Painted Truth

by Lise McClendon

  “Of course not. I’m just busy. I got a new roommate and two new shiners yesterday. There was a terrible fire at my friend Eden’s gallery. And on top of all that, I got caught in Kahuna.” I took off my sunglasses and gingerly felt my sore nose. The Ray-Bans were too heavy, I was just going to have to brave the questions about my new battle scars. “I felt the raw power, I can tell you that.”

  “The Big Kahuna? Oh, man. I’ve heard about that one, and Lunch Counter. The waves up here are nothing like that I can’t wait till I get down there.” He paused, whistling through his teeth.

  His enthusiasm was catching, despite my bashed face. I had to remind myself that I had a lot of work to do before he arrived. Carl had scheduled his first-ever two-week vacation, saving up all winter to spend it kayaking with me. It began in a week. Eden should have her finances and insurance figured out by then. Last summer’s backpacking weekend with Carl had been wildly adventurous, at least inside the pup tent. It would be good seeing him again.

  Then I could see that wave again, feel the thrill and surge of its rollers. “Listen, Carl—”

  “I know you’ve got to work,” he interrupted. “Captain’s staring at me right now too. I just had to talk to you for a second. Can’t wait to hit the river! Call you later and we’ll get the details figured out.” He hung up.

  The receiver was heavy in my hand. One of these days I’d have to get a neat, slim portable phone like everybody else had. But now there was no money for telephones. I hung up, making myself concentrate on my immediate crisis—I pulled out the account book and pawed through it. It was the third time this week I’d stared at the figures, trying to make them change.

  The problem was simple: Expenses exceeded income. We had a decent reserve to tide us over the lean months, assuming there weren’t too many of them. The big problem was a mess of my own making and its name was Ditolla. Martin Ditolla was a local artist I had been bringing along and felt was ready for the big time. I had agreed to buy four of his paintings that we would both sell and make into posters for the gallery. If we paid him the $10,000 for the four originals as agreed, plus went ahead with the lithography so we could recoup our money and hopefully make a profit, well, we’d be scraping bottom. Broke. No groceries, no electricity. It wouldn’t matter if we had a telephone or not.

  I rubbed my forehead, trying to erase the headache centered around my nose. How had this happened? This was July, supposedly the busiest month of the year. I tried to imagine what we had done wrong. Were the Ingrid Wistmiller pastels too weak, too strong, too cold, too overpriced? Did we have too many expensive bronzes and not enough pottery? Not enough western-theme stuff? Too much? I was ready to tear out my hair. Paolo had always been so good at his “mix,” a delicate blend of contemporary and traditional, exotic and familiar, high-priced and affordable. Had he lost his touch, or was I just hopelessly out of the loop?

  I took a deep breath. It wasn’t going to help to start blaming Paolo—or myself. Or to panic. Maybe things would bounce back. Maybe we’d have a buying frenzy of oil-rich Texans even though the oil business had gone to hell in a handbasket. The Texans who still came to Jackson weren’t shelling out the derrick dollars like in the old days.

  The lock turned in the front door. That would be Paolo. I closed the account book, since nothing I could do would help there, and rolled my office chair across the floor to look into the gallery proper.

  “Morning,” I called.

  “Did you hear about the fire?” he yelled back. He was starting coffee on the counter behind his desk. I could hear the water running.

  “We were there. Eden and me.”

  The bell rang on the front door then, and I saw Eden step into the gallery. I got up and joined her. She smelled of baked goods, which she carried in two white sacks.

  “I brought breakfast,” she said, smiling.

  Paolo frowned at her and at the chocolate muffins she was extracting from the sack. “I ate already.”

  “He’s kind of a health nut, Eden,” I said. “But I’ll take a muffin.”

  Paolo had turned back to the coffeemaker and was pouring three cups of coffee. He handed me one silently, without looking at my face. Or at least not noticing the damage. I carried my cup back into my office while Eden began telling Paolo, with excitement and chagrin, about the wholesale destruction of Timberwolf Arts. I didn’t want to hear it again.

