Elizabeth Lowell - Blue Smoke and Murder

“It’s a long story.”

Jill was curious, but she didn’t ask. She came from a long line of long stories. She understood family privacy.

“Well, Joe can’t be any worse than the father of one of my roommates in college,” she said. “Sara’s dad was a veterinarian. After she turned fifteen, he mounted a castrating knife on the front door. Claimed it would work just fine as a door-knocker.”

Zach snickered. “She get many dates?”

“Not until she went away to college.”

Shaking his head, Zach kept driving. Hard.

Jill would have been nervous, but nothing about the car or the man suggested that either was on the edge of losing the road. She settled back, relaxed as she rarely was when someone else was at the controls.

Coordinated, smooth, quick, thorough. Wonder what else he’s good at?

She could think of a few things that would be fun test-driving with him. None of them had wheels.

Very quickly, wild mountain scenery gave way to chalets and chairlifts and empty slopes.

“Okay, time for your game face,” Zach said. “You’re the-”

“Sweet stupid thing,” she cut in. “You’re the kind of man Sara’s father hung the castrating knife over the door to discourage.”

Zach winced. “Not a happy visual.”

“I’m sure it took the rut out of more than one young buck.”

Privately Zach thought it wouldn’t have worked over Jill’s door, but he didn’t say anything aloud. It was bad enough wanting her. Having her know it, and back away because of it, would turn a fairly straightforward op into Grade A goat-roping real quick.

How did Faroe manage to keep Grace alive when he was head over balls in lust with her?

But Zach hadn’t asked his boss when he’d had the chance, and it was too late now.

He opened his mouth to go over the scenario for the gallery with Jill again. Then he thought better of it. She wasn’t stupid. If he had to make adjustments to the game plan in midplay, she was quick enough to keep up with him.

If anything, he should worry about keeping up with her. The lady was too used to leading. Problem was, she could easily go through the wrong door while he was running to catch up. And Zach knew in his gut what Jill knew only intellectually.

Some doors were fatal.

SNOWBIRD

SEPTEMBER 15

11:03 A.M.

The first gallery Zach and Jill went to was housed in a fake mountain chalet at the base of one of the ski lifts. The slopes above the town were still summer-naked and dry, not so much as a flake of snow anywhere. Finding a parking place was easy.

“Western Light and Shadow, Ms. Joanna Waverly-Benet,” Jill said, reading the sign. “This is one of the galleries I sent JPEGs to.”

Zach already knew that, but he nodded.

“If the big ones didn’t want to bother, I thought maybe a smaller, less-established gallery might be more eager to work with me,” Jill explained.

“Smart. Lucky, too.”

“How so?”

“According to Shawna, Ms. Waverly-Benet is an up-and-comer on the Western art scene. Her specialty is painters of Dunstan’s era. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Hillhouse showed her Modesty’s painting when he was testing the market.”

“Well, she didn’t answer my e-mail. But then, I haven’t checked it since last night.”

Zach pulled out his sat/cell phone, frowned at the level of the battery, and noticed that no new messages had come from St. Kilda.

“Ms. Waverly-Benet still hasn’t answered your e-mail,” he said. “Looks like even the little fish aren’t taking the bait.”

“Thanks so much for hacking my e-mail.”

“St. Kilda lives to serve.”

Jill got out of the big SUV, shut the door hard, and headed for the gallery. Automatically she touched her waist, checking the belly bag. Then she remembered she’d left it on the backseat. The bag’s rough band had kept catching on her only good blouse.

Zach was one step behind her, then one step ahead. “I go through doors first, remember?” he asked curtly.

“And people say chivalry is dead.”

“It was killed by rushing through doors first,” he retorted.

Large glass windows gave Zach a view inside the gallery. Clean, uncrowded, bright. Nothing unexpected. Everything in place, including a sleek brunette working on a computer just off the main showroom. She was just reaching for the telephone on her desk.

“Change of plans,” Zach said. “I’m nice for this one.”

“Should be a challenge.”

He smiled and brushed the skin at the nape of her neck as he straightened the collar of her silky shirt.

She gave him a startled look. Then she smiled and smoothed down the collar of his black cotton shirt, taking care to slide her fingers into the opening of the neck.

Zach’s eyelids lowered. “You’re distracting me.”

“Same goes.” She smiled up at him, traced the pulse beating in his neck, and moved back.

His slow smile was a warning and a promise. He opened the door, stepped through while chimes sang a sweet welcome, and held the door open for Jill.

“I’ll be right with you,” the woman called out before she picked up her phone.

“No problem,” Zach said, smiling.

The woman blinked, startled by the gentle voice and smile coming from a rough-looking man wearing enough stubble to make a movie villain envious. She smiled back at him, then began talking on the phone in a low voice.

Jill drifted off to look at a wall of Impressionist-style paintings. A few depicted the American West that no longer was. Most of the paintings showed Siberia in a storm, Paris in a spring rain, dancers stretching at the barre in the manner of Degas. Still other paintings offered the rural haystacks that Monet’s many imitators had turned into a cliché.

She half expected to find a vase of sunflowers in homage to van Gogh.

Zach glanced at the paintings and then looked away with an attitude that said he’d seen them all before and hadn’t been impressed that time either.

The woman’s voice murmured in the background. Her low, cultured tones couldn’t be overheard.

