"But, it's… it's cruel, isn't it? She's laughing at him. Making fun of him."
Even Trujillo had seen it, then, given time and a hint. How long had it taken Andy Lewis to see the derision in it? Had it taken him, perhaps, until the month after it was painted? Had Vaun told him what she had really painted, when she broke up with him? Had Jemima Louise died because of this painting? And, indirectly, Tina Merrill and Amanda Bloom and Samantha Donaldson, and very nearly Vaun herself?
Suddenly Lee Cooper's words came back to him: Vaun was "more likely to commit a devastating murder of someone's self-image on canvas…" This painting was her weapon, the victim as yet quite unaware that the murderous blow had been struck. Hawkin could see that anyone knowing Lewis, and truly seeing this portrait, would never take the man seriously again. It spoke volumes about Lewis's methods that he had not killed Vaun outright when he first realized what she had done. To Lewis, mere death was not sufficient revenge: hell must come first.
The apartment and its surroundings yielded no other immediately satisfying piece of evidence. The telephone answering machine gave out one succinct message: a man's bass voice said, "Tony? This is Dan. We could use a hand if you're free." There was no way of telling when the message had been left, but the state of the refrigerator indicated it had been some days since anyone had been in residence, and as the day wore on the neighbors interviewed confirmed that the last anyone had seen of him was before the big storm.
There were no papers, no address books or scribbled telephone numbers, no letters in the mailbox addressed to anyone other than Occupant. The neighbors could describe only a few of his numerous guests, and the only vehicle any of them had seen him with was the old pickup currently sitting in Tyler's metal shed.
That evening, Wednesday, Hawkin and Trujillo returned to the apartment house to catch the residents who had not been in during the day. It was tedious work, with little added to their meager store of information, until they rang the bell of number fifty-two. It was after nine o'clock, but the door was answered by a child of about ten or eleven with glossy black hair and a mouth full of braces, dressed in fuchsia-colored thermal pants and an oversized Minnie Mouse T-shirt. She peered at them gravely beneath the chain.
"Good evening, miss," said Hawkin. "I wonder if I might speak to your mother or father?"
"I do not know how I would produce my father," she said with considerable precision and an air of suffering fools, "but my mother may be available. May I tell her who's calling?"
Hawkin identified himself and Trujillo to the child, who looked unimpressed. She started to open her mouth when she was interrupted by a woman's voice from behind her.
"Who is it, Jules?"
The child stepped around so Hawkin could see her profile, which in another eight or ten years would be devastating.
"They claim," she said, "to be policemen. I was about to ask them for some identification."
"That is a very sensible idea, miss," said Hawkin firmly in an effort to retain some sort of control. He pulled his ID out of his pocket for the forty-seventh time that day and flipped it open for the benefit of the eyes, on two levels now, that peered through the gap. The door shut, the chain rattled, and the door opened again to reveal the paradigm on which the future devastatrix was modeled.
Ten pounds of gleaming blue-black hair balanced precariously on top of an oval face with brown in its genes and, intriguingly, golden-green eyes surrounded by eyelids that had been shaped somewhere in Asia. Damp tendrils curled gently around the collar of an ancient bathrobe like one that Hawkin's grandfather used to wear, of a particularly gruesome shade of purple, mercifully faded. She had bare feet and heavy horn-rim glasses of the sort Gary Grant might have removed to reveal a secretary of hitherto unseen beauty, and Hawkin was very glad that he was standing in front of Trujillo because he knew that his own face would reveal nothing, despite his immediate and intense awareness that beneath the robe, the rest of her was every bit as bare as her feet. Trujillo might take a moment to regain control of his face.
"Good evening, Ms. Cameron," he said coolly. "Sorry to bother you. We're trying to find some information on one of your neighbors, and wonder if you might be able to help us?"
