though they were looking inward, the mind always contemplating its own concerns and needs.
Prescott smiled, held out his hand, and said, “Mr. Waltek? My name is Roy Prescott. Our agency—the Vargas Agency—has been retained by a woman named Pauline Davis. She claims that you owe her some money, and she would like to collect it.” It was a gamble, an attempt to convince Waltek, not of the fantastically unlikely story that he had other business here, or was a person who had just happened by, only that he had not looked in the window and seen the body of Pauline Davis. Waltek said, “I do owe her some money. I don’t have all of it right now, but I can give you some. Come up to the house with me.”
Prescott said, “Okay.” He felt something like amazement mixing in with his alarm: this man he had never seen before had decided to kill him, and it would happen in a moment. Prescott judged that Waltek was stronger, and he had no plan for saving himself, but there was no time to wait for things to get better. Prescott walked with Waltek for a few steps, until Waltek’s eyes drifted away from him for an instant. Prescott pushed off with both legs to give force to his jab, and struck with all his strength. The blow went wide and smacked into the side of Waltek’s head below the temple, making the head turn away with its force. Prescott was afraid to take the time to wind up again, so he instantly brought his right elbow back into Waltek’s face. Waltek staggered into it, and his knees wobbled. Then Prescott was on him, delivering punches as hard and quickly as he could until Waltek was down. Waltek rolled to the side and reached for something inside his coat, but Prescott pinned the arm there, picked up a rock with his free hand, and brought it down on Waltek’s head.
Waltek was unconscious. Prescott dragged him to the foot of a nearby tree, brought his arms around the trunk, took out the pair of cheap handcuffs that were the only implement of the trade that Vargas would allow his employees, and snapped them shut on Waltek’s wrists. He went to get his car, but found that Waltek had left a pickup on the road below his, so he could not get out. He had walked about a mile back to a store where there was a telephone.
Now and then Prescott thought about Pauline Davis. Waltek had killed her for practical reasons. He had wanted the six thousand dollars to add to the down payment for his house in the mountains. There had been something about her that made people know instantly that nobody cared about her. Prescott had seen it, and so, he knew, had Waltek. It made her weak, somebody he could kill.
Prescott detected a distracting something in the back of his mind, then remembered what it was. When he had dialed his office number, the machine had said two messages. Millikan had been the first, but he had not heard the second. He lifted the phone off the back of the seat in front of him, took out his credit card again, and dialed. He pressed the code to hear his messages.
“I’m leaving. I left you a couple of good-bye presents at the motel in Marina del Rey.” Prescott sat up, the sound of the voice making him wince. “They’re to remind you never to come after me again.”
That was it, Prescott thought. That was the price of failing.
11
Prescott traveled with a suitcase that had nothing inside it that he couldn’t replace within ten minutes in a department store. He bought dress shirts of 60 percent cotton and 40 percent polyester that said permanent press and meant it, some blue jeans, and some worsted trousers with a razor crease. The sport coats were always summer-weight and dark colored. They were the belongings of a man so ordinary as to seem barely differentiated from others, a fictional person that Prescott had invented to keep from being too easily noticed and remembered. He picked up his suitcase at the baggage claim at Kennedy Airport, then took a cab into Manhattan to begin his preparations.
He checked into a hotel on Park Avenue and began making his calls to art galleries. In the next twenty-four hours, he spoke with thirty-six men and women whose voices told him they were genuinely convinced that they were experts. On each call, he patiently explained what he wanted and listened carefully to the response. At the end of his thirty-six calls, he had heard one name twelve times and no other name more than three times. He made three calls to curators of contemporary collections at museums to see whether they had a different sense of things, but it became clear to him that the voices were essentially the same. The name Prescott heard so many times was Cara Lee Satterfield. He dialed her number, listened to her quick, businesslike hello. He introduced himself, told her that he wondered if she would be willing to speak with him about a commission for a special kind of piece—a picture of a man he would describe.
She said in an unhappy monotone, “Did you get my name from the police?”
Prescott said, “No, from an art gallery. Do the police know you?”
“Come to my studio and we’ll talk.”
“Now?”
“Four o’clock. I’m working now.”
Prescott took a cab to the address she gave him, stepped out onto the street, and looked up. It was a brick building that had at some point had some business purpose, but the upper windows were too big for a business, and the frames were too new and expensive to have been from that era. He went into the man-sized door set into the larger garage door, and found himself facing a freight elevator. He stepped into it and pressed the UP button. The elevator rose two stories and stopped at a steel door with a big face on it that looked like a photograph. Prescott looked more closely. The face was an extremely realistic painted portrait of a grandfatherly man with a beard and glasses, crinkle lines at the corners of his wise old eyes, and an expression of mild puzzlement. He seemed to Prescott to be saying, “What do you want here—it wouldn’t be something that isn’t so good for you, would it?”
The thin woman who opened the door looked about forty. She wore jeans, a sweatshirt, and a pair of sneakers. Her hair had been chestnut brown, but it had been allowed to gray, so there were bright silver streaks in the tightly tied ponytail. Her face had no makeup and it had a bare look as though it had just been scrubbed. She gave a perfunctory half smile as she looked at him sharply. “Mr. Prescott?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Come in.”
He entered and looked at the loft. The high windows and skylight above threw a bright, even light everywhere, bouncing off the white walls to leave no shadows. There was a huge space to his right occupied by several easels, a big workbench cluttered with tubes of paint, brushes soaking in coffee cans, and assorted palette knives and rags. There was a second bench with a vise, a miter box, a table saw, a few tools.
She led him past that area, through what looked like a living room set on display in a department store. The furniture was modern, simple in its lines, and upholstered in a coarse black fabric. There he could see that a set of stairs led above to a wide balcony with another steel door that was open. Through it, he could see part of a carpeted hallway that seemed to have at least four doorways leading off it, and at the end, a big room with a vaulted ceiling, bookcases and furniture, and a huge window with green things growing on a balcony beyond.
He gravitated to the walls, where finished portraits hung. From a distance, they were different enough from one another to be the work of several painters, but as he drew nearer, subtle similarities appeared. It was not a similarity of feature, but of eye: the artist’s interest in the curve of a young girl’s cheekbone, the mottled texture of an old woman’s skin, somehow the same interest expressed with the same intensity. This was a calm, unhurried treatment, with no flattering smoothing over of features, but the effect was more than flattering. The precise rendering was a fascinated elucidation of the creature who was being recorded and preserved. Cara Lee Satterfield stood a dozen feet behind him, waiting patiently while he looked. He reluctantly relinquished his gaze at a picture of a young woman with shiny blond hair. He was not sure how he could tell, but the woman was proud of the hair, thinking about it at the moment of the portrait. “You’re the best I’ve seen alive,” he said without a smile.
“Thank you,” she said.
“It’s not exactly a compliment, it’s more on the order of a congratulation,” he said. “A waste of breath too, because you know it.”
She looked at him, puzzled, but did not deny it. “I don’t think that’s a compliment either.”
“Nope,” he said. “It’s not. People have what they have. When what they have is something special, you can always tell they’ve had to work very hard for it. If it’s this special, they’ve gone more distance than anybody can go just by working.”
“That sounded positive rather than negative, so I’ll thank you,” she said. “Tell me about your
