niece.
It was a caricature. Skillful, amazingly subtle for a teen-aged artist, but it was a caricature. At first view it was the portrait of a young man with whom the artist was both in love and in lust. Gradually, however, the slight exaggerations asserted themselves, and soon Hawkin knew that she was not painting how she felt looking at Andy Lewis but rather how Andy Lewis imagined women in general felt looking at him. It was dated April.
Trujillo heard him laugh and emerged from the closet to come and look over his shoulder. He made an appreciative noise in his throat.
'Wish some lady would see me that way,' he commented.
'Do you?' Hawkin asked. A bustle in the hallway outside indicated the arrival of the prints and photograph crew, and he handed Trujillo the painting. 'I want you to study this closely for a few minutes, and then tell me what you think. Be careful of it,' he added. 'It's worth more than you make in a year.'
Ten minutes later he came back and found a confused and troubled Trujillo sitting in a chair staring at the image of the young Lewis. He looked up at Hawkin.
'But, it's… it's cruel, isn't it? She's laughing at him. Making fun of him.'
Even Trujillo had seen it, then, given time and a hint. How long had it taken Andy Lewis to see the derision in it? Had it taken him, perhaps, until the month after it was painted? Had Vaun told him what she had really painted, when she broke up with him? Had Jemima Louise died because of this painting? And, indirectly, Tina Merrill and Amanda Bloom and Samantha Donaldson, and very nearly Vaun herself?
Suddenly Lee Cooper's words came back to him: Vaun was 'more likely to commit a devastating murder of someone's self-image on canvas…' This painting was her weapon, the victim as yet quite unaware that the murderous blow had been struck. Hawkin could see that anyone knowing Lewis, and truly seeing this portrait, would never take the man seriously again. It spoke volumes about Lewis's methods that he had not killed Vaun outright when he first realized what she had done. To Lewis, mere death was not sufficient revenge: hell must come first.
The apartment and its surroundings yielded no other immediately satisfying piece of evidence. The telephone answering machine gave out one succinct message: a man's bass voice said, 'Tony? This is Dan. We could use a hand if you're free.' There was no way of telling when the message had been left, but the state of the refrigerator indicated it had been some days since anyone had been in residence, and as the day wore on the neighbors interviewed confirmed that the last anyone had seen of him was before the big storm.
There were no papers, no address books or scribbled telephone numbers, no letters in the mailbox addressed to anyone other than Occupant. The neighbors could describe only a few of his numerous guests, and the only vehicle any of them had seen him with was the old pickup currently sitting in Tyler's metal shed.
That evening, Wednesday, Hawkin and Trujillo returned to the apartment house to catch the residents who had not been in during the day. It was tedious work, with little added to their meager store of information, until they rang the bell of number fifty-two. It was after nine o'clock, but the door was answered by a child of about ten or eleven with glossy black hair and a mouth full of braces, dressed in fuchsia-colored thermal pants and an oversized Minnie Mouse T-shirt. She peered at them gravely beneath the chain.
'Good evening, miss,' said Hawkin. 'I wonder if I might speak to your mother or father?'
'I do not know how I would produce my father,' she said with considerable precision and an air of suffering fools, 'but my mother may be available. May I tell her who's calling?'
Hawkin identified himself and Trujillo to the child, who looked unimpressed. She started to open her mouth when she was interrupted by a woman's voice from behind her.
'Who is it, Jules?'
The child stepped around so Hawkin could see her profile, which in another eight or ten years would be devastating.
'They claim,' she said, 'to be policemen. I was about to ask them for some identification.'
'That is a very sensible idea, miss,' said Hawkin firmly in an effort to retain some sort of control. He pulled his ID out of his pocket for the forty-seventh time that day and flipped it open for the benefit of the eyes, on two levels now, that peered through the gap. The door shut, the chain rattled, and the door opened again to reveal the paradigm on which the future devastatrix was modeled.
Ten pounds of gleaming blue-black hair balanced precariously on top of an oval face with brown in its genes and, intriguingly, golden-green eyes surrounded by eyelids that had been shaped somewhere in Asia. Damp tendrils curled gently around the collar of an ancient bathrobe like one that Hawkin's grandfather used to wear, of a particularly gruesome shade of purple, mercifully faded. She had bare feet and heavy horn-rim glasses of the sort Gary Grant might have removed to reveal a secretary of hitherto unseen beauty, and Hawkin was very glad that he was standing in front of Trujillo because he knew that his own face would reveal nothing, despite his immediate and intense awareness that beneath the robe, the rest of her was every bit as bare as her feet. Trujillo might take a moment to regain control of his face.
'Good evening, Ms. Cameron,' he said coolly. 'Sorry to bother you. We're trying to find some information on one of your neighbors, and wonder if you might be able to help us?'
'Certainly. Come in.' She stood back and waved them into a room so utterly ordinary it might have come from a catalog of motel furniture, onto which had been strewn a solid layer of books, covering every flat surface— heavy books with dark leather bindings and titles in gold, gothic letters, in a number of languages. She gathered a few together to clear the second pair of the quartet of metal and vinyl chairs at the Formica table, then stacked the tomes onto the table and sat looking over them. She was not a short woman but looked small beneath the hair, within the robe, and behind the books.
'I'm afraid I won't be able to help much,' she said. She had a sweet, low voice, and not so much an accent as a careful precision and rhythm to her speech. 'We've only been here since January, and I'm so rarely home, I haven't had a chance to get to know my neighbors.'
A voice came from the sofa, accompanied by one foot waving in the air. Hawkin had all but forgotten the younger generation of this incredible race of genius-goddesses.
'My mother was recently appointed to the chair of medieval German literature at the university,' said the voice, and then volunteered, 'I am going to practice criminal law.' Hawkin blanched at the thought of such a defense lawyer and hoped he would be retired before she came on the scene. Her head appeared over the back of the chintz. 'Which neighbor?'
'Mr. Tony Andrews, in number thirty-four.' He dragged his attention back to the mother. 'He's been missing for some days, and his family is beginning to worry.'
The daughter snorted derisively.
'So they sent two high-ranking officers out to look for a missing person?'
'Jules,' her mother began.
'Oh Mother, the police don't do things that way, and besides, I've seen them both on the news. They're working on that case of the little girls and the artist.'
The mother turned a look on Hawkin that made him feel like a student who had been caught in a bit of plagiarism.
'Is this true?' she asked.
'We do work on more than one case at once, sometimes,' Hawkin said, trying for sternness, but it sounded weak even to his own ears. He pulled himself together. 'Mr. Andrews. Do you know him?'
'No, I don't think—'
'Yes, Mother, we met him last month, don't you remember? The day you were giving a paper in San Francisco and couldn't get the car started.'
'Oh, yes, him. I had forgotten his name. Nice man.'
'He was not,' said Jules sternly.
'Well, I thought—'
'Pardon me, miss,' interrupted Trujillo. 'Why did you think he was not nice?'
For a moment the child was at an obviously uncharacteristic loss for words. She quickly mustered her forces, but her answer was given with a chin raised in half-defiant embarrassment.
'I don't have a reason, not really. Nothing concrete, I mean. It was simply an impression. I did not like the way he looked at my mother. It was,' she paused to choose a word. 'It was speculative, without the earthy immediacy with which most men react to her.'
