by Alan Russell
And even after her dog, she thought, scooping up Cerberus’s droppings. His crap wouldn’t have been out of place on the street, would have fit in with the emptied bottles of booze and fast-food wrappers and cigarette packages, but she felt better for having picked up after him.
She made the walk a short one. Tomorrow, she thought, she would do better by Cerberus. She would take him to Fiesta Island, to Dog Beach. It was late to be walking on the streets of downtown San Diego, even with hell’s watchdog at her side. Besides, the pulling was getting more intense, the compulsion to get to her art. It was the one constant in her life. Everything else could be falling apart, but she always had her art. She wasn’t sure whether that was a saving grace, or an anchor that pulled her down.
Cerberus stayed by her side. He had never been obedience trained, but was always right next to her if he sensed any uneasiness on her part or detected some potential danger. Maybe there was a homeless person lying in the shadows, or maybe she was upset and didn’t know it.
They walked upstairs. She quickly fed him, dropped him a rawhide bone for dessert, then changed into some old, comfortable clothes. A tingling touched her, almost electrical in nature. She was ready to create, even if she was unsure what form the expression would take. As might have been expected, she was an artist with many voices. Her first love had been painting, and she’d gone through more styles in ten years than most artists do in a lifetime. A few years back she had started designing jewelry and still dabbled in it. Her sculpting had been her latest passion, starting with what she called “death masks,” and then progressing into full figures. She couldn’t afford marble, so she used whatever was available, had managed to sculpt with everything from papier-mâché to treated vegetables to synthetics. She was skilled at molding and trimming and sanding and applying enough layers of lacquer and paint to give a finish that looked like fine stone.
Though there were several pieces of statuary she was working on, that wasn’t what had summoned her that night. She grabbed for her sketch pad. Her hand started moving, unconsciously drawing what had to be drawn. She called this Ouija board time, when the designs apparently came from somewhere outside herself. The spirit compelled her to do the background first, a building. It was night, so she shrouded the edifice in shadows. But the darkness didn’t mean that all was gloomy. There was a warm feeling to the backdrop that came through even in pencil, something tropical about the setting. It wasn’t exactly South Seas exotic, not Gauguin’s Eden, but it was clement and welcoming, with flowers popping up everywhere.
Mostly carnations, she realized.
Her pencil started working on another image. A figure emerged, materializing with his back turned to her. He looked to be walking rapidly away from the building down the pathway to the street. Or was that a woman hurrying off? She still wasn’t sure. The figure had a trench coat on, and gloves, which didn’t quite make sense in a setting with so many tropical flowers, but it wasn’t her place to question what appeared on the paper. At times like this she didn’t think of herself as the artist. She was only the vessel from which art flowed.
Her pencil gradually slowed. The artist examined her sketch critically, looking it over very carefully. It felt almost right, but something was missing. Her hand went back to the drawing, hovered over it, then found the detail that was missing.
She erased the figure’s right arm, then drew it again so that it curved up around the small of the back.
There was one necessary addition. Within the gloved hand she drew a knife.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Cheever waited for his appointment on the stoop of the gallery. Someone who didn’t know better might have thought he had stopped to smell the flowers. Sandy Ego Expressions was beginning to look like a shrine, with mounds of carnation bouquet tributes piled up along its entryway. Some of the bouquets had Bonnie Gill’s picture taped to their cellophane wrappings, the same picture that had run in that morning’s Union-Tribune. The paper had sprung for four-color but the print had somehow bled Bonnie’s red hair into the next column.
The article made Bonnie out to be a saint, with a lot of corroborating quotes. There was a sidebar piece on the “Carnation Fund” that told how Bonnie’s friends had already collected $50,000 in reward money for information leading to the arrest of her killer. “We want justice,” Reuben Martinez was quoted as saying, “and we’re willing to pay for it.” From what Cheever had seen, those behind the fund were very organized. During his morning’s canvassing, he’d seen that they already had bounty posters up all over the downtown area.
