INTO THE DARK : A TOM DEATON NOVEL

by Richard B. Schwartz

  After a full minute and a half she took the key from her purse and approached the front door. She inserted it into the lock, turned it quickly, and pushed open the door. She was still on the porch, her back against the left side of the door frame, the pistol in her hand, clutched against her waist. She listened for ten seconds, counting them off in her head, and then slipped inside.

  The family’s summer home was a two-story craftsman, constructed of redwood, pine, and California cedar. The front porch, of highly polished pine, led to a living room/great room with a Franklin stove on the west wall. The living room ran the full width of the house. In the rear were the dining area, the kitchen, a half-bath, and Carlton Bennett’s study. On the second level were the original master bedroom, now a small studio, and—at opposite ends of the hall—the childhood bedrooms of David and Diana, which were separated by a common bathroom.

  David had stretched a piece of heavy canvas across the length and width of the studio to protect the pegged plank floor from spattered paint and thinner. The master bath in the east corner had been converted into a kitchenette, with a long sinkboard and counter tops to hold his brushes, pigments, oils, and a small coffee maker.

  Diana walked across the living room and stood at the base of the stairway to the second level, listening. After a few seconds she returned to the front door, closed it, locked it, checked her pistol, placed it in her purse, and began to work her way through the house. She started at the Franklin stove. The cast iron was cool to the touch. Inside there were a few ashes and the remains of a piece of scorched oak. She raked through the ashes with the fireplace pick but found nothing more than some charred fragments of newsprint.

  She checked the drawers in the living room occasional tables and opened the books scattered throughout the room, looking for anything that David might have left. David used notes, checks, bills and letters for bookmarks, anything that was within reach, but there was nothing in any of the books except for an old Rizzoli bookmark and some simple slips of white paper. David had always surrounded himself with stacks of journals and piles of magazines, newspapers, and books, all with protruding paper markers. Where were they? Someone had been there before her. Who? And why? Were the intruders David’s killers? Did they know of her or did they underestimate her? Why would they call attention to their presence by rearranging the objects in the room and confiscating or burning nearly every loose scrap of paper?

  The dining room was empty except for the table, four chairs, and sideboard. The plates and tablecloths inside appeared undisturbed. David seldom entertained at home and usually ate while he was working. He “grazed,” he said. Diana thought of the empty glasses with dried milk along the rims and the remains of his sandwiches, drying on cardboard plates, with paint smudges along the tops of the crusts.

  She went through the kitchen cabinets. Nothing. There were no reminder notes pinned to the corkboard and nothing written on the blackboard above the telephone. She lifted the receiver and hit the redial button on the phone and got the weather line. David never called the weather line. He didn’t care about the weather unless he was painting it or its effects.

  There were a few books stacked on the library table in the den but nothing inside them. There were three novels, two books on Mediterranean architecture, and two large books, one containing photographs of antique pinball machines, the second an Abrams art book on Christopher Wren and the rebuilding of London after the great fire of 1666.

  The studio on the second level looked as if it had been recently cleaned and straightened. David’s paints were all arranged in the cupboards and on the countertops of the kitchenette. His brushes were clean and dry. The easels were empty and there was no work in progress anywhere, not even pencil sketches or scribbles. The coffee maker was clean, dry, and unplugged. There was no food except for an unopened box of Peek Frean biscuits, a package of Darjeeling tea (David preferred English Breakfast), and a sealed tin of Maxwell House coffee (David bought $14 a pound coffee from a place in Malibu). It looked as if someone had just returned from shopping. She opened the doors under the sink. The waste can was empty but it had a fresh plastic liner.

  Diana walked back through the studio, crossed the hallway, and paused for a moment in her former bedroom; she still slept there whenever she visited David. She checked the chest of drawers and the cupboard but there was nothing there: a few clothes, a rose sachet, some cologne. She looked at the pictures on the top of the chest: she and David in their teens, standing in tall grass, carrying a heavy picnic basket and shielding their eyes from the glare of the sun; David standing at his easel, caught unawares; Diana with her swimming and gymnastics medals, David beaming at her side.

  A more recent picture: she and David standing at the edge of a tree line behind the house, she in the shadows beside him. They had quarreled about it. She told him she would always be in his shadow but that she could handle that fact. At first her words had angered him, though he spoke gently to her, assuring her that she would never be in the shadows. “I don’t mind being the sister of a great painter,” she said, “it’s rather nice.”

  “And his best friend,” he had added, “who will do many great things, greater things than painting.”

  She thought of how they had embraced and made promises to one another. She remembered believing in David, in his trust and affection, if not in his words. The shadows could be a comfortable place, particularly with him nearby.

  The bathroom was devoid of anything human except for a bar of English soap, still in its heavy, expensively-printed cardboard box, toothpaste and brush, a razor, a set of five blades, a plastic container of shaving cream, and a twist-tube of deodorant. It looked like a hotel bathroom after a traveler had set out the few essentials he routinely brought. She had a thought. She got the flashlight from the downstairs closet, checked the drain in the sink and tub, then the drains in the kitchenette and the kitchen sink and powder room sink downstairs. She had no idea what she was looking for, but so far everything had been too neat, too pat, too clean.

