by Maria Hummel
Jim walked swiftly, occasionally naming a department, a lab, all marked by small signs. The building’s windowless stretches, filled with aging 1970s tile and paneling, didn’t help its eerie feeling of repetition and displacement. Only the library was open, empty except for a couple of students and the librarian at the desk. We passed it quickly, and then the Super Shop, where Brenae had worked. It was closed, the welding, sandblasting, and woodworking machines inside hulking and still. I stared in, wondering where the desk was where Brenae had stood, checking out tools to the students.
Janis seemed nettled by our silence. “What questions do you have for Jim? He’s been working at LAAC for three years, he tells me. Former graduate. Sculpture major, am I right?”
Jim gave her a nervous smile. “I did some different installations.”
“Sounds vague, Jim,” Janis said with her stern good humor.
Jim looked startled, then laughed. “Didn’t seem so at the time.”
Were we supposed to ask about Brenae? I glanced at Ray. He shook his head.
“Did you like being a student here?” he asked Jim.
“It changed my life,” Jim said.
“How so?” I said.
“A better question is ‘How not?’ The experience here is like nowhere else.” There was no snobbery or admonition in his voice, but he seemed puzzled by my question, as if I didn’t understand LAAC at all.
We approached a staircase. “Oh,” Jim said, halting. “Would any of you prefer to use the elevator? We have an elevator.”
“Does it go directly into the studio building?” said Ray.
“No, we still have to go outside for a minute.” He jangled the keys. “But we can take it if you want.”
“That’s all right,” said Ray. “Stairs are fine.”
I guessed at Ray’s line of questioning: he wanted to know if there were multiple ways to access the studio building. This might explain someone entering Brenae’s studio on Thursday without being seen.
Outside, morning sunlight filled a truncated courtyard, flanked on all sides by snaking walls. It looked like a cross between a prison yard and a secret garden. The sky bloomed, open and blue above. The grass was sparse, broken by patches of gravel and steel benches, yet here against a wall, someone had artfully stacked a pile of dusty glass jars, and there, silver wire wound around a pole, twisting on itself in a complicated filigree. Mysterious symbols emblazoned a large hunk of pink rock, making it look antique and new at once, a contemporary Rosetta stone.
I paused over it.
“What’s it mean?” I said.
Jim turned back. “It’s a translation of the menu from Canter’s Deli. Someone made up their own hieroglyphic language, and that’s the key that unlocks it all.”
The symbols—tiny cats, an umbrella, collections of dots—did not evoke matzo ball soup and pastrami to me, but the stone’s pale pink luster did conjure California adobe, a solidity that also seemed fragile.
Jim stopped at a new steel door and held up his ring of keys, flipping through them.
“People prop this open most of the time, but not till later in the day,” he muttered.
He turned the lock, and we entered a narrow, white-painted hallway, etched and stained with nameless substances, the tile floor cracked. Both sides of the corridor were lined with dented doors, some painted brightly, some stickered, some plain. One door had no handle at all, just a hammer hanging off a wire. For the first time since arriving, I felt the hive mystique of LAAC, the air of common industry and creative life that hung over these spaces. Behind each of these doors, all day and night, people were painting, etching, threading, sketching. The walls came as high as the thresholds, but the studios’ ceilings were all connected, which meant you’d be able to hear your neighbor talking, not to mention sawing or pounding. And pounding. And pounding.
“These belong to the undergraduates,” said Jim. He gestured weakly at the walls. “Obviously they could use an update.”
“Might we look inside one?” Ray sounded exceptionally courtly.
“Um.” Jim flapped his hand again. “They’re all full. And people are a bit sensitive about . . .” He trailed off. “We can knock.”
“That’s all right,” said Ray. “Don’t want to wake anyone up.” He sounded peeved, though, as if it were such a small request, after all, to peek into someone’s empty studio.
“Lead on, then,” said Janis.