  The top message on my To Do pile was from Martin Ditolla. He had called three times. I had been avoiding him for the last week or two, since Paolo and I had had the talk. I still couldn’t bring myself to tell Martin that we couldn’t help him, couldn’t buy his paintings. He was getting so good and was incredibly excited about this new venture, as well he should be.

  Martin was badly injured in a snowmobile accident that changed his life. A skier, hunter, and fireman before, he had broken his back, then dissolved into self-pity and the bottle before finding a new life in art. He deserved my help and I gave it freely. One of the great satisfactions of being an art dealer was to bring talent to recognition, to nurture and celebrate it. But now I was going to have to go back on my word. We wouldn’t be able to buy Martin’s pieces. I had to face that.

  The phone rang again. Paolo picked it up out in the gallery. In a moment he appeared in the doorway to give me the message.

  “It’s Frye,” he said. I turned and saw the unsmiling look on the well-formed Latin face. Ten years older than when I first met him and getting a few lines around his eyes, Paolo was still heart-stopping handsome with dark golden skin and wavy black hair that curled over the collar of his white button-down shirt. “I thought you couldn’t work for him anymore.”

  As police chief, Frye was out of the insurance business. Conflict of interest and all that.

  Paolo was staring. “What happened to you? You try to ride that wild horse of yours?”

  “I’m not that stupid.” I touched my nose self-consciously, hoping it was true. “More like a wild paddle.”

  “Just so none of your boyfriends is beating you up,” Paolo said, half serious. “You tell me and I send a couple of my goons over to rough him up.”

  Tm flattered,” I said, turning my chair to face him. “I didn’t know you cared.”

  “You better wear those,” he said, pointing to my Ray-Bans on the desk. “At least they make you look mysterious.”

  Paolo turned to go back into the gallery. In the last year his attitude toward life had lost its light frosting, as if our money troubles had darkened the whole world. Paolo loved the finer things in life and would do almost anything to make good fortune come to him and the gallery. No wonder his attitude was so bad, with our poor finances. Eden sat behind his desk, drinking coffee and munching muffins while she read the newspaper. Paolo got out window cleaner and paper towels, squirted the liquid on the new plate-glass window. I watched him as he moved gracefully in front of the window, rubbing the glass in circles. He could be a pain in the ass all right. But what an ass it was. Admiring it was one of the last perks as his partner.

  I picked up the phone. Frye sounded impatient and irritated. “Goddamn Dalton is out of town. I’m supposed to be the silent partner in the insurance company now. This is sure putting me in a helluva spot,” he grumbled.

  “What can I do for you, Charlie?” He reminded me of a hard-edged Barney Fife, homey with a bitter undercurrent.

  “It’s the fire, that gallery. Your friend Chaffee. Dalton wrote a policy for the contents, a special one, just last, ah, let’s see.” He shuffled through papers. “Last June second. Covered this new show. And anything else she had in the way of fine art in there.”

  “You need some appraisal work done?”

  “Yeah. That Tantro stuff. The guy we found. Christ, I hate to see somebody take their life like that. Against the Christian way, I say.”

  “I know what you mean.” Charlie’s mixture of epithets and piety had the effect of making me smile until I thought again about Ray. I doubted Ray Tantro was particularly
religious. At least not yesterday afternoon.

  “Anywaaaays,” Charlie said, getting down to business, “I got to have an appraisal done for those paintings. Bonnie at the office said she called already this morning, all anxious. Ms. Chaffee, that is. I just want to get this over and done. No hassles. Monday, okay?”

  I agreed and hung up. It was enough time, three days, to try to piece together what was in the gallery. It wasn’t a big show, maybe twenty pieces, and I had seen it myself. Eden probably could remember most of it. I turned my chair around again to tell her, but she had disappeared. The two paper sacks were all that remained on Paolo’s desk. Now where had she gone?

  I peered into the gallery, not wanting to seem as if I was volunteering my sales services. Paolo was in the far front corner, gesturing and talking confidentially to a young couple with brand-new hiking boots and immaculate tans. No sign of Eden. I turned back to my handkerchief office and remembered suddenly what had come to me late last night.

