David Handler: The Cold Blue Blood

“Girl, I’m wearing them.”

“What about Brandon-did he leave anything behind?”

Des let out a laugh. “Just ill will.”

When Des was twenty-three, she and Brandon had been featured on the cover of Connecticut magazine under the headline: “Our State’s Shining Future.” She was a West Point graduate with almond-shaped pale green eyes, a wraparound smile and dimples that could melt titanium at a distance of a thousand feet. Brandon, just two years out of Yale Law School, was the state’s top young district prosecutor. Only it turned out their future was in Washington, not Connecticut. Or at least his was. He went to work for the Justice Department looking into campaign fraud by several high-ranking senators. It was just a temporary assignment, he insisted. But one investigation led to another. And then he was signing a two-year lease on an apartment there without talking to her about it.

It was right around then that Des started rescuing cats with Bella. There is an old saying in pet connection circles: People who are trying to save stray animals are really trying to save themselves.

Des knew it was over when Aretha peed in Brandon’s $395 Ferragamo loafers. Cats know about such things. That same night he told her there was another woman. For the record, she was not white. But she was the daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia congressman. Their affair had started when they were in law school together. And it had picked up heat again in D.C. In fact, it had never actually ended, not even after he married Des. Which had taught Des a most valuable lesson in life:

Don’t ever trust lawyers.

“What you need,” Bella counseled her as they drove along, “is a Jewish man.”

“Is that right?” asked Des, raising an eyebrow at her.

“Absolutely,” Bella replied with total conviction. “They don’t drink to excess, they always come home at night and, oy-yoy, do they have low self-esteem.”

“Why is that such a good thing?”

“It means they work harder to please you-morning, noon and night.”

“Um, wait a second, are you saying Jewish men make better lovers?”

“I’m saying it.”

Des let out a hoot. “Bella, you are baad.”

“Now don’t misunderstand me,” Bella cautioned. “Stallions they are not.”

“Been there, done one. Maybe two.”

“But a good Jewish man won’t sleep a wink until he is absolutely positive you are satisfied. And I mean fully. Even if it means he has to go to work in the morning with bags under his eyes and full-blown case of lockjaw.”

“Yum, sounds totally off the hook.”

“They also make excellent fathers.”

“Whoa, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Des drained her coffee and put her empty cup in the bag at her feet. “But, listen up, I thought they only went out with their own kind.”

“Not a problem. You’re one of us.”

“I am?”

“You forget, I’ve personally laid eyes on you climbing in and out of your hot tub,” Bella replied, her eyes twinkling at her with mischief. “And there’s no getting around it, Desiree-you are one of the chosen people.”

Des grinned at her. “Girl, are you alluding to my booty?”

“If bootay is another word for tuchos then the answer is yes. And you’ve got one to die for. Although what you do for a living might scare them.”

“Hey, it scares me.”

It was not yet dawn when they pulled up behind the darkened supermarket and unloaded their traps. Dog cages worked the best, they had found. They would tie a length of string to the cage door. Lure the cats inside with opened jars of Gerber’s strained turkey. Then pull the cage door shut behind them.

They waited, strings in hand, huddled together by the Jeep in hopeful silence. As dawn came, the first to show was that black male with the white patch on his face and paws. Big Willie, Des had dubbed him. He was her kind of guy. Skinny. One ear bloodied. One eye, the left, half shut. She thought they might get him today. He actually crept to within two feet of the cage, the closest he’d come since they’d started staking out his Dumpster. And then he was just one foot from the cage. He was very hungry. Also very skittish and suspicious. His head was actually in the cage… Des tensed, poised to slam it shut behind him… But at the last minute he went skittering away into the brush and was gone. They waited an hour more but none of the others showed.

By 6:00 A.M. Des was back home in the spare bedroom that she had turned into her studio, seated before her easel with her 18-by-24-inch Strathmore 400 drawing pad and her sticks of soft vine charcoal. A pair of high-intensity desk lamps cast light on her subject, which was affixed to the easel at eye level with a bulldog clip. Not exactly ideal studio conditions. Natural light would have been vastly preferable. But Des had no choice. It was vital that she draw for at least an hour every morning before she left for work. The studio was Des’s sanctuary. Here, she found wholeness and meaning. Here she found peace. These things she found nowhere else.

Always, she drew still lifes. Always, her subjects were taken from photographs.

Always, Desiree Mitry drew dead bodies.

They were crime scene photos. Gruesome photos. Horrifying photos. They were photos of what she had seen on the job. Des had seen things that most people never do and never should have to. Des had seen too much.

And so she drew.

On this particular morning, her subject was one Torry Mordarski, a young single mother who had been found in the woods near Wadsworth Falls shot twice in the face. One shot had glanced off her forehead. The other had caught her over her left eye, which was submerged under a coating of congealed blood and brain matter. Her right eye was staring straight at the camera. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth in the frozen death rictus.

Draw what you see, not what you know.

Des drew, stroking boldly as she had been taught to. Although she did not handle the soft charcoal in the preferred manner. She gripped it tightly, not loosely, and she held it between her thumb and middle finger, digging the tip of her index finger into the side of the stick. But it worked for her. Her strokes were sure and precise, her passion boundless. Always, she kept in mind the rule that a drawing teacher had drummed into her years ago. For Des, it had become a mantra.

Draw what you see, not what you know.

Des drew what she saw. What she saw were lines and contours, shadows and highlights. Nothing more. She started Torry Mordarski’s face very dark, then began to pull the light away from the shadows with swipes of her kneaded eraser. Finding Torry’s features. Giving contour and value to the shadows, texture to the highlights. Line by line, shadow by shadow, highlight by highlight, Des deconstructed the image of Torry Mordarski from her memory. Expunging the visceral impact. Neutralizing the horror. Abstracting the painful reality-stretching it, contorting it, injecting it with fearsome emotional power. Until the image was no longer a photographic memory but a haunting, mesmerizing work of art.

Her drawings gave Des chills up and down her spine. They gave her comfort as well. When she drew, Des was alive and free. She was the person who she wanted to be. In a perfect world she would have quit her job and drawn full-time. But it wasn’t a perfect world. So she brought copies of crime scene photos home. No one knew she did this. No one had ever seen her drawings. She did not display them. She did not talk about them. Once a drawing was completed, she would store it away in a folio book and never look at it again.

No one knew. Not even Bella.

When she was done she ate her breakfast of grapenuts, banana and skim milk. It was the same breakfast she ate every morning. She showered and dressed in a crisp white blouse and pressed gray gabardine slacks, blue blazer, polished cordovan loafers. She cleaned the charcoal smudges from her horn-rimmed glasses and put them back on. She applied a bit of purple lipstick. She wore no other makeup. Her hair burst forth in dreadlocks that tumbled wild and free halfway down her shoulders and back. A woman in East Hartford did them for her every three months. All Des had to do was keep them washed and oiled. Des’s immediate higher-ups on the job, all of them white men, regarded her hair as some kind of a militant black feminist statement. They hated it. Des didn’t care.