"Certainly. Come in." She stood back and waved them into a room so utterly ordinary it might have come from a catalog of motel furniture, onto which had been strewn a solid layer of books, covering every flat surface—heavy books with dark leather bindings and titles in gold, gothic letters, in a number of languages. She gathered a few together to clear the second pair of the quartet of metal and vinyl chairs at the Formica table, then stacked the tomes onto the table and sat looking over them. She was not a short woman but looked small beneath the hair, within the robe, and behind the books.
"I'm afraid I won't be able to help much," she said. She had a sweet, low voice, and not so much an accent as a careful precision and rhythm to her speech. "We've only been here since January, and I'm so rarely home, I haven't had a chance to get to know my neighbors."
A voice came from the sofa, accompanied by one foot waving in the air. Hawkin had all but forgotten the younger generation of this incredible race of genius-goddesses.
"My mother was recently appointed to the chair of medieval German literature at the university," said the voice, and then volunteered, "I am going to practice criminal law." Hawkin blanched at the thought of such a defense lawyer and hoped he would be retired before she came on the scene. Her head appeared over the back of the chintz. "Which neighbor?"
"Mr. Tony Andrews, in number thirty-four." He dragged his attention back to the mother. "He's been missing for some days, and his family is beginning to worry."
The daughter snorted derisively.
"So they sent two high-ranking officers out to look for a missing person?"
"Jules," her mother began.
"Oh Mother, the police don't do things that way, and besides, I've seen them both on the news. They're working on that case of the little girls and the artist."
The mother turned a look on Hawkin that made him feel like a student who had been caught in a bit of plagiarism.
"Is this true?" she asked.
"We do work on more than one case at once, sometimes," Hawkin said, trying for sternness, but it sounded weak even to his own ears. He pulled himself together. "Mr. Andrews. Do you know him?"
"No, I don't think—"
"Yes, Mother, we met him last month, don't you remember? The day you were giving a paper in San Francisco and couldn't get the car started."
"Oh, yes, him. I had forgotten his name. Nice man."
"He was not," said Jules sternly.
"Well, I thought—"
"Pardon me, miss," interrupted Trujillo. "Why did you think he was not nice?"
For a moment the child was at an obviously uncharacteristic loss for words. She quickly mustered her forces, but her answer was given with a chin raised in half-defiant embarrassment.
"I don't have a reason, not really. Nothing concrete, I mean. It was simply an impression. I did not like the way he looked at my mother. It was," she paused to choose a word. "It was speculative, without the earthy immediacy with which most men react to her."
(Earthy immediacy? thought Hawkin, uncomfortably aware of the earthiness of his own first reaction to the woman. Where does this kid come from?)
"Jules!" her mother scolded. "You sound like a bad romance novel."
"I thought it was a good phrase," her daughter protested.
"It is inappropriate."
"But accurate." Accuracy was obviously the ultimate consideration in Jules Cameron's life and, judging by the capitulation of her mother, it was a family trait.
"Was that the only reason?" Hawkin interjected, before the conversation deteriorated into semantics. "The way he looked at your mother?"
"I also found his physical appearance, his untrimmed beard and dirty hands, didn't go with the clothes he was wearing. They seemed almost to belong to a different man entirely, although they fit him w
ell. He helped us with the car," she concluded, as if to a panel of jurors, "but he was not a nice man."
"I see," said Hawkin, trying to. He spoke halfway between the two women. (Women?) "Did he say anything to you, about where he was going, friends, anything like that?" To his relief the mother picked up the story.
"He saw I was having trouble with the car. Jules and I were looking into the motor trying to find a loose wire or something obvious when he walked by and saw us. He rummaged around for a few minutes—"
"It was the alternator lead, as I told her," Jules put in.
"—although I said he mustn't get his suit dirty. He said not to worry, he was a mechanic and it would only take a minute, and it did—he got it going right away."
"He told you he was a mechanic?" asked Hawkin.
"That's what he said. I offered to pay him, but he laughed, a nice laugh—"
"It wasn't," growled the sofa.
"—and said I should keep my money and buy my little girl a doll."
(Ah.)