We came to the end of the corridor and opened another creaking door. Every footfall we made was amplified by the bare walls and floor. The studios’ lack of privacy struck me again. Why hadn’t more people heard a gun go off?
“How do people deal with the noise?” I said.
“High-quality headphones,” said Jim. “First thing they tell everyone at orientation: buy a pair of headphones or you’ll lose your mind.” He said this without amusement, beckoning us into a broader hall, with fewer doors, more light, walls that reached the ceiling.
“Big difference,” Janis observed.
“These are the Shangri-la of studios,” said Jim. “They all go to graduate students, and there’s a lottery for them. It would be great if all the spaces looked like this.”
“Any chance we can step inside one of these?” said Ray. “They’re really impressive.”
“Um,” Jim said. He looked at the walls as if noting some new markings there. “There is an empty one in the next building. It’s not as nice, but . . . Or you could come back when we have more time to arrange things. Ask permission.”
He fiddled with his key ring, his fingers twisting.
“I’d like to see one of these now,” Ray said firmly. “I don’t have time in my schedule to come back.”
I realized Ray knew that Brenae’s studio was on this hall. He intended to see it. I wanted to see it, too, but ever since we’d left the main lobby, I’d had the distinct feeling that there was somewhere else on campus that I needed to go.
Jim shook his head. “I don’t—”
“Show the gentleman what he wants,” said Janis. “Your development director would do it. I know her, and she does anything for a buck.”
The manager glanced at the hallway’s entrance and exits, then scurried over to a door at the end of the hall. “You can’t touch anything,” he said. “It belonged to the student who passed away last spring, and the police asked us to leave it open for the rest of the year. It’s clean, but I hope you’re not squeamish.”
Up until the instant Jim had said the word squeamish, I had intended to follow Ray and Janis into Brenae’s studio, to see what Ray saw and try to discern as best I could what he was trying to find. But now another idea occurred to me. A very Brenae idea. If Brenae couldn’t show her videos on the walls of LAAC, she might make them public another way.
“Sorry,” I said. “You might have to excuse me.” I clutched at my stomach.
It took some willpower not to look over at Ray and Janis, who were frowning at my sudden queasiness. Why wouldn’t I want to see the scene of Brenae’s suicide?
Let them ponder. I would explain later.
“Sorry,” I said again. “I just need a breath of fresh air. I’ll catch up with the tour.”
“I know, right?” Jim said sympathetically. “Trust me, it was way worse when the forensics people were here. I saw some things that I want to scrub from my mind.”
“Like what?” said Janis, sounding equal parts amazed and disgusted at the turn in conversation.
“They use putty knives,” said Jim. “Anyway. A quick look, okay, please? I could really get in trouble.” He followed them inside.
I wandered away, casually, my eyes on the ground, like I was fighting the urge to hurl. I’d lost my chance to scrutinize where Brenae died. But it couldn’t be helped. I had to get back to the library.
I KEPT MY EXPRESSION BLANK as I entered the room, feeling out of place in my pseudo-fancy West Side getup. The students glanced at me and went back to their laptops. The librarian, who looked like o
ur tour guide aged twenty years—skinny, blinking, with an obsessively trim beard—gave me a thorough stare. I returned it with a firm smile and ducked into the shelving. I looked in the books first, just in case, but the last names skipped straight from Bennio to Broncs. Then I went to the videos, lined up in their library sleeves, the colorful DVD cases replaced by plain white covers, the titles typed large. Like all lucky discoveries, it seemed like this should have been harder to find—that there would be a fake drawer or trick shelf hiding Brenae Brasil’s After-Parties. But there it was. The video she’d supposedly destroyed, left in plain sight, for someone to discover.
I didn’t pause long. I stood beyond the sight lines of the librarian. Within moments I’d slid the DVD into my purse, returned the jewel case, and made my way out.
