by Sue Grafton
The interior was unfurnished except for easels and a few straight-backed wooden chairs. In the center of the room there was a low platform where a woman in a bathrobe, presumably the model, was perched on a tall wooden stool, reading a magazine. Students milled about, their ages ranging from late thirties into the seventies. In Santa Teresa, most adult education courses are offered free of charge. In a lab class like this there might be a two-dollar fee for materials, but most enrollment is open and costs the students nothing. I stood in the back of the studio. Behind me, cars were still pulling into the parking lot. It was 6:52 and people were still arriving, chatting as they entered the classroom. I watched as several women dragged additional easels from a small supply room. A coffee urn had been set up and I could see a big pink bakery box, probably filled with cookies to have with coffee during the break. A tape of Kitaro’s Silk Road was playing, the sound low, infiltrating the room with a seductive tone. I could smell oil paint and chalk dust and the first bubbling evidence of strong coffee perking.
I spotted the woman I assumed to be Rhe Parsons emerging from a small supply closet with a roll of newsprint and a box of pencils; jeans, a denim work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a pack of cigarettes visible in her left breast pocket. No makeup, no bra. She wore heavy leather sandals and a hand-tooled leather belt. Her hair was dark, pulled back in a French braid that extended halfway down her back. I placed her in her late thirties and wondered if she’d been at Woodstock once upon a time. I’d seen clips of the concert and I could picture her cavorting barefoot through the mud, stark naked, with a joint, her hair down to her waist and daisies painted on her cheek. Growing up had made her crabby, which happens to the best of us. She set the pencils on the counter and carried the newsprint to a big worktable where she began to cut off uniform sheets, using an industrial-size paper cutter. Several students without sketch pads formed a ragged line, waiting for her to finish. She must have sensed my scrutiny. She looked up, catching sight of me, and then went on about her business. I crossed the room and introduced myself. She couldn’t have been more pleasant. Perhaps, like many habitually cranky people, her irritation passed in the moment, to be replaced by something sunnier.
“Sorry if I seemed short with you on the telephone. Let me get these guys going and we can talk out in the breeze-way.” She checked her watch, which she wore on the inner aspect of her wrist. It was seven straight up. She clapped her hands once. “Okay, people. Settle down. We’re paying Linda by the hour. We’re going to start with quick sketches, one minute each. This is to loosen up so don’t worry about the small stuff. Think big. Fill the paper. I don’t want any tightass tiny images. Betsy’s going to be the timekeeper. When the bell rings, grab the next sheet of newsprint and start again. Any questions? Okay, then. Let’s have some fun with this.”
There was a bit of a scramble while the late students found empty easels. The model hopped off the stool, dropped her robe, and struck a pose, leaning forward with her hands on the wooden stool, a graceful curve to her back. It was comforting to see that she looked like an ordinary mortal—round and misproportioned, her torso softened by motherhood. The woman working next to me studied the model briefly and began to draw. Fascinated, I watched her capture the line of the model’s shoulder, the arch of her spine. The quiet in the room was intense against the lyrical meandering of the music.
Rhe was watching me. Her eyes were a khaki green, her brows ragged. She moved toward the rear exit and I followed. The night air was fifteen degrees cooler than the room itself. She reached for a cigarette and lit it, leaning against one of the supports. “You ever draw? You seemed interested.”
“Can you really teach people how to do that?”
“Of course. You want to learn?”
I laughed. “I don’t know. It makes me nervous. I’ve never done anything remotely artistic.”
“You ought to try it. I bet you’d like it. I teach the basics fall semester. This is life drawing, for people with a little drawing experience. Do what I tell you, you could pick it up in no time.” Her gaze strayed out across the parking lot.
“Are you expecting someone?”
She looked back at me. “My daughter’s stopping by. She wants to borrow my car. Hang around long enough and I may bum a ride home.”
“Sure, I could do that.”
