Running From the Law Page 9

  “My God,” I heard myself say.

  “Remember, don’t touch anything,” Johanssen said. His eyes were focused on the right side of the room and his affect was flat. I followed his gaze.

  A white line was taped to the floor like a Keith Haring outline. It was a jumble of arms and legs, as askew and berserk as the studio itself. No human, no woman, could lie in such a fashion. The neck was twisted back on itself. In the center of the figure, spreading over the hardwood floor, was a thin pool of blood, oddly a bright shade of red. Its primal scent was overpowered by a stronger odor.

  “What is that smell?” I said, talking out loud, but Johanssen didn’t reply. I stepped back, because whatever it was made my eyes sting slightly. A solvent, turpentine. I looked over and saw a clear liquid running like a tributary from an upended coffee can. It flowed into the pool of blood and the two fluids commingled grotesquely, so the blood stayed red, oxygen-rich. I recoiled from the sight and smell, almost slipping on a paintbrush as I stepped back.

  “Miss?” Johanssen said.

  “I’m okay,” I said, regaining my footing if not my composure. I walked toward the window, where one of the screens was open. Outside was an expanse of grass in dappled sunshine, and the weathered slate roof of the main house peeked through the treetops. The air smelled fragrant and clean and I closed my eyes, inhaling deeply. Was Fiske capable of such savagery, especially toward a woman he loved?

  “You done here?” Johanssen asked.

  “No. I want to see everything.” I had to.

  We left the room and crossed the landing at the top of the stairs. Straight ahead was a galley kitchen that was undisturbed. A porcelain mug sat on a gray counter next to some dirty dishes. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

  I peeked into the bathroom next to the kitchen. It was tiny, with a maid’s sink and an old-fashioned tub with claw-and-ball feet. Everything was in order, down to the loofah stuck between the tub and the tile wall. Except for the toilet seat. Its ring was up. Odd. Would a killer use the toilet? I wondered if the police had noticed, or if you had to be a woman to notice when the seat’s been left up.

  “The bedroom’s here,” Johanssen said, and I walked to the doorway.

  It was beautiful. A queen-size bed with a lacy spread, in a disarray that looked sweet instead of merely unmade. The sheets were a soft, unbleached cotton, as were the pillows. Against the wall on the right was an oak bureau covered by a lace runner. “I guess there was no struggle in here,” I said.

  Johanssen said nothing for a change.

  Against the far wall were windows with white lace curtains and a blanket chest stood between them. To the left was a bookshelf, but there were no clues announcing themselves anywhere. “Are there any other rooms, Officer?”

  “No.”

  “Then I think I’d like to see the living room again.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  I tried to look at the room like a professional, now that the initial shock had worn off. I took a small legal pad from my purse and began to make notes. The blood didn’t seem to fall in any particular pattern or spatter. It seemed likely that Patricia had been attacked in the studio, perhaps while painting, and had been stabbed there. I had no support for it, but it looked as if the killer had wrecked the place in a rage, possibly drug- or alcohol-induced, or in a struggle. I wondered if the cops had any theories.

  “Looks like a struggle,” I said, to no cop in particular.

  Johanssen didn’t reply.

  Real helpful. I considered reminding the cop that I was a taxpayer and the least he could do was throw me a bone, but thought better of it. It wouldn’t be very detectivey, begging for hints and all.

  I stepped over to a shelf to the right of the room. Sketchbooks and pads flopped over on the shelves, next to a cigar box of pencils. Messy black smudges covered almost all of the surfaces around me. “Is this dusting for fingerprints?”

  Johanssen nodded.

  Hey, I was in the zone. I moved closer to the bookshelf. Untouched, except for the fingerprint dust, was a massive wooden paint box that sat open on top of the bookshelf. It looked expensive, so I guessed this was the paint box Fiske had bought Patricia. It was three trays deep and laden with silver tubes of oil paint. Cadmium Red, Prussian Blue, Viridian, said the black labels, and each tube had been squeezed in the middle like the nightmare tube of Crest, travel size.

