Death of an Artist (18 page)

“Oh, God. Don't let him do it. It will be like a circus tent or something.”

“We'll see. By tomorrow it might have changed to pink and purple.” Marnie smiled slightly, remembering when Stef had wanted black walls, black floor, black everything. Marnie had put her foot down and said no. A week later the color scheme had changed to dark blue and white, then something else, and something else again. It had ended up stark white with garish posters and lavender drapes and bedspread.

Van sipped pinot noir and thought about having Tony over for her birthday dinner, and the disquieting feeling that had washed over her when Marnie suggested it. She had to face him. Put it out of mind that with her hand on his arm, she had felt such a strong, immediate desire for him. Never, she told herself firmly. He wasn't interested, and she didn't have time, not now, not with a year away coming. Never, in fact. She didn't want a man in her life in the near future, or possibly ever.

He had felt it. She knew he had. She had seen the change come over his face, had felt his arm grow rigid. Reacted to her surge of hormones? A strong whiff of pheromones? He had felt something as strongly as she had. And he had made no motion toward her, had instantly rejected that surge of sexual chemistry. He wasn't interested, she told herself again, and wanted to believe it. He knew it wouldn't work as well as she did, and he had not made a motion toward her, had rejected what he probably had seen as a pass. She drank her wine.

“I told Tony that I want to help in any way I can,” she said, and heard the strained quality in her voice. “I don't know what I could do, but if anything comes up, I want to be on hand.”

*   *   *

T
ONY
HAD
READ
the autopsy again, this time more slowly and carefully. He studied the three pictures. One a full-body shot with only the bottom steps in the frame. One a close-up of her head and shoulders. And the third one from a greater distance, showing her and the entire staircase. As Will had said, it was obvious from the close-up that she had been dead. Her head was twisted in such a way that a broken neck was equally obvious. In the full shot of her body and the stairs, she looked smaller, childlike, with one bare foot still on the bottom step. A broken, discarded pink-and-red Barbie doll, he thought, and shuffled the pictures together.

From the multiple bruises and abrasions, it was clear to him that what he had said earlier was in fact correct. She had tumbled head over heels down the stairs, had not stiffened and tried to stop her fall, had not slid down on her back or her front, had not done any of the things a fully alert person might have attempted to stop falling. She had been unconscious.

Would the doctor back up that conclusion? Cranshaw, he reminded himself. Dr. Cranshaw. But even if he did, so what? The counterargument would be that she had hit her head, knocked herself unconscious. Or she'd had a dizzy spell, a fainting spell. It wasn't enough, he knew. More than enough for him, far too little to make a convincing case.

He turned away from the table, surveyed his kitchen and living room with hatred, and knew he had to get out, go somewhere else. Find a restaurant, maybe in Newport, where he could get seated, have something to eat, put all this out of mind for a while.

And especially put Van out of mind, for a long, long time. She kept getting in the way of thinking. She had seen those pictures, had known what they implied. No doubt she had participated in autopsies during her training, but that was her mother in a twisted death pose, and she had handled it better than anyone else he could think of. He had seen witnesses crumple and collapse when faced with such pictures, and she had handled them. She knew. Marnie knew, and he did, that Dale had murdered Stef, and she was handling that. No hysterics, no hair pulling, just looking to him to prove it, waiting for him to wave the wand and make things right. And he didn't have the magic, didn't know the spell that would work.

He was in a savage mood when he left to go find a restaurant, to just get away from it, be somewhere else. Maybe find a woman somewhere. His laugh was bitter when he thought of that. He didn't want any woman. He wanted Van.

*   *   *

H
E
HAD
DRIVEN
to Newport in maddeningly slow traffic, summer people out in droves, had put in a reservation at a restaurant that couldn't seat him until eight-thirty, had walked in old town by the bay until then, had eaten, and now, back in his apartment, it was still only ten-thirty, much too early to think about bed. He turned on the television, turned it off, and finally got out his laptop and resumed his search for information about Delmar Oliver.