She went back to the subject, maybe hoping to postpone any talk of Isabelle. “I’ve been drawing since I was twelve. I can remember when it happened. Sixth grade. We were out on a field trip in a little park with a pond. Everybody else drew the fountain with these flat stick people at the edge. I drew the spaces between the chicken wire in the fence. My drawing looked real. Everybody else’s looked like sixth graders on a field trip. It was like an optical illusion . . . something shifted. I felt my brain do a sudden quickstep and it made me laugh. After that, I was like this art prodigy . . . the star of my class. I could draw anything.”
“I envy you that. I always thought it’d be neat. Can I ask about Isabelle? You said your time was in short supply.”
She looked away from me then, her voice dropping somewhat. “You might as well. Why not? I talked to Simone this afternoon and she filled me in.”
“Sorry about the confusion over Morley Shine. According to the files, he’d already talked to you. I was just going to fill in the blanks.”
She shrugged. “I never heard a word from him, which is just as well. I’d have really been annoyed if I had to have the same conversation twice. Anyway, what is it you want to know?”
“How’d you meet?”
“Out at UCST. We took a printmaking class. I was eighteen, unmarried, with a kid on my hands. Tippy was two. I knew who the father was. He’s always pitched in with her and helped me out with the money, but he’s not the kind of guy I’d ever marry. . . .”
I pictured a dope dealer with his nose pierced, a tiny ruby sitting on his nostril like a semiprecious booger, long, unwashed hair tumbling halfway down his back.
“. . . Isabelle had just turned nineteen and she was engaged to the guy who was later killed in a boat. We were both way too young for the shit that was coming down, but it bonded us like cement. We were friends for fourteen years. I really miss her.”
“Are you close to Simone?”
“In some ways I am, but it’s not like Isabelle. For sisters, they were very different . . . remarkably so. Iz was special. She really was. Very gifted.” She paused to take the last drag from her cigarette, which she flipped into the parking lot. “Tip adored Isabelle, who was like a second mother to her. She told Iz the secrets she didn’t have the nerve to tell me. Which is just as well, in my opinion. There are things I’m not sure any mother needs to know about her kid.” She interrupted herself by holding an index finger up. “Let me take a break here and see how the class is doing.”
She moved to the doorway and looked in on the class. I saw one of the students, a man in his sixties, turn a befuddled face toward her. He put a tentative hand up. “Hang on a sec,” she said, “I better earn my paycheck.”
The man who’d summoned her launched into a long-winded question. Rhe used hand gestures as she made her response, almost like American Sign Language for the deaf. Whatever her point, he didn’t seem to get it at first. The model had changed her pose and was perched again on the stool, one bare foot resting on the second rung. I could see the angle of her hip and the line where her buttock was flattened out by the wood. Rhe had moved on. I waited while she completed the circuit, making her way from one easel to the next.
I heard footsteps behind me and I turned, glancing back. A young woman was approaching in tight jeans and high-heeled cowboy boots. She wore a Western-cut shirt and a big leather bag slung across her shoulder like a mail pouch. Her face was a clumsier version of Rhe’s, though I suspected the maturation process would refine her features somewhat. At the moment, she looked like a rough pencil sketch for a portrait in oil. Her face was wide, her cheeks still rounded with the last vestiges of baby fat, bu
t she had the same green eyes, the same long, dark hair pulled up in a braid. I placed her in her late teens or very early twenties. Bright-looking, good energy. She flashed me a smile.
“Is my mother in there?”
“She’ll be out in a minute. Are you Tippy?”
“Yes,” she said, surprised. “Do I know you?”
“I was just talking to your mom and she said you’d be stopping by. My name is Kinsey.”
“You teach here, too?”
I shook my head. “I’m a private investigator.”
She half smiled, getting ready for the punch line. “For real?”
“Yep.”
“Cool. Investigating what?”
“I’m working for an attorney on a case going into court.”
Her smile faded. “Is this about my aunt Isabelle?”
“Yes.”
