Tough Cookie gbcm-9

by Diane Mott Davidson

  More questions for Tom.

  I asked, “What’s the name of the convict who had cancer?”

  “Barton Reed. The guy used to be a church acolyte, but he went bad. He believes the cancer is God’s punishment for his crimes.”

  Well, well. Remembering everything Tom had told me about investigations, I didn’t let on that I recognized Reed’s name. As I drank more coffee, Eileen slipped off her bright pink robe and threw it on a maple wheat-back chair. Underneath she wore a sheer, low-cut top swirled with gold and silver, along with matching billowing sheer pants. She scanned the kitchen, yanked open the refrigerator door, and retrieved a carton of orange juice and a bottle of champagne. The bottle’s tilted cork indicated it had already been opened. She expertly poured both the juice and the champagne into a clean crystal flute to make a mimosa.

  Then I noticed four orange-specked champagne flutes on the sideboard. If Jack had truly given up drinking, there was no way I was letting Eileen drive Arch anywhere.

  Jack read my mind. “Uh,” he interjected as he sought my eyes, “I’ll be taking Eileen and the boys to Vail.”

  I watched him as he filled a china plate with golden orange muffins. The man was truly a fabulous cook. The time Eileen and Jack had invited Arch and me to spend the night, Jack had prepared a spectacular dinner in which he’d grilled chicken, flipped sautéing asparagus, made hollandaise, and pulled out a spectacular baked Alaska faster than you could say culinary school.

  I bit into a proffered muffin—it was tender, buttery, and moist with orange. “Very good,” I said to Jack. “Do you share recipes?”

  “Sure,” he said proudly. He riffled through a card box and handed me a printed card: Marmalade Mogul Muffins, he called them.

  “I’ll make them for clients as soon as I’m reopened,” I promised. “And I’ll give you all the credit.”

  “Thanks,” he said happily, and beamed at Eileen, who took a slug of the mimosa.

  It worried me to see Eileen drinking again. I wondered how Jack felt about having first an older wife, then an older girlfriend, who overindulged in alcohol. Fiona I didn’t know about, but Eileen never used to drink more than a glass of wine in an evening. Then, she’d caught her husband—the very successful president of a pharmaceutical supply company—mainlining heroin with his girlfriend in the Druckmans’ home library. Eileen had started buying champagne by the case. At first she drank to console herself, then she drank to celebrate receiving ten and a half million dollars for the sale of her husband’s company. He’d been jailed briefly on drug charges, been warned out of the medical supply business, and had moved to Florida.

  And then Eileen had met Jack. She’d told me he made her so happy she didn’t want booze. But with the death of Doug Portman, she seemed worried and morose. And drinking more than she should.

  I asked Eileen, “What’s the bottom line here?”

  “Arthur Wakefield,” Eileen replied promptly. She gestured at the newspaper article with her glass. “Arthur has not had an open conflict with Jack since Jack’s been working for me. But now with Portman suddenly dead, I’m afraid Arthur’ll try to use the local paper to stoke public opinion. Maybe he wants Jack out of town and my restaurant closed. Who knows?” Her voice turned bitter. “I believe Arthur killed Doug Portman yesterday, because he was so angry with him for granting Jack parole. Doug’s death is bound to bring all kinds of negative attention to Jack’s new life. I also believe,” she added, almost spitefully, “that Arthur knocked Jack out and killed his mother, so he could try to inherit her millions before she made Jack a beneficiary of her will. But she’d already changed her will, and Arthur has never recovered.”

  I looked at Jack. He shrugged. He said, “That’s all I could think about when I was incarcerated. Who hit me over the head? Who pushed Fiona over the cliff? And why?”

  I’d heard a lot of theories this morning, too many to keep straight. On the other hand, I’d seen Tom barely nod at one hypothesis about a crime, laugh at two more, discard a fourth, and jot down his own ideas about a fifth.

  “What I don’t understand,” Jack continued quietly, “is all these stories I’ve been hearing from folks in town. Portman had a ton of cash on him when he died. Why?”

  I sighed and shrugged. I didn’t want to tell them about my connection to Doug and the unconsummated sale of the skis. I finished my coffee and set the cup down on the saucer. “Thanks for the goodies. I’ll report to Tom everything you told me.”

