What are these paintings saying? That Catherine was so perfect she was false. In Aoki’s mind, Catherine’s perfection had crossed into the unreal, and Helen was a creature that she feared.
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Brouwer parked her old Jeep in front of the Hysteria Art Gallery and swung her driver door closed with a creaking thud. The gallery owner let her in by offering a thin arm heavy with bangles, as though to help her up the single step. Brouwer declined the gesture of help.
The gallery was a newer addition to the already significant Jackson art scene, wealthy collectors of Western art long having made Jackson a leading art location in the Middle West. Hysteria gallery was not western in theme, but purely contemporary, its collection of black and white photographs and bold canvasses were ideal for expansive cabins with modern decorating themes.
From behind a small desk in the darkened gallery, the thin woman turned on a row of recessed lighting, just enough to illuminate the main wall.
“Please wait by the lights,” Brouwer ordered.
“Of course,” the thin woman deferred.
Acrylic paintings on canvasses hung down a long white wall. A black dog stood massive and imposing. The dog’s mouth, nose, and eyes were a rolling mass of porcupine quills speared into its face and chest. The quills rippled with the contours of the muscled coat. Blinded by the porcupine, the dog stood stunned in the cruel beard of its prey.
“That’s not by Aoi Aoki,” the woman said.
The woman’s voice had a studied patience for showing art to tourists and locals she must view as rough westerners, one generation removed from shit kicking cowpokes.
“Looks like a rough day for the dog,” Brouwer humored her.
“The viciousness of nature, of course, but more than that, it captures a cruel beauty. When we truly develop our palette for life, we can see the sublime within the repugnant. Anything natural can be repellent and mesmerizing, cruel and beautiful, at once. A naturalist grotesque if you will,” the woman said.
“Nature is cruel,” Brouwer said. “But in this case, a fair deal to a porcupine.”
Catherine Kinderdine stood naked to her delicate ribs, her petite breasts given few brush strokes, as though adolescent. A figure straddled and held her at the waist. Catherine was indifferent to the viewer; her thoughts were out of view. Her lips were down slightly at the edges but she was not sad. The figure behind her rested her chin onto Catherine’s bare shoulder. The two posed naked together, the girl behind pressed her breasts into Catherine’s bare back. The large eyes behind Catherine were defiant, challenging. Helen Hearne.
The painting was watercolor in dull rust. The two women held distinct feelings in their eyes. A longing in Helen even in the simple watercolor, the yearning was pure performance for the viewer. Catherine held something else in her gaze, something alive in her eyes that Brouwer could not settle on.
“Do you recognize the emotion of the first girl? What would you say she is feeling?” Brouwer asked the gallery owner.
“It’s not emotion, but rationality. The first girl is cerebral.”
“What is she communicating?” Brouwer asked.
“Control. The girl in front is in control, and the blonde woman holding her is her devotee, caged to her. The first woman is ego, the second woman, her raging id. They are a queen and her chief huntress. Hera and Artemis. However, you will see that it’s a carnival mirage, an illusion. The two women are the same, literally, if you will. The brushstrokes form only one figure. The competing aspects of selfhood are shown doubly, but in truth, they’re one.”
The two women are ‘one’ symbolically in the painting. Now there is only one of them left. Brouwer pulled the bottle of luminol out of her heavy wool sweater. She sprayed the outer edge of the canvas in toward the center of the portrait, misting the chemical onto the canvass in short bursts. She told the woman to cut the lights and the room was black. A blue glow emerged. In florescence, the women’s faces reappeared. With the Nikon viewfinder to her eye, Brouwer took a long exposure photograph of the glowing blue nude portrait of Catherine and Helen.
“What have you done to my painting?”
“I sprayed it with a chemical called luminol. It detects blood plasma.”
“Why is the painting glowing in the dark?”
“The portrait is glowing because it was painted using human blood.”
“Oh my,” the thin woman said from the dark.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Brouwer said. “It’s menstrual.”
17.
Travis Vetchoski, also known as ‘Swindle’ Vetch, rumbled the big Peterbilt semi-truck into the town of Jackson late in the morning after pounding the highway all night from Fort Collins, Colorado. It’s a long drive when it’s all Mountain.
He was hungry. His stomach growled for breakfast and he was tired. Swindle Vetch didn’t see well at night anymore but still liked to make these drives in the dark. There was less traffic, fewer dipshits in minivans and motorhomes. The methamphetamine in an everyday toolbox encased in steel below the semi-truck’s overnight sleeper, was, like everything else in life, never completely fool proof. Nothing was ever fool proof, as fools run amok.
Searching the locked truck’s cabin would require a warrant and he was simply one more transport truck on a highway riddled with them. There was no need to search him, no need at all. The cargo was legit and manifested construction equipment and heavy truck parts. A few years ago, the cargo would have been stolen, but not anymore. Swindle Vetch had made the Jackals come around to his way of doing things. It had taken many years.