“I thought that already went to court and the guy got away with it.”
“We’re trying again. A different angle this time. We may nail him if we’re lucky.”
Tippy’s expression seemed to darken. “I never liked him. What a creep.”
“What do you remember?”
She made a face . . . reluctance, resistance, a touch of regret perhaps. “Nothing much, except we all cried a bunch. Like for weeks. It was awful. I was sixteen when she died. She wasn’t my real aunt, but we were really close.”
Rhe emerged from the classroom with her key ring in her hand. “Hi, baby. I thought that was you out here. I see you met Miss Millhone.”
Tippy gave her mother’s cheek a kiss. “We were just waiting for you. You look tired.”
“I’m okay. How was work?”
“Work was fine. Corey says I might get a raise, but it’s only like three percent.”
“Don’t knock it. Way to go,” Rhe said. “What time are you picking Karen up?”
“Fifteen minutes ago. I’m already late.”
Tippy and I watched while Rhe slipped the car key from the ring and then pointed toward the parking lot. “It’s in the third row, to the left. I want the car back by midnight.”
“We’re not even out until quarter of!” Tippy yelped in protest.
“As soon as possible after that. And don’t run me out of gas the way you did last time.”
“It was empty when you gave it to me!”
“Would you just do what I say?”
“Why, you have a date?” Tippy asked impishly.
“Tippy . . .”
“I’m just teasing,” she said. She plucked the key from her mother’s hand and started off across the parking lot, bootheels clacking.
“ ‘Gee, Mom, I hope this isn’t inconvenient,’ ” Rhe called toward her departing form. “ ‘Thank you, darling mother.’ ”
“You’re welcome,” Tippy called back.
Rhe shook her head with the kind of mock disgust that only a totally smitten parent indulges in. “Twenty years they’re totally self-involved, then they turn around and get married.”
“I know people must say this to you all the time, but you really don’t look old enough to be her mother.”
Rhe smiled. “I was sixteen when she was born.”
“She seems like a neat kid.”
“Well, she is, thanks to AA, which she joined when she was sixteen.”
“Alcoholics Anonymous? Are you serious?”
“The drinking started when she was ten. I was working to support us and the baby-sitter was a lush. Tip would go there after school and guzzle beer every chance she got. I never had a clue! Here I am thinking it’s neat because my child is so docile and obedient. She never once complained. She never whined if I was late or had to leave her overnight. I had other friends who were single moms like me. They had a bitch of a time. Their kids ran away, or caused trouble. Not my little Tippy. She was so easy to get along with. She didn’t do well in school and she had the ‘flu’ a lot, but otherwise she seemed fine. I guess I was in denial, because I know now she was drunk or hung over half the time.”
“You’re lucky she straightened out.”
“Part of that was Izzy’s death. It did us in. It made us closer. We lost the best friend we ever had, but at least it brought us back together.”
“How’d you find out about her drinking?”
“She reached a point where she was drinking so much I couldn’t miss it. By the time she reached high school, she was really out of control. Popping pills. She smoked dope. She’d had her driver’s license six months and she’d already had two wrecks. Plus, she stole anything that wasn’t nailed down. This was actually the autumn before Isabelle’s murder at Christmastime. She’d started her junior year, cutting classes, flunking tests. I couldn’t handle it. I kicked her out, so she went to live with her father. When Iz died, she came back.” She stopped to light another cigarette. “Jesus. Why’m I telling you this stuff? Look, I gotta get back to class. Do you mind hanging out? I really do need a ride home if you can do me that.”
“Sure. I’d be happy to.”
8
I drove her home at 10:30 after class had ended. Most of the students were gone by five after ten, cars spilling out of the darkened parking lot with the sweep of headlights, engines thrumming. I offered to help her tidy up, but she said it’d be quicker if she did it herself. I wandered around the room, doing an idle survey while she emptied the coffee urn and rinsed it out, put away the drawing supplies, and then flipped out the lights. She locked the doors behind us and we headed for my VW, which was the only car left in the parking lot.
As we drove through the gated driveway, she said, “I live in Montebello. I hope that’s not too far out of your way.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m on Albanil, near the beach. I can come back along Cabana and it’s no big deal.”
I turned right onto Bay, and then right again on Missile, picking up the freeway about two blocks down. She gave me directions to her place and for two miles we chatted idly, while I tried to decide what I could learn from her. “How’d you first hear about Isabelle’s death?”
“The cops called about two-thirty and told me what had happened. They asked if I’d come over there and just sit with Simone. I threw some clothes on, hopped in the car, and barreled over there right away. I was just in shock. The whole time I was driving, I kept talking to myself like some kind of nut. I didn’t cry till I got there and saw the look on Simone’s face. The Seegers were a mess. They kept telling the same story over and over again. I don’t know which of us was in worse shape. Actually, I think I was. Simone was numb and out of it until David showed up. Then she lost it completely. She really came unglued.”
“Oh, that’s right. He claimed he was jogging in the middle of the night. Did you believe him?”
“God, I don’t know. I did and I didn’t. He’d been doing night runs for years. He said he liked it because it was quiet and he didn’t have to worry about all the traffic and exhaust fumes. I guess he suffered from insomnia and roamed the house at all hours.”
“So he used the jogging to wind down when he couldn’t sleep?”
“Well, yeah, but on the other hand, the night of the murder, it seemed awfully contrived.” She twisted a finger in an imaginary dimple in her cheek like a ditzy blonde. “ ‘What a coincidence. I was just passing by on my two A.M. run.’ ”
“Simone tells me he was living down the road at that point.”
She made a face. “In that awful house. He told the cops he was just getting back from a run when he saw the lights up at Isabelle’s and stopped to see what was going on.”
“Did he seem upset?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that, but then nothing seemed to move him. It was one of her big complaints. He was an emotional robot.”
“You mentioned Simone going nuts. What’d you mean by that?”
“She got hysterical when he showed up, convinced he’d killed Isabelle. She always maintained the story about the stolen gun was pure bullshit. We’d all been in the house on countless othe
r occasions. Why would any one of us suddenly sneak upstairs and steal David’s thirty-eight, for God’s sake? She figured it was part of a setup. I guess I’d have to agree.”
“So, you were at the dinner party Labor Day weekend when the gun disappeared?”
“Sure, I was there and so was everybody else. Peter and Yolanda Weidmann, the Seegers, the Voigts.”
“Kenneth was there? Her ex-husband and his wife?”
“Hey, current etiquette. One big happy family, except of course for Francesca. That’s Kenneth’s wife, the long-suffering. What a martyr she was. Sometimes I think Isabelle just invited them to bug her. All Francesca had to do was refuse to go.”
“What was her problem?”
“She knew Ken was still hung up on Isabelle. After all, Iz was the one who gave Kenneth the boot. He married Francesca on the rebound.”
“Sounds like a soap opera.”
“It gets worse,” Rhe said. “Francesca’s beautiful. Have you met her?” I shook my head and she went on. “She’s like a model, perfect features and a body to die for, but she’s insecure, always choosing men who withhold. You know what I mean? Ken was ideal because she knew she’d never really have his full attention.”
I said, “Let me ask you this. I heard his version last night and he claims Isabelle was the one who was insecure. Is that true?”
“Not from my point of view, but she may have shown a different side of herself to men,” she said. She pointed to a series of driveways coming up on the left. “It’s this first one,” she said.
We were in the section of Montebello known as the slums, where the houses only cost $280,000 each. I pulled up in front of a small stucco cottage painted white. She opened the car door on her side, getting out. “I’d ask you in for some wine, but I really do have to get to work. I’ll be up half the night.”
“Don’t worry about it. That’s fine. I’m bushed. I appreciate your time,” I said. “By the way, where’s the show?”