Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

“When did you start painting? The Sleeping Women?”

Wheaton purses his lips, like a man trying to recall the year he got married or joined the service. “Seventy-eight, I think. I was driving out of New York, and I saw a girl beside a bridge, hitchhiking north. She was young and pretty, and looked like a student. A waif, you know? A leftover hippie. I asked where she was going, and she said, ‘Anyplace warm, man.’” Wheaton smiles at the memory. “I knew exactly how she felt. I’d been there too.

“I drove her back to the farm. On the way, she got high. She had pills with her, and they made her talkative. Her story was like others I’d heard from women. A father like mine. A mother who couldn’t protect her. Men who used her. At the farm, I fed her. She got sleepy. I asked if I could paint her, and she said yes. When I asked if I could paint her nude, she hesitated, but only a moment. ‘You wouldn’t do anything freaky,’ she said. ‘You’re too nice.’ And then she took off her clothes. I posed her in the tub.”

Lulled into a trance by his story, I feel a sudden nausea as his last words sink in.

“I painted as Roger never had. I was in control, you see? I had the brush. It worked under my will.”

“But something happened,” I say hesitantly.

Wheaton puts down his brush and vigorously massages his left hand. “Yes. Before I finished the painting, she woke up. I was naked. I’m not sure how I got that way, and what does it matter? I only know I was naked and painting, and I was aroused. The girl panicked.”

“What did you do?”

“I panicked too. She knew where she was. If she told people the way things had happened, it could cause trouble for Roger. I tried to calm her down, but she took it wrong. She fought. She gave me no choice. I pushed her under the water and held her there until she stopped fighting.”

Jesus… “What did you do then?”

“I finished the painting.” Wheaton picks up his brush, dips it, and goes back to his work. “She looked so peaceful. Much happier than she had when I picked her up. She was the first Sleeping Woman.”

Nineteen seventy-eight. The year I left high school, Roger Wheaton drowned a waif junkie in New England and started down a road that led ultimately to my sister.

“What did you do with her body?”

“I buried her in the clearing.”

Of course he did.

“I waited a year before I picked up another one. She was a runaway. She made it so easy. And I knew what I wanted by then.”

“What about Conrad Hoffman?”

“That was 1980. Roger had a one-man show in New York, and Conrad showed up for that. He saw something in The Clearing paintings that no one else did. He saw me. The germ of me. He was charismatic, young, dangerous. He hung around after the show, and we went for coffee. He didn’t fawn over Roger, as some did. He sensed the power hidden in the paintings. The darkness. And I did something I never thought I would do.”

“You showed him your Sleeping Women.”

Wheaton nods cagily. “There were only two then. You should have seen his face when he saw them. He knew immediately that the women were dead. He knew because he’d seen women that way. And when he looked back at me from the paintings, I let him see my true face. I dropped the mask.”

As you did with me, after tasing the FBI agent in the gallery. “What did Hoffman do?”

“He reveled in it. When I saw that he understood, I felt some irresistible power well up within me. And I ravished him.”

“What?”

“I wasn’t like Roger – facedown and taking it in pain. I was the one in control. Conrad saw my genius, and he wanted to experience its totality. He was a vessel for my power.” Seeing shock in my face, Wheaton says, “Conrad was bisexual. He’d told me in the car. He picked it up in jail.”

“And after that, he started helping you?”

Wheaton is painting with almost mechanical speed now. “Conrad procured my subjects, mixed the drug cocktails, worked out what was best to keep them sedated while I worked. The insulin. He carried many burdens for me.”

“And he raped the women as a reward.”

Wheaton’s brush hardly stutters. “I suppose he did. I doubt they were conscious while it happened.”

I pray they weren’t. “What made you stop? In New York, I mean?”

“Conrad killed someone in an argument. He was sentenced to fifteen years. He told me not to take any more, but I… I couldn’t stop. I tried to pick up a girl in New York. She sensed something wrong, and she fought. Screamed. I barely escaped the police. That’s what made me stop. Conrad had told me about prison. I couldn’t go there. It would have been like being back in my father’s house.”

“So you channeled your desires into the Clearing paintings. Didn’t you? That’s why they became more abstract.”

“Yes. And the more I put into them, the more famous Roger got. I wanted the world to see my work – purely - not through the distorted mirror of Roger’s abstracts.”

“Is that why you started killing again, fifteen years later?”

“No.” He gives me a simple, clear gaze. “I was dying. I had to do what good I could, while I could.”

“Hoffman was out of prison by then? He helped you?”

“Six months after my diagnosis, he was released to make room for new inmates. I’d already moved to New Orleans. I had a juvenile fantasy of finding my biological father. Or his grave. Something tangible. But I never did. But yes, Conrad helped me begin my work again.”

“Why did you sell the paintings? Why take the risk? You already had money. Fame. Respect.”

“Roger had those things.” Wheaton’s brush pecks the palette, then flies to the canvas. “In his bourgeois way. But when collectors saw my Sleeping Women, they recognized an entirely different level of truth.”

“Like Marcel de Becque?”

“He was one.”

“Do you know him well?”

“I know he buys my work. Nothing more.”

Strangely, I believe him. So what explains the connections between de Becque, Wingate, and Hoffman? Were they all exploiting this tortured artist and his twisted vision?

“What do you intend to do now?”

“I’m going away. To live as myself. Openly. Money’s not a problem, and Conrad established new identities for us long ago. Just in case.”

“Will you paint?”

“If I feel the need. After this one, I don’t suspect I will.”

“What do you plan to do with me?”

“I’m going to give you what you most want. I’m going to reunite you with your sister.”

My eyes close. “Where is my sister?”

“Very close.”

“Driving distance? Walking distance?”

Wheaton sniffs. “Closer than that.”

John’s voice sounds in my head, an echo of the first day I met him. Lakeshore Drive. The water table has fallen considerably in recent years. He could be burying them under a house, and they would stay buried. And dry. Toss in a little lime every now and then, they wouldn’t even stink.

“Is she buried here? Under this house?”

There’s not even a hitch in Wheaton’s brush stroke as he nods. It’s almost more than I can bear.

“The other women too?”

“Yes. Your sister was a bit different from the rest. She tried to escape. I’m not sure how she managed it, but she made it out to the garden. Conrad caught her, but she fought, and he had to end it there. He buried her immediately. I finished painting her using only a photograph.”

For the first time in many hours, anger boils to the surface. Reaching out to the tap, I turn it as I have twice before – only this time I open the cold valve. Wheaton doesn’t seem to notice.