Elizabeth Lowell - Blue Smoke and Murder

“Yeah. At a minimum.”

“I know as much about the market for Western art as I do about finding, um, so-called industrial art in old junkyards,” she said.

He grinned despite the adrenaline humming in his blood.

Twelve new Dunstans. Sweet God.

If they’re real.

“I loved these paintings as a child,” Jill said, pulling out a fat, carefully wrapped rectangle. “I used to sneak up into the attic, where Modesty had them hidden, and look at them. That stopped when Modesty caught me. She smacked me but good.”

“And you sneaked back anyway.”

She shook her head. “Mother told me Modesty would throw us out if she caught me in the attic again. I was a kid, but I’d learned how precious shelter was when we ran away from New Eden. I never saw the paintings again until my great-aunt was dead.”

“Did Modesty say the paintings were valuable?”

“All she said about them was to stay away and never mention them again. To anyone.”

Zach really wanted to peel off the wrapping and have a look at what Jill was holding, but made himself wait. One of many things he’d learned from Frost was patience.

Of a predatory kind.

“What do you think now that you’ve seen them?” Zach asked. “Valuable or trash?”

“I look at things as an artist, not as a merchant.”

Ah, finally, he thought.

There was information about Jill in the files from St. Kilda, but he preferred to compare facts on file with what she willingly told him. He’d been real curious about some of those facts, given that one of Jill’s three college majors was fine art.

Some of the best counterfeiters were frustrated fine artists.

“Do you paint?” he asked.

“I studied painting in college,” she said. “I loved playing with oils, but making a living at it wasn’t likely. So I went to my second love, the river.”

He wondered what she wasn’t saying. He didn’t ask, hoping that she would keep talking. He needed her to trust him.

Part of the job, he told himself.

But he’d never been quite so determined to win a client’s trust as he was with Jillian Breck.

“The more I learned about how to create certain effects with oils,” she continued, “the more I began to wonder if these paintings weren’t quite valuable. They’re very good. In my opinion, anyway, which isn’t worth a penny.”

Zach wanted to rip the fat rectangle out of Jill’s hands. But all he did was ask, “Didn’t your great-aunt ever have the paintings appraised?”

Jill shook her head. “My grandmother never wanted the paintings seen by anyone. Modesty agreed, and kept that promise even after her sister died.”

“That’s odd.”

She shrugged. “Modesty raised odd to an art.”

“Then why did she finally send one of the paintings out to be appraised?”

“I’m guessing it was the taxes on the ranch. We’re land poor. I just keep wondering…” Jill’s voice faded.

“What?”

“If she would still be alive but for the tax bill. It’s paid now, by the way. Back taxes, death taxes, the whole greasy tortilla. It took every head of stock she owned, plus the insurance settlement for the fire and accidental death. Next year…” Jill shook her head. “Next year the land will be on the market. Unless those paintings are worth something, I can’t afford to keep the Breck ranch. And I’m damned if I’ll hand it over to my fundamentalist brothers.”

Zach looked out the cabin’s open door, across the sloping bench of land the ranch sat on to the dry canyons and low ridges that ran all the way to the north rim of the Grand Canyon ten miles distant. The ranch was beautiful in the way of the arid West, the kind of spare, demanding beauty that most people couldn’t see.

Jill could. Her eyes and her voice told Zach that she loved the land. She was hoping the paintings would allow her to keep the ranch.

“Art is a funny business,” he said. “Getting funnier every day.”

“From what I’ve gathered online, there’s huge money in the art market.”

“And no way to value a painting but its last auction price,” he said. “Or the second-to-last price-that’s the one two people were willing to pay.”

“What do you mean?”

“Art is like everything else. It’s worth what someone’s willing to pay for it. Period. In order to make people pay more, much more, auctioneers and experts churn out a lot of blue smoke. The painting being flogged doesn’t change from one decade to the next. Only the volume and quality of blue smoke varies. And the price of the art.”

“You think my paintings are worthless?” she asked.

“I haven’t seen them, have I?”

She smiled slowly. “Thought you’d never ask.”

HOLLYWOOD

SEPTEMBER 14

1:50 P.M.

Score had barely ushered a rich new client out of his office before Amy strode in, all but slamming the door behind her. The green tips of her hair quivered with anger.

“The next time you tell me ASAP,” she said, “take my calls.”

He grabbed his temper before he decked her. He needed Amy’s head right where it was, on her shoulders. He’d always had a temper, but lately it was on a hair trigger.

’Roids.

No. I do steroids, they don’t do me. It’s this damn Breck case that’s jerking me off.

“The bug on subject Breck has moved about three miles northeast from its initial site,” she said.

“What’s three miles away?”

“According to the map you gave me, a lot of nothing. It’s Nowhere, Arizona.”

Modesty’s taunting words came back to Score.

This house was built by pioneers, people who lived alone and protected themselves. They built hidey-holes that even the Paiutes couldn’t find.

“Anything on the phone bug?” he asked.

“No more than I already gave you. The subject must be away from her sat phone.”

Score looked at his schedule, swore under his breath, and wished he knew what the Breck girl was up to.

