Skyscape (12 page)

He was going to take each work and slash it, and then take it down to the freeway, 101 south of Van Ness, and let the wheels finish the job, the endless traffic, the trucks and the cars, the rolling stock of the entire country.

He had painted many pictures of freeways, the search for happiness transformed into a blitz of color and speed. Hockney had said Curtis was the “Turner of traffic.” Curtis enjoyed depicting the freeways at dawn, the russet lanes already filling with the points of light that implied destinations, responsibilities, dreams.

Some people envision themselves diving into rivers. Curtis dreamed of plunging into eight lanes.

He wanted it all back. After years of having people following him, eagerly awaiting his next painting, he would like to roll it all up and lose it.

Where had she learned this kind of courage? Margaret wasn't afraid of much. Look at her, now. She was going to do something terrible if he tore up any more art.

He used his Jack-the-Ripper-speaking-very-sweetly tone. “Let me into the bedroom.”

She didn't move. “You're going to sit down in the living room where I can keep my eyes on you.”

He gave her one of the looks that scared the shit out of women if you turned it on them on a first date, made them wet their pants and go dumb. Avedon said Kodak wouldn't print looks that bad.

And she gave him a bad look back. It was pretty impressive. The girl was still there, looking back.

And he laughed.

They both were laughing. Her laugh was a little brittle, a little hysterical, but it was a laugh. It was funny, this ongoing battle that had just now culminated in a staring contest and then it was just too much and they had to laugh. She thought it was all okay.

He could hurt now. Really hurt her.

Because she was trusting, had her arms around him. And he still had the knife.

This thought made him wrench away from her. He threw the knife, hard. It struck a doorjamb, and trembled there, splitting the wood.

It was himself he didn't understand. It was his own mind he didn't know any more.

“I'm going to go sit down,” he said.

“That's right.” She was leading him by the hand, guiding him, trusting him. “Sit down here,” she said gently, with a caring tone in her voice.

All he could think was: don't let me.

Don't let me hurt her.

A knock sounded at the door at the same instant the doorbell jangled. Someone heavy-handed was there. There were steps on the hardwood, and softer ones on the carpet.

I'm trapped, he thought.

Have to get out of here.

Teresa Madison stood beside the coffee table, a tall woman, refined in appearance, her black hair with a single splash of white. She was regal. She looked like the Statue of Liberty come to life to kick some legal butt. There was a security guard behind her, looking over her shoulder.

“I don't know how you put up with it,” Teresa was telling Margaret.

“I don't know what's he's going to do,” said Margaret, her voice broken.

Jesus, maybe Teresa was in league with the bad guys somehow. You can't tell with lawyers. Maybe Margaret was too. Look at this: he was surrounded.

Trapped.

If you're really surrounded, there's only one way out. Even Custer carried a derringer so he wouldn't be taken alive. The phrase had a nice ring: only one way out.

Taken alive
. You don't want that to happen. Fifteen floors ought to about do the job. Let them see what kind of art they could get out of him after that.

He stood, and then he stopped himself. He couldn't understand the look in their eyes. Teresa was a friend, wasn't she? And Margaret—he trusted her, didn't he?

He put his hands to his eyes. His hands were trembling.

He just wanted a few moments alone so he could rethink a couple of things.

He knew he was right. He knew he made sense. But there was just a little bit of doubt. Just a little.

He was afraid.

13

It was day three of the death threat.

Another day in the thrill-packed life of Red Patterson. He had to think of it that way, right out of a boyhood television series. He was a fighter for truth, justice, and the American psyche.

There had been another call to a local radio station. A man's voice, according to what Angie had chirped over the phone: Red Patterson was going to have his brains blown out.

The stage had a cooling system. Nice, cool air blew from a grill in the floor. It was usually very refreshing to stand there and feel glacial air up his pant legs. Today the cooling system was paralyzed. Twice during “right back after this” one of the powder puff experts had to dust his face so he wouldn't gleam under the lights.

The taping wasn't going well. Two mathematical geniuses, twins who were joined at the head, turned out to be irritable. When one member of the audience asked how they “managed toilet stuff” the twins replied that they were interested in nonlocality related to the pilot-wave theory, and weren't interested in talking about going to the bathroom.

Only Patterson's best efforts saved the show, moving the audience near tears as he asked the kind of questions that would make the irascible twins appear courageous, which, of course, they were. At the end of the show there was applause, genuine, loud. The human spirit was wonderful.

He was on the phone to Loretta Lee as soon as he was in the dressing room. “The twins were awful,” he said.

“I told you they would be,” she said.

“Don't they realize they're lucky to be on TV? If people want to know about how they get sucked off they should tell us.”

“The burn victims next week are going to be great,” said Loretta Lee.

“How great?” said Patterson.

“Lots of scar tissue. Survivor guilt. Suicidal depression.”

He sat in the dressing room listening to Loretta tell him about the upcoming guests. No secrets, there was a guarantee on that. These future guests wanted to talk. The taped show played silently on the monitor.

Something wonderful was happening to the world. There were no secrets anymore. Child molesters and rapists had confessed their crimes on his show. If you wanted to kill someone you broadcasted it. And it made sense that some people wanted him dead. There were people who did not admire his work. They had a point. Paul Angevin had said his show would end up a “freak circus,” without the dignity of at least being honest about itself.

He took a slug of Diet Coke. He tossed down the towel he was using to rub his face clean.

Loretta Lee had a wonderful telephone voice, calming, sexy. Patterson watched his image on the monitor. I'm good, he thought. I can't help it.

Too good to quit.

“They were joined at the head, right?” Loretta Lee was asking.

“At the head. Like two ice cream cones stuck together,” said Patterson.

“It makes you stop and think,” she said.

