Die in Plain Sight

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Then London, Rome, and every other place on your list. Our list,” he corrected. “First the cities, then the golf.”

  When Lacey’s parents faced Ian, it was as a unit. They weren’t happy about the compromise life had forced on them, but they weren’t going to waste time and energy fighting it.

  “My father was an art forger,” Brody said bluntly. “Lewis Marten was his specialty. Ever since I figured out what was going on, I’ve known the shit would hit the fan someday. Still, for Dottie’s sake, I’d like to keep it as quiet as possible. My wife’s family…well, they wouldn’t accept the scandal very well. Neither would our other daughters. They really take after their maternal grandmother, who regularly lectured the minister on his moral duties.”

  Lacey winced. She didn’t like to think which grandparent she took after. No doubt that was one of the reasons she’d been so reluctant to see the truth in her grandfather’s paintings.

  “Don’t even think it,” Ian said coolly. “Any of you. Lacey is as clean and honest as sunshine. Just because she can paint doesn’t mean she’s some kind of social slime.” He took her hand. “You hear me, darling? What our family was or wasn’t has an effect on us, but it sure as hell isn’t chiseled in stone unless we want it to be. Otherwise I’d be serving life for murder like one of my cousins, or be living in Guatemala with the poor-est of the poor like another of my cousins, a priest. Two brothers, and different as night and day.”

  Lacey moved closer to Ian on the couch and threaded her fingers through his.

  Dottie’s chin came up in a gesture that reminded Ian of Lacey. “I never so much as hinted that Lacey wasn’t honest. She’s our daughter and we love her.”

  “I know that, or I’d have chucked you out the hotel room the first time I met you.”

  “You can be a very rude man.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He smiled slowly. “But I love your daughter and she’s getting around to loving me, so you’ll have a long time to get used to my manners.”

  Lacey looked stunned. Then she smiled—a slow, wide reflection of Ian’s smile.

  Dottie gave both of them a startled look. Then the older woman let out a long breath. “Well, I always knew it wouldn’t be a doctor or a lawyer. At least he’s quick and hardheaded. You need both.”

  Ian felt himself relax, just a little. The upcoming conversation wouldn’t be fun, but at the end of it Lacey would still have a family. He hadn’t been sure of that going in.

  And he’d been afraid that she would shoot the messenger, one Ian Lapstrake, on the way out.

  “When did you figure out what your father was doing?” Ian asked.

  “Do you really think the women need to hear this?” Brody asked.

  “They can decide for themselves,” Ian said.

  Neither woman got up to leave.

  “There’s your answer,” Ian said.

  Brody hesitated, then decided that since hiding the truth hadn’t worked, he might as well empty the whole bag. “I suspected, but didn’t know for sure until he shoved it down my throat about fifteen years ago, give or take.”

  Dottie looked startled, started to say something, and thought better of it.

  “I kept it to myself for years. I knew it wouldn’t help anyone and could hurt a lot of people.” Brody shrugged. “After our first two daughters were born, Dottie wanted a bigger home closer to her parents. So did I. I knew it would mean the kind of life that would help me professionally and please us personally. So I borrowed money from my father to buy this place, and I carefully didn’t ask him where the money came from. Not many unknown painters can come up with almost half a million in cash to buy a house.”

  Ian’s dark eyebrows lifted. Even thirty years ago, that was a lot of money.

  “Then one day, about fifteen years ago,” Brody continued, “Dad and I were arguing over him pushing Lacey into paint—”

  “I wanted her to spend more time with her peers,” Dottie interrupted. “Spending all her time with her grandfather instead of having friends and parties. It wasn’t good.”

  “Dad started shouting,” Brody said. “Told me painting like Lewis Marten had put the fancy roof over Dottie’s head and if she didn’t like it she could move out. Lacey had talent and he was going to see that she wasn’t flattened by the social steamroller of Dottie’s snooty family.”

  Dottie drew in a harsh, surprised breath. That was something else she hadn’t known. It was one thing not to like Brody’s disreputable father; it was quite another to know that the old man had disliked her just as much.

