The Eye of the Beholder

by Janice Macdonald

  Steve and I started at the blocked off area on 105th street where there were two rows of stalls, and worked our way around. There was a mix of everything from bright primitive portraits to highly stylized landscapes, with some metalwork and woodcarving thrown in. Steve was drawn to a bright depiction of our river valley from almost the same vista as our balcony. We could think about it in several sizes, in print form, or as an original acrylic stretching about four feet long and two feet high. I purchased a postcard-sized version, so that we could compare it along our way.

  We craned our neck down to the west, and decided to head east for more diversity. I bought another postcard-sized print of little birds sitting on telephone lines, looking like music notes, for my office bulletin board.

  We paused for a long time at the booth run by Maria Pace-Wynters. I loved her series of paintings dealing with dress forms and corsets, but couldn’t imagine Steve being keen to look at dressmakers’ dummies on his wall every evening. She had a couple of her trademark huge poppies in both print and canvas form, and I was rather smitten with the blue poppies. I turned to ask Steve, but he was engrossed in a conversation with Maria’s husband, Chris, who was both a well-known musician as the lead of the local band Captain Tractor, but also the organizer of a summer music festival, which was how Steve knew him. They had connected to make security at the Interstellar Rodeo a thing of beauty, where both on duty and extra-curricular cops who happened to love music were on hand to keep the rowdiness at bay.

  I tugged lightly on his sleeve, and made him look where I pointed. Steve was equally taken with the blue poppies, and Maria happily set about wrapping the canvas up for us in clear plastic while Steve and Chris went back to their conversation.

  “I’m not painting the poppies so much anymore, but I love this combination. The blue Siberian poppy is the symbol of the U of A Botanical Gardens, you know.”

  “Oh, is it indigenous to Alberta? I had no idea. I just love the lushness of what I know is such a small flower in the grand scheme of things.”

  “That’s why I started painting them, because they’re everywhere in the older gardens, and they pop up in cracks in the sidewalk, like dandelions. I wanted to look at something so ordinary and find the beauty.”

  “You’ve made the dressmakers’ forms beautiful, too.”

  “They are necessary before the fashion can begin.”

  I nodded.

  “I’ve been studying a lot of Frida Kahlo since we went to Mexico for our honeymoon, and her corsets were essential to her. They must have been connected to such pain, and yet she painted them so exquisitely.”

  Maria smiled.

  “One of my art teachers a long time ago said that you either painted something to ease your own eyes after seeing it, or to rip out someone else’s eyes so they could see it afresh.”

  “That’s exactly the way I think Kahlo painted, putting things right in your face. But she also had a sense of symbolism that I’m not sure I’m catching in its entirety.”

  “Oh, I did a paper on allegorical symbolism in the Renaissance back in my BFA days,” laughed Maria. “The whole language of objects was great, like if you were to put a cat on the lap of a great lady you were painting, it actually might be saying that she was secretly having an affair, because cats were a sign of illicit love. And lemons were so expensive that if they were falling out of the bowl, the owner might be overly extravagant or showing off with his money.”

  “That’s amazing. So, are there books detailing that sort of symbolism in art?”

  “There are loads of them. Of course, I think you need to take it all with a grain of salt, or an understanding that any code is only useful if there is a key to which more than one person subscribes. The artist and the viewer have to be in agreement as to what the symbols stand for. Otherwise, it’s a crapshoot. And, once you’ve bought the painting, you can decide whatever it means yourself.”

  Steve and Chris were shaking hands, and I had finished the transaction with Maria and her smartphone gizmo that read my credit card, so we said goodbye and headed down the street.

  “So I gather the large landscape idea is no more?”

  “Nope, you win. I say we work with the concept of this blue as something to join things together. We could have another biggish painting and one or two smaller ones.”

  “Well, we could still afford that smaller river view, the evening skyline. And then keep an eye out for another small painting?”

  “Sounds good. Do you want to carry this to the car first? Or take it with us to match with?”

  “Let’s take it with us. That way, we’ll look like serious art buyers, and they’ll clear the path for us.”

  I laughed.

  “Oh yes, we look like art moguls for sure.”

  In the end we bought Steve’s river valley view, a stylized vision of Whyte Avenue, and two funky little pictures of birds, which I had to assure Steve didn’t make us hipsters.

  “It was a good thing we did bring the car,” Steve said as we wove his car blanket between the canvases and linked the car seat buckles together to hold them secure in the backseat.

  “I’ll say. I think this will all look amazing, though.”

  “Let’s hang the bigger ones and hold off on the birds till we decide whether or not we’re going to buy frames for them.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  As plans go, though, it fell through, because Steve got called in to deal with something he and Iain were working on, so I lined the paintings up against the living room wall and went to put the kettle on.

  As soon as I had a cup of tea in my hand, I curled up in the corner of the sofa with my laptop. Ever since my talk with Maria, I had been eager to do some research into visual art symbols. Maybe the killer had been saying something with the way Kristin had been laid out on the sandy spit.

