As I drove, Milo balanced a toothpick between the tips of his index fingers and radar-scanned the passing world with cop’s eyes. “Been a while since we did this, huh?”
Over the past few months we’d seen each other less and less. I’d put it down to his backlog of cold files and my workload. That was denial. There was mutual isolation going on. “Guess, you didn’t have enough weird ones.”
“Matter of fact, that’s true,” he said. “Just the usual, and I don’t trouble you with the usual.” A second later: “You doing all right? In general?”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Good.” A block later: “So… everything with Allison’s… things are working out?”
“Allison’s wonderful,” I said.
“Well, that’s good.” He picked his teeth, kept surveilling the city.
His first contacts with Allison had been professionaclass="underline" wrapping up the Ingalls file. She told me he’d been deft and compassionate.
His first reaction upon hearing that we were seeing each other had been silence. Then: She’s gorgeous, I’ll grant you that.
I’d thought: What won’t you grant me? Then I figured I was being touchy and kept my mouth shut. A few weeks later, I cooked dinner for four at my place: a mild March evening, steaks and baked potatoes and red wine out on the terrace. Milo and Rick Silverman, Allison and me.
The surprise was Allison and Rick knew each other. One of her patients had been brought into the Cedars-Sinai ER after a car wreck and Rick had been the surgeon on duty.
They talked shop, I played host, Milo ate and fidgeted. Toward the end of the evening, he drew me aside. “Nice girl, Alex. Not that you need my approval.” Sounding as if someone had prodded him to make the speech.
Since then, he’d seldom mentioned her.
“A few more blocks,” he said. “How’s the pooch?”
“I hear he’s fine.”
A moment later: “Robin and I got together a couple of times for coffee.”
Surprise, surprise.
“Nothing wrong with that,” I said.
“You’re pissed.”
“Why would I be pissed?”
“You sound pissed.”
“I’m not pissed. Where do I turn?”
“Two more blocks, then a right,” he said. “Okay, I keep my trap Crazy-Glued shut. Even though all these years you’ve been telling me I should express my feelings.”
“Express away,” I said.
“That guy she’s with-”
“He has a name. Tim.”
“Tim’s a wimp.”
“Give it up, Milo.”
“Give what up?”
“Reconciliation fantasies.”
“I-”
“When you saw her was she pining for me?”
Silence.
“Whoa,” he said.
“Right turn here?”
“Yeah.”
Light and Space’s neighbors were a plating plant and a wholesaler of plastic signs. The gallery’s warehouse origins were obvious: brick-faced, tar-roofed, three segmented steel overhead doors in front, instead of a window. Black plastic letters above the central door read LIGHT AND SPACE: AN ART PLACE. Stout combination locks secured the outer doors but the one in the middle was held in place by a single dead bolt that responded to a key on Milo ’s ring. He pushed, and the metal panel slid upward into a pocket.
“They gave you a key?” I said.
“My honest face,” he said, stepping inside and flicking on lights.
The interior was five thousand square feet or so. Walls painted that vanilla white that brings out the best in art, gray cement floors, twenty-foot ceilings thatched by ductwork, high-focus spotlights fixed upon several large, unframed canvases.
No furniture except for a desk up front, bearing brochures and a CD player. The nearest wall was lettered in the same black plastic used on the outside of the building.
Juliet Kipper
Air and Image
Same title on the brochures. I picked one up, skimmed a few paragraphs of art-speak, flipped to a black-and-white headshot of the artist.
Juliet Kipper had posed in a black turtleneck and no jewelry, her face pallid against a gray matte background. Squarish face, not unpretty under chopped, platinum hair. Pale eyes, deep-set and watchful, challenged the camera. Her mouth was grim- tugged down at the corners. High, uneven bangs exposed a furrowed forehead. Concentrating hard. Or burdened. She’d made an effort to look the part of the troubled artist, or it had come naturally.
Milo was pacing the gallery, setting off echoes as he drifted from painting to painting. I began doing the same.
A smug psycho-prediction of Julie Kipper’s art based upon the cheerlessness of her photo would have fallen flat. She’d created fifteen luminous landscapes, exuberantly colorful and textured, each marked by a master’s control of composition and light.
Sere arroyos, fog-shrouded, razor-hewn mountains, furious waterfalls emptying to mirror-glass streams, deep green forests pierced by gilded bursts that promised distant discovery. Two ocean nocturnes were livened by cerulean blue heavens and lemon moonglow that turned the tide to froth. Every painting bore the confident brushstrokes of someone who’d known how to move pigment around the canvas. Layers of color seemed to fluoresce; in lesser hands, the work would’ve veered into tourist kitsch.
Prices ranged from two to four thousand. I examined the canvases with another eye, searching for familiar locales, but finding none. Then I read the title tags: Dream I, Dream II, Dream III…
Juliet Kipper had created her own terrain.
I said, “To my eye, she was a major talent.” My voice bounced around the near-empty space.
Milo said, “I like her stuff, too, but what do I know? C’mon, let me show you where she died.”
The bathroom was too small for both of us, and Milo waited outside as I checked out the grimy spot where Juliet Kipper had been strangled.
A nasty little space, windowless, dank. Cracked sink, oxidized spigots. Black threads of mold curled in the corners.
With all that dirt, the series of faint brown smudges on the cement floor would’ve escaped my notice if I hadn’t known better.
I backed out of the room and Milo showed me the rest of the rear space. A large storage area to the left was filled with unframed paintings and office supplies and random pieces of cheap-looking furniture. The men’s room was no more generous or attractive.
The gallery’s rear door was striped by a push bolt.
“Another self-locking mechanism,” I said. “Another deliberate attempt to invite discovery.”
“Exhibitionist.”
“But he keeps it in check. Someone very measured.”
He pushed the bolt, propped the door open with a block of wood left there for that purpose, and we exited the building. An asphalt strip was backed by a ten-foot block wall. A Dumpster took up the far corner.
“What’s on the other side of the wall?”
“Parking lot of a plumbing supplies outfit. The ground’s higher on their side- two feet or so, but it would still be a climb. And there’d be no reason for the killer to scale it because all he had to do was walk right in.” He led me around the north side of the gallery and pointed down another tarred passageway that bordered the plating plant and opened to the street. Fumes rose from the plant; the air smelled lethal.
“Not much security,” I said.
“Why would a bunch of artists need any?”
We returned to the propped-open door, and I had a closer look at the lock.
“Same key as the front?”
“Yup.”
“I assume all the co-op members have keys.”
“Access is no mystery, Alex. Motive is. Like I said, I’ve already talked to all the co-op members, and none of them even remotely twangs my antenna. Fourteen out of twenty are women and of the six guys, three are of CoCo ’s vintage. The young ones seem like your basic, head-in-the-clouds creative type. We’re talking the Venice crowd, here. Make art, not war. No one’s being evasive. I ran checks on all of them, anyway. Clean. I’ve been fooled too often to think it can’t happen again, but I’m just not picking up any serious vibes from this bunch.”