Beware Beware (14 page)

And then my eyes landed on the painting on the wall behind me. I whipped my head around with my hands still wet.

It was a large oil painting, covered in layers and layers of rich hot colors. Paint curled with the texture of rose petals, flame petals, and it ate up the canvas with small, hungry licks of vermillion and scarlet, blood orange and blood red. Four long black streaks cut across the lake of fire, diagonal gashes that revealed a neutral, outer-space black, an alternate dimension peeking in through portals rent by a hero's sword.

There was a violence to the painting that sent a chill of recognition up my spine, but it took me a paralyzed minute to recognize why.

My eyes found the signature in the bottom right corner. It was black and almost illegible, but I made out a sharp L, four knife strokes of a W.

I dried my hands methodically, gripping my palms together until they almost hurt. I gave my knuckles a thorough crack and looked back in the mirror until my face looked peaceful again.

When I went back out, Willow was lighting another cigarette, and this time I asked if she minded if I joined her. She shrugged, so I lit up and took a long pull.

“Nice bathroom,” I said.

“Should be,” she said. “You don't even want to know how much it cost to remodel.”

“I like that painting. The red one.”

“That one?” She made a face like I'd mentioned seeing her robe in a JC Penney catalog. “Joe had it from before we got married. Some young artist he basically sponsored. I think he paid six figures for that dumb thing.”

“Really,” I said, and took a casual drag on my Lucky Strike. “Who's the artist?”

“Something Waters. Latoya … Latisha … something like that. Never amounted to anything, as far as I know.” She ran her nonsmoking hand through her long blond hair. “If you want to see some real art, Joe has, like, a Rodin.”

I started to demur politely and gathered up my purse.

“Had,” she interrupted, her voice soft and dreamy. “I guess it's all mine now.”

 

Eight

As I drove to the office, I felt the hot lump of a hunch turning and taking form in my stomach. It was a familiar feeling, dull-edged and vaguely sickening, and I tended to it carefully, the radio off, gripping my steering wheel in relative silence.

The office was empty when I arrived, and the light turned on with a yellow buzz as I sprinted to my desk.

I booted up the desktop and opened InvestiGate. It was a good tool, one we relied on, that we refrained, as a practice, from using on clients without cause. It wasn't courteous, and more to the point, it wasn't free. With it, though, I had access to the kind of information Philip Marlowe risked his life for a dozen times over. These days Google was pretty comprehensive for things like birthdays, addresses, little bits of information released into the wild of the Web, more often than not on purpose. But with InvestiGate, I could pry out the nuggets that wanted to stay hidden. I could plug in a name and learn employment information, criminal history. Even changes in identity.

Daphne had given me no reason to distrust her. I liked her more than most of the people I knew, and she'd been fully cooperative the entire time we'd been working together. But the painting in Joe Tilley's house might have been torn from her portfolio. There was too much similarity there to ignore, and too little else, so far, to go asking strange questions.

I typed Daphne Freamon's name into InvestiGate and ran a background check. I'd done it before, on people I'd never met, found things their closest friends would never know. This—using this tool on Daphne—was an invasion. It was worse than reading her diary, the facts of her life displayed without her participation, exhumed without her knowledge. I hoped I would find nothing important, that I could tell her about my crazy suspicion and my breach of trust, one future night, drinking confessional wine. I held that hope for a precious twenty seconds.

*   *   *

Lanya Waters was born in Watts, at the southernmost tip of Los Angeles, when her mother, Tatiana, was twenty years old. Her father was unknown. When she was five, her mother married a man named Rudy Roberts, who died when Lanya was nineteen. Rudy and Tatiana had two sons, Colson and Samuel. Both boys were now in their early twenties.

When she was in sixth grade, Lanya showed up at school with bruises on her neck, prompting a home visit from a social worker that generated an incident report. The report was skimpy, and there was no follow-up.

