I stopped the Morris next to a Lotus Elan in a little clearing under some eucalyptus trees and had started to open the door when my eye was caught by something moving toward me through the leaf-strained sunshine at a menacing gait. I blinked and it had disappeared. Then it was there again, a piebald Great Dane making slightly better than ramming speed in my direction. I had second thoughts about getting out of the car and rolled up the window.
The big dog came to a splay-footed stop with his long tongue lolling wetly and was probably wondering whether to eat the whole car just to get a taste of me when we both heard a commanding voice call: “King!”
A check of my dog tag told me it wasn’t me. King turned around in a single movement and bounded toward a tall man coming to the car from the house.
He was dressed for riding in a musical-comedy sort of way. Impeccably tailored jodhpurs rose from polo boots as if they were one unit he’d been ladled into, and the whole effect was topped off with a silk paisley-printed scarf that seemed to be holding his head on. His face suggested a minor Russian prince who’d been born under a sun lamp. The swollen veins in his fine Romanov nose hinted loudly of too many bottles of twelve-year-old Scotch, and the tinkle of ice cubes from the glass in his left hand reinforced the idea. His right hand was taken up by a riding crop that had never bothered a horse.
“Don’t worry, old boy,” he said, leaning down and peering at me. “King wouldn’t hurt a fly. I keep him mostly for effect.” Behind him, King sat down and besieged a flea behind his left ear as if to prove that he, too, had human foibles. “I’m Rudolph Verrein. Can I help you?”
Rather than hold the interview in my car, which King could have carried away and buried, anyway, I slipped out of the Morris, keeping Verrein between me and the dog.
“My name’s Joe Goodey, Mr. Verrein,” I said, giving him a peek at my credentials. “I’m over at The Institute trying to find out who killed Katie Pierce.”
The change in his expression was instantaneous. No longer was it languid. His eyes took on a hard, Baltic glitter, and if he’d had a mustache it would have bristled. “Ah!” he barked. “They told you I did it, did they? Who was it? Don Moffitt? Pops? Perhaps Jim Carey? They’re all charlatans and liars!”
“No, no … wait,” I said soothingly. “It’s not like that at all. It just occurred to me that perhaps you could tell me some things about The Institute and Katie Pierce that I couldn’t learn over there.”
“Ah, Katya,” he said softly, and the Cossack bluster was gone. His mobile features were a study in Slavic tenderness. “Poor, poor Katya.” I half expected him to whip out a gypsy violin. But instead he gulped his drink, and bisected an ice cube with large, white teeth. “Come,” said Verrein with a flourish, “I will do what I can to help you. I can tell you a lot.” He spun and stalked toward his house.
The interior of Verrein’s house was as spectacular as the outside. It gave the impression of having been built around a natural outcropping of rough granite, laced with a spectacular array of exotic house plants and set in a frame of oiled teak, stripped pine and the ubiquitous plate glass. A cunningly contrived indoor waterfall trickled down a pile of expensive rocks to a free-form swimming pool set in a grassy terrace on the seaward side of the house. I put a finger in the waterfall; it was blood warm.
I followed Verrein into a large airy studio like a glass box on the north side of the house. It was Spartan in the extreme, containing only a paint-splattered easel, a few Eames chairs and a naked sixteen-year-old girl sitting on a padded stool reading a comic book and popping black grapes into a softly carnivorous little mouth. Her smoky eyes registered my presence but showed no signs of modesty or alarm.
“Rudy, darling,” she said, stretching showily, “haven’t we done enough today? I promised to go surfing.”
As I passed his easel, I noticed that he had half-finished an idealized head and shoulders portrait in which the girl looked like a hip Scarlett O’Hara. Presumably, she was naked because Verrein was trying to portray the inner woman.
“Of course,” said Verrein, with the deference money and beauty attract. “You run along, and I’ll see you at the same time tomorrow morning.” She reached a hand down beside the stool, and as if by sleight of hand she was suddenly dressed in a pair of skin-tight Levis and a midnight-blue velvet top. She must have saved a lot on underwear bills.
