Die in Plain Sight

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Can’t afford you.”

  “If those paintings are what Susa thinks they are, you can afford us.”

  “They aren’t,” Lacey said flatly.

  “You sound very sure,” Ian said.

  She just shrugged.

  “Why?” Susa asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Lacey said. “I’m just sure.”

  Gnawing at her lip, she looked at the three canvases and wondered how long her father had known that Grandpa Rainbow was a forger.

  Painter’s Beach

  Wednesday morning

  12

  Stacks of paintings leaned haphazardly against the wall and one another in the elegant ballroom of the Savoy Hotel, the latest in a series of four hundred dollars a night and up—way up—hotels studding the glorious southern California coast. The hotel wasn’t open for business yet. Electricians still chased ghosts in the wires and decorators were still unwrapping crates of “accents” to add to the public areas. But for a few very important people, the hotel was open for business. Any member of the Forrest family was one of those important people. Any guest of theirs was another.

  Savoy Forrest looked at the chaos and wondered how the place would be ready in time for the auction on Saturday, but he knew it would be. His father had made it a personal crusade, and nobody wanted to face Ward Forrest with a handful of excuses as to why a job wasn’t done on time. Ward would listen, say something savage, and fire people. Failure wasn’t a word that he accepted, especially on one of the few Savoy development projects he’d managed to get built despite all the protests.

  “Mr. Forrest, how wonderful of you to stop by,” Mr. Goodman said, all but rubbing his hands together at having one of the wealthy art-buying Forrests within reach.

  “I kept hearing rumors that Susa Donovan was excited about some of the paintings,” Savoy said. “If anyone would know about it, I figured the past president of American Figurative Artists Association would.”

  Goodman nodded. “Absolutely. I do.”

  Savoy smiled. It wasn’t likely there was any connection with the paintings and those that the Savoy Museum already owned, but if they were by the same elusive artist, he wanted to place the first and last bid before some collector or art gallery beat him to it. It wasn’t often he got a chance to give his father something he’d really love to have.

  “If she’s excited, I’m damned curious,” Savoy said as he surveyed the chaos. “Are the paintings here?”

  “No, these are the donated paintings for the auction. The exhibition-only paintings are in the main conference room.”

  “Anything that might be of interest to the museum in this lot?” Savoy asked, waving a hand toward the leaning paintings.

  “Actually, there are several rather nice early landscapes,” Goodman said, smoothing a long strand of hair across his otherwise bald head. “Not world-class, of course, but La Susa thought enough of them to write a note and tape it to the back of each canvas. That alone should add several hundred dollars or more to the final price of each painting.”

  “Let’s see them. I’m always on the lookout for art for our museum. We own quite a few works by relatively unknown painters.”

  Goodman smiled eagerly. The Forrests were the foremost—and most unpredictable—collectors of plein air paintings in a state full of wealthy, eccentric art collectors. “I’ve set aside some of the most interesting paintings over here.”

  He led Savoy to a corner overlooking the zero-rim swimming pool at the cliff’s edge and the whitecapped ocean beyond. Savoy dodged a decorator and two carpenters stringing a long, tight wire above eye level across the wall to hang the canvases. At the moment, some of them were leaving marks against the base of the newly painted wall. Goodman stopped at a long eighteenth-century library table where paintings were carefully stacked.

  “This one is especially sweet,” he said, lifting up a small landscape.

  Savoy took the landscape and shifted position until he found the best light pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The surface of the landscape badly needed cleaning, but beneath decades of grime the colors of golden light and equally golden hills whispered of lazy, sunny afternoons and a time when steam trains were the fastest thing on earth. On the back there was a piece of paper taped to the canvas that gave Susa’s reasons for singling the painting out for special attention. She mentioned elegance and simplicity of composition and “unself-conscious, almost naive brushwork. This is a genuine act of creation rather than simply an imitation of a popular artistic style.”

  “I believe that’s the hill where the Savoy Tower stands now,” Goodman said. “This painting would fit nicely into the Before and After wing of the Savoy Museum.”

  Savoy nodded and set the painting down. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Goodman pulled out several more landscapes that had caught Susa’s eye, including another one that depicted a piece of the Savoy Ranch that hadn’t changed. “This one is—”

  “Picnic Bluff,” Savoy cut in, taking the painting.

  He’d seen more accomplished plein air paintings—a lot of them—but not one of them had been painted on Picnic Bluff. It was his own personal time-out place. Whenever family, business, or life in general got to him, he would go to the bluff, lie on his back with a stem of grass in his teeth, and listen to the ocean foaming softly below and the wind whispering secrets to the hills. It didn’t cure the problems of the world, but it went a long way toward making them tolerable.

