by P. N. Elrod
“I’ve no intention of disturbing that worthy man’s rest.”
“You need me along to go through the door and let you inside?”
“Not as long as I have my burgling kit. I would like your company because you had been there only a scant hour or so prior to the crime and can so inform me of any differences that might impress themselves upon your memory.”
“After all this time?”
“You underestimate yourself, though I do see the point that for you, the period between has been amply filled with activity. Are you really that tired?”
An answer to that question might lead to a dozen other questions, none of which I wanted to go into at the moment. “I think I can last till morning.”
“Excellent! I’ll just fetch my keys—”
I stopped him before he got too far along. “Let’s take mine, it’s already warmed up, and I wanted to move it closer to the house anyway.”
“Quite so. I daresay it will be less conspicuous in that neighborhood than my Nash.” He tossed me my hat and settled his own at a rakish angle over his brow. Now that he had something to do he was impatient to be off, so I speeded up a little, but my heart wasn’t in it. The next time Bobbi and I exchanged, I was going to make damn sure I had nothing else to do for the rest of the night but recover from the celebration.
Escott opened the front door and practically bounded down the steps. I moaned inwardly and did what I could to keep up.
We walked into the building normally. Escott was of the opinion that in this case stealth would draw more attention than if we acted like we belonged. No one bothered to poke their heads out as we climbed the stairs, and after a short moment of listening, I was satisfied no one would.
The police had sealed off the flat, which was hardly a barrier to me. I saved Escott the trouble of working with his skeleton keys and picks and went on through the door to open it for him from inside. He slipped in, shut the door quietly, and flipped on the light.
Sadness hung in the air like a fog. Things had been moved and shifted but not cleaned up. Fingerprint dust was still everywhere and the chalk outline still lay on the floor, a pathetic marker of her presence. Escott frowned furiously at it, shook his head sharply as if to clear his mind, and moved on to search the kitchen.
He did not take long and moved through the two small bedrooms and the bath just as quickly before coming back to the front again. “Does anything draw itself to your attention?” he asked.
“Evan’s painting has been moved.”
Apparently some fastidious soul had seen the big self-portrait at just the right distance and had turned it to face the wall. I reached for it.
“A moment.” Escott had come prepared and gave me a thin pair of rubber gloves, the kind surgeons use. He was already wearing some himself, I just hadn’t noticed when he’d put them on. I shook myself in- wardly and tried to pull on an attitude of professional detachment along with the gloves. In this depressed state I was no good to anyone.
I tipped the painting out enough to see that it was undamaged and checked the other vertical racks and their contents. As far as I could tell, nothing was missing or marred, though as elsewhere, many of the paintings had fingerprint dust on them. Escott found that of interest and peered at the bright colors of an abstract through his pocket magnifier.
“It appears Mr. Robley used his fingers as well as his brushes to achieve certain effects.”
“Sandra, too. Both of them had paint stains on their hands.”
“Are these Sandra’s?” He indicated another stack of stored paintings against the opposite wall.
“I guess so, we only looked at Evan’s that night.”
He sorted through them. “She would seem to be less prolific than her brother, as there is more than adequate storage space available—or perhaps she sold more?”
I nodded. “She said she was on some kind of WPA art grant. That was how they were able to live.”
“Producing art for federal buildings?”
“Yeah. I think she also did stuff for interior decorators. There’s apparently a market for genuine oil paintings.”
“I’ve heard of it, assembly-line oils, pretty pictures for the masses at the cost of artistic integrity.”
“Integrity is hard to afford when you don’t have food in the cupboard,” I pointed out.
“Yes, there are strong arguments in both directions, and who’s to say where one may safely draw the line?”
That called for a second look on my part, but I didn’t think he meant it as a pun. I flipped through Sandra’s work with Escott looking over my shoulder.
“She would appear to have a wide range of styles,” he said. “This one is after one school and this after another. I wonder if she ever had time to develop a style of her own….”
“What do you mean?”
He set four different paintings out for view. “These for example: all are landscapes and all depict the same basic forms of hills, trees, and water, but they could have been painted by four different people. I’d be inclined to think so, too, but they are all out of the same palette.” He darted to the other side of the room, where some painting supplies were kept, and drew out a thin flat of paint-stained wood, then held it up to the landscapes. The dominating colors of brown, green, and blue matched.
“You’re sure about that?”
“I’ve had a smattering of art in my time. A painter’s palette is often as identifiable as his fingerprints.”
“Okay, so we know Sandra painted them all. Her work had to appeal to a lot of different people so she could sell. Is it important?”
“All information is important until proven otherwise.” He returned the palette to its place and focused his attention on one of the big easels. “Is this one hers?”
“I think so.”
He flipped off the dust cloth protecting the surface of the canvas beneath. The painting was an angular townscape in autumn, with wet streets and blowing leaves. Escott peered at it closely with his lens, then with his beaky nose practically touching the surface, sniffed. He backed off, puzzled, sniffed again, covering a wider area this time.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking the state of the linseed oil.”
