died. You’re probably the only one outside Yates who read his thesis, other than me and Alicia.” He took another bite of the pastry. “Not sure that opened up any new lines of inquiry anyway. But it is pure Cal.”

  I told him I was impressed by Calvin’s enthusiasm for the British art scene and James Compton’s role in it.

  “He was trying to turn it into a book,” Ray said. “He could have done it. But he was also a dreamer, a dad who never made enough scratch for his kid. And he was still an addict.” Cal had kept clean in North Carolina, but in L.A. he’d hoped to score again. “He tried to connect with a few dealers while he was out here. There are records in his webmail. As I said, Cal had no sense. And when he backslid, he slid hard. But LAPD followed up on all the dealers, and not one checked out. The only other clue in his hotel room was a little L.A. snow globe from a tourist shop, and the name ‘Genevieve’ written on a piece of paper.” Ray had painstakingly traced the snow globe to a shop in Venice Beach, but the owner had no recollection of Calvin.

  Ray still couldn’t figure out who Genevieve was.

  “I left L.A. last summer because I decided that finding Calvin’s killer wouldn’t help me. Or Willow. Or Nathaniel.” He looked at me, not wary, not shuttered anymore, but dead certain. “I belong with him. The boy.” I belong with him. Love and fear mixed in his voice, making the simple statement echo in the car. “And I need to bank the funds to support him, in case anything—” He turned away, a thin scar on his right cheek shining in the sunlight. “My line of work doesn’t guarantee a long life, so when Janis offered me another well-paying gig, I took three weeks of vacation time to come here. I think I can stretch it a few more days, and then I have to go home again. And then this story—whatever it turns out to be—will be all yours.” He paused, and his tone changed. “I’m happy to stay in touch, if it helps you. I won’t be able to fetch your coffee anymore, but I can be a sounding board.” He smiled, but his eyes were on the distance again, the dry hills and telephone wires, the white stripe of the aqueduct descending.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Does Janis know all this?”

  “Most of it,” said Ray, and then added in a mutter: “Enough to scold me for leaving you behind.”

  My stomach fluttered. “As if Janis doesn’t have enough to do, she has to matchmake, too,” I said, forcing a laugh.

  I waited for a joking reply. When it didn’t come, I had the sinking feeling that Ray had been referring to leaving the investigation. Not leaving me.

  “Your nephew must miss you,” I rushed to say. “I’ll take you up on the sounding-board offer.”

  Ray remained silent, his face tense. He was reading the green freeway signs, the next exit in five miles. Another eleven to Valdivia. Then he looked at the steering wheel and the long lanes in front of us, as if somehow either could offer him another direction in which to turn. Finally he sighed and sank back in his seat. “You cool enough?” he said, glancing over. “I can turn up the AC. Let me turn up the AC.” He cranked the knob and asked me about my latest research on Brenae, chill air spilling over both of us.

  15

  UNLIKE THE SPRAWLING VILLAGES OF most colleges, LAAC was a single, bulging hive. Centrality and connection defined the architecture. Our drive into the parking lot today revealed the college in glimpses—a long white walkway here, a shaded patio there, the wavy roof of the new music theater. At LAAC, you could stroll the entire campus without leaving a building, without breaking free of the school’s humming activity. Along the way, the ghostly tracks of its illustrious alumni crisscrossed your path—this was a MacArthur Fellow’s studio once; that was the stage where an Oscar winner had made his debut. Every doorknob on campus had been touched by someone famous.

  LAAC was a pressure cooker, an incubator, and a chrysalis. Although my young alumni friends ranged in personality and background, they all had one thing in common: they questioned everything but the value of art. If they’d arrived at the school with faith in some other higher purpose—honoring God, their parents, their culture, money, love—they left the school with that certitude in tatters. Instead, art sewed their existence together. For this conversion, they’d gained a tremendous education and an ability to see into our culture, to dismantle it, to find the reasons behind the reasons. In conversation, they could unravel an average person like me. Yet the change came at a cost. An ordinary life—working at any dull or obligatory job, marrying, buying a house, raising kids, even wanting wealth at all—was, for an LAAC grad, no longer acceptable as a means for happiness. You could do it, but you might betray your true nature. Far better to starve and self-deny than to yield to a life of quiet desperation. This transformation was Hal’s real legacy. His masterpiece. It’s one thing to influence culture with your paintings or sculptures, but to transform hundreds of young men and women, one by one, into new creatures in your own image? That is the work of a Creator.

  Janis was waiting in the parking lot with her driver. She hopped out as soon as we pulled up. She did not look ill. In fact, she looked like she was refusing to look ill, all wound up in her blue pantsuit and huge round sunglasses. Yet the sight of her stabbed me.

