“My, my,” she answered quickly, as if he had just taken a swing at her, “how the young man bucks. I’ll bet you’re a tiger in bed, telling all those little beach girls just where you like it best.”
He tried to think a way into the mind of the woman who sat next to him, but again he could not.
Shephard was never sure if he could have prevented what happened next, or if he had caused it, or if it was simply the last act in a script she’d written — one he couldn’t understand. With one hand Dorothy Edmond snapped her fingers in the air, and the dark-suited man at the bar snaked off his stool and moved toward them. With the other she brought a large white envelope from her purse and handed it to Shephard. It was stiff and heavy.
“A little gift from the personal safe of Joe Datilla,” she said. “Remember the old advice from Plato? ‘Know thyself’?”
He nodded.
“Take it.”
She rose from the booth in a swirl of smoke and lilac perfume, waving an irritated hand at the man who had dropped a fifty-dollar bill on the table and now stood waiting. “Bring the car, David,” she said. “I’m perfectly capable of walking to it myself.”
Then she disappeared unsteadily into the lobby.
In the dim candlelight Shephard examined the contents of the envelope. It contained two items, one a current California license plate — IAEA 896 — the other a check for twenty thousand dollars from Joe Datilla to Wade Shephard. It was canceled and dated September 20, 1951.
Eighteen
Ken Robbins sat amidst the clutter of his forensic lab and grunted off the stool when Shephard walked in. His white smock hung untied around his bulk and was stained with something that Shephard assumed was lunch. Stooped and massive, he looked like a man with scarcely enough energy to hold himself up, but behind his thick glasses Shephard saw the excitement in his eyes.
“Wouldn’t have called you up here on a Saturday, but I got something that won’t translate over the phone.” He shook his big head dramatically. “Those reporters sure gave you a grilling the other night. Thought you handled it okay. Take my advice, though, once you get on their bad side, just quit talking.”
Robbins led Shephard across the lab to a long table that lay against a wall of windows overlooking the smoggy city. In one quick glance, he could see the heart of the county’s government and the bowels of its poverty. To the east, the new Federal Building rose above them, and behind that the tall stiff towers of the jail. The Santa Ana Civic Center sprawled from behind the jail, and in the milky smog that seemed to hover everywhere, the County buildings etched their diminishing outlines against the suburbs. But to the west Shephard saw the gutted remnants at the end of what was once Fourth Street — century-old storefronts, hotels, and restaurants built out of brick that had lost its color. Their facades were festooned with construction company signs that announced the beginning of the end. The destruction had already begun at the north end of the street. Piles of rubble, cordoned off and alive with workers, lay where the old heart of the city had once beat. Farther down the street, Shephard could see the next set of businesses that were doomed, their fronts already so lifeless it looked as if they had given up long ago. Pawnshops, Zapaterias, Joyerias, the Palace Hotel, the Norton, where he had met Little Theodore, cafés, bars. End of a chapter, he thought as he turned to Robbins.
Three microscopes were set up on the table, each with the specimen slides already inserted. Robbins checked the first, then motioned Shephard to do the same. “Some you’ve seen, some you haven’t,” he said, stepping away.
Shephard gazed into the eyepiece at the rich blue slab under the glass. Robbins’s voice came from behind him, patient but intense.
“Recognize it?”
“Cobalt.”
“Right, or almost right. I got cobalt when I did the scan the day you were here, and the reading was so high I let it slide. Shouldn’t have. What you’re looking at is a cluster of cobalt particles suspended in a base of oil. Try the next one, dick.”
Shephard moved to his right. The color that hit him as he bent to the eyepiece was as rich as the blue, but brighter. He hadn’t seen such a flagrant yellow since he stared at the sun once as a boy, then closed his eyelids and viewed it through his own skin.
“What we have here is the element cadmium. I found it connected to a hair on that dead dog’s neck. Routine scan, you know, but that yellow burned my eyes like it’s burning yours right now. You don’t find cadmium very often, about as often as you find cobalt or a beautiful woman who doesn’t know it. So I ran it through the scanner slow and got the same oil trace I found in with the cobalt. Not that it meant shit to me at the time.”
In the last microscope Shephard found the same truncated branch — camel hair — that he had seen a week ago. It was magnified to show the mounds of tocopherol acetate.
“Here’s the skinny,” Robbins said as Shephard worked the focus and continued to study the hair. “Last week you bring me a handful of gray hair from the fist of a dead man. I named it killer’s hair. And attached to that hair is a fleck of cobalt you don’t find a helluva lot these days. And a piece of hair from an animal that doesn’t even grow on this continent. A few days later more hair from the same guy. Both the camel hair and the human hair conditioned with the same stuff. This time there’s a piece of cadmium in the hair of the dog this guy has choked.”
Robbins threw off his lab smock and headed for the door. Shephard followed him to a small alcove filled with coffee and junk food machines. Robbins was silent while his coffee “brewed”; then he sipped and eyed Shephard over the cup.
“So I go home after the cadmium day and I’m halfway through a martini — a big one — and my wife asks what I did. It isn’t easy to explain what I do. But I was feeling good, so I told her about the cobalt and the cadmium and the camel’s hair dented in the middle. All of it. And she smiles and says, Robbins, you’re a dummy sometimes. All it took was a little art back in college to know that cobalt and cadmium are used in oil paints and camel hair brushes are what you put them on the canvas with.”
Robbins treated Shephard to coffee, light, then slurped loudly from his own cup and continued.
