I ask my mother if she minds returning to the apartment to finish packing. “The sooner we’re done, the sooner we can get home,” I say.
She brightens at the word home, but inside I feel the discernible prick of a lie. I picture Vermont in May, mud season giving way to crocuses and the delicate gold-green that explodes all over the woods. It’s still mine, but it’s also very far away.
“I’ll go for a couple of hours,” my mother says. She stands and regards me. “You’re looking better now.” She puts both hands to both her cheeks, and, for a moment, her resolutely cheerful manner slips. “I didn’t even recognize you when I first came,” she admits in a quavering voice.
“Oh, Mom.”
I let her hug me too tight. She leaves her knitting lumped on the chair, needles poking up, as if to prevent anyone else from occupying it.
As soon as she’s gone, I call Yegina.
“Just bring yourself,” I say. “And hurry.”
I’m so relieved to finally have time alone with Yegina that it surprises me when she walks in the room and I don’t know what to say. There she is, with her beautiful, alert face, laden with bags under her arms, my friend and rescuer. My memory flashes to the open door at her house, the anger in her eyes, Bas behind her on the couch—and then to Don, tumbling from his bike. I want to thank her with my whole heart, I want to beg her forgiveness, or to cry, or just to pretend nothing happened, but not knowing where to begin with her is terrible. It paralyzes me.
“I brought magazines,” she says awkwardly. “You want to know about the case, right?”
“Definitely,” I say. “It’s all I’ve been thinking about since I fell.” I emphasize the last word, and Yegina nods. She doesn’t say What happened with Evie? How’d you slip? Doesn’t wait for me to lie. She just nods.
“And I brought mochi,” she says, and sets a Japantown box on my bedside table.
Then she looks warily at my mother’s knitting needles and sits on my bed instead. The jostling sends a wave of discomfort through me.
“Where should we start,” she murmurs, and spreads the magazines and newspapers out on my white blankets, cover stories with pictures of Evie in an orange jumpsuit, of the glass-and-steel front of the Rocque with photoshopped blood running down it.
Nothing squalid. Nothing cop-show. This is supposed to be high art. Lynne must be shattered and impossible now, I say.
“She got herself a third cat,” says Yegina. “It seems to be helping her cope.”
“How about Jayme—did she quit?” I received a card from her, wishing me a speedy recovery, but I’m surprised she hasn’t visited. I’ve been here almost a week.
“Jayme’s on vacation in Hawaii,” says Yegina. “She actually sat Bas and me down last week and told us that she was stalked as a teenager, and that Kim Lord’s disappearance and death have been extremely upsetting to her.” Her eyes rest on me. “She said she didn’t want this public, but she’d already told you, and it made her realize she needed to tell us, too.” She adds, “I always wondered.”
“Yeah, me too,” I say, grateful that Jayme has finally stopped bearing her pain alone. “I’m glad she left all this behind for a while.”
I finger the cool, smooth pages spread around me. The “museum murderess” is huge news, both the grisly homicide and the quick reprisal by the LAPD, which gets all the credit for solving the case. Hendricks is absent from the story. I am absent from it, too, and Evie’s flight through the sculpture garden is reduced to a simple arrest. Instead, reporters have sunk their teeth into every other aspect of the murder. Yegina shows me “Dimensions of Death” in one magazine, a timeline that chronicles Kim Lord’s alleged killing, hour by hour. A dotted line shows a figure in a wig and a trench coat entering the museum through the loading dock, passing the guard station, then proceeding into the carpentry room and into Brent’s office. It also shows a second blond figure in a blue pantsuit in the registrar’s room, and a dotted line leading to the same office. The police found traces of Kim Lord’s blood on Brent’s floor and on one of the mallets. They never found the syringes holding the sodium thiopental.
“Any ordinary day, and this murder could never have occurred,” wrote one journalist. “But on Wednesday, the entire exhibition crew was upstairs in the galleries, installing the opening show, and Evie Long was alone for hours. She turned on the saws in the carpentry room, grabbed a mallet, and crept to the door of Brent Patrick’s office.”
“How an Art Crate Became a Coffin” follows how Evie shipped the unconscious and dying Kim Lord out of the museum to the Van Nuys storage facility, and then retrieved the crate two hours later and relocated it to her loft. The Diamond Storage shipment is key to the police case, because the second truck driver, the one who picked up the crate, remembers rolling it into Evie’s loft. The crate itself has vanished, but dirt on Evie’s sneakers matches dirt from the burial site. Enough puzzle pieces will finish the picture for the jury, even if key ones are missing. Yet Evie’s cruelty will never be completely explicable. Did she assume Kim Lord was dead? Did she ever hear her cry for help? No one knows. While Evie played business as usual at the Rocque, and stayed out late at the Gala in Kim Lord’s honor, the artist was clawing at her coffin, dying from suffocation and thirst.
“The Gallerist, the Artist, the Murderer, and Her Lover” focuses on Brent Patrick, the “Leonardo of stagecraft” who relocated to L.A., watched his marriage collapse with his wife’s mental illness, and got involved with an obsessive young woman who later murdered her supposed rival. Tawdry stuff. I can’t believe I sat through dozens of thumb-twiddling meetings with these people. Brent claimed he had no relationship to Kim Lord beyond a professional one. He did know Kim was pregnant because she’d told him in his office earlier that week. He also admitted to a few months’ affair with Evie Long last year, which he ended when Evie began appearing at his apartment without his invitation. “I’m not proud of it, but I broke it off,” he told the reporter. “To be honest, I partly wanted to move back east to get away from her.”
“Dee knew about him and Evie,” says Yegina, leaning over my shoulder. “She thought it ended last fall.”
In my mind’s eye, I see Dee and her hurt but obstinate face. “She was being so secretive about Brent last week, though,” I say. “Do you think she suspected something anyway?”
“Brent begged her not to tell about him being hired in New York. He was double-billing his two health insurances. For his wife’s care,” Yegina says, and taps a paragraph where Brent claims his “insanely busy” schedule kept him “utterly unaware” of Evie’s actions. “I believe Dee. She was all lovesick about Janis. She was absent the days it happened. But I don’t buy Brent. He must have known something. His office must have stunk of disinfectant. There was a crate missing. Tarps missing. Why wouldn’t he tell the police?”
It’s a logical question, and the logical answer would be: He’s telling the truth. He simply didn’t know.
But I don’t believe that’s it exactly. Brent let himself go blind. I think of the momentary fire in his eyes after the Jason Rains preview, how even my small burst of admiration affected him. What if such adulation were magnified a thousand times by the big theater company orchestrating his Broadway comeback? Why would he care about anything else? I relay my thoughts to Yegina.
“But Kim told him she was pregnant,” she says. “It seems like they were really close.”
“Maybe.” I muse aloud that Kim was panicking about the responsibility of a child, and how it might ruin her art career. She might have thought Brent would understand. Because of Barbara.