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“True,” I said, and walked farther down the wall to find new animals mounted in the far corner. There was a black leopard head on the wall this time, and a skin that matched stretched up on the wall beside it. The paws were missing, but someone had done a good job of stretching out the skin so there wasn’t much shrinkage. It had been a big leopard, probably a male. It would have looked even more impressive if there hadn’t been a full-size tiger skin right beside it. Tigers are the largest land predator, not just the largest big cat. The huge striped skin made the rich black of the leopard look smaller than I knew it was, like Mutt and Jeff in fur. The tiger’s head was mounted on the other side of its skin.
Newman turned on a pole lamp in the far corner, and more animals sprang to “life.” There were monkey heads with impressive canines visible. There was a glass case full of brilliant birds that were unknown to me. In fact there were several cases of birds. Then, in the corner, was an elephant head with smaller ears than the ones on the full-body version across the room. The tiger had clued me in that this group of animals was from the Indian subcontinent, but the Asian elephant was the other clue. If I’d known more abo
ut the birds in that area of the world, or the monkeys, I’d have probably figured it out from those specimens. The first corner had felt like trophies, but this one had more of a scientific feel to it. I mean, what Great White Hunter collects birds? Apparently this one, because more than anything else in the room, this corner felt like one hand, one mind, had put it together. I wondered if this Marchand ancestor had done his own taxidermy. That might explain why it was just heads and skins for the bigger animals and full bodies for the birds. My understanding is the bigger the animal, the more challenging it is to stuff and mount.
There were a few primitive-looking weapons scattered among the heads, but they were more carefully placed, with the same eye for detail that had arranged the birds in lifelike poses behind glass. The other animals just looked dead—impressively preserved, but dead. The birds looked like they should have moved or had just stopped moving a moment before. I could recognize the art here.
Newman turned on two other floor lamps, and there were full-size family portraits that wouldn’t have fit in Muriel’s car. I assumed the paintings were of family, because though the people in them were attractive for the most part, they looked grim, except for a pair of young women in one painting and a couple with five small children plus the family dog in another. That one was the most natural and gave you a sense of an oil portrait rather than just an oil painting. There were four small spaces on the wall, all in a row, that were bare, but the frames had been there so long, the wall was a different color underneath, so that their loss stood out even on a wall full of art.
“They were here when I first toured the room,” Newman said.
“Do you really think that Muriel and her husband planned on blaming the police and emergency responders for the thefts?”
“I think they would have tried,” he said, turning on a smaller lamp that was on top of a full-size grand piano.
If we’d started with the piano, I would have been impressed, but after all the rest, I shrugged it off as no big deal, though the wood gleamed with years, maybe decades, of polish and care. There were more pictures on top of the piano, but these were photos. Some looked like women in nineteenth-century clothes. Others had men posing with what might have been some of the specimens in the room, but the animals were freshly killed and limp with death. The tiger’s head was propped up so it was looking at the camera. The black leopard that a mustached man had just caught was hung upside down like a fish. It looked so terribly dead. The man’s arm was in a sling, and there were bandages along one side of his face. It looked like the leopard had given him a run for his money and for both their lives. It made me strangely happy that the leopard had cut the man up before it died. I’d grown up hunting with my father, but we’d hunted deer and rabbits, never predators. He’d raised me with the belief that if you couldn’t eat it, you didn’t need to hunt it. I tried not to feel like I was on the leopard’s side as I looked at that long-ago man standing so upright beside the animal that he’d hung by its hind legs like a deer. I guess dead meat is dead meat, and certainly the animal had been beyond caring, but it seemed like an insult. The leopard had marked him, hunted the hunter. To me that made it a foe. You should respect your opponents even in death. Hanging them up like a big fish for a photo just felt wrong to me.
The pictures went through the centuries. A lot of the family was blond. There were a couple of redheads, then a brunette or two, but they were predominantly pale of hair, skin, and eye. I guessed if you kept marrying among your white-bread roots, that was what you ended up with, but it bothered me. Maybe I was letting my own personal issues interfere? Probably. I’d been dealing with my family more than normal because of the wedding planning. My stepmother, Judith, was as blond and blue-eyed as her daughter, as my father, and as their shared son, my half brother. I was the only dark, ethnic note in their German white bread, and Judith had never, ever let me forget it. She’d been so rude about it that by the time we were teenagers, Andrea, Judith’s daughter from her first marriage, had started correcting the racism in front of her mother and whomever she was talking to. Andrea and I had never really gotten along that well, so I’d been surprised that she’d come to my defense. In hindsight I wasn’t sure she’d been defending me as much as she was just embarrassed by her mother’s obvious white-supremacy leanings. Either way, it had left me with an ethnic chip on my shoulder that I never let Judith forget.
