Belinda (56 page)

BONNIE'S DAUGHTER RUNS FROM STEPFATHER TO TRYST WITH SAN FRANCISCO PAINTER.

BONNIE, STAR OF "CHAMPAGNE FLIGHT," ABANDONS TEENAGE DAUGHTER FOR PRODUCER HUSBAND.

BELINDA STILL ON THE RUN.

"Well, Rembrandt," Blair said over the noise. "I think you gotta point."

ALL morning long as people lined up for two blocks before the Folsom Street gallery, the news came in, through television, radio, telegrams at the front door, and calls from George and Alex on a private line that had just been installed.

Three more lines had been added to my regular number also, but, now that the tabloids had the story, the situation was worse than ever with the hate calls coming in from as far away as Nova Scotia. Dan's secretary, Barbara, was at the house now full-time, answering as fast as the machine.

It was all coming out. Nurses, paramedics, a chauffeur who had been fired by Marty, two of my neighbors who had seen Belinda with me-those and others had apparently peddled their stories. Film critics dragged out their old notes on the Cannes showing of Final Score. The TV and radio people were too cautious to use the tabloid accounts verbatim, but one medium fed upon another with ever-increasing confidence. News of fire, flood, political events-all this continued as before-but we were the scandal of the moment.

The morning network news showed live coverage in LA of United Theatricals executives disclaiming all knowledge of the alleged disappearance of Bonnie's daughter, Belinda, insisting that they knew nothing about the distribution of Final Score.

"Champagne Flight" would air this week as scheduled, said network spokesmen. They had no comment on reports that affiliates all through the South were dropping the program.

Again and again "modest" portions of the paintings were flashed across the screen: Belinda's head in the Communion veil, Belinda in punk makeup on the carousel horse. Belinda in braids dancing.

Televison cameras stopped Uncle Daryl's car as he tried to leave the Beverly Hills Hotel. Through the open window he said: "I can tell you right now, as God is my witness, my sister, Bonnie, knew nothing about her daughter living with this man in San Francisco. I don't know why the exhibit has not been closed down."

The late edition of the morning Chronicle ran a picture of G.G. and me and Blair taken in the lobby of the Stanford Court. DID BONNIE KNOW OF WALKER'S PAINTINGS. Two kids in the Haight claimed to have known Belinda, they called her "wild, crazy, lots of fun, just a really beautiful spirit" and said she'd disappeared off the street in June.

When the noon news came on Channel 5, I saw my own house live on the screen, got up and went to the front windows and looked out at the video cameras. When I went back to the kitchen, they had switched locations to the Clift downtown and the reporter on the scene was talking about the closing of G.G. 's salon.

I flicked the channel. Live from LA the unmistakable face and voice of Marty Moreschi again. He was squinting in the southern California sun as he addressed reporters in what appeared to be a public parking lot. I turned up the volume because the doorbell was ringing.

"Look, you want my comment!" he said in the equally unmistakable New York street voice, "I wanna know where she is, that's what I wanna know. We've got eighteen pictures of her naked up there, selling at half a million a pop, but where is Belinda? No, you don't tell me-I tell you!" The loaded .38-caliber finger again aimed at the reporter. "We've had detectives scouring this country for her. We've been worried sick about her. Bonnie had no idea where she was. And now this clown in San Francisco says she was living with him. And she consented to these pictures. Like hell!"

"I knew he'd take this tack," Dan said. He had just come into the kitchen. He was unshaven and his shirt was a mess. Both of us had slept in our clothes listening to the answering machine and the radio. But he wasn't angry anymore. He was concentrating on strategy instead.

"-come right out and say she was missing?" Marty yelled. "And have some guy kidnap her? And now we find out this world-famous children's artist was busy painting every detail of her anatomy? You think he didn't know who she was?"

"He is slick, he is real slick," Dan said.

"It's a dare," I said. "It's been a series of dares from the beginning."

Marty was getting in the car, the window was going up. The limousine was pushing through the flash of silver microphones and bowed heads.

I hit the remote control again; the anchor woman on Channel 4: "-of the LAPD confirms that no missing persons report was ever filed on fifteen-year-old Belinda Blanchard. Belinda is seventeen now, by the way, and her whereabouts are still completely unknown. Her father, internationally known hairstylist George Gallagher, confirmed this morning that he does not know where she is and is eager to find her."