He looked at his watch. It was a little past ten thirty, and he wondered if his appointment was going to show. He’d give her a few more minutes. The day already felt long. His interviews had been mostly redundant, going back to places and people he had already seen. While walking the neighborhood, Cheever had kept smelling fresh-baked tortillas from a nearby tortilleria. He knew that in his mind Bonnie Gill would forever be associated with carnations and the scent of a Mexican bakery. It was a better way to remember the dead than most.
A woman in her mid-thirties walked slowly up the pathway to the gallery. She was cautious and tense, and her body language said she was just looking for an excuse to run away. Despite it being sunny and warm, she was holding her sweater close to her as if she were cold. Cheever had seen her kind of upset too many times before. Her mostly red outfit went well with her bottle-blond hair.
“Good morning,” he said. “I’m Detective Cheever.”
“Gretchen Stoeffer,” she said, her caution replaced by relief. She shook his hand and started talking nervously. “My husband didn’t want me to come in today, or ever again. He figures if I’d been working the shop instead of Bonnie, I’d be dead.”
Cheever let her talk. Gretchen lived in Del Cerro, had two kids and an engineer husband, and it showed. Life was PTA, some sporadic drawing, and her part-time job at the gallery.
Together, they approached the gallery’s door and all of the flowers. In a setting other than yellow crime scene tape the carnations would have been a pleasant sight. Cheever cleared a path for them.
“‘Think carnations,’” said Gretchen. “That’s what Bonnie used to always say. ‘If you give an area an identity, it will become special.’”
“Did anyone resent Bonnie’s dreams?”
She shook her head. “Everyone seemed to think she was the best thing that ever happened to this neighborhood. Bonnie’s philosophy was to improve things. She believed in reincarnation and thought it only made sense for her to make the world better, because she wanted to return to a better place.”
“Bonnie was a Hindu?”
“Not in the practicing sense. She was just sure she had lived other lives and not all of them in human form. She was at her happiest when she was nurturing, helping something to grow. That’s why she loved the garden so much.”
Cheever lifted up the crime scene tape and then opened the door. As Gretchen stepped inside, her nervous chatter ran dry. Bonnie Gill’s body was long removed, but the gallery hadn’t yet been sanitized. The evidence tech had powdered everywhere, and the black dust was only the first reminder of what had happened here. Cheever knew that as they proceeded further into the gallery it would be even worse. He slowed their pace and tried to talk Gretchen through her initial shock, his voice calm and settling. “As far as we’ve been able to determine,” he said, “neither Bonnie’s pocketbook nor the store receipts were touched by her assailant. But we need you to look around to see if anything’s missing, or different.”
He stressed his words, forced her to look into his eyes. “You mean like missing art?” she asked.
“Anything,” he said.
“Because,” she said, upset, “it’s not as if there are any Picassos here.”
As gently as he could, Cheever said, “We’re just curious about your impressions, Gretchen. May I call you Gretchen?”
She nodded.
“We want to see if you not
ice anything out of the ordinary, Gretchen, anything at all.”
“Okay,” she said, but her voice said it was anything but that.
“We’re also curious about what you can tell us about a certain painting,” he said. “It’s a beach scene.”
Cheever showed her a photograph of the painting. It was hard to tell from the picture that the painting had been splattered with blood, which was just as well.
“I think that’s one of Keith Aubell’s,” she said. “I can check on that.”
“Please do,” he said.
She took a deep breath, as if preparing to dive underwater, and then walked toward the gallery’s west wall. She stopped at a spot, and for Cheever’s benefit pointed to what wasn’t there. If you knew what you were looking for, you could see that there was a blank space along the wall big enough for a three-foot by three-foot painting to hang.
“That’s where the painting was hanging,” Gretchen said. “It’s Keith’s.”
“Do you have his telephone number and address?”
She nodded, opened her mouth, then thought better of it and went off to get the information. It was clear she wanted to ask why, but didn’t find the nerve to broach the question until she returned with the artist’s address and telephone number. Handing Cheever the piece of paper, she said, “I’m curious...”
