A Cold Heart

As we returned to the Seville, an old blue VW bus drove up to the gallery. SAVE THE WETLANDS sticker on the rear bumper. Above that: ART IS LIFE. A tiny white-haired woman sat low in the driver’s seat. A yellow-and-brown dog on the passenger side stared at the windshield.

The woman waved. “Yoo-hoo, Detective!” and we approached the bus.

“Ms. Barnes,” said Milo. “What’s up?” He introduced me to CoCo Barnes, and she gripped my hand with what felt like a sparrow’s talon.

“Just came by to see if you got in okay.” Barnes glanced at the gallery’s frontage. The dog remained in place, dull-eyed but tight-jawed. Big dog with a graybeard muzzle. Bits of dry leaves specked its coat.

I chanced petting the animal. It licked my hand.

Milo said, “We got in fine.”

“You’re all finished up in there?” CoCo Barnes’s voice was scratchy, veering toward abrasive, tempered by a Southern inflection. She looked to be seventy. The white hair was cut in a boyish cap and trimmed unceremoniously. Her skin was the color and consistency of well-roasted chicken. Slate gray eyes- more acute than the dog’s, but filmy, nonetheless- checked me out.

“What’s his name?” I said.

“Lance.”

“Nice dog.”

“If he likes you.” CoCo Barnes turned to Milo. “Any progress on Julie?”

“It’s still early in the investigation, ma’am.”

The old woman frowned. “Didn’t I hear something about if you don’t solve it quickly, you probably won’t solve it at all?”

“It’s not that simple, ma’am.”

CoCo Barnes ruffled Lance’s neck. “I’m glad I caught you, it saves me a phone call. Remember how you asked me to think about anything unusual that happened Saturday night, and I said there’d been nothing, it had just been your typical opening? Well, I thought about it some more, and there was something. Not at night and not at the opening, strictly speaking. And I’m not sure it’s really what you’re after.”

“What happened?” said Milo.

“This was before the opening,” said Barnes. “The day of the opening, around 2 P.M. Julie wasn’t even here, yet. Just me and Lance, here. Clark Van Alstrom was here, too- the man who does those aluminum stabiles?”

Milo nodded.

CoCo Barnes said, “I brought Clark along because I can’t lift that metal door by myself. Once I got in, Clark left, and I started setting up. Making sure everything was in order- a few months ago we had a power outage, and that was no good.” She smiled. “Especially because the artist worked in neon… Anyway, I was checking things out, and I heard Lance bark. That doesn’t happen often. He’s a very quiet boy.”

She smiled at the dog. Lance made a low, contented sound. “I’d set up a water bowl for him at the back, in the hallway near where Julie- just outside the bathrooms- but I’d left the door to the vestibule open, and I could hear him barking. He doesn’t have much of a bark, mind you, he’s fourteen years old and his vocal cords are pretty shot. What he produces is more of a cough.” She demonstrated with a series of dry hacks. Lance’s eyes shifted to her, but he remained inert. “He just kept it up, wouldn’t stop, and I went back there to see what was wrong. By the time I got there he’d shlepped himself up on his feet and was facing the back door. I wondered if he’d heard rats- we’d had some rat problems a couple of seasons ago, an opening that was absolutely disastrous, where’s the Pied Piper of Hamlin when you need him- so… where was I… oh, yes, I opened the door and had a look out back and there were no rats. But there was a woman. Foraging in the Dumpster. Obviously homeless, obviously quite mad.”

“Mad as in angry?” said Milo.

“Mad as in disturbed, psychotic, mentally ill. I abhor labels, but sometimes they do get the picture across. This one was mad as the proverbial chapeau maker.”

“You could tell this by-”

“Her eyes, for starts,” said Barnes. “Wild eyes- scared eyes. Jumping all over the place.” She tried to demonstrate with her own gray orbs, but they moved lazily. Blinking several times, as if to clear them, she turned to Lance and scratched behind his ear, and said, “Easy now, you’re a good boy… then there was the way she carried herself, her clothes- mismatched, oversized, too many layers for the weather. I’ve lived in Venice for fifty-three years, Detective. I’ve seen enough mental illness to know it when it stares me in the face. Then, of course, there was the foraging. The moment the door opened she jumped back, lost her balance, and nearly fell. Such fear. I said, ‘If you wait right here, I’ll fetch you something to eat.’ But she raised her hand to her mouth, chewed her knuckles, and ran off. They do that a lot, you know. Turn down food. Some of them even get hostile when you try to help them. They’ve got voices blabbering in their heads, telling them who-knows-what. Can you blame them for not trusting?”

She ruffled the dog some more. “It’s probably nothing, but in view of what happened to Julie I don’t suppose we can be too complacent.”

“No we can’t, ma’am. What else can you tell me about this woman?” said Milo.

The old woman’s eyes sparked. “So you do think it’s important?”

“At this stage, everything’s important. I appreciate your telling me.”

“Well, that’s good to know. Because I almost didn’t tell you, being as it was a woman and my assumption was a man killed Julie- the way she was…” The old woman’s eyes clamped shut, then fluttered open. “I’m still trying to rid myself of the image… not that this woman couldn’t have overpowered Julie. She was large- maybe six feet tall. Built big, too. Though with all that clothing, it was hard to tell, precisely. And we were only face-to-face for a second or so.”

“Big bones,” said Milo.

“Sturdy- almost masculine.”

“Could it have been a man dressed up as a-”

Barnes laughed. “No, no, this one was pure girl all right. But a big girl. A lot bigger than Julie. Which got me thinking. It needn’t have been a man at all, right? Especially if we’re dealing with someone not in their right mind.”

Milo’s pad was out. “How old would you say she was?”

“I’d guess thirties, but it’s a guess because that kind of misery- homelessness, mental illness- it overrides age, doesn’t it?”

“In what way, ma’am?”

“What I mean,” said Barnes, “is that people like that all look ancient and damaged- there’s a coating of despair. This one, though, she’d managed to hold on to some of her youth; under the grime I could see some youth. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

CoCo Barnes ticked a finger. “In terms of other details, she wore a thick, padded military-type camouflage jacket over a red, black, and white flannel shirt over a blue UCLA sweatshirt. UCLA in white letters, the C was half- gone. On the bottom were heavy-duty gray sweatpants, and from the way they bulked, she had on at least one other pair of pants underneath. White, lace-up tennis shoes on her feet and a broad-brimmed black straw hat atop her head. The brim was shredded in front- pieces of straw coming loose. Her hair was bunched up in the hat, but some had come loose, and it was red. And curly. Curly red hair. Add a layer of grime to all of that, and you’ve got the picture.”

Milo scribbled. “Ever see her before?”

“No,” said Barnes. “Not on the walkway or kicking around the alleys in Venice or in Ocean Front Park or anywhere else you see the homeless. Maybe she’s not one of the locals.”

“Is there anything else you remember about the encounter?”

“It wasn’t much of an encounter, Detective. I opened the door, she got scared, I offered to get her some food, she ran off.”

Milo scanned his notes. “You’ve got a great memory, Ms. Barnes.”

“You should’ve known me a few years ago.” The old woman tapped her forehead. “I’m accustomed to taking mental snapshots. We artists view the world with a high-focus lens.” Two rapid blinks. “If I hadn’t chickened out of my cataract surgery, I’d be doing a lot better.”

“Let me ask you this, ma’am: Could you draw me a picture of this woman? I’m sure it would be better than