John Lescroart - Damage

“I would love to fuck that woman.”

“Lapeer?”

“No. Well, maybe. But I’m talking Sheila. Hit?” He passed the joint across. “So. Just like that we’re free again?”

Eztli had a toke. “Looks like.”

“You got any plans?”

“Nothing definite.”

“Well, I was thinking,” Ro said. “I got an idea.”

Glitsky talked to Jeff Elliot for more than an hour, then stopped back at the Hall to show his face. Farrell had gone off somewhere, and most of Glitsky’s own troops were running on autopilot, writing up their cases in the detail. In the detail, he’d received a nice, informal show of support from all the homicide inspectors, and taking any little bit of goodwill where he could get it, had stayed just to shoot the breeze for a while.

Now he was driving around and around, trying to find a parking spot someplace within five or six blocks of his duplex and running out of hope.

Not helping matters, out to the west, a fog bank presaged the end of the cold and clear weather they’d been tolerating. Next up, Glitsky thought, ought to be cold and wet. There it was, black and foreboding, bearing down on him from thirty blocks away.

When his cell phone rang, he was tempted to simply turn it off without even looking at it. He’d already worked a full and grueling day, he felt a little sick from his stupid lunch, and he was exhausted. But on second thought, he thought it might be Treya, and he looked down to check.

Michael Durbin.

“Lieutenant,” Durbin said. “You’ve got to get over here. You’re not going to believe what he’s done now.”

By the time Glitsky got out to Rivera Street, the bank of bad weather had completely engulfed the neighborhood. Wipers slashing back and forth against the thick mist, his lights on in the fog and darkness, Glitsky pulled up at Durbin’s address and could barely discern the outlines of the house from the curb.

A figure sat behind the wheel of the car Glitsky pulled up behind, and no sooner had he pulled over when the driver’s door of that car opened and his headlights revealed Michael Durbin stepping out into the street. Glitsky killed his lights and ignition and was out of the car before Durbin got back to him.

“Thanks for coming out. I really think this is something.”

Glitsky crossed his arms against the chill. “Well, let’s go take a look.”

In silence, Durbin led the way up the driveway and back behind the house to where an unattached garage filled up half the backyard space. Because it wasn’t part of the house, it had escaped any fire damage, and now with bits of broken glass and cinders crunching under their feet, they proceeded around to a side door. A bare lightbulb burned over the door.

Durbin reached into his pocket for a set of keys and fitted one into the dead-bolt slot. “I probably should have thought about touching the doorknob,” he said, “but it never occurred to me there’d be anything to see in here.”

Glitsky glanced down at the standard plain brass doorknob, something that would take and hold a fingerprint beautifully. “Hold on. So you’ve already gone in this way?”

“Just the once.”

Backing Durbin away, Glitsky stepped closer, pulling on the pair of latex gloves that he always carried with him. “I’ll open it this time. I don’t want you to touch anything else out here or inside. Nothing at all. Is that clear?”

“Sure.”

Glitsky turned the dead-bolt key and gripped the doorknob with his gloved hand, turning it and pushing. The door came right open, and he stepped into the doorway and felt to the right of the door for the indoor light switch, which he turned on, bathing the room in brightness from three lines of track lighting up in the ceiling.

Somewhat warned of what to expect, Glitsky still wasn’t completely prepared for the sight that greeted him. Durbin had obviously used this place as a painting studio. Somewhere between a dozen and twenty very large, colorful, and-to Glitsky’s eye-professional-looking portraits of very real people stared back at him from canvases that were stacked and leaning all along the back and side walls. In the center of the wide-open space, three others of what looked to be works in progress sat on the ground, leaning up against the wooden tripods or easels that held them.

Someone had come in here, though, and slashed every one. Sometimes only once, sometimes five or six times, the canvas simply shredded, but there was no painting Glitsky could see that hadn’t been cut into. And what made the vandalism all the more disturbing were the pictures themselves. Glitsky did not consider himself any kind of connoisseur of art, but these paintings-none of them less than three-by-four feet, and a few as large as six or even eight feet on a side-were clearly the work of, at the very least, a talented artist. Whatever else his misgivings about Durbin, the man’s work had an undeniable power and quality.

Glitsky was standing as though hypnotized just one or two steps inside the door when Durbin came up next to him. Glancing over at him, he was not unduly surprised to see what might be incipient tears in his eyes.

“You’re thinking Ro did this?” Glitsky asked.

“Absolutely.”

“How would he have known these were even here?”

“Marrenas. She wrote about my derivative, amateur, ludicrous stuff back in the day while she was libeling both of us. This place has been my studio forever. I never made any attempt to hide it. Why would I? Who cared?”

Glitsky found himself focusing on one of the unfinished paintings sitting on the floor. It was a woman’s face, filling the frame with almost no background showing. Durbin had caught her turning around, her beautiful dark eyes a mystery, her skin touchable. Even with the one slash through her right eye and down across her nose and lips, she was arresting, especially caught in that pose. And, of course, even so, the portrait wasn’t yet completed. “Is that Liza Sato?” he asked.

“Yeah. Or was.”

“Did she come over here and pose for you?”

“No. No, of course not. People don’t have the time to pose. I don’t have the time to work with them that way, anyway. Mostly I just start with a picture, a photograph.” He was staring at the piece. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

Glitsky nodded. “Yes, she is. Did your wife ever see this?”

Durbin shook his head. “I keep telling you, Lieutenant, I didn’t kill Janice. I didn’t do this, either, slash my paintings. This is my life’s work for the past ten years.”

This might be true, but Glitsky was aware that he hadn’t answered the question. “Did your wife ever see this?” he asked again.

Defeated, Durbin’s shoulders sagged. “I just don’t know. She wasn’t my art’s biggest supporter, Lieutenant, and I couldn’t blame her. I couldn’t sell these things back when we really needed me to.”

“They look pretty saleable to me.”

“Well, thank you, but you don’t know the market. Or how to play it. It’s brutal out there for realistic fine art, which is unfortunately what I do, what I’ve always wanted to do. But it doesn’t pay the bills. And that’s the bottom line when you’ve got a wife and kids. Sad but true. So I haven’t even tried to sell in years.” He ran his eyes over his ruined work. “But that doesn’t mean this doesn’t break my heart. That this doesn’t feel more wrong than almost anything I can conceive of.”

Glitsky could not help but understand; this was a soul-shattering display of pure inhumanity. Glitsky’s own stomach had gone hollow at the waste and destruction. But he was also aware that Michael Durbin might still have performed this vandalism on his own works in an effort to keep Ro Curtlee in the picture as a viable candidate for Janice’s murder. The timing-coming so soon after Ro had provided an alibi for the time of the crime-was suspicious, as was the fact that Michael Durbin had been the one who had discovered these slashed paintings.