by Thomas Perry
Prescott had listened politely, written everything down, then gone directly to the county clerk’s office to see who really owned the apartment building. To his surprise, the tax rolls said Pauline Davis did.
He began to search for Waltek. He visited the landscaping company Waltek had listed on his rental application as his employer. The owner told Prescott that Waltek worked as a trimmer, climbing the big, old trees with a set of spikes on his work shoes and a leather strap, then using a light chain saw to lop off unwanted limbs. He said Waltek had collected his last check a month ago and expressed some vague intention to move inland.
It took Prescott a week of telephone calls to pick up a trace of Waltek. Prescott always made the calls as Vargas had taught him, claiming to be a former employer who owed Waltek some money, or a friend of a friend who had been told to give him a letter. He found a tree service in Riverside where Waltek had applied for a job. There had been no openings, but they had kept his application because he was experienced at a kind of work that not everyone could—or would—do. When Prescott arrived in Riverside, he found that Waltek’s address was not in Riverside. It was on a rural road somewhere in the San Bernardino Mountains. He drove for over an hour up narrow, winding roads, through tiny towns that seemed to exist for the benefit of people who came in other seasons—skiers in the winter, or campers in the summer—but never in the spring. The tall pine trees were shrouded in mist nearly to their tops, and on some of the low, shadowy rock slopes there were still half-melted streaks of dirty snow.
His car was an old Chevy he always had to feed with oil after a couple of hours of driving. As it climbed the steep inclines, it began to grind out a high, whining noise that made him hope that when it broke down he would still be able to disengage the transmission, push it around, and coast back down to the last of the little towns.
Waltek’s house was not even on the main road. It was up a side road so small that it turned into a mud track a quarter mile into the woods, and Prescott had to pull off into a level space in the forest and walk the rest of the way up. As he walked, the cold and damp and solitude began to affect his enthusiasm. He was arriving, unexpected, to dun some guy for six thousand bucks—some guy who worked in a job that probably didn’t pay a lot, and that required him to inhabit the border between courage and recklessness. It also occurred to Prescott that, while a lot of people way out here had guns where they could reach them, Prescott didn’t own one. As Prescott walked higher up the slowly vanishing path, he began to listen for any sound to reach him in the silence. He heard nothing, and that made him more uneasy. He came around a curve and saw the house. It was in a flat, rocky clearing, sheltered by tall trees on all sides. It was small, with siding composed of half logs nailed to boards so that it looked like a cabin. There was no car, and he could see no way for a car to get here, so he guessed that Waltek must park in a spot near where Prescott had left his car and walk the rest of the way. He knocked, but there was no answer. He supposed Waltek must have found a job, and maybe that meant he could pay. He decided that all he could do was wait.
He sat on the low front steps for a time, then gave in to his curios-ity and looked in the side window. The inside of the house consisted of one room at ground level and a loft. The part that he could see was cluttered. There were dishes overflowing from the sink onto the counter, clothes lying on the floor . . . he stopped. What he had thought was a pile of clothes now seemed to be something else.
Prescott moved to another window to look more closely. Then he kicked in the back door and entered. Lying on the floor was the body of Pauline Davis. He could see she had been beaten and probably, in the end, strangled. What had she been doing out here with Waltek? Then he saw the footlocker lying open near the door. There was nothing inside it, and when he bent to look, he saw stains that had to be blood. She had probably been killed in Los Angeles and brought here, so Waltek could bury her where he could keep people away from her grave.
Prescott backed out the door and headed down the path. He made it nearly to the car before he heard the footsteps. He could see Waltek now, just as he had seen Waltek when he’d emerged from the woods—as tall as Prescott, but very wide, with broad shoulders that made his neck seem short, and heavily muscled forearms developed by years of climbing and cutting. The eyes were the part that bothered Prescott all these years later. They were bright and intense, as the eyes of intelligent people often are, but they had a strange opaque quality, as though they were looking inward, the mind always contemplating its own concerns and needs.
Prescott smiled, held out his hand, and said, “Mr. Waltek? My name is Roy Prescott. Our agency—the Vargas Agency—has been retained by a woman named Pauline Davis. She claims that you owe her some money, and she would like to collect it.” It was a gamble, an attempt to convince Waltek, not of the fantastically unlikely story that he had other business here, or was a person who had just happened by, only that he had not looked in the window and seen the body of Pauline Davis. Waltek said, “I do owe her some money. I don’t have all of it right now, but I can give you some. Come up to the house with me.”
Prescott said, “Okay.” He felt something like amazement mixing in with his alarm: this man he had never seen before had decided to kill him, and it would happen in a moment. Prescott judged that Waltek was stronger, and he had no plan for saving himself, but there was no time to wait for things to get better. Prescott walked with Waltek for a few steps, until Waltek’s eyes drifted away from him for an instant. Prescott pushed off with both legs to give force to his jab, and struck with all his strength. The blow went wide and smacked into the side of Waltek’s head below the temple, making the head turn away with its force. Prescott was afraid to take the time to wind up again, so he instantly brought his right elbow back into Waltek’s face. Waltek staggered into it, and his knees wobbled. Then Prescott was on him, delivering punches as hard and quickly as he could until Waltek was down. Waltek rolled to the side and reached for something inside his coat, but Prescott pinned the arm there, picked up a rock with his free hand, and brought it down on Waltek’s head.
