Die in Plain Sight

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Well, she’s as near to sainthood as anyone I’ve ever investigated,” Rory agreed, tossing the report on the table in front of Ward’s empty chair. “No lovers of either sex, no drugs, no booze, no bad loans or over-drawn accounts or maxed credit cards. No tickets or outstanding warrants. She tithes regularly and goes to church twice a week. Dresses well, and why shouldn’t she? She can afford it. She runs the family business and does it damned well. Pays all her taxes and then some. Drives her accountants and lawyers nuts demanding that they stay cleaner than clean. Doesn’t even break the frigging leash law with her dogs.”

  Ward scooped up the report and read the summary. “Jesus. The woman really should have been a nun.”

  Living up on that kind of high moral plane—or even appearing to—was a tightrope act and the Forrest family couldn’t afford to fall. The merger had to go through. If it didn’t, Savoy Ranch would be just one more big family ranch holding nibbled to death by taxes, environmentalists, and generational incompetence.

  Not that he was worried about incompetence. Blissy and Savoy might have control of Savoy Enterprises, but their daddy still held the purse strings. After he was dead they could piss it away—if they could get around his lawyers—but by God they wouldn’t fuck it up while he was alive to see it.

  “Keep digging,” he said to Rory. “We’ve got a little time until the final negotiations. Get me just one handful of mud on Saint Angelique and I’ll sit down at the table with real pleasure.”

  “You better have a fallback position,” Rory said bluntly. “Getting dirt on her isn’t looking likely.”

  “You do your job. I’ll do mine.”

  Corona del Mar

  Tuesday

  4

  Lacey Quinn stood in the middle of her partner’s large storage unit and wondered how she could ever select only three out of the hundreds of her grandfather’s powerful paintings. So much depended on finding the right ones, the best, for Susa Donovan to appraise.

  But choosing just wasn’t possible. Maybe I misread the rules, Lacey thought hopefully. She glanced at the flyer in her hand. Nothing had changed. The paper still discreetly insisted NO MORE THAN THREE PAINTINGS PER PATRON, PLEASE.

  “Damn,” she muttered.

  “Now what?” Shayla Carlyle asked from the other side of the room.

  Lacey started. She’d forgotten that her business partner and old friend was with her. Painting—and paintings—had that effect on Lacey’s brain, as people had pointed out more than once. Guiltily, she looked over her shoulder. Shayla was sitting cross-legged on the cement floor, price stickers clinging like confetti to her black bike tights and red sweatshirt. Her sleek laptop computer balanced uneasily on her long legs as she updated prices and inventory for their shop. That was work Lacey should be doing, or at least helping with.

  “Oh, I just was hoping I’d read the pamphlet wrong,” she muttered.

  Shayla glanced up. “Huh?”

  “The charity auction. They only let you bring three paintings for Susa Donovan to look at and I can’t get past these six.”

  Shayla bent over the computer again. “I don’t blame you. I like all your paintings.”

  “Not mine. Grandfather Quinn’s.”

  “You’re better than he is.”

  “You’re sweet, but you’re no judge of art.”

  “I know what I like, and it’s your paintings I like. So there. Sue me for lewd and dissolute taste.”

  Laughing, shaking her head, Lacey turned back to the six Quinn canvases and rearranged them yet again. Maybe this time a different angle of light would reveal flaws or flatness or slightly skewed compositions—anything to put three paintings out of the running.

  Five of the six paintings were solidly in the tradition of southern California Impressionism, lyrical yet muscular evocations of a landscape that had long since gone down beneath D9 Caterpillars and belly dumps gouging out pads for upper-class MacMansions overlooking the ocean. Sandy Cove was a case in point. The paintings done by her grandfather showed a landscape more than fifty years in the past. There were golden beaches with no human footprints, coastal bluffs with no houses. The ravines were green with grass from winter rain and graceful with eucalyptus trees dancing in the breeze, instead of the modern cement culverts lined with chain-link fences.

  Whether David Quinn painted coastal mountains, beaches, grasslands, or chaparral canyons, most of the canvases celebrated southern California before the huge population leap at the end of World War II. The land was filled with light and distance and clean air.

  Then there were his other paintings, the ones that Lacey could admire professionally but wouldn’t hang in her own home to be part of her life. Perhaps a tenth of his work was in the dark, brooding school of social realism that had supplanted the plein air painters after the Depression. Not that Quinn’s bleak canvases really fit in that category, either.

  There wasn’t any handy art history label for the grim side of her grandfather’s talent.

  The Death Suite.

  Her artistic conscience wanted her to include a painting from each of the three kinds of death—fire, water, and earth/car wreck—but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do it. She’d settled on one of the water paintings with its chilling contrast of blood-red scream, blond hair, turquoise water, and inky night. The figure’s humanity was clearly visible, the death struggle intimate and terrifying.

