Belinda Page 45

  “No, she hasn’t contacted me,” I said in answer to a question I’d hardly heard. “No idea at all where she is,” I said to another. “Yes, she would, I can say that with absolute conviction, she approved of the paintings and she loved them.”

  I shut the door. Cynthia could always buy herself another magazine. I ignored the ringing and pounding and started in on the Time article. They had run full-color pictures of The Carousel Horse Trio and the one I secretly loved most of all, Belinda in the summer suit, standing with her back to the river titled simply Belinda, My Love.

  “Why would this man, who is a household word to millions, risk his reputation as a trusted and admired children’s artist for such an exhibit?” asked the writer. “No less unsettling than the frank eroticism of these paintings, each one faithfully rendered in a five-by-seven color photograph in the expensive exhibit catalog, is a narrative of ever-deepening madness as we see Belinda subjected to the artist’s bizarre fantasies—Belinda with Dolls, Belinda in Riding Clothes, Belinda on the Carousel Horse—before she is finally transformed into the most enticing of women, Belinda in Mother’s Bed—only to be victim of stunning violence in the carefully rendered Fight of Artist and Model in which the painter strikes his muse cruelly across the face, causing her to sink to the floor against a backdrop of stained and broken wallpaper. This is not merely a children’s author’s attempt to commit public suicide, it is not merely a tribute to a young woman’s beauty, it is a self-indicting chronicle of a lurid and conceivably tragic affair. To learn that Belinda Blanchard was in fact a teenage runaway when these pictures were painted, to learn that she is again missing, is to arouse speculation that is perhaps best pursued by law enforcement officials rather than artistic critics.”

  I closed the magazine. Dan was coming down the hall. He had a steaming cup of coffee in his hand.

  “That was Rhinegold on the phone, he said four guys from the SFPD just went through the exhibit.”

  “How does he know that’s what they were? Surely they didn’t show their badges to him—”

  “That’s exactly what they did. They didn’t want to stand in line like everybody else.”

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “Yeah, you can say that again,” he said, “and I’ve called in a criminal lawyer name of David Alexander and he’ll be here in two hours and I don’t want to hear another word on that score.” I shrugged. I gave him the Time article. “Does this say what I think it says?”

  I went to the private line in the kitchen and dialed Alex: “I want you to leave now. Go back to LA. This is too ugly already.”

  “The hell I will,” he said. “I was just talking to the girls at ‘Entertainment Tonight.’ I told them I’ve known you since you were a kid. Look, George and I will bring you some supper around six o’clock. Don’t try to go out. They’ll ruin your digestion. G.G. is down in the lobby talking to them, by the way. One of Marty’s lawyers came here personally this morning, but I’ll tell you something about G.G., he’s sweet, but he’s not dumb, no, not at all, he just slipped around that guy like a feather in a draft. You never saw such beautiful evasion. Hey, hold on. OK, that was this nice boy who’s been getting me cigarettes and things. He says he thinks the guys talking to G.G. down there are plainclothes policemen. My lawyer’s on the way up from LA to give G.G. a hand.”

  The phone rang almost as soon as I put it down. Dan answered, and all I heard was mumbling and yes and no for about ten minutes.

  The doorbell was ringing again. I went back to the curtains. Kids all over out there, some of them neighborhood teenagers I’d seen at the corner store or just walking around on Castro or Market. Couple of very wild punk types from the Cafe Flore a block away, one with pink hair, and the other with a mohawk. But no Belinda.

  I saw my neighbor Sheila wave as she went by. Then someone approached her. She was trying to make a clean getaway, but other people were asking her questions. She was shrugging, backing off, almost stumbled off the curb. Then she sprinted towards Castro Street.

  How would Belinda look if she tried to come to the door?

  I went back into the kitchen. Dan was off the phone.

  “Look, Uncle Daryl has just called the district attorney’s office personally,” he said. “The SFPD wants to talk to you and I’m trying to stall them till Alexander’s on the case. Uncle Daryl is on his way up from LA by plane, and Bonnie has just been checked into a hospital.”