It was interesting, he realized an hour later when he stood to stretch and make a pot of coffee, cursing himself as he did so. He knew he didn't need coffee at that hour, but he made it, and when it was ready, he drank a cup and thought about what he had learned.

Delmar Oliver had been a genius of radio drama, apparently, a sound-effects genius. You wanted a mob scene, he could provide it. Airplanes landing or taking off, got it. Kids at play, street sounds, gunfire, screams, whatever the script called for, he was there with the sound effects to put the listening audience on the ground of the action.

Delmar had arrived at the midpoint of what had come to be called the golden age of radio dramas, from the thirties into the fifties, when they went into a gradual decline with the advance of television.

Delmar was said to have had a huge collection of old program records, a collector's dream collection. Tony had not yet been able to find out what had happened to it after his death five years ago. Possibly Dale had sold it, accounting for his sudden wealth, how he had bought into the gallery.

Tony had copied several links to follow up on, and he started, with a second cup of coffee at his elbow. A guy in Idaho whose Web site malfunctioned. Someone in Rhode Island who was offering digitized programs from that period. But since digitized programs seemed readily available, Tony passed on that. He went on to the next link, a company called Audio Magic Studios in Portland. It was midnight when he visited that site. “In stock,” the come-on read, “dozens of authentic Delmar Oliver sound effects! What isn't in stock, we can provide. Try us!”

Tony clicked on some of the sound effects offered. A train whistle, people boarding, crowd noises. Closing his eyes, he could see the scene, almost smell the station. He tried another one or two and was impressed. Sound magic. And the man who ran it was, it appeared, a fan of Delmar Oliver's and had acquired some of his sound effects. Tony wanted to talk to him. He made a note of his name, Kent “Bud” Budowsky, and the telephone number to call the next day, then remembered that he had not turned his own phone back on after muting it in Newport.

When he turned it on, he found a message from Marnie inviting him to dinner on Sunday. “Not a party, and you are ordered not to bring a present, but please join us if you're free. Anytime in the afternoon. Hope to see you then.”

His first reaction was to plead a previous engagement. He had to smile at his own inane excuse. “Right,” he said under his breath. A date with a seagull. He had to face Van, he knew. She was more or less a client, or something akin to one, and he was doing a job for her and Marnie. He would have to see her now and then, and it would not get easier. He appreciated it that he was talking himself into the dinner that was not her birthday party, and he knew he would go. Get it over with. Establish a professional relationship and be done with it.

When he looked at his monitor again, he knew it was hopeless. He no longer could concentrate on the screen. He kept thinking,
Now she's thirty, or will be on Sunday.
And he was fifty. And a beat-up fifty at that, with a bum hip and bad knee. He couldn't wish the years away, go back to forty, or have her advance to forty. Thirty and fifty. Period. At forty he had been married to a woman he didn't love and who didn't love him; he had no wish to repeat those years. And at forty she would have an established medical practice, a child who would be fifteen, in high school, and he would be sixty.

He turned off his laptop, went out to his balcony, and wished he had a cigarette. He had not smoked in fifteen years, and suddenly he was craving a cigarette. And the nights out here on the coast were too damn cold not to have on a heavy jacket. He was all but snarling when he went back inside and got ready for bed.

*   *   *

T
HAT
NIGHT
AFTER
Marnie said good night and went to her room, Van put down a book she had not been reading, pulled on a sweater, and went out to the deck. Many town lights were already turned off, and nothing was visible beyond the few remaining. Too many thoughts and images were swirling in Van's head for her to have concentrated on words on paper, but neither had she wanted to talk. Now the images and thoughts surged with a new urgency.

No matter where she started, the image of Stef, of her mother tumbling down the stairs, imposed itself and made anything else vanish. Van knew what the autopsy meant. No paint under her fingernails, no abraded fingers to indicate she had tried to check her fall. Thank God she was unconscious, she breathed, and had not suffered the terror of the fall. The abrasions and bruises on her arms, her face, everywhere, said it was not a slide, but a head-over-heels tumble. Van saw again the injuries the autopsy had meticulously listed. Scrape, abrasions on both arms, on her feet. Her face, bruised, one cheek abraded. Van closed her eyes, but the image only grew sharper.

