Still Lives(76)

“I hate to be gauche here, but aren’t our attendance numbers huge this week?” I say. “What if the police find out the murderer was someone at the Rocque? Our budget would be made for years.”

“That is really gross,” Yegina says, but I am watching Evie for a reaction. With incredible slowness, she reaches back and touches the bare place where her blond hair curls against her neck.

“I know,” I say. “I would hate for it to be true.”

Evie’s hand falls back to the wheel. The light goes green and the car surges forward again.

“We’re getting close,” says Dee. “There’s a right turn soon.”

“Can I use your phone for a second?” I say to Yegina. “I’ve got to text Jayme something.”

Yegina hands it over reluctantly. I switch off the ringer and type a message to her instead:

Get away from us and get J. Ro to call Hendricks. Tell him I’m here with Evie. Tell him that Evie had the drug from the Jason Rains show and put Kim’s body in an art crate. Tell him to call Diamond Storage about a recalled delivery last Weds. Say exactly that. You have to believe me.

Then I hand it back. She slides it in her pocket without glancing at it as we turn past some hedges, down a private drive into the hills.





26


Janis Rocque’s gatehouse is barely larger than a toll booth, but when a gray-haired attendant slides open the window, I feel the cool gust of its air-conditioning and hear the murmur of a TV.

“Dee here,” Dee says, and leans over to wave.

The attendant gives her a knowing smile, and the two green-painted gates to Janis Rocque’s estate open inward.

Slowly a narrow road appears before us, flanked by blue-headed bird-of-paradise flowers. Tall hedges make second and third perimeters, but, between them, lawns extend like primeval savannas for dozing dinosaurs of iron, stone, and steel. I see Yegina mouthing the names of the artists she recognizes, her hand drifting to her high white collar like a Victorian in an opera-induced swoon. Here and there, a winglike edifice soars over the hedges that conceal it.

“There are open gardens and hidden gardens,” says Dee. “It’s designed to make the viewer feel lost and found at the same time.”

“Where do I go?” Evie murmurs, though the road twists in one direction, toward a surprisingly small house with a solar-paneled roof, rising above the trees. After all the magnificence and spread of the sculptures, the actual Rocque home seems modest by comparison.

“Is that the servants’ quarters?” Yegina asks in a wondering voice.

“Janis tore the old mansion down to make more room for the outdoor installations,” says Dee. “It’s all about the art.”

The road ends in a white gravel parking lot big enough for a dozen cars, its perimeter also marked by trimmed shrubs. We slide to a halt beside a beat-up Toyota and two sporty sedans. Dust shimmers in the heat. Dee and Yegina leap out of the vehicle. I wait in my seat, paralyzed, the air going stale and sweltering as soon as the doors shut. I watch the back of Evie’s motionless blond head.

“Coming?” I say. “You’ll regret it if you don’t.”

“Will I?” she mutters, staring out the windshield. She doesn’t glance at me and I don’t look at her. I force myself to breathe the stuffy heat. She unclips her belt, opens her door. I wait until she’s almost out of the car before leaping out after her. We slam our doors in tandem.

Yegina is already staring hungrily around, her phone dropped into her purse without a second glance. She roams to the edge of the parking lot, peeking through cracks in the green walls to see a hulking ellipse beyond. It’s a curving metal wall, the height of a garage, the color of wet chocolate.

“Hello! We’re here,” says Dee, holding her phone to her ear. “Okay.” Her face falls. “Sure. You do that.”

She pockets her phone and gives a sharp shrug.

“So! Want to see the Richard Serra?” she says with determined glee. “We should stick together, at least at the start. We’re still installing works, and there are some holes and sharp edges.” Without waiting for an answer, she bounds off after Yegina, leaving Evie and me alone.

I still can’t bring myself to look at Evie’s face, but I take in her slim legs and her little blue pumps, the same shoes she was wearing the night of the Gala, when I talked to her in the bathroom stall. She must have been hiding then. She was hiding herself away to text Lynne with Kim Lord’s phone. Announcing the artist’s arrival at seven o’clock. While I was rattling on about parties, Evie was pretending to be the woman she murdered. Was murdering. Kim wasn’t dead yet. Kim was bleeding and suffocating in an art crate, her body dying around the child inside her.

“This might take too long,” Evie says.

I finally meet her eyes and they’re as bright as dimes.

“It’s right there,” I say.

She slides her sunglasses on, blanking her gaze. “You first,” she says.

“No, you first,” I say with fake enthusiasm. “You’re the one who has to rush.” And I wait until she struts ahead of me, feeling that I will survive today only if I keep playing the ingenue, and actually that I’m not playing at all.


When we catch up with Yegina and Dee, they’re in the middle of the Richard Serra ellipse, laughing and stepping in and out of the sharp quadrants of shadow and light. “Almost crushed a guy when they put this one in,” Dee chirps. “It weighs almost thirty tons.”