David Morrell - Double Image

The phone rang.

Maybe it’s the old man, Coltrane thought. “Hello?”

“You’ll never guess what a messenger just delivered,” Jennifer said excitedly. “The prints and the signed permission forms. This is very definitely a done deal.”

“And you’ll never guess what a messenger just delivered to me. The view camera Packard used.”

“What?”

“Get over here. You’ve got to see this camera.”

“HELLO.” Duncan’s voice sounded thick, as if he’d been drinking.

“It’s Mitch Coltrane.”

No response. Coltrane pressed the phone harder to his ear, wondering if there was something wrong with the connection. “Duncan?”

“This is about the camera?”

“I can’t get over how generous he’s being. Is this a good time to talk to him? I’d like to thank him and swear he’ll get everything back in perfect condition.”

“No, I’m afraid this isn’t a good time.”

“Then I’ll call back. When do you think he might be feeling-”

“Randolph died two hours ago.”

A chill started at Coltrane’s feet and went all the way to his scalp. “No. How… Yesterday…”

“He put up a good front. His breathing got worse around three this morning. Even with the oxygen at its highest setting, he still had to fight for air.”

“Jesus.”

“I phoned for his doctor, but Randolph left strict instructions that he didn’t want to go to a hospital. All we could do was make him comfortable. By early afternoon, he was finally at peace.”

“The camera.” Coltrane had difficulty getting his voice to work. “When did…”

“We discussed it last evening. That’s also when he signed the photo-permission forms, which I assume your editor has by now, along with the prints. The project can go forward as planned. For some reason, Randolph thought it important that someone retrace his steps.”

“I won’t let him down.”

“He didn’t think you would. You’d be surprised how close he was beginning to feel toward you. ‘A fellow orphan’ is how he described you. I want to be sure you understand. Randolph found it almost impossible to speak near the end, but he managed an amazing effort to make me promise to tell you.”

“Tell me?”

“The camera is yours.”

“… What?”

“It’s not a loan. It’s a gift. I guess you could call it an inheritance.”

SO, WEIGHED DOWN WITH GRIEF, Coltrane brought Packard back to life. He couldn’t help thinking that way as he worked in the darkroom, a faint amber safelight over his head. Jennifer stood next to him, watching somberly as he used tongs to slide a sheet of photographic paper into a tray of developing solution. He stirred the solution. Briefly, the sheet remained blank. Then the magic took place, an image coming to life on the paper, a black-and-white picture of the old man gazing up.

Jennifer wasn’t able to speak for a moment. “It’s fabulous.”

Sorrow negated any tone of satisfaction that Coltrane might have felt. The odor of chemicals was bitter. “I took a dozen exposures, but this is the one I knew I wanted.”

The image showed Packard looking shrunken in his pajamas and his housecoat, sitting in his wheelchair, the fireplace in the background. The aperture setting Coltrane had used had allowed him to keep that background in focus, specifically part of a burnt-out log in the hearth, the kind of symbolic detail that Packard had liked to use in his early work.

“His eyes,” Jennifer said.

Coltrane nodded. “The expression in them constantly changed – from arrogance to impatience to irony to amusement to calculation. But this particular expression was the one I wanted. Earlier, when he’d looked at the collection of his photos I brought for him to autograph, his eyes became sad. There wasn’t a hint of pride in his reaction to what he’d created. Instead, the only thing the photographs seemed to do was remind him of the passage of time.”

“Did you have any trouble getting him to hold the book in his lap?”

“Not at all. He told me, ‘I surrender myself.’”

“So now we have a photograph of a fragile old man who happens to be a genius, inspecting the contents of one of his books. A photograph about a photographer and his photographs.”

Coltrane’s voice was filled with melancholy. “His photos stayed the same, but he got older.”

“But now he stays the same in this photo.”

“I wonder what it’ll feel like, going where Packard did, doing what he did, trying to be him.”

APPROACHING THE BEVERLY HILLS HOTEL, Coltrane steered left off Sunset Boulevard and headed up Benedict Canyon Drive. It was a little after eight Wednesday morning, the day after Packard’s funeral. Determined to start the project, he and Jennifer had set out early. They drove through the shade of towering palm trees, past expensive homes concealed behind meticulously trimmed hedges and tall house-hugging shrubs. The sky was clear and bright for a change, the clouds having moved on.

“Don’t keep me in suspense. Which house is first on the list?” Jennifer asked.

“Falcon Lair.” Coltrane wore his typical work clothes: leather hiking boots, jeans, and a navy sweatshirt.

In contrast, Jennifer had an orange sweatshirt with a Southern California Magazine logo. Her short blond hair was tucked beneath a baseball cap, making her face look attractively boyish, reminding Coltrane of the movie actor she now mentioned. “Rudolph Valentino?”

“The sheik himself.”

“I never understood why he called the place Falcon Lair.”

“In the mid-twenties, Valentino’s second wife was trying to get the studio to let her supervise the production of one of his movies. The picture was called The Hooded Falcon . But she ran up costs so much that the studio canceled it. To make her feel better, Valentino named the mansion they were building in honor of the aborted project. They got divorced shortly afterward.”

“And what happened to Valentino?”

“When his wife left him, he threatened to blow his brains out. Instead, he bought tons of antique furniture – suits of armor and Moorish screens, crap like that. It was more than Falcon Lair would hold, but he managed to cram it all in there. In the end, he almost spent himself into bankruptcy. He worried about his career until he died at the age of thirty-one from a bleeding ulcer.”

PACKARD’S MUCH- PRAISED PHOTOGRAPH OF FALCON LAIR had been taken from a neighboring hilltop. It showed the thirteen-room mansion tiny in the distance, surrounded by a high white wall, perched on a flattened ridge, looking so isolated that it bore an intriguing resemblance to a Spanish monastery. None of the many hills beyond it had any houses on it, but tentacle-like roads predicted the invasion about to take place. On the bottom left of the photograph, amid exposed earth on one of the slopes, a developer’s sign announced BEVERLY TERRACE. The implication was clear. Soon the area would be filled with comparable estates. The remoteness that made the location attractive would be destroyed. As if commenting on the impending invasion, Packard had managed to capture a bird of prey hovering in the foreground.

NEAR THE TOP OF BENEDICT CANYON DRIVE, Coltrane chose a secluded street to the left and headed higher into the wooded hills. The neighborhood became increasingly deserted the more the houses looked expensive.

“How do you know this is the way?” Jennifer asked.

“I don’t. Monday, I bought a contour map and tried to orient it with Packard’s photo and a Beverly Hills street guide. Falcon Lair is on one of those bluffs to the right, so we have to go in the opposite direction to find the spot where Packard took the photograph.”