Lesson In Red

by Maria Hummel

  “He was furious tonight.”

  “Shocked, too,” Ray said in a thoughtful tone.

  “What about Erik? You think Hal warned him?”

  “Erik flinched before I even pressed play,” said Ray. “He was dreading it. Covering it up with his abstinence and Fatburger stories, but the whole time his leg was shaking.”

  “He knew what he did to her,” I said, my mouth sour.

  “He knew,” confirmed Ray. “But I think he witnessed it today for the first time.”

  I disagreed, but I didn’t articulate why. You know when you’re hurting someone. Someone’s body beneath your body. For a moment we sat together, in the steam of the grill, in the division this created between us.

  “The heart can justify a wrong for a long time,” Ray went on, “especially if you stop seeing a person and only see a cause.”

  “And his cause was . . . ?”

  “Brenae, in Erik’s mind, was his creation,” said Ray. “Think of it. Everything he taught her about art. Every video he shot of her. Every door he opened for her at LAAC. He can’t finish his own work, but he finished her.” He paused. “Maybe she didn’t need him anymore, and he wanted her back.”

  This version of Erik and Brenae’s story hadn’t occurred to me. “You mean he was jealous of her success,” I said.

  “Not exactly,” Ray said. “He didn’t want to lose his power over her. His power to make her.”

  “When you asked him about forcing her into sex, do you think he was lying to himself? Or to you?”

  “Some combination.”

  I told him about Erik’s frequent disappearances to the restroom. Ray said he’d noticed the burst blood vessels in Erik’s face, had concluded that he was probably a drinker and that that contributed to his two different selves, the easygoing Erik and the manipulative one. This made sense to me. It all made sense, what Ray was saying. It should have felt satisfying, figuring out some things together, but I couldn’t get Brenae’s face out of my mind, or the chilling fact that someone—knowing she was dead—had erased the art she’d made.

  “Killing her would make a spectacle,” I said softly. “But staging a suicide and cleaning up after—it could end her life and career without pointing the finger at anyone.”

  “Very deliberate for someone like Erik,” said Ray. “And flawless in its execution.”

  “Someone who wanted to protect him, then?”

  “Maybe to protect him or LAAC.”

  I thought of Hal. Of Layla. Of Pearson, the heavy, methodical swing of his mallet.

  “Thirty pages of notes and labs from one of the best homicide units in the country,” I said. “They determine a suicide. What are they missing?”

  I could see the doubt in Ray’s face. It turned the corners of his mouth down and tightened his eyes. “You sound like a reporter,” he reflected after a moment. His tone was not derisive, but there was a caution in it.

  “So talk to me like a detective. What are they missing? You must have a theory.”

  “I don’t have theories. Theories tend to obscure facts,” said Ray. “I have a client who wants to know exactly how Hal Giroux responded to a cry for help and a death at his school so that she can force him to resign and he can’t bounce and build a museum downtown. All I’ve ever really needed to find out is when Lesson in Red was shot, who erased the files, and why. Today brought me some steps closer, but it didn’t clinch anything.”

  I thought about Janis, Ray’s “client,” wanting dirt so she could unseat Hal from his throne at LAAC and stop his plan downtown. It was an underhanded move, not her usual method. Janis had never been afraid to say anything to anyone’s face. Why wouldn’t she insist to the city that Hal find another location?

  Almost as soon as I entertained this idea, I knew. The city wanted a big, shiny new museum, not the ragtag old Rocque, with its leaky, garage-like galleries, its bewildering and occasionally offensive art. Not with its recent murder. Janis couldn’t take down Hal in this culture war without extra ammunition. Yet still. At the heart of all this was a young woman in pain, not a negotiation over territory.

  I asked Ray what he’d found. As I listened to his answer, I stared at the grease on my empty plate, its dingy swirls.

  “Three of them hadn’t seen the video before,” Ray said. “Harder to tell with Layla. She had a look on her face like she’d been expecting it all along. Her motivation to erase the file would be to shield Erik. Simple.”

