I gave him a look. We had had a few nice dinners, hadn’t we? I squirmed on the hard straight-back chair, remembering the feel of his fingers on my thigh. I had a strong desire to go back to my apartment and take another shower with him. Squeak the bedsprings with the wild monkey dance. I let the idea drift over me, a titillating thought.
Martin’s eyes flicked between us and settled finally on me. “Sorry to bring up business. But if I don’t bring it up now, who knows when I’ll see you again.”
I tried to smile. I didn’t want to hear this.
“It’s the paintings, Alix.”
“I know.”
“They’ve been done for three months, framed for over six weeks. I can tell you aren’t ready for them—”
“It’s not that, Martin.”
“Just let me explain. I sold two of them.”
“You what?”
“I know I promised them to you. I’m sorry. I saved the two best ones for you. The ones hanging in the Second Sun. Of course, they won’t be a set like the four. But I needed the money.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. Regret at losing the set mingled with relief at not being responsible for the bankruptcy of my friend. My throat clogged with emotion. The sight of Ray Tantro’s blank canvas popped into my head: What was it saying? Why hadn’t he painted in that room? Where did he paint? Why had I found him? I blinked my eyes and focused on Martin again. His large head was still perspiring. His hair was damp on his forehead.
“You’re not mad?” he said uncertainly.
“Mad? No. Disappointed. I loved those pieces, Martin. They were the best things you’ve ever done.”
Martin smiled modestly. “I talked to Paolo a couple of times and he never would say anything. I got the feeling there was some disagreement between you two and I hoped it wasn’t because of the paintings.”
To be honest with you, Martin—” I stopped myself. Why tell him we couldn’t afford his paintings? Why tell the world that we would soon be splitting the spreadsheets? Paolo could blab to his bedmates, but I wouldn’t. “To be honest, it’s going to put a hole in my autumn plans. But maybe we can work something else out. I mean, the season is weeks away yet. At least we can keep displaying the other two.”
Martin chewed a mouthful of eggs. “I know I let you down. If you got into production of the prints right away, I could oversee that for you. Before I go to Salt Lake for the race.”
“When is that again?”
“Three weeks.”
Great. Now I only had to come up with five thousand dollars for the remaining two paintings, get them color separated and into production with the printer in the next three weeks. As if I had the five grand lying around, ready to slap into this good man’s hand. As if I had the time to shepherd his fine works through the printmaking process, or the energy to give that they—and he—deserved.
“I—I’ll talk to Paolo about it,” I said, pouring maple syrup on the pancakes. Carl was shoveling them into his mouth. “Martin, I can’t promise anything. You understand?”
He nodded and seemed to be finally getting the message. His eyebrows twitched as he cut a slab of whipped egg with his fork. “Whatever you guys want to do, Alix. You’ve been great to me.”
We ate our meal, making chitchat about the dismal weather, kayaking the canyon, Carl’s lack of plans since quitting the Missoula PD, and Martin’s one-man show in a Sun Valley gallery this winter. When it was time to go, Martin insisted on paying.
“I owe you,” he said. “And more than just—” He consulted the bill. “More than just sixteen forty-five.”
We moved toward the door. “Who did you sell the paintings to? Or is that privileged information?” I held open the screen.
“Oh, Alix. I’d tell you anything.” Martin spun his chair around to face us on the porch and laughed hard. “You wouldn’t believe it if you heard it from anybody else anyway. I sold them to Jake Laughlin.”
15
“WHO’S JAKE LAUGHLIN?”
We stood on the sidewalk in front of Jedidiah’s House of Sourdough, our stomachs stretched from pancakes and that heavy feeling in our limbs from too much syrup. At least Martin looked alert, stretching his arms out from his wheelchair. The orange shirt he wore made him look even healthier. Carl had asked the question.
“You must have met him the same night you met Martin. Pudgy, arrogant. Bushy, bushy brown hairdo,” I told Carl. “Paints wildlife scenes. What would he want with your pieces, Martin? No offense, I mean, but they’re so different from what he does.”
