The Eye of the Beholder

by Janice Macdonald

  The next painting was of another young woman, who wasn’t looking directly out of the painting, but off the side and down, as if she was reading a book propped on a table. I set it to the side and took a photo of it. Maybe Andrea would know who she was.

  There was another painting of the three men that Kristin had entered in the art show on 124th Street. I could tell it wasn’t the same, because they were all clothed this time. And this time, having met two of them, I could tell who the subjects were. Austin Stauffer’s red hair was applied with a palette knife, making the curls tangible. Diego’s cheekbones were almost a caricature, they were that sharp. And the blond man’s eyes were visible this time, an intense blue, so that they were the only thing you looked at even though the rest of his face was fully realized. I wondered if this was Cole, the time-lapse photograph artist. Collars of shirts were roughed in, but melded into the rough background of the painting. Was Kristin trying to decide between the men in her life? Was this a class exercise? Was she recording a friendship between the three of them? Were they the only men in the studio to sketch as a studio in masculine form? Had they all come together to kill her?

  I was getting fanciful now. Surely no one except Agatha Christie would take a group of people on a trip and make them all responsible for someone’s death. I took a photo and went on. There were more paintings of fingers and toes, and then several studies of plants. I took photos of them just in case the plants were somehow only found in Mexico, but I didn’t think there was much to that.

  The last row of paintings were self-portraits, for which Kristin seemed to have an affinity. Perhaps she, like Frida, had been drawing herself all her life, and knew her best subject inside out. She seemed to be concentrating on a different element of the portrait in each. One was focused on the hair, bringing several shades of blond and gold into play to make the texture of strands of hair read across the room. The second one had Kristin looking directly out at the viewer, as if she was checking out a new subject to paint. There was something a bit eerie about being judged by a dead woman. I moved quickly to the third where she was actually painting, sitting at the easel. I couldn’t quite tell what it was she was painting, for her shoulder hid most of the canvas but a corner of red showed. I took a photo of this one and set it to the side.

  I was taking a photo of the last portrait, Kristin looking into a mirror, with a sort of Colville sensibility to it, when Andrea came back into the room.

  “Just coming into check on you, see if you needed anything.”

  “I was just about done, good timing.” Andrea looked a bit askance at the mess I had made by setting some of the paintings out of their tidy rows.

  “I was wondering if I could buy three of these paintings from you, for say seventy-five dollars a piece?” I could see Andrea adding things mentally.

  “Double that, and I will wrap them up for you as well.”

  I had hoped to gauge Kristin’s monthly share of the rent correctly and offer about half, to make Andrea feel she was negotiating for a better price. I had nailed it. For four hundred and fifty dollars, Andrea could squeak out another month without a roommate search, and the nearer she and Jeannie could get to September, the easier it would be to pull in a fellow student. I agreed, setting out the painting of the three men, the one of the young woman reading, and the one of Kristin painting. Andrea went down the hall to retrieve a roll of brown paper and some twine, and I obliged her by pushing her chair back down the hall the other way to her room.

  Andrea was obviously a sports enthusiast. A hockey stick leaned in a corner of her bedroom, along with a lacrosse stick and a tennis racket. Her desk had a book hutch on it, containing texts on kinesiology and a portrait Kristin had painted of her that showed Andrea holding a medal up proudly, as if she’d just bitten it to prove it was made of gold.

  I pushed the chair up to the desk, and turned back to the doorway. Over the bed hung a velvet sombrero, probably Andrea’s only happy souvenir of their Reading Week trip. I wondered if she and Jeannie were getting any counseling. After all, if Kristin’s death had made such an effect on me, who had never met her; what had it done to two girls on their own in a foreign country, being questioned by the police and harangued by parents back home for not being the one who died?

  Or maybe they were well-adjusted enough, buoyed by that glorious egoism of youth to think it didn’t really concern them, and had no lasting damage. How could anyone know what did or didn’t affect a person’s psyche, until it twisted up so much inside that they acted out in unexpected and violent ways?

  I met Andrea back in Kristin’s room, who by that time had already wrapped one painting. I asked for her email address and made an e-transfer of $450, then called a cab to help me get my purchases home. Andrea helped me carry them down the stairs to the lobby, and stood with me to wait for the cab to arrive.

  “I hope you picked these because you liked them, and not because you just thought these would be the best investment.”

  I shook my head.

  “I never think of art as an investment. I have to want to look at it for the rest of my life, or at least a good portion of my life, or what’s the point?”

  Andrea seemed to agree, though as a sports-minded person, I wondered if she and Kristin had ever had that much in common. Perhaps it was the drive in their own field that made them understand each other, without having any real overlap in each other’s interests.

  “Were you friends?” I asked, impulsively.

  Andrea took her time to answer, and I automatically liked her better for that.

