Death of an Artist (15 page)

“Jesus Christ!” he said under his breath, surveying the clutter of paintings. A lifetime of paintings was in the room. One in the forefront held his attention a long time. It was in the mode of
Feathers and Ferns,
what looked like a bottomless collection of starfish, sea urchins, crabs, tiny fish, sand dollars, other tide-pool life, all meticulously rendered, merging, morphing one into another in a way that at first glance suggested a surreal blending of marine colors, sea green, pinks, tans … It was titled
Treasures.
The painting next to it was titled
Searching.
A child, a searching child, and what she found, he thought studying them. They belonged together, that much was clear, and Tony decided that if and when they went on sale, if he could afford them, he wanted them both. He made a note to himself to tell Freddi he wanted them.

Finally he turned his attention to the picture with the broken frame. It was in oil, beautifully rendered, realistic enough to suggest that the tree was suffering. Even in oils she'd had that ability to share with a viewer whatever she had felt about her subject. Pain, suffering, patience, endurance, they were all there. The painting itself apparently had not been harmed by the fall. It could be reframed. He could see no traces of green on the frame, but that meant little, he knew. A good forensics lab might well find such traces. Something had hit the rail hard enough to chip it, and the painting had been found below. No mystery. He shrugged, left the room, and closed the door behind him. He returned to the living room, through to the deck to join Marnie.

“I brought out the coffee,” Marnie said. “It's nice out here this time of day. We seldom get much wind up here, but later, when the sun gets lower, it can be too hot. Coffee, and in a few minutes, I thought we might want a sandwich.”

“Marnie, you don't have to play hostess for me,” Tony said. “Relax.”

She laughed and nodded. “I guess that's how I sounded, didn't I? Just all polite and Sunday-school nice. But I do want to make some sandwiches. It really is lunchtime, if you didn't notice.” She suspected he had no idea that his wandering about a little had lasted an hour. She poured coffee and motioned for him to take one of the mugs that they always used out on the deck. She believed they held the heat better than regular cups.

“I saw my attorney, as you know,” she said. “Like you, he said it's going to take a little research about that contract and it might end up in court. He'll get the autopsy as soon as he can. And if Dale or his attorney gets in touch with me, I'm to refer them to him.” At Tony's nod, she continued, and told him what Van was up to, their plan for the storage of the art.

“Good,” he said. “That's a valuable collection that should be protected.”

“Now it's your turn. Your questions.”

“Just a few. Was Stef in the habit of going barefooted in the house?”

“No. Why?”

“She was barefoot that day. Did the sheriff go into her room, look around? Do you know?”

Marnie nodded. “He asked me to go with him, see if there were signs of anything out of order. It looked about like it always did when she was planning to go away for a few days. Clothes on the bed, not packed yet, but nothing really out of order.”

“I didn't see that painting, the broken one, up in the studio the day I had my mini-tour. Where was it kept usually?”

“Downstairs,” Marnie said promptly. “I can't imagine why she took it up only to take it down again. It's an early painting, from when she was still interested in using oils, twelve or more years ago.” Before he could ask another question, she said, “That was her pattern, too. She claimed not to be finished with a work for a long time, then moved it downstairs.”

Marnie hesitated. “Sometimes she put the new one behind others, almost as if to hide it. Others, those out front, were mostly conventional works, and if they were sold, usually it was all right with her because by then she had rejected them, renounced them. But the ones she put in the back, deliberately put behind others, seldom were.” She hesitated again, then said slowly, “She was afraid of being rejected. Any area where it meant a good deal to her, her husbands, her art, anything, as long as the tie was still strong, she feared rejection and avoided it by being the one to end a relationship, or by not turning loose of her work. Later, it mattered little to her what happened to it. She scorned those who bought work that she had rejected as not being good enough.”

“Did she also have the pattern of getting revenge on the men she broke with?” He watched Marnie closely, not knowing if he had stepped over a line with her.