“I know.” Martin nodded. “You know what I think? I think he’s starting a gallery himself. He made some comments about Westward Galleries, you know, gave me the idea he wasn’t happy there.”
“Jake Laughlin will never be happy,” I grumbled.
Carl wasn’t listening. He stared, frowning, down the street to the corner. I followed his gaze. Sitting by the stop sign on the side street was the biker, his black helmet with mirrored visor making him faceless. He sat motionless, astride the big chopper, looking the other way.
“Come on.” Carl grabbed my hand, pulling me down the street toward the corner.
“Nice meeting you, Carl,” Martin called as we broke into a run.
“Thanks for breakfast.” I managed a wave behind my back to Martin.
“The biker was still a block away from us when he calmly made a U-turn, walking chained boots in a circle. He revved the motor and disappeared down the side street. Carl dropped my hand and dashed into the street. His sandals slowed him down. By the time we reached the corner, the biker was gone.
“Did you see the license?” I panted, out of breath.
Carl shook his head. “I’m not sure he had one.”
The traffic, both foot and auto, had picked up. Families in shorts and sandals shivered in the morning dew, peering greedily into closed stores for replacements for the sweaters they left at home. Two bicyclists swerved around us as we stood in the gutter. We began walking slowly back toward the apartment. We were almost to the square when a silver Jeep pulled up next to us.
“You two lost?”
Paolo grinned from his open window, wearing a red turtle-neck with the sleeves pushed up. “Get in, lost ones. I’ve been looking for you.”
I got in the front, Carl in back. Paolo’s Jeep was the new model, loaded with extras like gray leather seats, blaster stereo, and sunroof. I had never actually been in it. The seat cradled my backside; he had even turned the seat warmer on, an unusual but welcome summer choice for Wyoming.
“Where are we going?” I asked when Paolo did a U-turn much like the biker had.
“Just driving. The cops are looking for you everywhere. They came by the gallery and your apartment. Then they came to my house, wanting to know if I knew where you were. Luckily I didn’t. I’m a terrible liar.” He smiled.
“Right.” I turned to Carl and rolled my eyes. “What did they say?”
“They want to question you about the murder.”
“Goddamn gun,” I grumbled, looking out the side window. “Wait till I give my mother a piece of my mind for sending it to me.”
“You didn’t have to keep it,” Carl said. “Especially since you never learned to use it. It’s dangerous to have a gun in the house that you don’t know how to use.”
“I don’t need a lecture, Carl.” I sunk into the leather seat and pulled down my slouch hat. But inside I knew that hiding wasn’t the answer to this mess. I was going to have to act if I was going to get my ass out of this sling.
“Just like Argentina,” Paolo said. “Everybody has a pistol.”
“Wyoming isn’t much different, ” I said.
“That’s what I liked about it, when I first came out. It reminded me of home. Cowboys, horses, mooing cows and hay and mountains. Just like home.”
I watched him. Then why don’t you stay? Why leave this home-away-from-home? His face was sad in memory, as if something good had passed.
“But it
has changed. It doesn’t look like home anymore.” We were on the business strip west of town, filled with cheap motels, restaurants serving barbecue and fast food, car dealers and rafting companies, helicopter rides and climbing gyms. It wasn’t how I had envisioned Jackson either, when I’d come. But it was America to me, a part I disliked but accepted, free enterprise, capitalism in action, the money where the mouth is. Perhaps that was something that Paolo could never understand.
I put my hand on Paolo’s arm. “Can we go to your house? I have to, you know, use the facilities.”
“The faculties—?”
“The toilet.”
Paolo grinned and swung around toward his bungalow.
“He seems like a good guy. A little glum, but a good guy.”
We stood in Paolo’s kitchen while he made coffee. I already had jangled nerves from too much caffeine and too little sleep. Carl was in the bathroom. I looked out over the lush backyard, delphiniums towering in the back, daylilies nodding their orange heads.
“Who? Carl?” I said absently.
“Is he good to you?” Paolo poured water into the coffeemaker.
I turned. “Who wants to know?”
