A Grave Talent km-1

by Laurie R. King

  "You haven't had a break? You go ahead, I'll stay here until you get back."

  When the woman returned, Kate went for coffee and a stale roll, retrieved some clothes from her car, had a shower, and returned just as Lucy was going off duty. Her replacement was a massive Hispanic man whose movements were slow, except for those of his eyes. Kate introduced himself and made sure he knew that he was not to enter the room if he could possibly avoid it, and then very quietly. She then let herself in with only a faint click.

  The first thing she noticed was the bright drawing taped to the wall above the light. Teddy's effort, no doubt. Paul McCartney was singing about blackbirds. The bed's inhabitant lay as before, limp and remote. Her hair had been heavily brushed. The perfume from the roses on the bedside table rose above the pervasive medicinal smell of a hospital room, two dozen incongruously perfect scarlet blooms hacked off and stuck into an institutional mayonnaise jar with patches of the label still clinging. Next to the jar were several items that Bruckner must have brought with him: a flat box of jumbo-sized crayons, the kind designed for pudgy little hands, a package of Conte crayons, and one of charcoal sticks. Kate wondered if he was planning on some kind of sleep-drawing with the unconscious woman and wished she could be witness to it.

  Bruckner was sitting on the edge of the bed, bent forward in close scrutiny of Vaun's right hand, which lay curled up on her chest. He looked around when Kate came in, winced, stood up slowly, and eased his back. He was wearing a drooping bud in the lapel of his corduroy jacket. His hair stood on end, his five o'clock shadow was verging on an early beard, and when he came over to Kate he brought the mustiness of stale sweat. They both kept their voices very low.

  "How is it going?" she asked him.

  "Too early yet to know. Hawkin said you'd be able to help me today?"

  "I haven't heard any different. What do you want me to do?"

  "Relieve me for a couple of hours. I've got to shave, and I should talk to Tanaka and go through her records so I look professional."

  "There's a shower in number seventeen," she suggested.

  "I am looking forward to using it." He dug a crumpled shirt and a zip bag from his briefcase, and handed Kate two cassettes. "Put these on next, and brush her hair. Don't talk to her, and try to keep out of her line of sight. And watch her."

  So for two hours Kate listened to half-remembered songs by Judy Collins and Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Simon and Garfunkel, and brushed firmly until the black curls lay flat against the head and pillow, and held her breath at several imagined movements and once at a faint noise that she decided must have come from the tape player. At the end of the hypnotic time, she was startled at the careless shock of the door being thrown open and Bruckner carrying in the canvas. He propped it on a chair against the wall facing the bed, and as she looked at it Kate realized that it had no signature. Bruckner came back with the glowing velvet and the quilt, and closed the door. She got up from the bed and went to whisper that there was no change, but his eyes swept over Vaun and the monitor that he had reattached to her, and grinned.

  "Oh, yes there is. Look at her color, and her pulse rate."

  Kate looked more closely, but could see no variation in the skin. The luminous numbers on the monitor had read between 55 and 58 before, and now read 59, hardly a noteworthy increase, she thought. It blinked to 60, then back to 59, and stayed there.

  "No movement, though?"

  "I thought a couple of times, but it's kind of like staring at a spot on a blank wall: It starts to jump after a while."

  He nodded, tossed the velvet on the chair, and shook out the quilt to spread over the bed. He picked up Vaun's loose right hand and something fell out onto the folds of the bed, a small black something that brought an intake of breath and a look of slow, intense satisfaction to his face. He turned the flaccid hand over, plucked something from the furled fingers, and laid the hand down again on the bed, patting it affectionately. He walked around the bed to Kate and held out his hand. On his palm lay two short lengths of a charcoal stick. Kate picked them up and looked curiously at him.

  "She broke it," he explained. "She felt it, knew what it was, and tightened up on it enough to snap it."

  "And that makes you happy."

  "That makes me very happy indeed. I'll need you again in two or three hours. Will you be here?"

  "All day and tonight, so far as I know. Shall I come back in two hours?"

  "Make it three. If I want you before that I'll ask Cesar or whoever's on duty to find you."

