Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) (20 page)

“The process painter? Kind of mid-list, I think.”

“Mid-list?”

“More of a publishing term. You know, not quite there, but not undiscovered, either.”

“Yeah,” said Cat. “That’s him. What do you mean by process?”

“Oh, he’s kind of into chance operations.” When this elicited no recognition from Cat, he further explained. “He sets up a pattern in his painting and then lets the process break down organically.”

Cat thought about the paintings she saw in his house, which at the time had looked like nothing so much as a field of raised dots on blue. Now she remembered the dots weren’t uniform but rather like cupcakes that had been poured by hand, each one coming out different. There were splatters of paint in between. She told this to Jacob, who smiled. “You got it, sister.”

Clive wasn’t really a suspect in Cat’s book, but there was nothing to rule him out other than his own insistence. She thought Clive’s beef about the art world was a lot more personal than he had let on, and she had a feeling Mick was included in that.

They drove into the parking lot of an aluminum-clad warehouse building surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. “Have you been here before?” Cat asked Jacob, and he nodded.
 

“Just once. I was looking for the original art for a vintage ad we ran in the Sixties.”

He took out another set of keys and slid one into a rusty lock. “Behold,” he said. “You’re about to be transported to a bygone era.”

Dust motes swirled in the shafts of sunlight let in by clerestory windows. Jacob threw a series of light switches on the wall, flooding the warehouse with light.
 

“All right,” he said. “We’re looking at these dates on the end caps.” He pointed to a yellowed index card taped to the side of one of the metal bookshelves. This one said, 1922-3, A
D
C
OPY
, so they walked down to another section. It took them about fifteen minutes of tracing around, as the rows weren’t always sequential, before Cat spotted it. “Here it is. 1973-5, L
ETTERS
TO
THE
E
DITOR
.”

They spent a good hour digging through the boxes of letters, Cat surprised by how many there were, but Jacob not so much. “You should see my email inbox,” he groaned.

The letters were an interesting lot, she had to admit, and the most interesting ones were the ones that had never been printed. They bore huge red R
EJECTED
stamps. There was one from a housewife in Mobile, Alabama, that requested the magazine “stop printing those lascivious nudes.” The writer went on to catalogue every nude appearing in the magazine for the past three years, each page noted, and the nude described in almost lurid detail. Cat read it aloud to Jacob, the two of them roaring with laughter.

Soon Cat’s stomach was grumbling, and they hadn’t yet found the letter Cat was looking for. “Let me take you to lunch,” Jacob offered. “Some of these strip malls out here hide amazing mom-and-pop restaurants.”

He took her to a place called Star of India that had a buffet. Cat was no food critic, admittedly, but she’d never had Indian food this good before. The place seemed to be run by a family, the mother in a beautiful orange sari working the cash register, and her daughters waiting tables. Cat could see an older gentleman in the kitchen banging well-seasoned pots around.

As Cat dug into a helping of curried chickpeas, she asked Jacob, “So are you a frustrated artist? I mean, is that what you
really
wanted to do?”

Jacob again nearly choked on his laughter, and this time on his food as well. “You’re so to-the-point,” he said, but his face was glowing, and it seemed to come out as a compliment.
 

“I didn’t mean for it to sound like you shouldn’t want to do what you’re doing.”

“To answer your question,” he said, wiping his face with a napkin, “no.” He elaborated: “My parents always subscribed to
Art in Our Time
. I grew up reading it. But that wasn’t the only magazine. We had the
Atlantic
, too, and
Harper’s
. But it was art I loved to read about most.”

“And you never wanted to make any of it?”

Jacob laughed. “I never progressed beyond stick figures. No. Talent. Whatsoever.”

Cat smiled. Jacob’s honesty, not to mention his rare lack of ego, made her like him even more. He paid the bill and told her not to worry, he’d get reimbursed for it, and then they headed back to the warehouse.

About fifteen minutes into their search, Jacob cried, “Eureka!” He produced a postmarked envelope and the letter he’d retrieved from inside it.
 

Cat took it delicately, examining every square inch. Emblazoned with the words ACCEPTED in bold blue all caps, the letter was on watermarked bond typing paper, and it had been typed on an electric typewriter. She could tell that by the level lettering and the faint smudge left by the ribbon along the edges. It was signed
Mick in Miami
, but it wasn’t her uncle’s handwriting, of course. There could still be fingerprints on the letter, she thought, especially since it had been so well preserved in the archives. The paper hadn’t even yellowed. And perhaps she could have someone analyze the handwriting. But she needed more.

She turned over the envelope, and a clue jumped out at her: the postmark. The cancellation read
Apr. 29, 1974
, and around the circle instead of Miami it said,
Ft. Lauderdale, FLA
.

Cat immediately thought of Chester Canon, who’d had his house in Fort Lauderdale back then as a summer home. After retirement, he’d given up his New York apartment and moved there permanently. April twenty-ninth was probably Columbia University’s spring break. That’s when he sent the letter, Cat realized. No other suspects had ever lived in Fort Lauderdale. The postmark should be New York, Miami, or even Sanibel. Chester would have had no reason to conceal the letter’s origin to that extent. It merely needed to sound authentic enough to publish.

“Why do you think this was published?” Cat asked Jacob.

“Oh, art MFA programs are always political. You know, people say academia kills art. I’m sure the editor back then snapped this up. People love gossip, and here, disguised as a confession from an art student? That’s gold.”

Cat was ready to head back, but first she had a hunch about something she wanted to follow up on. It would require a detour, and taking Jacob into her confidence more than she would normally. She looked into his big, brown, trusting eyes and decided to risk it.

“How’d you like to meet Clive Smith?”

“Uh…sure.”

