Текст книги "Bloodman"

Автор книги: Robert Pobi

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

27

Hauser was gone, and Kay and Jeremy were finishing up lunch, Jeremy’s face bisected by a line of raspberry jam that made him look like the Joker. The clouds on the horizon had grown fatter, and the pregnant belly of the ocean was hazing over. The wind had picked up but it was still little more than a fall breeze, a light little hiss that would soon begin to change into a malevolent beast. Jake stood in front of the studio, another member of the quarter-century club, and wondered what he would find inside Pandora’s building. He felt like he was using his father to avoid the case even though there was very little he could do right now. He had seen the crime scene, talked to the ME, and received Hauser’s protocols. There wasn’t much for him to do now but sift through what he had—and give Hauser all the information he could put together. So he occupied himself with trying to find a way into his father’s studio.

He walked around it a few times, searching for an entry. There wasn’t much in the way of security; the windows were all single-pane, glazed with brittle old putty; the door had a decent lock on it but the top half was glass—all he’d have to do was smash it and reach inside. The weird part—if he could even consider it weird after everything else he had found—was that all the windows had been painted over from the inside. Wherever he tried to see into the building, all he saw was a black mirror reflecting his own image.

“Fuck it,” he said aloud, and pulled his elbow back to punch out one of the mullioned panes. Then the voice—the one with the perfect memory—reminded him of the ring of keys back in the fridge.

He ran inside, grabbed them, and came back out—all in a quick jog. He tried a few keys until he found one that worked, then opened the door and stepped inside.

Jake closed the door behind himself, flipped the lock, and slowly moved into the dark.

He cracked the lighting to life and looked around. Like the house, the space had a large main floor and a mezzanine overhead. About a quarter of the downstairs was the garage, and had a single door centered in the wall as access. The rest of the space had been Jacob Coleridge’s studio, but unlike the stasis of the house, the studio had changed. A lot. Jake looked around and sucked in a long, low breath that actually scraped his windpipe as it went down.

Jacob had painted every available surface—including the floor and ceiling—a flat black. He had then decorated this negative space with dozens of portraits of the same bloody man from the hospital wall, filling the dark expanse with anatomical studies out of a Hieronymus Bosch-inspired hell. They were deftly executed and hyperdetailed—anatomically perfect. Except they were faceless. The sense of menace they conveyed could not be ignored.

Jake walked to the center of the studio and spun in place, trying to take in the work. Each figure was frighteningly executed, the flesh breathing, the blood pumping. No matter which figure Jake looked at, it seemed to be watching him back with faceless malevolence.

The ceiling was twenty feet above the painted concrete floor of the studio, hidden in a seamless cloud of shadow and black paint. As he moved beneath the beams the figures painted on the ceiling looked like they were crawling around in the darkness, following him. When he stopped moving, the illusion ceased, and the bloody figures froze in place.

But the strange part—the part that somehow eclipsed Jacob’s garage/studio Sistine Chapel of demented demons—were the canvases piled up everywhere; the same senseless pieces that were scattered all over the house. There were hundreds of them—maybe even thousands—filling every available scrap of space, stacked like valueless cargo. Jake looked around in awe, thinking of the old adage about the manic woodchuck. How many crazy paintings would a crazy painter paint if a crazy painter could paint crazy paintings?

The answer was, of course, a shitload.

Jake picked one up and examined the composition. It was like the ones in the kitchen drawer, or in the upstairs hallway, or under the piano—a lifeless shape of near-color. He flipped through a few. Some were gray, others black, some the color of rotting tumors. More paintings of nothing. Negative space. Dead blobs. But the quantity gave them a communal voice that let him know that there was a point to them. How long had these taken? A year? Two? Ten? He put the canvas back and looked around the studio.

The faceless figures up in the rafters were still following him. His father had never considered himself a classicist, but the three-dimensional representations of whatever the fuck he was looking at were beyond lifelike. They were astounding. Tormented, horrid effigies, that represented…that represented…he swung his head across the black skyline of the ceiling, pulling in the details of the same man Jacob had painted on the wall of his hospital room—just what did they represent?

