Obstruction of Justice

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  Too much info, too many possibilities. He needed to start simple with a single end of the string and from there he could follow it through all its tangles, all the way home. He turned away from the Powerbook and picked up the pictures from the on-site police investigation. In sharp-focus black and white he studied Anna Meade lying on top of a white-painted parking stall stripe, her small shoe a couple of feet away.

  Though the shadows were long on that August evening the photographer had managed to expose well for detail. Faceup on the asphalt, one of her eyes open and looking off shyly to the side, already comatose, she looked as if she felt slightly embarrassed to make such a mess. The left side of her head had been cracked open and the blood from that injury had pooled around the back of her head. Her legs had settled into impossible positions. The car had hit her broadside from her left while she was walking, and she might have gotten away with broken bones, except she’d apparently gone up over the hood on impact, hitting the windshield before sliding to the pavement.

  Stroking his stubbly jaw, Paul thought about that. About ten years earlier he had handled a homicide investigation in San Francisco in which the victim had hit the windshield of the vehicle involved. The body had hit so hard, it had left an imprint of the face on the safety glass, a side view that showed the shape of the nose and an open mouth.

  The massive contusion on the left side of Anna Meade’s face looked similar to the injury on that victim. The cops were right. She had hit the windshield. He tried not to think about Hallowell seeing that face.

  Find the end of the string that led to the car, and the rest would take care of itself. Even without broken glass or bits of chrome or paint to match from the scene, there might be marks on the front grillework or signs of replacement. And then there was the long shot, the remote possibility that, unless the windshield had been replaced or the car had been crushed for junk, the car might still carry some kind of an impression, a web of cracks, a slight indentation not worth fixing, an oh-so-slightly visible imprint, a memory of murder on glass.

  He made some calls and opened a new file on the Powerbook. First, he would read it all, all three years of police work, again, taking notes on the computer. At three he would go to see Kim Voss, the eyewitness.

  Kim Voss’s home in Round Hill, on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, was an oddly shaped modern affair that started low and ended up more than two stories high, sheltered behind a solid eight-foot stucco wall with a security gate. Inside the gate, Paul found himself in a cactus forest, the tall cacti planted in massive pots beside a sandy walkway, in front of a white windowless house of the same stucco. The desolate effect was broken by a sun-colored door, which opened noiselessly to present the lady herself, late twenties, fluffy-haired, wearing paint-stained overalls and a wary look.

  "Did you read the sign?" she asked, pointing to a discreet brass plate next to her door that said NO SOLICITORS.

  "It doesn’t apply."

  She came closer, leaning a hip on the doorway and folding her arms as if settling in for a cozy talk. "Well, then. What does?"

  "My name is Paul van Wagoner. Collier Hallowell hired me to investigate the death of his wife, Anna, three years ago. I understand you were a witness."

  A fleeting look Paul couldn’t identify passed over Kim Voss’s face. She had strong classical features, a prominent nose, well-cut lips. Unlike so many women, she wore her body comfortably, as if she liked it.

  "He’ll never get over her, will he? I’ve already talked with Collier a number of times. Didn’t he tell you? I didn’t see anything."

  "I really just have a few questions...."

  "This is pointless. I saw a car at a distance, no plate, not even a specific color."

  Paul whipped out his notebook. "Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. What else?"

  "I’m busy ..." she said, but he could see she was weakening. Good, he liked women who weakened.

  Paul gestured through the door. "Any chance we could"—he paused and raised an eyebrow—"rake over the old coals just this one time"—his best imitation of Sean Connery in his heyday as James Bond—"someplace a bit more conducive?"

  She smiled slightly, responding to the familiar Scottish burr, as Paul always hoped they would, and thought for a long moment.

  "Let me see your ID."

  He handed it over and she studied it. "You live in Carmel. That’s a beautiful town," she said. "Lots of artists live there." She handed his card back, apparently satisfied.