“Is it stale?” I asked, amused.
“Indeed.” He swept the flat of one hand across the painting and held his clean palm up for inspection. “It’s quite dry.”
“Why would she have a dry painting on the easel?”
He didn’t answer but went back to her store of paintings and flipped through them, rapidly pulling out three, all the same size. They showed the same angular street, with variations of color and light.
“Winter, spring, summer and the one on the easel is autumn, obviously a series on the theme of the four seasons. I suppose it is just possible she was doing a little touch-up work, but it hardly seems likely.”
“Why’s that?”
“Please note the top clamp of the easel: it stops a good five inches above the painting.”
“Meaning that it was originally adjusted for a different size canvas?”
“Exactly. Now I wonder what became of that particular work?”
“She could have taken it out herself.”
“Then where is it? There are no wet paintings in this flat and she could not have sold them in that state.”
“The cops took them.”
He shook his head. “No, I stayed here and watched the forensic men. They did not remove any paintings. So unless Alex Adrian broke in and took them to his home for safekeeping or out of sentiment—”
“You figure the killer is some kind of art lover?”
“I’m not sure what to think. They were taken for a reason and unless he’s mad enough to want to retain a most dangerous souvenir of his crime, the only reason I can think of to justify his theft is—”
“That what he took incriminates him in some way. Then what was it, a quick portrait or something?”
He had no answ
er for me and flipped the dust sheet back onto the canvas, then turned and brooded over the chalk scrawl on the floor.
It blocked my sight for only a moment, but I saw Evan again, standing in the same spot and swaying at the waist; Blair watching in shock, and Brett reaching to help him. That inhuman keening went through me once more and I shivered as though someone had walked over my empty grave.
Oh God.
Sometimes it happens that way, your mind hits on an answer with a sudden bright burst of insight, but won’t tell how it got there, and you’re left fumbling for an explanation. It eventually came tumbling out of my memory: words, looks, gestures … all fell together, linked up, and formed into a solid composition.
“Oh God.” This time it slipped out aloud.
Escott sensed something in my tone. His eyes snapped up, silently demanding to know what it was.
I told him.
He soaked it up without comment, having heard some of it before, but only presented as idle conversation, and mixed in with other events. In the end he could only shake his head.
“You have the answer, and if we find the paintings, we’d have enough circumstantial evidence for the DA to bring it to trial—”
“But I sure as hell can’t come to court to tell it. The one thing I can do, though, is get the written confession you wanted.”
“Before only a single witness?” he questioned, meaning himself.
But I had a second witness in mind even as he raised the point.
12
THE streets were dead and sheeted over with cold white reflections from occasional lights. It was after midnight and one look at the lead gray sky clamped hard over the city was enough to make you realize how far away dawn could get if it really tried.
Escott sat next to the door and pretended to look straight out the windshield. Between us was Alex Adrian, who was doing the same thing, only he wasn’t pretending. The stuff inside his mind was keeping him too busy. His face was drained and white, even the lips. His hands with their bandaged wrists were curled protectively around one another, the right thumb and finger twisting his wedding band back and forth in slow, unconscious rhythm. Except for that and the motion of the car, he was perfectly still. He could have been a corpse, right down to the invisible wall behind his eyes.
I’d asked a lot of him, and before things were finished I’d have to ask more—the question was, how much could he stand. He was an unexploded bomb now and I didn’t know the length of his fuse.
“Turn here,” he said. I nearly jumped—you don’t expect a corpse to talk. “It’s the servant’s drive, better access,” he added, his voice soft and distant.
I turned into a narrow break in the curb line. Trees crowded overhead and we rolled slowly along the drive’s smooth cement surface for a hundred yards.
“Stop now and get out.”
It wasn’t a command, only another unemotional direction to follow. I eased the car to a halt and got out, pressing the door shut instead of slamming it. Adrian slid over on the seat, worked the gears, and drove off with Escott. They would circle around to the front of the stone castle Reva shared with Brett and use the main door. They’d called ahead and were expected company. I was not.
I followed in their wake. The driveway ran by a long slate-roofed garage with four wide doors and then curved away out of sight, masked by the bulk of the main house. The garage had two stories, but no lights were showing in any of the upper windows, so no chauffeur had been wakened by the passing of my Buick. The plain cement gave way to a span of decorative brick in a pattern, which I crossed to get to the house.
Except for a subdued night-light in the kitchen, the rest of the place was as dark as the garage, at least on this side. I found my way to the back garden and the line of French windows that marked the long hall where Bobbi had sung. The place was quiet enough now with all the people gone and looked larger than I remembered. The wind stirred unswept leaves around my ankles and I was just able to pick up the soft rush from the fountain at the far end of the grounds. It seemed like a century had passed since the night of the party, when I’d dragged Evan sputtering from the water.
