A Grave Talent km-1

by Laurie R. King

  "Please don't stand in front of a window with the inside lights on. It makes me nervous. Here's your water." Vaun looked like a startled deer, and Kate knew she had been overreacting. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to snap at you, but it's one of the rules of the game. After I've checked the doors and windows we can turn off the lights, if you like, and you can look to your heart's content. You've got the same view upstairs," she added, "and higher up, though there are fewer windows."

  Vaun said nothing, just nodded, and drank thirstily.

  "I'll give you a quick tour so you'll know what kind of place you're sleeping in, and then take you up. Okay? This, as you can see, is the living room. If you get the urge there's a television set and VCR behind those cabinet doors." The room was the full width of the house, more than fifty feet, with high walls of virgin redwood and natural hessian and a magnificent expanse of oak floor inset with a complex geometrical border of cherry, birch, and teak. It was divided informally by a hodgepodge of mismatched furniture, a beautiful rosewood dining table with a dozen odd chairs at one end, pale sofas and chairs at the other, two inexpensive Tibetan carpets in rose and light blue and white, a number of large and healthy plants, and an enormous metal sculptural form bristling with a hundred delicate pointed bowls, each one supported by a tiny, perfect human figure. Vaun went over to it and eyed it curiously, and Kate laughed.

  "That's one of Lee's treasures. It's a sort of oil-lamp candelabra, from South India. Each of the bowls is filled with oil and has a wick stuck into it."

  "Do you use it?"

  "We lit it once, but either we had the wrong kind of oil or else it needs to be outside, because it smoked to high heaven and covered everything with black smuts."

  "And we slipped on patches of oil for a week afterwards," came a voice from behind them. Lee stood in the doorway, wearing a long, thick white terrycloth bathrobe, her hands deep in the pockets. The tangle of her hair spoke of the pillow, and an angry red smudge on the bridge of her nose snowed that she'd fallen asleep with her reading glasses on again.

  "I'm sorry we woke you, Lee," Kate said, and made introductions.

  "You didn't wake me," she said, and looked at Vaun to add, "I'm often up early."

  "Lee, would you finish giving her the five-cent tour while I run her things upstairs?"

  "Glad to."

  Kate followed Lee's easy monologue with her mind while working the alarms, stilling the bell, and carrying the bags up from the garage to the recently furnished guest room. She then checked every window and door, every closet, and (feeling slightly foolish) under every bed, before joining the two in Lee's consulting rooms.

  The suite of rooms where Lee saw her clients shared a front door with the rest of the house, but was entered by a door immediately inside the main entrance. The rooms were self-contained, with a toilet and even a small refrigerator and hot plate.

  The first room was a large, informal artist's studio-cum-study, with a desk and two armchairs in one corner and an old sofa and some overstuffed chairs in another. Three easels, a high work table, a sink, and storage cupboards took up the rest of the room. In the cupboards were paper, canvas boards, watercolors, acrylics and oils, big tubs of clay, glazes, dozens of brushes, and myriad other supplies that might be called for by a client putting shape to an image from the depths of his or her mind. It was a comfortable, purposeful space, but the next room, the smaller sand-tray room, was Lee's pride and joy. Kate followed the sound of voices back into it.

  She had not been in the room in two weeks, and she was struck anew at the enchantment of the place. Three solid walls of narrow shelves held hundreds, thousands of tiny figurines. There were ballerinas and sorcerers, kings and swans and rock stars, horses, dragons, bats, trees, and snakes. One long shelf held two entire armies, one tin with knights and horses, the other modern khaki. Tea sets, tiaras, and teddy bears, the walls for a castle and a gingerbread dollhouse and a suburban tract house, thumb-sized street signs, creatures mythical and pedestrian, men, women, children, babies, a tiny iconic crucifix and an ancient carved fertility goddess, a porcelain bathtub, cars, planes, a horse-drawn plow and a perfect, one-inch-long pair of snowshoes. There were even the makings for a flood and a volcanic eruption at hand, when destruction was called for. Vaun was standing next to the taller of the two sand-tray tables, drifting her hand absently through the silken white sand and concentrating on Lee's words.