  Paul had seen the acknowledgment of being from a wealthy community defuse suspicion of him many times before. From salesmen at his favorite clothing store who jousted for an opportunity to become his personal shopper for the day, to cashiers at the Lucky Market who waved away his credit card proof-of-bucks-in-the-bank, they fell like supplicants at the magic word Carmel. Anyone who could afford to live there had to be okay, right?

  "Great place for painting seascapes," he said, and when he saw the look on her face above the color-spattered clothing, added, "Of course, seascapes get so ... so boring."

  "How true." She stepped aside. "You can come in."

  She led the way through a hallway decorated with big terra-cotta pots and more cacti. Through the arched doorway most of the house seemed to consist of a twenty-foot-high studio, all glass on the back wall, providing indirect northern light. Stained cloth tarps served as carpeting. A conference table covered with another tarp held myriad jars and brushes, house paint, rollers, and all sorts of other equipment. Paintings and frames leaned in loose groups against the walls. Paul’s eye was drawn to a disturbing canvas, slashed through with orange and green and white. The violent clash of colors attracted his attention. The thick brush strokes suggested an ordinary house painter’s brush had been used in its execution, and he did mean execution. He walked over to examine it, but she stepped in front of him and threw a drape over it.

  "I don’t mean to be rude, but like any painter, I’m sensitive about my work. That’s a really old one. I think I’ve improved. Let me show you some more recent work, if you’re interested?"

  He nodded. The longer they spent together on these unrelated topics, the more time she had to warm up to the pending topic, and to Paul.

  She led him past a series displayed along a wall that ran the length of the room. Her main subject seemed to be needle-sharp cactus in extreme close-up, though the abstract splashes of paint made this debatable. They looked like tattooed cucumbers undergoing acupuncture, or portions of dead porcupines he would prefer not to think about.

  "I really don’t know much about art," he said finally, realizing that she was waiting for him to say something. "And I can’t compare your work to the Expressionists or the Impressionists, because I only know enough to appear knowledgeable in a pinch. Is ’wow’ going to do it for you?"

  He didn’t know what she had expected, but he guessed he had delivered when she threw her head back in a laugh. "That does me fine!" she said. "You’ve missed your calling as an art critic. You’re a pretty refreshing character, aren’t you?"

  Paul was by now enjoying himself. Her finely cut lips pursed as she looked upon these paintings that had a crudeness he actually found rather powerful. She went over to one large painting, leaned over, and brushed a speck away. Sun glanced through the tall windows and made a halo of her hair. She had broad shoulders and a deep waist, a swaying walk that had an impact.

  "Let’s go out back," she went on. "That’s my dining room, at least for another month until the weather’s too cold."

  Paul followed her rounded, denim-clad rump out the door. Why, oh why, were there so many foxy women in the world to tempt him? Like a cornucopia of luscious flesh, the world spilled them into his path, where there was no way to avoid them or step over them without taking a sample.

  The backyard was like the front except more densely potted, a veritable Mojave Desert of spade-leafed cacti armed with prickers like tiny knives, faithful sentinels guarding the stone patio at center. A wooden table covered with a
clean white cloth had been set up. Paul sat down in one of the two iron chairs. Behind him was a fireplace with a grill set up and a tall chimney, the whole thing made of white rocks.

  "Let me make you a drink."

  "No, thanks," Paul said.

  "C’mon. If we’ve got to do this, let’s make it fun. Be a sport. I make a mean martini. It’s almost four o’clock, which makes it practically five."

  "I’m not much for martinis ..." he said, getting ready to make a little speech about how he hadn’t given much thought to martinis since he last admired Myrna Loy as Nora Charles ordering five of them to keep pace with her inebriate husband back in the days when alcohol had flash and panache and a total Hollywood detachment from its evil effects, but by the time he thought all this up, she had drifted off back toward the house. A few moments later, she reappeared with a stainless steel martini shaker beaded with evaporation and two of those invitingly wide conical cocktail glasses.