“The painting was found by Bonnie’s body,” Cheever said. “It might be evidence.”
He didn’t amplify beyond that, didn’t tell her that the painting had been used as a shield. It was presumed that whoever had stabbed Bonnie Gill hadn’t wanted to get sprayed by her blood.
Cheever looked at Gretchen expectantly. Prodded, she began a tentative tour of the gallery. He trailed behind her, saying nothing, but his presence seemed to make her nervous. It was the nature of the beast, he knew. Cops made people, even law-abiding people, sweat. He decided to give her some room.
“I think I might head out to the garden,” he said, “give you some breathing room to look around here.”
The path to the back of the gallery was hardly a scenic tour. Bonnie Gill’s trail of blood was easily discernible to the eye. And what couldn’t be seen had been studied. The evidence tech had spent long hours analyzing the blood splatter. Her conclusion had been that Bonnie Gill’s killer was an adept butcher, not to mention a fastidious one.
At the entryway to the garden was the sign announcing the Garden of Stone exhibit and the suggestion that visitors pick up a brochure. Cheever backtracked a few steps to an information rack. Most of the pamphlets in the stand detailed the gallery’s arts and crafts courses, with folders on glassblowing, pottery making, ceramics, and drawing. Behind those could be found a few Garden of Stone flyers.
Cheever picked one up and began his tour. Even in daylight the statues were disconcerting, their Mona Lisa eyes following him, their clothing playing with his peripheral vision. Again and again, he found himself turning, expecting to see a person.
He stopped walking and tried concentrating on the brochure. There was a picture of Holly Troy at work and brief descriptions of her creations. Cheever counted the statues and then the descriptions in the pamphlet. By his calculations, only two of her statues had been sold.
Helen had titled all of her works. Cheever compared her names with the remaining figures. It was apparent that most of the statues were classically influenced, even if Cheever didn’t know the stories behind them. With Helen, he thought, there were hidden meanings everywhere. Even in her titles. She liked to use wordplay and double entendres. One of her statues showed a man, presumably Anthor, pierced by a spear. Her title: Death Called, He Anthored. A boar being hunted was identified as Pentheus Boarn Again, and the statue of a woman turning into a tree was called Dryope as Sap. A beautiful youth lying on the ground was described as Hyacinthusis, and a woman in the midst of great grief, tears running down her face, was named Niobe on Mother’s Day. Not all of the statues were named, at least not directly. The identity of the knife-wielding priest and his victim remained a mystery, but perhaps their names could be discerned in her title of Achilles as a Heel.
Even in Helen’s seemingly innocent statues Cheever sensed something lurking, some unseen beast. One piece showed two little girls playing, apparently happily. The brochure cataloged them as Jason’s Offspring. Still, there was something about the girls that was far removed from Norman Rockwell, just as there was in the statue of the little girl who was afraid and crying, a piece entitled Growing Up.
Gretchen quietly entered the garden. Cheever turned, confirmed she wasn’t a statue. He could tell without asking, but had to make the pro forma inquiry: “How’s it going?”
She shook her head, a depressed motion that offered despair on several fronts. “I’m afraid I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing if you don’t count the...”
She didn’t know how to say it, or didn’t want to face up to saying it.
“Crime scene,” Cheever offered.
She nodded, then asked, “Why wasn’t everything cleaned up?”
“We had to do tests,” Cheever said, “and we wanted you to look around first. The cleaning always has to wait until we’re finished with the crime scene. We’re done now.”
“Will you be cleaning today, then?”
“I’m afraid that’s not something we do.”
“But...”
She looked like she might get sick, was probably picturing herself taking a mop and pail and trying to wipe up after her deceased friend.
“It’s usually best to have a cleaning firm do it,” Cheever said. “I’d be glad to give you some names and numbers. They can generally come out right away.”
“Yes,” she said distractedly, “I suppose I better get someone here.”
He wrote down several numbers on his card and handed it to her. Gretchen accepted his written recommendations reluctantly, wasn’t yet ready to face up to that responsibility.