Patterson said that he guessed it did.

The limo pulled into the large, virtually empty garage, and they waited while the garage door thumped gently shut behind them.

The house in the Marina had always been a tasteful fortress, a clean-lined, rectangular building with few windows and a wall, low profile, and easy to guard.

But he couldn't find solitude, even now. He paused in the atrium beside a potted palm. He heard the murmur of voices, and the trill of the telephone. His house was, essentially, the muted, dignified campaign headquarters of a man who never lost. It was always like this, but tonight there were more people than usual.

His life was an entrance from one stage to another. He checked his reflection in a hall mirror, and only really registered what he saw after he had stepped away from the looking glass.

He was a handsome man, better looking than ever. He couldn't help it. He didn't, in a way, even think it had anything to do with him—not the real him, the actual, sentient being. At the age of forty-seven his hair was just beginning to darken, less the sunset-red of his younger days, an autumn brown untouched by gray.

The name on his birth certificate was Stephen Boyd Patterson. It was not clear why his parents had chosen the first name. He suspected some religious inclination had made his mother anchor her son to the first Christian martyr, the spelling old-fashioned. The middle name was easy to understand. William Boyd, movies' Hopalong Cassidy, had once loaned the married couple enough money to satisfy a collection service.

Patterson had a wrinkle above one eyebrow, and his mouth had a determined set to it. Otherwise, he was the virtually the same man, in appearance, who had stepped from a local newspaper column, offering advice on bed-wetting and premature ejaculation, to syndicated radio to television, the man who had turned the talk show format into a forum for what one television critic called the “hyping of American angst.”

What he needed was a neck massage from Loretta Lee. She was downstairs in her office, on the phone, no doubt.

He shook hands, asked if everyone was comfortable, and he knew that, as always, he made that golden impression on people. The living room was populated with CBS security advisers, two plainclothes detectives, and that striking, well-dressed blonde, Angie. She was the representative from the mayor's office, and was the power here.

He paused at a side mirror. And then he reentered the theater of his life, made sure everyone there had the various diet colas and flavored sparkling waters of their choice, and had Jeff, the man who could make every drink in the book, make him a predictable and hammer-simple martini, with a single olive, straight up.

The cocktail went down fast, and tasted clean, sharp. The attractive young lady from the mayor's office was at his side. He knew that she was going to run down the list of “everything we can do,” reassure him, confide in him how much she had liked a recent show.

Loretta Lee joked about this kind of thing, but she would be very pissed off if he actually did engage in a little corporeal dalliance with this city official. He was not at all surprised when the mayor's representative said, “I'll get rid of these people.”

“They're here to make sure I don't drop dead,” he said.

“You won't.”

Patterson thought that he'd like to be a little more certain about that. “The person who calls the radio station is male, right?”

“We think so.”

“You mean it might be a woman with a very deep voice. Or maybe it's a transsexual, halfway through hormone therapy—”

“Like one of the people you get on your show.”

“Why don't they do voice prints?” asked Patterson.

“They're working on it. But what if they do a print and it's no one anyone has ever heard of? Just a voice.”

“Just a voice that calls up and says it's going to kill me.”

“We think it's the same voice every time.”

“Isn't science wonderful. You narrowed it down that much.” There weren't really that many people here, it just seemed that way. Everyone was reluctant to go. They wanted to be with Red Patterson in his moment of danger, share his trials with him. It wasn't just professional duty. They wanted to be here if and when it happened.

It was almost a party, except for the tension. Someone knocked over a half-empty cola, and salted peanuts spilled from someone else's grasp. It didn't matter. The carpet was due to be cleaned tomorrow. Jeff made him another martini, and, when all the other visitors had departed, or at least retired to their squad cars and lookouts, Patterson offered the young woman a drink.

“Angie,” she said, telling him her name, as though he might have already forgotten. “No thanks.”

There was a courtesy involved even in such relationships, and Patterson had always stressed the importance of gentle behavior. He had always tried to be civilized in his relationship with women, even courtly. He was about to sip his drink, but stopped himself. “Angie Turner.”

She smiled. “I was watching your video on memory just the other day. You called your trouble with names your own personal mnemonic banana peel.”

“I have a theory about you,” said Patterson. “My theory is that you're trying to be seductive, but that you actually hate me and halfway think it would be a good idea if I was dead.”

She kept smiling. It shut her up for a moment, though.

He paused, eyeing the drink in his hand. “I don't have a private life,” he said. The way he put it made it sound like no problem at all. “All my fears, all my weaknesses, have been on the show at one time or another.”

“There's no reason why you should so much as look at me,” she said. Maybe her feelings had been hurt. He couldn't tell. Maybe he should apologize. “And, on the other hand, why should I want to go to bed with you?”

He was right—she thought that being slightly obnoxious made her more attractive. Maybe it did. “I'm tired,” he said. “I want to get away from all of this.” He stopped himself. He had not been prepared to be so honest.

She said, “You can, can't you? You can afford to do anything you want.”

“Anything.”

“I finished your book. I think anyone as smart as you are ought to be free to do anything he chooses.”

Patterson nearly laughed, but did not want to appear insulting. He knew that liberty was the one basic ingredient he most lacked at the moment. He did enjoy certain comforts, it was true. He did own some prize pieces of art. That was so important to him. The glorious Jackson Pollock, the de Kooning, even—and this was reason enough for security—an early van Gogh, from the period in which he was so heavily influenced by Japanese prints. And, the prize of the collection, on the far wall, the Curtis Newns, a vision of the San Diego Freeway the way few people ever saw such a highway, a study in freedom and desire.

He invited her to follow him to his private office. As she walked with him down the corridor, she said, “We think it's an organized group,” she said.