Death of an Artist (20 page)

He watched her easy stride, the ease of her body where the trail steepened, her grace. She moved like a dancer, or a trained athlete. He suspected that if he were not along, she would be right with Josh all the way up.

Twice they nearly caught up with Josh when he stopped to investigate something, then he was out of sight again in a flash.

As they went up, Tony knew that he was walking more and more slowly, but it could not be helped. Stabs of pain shot from his hip through his back, down his leg. Van was adjusting her pace to accommodate his, he also realized, and cursed under his breath.

“Josh,” Van called, when they neared the house, “take your shoes off on the deck and go straight upstairs.” To Tony she said, “I'll warm him up in the tub and clean him up. God only knows what all he's been handling. Worms, bugs, anything that moves and is smaller than he is.”

“Boy things.”

She laughed again. “I was just like that, according to Marnie.”

When they reached the deck, she set the pail down and took off her wet shoes. Tony picked up hers and Josh's and they went inside. He put the wet shoes on the hearth by the fire.

“Success,” Van said to Marnie. “I'll get Josh in the tub and change my wet jeans, then I'll clean them.”

“I'll clean them,” Tony said quickly. “I'd like to do something useful.”

He cleaned the crawfish. Marnie had already set the table, and when Josh and Van returned, warm and dry, they all sat down to eat.

“I haven't had crawfish since I was about ten,” Tony said. “That's when my dad began to show me how to use his tools, and I guess I never went crawfishing very much after that. I had forgotten how delicious they are.”

And the cake was also delicious and brought up memories of his own mother in the kitchen putting icing on such a cake, his anticipation of having the pan to scrape clean. Josh was disappointed that only three candles were on the cake.

“You said a lot,” he grumbled to Marnie.

“These represent a lot,” Marnie said. “Thirty candles would melt the icing and it would run like a river down the sides of the cake. Each candle means ten, so we have ten, and ten more make twenty, and ten more make thirty. See?”

He seemed awed by the number thirty and looked hard at Van, as if trying to understand how anyone could be that old.

Only after the table was cleared did Josh see the bag on the coffee table and go to investigate.

“I said no presents,” Van said sternly. “Really, I didn't want you to bring anything.”

“It's for him,” Tony said. “Open it, Josh, take a look.”

He dumped the box from the bag, studied the illustration on the cover, and began to tear it apart. “It's a train!” he yelled over his shoulder. When he opened the box, he found a jumble of wooden puzzle pieces. “I thought it was a train.”

Van joined him and looked at the box. “It's a puzzle. A train puzzle. When it's put together, you get the train. Let's empty the pieces on the floor and see how hard it's going to be.”

They both sat on the floor cross-legged and began to examine the puzzle pieces.

“Tony, do you want coffee?” Marnie asked. “I do. And it's ready.”

They had coffee at the dining table and watched Van and Josh start to piece together a train. Marnie smiled softly, glanced at Tony, and then, aware of his expression, she thought,
Oh, dear.

Soon Van stood and joined them. “He's got the hang of it. His job.” She looked at her watch. “Half an hour and it's off to bed for him. Tony, can you stay a little longer, give us a little talking time?”

He nodded, and Marnie said, “Well, let's take more comfortable chairs by the fire.”

When she rose, Tony got to his feet, and a stab of pain hit him in the hip, raced through the groin and down into his leg. He stopped the motion midway, and Van made an involuntary movement toward him, quickly drew back, and exchanged a glance with Marnie. Tony finished straightening up and without a word turned and walked toward a chair across the room.

“I'll put on fresh coffee,” Marnie said.

“Josh, how's it coming?” Van asked, and went to sit by him on the floor.

Giving him a minute, Tony thought bitterly, and he needed a minute or two. It had been bad, as bad as it ever got, and only slowly was subsiding. Soon Marnie was bringing the coffee carafe, and Van was helping Josh gather up puzzle pieces. As they started for the stairs, Josh detoured to approach Tony. “Thanks for the train puzzle, it's really cool.” He showed Tony one of the coaches, complete except for the wheels.