  "You know the right way to make one of these, don’t you?" she asked, examining an empty glass in the sun, wiping an invisible speck with the immaculate white towel she had brought. She was conjuring up a show for him, Paul realized, pleased. "Shaken, not stirred?" he suggested, recalling his earlier success with Bond.

  "No, no, no. Makes no difference whether it’s shaken or stirred. That stuff about bruising the gin is just a lot of hooey. First, you swirl the driest of vermouths in a frosted glass, like this." She poured it out of a silver and green bottle from high up, lifting her breasts for him to notice.

  "Then—and this is the fun part—you discard all excess." Keeping her eyes on Paul, she tossed all the vermouth in the glass over her shoulder, straight into a tumorous, twisted pear cactus barely supporting itself against the house, a real Elephant Man of cacti. "Finally, you pour perfectly frigid gin through cracked ice"—which she did, the gin flowing like diamonds from a jeweler’s pouch—"into the now supremely primed vessel." She finished, popped an onion-stuffed olive inside, and handed him the glass, her hand touching his.

  "Whew," said Paul. "That was great. You do make it sound luscious."

  She made another for herself "Chin-chin," she said, tapping his glass.

  He drank out of politeness, to test his memory about how closely gin resembled battery acid.

  "Don’t the cacti die in the winter?" he asked after two sips. He didn’t ask what the vermouth did to them in summer. If that prickly pear was any example, he already knew. Actually, the martini had a pleasant flavor, piquant almost, or was he merely seduced by the arrant sexuality of her little exhibition? He had some more of the drink.

  "Most of these are imported from the low deserts of New Mexico, where I grew up. See the barrel cactus there? The Indians used those curved spines as fish-hooks. And near the back, I keep the jumping cholla," she said, pointing to a thorny, many-branched bush resembling a sea anemone. "It has a bad reputation for jumping people, but really only has weak branches that break off and cling to people and animals passing by. I haven’t had much luck with the saguaro, or giant cactus, but there are a few out front that are surviving. Oh, and inside, later maybe, I’ll show you the old man cactus."

  "I saw it as we walked through," Paul said. "I even touched it; that white shaggy fur cover looked so soft. Fortunately, it didn’t get me."

  "It’s thornless, that’s why it works so well inside. Anyway, the winters are cold and snowy in New Mexico, although drier. The sun is strong here, and the summers are hot and dry, just like in the desert. This patio has a winter cover, and I remove some of the plants to a greenhouse out back to keep them warm through the worst of the winter."

  Paul’s glass was empty. She poured him another from the stainless steel, praising the shaker’s convenience and apologizing for its aesthetic failures. "I’ve read your statements from the accident," he said finally, promising himself not to drink another lick. He had work to do.

  "I must have told the story a dozen times. Collier talked to me personally three times. I think he felt I was his last link to his wife. I felt so bad for him."

  "He’s not over it," Paul said.

  "Maybe he never will be," she said, slipping an olive into her mouth and chewing thoughtfully. "Which would be very sad. Some people love only once. If you lose the one you love, you lose everything, your future as well as your present. You don’t recover."

  "Just bear with me. Try to remember what you can."

  She nodded. "Too bad I was the witness. I have no interest in cars. I can’t tell a Chevy from a Toyota. I don’t notice most people, either. All I knew was that there was only one shadow in there. I was about two hundred feet away, and I couldn’t pick up any details."

  "You were shopping at the Raley’s?"

  "Yes. I picked up a few things. I guess I came out just after she did. The parking lot is huge—well, you’ve probably seen it, it’s really for the whole shopping center. I spotted her heading for the far end of the lot, almost at the street. Nobody else was parked that far out."

  "But her car was parked there?"

  "I found out later it was her car parked under a tree in the last lane before the street. I saw it at the time, but it hardly registered. All I really noticed was her."

  "You told Collier you noticed her because of her dress."

  "Yes. The wind had come up a little and it was getting cooler, but she was wearing just a silk dress, a tangerine color, clingy, very full in the skirt, old-fashioned. A shirtwaist, I think it’s called. The color caught my eye, so I watched her. Color is my thing."