  But the paint box hadn’t been harmed. It seemed strange, especially if it was Fiske who had killed Patricia and ransacked the place. Wouldn’t he have destroyed his expensive gift? And was the studio ransacked before or after she was killed? Was the killer looking for something? I stepped back and heard the rustle of paper underfoot.

  “Watch out,” Johanssen said. “We’re not finished with the scene yet.”

  “Sorry.” I reddened. Joe Cool at the crime scene, tripping over Exhibit A. I looked down at my feet, expecting yet another depiction of flowers in May, but I was wrong. Underneath my pump was a sketch of a young black man.

  Nude.

  I looked closer. He was reclining on some sort of sheet, and his handsome face, framed by short dreadlocks, was turned directly toward the artist. His body was young and strong; muscular shoulders, a broad chest, and nipples were suggested by delicate lines of black india ink. His hips looked bulky and powerful, and one leg was up, discreetly concealing what lay beneath his flat stomach. I wondered who he was and whether he was real or imaginary. I made a note to find out.

  I glanced at the other sketches. All of them were fruits or flowers—peonies, cosmos, rudbeckia—like a Burpee’s catalog in pencil. But I learned more about Patricia from the erotic drawing than I did from all the leggy cosmos, and I took the time to look at each painting, as well as the unfinished canvases that she had leaning against the wall. Then I remembered another unfinished canvas.

  “Officer, can we see that garage now?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I led the way down the stairs, relieved to leave the bloody scene behind, and walked ahead of Johanssen while he locked the front door. I made a note about the distance from the driveway to the mansion and confirmed my original conclusion that the witness’s identification of the judge could be attacked. Except for that license plate part.

  It gave me another unwanted thought, one I’d dismissed when I’d seen Kate at the house, looking so upset. Kate drove a black Jaguar, she had an almost identical license plate. And she had a motive—her anger at Patricia for bringing the lawsuit. If she knew about the affair, she’d have an even stronger motive. It sounded crazy, but could Kate have done it? And did I want to exonerate Fiske only to put Kate on the hook?

  “Must not have used the lock,” Johanssen said to himself, as he struggled to lock the front door.

  “But she wouldn’t leave the door unlocked.” A woman, living alone? No way.

  The lock fell into place. “Let’s go,” Johanssen said, and led me around the house to the front, where the avaricious ivy crept over the left side of the garage door. Johanssen tipped his hat back and frowned. “You really have to do this, lady?”

  “Yep.”

  “This real important to the defense?”

  “I doubt it, but the alternative is reading cases.”

  He looked at me sideways, then back at the door. “Must be manual.”

  “What?”

  “The door.” He bent over and gripped a rusty handle on the bottom of the garage door. It opened after four hard yanks, and a bare lightbulb in the ceiling shone down on the damndest thing. A motorcycle. It was a shiny turquoise blue with bright chrome pipes underneath and a leathery black seat. So Patricia had a motorcycle. There was no car in sight. I filed this piece of information and looked around the musty garage.

  “Well, will you look at that?” Johanssen said with sudden animation, and glommed on to the bike as if pulled into its gravitational field. “It’s a BMW.”

  “I didn’t know BMW made motorcycles,” I said idly.

  “BM
W? Are you kidding? They’ve been making them for years, since World War II. They made them for Rommel, the first shaft-drive bikes. He needed them because the sand from North Africa, it got in the chains on the old bikes. Abraded them. Motoguzzi copied it, and by the eighties everybody had the drive shaft.”

  “Really?” Like I care. Against the cinderblock wall of the garage was a shelf with tins of painting supplies, slim cans of brush cleaner, and linseed oil. So Patricia did keep her painting stuff in here.

  Johanssen wolf-whistled. “Jeez, this is a 750.”

  “A 750?” I asked, keeping him distracted so he wouldn’t see me snooping. “What does that mean?”

  “Seven hundred and fifty cubic centimeters. The displacement, the size of the engine. Like the horsepower in a car.”