Tony knew it was murder, she told herself in an effort to see something else, think of something else. And, she added, he knew there was no way to prove it. No witnesses, and Freddi there to back up Dale's story. Tony knew, and his talk of other leads was just talk. There was no way. She saw again his rigid stance, his fury that once more a killer would succeed, would get away with it.

Her own instant denial when he posed his question again. Can you accept that? No! She would never accept that! “I'll kill him first,” she said under her breath. She remembered her own vapid and empty words to Marnie that they would stop him together. Slowly she shook her head. Marnie wanted to kill him, she had said it twice. “I will kill him myself,” Van said quietly. “I will kill him for what he did to my mother.”

She was cold suddenly. Shivering, she hugged her arms about herself, and slowly she nodded. She would do it. She would kill him. She had to kill him.

She had dedicated her life to medicine for fifteen years, she thought then. To be a physician, to help the ill, cure them when it was possible, alleviate their pain, talk to them, comfort them. To do no harm. She bowed her head, and instantly the image of her mother tumbling head over heels down the stairs erased everything else. Poor skinny Stef, all nervous energy, given the gift or curse of seeing too much, feeling too much, unable to resist the compelling need to express what she saw and felt, terrified by the truths she revealed through her art, communicating those truths, those raw emotions, to anyone who gazed at her work. Compelled to do it again and again, suffering through the process again and again, unable to stop.

What relief it must have granted her when she painted a work such as
Feathers and Ferns,
or the lovely if conventional landscapes, but the escape had always been short-lived. Maybe that's what let her keep painting, Van thought, the hope that she would return to such work more often. Like a candy treat, to be handed out rarely, but always a possibility, a reason to keep going.

The image of her mother tumbling down the stairs returned as strong and clear as ever, and this time it included Dale Oliver standing watching.

Tears were hot in Van's eyes as she rose and went inside. She had to kill him for doing it. It was not a question, not a hypothetical, not an idle thought. She was going to kill Dale Oliver.

 

15

T
ONY
WAITED
UNTIL
ten on Saturday morning to call the Audio Magic Studios. Expecting to get voice mail or a “leave a message” answering-machine response, he was pleased when the phone was answered promptly. It sounded like a kid on the line saying, “Audio Magic.”

“Is Mr. Budowsky in? May I speak with him please.”

“This is Bud. What can I do for you?”

Tony rolled his eyes, imagining a kid in his bedroom, probably in his underwear, on the other end. “I'm trying to track down some of the original Delmar Oliver recordings. I understand that you might know something about them.”

“I sure do. What do you want to know?”

“I'm trying to find out what happened to the collection after Oliver died, five years ago. It seems to have vanished.”

The kid laughed. “Right. Vanished into the collection of a collector. They were all sold to a collector.”

“Is that when you acquired the originals you mention on your Web page? Are they part of the collection?”

“No, sir. My grandfather gave them to me. He worked with Delmar Oliver for a long time and he made the recordings and gave them to me. I have the original recordings, you know, old reel-to-reel tapes, and some pictures, stuff like that, probably worth a fortune to certain collectors, but I'm holding on to them. Granddad told me if he'd known how much they were worth, he could have sold them and made out,” he said cheerfully. “But he said what would he do with a fortune at his age, so he's glad he gave them to me for nothing. He's going on ninety.”

“Mr. Budowsky, would it be possible for me to come by your studio and have a look at some of that material, the pictures, find out a little more about them?”

“Sure. But they aren't for sale. I'm selling digitized copies, not the originals.”

“I understand. Do you know who bought the Oliver collection?”

Bud hesitated a moment. “I can't remember now, but it'll come to me. So much money got involved, you know, people bidding against each other. When do you want to come?”