  Spirits lifting, I opened the door to the storeroom. Inside, old red-and-pink-flowered wallpaper hung limply on the walls. I flicked on the light switch that activated a single bare bulb. Simple wooden frames held paintings upright as they sat lined along the floor. Against the gaudy wallpaper from the frontier brothel that occupied this space a hundred years ago (I call it the House of the Grand Tetons) hung odd paintings that we didn’t have room to display.

  In the far corner, tucked away in the back, I found what I was looking for, my small, forgotten Tantro oil. In the days when I’d bought it I didn’t have much money. (Some things change at glacial speed.) The hundred dollars I spent was an extravagance, but I’d just gotten my trust from my father and wanted something wonderful to remember him by. It had hung in every apartment I had until I moved to Jackson and somehow forgot to unpack it at all.

  Kneeling on the dusty carpet, I slipped off the cardboard cover. It was a winter scene, a prairie in snow and pale light, framed in hunter green. I remembered the little shop where I’d bought it, in Livingston, Montana, a magical place that perhaps gave me the first inkling I might enjoy being an art dealer. I was still painting then. The small, eight-by-ten-inch oil painting had been dwarfed by the larger canvases Tantro had been selling like hotcakes. Lush, glorious landscapes in an impressionistic style. A penchant for white, for snow, a difficult artistic task that young Tantro handled with an unstudied genius.

  Carrying the small painting into my office, I turned off the light and shut the door behind me. I set it at the back of my desk, against the wall, and admired it. It was still a beautiful piece, a little gem, a perfect composition. The gradations of purple and blue in the snow made the scene come alive with color. I pulled a soft rag from a drawer and lovingly wiped the dust from the canvas.

  The bell on the front door clanged three times. The tourists are coming! The tourists are coming! Reluctantly I tore my eyes away from the Tantro painting and pushed back my chair. I took a deep breath and braced myself for the day.

  3

  TIMBERWOLF ARTS, ONCE elegant space in a late Victorian storefront with two yellow awnings contrasting with the stained blue siding and ferns in the windows, now looked like a war zone. If only I could forget the way it looked before. I remembered too vividly the newly sanded hemlock floors, the quaint tin ceiling that Eden had spent hours detailing with gold paint, the open staircase with its delicate wrought iron-railing. The way the morning light made the room glow. The wine and cheese receptions, the laughter. All these images haunted me, echoes of the obliterated past.

  I had worked the phones as much as I could between customers yesterday, trying to get some information on Ray Tantro. I had found an old listing through the local library of an article in an art magazine. The library in Cheyenne faxed it to me. Dated October 1974, it showed a young Tantro in a dark silhouette against a window in his Montana studio. Outside the mountains were graceful and commanding. The same could be said for young Tantro at the peak of his powers.

  Eden had finally returned to the gallery after lunch, exhausted from trying to gather together her tenuous finances. She was too busy, she said, to talk to me about the appraisal. We would get to it tonight, I hoped. There wasn’t much to it, but the lack of information on Tantro was disturbing. How much detail did Charlie Frye want? How little could I bear in good conscience?

  I stood in the back doorway of Timberwolf Arts and wrinkled my sore nose. The smell of wet carbon, both acrid and sweet, was thick in the air. Rex Scanlon, Teton County fire investigator, slogged through the sticky, charred mess in pea green irrigation boots. Wearing jeans and a work shirt, Scanlon was well built like most firemen, but sagging a little. Despite the arsons over the years in Jackson, I’d never worked with him. He carried a clipboard and set a duffle bag next to the alley door.

  “If you’ll follow me,” he said formally, then looked at my old, formerly white, leather athletic shoes. “Are those washable?” I nodded. I had washed them many times, being the type who gets attached to her clothes. My clothes and I need history together. Oh, the places we’ve been. I woke up this morning feeling better, still sore but rested and eager to dig into this assignment. My nose gave me the go-ahead. It now only resembled a battered banana. I followed Scanlon as he turned into the depths of the gallery.

