“So it was solved?”
“Don’t know, I’ll find out,” he said. “So . . . jealousy’s become the motive?”
“It’s the one point of consistency: artists struck down just as they’re about to ascend. Four, if you include Angelique Bernet. But the differences outweigh any link.”
“Wilfred Reedy wasn’t ascending. He’d been admired for years.”
“Like I said, wasting your time.”
Silence.
“On the surface, it’s not much,” he said. “Still, I ain’t sherlocking anything the old-fashioned way. Why don’t I do this: make a few calls and try to disprove the theory. That’s the scientific method, right? Blow up the whatchamacallit . . .”
“The null hypothesis.”
“Exactly. I’ll find out who handled Reedy, talk to Cambridge PD, see what’s really gone down. I can also check whether or not that ceramicist’s boyfriend is still behind bars, what are their names?”
“Valerie Brusco and Tom Blaskovitch,” I said. “He was sentenced three years ago.”
“Another creative type?”
“Sculptor.”
“Same as Kipper—maybe another vindictive chisel man. Ah, the art world. Like I tell my mother, you never know when the job will elevate you to higher ground.”
16
The next few weeks were a slow fade to futility. No new evidence on the Kipper murder surfaced, and Milo learned nothing about the other killings that excited him. He contacted Petra and learned she’d dead-ended on Baby Boy.
Tom Blaskovitch, the sculptor-killer, had been released from prison a year before, having earned good behavior points by setting up art classes for his fellow inmates. But he’d settled in Idaho, gotten a job as a handyman at a dude ranch, which was exactly where his boss was certain he’d been on the nights of the Kipper and the Lee murders.
Detective Fiorelle of the Cambridge police remembered me as a “pushy guy, one of those intellectuals—I know the type, plenty around here.” The facts of Angelique Bernet’s murder did nothing to support any link with Baby Boy or Julie: The dancer had been stabbed half a dozen times and dumped in an area of the college town that was well traveled during the day but quiet at night. No strangulation, no sexual posing; she’d been found fully clad.
The detective who’d worked the Wilfred Reedy case was dead. Milo got a copy of the file. Reedy had been gut-stabbed in an alley like Baby Boy, but strong indications of a drug-related hit had surfaced at the time, including the name of a probable suspect: a small-time dealer named Celestino Hawkins, who’d fed the habit of Reedy’s son. Hawkins had served time for assault with a knife. He’d been dead for three years.
China Maranga’s file was thin and cold.
Milo phoned Julie Kipper’s uncle and told him not to expect any quick solve. The uncle was gracious, and that made Milo feel worse.
Allison and I spent more time at each other’s houses. I bought Guitar Player and read the profile on Robin. Spent a long time staring at the photos.
Robin in her new shop. No mention there’d ever been another one. Gorgeous carved guitars and mandolins and celebrity endorsements and big smiles. The camera loved her.
I wrote her a brief congratulatory note, received a thank-you card in return.
Two and a half months after Julie Kipper’s murder, the weather warmed and the case file froze. Milo cursed and put it aside and resumed excavating cold cases.
Few of them were solvable, and that kept him grumbling and occupied. The times we got together, he never failed to mention Julie—sometimes with that forced blithe tone that meant failure was eating at him.
Soon after that, Allison and I drove up to Malibu Canyon to watch a meteor shower. We found an isolated turnoff, lowered the top of her Jaguar, reclined the seats, and watched cosmic dust streak and explode. Shortly after we got home, at 1:15 A.M. the phone rang. I was skimming the papers, and Allison was reading V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men. She’d pinned her hair up. Tiny, black-framed reading glasses rode her nose. As I lifted the receiver, she looked over at the nightstand clock.
Most of the early-morning calls were hers. Patient emergencies.
I picked up.