The Color of Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Fine,” I said, taking Jean-Paul by the hand. “Thank you.”

  We wasted no time getting upstairs. Uncle Max followed us into our room.

  “You know the sarge is going to take a hit for letting us wash,” he said. “He should have waited until we’d been checked for gunshot residue first.”

  “Oui,” Jean-Paul said, slipping his arm around my waist. “But I prefer not to start a diplomatic firestorm. Maggie, will you join me in the shower?”

  I smiled at him and said, “Oui.”

  “See you downstairs,” Max said, retreating.

  “Max?” I called after him. He stopped in the doorway and turned to me. “You never said why Kevin was here?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” he said. “We need to get cleaned up before the detectives get here and stop us.”

  Max was already downstairs when Jean-Paul and I went back down. The big man himself, the police chief, had arrived, and he didn’t look at all happy. I heard Max tell him, “Don’t be too hard on the sergeant for letting us clean up. I didn’t fire a gun, neither did my niece. And the boyfriend has diplomatic immunity so you can’t talk to him unless there are representatives from our State Department and his government present.”

  Jean-Paul squeezed my hand. I leaned close to him and whispered, “Is that true?”

  “Not exactly, but it sounds good, doesn’t it?”

  The three of us were taken into separate rooms, Max and I for questioning and Jean-Paul to be out of earshot so that what we told the detectives about the events of the evening wouldn’t taint his own account, if the legalities of that ever happening could be sorted out. Jean-Paul volunteered to be sequestered in the kitchen so that he could start a pot of coffee; the chief thought that was just a dandy idea.

  The chief, Tony Wasick, a good-looking man in his fifties, conducted my interview himself, in the dining room with the big doors closed.

  “Miss MacGowen, what the hell has been going on here?” he asked, clearly piqued. “The body count from this address alone over the last two days has doubled my murder rate for the year so far. Throw in the burglary call overnight Thursday, and that makes your house the scene of the biggest crime wave we’ve had in Berkeley since I became chief five years ago. I know who you are and I know what you do. Have you pissed off some mobster with one of your TV shows and he’s come gunning for you? Are you up here hiding out, making life tough for me and my guys?”

  “I’m sorry, but no,” I said. “My mom moved into a smaller place, and I’m only here to clear out the family house for her. Whatever is behind all the mayhem belongs entirely to you.”

  “To me?” Like the rest of us, Wasick had been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, and he looked like it. The first whiff of fresh coffee coming from the kitchen distracted him for a moment. He turned his attention back to me. “You want to explain that?”

  “I can only speculate,” I said. “There seems to be something in this house that someone wants very badly. And I believe it has something to do with the murder of Trinh Bartolini over thirty years ago.”

  “The Bartolini case. Jesus.” He let out an exasperated breath, paced off a tight half circle. “When I heard Kevin was shot at your house, and that his father-in-law was out front getting froggy, hell, I figured it was a personal thing. Never occurred to me that it could have anything to do with the Bartolini case. Talk about lost causes.”

  “Kevin?”

  “No, the Bartolini case,” he said. “There’s just not enough evidence left from the original investigation to work with. But Kevin won’t let it go.”

  “Kevin has new evidence,” I said. “Your crime lab found DNA from three people on Mrs. B’s shirt,” I said. “That’s major evidence.”

  “Sure.” Wasick did not sound convinced. Or maybe he was just tired. “And thirty years later, what are the odds we’ll find those three people?”

  “The odds aren’t bad,” I said. “The victim’s son will give you a sample so you can segregate her DNA. For the other two, you might begin with the man who broke into my house tonight.”

  He thought that over before he wrote something in his notebook. “The coroner will get a sample from the guy.”

  “Chief Wasick?”

  He cocked his head, looked up.

  “What do you know about Chuck Riley?”

  “That knucklehead?” He lifted a shoulder. “Not a lot. I know he was on the force for a while, but that was before my time. Now he works security at a bank in town.”