  “Not that simple,” I countered, remembering her outrage. “Why would she shield him? Why wouldn’t she want him burned at the stake?”

  “No idea.” Ray chuckled. “So say it was one of the others—why would they erase something without watching it?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t one of the crew,” I said. “Maybe it was someone else at LAAC. Maybe Hal.”

  “I don’t think so. You need some software and know-how,” said Ray. “Hal has a reputation for being a technophobe. He doesn’t even own a cell phone.” He paused. “I’m still puzzling over Layla’s reaction.” He crossed his arms and tightened them, buckling forward like he was sick to his stomach. “Like that. The whole video. She’s keeping something back.”

  The body language reminded me of Layla in Nelson’s coupe earlier, and I told Ray what I’d spotted between her and the gallerist.

  Ray stopped chewing, pushed his plate away, and asked me to repeat everything I’d seen.

  “It didn’t look like the first time,” I admitted, and wondered aloud if Layla was upgrading boyfriends from Erik to the gallerist, gamely overlooking the complication that Nelson was her best friend’s dad.

  “Maybe,” said Ray. With what seemed like forced casualness, he pulled his plate back and began eating again. But his movements were robotic, and the meat didn’t stay on his fork, so he balled up the tortilla with his hand and bit into it. He caught me watching him, and his eyes went soft and lazy. “You should get another one,” he said, gesturing at my plate.

  He was trying to change the subject from Layla and Nelson. Something about them bothered him. Their age difference?

  “You think Erik knows about them?” I said.

  He swallowed. “No.”

  “Do you think Brenae did?”

  “Hard to say,” he said carefully. He asked me to give him an exact play-by-play of my day, from the moment I walked in, the latte from Layla, my conversations, to looking for the key in Nelson’s office, to bringing in the shoes.

  There was something else, I realized, as I related the whole day to Ray, some other detail of the morning that was bothering me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I just had an intuition that what I had missed was obvious, and I ought to be pointing it out.

  As Ray and I sat in the booth together, talking intently across a wreckage of plates and napkins, I wondered what we would look like to strangers. Coworkers? A couple? Despite the measured course of our conversation, I knew that Ray’s eyes were on me a lot, and that I blushed at odd intervals, sensing his attention. This awareness built alongside my interest in the discussion, like a chord following a melody. I blinked it away, returning my mind to the task between us. We were coworkers, that was all. We had discovered much in one day, and yet Brenae’s death seemed muddier than ever.

  We agreed it was best for us to part ways at the restaurant and for me to walk alone to my car, lest we be seen together if any of the students or Hal returned to the Westing. Tomorrow I would continue observing at the gallery, and Ray said he would transcribe the interviews for Janis, and ask her about how he should proceed.

  “I need to talk to her, too,” I said. “If I want to write about this, I should tell her.”

  “Do you?” said Ray.

  “I’m giving myself the week to decide,” I said. When the words came to my mouth, I intended them to be about the story, but with Ray looking at me so hard, they gathered a different weight, and I faltered before finishing the sentence.

  We bused our plates, then I accompanied Ray to the
door, chatting about something meaningless to cover up my embarrassment at the sudden intensity of the moment before.

  “You sure you don’t mind walking three quarters of a mile?” Ray asked me, and then grinned, his face brightening. “I guess I’m asking the wrong person. Though I wish I could plant a few maple trees to shade you.”

  “Maybe I should aspire to jacaranda these days,” I said.

  “Should you?”

  It was a stupid conversation, but we both were smiling. Both uneager to leave. From behind the counter, the prep cook nodded good-bye to us, then flipped a tortilla into a warming iron and pressed down.

  “Sorry for the long phone call,” Ray said. “My nephew. My brother’s son. You know.”

  I didn’t know much except that the boy lived in North Carolina and that Ray clearly cared for him, but I nodded.

  “He needed help analyzing a recess game,” said Ray.

  “Must have been a complicated game,” I said. I’d listened to more than ten minutes of interviews.