  “We’re late,” she said, although we weren’t. “Shall we go in? I’ll brief Maggie on the way.” With a nod at Ray, she put her hand on my arm and steered me over the asphalt. I realized I’d never walked beside Janis. Most of the time I’d stared up at her behind a podium. Her dark, curly head came to my shoulder now, and there were sparse patches of scalp that shone in the sun, but her grip was strong and her stride quick and forceful. She radiated energy and determination as she launched into telling me about Steve Goetz and Hal Giroux’s secret plan to build a massive free museum for Goetz’s contemporary art collection two blocks away from the Rocque. “They’re already in negotiation with the city for building permits,” she said. “I think Goetz has a grudge with me over the Kim Lord business.”

  “Two blocks away?” I said. “How did you find out?”

  “I have my spies. They’re much farther along than we expected,” she said in a bitter voice. “Our lease comes up next year, and the city might pressure us to make our museum free, too. They might even decid
e not to renew the lease. We’re in a race against time.”

  The hush-hush nature of the plan proved the men’s animosity toward Janis. They wanted to wipe her out. Sure, she would always get credit for being a downtown pioneer, but Goetz and Giroux would arrive as conquerors to replace her.

  “Hal’s done with this place,” Janis said as we stepped onto LAAC’s paved arcade, which led to the green main building, with its two blank glass doors. “He wants a grand exit to a better opportunity, but there aren’t many for a guy his age. It’s my belief that he tried to bury Brenae’s suicide and her artwork so he could keep his reputation spotless and make this leap. Big-time director of the big-time Goetz Museum.” She paused, her hold on my arm tightening. “I didn’t want to share the news with anyone who worked at the Rocque until I was sure. But you still need to keep it—and this whole investigation—to yourself. We might find enough; we might find nothing.” She jabbed her chin at Ray. “He’s interested in seeing the layout here, thinks it might shed some light on who came and went after Brenae died. Today, you and I can just keep quiet and support him. He’s a very good investigator,” she added as if I were just meeting Ray. “Very thorough and discreet.”

  I was still processing all that Ray had relayed in the car, a veritable avalanche of personal information, followed by his intention to return home again. It was as if he’d been in a race to tell everything to me before it was too late. The past week had made us comrades, professional but true to each other. But after this morning, there were more dimensions to Ray—the grieving, frustrated brother, the loving uncle—to mix in to the image I’d constructed of him as the bottled-up detective who kept appearing in my life. I didn’t like Ray suddenly evolving into a cocktail of confused selves, especially one who seemed to have feelings for me. I liked how he’d been the first night, when we’d gone to see Davi play, and he’d cruised through the whole evening with the certitude that he would get the information he wanted. Vulnerable Ray made me pity him. No, not pity. Ray was leaving L.A. behind for good reasons. I saw that. Pity meant charity, forced sympathy, and not this soft, achy, deflating sadness, like something I’d held taut inside me had sprung a tiny hole.

  I dreaded the car ride home with him—what would we say to each other now?—but here, at LAAC, we had a job to do.

  We entered the main building through the glass doors. Beyond was a cavernous chamber. The ceilings hung high over a two-story lobby lined with theater lights. Corridors stretched off in all directions. I could hear dim sounds of music and thumping feet, but I couldn’t tell where they were coming from. The architects had designed the space so that students from all the different disciplines—art, music, dance, film, criticism, and more—would cross one another’s paths, cross-pollinate, collaborate. Later in the day, the space would be bursting with commotion.

  Empty this morning, however, the surfaces looked old: the paint faded, the tile worn, the room lacking the alabaster glow of newer Los Angeles locations. Hal had erected a castle, but after a couple of decades in this city, all castles eroded. You weren’t supposed to erode with them, though. Not if you were a genius. You were supposed to go out and build another. I understood Hal’s career motives. And why should he care about the Rocque’s future? Bunker Hill was fair game to him. Not to me. It was irrational, I knew, but I hoped Ray would find exactly what we needed to nail Hal today. Some clue that Brenae had left behind.

  The campus welcome office wasn’t open yet, but Janis jabbed at her phone and spoke into it, then nodded at us. “Someone’s coming.”

  Ray stood loosely beside me, examining the lobby. I tried to see what he would see, through the eyes of a trained professional. Was he looking at the objects and their locations now, imagining the timeline of the week Brenae died? I could only picture what was missing: the students. An image of Brenae popped into my mind, plunked on one of the couches by the window, hunched over a laptop screen. And then in my mind’s eye, I saw Erik, sauntering in, spotting Brenae, then pivoting to avoid her.

  Erik and Brenae. Mentor and student. Lovers. Hardly unusual in the history of art. Picasso and Gilot, Rivera and Kahlo, Pollock and Krasner, Rodin and Claudel, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe. The older ones gave the younger ones their knowledge and experience; the younger gave their inspiring energies. And usually their bodies. Their affairs, passionate at the outset, rarely ended well, yet such relationships happened in every generation, and sometimes the world benefited greatly.