“Kelly De Freese—Joe Goodey,” said Verrein by way of introduction. “Kelly is making her debut in Carmel this summer,” he added. “And I am immortalizing her beauty. Kelly, Joe is a detective from San Francisco. He’s come down here to solve a murder.’’
She murmured: “Oh,” as if he’d said that I liked blueberry pie and wore size nine and a half D shoes. “Hello. See you.” And she was gone.
“Does Mama know that little Kelly sits for her portrait in the buff, Mr. Verrein?” I asked.
“Call me Rudy,” he said. “Of course. It’s the only way I paint women. That’s Violet De Freese up there.” I followed his finger to a large portrait of a Rubens-esque blonde lying back on a brass bed showing a lot of skin. I could see where Kelly got the eyes and a few other things.
“Sit down,” he said, indicating one of the chairs. “Now, how can I help you?”
“As I understand it,” I said, “you were very close to Hugo Fischer and The Institute in the months before Katie Pierce died, but that you’ve fallen out with them. Would you mind telling me why?”
“What did they say?” he demanded with a slightly cunning expression on his narrow face.
“Jerry Wildenradt said it was because you spent most of your time chasing girls at The Institute,” I said. “He added that he’d like to break your neck.”
To my surprise, Verrein responded not angrily but softly. “Ah, Jerry,” he said. “We were good friends once.”
“He didn’t seem to think so,” I said. “What’s your version?”
“I’d have to go quite a way back to explain that,” he said, gesturing expressively with a hand that shot out in a flourish and ended up drumming on his brown forehead with three fingers. He looked pensive.
“Tell me,” I said and put on my listening-attentively face.
Leaving out a certain amount of Slavic embroidery, Verrein’s story was that when The Institute had come to squat in J. B. Carter’s mansion, he hadn’t seen much charm in having the neighborhood overrun with drug addicts, criminals and other undesirables. He’d signed petitions, chipped in for lawyer’s fees and rained protests on the head of Sheriff Dominguez. All to no avail. Fischer was on perfectly sound legal ground, and all the antis could do were seethe and hope that one of the dopers would do something to get The Institute thrown out by the authorities.
But then came a personal invitation from Hugo Fischer urging Verrein and other influential neighbors to visit The Institute for an open house. Verrein at first rejected the idea, but then decided to go along—partly out of curiosity.
But—surprise, surprise—Hugo Fischer turned on his massive charm, the residents of The Institute couldn’t have been more appealing and winsome, and Rudolph Verrein was converted almost instantly from an enemy to a new supporter of The Institute.
“The most impressive thing,” said Verrein, “was that Hugo and the others seemed to be living such clean, worthwhile lives without the compromises which seem to be necessary to the rest of us.” A fluid gesture included Mama De Freese’s portrait on the wall and the unfinished one of Kelly. “I’m not kidding myself that this is what an artist should be doing.”
Once clasped to Hugo’s bosom and initiated in the mysteries of The Institute, Verrein became a very tight friend indeed. “I painted that portrait of Hugo,” he said, “which is the best thing I’ve ever done, became chairman of the sponsors group and spent more time over there than I did here. I think it was the happiest time of my life.” He looked wistful.
“So what happened?” I asked.
“To this day, I really don’t know,” he said, and his bewilderment s
eemed genuine. “Things were going so well. I was happy, and I had great plans for a really splendid art exhibition that would have brought money and good publicity to The Institute. But then, suddenly, overnight, I was frozen out. I was an enemy. People I’d come to love like brothers and sisters spat when my name was mentioned.” The memory brought pain with it.
“When was this?”
“Early last December,” he said. “The art exhibition was to have been at Christmas time. But of course there was none.” He looked like a kid who’d been crossed off Santa’s list.
“But you don’t know why you were frozen out?” I persisted. “It couldn’t have been over girls at The Institute as Wildenradt said?”