  “I’ll talk to them anytime,” I said. “I don’t want a criminal lawyer, Dan, I told you that.”

  “I’m overruling you on that one,” he said patiently. “We’ll reconnoiter when Alexander gets here.”

  I went down the back steps and into the garage and had the car out and roaring up Seventeenth Street to Sanchez before the crowd on the street could make up its mind what was going on.

  When I got to the Clift, the police had just left. G.G. was sitting on the couch in the suite with his elbows on his knees. He looked tired and puzzled, pretty much the way he’d looked last night. Alex was in that gorgeous satin robe of his, pouring drinks for both of us and having room service send up some lunch.

  “I figured it this way,” G.G. said quietly. “I wasn’t under the oath, so it didn’t have to be the whole truth, just the truth, if you know what I mean. So I told them about her coming to New York and about my hiding her on Fire Island and the mean way those Hollywood men acted, but I never told them the things that she said. I told them about her leaving for San Francisco, and I told them how happy she was when she called with the news about you. I told them she loved the paintings. She really did.”

  He stopped, took a little of the wine Alex had given him, and then he said:

  “I’11 tell you what worries me, Jeremy, they kept asking about the last time I’d heard from her, they kept saying ‘Are you sure the call from New Orleans was the very last time?’ It was as if they had some fixed idea in their minds. Do you think they know something about her whereabouts that we don’t?”

  The crowd in front of the house was even bigger when I got back. I had to honk my way through the garage door. Then a couple of reporters came into the garage after me. I had to lead them out into the street and close the door and go up the front way, or they would have been all over the backyard.

  “Jeremy, is it true you found Belinda in a hippie pad on Page Street?” someone shouted. “Did you tell a San Francisco policeman that you were her father? .... Hey, Jeremy, have you seen Final Score yourself?.”

  I shut the front door.

  Dan came down the hall. He’d shaved and cleaned up, but the expression on his face unnerved me.

  “The police are really putting the pressure on,” he said. “Alexander is trying to stall them, but you’re going to have to talk to them sooner or later, and Alexander thinks that voluntarily is the best way to go.”

  I wondered suddenly if you could paint in prison. Idiot thought. How the hell was I going to protect her from all this if I was in prison? No, things just wouldn’t move that fast.

  When I came into the back office, Barbara handed me an open telegram. There was a pile of them in front of her, they’d been coming almost nonstop. The phone machine was recording the incoming voices at low volume. I think I heard someone whisper: “Pervert!” I took the telegram.

  “CONGRATULATIONS ON THE NEW SHOW. SAW CATALOG. STUNNING. WOULD BE THERE IF I COULD. ON WAY TO ROME TO GET INTERPOSITIVE OF FINAL SCORE. WILL CALL ON RETURN IF I CAN GET THROUGH. SUSAN JEREMIAH.”

  “Ah, beautiful,” I whispered. “That means she’s making more prints of the movie. When did this come?”

  “Probably yesterday,” Barbara said, “there’s fifty of them here. Twenty more were delivered this morning. I’m going through them as fast as I can.”

  “Well, they’re the best line of communication at this point,” I said, “so let the machine answer the phone while you check them out.”

  “Call the number this was phoned from,” Dan said. “It’s an LA number. Se
e if we can reach Jeremiah there later on.”

  “I’ve got other news for you,” Barbara said. “From Rhinegold. Hc was here while you were gone. A Fort Worth millionaire named Joe Travis Buckner is furious that the museums have first right to the paintings. He wants two paintings now. But the representative from the Dallas Museum has made the first solid and unequivocable offer: five hundred thou for Belinda with Dolls. Rhinegold has asked for two weeks in which to evaluate the offer. And oh yeah, this other guy,” she stopped to glance at her note pad, “this Count Solosky? Is that it? Solosky? Well, anyway he’s from Vienna, and he settled on four of the paintings, paid already. Do you know how much money that is? Rhinegold seems to think he’s as important as a museum or something. Pretty terrific, right?”