  “You know he was the original detective on the Bartolini case,” I said. “If the Bartolini case is, as you said, a lost cause, is it because Chuck Riley botched the investigation?”

  He smiled. “Who’s asking the questions here?”

  A uniformed officer came through the kitchen door carrying two mugs of coffee. Grateful, Wasick wrapped his hands around a mug and blew on it until it was cool enough to drink. Revived a bit, he spent the next hour having me tell him, and retell him, about the shooting and the break-in and anything I knew about Larry Nordquist and Khanh Duc.

  “Are you making a film about the Bartolini case?” he asked.

  “No, absolutely not.”

  “But you’ve been going around town asking questions about her,” he said. “If you’re not making a film, why would you do that?”

  “Because that’s who I am,” I said. “And that’s what I do.”

  “Too bad about the film.” He managed a little smile as he closed his notebook. “That was my only shot at being a movie star. And now you tell me it’s pfft. Gone.”

  “You never know, Chief,” I said. “Are we finished?”

  “For now.” He picked up his empty cup and headed toward the kitchen for a refill. With one hand on the door, he paused. “There will be more questions later. In the meantime, I’d appreciate it if you let us handle the media swarm gathering on your front lawn. We’ve had enough excitement for a while; let’s not invite a circus.”

  “Suits me,” I said.

  He saluted me with his cup as he pushed through the swing door and went into the kitchen.

  I opened the dining room’s big double doors and looked out. Duc’s body still lay in the hall outside the door to Dad’s den, but someone had covered him with a yellow plastic sheet; his feet in black sneakers stuck out of the end. While I was with Chief Wasick, the crime scene technicians had arrived and gone right to work. I looked at their handi­work with dismay. Wherever bullets had lodged in the old lath-and-plaster walls, there were now foot-square gaps. Two big pools of blood, taped off, were soaking into the bare oak floor, the one under Duc still slowly oozing outward. Forget the simple house cleaning scheduled for later that morning. Now I needed to find bio-cleanup specialists to take care of the blood and a handyman to repair the walls. More time, more money, I thought, feeling guilty for even considering the practicalities of the aftermath created by that horrific night. I was sorry about Duc, though what happened to him was his own damn fault. I was deeply sorry for Kevin’s pain, but I’d had a message that he was out of surgery and was listed as stable so I could crawl safely away from the edge of panic and give in to the inevitable letdown.

  A young woman technician swept past me, headed for the heater access hatch in the far corner of the dining room. She knelt on the floor and began dusting the hatch and the area around it for fingerprints. Duc wore gloves when he came in. But had the intruder Thursday night? Was Duc the intruder?

  The tech caught me watching her. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

  She was right, I was in the way. It would have been nice to be able to go upstairs and take a nap, but the stairway was blocked off by crime scene tape because Jean-Paul had fired down at Duc from the top step. So I collected my computer from the kitchen counter where I had left it charging the night before and went out to the front porch and curled up in one of the big wicker rockers. There were four uniformed officers in the yard, so I felt safe.

  When Chief Wasic
k asked me the inevitable question about making a film about Mrs. B’s murder, I’d almost said, “My dad already made all the film that needs to be made on that subject.” But it would have been a flip comment from an exhausted interviewee, so I kept the thought to myself.

  Eight months ago, when I found out about Isabelle, I said that I would never make a film about discovering the truth about my parentage. Too close, too personal, potentially too hurtful to people I love. But, in two weeks I was leaving for France to make a film about Isabelle’s family and their farm estate in Normandy. It won’t be a film about discovering Isabelle, but she, and my dear dad’s infidelity with her, cannot be ignored. Given time, I might find an angle to the Bartolini case that would make a good film subject. I wasn’t taking bets on that film ever happening, but I began to think about the little collection of Super 8 movies I found locked in Dad’s desk just the same.