After high school, Lanya moved to Hollywood, where she waited tables and obtained a SAG card. It was hard to say how many young women in L.A. shared that profile at any given time. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two, she worked at bars and restaurants at every level of service. There was some advancement in her service career—by its abrupt end, she was the hostess at a trendy restaurant in Beverly Hills. Her acting career saw less motion. Her employment records showed a couple short gigs—a TV commercial, a photo shoot with a stock-photo company, and one for a print ad.

And then, one day, she sold a painting to an anonymous collector. Its title was listed as
Beware Beware
, and it sold for a cold one million American dollars.

Shortly after, she changed her name and moved to New York, where Daphne Freamon launched her own artistic career. Five years later, her boyfriend was working for Joe Tilley, and within months, the man was dead.

It took me an hour to cull through all the information, to piece together the story of Daphne's life from mismatched patches of fabric, many of them torn and holey. I opened a window and smoked a chain of cigarettes. I thought about checking Arturo's and Chaz's offices for liquor, but I knew I'd get in trouble even if I did find something to drink.

That Daphne had lied to me was clear enough—if not directly, then certainly by omission. She lied, in that passive, comprehensive way, to just about everyone who came across her. Her Web site offered a false biography, complete with made-up credentials she must have used in her career.

I googled Lanya Waters and found a lot of noise, with no likely matches for Daphne. The name was more common than I would have guessed, and it looked like she'd met little success as an actress. There was no hint of employment beyond what I'd found in her records, no IMDb page. She had the Internet presence of a young person who came of age right before overexposure became the norm.

It was remarkable how little trace there was of the sale of her painting. An unknown twenty-two-year-old artist made a million-dollar sale, and somehow, this escaped public notice. Even with the buyer's identity suppressed, this stretched credulity. If I hadn't seen it an hour earlier, I would've had a hard time believing the painting ever existed.

Searching both of her names together yielded nothing—her change in identity was unacknowledged in the public sphere.

Maybe Jamie knew. I couldn't decide whether it was better if he did.

I shifted in my chair and reread everything three times. It was starting to hurt my head. I was about to call Chaz when my phone rang. I jumped like I'd been caught with my pants down.

It was a 323 number neither my phone nor I recognized, and on most other days, I would have let it go to voice mail. But alone with my discoveries, everything around me felt heightened and prickly with potential importance, so I picked up.

“Juniper Song?” The voice was female, clear and stern as a schoolteacher's, one with God on her side.

“Yep,” I said, sitting straighter. “Sorry, who is this?”

“It's Veronica Sanchez.”

“Ah,” I said. “How're you doing?”

“Good. I was wondering if you had anything to report.”

“Why? Should I?”

“Sounds like you do.”

A large part of me felt the draw of her invitation, and I knew it would feel good to hand everything over to this law-enforcement professional. What did I owe to Daphne, after all? She was my client and friend, but she was a proven liar, capable to a frightening degree. I didn't trust her, and she clearly didn't trust me. How much loyalty could she expect from a friend she wouldn't trust with her own name?

But maybe I owed her this much—to resolve these discrepancies between us first of all, to keep cops out of a crisis that could just be personal.

“Nothing to report,” I said. I massaged my temple with the heel of my hand.

“Well, I talked to Jamie Landon today, and he said you were working for him.”

Her tone ticked me off. It was nonchalant in a phony way, calculated to put me on the defensive.

“That's true. I am. And he's free to talk about that as much as he wants.”

“And what are you doing for him, exactly?”

“If he told you anything, I'm sure he told you that.”

“You know, Juniper, we're on the same side here.”

“Sure.”

“I'm not out to put Jamie in jail. I'm after the truth. You seem like an upstanding citizen, more or less. I'm sure you'll help me out if you find anything worth reporting.”

There was just the smallest hint of admonishment in her voice, like she was trying to extract guilty secrets from a child.

I made a vague humming sound that could be taken as assent.

“Do you know any Lanyas?” she asked.

I paused, and regretted it. “Should I?”

