A Cold War

by Alan Russell

  “What are you doing here?”

  Her words came a little faster now: “Checking on my pieces.”

  “The Garden of Stone,” he said, the slightest hint of sarcasm in his words.

  “That wasn’t the name I wanted for the exhibition.”

  “Oh? What name did you want?”

  She mumbled her answer: “What the Gorgon Saw.”

  “What the Gorgonzola?”

  “Forget it.”

  Words invariably uttered when there was something that should be remembered. In his mind Cheever made sense of what she had said. What he couldn’t make sense of was why she was here.

  “I wouldn’t worry about anyone trying to make off with your rocks,” he said. “They’re too heavy.”

  “They’re not as heavy as you’d think,” she said. “They’re faux marble.”

  Cheever didn’t like her answer. It sounded too goddamn superior to him. He knew lack of sleep was coloring his mood, but he still didn’t like her statues. He wanted to tell her that they were pieces of crap, and not even faux pieces of crap. Her stuff disturbed. To his thinking, the best art showed a way out of the cesspool, didn’t offer a wallow in it.

  “You know about the murder?” he asked.

  She could hear the anger in his voice even if she didn’t know the source. “Yes,” she said.

  He closed the distance between them. “How well did you know Bonnie Gill?”

  “She’s represented me for several years.”

  Cheever let the silence build. People usually started talking about the dead, saying all kinds of things, but not this one. “That’s all you have to say about her?”

  She didn’t immediately respond. Her expression was sad, despondent, then, to his surprise, he thought he saw a momentary smile, a glee. Her posture shifted, her face went slack, and she straightened. Her chin tilted up and her manner became imperious.

  So, she thought. Cop wants a confrontation. I can play that game. “I’m not good at eulogies,” she said.

  They had a little stare-down. She was acting tough now. Yeah, she was a rock, he thought. Faux rock. What was that children’s game? Scissors, paper, rock. It was time for paper to wrap rock. “What’s your name?”

  The smallest hesitation: “Holly Troy.”

  “Got some ID?”

  “Not on me.”

  He flipped open his pad. “What’s your address and phone number?”

  Monotone, she gave him both.

  “Any reason for Ms. Gill to be dead?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said.

  The words were offered without any feeling. Holly Troy was young to be that uncaring, he thought. Usually you have to live for a while to earn the right.

  “And you don’t give a damn, do you?”

  Holly ignored his question. “It’s going to be a bother,” she said, “finding a new gallery. Not many take on statuary, or at least pieces of any size.”

  She was avoiding the issue of a body, playing scissors now on his paper, cutting out lines of inquiry she didn’t like. It was time to rock her. Smash her scissors.

  “When we discovered Bonnie Gill’s body last night,” he said, “she was already cool. Not cold, not in San Diego. When the dead are described as being cold that’s sort of a myth. After the heart stops pumping, the body loses heat. Gradually it becomes the temperature of its surroundings. Of the air, of the ground . . .”

  Cheever walked over to a small statue of a little girl crying. One of Holly Troy’s horrors. The statue had been clothed in a yellow dress with red polka dots. The girl’s mouth was open. She was scared. She was terrified. Cheever wished he could tell her everything was all right.

  “. . . of the stone,” he said.

  The anger rose in him unexpectedly. “By the time we got here she was the temperature of your fucking faux marble,” he said. “But your stone doesn’t bleed, lady. She did. But then you don’t care, do you?”

  The same question again, and another silence. Her shifting of posture was the only indicator that she had heard.

  Bonnie Gill didn’t fit the profile of most San Diego homicides. She didn’t use or abuse, didn’t have a record, was a business owner and community leader. She was an attractive woman whose death would make the taxpayers uneasy. San Diegans weren’t going to like seeing Bonnie Gill’s smiling, freckled face staring at them from their morning newspaper.

  Cheever didn’t have one of the smiling pictures. He had the other kind. The crime scene shots had been processed that morning. When Cheever had first started in homicide all the pictures had been black and white. Now they were color, the better to see with, and the better to sicken juries. To make an impact, even on the jaded.

  “Two wounds,” he said, holding up one of the pictures to Holly’s face. She looked different now, diffident even, but Cheever didn’t care. “One in the back here.” Cheever slapped the spot hard, did it so she could hear the impact, and feel it. “And one here, across the throat.” He pushed the second picture almost to her nose, tapped on it to show the wound, then demonstrated on his own throat with particular savagery, leaving an angry red line across his neck.

  In the pictures, Bonnie looked small. Only her wounds looked large. She had red hair and looked like a fallen Raggedy Ann doll.

  For some reason Cheever had lost it with this woman, something he rarely did. He prided himself on his control. It made the job possible, but something had kicked in.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” Cheever told her as he shoved the pictures into his coat pocket, “for mistaking you for someone who cared.”