The Shadow of Venus (9 page)

“Usually we do get buyers' names and addresses,” she said. “Especially when we're selling for Hope Central, because Chris likes to put the names on his donors' list and hit them up again. The woman who bought
Summertime
paid cash. I didn't get her name.”

“Twenty-five hundred dollars is a lot of cash to have on Central, isn't it?” Claire said. “Who carries around that kind of money?”

“She wasn't a hooker or a drug dealer, if that's what you're thinking.” Linda took a good look at Claire. “She was a normal woman like you and me. She wore jeans, casual but neat. She was about our age, old enough not to feel comfortable walking around Central alone at night.”

Claire had placed Linda in her midforties. The gallery light, which focused on the paintings rather than the customers, was flattering. It was possible Linda judged Claire to be younger than she actually was.

As she filled the room with her chatter, Linda reminded Claire of moths beating their wings
against
the light. “It's the kids who like to come down here after dark and they don't buy art. I keep telling Rachel that, but after we made twenty-five hundred dollars on the
Summertime
sale she thought it would happen again. Most of the time I sit here all by myself or I'm trying to get rid of the street people who wander in. The woman told me she was visiting from out of town and didn't like to carry her credit cards when she was on Central. I said we would hold the painting and she could come back for it the next day. But she had to leave early in the morning, she said, and she wanted to take it home with her. She went to get the money from an ATM machine or the friend she was traveling with, I'm not sure which. I promised to keep the gallery open for another hour. She came back with twenty-dollar bills. She took the painting. I put the money in the safe. That was that.”

“When was it?” Claire asked.

“Let me see. It was the last night of the show. That would have been the Thursday before Memorial Day. The next day we set up the Janelle Alarid show and it opened on Saturday.”

“Can you tell me any more about the woman's appearance? Her height? The color of her hair? Was there anything to distinguish her?”

Linda shrugged. “She was average height. She wore a hat so I couldn't tell what color her hair was. Really, there was nothing about her you would especially remember.” She glanced at her watch, cupped her hair in her hand and pushed it higher. “Anything else? It's eight o'clock. Rachel told me to close at eight. I'm ready to go home.”

“Did the homeless woman in
Summertime
ever come into the galley?”

“Not that I noticed.”

“Thanks for your help,” Claire said.

“Where did you park?” Linda asked her.

“In the next block.”

“I park right behind the gallery myself. I'll watch you walk to your car.”

It seemed excessively cautious to Claire; it was only eight o'clock. But she agreed.

“Night seems to come earlier every year,” Linda said as Claire left the gallery.

She stood in the doorway and watched Claire walk to her truck. The back light from the gallery turned her into a solitary silhouette. The street was empty except for a bunch of kids pushing and shoving each other farther down Central near the El Rey Theatre. What did Linda intend to do if something happened? Claire wondered. If someone grabbed her purse, what could she do but call the police? By the time they arrived whatever could have happened would have.

Claire opened the door of her truck and climbed in. She turned toward the gallery and watched while Linda shut the door, hung a closed sign in the window, and turned off the light. She knew what Linda meant when she said night seemed to come earlier every year. It was easy to fall into the habit of
staying
home after dark and going to bed early. On the surface other parts of town might appear safer than Central, but the truth was life was dangerous no matter where you lived. Claire thought it was better to remember that fact than to pretend otherwise, but to creep around like a scared rabbit was a sure way to attract the predators.

She turned her truck around and drove east on Central in the direction of UNM and home. There was still a line waiting to get into Tucanos. She stopped at the light and thought about the woman who bought the painting, the woman Linda claimed was uncomfortable on Central. Did that mean she was from a small town? Linda said she was approximately their age. But Claire judged Linda to be several years younger, which could place the woman anywhere in her forties or fifties. She wore a hat that covered her hair, and jeans. That didn't reveal much; everybody wore jeans. The maximum amount Claire could get from her own ATM machine was five hundred dollars. With that limitation the woman would have had to hit every ATM downtown to come up with twenty-five hundred dollars cash, unless she got some or all of it from the friend.