He thought about that for a long time, massaging his lean jaw lovingly. “No, I honestly don’t think so. I’ll be honest with you, I like girls, young girls.” He peeked at me to see how I was taking this revelation. “And there is no shortage of friendly young girls at The Institute.”
“Could the big freeze have had anything to do with Katie?” I asked, not really hoping for much from the question.
He started to answer no automatically, but then paused. “I don’t think so,” he said, “but…”
“But what?”
“Well, something a bit strange did happen just before … before I wasn’t welcome at The Institute any more. I didn’t really know Katie very well. When she’d first come to live there her mind was so confused that it was hard to communicate with her at all. But,” Verrein went on, “the longer Katie stayed at The Institute, the better she seemed to get, and I began to notice that this was no ordinary girl. There was something very special about her. You could call it soul, if you like. And as autumn came on I got to know her and to like her very much. You know, Katie was a very good singer. And she played guitar, too. I can still remember her sitting on the terrace, playing and singing ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.’ You know, the Bob Dylan song.”
I nodded appreciatively just to keep him going. He closed his eyes soulfully and swayed a little, recapturing the scene. I could almost see it myself.
“Katie and I became quite close,” he said. “I liked her, and I’m pretty sure she thought of me as something more than a friend.”
There must have been some doubt in my expression because Verrein drew himself up like a goosed librarian and insisted: “I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. Katie wasn’t ready for that yet. I’m not saying that one day…but I’ swear to you, at that time there was nothing between us but affection, purely affection.”
“I believe you,” I said, as sincerely as possible, not adding that there were thousands who wouldn’t. “But you were saying that something strange happened, possibly because you were…close to Katie.”
He let the little hesitation pass. “Yes, it was very odd,” he said. “I began to notice that some of the old-timers had begun to give me hard looks when I came around the mansion. These were mostly former drug addicts. I’ve never found it easy to understand the drug addict’s mentality, anyway. To me, The Institute had gone a long way past the stage of just drying them out and keeping them away from the needle.”
“You began to sense that someone wasn’t too happy with your behavior,” I said.
“To put it mildly,” he said. “I began to encounter real hostility at The Institute. Even Tommy Carter seemed to be unfriendly. At first, I shrugged it off, but then, late in November, Don Moffitt got in on the act.”
“He was trying to protect Katie’s chastity, too?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Verrein said. “I’ve never liked Moffitt. I think he’s a thug. And when he started to lean on me about Katie, I’m afraid I overreacted. I told him to stay the hell out of my business.”
“And then the iron curtain came down,” I said.
“No,” Verrein said. “Not exactly. You see,” he said with a self-mocking laugh, “I was convinced that I was a pretty important person around The Institute, and that I could handle professional hard nuts like Moffitt.”
“But you were wrong,” I prompted.
“I guess so,” he said. “Nothing happened at first, except I kept catching a lot of hostility from the dope fiends. Moffitt pretended I didn’t exist, but I didn’t mind that. But then one day early in December I was sitting in the Horizon Room with some friends when Hugo came wandering in and said casually: ‘Oh, Rudy, about that art exhibition thing you’ve been planning: it’s off.’ I didn’t understand at first, but then it finally got through to me that something on which I’d spent months of work and string-pulling was suddenly, arbitrarily canceled.”
“That was tough,” I said.
“It was worse than that,” he said. “To me it was a tragedy, and I tried to get Hugo to give me a reason. But he wouldn’t. He just said something about The Institute having more important things to do than mess around with such artsy-craftsy bullshit, and left me standing there. I went home feeling sick about it. And the next day when I tried to drive to the mansion, the security men wouldn’t let me through. They said my name wasn’t on the list of approved guests.”
“Fischer disappeared you, eh?” I asked, not too surprised to hear it.
“I just don’t know,” said Verrein gloomily. “I don’t want to believe it, but…”He made a palms-up gesture of helplessness and dismay. “I tried to call Hugo; I wrote him letters, but nothing happened. I was a nonperson as far as The Institute was concerned. But do you know what I think?” He looked at me intensely.
