She said in an unhappy monotone, “Did you get my name from the police?”
Prescott said, “No, from an art gallery. Do the police know you?”
“Come to my studio and we’ll talk.”
“Now?”
“Four o’clock. I’m working now.”
Prescott took a cab to the address she gave him, stepped out onto the street, and looked up. It was a brick building that had at some point had some business purpose, but the upper windows were too big for a business, and the frames were too new and expensive to have been from that era. He went into the man-sized door set into the larger garage door, and found himself facing a freight elevator. He stepped into it and pressed the UP button. The elevator rose two stories and stopped at a steel door with a big face on it that looked like a photograph. Prescott looked more closely. The face was an extremely realistic painted portrait of a grandfatherly man with a beard and glasses, crinkle lines at the corners of his wise old eyes, and an expression of mild puzzlement. He seemed to Prescott to be saying, “What do you want here—it wouldn’t be something that isn’t so good for you, would it?”
The thin woman who opened the door looked about forty. She wore jeans, a sweatshirt, and a pair of sneakers. Her hair had been chestnut brown, but it had been allowed to gray, so there were bright silver streaks in the tightly tied ponytail. Her face had no makeup and it had a bare look as though it had just been scrubbed. She gave a perfunctory half smile as she looked at him sharply. “Mr. Prescott?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Come in.”
He entered and looked at the loft. The high windows and skylight above threw a bright, even light everywhere, bouncing off the white walls to leave no shadows. There was a huge space to his right occupied by several easels, a big workbench cluttered with tubes of paint, brushes soaking in coffee cans, and assorted palette knives and rags. There was a second bench with a vise, a miter box, a table saw, a few tools.
She led him past that area, through what looked like a living room set on display in a department store. The furniture was modern, simple in its lines, and upholstered in a coarse black fabric. There he could see that a set of stairs led above to a wide balcony with another steel door that was open. Through it, he could see part of a carpeted hallway that seemed to have at least four doorways leading off it, and at the end, a big room with a vaulted ceiling, bookcases and furniture, and a huge window with green things growing on a balcony beyond.
He gravitated to the walls, where finished portraits hung. From a distance, they were different enough from one another to be the work of several painters, but as he drew nearer, subtle similarities appeared. It was not a similarity of feature, but of eye: the artist’s interest in the curve of a young girl’s cheekbone, the mottled texture of an old woman’s skin, somehow the same interest expressed with the same intensity. This was a calm, unhurried treatment, with no flattering smoothing over of features, but the effect was more than flattering. The precise rendering was a fascinated elucidation of the creature who was being recorded and preserved. Cara Lee Satterfield stood a dozen feet behind him, waiting patiently while he looked. He reluctantly relinquished his gaze at a picture of a young woman with shiny blond hair. He was not sure how he could tell, but the woman was proud of the hair, thinking about it at the moment of the portrait. “You’re the best I’ve seen alive,” he said without a smile.
“Thank you,” she said.
“It’s not exactly a compliment, it’s more on the order of a congratulation,” he said. “A waste of breath too, because you know it.”
She looked at him, puzzled, but did not deny it. “I don’t think that’s a compliment either.”
“Nope,” he said. “It’s not. People have what they have. When what they have is something special, you can always tell they’ve had to work very hard for it. If it’s this special, they’ve gone more distance than anybody can go just by working.”
“That sounded positive rather than negative, so I’ll thank you,” she said. “Tell me about your commission.”
“It’s what I said on the telephone,” Prescott answered. “I want a picture of a man I describe to you.”
“Who is he?”
“My business is finding people who have done bad things,” he said.
“I didn’t ask about business,” she said testily. “I asked about him.”
“He’s a young guy, late twenties, probably. He gets paid to kill people. I’ve seen him, watched him for a couple of hours before I knew who he was. Now his image is in my mind, and I want you to put it into a picture.”
“If you found your way here, someone must have told you about me. You must know that I’m always pretty busy,” she said. “What made you think I would do it?”
Prescott said, “I asked people who was the best, not who needed the commission.” He added carefully, “I checked with galleries to find out what they get for your work. Of course I would expect to pay much more for—”
“I don’t want to talk about money just yet.” She stared at Prescott’s eyes. “You can see him, still?”
“Yes.”
“Have you talked to him?”
“Yes,” he said. “A few times. I’ve been doing pretty well at getting to know him.”
She kept her gaze on him, unblinking, but she was no longer focused on his eyes. “All right. We’ll start it and settle the price later, when I decide what it is.”
“When?”
She seemed to think the question was beneath answering. She sat down on a couch, pulled her feet under her, picked up a sketch pad and pencil from the end table, and began to work as she spoke. “Let’s start with general outline, simplest stuff. You talk, I’ll listen.”
Prescott sat in the armchair facing her. “His hair is straight, dark brown. His forehead is high and narrow, but shaped, so you can tell there’s a very slight ridge where the eyebrows are that disappears as you move in above the nose. His chin has no cleft, but it comes out a little in a slight horizontal oval, the way some chins with clefts do. The nose is thin and narrow, but the nostrils have a slight flare to them.” She was sketching furiously as he spoke, and he could tell that his curiosity was going to make this experience miserable. He added, “His ears are small, kind of rounded, and close to his head.”
“Eyes big or small?”
“Average, and not particularly close-set, either.”
“Tell me about his mouth.”
“It’s narrow, with the lower lip a little bit thicker than the upper—not red or overly full, or strange.”
“How about this part of his face, right here?” She put one hand across her face just above her mouth to touch both cheekbones at once lightly, with thumb and forefinger.
“Only slightly wider than the rest of the face, tapering gradually to the chin.”
She worked in silence for a few minutes while Prescott began to feel the curiosity tormenting him again. Then she stood up, spun the pad around, and stuck the pencil in his hand. “Here. Fix the lines where they’re wrong.”
He looked at the picture in surprise. “Me? I’ll ruin it.”
“So ruin it. This is just a preliminary step to get the shapes and sizes of things right. Study your memory and make marks. Too wide, too narrow? Eyes too big, whatever.” She tossed a gum eraser onto the pad in his lap. “Take your time.”
He was disconcerted. The drawing already looked enough like the man to be almost recognizable. He closed his eyes and brought back the image, watched the man sitting behind the console in the lighted lobby, his face unconcerned, at ease while he waited to kill his companion. Prescott began to make lines, faint and tentative at first, then more sure and bold when he saw that the lines made the resemblance clearer.