"Can you believe it?" exclaimed the insulted party. "Can anyone be so sexist and archaic in this day and age?"
Trujillo was looking from fond mother to indignant daughter with a stunned expression, his mouth gaping slightly.
"Did you see how he left? His car?" Hawkin asked.
"No. Did you, Jules?"
"Yes. There was a man waiting for him on the street, in a red Grand Prix. I remember thinking the name of the car was funny because he so obviously considered himself a big prize."
"Beg your pardon, Miss?" said Trujillo, who was trying to write all this down. She looked at him pityingly.
"Grand Prix. A pun?" She sighed. "Grand Prix is French for 'big prize'."
"Oh. Right."
"It must've been his car, too, because the other man moved over into the passenger seat to let him drive."
"I don't suppose you noticed the license plate number," said Hawkin, knowing that if she had, she'd have given it to them right off.
She looked abashed. "I knew you would ask me that. No, I didn't. All I remember is that it wasn't personalized—I did look for that, I remember—and that it was fairly new."
"Was that the only time you saw him?"
"Yes," said Jules.
"No," said her mother, and looked at her daughter apologetically. "I saw him a couple of weeks ago. It must have been a Tuesday night, because I was coming in from my late class. He was just going out as I came in, so I said hello and thanked him again. He said he was glad to help. That was all."
"Which Tuesday was this?"
"Not last week. The week before, a couple of days before the storm."
The day after Samantha Donaldson was killed. Hawkin stared for a long minute at a book spine with a title he couldn't begin to pronounce, and thought. And thought. When he finally looked up the woman was looking amused.
"Sorry," he said.
"I do it all the time." She smiled, and his middle-aged heart turned over, and he wanted to stay seated at this horrid plastic table forever.
"What was he wearing?" It was nearly a random question.
"Something old, blue jeans and a dark jacket over a work shirt of some kind. Plaid, I think. Red plaid. It looked better on him than the suit did. More appropriate."
"How did he seem to you?"
"Cheerful. Excited, almost. He looked tired as well, though."
"Do you think he killed that little girl?" breathed Jules, looking curious and doubtful and more than a bit scared. Hawkin turned from her to her mother, who just looked scared. He took out his card and wrote a number on it.
"Ms. Cameron, if you, or your daughter, see the man Andrews at any time, do not allow yourself to be alone with him, and call this number as soon as you can. He may no longer have a beard." He showed them the drawings. "I would also appreciate it if you would not talk with your friends or neighbors about this conversation, not for a few days. It could jeopardize the investigation and put people in danger." He fixed Jules with a hard eye, and she put her chin up.
"I don't gossip," she said with dignity.
"I didn't think you would," he said, and stood up to go. At the door he stopped and looked down at the child and thought of poor, confused Amy up on Tyler's Road.
"So you want to go into law?" he asked.
"It's one option," she agreed.
"Would you like to see a trial some day, meet the judge, talk to the lawyers?"
"I would, very much." From the gleam in her eye he might have been offering Disneyland.
"When this case is over, if I can work a free day, we'll see what we can do."
Trujillo stared at him as if he were crazy; Jules looked at him as if he were God; Jules's mother looked him over as if he were a distinct possibility.
In the elevator Trujillo watched the numbers change with great concentration, and they had stepped out of the box and onto the ground floor before he could no longer contain himself.
"Did you really have to ask the kid to go to court with you? I mean, God, the mother, and it's probably the only way to get to her, through the kid, but still. Can you imagine her cross-examining you?" The thought was one to give him nightmares, obviously.
"I thought she was cute."
Trujillo looked incredulous. "Cute like a cobra, you mean."
"Not so bad. And look at it this way, I may convert her to aiming for the D.A.'s office. We could use a few of those on our side, don't you think?"
Trujillo just shook his head and muttered something under his breath. It sounded like "earthy immediacy."
Hawkin let him conduct the last three interviews of the evening, which were short, uninformative, and extraordinarily dull.
