But why was this vision so flat and colorless? Maybe just because of the grayed winter light, and the stained plaster on which the scene was projected. Or maybe she was still rundown; she surely shouldn’t be depressed by a future in which she would be accepted, loved, and surrounded by intelligent, affectionate women who admired what she had done.
“Sorry about this place,” Leonard Zimmern said twenty minutes later, sliding a plastic tray the color of curdled mushroom soup onto a table in a kosher cafeteria. “The thing is, it’s the only restaurant near my office that’s not choked with tinsel and artificial holly this time of year.” He gave Polly a narrow glance and added: “I’m not going all Orthodox suddenly, don’t get any ideas. But the older I get, the more all this Christmas crap irritates me. Hope you don’t mind.”
“No, it’s okay,” Polly said, setting her coffee and bagel with cream cheese on the damp tabletop.
Lennie sat, and stirred his coffee. “So, you went to Key West and found Hugh Cameron,” he remarked.
“Yes,” she agreed.
“And I hear that’s not all you found.” Lennie smiled. “Jacky Herbert tells me you saw two of Laura’s paintings there. Including the big one from her last show that he thought was lost.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Cameron has them.”
“Really.”
Polly gave Lennie a look of ill-suppressed irritation. It was just like him not to show any surprise at her discovery — let alone enthusiasm or gratitude.
“I understand Herbert would like to get those paintings back for his exhibition.” He smiled narrowly and raised heavy black eyebrows threaded with gray.
“Mh.” Polly did not smile. The discovery of Lorin’s lost canvases was her greatest achievement so far; she wanted them in the new show, so that everyone could see and admire them; she wanted them photographed for her book. Yes, fine. But after that what would happen? Jacky wouldn’t give them back to Mac if he could help it; they would be sold to collectors who’d never known Lorin. But, as Jeanne had said, that was none of her business.
“Herbert suggested that we should all go together to his lawyer,” Lennie said. “He wants to send Cameron a letter demanding that he ship us the paintings, unless he can produce written proof that he owns them.”
“Mh,” Polly agreed uneasily. She knew all this; only yesterday Jacky had urged her to persuade Lennie to take such action as soon as possible.
“So you think that’s what we should do?”
“I suppose so,” she said, trying to speak positively, reminding herself that legally the paintings belonged to Lennie; that their recovery would be morally justified and professionally advantageous to her.
“I don’t care all that much for the idea of a lawsuit, you know. I always think of Bleak House.”
“Mmh.” Polly had never read Bleak House but was damned if she was going to admit it. Of course Lennie would go to a lawyer in the end, she told herself; he wouldn’t want to let two paintings worth at least twenty thousand each get away. But first, just for the fun of it, he was going to give her a hard time. He was teasing her now, as he had teased his sister years before. “Excuse me, I forgot the milk.”
The trouble is, she told herself as she picked her way between the crowded tables, I don’t like the idea of a lawsuit either. I don’t want to help take those paintings away from Mac. It’s against my own interests and maybe even illegal, she thought, holding her mug under the metal spigot, but I don’t want to be part of that.
“Hey, watch it,” a voice next to her cautioned. Polly looked down; her mug had overflowed and a puddle of milk was slopped around it.
“Sorry.” But Mac said Lorin had given him the paintings, she thought, releasing the lever. And even if she didn’t, they mean something to him; doesn’t that give him a sort of right to them?
“About those two canvases,” she said to Lennie, setting down her mug, now mostly lukewarm milk. “The problem is, they actually belong to Hugh Cameron.”
“Really?” This time he raised only one of his theatrical eyebrows.
“Your sister gave them to him, you see.”
“Yes? And what’s the proof of that?” he asked skeptically and hatefully.
Polly clenched her jaw. “It’s written on the back of both of the canvases,” she heard herself lie. “ ‘For Hugh with love from Lorin.’ I hadn’t seen it when I phoned Jacky,” she improvised.
“Really,” Lennie said for the third time, now with a descending intonation, drawing his eyebrows together. “I wonder who wrote it.”
“That’s why Cameron didn’t mention them to you when you were there, I guess,” she plunged on, appalled at what she had done, but trying to speak casually.
“It could have been.” Lennie shrugged. “It could have been anything. He was half out of his wits at the time, in my estimation.” He rotated his coffee mug. “Well. I can’t say I’m totally unhappy about it. I have enough trouble with the paintings of Lorin’s I’ve got now: the insurance and storage fees are ridiculous. And then, ever since that damned show of yours, some museum or other is always after me to lend them something.” He laughed slightly. “I’m certainly not going to get embroiled in a legal squabble. Let Cameron keep those paintings if he wants to.”
Well, you’ve done it now, Polly thought, shocked at herself. “I thought you didn’t like Hugh Cameron,” she said at random, recalling that Lennie had earlier described him — it was in her notes — as “a typical faux-naïf clinging to the role of artist and the role of child long after that was even faintly plausible.”
“I’m in no hurry to spend time with him, let’s put it that way. But I’ve no quarrel with Cameron; he put up with my sister a lot longer than most people would have, and he didn’t cheat on her the way Garrett did, as far as I know.”
“You’ve heard about that?” Polly asked.
“Uh-huh.” Lennie shrugged. “Most people who knew them have, I imagine.”
“Garrett was in love with her, though,” Polly said. “I think he still is, in a way.”
“Yes,” Lennie said savagely. “Lolly had that effect on men. From her earliest years.” He took an angry bite of sandwich that left yellow shreds hanging from his mustache and made him look suddenly carnivorous.
“Lolly; that was your sister’s nickname as a child.”
“Mm-hm.” He sucked in the rags of fried egg and wiped his mouth neatly; his expression was in neutral again.
“Do you happen to know how she got it?”
“I’m not sure, really. Probably it was short for what my father used to call her when she was a baby: Lollypop.” He took a sip of coffee. “So what else did you learn from Hugh Cameron?”
Polly glanced rapidly at Lennie, then away. Ridiculous to imagine that he knew what had happened in Key West. It was only his suspicious, probing professorial manner, developed no doubt over decades of intimidating students, that had caused her sensation of panic, her visible flush. She counterattacked:
“I learned several things you didn’t tell me. Or maybe you didn’t know them.”
“Really. Such as?”
“I found out how Lorin died, for instance.”
Lennie made no comment; he sat with the coarse white mug halfway to his thin, finely cut lips, waiting.
“She got a chill from swimming in the ocean for too long, when the water was still cold. And then she didn’t go to the doctor until it was too late.”
“Yes. Cameron told me that,” Lennie said on a harsh, falling note. “I wasn’t too surprised,” he added.
“You weren’t surprised by what?”
“The whole thing. Lorin was always attracted by water. And she was strange about doctors and hospitals, even as a kid. She didn’t like to have anyone poking about in her body. Or her mind, if it comes to that.”