  “Lots of rules. Lots of changes to the rules,” he said. “And some little twerp who always cheats anyway.”

  We faced each other beside the door.

  I laughed. “I guess nothing has changed.”

  “No,” he said, holding my eyes for a beat too long before turning away. “It hasn’t.”

  13

  I’D DONE SOME DIGGING OVER my summer in Vermont into the death of Ray’s half brother. Every time I searched online for information on Calvin Teicher, I felt like I was trespassing on a property that did not belong to me. I had to take breaks to pet the dogs or rip at the mint overtaking the garden or make iced tea. I made sure to erase my online history so that my mother didn’t spy on what I was doing.

  First, I found the small news report of Calvin’s death. A Boyle Heights hotel. Evidence of sleeping pills in his system. The sink bloody where Calvin’s head had smashed it, his body found fully clothed, prone, in an overflowing tub.

  Then I found a picture of Calvin—a small and blurry snapshot for a college publication. He had the same blue eyes as Ray, but they looked out from a sharper face: His chin was pointy, his cheekbones high, his hair thin and cropped short. He wore tiny glasses. More keen argument and wit than absurd humor and tenderness. A brother to Ray, but a different make.

  I even called the Boyle Heights hotel where he’d died, pretending I was delivering a pizza, to find out if there was a back entrance where someone might have sneaked in and out without being seen by the front desk. There was.

  And I looked up Steve Goetz again, seeking a connection that Ray had hinted at during a conversation I had had with him last spring. But Steve Goetz and Calvin had attended Yates University in different years, and there was no obvious link between them. There was no apparent motivation for anyone to kill Calvin.

  All roads led to the conference that Calvin had attended in Los Angeles. He had come to speak on a panel about Britain’s nineties art scene, with a focus on the role of a young artist and dealer named James Compton. In his thesis, Calvin made the case that Compton’s gallery, fueled by his edgy, egalitarian worldview, ultimately changed the map of London, spurring trendy resettlement of once abandoned areas and vast increases in real estate prices. He also wrote, “Compton liked dangerous friends, friends who smuggled ether from Poland for him, friends who sold him explosives. Friends who came looking for him after he died, claiming giant debts.”

  I copied that down when I read it. I copied it into a little blue notebook devoted to Calvin’s death, my self-conscious attempt at documenting a case I’d had no business trying to puzzle out. But by the time I returned to L.A., almost three months had passed without any further word from Ray, and I left the notebook in a box I still hadn’t managed to unpack. I unearthed it now and flipped through the pages, noting my self-consciously tight, readable hand. As if I had expected someone to find it someday, and that someone to see that I had tried to understand him.

  I tossed the notebook back in the box and looked around my bedroom, with its one nightstand and one lamp, the obvious solo occupancy. Books spilled over every surface. A woman was supposed to know how to make a home, and I just wanted a place to think and read and sleep.

  Prints of night-city skylines circled me on the walls. Bangkok, Cairo, London, Vancouver, their skyscrapers aglow with lights. Globetrotting dreams courtesy of the apartment’s owner. What would I hang now? What images would tell people who I was inside? When I closed my eyes, I saw the case file, I saw the gallery, I saw the crew sorting shoes. I saw the proprietary way Nelson reached for Layla’s breast, and the compliance in her face as she bent to him. I also saw Ray, wherever he was in L.A., staring into space, seeing these same things, trying to work the puzzle together into a picture.

  When you’re doing a puzzle, you often start with the edges. The frame. The frame dictates the composition: how far or close up you see the castle or horse in the picture and how it’s arranged in relation to everything else. In the death report, the frame was Brenae’s suicide—where she did it, how she did it, how she died. The detectives had looked closely, intently, at the series of actions that preceded her taking her life. They’d interviewed witnesses and found evidence that proved Brenae’s death at her own hand.

