natural outgrowth of what I was doing, but everybody hated it.' He smiled at me. 'I knew I wouldn't have a chance in New York, so I came back here to Millhaven, where you can live a lot cheaper.'
'John said that a gallery owner gave your name to April.' He looked away abruptly, as if this was an embarrassing subject. 'Yeah, Carol Judd, she has a little gallery downtown. Carol knew my work because I took my slides in when I first got back. Carol always liked me, and we used to talk about my having a show there sometime.' He smiled again, but not at me, and the smile faded back into his usual earnestness when I asked another question.
'So that was how you first met April Ransom?' He nodded, and his eyes drifted over the row of paintings. 'Uh huh. She understood what I was after.' He paused for a second. 'There was a kind of appreciation between us right from the start. We talked about what she wanted, and she decided that instead of buying any of the work I'd already done, she would commission two big paintings. So that's how I got to know her.'
He took his eyes off the paintings, set his cup on the table covered with paints and brushes, and swung around a sway-backed chair in front of the easel so that it faced the bed. Two tapestry cushions were wedged into the tilted back support. When I sat down, the cushions met my back in all the right places.
Dorian sat on the camp bed. Looking at his paintings had comforted him, and he seemed more relaxed.
'You must have spent a lot of time talking with her,' I said.
'It was wonderful. Sometimes, if John was out of town or teaching late, she'd invite me to her house so I could just sit in front of all those paintings she had.'
'Didn't she want you to meet John?'
He pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, as if he were working out a problem. 'Well, I did meet John, of course. I went there for dinner twice, and the first time was all right, John was polite and the conversation was fine, but the second time I went, he barely spoke to me. It seemed like their paintings were just possessions for him—like sports cars, or something.'
I had the nasty feeling that, for John, having Byron Dorian around the house would have been something like an insult. He was young and almost absurdly good-looking while appearing to be entirely without vanity—John would have accepted him more easily if his looks had been undermined by obvious self-regard.
Then something else occurred to me, something I should have understood as soon as I saw the paintings on the walls.
'You're the one who got April interested in the Blue Rose case,' I said. 'You were the person who first told her about William Damrosch.'
He actually blushed.
'That's what all these paintings are about—Damrosch.'
His eyes flew to the paintings again. This time, they could not comfort him. He looked too anguished to speak.
'The boy in the Vuillard painting reminded you of Damrosch, and you told her about him,' I said. 'That doesn't make you responsible for her death.'
This sentence, intended to be helpful, had the opposite effect.
Like a girl, Dorian pushed his knees together, propped his elbow on them, and twisted sideways with his chin in his hand. An almost visible cloud of pain surrounded him.
'I'm fascinated by Damrosch, too,' I said. 'It's hard not to be. When I was in Vietnam, I wrote two novels in my head, and the second,
Dorian shot me a blue-eyed glance without altering his posture. 'I must have looked at that boy in the Vuillard three or four times before I really saw him—it's so subtle. At first, you just take him for granted, and then the way he's looking out at you takes over the whole painting.'
He paused to struggle with his feelings. 'That's how we started talking about Bill Damrosch and everything. She was excited about the idea of the
I asked him how he had first become interested in Damrosch's story.
'Oh, I heard about him from my father. Lots and lots of times. They were partners for a long time. My dad didn't get on very well with his first wife, so he spent a lot of time with Bill Damrosch. I guess you could say he loved him—he used to say he tried everything he could think of to stop Bill from drinking, but he couldn't, so he started drinking with him.' He gave me a frank look. 'My father was an alcoholic, but after Bill died, he straightened himself out. In the sixties, when he was getting close to retirement age, he met my mother in a grocery store. Even she says she picked him up. She was twenty-five years younger, but they got married, and a year later I happened along, not exactly according to plan, I gather.'
It made sense, if Dorian took after his father—as long as he didn't get fat, women would be trying to pick him up for the next three decades.
'Your father must have been disturbed about the outcome of the Blue Rose case.'
He gave me a fierce look. 'What outcome? You mean the junk in the papers? That drove him crazy. He almost quit the force, but he loved the work too much.' He had calmed down, and now I was getting the frank, level look again. This time there was a touch of censure in it. 'He hated your book, by the way. He said you got everything wrong.'
'I guess I did.'
'What you did was irresponsible. My father knew that Bill Damrosch never killed anybody. He was set up.'
'I know that now,' I said.
Dorian hooked one foot around his other ankle and started looking stricken again. 'I should never have mentioned Damrosch to her. That's how everything started.'
'The only people who knew what she was doing with her spare time were one or two brokers at Barnett and the police.'
'I told her she should write to the police department.'
'It should have worked.' I told him what Paul Fontaine had done for me.
Outrage and scorn darkened his face. 'Then they're as fucked up as my father said they were. That doesn't make any sense. They should have let her see those records.' He glared at the paint-spattered floor for a couple of seconds. 'My dad told me he didn't like what happened to the force after he retired— all the new people, like Fontaine. He didn't like the way they worked. He didn't trust their methods. Except for Mike Hogan. My dad thought Mike Hogan was a real cop, and he had a lot of respect for him.' Dorian looked suspiciously back up at me.
'So your father was still alive when Fontaine and Hogan joined the force.' He was describing any veteran's natural resentment of a brilliant new arrival.
'He's still alive, period. My father is eighty-five, and he's as strong as an ox.'
'If it's any consolation, Paul Fontaine told me that he liked my book because it was so ridiculous.'
'I'll tell him that.' He flashed me a nice white smile. 'No, on second thought, maybe I won't.'
'Do you think I could talk to your father?'
'I guess.' Dorian rubbed his face and looked at me grudgingly for a moment before reaching down behind the end of the day bed to pick up a spiral notebook with a ballpoint pen clipped into its metal rings. He flipped to an empty page and wrote something down. Then he ripped out the page and walked across the floor to hand it to me.
He had printed the name George Dubbin above an address and telephone number.
'George Dubbin?'
'That's his name.' Dorian sat down on the bed again. 'My name used to be Bryan Dubbin. I thought I could never be a famous painter with a name like that. Francesco Clemente and Bryan Dubbin? As soon as I graduated from UI-Millhaven, I changed it to something that sounded better to me. You don't have to tell me that I was being silly. But it could have been worse—the other name I was considering was Beaumont Darcy. I guess my head was in a pretty decadent place back then.'
We both smiled.
'You actually had your name changed officially? You went to city hall, or wherever?'
'It's easy to change your name. You just fill out a form. I did the whole thing through the mail.'
'Your father must have been a little…'
'He was, a lot. Big time upset. I see his point. I even agree with him. But he knows I wouldn't do it all over