  There were twelve film reels hidden in Dad’s desk. ­Because they were locked in a strongbox, out of curiosity on the after­noon I found them, I went straight to the local network affiliate’s studio and spent a few hours converting the Super 8 reels to digital format. I’d wanted to know why these few, out of the hundreds of reels Dad shot over the years, were hidden away. More secret mischief, Dad? I wondered when I began screening them. The first time I spotted Isabelle, I knew Dad was recording Isabelle’s violations of the restraining order against her.

  I had been shown photographs of Isabelle and had met her once, briefly, but I was fascinated when I first saw her on film and was able to see the way she walked and gestured and canted her head to one side coquettishly whenever she caught sight of Dad. After that first glimpse of her, I had fast-forwarded through all the other parts of all the films looking only for her. But when I came across the fight between our little neighborhood gang and Larry Nordquist and his toughs, I stopped scanning for Isabelle and bore down on that scene, that day. The fight was a like a crease in the map of time, a demarcation between life before, and life after, Beto’s mother died. I pushed Isabelle aside and studied that reel frame by frame. For the last few days, I’d intended to go back through the other reels to see what I might have missed, but there had been so little time and so few private hours.

  Up at the top of the street, above Grizzly Peak, the sky was beginning to brighten. Full of expectation, cocooned in my corner of the porch, I opened the computer and began watching the old home movies, one at a time. The dates on the reel headers were the dates the films originally were processed, not the dates they were shot. Estimating time frame by my hair, clothes, and body development, I didn’t bother watching films that were dated more than a year before or a year after Mrs. B died. That left me with four reels. Of the four, the third reel was the closest to the day Mrs. Bartolini died.

  I’m standing on the sidewalk with Sunny Loper. Dad is obviously inside the house, shooting through the window on the front door. The two girls who live up the hill come into the frame, and we join them. I’m wearing the same red high-tops I wore in the fight reel, but they are not yet as scuffed as they were on that day. How long do a kid’s canvas shoes last? Considering all the walking we did and the way we played, they probably wouldn’t last more than a few months.

  Dad scans potential hiding places for Isabelle before he catches up to us again. When he does, there are seven of us. The Bay Laundry and Dry Cleaners van stops in front of the Miller house, so it’s probably Thursday, the regular delivery day for our neighborhood. A white-haired driver hops out carrying a blue-paper-wrapped bundle and hangers with plastic-sheathed dress shirts. He knocks on the front door, hands off his cleaning, and is back in his van headed up the street in the time it takes Evie Miller to come down her front steps, cross the street and join us. Around the curve, Mrs. B waits in front of her house with Beto. She’s wearing a pink pullover and a gray pleated skirt. Mr. Loper drives past in his green Volvo and waves. Lacy and Dorrie Riley come out their front door, turn and speak to someone inside, the door closes. They cross the street, greet Beto and his mom, and wait for us.

  Dad steps into someone’s yard and films us through a gap in some kind of foliage. Mrs. B clings to Beto a bit longer than usual before she kisses him and releases him when the rest of us arrive. She stands on her driveway, watching us walk away. The camera jerks to the right, catches Larry Nordquist following us at a distance. Larry passes Mrs. B without greeting her; she is intent on our retreating backs.

  The image becomes a slurry of blurred colors as Dad runs while the camera continues filming. When the focus is steady again, Dad has crossed the street. When he walks past the Bartolinis’ driveway, Mrs. B is gone. Isabelle, back toward the camera, emerges from behind a hedge and sets off in our direction. Suddenly she stops, turns, pauses for only a moment, and then she begins to run away. Dad follows her until she turns up a side street, no longer following us. The camera is still running when Dad takes it down from his eye. The neighborhood is now upside down as Mrs. B walks up a neighbor’s front steps. The door opens and she goes inside.

  “Bastard,” I said. I reversed the film to the frame just before the door opens and flipped it right side up. I enlarged the image of the door as much as I could without losing the integrity of the image, and ran the sequence forward in slow motion. The door opens, someone can be seen standing there. I froze the image of the figure in the door, brightened it, enlarged it one more click, captured it and sent it to Guido with a request to enhance the image as much as he could and send it back.