Claire had a number of questions. Was the friend a man or a woman? Why would the friend be carrying around twenty-five hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills? ATM yuppie money was also street money, drug money, the price of a BB. Middle-aged women abused drugs, too, but they preferred prescription drugs. The people who used street drugs like crack or heroin rarely made it to middle age. The woman bought the painting on Thursday evening. Maia died over the weekend. If a man had bought the painting, Claire would have suspected him of being Coyote. But a woman the right age to be Maia's mother? Why did that woman have to have the painting immediately? Maybe the woman fell in love with it and it was as simple as that. Maybe the painting reminded the woman of her own youth or her own daughter. Or maybe she recognized Maia. Claire drifted into the realm of fantasy with this thought, a place far removed from the lights on Central but not so far away from the atmosphere in Lisa Teague's studio. It was a fantasy that somehow Maia and her mother would reconnect. Claire recognized the face in the painting as the young Maia, but it had only been a few weeks since she had seen her. Would someone who hadn't seen her for years recognize her face? Someone who knew her when she was younger might. Besides, there was another clue in the painting—the seven girls dancing in a circle. Anyone who knew the myth of Maia would know what that meant. So might someone who knew the reality.

Claire continued east on Central, wondering whether Maia had seen her own portrait in the window of the Downtown Gallery. If she had, would the exposure have empowered her or terrified her into hiding in the basement of Zimmerman with her stolen illustration and her drugs?

Chapter
Eleven

A
ROUND THE UNIVERSITY
C
ENTRAL WAS AS BUSY
as it was near Tucanos. Claire parked her truck at Kinko's. She could have made copies of
Summertime
at CSWR but it meant circling around the university to the lot behind Zimmerman. Kinko's was far more convenient. She went inside and ordered ten color copies. When they were done, she turned them over and wrote her own name and number on the back. Her excuse for not writing Detective Owen's number was she didn't happen to have it with her. As she wrote down her own name and number Claire felt she was stepping out of her comfort zone and dancing at the edge of her circle.

She left Kinko's and walked down Central, not knowing exactly where she was going or what she was going to do when she got there. If she came across Ansia, she would ask her about Maia, but she didn't see Ansia or anyone else dressed like a street person. Everyone she passed looked like a student or a professor or a wanna-be lugging a backpack and talking on a cell phone. Then Claire turned down Yale and saw the poet shuffling toward her. He was a tall, shaggy man who wore several layers of clothes even in the middle of summer, another homeless habitue of the library. Students jokingly called him Ralph Waldo Emerson, and somehow he had adopted the name of Waldo. Claire had spoken to him before in the library and found him to be confused but polite.

She stopped him and said, “Waldo, I'm Claire Reynier. Do you remember me from the library?”

“Evening, ma'am,” Waldo said, bobbing his head and giving the impression that if he wore a hat he would be tipping it.

“I'm looking for Ansia. Do you know her?”

“Sure. I know her.” He bent over to whisper. “She pees on her clothes.” He held his nose. “She says the smell keeps the coyotes away.”

“Would you tell her I'm looking for her?”

Waldo shuffled his feet and nodded again.

Claire took that as a yes and handed him a photocopy of
Summertime,
“That's my name and number on the back. Ansia can call me anytime. Do you recognize Maia, the girl in the picture?”

“Tiny dancer,” Waldo said. “I remember her.”

“She died a few weeks ago in a storage room under the library.”

“I heard that,” Waldo said. “It's hard to get under the library nowadays. You have to know someone who will let you in. Did Lisa paint this picture?”

“Yes.”

“She painted me once when I lived in the shelter, but now I'm a street person. Lisa can't paint me anymore. Chris Hyde says you have to be homeless to have your picture painted, but what he really means is you have to be staying in his shelter.”

“How did Lisa paint you?” Claire asked.

