by Pursuit
“I mean the way you go about it.”
“This isn’t the way it’s done, but this isn’t a normal portrait,” she said. She looked up and noticed he was surveying the huge loft. “You like my studio?”
“Artists all seem to be nesters. I’ve seen a few studios that are better than anything the owner ever made to sell.” He frowned. “That’s not you.”
She chuckled. “It’s a sick indulgence—something you do when you need to work but can’t do anything right. Maybe if I add a skylight, the shadows over here will be gone. Maybe if I move the wall over here in a little bit, I’ll have a small corner that glows just right. Then everything will work.” She spun the sketch again. Now the lines that he had made had been refined, and had become the new boundaries of the face.
He stared at it. “That’s closer.”
She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes at the picture, then propped up the pad so it faced him. “Let’s have some of those cakes while you get used to him. I want more lines as soon as you see something that’s wrong, remember something you forgot.” She sat at the table with him. “How did you get to chasing a killer around? Is it personal?”
He shook his head. “Nothing as honest and dignified as that. It’s something I fell into a while back.”
“How?” she asked.
“Process of elimination,” he said. He picked up the pad and began working on it again. “I started out wanting to be a great man, but then I noticed that every time there was a great man, somebody would lay the crosshairs on his forehead. Then I figured I’d be a saintly man. But it meant I would have to deny myself all the things my mama wouldn’t have approved of, and end up getting burned at a stake or something. Then I thought I’d settle for being a good man. But no matter how hard I applied myself to it, I couldn’t detect that I was getting any better than anybody else. In those days you had to go into the service, so I did. After a couple of years I got out and had nothing to do. I got a job at a detective agency, then started my own. I solved a couple of cases, and got a reputation. At that point, either I could keep making very good money doing that, or I could go start all over again at something I wasn’t even good at. So I kept on.” He handed the drawing back to Cara Lee Satterfield. “How about you? How did you get to be a famous portrait artist?”
She went to work with eraser and pencil again. “It’s a lot like your story.” She looked at him with half-lidded eyes, then down again at the pad. “Except that mine is true. I came up from Virginia twenty years ago. I needed to draw, and I needed money. I live in a century when representational art is something that’s only in style among people who wear cheese hats to football games and watch pro wrestling on TV. So I did odd jobs—quickie sketches at amusement parks, greeting cards, witness sketches for the police.”
He looked around him at the loft, then back at her. “Something else happened to both of you.”
“Both?”
“You and this building.”
She grinned as she worked. “I bought this place because I couldn’t afford SoHo, which was where artists were living then. This was a hellhole, a place where transients and addicts hung out. There had been four or five fires. I got it cheap. I made it secure so nobody could get in, fixed it up a little, and went to work. Over the years, the rent in SoHo got too expensive for artists, and most of them moved in around me anyway. In the meantime, I discovered that no matter how rich and sophisticated you are, you don’t want your portrait to be abstract. You want realism, with ten years lopped off.” She showed him the portrait.
“That’s close,” he said. “Really close. I don’t know what I could do to it.”
“Then let’s talk ethnic stereotypes.”
“Stereotypes?”
She said, “Nice people don’t. But all we’re talking about here is looks. You look the way the genes your grandparents brought from the old country tell you to look. The question is, Which old country?”
He shrugged. “His skin is pale. I thought about that when I saw him. His hair is dark brown, almost black. His eyes . . . I wasn’t close enough to tell the color, exactly. They looked light, not dark. Blue or gray. The old country is somewhere in Europe on both sides. But it could be anywhere from Ireland to Russia. You see him, you think ‘white guy,’ but you don’t think about a country.”
“If he were out in the sun, would he get freckles?”
“Maybe. He doesn’t have any right now.”
She did some more sketching. “Tell me about how he seems. You talked to him, watched him. What’s his personality?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Guess.”
“I think he’s got the skills he needs for getting along. If he’s supposed to smile, he smiles. If he’s supposed to look like he’s sad, he can do that. He doesn’t feel any of it.”
Prescott looked into her eyes. “You understand? He knows what people are supposed to feel and what their faces look like while they’re feeling it. He’s spent a lot of time practicing—probably in front of a mirror when he was young, and since then by watching people’s reactions—but it’s all the same. It’s like a man doing birdcalls: if he practices enough, he can hit the same notes, maybe not exactly, but close enough to fool a lot of birds. But he’s not a bird. He doesn’t know what the bird feels when it sings, or what it means. He just knows that when he does it, birds will come close enough so he can kill them.”
She looked up from the pad. “He doesn’t feel anything?”
“That’s not exactly right. He feels hunger, cold, heat, pain, a little fear—too little of that—and there’s a big reservoir of resentment or jealousy or something. I haven’t quite isolated that to the point where I can put a name to it. He thinks that other people have things that he deserves. He’s smarter, stronger, more disciplined. He works harder than they do—has been working harder than they do since he was a child—to improve himself. That’s the only sign of fear I’ve seen so far. Something made him afraid when he was young, I think, and that was how he got started on making himself dangerous . . . ‘potent’ is probably the word.”
