Blue Smoke and Murder (10 page)

HOLLYWOOD
SEPTEMBER
14
1:50
P.M.

S
core 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.

W
ithout 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?”

Jill shrugged. “Nothing shows in the family Bible. My mother is entered as Maureen Breck, daughter of Justine Breck. No father mentioned. From the few times Mother and Modesty talked about my grandmother, I gather that my mother could have had one of several fathers.”

“A real modern relationship,” Zach said dryly.

“More like whenever Justine and Dunstan had a big blowup, she took another artist-lover for a time. She always came back to Dunstan, though. Until the last fight, when they ended up in jail.”

“Drunk and disorderly?”

“I’m told she tried to kill him.”

Zach’s dark eyebrows rose. “Never piss off a Breck woman, huh?”

“Keep it in mind,” Jill said, smiling slightly. “After she got out of jail, Justine lived on the ranch with her much-younger sister and her daughter.”

“I remember reading somewhere that Dunstan hung himself in jail,” Zach said.

“Like I said, don’t piss us off.”

Zach smiled slightly. “You really do come from a long line of solitary, difficult women, don’t you?”

Jill looked him in the eye. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

He glanced at the canvas in his hand. “I wonder how the artist who painted this would have described it.”

“Breck women pretty much march to their own drummer, do their own thing, and otherwise don’t take orders from anyone,” she said. “But I’ve never minded being alone, at least not until the other night.”

He put aside the painting and began pacing along the lineup of canvases against the cabin wall. Even on the third round, each painting was more striking than the last.

Incredible.

“Anything you left out when we talked last night?” he asked, still looking at the paintings. “Names, telephone numbers, gallery owners, lost lovers, someplace to start looking for the connection between you and the trash artist in Mesquite? Because as it is now, we have to go with investigating the galleries, owners, and art salesmen. If the threat is coming from somewhere else, we’ll be barking up a whole forest of wrong trees.”

Jill frowned at the paintings, thinking, then shook her head. “No help here.”

“How about old boyfriends?”

“Nope.”

“You never had a boyfriend?”

“I never had one who wasn’t relieved to say good-bye. As you pointed out, Breck women don’t take orders worth a damn.”

“So it’s whips and leather in bed for you?”

Her jaw dropped.

“Never mind,” Zach said, trying not to laugh. “Question withdrawn. For now I’ll go with the art connections. If nothing pops, I’ll come back and question you some more.”

“Come back?”

“Yeah. I’m going to put you in a St. Kilda safe house and—”

“No,” she cut in. “They’re my paintings. I’m staying with them.”

“You’re too inno—um, transparent,” Zach amended quickly.

“Meaning?”

“I’m a better liar than you are.”

“Well, that gives me all kinds of confidence,” she said ironically.

“You don’t care for liars?”

“No.”

He nodded. “You make my case for me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You run rivers for a living. You don’t like liars and don’t lie well enough to fool anyone.”

“So what?”

“So you’re safer not being with a professional liar, because you’ll have to lie right along with me.” He smiled gently at her bewildered look. “Don’t worry, you can trust St. Kilda with the paintings. We only lie to benefit our clients. Then we can churn out blue smoke with the best of ’em.”

“Joe Faroe didn’t say anything about keeping me locked away somewhere.”

“He was a little busy at the time, remember? Wife having a baby?” Eyes narrowed, Zach studied Jill, measuring her determination to stay with the paintings. “That sort of thing makes a man a little scattered.”

“You’re an expert on having a wife give birth?”

“Hell, no. But I know how I’d feel in his place. You’ll love the safe house. Good food, a swimming pool, all the amenities.”

Pointedly, Zach picked up a painting and started examining it from all sides.

Discussion over.

Jill started to argue, then simply turned and walked out to the truck. She unwrapped his leather jacket from around her waist pack, yanked out her sat phone, and punched in the number she’d already memorized.

“Joe Faroe, please,” she said crisply. “Jillian Breck calling.”

HOLLYWOOD
SEPTEMBER
14
2:03
P.M.

S
core watched the intercom light flash at double speed. Urgent.

Now what? Never get a minute to myself. What the hell is it now?
Score ignored the leap of his temper.

“Excuse me,” he said to the frightened trust-fund baby sitting on the other side of the big desk. The dude was a coke-smoking gambler afraid of kneecap collectors. Not Score’s favorite kind of client, but money was money. The kid’s mother had a lot of it. “I’ll just be a minute.”

Without waiting for an answer, Score strode into the adjoining office where Amy was waiting, looking like someone who expected a pat on her spiky hair and a wad of money. He shut and locked the door behind him.

“This better be good,” Score said harshly.

“The subject talked to St. Kilda Consulting. The man with her is a St. Kilda op.”

“Huh.” Score thought fast and hard. No matter how he looked at it, he didn’t like it. St. Kilda was bad news. “Were the paintings mentioned?”

“Just once. From the context, I’d say the subject either has the
paintings or knows where they are. She was objecting to the op’s plan to stash her in a safe house while he pursued the death threat against her. No one said where the paintings were, but the implication is that the art is real and available.”

Mother of all whores. How does a country girl know about, much less afford, St. Kilda Consulting?

Maybe Steele was betting on the paintings being worth St. Kilda’s usual fee.

Worse and worse.

“You get the op’s name?” Score demanded.

“Zach was all she called him.”

“Don’t know him.” Which meant nothing. A lot of St. Kilda ops were contract workers rather than full-time. “You have a script?”

“Coming up.” She hurried to a nearby printer and scooped paper from the tray. “She talked to someone called Joe Faroe.”

Faroe. Bad, bad news. This could be a real cluster.

Or not.

Some of St. Kilda’s ops are straight bullet-catchers. Nothing fancy. Just one-on-one.

No problemo. I’ll bend him into a pretzel and then take him apart.

The thought made Score’s blood heat with something between anger and pleasure.

Score read while Amy waited, vibrating eagerness. All he learned was what she’d already told him. The only good news was that the subject wasn’t going to any safe house.

If Score had to, he could still get to Jill Breck. With her out of the picture, no one would get their act together in time to affect the auction.

His client would be happy.

Score would be happy.

Jill Breck would be history.