1 Portrait of a Gossip (2 page)

What baffled her was why he—and the other really successful
artists—chose to live in this colony. It wasn’t convenient for those with
physical handicaps and surely the privacy it offered was not enough incentive.
Maybe it all came down to superstition. Many artists would do anything to keep
their muses happy. Juliet wouldn’t know about that. Divinity had not
condescended to visit her yet. She did comfortable art that anybody could live
with and sold it at comfortable prices.

Raphael was not inclined to shouting, which he considered
vulgar, but he did wave at Juliet, who waggled a paintbrush in return. As
usual, he seemed distracted and one got the feeling that whatever thoughts he
was entertaining, it would be best not to disturb them. She would only speak if
spoken to.

Resigned to having people in her peripheral vision for a
time, she tried to ignore Carrie Simmons, the rubber stamp designer who also
did lovely charcoal drawings, as she sped by in her walker, an affectation that
Juliet was certain she didn’t need but had adopted so that she could have one
of the first terrace cottages. Carrie didn’t care for exercise. She also saw
life, at least the part that was witnessed by others, as performance art with
her in the starring role. Blonde, plump, a vacuous version of Jayne
Mansfield,
and because of all the time she had devoted to
perfecting herself cosmetically and surgically, she would be pretty even on the
back end of life. That she was a talented designer, no one could argue, but
Juliet suspected that she was also quite stupid when it came to reading people.
Or maybe she read them and simply didn’t care what they thought because her
needs and desires always came first.

Juliet had tried to see the good in her, but seemed to have
a genetic inability to like people of this kind. She would have been
hard-pressed to explain this antipathy to anyone else though, since Carrie was
generally liked and her habits considered amusing rather than annoying.

Juliet’s stomach rumbled and she supposed that she could
join her neighbors in the community dining room where the caretaker, Robbie
Sykes, always laid out a kind of coffee bar and continental breakfast. But the
light was so perfect and the morning still so refreshingly cool that Juliet
opted to keep working.

Jake Holmes limped by. Since he was usually dashing about,
preparing for some marathon or hiking expedition, Juliet had to assume he had
injured himself. He didn’t see her and she didn’t call to him.

The last person to make an appearance was the redheaded Dr.
Darby O’Hara. Darby walked without aid, but her clubbed feet made her slow and
ungainly. The retired veterinarian’s upper body was well developed because she
was a sculptor who worked in both wood and stone. She was often called in to do
restoration work in historic houses. She liked the work but always stipulated
that she needed to have time to work alone. She was no more interested in
expressions of pity than Raphael was.

“Good morning,” Darby called in her low, almost masculine
voice when she noticed Juliet perched on her stone. She was wearing a bright
yellow sweater that looked like it had had a head-on collision with a parrot. The
sheep who had donated the wool would never recognize it. The poncho-sweater was
one of Rose Campion’s expensive creations which the artist herself would never
wear, preferring to dress like a pale shadow.

“Good morning,” Juliet agreed and then shook her head as
Darby clomped away. There was talent in the compound and drive enough for a
hundred artists, but so many of them were aging and the other half gone to
wrack and ruin. She was on the young side of the bell curve and she’d seen half
a century.

Marley stirred again and this time decided that he should
rise and investigate Juliet’s painting. He poised a paw above the corner where
the paint was wet.

“Get your fur in that and you’ll be sorry,” she warned as
the cat peered around the edge of the prepared canvas to stare at her. “In
fact, shouldn’t you be getting home for your breakfast? Surely Harvey is up by
now.”

Unless Harvey was drunk again and wasn’t
up to feeding his cat.
That could be the case. His lights had been on all
night. She had noticed them going on quite early the day before. In fact, for a
while it had looked like there were two porch lights on, but that was probably
just an illusion caused by the panes of glass in the studio window. There was a
second bungalow up there, but a falling tree limb had damaged the porch roof
and it hadn’t been used for years.

Marley mewed, doing his best to look starved and pitiful.