  So Kate waited. She ate an overcooked lunch in the hospital cafeteria, ducked a reporter by diving into the kitchen and emerging from the back door in a white coat, talked to Hawkin when he called from San Jose, found someone to remove the stitches from the healed cuts in her back, and felt generally useless. In two hours and fifty minutes she went back to the room, and Bruckner told her what to do. She thought he was crazy, but she did it: she stood next to the unconscious woman (did her face seem less waxen?) telling her in slow, emphatic tones the outline of their investigation. She dwelt on Angie's concern for Vaun but not on her need for comfort; she told of Tony Dodson/Andy Lewis and his assumed guilt, though she did not say that he was missing; and finally she stressed that the police were aware and satisfied that Vaun was a victim, not a suspect, as much a victim as Tina Merrill, Amanda Bloom, and Samantha Donaldson. Then she went away, and fidgeted, and talked on the telephone to Lee and to Hawkin, and slept fitfully in a hospital bed on the other side of the wall from Vaun's.

  The next morning Vaun's pulse rate was 62, and she had broken another charcoal stick and a Conte crayon.

  It was a dreadful day, that Thursday. Bruckner called her in twice to repeat her story to the senseless figure on the bed and then sent her away. She couldn't go home, because he wanted her close and Hawkin had turned her over to him. She couldn't leave the hospital without trailing a conglomeration of loud people with flashbulbs and microphones. Tanaka and his assistants began to stop by and stare at the door with pointed questions, which they all knew she couldn't answer. Hawkin and Trujillo disappeared to direct the hunt for Andy Lewis. She felt closed in, forgotten, pushed to one side, bloated from the cafeteria food and the lack of exercise, and altogether gloomy about the future of the case and about her future as a detective.

  At ten o'clock that night Vaun's pulse rate was 63. She had not moved. There was now a thick orange crayon in her hand. Her picture rose up at the foot of her bed, arrogant, demanding, unfinished. Bruckner subsisted on coffee and looked drawn, nearly as pale as his patient. His voice was hoarse. Kate went to bed to the whisper of music through the wall, and woke to silence. It was dark outside.

  Vaun's guard paced up and down in the hallway, nervously fingering the clasp on his holster and eyeing the door, so dead silent after all these many hours. Kate met his glance, hesitated, and reached for the door handle.

  The magnificent painting, what was left of it, leaned drunkenly against the wall. The canvas was sliced in two places, and the soft paint remained only in chunks and smears; the image had disappeared. A palette knife gleamed on the floor, its edges clotted darkly. Kate took two rapid steps inside, and the bed came into view.

  The wires from the monitor lay in a tangle on the floor. The machine had been turned off. The tape player sat in silence on top of it. The IV bag dripped patiently into its tube and onto a growing puddle on the linoleum. Gerry Bruckner lay asleep on the bed, in socks and jeans and shirtsleeves, his right arm under the head of Vaun Adams, his left arm around her shoulders. She lay almost invisible, turned toward him under the patchwork quilt that covered the hospital blankets, her curls buried against his chest, completely within the circle of his arms. Rose petals covered the small table and spilled onto the floor, and their final perfume mixed with the fumes of turpentine and filled the room, driving out any smell of illness. Kate padded silently in and turned off the IV, and closed the door carefully behind her when she left. She stood in the hall feeling the st
upid grin on her face.

  "Is everything okay?" asked the anxious guard.

  "I think it will be, but look, nobody is to go in there. If the nurse wants to change the IV drip, tell her it's been disconnected, she doesn't need to do anything. Nobody is to go in," she repeated, "not Tanaka, not the head of the hospital, not the President himself. Nobody. If you need me, have me beeped."

  She went off humming to wake Hawkin with the first good news in many days.

  Bruckner looked empty, Kate thought. It was late morning, and he had come out to talk with her and Hawkin. The psychiatrist slumped into the armchair, head lolling against the back, hands limp over the chair's arms, only his eyes moving. He looked like someone recovering from a long fever, pale, exhausted, and very grateful. His athletic bounce was gone, and he was speaking to Hawkin in a slow voice several tones lower than normal.

