The Eye of the Beholder

by Janice Macdonald

  Having never owned a car, I wasn’t so fixed on the need to drive fast and park cheap that many Edmontonians seemed to think was their right. I did think that it was good to have parking access when you were grocery shopping or for lugging home large items, but, then again, there were more delivery options springing up all the time, so perhaps that would cease to be a real argument soon.

  I wished Steve’s—or rather OUR, I corrected myself—place was closer to a grocery store. Aside from the K & K, which was great for liverwurst and German cheeses, the closest grocery was two buses away in Bonnie Doon Mall. Steve and I were going to have to sort out doing a major shop once a month, and I could supplement with a walk to the deli for eggs and milk. Maybe we could fit a small chest freezer into the storage closet. I would have to check on that.

  Thinking and planning had taken me on autopilot all the way down Saskatchewan Drive and soon I was back up in the aerie, a term I had jokingly used the first time I had visited Steve’s condo, and which he had liked and begun to use himself.

  Steve had texted to say he would be late, and not to wait on him to eat. I hung my satchel on the back of one of the kitchen island stools and stood there, considering my options. All I had to grade were the pre-quizzes, and they would take all of half an hour to get through. My lecture notes were up to date for three more classes each, my clothes for lecturing were chosen and hung up in order in the closet, the condo was tidy, and I wasn’t even hungry, having picked at the huge muffin I’d bought to augment the coffee with Briar Nettles.

  I decided to do some research for Steve. After all, he had asked me to think about the book I was reading, to see if it held answers to who had killed Kristin Perry. Surely, the rest of what I had been doing fell under that umbrella, too.

  I plugged my laptop into the extension near the electric fireplace, and curled up in one of the oversized leather chairs that flanked it. I pressed the button for the fireplace on the handy remote beside me on the small side table, and hit the other button for the drapes. While there was likely no one across the river training a set of binoculars on me, I felt cozier shutting out some of the darkening sky. Steve’s remotes made me feel as if I was living in a Matt Helm movie, but I had to admire the way he had fashioned the condo to suit himself. He had organized the lights, stereo, electric drapes and fireplace to operate from multiple remotes, and from three or four places in the room you could control things without disturbing yourself from your cozy cocoon. I wasn’t sure how he managed to stay in such good shape, when hibernating seemed to be his default mode.

  I looked up Diego Rivers. Google asked me if I meant the more famous artist, assuming I was a mistyping dolt, as usual. No, I assured the program, Rivers was exactly who I meant. Three paltry items appeared, along with some Rivera sites, as well.

  Diego Rivers was a muralist like his more famous namesake. While he hadn’t been the artist who revitalized Chemainus, BC with their now famous murals, he had provided centennial murals to many small towns across western Canada as they each hit one hundred, and had developed a relatively politicized manifesto to promote himself as an artist of choice. The research component of his work was shown to take two or three months prior to committing anything to sketch, and the final work would be unveiled no sooner than a year after he was first commissioned.

  “To understand a community, one must live within its gates. One must read its history, drink in the atmosphere that shapes its people, and listen for the notes that set it apart from others—the chords that sound its individuality.”

  I grimaced at the hyperbole. Diego Rivers sounded like a huckster, selling a dream of a unique vision to small town councils, who would end up with a painting on an old brick bank wall featuring a wheat sheaf; several Slavic farmers; a train; a fur trader shaking hands with an Indigenous man wrapped in a Hudson’s Bay blanket; an iconic bird like a Canada goose, trumpeter swan, or loon; a beaver; and two portraits of people in wire-rimmed glasses who were either famous and came from there, or not-famous outside of there.

  That, in fact, was the sort of thing in his portfolio portion of the website. I had to admit, however, his people looked real, and the distribution of subject matter and overall layout was very well wrought. One’s eye was drawn from one element to the next with ease. Perhaps there was more to mural design than I had first believed.

  I clicked on the bio section to see if there was anything else to learn about the man. Apparently, he was happy to tell all. He came originally from Pousse Coupe, British Columbia, and had spent most of his life in the interior of BC, in Nelson, Vernon, and Kamloops, before moving to Toronto. There was a picture set into the text on the page of Rivers and his wife. I stopped short, and then clicked on the picture in order to expand it to the full size of the window.

  Diego Rivers was David Rivers with whom we had shared a food tour in Puerto Vallarta, and whose wife, Alessandra Delahaya, had been so dismissive when I had mispronounced her name.

  I had a strong feeling that Steve was going to want to know that Kristin Perry’s former art professor had also been in Puerto Vallarta the day she had been killed. I picked up my phone to text him. I figured I would hear back from him pretty quickly.

  For fun, I opened a new tab and searched out some Diego Rivera murals. The previous spark of admiration I’d held for Rivers’ work vanished as I noted what could be achieved in the imagination of a great artist. Rivera’s command of huge spaces was unsurpassed; his work drew the eye from one grouping of people to the next, a central theme pulsing from every corner of the images, and used small wonders to hook a viewer into a more intimate relationship with the painting. I could see why Rivers would want to identify with such a master. But he was always going to be the pupil.