  With a sigh, Lacey kept on trying to pick the three best paintings out of the six she’d set aside. She rearranged them, leaning two against the big fire extinguishers that she insisted be kept in the storage area. Her grandfather’s phobia about fire in the studio or storage room had been thoroughly drilled into her.

  When the silence got to Shayla again, she stretched her back and looked over at her friend. As always, Lacey’s hair was a glorious whirl of cinnamon-colored chin-length loose curls, the kind women with straight hair would kill for. The rest of the package was equally casual—faded jeans, sandals, no socks, and a flannel shirt that could have come from one of the garage sales both women haunted, looking for new merchandise for their shop. Old paint stains made startling patterns on both shirt and jeans.

  Then Shayla noticed the six paintings lined up. “Hon, you aren’t going to show that one in public, are you?”

  Lacey jumped again, having forgotten again that she wasn’t alone. She looked at the dark, savage painting. “I don’t know.”

  “It creeps me out.”

  “That’s what it’s meant to do. That’s what makes it so good.”

  “Well, yippee-skippy. Give it to a horror museum or the public morgue. Should fit right in. How many of those damn things did he paint anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” Lacey said. “I inherited thirty of the dark ones, but they’re numbered one through forty-seven. So my grandfather either sold, gave away, or destroyed the seventeen missing paintings. Or some combination of the three. The man was nothing if not unpredictable.”

  “I’m voting for destroyed.”

  Lacey sighed and swept her hand through her unruly cloud of curls.

  “I’m not. Even though the subject matter of the paintings isn’t exactly warm and cuddly—”

  Shayla snorted. “Ya think?”

  Lacey ignored her “—the Death Suite—”

  “Now there’s a name to draw little children.”

  “—is nothing short of brilliant,” Lacey finished loudly.

  “What about the others? Just because they don’t make you want to scream, does that mean they’re not good?”

  “Of course not. The landscapes have the same emotion and energy and finesse as the bleak paintings. Quinn painted light and dark, yin and yang, heaven and hell with equal skill and emotion.”

  “Maybe he was bipolar,” Shayla said, bending over her inventory again.

  “Could be. My dad said as much once. But I think my grandfather was simply a gifted artist who was able to create both sin and salvation with equal power.”
>
  “Give me heaven every time.”

  “Hey, I didn’t say I was going to hang any of the Death Suite in my apartment. But that doesn’t make those paintings bad. Just uncomfortable to live with.”

  “Uncomfortable. Yeah. The way a bed of razor blades is uncomfortable.”

  Lacey ignored her friend and went back to staring at the six canvases. Well, Grandpa Rainbow, she thought, using the nickname she’d given him for the paint splatters on his clothes, you’ve given me an impossible job. I’ve been hovering over these six paintings forever, and they all still look equally good to me.

  She turned the paintings to a wall, shuffled them like a con artist moving a pea beneath walnut shells, and then picked three paintings at random. The first one portrayed breakers foaming on the beach and the ocean in every shade of blue and green imaginable. The rocky cliffs were darkly textured, a solid masculine presence against the fluidly feminine sea. Though no people appeared in the painting, Lacey loved the canvas for its sheer sensuality, almost sexual in its impact.

  “Now that one is worth looking at,” Shayla said.

  For the third time, Lacey jumped.

  Both women laughed.

  “Score one for blind chance,” Lacey said, pleased that Sandy Cove would be one of the three she presented to Susa Donovan.

  “What else is going with it?” Shayla said.

  “Don’t know yet.” Lacey reached out to the second of the three blindly selected paintings. “Let’s find out.”

  The second painting was an untitled portrait of eucalyptus trees silhouetted against sunrise. The shadowed, textured masculine strength of the trees stood in stark contrast to the fluid, multicolored sigh of dawn. Again, the near tangible sensuality of the painting left Lacey with the feeling of having been stroked by a lover who savored the difference between male and female.

  “Excellent choice,” Shayla said dryly, like a waiter approving a dinner selection. “Or is it just that it’s been a long dry spell in the XY department for me?”

  “Does it really seem that sexy to you?”

  Shayla fanned herself. “Your granddaddy might have been twisted, but he knew that a woman’s mind is her most erogenous zone. Probably because when it comes to sex, a woman’s imagination is always better than reality.”

  Lacey made a face. “I hear you. I never started out to spend my life alone, but men keep changing my mind. After some of the specimens we’ve known, being single looks real good.” With a shrug for the state of manhood in modern America, she added, “Give me a good painting any day. Speaking of which…”

  She reached for the third painting and turned it around.

  Scream Bloody Murder.

  Shayla grimaced and went back to her stickers.

  “Um,” Lacey said, her brown eyes intent on the canvas. “Maybe not. It’s brilliant, no doubt, but this is a charity event and…”

  Her voice trailed off. The savage, almost abstract whirl of turquoise water and black night, pale hair and blood-red mouth distorted in a death cry stunned Lacey each time she saw it. It made her stomach clench as if she’d stumbled onto a murder scene too late to do anything but close the eyes of the dead.