  “I was furious,” Brody said. “I’d been paying back the loan on a regular basis, but not enough to have majority ownership of the house. I told him I wasn’t going to gag Dottie just to make him feel better, and that Lacey was getting old enough to need more than her grandfather for company. And if he didn’t like that, he could take a hike.”

  Lacey started to say something, but pressure from Ian’s fingers made her stop.

  “After that,” Brody said, “things got fairly tense. Dad spent more and more time in the carriage house and on the road. Dottie’s parents put all the girls through the university, but when Lacey wanted to study painting overseas, the education money dried up. My father went on the road with some paintings and came back with enough money to send Lacey to France. He didn’t even tell us, much less ask us. He just—”

  “Handed me a ticket and a checkbook, and told me not to come back until I could stand up to my parents or support myself,” Lacey finished.

  Dottie winced. “I didn’t mean, that is—” She held out her hands. “I wanted what was best for you.”

  “So did he,” Lacey said. “It’s just that you wanted different things.” She closed her eyes on a wave of pain. “And in the end, I didn’t please either of you, did I? I didn’t turn into a society woman like you or a vagabond painter like Granddad.”

  “It’s not your job to please them,” Ian said. “Pleasing me, now, that’s different.”

  She blinked, then accepted his gentle, outrageous statement, letting it defuse her sadness and anger at her family. “So good to finally know my mission in life.”

  “I’m here to serve.” He smiled, and his dark eyes were very serious. He turned back to Brody. “If I’m doing my math right, your father was about forty when you were born.”

  Brody nodded.

  “Is your mother still alive?”

  “No. And we weren’t close while she was. She said more than once that if she hadn’t had me, she’d have left the son of a bitch. When I was sixteen, she decided I was old enough to take care of myself, so she left.”

  “No other kids?” Ian asked.

  Brody laughed curtly. “No. Just as well. Neither of them was any good as a parent.”

  “Did he have a wife before your mother?”

  For a moment Brody looked startled. “No. At least I don’t think so. If he did, he never talked about it.”

  “What about his own parents?”

  “Never mentioned them,” Brody said.

  Ian raised his eyebrows. “Not a close family.”

  “I guess not,” Brody said. “I think he ran away from home. Or at least left home real early. He would have been in his teens in the Depression years. Maybe there wasn’t enough money to raise him, so he hit the road and never looked back. It happened to a lot of young men like that. Go in the army or go on the bum. He could have gone the army route. I just don’t know. He never talked about it.”

  Ian studied Brody in silence. “Most men talk about themselves at some point to their son, even if it’s something they’d rather not have their wives overhear. Can you remember anything at all about your father as a young man?”

  “Other than the usual way-too-late talk about condoms, he didn’t say much. You have to understand—my father had contempt for everyone he met except Lacey. He saw in her a reflection of himself that he’d never seen in me. She loved painting and she loved him.” Before Ian could ask another questio
n, Brody held up his hand. “What’s the point of all this raking over the muck of the past?”

  Before Ian could answer, Lacey did. “Murder.”

  Pasadena

  Sunday afternoon

  53

  Dottie and Brody stared at their daughter.

  “What on earth?” Dottie asked sharply.

  “Sorry,” Lacey said, wincing. “I didn’t mean to just plop it out like that. But you remember the paintings Grandfather did of death by fire, by auto wreck, and by drowning?”

  “No,” Dottie said, appalled. “Which ones?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Brody said impatiently. “Landscapes, yes, sure, hundreds of them. But nothing like murder. This is really too much, Lacey. Why do you insist on upsetting your mother?”

  “Hell,” Lacey said under her breath. Then, to Ian. “I knew we should have brought some with us.”

  “The sheriff would have, um, plotzed,” Ian said dryly. “That’s why I took the photos instead.”

  He stood up and went to the table where he had set aside his small computer. He turned it on, called up the electronic files, and carried the computer back to the coffee table, where everyone could see the screen.