“Maybe.” I could almost hear her shrug. “If you're any good at your job.”

*   *   *

I called Chaz for advice when I got rid of Veronica, and he told me to stop by his house on my way home. Chaz lived in Van Nuys, which was farther from Koreatown than Echo Park, and in the opposite direction.

“How's your house on my way home from the office?” I asked.

“You come here, and then you go home, that's how.” He chuckled, apparently pleased with himself. “It's up to you, girl, but I can't go out on a Sunday. Molly's making dinner.”

I realized I was shaken enough that I wanted to see him, and I agreed to drive over, grunting my acquiescence. Sunday afternoon was disappearing into a quiet cast of gray, and I made the drive in twenty minutes through scanty traffic.

The Lindleys lived in a part of the valley that wasn't holding its breath to gentrify. Sherman Oaks bordered Van Nuys to the south, and it guarded that fence with disdainful jealousy, a haughty, superior neighbor. Pockets of Van Nuys seceded over time, choosing neighborhood names that were not Van Nuys, and thus increasing their property value.

The Lindley home was in the heart of Van Nuys, a four-bedroom house built in the fifties. Chaz and Molly had bought it in 1997 and they had no plans to leave. It was a nice house, with an old look that wasn't shabby, brick and stucco with an inviting front yard. Chaz approached landscaping as a hobby, and he'd planted an orange tree that made the house look like a picture.

I parked in the driveway and rang the doorbell. Molly came to the door and ushered me in. She was a plain woman with a sweet, doughy face that maintained the smoothness of youth. She had brittle dark blond hair that knotted easily, and she wore a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt over big faded jeans. Her eyes were small and kind, and they shone like marbles when she smiled. I could tell that she liked me—we'd only met a handful of times, but she approached me with a warmth that would have seemed exaggerated from a less earnest source. I had no doubt that Chaz had apprised her of my background, and that my very image filled her with pride in her charitable husband.

“Chaz is in the office,” she said. “Go bother him. He's not busy.”

I thanked her and found Chaz watching a talking dog video on YouTube with Opal, his younger daughter. Their laughter filled the house.

The office was one of the fourth bedrooms of the Lindley home, and it served every family purpose unmet in the rest of the house. Two desks held two computers, and the remainder of the space was given over to play space, covered in a disarray of toys. It looked like Opal and Ruby had built a fort with small blankets and stuffed animal bricks.

“That was fast.” Chaz mussed his daughter's hair. “Opie, go play with your sister. We'll watch more later.”

She gave me a shy, impish smile and dashed out of the room.

I sat down in the empty desk chair and Chaz closed the door.

“You need my help again?” he asked.

“Yeah. It's almost like this is my first solo case and a murder happened.”

“I'm just giving you a hard time, Song.” He reached over to pat my shoulder. He miscalculated the distance and had to bend in a diver's stance to tap me with his paw. “It is a little more complicated than advertised, I'll give you that. So what's going on now?”

I told him about the painting, and the call from Detective Sanchez. He stuck his head out like a turtle's while I talked, and when I was finished he pulled down on the loose skin around his mouth.

“Well you don't have to tell that cop a damn thing. She can do her own investigating. She probably has the same resources we do.”

“I agree.”

“But this definitely changes how you deal with your client.”

I pinched the inner corners of my eyebrows. “So here's a question: Who is my client? Jamie or Daphne?”

“Good question. On paper? I guess it's Daphne.”

“But I'm trying to keep Jamie out of jail, aren't I?”

“Because that's what Daphne wants you to do.”

“I don't know if Jamie even knows.”

“About any of it?”

“Yeah. I mean he's made no mention of any real connection between Daphne and Joe, and I don't know if you really share past identities with your significant other.”

“Well, that would depend on the relationship.”

“Sure,” I said. “But I shouldn't assume, should I?”

“No, definitely do not assume.”

“So, what do I do?”

“I guess you talk to Daphne.”