Cat still had Clive Smith’s address in her phone. She gave Jacob directions, and they were at Clive’s front door twenty minutes later. The artist himself answered the door, the look of surprise on his face soon replaced by suspicion.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Smith,” Cat said, putting some heft into her voice, “but there’s been a new development in Mick Travers’s case, and I need to ask you a few more questions.”

“I thought they caught the killer,” he said. “I read it in the art news.”

“They did,” she said, partly to put him at ease and partly to keep the facts a secret. “But there’s been a new development I’d like to discuss with you.”

“And who are you?” he asked, looking pointedly at Jacob.

“I’m an editor at
Art in Our Time
,” Jacob said, holding out his hand. “And I’m a big fan of your work.”

Clive’s face softened at that, and he opened the door to them. “Very well,” he said. “Come on in.”

Once they were seated in the living room, Cat began. “Mr. Smith, I want to ask you about that letter again, the one in the magazine.”

Clive looked at Jacob. “Is that why you’re here?”

Jacob gave him a nodding shrug.

“What about it?” Clive asked.

“We’ve found the original, in the magazine’s archives,” she said. “I know you didn’t write it.”

“Fantastic detective work,” Clive said sarcastically. “Now you best be going.”

“There’s just one thing,” Cat said. “I know nearly without a doubt who wrote the letter. But it contains details about the curriculum in that professor’s class that the author wouldn’t have known. You were in that class, though. You would have known.”

“But you said I didn’t write the letter.”

“Yes, but you gave information to the person who did.”

Clive was quiet. He sighed heavily, looking out the window at the backyard, where a robin pecked at a worm. “I swear. Mick Travers is not worth this.”

“You know something,” Cat said, her voice gentler. “Tell me.”

“All right,” he said. “Listen, I’m not a drinking man normally, but I could use one right now. You two want a glass of whiskey?”

Cat looked at Jacob, who shrugged in a gesture of “Why not?”

“Okay,” she said.

Clive disappeared into the kitchen and came back out with three tumblers of whiskey on a tray. He gave Cat hers first, then Jacob, and then he sat down with his between both hands, as if it had the ability to warm him.

“One night we were at this pub near campus. Everyone except Mick. Annie Lin, Norris, a bunch of first-years, too, but they didn’t really know what was going on.”

Clive took a pull on his whiskey, closed his eyes briefly, and then went on.

“We were pretty drunk, and as usual, the subject of Mick came up. Chester Canon was there, and he seemed to enjoy the way we raked Mick over the coals for this or that. He fanned the flames, totally breaking out of his professorial demeanor, telling us what a phony Mick was, what a hack.”

Clive set his drink down. “In retrospect, I wish I’d left at that point. It wasn’t healthy, what we were doing. We were jealous of Mick, so we egged ol’ Canon on, taking glory in having our anger at Mick validated. Then at one point, Canon got onto the subject of how Mick had been championed by Professor Altair. He thought Mick was all that and a bag of chips, you know what I’m saying? And Canon couldn’t stand having Altair best him on that Emerging Artist Award. So he cooked up this scheme to make it look like Mick had betrayed Altair, in public.”

“And you went along,” Cat said, “giving him details to put in the letter.”

“Yes, we did,” Clive said. “Canon’s the one who typed it up and sent it, though. I never thought he’d actually do it, till I saw the letter in print.”

“And how’d that make you feel?” Cat asked.

“I’m not proud of this,” Clive said. “And I’ve worked hard to successfully distance myself from it. But I have to admit, I took some pleasure in it at the time.”

Cat felt ashamed for the man, but sad for him, too.

“So if you’ve got the killer,” Clive said, “there’s no connection between the letter and the fire after all.”

“That would be the logical conclusion,” Cat said.

“But you know Canon sent it anyway, don’t you,” he said.

“Yes.”

As they rose to go, Jacob commented on the paintings on Clive’s wall, the ones Cat had thought of earlier during their drive.

“I think your work is some of the finest example of process painting,” Jacob said.

“Why, thank you, son,” Clive said.
 

“But these are from the Eighties, aren’t they? It looks like you’re still active.” Jacob gestured toward paint visible on Clive’s hands. “I’d love to see what you’re working on.”

Clive’s drawn face broke into a genuine grin. “Oh, I’m dabbling in my old age here, but I’ll show you.”

They followed Clive down a narrow hallway to a room that opened up to double ceiling height, with skylights added for natural light. Cat realized it was the garage, converted into a studio.

On a bank of easels were paintings that looked no different from the ones they’d seen in the living room. Cat was amazed at how well Jacob hid his disappointment, though. He asked Clive questions about the way he layered and how often between layers. Then as they turned to leave, Jacob stopped, Cat nearly bumping into him.

“Oh, my God,” he said, walking over to a grouping of strange sculptures along one side wall. “Are these new?”

Clive came over, sounding apologetic. “Oh, those are for my grand-baby, Ru. She loves them.”

“They’re astounding!”
 

Cat watched as Jacob examined the sculptures, which to Cat looked like what you’d get if you crossed an old-school Fifties-era wooden child’s toy with an African statue. One had red spikes coming out of its head, but when Jacob touched them, they were soft, likely made of silicone.

“That’s so Ru doesn’t hurt herself,” Clive said. He seemed actually bashful about these pieces. Cat was amazed at the change in his attitude.

“They really are great,” Jacob said. “Do you mind if I take a few pictures?” He took his phone out. “We have this blog… These would be great on there.”

Clive looked flabbergasted. “Okay,” he said, as if he were still thinking it over, or maybe he couldn’t believe his sudden good fortune. “Sure.”

Chapter Fifteen

Candace was wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, and her gray roots were showing. Mick felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for her as she shuffled over to the table where he was sitting. A guard hovered nearby.