“Well,” Marnie said as soon as Josh and Van were going up the stairs, “he's learning, isn't he? No prompting necessary, thank you.”

“He's a great kid,” Tony said.

“Van's a great mother. She told me you're following up on a lead or two, and we're hoping you can tell us a little about what they are, when Van comes down. Meanwhile, tomorrow I'll drop in on the boys to see how the inventory is coming. They'll make a printout or two and be ready to leave. Also, I plan to see Ted Gladstone and tell him to go ahead with a new will.”

“Marnie, I'd suggest that when you call Freddi, tell her there's no rush. Anytime in the next few weeks is fine for an appraiser. Are you okay with that?”

“Yes, but why?”

“Let's squeeze Dale a little and see how much he squeals.”

Silently Marnie went to the fire to put another small log on, alarmed at how suddenly the image of the gun in her desk drawer had flooded her mind with his words. She needed time for the will, she had come to realize, time to make certain it got written and signed, and she had not thought of it right away. What else was she overlooking? She needed a little time.
Slow down everything for now,
she told herself.
There's no rush.

Van rejoined them. “He loves the puzzle. He decided to paint the train red when it's all put together. Thanks, Tony. One of the best presents I never got.”

Moving carefully, Tony leaned forward. “Here's all I have so far. Not much, but it's how a real investigation goes. You plod along, pry into this and that, and most often come up empty-handed, but it's got to be done. I'm in that stage. I'm looking into how he got enough money to buy into a business, and wondering why it was one that doesn't offer greater return. Tomorrow, I'm off to Portland to see Freddi. She's having an audit done, and there's something else on her mind, but I don't know what it is yet. And I'm seeing a guy about some original tapes Dale's father had when he died, tapes of radio drama shows from the forties into the sixties. He was considered a sound-effects genius.”

“Let me go with you,” Van said quickly. “I know my way around Portland, and I'll drive and act as assistant or something. I'll take notes. If Freddi wants to talk to you alone, I'll take a walk and you can call me when you're ready.”

Marnie nodded, and after a moment Tony did, too. “Okay, assistant.”

“I know about those radio shows,” Marnie said. “Out here television was late in arriving, and the reception was terrible when it did. We listened to the radio in the evenings. There were some very good dramas, and some that no doubt were dreadful, but we listened to them, anyway. Some were really scary,
Lights Out, The Inner Sanctum,
things like that, but some were as fine as any dramatic presentation possible, real plays with real characters in real situations. I loved them. And to think Dale's father was involved in producing them. Boggles the mind.”

They talked a while longer, planning the coming day, and Van and Tony agreed to take his Acura instead of her much older Nissan, but that she would do all the driving. He hesitated at that, reconsidered, and said fine, dreading the moment when he would have to stand again, and yearning for a long, soaking, hot bath. When that moment came, both women made a point of not watching. It was bad, not as bad as earlier, but bad.

After he was gone, Van said, “He's in real pain at times. It must have been from coming up the trail. That can be hard on a bad hip. I wonder if a hip replacement is an option.”

Marnie's gaze was searching when she looked at Van, and she thought again,
Oh, dear.
It was swiftly followed by another thought:
She could do worse.

 

16

V
AN
HAD
INSISTED
on leaving at nine-thirty to give them plenty of time and to allow for a coffee stop at some of the most magnificent old-growth rain-forest trees to be seen. She would provide a thermos of coffee.

That morning Tony came to fully appreciate the view of the drive up the coast, the wild surf and cliffs, the sudden stretches of beaches, well-spaced turnoffs where the vista expanded dramatically up and down the coastline, stunningly beautiful in both directions. As driver he'd had to concentrate on the road and never before realized how little he was seeing. He stretched out his legs and enjoyed being a passenger. The soak the night before had helped, and so had the codeine tablets he kept for just such a time. He had decided that morning to keep a couple of the tablets with him, just in case, and now they were in a little pillbox in his pocket. Pain was a private affair, and he despised how he had revealed it the night before. It seemed to be a plea for pity, and that was contemptible.