Waltek was unconscious. Prescott dragged him to the foot of a nearby tree, brought his arms around the trunk, took out the pair of cheap handcuffs that were the only implement of the trade that Vargas would allow his employees, and snapped them shut on Waltek’s wrists. He went to get his car, but found that Waltek had left a pickup on the road below his, so he could not get out. He had walked about a mile back to a store where there was a telephone.
Now and then Prescott thought about Pauline Davis. Waltek had killed her for practical reasons. He had wanted the six thousand dollars to add to the down payment for his house in the mountains. There had been something about her that made people know instantly that nobody cared about her. Prescott had seen it, and so, he knew, had Waltek. It made her weak, somebody he could kill.
Prescott detected a distracting something in the back of his mind, then remembered what it was. When he had dialed his office number, the machine had said two messages. Millikan had been the first, but he had not heard the second. He lifted the phone off the back of the seat in front of him, took out his credit card again, and dialed. He pressed the code to hear his messages.
“I’m leaving. I left you a couple of good-bye presents at the motel in Marina del Rey.” Prescott sat up, the sound of the voice making him wince. “They’re to remind you never to come after me again.”
That was it, Prescott thought. That was the price of failing.
11
Prescott traveled with a suitcase that had nothing inside it that he couldn’t replace within ten minutes in a department store. He bought dress shirts of 60 percent cotton and 40 percent polyester that said permanent press and meant it, some blue jeans, and some worsted trousers with a razor crease. The sport coats were always summer-weight and dark colored. They were the belongings of a man so ordinary as to seem barely differentiated from others, a fictional person that Prescott had invented to keep from
being too easily noticed and remembered. He picked up his suitcase at the baggage claim at Kennedy Airport, then took a cab into Manhattan to begin his preparations.
He checked into a hotel on Park Avenue and began making his calls to art galleries. In the next twenty-four hours, he spoke with thirty-six men and women whose voices told him they were genuinely convinced that they were experts. On each call, he patiently explained what he wanted and listened carefully to the response. At the end of his thirty-six calls, he had heard one name twelve times and no other name more than three times. He made three calls to curators of contemporary collections at museums to see whether they had a different sense of things, but it became clear to him that the voices were essentially the same. The name Prescott heard so many times was Cara Lee Satterfield. He dialed her number, listened to her quick, businesslike hello. He introduced himself, told her that he wondered if she would be willing to speak with him about a commission for a special kind of piece—a picture of a man he would describe.
She said in an unhappy monotone, “Did you get my name from the police?”
Prescott said, “No, from an art gallery. Do the police know you?”
“Come to my studio and we’ll talk.”
“Now?”
“Four o’clock. I’m working now.”
Prescott took a cab to the address she gave him, stepped out onto the street, and looked up. It was a brick building that had at some point had some business purpose, but the upper windows were too big for a business, and the frames were too new and expensive to have been from that era. He went into the man-sized door set into the larger garage door, and found himself facing a freight elevator. He stepped into it and pressed the UP button. The elevator rose two stories and stopped at a steel door with a big face on it that looked like a photograph. Prescott looked more closely. The face was an extremely realistic painted portrait of a grandfatherly man with a beard and glasses, crinkle lines at the corners of his wise old eyes, and an expression of mild puzzlement. He seemed to Prescott to be saying, “What do you want here—it wouldn’t be something that isn’t so good for you, would it?”
The thin woman who opened the door looked about forty. She wore jeans, a sweatshirt, and a pair of sneakers. Her hair had been chestnut brown, but it had been allowed to gray, so there were bright silver streaks in the tightly tied ponytail. Her face had no makeup and it had a bare look as though it had just been scrubbed. She gave a perfunctory half smile as she looked at him sharply. “Mr. Prescott?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Come in.”
He entered and looked at the loft. The high windows and skylight above threw a bright, even light everywhere, bouncing off the white walls to leave no shadows. There was a huge space to his right occupied by several easels, a big workbench cluttered with tubes of paint, brushes soaking in coffee cans, and assorted palette knives and rags. There was a second bench with a vise, a miter box, a table saw, a few tools.
She led him past that area, through what looked like a living room set on display in a department store. The furniture was modern, simple in its lines, and upholstered in a coarse black fabric. There he could see that a set of stairs led above to a wide balcony with another steel door that was open. Through it, he could see part of a carpeted hallway that seemed to have at least four doorways leading off it, and at the end, a big room with a vaulted ceiling, bookcases and furniture, and a huge window with green things growing on a balcony beyond.