Waldo seemed startled. “As a poet. I am a poet. Ansia pretends to be a poet, but I am a real, true, honest-to-goodness poet.” He pulled a poem out of his backpack and handed it to Claire. “That's my name and number on the back.” He flipped the poem over, showing the back of it to be totally blank. He laughed. “No name, no number, no permanent address. I gotta go. If I see Ansia, I'll tell her you're looking.” He tipped his imaginary hat, did a shuffling little two-step and ambled down the street.

******

That had been enough encounters for one evening and Claire was more than ready to go home. She drove across town to the Heights and turned down her street, glad she had a house, a bed, and a cat waiting at the door. He wove a path between her legs while she walked to the kitchen and opened a can of cat food. The homeless at Hope Central had eaten franks and beans for dinner, probably from industrial-sized cans. Claire hadn't eaten franks and beans since she was a kid on Hawley Lake, but it was a meal she used to serve her father when her mother wasn't home. She opened the door of her cupboard and stared at the shelves. No franks and beans, no Jell-O, no comfort food. She found a box of penne and a can of white beans. She made pasta with fagioli, spicing it with black olives and pimentos. After she cleaned the kitchen, she took the copies of the paintings and Waldo's poem into her living room and sat down on the sofa. The poem was handwritten in pencil on a sheet of white paper.

Early to bed and early to rise

9-5 was just a disguise

I thought of all the things I could do

And I signed up for the poetry crew

Wrote all day and wrote all night

One day my words they really took fright

Had Waldo meant “fright” or “flight”? He could be incomprehensible in person, but his handwriting was perfectly legible. Claire decided he had said what he meant—“fright.” A blank sheet of paper could open the door to many fears.

She stared at the photocopy of
Summertime.
Seven girls danced in white summer dresses while a
shadow
closed in on them. Then she looked at Ansia floating above the river in a stoned state of mind where there was no fear.

Claire got up and filled the bathtub with hot water and lavender bath oil. She pinned up her hair and climbed in, sinking down until the water reached her chin. While she soaked, she thought about fear, pondering which was worse—the fear caused by other people or the fear created by your own mind. For her, agoraphobia had been worse than reality, but she had been touched by a family friend. She hadn't been raped. She hadn't been beaten. She hadn't been victimized by a family member year after year after year. The assault on her body had been brief. She was able to get away, run home to her parents, her dog, her bed, but an animal was conceived during that attack, a rodent with sharp little teeth that lived inside her and gnawed at her nerves.

She'd learned that the rodent was aroused by anxiety and hunger, stimulated by sugar, calmed by routine. It remained dormant if she shut down her senses and focused on her will. Battling her phobia gave her life heroism and purpose just like the lives of the people who lived on the street. She became a teenage warrior, but by the time she went to the U of A she had the phobia under control.

Leaving her comfort zone and going to Europe with her girlfriends was a victory, but she lost a battle in Venice at the edge of Piazza San Marco. She had left her friends and spent the winter semester traveling with Pietro Antonelli, an Italian student she met in Spain. They traveled through Morocco in his Volkswagen van that broke down in every country they visited. Then they made their way north through Spain and France into Italy, where Claire had to make the overwhelming decision whether to return to school and family in Arizona or to stay in Italy with Pietro. They'd had a fight and were on the verge of a bitter breakup. She hadn't been eating or sleeping.

She stood at the edge of the open space, thinking she would lose her mind if she stepped into it. The threat of insanity filled Piazza San Marco. Tourists scattered bread crumbs and gangs of pigeons swooped down and snatched them up. Rodents were gathering around the edges of the piazza, rats that could chew her mind to shreds. You're being stupid, she said to herself. It's not the piazza or Pietro you're afraid of, it's yourself. You're afraid of growing up, you're afraid of being a woman. She wanted to run but she made herself turn slowly away from the piazza and walk back to the hotel room. She got into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. Although it was ninety degrees, she was shivering.