Read Online A Cold Heart by Jonathan Kellerman - Free Book Online

gorgeous, I'll grant you that.
     
     
I'd thought: What won't you grant me? Then I figured I was being touchy and kept my mouth shut. A few weeks later, I cooked dinner for four at my place: a mild March evening, steaks and baked potatoes and red wine out on the terrace. Milo and Rick Silverman, Allison and me.
     
     
The surprise was Allison and Rick knew each other. One of her patients had been brought into the Cedars-Sinai ER after a car wreck and Rick had been the surgeon on duty.
     
     
They talked shop, I played host, Milo ate and fidgeted. Toward the end of the evening, he drew me aside. 'Nice girl, Alex. Not that you need my approval.' Sounding as if someone had prodded him to make the speech.
     
     
Since then, he'd seldom mentioned her.
     
     
'A few more blocks,' he said. 'How's the pooch?'
     
     
'I hear he's fine.'
     
     
A moment later: 'Robin and I got together a couple of times for coffee.'
     
     
Surprise, surprise.
     
     
'Nothing wrong with that,' I said.
     
     
'You're pissed.'
     
     
"Why would I be pissed?'
     
     
'You sound pissed.'
     
     
'I'm not pissed. Where do I turn?'
     
     
'Two more blocks, then a right,' he said. 'Okay, I keep my trap Crazy-Glued shut. Even though all these years you've been telling me I should express my feelings.'
     
     
'Express away,' I said.
     
     
'That guy she's with-'
     
     
'He has a name. Tim.'
     
     
'Tim's a wimp.'
     
     
'Give it up, Milo.'
     
     
'Give what up?'
     
     
'Reconciliation fantasies.'
     
     
'I-'
     
     
"When you saw her was she pining for me?'
     
     
Silence.
     
     
'Whoa,' he said.
     
     
'Right turn here?'
     
     
'Yeah.'
     
     
Light and Space's neighbors were a plating plant and a wholesaler of plastic signs. The gallery's warehouse origins were obvious: brick-faced, tar-roofed, three segmented steel overhead doors in front, instead of a window. Black plastic letters above the central door read LIGHT AND SPACE: AN ART PLACE. Stout combination locks secured the outer doors but the one in the middle was held in place by a single dead bolt that responded to a key on Milo's ring. He pushed, and the metal panel slid upward into a pocket.
     
     
"They gave you a key?' I said.
     
     
'My honest face,' he said, stepping inside and flicking on lights. The interior was five thousand square feet or
     
     
so. Walls painted that vanilla white that brings out the best in art, gray cement floors, twenty-foot ceilings thatched by ductwork, high-focus spotlights fixed upon several large, unframed canvases.
     
     
No furniture except for a desk up front, bearing brochures and a CD player. The nearest wall was lettered in the same black plastic used on the outside of the building.
     
     
Juliet Kipper Air and Image
     
     
Same title on the brochures. I picked one up, skimmed a few paragraphs of art-speak, flipped to a black-and-white headshot of the artist.
     
     
Juliet Kipper had posed in a black turtleneck and no jewelry, her face pallid against a gray matte background. Squarish face, not un-pretty under chopped, platinum hair. Pale eyes, deep-set and watchful, challenged the camera. Her mouth was grim - tugged down at the corners. High, uneven bangs exposed a furrowed forehead. Concentrating hard. Or burdened. She'd made an effort to look the part of the troubled artist, or it had come naturally.
     
     
Milo was pacing the gallery, setting off echoes as he drifted from painting to painting. I began doing the same.
     
     
A smug psycho-prediction of Juliet Kipper's art based upon the cheerlessness of her photo would have fallen flat. She'd created fifteen luminous landscapes, exuberantly colorful and textured, each marked by a master's control of composition and light.
     
     
Sere arroyos, fog-shrouded, razor-hewn mountains, furious waterfalls emptying to mirror-glass streams, deep green forests pierced by gilded bursts that promised distant discovery. Two ocean nocturnes were livened by cerulean blue heavens and lemon