  Picnic Bluff was square in the center of the land that was slated for development into Ward Forrest’s visionary twenty-first-century city. Part of Savoy regretted that. The rest of him knew that unless the majority of the land was developed, the ranch would have to be broken up and sold off for taxes to keep the family in money. If the developed land included Picnic Bluff, so be it. There were a lot of bluffs on the ranch; he’d find another one to retreat to.

  “Put a five-hundred-dollar minimum on this one,” Savoy said. “I’ll guarantee that much.”

  “Excellent.” Goodman pulled out a business card, scribbled on the back of it, and stuck it into the frame.

  Savoy looked at a few other paintings, but didn’t find anything he wanted to own for himself or for the museum. He glanced pointedly at his watch. Goodman got the hint and unlocked the door to a room that was furnished as an intimate conference area.

  “Reporters,” Goodman said apologetically as he walked across the room to another locked door. “Word of Susa’s enthusiasm got out and we’ve been buried in calls for photo ops of Susa with the paintings.”

  “Great publicity.”

  “It certainly would be,” Goodman said, working over the lock on a door to an executive retreat that was bathroom, sitting room, and changing room combined, “but the owner of the paintings refused reprographic rights, even to the press.”

  “Not uncommon.”

  “No,” Goodman said, “but usually owners of unknown artists aren’t so reluctant for publicity.” He shrugged. “Artists are an unpredictable lot.”

  “The owner is an artist?”

  “So I understand. At least the person who brought the paintings to Susa last night is an artist.”

  “Who?”

  “Ms. January Marsh.”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “Neither have I.” The lock finally gave way. “Ah, here we go. Have to remember to have Maintenance oil that. They don’t have room for paintings in the hotel safe, you see.”

  Savoy didn’t answer. He’d just seen the three paintings that had been hung carefully on the opposite wall. Between the two landscapes the violence of the center painting was almost surreal.

  This definitely was the same artist his father collected at every opportunity. Paintings came on the market so rarely that it had been years since he’d seen one.

  “The woman, January Marsh,” Savoy said without glancing away from the art.

  “Yes?”

  “What is she asking for these?�
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  “They aren’t for sale.”

  Savoy turned and gave Goodman a look. “Not for sale? Wasn’t that the whole point of this charitable exercise—raising money for the Friends of Moreno County?”

  Goodman shifted uncomfortably under Savoy’s cool eyes. “Well, yes, but not all people decided to auction off their paintings for charity. Their donation is the twenty-dollar-per-painting fee for having La Susa look at their family treasures.”

  “I see.” Savoy turned back to the paintings. “I take it that Ms. March is local?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Savoy spun around. “Excuse me?”

  “Our contact is an e-mail address.”

  “No telephone? Not even a P.O. box?”

  Goodman shook his head. “La Susa had a difficult time getting Ms. Marsh to agree even to exhibit the paintings.”

  “Odd.” He went closer to the paintings. “Well, give me the e-mail then. I’ll contact Ms. Marsh. I want my father to see these paintings before I do anything, but I’m sure he’ll agree that they would be excellent additions to the Savoy Museum.”

  Then perhaps Ms. Marsh could explain why there was no signature on Marten’s paintings—and how they had survived the fire that killed Marten and burned his life’s work to smelly ash.

  Newport Beach

  Wednesday

  13

  Frowning, Lacey clamped a brush between her teeth and looked at the landscape she was painting. It wasn’t working. Maybe it was the fact that she’d been thinking about Susa and David Quinn’s paintings. Maybe she was just having a bad day and shouldn’t be trying to paint.

  And maybe she was spending all her energy wondering what to do about a string of e-mails from one of the most powerful men in the state of California.

  Ignore him. He’ll go away.

  She blew fiercely at the curl that kept dangling over her right eye, switched brushes, and added a touch more yellow to the green already on her brush.

  Dad would shit a litter of green lizards if he knew.

  And that’s what the painting she was working on looked like—a litter of excreted green lizards.

  “The hell with it,” she said, throwing down her brush in disgust.

  “It’s not that bad,” Ian said.

  Lacey gasped and turned around so fast she almost tripped. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to pick up my poster and—”

  “It’s downstairs.”

  “Your partner sent me up here,” Ian continued, ignoring the interruption. “Susa wants you to come and paint with her out on the Savoy Ranch.”

  Lacey just stared at him. “What?”

  “My poster,” he said, beginning all over again. “You know, the one that—”

  “Not that,” she cut in. “Susa wants me to paint with her?”

  “Yeah.” He tilted his head and took in her shocked brown eyes. “Something wrong with that?”

  Lacey took a breath, then another. “Susa is a goddess.”

  “I’ll have to tell her sons. They haven’t figured it out. Archer is sure she’s a mortal in need of tender loving care.” Ian smiled slowly.