“It won’t work,” Juliet said. But it did actually work. And
since Harvey’s house was only about fifty feet above her and he kept Marley’s
kibble in a plastic trash can outside the front door, Juliet decided to take a
break and get her feline friend some breakfast. She stuck her brush in a jar of
turpentine.

“Coming?” she asked the cat, who at first seemed
uninterested but then decided that, yes, perhaps he was interested enough to
bestir himself.

All along the steep, winding way, blue and white lupines
edged the steep path, swaying sometimes as the wind pattering along behind her
batted at them and pulled on Marley’s
plumelike
tail.
The trail had steps of sorts, uneven stone ledges and outcroppings with minimal
dressing, cracked in places and spaced at odd heights. Juliet’s gaze was
sensibly directed downward at her feet until she heard a deep caw almost
directly overhead.

In the oak tree at the corner of Harvey’s small yard sat a
pair of ravens, watching her with evil eyes. Directly under them was a patch of
ground where someone had spent a fair amount of time, perhaps sitting on the
convenient boulder, crushing the small seedlings and groundcover with their shoes
as they waited. She couldn’t imagine who would sit there, inviting ticks and a
case of poison oak. It wasn’t as if the site offered a great view of anything
except Harvey’s bungalow.

Juliet didn’t care for the intense observation of her
activities by the twins of winged darkness and looked uneasily at Marley,
wondering if he was the true object of their attention. Would ravens attack a
cat, especially a large one? She knew they sometimes ate carrion.

“Don’t glare at me,” she told them. “I’m the one who puts
out the peanuts and bird seed all winter. Show some gratitude.”

Taking her courage and Marley in hand, she lugged the
purring cat past the twin black harbingers. She set him down only after she had
pushed past the bushy
toyon
that was denuded of ripe berries
and stepped onto Harvey’s small patio which he shared with the empty bungalow
to the north.

Harvey Allen appeared to be napping in the Adirondack chair
in front of his cottage. Appeared to be except…. Juliet had encountered him in
the arms of Morpheus before and Harvey was generally not a delicate sleeper. He
snored and drooled and spluttered like Bernini’s Fountain of Four Rivers in the
Piazza
Navona
. Today he sat still and silent. In fact
his chest didn’t appear to be moving at all.

And his clothes were sodden and covered in pine needles and
cedar detritus. Not
dripping,
but wet enough to
plaster themselves to his body and to hold tight to the various leaves and
needles that had fallen on him.

Had the idiot been so drunk that he hadn’t wakened long enough
to get in out of the storm?

Juliet shivered and stopped deceiving herself before she
even got started. This wasn’t sleep and it wasn’t a drunken stupor. She was
certain that he was dead when she noticed a wasp foraging in his hair.

“Well hell.”

All thoughts of feeding Marley abandoned her as she
considered what to do.

Certainly she—or someone—must summon the authorities. The
nearest phone was in Harvey’s bungalow, but a mixture of habit and instinct had
her backtracking to Hans
Dillmeyer’s
bungalow on the
third terrace so she wouldn’t disturb a crime scene. She didn’t ask why she
thought it was a crime scene. Juliet told herself that any unexplained death
was a potential suspicious death, and that while she didn’t believe anything
specifically illegal had happened, it might have and she needed to observe
correct procedure.

That was a slight lie. Had it been anyone else dead, she
wouldn’t have been so sure that there was the potential for foul play, but this
was Harvey Allen, loathed universally and threatened from Hollywood to San
Francisco with everything from lawsuits to bodily harm. Her gut said someone
had killed him.

Knowing what needed to be done was not sufficiently
motivating to make her hurry down the hill. The murder was inconvenient and
when her name came up in the investigation it would probably ring bells in
places she would prefer stayed silent. She was estranged from her old life. The
separation hadn’t been as difficult as losing her parents, but that was because
it was voluntary.
On her part.
There were still many
nights though when she dreamed of dim passages, doors without numbers, and
people without expressions from her past and feared they would drag her back
again.

She allowed herself a moment to talk her more selfish half
out of its black mood. It wasn’t easy. This place was supposed to be a safe
haven where bad things didn’t happen, where she could retire off the radar and
not be bothered by nastiness ever again.

