Blind side

5

It took me a while to clean things up.

The night I killed Kim, I drove down to Mai's house in Galisteo, then phoned my room at the motel. Grace picked up. I told her I'd executed Kim, was going to give the money to Mai, and that if she ever bothered me or Frank's family again, I'd kill her too. Then I ordered her out of Santa Fe. There was a pause after I said all that, as if she was thinking out a reply. But she didn't say anything, just breathed into the phone for a while. Then she hung up. Which was just as well, I thought.

The following morning Frank's body was found. The police speculated he'd been shot by a robber. There were no fingerprints or clues of any kind. Anyone with information was urged to contact the authorities.

Two days later there was an article in the Santa Fe Register, a small item near the bottom of the second page. The well-known New York architect Arnold Darling had checked into the Rancho Encantado several days before. His luggage and clothes were still in his casita, but he had disappeared. Again: anyone with knowledge, etc.

Darling's disappearance was worth a mention, but things like that had happened before. It seemed that people often choose New Mexico as a jumping-off point when they decide to disappear or change their lives.

After Frank's burial, I stayed on with Mai for several weeks. She was a strong woman even in her mourning. Every day she went out to her studio behind the house, put on her welder's mask and worked on her sculpture.

Jude and the girls took Frank's death hard, so I spent a t of time with them.

Two weeks after the killings I bought a sturdy shovel and a pair of rubber gloves. Then I drove back out to that rotting movie set.

Kim's and Darling's faces had been pretty much pecked away, but the bodies lay just where I had left them. I put on the gloves, tied on a bandanna to cover my nose, then stripped the clothes and jewelry off them both. I dug a pit and buried them together. Then I burned their clothes, and scrubbed out the rental car just in case any of Darling's blood had gotten on the seats.

When I thought it was about time to go back to New York, I had Mai drive me out there again to pick up the Volvo. I followed her back, and, when we got to the house, I presented her with Darling's money.

I had counted it, of course, and was surprised to find there was only a hundred thousand dollars in the attache case. Evidently Darling had thought he could bargain us down to 10 percent. He had no idea of the kind of vipers he was dealing with.

At first, when I told Mai it was Frank's share of our venture, she was hesitant about accepting it. She still refused when I told her it was "reparations," but she finally accepted when I persuaded her that she had to ensure the children's educations.

A week after I got back to New York, Sal Scotto came by my loft. We talked for a while. He told me he and Ramos were about to give up on the Cheryl Devereux case.

"Funny thing," he said, "this Mrs. Z you sent us to-evening of the day we talked to her, her place caught fire with her inside. Fire investigators think it was arson. My guess is it was self-immolation.

She had some kind of weird cult thing going down there. Must have been what the killings were about."

"What about the Duquaynes?" I asked.

"Did you ever talk to them?"

"Tried, but they wouldn't talk. Had these fancy lawyers warn us off. If we'd had something on them we would have hauled them in. But all we had was your hearsay."

So-all the killings explained themselves, and none appeared to be connected. Rakoubian "jumped" and Mrs. Z "self-immolated," and Darling "disappeared" in New Mexico. Frank Cordero was killed by "a party unknown," and as for an obscure actress named "Kimberly Yates," no one missed her, because no one knew who she really was.

"I'll tell you something," Scotto said to me.

"The first time we met I told Dave Ramos afterwards: 'This guy's in over his head." I think I was right. Except you got out clean." He looked hard at me.

"Least you say you did…,. "

He asked me if I'd be willing to swear out an affidavit stating everything I knew about the case. I told him I didn't much feel like swearing out anything, at least not until I consulted with a lawyer.

"Figures." He nodded. "I always knew you knew more than you told me.

Wanna know my opinion, I think you were up to your ears in it. Maybe even a member of the cult. But like I said, you seem to have got out clean." He looked hard at me. "Funny. You're different now. Can't quite put my finger on how. Like you're more clearheaded. Focused, directed. Like you know what you want out of life. You were pretty weird before."

"Hey, Sal-I told you everything."

"Forget it, Geoffrey. Nobody gives a shit. Cheryl Devereux, a.k.a.

Shadow, victim of a torture slaying-little splash in the media that's all that was. I can't even find anyone who's heard of this Sonya you told me about. Girls like that, they disappear all the time. Which doesn't mean I'm giving up. Figure they'll pull Dave off in a couple of weeks. But not me. I'll ask to stay on it for a while. I need the free time. Some personal stuff I've been wanting to do. Being a lone detective on a dead-end case like that-you can spend your time pretty much the way you want."