  You can find pretty much anything on the Internet, but you have to be prepared to wade through a lot of dross to get there. I suppose it was the same with any sort of research, except it was far less likely that you would stumble on porn in a university archive while looking for the Renaissance.

  Finally, after watching about seven or eight online videos of Sister Wendy, the charming nun whose razor sharp wit and slight lisp had made her the darling of the middlebrow art world, I found my way to a site that listed a variety of symbols, including cats representing infidelity, as Maria had mentioned.

  I opened two windows on my laptop, one with the website on it, and another of the photo I had taken of that lonely sun tanner on the beach. Mine was the photo the police were still using, even after all the forensic team had been through, and it gave me pause to think I might be the artist’s keenest appreciator.

  Kristin had her hat over her face. It could mean the artist was obliterating Kristin herself, which of course, as a murderer, he was. But it could mean that it wasn’t Kristin that was the target so much as what Kristin represented.

  She had a large bag with her in place of a purse. Did that mean she was to be seen as rich, or as a tourist? Or that she had capacity to carry more than she did, or, in other words, was vacuous. One shoe on and one shoe off. Did that mean she was careless in her travels? Or that she was not quite so elite as how she would like to present herself?

  Sometimes you just have to go old school. I unfolded myself from my cozy corner in the living room and went in search of my own meagre art supplies. Back at the kitchen island, I lined up my computer, my book on Frida, and my phone, with my old sketchbook, a gummy eraser, and a soft pencil—holdovers from when I had taken a drawing class through the Art Gallery of Alberta evening classes. In my sketchbook, I outlined a picture of Kristin on her beach towel from my enlarged photo, trying to capture every element that might or might not be deliberate. Carefully, I drew her large beach bag, her shoes, and her hat with its circular maze design. I enlarged the photo I’d taken of her as
much as I could and even tried to trace in the shadows and edges of what I now knew were bloodstains, but which I hadn’t registered at the time.

  I recalled Steve telling me that Kristin’s blood had sunk down into the sand rather than spreading evenly through the towel she was laid out on. She had been killed on-site, but had likely been drugged into submission. The forensics team, urged on by the tourism police, had dug up and carried away almost a ton of sand.

  I stared at the lay out, looking down on it from above. Then, I sketched it again, as if it was being presented to be seen from the bridge, in the same perspective as Frida’s little cuts painting. I still didn’t see anything that jumped out as a statement symbol. As I was drawing Kristin’s legs, with one shoe hanging off her toes, it occurred to me that it felt totally unlike the life drawings we had done in the art class I’d taken. Even though the model we’d been sketching was still in her poses, there had been something about the energy in the tensions of her muscles that let you know you were capturing an image that would be changed at a moment’s notice. Drawing Kristin Perry from the photograph on my phone, I realized that I was seeing her as a still life, a grouping of objects displayed together. I had likely sensed that as I was taking the picture. After all, why had I been moved to shoot a picture of a solitary tourist on the beach?

  This was a painting, replete with symbolic messaging, laid out on the morning sand for the world to see and understand. What was the message, though? Without a real sense of what the key to the code might be, I was helpless.

  I wasn’t sure whether it was frustration with not being able to read what might or might not be a message in a crime scene, or the idea that I was veering close to sounding like a character out of a Dan Brown novel, but I found myself pushing aside my sketchbook in irritation. It slid off the island with a flurry of pages. I reached down to pick it up before the expensive paper of the pages became creased or folded, and shook it out before setting it to rights.

  The sketchbook had flipped back several dozen pages into the studies our teacher had made us do of a large brocaded purse, reminiscent of the carpetbag Mary Poppins carried in the Julie Andrews movie. It had slumped on the table with loads of folds and creases, making the flowers and leaves turn in on themselves, while the wooden handles stood upright.

  I had been intent on making the designs on the outside of the bag appear accurate, and the shadows created by the folds. My teacher had put a hand on my shoulder and said to me, “Your job as an artist is not to record every thread of the brocade on the outside of the bag. Your job is to make the viewer wonder what is inside the purse.”

  I stared at my stupid purse studies. While I understood what she had been saying, I didn’t have the skill or talent to translate that into pencil strokes. There was nothing of interest in that carpetbag the way I was drawing it.

  On the other hand, as I started to flip forward to the more recent sketches I had just been making, there was another purse to think about.

  There, on the oversized towel, with one dead hand near it, one lost shoe close by, and the other hand of the corpse resting on her abdomen and pointing straight toward it, was a beach bag that made me want to know exactly what was in it.

  25

  It was going to be difficult to get Steve to give me the content list of Kristin Perry’s bag. I did know she had a copy of the same book on Frida Kahlo that I had bought at the little bookstore near the plaza in Old Town, because that was what he had asked me to make notes on. He had also mentioned a change purse that held her ID.

  But, if I was going to follow the idea of the murderer as artist, then one of the things I was meant to wonder about was things on display but deliberately hidden, and that amounted to Kristin’s face and the contents of her beach bag. Those were the only two elements of the presentation that weren’t laid out for immediate view.