I hurried back to the studio wing through the door I’d propped open and nodded to Jim, who stood in the hall, tugging at his shirt cuffs. I entered Brenae’s studio as Ray and Janis were turning to leave. It was just an empty room, light-filled, with walls as soft as bulletin boards and punched with holes from hundreds of pushpins. The scene of Brenae’s death existed only in notes and memories now. The acoustics amplified our slightest moves. Even our breath sawed in and out.
Ray was studying the window, opening and shutting it gently. It had a half pane that shoved out at the bottom, and the rest rose six feet high, with a view of a wood-chipped median, the parking lot, trees, and the sky. An unremarkable suburban view.
The room had been scoured by crime experts. I knew from their reports which corner Brenae had chosen, and what the dents and scuffs on the wall there meant. Technicians had scraped off pieces of her brain and skull to dislodge the bullet embedded inside. They’d bagged the bullet, the gun, and every other object in the studio, including the laptop, an empty pill bottle, a pair of slippers, a mug with dried coffee ringing the bottom, and lots of shredded paper that they diligently tried to tape back together to find a message. But the paper was blank. They’d bagged the mattress, too.
They’d also bagged Brenae, and, in another building in the county, a medical examiner had checked her thoroughly for bruises or signs of penetration (none), then examined the wound and took toxicology samples, while the detectives had spoken to students, faculty, and family about Brenae’s last days. Everyone they interviewed had alibis, except Pearson and Davi, who’d both been home alone that night. Every expert on the case had come to the same conclusion: sometime between midnight and 4:00 a.m., Brenae had lain down, put a large, heavy pillow over her head, stuck the gun up under her chin, and pulled the trigger.
But as I stood there, in the room where it had happened, I still couldn’t believe it. And I knew Ray couldn’t, either. That’s why he’d been checking the windows, and now the ceiling. We were unable to un-see murder. The violence of Brenae’s death: it demanded an explanation other than isolation and desperation. And because we possessed the sex video, something that LASD hadn’t seen, the case seemed different now from the one they had solved. Their detectives had located Brenae’s suicidal motivations everywhere—in her financial situation, her precarious position at the school, her lack of medication. To me, they had a locus. Erik. Erik had gone to see her on Tuesday. He claimed that his attempt to talk to her had failed. But by Thursday, Brenae was dead and, by Friday morning, Lesson in Red erased.
“Anything?” I whispered.
Ray turned away and pointed at the skylight, to the plastic glow-in-the-dark galaxy that someone had glued up there.
“Fake stars,” he said.
“NOT MUCH TO UNCOVER,” RAY said as soon as Jim had left us in the parking lot. The students were starting to gather on campus, and perhaps Hal would be showing up soon, too. We hid in the shade of a sycamore behind Janis’s car.
“I wouldn’t think so,” said Janis. “It was months ago.”
I nearly announced my find in the library but noticed that Ray was looking off into the distance, hands in his pockets, his gaze dazed.
“What?” I said. “Just tell us.”
“You have a minute?” Ray asked Janis.
“Of course,” said Janis.
He went to his car and pulled out his laptop from the trunk. While it booted up, he glanced at me. “Why did you leave the room? You lose your stomach for this?”
Ray had walked close to me all the way back through the studios, the secret garden, down the tiled halls, out the glass doors. As if to catch me if I stumbled. I didn’t want to lie to him or Janis, but I was afraid if I showed the DVD to Janis now, she would take possession of it, and it wouldn’t be mine, my discovery.
I felt a grip on my arm. “It’s all right,” said Janis. “Grief works in strange ways. You didn’t know Brenae personally, but you feel like you do now. It’s all right to feel sick about it.”
She kept her hand on me, wearing a concerned, maternal frown, and I almost confessed my discovery, but she swiveled back to Ray. “Go on, then. Show us what you’ve got.”
Ray set the laptop on his trunk and lifted his screen. “Tell me what you see,” he said. “On the floor, next to them.”
