Chapter 13

He had not driven straight back from talking with Feltner but had cut through the residential sections of Bellaire and West University Place, taking his time, his mind wandering as he drove through the shaded streets. When he reached Kirby Drive, he turned impulsively and headed north, intersecting Bissonnet again where it was now deep into the wooded boulevards not far from his home. He continued with the slackening traffic, passing under the elevated Southwest Freeway, crossing Richmond Avenue and Westheimer. On San Felipe he turned right and pulled up to the art gallery of Mears, Simon & Company. They were closed, but he knew they were still there, and he banged on the front door. Spencer came from the back, cautiously, his expression half wary, half belligerent at the afterhours interruption.

Haydon stayed thirty-five minutes, mostly with the canvases of the late nineteenth century American impressionists, and then he left, making a mental note to return for the upcoming exhibition of Eugene Atget photographs. He circled over to West Gray and stopped at the Marchand Gallery. They were closed. He knocked again and was let in, as before, with cordial familiarity. He stayed only a short while, restlessly wandering through the gallery’s collection of modern Latin American artists.

The traffic had diminished considerably as he cut back on Shepherd Drive and returned to the section of Bissonnet where a number of quality galleries had established themselves along the approach to the Museum of Fine Arts at the Main Street intersection. He was unable to raise any response to his knocking at the next two galleries. At the Anton Busch Gallery a special exhibition party was in progress. Haydon wanted no part of the crowd and drove past without stopping.

Then he changed his mind, pulled to the curb, and walked back. He made his way through the crowd, which milled around the cheese and wine like cattle, and went straight to the canvases. He did not care for the work of the new artist who was the subject of the show and quickly searched out the other rooms. There were still the two small things by Klimt that Haydon had been tempted to buy and probably would, and then there were the canvases of a young photographic realist named Wiman, who had recently moved into a variant, looser style of portraiture, with elongated figures interestingly reminiscent of Modigliani and Giacometti. He liked these, spent a while with them, and then left.

By the time Haydon was nearing home, the sun had died to a gold wash that streamed through the trees along the boulevards and cast long shadows whose edges were melting away into a blue evening. The limestone pillars at the gates were caught in a brief light of rose madder that was quickly deepening to perse. As he pushed the remote control for the wrought iron gates, they parted slowly, moving like black lace across the swarthy flesh of dusk.

There were two notes on the refectory table in the library. One in Gabriela’s handwriting said simply Mooney and gave a telephone number. The other was from Nina.

Stuart . . .

R. Mandel called AGAIN. Wants very much for me to work with him on the Nordstrom design. You know I’ve been putting him off until now. I guess it’s time for both of us to go back to work. I’ll be at the studio with R. Call if you want or come by. I should be home around ten-ish.

Love you,

Nina

The R stood for Race. Haydon didn’t like the name or the man to whom it belonged. Mandel knew that, and Haydon sometimes believed that Mandel’s silly grin, which reminded him of the graceless humor of a man who read scatological double entendres into every simple remark, was a conscious, taunting goad at the core of which was Mandel’s access to Nina. Race Mandel was one of the few persons, perhaps the only person, whose very existence was offensive to Haydon.

He disregarded the telephone number under Mooney’s name and called him at home, where Haydon knew he would be by now. It rang four times before Mooney picked it up. He was out of breath.

“Naw, naw. No problem.” He took a few more heavy breaths. “Listen. I wanted to tell you that Jennifer Quinn is coming in tonight from New Orleans. Continental Flight 224 arriving here at eleven thirty. Their people are going to make sure she gets on the plane, and we’ll have somebody out there to stick with her when she lands. How long you want a tail on her?”

‘‘I’ll try to see her in the morning. I’ll get in touch with you after that.”

Haydon hung up. It was too dark to read the notes now. The lamps would be on at the gates. A splash of yellow fell through the library door from the hallway, and he could hear Gabriela in the kitchen across the hall and through the dining room. The house seemed empty. He wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t read the note from Nina. If there had been no note, he would have assumed she was there, and it wouldn’t have seemed empty. He thought about that, how he would have been happier because of a misconception. A mistake.

