False hope, even after three years. I cleared my throat before I said, “Did you bring a photo of your ex-wife, Mr. Erskine?”
“Yes. I brought several.” He took an envelope from his coat pocket, slid it across my desk. “Keep whichever ones you like. I have the negatives.”
There were a dozen or so photographs, a mix of professional studio shots and candid snaps, all in color. Most were head-and-shoulders and full-body poses of a woman alone. One was of her cradling an infant in her arms — the boy Tommy, I supposed. Two others were relative close-ups of oil paintings, one hanging on a wall, the other propped on an easel.
Janice Erskine had been in her mid to late twenties when the photos were taken. She was an ash blonde, slender, narrow-hipped. Eyes green or maybe hazel. Strikingly attractive, though her nose was too flat and her ears too large for the Vogue model and movie star kind of beauty. Her mouth was her best feature: wide, well shaped, so that her smile was fairly dazzling. There were no signs of the ravages of drug abuse in any of the pictures; they’d probably been taken early in their marriage.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Erskine said with that near-reverence in his voice. “Back then she was the most stunningly beautiful woman I’d ever seen.”
I said “Yes” and let it go at that. “I take it those are her paintings in the other two snaps?”
He nodded. “I suppose it’s a small hope that she has started painting and displaying her work again. No one in Santa Fe has heard any more of her since she left. But I didn’t want to overlook any possibility.”
I studied the two snaps. He’d said that her style and vision were unique; I don’t know much about art, but even I could see that it hadn’t been just pride talking. Both paintings — one of an old church stark against a sky full of thunder-heads, the other of an age-wrinkled Native American seated on a bench — were so realistic and finely detailed that they approximated photographs. There was no color in either; they were done in primary black, white, and silver, without shading of any kind. The effect was impressive, made even more so by clearly defined lines and angles and the minute detailing.
“Is all of her work like this?” I asked. “No color and no shading?”
“Yes. Janice saw all her subjects in terms of black and white. She said color spoiled the true essence of objects and people. Remarkably talented, wasn’t she?”
I agreed that she was.
He said, “Such a shame, a waste to have thrown it all away,” which was exactly what I was thinking.
“Is there anything else you can tell me, Mr. Erskine, that might help me find her? Did she have any hobbies, for instance?”
“No, no hobbies. Art was her only real interest.”
“Places she frequented, special events she attended?”
“None that weren’t art-related.”
“Did she have a favorite charity? Do any charity work?”
“Museum and gallery fund-raisers. And early in our marriage, she helped organize a Cancer Society benefit.”
“Was she politically active?”
“No. Apolitical.”
“Did she ever live in California? Spend much time here?”
“I don’t think so. She was born in Chicago, grew up there, and moved to Santa Fe when she was nineteen. It was the art scene that drew her.”
“Any visits to this area, with or without you?”
“Not before her fall from grace,” Erskine said. “At least none I ever found out about.”
Fall from grace. Odd phrasing. But he seemed unaware of it; his pained eyes had a squeezed, remote look, as if he were seeing or trying to see something deep in the past. So I let the remark ride, waited until his gaze cleared and focused on me again.
“Did she know anyone, even a casual acquaintance, who lived in northern California?”
“No, no one I know of.”
“Are either or both of her parents still living?”
“Both dead more than ten years now.”
“Other relatives?”
“None. Janice was an only child.”
“What was her maiden name?”
“Durian. D-u-r-i-a-n.”
“Did she start using it again when you filed for divorce? Or was she still going by Erskine when she disappeared?”
He sighed. “Durian,” he said, as if the fact distressed him.
“She may or may not still be using it. Depends on what she’s doing now, whether she’s in fact clean again and how much connection she still feels to her past. The postcard would seem to be a positive sign. Then again, it could’ve been no more than a momentary attack of conscience.”
“I’m afraid that’s all it was,” he said. “If she were thinking of coming back to us, or making amends in some way, I’d have heard from her directly by now. Too much time has gone by... the only way is for me to go to her.”
“And if a meeting should happen? What do you think her reaction will be?”
“Reaction? To me?”
“To the news about your son.”
“She’ll come back then. She has to.”
“Her maternal feelings can’t be particularly strong,” I said, “or she’d have made some effort to see the boy by now. Did she want a child in the first place?”
That seemed to stir him to the edge of anger. “Of course she wanted him. We both wanted a child, our own child.”
“And yet she was an unfit mother—”
“I didn’t say that. I said she neglected Tommy. That isn’t the same thing at all. It was the drugs. She wasn’t herself, she wasn’t the same person who... It was the goddamn drugs!”
“Easy, Mr. Erskine. I’m on your side here.”
He stared at me blankly for a few seconds. Then he seemed to shake himself; rubbed a hand over his face as if wiping away the sudden irritation. “I’m sorry,” he said, “it’s just that the way I feel about her, even now...”
“You don’t need to apologize or explain. I understand.”
“Do you? I hope you do.”
“How long are you planning to stay in San Francisco?”
“How long? Until you find Janice.”
“That could take some time, and it might not happen at all. Frankly, given the circumstances of her disappearance, the time factor, and the lack of any definite leads, the odds are against it.”
“You’ll find her,” he said. “You have to.”
“Why wait around while I try? Don’t you want to be with your son?”
“Of course I do. But he’s in the hospital, he has the best of care, there’s nothing I can do...” Erskine broke off, scrubbed his face again. “You’re right. I know you’re right. I should go back to Santa Fe, and I will. But not just yet. A day or two... I’m at the St. Francis. You can reach me there any time, day or night.”
I didn’t argue with him; it wasn’t my place to tell anybody how to deal with the tragedies in their lives. I had him sign one of the standard agency contract forms, accepted a five-hundred-dollar retainer — he insisted on paying with hundred-dollar traveler’s checks — and told him I’d get to work right away. When he left, his shoulders were a little rounded and there was sweat on his neck that hadn’t been there before he opened himself up to me.
After he was gone, Tamara said, “Told you you’d take the job.”
“Yeah. You should’ve told me about his son, too.”
“Better you heard it from him, wasn’t it?”
“Wrong, Ms. Corbin. I don’t like being blindsided, emotionally or any other way. From now on I want any and all details up front.”
“Okay.” She asked then, “What’d you think of the man? Kind of strange, if you ask me.”
“Strange? How so?”
“Seems to care more about his ex-wife, woman who hurt him bad, woman he hasn’t seen in three years, than about his dying kid.”