Skinned, they whispered in unison.

These were a message. A signal. There was a reason behind them. Jake could sense its signal but he couldn’t isolate the meaning. And this bothered him. These lifeless little canvases said something. Like the faceless man of blood on the hospital wall. Like the Chuck Close portrait with the missing eyes. Like the stacks of paintings. Could it be nothing more than madness? Alzheimer’s? Paranoia? All of the above?

Somewhere in the decaying apple of his father’s mind was a worm of a thought that the old man listened to. It had wriggled through his skull, sending him diseased instructions that he deciphered in his own way. How much of that had bled into what he had tried to say here? This couldn’t all be random—there was too much in the way of long-term planning and execution. Someone with Alzheimer’s would have gone off the rails a long time ago. So what was he trying to say?

Jake spun on the floor, his eyes digging into the walls, trying to see around the pillars of canvases stacked like pizza boxes. From a trompe l’oeil perspective, it was an engineering feat. Wherever he stood, the faceless watched him.

They were trying to tell him something.

Like the speech of the dead that he deciphered, he needed the code. The common language. That secret way his old man’s mind worked. Which might as well have been written in Easter Island glyphs.

What he did—what he was good at—was figuring out how killers thought. And the killers he hunted were artists. From a societal perspective it was demented, sadistic art, but that was missing the obvious; to them it was art. And it was always expressed with a unique voice; the language of the worm firing bursts of code into the rotting apple. Jake’s gift had always been figuring out the artist-specific language of the murderers he hunted, figuring out their own personal symbolism and its subtext. If he could look at a murder scene through the eyes of the psychotic, how much harder would it be to look at this space through the eyes of a man he shared some common ground with? It was a different language—the language of the mad—but it was still language. Which meant it was decipherable. What was—?

–And there was a jolt of electricity that came at him out of nowhere, shaking the engine room beneath his ribs. He had time to grab his chest before there was another crackle in the circuitry. Fell to his knees.

Then his stomach.

The floor stretched away into the dark at a right angle to his line of sight, and dust bunnies danced in front of his face with his breath.

How many crazy paintings would a crazy painter paint? echoed somewhere off in the distance.

Then everything faded away, even the canopy of faceless stares.

28

For a second there was the black-hot pain of a fist clenching inside his skull and as quickly as it took hold, it faded to a distant hammer against the membrane of his mind. Kay was in a rectangle of light, her hair outlined in a phosphorescent glow, rushing forward, mouth flying open. A filling twinkled amid her molars.

“Jesus! Fuck! Jake!”

He pushed himself up onto his knees, holding his chest.

“I prefer See Spot run, but if it turns you on…” He let the sentence trail off.

Kay helped him to his feet.

“Sorry, baby. The jukebox took a hit. I guess I got too excited.” He stood up shakily, massaging his chest.

She punched him in the arm. “Thanks for scaring the piss out of me. Usually you just twinge a bit and you’re good.” Kay wondered what could have set his heart rate through the roof.

Jake turned away from her, back to the images on the walls and ceiling. “Whacha think?” he asked, nodding up into the darkness.

She followed his nod and her mouth twitched into an uncomfortable grin, all teeth and no lips. “This is Gustave Doré on psychotropic leave.”

Jake nodded. “Apt comparison.”

Kay walked slowly around the room.

Like Jake, she was more impressed with the endless stacks of little paintings than the bleeding men in the black sky overhead, although it was obvious that she felt they were following her as well by the way she kept glancing up at them. She threaded between the pillars of paintings, trying to make sense of it all. “There has to be three thousand of these things.”

Jake did a rough and dirty calculation. “Closer to five.”

“There’s a bunch in the house, too.” Kay stopped, picked one up. “Are they all a different shape?”