“I said that’s great, Carole, but you don’t condition paintbrushes. She tells me sorry, but that’s exactly what a serious painter does. They wash their brushes in shampoo and condition them with the best stuff they can afford. It keeps the filaments clean and supple. And when I pictured that camel’s hair again, I saw that we were just looking at the wrong end when we said it wasn’t from a hairbrush. The straight end goes into the metal that holds it in place with the others. That’s why it’s dented halfway — from the metal. That explains the oil base, too. Cobalt blue and cadmium yellow. I called a local art house this afternoon and they sell it all the time.”
Robbins trailed slowly back toward the lab, his head bent to the coffee. Inside he shut the door and looked at Shephard with a smile. “You got a killer who paints. An artist. Only in Laguna, young dick. Weird shit.”
An hour later Shephard entered the Laguna Art Mart with a stack of Identikit sketches in his hand. The clerk was a sweet young man who bore some resemblance to Elvis Costello, but with a pot belly. His name was Frank and he took the Identikit sketch, holding it close to his plastic-rimmed sunglasses.
“Oh God no,” he said quickly. “I’m sure I didn’t sell any Winsor and Newtons.”
“Winsor and Newtons?”
“Paint,” he said flatly. “If you want paint with real cobalt and real cadmium the only thing I sell is Winsor and Newtons. The best. Five ninety-five big tube three ninety-five small.” Shephard wondered if Frank had dropped commas from his vocabulary. “Aisle one,” Frank said in a blur, then threw back his head and went to help another young man struggling with a large picture frame.
Shephard found the paint tubes locked in a case on aisle one. He noted that Frank was correct in his prices. Leaning up to the glass, he spotted both Cobalt Blue and Cadmium Yellow among the uniform tubes. On the other side of the aisle were the paintbrushes. The camel hair brushes were moderate in price and came in a wide selection of shapes, sizes, and lengths.
As Shephard worked his way through the store, showing the Identikit to the clerks, he decided that the Art Mart must be the largest employer in the city. A toothy blond girl said he looked familiar but that she probably would have remembered because you have to unlock the case to sell Winsor and Newtons, and so far as she knew she hadn’t. A wide and serious woman with a head of healthy brown curls told Shephard that she had sold so many Winsor and Newtons in the last week that she couldn’t remember them all.
“Can you remember who bought them?” he asked earnestly.
“Come on, man,” she said. “I’m an artist, not a clerk. A face is a face.”
A red-headed boy with bright green eyes studied the Identikit sketch and pursed his lips grimly, as if wondering whether or not he should take a bet. He finally decided no and told Shephard to try Ella’s Corner because the best artists in town didn’t shop Laguna Art Mart anyway.
An hour later he merged onto Coast Highway and the slow knot of tourist traffic.
Ella’s Corner was just that, a nook filled with art supplies, owned and maintained by a substantial woman named Ella. She examined the Identikit patiently, once with her glasses on and once with them off. A poodle wearing a knit vest poked from behind the counter, smelled Shephard’s shoe, and clicked away.
“I didn’t exactly sell him the paints,” she said finally. “He said he didn’t have any money, so I took one of his works in trade. I do it a lot. That’s probably one of the reasons this is Ella’s Corner and not Ella’s place, house, or castle.” She smiled beautifully and leaned over the counter, watching her poodle wander toward the easels. The dog turned a pair of gooey eyes to Ella when she called its name. “The painting is hanging over there.” She pointed behind her and called the dog again.
Shephard picked his way through the crowded store to the far wall, which was covered with frames suspended on wooden pegs. Balanced above the top row was a large painting that grabbed his attention and sent a sparkle of nerves down his back.
It was done in reds and blacks, thickly applied, a dense canvas that was as visceral as any painting he had ever seen. In the upper left, a figure in black loomed from an angular bench of some kind, while below him a man with his back to the viewer gazed upward. Jutting from the center of the scene and disappearing off to the right was a thin stable of sorts, filled with beasts that had horses’ heads and the bodies of men. As Shephard stared at the presiding figure, it seemed at first to be a hooded man, then a demon, then perhaps a woman with severe black hair, then a large reptilian bird. Slashed in black across its shadowy form was a dark protrusion. An arm? Wing? Cape? And deep in the dark recess of the head, two deep red sockets glowed dully.
He started when Ella appeared beside him.
“Unsigned,” he said.
“Powerful,” she said, cocking her head gallery-browser style, “but rather opaque. I kind of liked it after all the chintzy seascapes we see in this town. This painting has guts. So what the heck. I give up fifty dollars’ worth of paint and fifty dollars’ worth of canvas and brushes so he can do another one. It’s a fair shake even if I can’t sell it. You don’t sell nightmares in Laguna. Of course we’ve got enough real-life nightmares to keep us busy for a while, don’t we, detective?”
Shephard shrugged and continued to study the painting.
“No offense,” she said pleasantly. “I recognized you from the television news.”
Shephard accepted a cup of herb tea and sat with Ella for nearly half an hour, asking her every question he could think of about the man who had done the painting. But in the end her information was thin: he had come in one afternoon early last week, gone straight to the best paints and supplies, stacked them on the counter, and said that he was a great artist with no money but a painting he could give her in trade. He had then gone back downstairs — she had watched from the window — and brought back the canvas, framed, from the trunk of an early model red convertible Cadillac parked at the curb in front.
“How many blocks are we from St. Cecilia’s Church?” Shephard asked.
“Just three,” she said, then talked more about the strange painting, the humorless intensity of the man, his very near resemblance to the Identikit sketch that she now studied again. After a long pause she took the poodle up onto her ample lap and stroked its head. “Did he kill the old folks here in town?” Her eyes looked resigned.
Shephard nodded and touched the fluff of the dog’s head. “How much would you like for the painting?”