So Sal and I made an agreement-I wouldn't tell anyone he was goofing off, and he'd keep his suspicions of me to himself. It worked out pretty well for both of us.

Gave me the peace of mind I needed to get back into the game.

I sold my view cameras to Aaron Greene. Once I was nd of them I felt relieved. I decided to give up fine-art holography and go back to photojournalism. p I phoned Jim Lynch to give him the news.

"Hey! Great, Geof! Now how about Beirut?"

He was so ecstatic when I told him I'd go, he invited me to lunch.

I flew out to the Middle East two weeks later, took a lot of pictures, and, strangely enough, had a fairly pleasant time. There were bodies around most everywhere, and, when I happened to be near when a big car bomb exploded, I was able to get to the site and shoot three rolls before they picked up the dismembered limbs.

Bloody stuff, brutal stuff-but I'd seen it all before. And thanks to the reflex viewin2 svstem of my Leica I was able to cast a cool eye.

F@a@kly, I don't think I caught much that was new, but Jim was thrilled when he saw my proofs.

"Just like old times," he said.

"You want the goods, you send Barnett." I started taking portraits for magazines again, serious portraits of athletes, actors, people in the arts. The editors who hired me liked what I gave them, said my stuff had an intensity, a penetration, that they hadn't seen in my earlier work.

"It's like now you pin your subjects right to the wall," one guy told me. I shrugged, but he was right.

Last month Vani Fair offered me a contract, and ty then so did Rolling Stone. So far I've opted to stay free-lance. I've got a cover idea I want to talk over with Elle.

Late this past winter, after I got my career securely back on track, I had a new piece of molded plastic made to fit the lens shaft of my gun-camera. I cleaned out the barrel of the Beretta inside, stashed the device and a box of ammo in a corner of my check-through luggage, and flew out to Cleveland under the name of Frank Cordero.

At the airport I rented a gray Buick with the kind of heavily tinted windows that appear opaque Ahen the sun shines hard. Then, just for old times' sake, I checked into the Devora.

The following morning, I trailed Grace from her house to the shopping mall where she did her Nautilus routine. I watched her enter the gym, then parked beside her c@ir, with my Buick facing in the opposite direction.

I opened the back of the camera, loaded two bullets into the Beretta, then munched on potato chips while I waited for her to come out.

When she came, hair wet from her postworkout shower, I cocked my weapon and held it ready. When she opened her car door, I suddenly opened mine, creating a little pen that w ' ould keep her from getting away.

"Grace?" I said. She turned.

"Remember me?"

She stared hard at me, frowned.

"What the hell do you want?"

"Came to take your picture, Grace."

She looked at me curiously. I shot her twice, fast and neat in the chest.

She died, I think, almost instantly. After she fell, I picked her up, placed her in her car, and locked her inside. I looked around. No one was near and no one, as far as I could tell, had seen. I was lucky. I'd killed her cleanly. Afterwards I just drove away.

I didn't kill her because I thought she might come after me. I killed her because of Frank. If it had been me who'd been killed out in New Mexico, he wouldn't have rested until he'd tracked my killer down. He would have called what I'd done "a pure justifiable act of revenge," and I think he would have appreciated the fact that I committed it with the special weapon he'd made, the disguised gun he'd created to accommodate my refusal to carry anything but a camera into war.

I learned something firsthand too from that little escapade, something Frank had told me once: though it's fairly hard to kill the first time around, it is a lot easier the second.

As for Kim, the memory's still vivid, but in time, I know, it will fade.

I took so many shots of her over the weeks of our acquaintanceship, they all seem to run together now. At each stage I saw her the way I wanted to, and when we finally got to the end I saw her dead.

Every once in a while I look at my last picture of her-the one I took just after I shot her. I looked at it again last night. I must have studied it for at least an hour. Like every other picture I ever took of her, it tells me nothing about her, nothing at all. But it does tell me something about Geoffrey Barnett. It fixes the moment he knew he could be merciless.

Which, I've begun to think, is the case with almost every kind of photograph. A photograph, you see, may or may not tell you much about its subject. But if you look at it closely, and you were the photographer, it can tell you a great deal about yourself.