  The main room was the worst. I stood in the doorway from the back hall and stared. The floor was black with puddles of water standing in low spots on the warped wood boards. The walls, once pristine white, now were streaked with gray and black, Sheetrock sagged off them in slabs where the water from the fire hoses had hit hard. The pressed-tin ceiling was in decent shape, still showing a little of its green and gold color. The brass chandelier in the center of the old room lay smashed on the floor. Wires dangled from the spot where it hung. I wondered aloud if the building was safe.

  Scanlon glanced back at me, then at the ceiling. “Safe enough. Power’s shut off. I wouldn’t go upstairs though.” He stopped in the middle of the room near some unidentifiable debris. I tried to remember what had been in that spot. A chair, I thought, overstuffed variety. A floor lamp with a fringed shade and a small table. “You’re just interested in the art? That’s what Charlie said.”

  I nodded, venturing out into the room. The floor felt slick. The smell of wet ash and charred wood permeated everything. “I will need to go upstairs. Eden said she has a closet up there with some stuff in it.”

  Scanlon shook his head before turning his focus elsewhere. “Let us check it out first. Most of the art’s down here, right?”

  I agreed, taking out my notebook. I tried to count the canvases, most of which still showed a little pigment through burns, water damage, and smoky ash. All had fallen off the wall to the floor and been stomped on by firemen in their rush to put out the fire. I was relieved I disliked these paintings; seeing art destroyed did not make my day. It was sad what had happened to these paintings, but not mortally so. They could have been Picassos, although with Eden’s luck, I doubted it.

  Examining and measuring and counting and cataloguing, I made my way around the room, vaguely aware that Scanlon was concentrating on something else. The back room revealed a small stash of prints, most worth little to begin with. They had been ruined by water. I counted them, made notes of their sticker prices, and looked around for more. When I came back out into the main gallery, Scanlon was talking to a policeman. His brown shirt and pants blended into the shadows. They had their heads down, gesturing and looking at the floor. Their voices were low as they moved together and examined the floor again. They pointed at an odd marking on the wall, an arc of black ash.

  The fire investigator had been in the news regularly whenever our local arsonist struck. In the paper he looked weary and disappointed. I had assumed it was because of the fires, but now I had the feeling that he always looked that way. Maybe it came from seeing so much. He had that hangdog look today. Scanlon and the policeman walked toward me, deep in discussion.

  “I think you’re right, Scan,�
� the cop said, clapping Scanlon on the back.

  “We’ll know more when we get the samples back,” Scanlon said, looking startled as he saw me, as if he had forgotten I was there. “Ah, Alix Thorssen, this is Gary Hayden.”

  I shook the policeman’s hand. It was a big hand. Better than average haircut for a cop but of the type.

  “She’s doing the insurance work for Charlie,” Scanlon explained.

  “Well, then,” Hayden grinned, puffing out his chest, “you’re probably wasting your time.”

  Scanlon frowned, flicking his eyes to the policeman. “I don’t think we can make speculations to the public at this time, Gary.”

  “Oh, oh, sure,” Hayden said, nudging Scanlon with his elbow. Rex looked at me, with You see what I have to deal with? in his eyes. “Sure, we’ll keep it under our hats till the reports come back. Give it your best shot, Scan-man.”

  Rex and I watched Hayden go out the back door and spend a good minute wiping his boots on a piece of wet carpet in the alley. When he finally left I turned to Scanlon. But he had returned to the center of the room.

  “What was that supposed to mean?” I asked, looking at the charred debris next to where Scanlon kneeled. It came to me then that this had to be the spot where the body had bee n. Where Tantro had burned to death.

  “Hmmm?” The investigator was deep in thought. “0h, Hayden? Pay him no mind. He’s a—” He waved his hand to dismiss the policeman.

  “Yeah. A moron. But what did he mean? I like to know if I’m wasting my time.”

  Scanlon didn’t answer. He took out a pocketknife, made scrapings of the floorboards and put them into a plastic Baggie, and labeled it with a black felt-tip pen. He felt the floor in several places with his fingertips, then stood up.

  “I’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said. The tired look had deepened on his face. He was the kind of man some women want to take home and cook a good meal for. “If you’re done here… ?”