9
THEY LIVED IN A HANDSOME AND SPACIOUS THREE-STORY house—four, if you counted the subterranean garage—that no police detective could afford, a consequence of Nicolette’s success as a painter, which had been growing for a decade. On a double lot, they had generous grounds for a city house and distance from their neighbors. Made of brick and painted white, with black shutters and a black slate roof, the place appeared Georgian, but it was not a scrupulous example of the style.
John parked in the underground garage, between Nicolette’s SUV and the Chevy belonging to Walter and Imogene Nash, the couple who kept the house well ordered and the family well fed. Because mornings were sacrosanct in the Calvino residence, the Nashes came to work at 11:00 A.M. five days a week, and were usually gone by seven.
An elevator served the garage and the three floors above. But the sound of it would announce his arrival and the kids would come running. He wanted a moment alone with Nicky.
On the drive home, he had called her and discovered she was in her studio, far past her usual quitting time. The master suite and the studio occupied the entire third floor.
In the corner of the garage where a few umbrellas dangled from a wall rack, he hung his raincoat on a hook.
Now that he was home, where life made sense and the madness of the world did not intrude, the events at the Lucas place seemed to have been dreamed more than experienced. He reached into his sport-coat pocket, half expecting the tiny silver bells would not be there.
As his fingers found the small box from Piper’s Gallery, three knocks and three more issued from the farther end of the garage, from beyond the parked cars. Sharp, insistent, the rapping knuckles of an impatient visitor at a door.
In spite of fluorescent panels, shadows swagged here and there. None moved or resolved into a figure.
Directly overhead, the rapping came again. John looked at the plastered ceiling, startled—then relieved. Just air bubbles knocking through a copper water line, rattling the pipe against a joist.
From a pocket of the hanging raincoat, he retrieved the six cookies that Marion Dunnaway had presented to him in a OneZip bag.
He unlocked an inside door and stepped onto the landing at the foot of the back stairs. The lock engaged automatically behind him.
The door at the top opened on Nicolette’s large studio. Working on a painting, her back toward him, she didn’t know he had arrived.
Girlishly slim, brown hair almost black and tied in a ponytail, barefoot, wearing tan jeans and a yellow T-shirt, Nicky worked with the litheness and physical charm of a dancer between dances.
John smelled turpentine and under it the fainter scent of stand oil. On a small table to the right of Nicky, from an insulated mug, the aromas of black tea and currants rose on ribbons of steam.
The same table supported a vase of two dozen so-called black roses that were in fact dark red, darker than a corrupted vermilion pigment in the process of reverting to a black form of mercuric sulfide. The striking flowers had no scent that he could detect.
When painting, Nicky always kept roses nearby, in whatever color her mood required. She called them humility roses, because if she became too impressed with any canvas on her easel—which could lead to a sloppiness born of pride—she needed only to study a rose in full bloom to remind herself that her work was a pale reflection of true creation.
Her current project was a triptych, three large vertical panels, a scene that reminded John of Gustave Caillebotte’s
John liked to watch his wife at moments she thought herself unobserved. When she lacked all self- awareness, her characteristic ease of action and elegant posture were so pure and unaffected that she became the essence of grace, and so beautiful.
This time, his belief that he had arrived with perfect stealth proved wrong when she said, “What have you been staring at so long—the painting or my ass? Be careful what you answer.”
“You look so delectable in those jeans,” he said, “it’s amazing you’ve painted something that could be equally mesmerizing.”
“Ah! You’re as smooth as ever, Detective Calvino.”
He went to her and put a hand on her shoulder. She turned her head, leaned back, and he kissed her throat, the delicate line of her jaw, the corner of her mouth.
“You’ve been eating coconut something,” she said.
“Not me.” He dangled the bag of cookies in front of her. “You could smell them through an airtight seal?”
“I’m starved. I came up here at eleven, never stopped for lunch. This bitch”—she indicated the triptych —“wants to break me.”
Occasionally, when a picture proved a special challenge to her talent, she referred to it as either a bitch or a bastard. She could not explain why, in her mind, each painting had a specific gender.
“A lovely army nurse baked these for the kids. But I’m sure they’ll share.”
“I’m not so sure, the little fiends. Why are you hanging out with army nurses?”
“She was older than your mother and just as proper. She’s a sort of witness on a case.”
John knew many cops who never discussed active investigations with their wives, for fear that evidence would be compromised during beauty-shop gossip or over coffee with the neighbors.
He could tell Nicky anything, with confidence that she would not repeat a word of what he said. She was warm and forthcoming at all times, but regarding his police work, she had the virtue of a stone.
As for his current and unofficial investigation, however, he intended to keep it to himself. At least for the moment.
Nicky said, “Better than a cookie—cabernet.”
“I’ll open a bottle, then freshen up for dinner.”
“I’ve got maybe a dozen strokes to make and one sable brush to clean, and then I’m done with this bitch for the day.”
Another door opened on a large landing at the head of the front stairs. Directly across from the studio stood the door to the master suite: beyond, a bedroom with a white-marble fireplace featuring ebony inlays, a sitting room, two walk-in closets, a spacious bath.
The retreat included a compact bar with an under-the-counter refrigerator and wine cooler. John uncorked a bottle of Cakebread cabernet sauvignon and carried it, with two glasses, into the master bathroom, where he put everything on the black-granite counter between the sinks and poured for both of them.
When he glanced at himself in the mirror, he didn’t look the least bit apprehensive.
In his closet, he took the boxed bells from his coat pocket. He put them in the jewelry drawer with his cuff links, tie chains, and spare watch.
He slipped out of his shoulder rig and put it, with the pistol still contained, on a high shelf.
He hung his sport coat on the to-iron rod and tossed his shirt in the laundry basket. He sat on a dressing bench, slipped out of his rain-wet Rockport walking shoes, and set them aside to be shined. His socks were damp. He stripped them off and put on a fresh pair.
These mundane tasks were slowly taking the supernatural shine off the day. He began to think that in time he might find logical explanations for everything that had seemed outre, that what appeared to be malevolent fate in action might look more like mere coincidence in the morning light.
At his bathroom sink, he scrubbed his hands and face. A hot washcloth, like a poultice, drew the ache out of his neck muscles.
As John was toweling dry, Nicky arrived, took her glass of wine, and sat on the wide edge of the marble tub. She wore white sneakers on the toes of which, as a joke during play with Minette a few weeks earlier, she had painted LEFT and RIGHT, each word on the wrong shoe.
Picking up his wine, leaning on the counter with his back to the mirror, John said, “Walter and Imogene are
