Blue Smoke and Murder sk-4

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Like I said, don’t piss us off.”

  Zach smiled slightly. “You really do come from a long line of solitary, difficult women, don’t you?”

  Jill looked him in the eye. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  He glanced at the canvas in his hand. “I wonder how the artist who painted this would have described it.”

  “Breck women pretty much march to their own drummer, do their own thing, and otherwise don’t take orders from anyone,” she said. “But I’ve never minded being alone, at least not until the other night.”

  He put aside the painting and began pacing along the lineup of canvases against the cabin wall. Even on the third round, each painting was more striking than the last.

  Incredible.

  “Anything you left out when we talked last night?” he asked, still looking at the paintings. “Names, telephone numbers, gallery owners, lost lovers, someplace to start looking for the connection between you and the trash artist in Mesquite? Because as it is now, we have to go with investigating the galleries, owners, and art salesmen. If the threat is coming from somewhere else, we’ll be barking up a whole forest of wrong trees.”

  Jill frowned at the paintings, thinking, then shook her head. “No help here.”

  “How about old boyfriends?”

  “Nope.”

  “You never had a boyfriend?”

  “I never had one who wasn’t relieved to say good-bye. As you pointed out, Breck women don’t take orders worth a damn.”

  “So it’s whips and leather in bed for you?”

  Her jaw dropped.

  “Never mind,” Zach said, trying not to laugh. “Question withdrawn. For now I’ll go with the art connections. If nothing pops, I’ll come back and question you some more.”

  “Come back?”

  “Yeah. I’m going to put you in a St. Kilda safe house and-”

  “No,” she cut in. “They’re my paintings. I’m staying with them.”

  “You’re too inno-um, transparent,” Zach amended quickly.

  “Meaning?”

  “I’m a better liar than you are.”

  “Well, that gives me all kinds of confidence,” she said ironically.

  “You don’t care for liars?”

  “No.”

  He nodded. “You make my case for me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You run rivers for a living. You don’t like liars and don’t lie well enough to fool anyone.”

  “So what?”

  “So you’re safer not being with a professional liar, because you’ll have to lie right along with me.” He smiled gently at her bewildered look. “Don’t worry, you can trust St. Kilda with the paintings. We only lie to benefit our clients. Then we can churn out blue smoke with the best of ’em.”

  “Joe Faroe didn’t say anything about keeping me locked away somewhere.”

  “He was a little busy at the time, remember? Wife having a baby?” Eyes narrowed, Zach studied Jill, measuring her determination to stay with the paintings. “That sort of thing makes a man a little scattered.”

  “You’re an expert on having a wife give birth?”

  “Hell, no. But I know how I’d feel in his place. You’ll love the safe house. Good food, a swimming pool, all the amenities.”

  Pointedly, Zach picked up a painting and started examining it from all sides.

  Discussion over.

  Jill started to argue, then simply turned and walked out to the truck. She unwrapped his leather jacket from around her waist pack, yanked out her sat phone, and punched in the number she’d already memorized.

  “Joe Faroe, please,” she said crisply. “Jillian Breck calling.”

  23

  HOLLYWOOD

  SEPTEMBER 14

  2:03 P.M.

  Score watched the intercom light flash at double speed. Urgent.

  Now what? Never get a minute to myself. What the hell is it now? Score ignored the leap of his temper.

  “Excuse me,” he said to the frightened trust-fund baby sitting on the other side of the big desk. The dude was a coke-smoking gambler afraid of kneecap collectors. Not Score’s favorite kind of client, but money was money. The kid’s mother had a lot of it. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Score strode into the adjoining office where Amy was waiting, looking like someone who expected a pat on her spiky hair and a wad of money. He shut and locked the door behind him.

  “This better be good,” Score said harshly.

  “The subject talked to St. Kilda Consulting. The man with her is a St. Kilda op.”

  “Huh.” Score thought fast and hard. No matter how he looked at it, he didn’t like it. St. Kilda was bad news. “Were the paintings mentioned?”

  “Just once. From the context, I’d say the subject either has the paintings or knows where they are. She was objecting to the op’s plan to stash her in a safe house while he pursued the death threat against her. No one said where the paintings were, but the implication is that the art is real and available.”

  Mother of all whores. How does a country girl know about, much less afford, St. Kilda Consulting?

  Maybe Steele was betting on the paintings being worth St. Kilda’s usual fee.

  Worse and worse.

  “You get the op’s name?” Score demanded.

  “Zach was all she called him.”

  “Don’t know him.” Which meant nothing. A lot of St. Kilda ops were contract workers rather than full-time. “You have a script?”

  “Coming up.” She hurried to a nearby printer and scooped paper from the tray. “She talked to someone called Joe Faroe.”

  Faroe. Bad, bad news. This could be a real cluster.

  Or not.

  Some of St. Kilda’s ops are straight bullet-catchers. Nothing fancy. Just one-on-one.

  No problemo. I’ll bend him into a pretzel and then take him apart.

  The thought made Score’s blood heat with something between anger and pleasure.

  Score read while Amy waited, vibrating eagerness. All he learned was what she’d already told him. The only good news was that the subject wasn’t going to any safe house.