He wondered how many times he had operated under false assumptions without ever knowing the difference, and he wondered how much of one’s life was like that. What was the average percentage of time one spent operating within false premises? The percentages no doubt varied dramatically from person to person, but it seemed inevitable that in the end some people will have lived out their lives under the burden of more than their share of misconceptions. Fate, the consummate con, will have cheated them in the ultimate shell game and left them none the wiser. They won’t have known the difference. No complaints.

He ate alone in the dining room, sitting at the end of the table that allowed him a view of the terrace. There was nothing to watch. The terrace lights were on, but not those that lit the lawn and the trees. He could see nothing beyond the balustrades, and in the light there was only Cinco, who lay sleeping at the top of the steps that led down into the dark.

Haydon lifted the wine bottle and poured only enough Chablis for one or two sips into the small ribbed bistro glass. He raised the glass and took a drink and held it in his mouth. How could he have forgotten the messiness of investigations? He had told himself that he would approach Wayne Powell’s death strictly as a cerebral proposition. He would take the problem, put it through its paces of equations and theorems, and try to follow it to its proper solution. That was exactly how he had intended to look at it, and how he told himself he must look at it if he was going to be able to handle it at all.

And yet now, at the end of only the first day on the case, he had already begun to doubt his ambition to remain meticulously analytical. How could he have forgotten the messiness of these things? Homicides were always messy. They had to be because they were about people, and people were unbelievably messy creatures. Their public lives were messy, their private lives were messy, their businesses were messy, their affairs were messy . . . their minds were messy. Even after five months away, Haydon seemed to taste the coppery staleness of it as he swallowed his wine.

Still, he wondered, who had crumpled Wayne Powell into the sink of developing solution and then cut his throat and held him there while his life spilled out into his lap? Despite the messiness, or maybe because of it, he wanted to know who had made garbage out of an aging beachboy.

Haydon looked to the terrace again. Cinco was gone. In his place he imagined Powell’s wasted body lying for all to see in the undissembling glare of wrongful death, offensive and pitiable. And just beyond him, the menacing descent of the stairs that led, if not always to the light of truth, then certainly, inevitably, to a darkness that never disappointed in its enormity.

HAYDON WAS SITTING in a high backed chair in front of the French doors that opened to the balcony of the bedroom. He had loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar, his shoes lay next to his chair, and his feet were stretched out on the cushions of a small sofa. A Tanqueray and lime sat on a marble coffee table just to his left. He had been looking at an exhibition catalog of selections from the Divertimento per li regazzi, a series of drawings known as capricci by the eighteenth century Venetian artist Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. The pen and ink drawings overworked with washes in tones from blond browns to red browns featured scenes from the life, death, and resurrection of the harlequin Punchinello.

He had laid down the catalog and was staring vacantly at an etching on the white wall across the room when Nina opened the door. She was carrying her oversized portfolio case under one arm and carefully held a fresh drink in her other hand. She smiled at him and gently pushed the door closed with the back of her foot.

“You saw my note?” she asked. She walked over and kissed him, still holding the portfolio. Then she laid it down flat on the sisal flooring and kicked off her shoes. “I saw it,” he said. “How did it go?”

“Marvelous.” She came around and sat on the sofa, swung her stockinged feet up, and stretched them out to touch his. “Oh, this feels so good.” She sipped the drink and unbuttoned the waistband of her skirt as she sighed.

“Well, you already know it’s an important account for Mandel’s firm. The Nordstroms have made sure everyone’s heard about their new project. The house had been discussed for months over afternoon tea at the Remington and the Four Seasons, over dinner at Tony’s, over dinner at the Carlyle, over drinks at Boccaccio’s, over drinks at the Rivoli, and on and on. Francis Nordstrom asked specifically for me to design the atrium portions. Essentially, I get free rein and a big budget.”

“Congratulations,” Haydon said. He raised his glass to her. “And how about you? How was the first day back in harness?”

“Come on,” she laughed. She set her glass on the table and raised her hips slightly and slipped off the skirt. She tossed it on an empty chair and began unbuttoning her blouse.

Nina took off the blouse and tossed it on top of the skirt. “Is that good or bad?” she asked.

“Both,” he said. Her half-slip and bra were peach. “Same amount of each?”

