Big Willie was lurking there in the bushes, acting like he wasn’t waiting for them. God, he was mangy. Looked like he’d gotten himself in yet another fight, too. The dried blood that was caked around his left ear hadn’t been there early that morning.
Des and Bella baited their cages with the jars of strained turkey and stationed themselves a safe distance away, strings in hand. Big Willie moved in closer, crouched low to the ground. Looked at them with his one good eye. Looked at the cages. He inched closer still. Looked at them. Looked at the cages… Des talking to him softly, telling him it was all going to be okay.
It was, she reflected, uncanny how after all these weeks Big Willie chose now to come in from the cold. It was almost as if he sensed that Des was hurting. Or maybe he just knew that this was one moment when she really and truly did not need any more aggravation in her life. Whatever it was, this was the night Big Willie crept nearer
… and nearer… and finally went all the way inside the trap as Des slammed it shut behind him.
They had him. He hissed. He yowled. He hugged the ground, swatting at them. Damn, he was mean. Like a little caged lion. But they had him at long last.
“Big Willie is in the house!” exulted Des, triumphantly highfiving Bella.
“You go, girl!”
Dr. John would have to check him over in the morning. Until then, they quarantined him in Bella’s garage-Des had a full house right now with Dirty Harry being back in residence. But Des had no doubt that once the vet gave Big Willie a clean bill of health he would end up with her. He was her kind of he-cat. Although she would have to find Dirty Harry a new home first. Where?
Des had herself a hot shower and a cold Sam Addams, good and tired from her day of physical activity. She heated up Bella’s stuffed cabbage and wolfed it down. Then she went in her studio for her therapy.
She had two photos of Tal Bliss pinned to her easel. One was his official I.D. photo, the one that had been distributed to the media. It was a standard head-on portrait of a lawman, gaze direct, his jaw strong. Tal Bliss had been the living image of a state trooper-brave, determined and fair. He had an honest face.
The other picture was a crime scene photo of him slumped at his redwood picnic table with most of that face gone.
Des stared at it long and hard, slowly reawakening her senses. Summoning up the smell of bacon and sage in the air. The sound of laughter from the kayakers out on the lake. The sunlight streaming through the trees and onto the deck. Remembering how at peace Tal Bliss had seemed, standing there in his kitchen making fruit salad in his spotless white T-shirt and apron. Remembering her horror, her anger. Remembering…
Now she began to draw him in vine charcoal, stroking boldly and rapidly. Gesture drawings at first, one after another. Placing Tal Bliss on the page. Finding her major contours and shapes. Locating her light source, her core shadows. Then she began to get more specific, gradually taking away with her kneaded eraser, squinting as she searched for the values in his shattered face, the cast shadow of the gun on his chest. After two hours she had a drawing that was beginning to work on a technical level. It was three-dimensional. She had her information down, her shapes and values. What she did not have was her emotion. The drawing was not alive yet. It merely sat there, cold and remote.
Draw what you see, not what you know.
She switched to a hard graphite stick, focusing less on values and more on lines. To free herself from what she knew, she turned his photograph upside down and tried drawing it that way. An exercise she had once been taught. She drew a portrait of Tal Bliss with her left hand. Another with her eyes closed. She drew for hour upon hour, deep into the night, until the floor around her was heaped with discarded drawings. But it still didn’t work. She could not make it work. Exhausted and frustrated, she hurled her stub of graphite stick against the wall.
She didn’t believe it. That was why.
Tal Bliss was no killer. He was an old-school cop-a good, decent man who lived to serve. Tal Bliss had believed in the code. He was prepared to put his own life on the line to protect someone else. That was his job. That was his duty.
Des got up and went into the bathroom to wash the charcoal from her hands, her mind beginning to race… What if… Jesus, what if that was what really happened? It sure made a hell of a lot more sense, didn’t it? What if Tal Bliss hadn’t committed those murders at all? What if he had shot himself to spare the life of the woman he loved? What if he had been protecting Dolly Seymour?
Des didn’t know the true story. But she did know that her portrait of the man wouldn’t come to life until she did. Nor would she be able to rest. Not until she knew what happened. She had to know what happened.
She was staring long and hard at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, wondering what on earth she was going to do about this, when her phone rang.
CHAPTER 17
THE SANDWICH BAG FULL of oatmeal cookies that Sheila Enman had pressed upon Mitch as he left was empty by the time he reached the army of TV reporters who were staked out at Peck Point, desperate for a chewy morsel of their own.
Mitch barreled his pickup right through them and out onto the bridge, paying scant attention to their shouted queries. His head was still spinning. Had Tuck Weems been in on it with Bliss? Was there someone else-a third person? Or was Sheila Enman merely an addled old lady who refused to believe her beloved boy was capable of such monstrous behavior on his own?
Mitch wondered. He most definitely did.
He played back the tape of their conversation when he got home, Sheila’s voice firm and strong over the cascading waterfall… “I don’t believe Tal could have dreamt this whole scheme up all by himself.”
Listening to her. And wondering some more.
He cranked up his computer and got to work. He’d put a lot of thought into his opening paragraph. He felt pretty sure he had it:
I think that many of us have a yearning for the joyous and pastoral New England scene. It is the stuff of Currier and Ives, this scene. And Norman Rockwell. The feel-good Yuletide bathos of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is poured all over it like Vermont maple syrup. But I am here to tell you that the reality does not quite match the fantasy. In fact, it is not even close.
Mitch had his opening, all right. What he did not have was the rest of it. And it was bugging the hell out of him.
By now, the sun was getting low over the sparkling blue Sound, casting long shadows through his living room windows. The tide was out so Mitch went for a walk among the tide pools. One question kept nagging and nagging at him as he plodded along in the wet sand among the crabs and oysters: Why? He could not shake it. It was there as he heated up some three-day-old American chop suey and scarfed it down. Why? And while he watched a few choice minutes of Hombre. The stagecoach scene early on where it slowly begins to dawn on the other passengers that Newman is a half-breed. Ritt’s camera never leaves his riveting blue eyes. Why? When Mitch flicked on his Stratocaster and went chasing after “It Hurts Me, Too,” the old Elmore James blues number, it was still there:
Why had Tal Bliss killed his very best friend in the whole world?
Say Sheila was right. Say he and Tuck Weems had pulled off the murders of Niles Seymour and Torry Mordarski together. Why would he then proceed to eliminate Tuck? Had the two old friends had a falling-out? Had Tuck threatened to expose him? Was this simply a case of Bliss covering his own tracks? Or had another conspirator shot both of them? Someone who was now walking around, free and clear?
It didn’t make sense. Well, it made some sense but not absolute sense. Maybe because Mitch was searching for a proper villain like Richard Boone in Hombre. But this was no Western, its morality clearly etched. This was real life-complex, interwoven and exceedingly murky. And these were real people. Real people did not necessarily have intelligent reasons for the way they behaved. In fact, they might very well have no reasons at all. At least none that were sane or rational.
Mitch arrived at this unhappy conclusion after several hours of lying in bed in the darkness with his wheels spinning. Clemmie was curled up on his chest, purring away. He stroked her soft fur gently, gazing up at the half-