  “I didn’t really get her to begin with, but we got along okay. She was a very good roommate, very fair, cleaned up after herself, stayed out of your business. But after a year or so we got into a rhythm, and even though she was sort of messed up in her personal life, she was always really professional with her studies and her painting, and you have to respect that.”

  “You mean messed up with men?”

  Andrea nodded.

  “She had a couple of flings with married men, and I had a hard time with that, and so did Jeannie, who comes from a very straight-laced family. We asked Kristin not to bring them here, and at first she laughed, but then she saw our point and agreed.”

  “Did you tell the police all that?”

  “They didn’t really ask what I thought of her. After all, we were all three on vacation together, I guess they just assumed we were all best friends.”

  “How did you come to be travelling together?”

  “Kristin wanted to go to Puerto Vallarta for Reading Week, because she heard of some other people doing it, and that there was a good deal if we split the room three ways. Jeannie really needed to get out of her own head and take a break, and I figured what the hell. I had enough Christmas money and it seemed like the right thing to do, to go someplace warm for break, you know? Normally, I go skiing with friends, but this was going to be our last year together and I guess I saw it as a box to check in university experiences.”

  “So it was Kristin’s idea?”

  “It was all Kristin’s idea. She had our tickets and hotel booked and two or three outings purchased before Jeannie or I had even googled PV. We just went along for the ride.” Andrea smiled. “And she was right, it was a beautiful place, full of really nice people.” Then her face crumpled. “Of course, that was before Kristin…”

  I reached out to pat her arm, but just then my cab arrived and she used the diversion to shake herself back into shape. She opened the door for me, and I lugged the three parcels out to the street. The cab driver was solicitous enough to flick open his trunk for me to place the paintings in, but he didn’t get out of the car. I shut the trunk and turned to wave at Andrea McManus, but she had already gone inside and up the stairs. I got a glimpse through the front hall windows of the upper fire door closing.

  I got into the back seat of the cab and gave him our addres
s.

  Steve and I really were becoming quite the art collectors.

  34

  I had the three paintings unwrapped and leaning against the coffee table before Steve got home, so that he could walk in and get the full impact of Kristin Perry’s artistic vision. Or message. I wasn’t sure which was supposed to be most prominent. I still wasn’t sure whether art was supposed to be revving up the brain or cooling it down.

  I had folded up the brown paper wrapping and wound up the twine, and put it all on a back shelf in the pantry. You never knew when you were going to need some good wrapping paper, and you never got paper bags at the grocery store anymore. This was probably the first sign that I was going to turn into my grandmother, who had lived through the Great Depression and could never bring herself to throw anything away.

  To her credit, she had found a use for things, rather than just hoarding them away. Her garden had been full of odd but effective scarecrows made of old straws, bread clips, and shiny coffee can inner seals.

  From what I had seen at the art studios yesterday, Grandma could have been a collagist if she’d lived today. Some of the junk piled up there wasn’t anything she couldn’t have found a use for.

  I was in the bathroom when Steve got home, so I didn’t see his face reacting to the paintings after all. What I did see was his back, tensed and still, as he stood in front of them.

  “Where did you get these?”

  “I bought them from her roommate, Andrea.”

  “You went to the apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “You do realize that Keller will tear a strip off me for this?”

  “I didn’t think it would be seen as interfering. Andrea understood that I was someone who felt an affinity for her because of having been there when she died, and that I was a collector of art in a small way, anyway.”

  “Did you tell her you were connected to the investigation at all?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Don’t think or don’t know?”

  “I’m not sure why it matters.”

  “It matters because these are going to have to go into the station as evidence and I’m going to have to explain how I came to obtain them.”

  “Why? I just thought it would be a useful thing to know who she’d been painting.”

  “It’s very useful. Do you know who that is?”

  “It’s Diego Rivers, and Austin, and, I think, Cole. The men in her life. And of course, the self-portrait is Kristin.”

  “Not them, the reading girl.”

  He was pointing to the one picture I’d bought because I’d actually been taken with it, not because I thought it would inform the case.

  “No, I just liked that one. Are you saying you know who that is?”

  “Yes. That’s Marta Gainer, an art student from U of A, who just turned up dead this morning in the water park at West Edmonton Mall.”

  35

  I sat abruptly, my eyes glued to the painting I’d been drawn to earlier in the day. Steve continued to talk.

  “She was laid out in a similar fashion to Kristin, with the towel over one of their lounge chairs, the beach bag, the sunhat, the art cards including the toad-in-the-hole fried egg. There wasn’t any blood, probably because it would have dripped onto the sand painted floor and alerted someone. Some early morning mall walkers spotted her from the glass wall upstairs and called us. We got there before anyone had opened up the park and disarranged the scene. I’m not sure why no one had found her during the evening clean up the night before, but that place is run by teenagers and shift workers on minimum wage, so who knows.”

  “How did the mall walkers know she was dead?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the mall used to have statues of people all over the place. Remember the cop and the streetwalkers at the opening of their Bourbon Street wing?”

