Still Lives(31)

“And then when I saw you at the Gala, it hit me,” says Greg. “You’re the only person—”

The voice breaks off.

I’ve ever really loved, I hear him say.

“—in Los Angeles that I trust completely,” Greg says. “My mother even said it, that I would always be able to trust you.”

His mother. That specter of strength and bitterness and pain.

Greg is still talking. “But how could I ask you for help now?”

“Help?” I wobble back to the present.

Of all the apologies and reconciliations that I fantasized about, I never imagined this one.

“I’m the police’s lead suspect. I have no alibi for Wednesday evening. I was out walking that night, too.” There’s a catch in Greg’s voice.

I glance over at him, but it’s too dark to see his face.

“I told them about Kim seeing Bas with some man she thought was stalking her. But I can tell they don’t believe me,” he says. “Frankly, I didn’t believe Kim.”

“She saw Bas with her stalker?” My stomach suddenly roils, and I sip the bubbly water.

“On Monday. On the West Side somewhere.”

“But what kind of stalker was he? Was he following her, sending her messages? Was he threatening her?”

“She wouldn’t tell me.” Greg sounds hurt and defensive. “She said it was complicated.”

“But she knew who he was?”

“She thought she did, but she wouldn’t say.”

“What would Bas be doing with him?”

“I don’t know. She thought he wanted to get at her through her art. I don’t know. The show was making her hysterical,” Greg says. “She was barely sleeping, and she wasn’t … taking care of herself.”

It’s dawning on me: why he hasn’t seen her since Tuesday. “And you fought about that and she left. And you don’t know where she went.”

“Yes.”

“Must have been a serious fight.” I drink another slug of my water.

“It was. But I never thought—”

I hear the same dread in Greg’s voice as earlier, when Babe reared beneath me, pitching us backward. I don’t want to hear any more.

“You’re absolutely sure it was Monday?” I interrupt.

Greg says he’s certain. I tell him about Bas’s bizarre behavior in the elevator, and the board vote on his directorship, and the press release that Jayme had me copyedit.

“That’s impossible.” Greg bolts up in his chair. “Kim needs that money as much as anyone. So does Nelson.”

“As much as Bas needs his job? The gift would make him look really good. Especially if it was announced to the public. It might make it hard to fire him.”

As I say it, I still can’t see how the gift would be a motivation for Bas to make Kim Lord disappear.

“Giving away millions of dollars makes no sense for her,” says Greg. He tugs a hand through his hair as if trying pull free an explanation for Kim’s alleged donation.

He refers to her in the present tense. I notice this with a slow lurch inside.

“You need some more water? I’ll get you some more,” Greg says, and disappears into the house, the steel back door slamming behind him.

I hunch in my chair, trying to process the information Greg has told me. Their fight. Kim’s departure. Her connecting Bas to her stalker. The pieces feel jagged, like they don’t fit together. My sense of time has been mugged by the tequila, and I don’t know if minutes pass or just a moment before I look up and see Greg in the window watching me, his face twisted with rage. I flinch, our eyes catch, and the expression vanishes. He waves and holds up a water glass.

“Here. You need to drink about ten of these,” he says in his usual amiable tone when he returns.

I decide my vision must have been a warp of the old bungalow window, an odd reflection. I can’t see any trace of anger or fear.

“I’ll try to find out where Bas went on Monday,” I say.

“Christ, if you could—” says Greg.

“But your new lawyer, what’s she doing?”

“She says the police are getting a warrant to search my properties. There’s nothing to find.” He sits back down in his chair and sighs. “Except this.” From his pocket he fishes something that looks like a thin, black finger. “I do have another favor to ask.”

I’m shaking my head, but when he slides the object toward me, I take it in my palm. It’s a flash drive.

“These are Kim’s photos. The studies for Still Lives. She deleted them off her computer and camera, and she was going to destroy this after the opening.”

I recall copyediting the pages in the Still Lives catalog devoted to Kim Lord’s idiosyncratic process, the same one I first puzzled over so long ago in Thailand: first her study of her subjects, then her photographs of herself costumed as those subjects, then her paintings of her photos, and, finally, the obliteration of the photos. Smashing the flash drive is her last ritual. I would have thought she’d done it by now. She delivered her last painting to the Rocque on Tuesday.

“Why don’t you just take a hammer to it yourself?”

“I can’t,” Greg says. “I just can’t. Please hold on to it for me?”