Deadly Arts

by Ken Brigham

  “Is there any chance that you showed her the likeness of the man I knew as Damian Saturn and to whom you refer as The Dude?”

  “I’ll do that,” Hardy replied, annoyed that he hadn’t already thought of it. “And I need to get in touch with this Therault guy.”

  “Capital idea, Hardy, my man,” Shane replied. “Capital idea. And now that I think about it, maybe dig a little deeper into Moleskin.”

  Except for the fact that they all smeared paint onto stretched canvas, Parker Palmer had precious little kinship with the great artists of the Italian renaissance. For one thing, Palmer never painted any theme that was remotely religious. Some of his paintings did look a little other-worldly, but not in any religious sense. Palmer was very much a man of his current world, perhaps existentially so. He painted that world as he saw it, a unique perspective, granted, but no less real and present for that. It was the developing strength of his tether to reality that finally led to his rift with Billy Wayne Farmer and to Farmer (aka Fitzwallington)’s bitter and public denunciation of Palmer’s art. Fitzwallington believed that he had tried to mentor the younger man, get him headed in the right direction, but that Palmer had betrayed him in the end, taking off on his own to produce copious works of mediocrity and shamelessly hustle them to people who knew nothing of art but sought the cache of owning something that was original.

  An essential component of Parker Palmer’s shtick was to make himself conspicuous, especially at any art-related public function. Thus, he made a late entrance at a lecture by a noted New York museum curator at Cheekwood. He made his way down a long row of occupied seats, bumping knees and apologizing, to alight, not entirely by accident, beside a particularly attractive young woman. He recognized her as a member of the tribe he thought of as the OMNIs, both because of their ubiquitous presence in the local art world, and because the acronym for Old Moneyed Nashville Ilk was an apt descriptor. These were people whom Palmer sought any opportunity to connect with; these were potential customers.

  The lecture was titled “Titian and Tintoretto: Selling Genius.” Parker Palmer was fond of Tintoretto, his work, and what little he knew of the historical person. But Palmer attended this lecture more for its social potential than for any burning interest in the two Italian Painters. As it turned out, the substance of the lecture was more relevant than Palmer anticipated.

  The story of the Venetian Titian, uncompromising master painter of the grandest Christian myths and his ambitious student Tintoretto, who was not above some artful bending of principles if the price was right, set Palmer to thinking of his relationship with Billy Wayne Farmer. It was complicated, and he regretted some of it. But if you wanted to make a living from art in the time and space where Parker Palmer lived, there were things you just had to do. You wouldn’t last long perched on your high horse unless blessed with more luck than anyone could reasonably expect. Billy Wayne was lucky. Parker Palmer had earned what he got. Every last farthing of it. If sometimes that involved doing stuff that he would rather have left undone, well, them’s the breaks. You do what you have to do. Nobody’s going to do it for you.

  Yeah, he liked this Tintoretto guy. Old Tintoretto had it figured out.

  “So,” Athena Golden said, walking up behind Palmer as they threaded their way through the crowd exiting the hall, “how’d you like the lecture?”

  “Which part?” Palmer responded.

  Athena thought his response uncharacteristically terse. And, unlike his usual behavior, he wasn’t glad-handing the people they passed, even some of whom she was sure that he knew.

  They worked their way through the exit from the hall, but Palmer turned abruptly to his right, toward the gardens instead of heading toward the parking lot. Athena continued to walk with him, wondering where he was going, but genuinely curious about his reaction to the lecture and for other more selfish reasons. Once beyond the press of the crowd, Palmer lapsed into his normal gait, a slouching lope; the much shorter Athena had trouble keeping up. For a moment, she thought he might be trying to escape her. But that would be very unlike him. After all, she owned the gallery that was a principal outlet for his work. And if Parker Palmer had any inviolable principles, one must be that one never stopped shaking it for the paying customers. How many times had she heard him say that?