“Here’re Bobby and his parents,” Newman said, pointing.
There was a smiling couple with a baby and then a picture of them with a slightly older version of the baby. The next picture of the baby was with a man alone, just him and the baby.
“Is this Ray Marchand with baby Bobby?” I asked.
“Yes, those are the last of the older photos.”
Newman led me back to the office area. There was a smaller corner table between the file cabinets and the desk that I’d overlooked, too busy looking at the blood and mayhem. There were pictures of Ray with a progressively older boy. Bobby at somewhere between six and eight, holding up a bigmouth bass almost as big as he was, a huge grin showing that he was missing some of his baby teeth. Ray was helping him hold the fish, a look of pure happiness and pride on his face. There were pictures of them with skis someplace cold, and then there was a wedding photo: Ray Marchand with a statuesque woman so beautiful, she didn’t look real. From cheekbones to carefully waved hair, she was model perfect, movie-star gorgeous. Her hair was black, her skin the color of coffee with cream in it. Bobby stood beside her in a tiny tailored tuxedo complete with tails that looked to be a match to the one that Ray was wearing. His smile was flashing the same missing teeth as the fishing photo. He had a white cushion in his hands held loosely so that if the rings really had been on it, they’d have rolled away. I guess that’s why there’s a ribbon on ring bearer pillows. The easiest choice for Jean-Claude and my wedding party had been the ring bearer. There was a little girl clinging to the side of Ray’s pants leg. The girl was younger than Bobby, so maybe four or five? She looked like a tiny replica of her mother, except her black hair was a short mass of curls and her skin tone had less cream to it and more coffee. There were no other pictures from the wedding. Maybe Ray and his new bride had been as tired of the drama llamas in their lives as I was, and just said Screw it. We’ll have a flower girl and a ring bearer and be done. Of course, the flower girl position in our wedding had turned into a hotbed of drama, so maybe we’d just have a ring bearer and be done.
There were pictures of all four of them in the summer with a lake behind them, all smiling and happy. Ray was holding the little girl, and the woman had her hands on Bobby’s shoulders. Without any obvious makeup, the woman was still gorgeous, just less dramatic. Close-ups showed her eyes were a startling shade of green. The daughter’s eyes were a deep, rich brown, but except for that, she looked remarkably like her mother. The pictures jumped around in the years as if they’d been arranged more for ease of viewing than for chronology, or maybe favorites were in front. A picture of Ray with his wife entwined in a hug, both of them laughing, wasn’t a professional photo, but it had been blown up and placed in the center of it all. The family photo beside it was of the four of them in bathing suits still wet from the Caribbean blue sea that gleamed around them. The kids were teenagers in that photo, and both Ray and his wife were in great shape. They looked like a happy, healthy, outdoorsy, athletic family. There were pictures of the two children growing up—Christmases, Easters, school track meets with them both winning ribbons, Bobby in football gear with his teammates holding a trophy. It took me a few minutes to realize one of the cheerleaders in the shot was the daughter. Then there was a photo of Ray and the girl jogging with a leopard bounding alongside them like a dog. Another picture had the girl lying back with her head against the leopard’s side, its head turned so that his furred cheek was against her black curls. The leopard had bright yellow eyes. The photos of just Ray and the children seemed not to care if Bobby was in human form or animal. I’d never seen any family treat someone’s beast form so casually. I liked that a lot, but I also liked that there were almost no professionally posed shots in the entire collection of photos. Maybe professionals had taken some of them, but they were remarkably candid looking, moments of people’s lives frozen and happy. They seemed more like real memories than the stiff family photos that marched up the wall by the stairs in my father’s house. It made me think about the photos that Jean-Claude wanted for the wedding. Was there such a thing as unposed, natural-looking professional photos?
“They looked happy,” I said, at last realizing I’d probably looked at the photos longer than I would have at most crime scenes. “Do you know what happened to the wife?”
“Her name was Angela Warren.”
I frowned. “Why does that name sound familiar?”
“I’m surprised you didn’t recognize her in the wedding photo,” he said.
“Did you?” I asked.
He looked almost embarrassed. “One of my favorite movies as a kid was her one and only starring role in an action flick.”
“Oh, yeah, The Model and the Spy or something like that.”
“Model Spy,” Newman said.
“Why was it her one and only starring role?” I asked.
“It became a cult favorite, but when it was first released, apparently it didn’t make that much money.”
I studied the wedding photo again; she wore more makeup in that one than in any of the other photos. “I should have at least thought I knew her from somewhere.”
“You weren’t a little boy, so the fact that she got the cover of the swimsuit issue twice probably escaped you,” he said.
I smiled. “Didn’t she put out an album while she was a model?”
“She did, and she wrote all the songs on it, plus an extra song that she wrote for her boyfriend at the time, Tucker B.”
