A Grave Talent km-1

by Laurie R. King

  "Your talk with Tommy Chesler this afternoon? It was successful?"

  "The talk, plus a bit of honest-to-God, old-fashioned, snooping-about type detecting. I found a copy of this— behind a hidden panel, can you believe it?—in some shelves in Lewis's cabin. Angie's cabin."

  "This" was an issue of Time magazine from the previous summer. The copy Hawkin laid on the table was stamped with the name of the local library, and had a date-due card clipped inside the cover. The other was undoubtedly in the police lab.

  "Look at page seventy-two," he said, and stretched across to steal the candles from two neighboring tables so she could see.

  It was the article on Eva Vaughn, the mysterious genius of the brush (as a caption read). The left-hand page showed three of her paintings, all from the New York show. The right-hand page held Strawberry Fields and the beginning of the article, which continued on page seventy-four with a discussion of the revival of art as psychological revelation and social criticism. A jazzy three-color bar graph, the bars represented by stylized brushes, illustrated the phenomenal rise in prices brought by works of living artists.

  Hawkin reached across and flipped the page back to the beginning, then tapped one of the three reproductions, which showed two very small, grubby, naked children squatting on a dirt road, heads together, studying something on the ground between them. One of them looked vaguely familiar, and after a moment Kate realized it was Flower Underwood's little hellion who had dismantled pens and sprayed her with milk while she had tried to interview the mother.

  "Tommy Chesler helped her crate this one up last June. In August this article came out, but Tommy didn't see it until October, up in Tyler's room. He stole the magazine—took me twenty minutes to convince him I wasn't going to arrest him—and kept it in his shack next to his bed. Three or four weeks later—he wasn't sure about the date, but it was before Thanksgiving and after the first rain, which for your information was from the twelfth to the fifteenth of November—his buddy Dodson saw it lying there, and Tommy, who was just bursting to tell somebody about his role in getting that picture into Time, told him all."

  "And within two weeks the Jamesons were burgled and Tina Merrill was dead."

  "Yes, indeed. He can move fast when he wants, but then we knew that already, didn't we? So you see the nice clear portrait of a two-bit punk who can't stand it when someone gets the better of him. As a child he kills dogs and cats when he's angry with the owners, and he ends up with getting the preacher's only daughter pregnant and then beating her up. He goes away for two years, I think to Mexico—his only decent grades when he went back to school were in Spanish—learning God knows what tricks and having himself tattooed along the way.

  "For some reason, boredom probably, he decides to go back to Mama for a while and puts himself into a small-town high school to strut around. Where he meets Vaun. Little Vaunie, who falls for his charm and his recreational poisons until she decides she's had enough and three weeks later very mysteriously murders a child she's fond of."

  "I wouldn't want to have to go to the D.A. with only that in my hand," Kate said unhappily, and saw the last of the day's ebullience fade from Hawkin's face.

  "Couldn't you just see it in court? 'So, Inspector Hawkin, you would have the jury believe that Andrew Lewis let himself in through the back door of a house, strangled a strange child, undressed her, and arranged her body to look like it did in a painting, all to get back at the child's babysitter who had hurt his pride?' "

  "But you think that's what happened."

  He was saved from the immediate need to answer by the arrival of Phil with their entrees. The waiter arranged their plates and hovered over them until Hawkin glared at him and he slunk off, hurt. They each had taken several hungry mouthfuls before Hawkin answered her question, obliquely.

  "I came across a study recently. It said that as many as a half a percent of all suspects charged with violent crimes are wrongly convicted. I can't believe that, but even if you reduce it by a factor of one hundred, that still leaves eight or ten every year.

  "And you think Vaun Adams is one of those."

  He sighed. "I'm afraid I do."

  Both of them concentrated on the food for a while, although their pleasure was dulled. It was hard not to take a failure of the judicial system as a personal failure.

  "So," Kate prompted.

  "So Vaun goes through a mockery of a trial, is sent to prison, gets out, travels, ends up on Tyler's Road. He may have known she was here, or he may have come across her at the 'Faire' entirely by accident, but however it happened he found her there three years ago, and when she didn't recognize him because of the beard and the years and the hell she'd been through, he decided to stick around.

