The lapse between his comment and my comprehension of it ran to about half a minute. I looked away from the painting. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
Standing behind his desk now, Perret adjusted the blinds to lessen the flow of sunlight in the room. “What do I mean by what?” he said, in a tone to suggest he welcomed any intellectual challenge I might present him with. A sheet of glare had been reflecting off the surface of the Asmore, but now the painting’s color glowed in soft, diffused light. Christine was a fair-haired, rather chesty girl standing before a river, with flowers in her hands. About her expression was the post-coital glow that identified her as yet another satisfied notch on the Asmore bedpost. In the background a circle of sun illuminated a stand of enormous oak trees.
“You said something about the State Museum having a familial connection to the sitter. What do you mean by that?”
“Christine,” he said. “The woman you’re looking at, as well as the one who welcomed you earlier with a wave as we walked by her.”
I still refused to understand. “Forgive me, Dr. Perret.”
“Come on, Mr. Charbonnet. My assistant, Christine Dalrymple, out in the hall.” He pointed to the top of his head. “Don’t you recognize her? The docent, Mr. Charbonnet, the one with the… well, with the curiously colored hair.”
“Mind if I sit down?”
“Please.” He came out from behind the desk and showed me to a chair.
I felt it in my chest. Someone had reached down my throat and was trying to yank my heart out. Perret walked past the open door into the hall. “Christine, if you have a few minutes, dear, I’m sure Mr. Charbonnet would enjoy hearing about Levette.”
He pulled back a second chair and turned it toward me. I rose to my feet as the elderly woman entered the room, shambled past without a word and stood next to the painting. She held her head at the same angle as the girl in the portrait, and calculated her expression to mimic that of Beloved Christine. Obviously she’d practiced the pose many times before, and it seemed to delight Perret, who all but guaranteed future demonstrations by giving spirited applause. “Thank you,” he said. “Mr. Charbonnet, I have a full calendar this afternoon, so if there are questions please ask them now.”
“He’s too shook up,” said the docent, clearly pleased with herself. “Even worse than that other fellow. What was his name, Dr. Perret?” She put a hand up to her mouth. “We thought he’d throw up.”
“I’ll leave you with Christine, then,” Perret said.
I cleared my throat and glanced back at the curator. “Someone else was here? To see the Asmore?”
“Only yesterday,” he said. “Do you know Thomas Smallwood, by chance?”
“No, I don’t. I mean, I know of him, of course. And I’ve met him. But I don’t know him. He’s a collector of this sort of thing.”
“Yes, and a determined one. I must say, I admired his enthusiasm, exhausting though it may have been.” Perret laughed. “He spewed out more hackneyed details about the Asmore myth than I’ve heard from even our least inspired museum guides. No, if you want to know the truth about the artist, Mr. Charbonnet—the man, the real one—then Mrs. Dalrymple here is your source.”
“He took my picture,” she said. “This Mr. Smallwood did. He had a camera and he took me with the painting, didn’t he, Dr. Perret?”
“I saw him do it,” said the curator, rocking back on his heels in a show of pride.
“Maybe I can get you a copy,” she said to me.
“Pleasure to have met you, Mr. Charbonnet.” He extended his hand. “And do make sure she tells you everything.”
As soon as he disappeared past the door Christine Dalrymple said, “Fire away and don’t be bashful. I’ll sit here.” With her descent into the overstuffed leather chair came the motherly scent of skin lotion and talcum powder.
“What did Dr. Perret mean by everything, ma’am?”
“Probably the sex. And maybe the body odor.”
“Body odor, was there?” I laughed and looked back at Beloved Christine, as if for confirmation from the girl in the painting. “I suppose soap was hard to come by, for someone of Levette’s limited means,” I said. “You don’t imagine how they smell.”
“How who smells?”
“An artist. You see their paintings and that’s the last thing that comes to mind.”
She brought her hand back up and whispered again, “I liked it. Now want to hear about the sex?”
“Whatever you’re comfortable sharing.”
