Die in Plain Sight

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Doesn’t work in Manhattan,” Susa said. “Any emergency vehicle caught in rush-hour traffic doesn’t get a break from the other drivers.”

  “No wonder people get shot,” Ian muttered. “Stupid bastards. What if they were the one who needed help?”

  “It always happens to the other guy,” Susa said. “First article of faith in cities.”

  “Water-hole theory of risk,” Ian said, smiling slightly.

  “What’s that?” Lacey asked.

  “Every animal has to drink, so predators lie in wait at water holes. When thirsty time comes, someone’s going to get eaten, but everyone figures it will be someone else.”

  “Wow, that’s a cheery outlook,” Lacey said. “Turn right at the next street and I’ll show you a back way to my shop.”

  The twists and turns Lacey took them through showed Ian a bit of the pre–World War Two California he found in old Westerns. He had to stare past rows of parked cars to see it, but at least it was there.

  “Look at that little cottage,” he said. “Isn’t it great?”

  Lacey glanced at the run-down place that someone had turned into a tattoo parlor. The picket fence was more memory than reality. The tiny window gardens were bare of all but a few tough weeds. The small wooden porch sagged at one corner. So did the steps leading up to the door.

  “Heaven help them if the termites all sneeze at once,” Lacey said.

  “It has great lines,” Ian said.

  “So does a mummy. Turn left into the alley, then right.”

  “Are you saying you don’t feel the poetry in that old cottage?” Ian asked.

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Thank God.”

  She gave him a questioning look.

  “I was afraid you were perfect,” he explained.

  Susa laughed and decided January Marsh was right—Ian should come with warning labels.

  “If Shayla isn’t here, you can park in back,” Lacey said. “Otherwise, just let me out.” She stretched to look around Ian’s wide shoulders. “She’s still here.”

  “You sure you won’t have dinner?” Ian asked.

  She hesitated, then sighed and did the right thing. “I have to help Shayla with inventory. But thanks.”

  Ian double-parked and put on the emergency flashers so that he could help Lacey unload her gear.

  “You stay with the truck,” Lacey said as she slid across the bench seat. “Newport supports itself on parking tickets. I’ll be right back.”

  She made several trips into the store with fresh field studies while Ian sorted out the rest of her things from Susa’s. When it was down to an easel and a box of brushes stacked against a box of oils, Lacey ran up and gathered everything into her arms. “Thanks for everything.”

  “Wait. Don’t forget these,” Ian said, holding out two bottles of champagne.

  “What? They’re not mine. They cost a fortune!”

  “Susa has two more in her suite refrigerator, compliments of the management,” he said.

  “Then you take them.”

  “Champagne and side arms don’t mix.”

  Lacey blinked. She kept forgetting that this easy-laughing, gentle-smiling man wore a gun beneath his denim jacket. She shifted on the sidewalk, getting a better grip on her gear—and herself.

  He tucked the two bottles of expensive bubbly into her arms. “Don’t drink it all it once.”

  She tilted her head and looked at him with clear brown eyes. “Do you always wear a gun?”

  He smiled slowly. “I’ve been known to take it off for close friends.”

  “Here.” She nudged one of the bottles out of her arms. “Go get close to a friend.”

  He caught the bottle before it hit the sidewalk and became a pricey pile of foam and broken glass. “How long will you and your partner be working on that inventory?”

  “Until it’s done or we go nucking futz.”

  “Now that I’d pay to see.” He brushed her stubborn shiny curl aside and kissed the spot on her eyebrow where the curl had been. At the same time, he tucked a piece of paper into the pocket of her wildly colorful jacket. “If you decide you need help, that’s my cell phone number.”

  “Help with the inventory?” she asked, shivering at the warmth of his breath feathering over her temple.

  “With anything at all. Okay?”

  Hesitantly she nodded.

  “Call me, no matter what the time,” he said. “I’m used to it.”

  “Women calling you?”

  He smiled and wished the time and place were different. But they weren’t. “No. Odd calls at odd hours from odd people.”

  “Are you calling me odd?”

  “Yeah.”

  She blew back the stray curl. “Good call. And good night.”

  Ian waited until Lacey went through the shop door before he slid behind the wheel of the truck, turned to Susa, and said, “Well?”

  “She didn’t forge those three paintings.”

  He let out a long breath. “Thank you, God.”

  “Didn’t want to seduce a crook in the line of duty, even an appealing one?” Susa asked, partly joking and mostly not.

  Ian turned off the flashers and drove carefully down the narrow street.

  Susa waited for an answer.

  “I’m real picky about who I get naked with,” Ian said in a level tone. “So you’re saying she isn’t good enough to have painted those Martens or whatever the hell they are?”