  "How close was she to her car when she was hit?"

  "Very close. She was carrying a grocery bag in her left arm. Maybe that made it hard for her to see the car coming at her."

  "When did you first see the car?"

  "I don’t know. All of a sudden, there was this car coming down the lane from the left." Kim pushed her chair back and rested her eyes on her cactus garden. "I heard a muffled thump. I saw it hit her at the same time. I saw her from the back, the car approaching from her left. She went up and over the hood. She hit the windshield. She never made a sound. The car had slowed down to a stop by then. She began to slide, and she slid off the car onto the ground just to the side of the car, while I stood rooted there like a tree. Then I heard the engine rev up. And the asshole took off straight ahead, curled out of the lot at the first exit to the right, and took off into the traffic past the movie theater. "

  "So you saw the whole thing."

  "Apparently I’m the only one who saw anything. Anyway, I ran after the car, yelling, but in my hurry, I twisted my ankle and I had to stop. Then I limped over to the girl to see if she was still alive. It was horrible. She was bleeding a lot. I suppose she was dying. Her dress was torn and spattered. I got down there and held her head. I had so much blood on me by the time the ambulance came they thought I was hit too."

  "Did she say anything?"

  "No, no. She didn’t really seem to be there, as though her soul had fled at the impact."

  Paul said, "Her death seems to have had a lasting effect on you."

  "Oh yes, it did. To see another human being so hurt and not be able to help is ... indelible. I don’t take the newspaper, Paul. I don’t watch TV. The suffering out there is too overwhelming. I try to stay in balance. I suppose you could call me an avoider. I stay home and paint my pictures."

  He was touched by her earnestness and her obvious emotional reaction to the story she told. As the shade drifted across the patio, and the martinis did their work, he felt his attraction to her growing. Her lack of makeup could have made her plain, but clear tanned skin and intelligent eyes made a harmonious balance, full of character and liveliness. She was licking the rim of her glass, not caring that he was watching, the tongue flicking around it, her eyelids half lowered so the lashes shaded her cheeks, her expression still thoughtful.

  He envied artists. He suspected they tapped in to tantalizing mysteries beyond his ken, mysteries he could only imagine in a special state of mind, su
ch as right after drinking straight gin over vermouth vapor. She was getting up. His time was over, but he wanted to stay.

  "I wish I could have helped. Tell Collier I hope you catch the bastard."

  "You live alone?" Paul asked as they walked back through her studio.

  "Yes. And you?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you like it?" she said. They were at the door now, and outside the sandscape was blinding under the sky, as if he had suddenly been transported to Taos.

  "Not much," Paul said.

  "I do. I love it. My work means everything to me. I feel like I’m rushing toward a great future." She blushed slightly.

  "You were married?"

  "No. Just a long relationship."

  "Your paintings. You’ve sold a lot?"

  "Almost everything I’ve painted over the past four years. Several Asian collectors pay very good prices for almost everything I can bring myself to part with." She smiled. The thought of her success seemed to amuse her.

  "I’d like to have dinner with you," Paul said. "Tonight."

  "I don’t date."

  "Okay." He started toward the door, and then, his eye caught by the drape on the painting he had seen when he first entered, he stumbled, knocking the drape off the picture.

  Strong emotion had been layered onto it in the wide, thick brush strokes. "Sorry," he said. "Hmm. This is different from your other work." He stooped down to read Kim’s signature. Above it, in italics, was the word Anna.

  "It’s the accident," Kim said. "I painted it after she died. I don’t show it to strangers. It’s hideous, but I can’t bring myself to get rid of it."

  The bending curve of orange on the right looked like a woman to him now, vulnerable, surprised by death in the middle of life. The car, white except for a hyphen of green in front, formless over the black streak of asphalt, surged across the canvas from left to right like a nightmare locomotive. The far left side of the picture broke into two red triangles, like a pair of following sharks.