  I remember Erik’s deft hands piling and twisting shoes; I could see him focusing a camera on Brenae’s mouth as she lifted the dripping gun to it. What if she had inspired him? And what if he had given her the footage she needed?

  As we waited for our LAAC guide, my mind played a romantic version of Brenae and Erik’s first meeting: Here was the dusty, dim classroom at USC, a cluster of students in flip-flops and battered T-shirts, and there was Erik pacing back and forth in front of a slideshow, asking questions. The students, mostly freshmen, hung in silence. Erik captivated them with his freewheeling commentary, his curly-headed boyishness.

  Finally, one student raised her hand. Brenae’s voice was flat, declarative. She refuted the question he asked. Or she changed the question. She had barely outgrown her childhood body, but her face was burnished now by an intense lust—lust not for the young man directing them but for what he stood for: authority, skill, knowing. She wanted it so badly it sharpened her, making her profile cut the air. He softened to her interest. It was real interest, he realized, fresh and intelligent, an instructor’s dream. The air grew vivid between them, and the other students fell away. After class, Brenae stayed. She challenged him again, and he faltered. She left the room first, her walk awkward, as if she knew he was watching. And he was. The light in her made him blink as he thought over her questions, as he drove home later, imagining better answers.

  BUT THAT WAS THE EXPERIENCE I had longed for, once. It wasn’t necessarily Brenae’s experience. There she’d been, a first-generation college student, all alone, in a prestigious university in an enormous city. Had she concealed that her mother worked in an auto parts store, that her father managed milking protocols? Such lives weren’t anything to be ashamed of where I’d grown up, but Los Angeles schools drew many worldly and monied students, coached all through their childhoods to secure a competitive college berth, to ensure they retained their social class. Had Brenae known how much she would change among them? She’d said in her bio for Packing that the day she’d entered her first art history course, she’d switched her major from premed to art. Erik must have been there.

  What had Erik been like three years ago? I tried to conjure a younger, dewier version of his flop-haired charm, but all I saw was his power. Erik was Brenae’s gateway. He was already an artist, he had department connections, and he held the camera as she began making her own work. He knew how to shoot her, and he made her ideas more real than ever before. Erik was a legitimizer. He belonged, and if he said Brenae belonged, too, then she did. She needed that, coming from nowhere, feeling like no one.

  What else did she want from him? The lust, the sex, that was clear, at least according to him—but had she wanted love? Was it too old-fashioned or naïve these days to want love?

  Say Brenae hadn’t. She’d only wanted knowledge. Intellectual gains. What if their relationship had started as lessons—Erik had so much to show her, she wanted to learn everything—and then moved to manipulation, the way Picasso had manipulated the young Françoise Gilot, praising and pursuing, embracing, then later deriding, then making her admit his mastery over her, driving her out, begging her to come back?

  It was impossible to know. Yet as I looked around the vaulting bunker, with its bulletin boards layered thick in posters, I realized that over the decades of LAAC’s existence, this space would hold every version of the powerful story of mentor and student: both the generous and the cruelly indifferent ones, the one that ended at the classroom, and the one that began there; the one where they never touched; t
he one full of abiding trust; the one where they buoyed each other, gift of a lifetime—as well as the version where one held the other down, the version where they both drowned.

  Gilot had refused to be a victim. After ten years, and numerous threats from Picasso, she’d left, taking what she’d gained and leaving the rest behind.

  Brenae had left, too, but she had gained nothing.

  A PALE, UNSMILING MAN MATERIALIZED beside us in the lobby. He was so thin that his hips could fit into the jeans of a twelve-year-old girl. He grimaced as we shook hands, his hairy wrists immediately retracting into their buttoned sleeves. “I’m Jim, the studio manager. Sorry, the director doesn’t generally come in today,” he told us. “Would you like to see the studios?” He held up a ring of keys and key cards. “I understand that’s why you’re here.”

  “We’d love to see the studios,” said Janis. She glanced at Ray for confirmation, and he nodded.

  “Anything else you’d like to show us along the way,” Ray said in a thickened southern accent, “feel free.”

  Jim gave a little shrug, as if tour add-ons were not his bailiwick, and started toward a corridor on the far side of the lobby. Our footfalls made hollow sounds. I was glad to be here, glad to have some context to visualize Brenae’s last days, but without talking to people, I couldn’t imagine we’d find anything new at LAAC. Instead, the silent, vacant corridors reminded me of the interchangeability of the students. For a few years, LAAC was theirs, their paint-spattered studios, their dinky library, their cafeteria with the pork buns on Wednesdays. Then, abruptly and just as intensely, it became the possession of others. The constant flow through the school would have protected Hal, enabled him to side with whichever student he chose; in two years, few would have personally known Erik Reidl or Brenae Brasil.