“Just a concerned friend. What? Do I sound jealous?”
Maybe I just imagined that hint of excessive concern in his voice. “I’m not very good to him, if you must know. I told him to go home yesterday.”
“What, didn’t he wash the toothpaste out of the sink?” Paolo smirked, remembering one of my pet peeves when we lived together. It seemed so petty now, but I used it as a rationalization for giving my partner the domestic boot. At the time it was too painful to admit I knew of his dalliances, or that I cared too much to make a stand.
I changed the subject. “Did you ever meet Ray Tantro?”
Paolo flipped the switch on the machine. “At Eden’s opening for the show, sure. I met him there.”
“You went to the opening?”
“It was your Sunday to work, I think. Speaking of which, I have to go open up in a few minutes.” He glanced at the wall clock, a clever tiled number that read over a face full of cockeyed numbers: Time Becomes Meaningless in the Face of Creativity.
“Wait a sec, Pao. Tell me about Ray Tantro,” I said, pouring myself an unneeded mug of Java. “What was he like?”
He frowned. “Kind of a what-you-call-it? A jock.”
“A jock?”
“Yeah, full of himself. Talking loud and basically full of horseshit.”
“Like how? What did he say?”
“Like this.” Paolo struck an arrogant pose, nose up, hands on hips. “Big-heeled boots, fancy cowboy clothes. Then he says, ‘This piece reflects my inner being in conflict with the tempest of life around me.’ Baloney like that. Very boring.”
Carl found us. “Coffee, Carl? Just made it,” Paolo said, looking at the clock again. “Gotta go, guys. Hang out here if you want. Things may be a little hot around your place, Alix.” He looked at me sternly. “I don’t like the cops showing up at the gallery. It scares away the customers.”
“Always thinking about the customers. Never mind my rear end is in a sling.”
“Keep your rear end out of other people’s business.” He gave the anatomy in question a firm slap on his way out of the kitchen. From the living room he called, “My old Subie is in the alley. I’ll leave the keys here on the table if you want to use it.” The door closed behind him.
CARL AND I took the battered Subaru back to my apartment, having lost our ability to agree on anything, particularly a course of action. I had argued in Paolo’s living room for a full frontal assault on all the main suspects in the case, but Carl had reminded me that the only suspect we knew of was sitting right there on the mauve leather couch. Then I wanted to go talk to Margaret, and the doctor, and Eden again, to round up anybody who knew Ray, his mother, his neighbors, his friends.
But Carl didn’t agree. He had a cloud on his forehead and refused to talk about it, as if his mind was far away.
AT TWO IN the afternoon Carl and I stood stiffly on the stoop of Danny B.‘s apartment, not far from Paolo’s house. The sun struggled through high clouds, turning the day a pale shade of blue cream. A clay pot of bright salmon geraniums sat on a corner of the cement stoop. The brown stained siding had weathered badly, in streaks, and the cement steps we mounted were unadorned by railings. They led to an untended commons of grass and weeds where a rusty tricycle sat abandoned.
I knocked on the metal door, painted a dark gold. On it hung a homemade wreath made from red willow branches. Inside a baby cried, a woman’s voice hushed him. Carl didn’t look at me as he said, flatly: “You let guys give you fanny pats?”
“I usually don’t. So don’t get any ideas,” I tried to joke. But he wasn’t in a jovial mood. He slumped against the building, dressed today more like I remembered him from last summer: hair slicked back, face tense, jeans and cowboy boots. I noticed suddenly that he had shaved his mustache.
“So he’s the exception,” he said.
I opened my mouth to speak when the door opened.
A slight, blond woman stood smiling with a baby on her hip. When we had called fifteen minutes earlier, Geri Bartholomew told us Danny was taking a nap but to come over anyway because she was tired of watching the kids alone. Her voice was light and full of laughter. She ushered us into the small apartment, more like a town house with bedrooms upstairs.