  "It took him a few hours, but he found Angie that day, a simple, abandoned woman with a small child. She was charmed—God, I'm beginning to hate that word! And in no time at all there he was, living next door, unrecognized, to a woman he'd sent to prison. The one thing that strikes me as odd is that he stuck around Vaun for two years without doing much of anything, other than going off every few days to do some kind of work in the Bay Area. Probably something illegal."

  "Tyler's Road would be very inconvenient, but plenty far enough from San Jose to make him feel safe."

  "Maybe. At any rate, he plays this little game, living half a mile away, transporting her paintings—already crated—for her, but keeping away from her so her artist's eyes don't see who's under the beard. Until November, when all-trusting Tommy Chesler tells him that he helped box up the painting shown on page 72 of Time magazine, and Lewis realizes that little Vaunie isn't just making a few dollars out of her canvases, she's an internationally recognized artist whose paintings bring in five and six figures. It may have been the money that got to him, and the thought that if eighteen years before he'd played his cards right, he would now be in charge of that income. Maybe it was just the sheer effrontery of the woman, to become such a stunning success despite his efforts to crush her. Either way, his knack for a clever revenge comes into play, and he works out a way of first driving her around the bend, then destroying her reputation, and finally killing her, making it look like suicide."

  Kate pulled the magazine back beside her plate, and with her left hand began to turn over its pages. She remembered it now. This article, like the one she had waded through in the glossy art magazine, was also bipartisan, divided into a pro and con. A reflection, no doubt, of the ambiguous attitude of the art world at large toward Eva Vaughn. A few phrases caught her eye, the names of Vermeer and Rembrandt again, and Berthe Morisot.

  She glanced at the final paragraphs. The pro writer ended with:

  In the thirteenth century the painter Cimabue happened across a young and untrained peasant boy sitting by the road drawing remarkable sheep on a stone. The child's name was Giotto. He went on to surpass his master, and it was his reworking of Gothic forms to include drama and human emotions that paved the way for the Renaissance and changed the face of European art forever. Now in the late twentieth century we have, appropriately enough, a woman, Eva Vaughn, coming to bring form and formalism back to abstract emotionalism. She has brought craft and the human heart back, in forms we thought to be drained empty, and even the most jaded are forced to see classical Realism with new eyes. Giotto's revolution came at the right time. It remains to be seen whether the vessel refilled by Ms. Vaughn can contain her.

  On the other hand:

  It is impossible to deny the sheer raw talent in these pictures. It is, however, a pity that such power has not been turned to saying something new, instead of a cautious, deliberate reworking of threadbare forms. Paul Klee once said that the more horrific the world, the more abstract its art. If we may apply that theory to the individual, when faced with the style of Eva Vaughn, one can only assume that the artist has led a very sheltered life indeed.

  "Sheltered," Kate snorted.

  "Ironic, isn't it? The rest of the article wasn't bad, but to end by quoting a man w
ho obviously has no sense of history, and cap it off with a logical fallacy—I wonder if the writer'll be embarrassed when this thing breaks."

  "It will break, won't it? It'll all be in print before the week is out."

  "Bound to be. No more coffee, thanks." This last was to the waiter, who returned bearing a discreet little tray with two chocolate mints and the bill. It had been an unimaginative menu but a satisfying dinner, and after his preliminary burst of eloquence Phil had left them alone. Hawkin peeled several crushed bills apart and dropped them in the neighborhood of the tray, and looked at his watch.

  "Quarter to eight. Hope she's awake. I'd like to sleep in my own bed tonight."

  Vaun was drowsing on her pillows after the effort of a meal and bath, but her eyes snapped open when the two detectives walked in. Gerry Bruckner was sitting at the small corner table hunched over a neat stack of typescript with a pen in his hand. A fresh vase of roses, pink and yellow, glowed on the table next to him.