  "I should have been back today. I can stretch it to Sunday, but I have to be there at nine o'clock Monday morning. I haven't told her yet, because she's in such a fragile state, but we must decide very soon who's going to take my place."

  "Tanaka? Or one of his people?" asked Hawkin.

  "It doesn't need to be a doctor. In fact, from her point of view it might be better if it weren't. She needs a friend, to protect her until she can grow some skin back."

  "Someone from Tyler's Road?"

  "She has three friends there: Angie Dodson, Tommy Chesler, and Tyler. I can't see Tommy coping, somehow. Angie would be ideal, but I don't know how she's dealing with her husband's role in it, and we don't want a weepy, guilt-ridden woman near Vaun. Tyler—I don't know. An ex-lover might be uncomfortable, and he's got too much on his hands as it is."

  "You have somebody in mind?"

  "What about Casey?"

  Hawkin did not seem in the least surprised, but Kate jumped up from her chair and stared at the two men.

  "No!"

  "C'mon, Casey," Hawkin reassured. "She's going to need a bodyguard anyway until we get our hands on Lewis. You've done that kind of work before. You've been on this case from the beginning, and though normally you'd be too high a rank for straight guard work, she's an important lady and Lewis is without a doubt still after her."

  "Al, this could drag on for weeks. Months!"

  "I don't think so. If it does we'll make other arrangements. I want you to do this, Casey. I could order you," he pointed out. She saw nothing in his face but the decision, and she sighed.

  "All right, then, two weeks. I'll babysit her for two weeks, that's all."

  "That'll get us started anyway."

  "Not here, though," said Bruckner firmly.

  "No, not here," Hawkin reassured him. "Someplace quiet and safe."

  "Good."

  "When will she be able to talk to us? We have to get a statement from her."

  "She's asleep now. I think she'll sleep for some time. Tonight, maybe? She'll eat and the nurse wants to bathe her, so about eight? But it'll have to be short."

  "Twenty minutes okay?"

  "That should be fine." Bruckner closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and pushed himself to his feet. "Now for the good Dr. Tanaka and writing up what I did with Vaun so that it doesn't sound like absolute quackery." He laid his hand lightly on Kate's shoulder as he went by. "Thank you, Casey."

  When they were alone Hawkin went to stand by the window and light a cigarette. He smoked it and looked out between the blinds, and Kate pushed herself deeper into her chair and watched him warily.

  "I've become very suspicious of your cigarettes, Al," she said finally. "I told you I'd babysit her. What else do you want?"

  He turned around, surprised, and looked down at the thing in his hand, smiled sheepishly, and went across to the chair opposite Kate.

  "The problem is what to do next. We can't very well send Vaun home and trust that Lewis will go away and play elsewhere. I can't very well go to the captain and say, 'Well, awfully sorry we don't have your man, but I sincerely doubt he'll try anything like it again, for a while anyway.' We're stuck unless we can track him down or flush him out."

  "You want to use Vaun for bait," Kate said flatly.

  "You have any other ideas?"

  "She's in no shape for it, mentally or physically. Bruckner would have a fit."

  "He won't know. She's a big girl, it's her decision. In ten days she'll be on her feet and Lewis will be relaxing, convinced he's shaken us, and starting to sniff out ways to get back at her."

  "You're so sure about him?"

  "Yes." Hard, flat certainty.

  "All right, you're the boss. So what is it you're going to try and wheedle out of me?"

  "You live on Russian Hill, don't you?"

  The room was suddenly very cold, and a hand was at her throat.

  "Al, no."

  "You don't? I could have sworn—"

  "Yes, I live there, but no. It's not my house, you can't ask it of me."

  "A quiet, residential area with private houses, trees, dead-end streets. Looks vulnerable, but the sort of place you can plaster with eyes and ears—"

  "No."

  "Casey—"

  "It is not my house, Al. No."

  "Where, then? My place? One bedroom, bald and open, a busy street, neighbors three feet away on both sides."

  "A hotel."