Jake shrugged. “Looks like. Just in framing it would take a year to stretch all of these. Then to gesso the canvases and paint them…” He let the sentence die. “Mad as a—” he looked around the place and a wave of sadness sunk into his flesh—“painter. You sure you want to spend the rest of your life with a guy like me? This,” he said, sweeping his arm over the piles of canvases, “is hereditary. Except with me, it will be pictures of dead people.” Jake sat down on the edge of the framing table, one of the only uncluttered surfaces in the studio.

Kay pointed at the door to the garage. “What’s in there?”

Jake, brought away from the dark ride he was taking through the demon-haunted universe painted by his father, looked over. “Garage.”

“Can I?”

He shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”

She turned the knob and to both their surprise it swung open on greased hinges. Kay flicked a switch beside the door and the lights in the garage hummed to life. The room, in direct contrast to the studio, was painted in a bright blue-white. A car sat in the middle of the space and Jake eased forward, not realizing that he had stopped breathing again.

He got closer to the door and the image of the automobile began to widen. The skin was obscured by a thick layer of dust that hadn’t been disturbed in years. The windshield was opaque and the whole car looked like it had been sitting in here unnoticed forever. Jake knew this car, knew what it looked like under the neglect, and it reminded him of the night that everything had fallen apart. His life. His father’s. Everything turned to bloody black dirt in one big swing of fate.

It had been his mother’s—a 1966 Mercedes W113 in factory cream with a red leather interior. Jake remembered the morning they had brought it back on a flatbed after her murder. Jacob was drunk and had stayed in the house. Jake had helped them back up the truck and when they had rolled the Benz off, it had grazed the paneling under the window. They had closed the door and that seemed to be the end of it all. The sealing of the tomb of the queen.

At the front of the garage sat a cracked leather Eames lounge chair. It was dust free and surrounded by a forest of whiskey bottles, the floor at its feet worn smooth. He saw the chair, the bottles, and a quick flowchart sparked to life in his head. How often had his father come in here? Once a year? A month? A week? Looking at the forest of bottles and the smooth ring worn around the base of the chair, Jake guessed that he had come in here often. Maybe every night. Perched in his Captain Kirk chair, bottle of anger fuel in his hand, thinking about his dead wife. Probably never driven the car. It had stayed right here for how long? Thirty-three years now.

Jake moved slowly down the wall and peered at the back bumper. It was still touching the panel where it had rolled to a stop all those years ago, a fibrous tear in the grain of the wood, still splintered but now covered in dust and cobwebs.

It was obvious that it had not been moved since the morning after his mother’s murder.

The last people to touch it had probably been the flatbed guys. Before that, the police. And before that, his mother’s killer.

“Don’t touch anything,” Jake said, holding his own hands up as an example.

“Why?”

Jake ignored her and took out his cell phone. Dialed. “Yeah, Smolcheck, Jake Cole. You have time to do a car for me? Sure. Yeah. No. 1966 Mercedes convertible. Two-seater.”

Pause.

“It was part of a murder scene thirty-three years ago.”

Pause.

“I think so. Local police went through it.”

Pause.

“Returned to the family within twenty hours of the crime.”

Pause.

“Bare storage. Unheated but safe from the elements.”

Pause.

“No, no traffic. No one has touched it. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Yeah.”

Longer pause.

“Okay, I’ll book storage from here. I’ll do the best I can. Polyethylene and duct tape. Got it. Sure.”

Pause.

“Thanks, Smolcheck. I appreciate it. It’s cold but it’s going to help me with a lateral case. I’ll make sure I go through Carradine. Don’t worry, it will be okayed by the time it gets there.”

Jake hung up and focused on a note taped to one of the scotch bottles: YOUR NAME IS JACOB COLERIDGE. KEEP PAINTING.

Oh, you kept painting, you mad old motherfucker, Jake thought. And what were you trying to say?

He looked up and Kay was gone, back in the house with Jeremy. How long had he been in one of his trances?

He put his hand to his chest and felt his heartbeat. Everything was fine. Fit as a fucking fiddle. When he thought about it, it was amazing what you could live through. Nietzsche had been right. After killing yourself three times with a high-octane mix of China White and Columbian, there was pretty much nothing else on the planet you were afraid of.