  I nodded to them and they smiled. From habit, I rose and put my dishes in the sink next to the dirty crystal glasses. When I turned back around, Eileen had clasped Jack’s hand in hers.

  I let myself out.

  CHAPTER 10

  Moments later, I was lost in a condo maze. Despite the curving roadways’ fanciful names—Sweethearts’ Summit, Lynx Lane, Mogul Avenue, and Snowcone Court—all the houses were painted monotonous tones of gray or beige, and featured yards piled high with identical mountains of snow. I was baffled and frustrated, as I hadn’t yet mastered crucial details of driving the Rover, including how to signal. After fifteen minutes of winding around in search of Arthur’s condo, I whipped the Rover onto a new, unmarked roadway and searched for clues to my whereabouts.

  Arthur had said he lived on Elk Path. Bouncing along the snow-pocked street, I saw signs for the Elk Ridge Nature Trail and Picnic Area, and followed them to a parking lot. I wound between day-skiers unloading equipment from the backs of sport-utility vehicles. A couple of fellows directing traffic did not understand my question, and said I was on Elk Path. Maybe the elk can find it just fine, but I’m having problems, I longed to retort, but didn’t.

  It was nine o’clock. I wasn’t due at Arthur’s until ten. One sure way of finding any residence in Killdeer was to locate the street on the town map. It was a smaller version of Big Map, and it was conveniently located next to Cinda’s Cinnamon Stop. Come to think of it, I could get a quadruple-shot espresso there, too! A mind-clearing detour could help, especially since I’d just discovered all kinds of things about Arthur Wakefield that had never emerged in our five weeks of work together.

  I parked in one of the gondola lots, trod carefully across the snowpack to the Killdeer map, and found Elk Path. I had missed a turnoff that I had mistaken for a driveway; Arthur’s house was less than five minutes away. I growled and headed for the back of a lengthy walk-up line at Cinda’s. If no one was allowed to ski until the cops finished their investigation, I couldn’t imagine what kind of boom was happening for the shopkeepers and restaurant folks at the base. From inside the shop, though, a waiter recognized me and waved. A moment later, he brought out a quadruple-shot espresso. “PBS lady, right? No charge.”

  “Public television has great fans.” I thanked my benefactor, a diminutive fellow with gray eyes set in a freckled face topped with curly red hair. I wondered if this was Davey, but he wore no nametag. I sipped the dark, hot, life-giving stuff. Fantastic. “What’s your name? I want to tell Cinda how nice you were.”

  “Ryan,” he said with a grin and a wink.

  “Well, Ryan, is Cinda in?”

  “Naw, she had a doctor’s appointment for her knee.”

  “It’s flaring up again?”

  “Yeah. Old boarding injuries never really heal. She lives with a lot of pain. That’s why she opened the shop,” he added helpfully. “She can wash down a painkiller with espresso and feel sorta normal in twenty minutes.”

  I thanked Ryan again and moved off toward the Killdeer Art Gallery, where a floppy black-and-white ribbon bow tied on the door had caught my eye. Next to the bow was a calligraphy note.We’re open in honor of our dear departed critic, Doug Portman. Come in and see the artworks he honored as “Best of Killdeer” over the last five years.

  When I peered into the gallery, I saw a fur-clad customer and what looked like a saleslady. I pushed through the door and tried to shed my nosy-caterer persona to take on the air of a short, female tycoon. A wealthy patron of the arts, just s
ipping her espresso …

  The fur lady departed. In my backup quilted parka (my better one having been torn in my plummet down the hill) and black ski pants, it was pretty clear that I hadn’t done anything in the presence of a tycoon except serve barbecued ribs. After ten minutes of being ignored by the saleslady, I wandered down “Prize Row,” so indicated by another black-framed calligraphy note lauding the late Doug Portman.

  I frowned at the twenty works displayed there. Maybe I was missing something, but I didn’t like them. Then again, what did I know? I stared at the paintings. Some commonsense inner critic was announcing that the work Doug Portman had liked ranged from imitative to mediocre to terrible. I walked past a bad-rip-off-of-Peter-Max acrylic-painted canvas of a racing skier exploding through a snowbank, a Monet-ish drizzly watercolor featuring a rain-soaked elk, and a Dutch-style still-life of a gun cabinet full of rifles. Finally, there was a slashing-brushstroke oil of a bucolic cabin in a daisy-strewn mountain meadow. Bor-ing, as Arch would say. Yet from the right corner of each frame dangled a sometimes-dusty “Best of Killdeer” blue ribbon or bright red ribbon declaring, “Honorable Mention.”