  "Oh, well, hey, how about putting her in the county jail, with a string of crumbs leading to her and a piece of twine tied to the door to slam it shut behind him? For Christ's sake, Casey, he's not stupid. Anything unnatural and he'll sit tight and wait for six months, a year. He's capable of it. It's got to be natural, as natural as having her go to the home of a friendly police officer to recuperate and be half-heartedly watched over, because the police don't really think he'll try again."

  "How would he find her? I'm not exactly listed in the phone book."

  "A judicious press leak, perhaps?"

  "Oh, God, Al!" There was real pain in her voice, and he relented.

  "Not your address, just a couple of vague hints."

  "Al, no, please don't ask me to do this."

  Hawkin did not answer. He looked at the precarious ash on his cigarette and reached for the decorative ashtray on the table. He concentrated on the ash for a moment longer, took a final draw on the stub, and proceeded to grind it out methodically, like an apothecary working a mortar and pestle. His face was without expression, and when he spoke it was in the manner of a recitation of facts.

  "You are right, the house does not belong to you. The house you live in is owned by one Leonora Cooper, Ph.D., a practicing psychotherapist who specializes in art and artists, particularly among members of the gay community. She was at Cal the same time you were. You have rented a room in her house for the last twenty-one months. That is all I need to know about your home life." His hard blue eyes came up and drilled into her wide brown ones. "All I need to know," he repeated, "unless and until your home life begins to interfere with your work. Is that understood, Martinelli?"

  "Understood, sir," she said. Her voice was even, but he was beginning to know her well enough to see the effort of control in her jaws and hands.

  "Good. This is not an order, I have no right to do that, but I would like you to ask your housemate Lee if she would be willing to move into a hotel for a couple of weeks, at our expense, of course, to give this a try."

  "She won't go."

  "You'll ask?"

  "All right, God damn it, yes, I'll ask. But she won't go."

  She wouldn't. Kate knew without thinking that there was no way Lee would go while the painter of Strawberry Fields was under her roof.

  She also knew that Hawkin was right, that the best trap for Lewis was one that looked like no trap. She looked up at him, and caught on his face the same expression she'd seen in the parking lot outside the restaurant—approval, sympathy, and an odd element of pride. It was gone in an instant, and he stood up.

  "The last few days have put you behind, so I told Trujillo he was to be available fo
r you today. He'll bring you up to date, not that there's that much to tell. I'm going up to Tyler's Road to have a chat with Tommy and a look 'round at Angie's but I'll be back by six. Feel like going to dinner? My treat. I'll even drive."

  "Sounds great," she lied. Her appetite had been ground out by the hospital air, and she doubted she would feel like eating.

  "Trujillo recommended a place."

  She made an effort.

  "Tofu enchiladas?"

  The flash of his grin made the effort worthwhile.

  "A first rate Italian place, he swears. I was hoping for some edible veal. Six o'clock, then? To be back by eight?"

  "I'll be ready."

  He walked to the door and paused with his hand on the knob.

  "Thank you, Casey." He pulled the door open, and the sounds of the hospital drifted in.

  "Al?" He looked back at her. "My friends call me Kate."

  24

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  Shortly before six Hawkin reappeared and swept Kate out by one of the lesser exits. He was in a strangely ebullient mood and hummed some vaguely familiar tune that she thought might be Bach or Beethoven, whom she tended to confuse, and ground the gears in Trujillo's sports car. They were seated in a quiet corner, draped with napkins the size of small tablecloths, and presented with three-foot-tall menus, a wine list the thickness of a novel, and a waiter who identified himself as Phil, who for the next three minutes proceeded to rattle off the day's specialties before he vanished into the gloom. Hawkin looked at Kate, and his lips twitched.

  "Did you get that, Martinelli?"

  "Something about pasta, and fish, I think."

  "Right, I'll have the veal parmigiana."

  The antipasto was good and they were hungry, Kate to her surprise, Hawkin because he loved to eat. The salad was served before the entree (chilled forks, a pepper grinder the length of Phil's arm), and Kate could stand it no longer.

  "All right, Al, give. You've been clucking like a mother hen. What's up? You haven't found Lewis—you'd have told me that."

  "No, not yet. But I've got the last pieces of the puzzle now. It's a nice, smooth picture, and I'm very glad to have that much."