  "—exactly right. That's why I start nonartists out in the other room, and ask them to try the paints or a collage or a sculpture. But of course, an artist is used to forming things into a visual expression, and it's not as likely to be therapeutic as the sand trays are. Here, where all the objects are already available, not waiting for manipulation, the unconscious is freed from aesthetic decisions and judgments and can just get on with telling its story through the choice and arrangement of figures and objects. The statement the final arrangement on the tray makes can be very revealing."

  "Revealing to you?"

  "Both to me and to the client. When they have finished, I usually come in and ask questions and comment, and I often leave it up for a while to study it, though I do have a couple of clients who do one by themselves and then put it away unless they have a question. If I know the person well enough to be sure he can handle it, I encourage it. It's all therapy."

  "Speaking of which," Kate interrupted gently, "do you think this is the best treatment for someone just released from a hospital bed?"

  Vaun did look tired, despite the short sleep she had had in the car, and followed Kate meekly up the stairs, past Lee's room on the left and Kate's on the right, to the large airy room at the end of the hallway, the one with no nearby trees, no sturdy drainpipes, no balcony, and windows that framed an incomparable view of the world. Lee had put roses on the dresser, delicate, tightly furled buds of a silvery lavender color.

  "Bathroom," said Kate, opening a door and shutting it. "Television," doing the same with a cabinet. "Alarm button," handing Vaun a looped cord on which hung a small black square with an indented button. "It's not waterproof, but other than in the bath wear it every minute or keep it nearby. Push it and I'll be here in ten seconds. That's my room there, if you need anything during the night. Lee's is on the other side. If you want a book, the door at the other end is what we grandly call the library."

  "Does Lee really get up at this time, or was she being polite?"

  "Lee keeps even weirder hours than I do. A couple of weeks ago she spent several nights at the hospital until about this time, but when she goes to bed at a normal hour, she gets up early, yes. She doesn't sleep much. Don't worry about Lee, don't worry about me. You are welcome here." To her own surprise, she realized that she meant it.

  "Thank you, Casey."

  "Kate. Call me Kate, please?"

  "Yes. Thank you, Kate. Good night."

  "Keep the button near you, and don't open the windows until I rig a way to override the alarm. And turn off the lights if you open the curtains. Please."

  Vaun looked suddenly fragile, and she sat on the bed. "Oh, Casey. Kate. Really, I don't think I can go through with it. Let me go home and—"

  "Oh, God. Gerry Bruckner said you'd feel like this. Please, Vaun, just turn off your brain for a few hours. You're tired and unwell and easily discouraged, that's all. Tomorrow the sun will shine. Even in San Francisco. Yes?" Lee would have reached out and touched Vaun, to soothe them both, but Kate did not.

  "All right, yes, you're right. Al Hawkin is coming?"

  "For lunch. Good night."

  "Thank you, Kate. Good night."

  Kate slept lightly, every fiber aware of the woman who slept down the hall. She woke several times, at the short rattle of a cup in the kitchen, a door opening, once a short cry of words, Vaun's dreaming voice. The doorbell woke her finally, and she lifted her head to listen to Lee's footsteps as she went to answer it. The clock by the bed said it was ten forty-two. Hawkin's voice came up the stairs, and she relaxed, lay back and stretched hard, a
nd in a minute got up to put on her clothes and go down to greet him.

  The burr of the coffee grinder pulled her down the hallway, and she found Hawkin ensconced at the little table eyeing Lee's back with an expression of uncertainty and slight distaste. Lee was wearing one of her typical eclectic outfits, in this case baggy, paint-encrusted trousers made of Guatemalan cloth, a long-sleeved blouse of smoky plum raw silk, the sleeves rolled up, a pair of moccasins Kate had bought her in the Berkeley days from a Telegraph Avenue vendor, a starched white apron Lee's grandmother had made, and a pencil holding back the knot in her hair. Nothing to inspire distaste. Perhaps the pencil?

