Blue Smoke and Murder sk-4

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Please tell Mr. Worthington that I want to look at what he has in the way of fine Western art,” Jill said smoothly.

  “Well, that’s just it, I’m afraid,” the woman said, turning to Jill, obviously relieved to be dealing with someone less rough-looking than Zach. “Mr. Worthington is in the midst of preparing for the auction in Las Vegas and he was very firm about not being disturbed. Why don’t I get Mr. Cahill, the manager?”

  “Why don’t you get Worthington,” Zach said without looking at the woman. “We’ve got a plane standing by to take us to Telluride. If the big man is too busy to sell us his goods, we’ll find another gallery.”

  “Um, well, yes, of course,” the woman said. “Excuse me while I conference with Mr. Worthington. It may take some time, especially if he is talking to one of his collectors about the upcoming auction.”

  “We’ll either be here when he comes out or we won’t,” Zach said. His voice said that he didn’t care much either way.

  The young woman hurried off.

  Jill glanced around, taking in the guard at a console. He was dividing his attention between Zach and the five closed-circuit TVs that displayed whatever was in view of the cameras scanning every inch of the gallery.

  Just as saleswoman opened the door marked private, Zach said in a carrying voice, “Tell him it’s the owner of the newly discovered Dunstan that was sent to him for an opinion.”

  Moore froze, then shot through the door like a housecat with a coyote on its heels.

  “At least she knew what painting you were talking about,” Jill said in a low voice.

  “Yeah.”

  Finally.

  Now all he had to do was pray that Ramsey Worthington took the bait.

  34

  SNOWBIRD

  SEPTEMBER 15

  11:22 A.M.

  At least this won’t be a total waste of time,” Zach said, glancing at his watch.

  “Why?”

  “Take a look behind you.” He gestured toward a long wall hung with the kind of Western art that gave meaning to the word fine.

  Jill turned, drew in a quick breath, and headed toward the wall without a backward look.

  Zach enjoyed the view. Eagerness and impatience with all the game playing put something special in her walk.

  Even the guard noticed.

  Zach followed her toward the wall of art. Along the way, he picked a catalogue off the top of a stack. The pages of the catalogue, like the long wall, featured art from the upcoming auction in Las Vegas. Nearly all the paintings had traditional or modern gilt frames. Many of the canvases were big enough to fill the wall above the mantel of a trophy mansion in Vail or Telluride, Aspen or Taos.

  Or a museum.

  Jill did a quick turn down the long wall, then a much slower one. Either way, the results were the same.

  “Incredible,” Jill said when Zach came to stand beside her.

  “No argument from me,” he said. “There are some truly fine paintings here.”

  “Yet…”

  Zach waited.

  “I can’t help thinking that Modesty’s paintings are strong enough to hang here and not be put in the shade,” Jill said. “Except for size. None of the paintings in the trunk are more than forty inches on a side.”

  “Dunstan didn’t do a lot of big canvases,” Zach said. “He wasn’t painting for the museum trade. He didn’t even keep a full-time studio at his home. He was truly a plein air painter. The great outdoors was his workplace.”

  She thought of the near-constant, always unpredictable wind of the Basin and Range country. “Out in the open, big canvases would be nearly impossible to paint. Especially in the wind. Like kites without tails.”

  “Most of the time, Dunstan got around on horseback or in an open wagon,” Zach said, remembering what Garland Frost had told him. “Anything much bigger than forty inches on a side was too big to drag through the wilderness.”

  “Whoever painted Modesty’s legacy didn’t need a huge canvas to evoke a huge land,” Jill said.

  “That’s part of their brilliance. Small paintings that expand your soul in a big way.”

  She glanced at him and saw that he was intent on the art in front of him. “You are the unlikeliest connoisseur of fine arts I’ve ever met.”

  “It’s the beard stubble.”

  “It’s the whole package. You look like an entirely physical man.”

  He gave her an entirely male look. “Any time you doubt it, I’ll be glad to demonstrate.”