  I looked up when I heard the Lopers’ back door open, the soft clang of a trashcan lid, and the door close again.

  “I think, from the look on your face, chérie, that something is up.” Jean-Paul was perched on the porch rail, watching me. “Should I worry?”

  “Possibly.” I gestured for him to come closer. “Look at this.”

  I ran the film sequence again. When he saw Mrs. B go into the house, he nodded.

  “I see,” he said. “You think she is not going in for a visit and coffee, yes?”

  “Yes.” I turned off the computer. “Do you think it’s too early to call on the neighbors?”

  “In what time zone are these neighbors?”

  I pointed to the Loper house next door. He smiled his upside-down smile and held out his hand to help me up. Before we went next door, we went inside to tell Chief Wasick why I wanted to go see the Lopers. I started at the beginning, with Dad’s film, and told him about Larry’s history of spying on the neighbors and his recent mission to make amends, the extortion of Trinh Bartolini for both money and sex and that Larry saw her with another man. He winced when I brought up Lacy Riley Halloran shooting at us on the freeway Saturday.

  “You think all of that—any of that—has some bearing on what happened here last night?”

  “I do. Let me show you something.” I opened my computer to the sequence I had shown Jean-Paul. As Mrs. B walks across the street, I froze the image and asked him, “Do you know who that is?”

  He took a close look and shook his head. “Should I?”

  “That’s Trinh Bartolini.”

  “I only know the case in broad outlines,” he said. “Kevin’s been working on it, but I’m not up to speed on the details. That’s her, huh?”

  “Yes.” I restarted the sequence. When the neighbor’s front door opens, I froze and enlarged the frame. “Now, do you recognize him?”

  His interest perked. “You said she was being extorted for sex, and that Nordquist saw her with someone. You saying it’s that knucklehead?”

  I closed the computer. “We may know more when Kevin gets the report on the DNA found on Mrs. Bartolini’s shirt. But until then, a good place to start is next door.”

  Maybe he was just tired, or maybe he wanted to get us out from underfoot, but with some caveats he agreed that we could go.

  “Hello, neighbor.” George Loper, clearly surprised to find us knocking on his back door at the crack of dawn, pushed open the screen and welcomed us into his kitchen. He
wore shorty pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, his sparse white hair standing up in random spikes. There were dark circles under his eyes; he, too, had been robbed of peaceful slumber. “Come in, come in. Glad you’ve come over, Maggie, Jean-Paul. Gladder yet to see you’re okay. Karen and I were just real worried when the paramedics showed up last night; no one would tell us a damn thing about what happened. We headed over to check on you, honey, but the cops told us to go home in no uncertain terms. We’re getting pretty used to the police being over there regularly, but seeing the paramedics, well... Just glad you’re okay. Karen was so upset she had to take a sleeping pill. Sit down, coffee’s fresh. Whatever happened?”

  “Another break-in,” I said, pulling out a kitchen chair.

  He paused, holding mugs in both hands. “For cryin’ out loud, what is this neighborhood coming to? Who got hurt?”

  “The intruder,” Jean-Paul told him, which was true enough for the moment.

  Before George could launch into the inevitable barrage of follow-up questions, I asked him, “Those guns you said you got from Chuck, did he give them to you?”

  “Give, as in give for free?” He chuckled at that as he poured coffee. “You know Chuck, always working a deal. No, we paid for the guns. Less than sticker, but we paid for them. Why do you ask?”

  “You told me he showed you four guns,” I said. “But I was wondering how many he had to sell.”

  “You’d have to ask Chuck.” After he said that, a sudden thought seemed to jolt him wider awake. “What happened over there last night have something to do with those damn guns?”

  “Perhaps.” Jean-Paul took the mugs from George’s shaking hands before he could spill coffee all over. “The man who broke into the house last night had a Colt from the same armory shipment as Maggie’s father’s, and perhaps your own.”

  “I’ll be damned.” George had to sit down. “I’ll be goddamned.”

  “When was the last time you saw your gun?” I asked him.