“You never think about these kinds of things,” she said.
Cheever agreed, even though he thought about them all the time.
They stood looking at the statues together. Given the alternatives, Cheever thought, maybe they weren’t so bad after all. Still, they were annoying. “What’s with their clothes?” he asked.
“The sculptor liked to dress them,” she said.
“Holly Troy?” he asked, using her brochure name.
She nodded. “You know Holly?”
It was his turn to nod. “Were clothes always a part of her statues?”
“No. Holly started dressing them a few days after the display opened. She said the clothes were a way to keep the exhibit fresh. Bonnie let her do it, but more to humor her than anything else. She started referring to the statues as Holly’s Barbie dolls. ‘You can dress them up,’ she told her, ‘but I don’t see anyone taking them out.’”
“They weren’t selling?”
“Not very well. We only sold one or two. Bonnie told Holly she thought they were too serious and macabre, and said if she didn’t lighten up on her statuary, she’d only be creating for herself.”
“How did Holly take that?”
“About as well as most people take personal criticism. She said she wasn’t going to pander to common tastes and that if Bonnie wanted her garden known as the birdbath emporium that was fine with her.”
“Did Bonnie have an answer to that?”
“Something to the effect that ‘birdshit sometimes pays the bills,’ and that Holly could learn from that.”
“Sounds like there wasn’t any love lost between them.”
Gretchen’s head disagreed. “Bonnie understood that Holly needed space to fly, but she also knew when to yank her string. Bonnie wanted Holly to be more centered, to concentrate on one art form instead of jumping around. She thought Holly should stick to painting.”
“Painting?”
Nodding, “We have a few of her paintings inside.”
&n
bsp; “I’d appreciate seeing them,” he said.
Cheever followed her back inside the gallery. Though Gretchen didn’t say anything, Cheever noticed that she detoured around the dried blood without looking directly at it. They ended up in the southeast side of the gallery, in what Cheever suspected were the bleacher seats for artwork. “There,” said Gretchen, pointing. “Those three.”
The paintings were hanging next to one another. Cheever glanced from one to another and doubted whether even an art expert could have determined they had been drawn by the same hand, as the colors and styles and subjects were very different.
“Proximity seems to be the only thing they have in common,” he said.
“Holly is diverse,” she said.
That, Cheever knew, was an understatement. “Doesn’t do fruit bowls, does she?” he said.
The first painting showed a woman of indeterminate age almost passed out from too much booze. Somehow she was still managing to hold on tightly to her broken bottle of vodka. The title emphasized the woman’s straits: Russian Roulette.
“I think I’ll make that phone call,” Gretchen said.
Cheever gave a preoccupied nod while continuing to study the paintings. The second drawing was framed and set up to look like a billboard. He found himself not breathing when confronted by a familiar face. Surrounded by clouds was a smiling Graciela Fernandez. There was a special illumination around her face, a glow that came from within instead of from the billboard lights. The painting had been named Now Playing. There was something of a Hollywood feel to it, one of those feel-good movie billboards. Or maybe Helen was saying that Graciela was playing somewhere else, somewhere better, and was happy in her new playground.
In the background, Cheever could hear Gretchen talking. Her voice was high-pitched, nervous: “If someone could come out today, I would really appreciate it.”
The third painting was called The Cast. There was a stage, but the emphasis was on the front row of mostly female patrons. The women were very different, both in person and how they were responding to the play. Judging by their expressions, they were all witnessing a different performance. One woman was uproariously laughing, another piteously crying. There was boredom and a glimpse of cruelty on one beautiful woman’s face, shock on another. One of the figures was falling asleep, another was mesmerized. There was a red-haired little girl who was too frightened to look, covering her eyes with her hands, and in the shadows was a male figure, his eyes luminescent and intense. Predator’s eyes. While one woman knitted, not bothering to watch the show, another was extravagantly gesturing. Cheever suddenly realized that what he was seeing was a self-portrait of Helen in all her guises.