He watched her reach back and begin taking the pins out of her chignon, putting them in her lap. He loved watching her do this, the angle of her head, the lift of her arms, the way she crooked her wrist to hold her hair. Always reminiscent of Degas women. It was a shocking moment for the image of Powell’s grisly body to pop into his mind, but it did. It was there as unexpectedly as the murder itself must have surprised Powell. Real, but inspiring disbelief even as it happened. It could have been anyone; no one was exempt from the possibility of a sudden, violent death. Then he imagined, in the moment of the graceful upward movement of her arms, in a single brutal instant, Nina’s lap awash in blood, a torrent of purplish grume, splashing, filling the depression in the silk between her thighs, a string of black droplets splattering across her bare rib cage.

His voice was wrong. She looked at him, her eyes flashing up, pausing, and then down again from under her bent head as she continued to remove pins. Haydon tried to turn his mind away from the gory all too vivid image. He was stunned at the strength and clarity of it, an idle mind game threatening to go out of control, needing to be put back in its place the way a defiant demon must be sent back to its source by the conjurer who summoned it.

He couldn’t speak. He shrugged instead and took a drink of the Tanqueray, hoping to dissolve the knot in his throat. He was afraid his face was coloring.

She straightened up, her hair falling in wonderful cinnamon folds, unrestrained, uncombed, shiny.

He clenched his teeth and looked at her, clearing his throat to relieve the tension in his vocal cords.

“Are you all right?” Her puzzled expression passed into something more like simple concern.

“Sure,” he said putting down his glass and rubbing his face. He cleared his throat again. “Sure.”

Nina ran her fingers through her hair and waited while Haydon reached for his glass again and took another drink.

He continued. “I mean simply that nothing ever changes. The work’s always the same, and now is as good a time as any to be going back.”

Having extricated himself, Haydon didn’t know what to do. He leaned over in his chair and closed the exhibition catalog, which was now lying on the coffee table. He stared momentarily at the drawing on the cover. It was a detail from a drawing entitled “Punchinellos with Donkey Before a Farmhouse” and was done in golden brown ink and golden brown wash over black chalk. Like much of Tiepolo’s narrative Divertimento, it was not easy to understand the context of the narrative depicted. Haydon studied the shaky strokes of the ink pen, the coloration of the wash that created shadow and mood and looked into the faces of the strangely clothed harlequins whose beaked dominoes, humped backs, and tall conical caps gave them the appearance of melancholy clowns, whose attitudes seemed eerily reminiscent and familiar.

“Haydon?” Again Nina’s voice had an edge to it. He looked up with a blank expression.

“He was killed in their offices downtown. They think it’ll be easier to keep quiet this way. Langer’s anxious to keep it quiet.”

“Nothing. There are some places to nose around in, but there’s no evidence. Nothing at the scene. We’re going to have to talk to a lot of people.”

She listened attentively as he explained to her what Dystal wanted to do, how he wanted Haydon to handle it. Occasionally she sipped from her drink, which she rested in her lap, the sweat from the glass making a dark circle on the peach silk.

When he finished she said, “If you’re going to have to do it, then this is the best way. It’s better that you don’t have to go to the office.”

“It’s just for this one case,” he said. “After this I’ll go back to the regular schedule.”

“Still, for this one case it’s good. The longer you put off getting back into the grind the better.”

“Hey, mister. You ready for bed?” She rubbed his foot with her toes and nudged him.

They undressed, leaving their clothes scattered over the furniture, and got into bed. Haydon reached up and turned out the light. The sheets were crisp and cool. Nina was finicky about fresh sheets. He lay on his back and stretched out his arm as she automatically rolled in next to him, folding one arm between them and laying the other across his chest. He could feel her skin touching his in a continuous unbroken line from his head to his toes. She massaged her pelvis against his leg as she settled in.

He lay with his eyes open until gradually he could make out the silhouettes of the furniture, emerging hesitantly like earthbound spirits from the dark. The ceiling fan created a soft movement of air. He could tell from the rhythm of Nina’s breathing that she was not going to sleep. She waited with him, feeling, he imagined, his apprehension, even his bewilderment. Together they waited in the sapphire light, and he could almost feel her mind searching toward his, wanting to help, silently offering her empathy for whatever it was that threatened him. He held her closer, as if to absorb her serenity, her soundness of mind.