“The first time was in his studio. He wanted me to model without my clothes on. He asked all the girls to model that way. So you take your clothes off and he paints you but when he finished you always had your clothes on—in the picture, I mean. He just liked to look, I guess. He had a reputation, but I would have done anything for him. I was in love, you see?”
“Do you know why he jumped from the bridge, Mrs. Dalrymple?”
“Oh, did he jump from a bridge? I didn’t know that. Why would anyone in his right mind jump from a bridge?”
“You don’t remember how he died?”
“I think I remember reading something about it in the papers.”
“The Huey P. Long Bridge? In Harahan?”
“Of course,” she said. “I can tell you all about the Kingfish. He paved the roads and gave free schoolbooks to the children. Am I right?”
“Mrs. Dalrymple, please forgive me for asking this question. I don’t intend to insult you. But you aren’t really Christine, the girl in this portrait, are you?”
She squeezed her lips together and glanced back at the portrait, as if expecting the girl in the painting, whoever she was, to come to her defense.
“What color hair did Levette Asmore have?” I said.
“Hair?”
“What color was it? Levette’s hair?”
Her eyes closed and she threw her head back. She seemed to be trying to concentrate. “Give me a minute, please.”
“You recall how he smelled, you recall making passionate love to him in his studio, but you don’t remember the color of his hair?”
Her mouth opened and she stammered a reply: “Was it red? That’s right, I remember now. Levette was a redhead.” She sank deeper into the chair. “That was a trick question, wasn’t it?”
I walked over to the painting for a closer inspection. They were different people. They possessed similar facial features, perhaps enough to pass as sisters, but Christine in the portrait was not Christine in the room. “You didn’t know Levette Asmore, did you? And you aren’t the girl who sat for this portrait, are you?”
She seemed prepared to protest, but then resigned herself to a less likely tactic, that being honesty. “Dr. Perret is so proud to tell people I’m one of the Beloved girls. Promise you won’t say anything. Please promise, Mr. Charbonnet.”
I sat back down. I was disappointed, having already planned to drive to the Guild’s studio to tell Rhys, but I also was embarrassed for the woman. “How did Dr. Perret confuse you with the girl in the portrait?”
“I don’t get paid to work here, I volunteer.”
“Yes, you’re a docent.”
“I walked in my first day and he did a double take. ‘It’s Christine,’ he said. I nodded, because my name really is Christine. My middle name. He called everybody in, everybody he could find, and he started telling them, ‘It’s Christine, it’s Christine, Beloved Christine.’ The more he said it the more the stories came out of my mouth.”
“And none of them true,” I said.
“The only man I ever posed for was my third husband and his Polaroid. This was in the seventies when people did that sort of thing. I admit I enjoyed it.”
Trading me step for step, she followed me out onto the gallery, then down the stairs all the way to the first floor and past the receptionist. As I approached a rear exit door I thought about Smallwood and wheeled around to ask more questions about his visit, and Mrs. Dalrymple and I nearly collided. “About Smallwoo
d,” I said. “The collector? Did he talk to Dr. Perret about Levette? Do you remember what he said?”
“Yes, now I do remember that. He said he’d been shopping for a painting by Levette Asmore for years, searching high and low, without any luck. He was thrilled, he said, because he’d finally located one to buy. He’d paid for it that day—yesterday, as a matter of fact—and was arranging for delivery.”
“An Asmore?” I said.
“Someone here in town, willing to sell. When Dr. Perret asked him who the painting belonged to, Mr. Smallwood shook his head and wouldn’t say. He was very secretive about it.” She placed a hand on my arm. “You still haven’t promised, Mr. Charbonnet.”
“I promise,” I said. “Don’t worry, ma’am. Your pose is safe with me.”
She let out a sigh. “I just pray God keeps the real Christine from ever deciding to make an appearance. Is it bad of me that I enjoy the attention? It keeps me young, being the girl in the painting, and if you’re not young, Mr. Charbonnet, you’re no one in this town. When I told Mr. Smallwood about how Levette smelled, he told me the sweetest thing. ‘I’d have washed for you, Mrs. Dalrymple.’ Then he kissed the back of my hand.”
