Black House

The little Fairfield Porter, which name Dale assumed to be that of its painter, had appealed to him as soon as he and Jack had pulled it out of its crate. You could hang a picture like that in your own living room. You could almost step into a picture like that. The funny thing was, Dale thought, if you hung it in your living room, most of the people who came in would never really notice it at all.

Jack had said something about being glad to get the paintings out of storage. “So,” Dale said, “your mom and dad gave them to you?”

“I inherited them after my mother’s death,” Jack said. “My father died when I was a kid.”

“Oh, darn, I’m sorry,” Dale said, snapped abruptly out of the world into which Mr. Fairfield Porter had welcomed him. “Had to be tough on you, losing your dad so young.” He thought Jack had given him the explanation for the aura of apartness and isolation that seemed always to envelop him. A second before Jack could respond, Dale told himself he was bullshitting. He had no idea how someone wound up being like Jack Sawyer.

“Yeah,” Jack said. “Fortunately, my mother was even tougher.”

Dale seized his opportunity with both hands. “What did your folks do? Were you brought up in California?”

“Born and raised in Los Angeles,” Jack said. “My parents were in the entertainment industry, but don’t hold that against them. They were great people.”

Jack did not invite him to stay for supper—that was what stuck with Dale. Over the hour and a half it took them to hang the rest of the pictures, Jack Sawyer remained friendly and good-humored, but Dale, who was not a cop for nothing, sensed something evasive and adamant in his friend’s affability: a door had opened a tiny crack, then slammed shut. The phrase “great people” had placed Jack’s parents out of bounds. When the two men broke for another beer, Dale noticed a pair of bags from a Centralia grocery next to the microwave. It was then nearly 8:00, at least two hours past French County’s suppertime. Jack might reasonably have assumed that Dale had already eaten, were his uniform not evidence to the contrary.

He tossed Jack a softball about the hardest case he had ever solved and sidled up to the counter. The marbled red tips of two sirloin steaks protruded from the nearest bag. His stomach emitted a reverberant clamor. Jack ignored the thunder roll and said, “Thornberg Kinderling was right up there with anything I handled in L.A. I was really grateful for your help.” Dale got the picture. Here was another locked door. This one had declined to open by as much as a crack. History was not spoken here; the past had been nailed shut.

They finished their beers and installed the last of the pictures. Over the next few hours, they spoke of a hundred things, but always within the boundaries Jack Sawyer had established. Dale was sure that his question about Jack’s parents had shortened the evening, but why should that be true? What was the guy hiding? And from whom was he hiding it? After their work was done, Jack thanked him warmly and walked him outside to his car, thereby cutting off any hope of a last-minute reprieve. Case closed, game over, zip up your fly, in the words of the immortal George Rathbun. While they stood in the fragrant darkness beneath the millions of stars arrayed above them, Jack sighed with pleasure and said, “I hope you know how grateful I am. Honestly, I’m sorry I have to go back to L.A. Would you look at how beautiful this is?”

Driving back to French Landing, his the only headlights on the long stretch of Highway 93, Dale wondered if Jack’s parents had been involved in some aspect of the entertainment business embarrassing to their adult son, like pornography. Maybe Dad directed skin flicks, and Mom starred in them. The people who made dirty movies probably raked in the dough, especially if they kept it in the family. Before his odometer ticked off another tenth of a mile, the memory of the little Fairfield Porter turned Dale’s satisfaction to dust. No woman who earned her keep having on- camera sex with strangers would spend actual money on a painting like that.

Let us enter Jack Sawyer’s kitchen. The morning’s Herald lies unfolded on the dining table; a black frying pan recently sprayed with Pam heats atop the circle of blue flames from the gas stove’s front left-hand burner. A tall, fit, distracted-looking man wearing an old USC sweatshirt, jeans, and Italian loafers the color of molasses is swirling a whisk around the interior of a stainless steel bowl containing a large number of raw eggs.

Looking at him as he frowns at a vacant section of air well above the shiny bowl, we observe that the beautiful twelve-year-old boy last seen in a fourth-floor room of a deserted New Hampshire hotel has aged into a man whose good looks contribute only the smallest portion to what makes him interesting. For that Jack Sawyer is interesting declares itself instantly. Even when troubled to distraction by some private concern, some enigma, we might as well say in the face of that contemplative frown, Jack Sawyer cannot help but radiate a persuasive authority. Just by looking at him, you know that he is one of those persons to whom others turn when they feel stumped, threatened, or thwarted by circumstance. Intelligence, resolve, and dependability have shaped the cast of his features so deeply that their attractiveness is irrelevant to their meaning. This man never pauses to admire himself in mirrors—vanity plays no part in his character. It makes perfect sense that he should have been a rising star in the Los Angeles Police Department, that his file bulged with commendations, and that he had been selected for several FBI-sponsored programs and training courses designed to aid the progress of rising stars. (A number of Jack’s colleagues and superiors had privately concluded that he would become the police commissioner of a city like San Diego or Seattle around the time he turned forty and, ten to fifteen years later, if all went well, step up to San Francisco or New York.)

More strikingly, Jack’s age seems no more relevant than his attractiveness: he has the air of having passed through lifetimes before this one, of having gone places and seen things beyond the scope of most other people. No wonder Dale Gilbertson admires him; no wonder Dale yearns for Jack’s assistance. In his place, we would want it, too, but our luck would be no better than his. This man has retired, he is out of the game, sorry, damn shame and all that, but a man’s gotta whisk eggs when he’s gotta have omelettes, as John Wayne said to Dean Martin in Rio Bravo.

“And as my momma told me,” Jack says out loud to himself, “she said, ‘Sonny boy,’ said she, ‘when the Duke spoke up, everdangbody lissened up, lessen he was a-grindin’ one of his numerous political axes,’ yes, she did, them were her same exack words, just as she said ’em to me.” A half second later, he adds, “On that fine morning in Beverly Hills,” and finally takes in what he is doing.

What we have here is a spectacularly lonely man. Loneliness has been Jack Sawyer’s familiar for so long that he takes it for granted, but what you can’t fix eventually turns into wallpaper, all right? Plenty of things, such as cerebral palsy and Lou Gehrig’s disease, to name but two, are worse than loneliness. Loneliness is just part of the program, that’s all. Even Dale noticed this aspect of his friend’s character, and despite his many virtues, our chief of police cannot be described as a particularly pyschological human being.

Jack glances at the clock above the stove and sees he has another forty-five minutes before he must drive to French Landing and pick up Henry Leyden at the end of his shift. That’s good; he has plenty of time, he’s keeping it together, the subtext to which is Everything is all right, and nothing’s wrong with me, thank you very much.

When Jack woke up this morning, a small voice in his head announced I am a coppiceman. Like hell I am, he thought, and told the voice to leave him alone. The little voice could go to hell. He had given up on the coppiceman business, he had walked away from the homicide trade . . .