  There was nothing. No hair, no residue of blood. She went back upstairs to his bedroom. His clothes were clean, neatly stacked in drawers or neatly hanging in his closet. His bed was made. She put her purse on top of his chest of drawers, slumped down in the armchair next to his favorite window, and looked out into the trees. When he was young he had done that for hours—thinking, musing, daydreaming.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked him once.

  “Everything,” he said.

  The trees were smaller then and you could see for at least two hundred yards down the southern slope of their property. Gulls came up from the coast from time to time looking for an easy meal and the hummingbirds fluttered about the nectar feeders their father had installed beneath the roof at the corners of the house. At night the coyotes took over the canyon, filling the air with their cries.

  Most of all she remembered the light, its changing tints, the ways in which it was filtered by the treetops, the way it glistened on the sea and reflected off the heavy chrome bumpers of cars working their way to the top from the canyon below. David watched it, studied it, talked about it, and painted it.

  “It’s the first thing and the last, the only thing,” he used to say. “Look,” he said to Diana, squeezing the tubes of pigment and mixing reds and yellows and whites on his palette. “Look there . . . see that rose and pink. You can only see those colors in the skies of Italy. When Canaletto painted London he painted it with Italian light. You see it immediately. It’s wonderful, but it’s not real. Even at the height of his powers—doing Greenwich from the Isle of Dogs or looking down river at the City from Lambeth Palace—it’s painfully beautiful but it’s still only art. The skies on his canvases melt your heart with envy and admiration, but they’re not the original. The sun sets every day but people still line up all along the coastline to watch it. They’ve been watching it for millions of years. Every day. And it does
n’t work without the color, without the oranges and pinks and reds. The god has to bleed before he slides into the sea. And we have to know in our hearts and minds and spirits that he’ll return. He always has, each and every one of those days and each and every one of those years. He has to leave and he has to return. Without each step, each act—each one just like the one before—each of those days would lose some part of its special meaning.”

  She could hear him in the back of her head as if he was still sitting beside her. She looked around the room, imagining him there, seeing him there, hearing the timbre of his voice, sensing his presence. She remembered the day she began to study art. She couldn’t do it as he could, but she could read of it, learn of it. It would be her way of staying in his world. He encouraged her, though he never fully understood why she was doing it. He suggested things to her, loaned her books and magazines, talked to her, asked her for her advice and opinions.

  She thought of him in his room as a child, then as a teenager, and finally as an adult. This room was one of the few constants in his life. She leaned forward in the chair, David’s chair, staring at the far wall. She looked a second time and then a third. There was something about the wall and the bed that was not quite right. She thought back through the years and it suddenly struck her. David’s poster. It had been removed and the bed moved slightly to the side.

  Their mother had continually been at David to pick up his clothes; she told him again and again that the laundry hamper was only a few steps away, in the bathroom. She would do his laundry, but he must help her; there was no reason for him to leave his clothes lying on his chair or bed or floor. Time and again she would find him in his room, reading, forgetting about all other things, lost in his thoughts. Sometimes slumped in his chair, sometimes curled up in his window seat, his eyes fixed on the pages of a book, he had passed through the gates of a world no one else could enter. “David, your shirt,” she would say, or “David, your socks,” and he would nod, momentarily remembering.

  Once when she was away he took a drywall knife and cut a large rectangular hole in the wall next to his bed, just on the other side of the bathroom wall. It was large enough that he could slip his clothes into it at a moment’s notice, saving the moments it would have taken him to walk to the bathroom. Everyone would then be happy. He covered the hole with a poster and left the bottom portion untacked. It was one of the secrets he shared with Diana.

  A few months later he built a small, three-sided frame inside the wall. He attached pieces of wood to the parallel studs, making miniature shelves. He stored personal things there—notes from girlfriends, clippings from magazines, pictures, photographs. Diana knew that it was his private place and she had always left it undisturbed.

  She pulled herself up from the chair and hurried to the side of the bed, moving it with her hip. It slid easily. When the headboard was out of the way she could see the hole. David had covered it with a piece of snug plywood on a single, tiny hinge. The plywood was flush with the wall and both it and the center-top hinge were painted the same tone of off-white as the wall. It could easily have been missed by someone going through his room. She used her fingernail to free the piece of plywood. Then she lifted it with her left hand and reached in slowly.

  Twenty minutes later, sitting at the desk in the den, she finished sorting through the images she had found there. She took an empty shoe box from the den closet and filled it with the pictures which David had left behind. Her eyes were moist and as she put the last item in the box she put her hands flat against the desk to stop them from trembling. “So that’s what you were doing,” she whispered audibly. “Did you trade your life for them?”

  Chapter Five

  The LBPD, Investigations Division

  Sunday, 2:00 p.m.