Except maybe the past.

29

Jake sat atop an old dented mechanic’s chest filled with brushes, palette knives, and the assorted implements of his father’s trade. It was an old Snap-on model, covered in painted fingerprints, brushstrokes, and random cuts of color. An open but untouched bottle of Coke sat on the concrete floor, bleeding condensation in a wet ring that seeped into the dust. He had one boot up on the edge of the tool chest and he hugged his knee, staring off into darkness decorated like Breughel’s The Triumph of Death. There was no exterior light, and bright bulbs lighted the room.

At first he thought it was the wind. Just an oblong sound that the ocean had somehow kicked up. Then he heard it a second time, the distinct cadence of human speech in its vowels. Someone was yelling. It was a tentative yell, but a yell nonetheless.

“Hello? Hello?”

Jake recognized the voice, the accent. He unfolded himself from atop the tool chest, stood up, and walked outside.

A man in a suit was on the balcony, bent over and peering into the living room. The posture, the hair, the soft pink hands clasped behind his back, the well-tailored suit—hadn’t changed in twenty-eight years. Jake walked quietly up behind him, leaned in, and very softly said, “Hello, David.”

David Finch jumped, banged his head on the mullion, and converted the startled jerk into a quickly extended hand. “Hello.”

Jake stood there for a second, appraising the man. “It’s me. Jake.”

Finch’s eyes narrowed, and he took in Jake with an exaggerated up-and-down. “Jakey?” He examined his face, his big polished smile opening up. “You still look like Charles Bronson.”

David Finch was one of the top gallery owners in New York and Jacob Coleridge had been one of his first discoveries. The two events were not mutually exclusive.

“And you look like a parasite coming to feed on a not-yet-dead cash cow.”

“I didn’t know you and your father were that close, Jakey.”

“Fuck you.”

“Still making money with that mouth?” Finch asked.

Jake took a step closer to the man and opened his teeth in an ugly smile. “What do you want?”

“I sent flowers. Did your father get them?”

Jake remembered the broken vase on the floor. “My father isn’t getting anything anymore.”

Finch looked around the deck. What for? Help, maybe. “Jakey, can we talk?”

Jake thought about the last time he had seen the man. About how he had asked for thirty-one dollars. About how he had been turned down. About the things he had done to feed himself because of that. “No, David, I don’t think we can.” Besides, Kay and Jeremy were inside and Jake didn’t want them to get contaminated by any more of his old life than they already had.

“I need to talk to you about your father’s work.”

Jake thought about the bloody portrait splattered onto the hospital wall. “Dad’s not making a lot of sense on any level, David. The old Jacob Coleridge is on a permanent vacation.”

Finch pointed at the Chuck Close through the window, the eyes gone. “Jacob Coleridge would never do this to a Close. Cy Twombly maybe—maybe. But a Close? Rome could be burning and he’d be the guy defending the museum with an axe.”

“It’s Alzheimer’s, David—not a German opera. Jacob Coleridge is not coming back.”

Finch’s head swiveled in an angry jerk. “I know you and your father haven’t exactly been simpatico, Jake, but I know your old man; we’ve been friends for almost fifty years. We’ve stuck by one another when the going was tough and both of us had plenty of opportunities when we should have taken up other offers in the interest of our careers. But we didn’t because we were a good team. And that only happens when you know someone. Know them intimately. And Jacob Coleridge could be drunk off his ass with his cock falling off from a bout of syphilis and be using someone else’s liver because his was out being dry-cleaned and he’d never lay a finger on a Chuck Close. Too much respect. Too much professional admiration. Never. Ever. No way.” Finch turned back to the painting.

Jake followed his gaze, then looked beyond the painting into the kitchen. Kay and Jeremy were gone. Maybe down on the beach for a walk. He saw his own reflection staring back at him. “If you say so.”