  “She’s talented, no doubt about it. If she keeps painting, she’ll shed the last of the academic shackles and fly.”

  “Then what makes you so certain she didn’t paint those landscapes? I’m no specialist, but what she painted today looked damned good to me. Hell, it looked better than good. Maybe she was soft-pedaling her ability so that no one would suspect what she was capable of.”

  Susa was silent for the space of several breaths. Then she sighed. “It’s possible that she might have consciously shifted her brush strokes and managed to paint the two pure plein air landscapes she brought to me. Barely possible, in my opinion.”

  “But possible all the same.”

  “Don’t you want her to be innocent?”

  “I want to play blues guitar like B.B. King. So what?”

  Susa rotated her head on her shoulders, trying to loosen muscles tied up by decades of painting. Or by decades, period.

  “Field studies,” she said, “which is plein air painting by another name, are by their very nature looser and less academic than studio works. In that sense, someone might argue that field studies are easier to forge. I’m not saying I would argue that myself, simply that an argument could be made.”

  Ian wanted more than faint reassurance. He didn’t like to think that he could have been so completely taken in by a paint-spattered con artist.

  “Did she or didn’t she?” he asked bluntly.

  “I’d say no.”

  “Much as I’d like to agree with you, I flat don’t believe she got those paintings at a garage sale.”

  Susa shrugged. “Stranger things happen all the time. In fact, one of my old paintings turned up in a flea market a few years back.”

  Ian grunted. “She didn’t act like she was comfortable talking about the so-called garage sale.”

  “How about this? Even if she was working from a photo or copying directly from another painting, I don’t believe she could have changed her basic style enough to produce the drowning woman canvas. Brushwork is as individual as handwriting and much harder to forge successfully.”

  “Keep going.”

  “Do you want a declaration signed in blood and notarized?” she asked impatiently.

  “Rarities Unlimited exists because forgers, good forgers, exist.”

  “People who are excellent copyists often are like good actors—they don’t have their own vision, so they borrow someone else’s. You saw her paintings today. What do you think?”

  “She didn’t wait around to see w
hat you would paint. She just went out there and set up her easel and started thinking. Not painting. Not right away. She looked at the land, her brushes, the canvas, her paints, and then the land again. Once she started to paint, she never came up for air.”

  Susa smiled. “You’re a very noticing kind of man, Ian Lapstrake.”

  “It’s not like I had a lot else to do today.”

  “Am I detecting a faint whine?”

  “Yeah. And thanks, I’ve already had plenty of cheese to go with it.”

  Susa took pity on him. “You don’t have to come to the dinner with me tonight. I’ll be in the midst of southern California’s art glitterati and the spendy sponsors who go with them. The only thing threatening me is terminal boredom. That’s why I wanted Jan along.”

  “That’s the other thing bothering me about her,” Ian said.

  “What?”

  “Her name isn’t January Marsh.”

  Newport Beach

  Wednesday evening

  17

  Ward got out of the car and shot his cuffs, freeing them from the sleeves of his navy blue suit coat. He fingered his maroon silk tie, found it smooth against the handmade linen shirt, and didn’t know whether to laugh or swear at having to get tricked out like an executive flunky just to have dinner. But unless you were born with a platinum spoon clamped between your gums, the well-dressed social game was necessary to business success.

  “Very handsome,” Savoy said to his father.

  “Go ahead, say it. Too conservative.”

  Savoy shrugged, shut the car door, and gestured the driver on. “This isn’t Hollywood.”

  “Couldn’t tell it by you.” Ward waved at his son’s sport coat and slacks, shirt and no tie. At least he hadn’t worn running shoes. “The only people who can afford to ignore society’s conventions are the children of the spoiled wealthy, like you and Blissy. I’m the son of a working man. Nobody handed me anything.”

  “You married well.”

  “You think that wasn’t work?” Ward shot back. “Every day of her life, Gem shoved my lack of good breeding in my face.”

  “Couldn’t have been all that bad,” Savoy said. The whole topic of bloodlines bored him almost as much as his mother’s pathetic, drunken insistence on good breeding had. “Your father was a close friend of Mother’s father—and she married you, didn’t she? Stayed married, too.”

  Ward made a sound of satisfaction. “She sure as hell did, common blood and all.” But it had taken some real persuasion on his part.

  In his younger days, he’d been good at charming the upper classes. Good enough to win a place by marriage in the Savoy family. Good enough so that his children would inherit the Forrest name and the Savoy fortune, minus the fifteen percent his ever damned mother-in-law had given to her sister’s kids. Of course, knowing where all the family bodies were buried hadn’t hurt him, either.

  The maître d’ of the Hunt Club rushed forward to greet Ward and Savoy. “This way, sir. Your private room is waiting. Mr. Goodman, Ms. White, and the Birch-Andersons have already arrived.”