  If Score had to, he could still get to Jill Breck. With her out of the picture, no one would get their act together in time to affect the auction.

  His client would be happy.

  Score would be happy.

  Jill Breck would be history.

  24

  BRECK RANCH

  SEPTEMBER 14

  2:07 P.M.

  Inside the house, Zach talked on his own phone to Grace until Faroe was free. Grace’s sympathy for Zach’s position ran over like a plugged toilet. There was laughter in her voice.

  “…and from what I’m overhearing on Joe’s end,” she said cheerfully, “Jill will walk if we try to tuck her away. Joe’s doing more listening than talking. Good for him. He has a baby daughter now, so he’ll have to learn to rein in his protective impulses.”

  “Congratulations on the baby, and don’t hold your breath about Faroe backing off.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He’s agreeing with Jill. She goes with the paintings.”

  Zach told himself he was angry.

  He lied.

  And he knew it.

  “Let me talk to Joe,” Zach said.

  “He won’t change his mind.”

  “Ya think?” he said sarcastically.

  Laughing, Grace exchanged phones with her husband.

  “You want out?” Faroe asked Zach.

  “No. You need me.”

  “Bullet-catchers aren’t all that rare.”

  “Ones who learned about Western art at Garland Frost’s knee are.”

  Silence. Then Faroe said, “So you like the paintings.”

  “A lot.”

  “Enough to kill for?”

  “Me personally? No. Someone else? You bet. Provenance will be a bitch, though. If St. Kilda is counting on a piece of
the paintings to pay for the op, you could end up with a double handful of nothing.”

  “Jill saved Lane’s life on the river. Ask for whatever you need, whenever and wherever you need it. If St. Kilda has it, it’s yours.”

  Smiling, Zach started making a list.

  25

  HOLLYWOOD

  SEPTEMBER 15

  4:00 A.M.

  Score woke up when the alarm on his computer went off. Every hour on the hour. Slightly more often than the client called.

  He’d stopped answering his phone. Even after a hard workout, he was afraid he’d lose his temper. This client was too important to scream at.

  Rolling over, he eyed the computer on the bedside table. He hit refresh and waited for the computer to show a new readout. A red line and a blinking red arrow recorded Jill Breck’s progress against a map of Arizona.

  Still moving.

  Damn. What are they doing-heading for dawn at the Grand Canyon?

  Do they have the paintings? Or did they stash them in the same place the old lady did?

  He sat up, reached out for a different computer, and hit the digital replay of the sat phone bug, selecting for certain words.

  Thank god for computers. Nothing more butt-numbing than listening to a bug, waiting to hear something besides garbage.

  With computers, he could cut to the good stuff.

  Well, sometimes. Right now there was static…and classic country music playing in the background. Wherever Jill was keeping her sat phone, it wasn’t close enough to do any good.

  Or maybe she and the op weren’t on speaking terms anymore.

  If Score had been the St. Kilda op, he’d have been furious to have a client in his pocket, watching his every move. But it made Jill easier to get to, so Score wasn’t going to complain.

  All he had to do was keep a lid on those paintings until the auction was over.

  Four days.

  He yawned, wished he could go to back to sleep, knew he couldn’t risk it. If Jill had those paintings with her-and he had to assume she did, because it was the worst-case scenario-he needed to steal or destroy them before the auction.

  After another yawn, he called At Your Service’s twenty-four-hour line and began spending thousands of the client’s dollars chartering a plane out of Burbank.

  He could always sleep in the air.

  26

  OUTSIDE COLORADO CITY

  SEPTEMBER 15

  6:00 A.M.

  Zach drove to the edge of the small airport’s paved strip and parked. The plane he’d chartered should be on final approach. He looked up.

  No incoming lights.

  He told himself to be patient. Headwinds, tailwinds, sidewinds, storms, and the rest of Mother Nature’s bag of tricks had the last word when it came to keeping schedules.

  The small lounge near the tie-down area was dark. None of the private planes waiting patiently in the light breeze were being checked out for an early morning joyride.

  Beside him in the truck, Jill poured coffee from the thermos she’d filled at the ranch and handed him a cup. “You still mad at me?”

  “I wasn’t mad at you to begin with, so there’s no ‘still’ about it,” he said, searching the early-morning sky for signs of an incoming plane.

  “I know you didn’t want me to come along.”

  She looked at the side of his face, shadowed and modeled by the early morning light. He looked unreasonably good. She wanted a taste.

  She settled for coffee.

  “Thanks,” he said as he took the cup. “As for having you along, I just wanted to make sure you were on Faroe’s karma, not mine.”

  “Well, that sounds reassuring.”

  “Your great-aunt is dead, your car is trashed, you have a death threat. You want reassuring? You’ll find it in the dictionary between real and stupid.”

  She chewed on the words and swallowed them with coffee from the thermos. “I don’t scare easily.”

  “More important, you don’t lie worth a damn.”

  “We’ve been down this river before.”

  “And we’ll go down it again,” Zach finished the coffee and handed the cup back to her. “You stay with me and you play a role. Until further notice, I’m the sleaze job and you’re the sweet young thing.”

