"You are right, the house does not belong to you. The house you live in is owned by one Leonora Cooper, Ph.D., a practicing psychotherapist who specializes in art and artists, particularly among members of the gay community. She was at Cal the same time you were. You have rented a room in her house for the last twenty-one months. That is all I need to know about your home life." His hard blue eyes came up and drilled into her wide brown ones. "All I need to know," he repeated, "unless and until your home life begins to interfere with your work. Is that understood, Martinelli?"
"Understood, sir," she said. Her voice was even, but he was beginning to know her well enough to see the effort of control in her jaws and hands.
"Good. This is not an order, I have no right to do that, but I would like you to ask your housemate Lee if she would be willing to move into a hotel for a couple of weeks, at our expense, of course, to give this a try."
"She won't go."
"You'll ask?"
"All right, God damn it, yes, I'll ask. But she won't go."
She wouldn't. Kate knew without thinking that there was no way Lee would go while the painter of Strawberry Fields was under her roof.
She also knew that Hawkin was right, that the best trap for Lewis was one that looked like no trap. She looked up at him, and caught on his face the same expression she'd seen in the parking lot outside the restaurant—approval, sympathy, and an odd element of pride. It was gone in an instant, and he stood up.
"The last few days have put you behind, so I told Trujillo he was to be available for you today. He'll bring you up to date, not that there's that much to tell. I'm going up to Tyler's Road to have a chat with Tommy and a look 'round at Angie's but I'll be back by six. Feel like going to dinner? My treat. I'll even drive."
"Sounds great," she lied. Her appetite had been ground out by the hospital air, and she doubted she would feel like eating.
"Trujillo recommended a place."
She made an effort.
"Tofu enchiladas?"
The flash of his grin made the effort worthwhile.
"A first rate Italian place, he swears. I was hoping for some edible veal. Six o'clock, then? To be back by eight?"
"I'll be ready."
He walked to the door and paused with his hand on the knob.
"Thank you, Casey." He pulled the door open, and the sounds of the hospital drifted in.
"Al?" He looked back at her. "My friends call me Kate."
24
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Shortly before six Hawkin reappeared and swept Kate out by one of the lesser exits. He was in a strangely ebullient mood and hummed some vaguely familiar tune that she thought might be Bach or Beethoven, whom she tended to confuse, and ground the gears in Trujillo's sports car. They were seated in a quiet corner, draped with napkins the size of small tablecloths, and presented with three-foot-tall menus, a wine list the thickness of a novel, and a waiter who identified himself as Phil, who for the next three minutes proceeded to rattle off the day's specialties before he vanished into the gloom. Hawkin looked at Kate, and his lips twitched.
"Did you get that, Martinelli?"
"Something about pasta, and fish, I think."
"Right, I'll have the veal parmigiana."
The antipasto was good and they were hungry, Kate to her surprise, Hawkin because he loved to eat. The salad was served before the entree (chilled forks, a pepper grinder the length of Phil's arm), and Kate could stand it no longer.
"All right, Al, give. You've been clucking like a mother hen. What's up? You haven't found Lewis—you'd have told me that."
"No, not yet. But I've got the last pieces of the puzzle now. It's a nice, smooth picture, and I'm very glad to have that much."
"Your talk with Tommy Chesler this afternoon? It was successful?"
"The talk, plus a bit of honest-to-God, old-fashioned, snooping-about type detecting. I found a copy of this— behind a hidden panel, can you believe it?—in some shelves in Lewis's cabin. Angie's cabin."
"This" was an issue of Time magazine from the previous summer. The copy Hawkin laid on the table was stamped with the name of the local library, and had a date-due card clipped inside the cover. The other was undoubtedly in the police lab.
"Look at page seventy-two," he said, and stretched across to steal the candles from two neighboring tables so she could see.
It was the article on Eva Vaughn, the mysterious genius of the brush (as a caption read). The left-hand page showed three of her paintings, all from the New York show. The right-hand page held Strawberry Fields and the beginning of the article, which continued on page seventy-four with a discussion of the revival of art as psychological revelation and social criticism. A jazzy three-color bar graph, the bars represented by stylized brushes, illustrated the phenomenal rise in prices brought by works of living artists.
Hawkin reached across and flipped the page back to the beginning, then tapped one of the three reproductions, which showed two very small, grubby, naked children squatting on a dirt road, heads together, studying something on the ground between them. One of them looked vaguely familiar, and after a moment Kate realized it was Flower Underwood's little hellion who had dismantled pens and sprayed her with milk while she had tried to interview the mother.
"Tommy Chesler helped her crate this one up last June. In August this article came out, but Tommy didn't see it until October, up in Tyler's room. He stole the magazine—took me twenty minutes to convince him I wasn't going to arrest him—and kept it in his shack next to his bed. Three or four weeks later—he wasn't sure about the date, but it was before Thanksgiving and after the first rain, which for your information was from the twelfth to the fifteenth of November—his buddy Dodson saw it lying there, and Tommy, who was just bursting to tell somebody about his role in getting that picture into Time, told him all."
"And within two weeks the Jamesons were burgled and Tina Merrill was dead."
"Yes, indeed. He can move fast when he wants, but then we knew that already, didn't we? So you see the nice clear portrait of a two-bit punk who can't stand it when someone gets the better of him. As a child he kills dogs and cats when he's angry with the owners, and he ends up with getting the preacher's only daughter pregnant and then beating her up. He goes away for two years, I think to Mexico—his only decent grades when he went back to school were in Spanish—learning God knows what tricks and having himself tattooed along the way.
"For some reason, boredom probably, he decides to go back to Mama for a while and puts himself into a small-town high school to strut around. Where he meets Vaun. Little Vaunie, who falls for his charm and his recreational poisons until she decides she's had enough and three weeks later very mysteriously murders a child she's fond of."
"I wouldn't want to have to go to the D.A. with only that in my hand," Kate said unhappily, and saw the last of the day's ebullience fade from Hawkin's face.
"Couldn't you just see it in court? 'So, Inspector Hawkin, you would have the jury believe that Andrew Lewis let himself in through the back door of a house, strangled a strange child, undressed her, and arranged her body to look like it did in a painting, all to get back at the child's babysitter who had hurt his pride?' "
"But you think that's what happened."
He was saved from the immediate need to answer by the arrival of Phil with their entrees. The waiter arranged their plates and hovered over them until Hawkin glared at him and he slunk off, hurt. They each had taken several hungry mouthfuls before Hawkin answered her question, obliquely.
"I came across a study recently. It said that as many as a half a percent of all suspects charged with violent crimes are wrongly convicted. I can't believe that, but even if you reduce it by a factor of one hundred, that still leaves eight or ten every year.