  “Don’t smile like that,” she said, groaning. “I’m having a hard enough time thinking as it is.”

  He laughed and wound a shining chestnut curl around his finger. Letting the hair go, he stroked the back of his finger down her cheek. “You’re one of a kind, Ms. Marsh.”

  “More like one of thousands who get lost in that smile.”

  “No one ever had any trouble finding her way out again real quick.”

  “I’m terrible at mazes,” Lacey admitted.

  “This is supposed to discourage me?”

  “Think of it as a warning.” She smiled crookedly and drew in a deep, cautious breath. Lord, but the man was good. He hadn’t crowded her at all, yet her heart was doing the double-time thing. “Does Susa really want me to paint with her?”

  “Don’t take my word for it. Ask her yourself.”

  “Wow.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just wow. I’ll be all thumbs and squirt oils everywhere.” Lacey sighed. “But La Susa has taught classes and done videos, so I guess she’s used to awed students getting clumsy around her.”

  “After ten minutes, you’ll never think of her as La Susa again. She’ll just be Susa, a wife and mother and woman with a great sense of humor and a mind like a steel trap.”

  “You left out the part about being beautiful,” Lacey said, thinking of Susa’s petite elegance.

  “She’s happily married to a man who would clean my clock if he caught me flirting with his wife.”

  “In that case, when do we go painting?”

  “The hotel put up a fancy picnic so we can go whenever you’re ready.”

  “Which hotel?”

  “The one that’s opening Saturday with the charity auction.”

  “Savoy Hotel? Am I dreaming?”

  Lazily Ian reached out as though to pinch her.

  Lacey swatted his hand away. “No, I don’t want to wake up. I get Susa and a catered lunch from a five-star chef?”

  “Five stars, huh? No wonder the stuff smelled so good.”

  Behind Lacey, her computer beeped, telling her that another e-mail had arrived.

  “Something important?” Ian asked.

  She shrugged and said under her breath, “More like some one.”

  Ian glanced at the screen. Her e-mail program was open. Five e-mails were lined up, three unread. A sixth was displayed on the screen.

  “Are you always this nosy?” Lacey asked as he leaned toward the computer.

  “Yes.”

  “Anyone ever tell you it’s rude to read other people’s mail?”

  “Constantly, but my own is so boring.”

  She hit a button on the keyboard and the mail program vanished.

  “Dang,” he said. “Just when it was getting interesting. What does Savoy Forrest want?”

  “To buy my paintings.”

  “That’s great!” Ian looked around at the canvases stacked against or hanging on the wall. “Which ones?”

  “Not ones I’ve painted. The ones my—the ones I found at a garage sale,” she corrected quickly.

  “Oh. That explains it.”

  “What?”

  “Why the e-mails were addressed to Ms. Marsh.”

  And why there were only six listed e-mails, all of them within the past twenty-four hours. Obviously “Ms. Marsh” was a very new identity that had been activated recently, probably for the mystery paintings. Ian had pretty much figured that out already, but in his line of work independent verification was always good. What he really wanted to figure out was what Lacey was hiding, and why.

  He wondered if a champagne picnic would loosen her tongue.

  Savoy Ranch

  Wednesday afternoon

  14

  The dirt road wound out of the grassy canyon and up the chaparral-covered flanks of the coastal hills. Although the ranch had three guarded gates close to public roads, the back country had few fences, many twisting tracks, and no guards. Anyone who knew the back roads of the county could bypass the gates and have a lovely drive through open land—until one of the ranch hands noticed and put out an alarm. Then a county deputy or ranch employee would show up and escort the trespassers back to public highways.

  Overhead, wind stirred the clouds into swirls of shadow and light, drama and tranquillity. Ian drove the ragged ranch road with the ease of a man who had seen a lot of dirt tracks in his childhood. The vehicle he drove could have belonged to his childhood, too. It was a GMC SUV from the time before SUVs got their name. He called it a truck and dared anyone else to do otherwise. Truck chassis, bench seat in front, backseat ripped out to make room for more covered cargo area, four wheel drive that didn’t go sour with hard work—Ian’s baby was dusty, battered, smooth-running, and tough. Everything that mattered to performance was in top shape, from the new safety windshield fo
r the new wipers to the well-tuned engine and expensive off-road tires.

  Even after all Ian’s hard work, when put next to the fleet of white Savoy Enterprises vehicles that the ranch hands used, his ancient truck looked like an accident waiting to happen.

  Susa and Lacey loved the truck at first sight.

  He just enjoyed one of the perks of having a pretty woman in the center of the seat—in spite of the after-market seat belts he’d installed, every time he swerved right, Lacey slid across the slick old bench seat and into him.