  “I just talked to the D.A., Bill,” Chief Chris Dietrich said. “He thinks it’s a nonstarter. That was the word that he used. You’ve been a street cop for twelve years and a lieutenant for seven. What do you think?”

  “I can see where he’s coming from,” Brighton said. “He’s like a football referee studying the videotape. If there really is no positive evidence supporting a different call, the original call stands. It has to, at least from his point of view, because he’s spending the public’s money and he’s got many more potential cases than he has dollars to prosecute them. In this case there’s nothing substantive jumping out at us. Murder requires motive. If someone killed him they didn’t do it for money. His studio was filled with paintings. Most were in progress, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t valuable. There was eight hundred and fifty dollars in his wallet, credit cards with credit lines from here to Cabo, an Omega watch . . . lots of things to steal.”

  “He lived in L.A. but did most of his work here,” Dietrich said. “Everybody we’ve talked to loved the guy. They used words like quiet, unassuming, decent . . . A gallery owner here said that for an artist he showed no temperament. None whatsoever. So the next question is obvious: if he was pure Frank Capra, with no dark side, why would he ever kill himself?”

  “Very hard to say, Chief. Especially when he was pulling down huge bucks for his work and had a devoted sister. The art critics loved him too. I wish we had a suicide note or a note that said he’s as happy as he could possibly be. The phone call to his sister suggests that he was in distress, but it doesn’t seem like something worth killing yourself over. Why would he do it?”

  “I asked the D.A. that question,” Dietrich said, as he refilled their coffee cups. “Like you said, he’s got to be like the referee. He can never really see everything and never really know everything, so all he can really judge is what he can see and what he can prove. Since none of us can read minds either, the physical facts trump everything. I pressed him a little and he said something about God judging intentions, but men judging results. I’m not sure who he was quoting, but it sounded good. Anyway, he’s trying to be reasonable and think through this situation fairly. You know the D.A.; he’s pretty no-nonsense, but he’s also very experienced when it comes to human behavior. He ran a riff on me about how the rest of us see things versus how artists see things. ‘Maybe the guy was trying to achieve something he couldn’t quite reach,’ he said. ‘In his league the acclaim becomes irrelevant and the money is a foregone conclusion. He understands what he’s trying to do at a far greater level than anybody standing on the sidelines, even if they’re bankrolling him or leading the cheers. If he thinks he’s failed then he’s failed and it could be over something that the rest of us wouldn’t even begin to see. He’s trying to mix his colors in just the right way and it’s not working. He sees something that some dead Frenchman was able to do, but he can’t. He gets buried in praise for a work that made everybody happy when they were all supposed to feel sad. We’re talking world-class talent and that means world-class aspirations and the potential for a world-class feeling of failure.’”

  “I can’t disagree with any of that,” Brighton said.

  “No, neither could I, Bill,” Dietrich said. “But there’s still that red dirt in his mouth and on the backs of his fingers. If we’re talking about facts that’s a big one, one with no quick and easy explanation.”

  “I keep coming back to that too, Chief. What did the D.A. say about it?”

  “Nothing really. Oh, he repeated the fact that this guy was a heavyweight and that the rest of us were mere mortals who could never see things the way he would. People like that, he said . . . at that level . . . they’re different from the rest of us. We put dirt on our gardens; maybe they taste it. They want to paint it so they want to know what it’s all about . . . how it smells . . . how it feels . . . even how it tastes. It doesn’t prove that somebody killed him. It doesn’t prove anything, for that matter, except that this guy lived and worked very differently from the rest of us. Which we already knew.”

  “So you think he’ll want us to drop the investigation entirely?”

  “He doesn
’t have any enthusiasm for it; that’s for sure. At the same time, it’s very clear that he’s anticipating the heat that’s going to come from the media lights and the questions that are going to come from the people in the art community. If the guy wasn’t so well-known and, apparently, so loved, the case would sink like a stone, the waters would close over it, and we’d all move on. But that’s not going to happen. There are going to be questions from both local and national reporters and questions from the people who collected his paintings—prominent people—the kind whose first calls go to people much farther up on the food chain. He can’t simply drop it all and stonewall their questions.

  “What he’ll do is make some comments designed to reduce expectations. He’ll say something like, ‘This is a terrible loss but sometimes, tragically, these things happen.’ Then he’ll backtrack a little and say that he shares the concerns of those who loved David Bennett the man and David Bennett the artist. He’ll announce that, of course, the investigation continues, but that we shouldn’t get our hopes up. He won’t put it that bluntly; he’s too smart for that. He’ll say something like ‘Please join me in praying for some answers to the questions we all have,’ the point being that he’s hoping against hope to find those answers, but the subtext being that we’re going to need the Almighty on this one, because the facts are all pointing in another direction.”

  “So we can continue the investigation . . .”

  “Yes, for the moment at least.”

  Brighton smiled approvingly.

  “However . . . I’m going to take a little different tack on this one.”