  “Interesting.” To others. I walked by the motorcycle to the other side of the garage. In the light from the window I could make out some suitcases, a pink steamer trunk, and some papers against the wall.

  “My bike’s a Honda,” Johanssen said. “It’s only a 550. They don’t even make it anymore. They start at 650 now.”

  “I guess there’s nothing down here,” I said, trying to sound disappointed. “She must’ve used the garage for storage.” I walked over to the cardboard boxes and peeked under one of the flaps, which was slightly damp. Inside was a pile of wool skirts and pullover sweaters. “Just a lot of old winter clothes. I wouldn’t put my sweaters in an open box, would you?”

  Johanssen shook his blond head over the bike. “Five hundred ccs just isn’t enough, especially on an on-ramp when you need the acceleration.”

  Terrific. My usual communication with men. I walked softly to the steamer trunk. “I would never leave wool in a garage where the moths could get it, would you?”

  “No. Half the time, the cars don’t see you. That’s the leading cause of motorcycle accidents, poor visibility of the bike. That’s why you need the power, for maneuvering. You have to drive defensively on a bike.”

  “You know how I store my sweaters, Officer?” The latch on the trunk was a mottled brass. I lifted it quietly with my best fingernail. “I get each one dry-cleaned, then I store it in the plastic bag they give you. You know the ones I mean?”

  “Yeah. Lotta power in this baby. Lotta power.” He squatted on his haunches to drool on the chrome pipes. “This needs a belly cowling. I’d put a belly cowling on it if it were mine.”

  “Then, after I have each sweater in its own individual bag, I slip in a couple of mothball crystal packets, the kind that come with the lavender sachets.” Inside the steamer trunk was a slew of paperback books, Grateful Dead albums, old shoes, and sketchbooks. “You know the sachets I mean? The lavender? Purple?”

  “Blue is nice. I think it comes in red, too. Like a maroon.” His voice came from behind the motorcycle.

  “This way you don’t get that mothball smell in your clothes, you know what I mean?” Under the paperbacks were a bunch of spiral composition books. “I hate that mothball smell, don’t you? I’ll take lavender any day.”

  “Sure. And black. Black is something else. If I were gonna spring for one of these babies, I’d get the black.”

  “Black is nice,” I said supportively, and closed the trunk. Behind it was a workbench made out of a door resting across two sawhorses. On top of the door were coffee cans and jars filled with paintbrushes and painter’s knives, and a stack of small sketchbooks. Underneath were canvases, their rough white edges sticking out from between the sawhorse. Maybe the portrait of Paul and me was among them.

  Johanssen had been quiet for some time, so I checked over my shoulder. He sat astride the motorcycle with his eyes closed. At least he wasn’t making engine sounds. Not out loud, anyway.

  I bent down and flipped through some of the canvases. More wildflowers, one after the other, then a portrait of the young black man, again nude. He stood and faced the artist almost obscenely. I passed by it quickly. There were three other canvases, each of different nude men. Patricia had a wild side, all right, despite her cherubic appearance.

  I glanced back at Johanssen. His eyes were closed in orgasm. Again, mercifully silent.

  I flipped over to the next canvas and swallowed hard. I was looking at a gorgeous portrait from our Bermuda trip. Paul was sunburned under the moongate, his jacket an idealized white. The garden behind us was lush, the sky shone a faultless blue. The only part unfinished was me. My face was barely sketched in, like a ghost.

  “Find anything?” Johanssen asked. He was standing behind the motorcycle looking at me.

  Bluff, girl. “Yes. Some beautiful paintings. I love art, don’t you?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You should really see this one, Officer. It’s lovely. A still life of some Gerber daisies in a vase. You can see each brushstroke. Come on over and see.”

  “Uh, Gerber daisies?”

  “Thick stems, a big bloom. Pinks, oranges, yellows. So perfect, so real. You’d love them. Come see.”

  “I guess I’m not a real good art fan,” he called out, walking around the back of the motorcycle. “But my wife, she likes art. She grew up in Chadds Ford, so she likes Wyeth and those Brandywine guys. Sure is a nice bike.”