“I-am-open-and-accepting-of-all-good-things-from-the-universe,”
she muttered several times. It was her yoga mantra and eventually it worked to
soothe her.

Feeling resigned, if not actually at peace with what had to
be done, Juliet started down the hill again. She bypassed the first bungalow where
the opera composer worked and stopped at the red door of Han’s cottage. She
smoothed her hair before knocking loudly. Hans carved beautiful custom crèches and
pipes, and was phlegmatic and unflappable but also slightly hard of hearing. Hans
usually breakfasted in his own bungalow instead of going down to Robbie Sykes’
breakfast bar. She would use his phone, assuming he had one. Even if he didn’t
have a cellphone, he would have one of the crank phones that all the bungalows
had been installed with back in the 40s. Each resident had their own ring tone.
Juliet’s was seven short rings. One long ring would raise the caretaker’s
cottage.

Of course, what was needed was the sheriff, but Robbie Sykes
could take care of that, she thought, brightening a little. There was no need
for her to explain this mess, at least not yet, and she could keep her name out
of it for a while longer.

“Miss Juliet,” Hans said in some surprise as she was
enveloped in the smell of lacquer and pipe tobacco. His face was simple, put
together without a lot of fuss, functional but not memorable. No one would be
asking to paint him. It was, however, a face that Juliet was very glad to see.

“Hello, Hans, may I use your phone? I’m afraid that Harvey
Allen has …” She stopped, realizing she was about to say that he had been killed.
“He’s died.
Out in his yard.”

Juliet betrayed none of her shock and outrage with her
voice, but words announcing someone’s death can’t help but be shocking to both
the bearer and the receiver of the tidings. There was nothing novel about evil
or killing. She simply hadn’t expected to encounter anything like it in
Bartholomew’s Wood.

“Good heavens.”

She was glad that she was speaking to Hans and not Rose
Campion who lived next door. Rose was a lovely lady who wove beautiful textiles,
but she seemed to be made more of nerves than muscle and was always clutching
at herself mentally, starting at shadows of thoughts that crept up on her.

“Please come in,” he said. “You wish I should call Mr.
Sykes?”

“Yes, please,” she said, but hesitated about stepping inside.
“Could you do it for me? Please tell him we need the sheriff right away.”

“Of course.
You do not wish to come
in and rest, or have some coffee? You look pale, my dear.”

“I’ve just remembered the cat. There were two ravens up
there in the yard and I am afraid they may attack Marley. I had better go find
him.”

This was true. She also wanted a better look at the body now
that duty was done. Something was whispering that this was murder and she
wanted to know what at the scene was toying with her intuition in this
uncomfortable way. And forewarned was forearmed. This matter needed to be
solved swiftly and quietly, perhaps avoiding any mention in the national news.

“Okay. You rescue the cat and I will phone for help…. I
wonder if it was spleen that killed him,” Hans muttered as he retreated inside,
shaking his silvered head.

Juliet didn’t think it was spleen, though according to her
neighbors Harvey had certainly had enough of it to poison anyone.

“Marley,” Juliet began calling when she reached the yard.
She was a bit breathless from all the dashing up and down steep trails. She had
only been there for a few months and had yet to build up a tolerance for
exercise at elevation.

“
Meooow
.”

The orange fluff ball was up on the roof, digging at
something in the gutter.

Were
she ten years younger and
twenty years stupider, she would go up on the roof and look for herself at
whatever had the cat’s attention. Fortunately, wisdom prevailed.

“Come down and I’ll feed you,” she promised, but Marley
ignored her. Juliet looked around but the ravens were gone.
“Fine.
I have things to do too. Come down when you’re ready.”

Juliet faced the dead man and decided that playing ostrich
wasn’t an option.

She was careful not to touch the body as she leaned over it.
Had the patio been something other than moss and shattered brick and capable of
taking prints, she would not have ventured so near, but there was no hope of
lifting any tracks, not after the rain had scattered pine needles everywhere
and washed any muddy tracks away.