Jonathan Kellerman - Private Eyes

The gardeners worked on the vegetation with hand clippers, barely breaking the silence with dull clicks. No air guns or power tools here. Another covenant? Or house rules?

The path ended in a perfectly semicircular drive backed by a pair of date palms. Between the knobby palm trunks, two flights of double-width Bouquet-Canyon stone steps flanked by wisteria-laced stone balustrades led to the house: peach-colored, three-storied, wide as a neighborhood.

What could have been simply monolithic grossness was merely monumental. And surprisingly pleasing to the eye, the visual flight piloted by fanciful turns of the architect’s pencil. Subtly shifting angles and elevations, a richness of detail. High, arched, leaded windows grilled with teal-green, neo-Moorish wrought-iron work. Balconies, verandas, dripstones, running molds, and mullions carved from mocha-colored limestone. A limestone colonnade on the east end. Spanish roof-tiles honeycombed with mosaic precision. Stained-glass cinquefoil insets placed with a contempt for synchrony but an unerring eye for balance.

Still, the very size of the place- and the solitude- was oppressive and sad. Like an empty museum. Nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to be phobic here.

I parked and got out. The gardener’s clicks were augmented by bird-squawks and breeze-rustle. I climbed the stairs, unable to imagine what it would have been like to grow up here, an only child.

The entry was big enough to accommodate a delivery truck: double doors of lacquered oak, trimmed with more verdigrised iron, each side divided into half a dozen raised panels. Carved into the panels were peasant scenes that evoked high-school Chaucer. They held my interest as I pressed the doorbell.

Two baritone chimes sounded; then the right door opened and Melissa stood there, wearing a white button-down shirt, pressed blue jeans, and white tennies: she looked tinier than ever. A doll in a dollhouse built to too large a scale.

She shrugged and said, “Some place, huh?”

“Very beautiful.”

She smiled, relieved. “My father designed it. He was an architect.”

The most she’d said about him in nine years. I wondered what else would emerge now that I’d made a house call.

She touched my elbow briefly, then drew it away.

“Come in,” she said. “Let me show you around.”

Around was a vast space crammed with treasures- an entry hall big enough for croquet, and at its rear a sinuous green marble staircase. Beyond the stairs, cavernous room after cavernous room- galleries built for display, vast and silent, indistinguishable from one another in terms of function. Cathedral and coffered ceilings, mirror-sheen paneling, tapestries, stained-glass skylights, kaleidoscopic Oriental and Aubusson rugs over floors of inlaid marble and hand-painted tile and French walnut parquet. So much sheen and opulence that my senses overloaded and I felt myself losing equilibrium.

I remembered feeling that way once before. Over twenty years ago. A college sophomore, backpacking solo across Europe on a second-class rail pass and $4 a day. Visiting the Vatican. Staring bug-eyed at gold-encrusted walls, the treasure-trove assembled in the name of God. Gradually pulling away from it and watching other tourists and Italian peasants visiting from the southern villages, gawking, too. The peasants never leaving a room before dropping coins in the alms boxes that stood near each door…

Melissa was talking and pointing, a docent in her own home. We were in a book-lined, five-sided, windowless room. She indicated a spotlit painting over a mantel. “And this one’s a Goya. “The Duke of Montero on His Steed.’ Father bought it in Spain when art was much more reasonable. He wasn’t concerned with what was fashionable- this was considered a very minor Goya until just a few years ago; too decorative. Portraiture was dÉclassÉ. Now auction houses write us letters all the time. Father had the foresight to travel to England and brought back cartons of Pre-Raphaelites when everyone else thought they were just kitsch. Tiffany glass pieces, too, during the fifties, when the experts brushed those off as frivolous.”

“You know your stuff,” I said.

She blushed. “I was taught.”

“By Jacob?”

She nodded and looked away. “Anyway, I’m sure you’ve seen enough for one day.”

Turning heel, she began walking out of the room.

“Are you interested in art yourself?” I said.

“I don’t know much about it- not the way Father or Jacob did. I do like things that are beautiful. If nobody gets hurt by it.”

“What do you mean?”

She frowned. We left the book-filled room, passed by the open door of another huge space, this one ceilinged with hand-painted walnut beams and backed with tall French doors. Beyond the glass was more lawn and forest and flowers, stone pathways, statuary, an amethyst-colored swimming pool, a sunken area, vine-topped and walled with dark-green tennis tarp under chain link. From the distance came the hollow thump of a ball bouncing.

A couple of hundred feet back, to the left of the court, was a long, low peach-colored building that resembled a stable: ten or so wooden doors, some of them ajar, backing a wide cobbled courtyard filled with gleaming, long-nosed antique automobiles. Amoeboid pools of water dotted the cobblestones. A figure in gray overalls bent over one of the cars, chamois in hand, buffing the flaring ruby-colored fender of a splendid piece of machinery. From the blower pipes, I guessed it was a Duesenberg and asked Melissa for confirmation.

“Yes,” she said, “that’s what it is,” and keeping her eyes straight ahead, she led me back through the art-filled caverns, toward the front of the house.

“I don’t know,” she said suddenly. “It just seems that so many things start off beautiful and turn hateful. It’s as if being beautiful can be a curse.”

I said, “McCloskey?”

She put both hands in the pockets of her jeans and gave an emphatic nod. “I’ve been thinking about him a lot.”

“More than before?”

“A lot more. Since we talked.” She stopped, turned to me, blinked hard. “Why would he come back, Dr. Delaware? What does he want ?”

“Maybe nothing, Melissa. Maybe it means nothing. If anyone can find out, my friend can.”

“I hope so,” she said. “I certainly hope so. When can he start?”

“I’ll have him call you as soon as possible. His name is Milo Sturgis.”

“Good name,” she said. “Solid.”

“He’s a solid guy.”

We resumed walking. A big, broad woman in a white uniform was polishing a tabletop, feather duster in one hand, rag in the other. Open tin of paste wax near her knee. She turned her face slightly and our eyes met. Madeleine, grayer and wrinkled but still strong-looking. A grimace of recognition tightened her face; then she showed me her back and resumed her work.

Melissa and I stepped back into the entry hall. She headed for the green stairway. As she touched the handrail I said, “In terms of McCloskey, are you concerned about your own safety?”

“Mine?” she said, pausing with one foot on the first step. “Why should I be?”

“No reason. But you were just talking about beauty as a curse. Do you feel burdened or threatened by your own looks?”

“Me?” Her laughter was too quick, too loud. “Come on, Dr. D. Let’s go upstairs. I’ll show you beautiful.”

The top of the landing was a twenty-foot rosette of black marble inlaid with a blue-and-yellow sunburst pattern. French provincial furniture hugged the walls, potbellied, bowlegged, almost obscene with marquetry. Renaissance paintings of the Sentimental School- cherubs, harps, religious agony- competed with flocked-velvet paper the color of old port. Foot-wide white molding and coving defined three hallway spokes. Two more women in white vacuumed the one on the right. The other corridors were dark and empty. More like a hotel than a museum. The sad, aimless ambience of a resort during the off-season.