  “These people walk the mall three times a week. If there had been a statue in the water park, they’d have seen it every time. This was new enough to catch their eye. Honestly, with the rest of the place empty, the crime scene really does stand out.”

  “How so?” I was feeling a sense of jealousy, that this was not a scene I could feel associated with, not having seen it myself, as I had Kristin.

  “Her bathing suit was splattered in blood, not completely soaked. It looked like a striped white suit with odd splotchy bits on it. There were thumb tacks and tiny nails poked into the suit, though most of them hadn’t really pierced the skin. They’re not what killed her. That was a very thin knife right into the heart, which didn’t bleed out so much as fill her chest cavity with blood. Coroner thinks it would have killed her almost instantly, but that she had been drugged pretty well beforehand, in any case. The crime scene folks are all over the place, checking for prints or signs of a skirmish in a dressing room. The murder didn’t begin right out there on the beach; she was probably walked out there solicitously, as if she was feeling under the weather, and placed on the chair. We have someone going through all the mall cameras to see if they can plot the timeline.

  “So, I guess Roberto and his boss are going to be happy to hear that the murderer really was imported.”

  “We can’t rule out the possibility that someone came here from there to commit a similar crime, but it seems unlikely. The team is concentrating their efforts on everyone from Edmonton who knew Kristin from an art perspective and who were also in Vallarta. It’s going to be all go from here on.”

  “Have I got you into trouble, buying this painting?”

  Steve shook his head.

  “You’ve probably saved us a step. We can now link Kristin to Marta. If we can figure out when and where this painting was made, we may be able to narrow the circle even more.”

  “So you’re going to take it with you.”

  “I’m going to take them all. What can I wrap them in, do you think?”

  “Don’t worry, I have everything you need right here.”

  36

  The news media was all over the murder of Marta Gainer, and were quick to make the connection between the two deaths. I learned from the CBC that Gainer was originally from a small town in BC, and that her family had not wanted her to pursue a career in the fine arts.

  “It’s not as if doing a BFA is going to automatically get you murdered,” I muttered, turning off the radio.

  “The odds are going down, though.”

  Denise was over at our place for coffee and danishes, which she had brought with her. Steve, of course, was out. I had seen very little of him in the days since Marta’s body had been discovered.

  I snorted with a gasp, that sort of laugh when you get startled into reacting to something politically incorrect. Denise shrugged.

  “They take in, what, eighteen students a year? Twenty? And two of them are murdered in the space of a few months? Compared to the larger intake and, of course, zero murders of students in other faculties.”

  “But is their enrollment the reason for their death?”

  “Perhaps their enrollment is what put them in proximity to their killer,” Denise mused. “That would make the faculty more dangerous, if it was harbouring a killer.”

  “And it likely is. But is it another student or a member of the faculty?”

  “That’s what Steve and the gang are looking at?”

  “Well, it’s not for me to say, and I’m not all that sure I know exactly where their investigation is aimed, but they took my paintings, all three of them, including the one of the three men in Kristin’s life. My sense of things is that it’s one of them. Everyone says she had relationships with each of them, and two of them are married, which made Kristin seem less favourable to her roommates, and perhaps some of the other female students in the fine arts stream. But if there is another victim, maybe she, too, was dallying with a married man.”

>   “And don’t forget that married men come with wives, who may be vengeful.”

  “But would the wives be aiming to make an artistic statement with the layout of the bodies?”

  “They might, especially if they were artists themselves, or trying to pin it on other artists—like their ne’er-do-well husbands.”

  “And what do you make of the fact that Kristin had done a portrait of the latest victim, Marta? Should that mean something?”

  “I would think that has less to do with precognition and more to do with availability of models. It costs a lot to get models to pose for you, and if you have to produce ‘x’ number of portraits for an assignment, they probably spell each other off and pose for each other.”

  “That makes sense, but it still creeps me out a bit that hers was the portrait I was drawn to.”

  “Well, that I can make sense of for you, too. She was posed reading, and you related to the posture as an attractive one, because you validate and privilege reading. And speaking of reading, I think you’re reading a lot more into this than you need to. The main facts are scary enough: there is a murderer targeting students in the Visual Arts stream of the BFA program. That should be enough to go on, don’t you think?”

  Denise was right. I was going off on crazy tangents. Thank goodness I wasn’t leading the investigation. Steve was probably minutes away from discovering and arresting the killer.

  “So, who was the unmarried man she was fooling around with?”

  “His name is Cole Vandermeer. Why are you thinking about him more than the other two and their possibly vindictive wives?”

  “For one thing, because there’s only one of him, making him stand out. And for another thing, there might be more ego at stake if Kristin was breaking it off with him, than with the married guys. They might be breathing a sigh of relief, if they weren’t planning on leaving their wives, you know? After all, if they were conducting a clandestine relationship; how long could it go on before someone who knew the wife recognized them together and told?”