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Thursday involved sending people out to trudge through every garage, gas station, and body shop in that part of San Jose, with no luck. Friday they widened their search, with little hope, but within the hour one of the San Jose men found the garage. Hawkin and Trujillo were there in twenty minutes.
It was a big, sprawling work shed filled with men and cars and noise. The owner, Dan Whittier, was a giant with a huge belly and no hips, whose greasy black trousers threatened to descend with every step. He recognized "Tony Andrews" from the drawing, a guy who came in occasionally to help when they were rushed. First met him about a year ago, at a bar. Yes, it might have been the Golden Grill; he went in there sometimes. No, he didn't think anyone introduced them, just got to talking. No, he hadn't seen him for a couple of weeks. Yes, he'd tried to reach him, left a message on the answering machine like usual, but he never showed up. It had happened before; no problem, the work got done eventually. The number? Yeah, it was here, next to the phone.
It was the number of the apartment.
Trujillo asked a few more questions until it was obvious that to this man, Tony was a nice guy, an adequate mechanic who helped out occasionally in exchange for being able to use the facilities during off hours to work on his own cars. Offhand, nobody could remember any of his cars except in the vaguest of terms—a pickup, a red Grand Prix, a couple of old Dodges—but no paperwork had been kept on any of them.
Frustrated, they left, and looked back, and then came the little break that was to earn Trujillo his promotion. Among the many cars, trucks, and vans sitting inside the chain-link fence of the storage yard were two U.S. Government mail-delivery vehicles, the boxy white ones used for streetside delivery. Trujillo walked around the unmarked car to the driver's side and then paused and looked thoughtfully back over the car roof toward the storage yard.
"Have you ever noticed," he said slowly, "how people don't remember seeing things like mail vans? They're nearly invisible."
Hawkin stared at him, then stared at the two innocent white delivery trucks, and was one step ahead of him when they went back through Dan Whittier's door.
Dan Whittier was surprised and a bit annoyed at seeing them again, and followed them back into his office. Yes, they had Post Office vehic
les here from time to time. Not regularly, just when the government's regular mechanics were swamped. Oh, yes, those they kept close records of. What dates were they interested in? Trujillo gave him the three dates. The first one would be from last year's books, Whittier told them, which weren't here now, but the second and third dates were very clear: yes, there was a mail van in during both those times, had come in two working days before in both cases, and yes, Andrews had worked on them, and yes, Andrews had taken them out for road tests, and come to think of it the last time, yes, he had been gone a long time, four or five hours, something wrong with the fuses, and yes, Trujillo was welcome to the license numbers if it would allow Dan to get back to his cars.
Several telephone calls later a police team laid claim to the two vehicles. The one that had been into the shop back in January had since been thoroughly cleaned; the one that had been in on the day Samantha Donaldson had disappeared had not been and gave forth several very nice latent prints of Andrew Lewis, from places one would not normally expect an engine mechanic to lay his hand, places where a man might brace himself, say, when lifting an awkward weight from the back. More materially there were several hairs, which proved later to make as close to a match with hairs from Samantha Donaldson's head as modern forensic science could judge, and finally a small snag of blue knitting wool that was microscopically identical to the remainder of the ball in the knitting basket of Samantha's grandmother.
The postal van, the apartment, the Lewis/Dodson/Andrews tie, the rough partial print on Samantha's neck—Hawkin had a case that was air-tight.
All he lacked was Lewis himself.
Lee's dinner that Friday was the closest she ever came to failure, and it first amazed and then amused Kate to see Lee bothered out of all proportion. Kate didn't show her feelings, though, and dutifully protested as the tight-lipped cook scraped the fallen souffle into the garbage and reassured her that carrot soup, chewy multigrain rolls, a cold marinated vegetable salad, and raspberry-walnut torte were quite enough to keep them from starvation. Normally Lee would have shrugged and served the souffle flat, but it seemed as if the uneasy peace between Lee and Al Hawkin allowed for no sign of weakness.
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