  Art, like humanity, wasn’t always kind.

  “Do you think he really saw that?” Shayla asked reluctantly, drawn in spite of herself to the raw reality of the painting.

  “I think he dreamed it.”

  “They call those kind of dreams nightmares.”

  Lacey couldn’t argue that. “But anyone who can look at this and not feel something doesn’t deserve to be called human.”

  “Some really sorry pieces of mobile protein are called human.” Shayla turned away from the painting. “It’s too real. The difference between being able to imagine something that violent and actually doing it seems small enough to make me nervous.”

  Lacey didn’t answer. Part of her had always wondered if her grandfather—who always painted from life “en plein air”—had once seen violent death. But most of her really didn’t want to know what his inspiration had been.

  Maybe that was what her father had meant when he told her: Leave it alone, Lacey. Some people aren’t what you want them to be.

  Southern California

  Tuesday afternoon

  5

  Glass walls on all sides of Savoy Tower’s penthouse conference room showed the colorful sprawl of Moreno County’s high-tech industrial parks, world-class shopping centers, skeins of freeways, and subdivisions that ranged from six-bedroom McMansions to luxury beach condos for the itinerant and truly rich. Low mountains, chaparral-choked canyons, rolling hills where white-faced cattle grazed, citrus groves, strawberry fields, marinas, and a few highly endangered saltwater marshes were interlaced like fingers through the various developments. Bounded by mountains to the northeast and ocean to the southwest, the Savoy Ranch was both fulcrum and lever of a power that reached to the state governor and the United States Senate, and had a hefty down payment on the present vice president.

  The portrait above the head of the sleek cherry conference table was as imposing as the view: old man Benford Savoy himself, the merchant who had made a fortune selling twelve-dollar eggs and thirty-dollar women to forty-niners. Mining gold from other men’s pockets was a lot easier than crouching in icy water and panning for gold from “can see to can’t see.”

  Benford had taken the gold and bought up an old Spanish land grant. Land and wealth had passed from generation to Savoy generation for almost one hundred years without a hitch. Said hitch was the third generation’s bride, Sandra Wheaten Savoy, who had the gall to leave part of her Savoy inheritance to her sister’s children. It was an irritant to have someone “not of the blood” sit on the board of Savoy, Inc., but when the cause was important enough, those of proper Savoy blood unbent enough to acknowledge their shirttail Pickford cousins.

  Another hitch in the proud Savoy tradition occurred in that same generation. Benford Savoy III, called Three by his close friends, had the bad fortune to beget a daughter rather than a son for his one and only child. The next best thing to a son was to have his daughter marry the son of an old friend. Gem Savoy and Ward Forrest duly tied the knot. And if they didn’t live happily ever after, they multiplied in a way their parents and grandparents hadn’t. Four children came along in short order. Two of them contracted severe cases of Moonie religion and were completely excised from the family. Not even cards at birthdays or Christmas.

  That left the much married Bliss and her younger brother, Savoy, to play tug-of-war with the family fortunes. Bliss’s interest in running the family business was erratic. When she was between husbands and/or lovers, she meddled in her brother’s business life and ignored her three grown children. Savoy managed to keep his marriages to two and his off-spring to three.

  The six cousins weren’t present at today’s important meeting for the simple reason that as long as Bliss and Savoy lived, corporate control was theirs. Like their own father, Savoy and Bliss were very much alive. The Savoy Curse of accidental death hadn’t visited them, probably because they weren’t as reckless as some of their ancestors.

  The chair at the head of the conference table was empty when the door at the far end of the room opened. With a nod here and a word of greeting there, Savoy Forrest walked confidently to the waiting chair. His dark blond hair was like his clothes—casual, expensively cut, and hinting of the sun that flooded southern California’s saints and sinners with equal light and warmth.

  Bliss closed the book she’d been reading, Powerful Women in the Twenty-first Century, and glanced at her solid gold digital watch, which she always wore with the gold-and-diamond heart design bracelet she’d inherited from her mother along with a diamond necklace that showed well at the opera. “You’re seven minutes and forty-four seconds late.”

  “Thanks, Blissy,” he said, putting a thick folder on the table. “I gave the governor your best regards.”

  “Fuck her.”

  “She’d be one of t
he few you’ve missed,” Rory Turner said.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Been there, done that, remember?”

  “No,” Bliss said. “Was it good for you?”

  The rest of the people around the conference table sighed, shifted, or looked impatient, depending on their mood. In addition to being sheriff of Moreno County, Rory was one of Bliss’s four ex-husbands. The other three had taken their money and run for more welcoming pastures. Rory hadn’t. The two of them fought more now than they had when they were married. But since this was family rather than civil business, Rory had changed into a suit and tie and left the khaki uniform at his office.

  “Thanks for the update,” Savoy said ironically to the two of them. “Can we keep it above the belt while we take care of business?”