  Since 1960, the palatial mansion and grounds, earlier home to several generations of Cheeks, had been the Cheekwood Estate and Gardens, a public facility supported primarily by private money. There was an art museum, lecture hall, and some truly extraordinary gardens. The whole thing was created originally by the inventors and aggressive marketers of Maxwell House Coffee, named for Nashville’s most posh hotel at the time. The coffee was declared by President Franklin Roosevelt to be good to the last drop, and that phrase was adopted by the Cheeks as an enduring and wildly successful marketing slogan.

  Some serious art aficionados, for obvious reasons, and a lot of the very rich people who valued art as a means rather than an end, with decidedly less aesthetic motives, bought expensive memberships to Cheekwood and visited the place often, sometimes hanging out for a while, seeing and being seen . But on this particular balmy evening, grandly illuminated by a full moon, the crowd attending the lecture made beelines for their cars after the Q&As petered out. So, Parker Palmer and Athena Golden were the only people strolling through the serpentine polished brown gravel garden paths. It may have been the gravity of the amber light of the full moon bathing this hauntingly beautiful and uncommonly serene place that set their moods. They were only steps from a place where a collection of pretentious people had patiently endured a canned lecture by a pretentious lecturer and then beat it for the wilds of Belle Meade or some equally pretentious area south of the city, but the gardens’ ambience was a place apart from the evening’s busy affair. Palmer and Golden walked together but separately, each in their singular world.

  Athena’s thoughts were of the world of Bechman Fitzwallington. Since the old man’s death, her appreciation of the potential consequences of capturing the rights to his now exorbitantly valuable paintings had overcome her abiding distaste for his work. After all, she had sold some of his paintings in the past, so this wasn’t exactly virgin territory for her. But she was increasingly concerned that the New York gallery had the upper hand, and her recent phone call from Blythe Fortune had certainly done nothing to allay her fears. In fact, an imaginative reading between the lines of Blythe’s rather obtuse message could make one suspicious of the whole operation of the Galleria Salinas. Athena didn’t care about that. She wasn’t interested in getting bogged down in her competitor’s business practices. Athena just wanted her gallery to be the place where any existing new Fitzwallington paintings would be sold. Hopefully an exclusive deal, but if that wasn’t possible, then she was willing to share the riches with Blythe Fortune.

  AvantArt needed a shot in the arm if it was to continue to live and do well. The last year or so had been nip and tuck for the gallery finance-wise. Her hats were beginning to attract some attention, but it would be a long time before they would pay the rent if they ever did. The same was probably true of the emerging group of Nashville artists whose works she attempted to sell. Some were beginning to get noticed, but the trajectory from there to enough fame to pay the bills was likely to be a very long and tortuous slog. Such was the nature of the art business.

  Athena felt as though she was out of the loop. She wasn’t sure who would decide about those paintings; she assumed the old man’s daughter, but she was such a flake and seemed of late to be fading from the picture. Athena had a suspicion, with precious little evidence to support it, that Parker Palmer might know more than he was letting on about this situation. She had attached herself to him after the lecture and followed him into the gardens with the hope that she might extract some relevant information.

  They had strolled in the lush evening moonlight for a while, neither of them speaking. Athena broke the silence.

  “So, Parker,” she said, “what’s
the situation with the Fitzwallington paintings? Any decisions about their disposal in the offing? I haven’t heard anything, and I’m obviously anxious to know if my gallery is still in the running.”

  “Billy Wayne Farmer,” Palmer groused and said nothing more for a while.

  Palmer had been thinking about the old artist, thoughts triggered by the Titian-Tintoretto lecture. He had also been remembering his mother.

  Palmer thought the prissy lecturer had a very simplistic interpretation of the two Venetian painters. He had depicted them as a good guy/bad guy dichotomy, the principled genius, and the blatant hustler. Maybe like him and Farmer. Although Billy Wayne might have been arrogant enough to compare his and Palmer’s relationship with those superstars of the Italian Renaissance, Palmer suffered no illusions about the value and staying power of either his or Billy Wayne’s art. But the lecture had stimulated him to think about the world of art, how it worked. Didn’t it take all kinds?