  She looked at me. And I knew I ought to say something, just to be polite to her, because she was so nice, and she was tired from working so hard. But I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I went into the kitchen and sat down in my usual chair.

  So Count Solosky had put his signature to the check. And he was only the collector Rhinegold had courted for three decades, the man he considered the premier art collector in the world today. And this right on top of the first sale of my work to any museum in America. It was “pretty terrific,” all right. At least it was to the guy I’d been six months ago on the Memorial weekend day that I met her at the ABA convention, the guy who said, “If I don’t go over the cliff, I’ll never be anything.” How she had smiled at that.

  Impossible to put it in focus for anyone else. Impossible to sharpen the focus myself. It was all at a great remove, like a landscape done by an impressionist: color, line, symmetry, all indistinct, having more to do with light than what was solid.

  “This isn’t going to help, you know,” Dan said.

  [4]

  THE police were due at nine thirty a.m. Tuesday morning. David Alexander arrived about two hours before that. He was a slender blond-haired man, perhaps fifty, rather delicate of build with ice-blue eyes behind gold-rimmed aviator glasses. He listened with his fingers together making a church steeple, and I vaguely remembered reading something about that particular mannerism, that it denoted feelings of superiority, but that didn’t mean much to me.

  I didn’t want to talk to him. I thought about Belinda, what she said about telling her whole story to Ollie Boon. But Alexander was my lawyer, and Dan insisted I tell him everything. OK. Set your emotions on the table like an envelope of canceled checks.

  The morning news was hellish. G.G. and Alex, who had come over for break fist, refused to watch it. They were having their coffee in the living room alone.

  Daryl in a somber charcoal gray suit had read a prepared statement last night to network reporters:

  “My sister, Bonnie, is in a state of collapse. The year of searching and worrying has finally taken its toll. As for the paintings on exhibit in San Francisco, we are talking about a deeply disturbed man and a serious police problem as well as a missing girl, a girl who is underage and may be herself disturbed. These paintings may well have been done without her consent, possibly without her knowledge, and certainly they were done without the consent of her only legal guardian, my sister, Bonnie Blanchard, who knew nothing about them at all.”

  Then “feminist and anti-pornography spokesperson” Cheryl Wheeler, a young New York attorney, had been interviewed regarding the obscenity of my work. She stated her views without ever raising her voice.

  “The exhibit is a rape, plain and simple. If Belinda Blanchard did live with Walker at all, which has not been established by the way, she is one of the increasing victims of child abuse in this country. The only thing we do know for certain at this moment is that her name and likeness have been ruthlessly exploited by Walker, perhaps without her knowledge.”

  “But if Belinda did approve the exhibit, if she consented, as Walker says—”

  “For a girl of sixteen there can be no question of consent to this kind of exploitation any more than there can be consent to sexual intercourse. Belinda Blanchard will be a minor till the age of eighteen.”

  But the network program had closed with a capper: kids in the town of Reading, Alabama, led by a local deejay in a public burning of my books.

  I’d watched that one in stunned amazement. Hadn’t seen anything like it since the sixties, when they burned the Beatle records because John Lennon had said the Beatles were more famous than Jesus. And then, of course, the Nazis had burned books all during the Second World War. I don’t know why it didn’t upset me. I don’t know why it seemed to be happening to someone else. All those books burning in the little plaza before the public library of Reading. Kids coming up and proudly dumping their books into the flames.

  David Alexander showed not the slightest reaction. Dan didn’t say, I told you so, for which I was more than grateful. He merely sat there making notes.

  Then the doorbell was ringing, and G.G. came in from the living room to say the police had just come in.

  These were two tall plainclothes gentlemen in dark suits and overcoats, and they made a very polite and nice fuss over Alex, saying they had seen all his movies and they’d seen him in “Champagne Flight,” too. Everyone laughed at that, even Alexander and Dan smiled good-naturedly, though I could see Dan was miserable.