  At her entrance Hawkin's face was immediately amiable and workmanlike.

  "Morning, Kate. No problems last night?" She had been given an escort to the door and had talked to Hawkin after Vaun went to bed, so he meant after that.

  "Good morning, Al, Lee. You mean this morning, not last night. No. no problems."

  There had been on Saturday, though, and perhaps that was the source of the look of distaste. Hawkin had come to the house to meet Lee and explain to her why she should leave, and Lee listened attentively and then, when he had finished, told him in the politest of terms that he was a damned fool if he thought she would, and why on earth should the official police assume total responsibility for a human resource like Vaun? The two of them had circled each other warily for the better part of an hour, two fencers testing each other's psychic foil in feints and flurries, never quite committing themselves to outright combat.

  Suddenly Hawkin had stood up and gone out the front door. After a minute a car trunk slammed and he came back in with a familiar armload: Mrs. Jameson's old curtain wrapped around Vaun's paintings. He undid the parcel on the dining table, set them up along the wall, and with a sweep of his hand turned to Lee.

  "So. You're an expert. You tell me what sort of a person painted these."

  Lee's eyes were filled with the wonder of them, and with an air of tossing her sword into the corner she went over to the paintings and knelt down and touched them. She studied Red Jameson and his sweating son and the innocent temptress and the painful young/old girl in the mirror and the slouching young man. After a long time she stood back and ran her fingers through her hair. Her eyes on the canvases, she spoke absently.

  "What was it you wanted to know?"

  "I want to know what kind of person did these."

  "A woman with the eyes of a witch and the hands of an angel." She was talking to herself, and Hawkin gave a bark of derisive laughter.

  "Is that what they're teaching in the psych department at Cal these days? Don't burden me with so much technical jargon, please, Dr. Cooper."

  Lee flushed in anger, and swung around to face him.

  "What particular aspect of the artist's personality interests you? An analysis of the change in her sexual state over the time these cover? The degree of psychosis exhibited? Perhaps a Freudian statement regarding her relationship with her parents?"

  "I want to know if she could have committed murder."

  "Anyone can commit murder, given a strong enough motivation. You should know that."

  They glared at each other, and a faint smell as of burning hair reached Kate's nostrils. Hawkin spoke again, precisely, through clenched teeth.

  "In your professional opinion, Doctor Cooper, could the person who did these paintings have committed the coldblooded murder of a child, under the possible influence of a flashback from a previous dose of LSD?"

  Lee pulled her eyes back to the row of images and seemed to draw up a barrier as she collected her thoughts, eyes narrowed.

  "In my professional opinion, no. I am not an expert diagnostician, but I would have thought that this woman would be more likely to commit a devastating murder of someone's self-image on canvas than she would an actual, physical murder, particularly of an innocent. As for the LSD, it's an unpredictable drug, especially the street kind, but I have participated in sessions of LSD therapy and studied its long-term effects, and I'd say that kind of violent 'flashback' would be extremely unlikely. But as I say, I'm no expert. I could give you some names, if you like, of people to see."

  "Who would you suggest?"

  She reeled off half a dozen names. "Those are Bay Area people, of course. There's a man in Los Angeles—"

  "No, that'll do. I've seen all of them except for Kohlberg. She's in France." He started to gather the paintings together and wrap them in Becky Jameson's old curtain. Lee watched, and handed him the last one reluctantly.

  "What did the experts say?" Kate asked.

  "Pretty much the same thing." He tucked the thick bundle under his arm, paused, then shook his head in frustration, and left.

  Kate had felt a sudden rush of exhaustion when he had gone, but Lee had seemed in great good spirits, and burst into snatches of song at odd moments during the rest of the day.

  She was in the same aggressively cheerful mood now, Kate could tell, from the line of her back and the rapid, dramatic sweeps of the knife on the cutting board. She was using her self-assurance as a weapon, and Hawkin could only sit sourly and wait for his chance. He turned deliberately to Kate, fished a manila envelope from inside his jacket, and handed it to her.