“Is he?” she asked. “He has power?”
Prescott looked at her in surprise, as though he had been in a reverie and heard a discordant note. He nodded. “Yeah. Of a sort. We live in a beautiful, warm, cozy society. We don’t always know it, but we do.” Prescott paused. “He doesn’t.”
“How is that?”
“We have wars, crime, and so on—but only a few of us, and only some of the time. It isn’t a daily experience. For most of human history, it wasn’t that way. People had to walk around with a different attitude: heavily armed, watchful, ready to react instantly and violently. What he’s done is turn himself into a man from another time and place: training himself physically and mentally, learning the practices of old warrior societies, developing attitudes and skills of men in cultures that had some practical use for that kind of thing, that rewarded it with high status. He’s succeeded. He’s a killer, just as they were.”
“What about the fear? You said he didn’t have much.”
“Not enough,” said Prescott. “There are theories about that, but they’re just theories.”
“Tell me,” she said. “I need to hear everything that comes to mind when you look at him.”
“Once in a while the psychiatrists do tests on a certain kind of people—ones who jump out of airplanes a lot, or go for speed records, or whatever. Supposedly a lot of them have a deficiency in a chemical called monoamine oxidase. It’s a chemical that regulates other chemicals, and it’s released when you’re scared. When monoamine oxidase is released, it gives you more dopamine and norepinephrine, so you feel a rush. I think that could be what’s going on with him. He needs that rush, like an addict. But both intentionally and unintentionally, he’s been making himself resistant to fear. He needs more and more objective danger to trigger it.” He sighed. “But all of that stuff is invisible. It doesn’t have much to do with a picture.”
It seemed to Prescott that the last time he had seen the drawing it had been extremely good. The term for it was a “likeness.” But now something else had happened. The face was alive. In the skull that had simply been an accurate outline, then a three-dimensional shape, there were thoughts. He tried to analyze this impression, and realized it had to be the eyes. They were watchful in exactly the right way. The mouth was almost smiling, but the eyes were doing something different that made the smile just an extremely convincing lie. In the eyes was cunning opportunism; inside the pleasant young face a different person was waiting, with cold patience, for his chance.
“It’s him,” he said. “It’s the one.” He tried to say it more accurately: “It’s that man, and it’s nobody else.” That was what she had done. An hour ago, it had been a picture of the man. In subtle degrees, she had made it more like him, but absolutely not like other men who resembled him. She had eliminated them.
“Good,” she said, without surprise. She stood up and took the drawing away from him, then walked toward the other end of the room, where her workbenches and easels stood and everything was paint-spattered.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“It’s time to paint,” she said in a distracted voice, without removing her eyes from the drawing. “I’m a painter.”
“You already have him,” said Prescott, getting to his feet.
She kept walking. “Go sit down. Have more coffee, take a nap or something. This will take some time.”
“But why are you doing it?”
“I told you. I’m a painter. I’m not sort of a painter. I don’t quit just because some ignorant character comes in and tells me it’s good enough for him. It has to be good enough for me.”
Prescott sat and drank coffee. He paced the loft, looked out the windows at the night streets below, now surprisingly empty for New York. After a time, he lay on the couch and dozed, then woke. Each time he looked toward the other end of the loft, he could see her still standing, working intently, paying no attention to anything but the sketch and the canvas. It was daylight before she looked in his direction, then beckoned.
He walked to the easel and looked. The killer looked back at him. It was no longer just a representation. Somehow, contained in the painted version, there were all of the things that Prescott believed about this man and had told Cara Lee Satterfield. The painting was more like him than any blown-up color photograph could be. “When can I have it?”
“You don’t want this,” she said. “You want eight-by-ten photographs of it. I’ll take them now.”
The photographs took time. Big floodlights on stands had to be moved around, then white reflective screens arranged and rearranged until she was satisfied. She set up a camera on a tripod, took shot after shot, moved the lights and screens, then took more. At last, he heard the camera’s automatic rewinder humming. She popped the camera’s back open, took out the film, then looked at her workbench, tore the printed address off an old envelope full of slides, and handed him the address and the film. “That’s the place to get them developed.” She looked around, seeming to notice the daylight for the first time. “What time is it?”
“Nearly noon.”
“Good. They’re open.”
“You’re going to want to go to sleep, so maybe we’d better settle your fee before I go.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a checkbook.
She held up her hand. “No,” she said. “That’s not going to be enough.”
“I keep this account’s balance pretty high,” he said.
She shook her head. “That’s just money. This is magic. It’s a collaboration, an experience. I figured out my price.”
“What is it?”
“You can’t pay off until you’ve finished chasing this guy,” she said. “About how long will it take?”
He looked at her uneasily. “You know, I don’t want to be dramatic, but the finish could be that I stop chasing because he kills me.”