“No, what?”
“I don’t think it was Hugo at all. Oh, he made the decision, all right, but I’m sure that some of those mental cripples around Hugo poisoned him against me. I know it! But what can I do?” He slumped in his chair, the pugnacity going out of him.
“And you never saw Katie again.” I asked. But he surprised me.
“Yes,” he said. “Just once. One night about the middle of December—it was raining, I remember, a filthy night—I heard a knocking at the back door, and it was Katie. She’d walked all the way from the mansion, and she was soaking.”
He paused, as if reliving the experience, then started again. “I brought her in, got her a towel and one of my robes, and we sat in front of the fire while her clothes dried. She said she’d just come over to see me, to have a chat, but there was something more than that. Something wrong. She wasn’t the same Katie. I almost suspected…”
“That she’d gone back on pills?”
He didn’t like the idea, but he said: “Yes. But even if that were true, there was something else. I could have sworn that Katie was afraid of something—really afraid. I tried to find out what, but she wouldn’t talk about it. She started to, I think, several times, but then she would stop. She took my guitar down from the wall and sang some songs. You should have seen her, her hair still a bit wet and steaming from the heat of the fire, sitting there in my robe in the firelight, strumming the guitar and singing softly. It was…” He was lost in the image, and then the shadow of something unpleasant passed over his long features.
He broke out of his troubled reverie. “I couldn’t help it,” he said. “She was so beautiful. I reached out to touch her, and suddenly she jumped up from the hearth, screaming like a madwoman. Believe me, I didn’t mean…I only…she frightened the life out of me. Before I could do anything to calm her, she pulled on her damp clothes and ran into the night. I never saw her again—alive—after that night.”
He looked up at me, and we both sat in silence for a moment.
“Did you tell this to the police or to the Brazewell operatives?” I asked finally.
He shook his head. “No one,” he said. “It was a very personal experience, and there didn’t seem to be any point. It couldn’t bring Katie back to life.”
I agreed with him there. I seemed to have gotten about as much out of Rudolph Verrein as I was going to for the moment, so I stood up to leave him alone with his memories. He didn’t say anything, just followed me out to the Morris and watched me
climb in. King stood in the background looking like a dog that had just missed a good meal.
“One thing,” I said. “When did you get that brute?”
“Last December,” he said. “Just after I…left The Institute.”
“You didn’t think Fischer would send his lads over here to harass you, do you?”
Verrein pondered that one for a moment, then said: “No, I don’t think Hugo would. But I’m not so sure of some of the others. There are some pretty desperate characters over there, you know, and some of them are not fond of me.”
“You’ve got a point there,” I said. “So long.” But then I thought of something. “Is there any message you want me to give Fischer for you?”
His face brightened. “Yes,” he said. “You can tell him that I…that I…ah, to hell with it.” He turned around and started walking toward the house like a man going someplace to have a drink.
I nodded goodbye to King and headed for The Institute.
14
A gray-clad security man straddled the long, winding driveway down to the mansion and showed me his outstretched palm. I’d seen cleaner. His partner lounged near the lowered wooden barrier looking mean. It sure was good to be back home.
I waved cheerily, expecting the one playing traffic cop to jump aside and tug his forelock. He didn’t. I had to abuse the Morris’s brakes to avoid ruining the crease in his coveralls. Stiffly he walked around to the driver’s window and looked at me blankly. “Goodey,” I said as if talking to a half-wit. “Jonah Webster Goodey. Of San Francisco. California.”
He’d have made a hell of a poker player. Without a flicker of recognition, he consulted his clipboard and told me: “I’m sorry, Mr. Goodey, you’re not on the list of approved guests. I can’t let you in.” He gave me a flash of the guest list, and sure as hell, no Joe Goodey. Could it be? Had I become an official unperson at The Institute during my visit to Rudy Verrein? That possibility became more probable when I noticed sitting by the side of the driveway a suitcase that could have been mine. Fischer had made his move.
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