He had to laugh. Yeah, right. The feeling was hopelessly counterfeit.
It didn't belong to him. Who are you trying to kid, he wondered.
Then Richard noticed something: It was an envelope, manila, on the closet shelf hidden behind shoeboxes. It struck him as odd, for nowhere else in Ruta Beth's strange little house was there a hidden treasure.
Feeling just a little daring, Richard snatched the envelope, saw that it was stamped "Kiowa County Prosecutor's Office, March 15, 1983.”
Now what the-He opened the flap and reached inside.
There were two of them, green with age, in frozen copper postures of the hunt. Bud pulled to the side of the road and looked up at the building and saw what it was: the Harry J. Phillips Fine Arts Society.
Bud paused for a second, as an intriguing thought whispered through his mind. He glanced at his watch. Had some time. He decided, what the hell.
He got out, reached behind the seat, and removed his briefcase. Setting his Stetson right, he climbed the low concrete steps, pausing for a second to look at one of the lions close up. All the power and glory of its musculature stood capured in the art; the piece was an homage to the power of the lion, and even Bud felt a little thrill at looking at it.
He went inside, where it was dark and had the feeling of a cathedral, hushed and almost religious. A uniformed guard watched him come.
“Closing time is five p.M.” sir,” the guard said.
Bud flashed his badge.
“Looking for the head man. Who’d that be and how'd I find him?”
“Dr. Dickstein. He's the curator. Admin offices, down on the left.”
“Thanks.”
Bud walked down the corridor. He looked at the paintings.
They made him feel insignificant. A few made no sense at all; others seemed like photographs of explosions.
Now and then one would throw up an image so arresting it stopped him in his boots. But in time, he made it to the office of the curator and stepped inside to find a young man in shirtsleeves and wire glasses sitting at a computer terminal.
He was one of those wiry boys, with great coils of hair, like electrified springs. He looked a little like Russ, Bud couldn't help thinking.
“Ah, excuse me.”
“Can I help you?”
Bud pulled his badge.
“Sergeant Bud Pewtie, Oklahoma Highway Patrol. I'm looking for Dr. Dickstein. He in there?”
“Er, no. I'm Dr. Dickstein. Dave Dickstein. Sergeant, what can I do for you?”
God, they were growing them young these days! Bud immediately felt he'd screwed up, not getting that the guy who ran such a place could be so young.
“Sir, I was hoping you could give us some help.”
“Well—” said the young man, some ambivalence leaking into his tone.
“You may have heard, we had three convicts break out of Mcalester State Penitentiary a couple of months ago. Now they've set to armed robbery and they killed four policemen and two citizens a few weeks back.”
“The TV's full of it.”
“Sir, it seems that one of them was an artist. He studied art back East in Baltimore.”
“Yes. I still don't—”
“Well, I have some of his drawings here. It turns out he likes to draw lions. Lions.”
The young man looked Bud over intently.
“Sir, I'm no art expert,” said Bud, "and the truth is I couldn't tell one joker artist from another. I can't even remember which one sawed off his ear. But I thought I might find an expert and have him look at the drawings. Maybe he'd see something I wouldn't. Maybe there's a meaning in them I just can't grasp. And somehow, maybe, I don't know, it would lead me another step of the way.”
“Well,” said Dr. Dickstein, "I did my Ph . on Renaissance nudes.
That doesn't have much to do with lions. But I'd be happy to look at them. Did you see our lions, by the way. Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir, I did. That's what brought me in here.”
“Replicas of the lions outside the Chicago Art Institute.
The lion has been a theme in romantic art for a thousand years. It usually represents male sexuality, particularly in the Romantic tradition.”
“These boys ain't so romantic.”
“No, I don't suppose they are,” Dr. Dickstein said.
Richard slid out the photograph. He stared at it with some incomprehension; its details were exact and knowable but they had been arranged into a pattern that made no sense at all. He saw a bedroom slipper, a bedroom, a bed, two sleeping forms, a nice nightdress, a bathrobe.
Then he realized that the room in the photograph was the room he was at that moment in. And that the bed was the bed that still lay between the two windows, which Ruta Beth and Lamar now so placidly shared. In fact, the photographer had been standing almost exactly where Richard now stood, except that he had been perhaps three or four feet closer to the foot of the bed than Richard now was.
Involuntarily, Richard took the steps over the hardwood floor until he stood in the exact spot. He looked at the bed, which was ever so neatly made, so tidy, with a white bedspread with little rows of red roses on it. He looked at the wall above the bed, white and blank and formless.
He looked back in the picture. It was the same, except that the two people in the bed weren't sleeping, they were dead. Someone had fired something heavy—even Richard knew enough to suspect a shotgun—into them as they slept.
The shells had destroyed their faces and skulls, and the inside of their heads, like fractured melons, lay open for all the world to see.
Jackson Pollock at his most amphetamine crazed had contaminated the walclass="underline" flung spray, spatter, gobbets of flesh, patches of skin, a whole death catalog of the contents of the human head displayed on that far wall, which was now so tidily cleaned up and repainted.
Richard felt woozy. Ruta Bern's parents, obviously; the tragedy she had so glumly and vaguely referred to in her letter was a murder.
Someone had broken in and blown Mother and Daddy away. Ruta Beth had probably discovered them like this; that explained her weirdness, her craziness, her strange devotion to a man like Lamar who, whatever else, "could protect her.
But… she stayed in the same house?
She slept in the same bed?
Richard shivered.
He looked back at the picture. Blood, blood everywhere, a carnivore's feast of blood, the triumph of the lion over its prey.
Something in him seemed to twitch or stir. He noticed that—good heavens!—he was getting an erection.
Quickly, he put the photograph back in the envelope and the envelope back where he had found it. He returned to his desk. The blood sang in his ears.
The lion. The lion.
His pencil flew across the page.
Bud opened his briefcase and spread the three drawings out on Dr. Dickstein's desk: the crude tracing he'd found among Lamar's prison effects, the drawing from the Stepfords, and the doodles on the place mat at the Denny's crime scene.
“He studied at a place called the Baltimore Institute. Is that good?”
“The Maryland Institute. It's a fine school,” said Dick stein.
“You know, this is very unusual. If you study the lives of artists, indeed you find violent and maladjusted men. But almost always their rage is directed at the self.
The ear, you know, Van Gogh, that sort of thing. It's rare that they express their hostility to the world at large. I suppose they're too narcissistic.”