  I finished my espresso and yearned for another. Failing that, I thought, eyeing the paintings, a shot of Arthur Wakefield’s Pepto-Bismol.

  I yawned and took a third trip down prize row. All but three First Prizes and two Honorable Mentions were still for sale for sums in excess of a thousand dollars. Signs announced that the others were on loan. This left me with a question: If these prizewinners are so good, how come they haven’t sold?

  But really, the problem was the pretensions of poor, dead Doug. His own paintings had been mediocre and derivative, and he’d believed they’d make him rich. How then could he judge what was good? I felt sorry for him, even in death.

  When another five minutes elapsed and I still hadn’t been asked if I needed help, I meandered to the rear of the store to find a trash can for my paper coffee cup. Beside a water cooler, above the garbage receptacle, three collages hung on the wall. They were all by the same person, the artist whose collages I’d seen at the bistro and in Eileen’s home. For some reason, these works of art made me smile. “Spring Detritus” featured torn photographs of bright-white snow melting on churned-up soil, ski poles speared into patches of matted neon green grass, and dirty lilac mittens caught up in the teeth of a yellow snowcat. “Ski Patrol at Dusk” was crowded with images of ski runs in a blizzard, blurred inmotion images of athletic uniformed skiers, a snowmobile hauling a sled with an injured, faceless skier, and dark, forlorn-looking crossed skis, the signal for help.

  Finally, there was “Celebrity on the Mountain.” Pieces of photographs showed hordes of burly guards speaking into walkie-talkies, a stand of metal microphones gleaming in the sunshine, a photograph of half of the vice-president’s face. The other half of the veep’s face lay underneath an ad for a videocamera. I laughed aloud, and this finally brought a saleswoman to my side.

  “Is there a problem?” she asked. Short and compactly slim, she wore heavy matte makeup on a face framed with chic-cut jet black hair. Her clothes, a black turtleneck and pants edged at the neck and cuffs with faux tiger fur, seemed to have been form-fitted.

  “No,” I replied with a very slight smile and a glance at my watch. I had been in the gallery almost twenty minutes. “No problem at all.”

  She considered the collages, then sniffed. “They make me want to puke.”

  “Puke? If you feel that way, why do you have them here at the gallery? I think they’re wonderful.”

  She sneered at me. “They’re saccharine. Do you prefer decoration to art?”

  I looked back at the collages. “How’re you defining ‘decoration’?”

  “Doug Portman, our critic, used to say Boots Faraday’s art is purely decorative,” the woman commented with an if-only-you-understood shrug. “We handle Boots because she accounts for half of our profits. Most of it goes to decorators, of course.…”

  “So is that how you define ‘decorative’? Who buys it? Or what critic says it’s ‘decorative’?”

  Her face turned smug. She looked me and my noncouture outfit up and down. “It’s too complicated to explain.”

  “How much for ‘Spring Detritus’?” I demanded impulsively.

  Startled, the saleslady took a step away from me. “Uh, two-fifty. That’s two hundred and fifty dollars. You’re going to buy it? Today? Now?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Now,” I added decisively. It would make a great Christmas present for Tom, debts be damned.

  The woman took down the collage and swaggered to the front counter. I whipped out my credit card and ventured aloud, “To tell you the truth, I think the stuff Doug Portman picked as being good is pretty awful.”

  “You’re talking about our town’s premier art critic—”

  “You knew him?”

  “Of course. Unfortunately, he has just died. Yesterday. In a ski accident.” She scanned my credit card. “There’s no way you’d see Boots Faraday’s work in Doug’s Best of Killdeer picks.”

  “I’m sorry to hear Mr. Portman died,” I murmured. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” she replied. She handed me my receipt. “Probably a snowboarder got going too fast and whacked him. That’s why the authorities are up there investigating.”

  “Hmm.” Arch railed against snowboarder prejudice. If something goes wrong and they don’t know why, he’d say, they’ll blame it on a boarder.

  “Will it hurt the gallery,” I inquired pleasantly, “not to have the critic reviewing the art you display?”