  Kate was stunned at the change in the woman. She had been beautiful before, but now she was alive. The muscles of her gaunt face did not move as she watched them come toward her, glancing at Hawkin and then studying, absorbing, Kate; but her eyes, her startling blue eyes, brimmed over with life, filled to overflowing with vitality and awareness and the beauty of being alive.

  "Thank you," she said to Kate. Her voice was husky but clear, and the force of the life behind those eyes made Kate want to turn away even as they held her and made her smile foolishly in response. There was nothing to be said to that, and eventually—in ten minutes? ten seconds?—Vaun released her and turned her gaze at Hawkin, who withstood it little better than Kate had.

  Gerry Bruckner broke it, finally, when he came up to the bed and adjusted her pillows and rested his hand lightly on her head. She smiled at him, lovingly, and Hawkin cleared his throat.

  "Are you feeling up to giving us a statement now, Miss Adams?"

  "Of course," she said. Kate took out her notebook and dutifully recorded the details of what had very nearly been the last day of Vaun Adams's life.

  There was nothing there. Yes, she had noticed a peculiar taste in the whiskey, but then she'd felt as if she was coming down with a cold, and that always made things taste odd. And yes, the heavy-duty antihistamines she'd taken had probably compounded the effects of drug and whiskey. No, she did not take chloral hydrate. She was a hypochondriac, sure, but drew the line at sleeping pills. No, she'd seen nothing out of place when she returned from her walk. No, she had not realized that Tony Dodson was Andy Lewis, but yes, she supposed it was possible, and that could account for the frisson of apprehension she occasionally experienced when coming on him unawares. She would have to think about it. No, she had not noticed that the painting of the young Andy Lewis had disappeared, but it had been in her studio at Uncle Red's farm in August, she was certain of that. No, she had done nothing very out of the ordinary that Friday, deliberately so, that being the only way to keep the fear at bay. The storm had helped distract her, and she spent the afternoon clearing up some branches, talking to various neighbors about their damage. Yes, she had seen Angie, but not Tony. And finally, yes, she had talked it over with Gerry, and though she did not wish to, she was willing to cooperate by being, in her words, the goat tethered out for the tiger. She looked to be on the verge of saying something else but changed her mind as the whole situation seemed suddenly to be more than she could deal with and exhaustion flooded in.

  They left, with Bruckner speaking soothing words and stroking her clean hair, and drove home and slept in their own beds that night. Neither of them, incidentally, slept alone.

  25

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  Kate had first set eyes on Leonora Cooper nine years before in a vast lecture hall at the University of California, Berkeley. Kate was nineteen, beginning her sophomore year, closed into this inadequately ventilated space with several hundred other budding psychologists on a drowsy October afternoon, the fourth lecture of the term. A new figure walked up to the lectern, a tall, slim young woman with an unruly mop of yellow hair, awkward knees, and an air of quiet confidence as she stood beneath the cynical gaze of nearly a thousand eyes, eyes that had long since learned to view T.A.'s with misgiving.

  This one, however, was something different. For two hours she held those hundreds of sleepy freshmen and sophomores—made them laugh, respond, made them like her. She even made them learn something. She was less than five years from them in age—three years older than Kate— but she possessed a maturity and scope of vision most of them would never know. She took three more lectures during the quarter, and each time it was the same: the back rows of sleepers sat up, newspapers were put away, the constant undercurrent of whispers and coughs died down. Her passion for the workings of the human mind ruled them.

  In the winter quarter Kate arranged to be in the section led by Lee Cooper, by the simple expedient of bribing the graduate student who was responsible for assigning students to T.A.' s. It was the best ten dollars Kate had ever spent.

  The first week of the spring quarter came, a quarter in which Kate had no psychology course, and on a brilliant April morning she tapped on the door of the tiny cubicle that was Lee's office and asked if her former instructor would like to join her for a picnic up above campus. She would, and they did, and by June they were friends.

  During Kate's junior year their friendship deepened, and for the first time in her life Kate found herself telling someone about her problems, her questions, her life. In the course of the year Kate had three tumultuous relationships with men, and Lee listened as the affairs first blossomed, and then became rocky, and finally fell apart in rage and pain. In the miserable cold of a wet January, Kate's kid sister was killed by a drunk driver, and when Kate returned after the funeral, stunned and unseeing, Lee talked gently and fed her tea and toast and walked with her to lectures.