Stealing trucks or other machinery paled against the lucrative meth trade. Theft was high risk and low reward, and worse, it was time consuming. Club prospects and strikes loved hijacking. It gave them thrills. To knock over truckers and cargo, put pistols on truck driver’s heads, outlaws climbing up the side of a big rig at an intersection at night on the edge of nowhere. It all made the newbies feel like badasses, racing into the night, rattling some dead town awake by the loud cracks of motorcycle pipes. But the stolen freight was whatever happened to be sitting there when they swung the steel doors open. The cargo itself was a fool’s wager. For all the strikes knew, the truck was hauling plastic knives and forks. Armed robbery was never Swindle’s ideal leisure activity anyway. Then again, sitting directly on top of enough meth to put him away for ninety-nine years was not relaxing either.
The big black semi rumbled beside the town of Jackson on 189. Late risers made their way to work at schools and shops, wherever dummies work. He geared down behind a small truck pulling a boat and swung off the highway into the gravel lot of the Jackal’s compound.
A police vehicle sat in front of the bar. As he rumbled down gears, she came out from behind the wrecking shop and stood in the compound lot with a camera around her neck. The detective with Highway Patrol, who had asked around about the dead waitress, was standing in the gravel lot waving at him to pull the semi-truck alongside her.
She’d been waiting for him. Swindle took a drink from his Styrofoam cup of burnt gas station coffee and swallowed hard.
Standing outside the cab of his semi-truck in a white cowboy hat and leather lace up cowboy boots, a cotton shirt clung to her tight body. One hand rested on a pistol on her hip, with the other, she held up a badge and ID. As he rolled forward alongside her, she signaled to cut the engine and made a Highway Patrol hand signal, pulling out in a fist, indicating to empty the airbrakes, and he did.
Why Highway Patrol? Was this a routine inspection of the truck? She was the division’s detective and strangely, this relieved him. Maybe she was still snooping around about the dead girl. The metal box of meth slammed with waking reality and sweat flashed onto his brow. Being asked about the dead girl was better, no question about that.
He wiped his forehead with a rag and she stepped up the side of the truck. With her right hand on the chrome railing, she peered in at him, and pressed her badge inches from his face on the glass. He rolled down the window
and turned off the fan and radio.
“I thought we could have a quick chat,” she said.
She held his license and registration awhile and searched the cab with her soft eyes. There were no patrol cars rolling in, not yet. He let his hands sit loosely on the big wheel and sank into his low-slung air ride seat.
“Miss, it’s my duty to inform you that I have a criminal record.”
“I know that Travis,” she said to him. “I know all about you. You did some probation for fraud, for cooking books. You’re the Jackal accountant.”
She was putting him at ease. Her voice was friendly, warm, as though they would be getting to know one another.
She stood on his chrome side step with the transport manifest and his hour logbook and I.D. and asked him Highway Patrol questions, about his trip and his cargo. She got down and inspected the chains on his load and the safety condition of his tires and the she came back, wanting to know where he’d fueled, where all he’d stopped. She asked about the damn weather in Colorado, about whom he met with and where he went, but she already knew an awful lot. It was a regular trip, he was the bookkeeper for a few small companies, and the Jackals owned the bar, the motel, the wrecking yard, the used machinery lot, and the heavy engine repair shop. What they had title to and who their principle members in Denver were, all of this was old hat to her. After a while, she sat in her truck with his papers on the radio. She let him sweat and he did sweat, as though the box of Crystal Meth welded into the underbelly of the truck’s sleeper compartment was sitting on the hood. It was a federally controlled substance and it was enough volume to die over, right now.
Back on the side of his cab, she didn’t have Highway Patrol questions anymore, she didn’t have questions about his rig, she had homicide questions, and this relieved him.
She led him across the gravel lot and they sat in her hot Jeep. Peering into him the whole time, even while writing notes, her round baby blue eyes watched him like a little fox sat caged behind them. She wanted to know if he took anyone with him, if he was alone in the truck, and if he knew the dead girl. And then she asked where he was Sunday morning, how late he stayed at the Nite Ride Saloon Saturday night and to list with blue pen on a yellow pad everyone else that had been there. He named them all and signed the damn thing. She was all about the night someone took away the black haired waitress.
She said, “Well, Swindle Vetch, you and an associate were in the Nite Ride Saloon the night that Lara Mazer was murdered at the end of her shift. Your name is here on this list. You were among the last to leave that night. So I need to hear your story.”
He said, “There’s not much to tell you. I left the bar and the waitresses were there to close it down.”
Then she changed. She started to ask more and more about who else was in the bar and about Donald Swain. The space cowboy that Big Mick Cosgrove, the Club president, had told him to take on from Colorado Springs. Donald Swain came to Jackson to start taking over the icebox hauls from Colorado into Montana but Swindle rarely ever saw him.
“Yeah Donald Swain was there, with me that night, we hired him at the shop to do engine repair. He’s a mechanic. And he’s a decent one when he works, when he shows up.” He corrected the spelling of Swain’s name for her on her yellow notepad, Donald David Swain. “He’s been in town since fall. He and I were in the bar for a bit but I don’t drink much anymore. We had a few and went home. We left the waitresses there to close. Everyone was fine when we lit out. We stay in the living quarters in the truck repair shop when we’re in town. There are bedrolls laid out up there.”
