saying? I painted this to find out what I knew about Fred. What I know about parrots. What I know about feathers. What I know about green.'
The New York reviewer rallied somewhat and started taking notes again. Arty Magnus held his stub of pencil against his lower lip and waited for the pendulum to swing back his way. Augie paused for breath, then went on with the untrammeled directness of a man thinking out loud.
'You paint to find out what you know, but then the painting outsmarts you, ends up knowing more than you do.' He gestured toward the monumental canvas, toward the parrot's down turned beak and frozen gaze. 'Look at those eyes, that stare. Is it accusing? Resigned? Is it serene or is it mocking? For the life of me, I can't tell. But I know, without a doubt, that bird knows something I don't know.'
For a moment everybody stared at Fred. In the thick and shimmering light, the parrot's plumage was velvety, its unsettling red eyes appeared to pulse.
Then a soft voice was heard from an unexpected direction. It was Reuben. He'd kept a discreet distance from the guests and was leaning over the kitchen counter. 'Maybe he knows who is trying to hurt you.'
Augie twisted and looked at his friend across the back of the settee. 'Maybe. Maybe he does. And maybe someday he'll tell us.'
41
Detective Sergeant Joe Mulvane had seen countless crime scenes in his life, and they never failed to depress him. The scenes of homicides, of course, were especially appalling: the oddly metallic smell of blood, the ghastly chalk-drawn silhouette showing where and in what posture the dead guy had fallen. So often they fell with one hand reaching out. Probably they were just trying to hit the bastard that killed them, but it didn't look that way when they chalked it on the floor, it always looked like the victim was making one final grab at something good and beautiful, something he would never capture, never touch.
But even when nobody got hurt, when the crime was just some dipshit burglary or apparently aimless B- and-E, there was something bleak about the scene, something that made Mulvane feel gloomy. It had to do, he figured, with waste. Waste and stupidity. Shattered windows; smashed crockery; clothing pulled from ransacked dresser drawers and either torn or stretched all out of shape-these morons destroyed more than they stole. And there was something that never stopped seeming pathetic about a broken thing: a trashed room, a cracked mirror, even a busted coffee cup. You couldn't say those things had ever been alive, but still, when they were broken they were as full of death as any corpse.
Mulvane was feeling the crime-scene gloom at first light Thursday morning as he stood on Ray Yates's gangplank on Houseboat Row and saw what had been done to the radio host's floating home.
The louvered front door had been wrenched out of alignment; it hung limp and useless on a single mangled hinge. Inside, all was havoc. The living-room upholstery had been slashed with knives, white fiber stuffing poked out of it like hair from an old man's ears. The drawers from a file cabinet had been yanked out, the files dumped in a chaos of paper. Liquor bottles lay smashed on the floor, brandy fumes wafted from shards of green glass. In the bedroom, the closet had been decimated, the palm-tree shirts thrown in a pile and stomped with dirty shoes. The medicine chest was torn off the bathroom wall, the shower curtain ripped from its rod. In the tiny kitchen, a rotting fish had been left on the counter near the sink; flies clustered on its clouded eye. Above the fish, a terse note had been scrawled on the wall in red magic marker. It said No Deal, Ray. Clean Up Your Own Mess.
Mulvane looked at the fish, the note, and the beat cop who had called in the crime. 'Probably Ponte,' he said.
'Dust for prints?' asked the cop.
'If you enjoy that sort of thing,' said Mulvane. 'You won't find any.'
Later that morning he drove to Olivia Street. Feeling grim himself, he expected others to be feeling grim, and he was faintly put out to find the members of the Silver household positively chipper. Reuben answered the door in a crisp new apron, candy-striped. Smiling, he led the detective through the house and out toward the pool. Nina was swimming laps. Her legs scissored evenly and powerfully, her hair streamed sleekly back behind her, and when she lifted her face from the water, the tension seemed to have washed out of it, eased by exercise and chlorine. Augie was sitting at a shady table. He had a cup of coffee in front of him and a sketch pad on his lap. He wore a straw hat and was chewing on a toothpick.
'Ah, Joe,' he said. 'Beautiful morning. Cup of coffee? Muffin maybe?'
'Just coffee,' said Mulvane. He lifted a chair and turned it backwards, then straddled the seat with his beefy thighs and rested his forearms on the back.
'Did that interview yesterday,' Augie said. 'With your friend Magnus and this big-deal critic from New York. Got a big kick out of it, I have to tell you.'
'That's nice,' Mulvane said.
If Augie caught the lack of enthusiasm, he didn't let it daunt him. 'It's a game, talking to press. I'd almost forgotten how amusing it is. They ask you questions about what you do, and you're supposed to pretend you can explain it. Then they pretend they can explain-'
'Augie,' Mulvane interrupted, 'listen, I'm sorry to rain on your parade here, but Ray Yates-how close a friend is he?'
The words, the tone-they killed the mood sure as turning the lights up in a bar. Nina was standing at the edge of the pool, her elbows on the wet tiles; her face socked in again, you could see flesh moving, tightening around her jaw. Augie slapped his sketch pad onto the table and threw the jaunty toothpick on his saucer.
'Joe,' he said, 'that's exactly the kind of question I don't know how to answer anymore.'
'His place was trashed last night. Not a burglary. Whoever did it left a fish on the counter.'
'A fish?' said Nina.
'Quaint Mafia calling card,' said Mulvane. 'There was also a note about a deal.'
Reuben came out with the detective's coffee. It took him no time at all to see that his friends were unhappy again. The spring went out of his step, his face took on a remorseful look, as if he were somehow to blame for the morning's high spirits being dashed.
'What kind of deal?' asked Augie.
Mulvane shrugged. 'Loan sharks kill people who welsh on big debts. Yates owns paintings which, if you're dead, are worth enough to bail him-'
'Are you suggesting,' Nina said, 'that Ray Yates got the Mafia-'
'No,' Mulvane said. 'If he'd got the Mafia, Augie would be dead by now.'
'Is that supposed to be comforting?' she asked.
'Well,' said Mulvane, 'yeah. Sort of. But what I'm suggesting is he might have tried to get the Mafia. So I'm asking how well do you know him? Is he someone who could do that to a friend?'
Augie and Nina looked at each other and riffled through their impressions of Ray Yates. Plump, easygoing good-time Ray, Ray who'd always have a drink, another drink, a conversation. Ray with his mellow voice, his flattering talk-show way of asking everybody questions and showing a practiced interest in their answers. Ray who always tagged along. Ray who tried to out-local the locals. Ray who went from place to place and thing to easy, temporary thing, and was a different person in every setting: Ray who was soft and scared and soulless in the middle.
'Poor bastard' was all that Augie said.
'So you think that means-' said Nina
'It means nothing,' said Mulvane, 'except that he's a crumb.' He put his untouched coffee on the table and stood up from his backwards chair. 'Good news is, the police are now officially looking for him. Just to tell him he's been the victim of a crime.'
The cop left. Nina shivered, not from cold but from a spasm of disgust. Her skin felt itchy, oily, soiled with the guilt of others. She dropped underwater, kicked out to the middle of the pool, and stayed down as long as she could, cleansing herself, fending off the bright and scorching surface, hiding.
Mood swings are tiring, and the morning's ups and downs left Augie feeling mopey.
He tried to put some finishing touches on the portrait of Fred, but not one brush stroke pleased him, he felt
