“Some account,” Jill muttered.
“The rich are different. Bottom line is that Tal didn’t know what his wife was doing.”
“Are you sure?”
“He swore he’d take a lie detector test,” Zach said. “Faroe believes him. Said the old boy about stroked out when his wife screamed at him that he’d ruined everything, that she’d die poor and it was all his fault because he’d lost his business edge.”
Jill didn’t say anything.
“Does that change anything for you?” Zach asked.
“Like what?”
“The auction. Your paintings.”
Jill’s eyes narrowed. Her fingertips tapped a slow rhythm on his thigh.
Zach let her think while he watched the TV. He recognized a surprising number of people from his years with Garland Frost. Men from Texas with beers and bolo ties, women with wineglasses held nipple-high, the better to display their five-and six-carat diamonds. The diamonds were real. Most of the breasts weren’t.
One screen showed a Montana art dealer who wore a rodeo cowboy’s championship belt buckle-one he’d earned the hard way rather than a pawnshop trophy. Another screen showed a pig farmer from Arkansas who owned the second-largest string of slaughterhouses in the West. His wife was the trophy variety, wearing second-skin designer jeans, a lacy flesh-colored bra, and a black suede vest that had been carefully tailored to barely cover her.
Others screens showed a prematurely bald Hollywood producer with so much vanity he shaved and polished his head. Near him was a pleasantly cutthroat venture capitalist with his intelligent, gracious wife.
“She thought she was helping her husband?” Jill asked finally.
“You mean Caitlin?”
“Yes.”
“She was helping herself,” Zach said. “She’s pathologically afraid of being poor.”
Jill let out a long breath. “And I’d rather be poor than play a rich man’s game of blue smoke and murder. Let her sink.”
Zach shifted suddenly, lifting Jill onto his lap. “I really like that about you.”
“What?”
“You know what’s real and what isn’t.”
“Rapids are real,” she said, putting her arms around him. “You’re real. I’d like to teach you about my favorite rivers.”
“Sold,” Zach said. “As long as I get to show you my favorite junkyards and teach you about old muscle cars along the way.”
“Still looking for that hemi whatever?”
“That’s a convertible Hemi-cuda, the Holy Grail of muscle cars.”
She laughed and leaned closer. “I suspect you’ll learn the rivers real quick, but I have to warn you, I’m not good at the car thing. It could take me a long time to learn.”
Zach’s arms tightened around her. “I’m counting on it.”
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Blue Smoke and Murder sk-4 Page 33