Traffic was heavy on the coast road, but he didn't care. Van was a good driver, patient and relaxed. After they turned off the coast road, heading inland, he told her what little he had learned about Delmar Oliver and Kent “Bud” Budowsky and his grandfather. “He sounds pretty young but he seems to know his stuff. What does a ‘fortune' mean to a kid?”

“To me it meant I could get an old junker of my own to drive,” she said promptly.

He laughed. “Did you ever hear any of those old radio shows?”

“I don't think so, not that I remember anyway. TV generation, and now it's computer generation, or iPod generation. What next?”

“Implant generation. Straight into the brain.”

“Now that's a real horror story.”

It got warmer with the passing miles, and when they stopped for coffee, he took off his Windbreaker and she took off her sweater. Here, the rain forest was almost overwhelming with its exuberant growth. Magnificent trees, giant ferns, brambles, all crowding one another, greenery on top of greenery, with lichens and mosses covering everything firm enough to support them. It was a green world. Even the air seemed green.
Another time,
Tony thought, gazing at it,
take time to linger, explore a little.
That day's stop was regrettably brief.

“It's going to be hot in Portland,” Van warned, back in the car. “Up to ninety today.”

She proved to be prophetic. It was nearing ninety when she parked a block away from the restaurant at ten minutes before twelve. “I'll go in with you, and when Freddi gets there, if she wants this to be confidential, I'll get out. You have my number.”

But Freddi waved her down again when she made the same offer at the booth. “You might as well hear it, too. I have no idea if it will help, but Jordan and I both thought it might be relevant to have the audit.” Freddi looked tense and angry, her words were clipped.

They ordered, and as they waited, Freddi said, “We talked about it Friday night, and Jordan pointed out that our business went into something of a slump over two years ago, before the economy began to tank. I hadn't given it that much thought since it's really an up-and-down kind of business to start with. But then I started to think about several different things that might or might not be connected.”

She drew back when the waitress returned with their lunches.

That done, Freddie resumed, “Anyway, I called Hiram Delacroix, my former partner. His wife has Alzheimer's that's progressed to the point where she needs around-the-clock care in a facility. He knew it was coming, and he knew how expensive it would be, the reason he sold in the first place.

“The point is that Hiram was trying to plan for a very costly few years. Dale seemed a likely prospect. MBA, a sizable down payment, three hundred thousand, with five years of annual payments, was the arrangement they had. Partnership, profit sharing, a salary, it was a mutually satisfactory deal for both of them. Two years ago Hiram called me and asked how the business was doing, and I told him things were slow. That was the gist of the whole conversation, and I didn't give it much thought at the time. But it was very uncharacteristic. Saturday morning I called him back and asked if there had been a reason for that call, if there was a problem. He said there might be, but he figured it wasn't my problem and hadn't wanted to bother me with it. It seems that Dale was late in his payment that year, and again this year. He hasn't caught up yet.” Freddi sipped her tea. “He owes Hiram over forty thousand dollars. He told Hiram he had a CD coming due in a few months and he'd make it then. That was in March, and he still hasn't caught up.”

The Crab Louie was delicious, but Van was eating mechanically, tasting little of it. And Tony was watching Freddi so intently, it was a wonder that she didn't start squirming, Van thought. They remained silent as Freddi continued.

“Anyway, that was one of the things. That same year, two years ago, over Christmas, one of our regulars came in looking for a new work by a relatively unknown artist named Moira Koogan. She does charming children's fantasy paintings, fairy-tale characters, things of that sort. This customer had bought two of them for her own daughters and wanted another one for a niece for Christmas. Moira hadn't brought in anything in months and I didn't have anything to show. I know Moira makes little enough for her work, a couple of hundred or two-fifty usually, but there's a market for them and she always needed the money. Most artists do. Few can support their art on sales, and they have to have outside jobs to keep going. She clerks in Nordstrom's. Months after the inquiry about her work, I happened to run into her while I was shopping and I asked if she had given up, thinking to encourage her not to. She could have a future as an illustrator for children's books. She confided that since Dale had found her an outlet, she was making two thousand a year at least, and if she could keep up with the demand, it would be three or four thousand. She was happy about it.”