  And Palmer had also been thinking about his mother. Her startling revelations on her deathbed several years earlier had redefined Palmer’s life and his art, even redefined who he perceived himself to be. Why had she waited until then? Until her terminal illness, she had been determinedly silent about herself. She never spoke of her past….family… relationships. Even in response to Palmer’s questions. Silence. Until she was dying when she unburdened herself and burdened her son with long-concealed information that caused him to make a serious midcourse correction to the direction of his life. He hated her for that. The mother he had loved for all those years was not the woman he believed her to be. How could he love this stranger?

  “The lecture,” Parker finally spoke. “I liked the part about Tintoretto, but Titian sounded like a pompous fool. Not at all how the pompous fool who was doing the talking meant to paint him, I’m sure. And Billy Wayne’s paintings? I don’t know much that you don’t, but there may be some twists to that story that will surprise just about everybody. Stay tuned, Athena. Stay tuned.”

  Shane and KiKi had retired early, but they both lay wide awake staring at the ceiling, just visible in the light drifting through from the Third Avenue street lamps outside their bedroom window.

  “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, Shane, my love, but the two outliers in our study that are definitely linked genetically are Bechman Fitzwallington and Parker Palmer. Looks like Palmer may be something like a nephew.”

  Although Shane’s pulse rate probably doubled, his response to this surprising information sounded almost nonchalant.

  “KiKi, my love, you never cease to amaze me. When did you uncover this little morsel?”

  “Just a couple of days ago. Why?”

  “You might have let your devoted husband know a trifle sooner, you know.”

  “I also might have never let my devoted husband know,” she said. “Perhaps if I had paid more heed to the ethics of the matter, that would have been the case.”

  “And perhaps a consequence of heeding the ethics of the matter too strictly could have abetted a serious crime.”

  “Solving crimes is your job, not mine,” Katya said. “My job is doing everything I can to enhance the health and happiness of my fellow humans.”

  “Certainly. And a noble undertaking it truly is,” Shane responded. “But some of our fellow humans make your job exceedingly difficult by taking it on themselves to thwart your efforts. I want to identify those perpetrators of harm and put them out of business.”

  “I thought what attracted you to the crime-solving business was the intellectual challenge, like your fictional hero.”

  “Well,” Shane said, “there is that too.”

  He was no longer paying attention to the conversation. He was contemplating where this new information fit in the jigsaw puzzle that was assembling itself in his mind.

  Even though he had gone to bed later than usual, James L. (Jimmy) Holden was having trouble going to sleep. Ordinarily he slept quite soundly for a lawyer. His conscience was generally as pristine as the driven snow. He didn’t lie and he didn’t cheat. He personified the honest lawyer oxymoron. He didn’t seek the spotlight. Fame—or even public acclaim—was not one of his life goals. He honestly held the law in great regard and felt it an honor to have the opportunity to translate the sometimes daunting legal process for clients who needed his services. He usually chose his clients carefully.

  Ever since he had taken on this dead artist’s daughter as a client, he had regretted having done so. For one thing, the case was quite possibly destined to attract a lot of public attention—free advertisement but at a cost. He hadn’t appreciated all of the possible implications. For another, the young woman was a truly strange person, and he wasn’t sure how strange. But the case had looked so straightforward. The suit by the artist Parker Palmer was obviously frivolous and proving that required only the simple application of modern biomedical technology. Just get the DNA paternity data and case closed. He could collect his fee and bid farewell to the strange young woman as well as any possibility of having to deal with a too high profile case. It looked like a quick and easy job, a few quick bucks which he could certainly use.

  That is, until the results of the DNA tests arrived.

