The Night Café. Taylor Smith
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swung a short wooden bat and the lad’s knee shattered like a teacup. Dorrie clamped her hands over her mouth as he crumpled, screaming, to the floor. Bert tried to drag himself over to help him and was rewarded with an equally vicious clout with the stick.
The leader bent down next to Bert, murmuring in a voice too quiet for Dorrie to hear. The old guard raised a shaking hand and pointed around the corner.
“Wait here,” the leader told one of the others. “If they move, shoot them.” He cocked a thumb at the other intruder and the two disappeared into the east wing.
Dorrie’s body shook like a thing possessed. The young security guards lay on the marble-tiled floor, crying and writhing with pain, his arms wrapped around his battered leg, while old Bert, face bloodied and swollen, glared at the thug standing guard over them.
Time seemed to stand still. Later, Dorrie couldn’t say how long it took until the other two thieves returned carrying the one item they had obviously come for—the van Gogh.
As the guidebook for Madness & the Masterpiece reminded visitors, Plato had called creativity “divine madness, a gift from the gods.” Psychobabble in the accompanying text discussed how great angst fed the vision needed to produce great art.
That “gift from the gods” was a mixed blessing, Dorrie had told her “goslings,” the chattering patrons who pattered along behind on her guided tours of the galleries. The celebrated artists represented in the show—Jackson Pollock, William Blake, Edvard Munch, Georgia O’Keeffe and a dozen or so others—had all suffered from severe, debilitating depression or other psychological disabilities. And Vincent van Gogh, of course. No exhibit linking art, anguish and madness could possible ignore the gaunt, ear-slashed Dutchman. Most of these artists, Dorrie told the goslings, had been institutionalized at some point in their lives. Several, like Vincent, had committed suicide.
It was Vincent’s The Night Café that was featured on posters and banners promoting the exhibit. The painting showed a nighttime scene in a harshly lit bar peopled by bereft-looking patrons who seemed to have nowhere else to go. Vincent had lived over the café during his time in the south of France, when his psyche finally began to unravel. Not long after creating this piece, he sliced off a piece of his ear and presented it to a prostitute.
The thieves’ leader wrapped the painting in a sheet now, knotting the corners. Then he turned to his men.
“Okay, we’re done here now. Finish them.”
Dorrie watched, horrified, as one of the men fired into the head of the old security guard. The explosion echoed through the marble halls and Bert crumpled in a pool of blood. The other intruder hesitated long enough for the boy to start scrabbling away, dragging his bloody leg across the floor. The leader snapped a command. Then, eyes flashing contempt, he grabbed the gun, strode over to the boy and took him out with a quick tap of the trigger.
Tears coursing down her cheeks, Dorrie watched the intruders stroll out toward the lobby. A moment later she heard the opening and closing of the stairwell door leading down to the parking lot.
Then there was only silence.
“People remember pain.”
Afterward, the police kept pressing Dorrie to remember more. Some tiny detail, they said, could be the key to bringing the security guards’ killer to justice. Try, they insisted. But Dorrie didn’t want to remember. She wanted to forget it, all of it.
Eventually she stopped answering their questions. Clammed up when the LAPD Robbery/Homicide detective in charge of the investigation pressed her for more details. Refused to speak to the gray-suited agents from the FBI’s art theft division who showed up at her door. Even snapped at the kindhearted elderly neighbor who stopped by her home to ask how she was doing.
God, how Dorrie wanted them all to just go away. She became detached and unapproachable. Her sister in Minneapolis said she stopped returning phone calls. Her L.A.-based niece left reluctantly on a business trip, determined to call in professional help if her aunt didn’t seem any better by the time she got back.
Except by then it was too late.
The manager at the local Vons supermarket down the road from the seniors complex where Dorrie lived said she started phoning in her meager food orders. The delivery boy said she left her payment in an envelope under the doormat and made him leave the bags on the threshold. The only time she scuttled outside was to snatch the mail when it started overflowing her curbside box. A neighbor who saw her out there one day reported that Dorrie’s tidy brown helmet of curls had grown lank, frizzled and gray at the roots. Her normally pin-neat clothes hung rumpled and loose on a frame that seemed to have turned spindly and frail overnight.
One day the postal carrier found bills and junk mail spilling out of her box. When he knocked on her front door, he hoped she’d simply forgotten to arrange a vacation hold, but the dread in his gut told a different story. When no one answered, instinct made him call the police.
It was the cops’ experienced noses that picked up the faint, sweet odor seeping from the cracks around the barred doors and windows. Hearts heavy, dreading what they knew they were going to find, they jimmied the locks, ripped the chain bolt from the wall and broke in.
Dorrie Schaeffer had been dead about a week. Sleeping pills, the medical examiner’s report said. She’d swallowed enough to euthanize a horse.
People remember pain…
Dorrie Schaeffer had remembered. And like Vincent, when the agony became too much to bear, she had put an end to her suffering.
One
Orange County, California
Sunday, April 16
Hannah Nicks, loser. Black sheep. She whose bizarre line of work is not really suitable dinner-table conversation.
The accusations ran on a loop through Hannah’s brain during these family get-togethers. How could anyone not feel inadequate faced with the perfection that was her sister Nora?
Sliding onto a tall stool, Hannah tucked her unruly dark hair behind her ears and helped herself to a homemade scone from the linen-lined basket on the kitchen island.
The island was a granite oasis in a sea of domestic perfection. Nora’s home in the upscale seafront community of Corona del Mar was right out of Architectural Digest. Her kitchen was a Tuscan-inspired designer’s vision of terra-cotta and honey tones, run through with a grapevine motif. Outside the mullioned French doors that covered the entire west side of the house, the view was of tented gazebo, patio and pool, the blue-gray Pacific Ocean beyond stretching to the horizon.
Selecting a jar from a carousel in front of her, Hannah spread preserves on the scone. She took a bite, then leaned back and sighed over the warm, flaky pastry. “Oh, Lord, these are bliss.”
Nora, standing on the other side of the island, looked over and smiled. “Those are the last of the raspberries the kids and I picked at the cottage last summer.” Her husband’s family had a three-thousand-square-foot post-and-beam house in Ogunquit, Maine, where the California Quinns spent part of each summer. It was a “cottage” like the Hope Diamond was a bauble.
Hannah’s travel destinations tended to be war zones, where accommodations were spartan, at best. Her own home, a condominium in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, was a replacement for the only house she’d ever owned—well, not owned, exactly, given the size of the mortgage, but it had been a real house, an old Craftsman bungalow in Los Feliz. Her ex had signed the property over to her in the divorce but sadly, before she got around to renovating the place, it had been blown up by Russian gangsters intent on her demise.
In addition to a condo and a broken marriage, Hannah was the proud possessor of a son she saw only intermittently and a bank balance that constantly hovered near the red zone. She, needless to say, was not the daughter their mom bragged about to the other white-haired ladies in her Tuesday-Thursday Aquasize classes. Nora, oldest child of immigrant parents, was the American Dream personified. For Hannah, a major