Curious, Jill looked at the cards that named the artists who clearly had been thoroughly schooled in classic Impressionism. Every name was Russian. Every painting was nineteenth or twentieth century.

The asking prices were all well into six figures.

No matter what the subject, the Russian painters had flawless technique, rather like the superstars of ice, gymnastics, and ballet that the Soviet Union once had been famous for producing.

“You’re frowning,” Zach said to Jill. “Something wrong?”

“Nothing. That’s the problem.”

He raised an eyebrow. “It is?”

“The academics of these pictures are perfect. Light. Shadow. Color. Proportion. Brushstrokes. Everything.”

“Makes you nervous, doesn’t it?” he asked dryly.

“It makes me remember something you mentioned earlier about Russian Impressionism and”-she looked quickly at the woman, who was still talking-“the mafyia.”

“Yeah, this kind of stuff has been flooding the market by the container load,” Zach said heading for another wall, this one with scenes of the American West. “It’s one way for the new Russian oligarchs to get cash out of the former Soviet Union.”

“Amazing.” Jill leaned closer to a painting.

“The prices?”

“That, too.”

Zach’s smile wasn’t comforting. “The big problem is that nobody knows for sure which are historic paintings and which are being cranked out by painting factories in modern Russia.”

“The Italians of Leonardo’s day did the same sort of thing. One big name. A herd of ‘student’ painters doing the work.” She moved on to the next painting, sunlight over water. “Really awesome technique.”

“I like yours better.”

Her head turned toward him so fast that her hair flew out. “My what?”

“Technique. The one you did of the horse with its rump to the wind really made me feel the bite of the desert winter-and that was just a JPEG I was looking at.”

She tilted her head slightly. “Are you talking about the painting at Pomona College?”

“You’re too modest. They have six of your paintings hanging in various rooms. With a few breaks and a good handler, you could have a career in the commercial arts. If the critics fell in love with you, you’d become a ‘fine’ arts painter.”

Jill shrugged. “Decent painters are as common as horseflies. Check any fine arts department.”

Zach shook his head. “You’re one hell of an uncommon horsefly.”

“Thanks. I think.”

“Do you have more paintings around?” he asked casually, but his eyes were clear, hard.

“I used to,” she said, studying-yes-a vase of sunflowers. “I gave them all to friends when I went back to the river.”

“Landscapes?”

“Most of them. A few portraits.” Then Jill went very still. “You’re thinking that I painted Modesty’s landscapes.”

“It occurred to me.”

It was foolish to feel angry, much less hurt, but Jill did. “Thanks for the vote of no confidence.”

“If I hadn’t investigated the possibility that you were the painter, I’d be working for some fast-food joint rather than St. Kilda. Never overlook the obvious is the oldest rule in the book.”

“Good for you. As soon as I find a long nail and a hammer, I’ll mount a gold star on your forehead.”

“You didn’t paint the canvases in Modesty’s trunk,” Zach said, ignoring Jill’s sarcasm.

“Is that what Pomona College told St. Kilda?”

“That’s what your paintings told me. You understand being alone, but not lonely.”

“So did whoever painted what I found in the trunk.”

“Yes and no,” Zach said. “In those dozen paintings there’s a corrosive kind of anger, a trapped animal’s rage at whatever is keeping it from the freedom all around it. Your paintings don’t have rage. You accept life and the land as it is. You’re alone with the land, not alone on it.”

“And you’re a professional liar,” she muttered, not wanting to be lured by the belief that Zach understood her paintings.

And her.

He ruffled her nerves enough on a physical level, without adding all the complications of intelligence into the mix.

“Sometimes I’m a liar,” he agreed. “Right now isn’t one of those times.”

Jill blew out a hissing breath. “I keep thinking about the ruined painting and Ford Hillhouse’s suggestion that it was all a fraud, but he’d pay Modesty a couple thousand to go away. How do you ‘lose’ a painting?”

“You send it out to three or four other dealers for their opinion, one of them has a foul-up in shipping, and a painting goes missing. It happens. That’s why shipments are insured. Ask anyone in the trade.”

“But-”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Hillhouse showed the painting to a few Dunstan collectors, just to see if one of them would be willing to roll the provenance dice.”

“That’s fraud.”

Zach shook his head. “Not if both seller and buyer are aware that the painting hasn’t been authenticated. Then it’s just business.”

“Then why did Hillhouse as good as call the painting a fraud?”

“That was one of the questions I was going to ask him,” Zach said, “but he never took St. Kilda’s calls, the painting is now a pile of scraps, and there’s no point in wasting time nailing his balls to the wall. If anything in that equation changes, I’ll get whatever answers I need from him, whenever I need them.”

“But if he won’t talk to you, how can you-” Her words stopped when she looked at Zach’s eyes. She swallowed and reminded herself that just because people lived in civilization, they weren’t always civilized.

“She’s wrapping up her conversation,” Zach said, indicating the woman.

“How can you tell?”

“Body language. You ready to play?”

“I’ll never have a career in fine art,” Jill said muttered. “I can’t paint and hold my nose, which is what I’d have to do to keep from smelling the bullshit that seems to be a big part of the scene.”

“That’s how you get blue smoke,” Zach said. “You build piles of bullshit and set fire to them. Now lose the inner bitch and look pleasant for the nice saleslady.”

Jill gritted her teeth. “It’s a little hard to make nice with a stranger who won’t answer e-mails and might have had a part in my great-aunt’s death.”