  Listening to the students today, however, the frame changed for me. How Brenae died didn’t exactly matter. How she had lived mattered more: what she wanted, what she needed, whom and what she loved. In her last week alive, she had reached out to Janis Rocque for help. She had also contacted her brother. Why were Janis and Davi the only ones she’d sought, when she knew so many people at LAAC? Why did she distrust Layla so much? What had happened in London?

  Wherever Ray was now, under the same smudged moon and orange sky, listening to the same police helicopter begin to ratchet through the night, he must have been muddling over the same questions. Or was he? I couldn’t help thinking that his frame was different, that his picture of today’s discoveries was different, and that somehow it also included his brother.

  14

  THE CREW WAS ALREADY WORKING when I arrived at the gallery the morning after the interviews. Pearson acknowledged me with a nod. The others ignored me. They were preoccupied with the shoes. Sorting, piling, stringing, each falling into a specific role. If the video had had an effect on them, they were endeavoring to hide it. The backlash was like a creature locked away in another room—invisible, except as a thousand tensions in the air.

  Pearson resumed his role as their manager. All engineering questions went straight to him, and he answered with calm directives. His column of destroyed shoes rose in the gallery’s center, exactly his height—he must have worked on it all night—but he avoided it studiously, as if it were an embarrassing friend who disclosed too much.

  Layla was the chief communicator, moving between Zania, Erik, and Pearson, making sure everyone had the materials they needed. She often stood back and took in the whole scene, hands on her hips, and then, shaking her head, went about organizing new piles. She changed her demeanor for each interaction: with Pearson, she was polite and deferential; with Zania, prone to mutual disgust at the shoes; with Erik, contemptuous and confused. She disregarded everything Erik said, but I often caught her appraising him out of the corner of her eye and slowly tucking her red hair behind her ear.

  Erik wore rumpled clothes and an aggrieved expression. He wrenched at the rising columns, chucked a shoe so hard it scuffed the wall, and, as he’d done the day before, disappeared frequently to the bathroom. And yet there was no doubt he was the master maker here, wiring and building with his sensuous, expert hands. No matter what Erik touched, it looked better after. The ugliest penny loafers he wrapped and layered like clusters of grapes. A huge scuffed basketball shoe sprouted a bouquet of smaller sneakers from its ankle hole. He moved fast from task to task, whistling tunelessly through his teeth, his curly hair tumbling in his eyes. He rarely stopped to evaluate his creations. Once his hands were empty, he hastened to f
ill them again.

  Zania seemed the most engaged, even relieved, by her tasks. She was principal sorter of the unusual, pulling out her finds—a hot-pink pump, a Roman sandal. She did not immediately share her discoveries, but piled them up secretly, off in a corner, and went through them a second time, rejecting many before showing the chosen ones to others. The whole time Zania worked, she looked disdainful, her hawk-like face closed and her movements abrupt, except for the moment she found a rare shoe, and then her expression brightened like a child’s spotting sea glass at the beach.

  The gallery acted as a fifth character in their play. Though the white room was designed to become an unobtrusive stage to any kind of artwork, the height of the walls and ceiling mattered to the proportions of the cathedral. The light mattered, too, where it pooled. Pearson measured everything and paced, looking across the room from different vantage points. He even pulled out a light meter and stared at it, calculating. His primary ruminative state was splayed-leg stance, his palm coursing over his bald head.

  The crew didn’t talk much, so in the lull I turned to the computer and began digging into LAAC’s history. If anyone asked, I would say I was thinking of applying to school there, but in reality, I was curious about Zania’s claims about women’s experiences as students and artists. I checked the school’s press releases on its website, compiling a preliminary list of recipients for scholarships and awards. Ray was right. It appeared, from what I had so far, that more than two-thirds of the honorees were male.

  I also found the archive of the LAAC campus newspaper and searched through it for pieces on campus sexual assault. There were several articles, mostly vague updates by the administration. Yet one described five cases of campus date rape, and the school’s sluggish and incomplete response to them. A flurry of letters to the editor supported and denied the claims. A few letter writers shared their own stories.