  The power of information to roil a situation should not have surprised Holden as much as it did. Truth was his friend. He was in love with facts. One of his core beliefs was that any conundrum could be solved, any case settled, if you could get your hands on the facts. Accurate information was the bedrock of the law when practiced with the integrity that it deserved. And he had been led to believe that DNA didn’t lie, an apparent fact that he desperately wished not to believe on this troubled evening.

  As he spent this sleepless night wrestling with a dilemma that he did not expect and was not at all sure how to handle, he began to wonder if his bosom friend, truth, had betrayed him.

  Chapter 26

  “’Fraid I don’t know a helluva lot,” SalomeMe half-mumbled, exhaling a puff of blue smoke from a slim lavender cigarette toward the ceiling.

  Sensing her emotional fragility, Holden decided not to enforce his usually inviolable no smoking rule.

  The call had awakened her from a semi-coma long before she was prepared to engage the conscious world. It had taken a while for the summons to her lawyer’s office to register with her and even longer to get herself sufficiently organized to respond. Finally, she tumbled from her bed, assembled her quirky public persona, and called for a taxi to ferry her from Germantown to the Third Avenue office of James L. (Jimmy) Holden, Attorney at Law. She was in less than an optimal state for dealing with the news or responding to her lawyer’s questions, and she was a full hour later than agreed to, but she was, at last, there.

  Holden had asked her to recall everything she could remember about her early life. His revelation of the indisputable biological fact that the recently deceased artist known as Bechman Fitzwallington was not her biological father had elicited a wry smile, the lighting of a fresh slender pastel smoke, and not much else that was obvious. But it was early in the day for the strange young woman, so perhaps her higher integrative functions had not yet awakened sufficiently to react as they normally would. Judging from her tepid response to his request to recall her early life, maybe that was true of her entire central nervous system.

  “What about your mother?” Holden asked.

  “Never knew her. The old man said she died when I was born.”

  “Is it possible that he knew he was not your biological father but that he adopted you? That would still make you his heir.”

  “He never said anything like that. He raised me, if you can call it that, as a single father and never let on that he had any doubts about it. Not that he behaved like a father ought to, but that’s the role he claimed. Single father of an only child. He liked that he could claim that, like he should be admired for it. But we both knew that there was nothing admirable about his approach to parenting. He was a bad man, counselor. A bad man.”

  A bl
and observation even repeated; no detectable emotion. She yawned and flicked lavender ashes on the carpet absently. Holden grimaced but didn’t say anything.

  “Look, Miss SalomeMe,” Holden said.

  “The title,” she responded. “You can drop the title.”

  “OK,” he said, “SalomeMe, there has to be some proof of your relationship to Bechman Fitzwallington to establish you as his heir and therefore for you to claim the paintings. This is serious. From what I understand, you could wind up either disgustingly rich or impoverished. We’ll need to get your birth certificate and any other documents—adoption records, family bible—anything that supports your claim.”

  “Isn’t that why you get the big bucks?”

  She flicked her wrist, spilling more lavender ashes on to the carpet. She smiled. It was an incongruous smile. In another setting, it might have seemed seductive.

  Holden was finding it difficult to conceal his anger. When he took her on as a client, he had no way to suspect where the facts would lead him. But here he was. He was up to his unmentionables in the quagmire where this strange young woman dwelled and, despite the unfairness of it all, he felt obligated to see it through as far as he could. He had tried the quick and easy route, going directly for bedrock truth, the DNA test, expecting a rapid and profitable resolution of the situation. And the truth had proven extremely inconvenient. He had assumed that an appropriate exit strategy and its timing would be made obvious by the facts and hadn’t considered any other possibility. At least some of the truth was now known, and his planned route of egress was sealed shut. He still felt obligated to do what he could to benefit his client. Damn integrity!

  “My dear young lady,” Holden did not try to conceal his contempt for the situation and probably for his client as well, “when the dust settles, it is not at all clear that either of us will see bucks of any denomination. But I can assure you that if you make any money out of this debacle, I’ll lay claim to what I consider to be my fair share of it.”