  Ward nodded.

  As his father had taught him, Savoy put a folded fifty-dollar bill in the maître d’s palm and shook hands with him. “Thank you, Charles. I trust the fish came through on time?”

  “Yes, sir,” Charles said. “Fresh Dover sole, gulf prawns, and Maine lobster. A Mr. Lapstrake called and asked if there would be room for a Ms. Marsh, a friend of Ms. Donovan, to attend. I assured him there would be, but then he called again to say it would be just himself and Ms. Donovan, that Ms. Marsh had an engagement she couldn’t ignore.”

  Savoy wondered if Ms. Marsh’s first name was January, but before he could ask, Ward was talking to the maître d’.

  “How’s your son?” Ward asked. “Heard he’d been injured playing football.”

  “Much better, sir, thank you.” The maître d’ smiled widely. “You should have seen the other guy.”

  Ward gave a crack of laughter. “You tell that boy of yours to keep kicking ass. It’s the only thing real men understand.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Savoy watched the maître d’ and his father walk away, exchanging football lore. The old man should have been a politician. Savoy was the one tipping the maître d’, yet a single question from his father about the man’s son had him smiling and preening and actually liking Ward Forrest. Maybe you had to be raised with the common touch to have it. If not for hunting and target shooting, he wouldn’t have anything to share with his father but an accident of birth.

  With a stifled sigh, Savoy walked toward the private dinner room. Times like this he really missed his mother; Gem had understood him in ways Ward never would. Not for the first time, Savoy wondered why his parents had stayed married as long as they had. It must have been that old thing about opposites attracting. God knew that the two had been about as opposite as could be.

  And here Savoy was, by all accounts a gentle and charming scion of wealth, waiting for his second wife to meet someone else and divorce him. They had seemed so compatible ten years ago. Now they lived separately and, for the most part, peacefully, appearing together only when it was necessary to present a united front for special birthdays, corporate events, and the like. This coming Saturday, for example, when the family would strut their unity for Angelique White.

  Speaking of the New Horizons devil, there she was, her lean model’s body clad in a little black number that Coco Chanel and Gem Savoy Forrest would have loved.

  “Angelique,” Savoy said, smiling and holding out his hands while Ward went on to greet the other three people. “How lovely that you could come. My wife will be sorry she missed you, but the Volunteer Guild at the hospital only meets once a month.”

  “Believe me, I understand,” Angelique said as she took Savoy’s hands. “Charity always comes first.”

  Savoy felt the faint brush of her cheek almost touching his. Angelique knew how to air kiss with the best of them. Close to Bliss in age but with a lot less mileage—or a better plastic surgeon—Angelique was as shrewd as she was devout. It was an unsettling combination in a businesswoman. Savoy wasn’t used to working with a chief operating officer who wouldn’t pick up a phone on Sunday unless it was to report directly to God Almighty.

  “Congratulations on finally settling that CCSD problem,” Angelique said. “And a very generous settlement it was. Well done, Savoy.”

  He smiled and hoped she didn’t mention it in front of Ward. “We’re pleased with it.”

  She smiled like the businesswoman she was, but couldn’t help looking eagerly around. “I can’t believe I’ll get a chance to talk with one of the most famous painters America has ever produced. La Susa is coming, isn’t she?” Angelique asked.

  Savoy smiled and silently congratulated himself on arranging the dinner tonight. It was the historic and artistic lure that had drawn New Horizons to Savoy Enterprises in the first place. The association of his grandfather Three Savoy with California Impressionism helped to separate Savoy Enterprises from others courting the cash-rich New Horizons. Presenting Angelique to Susa Donovan would definitely put a rosy glow around the Forrest name.

  And unless Bliss got over her pique real soon and lined up with the rest of the family, the name was going to need all the help it could get.

  “La Susa and her escort should be here momentarily,” Savoy said.

  “I saw the easels. Is she really bringing some paintings?” Angelique asked.

  “At least three. It’s her way to thank people for their patronage of the arts. How is your own painting coming?”

  Angelique laughed and shook her head. “It’s just a hobby. A series of art teachers have assured me that I’m not even in the gifted amateur category. But that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the talent of a true artist like La Susa.”

  A stir behind Savoy told him the guest of honor had arrived. That, and Angelique’s murmur, “Oh, my, she’s petite.”

  As Savoy stepped forward t
o handle all the introductions, he speculated about Susa’s “escort.” While hardly a boy, the man still looked young enough to be one of her sons.

  “Just set them up over there, Ian,” Susa said, gesturing toward the end of the room. “Then you can stand guard over them like a junkyard dog or you can eat with the rest of us.” She leaned close enough not to be overheard. “But if you stay with the paintings I’ll put ground glass in your breakfast coffee.”