  Then the older of the two men, Lieutenant Connery, asked Alex to sign an autograph for his wife. The other policeman was eyeing all the toys in the room as if he was inventorying them. He studied the dolls in particular, and then he picked up one of the dolls that was broken and he ran his. finger over the broken porcelain cheek.

  I invited them into the kitchen. Dan filled the coffee mugs for everybody. Connery said he’d rather talk to me alone without the two lawyers, but then Alexander smiled and shook his head and everybody laughed politely again.

  Connery was a heavyset man with a square face and white hair and gray eyes, nondescript except for a rather naturally appealing smile and pleasant voice. He had what we call in San Francisco a south of Market accent, which is similar to the Irish-German city street accents in Boston or New York. The other man sort of tided into the background as we started to talk.

  “Now you are speaking to me of your own free will, Jeremy,” said Connery, pushing the tape recorder towards me. I said yes. “And you know that you are not being charged with anything.” I said yes. “But that you might be charged at a later date. And that if we do decide to charge you, we will read you your rights.”

  “You don’t have to, I know my rights.”

  Alexander had his fingers together in a steeple again. Dan’s face was absolutely white.

  “You can tell us to leave any time you wish,” Connery assured me. I smiled. He reminded me of all the cops and firemen in my family back in New Orleans, all big men like this with the same kind of Spencer Tracy white hair.

  “Yes, I understand all of that, relax, Lieutenant,” I said. “This whole thing must look pretty weird from your point of view.”

  “Jeremy, why don’t you just answer the questions?” Dan said in a kind of cranky voice. He was having a terrible time with this. Alexander looked like a wax dummy.

  “Well, Jeremy, I’ll tell you,” Connery said, taking a pack of Raleighs out of his coat pocket. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you? Oh, thank you, you never know these days whether people will let you smoke. You’re supposed to go out on the back deck to smoke. I go to my favorite restaurant, I try to have my usual cigarette after dinner, they say no. Well, what concerns us more than anything right now, Jeremy, is finding Belinda Blanchard. So my first question, Jeremy, is do you know where she is?”

  “Absolutely not. No idea. She said in her letter to me in New Orleans that she was two thousand miles away from there and that could mean Europe or the West Coast or even New York. She was seventeen years old just about four weeks ago, by the way, on the seventh. And she had a great deal of money with her when she left and lots of nice clothes. If I knew where she was, I’d go to her, I’d ask her to
marry me because I love her and I think that’s what we should do right now.”

  “Do you think she would marry you, .Jeremy?”

  The words came with a strange evenness and slowness.

  “I don’t know. I hope so,” I said.

  “Why don’t you tell us the whole thing?”

  I thought for a moment about what G.G. had said, about them seeming to have some fixed idea about Belinda. And then I thought about all Dan’s advice.

  I started with meeting her, the big mess on Page Street, her coming home with me. Yes, the statement of the cop was correct, I did say she was my daughter. I wanted to help her. I brought her back here. But I didn’t know who she was, and one of the conditions was that I didn’t ask. I went on about the paintings. Three months we lived together. Everything peaceful ...

  “And then Bonnie came here,” Connery said simply. “She arrived at SF International in a private plane at eleven forty-five A.M. on September 10 and her daughter met her there, right?”

  I said I didn’t know that for certain. I explained how I’d found out who Belinda was from the tape of Final Score and all that. I described Bonnie’s coming here, and how we’d gone to the Hyatt and she’d asked me to lo0k after Belinda.

  “Tried to blackmail you, to be exact, didn’t she?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The statement of the limousine driver, who overheard her planning this with her daughter. The car was parked. He says that the glass was not all the way up between him and the backseat and he heard everything they said.”

  “Then you know it was all a sham. Besides, before I left the Hyatt, I had the pictures back.” But I felt relief all over. He knew the worst part. I didn’t have to tell him. And now for the first time I could explain with some degree of clear conscience why Belinda and I had fought.