Damage (37 page)

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.

Which led to Glitsky’s next question: “So when did you come upon all this?”

“Just before I called you.”

“You just remembered these were back here?”

“No, Lieutenant. Obviously I knew they were here all along. And I knew the fire hadn’t touched the garage, so there was no urgency to see how they’d made it.”

“So were you coming back in here today to paint?”

“Why does it matter why I was coming back here? My wife’s dead. My kids are falling apart. My life as I’ve known it is over. After what Marrenas wrote this morning—and you should know this as well as me—the vibes even at my real job got too weird to handle. Plus, it seems one of my people there is leaking to her . . .”

“Why do you say that?”

“Somebody told her about me getting in late last Friday.”

“Do you know who it is? Or why?”

“Liza Sato thinks it’s a guy named Peter Bassey, who’s jealous because she likes me.” A nonplussed look. “Hey, what can I say? We like each other. We get along. Not a crime last time I checked. So Peter’s poisoning the well at work, and I had the whole afternoon off and yawning before me. So I came to hang out here.” He raised a hand at the destruction. “And found this. And then called you. If Ro’s been here, maybe he left some sign of it. What do you think?”

Glitsky didn’t answer. He was punching numbers on his cell phone. Bringing it up to his ear, he said, “This is Abe Glitsky with homicide. I need a crime scene unit as soon as I can get one.”

Her cheeks wet with tears, Sam Duncan sat disconsolately on one of the sagging sofas in the raggedy reception area where she worked. Wes Farrell, all cried out, sat beside her, holding her hand. Gert’s body lay on the other side of him, her head in his lap, his other hand gently stroking her head. Animal control was on its way and Sam was still trying to get a grip on what exactly had happened. Although to Wes, this was not a mystery.

“I mean,” Sam said, “she’d been out there on the bench all morning, just lying in the sun like she does.”

“Did you see anybody stop?”

“Wes, everybody stopped. Little kids, old ladies, every homeless person that passed by. This was Gert, remember. Everybody’s favorite dog, you know?”

“I do know. But then somebody stopped and poisoned her.”

“We don’t know that. Not for sure.”

“I do.”

“How?”

“I just do. She was—what?—five years old, in perfect health, and now suddenly she’s foaming at the mouth and she’s dead. That doesn’t just happen.”

“Sometimes it does. Why would somebody want to kill a sweet dog like her?”

“It’s got nothing to do with her. You remember the horse’s head in the bed in
The Godfather
? This was the same thing. This was Cliff Curtlee.”

“But I’ve met him, Wes. He’s a charming man. He gives money to the Center, for God’s sake. He wouldn’t do something like this.”

“Not himself, no. And he’s charming all right, but he’d order this in a heartbeat, and I’ll bet you a million dollars that he did.”

“But why?”

“To warn me that he’s serious. He’s not kidding around. And to give me a good idea what he’d do next. Except next time, to someone closer to me, like you. Maybe even to me myself.”

“He’d do next if what?”

“If I continued to pursue this grand jury thing on his little boy.”

She ran her free hand over her head, through her hair. “God, I can’t believe this. How can this be happening?”

“We both know the answer to that, Sam. I didn’t push hard enough denying Ro bail. Now he’s had a taste of freedom again and he’s not giving it up without a fight. Or a whole lot of fights.” His eyes went down to his dog. “Goddamn it!”

Sam reached over and touched Gert’s head gently, left her hand on Farrell’s thigh. “So what are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really have any idea. Take Ro out right now. Convene the grand jury for an emergency session, like, tomorrow, and just march in with Amanda’s basic case.”

“But you were saying this was Cliff Curtlee, not Ro.”

“I know. It probably was. I don’t know if it even matters. It’s all so fucked up. Which is why another part of me wants to just call Cliff and tell him I’ve gotten his message and he wins. We’re calling everybody off anything that has to do with Ro except the retrial, which isn’t calendared until next August anyway. Maybe that would slow down the carnage.”

“You believe that?”

Farrell shook his head. “No. Ro’s still going to want to find the other main witness, a woman named Gloria Gonzalvez. She’s still going to be in danger. No, she still
is
in danger, which is pretty much why I can’t just give up, either, besides the fact that it’s the last thing I want to do. Giving up is not happening. I’ve got to keep the pressure on these pricks. Let them know that they picked the exact wrong guy if they think they can pull this shit and get away with it.”

“But what if they come back at you with something worse?”

“One of us, you mean?” He shook his head. “I’m not going to give them any time. Although I know that if they’re capable of this”—he gave Gert’s body a pet—“there’s nothing they wouldn’t do. I could get you moved to someplace safe until this is over.”

“I don’t want to do that.”

“No, but it might be smart.”

Sam let go of Wes’s hand, stood up, and crossed over to the door. Standing there, arms crossed, looking out into the darkness and fog, she might have been a statue but for the slight rise and fall of her shoulders. Finally she took in a big breath and turned around. “Fuck that. If they’re not driving you off, they’re not pushing me out, either.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t sign up for this, and I did. It’s not the same thing.”

“Close enough.”

“No, it’s not. Aren’t you the one who moved out a couple of days ago because of how badly I was doing the job? And you know, you were right. I couldn’t have proven it any better these last couple of weeks if I’d tried.”

She had moved now back to the couch, going down to one knee in front of him. “That wasn’t about your job, Wes. It was about you and me communicating about what you were doing, what was in your life. The way we are right now, for example. And you can’t let these people get away with stuff like . . . like this. And worse.”

He looked at her imploringly. “I have to be honest. I don’t know exactly how I’m going to stop them, Sam, what I’m precisely going to do, but I’m sure as shit going to try. There are just no other options. Even if it’s probably true that I’m not the best man for the job.”

“But you are, Wes. You might be the only man left standing who can actually do it.”