  Kate's senior year was also Lee's last year in her Ph.D. program. They were both extremely busy, Kate sweating her finals and Lee writing her dissertation. Over the Christmas break Kate told her family that she had decided to join the police force and spent the next days devising snappy answers to the questions repeated by person after person. Why do you want to be a cop? To see if I can clean up some of the dirt in the world. But isn't it dangerous? No more so than driving on a rainy January afternoon. At the end of it she escaped to Berkeley and went to tell Lee she'd made her decision. Lee simply nodded and said she thought it a good idea, and what did Kate think of the Bergman film down on University Avenue tonight?

  During those last months the relationship between the two women developed some odd areas of tension and restraint, though Kate was not sure why. She thought it might be that the end was near, when the sheltered world of the university would throw them in separate directions, and they were preparing themselves for the wrench. Kate also had a relatively stable relationship with a man and for the first time began to think about living together, even marriage. She wondered occasionally about Lee, who had a hundred friends for every one of Kate's, who hugged and touched men and women alike, but who never, as far as Kate knew, had a lover. She even asked Lee about it once, late one candle-lit night, but Lee had smiled easily, shrugged, and said that she was just too busy.

  Graduation was in June. The following day Kate was in her room in the house she shared with five others, putting her last bits and pieces into cardboard boxes, when a single tap came on the closed door. She opened it, and there stood Lee, hair wilder than ever, shirt wrinkled, face tight, her pupils dilated hugely.

  "Lee! Or should I say, Dr. Cooper? I'm glad you came by. I was going to hunt you down later to say good-bye. Sit down. Are you okay? You want some coffee or something? There's still pans and food in the kitchen. Sit down."

  "No, I won't. I'm leaving tonight for New York. I decided to take that residency."

  "Oh. Two years." Kate looked dumbly at the book in her hand, and she turned to arrange it with great precision inside a box of
others. "I'm happy for you. I thought—I admit I was hoping you'd take the job in Palo Alto." Her hands felt cold and sweaty, and she wiped them along the sides of her jeans, then straightened and turned back to Lee. "So. I guess it's good-bye."

  Lee's green eyes were nearly black and seemed only inches from Kate's. "I hope not," she said finally, and then, shockingly, she took a step towards Kate, seized Kate's head between her hands, and kissed her hard, full on the lips. When she loosed her hands, Kate jerked back a step as if she'd been held by an electrical current, and Lee turned and disappeared rapidly in a clatter of feet on the uncarpeted stairs and a slam of the front door. Kate made no move to follow her but stood for several minutes staring blindly at the open door before mechanically reaching for the remainder of her undergraduate life and packing it away into its boxes.

  The stable relationship died a bitter death, and Lee was not there. Kate did not write to her about it but answered Lee's letters briefly. She graduated from the academy, made her first arrests, began painfully to construct the essential armor of distance that looks like callous indifference but which enables the cop to preserve a humanity in the face of dead bodies and abused children and the bestial inhumanity of greed.

  The only problem was that the armor began to prove more and more difficult to shed. She slept with a number of men but found it difficult to rouse much interest in the proceedings unless they'd both been drinking and edged into argument. At odd moments, in bed before sleep, on patrol, doing paperwork, she would taste Lee's mouth on hers, and it never failed to bring a brief spasm of ache and a flood of repugnance. She took to running long miles that fall, and it helped. She settled in for the long haul.

  Thirty months after graduation two things happened to tumble Kate from the tenuous security she had built. The first was a letter from Lee. The second was the night when she nearly murdered a man.

  The letter arrived a few days before Christmas, just before Kate left for night shift. It was Lee's first letter in months. Kate looked at the familiar scrawl and the New York cancellation, and put it unopened on the table next to the front door. It was still there when she came in early the next morning, and there waiting when she woke up at noon. She made coffee and sat in her bathrobe at the tiny table in her incongruously cheery kitchen and pulled it open. In its entirety, it read: