“I’m just taking care of the final details,” Duncan said.
Coltrane shook his head, not understanding.
“The movers were here earlier, carting away the furniture. But I didn’t trust them to handle the photographic materials.”
Coltrane continued to look perplexed.
“Of course.” Duncan gestured with realization. “You didn’t know.”
“Know?”
“This house belonged to Randolph.”
“Belonged to . . . This was his?”
“After Randolph photographed it, he couldn’t get it out of his mind. He was so haunted by the unusual design that he bought it.”
Coltrane continued to feel amazed. “None of his biographers ever mentioned that.”
“Well, as you must have gathered by now, Randolph liked to keep many details about his life confidential. He bought the house through an intermediary and put the title in the name of one of the corporations he inherited from his parents. Sometimes, he came here to reminisce about his youth. Mostly, though, he used it as an office, an archive, and a darkroom. Would you like to see the inside?”
3
A BROAD CHECKERED SKYLIGHT BATHED THE ENTRYWAY IN brilliance. Stairs led down and up, the areas beyond as bright as the entryway. Coltrane had never been in a house that collected so much light. Following Duncan, he climbed the steps and faced a white room with a wall of windows that looked down on a garden. The room’s lack of furnishings made its clean lines even more elegant.
“Bedroom and bathroom to the right.” Duncan pointed through a corridor into another sunlit area. “Dining room to the left. Note that its walls are draped with chromium beads. Original Art Deco design. The kitchen’s beyond it.”
As the stairs continued upward, Coltrane’s movements made a hushed echo. The next level was equally sunlit.
“A bathroom, a bedroom, and a study. Another balcony.”
One final set of stairs, and Coltrane reached a single room with four walls of windows and a skylight. A glass door in the middle of each wall led onto a flower-filled terrace.
“The master bedroom.”
Coltrane pivoted, spellbound.
“But I haven’t shown you the most important section,” Duncan said.
Curious, Coltrane followed him back down to the entryway, from where they descended toward the lowest level. In back, past a darkroom, windows looked out onto a narrow pool, its water reflecting the house’s coral stucco. Beyond was a flower garden.
But Duncan paid no attention to the view and instead guided Coltrane to the left, toward a white door within a white wall. When Duncan pulled at a recessed latch, he revealed not another room but another door, and this one was metal. He unlocked it. “This area used to be another bedroom. Randolph converted it into . . .” Beyond the door was an area more murky than the darkroom. “. . . a vault.”
Cool air spilled out, making Coltrane step back.
When Duncan flicked a light switch, a harsh glare exposed a windowless area that was filled with librarylike metal shelves, all but one of which were empty. “This is where Randolph stored all his important negatives and master prints.”
For no reason Coltrane could understand, he didn’t want to enter.
“A separate air conditioner keeps the area cooled to a constant fifty-five degrees.” Duncan’s footsteps scraped as he walked along the concrete floor.
Reluctant, Coltrane followed, the cool air making him shiver.
“The area is reinforced by steel to withstand earthquakes,” Duncan said. “It’s insulated against fire and sealed against flood. As a further precaution, a halon-gas fire-extinguisher system is recessed into the ceiling.”
What’s the matter with me? Coltrane thought. There’s plenty of space in here. Why do I feel smothered?
Hearing a metallic click, he turned, to discover that the door had swung shut. “Does the lock work from the inside as well as the out?”
“Of course. There’s no danger of being trapped in here. Randolph thought of everything.” Duncan reached the only shelf that wasn’t empty. “I have only a few more boxes. If you’ll give me a hand.”
“Gladly.”
In truth, Coltrane couldn’t wait to get out. He breathed normally only after he and Duncan carried the boxes into the soul-warming light and Duncan locked the darkness behind them. The change was immediate. Again, Coltrane felt at one with the house.
4
O UTSIDE , AT THE CURB , he helped Duncan put the boxes into the Mercedes. Turning, he peered toward the property and recalled the almost-mystical quality of brightness in it.
Except for the vault, he reminded himself.
But the vault doesn’t count, he thought. It was never intended to be part of the house.
“So what happens now?” he asked Duncan. “Where are you taking those boxes?”
“UCLA. Randolph established a special collection there. For the past few days, I’ve been making trips back and forth. It’s time-consuming. Maybe I could have trusted someone else to do the job. But somehow it gave me a sense of peace.”
“And the house?”
“Will go on the market.” Duncan hesitated. “You know, it’s odd. Randolph didn’t particularly care for where he lived in Newport Beach. You saw how badly maintained it was. But here, where he came only occasionally, he kept this house in perfect shape.”
“It’s being put up for sale?”
“That’s what the trustees of his estate have decided to do. Randolph willed the Newport Beach house to me, but he made no provisions for this one.”
“Duncan, would you do me a favor?”
“That depends.”
“Ask the trustees to delay putting the house on the market.”
5
Y OU WANT TO BUY A HOUSE ?” Jennifer asked in disbelief.
Daniel looked astonished. It was Saturday, 2:30 in the afternoon. They were in Coltrane’s Chevy Blazer, heading past Christmas decorations on Hollywood Boulevard.
“That’s what all the mystery’s about?” Daniel asked. “You’re taking us to look at a house?”
“You ought to feel complimented. I wouldn’t think of taking a drastic step like this without some input from the two of you.”
“But you’re out of town a lot—sometimes for months,” Jennifer said.
“Maybe not anymore.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it. When would you find time to look after a house?”
“I could hire people to maintain it.” Coltrane steered left onto Beachwood Drive, heading up into the tangle of streets in the Hollywood Hills.
“But right now, if you need to leave in a hurry, all you have to do is lock your place and drive away,” Daniel said. “No muss, no fuss. Not to mention, you’ve got me next door to come over and check on things. And you’ve got Jennifer. Why on earth do you want to complicate your life?”
“I was hoping to simplify it.” Coltrane steered to the right, heading up a eucalyptus-lined zigzag road. “I want to put down roots.”
“Then plant a tree,” Daniel said. “I’m telling you—this could be a mistake.”
Coltrane crested a hill. Excitement made him smile as the house appeared below him. He had been afraid that upon returning to it, he wouldn’t feel the same magic. But if anything, it gripped him more strongly.
“There.” He stopped in front.
The car became silent.
“So what do you think?”
Neither Jennifer nor Daniel said a word.
“Well?” Coltrane asked.
“Shit,” Daniel said.
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s fantastic.”
“What about you, Jennifer?”
She still didn’t say anything.
“Jennifer?”
“. . . It’s one of the houses Packard photographed.”
“Right.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want you to have preconceptions.”
Jennifer raised a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. “I wouldn’t have believed it. As impressive as it is in Packard’s photograph, he didn’t do it justice.”
“Then you understand why I’m tempted to buy it,” Coltrane said.
“The question that comes to mind is how. Have you got an oil well or something I don’t know about?”
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Daniel said. “This is a major piece of real estate. The asking price must be over a million.”
“And a half,” Coltrane said.
“How the . . . What makes you think you can afford . . .”
“My father’s going to buy it for me.”
They looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.
“Your father?” Jennifer asked.
“The son of a bitch had twenty dry-cleaning shops,” Coltrane said. “After he shot my mother and himself, the shops were sold. The proceeds were put in a trust account that my grandparents managed while they were raising me. Except for feeding and clothing me, paying my medical bills and my college expenses, the money was never used. Until I was twenty-one, I didn’t even know the account existed. I thought my grandparents were paying the bills. If I’d known where the money was coming from . . . Several times, I almost gave it away. What stopped me were my grandparents. They didn’t want the money, either, but I kept worrying that if something terrible happened to them, if they had catastrophic medical bills or . . . I wanted to be in a position to pay them back for all the years and the love they put into raising me. So I let the money stay—in case. The last thing I expected was to use it for myself.” Coltrane tasted something bitter. “But finally the asshole who called himself my father is going to do something for me.”
An emotional silence was broken by the stutter of a hard-to-start lawn mower down the street.
“Okay,” Jennifer said. “I can see you’ve got your mind made up.”
“Why are the two of you being so negative?”
They looked at each other.
Daniel glanced down in embarrassment. “I guess we do sound negative. The truth is, I enjoy having you as a neighbor. The last thing I want is for you to move.”
“But it’s not like I’d be moving to another city. We’d still see each other.”
“It wouldn’t be the same, though.”
“No.” Coltrane felt a twinge of melancholy. “No, it wouldn’t.”
“All we want is what’s best for you,” Jennifer said. “Don’t you think you should at least check to make sure the house doesn’t have structural damage from the last quake? Maybe it’s about to fall over. Or maybe its plumbing is all messed up, or the house is sitting on a swamp.”
Coltrane chuckled. “I sort of planned on getting it inspected.” He pulled out a key that Duncan had lent him. “Would you like to see for yourself about the swamp?”
6
T HE VAULT ,” Daniel said when they came out.
“I know,” Coltrane said. “But there’s an easy way to fix the problem.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Rip the damned thing out. Restore the house to its original condition.”
“You sound as if . . .”
“I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to buy it.”
“Let me ask you something, and then I’ll shut up,” Jennifer said.
“Okay.”
“If you just happened to be driving along that street and the house had no association with Packard and you noticed it was for sale, would you have suddenly wanted to buy it?”
Coltrane thought a moment. “Probably not.”
“So you’re buying the place because Packard photographed the house and made it famous?”
Coltrane hesitated. “I don’t think so.”
“It’s because Packard owned the house? You want to identify with him that much?”
Coltrane didn’t answer.
7
I ’ VE GOT SOMETHING ELSE I WANT TO SHOW YOU ,” Coltrane said.
They looked puzzled as they got out of his car in his garage.
“But I confess I’m a little nervous about it. Lord, I hope you’re more enthusiastic.”
“About what?” Jennifer asked.
“You have to wait here until I get everything ready.”
They looked even more puzzled when he disappeared upstairs.
Two minutes later, Coltrane called down to the garage, “Okay, you can come up now.”
He had put on a CD of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. He had glasses of chilled chardonnay ready when they reached the top of the stairs.
“What’s this all about?” Daniel asked.
“Well, I figured if I was going to have a showing, I might as well set the mood.”
“Showing?” As Jennifer sipped the wine, she peered into the living room and was momentarily frozen.
Coltrane didn’t need to explain. What he wanted to show them was obvious, everywhere, on the walls, the bookshelves, the furniture, any place he could hang them or set them: eight-by-ten-inch mounted photographs.
“My God, Mitch.”
“That’s why I didn’t want to go out to dinner last night,” Coltrane said. “I was working like crazy to finish the prints.”
“They’re . . .” Words failed her.
Coltrane’s updates of Packard’s photos were eerily suggestive of the originals. “Time warps,” he had called them as he worked on them. He had done his best to replicate the texture of Packard’s photographs, down to the slightest shadows and subtlest streaks of light. Juxtaposed, his images and Packard’s evoked powerful emotions within the viewer, creating the illusion of being in two time frames simultaneously.
Jennifer and Daniel seemed spellbound, moving from photograph to photograph, studying them while Coltrane didn’t say a word but merely sat on a stool at the entrance to the living room, sipping wine, studying them.
But the project was devoted to more than just Packard’s houses. Interspersed among the time warps were other mounted photographs, which—beginning with the heartbreaking depiction of Diane—recorded the emotional encounters Coltrane had experienced while retracing Packard’s steps.
Jennifer shook her head in wonder.
Daniel looked at Coltrane, as if seeing him with new eyes.
“This is the best stuff you’ve ever done,” Jennifer said. “I have a hunch you won’t mind talking about these pictures.”
“No,” Coltrane said, relief ebbing through him. “I won’t mind talking about them at all.”
“Well, I was wrong about one thing,” Jennifer said. “I thought this would be suitable for a feature in the magazine.”
“You’ve changed your mind?”
“Definitely. There’s too much here, and I don’t want to leave anything out. For the first time, there’s going to be a special issue.”
“. . . I don’t know what to say.”
“I do,” Daniel said. “Where’d you put the wine?”
Coltrane laughed.
Jennifer kissed him. “I’m so proud of you.”
As she and Daniel returned to the photographs, Coltrane noticed the red light blinking on his answering machine. He pressed the play button.
His stomach tightened when a chorus sang mournful classical music.
“Again?” Jennifer looked up from a photograph he had taken of the elderly black woman at the trailer court. “This is annoying.”
“I can think of less polite ways to put it,” Coltrane said. “I wish I had one of those machines that shows the number of whoever’s calling. Then I could phone the jerk back and play music to him—except I’d have trouble finding music as weird as this.”
“Verdi isn’t what I’d call weird.” Daniel didn’t glance away from the photo of the young black woman pushing a boy in a swing. Coltrane had juxtaposed it with the faded photo of his mother pushing him in the same swing twenty-four years earlier.
“Verdi?”
“You ought to get more culture. If you listened to something other
than jazz, if you went to those classical concerts I invited you to . . . The music on your answering machine is by Verdi.”
“Italian. That’s why I can’t understand what they’re singing.”
“Well, in this case, what they’re singing isn’t Italian—it’s Latin. Let me hear the music again.”
Coltrane pressed the repeat button.
“No doubt about it,” Daniel said. “That’s from the Requiem.”
“The music for a funeral mass?” Jennifer asked.
“Hear what they’re singing? ‘Dies irae.’ ‘Day of wrath.’ That’s definitely from the Requiem.”
Coltrane gestured in frustration. “But why would anybody phone me every day and play music for a funeral?”
“A prankster with a sick sense of humor.”
“‘Dies irae.’ What’s that mean?”
“Something about a day,” Daniel said. “If you’re really curious, I can go next door and get my copy of the Requiem. The liner notes have a translation.”
It was a vinyl LP, Coltrane saw when Daniel returned. Daniel was fond of lecturing that vinyl had a richer, more lifelike sound than the CD format. “Bernstein conducting. Domingo soloing. This is one of the best—”
“Just tell us what the Latin means, Daniel.”
“Right.” Daniel looked mischievous, as if he knew he was making them impatient. “It should be . . .” He unfolded the double-platter album and ran his index finger down the translation on the inside. “Here. ‘Dies irae.’
‘The day of wrath, the day of anger,
will dissolve the world in ashes. . . .
How horrid a trembling there will be
when the judge appears
and all things are scattered.’”
Daniel lowered the album. “Well, I guess a little fear of the Lord is a good thing at a funeral. Keeps our priorities straight.”
“But there’s no hidden message that I can figure out,” Coltrane said. “What about you, Jennifer?”
“The only message I get out of it is that I’d better say my prayers more often. We were right the first time. It’s just a prankster with a weird sense of—”
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