  “I don’t think Ramsey Worthington would appreciate a live sex show,” she said. “But thanks for the thought.”

  His smile flashed and vanished like lightning against a storm. He walked slowly along the wall.

  “Any favorites?” she asked after a time.

  “Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran are always worth spending time with,” Zach said, pointing toward two of the biggest canvases. “Moran, especially. But I prefer his smaller canvases. Less theatrical, more real.” He shrugged. “I’m in a minority.”

  “How about Charlie Russell and Frederic Remington?” Jill asked, walking toward two paintings.

  “They’re the men who led the charge of cowboys, Indians, and wilderness sojourners into the twentieth century.” Zach looked at the two paintings. “The Russell is a fine example of the genre. The Remington has a signature.”

  She bit her lip against laughter. “Not one of his better efforts?”

  “Even the best painters turn out ordinary canvases. Fact of life. But most people care more for the signatures than the art. The prestige factor disappears if no one knows the artist’s name.”

  “You have a jaundiced view of art collectors.”

  “I was in the business for a few years,” he said.

  “I thought you were in intelligence.”

  “I was.” Still am, sometimes. Just for a different employer. One who understands that bad intel leads to really bad strategy.

  “What about the artists who aren’t household names?” she asked, gesturing at the rest of the wall of art. “Some of these paintings are very skillful, both in technique and in evocation. And some of them are barely a step above old magazine illustrations.”

  “Some of these were magazine illustrations. Don’t hold it against them. Western art is meant to be accessible. No scholarly explanations are required in order to enjoy it.”

  “My professors would call a lot of these sentimental and intellectually naive.”

  “Politics, not art,” Zach said. “Used to be that the Church commissioned and explained art. Now it’s the turn of secular priests selling modernism of some stripe to commission and explain. Same claim to moral power, different collection plate.”

  Jill watched Zach from the corner of her eye. He didn’t notice. He was looking at each canvas with the eyes of a scholar and the body of a brawler.

  If he’d been a painting, she’d have wrapped him up and taken him home.

  But he wasn’t, so she concentrated on a large canvas filled with colorful Indian braves and stalwart cavalrymen in blue coats and hats that had been tattered by weather and war.

  “My professors would scream,” she said, “but this painting really speaks to me. Guess I’m a natural-born plebe.”

  Zach glanced at the painting, then found its page in the catalog. Along with a brief biography of the artist, there was a price range the canvas was expected to bring.

  “You’re a plebe with great taste,” he said. “That’s a Howard Ruckelshaus. It’s expected to bring between a million and a million-two. If there are some heavyweight Ruckelshaus collectors at the auction, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the bidding blow right through a million and a half. That’s what auctions are all about-excitement and record prices.”

  Jill stared at Zach, saw that he wasn’t kidding, and went back to looking at the paintings. She spent a long time on a bigger-than-life portrait of a drenched, exhausted cowboy in a yellow slicker hauling a saddle in one hand and a bridle
in the other. In the corral behind him, his weary horse had its head down, eating a freshly broken bale of hay.

  “I’ve been there,” Jill said. “So tired you see double. But the horse has to be fed, watered, and rubbed down before you crash.”

  “Code of the West?”

  “Code of the ranch. Animals first, humans second.”

  The next painting that stopped her was an epic canvas, fresh and vivid, like it had just come from the artist. The canvas showed the driving of the golden spike that symbolically joined the transcontinental railway across the United States. Well-fed Anglo men were congratulating each other on completing an important job.

  Yet the focus of the painting was not the successful men in business suits, but rather a large group of Chinese workmen who had been shunted off to one side. They were allowed to witness the event their sweat had made possible, but they weren’t included in the congratulations.

  Jill made a small sound and studied the workers. Their faces were individual, unique, subtly heroic, without the bland sameness of the businessmen. Like the cowboy’s horse, the Chinese were bone-tired; unlike the horse, no one was going to see to their needs.