  Was it ego or admiration that made him self-identify with this giant of an artist? I would like to have him answer that question. And it would be the best way to find out why it was that so many students connected to him were becoming fixated on Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican themes like the tin milagros.

  I made a note to myself on the pad of paper beside me. I still couldn’t bring myself to work entirely from the computer and smartphone. I was still leery of losing everything into the cloud or a power failure, and I also still thought better with a pen in my hand, especially for editing. I wondered, if when my generation died out, all stationery shops would close up entirely.

  The fire was warming me, and the efforts of the day catching up to me. I closed my laptop and reached for the television remotes. Searching Netflix, I found what I was looking for, the Salma Hayak/Julie Taymor movie Frida. We’d watched it when it first came out over a dozen years ago, but I had been hankering to watch it ever since we’d done our gallery tour in Puerto Vallarta. Now, with all the reading up on Frida and Diego, I really wanted to see it.

  Steve walked in just as Frida was demanding they move her entire bed into the truck so she could attend her gallery showing, and he sat down silently to watch to the end with me.

  “I take it this was research for me?” He smiled as I turned off the television and blinked toward him, coming out of the spell of the film. “And thank you, by the way, for the lead on Diego Rivers.”

  “You would not believe the research I’ve done for you,” I answered, and proceeded to tell him about my meeting with Briar Nettles, her background on Austin Stauffer and Diego Rivers, and my recently evolved sense of mural art.

  “You have been busy,” Steve nodded. “You do recall, though, that all I asked was that you read and report on the book you were reading.”

  “Yes, and you are very welcome.” I was a bit miffed. “It’s not like I overstepped entirely. I asked Denise who would be the best person to talk to about students in the BFA program. It was Briar who put me on to Rivers. And I wasn’t even really asking her about Austin, I just wanted to know if she was connected to any of the other students being shown in the gallery. I didn’t mean connecte
d romantically. Which I don’t think he was, unless he was really smooth. It strikes me that Briar Nettles is a pretty astute judge of character, and she seems to think Austin is upstanding all the way.”

  Steve shook his head.

  “We’ll have to ask some of Kristin’s friends about Austin, but I’ll try to make it casual, so we don’t blemish his reputation for nothing. It could just be the gallery owner making assumptions or enhancing the story for his own amusement, but when I spoke with him, he seemed to think they had a thing.”

  I wondered how much I did that, imagining secret lives for people I didn’t know. Probably more than I was willing to admit to.

  20

  Once Reading Week is over, the rest of winter term goes into freefall. Students are constantly popping into office hours, trying to massage out an extra mark for a quiz or puzzle through an outline for a paper that is getting out of control.

  My lectures were organized and our married life was settling into a pleasant pattern. Now that we actually cohabited, Steve and I spent less time discussing every element of our workdays to each other, and more time contemplating elements of the news we’d hear over the kitchen radio, or trying to amuse each other with funny things that had happened.

  I had handed in my review of the Kahlo book, with the general negative interpretation I’d received from Briar Nettles of whether or not a student would be reading an art biography for a class. I hadn’t heard much else from Steve about the case.

  I knew that Kristin Perry’s body had been buried in a family ceremony, and that the Mexican government had issued a statement that it was very safe for Canadians to visit Mexico, and that this was an isolated case that most certainly had ties to the victim’s life back in Canada. I wasn’t totally sure of that, though the knowledge that she was an art student certainly spoke to it being targeted and not random.

  If Steve was still in regular contact with the Puerto Vallarta police force, it was from the precinct and not from home. We had put the Mexican tablecloth into circulation with the other two we owned but it tended to remind me of death more than my honeymoon, so when it came out of the dryer, I folded it and popped it under the dishtowels in their drawer till the connection dimmed for us.

  Denise had asked me if I’d checked out the art students, but it wasn’t up to me to do that sort of thing, and I was pretty sure Iain and Steve had been all over that angle. They just hadn’t found any boyfriend other than Cole, the fellow Kristin’s roommates had said she’d broken up with in January, and he had the marvelous alibi of being in Edmonton during Reading Week, surrounded by roommates and poker-playing buddies.

  There’s an old police maxim that a case needed to close within a two-week window if it was ever going to close at all. We were well past that deadline now. I wondered if Kristin Perry’s family was ever going to find closure, or if they were going to decide in their hearts that adventure had killed their daughter.

  My own form of adventure, marriage, was taking up a lot of my time and interest, making me far less curious about the murder than I am sure I would otherwise have been. I was discovering all sorts of interesting aspects to my own personality I’d never bothered to examine. For one thing, while I’ve always considered myself to be pretty tidy and clean in my day-to-day habits, I had nothing on Steve, whose compulsion to wake to a pristine home each morning meant that the last half hour before crawling into bed was spent picking up magazines and plumping pillows while he washed and dried stray dishes in the kitchen.