  “I like Wyeth, too, some of those meadows he did. And the snow scenes. I love those, don’t you?” I flipped the portrait back in place and straightened up. I grabbed one of the small sketchbooks and quickly paged through it. They were pencil drawings of nude men, black men and white men, short men and tall men. The second sketchbook was more of the same, and I felt myself sweating by the third sketchbook, not knowing what I’d find. “Remember the Helga paintings?” I called out.

  “Yepper, maybe I’d go with the maroon. I could live with the maroon. I bet I could pick one up, used. That shop in Montgomeryville, they’d have it.”

  I opened the cardboard cover of the third sketchbook and froze on the spot. It was a sketch of Paul. His eyes were closed, in sleep, on a lacy bed. He was naked, with a sheet draped carelessly over his thighs. I wanted to cry out but didn’t.

  “Maybe I should ask for it for Christmas?” Johanssen said.

  I felt stunned. “Uh … worth a try.”

  “We could take long trips together. She’s always saying we don’t spend enough time, just the two of us. Be good for our marriage.”

  “Sure. Sounds like it.” As if I knew what was good for a marriage. I tore through the other sketchbooks. Paul wasn’t in any of them, but the young black man was, the one with the short dreadlocks. I returned to the drawing of Paul, holding the sketchbook in my hand. Deciding what to do with it.

  “Yes sir,” he said, and rocked back and forth on his heels. “I think I’ll put it on my Christmas list.”

  “Good idea.” I wanted to throw the sketchbook across the room, but I did something smarter. I shoved it into my purse.

  “Can’t blame a guy for trying,” Johanssen said.

  Oh no? Watch me.

  13

  I almost came to understand Fiske’s alibi because I drove for the next full hour with the convertible top down and the sketchbook in the backseat of the car. Hot summer air whipped my hair around and makeup melted off my face, but I didn’t care how I looked. I didn’t even care where I went. I just drove. Fast. Very fast.

  That I got no speeding ticket is a miracle, but that I did not rack up the car and kill myself stands to reason. First, I would never do that to my car. Second, I am not one of those women who turns her anger inward, the suicide prototype. I am quite proficient in turning it outward, and regard this as an improvement on the old-fashioned, Valium-taking, feminine-mystique model. After all, it wasn’t me I wanted to kill, it was Paul.

  For the first twenty-five miles or so, I actually considered this. How to commit murder, how to get away with it. You would think the fact that I had just examined a gory crime scene would counsel against my homicidal ruminations, but the opposite was true. It gave me a kind of permission. See, other people do it, you can, too. Lik
e cheating on your in-home office deduction.

  It took me thirty more miles to pass through the acutely felonious stage, but by mile fifty-five I had just enough high-octane bile left to make good company, so I roared home. I pulled into the driveway behind Paul’s Cherokee, spraying its gleaming finish with gravel. I cut the ignition, grabbed the sketchbook, and slammed the car door, regretting only this last act. I never slam the car door, I care for my car. It pissed me off so much that when I got in the front door to the house, I slammed it so hard that the windows on either side rattled in their glazier’s points and Paul came running downstairs into the entrance hall.

  “Rita!” he said. His alarmed expression reflected how deranged I must have looked, with my crayoned eyes, shiny face, and hair styled by Cuisinart.

  “What’s the matter, Paul? Don’t I look like the woman you want to marry?” I did a model’s pirouette and wobbled not at all.

  “You look … fine.”

  I eyed him up and down in his pressed pants, black rayon shirt, and silk print tie. “So do you. All for me?”

  “I was at Mom and Dad’s. The police came and searched the house, the closets, even the garage. It took all afternoon to put everything back together. They took Dad’s car, too. Where have you been?”

  I brandished the sketchbook. “Tell me, does this look familiar?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “But then again, maybe you don’t recognize it. You were sleeping, as I remember. You must have been so exhausted.”

  “Rita, are you okay?”

  “Why? Don’t I look okay?”

  “Well, you look a little—”

  “Crazy?” I said crazily.