The door bell was now ringing incessantly. There was a knocking. "How about not answering it?" Dan said. "And suppose she's out there?" I asked. I went to the lace curtains. Reporters on the steps, the video cameraman right behind them.

I opened the door. Cynthia Lawrence was holding an open copy of Time, which had hit the stands less than an hour ago. Had I seen the article?

I took it from her. Impossible to read it now. The questions were coming not only from her but from the others farther down on the steps and on the sidewalk. I scanned the scene, the crowd across the street, the teenagers on the corner, people on the balconies of the apartment house. There were a couple of men in suits next to the phone booth by the grocery store. Cops? Could be.

"No, she hasn't contacted me," I said in answer to a question I'd hardly heard. "No idea at all where she is," I said to another. "Yes, she would, I can say that with absolute conviction, she approved of the paintings and she loved them."

I shut the door. Cynthia could always buy herself another magazine. I ignored the ringing and pounding and started in on the Time article. They had run full-color pictures of The Carousel Horse Trio and the one I secretly loved most of all, Belinda in the summer suit, standing with her back to the river titled simply Belinda, My Love.

"Why would this man, who is a household word to millions, risk his reputation as a trusted and admired children's artist for such an exhibit?" asked the writer. "No less unsettling than the frank eroticism of these paintings, each one faithfully rendered in a five-by-seven color photograph in the expensive exhibit catalog, is a narrative of ever-deepening madness as we see Belinda subjected to the artist's bizarre fantasies-Belinda with Dolls, Belinda in Riding Clothes, Belinda on the Carousel Horse-before she is finally transformed into the most enticing of women, Belinda in Mother's Bed-only to be victim of stunning violence in the carefully rendered Fight of Artist and Model in which the painter strikes his muse cruelly across the face, causing her to sink to the floor against a backdrop of stained and broken wallpaper. This is not merely a children's author's attempt to commit public suicide, it is not merely a tribute to a young woman's beauty, it is a self-indicting chronicle of a lurid and conceivably tragic affair. To learn that Belinda Blanchard was in fact a teenage runaway when these pictures were painted, to learn that she is again missing, is to arouse speculation that is perhaps best pursued by law enforcement officials rather than artistic critics."

I closed the magazine. Dan was coming down the hall. He had a steaming cup of coffee in his hand.

"That was Rhinegold on the phone, he said four guys from the SFPD just went through the exhibit."

"How does he know that's what they were? Surely they didn't show their badges to him-"

"That's exactly what they did. They didn't want to stand in line like everybody else."

"Holy shit," I said.

"Yeah, you can say that again," he said, "and I've called in a criminal lawyer name of David Alexander and he'll be here in two hours and I don't want to hear another word on that score." I shrugged. I gave him the Time article. "Does this say what I think it says?"

I went to the private line in the kitchen and dialed Alex: "I want you to leave now. Go back to LA. This is too ugly already."

"The hell I will," he said. "I was just talking to the girls at 'Entertainment Tonight.' I told them I've known you since you were a kid. Look, George and I will bring you some supper around six o'clock. Don't try to go out. They'll ruin your digestion. G.G. is down in the lobby talking to them, by the way. One of Marty's lawyers came here personally this morning, but I'll tell you something about G.G., he's sweet, but he's not dumb, no, not at all, he just slipped around that guy like a feather in a draft. You never saw such beautiful evasion. Hey, hold on. OK, that was this nice boy who's been getting me cigarettes and things. He says he thinks the guys talking to G.G. down there are plainclothes policemen. My lawyer's on the way up from LA to give G.G. a hand."

The phone rang almost as soon as I put it down. Dan answered, and all I heard was mumbling and yes and no for about ten minutes.

The doorbell was ringing again. I went back to the curtains. Kids all over out there, some of them neighborhood teenagers I'd seen at the corner store or just walking around on Castro or Market. Couple of very wild punk types from the Cafe Flore a block away, one with pink hair, and the other with a mohawk. But no Belinda.

I saw my neighbor Sheila wave as she went by. Then someone approached her. She was trying to make a clean getaway, but other people were asking her questions. She was shrugging, backing off, almost stumbled off the curb. Then she sprinted towards Castro Street.