I left the museum and drove directly to Central City and the Guild’s studio on Martin Luther King. I hoped to tell Rhys in person about Smallwood’s claim of having arranged to buy an Asmore, but I was equally determined to see the work she’d done on the mural. While the possibility existed that Smallwood had succeeded in persuading a collector to sell, it was easier to presume that he’d reached an arrangement with Gail Wheeler. This presented more potential scenarios for disaster than I would ever attempt to sort out alone.
I rang the bell and Joe Butler let me in. “How’s the weather?” he said.
“It’s beautiful. I don’t think it can get any prettier.”
“I thought you might say that.”
Under loupes lighted with fluorescent tubing the retouch specialists, Sarah and Morgan, were busy at their easels, and not far away the cleaning specialist, Leland, worked on a canvas on a table heretofore used only for gilding frames. A moment passed before it occurred to me that the artists were now downstairs, rather than on the second floor at their usual posts. Joe signaled for me to follow him.
We walked to the other side of the room and stood next to the portrait of the instant ancestor known as “Jack,” or the one formerly known as such. The name tag had been removed.
Joe was cleaning his glasses on the tail of his shirt. “She said if you called or came by to give you a message. She said she owes you a lot, you’re still good friends and everything, and please don’t take this wrong.”
“What’s going on around here, Joe?”
“She wants some time to finish the job before letting anyone see it.”
“And why is that?”
“It’s personal with her, bro. Haven’t you figured that out yet?” He put the glasses back on but the lenses were as hard to see through as before. “The thing is,” he said, “she decided she was going to do the restoration herself—all of it, every step, and every square inch. The paint removal, the retouch, the consolidation, the whole damn deal. A couple of days ago she banished everybody to the first floor.”
“Banished? She actually said you were banished?”
“‘Banished! Everyone’s banished!’ More like that.”
I leaned against the wall next to him. “If that isn’t some shit.”
“Tell me about it. I really wanted to get my hands on that sonofabitch—the mural, I mean. I’m good with old Levette. I understand the dude’s moods, his rhythms, his strokes, his colors, his likes and his dislikes, his dos and his don’ts. I can get in his head, you know what I’m saying? But she’s locked me out. She wouldn’t even let me in this morning to get the coffeepot.”
“Any idea why Rhys is doing this?”
“I think you know.” He leaned in closer and tugged on his goatee. “For somebody like Rhys,” he said, “this is as good as it gets and as good as it will ever get. It’s the Holy Grail, my brother. She’s a temporary Jesus up there saving what was lost, healing it with the magic and the power in her hands.” I had to fight off an impulse to laugh. The guy was spastic. I wondered how long it had taken him to come up with such crap. “She’ll save other great paintings,” he went on. “Sure, she will. But she’ll never have a chance to save this one. It was his masterpiece. It’s got to be hers, too.”
“I appreciate what you’re saying, Joe. I really do.”
“Thank you, bro.”
“But what I’ve got to tell her is important.” I was trying to sound reasonable. “It’s urgent. It can’t really wait.”
“It’s got to wait. You should see her up there, man. She doesn’t go home. She’s sleeping on an old army cot, having us bring her food. It’s like she’s in her own desert fighting her own devil. It’s biblical. You think I’m full of shit, don’t you?”
“I didn’t until you mentioned the devil. Okay, Joe. Listen to me. Tommy Smallwood has negotiated to buy Levette’s mural.”
“But we already got the mural.”
“Exactly.”
He seemed to understand finally. “I’ll tell her.”
“One other thing,” I said, and pointed over his shoulder at the portrait of the instant ancestor. “Thanks for taking my name off that ugly thing.”
“Don’t thank me, bro. It was Rhys. She’s the one that did it.”
She didn’t call until later that night, hours after I’d gone to bed. As I reached for the phone I glanced at the dial of the clock on the bedside table. “It’s almost two in the morning,” I said, by way of greeting.