  “Remarkable,” she said. “The technique and composition are classical European, yet the Chinese men remind me of nothing so much as the clay army of Xian. Individually human and universal man at the same time.”

  “The artist is a Chinese immigrant. Lives in Tucson.” Zach skimmed the catalogue. “Someday he’ll be recognized as the great artist he is. Assuming galleries and collectors can get past a Chinese man painting the old West.”

  “That kind of bigotry is disgusting.”

  “So are a lot of things that are real. But don’t feel too bad-this canvas is expected to sell in the low six figures. Not bad for a dude who just turned forty.”

  Jill laughed softly.

  “Something funny?” he asked.

  “Just me,” she said. “I have a fine arts degree from one of the most prestigious colleges in the United States, yet many of these paintings are utterly new to me. I hadn’t realized how blatantly Eurocentric my fine arts education was. Most of my professors never got closer to America than Warhol’s Campbell soup can and Jackson Pollock’s premature ejaculations.”

  Zach made an odd sound. “I take it you’re not a Pollock fan.”

  “I could give you chapter and verse on Pollock’s importance to world art, his daring artistic vision, his slashing intellect, his blah blah blah. Yet his work never spoke to me on any level, including the intellectual. Neither did a lot of English pastoralists, but at least it was possible to admire their technique.”

  Zach started to say something, then sensed a person approaching behind them. He turned with startling swiftness and saw a tall, trim man with salt-and-pepper hair that brushed the collar of his dark blue blazer.

  Ramsey Worthington had risen to the bait.

  35

  SNOWBIRD

  SEPTEMBER 15

  11:28 A.M.

  I’m Ramsey Worthington, and you are…?” he asked.

  Jill turned to face Worthington. He looked more European than American West. His voice was refined, carefully modulated, with just enough of a British accent to suggest high culture as defined by PBS.

  He didn’t offer his hand.

  “Names aren’t important,” Zach drawled. “Isn’t that what dealers always say? ‘It’s the quality of the art, not the name of the artist’ that matters.”

  Worthington’s blue eyes narrowed. “What is this about?”

  “A Thomas Dunstan that was last in your custody before it was ‘lost,’ mutilated, and finally destroyed,” Zach said.

  Worthington’s eyebrows shot up in what looked like genuine surprise. “Mutilated? Destroyed? What on earth are-”

  “But the lost part doesn’t surprise you, does it?” Zach cut in.

  The door buzzer sounded.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Worthington said.

  Christa Moore opened the door. Several people walked in. Their clothes ranged from shabby casual to casual chic. All of them had the bearing that said they could afford anything that took their fancy.

  “I’ll be real happy to explain,” Zach said. “I’ll even use little words and a loud voice. You want that here or in your office?”

  Worthington looked at the newcomers. He knew them. High-level collectors giving a final review to some of the auction goods.

  The collectors were also high-level gossips.

  “My office,” he said curtly.

  The dealer’s office was a sharp contrast to the spacious, neat gallery. Painting after painting was stacked in ranks against the walls and inside specially made cubbyholes. Shelves were buried beneath bronzes and carved marble.

  Zach recognized an intricate Remington bronze of a cowboy astride a lunging horse. An original, numbered Remington was worth bragging about. The aged, bent cardboard tag attached to the statue by wire attested to the work’s authenticity.

  Jill’s hands itched to pull out paintings and look at them. A single glance at Zach’s face told her that wasn’t going to happen. Worthington didn’t look real outgoing, either.

  “Now, what’s this nonsense about a ruined Dunstan? All provenanced Dunstans are accounted for and in excellent condition.”

  Zach gave Jill a subtle signal.

  Showtime.

  “My great-aunt, Modesty Breck, sent out a canvas for appraisal. My adviser”-Jill nodded to Zach-“believes it found its way to you. The painting was reported as lost. Recently it was, ah, returned to me. In shreds.”