He gravitated to the walls, where finished portraits hung. From a distance, they were different enough from one another to be the work of several painters, but as he drew nearer, subtle similarities appeared. It was not a similarity of feature, but of eye: the artist’s interest in the curve of a young girl’s cheekbone, the mottled texture of an old woman’s skin, somehow the same interest expressed with the same intensity. This was a calm, unhurried treatment, with no flattering smoothing over of features, but the effect was more than flattering. The precise rendering was a fascinated elucidation of the creature who was being recorded and preserved. Cara Lee Satterfield stood a dozen feet behind him, waiting patiently while he looked. He reluctantly relinquished his gaze at a picture of a young woman with shiny blond hair. He was not sure how he could tell, but the woman was proud of the hair, thinking about it at the moment of the portrait. “You’re the best I’ve seen alive,” he said without a smile.
“Thank you,” she said.
“It’s not exactly a compliment, it’s more on the order of a congratulation,” he said. “A waste of breath too, because you know it.”
She looked at him, puzzled, but did not deny it. “I don’t think that’s a compliment either.”
“Nope,” he said. “It’s not. People have what they have. When what they have is something special, you can always tell they’ve had to work very hard for it. If it’s this special, they’ve gone more distance than anybody can go just by working.”
“That sounded positive rather than negative, so I’ll thank you,” she said. “Tell me about your commission.”
“It’s what I said on the telephone,” Prescott answered. “I want a picture of a man I describe to you.”
“Who is he?”
“My business is finding people who have done bad things,” he said.
“I didn’t ask about business,” she said testily. “I asked about him.”
“He’s a young guy, late twenties, probably. He gets paid to kill people. I’ve seen him, watched him for a couple of hours before I knew who he was. Now his image is in my mind, and I want you to put it into a picture.”
“If you found your way here, someone must have told you about me. You must know that I’m always pretty busy,” she said. “What made you think I would do it?”
Prescott said, “I asked people who was the best, not who needed the commission.” He added carefully, “I checked with galleries to find out what they get for your work. Of course I would expect to pay much more for—”
“I don’t want to talk about money just yet.” She stared at Prescott’s eyes. “You can see him, still?”
“Yes.”
“Have you talked to him?”
“Yes,” he said. “A few times. I’ve been doing pretty well at getting to know him.”
She kept her gaze on him, unblinking, but she was no longer focused on his eyes. “All right. We’ll start it and settle the price later, when I decide what it is.”
“When?”
She seemed to think the question was beneath answering. She sat down on a couch, pulled her feet under her, picked up a sketch pad and pencil from the end table, and began to work as she spoke. “Let’s start with general outline, simplest stuff. You talk, I’ll listen.”
Prescott sat in the armchair facing her. “His hair is straight, dark brown. His forehead is high and narrow, but shaped, so you can tell there’s a very slight ridge where the eyebrows are that disappears as you move in above the nose. His chin has no cleft, but it comes out a little in a slight horizontal oval, the way some chins with clefts do. The nose is thin and narrow, but the nostrils have a slight flare to them.” She was sketching furiously as he spoke, and he could tell that his curiosity was going to make this experience miserable. He added, “His ears are small, kind of rounded, and close to his head.”
“Eyes big or small?”
“Average, and not particularly close-set, either.”
“Tell me about his mouth.”
“It’s narrow, with the lower lip a little bit thicker than the upper—not red or overly full, or strange.”
“How about this part of his face, right here?” She put one hand across her face just above her mouth to touch both cheekbones at once lightly, with thumb and forefinger.
“Only slightly wider than the rest of the face, tapering gradually to the chin.”
She worked in silence for a few minutes while Prescott began to feel the curiosity tormenting him again. Then she stood up, spun the pad around, and stuck the pencil in his han
d. “Here. Fix the lines where they’re wrong.”
He looked at the picture in surprise. “Me? I’ll ruin it.”
“So ruin it. This is just a preliminary step to get the shapes and sizes of things right. Study your memory and make marks. Too wide, too narrow? Eyes too big, whatever.” She tossed a gum eraser onto the pad in his lap. “Take your time.”
He was disconcerted. The drawing already looked enough like the man to be almost recognizable. He closed his eyes and brought back the image, watched the man sitting behind the console in the lighted lobby, his face unconcerned, at ease while he waited to kill his companion. Prescott began to make lines, faint and tentative at first, then more sure and bold when he saw that the lines made the resemblance clearer.
While he worked, he was aware of her. She was moving around in the kitchen area, moving things, opening cupboards and closing them. After a while he smelled coffee, and she appeared with a big tray that had two cups and a thermos pot, and several kinds of tea cakes. She set it on a table nearby.
She looked over his shoulder. “Good. Very, very good. Leave it now and have some coffee.” She pointed at the table. “You don’t strike me as the tea-cake type, but they won’t hurt you.” She poured him a cup of coffee and went to the couch to take up the pad. She used the gum eraser and pencil and worked on the drawing.
He said, “This isn’t what I expected.”
“Yes, it is,” she said. “You could have gone to a police composite artist if you had wanted something simple. You went to a lot of trouble to find a real portrait painter.”