“Is it?” I could hear her scrambling around for proof. “Wow, you’re right, it is almost two. Forgive me, Jack. I shouldn’t be calling this late.”
“What are you wearing?” I said.
“Huh?”
“It’s a joke. ‘What are you wearing?’ A man gets a call from a woman at this time of night and it’s often about… well, it’s probably never about a painting, let me put it to you that way.”
“How interesting,” she said, in a not-so-subtle dismissal. “Now what did that monster Smallwood go and do?”
I didn’t bother to turn on the lamp. There was an edge to her voice, a hint of agitation, and I knew it wasn’t going to be a long conversation. I told her what I’d learned during my visit to the State Museum, and she yelled out a laugh that forced me to move the phone from my ear. “I only wish I could be there when they take down our replacement mural and Hairy Mary wipes away the fake yellow paint and finds a blank canvas underneath. This is good. Oh, this is wonderful. Either Smallwood will think she overcleaned the painting and damaged it or he’ll realize he’s been had and it’ll make him want the mural more.”
“He’ll suspect you, Rhys. He’ll figure it out. And that’s what has me worried. Smallwood broke into Patrick’s apartment and tried to steal Dorothy. The guy’s dangerous. Who can guess what he’ll do to get the mural?”
“Who can? Let me try.” She fell silent and I could hear the sound of liquid being poured into a cup. “Nah, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I just wish I’d left something for Hairy Mary on the replacement mural. A stick figure shooting the bird. A rat nibbling on Tommy Smallwood’s toes. Yes, that would’ve been nice. Am I being mean tonight?” Now she sipped the liquid. “I have to tell you something, Jack, I have to say it. I can’t let Tommy Smallwood own Levette’s mural, not at any price. I just can’t let that happen.”
“He’ll own it if he outbids everybody else.”
“I know you’re right. And it would be a mistake not to invite him to the auction. But I’d almost rather die than let him take actual possession of it.”
“Don’t you need him, Rhys?”
“Yes, I do need him. If I were to keep Smallwood from pursuing the painting, I would undermine our chances of scoring big. He has to be there. And it’ll be his if he buys it, I guess. But I can’t fatho
m the idea of his actually owning it…. Oh, God, why am I suddenly obsessing on Smallwood when there’s still so much work left to do? I’m tired, obviously. I mean, I’m really tired.” She sipped again. “Jack, if you want to dig around and find out how he got Mrs. Wheeler to agree to sell him the mural, you have my blessing to do so. Me, I have work to do.”
I could hear her chair squeak and I pictured her seated in the one without casters, there in her office with books and pottery and paintings all around. Through the door at her back I could see a splash of golden light from the studio holding the four Asmore panels, now unfurled on tables and the floor. “Tell me about the painting,” I said.
She was quiet but for the rustling of papers.
“Rhys? Come on now, tell me what you’ve found under all that old paint.”
I’d barely finished when she put the phone down, ending the call.
Classes were done for the day, and after the last of the students had left the school grounds I went inside and found Rondell Cherry mopping the floor of the lobby where the mural had been. He pushed the knot of sudsy red rags between the chairs and over the bases of the heavy chrome platforms. He worked it under the sinks and the racks holding hair-care products. Because he was wearing headphones and listening to music, he didn’t hear me when I entered the room, nor did he notice when I tracked a few steps back into the hall, stood in the shadows against the wall and had a careful look at the replacement mural. Tacks driven into the edges appeared to be in place, and the seams that ran between the panels remained glued to the wall. The corn-yellow surface was perfectly hideous. It had been no small accomplishment, matching the appearance of the copy to the original, and yet she’d pulled it off. I felt a flood of admiration for Rhys and wished she were with me now to view her marvelous handiwork. “It’s you who’s the real artist,” I said under my breath, then walked into the room headed straight for Cherry.
“Government man,” he said, coming up to his full height, which in boots put him at no less than six feet seven inches. He tipped the mop handle against one of the chairs and removed the headphones, and we shook hands like old friends. “Where’s Miss Goudeau?” he said, throwing a glance in the direction of the hallway.
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