  “Of course it will. Doug loved to talk about art. He would come in and explain things. He was brilliant. And we had a major, major New York art critic in here, who just raved about Doug’s picks.”

  “Really? Who was that, exactly?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say,” she replied, again smug.

  “Ah, well.” I tried to make my tone conciliatory. “Listen, do you have a card for this collage artist? I’d love to write her a little fan letter.”

  “If you’re thinking of buying Boots Faraday’s work direct, to cut us out, I’m just telling you, we’re her exclusive agent in this town.” The saleslady spat out her words. When I didn’t respond, she rummaged reluctantly through a drawer and thrust a card at me.

  While the woman wrapped the collage, I glanced casually at the card, then gaped at it. Not only were Boots Faraday’s address, phone number, and e-mail printed on the card, so was a miniature picture of her. Boots was handsome and high-cheekboned. She flashed white teeth set in a powerful smile. And she had an enormous mane of ruffled blond hair.

  I had seen her before. Where?

  “Now what’s wrong?” demanded the saleswoman when she returned and handed me the wrapped collage. “I can take the card back, if it’s giving you as much trouble as our prize paintings.”

  I smiled, gripped Tom’s collage, and walked away. I’d had enough art-appreciation-sniping for one morning. As I headed back to the Rover, a visual memory finally clicked.

  I had seen collage artist Boots Faraday. Fleetingly, from afar. The previous morning, the day that Doug Portman had lost his life on these slopes, she’d been hanging artworks on the wall of Eileen’s bistro. Then she’d sat down and watched our live filming of Cooking at the Top just like all the other guests.

  I stowed the collage in the back of the Rover. Eileen Druckman owned several of Boots Faraday’s works. Did Eileen know Boots Faraday? Had Eileen invited the artist to the PBS show? What about Arthur? Did he know Ms. Faraday?

  Stop, I reprimanded myself. If the occasion arose where I needed to talk to Boots Faraday, I now had her address and phone number. And her picture. She shouldn’t be that hard to find.

  As I drove toward Elk Path, my mind came back to the image of the blond artist up the ladder. She was an artist deemed “decorative” and not the “Best of Killdeer” by a man who died very shortly thereafter.

  Tom alwa
ys told me to look for what was out of place. Boots Faraday was an artist, not a TV fan, and certainly not a foodie. So on the day Doug Portman died, what was she doing at the bistro? Anything besides hanging artworks?

  CHAPTER 11

  At five to ten, I pulled into Arthur Wakefield’s driveway. Unlike the other houses along Elk Path, and undoubtedly pushing the limits of Killdeer’s covenants, his residence was painted the darkest gray I’d seen all morning. Charcoal siding contrasted with pearly decks and a steep slate roof. The place had a Loire-Valley château feel to it, which was undoubtedly what le wine-geek had in mind. Or had his mother chosen the place—and paid for it—before she died?

  Peering through my windshield, I wondered about doleful Arthur’s agenda. If his mother had left him a good chunk of change, why would he need to work for PBS? Was the wine import business struggling? Or was Arthur living in a Killdeer condo for other, more personal reasons? His letter to the paper suggested a whole lot of rage. At least there was no Subaru wagon parked outside.

  I hauled my box of goodies to the front door, balanced it on a silvery-gray railing, and rapped the gleaming knocker. I almost didn’t recognize Arthur when he opened the door. Gone were the black artiste clothes, the Pepto-Bismol bottle, the menacing body angle. The man actually looked happy to see me. His black hair was freshly washed and fluffed. Unfortunately, his cheeks were still gaunt and translucent, and his eyes retained their haunted look. Arthur may have been a bit happier, but the man was neither well rested nor relaxed. Maybe he’d been penning another tirade to the paper.

  “Uh, Arthur?” I rebalanced my box. “May I come in?”

  “Yes,” he rasped. “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been … I mean, I just couldn’t wait for you to arrive.”

  “Are you all right?” When he shook his head, I crossed the threshold and edged around an expensive-looking, intricately patterned wool Oriental. Another gift from Mom? I wondered. The formal living room, all mahogany furniture and light walls hung with Old-Master-style oil paintings, was strangely impersonal. In the hallway, porcelain figurines adorned a mahogany end table. Nowhere did photos or memorabilia give a clue as to Arthur’s background.