Read Online Double Image by David Morrell - Free Book Online

promise to tell you.”
    “Tell me?”
    “The camera is yours.”
    “. . . What?”
    “It’s not a loan. It’s a gift. I guess you could call it an inheritance.”
     
19
     
    SO, WEIGHED DOWN WITH GRIEF, Coltrane brought Packard back to life. He couldn’t help thinking that way as he worked in the darkroom, a faint amber safelight over his head. Jennifer stood next to him, watching somberly as he used tongs to slide a sheet of photographic paper into a tray of developing solution. He stirred the solution. Briefly, the sheet remained blank. Then the magic took place, an image coming to life on the paper, a black-and-white picture of the old man gazing up.
    Jennifer wasn’t able to speak for a moment. “It’s fabulous.”
    Sorrow negated any tone of satisfaction that Coltrane might have felt. The odor of chemicals was bitter. “I took a dozen exposures, but this is the one I knew I wanted.”
    The image showed Packard looking shrunken in his pajamas and his housecoat, sitting in his wheelchair, the fireplace in the background. The aperture setting Coltrane had used had allowed him to keep that background in focus, specifically part of a burnt-out log in the hearth, the kind of symbolic detail that Packard had liked to use in his early work.
    “His eyes,” Jennifer said.
    Coltrane nodded. “The expression in them constantly changed — from arrogance to impatience to irony to amusement to calculation. But this particular expression was the one I wanted. Earlier, when he’d looked at the collection of his photos I brought for him to autograph, his eyes became sad. There wasn’t a hint of pride in his reaction to what he’d created. Instead, the only thing the photographs seemed to do was remind him of the passage of time.”
    “Did you have any trouble getting him to hold the book in his lap?”
    “Not at all. He told me, ‘I surrender myself .’”
    “So now we have a photograph of a fragile old man who happens to be a genius, inspecting the contents of one of his books. A photograph about a photographer and his photographs.”
    Coltrane’s voice was filled with melancholy. “His photos stayed the same, but he got older.”
    “But now he stays the same in this photo.”
    “I wonder what it’ll feel like, going where Packard did, doing what he did, trying to be him.”
     

THREE
     
1
     
    APPROACHING THE BEVERLY HILLS HOTEL, Coltrane steered left off Sunset Boulevard and headed up Benedict Canyon Drive. It was a little after eight Wednesday morning, the day after Packard’s funeral. Determined to start the project, he and Jennifer had set out early. They drove through the shade of towering palm trees, past expensive homes concealed behind meticulously trimmed hedges and tall house-hugging shrubs. The sky was clear and bright for a change, the clouds having moved on.
    “Don’t keep me in suspense. Which house is first on the list?” Jennifer asked.
    “Falcon Lair.” Coltrane wore his typical work clothes: leather hiking boots, jeans, and a navy sweatshirt.
    In contrast, Jennifer had an orange sweatshirt with a
Southern California Magazine
logo. Her short blond hair was tucked beneath a baseball cap, making her face look attractively boyish, reminding Coltrane of the movie actor she now mentioned. “Rudolph Valentino?”
    “The sheik himself.”
    “I never understood why he called the place Falcon Lair.”
    “In the mid-twenties, Valentino’s second wife was trying to get the studio to let her supervise the production of one of his movies. The picture was called
The Hooded Falcon
. But she ran up costs so much that the studio canceled it. To make her feel better, Valentino named the mansion they were building in honor of the aborted project. They got divorced shortly afterward.”
    “And what happened to Valentino?”
    “When his wife left him, he threatened to blow his brains out. Instead, he bought tons of antique furniture — suits of armor and Moorish screens, crap like that. It was