“Did your father have any work in the studio?” The gallery owner asked, the unmistakable lilt of greed in his voice.

“It’s empty. It was filled with crap and most of it’s gone.” It was a lie but Jake didn’t feel like having an argument with Finch. If the sycophantic little fuck had his way, he’d be peeling up the paint-splattered floor in the studio and selling it by the square foot at Sotheby’s in their spring sale of important American art.

Finch stared into Jake’s face for a second. “Jake, you do know that I am your father’s sole representative. We have a lifetime and beyond contract.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Jake’s patience was running out. His old man had fried his hands off and this parasite was here to sniff out a commission.

“That means that I have proprietary rights on his paintings in reference to sales. No one—and that means you, too—can sell a Jacob Coleridge.”

Jake crossed the space that had developed between them in a long-legged stride that would have made Hauser proud. “David, you and my father may have been friends but as far as I’m concerned, you’re a smarmy little bloodsucker who would do anything for his wallet. Do you remember the night I showed up at your house when I left here?”

Finch sunk into himself, brought his head down. Said nothing.

“I was seventeen years old, David, and I was alone on the streets of New York. I came to you because you were the only person I knew in the city. The only one. And do you remember what I asked for?”

Finch shook his head but it was clear from his expression that he did.

“I asked for some food, David. I asked for a meal and thirty-one bucks. I didn’t ask for too much because I didn’t want to jeopardize your relationship with my father—I knew he’d get rid of you if you helped me. So I asked for very little.” Jake’s hands hung loosely at his sides and Finch’s eyes kept looking at them, something about the way they hung limply more threatening than if they had been rolled into tattooed fists. “You said no. Do you know what I had to do to eat? Do you, David?”

Finch shook his head slowly, keeping his eyes on Jake’s hands.

“I had to blow some guy, Dave. I know that’s your kind of thing, but it’s not mine. I was seventeen and alone and I had to suck some stranger’s cock so I could get something to eat. Nice, huh? So if you’re thinking about threatening someone, you’re picking on the wrong guy. Not only will you never see another of my father’s paintings, but I may just burn them.”

Finch gasped like he had been kicked in the pills.

“I can use them for fucking target practice.” He pulled out the big stainless revolver and placed it to Finch’s head. “You know what I do for a living, David?” Finch would have looked into it before coming out here—he was the kind of man who liked to cover all his bases.

Finch nodded. It was a frightened, skittish action.

“Then you know I don’t have a squeamish bone in my body.” Jake cocked the hammer on the pistol and pressed the heavy barrel into Finch’s temple, denting the skin. “I could empty your head all over this deck for trespassing and no one would think twice about pressing charges. So don’t you fucking threaten me, you little sack of shit, because I passed don’t-give-a-shit about ten years back and have become comfortably ensconced in don’t-give-a-fuck. Are we clear?”

“What about your wife? Your child?” Finch asked, his voice half an octave from hysteria.

“Was that a threat, David?” Jake’s other hand came up and locked on Finch’s larynx in a Ranger chokehold. “Because if it is, you are a dead man.”

Finch shook his head, coughed, brought his hands up to the tattooed vise fastened to his throat. “No. No. I didn’t—. I—. I—. Let go—!”

Jake pulled his hand away and Finch fell back against the railing. It creaked in protest.

“I think you better leave, David. Before I start getting angry.”

Finch opened his mouth to protest but his jaw froze. There was an instant of indecision as he made whatever calculations he thought necessary, then he turned and walked away.

Jake followed him off the deck, around the house, and watched him open the door to the big silver Bentley GT Continental. He stopped again, turned to face Jake, and said, “Not that it makes a bit of difference, Jakey, but I’m sorry. I always was. About everything. Your father’s drinking. Your mother’s murder. All of it.”

“Don’t ever contact me again, David. You’re dead as far as I’m concerned.”

Finch got into the big sedan, closed the door, and slipped out of the drive onto the Montauk Highway. Jake watched the Bentley until it was out of sight, then turned and walked back to the studio.