  It could be the obvious symbol of big bag meaning conspicuous consumption, or some sort of tirade against tourism, but I didn’t think so. After all, this was a rather small woman, and a very tidy spot, and the whole ethos of Puerto Vallarta was one of gracious welcome rather than irritated tolerance for tourists.

  Kristin could stand for foreigner, or tourist, or Canadian, or she could just be an anonymous woman. She might also have been chosen for being exactly who she was, with all of this being an elaborate cover up for what might be a very petty, personal revenge. I mustn’t forget that angle, though to my mind, that was probably what the police were pursuing, so I could likely put that one on the back burner myself.

  The beach towel was commercial, likely bought back home or in Puerto Vallarta at the Coppel or Woolworth’s, nothing indigenously woven, so maybe that was a comment on imposing anglo-values into the natural scene. Or maybe it was just a handy towel.

  The shoes were flip flops, and nothing like the lovely leather sandals Steve and I had purchased in the huarache store only blocks away from where the body lay. Again, this could be a comment on commercialization. Or it could have been easier shoes to dress a corpse with, or it could be nothing. Lots of Mexican nationals wore flip flops.

  The bag, though, that was where my eye kept returning. This was no commercially processed bag. She had either bought it from a beach vendor or at the market. It was a large, woven bag that stood upright with woven handles on either side of its maw. Holding it closed, though, was a flap of fabric covered in embroidered flowers that reached between the handles and was secured with a turning mechanism. This was the most Mexican element of the entire still life. Some of the flowers matched the deep red of the girl’s bathing suit, and others matched the bright yellow of the crown of the wide-brimmed sunhat covering her face, the white brim extending like a halo reversed in front of her head. The hat, seen from above, looked like a sunny side up egg, which was probably not the effect the designer had been going for. However, you usually didn’t see hats from directly above. Unless you were a bird.

  Was the colour-matching deliberate between the hat and the bathing suit and the flowers on the bag? And if it was, was it deliberate on Kristin the art student’s part, or was it an overlay of choice made by the murderer? That was the trouble with it being an art student who was murdered. Where did the general style and artistic choices she’d made when alive merge with the designs made by this audacious murderer?

  Steve surprised me, so intent was I on staring at enlargements of the photo on my screen.

  “I thought you might have gone to bed by now.”

  “Is it late?”

  “By your standards, it is.” Steve laughed. “But I could use a drink, if you want to stay up and keep me company for one.”

  “I’ll have a cup of peppermint tea alongside you. Right now, a drink would probably rev me up rather than calm me down. How was your evening?”

  “Less eventful than Iain thought it was going to be, which is a good thing. What about your evening? Were you drawing something?” Steve nodded to my art supplies strewn across the kitchen island.

  “Sort of.” I took a deep breath. There was no point in hiding anything from Steve about this. After all, I was trying to help him, not go behind his back on any of this.

  “I got thinking about the concept of symbols and codes in painting, like what I’d been discussing with Maria earlier. So I started looking for any obvious symbols in the lay out of the body of Kristin Perry.”

  “You think this murder was actually supposed to be some sort of art installation?”

  “That sounds creepy, and I’m not sure I want to go that far, but I do think there is something deliberate about the placement of the body and the layout of the items on the beach. This is something that was done by someone with an eye for symbols and placement. Maybe we’re looking for an artist as a murderer, because I believe that this murder is seeped in the language of visual art. And in order to understand what is in front of you, you have to speak the right language.”

  As the
kettle boiled, I went on to tell him my epiphany about the beach bag, and my need to know what was inside the bag.

  “I don’t suppose there is any reason why I couldn’t share that with you. We did let you know about the book, and while I should check with Roberto to see what they are withholding as nonpublic information, I’m pretty sure I could share the list with you. I like the idea of what you are saying. I’m not so sure there’s going to be much pay-off from what I recall from the purse contents, but I’m certainly willing to check it out through that lens.”

  “Really? That would be great. If there is any message we should be getting, I think it all points to the bag.”

  We sank down in opposite corners of the sofa, and I stuck my toes under Steve’s thigh, to keep my feet warm.

  “Do you talk a lot to Roberto about things still? Is there much going on down there on the investigation?”

  Steve shrugged.

  “It’s hard to say. Part of it is the language barrier, of course. My Spanish is schoolbook clunky and Roberto, though he’s better in English than I am in Spanish and, for that matter, much better in French than I am, maybe doesn’t catch the nuance of everything said over the phone. We end up waiting for Ana Maria here to translate things to read out, and that loses any spontaneity of conversation. Or maybe Roberto just doesn’t want to connect. After all, this is a blot on their reputation that they are really hoping can be traced directly back to something Canadian that just happened to occur between Canadians while they were on a vacation outside of Canada—something that could happen anywhere, and unfortunately happened on a Mexican beach, completely by happenstance. The last thing they want is the idea that murder on the beach is a regular occurrence. Puerto Vallarta is considered the safest city in all of Mexico. That’s a strong reputation to maintain.”