“No. But they seldom did anything she felt was outright betrayal. If she sensed the end of a relationship approaching, she was the one who ended it. It was that simple. I think I've made her sound like a monster, but she really wasn't. She had a habit of falling in love repeatedly, and it never lasted. Perhaps she was forever looking for the perfect relationship, the perfect mate, and thought again and again that she had found it. Perfection, the ideal in her mind, was not humanly possible. Not in her art, not in her life, but she kept looking for it, kept thinking this time she had grasped it.”

“Okay,” Tony said. “When you talked to your attorney, did he go into what might constitute a reasonable withholding of permission to sell a painting? What that arbitration clause means?”

Marnie felt a mild surprise that Tony had remembered it. “He said that it would be decided by an arbitrator, and most often that would be someone well schooled in the field in dispute, or a small committee of like people, knowledgeable people in the field. He also said that it would be hard to prove any legitimate offer was not a reasonable one.”

With those words he had dashed any hope she'd had of making it so costly and time-consuming for Dale to start selling the paintings that he might have been tempted to give it up.

“One more thing,” Tony said. “After the breakup of a relationship, did she ever maintain a friendly attitude toward her former partner?”

Marnie shook her head emphatically. “She put them in storage, exactly the way she did with her art that she rejected. Out of sight, out of mind, scorned.” She paused briefly. “I don't know how she would have been able to work with Dale, knowing he was a partner in the gallery, that he would profit from any sale they made. She might not have been able to keep her work in the gallery after that. Is that what you're getting at?”

“I don't know what I'm getting at yet.” But Tony did know that if that had been the way it had worked out, it might have provided Freddi a reason to back up Dale's story about the phone call, what she heard. How anxious would she have been to keep Stef's work exclusively in her gallery? Either party could have backed out of the contract by writing a letter to that effect, and if Stef had lived, it appeared that she had intended to do just that. Would she have backed out of the gallery at the same time? Just something to keep in mind, he decided.

Tipper had been close to Marnie, but now rose, stretched, and went inside the house.

“The sun's getting too warm for him, isn't it?” Tony said.

Marnie nodded. “Time to go in. Time for lunch. And you can tell me what Will said. I believe he was going to pay a call on you.”

Tony grinned as they gathered up mugs and the carafe. “At your bidding. As of this morning, I'm his deputy with access to certain databases. Why am I so sure that you're not surprised?”

Marnie smiled and did not respond.

 

12

A
T
A
FEW
minutes after six that late afternoon Tony pushed his chair away from his kitchen table, closed his laptop, and stood, grimacing a bit with the motion. He was cramped from an uncomfortable chair, the wrong height of a table to serve as a desk, concentrating too long on the monitor screen, just cramped. He stretched and eyed his apartment with disfavor. Cramped, just like him, with hardly enough space to do anything but the absolute essentials. Minimum cooking space, tiny living room, bedroom without an inch to spare. As soon as the summer people left, he thought, as he had been thinking more and more often, back to house hunting. Or at least find a bigger apartment, one with a view. From his back porch he could see a few trees and houses. What was the point of living on the coast if the view could have been from any city window in the world?

He smiled wryly at his own use of the term
summer people,
considered mixing a drink, decided against it, and instead headed for the door, for a walk down to the little isolated beach, the sun-drenched ledges made for sitting. It was a good place to think and watch the play of light on water, breaking waves, compare it to the painting by Stef.

He missed his old partner, Manuel Martinez. At this point they would be talking about every aspect of this dismal affair. He could imagine all too clearly what Manuel would be saying along about now. “It's a fuckup. We ain't got no case and we ain't gonna get one. He's home free. Let's take him for a little ride and beat the shit out of him and move on.” Justice served in a fashion, as much justice as was likely to come out of their investigation.

Tony knew enough about Dale Oliver to write a short, credible biography. And not a damned thing that he had learned would be helpful, he added to himself, crossing the access road to the motels. He started down the twisting path through the rocky cliff.