She sat with her little body curved under the thin wheel of the old Jeep Cherokee and made her notes and then she asked for the video from the cameras over the door of the garage. She only wanted the tape from the weekend.
“It will show that you and the mechanic, this Swain fellow from Colorado, on the night that Lara died, went home from the bar to sleep, as you say you did? And that you stayed in the garage all night?”
He paused to think a moment. If she gets the tapes she may have a look at them, confirm his story and move on to her other leads. If he resists, then she needs a warrant to get the security footage from the garage and, having gone that far, she may haul in the trucks and computers on that same judge’s time.
She continued, “That way we know you didn’t stay longer than you say and that you didn’t meet up with the girl after she left the bar.” She wanted to see how he would react to this.
“That’s fine,” he said. “We put the cameras in to curb theft. We had a few B&Es.”
“Okay,” she said. He got her the video discs himself, easy and cooperative, no subpoena and no search and no fucking police dogs.
She seemed to take him at his word that he’d went to sleep in the bedrolls at the Service garage no later than maybe 1:00 a.m. that night. The security footage would show him and Swain coming into the garage for the night and would eliminate him as a suspect in the girl’s death. God willing she would go on her way. He said again that when he left the bar only the women who worked there stayed behind.
“Okay, I understand your whereabouts Saturday night. Where were you Friday night?”
“We were in Great Falls, Montana.” He said. Now she was asking about the first dead girl, the rich kid.
“You and the mechanic Swain were up in Montana?”
“Swain was with me. We spent Friday night in Great Falls and came down Saturday slow as molasses through the park with that old Freightliner. A mile of RVs honking horns behind us. I have a manifest and a bill of sale. We bought the Freightliner up there Friday and I keep fuel receipts, of course, I’m the bookkeeper. I needed Swain’s help to bring that semi down. He followed behind me in the half-ton truck.”
Nodding as he spoke, she tucked her light brown hair behind her ears, and that seemed to be that. He was free to go and he walked to the cab of the black Peterbilt slowly, taking enough time so she made her way out of the gravel lot before he opened his truck door.
Brouwer made an impression on Swindle Vetch that day and not just the gun and badge and legs and ass. As he stood by the Peterbilt watching her drive out on the interstate all he could think of was her standing on the rail of the tractor-trailer, her shit-kicking cowboy boots twenty inches away from a heavy metal box packed with methamphetamine manufactured in a bunker on the Colorado plain. Damn right, girl, I’ll answer your questions about the dead waitress. I’ll tell you everything you want to know about that.
18.
Avina Zadeh huddled herself on the steel gray chair. Wrapped in a heavy wool blanket, she kept her feet pulled up on the seat.
Brouwer said, “You stay in a very large house Avina, with a full guesthouse. That property is worth many millions of dollars. Whose house is it?”
“It belongs to Tala Vahedi, a woman from Denver that I’m house-sitting for.”
“You’re from Denver?”
“Yes. I went to Kit Carson High School.”
“Where are your parents?”
“They’re out of country on business. They’re mostly out of country. I’m an adult so it doesn’t matter.”
“What are their names?”
“It doesn't matter,” Zadeh spoke slowly, forming words in the front of her mouth.
“What would your parents think about a girl you were camping with being murdered?”
“She wasn’t a girl that I camped with, she was my best friend. It matters to me more than it does anyone else.”
“I need to know what happened to Catherine that night, Avina.”
“I do too.”
“Tell me about Lara Mazer.”
“She was cool. It’s terrible what happened to her. She came up snowboarding a few times. Everyone liked her. Did whoever kill Catherine kill Lara?”
“How did you meet Catherine Kinderdine?”
“She came into the White Buffalo, the restaurant where I waitress. That was the summer before.”
“You live in the ni
cest house of any waitress I’ve ever known.”
“I know, right? I have to have a job if I’m going to stay there. I’m not allowed to sit around. Tala Vahedi said I should have a regular job. You have to have a skill if you’re not married.”
“The Land Rover truck is registered in your name, that’s a hundred thousand dollar truck imported from England.”
The girl held herself in the blanket, waiting for a question. Finally sitting still, she blinked slowly, doe like, wanting to look innocent, not just of any wrongdoing, but in general. She regarded Brouwer with interest, admiration maybe. Unlike Helen Hearne, who seemed to need nothing, but could respect Brouwer’s power, Avina Zadeh had desire. She was acting; performing a role of what she thinks expected of her, presenting an image as girlish and sweet.
Brouwer said, “I’ve spent some time getting to know Helen. She has a lot of interesting things to say about you.”
Zadeh’s eyes emptied of presence. That got her thinking.
“She says you were obsessed with Catherine.”
Her brown eyes widened and deepened, like thoughts rolling in a projector.
“Catherine and I were best friends, she loved me, and I loved her.” Her brown eyes lit at this, at the thought of Catherine loving her.
“Do you have any other friends?”
“Paula was my only friend until I met Catherine.”
“Paula Fraser was at the campsite, but she’s back in Denver.”
“She’s back in Denver.”
“Denver PD is questioning her about Friday night at the campsite. Will Paula Fraser confirm your story?”
Dream of the Wolf Page 10