“I’ve seen you, and now I’ve seen him,” she said. “I’ll take that chance. Give me a call when it’s done, and you can pay off.”
“Can you tell me what it is?”
“Sure,” she said. “There are two things. You’ll fly back here to sit for me. I want to paint you.”
“What’s the second thing?”
“In November I have a one-woman show,” she said. “The opening is a big, pretentious party, and they’re awful. They’re boring, frightening, and embarrassing all at the same time. You will be my escort. The women will be nice to look at, but you won’t be able to, or I’ll be angry. The men are not all bad, either, but there will be a few . . . you’ll want to pinch their heads off. You won’t do that, either.”
“Why would you want me as an escort?”
She walked toward the steel door, and opened it for him. “I don’t have to tell you that, so I won’t. It’s my price. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”
12
Prescott took the film to the photography lab and went to his hotel to sleep. When he awoke in the evening, he picked up the two hundred color prints. The diminished size of the photographs made the painting even sharper and the impression of perfection more striking. He was tempted to call Cara Lee Satterfield and tell her, but she had known long before he did. Instead, he packed his bags, took a cab to the bus station, and bought a ticket to Philadelphia. When he got there, he rented a car and drove west, deeper into Pennsylvania. What he wanted now was easier to obtain in some places than in others. After he had reached the hills, where there were farms and small towns, he made his first stop. He picked up the local newspaper, checked the bulletin boards in the first laundromat he saw, and then looked for flyers left at convenience stores. He was looking for announcements of private sales.
Prescott liked estate sales best, but not if they were big enough to be held as auctions. What he needed was a person he could talk to, and he preferred the closest female survivor. He would look over the dead man’s belongings, maybe buy something that was expensive and portable, like a rare book, a watch, or a set of cuff links. That would get him talking to the woman. He would talk about her wisdom in passing on possessions that someone else could use, listening for her lament that there were things she didn’t know what to do with. He would let slip that he was sure his wife—or daughter—would have the same problem: he was a gun collector, and guns were hard to resell. In some places, this was likely to give the woman the creeps, and the conversation would be over. But in these rural areas, more often than not, he would be led into the house to look over a gun cabinet.
Sometimes the cabinet was a metal locker in a den, but sometimes it was a big, polished piece of furniture like a glass-fronted armoire. Behind the glass would be a row of long guns: usually at least a pump shotgun for fowl, a .22 rifle for vermin, and a bolt-action .308 or .30-06 deer rifle. But plenty of these cabinets had much more exotic and expensive rifles, custom guns with carved stocks, antiques, military assault weapons. He would look them over, appraise and appreciate them, sometimes buy one or two. But he would make it clear that what interested him most was handguns. In a few minutes he might be on his way out with a pistol or two that, if they had ever been registered at all, were still the official property of a dead man.
In the first town, the estate sale included no guns. After he left the turnpike near Hoyerstown, he passed a large building on the road into town. It was surrounded by fields, and backed by a long, low barrow that looked like the back of a sleeping animal. The big sign above the door said THE GUN CLUB, and the small one said OPEN.
He pulled his car into the lot and got out. Before he had taken two steps he heard the familiar thud of a gun being discharged behind a soundproofed wall, then several more shots. He opened the front door and the noise was louder. Three men wearing yellow earphones stood beyond a
Plexiglas window, firing down adjoining cinder-block tunnels at small paper targets on wires that ran overhead. A wooden counter enclosed with the same thick Plexiglas dominated the entrance.
The slight man inside was only about thirty, but he had a shiny bald head. Prescott smiled at him and rested his elbows on the counter, so the man came to the window and opened it. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m from out of town,” said Prescott. “Is it possible to rent a weapon and get a little practice while I’m here?”
The man said, “Sure. For twenty bucks an hour, I can give you a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. Ammo and targets are extra, and the range fee is fifteen bucks a half hour.”
Prescott said, “How about ear protectors?”
“Those are five.”
Prescott gave him sixty dollars, accepted a weapon with a big red number 12 painted on the grip. He bought a box of twenty-five rounds and went to the range. He could tell from the expression of habitual worry on the man’s face that this was a business that had not lived up to his hopes. Probably he had told himself that indoor shooting would catch on as a family sport, and then the world would flock here to hand him money. The world seemed to be otherwise engaged.
Prescott clipped his target to the wire, pressed the button on the pulley, and watched the target skitter down to the end of the range. He loaded the pistol and snapped the cylinder into place. The .38 was lighter than the weapons he was accustomed to, and he expected it would have little muzzle rise with target ammunition, so he took a comfortable one-handed stance, extended his arm, and squeezed off six shots in rapid succession. Then he pressed the button again to bring the target back on the wire. He unclipped it, held it up to look at it, then turned to set it on the shelf beside the ammunition. He found that the owner was out of his booth, standing behind Prescott’s tunnel to watch.
The man’s eyes were on the target, looking at the six holes all within the inch-wide black circle. Prescott knew he had him. The man was one of those guys who were so hooked on a hobby that they could think of little else.