Danny bounded down the stairs, disheveled, black beard a mass of fur. “Sit down, please. Oh, Jesus, the papers.” Several Sunday newspapers were strewn over the available seating, a matched set of fifties furniture, sofa and two armchairs in a blocky style with skinny wooden legs and brown curly upholstery. The thing about polyester, it’s indestructible. You can be stuck with the same ugly couch for fifty years.
Danny rounded up the papers into a heap and dropped them on the floor. “Do we have coffee, Ger?”
“None for us, thanks. We’re way over our caffeine quota,” I said, sitting on the hard couch. I pulled a rubber squeak toy from between the cushions and set it on the papers. The living room was reasonably tidy for a family with two small children, sparsely furnished with a huge toy box in the corner.
“Well, I need some. Scanlon and Doc Miller had me out till two. Those two can nurse a beer longer than anybody.” Danny chuckled, perching on the armchair that faced Carl’s by the front window.
“What did you find out?” I said as Geri left to get coffee.
“That those two can’t hold their liquor, nurse ‘em all they want.” Danny smiled, sliding into the bottom of the chair. He ran his hand over his long dark hair and sighed.
“Did they say anything about the fire?”
“Oh, sure.” Danny sobered, seeing my face. “Scanlon still thinks it’s arson, of course.”
“Brilliant,” Carl said.
“I know, I know. It’s obvious,” said Danny. “And the victim—whoever he was—was intentionally burned to conceal his identity. Doc Miller changed his tune on that. He doesn’t think it was suicide now.”
“Equally brilliant,” Carl sniped.
I glared at him and turned back to Danny. “Will they reopen the investigation?”
“I don’t know that they’ll have a choice. But Frye will drag his feet, I’d guess. The election is only six weeks away. Nobody can blame him for the Tantro murder.”
“And it takes the attention away from the earlier one,” I said. “You’ve got to keep up the pressure on Frye, Danny.”
“I haven’t got anything new to use. Scanlon is, excuse me, a whining wreck who might have been a great investigator once. But now all he knows is that it’s arson and somebody died.”
“Smokey the Bear could have told him that,” Carl opined. “Or the Easter bunny.”
“Thank you, Carl,” I said.
Geri came back with Danny’s coffee. “Are you sure I can’t get you something?” We assured her we were fine. She scooped up the baby from the floor where he was crawling, intr
oduced him as Henry, and went out the back door.
“Bradley’s probably out there building a bomb, the little terrorist. Three years old and heavy into sabotage.” Danny smiled, shaking his head. “Yesterday I went to put on my shoes and found them filled with mud up to the shoelaces.” He sipped his coffee, then set the cup on the table. “You still haven’t told me why you went out there yesterday, Alix. I feel responsible. I shouldn’t have called you.”
“Bingo.” Carl again. We tried to ignore him.
“I had to talk to him.” I rubbed my forehead. “I knew he wasn’t dead. I knew he wouldn’t kill himself. He was such a genius with paint, and he fell so far. He was just coming up out of the darkness. He wouldn’t kill himself. Not now.”
“He really was big, then?”
“Very. I remember NBC News—who was on then? John Chancellor? He did a report himself on Tantro’s one-man show in New York. Ray was twenty-three.”
“So the drugs and liquor flowed. I can see it,” Danny said. “To be so famous so young. It’s hard to take that kind of adulation and keep your head on.”
“At any age.”
“Okay, okay,” Carl said, leaning forward to finally join the discussion. “So who the hell died in the damn fire? If it wasn’t suicide, then somebody killed a guy. Why? And the big question burning in my mind—why did somebody work so hard to implicate Alix?”
I looked at Danny for answers. He shrugged.
“If we find out who died in that fire, we’ll find out who killed Ray Tantro. I’m sure of it,” I said.
“Unless the first murderer was Ray Tantro,” Danny said.
“Maybe he killed somebody to make it look like he was dead. So that cousin Wally or whoever could make money on those old pictures,” Carl said.
“Then what happened to him?” Danny asked.
“He got into a disagreement,” I said.
“With Wally?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Wally didn’t kill him.”
“How can you be so sure?” Danny asked. “Who has the most to gain from Ray being dead? He’ll make a fortune off those paintings now.”
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