  Worthington frowned. “I remember the painting. Hillhouse sent it to me. I sent it back. I’m sure the receiving and shipping forms are filed, if it matters to you. As for the rest, it’s neither my affair nor my responsibility.”

  “Forms can be filled out and filed by anyone with a seventh-grade education,” Zach said. “They’re worthless as proof of anything worth proving.”

  “You’ll have to excuse him,” Jill said earnestly to Worthington. “The destruction of the canvas really angered him.”

  Worthington gave Zach a wary glance.

  Zach gave him two rows of hard white teeth.

  “I came here because I wanted to know what you thought of the painting,” Jill said.

  “It’s not my practice to discuss privately held paintings with anyone except the owner.”

  “No problem,” Zach said. “Modesty Breck is dead. You’re talking to her grandniece.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Worthington said automatically. “But that doesn’t answer the question of ownership.”

  “I’m her heir,” Jill said. “Would you like a letter from my lawyer? A death certificate from the coroner? Testimonial from an elder in-”

  Zach spoke over her, “I know it upsets you to talk about it.” He squeezed her shoulder-hard-and turned back to Worthington. “So what did you think of the painting?”

  “Surprisingly good,” Worthington said. “Reminiscent in many ways of Thomas Dunstan’s work. But the lack of signature, plus other issues, made the painting an unlikely Dunstan. Very unlikely.”

  “Issues, huh?” Zach said. “Such as?”

  Jill’s smile asked Worthington to be more polite than Zach was being.

  “Just how are you ‘advising’ Modesty Breck’s heir?” Worthington asked.

  “Any old way she wants it,” Zach drawled. “She’s real upset by her loss. You’re real busy with your auction. The quickest way to get rid of us is to answer our questions.”

  It took Worthington about four seconds to come to the same conclusion.

  “The historical record is the first issue,” he said. “By comparison to other artists, Thomas Dunstan painted remarkably few works. So far as we know, every single one of those paintings has been authenticated and accounted for. His heirs have been very jealous of his reputation. They guard his heritage very closely.”

  “And make money doing it,” Zach sai
d.

  “There is nothing unusual about paying for expertise.”

  “Since when has being someone’s heir made the heir expert on anything?” Zach asked.

  “It’s called droit moral, and I have no time to explain it to you,” Worthington said impatiently. “The second issue is that the subject of the painting is unlike anything in Dunstan’s catalogue raisonné.”

  “More French words,” Zach said.

  “If you aren’t familiar with them, you have no business advising anyone on fine art,” Worthington said in a clipped voice.

  “I understand French just fine,” Jill said, hoping her anger wasn’t coming through. “But the painting was a landscape, which is well within Dunstan’s oeuvre.”

  Zach wanted to laugh, but it would have spoiled his bad-boy sex-toy act. He stroked her arm instead, fiddling with the silky edges of her sleeve.

  “Dunstan seldom painted human figures into his work,” Worthington said to Jill, ignoring Zach entirely. “Less than four percent of Dunstan’s paintings had human figures. The figures were invariably male. Dunstan had an uncanny ability to paint landscapes that conveyed enormous masculine strength measured against the power of a raw, untamed land.”

  “I thought it was pretty well tamed by the time Dunstan was painting,” Jill said.

  “That’s why Dunstan’s work has always been so sought after by the very men who subdued the West,” Worthington said, glancing at his watch. “His paintings were a tribute to the brute male power it took to survive in, much less to tame, the West.”

  Zach wondered how he would defuse the coming explosion. Jill wasn’t about to take that kind of chauvinism without giving feedback. A lot of it. He squeezed her arm, reminding her that she was supposed to be the good cop in this duo.

  Her muscles were tight.

  He wondered if prayer would help.

  Jill didn’t give him time to find out.

  “Are you saying that women didn’t exhibit strength and courage in the old West?” she asked, wide-eyed. “I’d think that kind of bigotry would get you bounced from the national association of politically correct art critics tout de suite, mon ami.”