How would Belinda look if she tried to come to the door?

I went back into the kitchen. Dan was off the phone.

"Look, Uncle Daryl has just called the district attorney's office personally," he said. "The SFPD wants to talk to you and I'm trying to stall them till Alexander's on the case. Uncle Daryl is on his way up from LA by plane, and Bonnie has just been checked into a hospital."

"I'll talk to them anytime," I said. "I don't want a criminal lawyer, Dan, I told you that."

"I'm overruling you on that one," he said patiently. "We'll reconnoiter when Alexander gets here."

I went down the back steps and into the garage and had the car out and roaring up Seventeenth Street to Sanchez before the crowd on the street could make up its mind what was going on.

When I got to the Clift, the police had just left. G.G. was sitting on the couch in the suite with his elbows on his knees. He looked tired and puzzled, pretty much the way he'd looked last night. Alex was in that gorgeous satin robe of his, pouring drinks for both of us and having room service send up some lunch.

"I figured it this way," G.G. said quietly. "I wasn't under the oath, so it didn't have to be the whole truth, just the truth, if you know what I mean. So I told them about her coming to New York and about my hiding her on Fire Island and the mean way those Hollywood men acted, but I never told them the things that she said. I told them about her leaving for San Francisco, and I told them how happy she was when she called with the news about you. I told them she loved the paintings. She really did."

He stopped, took a little of the wine Alex had given him, and then he said:

"I'11 tell you what worries me, Jeremy, they kept asking about the last time I'd heard from her, they kept saying 'Are you sure the call from New Orleans was the very last time?' It was as if they had some fixed idea in their minds. Do you think they know something about her whereabouts that we don't?"

The crowd in front of the house was even bigger when I got back. I had to honk my way through the garage door. Then a couple of reporters came into the garage after me. I had to lead them out into the street and close the door and go up the front way, or they would have been all over the backyard.

"Jeremy, is it true you found Belinda in a hippie pad on Page Street?" someone shouted. "Did you tell a San Francisco policeman that you were her father? .... Hey, Jeremy, have you seen Final Score yourself?."

I shut the front door.

Dan came down the hall. He'd shaved and cleaned up, but the expression on his face unnerved me.

"The police are really putting the pressure on," he said. "Alexander is trying to stall them, but you're going to have to talk to them sooner or later, and Alexander thinks that voluntarily is the best way to go."

I wondered suddenly if you could paint in prison. Idiot thought. How the hell was I going to protect her from all this if I was in prison? No, things just wouldn't move that fast.

When I came into the back office, Barbara handed me an open telegram. There was a pile of them in front of her, they'd been coming almost nonstop. The phone machine was recording the incoming voices at low volume. I think I heard someone whisper: "Pervert!" I took the telegram.

"CONGRATULATIONS ON THE NEW SHOW. SAW CATALOG. STUNNING. WOULD BE THERE IF I COULD. ON WAY TO ROME TO GET INTERPOSITIVE OF FINAL SCORE. WILL CALL ON RETURN IF I CAN GET THROUGH. SUSAN JEREMIAH."

"Ah, beautiful," I whispered. "That means she's making more prints of the movie. When did this come?"

"Probably yesterday," Barbara said, "there's fifty of them here. Twenty more were delivered this morning. I'm going through them as fast as I can."

"Well, they're the best line of communication at this point," I said, "so let the machine answer the phone while you check them out."

"Call the number this was phoned from," Dan said. "It's an LA number. See if we can reach Jeremiah there later on."

"I've got other news for you," Barbara said. "From Rhinegold. Hc was here while you were gone. A Fort Worth millionaire named Joe Travis Buckner is furious that the museums have first right to the paintings. He wants two paintings now. But the representative from the Dallas Museum has made the first solid and unequivocable offer: five hundred thou for Belinda with Dolls. Rhinegold has asked for two weeks in which to evaluate the offer. And oh yeah, this other guy," she stopped to glance at her note pad, "this Count Solosky? Is that it? Solosky? Well, anyway he's from Vienna, and he settled on four of the paintings, paid already. Do you know how much money that is? Rhinegold seems to think he's as important as a museum or something. Pretty terrific, right?"