  “I’m neither sweet, nor young, nor a thing.” She lifted the thermos in silent toast and took another drink.

  “The whole point of an undercover op is to make people believe you’re something you aren’t,” he said.

  “Like sweet, young, and thingy?”

  He laughed and shook his head. “I’m beginning to appreciate what Faroe is up against with Grace. Of course, he gets some really nice side benefits.”

  “Intelligent conversation?” Jill asked blandly.

  “I don’t know anyone who made a baby just by talking about it.”

  She tried not to smile, failed, and just shook her head. “I’m beginning to sympathize with Grace. Truce?”

  “We’re not at war.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s not a game,” Zach said. “The only reason Faroe kept me with you is because I’m real good at making people believe I wrote the book on crooked. I also know enough about Western art to bullshit with the best of them.”

  Jill blinked. “Okay. You’re a good liar. We’ve established that. And?”

  “Lying is the best way to get down with the crooks who are running the scam.”

  “We’re talking art?”

  “And scams. Blue smoke, remember? That’s how you separate the marks from their millions.”

  “We barely touched on fraud in my fine art classes,” she said, frowning.

  Zach scanned the sky that was getting brighter with each heartbeat. Where is the damn plane? He sipped coffee and went back to the education of Ms. Jillian Breck.

  “A good forger can embrace today’s art history bullshit, turn out the next missing Old Master from his grandmother’s attic, and embarrass the shorts off the art establishment,” Zach said. “No salesman, critic, or curator likes to talk about really good forgery with a mark. Raises too many questions about the nature of art and value. Worse, it makes the marks real nervous. He or she is trusting the experts to know good art and suddenly the experts are telling the buyer there ain’t no such thing as certainty.”

  “Everyone who collects art isn’t a mark.”

  He shrugged and sipped coffee. “Depends on your point of view. In China, old calligraphy sells for a lot of money. It’s considered the highest form of art in a civilization that reveres art.”

  “Calligraphy? Really?”

  “You make my point. You majored in fine arts and yet you’ve barely heard of Chinese calligraphy. It sells real well among the wealthy Chinese, though. In art, context is everything.”

  Jill remembered Zach’s care, expertise, and pure esthetic enjoyment of her paintings. “Were you, um, blowing blue smoke about my paintings?”

  “No. That was personal. This is business.” He held out his empty cup and looked hopeful. “It’s all about con artists and marks.”

  She poured coffee carefully. “You sound like there’s no intrinsic, transcendent value in art.”

  He sipped coffee and almost sighed. Strong enough to float horseshoes. Perfect.

  “Before you lecture me about the transcendent nature of true art,” Zach said, “think about how well fine Chinese calligraphy sells in the U. S. of A.”

  “How well?”

  “Outside of the overseas Chinese communities, it doesn’t sell worth a handful of spit. Cultural context makes the difference in value.”

  He scanned the sky again. Still empty.

  “And context is another word for bullshit?” she asked.

  “It can be. Especially when it comes to positional art.”

  “Positional art? Must be another thing we didn’t cover in my fine arts classes,” Jill said, shaking her head.

  “What do you do when you’re the newest billiona
ire on the block?” Zach asked, watching the sky. “You have the mansions in trendy spots all over the world, you have enough expensive cars for ten showrooms, you have a yacht bigger than Monte Carlo; and so does every other billionaire. How do you separate yourself from the herd?”

  “Buy something the rest can’t buy. One-of-a-kind art.”

  He turned and looked at her. “Have I mentioned how much I like smart women? That’s exactly what people do, whether it’s a Japanese corporation driving Impressionist art out of the stratosphere to impress the Western world, or a tech billionaire outbidding everyone else for a Jackson Pollock. Positional art is a statement of importance that has damn little to do with love of art and everything to do with ego.”

  “A wealthy version of the old mine-is-bigger-than-yours game.”

  Zach laughed. “Yeah. In the context of an auction, you’re buying the spotlight as well as the painting. Spend big bucks. Impress your business associates. Get known as an important collector. Get the red carpet treatment at high-end galleries. Don’t give a hoot whether you personally like the art you buy or not. Welcome to the world of blue smoke and positional art.”

  “Interesting context,” she said blandly.

  “It leaves plenty of room for scams. At auctions, gallery owners have been known to front bidders on artists they represent and/or personally collect. Totally illegal, of course, but so are a lot of things that work. Suddenly your Unknown Artist is setting six-figure records. Gallery owner calls his favorite positional-art suckers, churns out a butt-load of blue smoke, and sells the New Best Thing at a 200 or 300 percent markup.”

  “I’m beginning to think my education was wasted.”

  “Education is never wasted.”

  “You sound like you mean that.”

  “I do.” Zach thought of Garland Frost. “And the education you resent the most teaches you the most.” He hesitated, then shrugged. “That’s the kind of education you’re in for now.”

  “You think my paintings are forgeries?”

  “I don’t know what they are, besides really, really good. The point is, until we find out more, you’re going to have to lie like a fine carpet when we meet some gallery owners. At least one of them likely will know a lot more than we do about shredded paintings and death threats.”