J is for Judgment (Kinsey Millhone 10)

“Probably. It’s one of those big unsolved mysteries that capture the public imagination. An alleged suicide, but there’s been a lot of speculation since.”

Rupert studied the pictures. I could see his eyes trace the contours of Wendell’s face, hairline, the distance between his eyes. He brought the picture up close to his face, angling it toward the window where the light was streaming in. “How tall?”

“About six four. Weight maybe two thirty. He’s in his late fifties, but he’s in good shape. I saw him in a bathing suit.” I wiggled my eyebrows. “Not bad.”

Rupert moved over to the copier and ran off two copies of the photograph on what looked like rough-textured beige watercolor paper. He dragged a stool over to the window. “Grab a seat,” he said, nodding toward a cluster of unpainted wooden stools.

I hauled one over to the window and perched beside him, watching while he sorted through his drawing pens and pulled four from the jar. He leaned forward and opened a drawer, taking out a box of Prisma color pencils and a box of pastel chalks. He had an air of distraction, and the questions he began to ask me seemed almost ritualistic, his way of preparing for the task at hand. He secured a copy of the photograph to a board with a clip at the top. “Let’s start at the top. How’s his hair these days?”

“White. It used to be medium brown. It’s thinner at the temples than in the photograph.”

Rupert picked up the white pencil and masked out the dark hair. The immediate effect was to make Wendell seem twenty years older and very tanned.

I found myself smiling. “Pretty good,” I said. “I think he’s had his nose trimmed down. Here at the bridge and maybe some shaved along here.” Where my finger touched the nubby paper, Rupert would shade and contour with fine strokes of chalk or pencil, both of which he wielded with an air of confidence. The nose on the paper became narrow and aristocratic.

Rupert began to chat idly while he worked. “It’s always amazed me how many variations can be wrung from the basic components of the human face. Given that most of us come equipped with the standard-issue features …one nose, one mouth, two eyes, two ears. We not only look entirely different from one another, but we can usually identify each other on sight. Do portraits like I do, and you really begin to appreciate the subtleties of the process.” Rupert’s unhesitating pencil strokes were adding years and weight, transforming a six-year-old image to its current-day counterpart. He paused, indicating the eye socket. “What about the fold in here? Has he had his eyes done?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Droopiness? Bags? Five years would etch in a few lines, I should think.”

“Maybe some, but not a lot. His cheeks seemed more sunken. Almost gaunt,” I said.

He worked for a moment. “How about this?”

I studied the drawing. “That’s pretty close.”

By the time he was finished I was looking at a reasonable facsimile of the man I’d seen. “I think you got it. He looks good.” I watched as he sprayed the paper with a fixative.

“I’ll run off a dozen copies and get them over to Lieutenant Whiteside,” he said. “You want some yourself? I can run you a dozen.”

“That’d be great.”

7

I had a quick bowl of soup with Henry and then downed half a pot of coffee, managing in the process to offset my lethargy and kick into high gear again. It was time to make contact with some of the principals in the cast. At 7:00 I drove south along the coastline toward Perdido/Olvidado. It wouldn’t be dark for another hour yet, but the light was fading, the air saturated with an ashen wash of twilight. Billows of fog blowing in from the ocean concealed all but the most obvious aspects of the land. Steep hills, pleated with erosion, rose up on my left, while to the right, the heaving gray Pacific was pounding against the shore. The quarter moon was becoming visible in the thick haze of the sky, a pale crescent of light barely discernible in the mist. Along the horizon, the offshore oil platforms lay at anchor like a twinkling armada. The island of St. Michael, and two that are known as the Rose and the Cross, are threaded like beads along the Cross Islands Fault, the entire east-west structural zone undercut by parallel cracks. The Santa Ynez Fault, the North Channel Slope Fault, Pitas Point, Oak Ridge, the San Cayetano, and the San Jacinto faults branch off like tributaries from the granddaddy of them all—the great San Andreas Fault, which cuts obliquely across the Transverse Range. From the air, the San Andreas Fault forms an ominous ridge, running for miles, like the track left by a giant mole tunneling underground.