That day the tide was lower than it had been on any previous visit. More tide pools were exposed, more beach, but he knew it was the same beach that Stef had depicted, the same surround of black cliffs. He picked out his own ledge, sat down and stretched out his legs, leaned back, and began to sort the facts he had learned about Dale Oliver.

Son of Delmar and Mary Oliver. There was one sister. Delmar had been an engineer at CBS radio for twenty years; Mary had worked in a frame shop. So Dale had been exposed to art of some kind at an early age apparently. Home in Newark, school in New Jersey, eventually an MBA and a job as business manager at a Ford dealership in Newark. No criminal record, a few driving infractions, nothing serious. Married four years, divorced. Mother died when he was in his early twenties, father died five years ago at the age of eighty-four. Dale's sister apparently had been a beautiful girl, Miss New Jersey, had gone off to Hollywood and a minor film career, then nothing more about her.

Tony didn't know how much the pair had inherited from their father, but it appeared that it had been enough that Dale had quit his job and a year later showed up to buy into the gallery in Portland. Now he was heavily in debt, apparently living high on plastic.

Later, Tony had already decided, he would find out a lot more than he had already learned. He had always been a careful investigator, pursuing every lead, following up on every hunch, every clue, no matter how irrelevant it first seemed. He had been a meticulous planner with every detail in mind before he moved in, and he had rarely ever been wrong, even if convictions had not followed. Also, he knew where the lines were that he should not cross, and he knew how to cross them in his data searches, and he would no longer hesitate to take those steps that would put him on the wrong side of the lines.

With what he had gathered already, little more than background and conjecture, he was not even tantalizingly near having enough to take to the next level of a district attorney or grand jury. Even if he had the resources of a major police department at his command, he doubted that he would ever have enough. He had the familiar infuriating and hopeless feeling that it was dead end, had been dead end from day one, and nothing he learned would change that. Time to take the guy for a ride and beat the shit out of him. Move on.

He sometimes wondered if taking that kind of action would have helped, would have assuaged the bitterness and hopelessness that had overcome him again and again. He no longer knew why he had stayed on the job as long as he had, how he had kept moving on knowing the system was broken and that nothing he did was going to fix it. Even when he and Manuel had gathered enough evidence, what had been irrefutable proof to make their case, there were the plea bargains, the deals behind closed doors, years of appeals, missing witnesses, or those who had died. Again and again the guy was home free.

He had not wanted to get involved ever again, he thought bitterly. All he wanted to do was work with his wood, make things, watch the waves break, sleep at night. He especially did not want to dwell on any of this; inevitably it led to that last day, seeing that terrified kid with shaking hands, holding a gun pointed at him. Watching the gun waver, the kid as still as a statue, listening to Tony, wanting to believe, desperate to believe it was going to be okay, he was going to be okay. Then the cowboys arrived with their guns drawn.

Tony shook himself and closed his eyes.
Not again. Jesus, leave it alone! Let it be. It's over, done with.

He was startled by the sound of someone coming down the trail, and he pulled his legs back, prepared to stand, yield the beach to the newcomers. No one had ever come down before while he was here, and he had assumed that few others knew about this little hidden place, few others found their way down. He regretted that he had been wrong.

He was more surprised when he heard Van's voice. “Josh, stop that. Slow down or you'll fall.” She was laughing.

Josh came around the last twist of the path and stopped when he saw Tony, then rushed forward again. “Hi,” he said, dashing past him and onto the beach. He was already at the first tide pool when Van came into sight.

“Tony! Oh, dear. I'll gather him up and head down to the public beach, leave you some privacy.”

“Please don't. In fact, that was going to be my line.”

“We can both stay,” she said. “It's one of our favorite places when the tide's going out, like now. Josh loves it, and I always did, too. I promised him that at the next low tide we'd come if it wasn't too dark.”