He didn’t want to leave Hollywood right now.

And he couldn’t afford to boot the Breck case. That particular client was too important.

“Tell me if you get anything on the phone bug,” Score said, “or if it leaves the ranch boundaries. And there’s a bonus if you get anything solid out of the phone.”

“Define solid.”

“I’ll know when you tell me.”

BRECK RANCH

SEPTEMBER 14

1:58 P.M.

Without a word, Jill unwrapped more paintings and leaned them against the wall.

Zach was equally silent.

The paintings were riveting.

Holy hell. Frost would get hard looking at just one of them. Twelve is staggering.

The canvases ranged from eight-by-twelve to thirty-four-by-forty inches. Just canvas and stretchers, no frames. If they were Dunstans, they were worth the kind of money even smart people killed for.

“Modesty lived alone? No one else?” Zach finally managed.

“Not after my mom died and I left.”

“Alone, and she hid these. That’s crazy,” he muttered.

“The wind out here can make you a little crazy sometimes.”

He looked at the incredible paintings. “This is way past a little.”

“Modesty didn’t have time or patience for art. She was too busy surviving.”

With that, Jill unwrapped the last two paintings and placed them against the wall.

“Holy, holy hell,” Zach said on a long gust of breath. If these are half as good as they look…

Almost reverently he lifted one of the canvases at random and took it into the sunlight to study. The first impression was of fine brushwork and careful technique.

And that mind-blowing, indefinable something called greatness.

The painting showed the first tentacles of the modern West overtaking the Wild West. Tucked away against the base of a dry, rocky ridge, green bloomed, and with it a gas station that must have been startlingly new when the painting was made. Despite the intrusion of the new into the old-or perhaps because of it-the painting echoed with space and isolation and time. He turned the canvas over. indian springs.

He picked up another painting at random. This one was a flawlessly executed Western landscape, basin and range country falling away from a lonely ridge. Below the ridge stood a cabin so small as to be insignificant against the sweep of the land. A human figure, a woman in a long red skirt and white blouse, carried a bucket of water from a spring.

The figure was suggested as much as drawn, a few brushstrokes added to the starkly beautiful land, brushstrokes that whispered of the human cost of pioneering the lonely, dry inter-mountain West.

“That’s one fine painting,” Zach said after a few minutes. “Of course, my opinion isn’t worth much more on the open market than yours.”

“I was trained in fine art. Western genre painting was never mentioned.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet. Europe, modernism, minimalism, or nothing at all. Except Georgia O’Keeffe, maybe, if you cornered a professor and peeled off thin strips of skin until he or she begged for mercy.”

“Sounds like you took my courses,” Jill said.

“My education was more informal, but the teacher was first class.” And a real son of a bitch along with it. Zach tilted the canvas so that sunlight raked over it from all angles, then flipped it over expertly to look at the back. “No signature. Again.”

“None of them are signed.”

He traded the canvas for another. A landscape again, just as technically brilliant and dynamic as the others, humming with time and space and distance, the thrill and exhilaration of testing yourself against an unknown, untamed land. Masculine long before Hemingway made a cult of it, and the hallmark of classic Western art.

This time a few spare brushstrokes evoked a woman with her pale skirt whipping in the wind, her back to the artist as she looked out over the empty land and endless sky. Again, the figure was very small in the context of the painting, yet without the woman the canvas would have been far less powerful. In a subtle way, she was the focus that made the picture transcend simple representation of a landscape.

Zach checked the back of the painting. A title had been painted in block letters on the canvas stretcher bar. enduring strength.

“Amen,” he said softly.

Jill looked over his arm. “That’s one of my favorites. The artist caught the heady isolation of this land perfectly.”

“Are they all this good?” Zach asked, scanning the paintings against the far wall.

“I don’t know what an expert would say, but I think so. They might not be to everybody’s taste, but nothing is.”

“There’s taste and then there’s insight.”

He held the painting up and studied it from edge to edge, back to front, and all sides. No signature.

“I’ve seen a few Dunstans,” Zach said. Every day, day after day, but that was years ago. Of all Frost’s collection of fine Western art, and of all the paintings that had passed through his galleries, the Dunstans had most appealed to Zach. Frost, too. The old man wouldn’t part with his two no matter what was offered.

“And?” she asked impatiently.

“These fit with my memories of Dunstan’s work. I don’t know how often he put figures in his landscapes, though.” Certainly not in the vast majority of them. “The landscape is strong.” Try incredible. “At the very least, this is the work of a gifted artist.”

“Then it should be worth something.”

“Like I said, art is a funny business.” Zach shifted the canvas gently. “The lack of a signature makes it really difficult to attribute the paintings to anyone, much less to a cult icon like Dunstan. Did Modesty ever suggest that they were Dunstan’s work? Maybe they were field studies for larger studio works. Lots of artists don’t sign their studies.”

“The most Modesty said about them was that her sister, Dunstan’s lover, called them ‘twenty-seven years of bad luck.’”

“Isn’t that an old saying about broken mirrors, black cats, and such?”

“I always wondered if it was the amount of time Justine knew Dunstan,” Jill said.

“Was your mother Dunstan’s child?”