  She pressed open the metal wings and slid four glossy black-and-white photographs and three drawings out onto the tablecloth. Hawkin reached over and arranged them in two lines like some arcane variety of solitaire. She picked up the first photograph and looked closely at the young face, its mouth open in a shout. It had obviously been cropped from a group action shot, with a shoulder across one corner and a leg in the foreground wearing tight white leggings and a cleated shoe.

  "Coach Shapiro's?" she asked.

  "Finally. The photographer did a good job on those."

  She concentrated on the other three prints, which showed the same face touched up first to show middle age, then with a moustache added, and finally with a full beard. She puzzled over this last one.

  "It doesn't look quite right," she said finally. "I only saw him for a minute, but the nose was different, and the shape of the eyebrows."

  "Well done, considering the circumstances. Angie and Tyler agree with you. Susan took the photograph and worked it into the drawing she did last week, and came up with those," he said, pointing. Susan Chin had also done a good job. The drawing with the beard was the man Kate had seen at Vaun's house ten days before. Susan had then removed the beard and left the moustache, using the jawbones of the high school picture, and finally shaven him clean.

  "That's him. He must have had a nose job, and something done to his eyebrows."

  "We also know who Tony Dodson is. Or was."

  "It's not just a false ID then?" She was surprised.

  "Apparently not. There was a man named Anthony Dodson who worked with Lewis, and even resembled him quite a bit: same hair color, eyes, height, only fifteen or twenty pounds heavier. Lewis went north after high school, spent some time in Seattle, then got a job in Alaska on the pipeline. He met Dodson there, they became friends, spent several weekends in Anchorage. After a few months the two of them went off for a week in Seattle and didn't show up for work again. Lewis wrote a letter to say they'd both got jobs in New Orleans, they were sick of the cold, that their clothes and equipment should be given away, so long. Nothing more is heard of Andy Lewis—nothing—but Tony Dodson, who was from Montana originally, gets a driver's license in Nevada two months later."

  "And the photo?"

  "Is the same man who went to high school as Andy Lewis, given that the photograph on the license is lousy, he's ten years older and has had facial surgery."

  Food began to move from stove to table to plates— avocado and mushroom omelet and hot buttery toast and orange juice fresh from the machine on the sink and mugs of thick coffee. Kate took a mouthful of the hot liquid and swirled it around her teeth, feeling the distinctive bite of the Yemen Mocha. She raised a mental eyebrow at this but didn't comment. Lee would not like it pointed out tha
t a special effort was being made at this meal.

  The cook sat down with a cup but no plate and picked up the original photograph. Several hundred calories later Kate looked over at her.

  "You're not eating?"

  "I had something a while ago. I thought I'd wait and keep Vaun company."

  "That picture bothers you," Kate noted. Hawkin glanced up sharply and then looked more closely at Lee, whose face revealed nothing other than a slight curiosity.

  "It does. I was just wondering if it would bother me if I didn't know who it was. It reminds me of someone I knew when I was in New York. Not one of my clients, though I'd seen him around the clinic. One day he told his therapist that he'd been beating up drunks, just for the fun of it, and one of them had died. She was really upset after he left, but managed to finish out the day. That night he waited for her and followed her home and killed her. He later said he'd decided it was unwise to have told her, but she'd already reported him to the police, and they were waiting for him when he got home. He didn't actually look anything like this," she waved the picture. "Maybe around the eyes." She gazed at it for another long moment, then with a slight shudder put it away from her. When she looked up it was directly into Hawkin's eyes, no swordplay now.

  "As a therapist I am required to deny the possibility of such a thing as innate evil. There are reasons why people become twisted. As a human being, however, I recognize its presence. This man Lewis must be stopped. I believe that my being here might help you catch him. If I see that I am in the way, I will leave. Immediately."

  It was not put as an offer, a compromise, but Hawkin chose to take it as such. The two women waited as he finished his toast, placed his fork and knife across his plate, took a swallow of coffee. When he spoke it was to Kate.