Pressing my ear to one of the doors, I only heard the slow tick of a clock somewhere inside. The quality of the sound muffled, went silent a moment, and returned sharp and clear as I slipped into the house and became solid again. Oriented, I fumed left and walked quietly through a series of rooms and halls, my ears cocked and the rest of me ready to vanish at a second’s notice. The bedrooms were all upstairs, though. I didn’t expect to run into anyone else prowling around and did not.
Like Adrian, Leighton Brett placed his studio on the north side of the house to take advantage of the light. It was a much bigger room and filled with more stuff, but had the same air of organized chaos. A line of wet canvases mounted on different kinds of easels took up a lot of floor space on one side. They covered many subjects: landscapes, some flowers with a jug, and the start of a bowl of fruit. The air was thick with the smell of linseed oil and the sickening bite of turpentine.
Operating on the principle of The Purloined Letter, I made for them and took a good look, comparing the colors of the canvases with the leftover smears on a palette I found. I was anything but an expert, but they seemed to match, which didn’t prove much one way or another—Sandra had used the same colors. We’d probably have to wait and work it from the fingerprint angle later on, just to be sure.
I caught the low voices and approaching footsteps in plenty of time to vanish. Something clicked after the door swung open, probably the light switch, and they walked into the studio.
“The kitchen really might be better for this,” said Leighton Brett. “At least I could offer you coffee or something stronger. I don’t keep any supplies here where I work.”
“We want nothing,” stated Adrian, his voice toneless as ever.
“Then why are you here at this hour?” The question held no exasperation, only reasonable curiosity.
I moved close enough to Escott to give him a shiver and let him know I was around, then floated off a pace. The door was shut, very firmly and quietly, and Escott said, “We must talk.”
“All right. About what?”
He did not get a direct answer. They were probably staring at him, reluctant to start now that the moment had come.
“Alex, what is this about?”
“Sandra’s murder.” This time there was some expression to Adrian’s voice, more than enough to put Brett on his guard.
“Jack.” But Escott didn’t really have to call me, I was already fading into the room.
Brett went comically slack-jawed at this. A whimpering sigh of fear rushed from him and his pupils dilated, turning his eyes to black pits. F clearly heard the jump and throb of his heart. He stumbled away from me, grabbing at the back of a fancy brocade sofa for balance. I kept still and did my best to hold his gaze. It kept dancing from me to Adrian, to Escott, and back as he tried to take things in. I didn’t dare look away to see how they were doing, I was completely focused on Brett.
His surprise died abruptly as common sense took over. He’d seen something impossible, therefore he hadn’t really seen it. My appearance had been some kind of trick. He was desperate to believe this, I could read it on his face like print on a page. When he looked at me for some kind of tip-off or confirmation of the joke I had him cold, and he went blank and wide-eyed as a store-window dummy.
I kept my voice low and even and told him to sit down on the sofa. He did so. He wore scuffed loafers and some old paint-spotted pants. Neither of them went with the embroidered Chinese dragons crawling all over his green silk smoking jacket. Maybe it had been a present from Reva for some birthday or other.
He was tractable now and it was safe for me to divide my concentration. Escott was on the other side of the studio examining the paintings on the easels. Adrian regarded me with caution, but he was nor really afraid.
“This is what you did to Evan?”
“More or l
ess.”
“How are you able to do it? Why?”
Escott and I had speculated on everything from telepathy to simple hypnosis, which my influencing resembled, and had yet to find a clear answer for how. Why I could do it was directly linked to vampiric survival: it was easier to drain blood from a quiescent source, whether animal or human, than from one awake and fighting the process. I shrugged; now was not the time for a lecture on my changed condition. Adrian let it go and sank into a chair opposite from Brett to stare at him.
I joined Escott by the paintings. “The colors looked alike to me.”
“And they appear to be painted in Brett’s style.”
“You spot anything that could help?”
He was bent down behind one of the canvases and was comparing it to another he’d taken from a storage rack. “Indeed, yes, while not con elusive, it is certainly worth consideration. The wet painting’s supporting frame is of a slightly different construction than the others in this room. It’s homemade, while these came from a commercial supplier.”
“Sandra and Evan made their own,” said Adrian, not looking up from Brett’s face. “They couldn’t afford to buy prestretched canvas.”
Escott peered at the raw edges of canvas through his magnifier. “The weave pattern of the fabric is also slightly different, but I believe—yes, there are some fingerprints in the paint. That will give us the final con firmation at least of the circumstantial element. As for the rest …” He broke off and replaced the dry canvas on the rack and went to stand just behind Adrian. I sat on the sofa, close to, but not touching Brett.
“I want you to speak freely and answer some questions,” I told him. “You will give us the complete truth. You will tell us everything we want to know.” I licked my dry lips and nodded to Escott, who leaned forward.
“Brett, did you take some paintings from Sandra Robley?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you take them?”
“They were mine.”
That puzzled him. “They were your paintings?”
Adrian spoke. “He means they were done in his style.”
Escott noted that with a quirk of one eyebrow and continued. “Brett, did you kill Sandra?”