  I was also fascinated to see how much more serene I was now that I knew Steve’s pension would see us through our twilight years. With that sort of safety net below me, I was free to concentrate on doing my best work in the moment, rather than constantly fretting about what course or job or commission I could snag for the next term. I’m pretty sure I did my best teaching that term, reveling in the assurance that I was not going to starve the week after grades were turned in.

  In that lovely way the world has of rewarding them that has, I was asked to stay on at Grant MacEwan University to teach an accelerated introductory English lit course for the spring session, and I had already agreed to teach a half-term summer session class at the U of A, so my summer was stacked up right till August. The phone calls from the chairs of the departments about fall teaching usually came around the middle of May, and for the first time in decades, it didn’t twist my stomach in knots to be having to wait on the pleasure and whim of other people’s scheduling to see if I would eat that year. Things were heating up politically with more light being shone on the plight of sessional lecturers, or “adjuncts” as they were called in the United States, but it felt inordinately calming not to have to worry, and for that, I was grateful to my handsome, clever, and caring husband.

  If only the university administrations knew how easy it would be to settle down the sessionals. Just give them five- or ten-year renewable contracts, so they knew they’d have regular employment and wages, and they would likely feel grateful enough to tamp down their desire for pensions. After all, if you knew you had some regular money coming in, you could likely start budgeting your own RRSP. Just a touch of continuity would go such a long, long way.

  Our May routine shifted a tad, because I was teaching three-hour morning lectures Monday through Thursday. I would talk in the mornings, mark through the afternoon, and head for home to rinse, repeat. Steve would get home right after I did, and the last thing I wanted to do was talk, so we watched movies and binge-watched television series, and went for long evening walks in the lengthening days. To fill the void of my previously incessant chatter, Steve began to talk more about his days. Without mentioning names, I heard about the cases he was working on, and nodded along while he laid out theories he and Iain were exploring.

  It was interesting to think that Staff Superintendent Keller, Steve’s boss, would likely be happier that we were married than when we had first been dating and I’d been caught up in one or two of Steve’s investigations. Now, as just a sounding board, I was far less involved in the workings of the Edmonton Police Service, who were very capable of handling things without the aid of some aging Trixie Belden.

  It wasn’t until The Works, the annual visual arts festival, began to advertise, that my thoughts came back to the Edmonton arts scene, and that was only because Diego Rivers was one of the featured artists. He was apparently commissioned to paint a mural that would hang on the back wall of Rogers Place, the huge new hockey arena, right across from the LRT station. Since the trains there always seemed to be stationary for minutes at a time, it would be nice to have something to look at while waiting.

  I thought it was canny of the arena executives to demand it be a movable mural, just in case there were defamatory pictures of Darryl Katz, the owner of the Oilers hockey team, worked into the piece. After all, Diego Rivera had put Lenin into a mural that Ford had demanded destroyed, since Rivera refused to paint over it.

  That night, after supper, Steve was regaling me with a visual story of Iain chasing a thief down Whyte Avenue on foot while Steve drove up to block him off at the end of the block.

  “I had this older woman hitting the car bumper because I was blocking the crosswalk, so I turned the flashers on the car, to make her aware and get her out of the way. She looked shocked, as if she’d somehow turned flashers on with her cane. Meanwhile, Running Man spots the car dead ahead and turns to detour through a shop or who knows what, and he bumps right into Iain, who grabs his wrist, even as they’re both falling down. Before I was even out of the car, Iain had him cuffed and was hauling him up on his feet.”

  “That’s really impressive. I’m not sure I could even run a block down Whyte Avenue, let alone catch someone.”

  “Well, you know Iain. He stays in shape just for that sort of thing. He is probably the only cop I know who didn’t make plain clothes and automatically gain ten pounds.”

  I looked at my handsome husband, wit
hout a spare ounce on his muscular frame and smiled. Though they’d likely never admit it, partners in the police force developed such a close bond, that were Iain not so completely heterosexual, I might be jealous.

  “How is that case coming with the young woman who was killed on our honeymoon?” I asked. “Has anything more come from your investigations into the art students here or have the Mexican police found anything?”

  Steve slumped a bit. He didn’t like open cases that dragged on. The longer it took to find the bad guy, the more likely you were never going to find the bad guy.

  “The Canadians are holding off on issuing a travel advisory because our team is still investigating some open ends here. But they’d like to. Meanwhile, Miguel and his guys are checking leads, but things all seem to run into tourist trails for them, and it’s next to impossible to trace some of the people because during Reading Week and Spring Break, kids come down and stay four or five to a room and all the hotels have is one name and address to link to the room.”

  “What do you think in your gut?”

  “Oh, hunch policing?” Steve smiled. “I think it was someone here who deliberately went there to do the deed. I see this as a highly pre-meditated action; you don’t get that level of staging of a crime scene happening on the spur of the moment.”

  “And what is the psychology behind that sort of staging? Is it hatred for the victim, or is the victim incidental to the tableau being displayed?”

  “Do you mean, could it have been anybody?”

  “Yes, or did it have to be Kristin Perry?”

  “That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question, for sure.”

  “Well, you recall me talking to that art professor, and her talking about the artist-in-residence?”