Lesson in Red played again, the whole excruciating thing. It was getting harder and harder for me to view the man pushing into her. The more I knew about Brenae. The more I knew about Erik. Beside me, I felt Janis shifting from foot to foot.
“This footage is monstrous,” she said. “I can’t stand it.”
“There,” said Ray, hitting pause and pointing to something on the floor by the bed. “What does that look like?”
A tiny, pointed thing, white and shining.
A glue-on star.
My nerves prickled. The plastic star, if it was a star, wasn’t proof that the video was from Brenae’s studio. But it was close. If Brenae had shot the video at LAAC, and not while she was an undergraduate, it refuted everything Erik had said. Erik had claimed the relationship was over. Erik had claimed it was all about sex and that he’d ended it over a year ago. But it didn’t look ended at all.
“And there,” said Ray, touching a shadowed rectangle on the wall beside the mattress. “That’s an outlet that matches one in the studio. It’s right beneath a couple of screw holes in the ceiling where Brenae could have mounted a camera. She may have even knocked down the star, mounting it.”
“Well,” said Janis, satisfaction in her tone. “Isn’t that something.”
Cars were pulling into the parking lot now, and I looked over at LAAC, the scattering of students heading into the building with their knapsacks and instrument cases, ready for their classes.
“I want you to see the new museum site,” Janis added to Ray. “My driver will take you to the Westing,” she told me. “It’s your last day there, honey. Nelson wants his old assistant back.”
Janis’s words hung in the air. My last day at the gallery? Then what?
“I’m going to show Ray’s interview transcripts to a few people. Probably the video, too,” said Janis, seeing the disbelief on my face. “Look, LAAC is by and large a marvelous place. I want it to thrive. Being here today makes me lean away from the public exposé. I’d rather use peer pressure through the right channels first. If the board gets wind that Hal protected one student at a horrendous price to another, especially a young woman of Brenae’s background, they’ll have to investigate. Hal will get distracted. These museum plans will be put on hold, and the damage won’t happen to LAAC. It will happen to Hal. That’s better in the long run.”
Was it? I didn’t think so. I looked at Ray for support. He ran a hand down his lapel.
“What you’re saying is that you want to do this gradually,” he said to Janis. “Say the board doesn’t respond. We still—”
“They’ll respond,” Janis said curtly. “This is a scandal.”
My purse weighed heavy on my shoulder. Maybe Janis would take down Hal, but she wasn’t standing up for Brenae, for her story. Her full, real story, written in flesh and blood.
“I’ll find you later,” Ray said, giving me a loaded
look.
“Sure,” I said, but I didn’t keep the anger from my voice.
Janis checked her watch. “And don’t worry about the new museum, Maggie,” she said warmly. “To Hal and Steve, it’s business and glamour. To me, it’s family. I won’t let them win.”
JANIS’S DRIVER PLAYED SOFT PAKISTANI music and kept to himself, which was fine with me. I pulled the silver DVD from my purse and stared at it, wondering what it contained. What had Hal said? It was footage of people leaving parties. He’d rejected it for being trite and uninteresting. But Brenae had stowed it in the LAAC library, perhaps because she wanted to belong to LAAC history. Now that I’d seen her vacant studio, once soaked in her blood, now that I’d heard even Janis Rocque giving up on her, I realized how inexorably Brenae’s history could be wiped away.
It was up to me now to save it. I still wondered if I had the right. I wasn’t an artist; I was middle class and white from a white state, and I’d never felt the precipice of economic insecurity or the cultural isolation that Brenae might have faced at the college. I’d never been reduced to her position, literally beneath a man who used her. Furthermore, I believed in the slip from attraction to lust in the face of power. I knew it could happen for a woman—even if rationally, politically, and personally she resisted seeing herself in that role. It had happened to me.
NOTHING HAD EVER KINDLED BETWEEN me and my beloved art history TA. But I had been more than an intern to Jay Eastman, the journalist who’d led me to Nikki Bolio and who’d protected me after our source’s death.