  “What is it?” Brody asked. “A fire?”

  “A car accident,” Lacey said. “It happened on Savoy Ranch at a place called Cross Country Canyon.”

  “I ran the license plate I found just to be sure,” Ian said. “I was right. Three Savoy died in the wreck.”

  Brody shot a narrow look at Ian. “Are you saying it was murder?”

  “Alcohol, according to the authorities,” Ian said. “Apparently, Three liked to get ripped and then race around the ranch in his old hot rod.”

  Dottie started to speak, then closed her mouth and looked away from the screen.

  “What is it?” Ian asked.

  “Nothing,” Dottie said.

  “Nothing is what we have,” Ian said. “What we need is information.”

  “Oh, just old gossip,” she said, waving her hand. “My mother’s sister married a Moreno County developer. She mentioned something…” Dottie frowned, then shook her head. “I can’t remember. Just the fact that there was gossip. Go on. It will come back to me sooner or later.”

  Without saying anything, Ian clicked through the other wreck paintings. Brody and Dottie looked baffled.

  “Why would he paint so many?” Dottie asked after a moment.

  “We were wondering the same thing,” Ian said. Then, to Brody, “Was your father big on the Savoy-Forrest family?”

  “I don’t understand,” Brody said.

  “Was he a fan, a groupie, an enthusiast?” Ian asked. “Did he follow the society pages or clip out pictures or talk about the family a lot?”

  “Not to me.” Brody looked at Lacey. “How about you? You spent more time with him than anyone.”

  “Not one word,” she said simply. “He never talked about Moreno County, either. In fact, until Susa identified some of the paintings as depicting the ranch, I thought that he’d only painted in San Diego and the desert and Santa Barbara, with a few side trips to L.A. and San Francisco. Which, come to think of it, is odd.”

  “San Francisco or L.A.?” Ian asked. “What’s odd about that, the fact that they’re cities?”

  Lacey shook her head. “I meant it’s odd that he never painted or talked about painting on Savoy Ranch. It had, and still has, a lot of cachet with the gallery set. But he obviously did paint there sometimes.”

  Mentally Ian added that fact to the growing list in his head under the category of David Quinn, artist, grandfather—and murderer?

  “Okay, here’s a new take on a way to die,” Ian said, opening the file holding photos of all the burning house paintings. “We believe it depicts the death of Lewis Marten.”

  Brody hissed something under his breath. “Why do you think that?”

  “The date on the front matches Marten’s death date,” Ian said. “The scene matches the small amount of information we’ve gotten on where Marten lived and painted.”

  Lacey’s parents looked at the screen and then at Ian. He clicked through the rest of the burning house paintings.

  “I fail to see the point,” Brody said.

  “Marten died on Savoy Ranch,” Lacey said. “The ranch that Grandfather never talked about and supposedly never painted. The ranch that is central to California Impressionism.”

  Brody made an impatient gesture, but before he could say anything, Ian did. “Lacey calls this one Scream Bloody Murder.”

  As he spoke, Ian opened the drowning file. If the idea of murder had been merely whispered in the other paintings, it was brutally clear in this one.

  Dottie’s breath came in with a hissing sound. “Dear God.”

  Brody’s mouth turned down. “Scream Bloody Murder. Aptly named, Lacey. Mother of God. Whatever possessed my father to paint this?”

  “We think this depicts Gem Savoy Forrest’s murder,” Ian said evenly. “She died on the ninth of February.” As he spoke, Ian tapped a fingernail on the screen, indicating the numbers that had been painted in red: 9.2.

  Dottie recognized the name before her husband did. “But she wasn’t murdered. She died of an accidental overdose of alcohol and medications. That”—Dottie flicked a glance at the computer screen—“is the imagination of a sick mind.”

  “Always a possibility,” Ian said before Lacey could fall into her reflexive defense of Grandpa Rainbow. “Note the bracelet.” He clicked on that area of the photo and it zoomed into larger size, but not so large that the shape of the bracelet was lost. Dottie leaned forward.

  “Interesting bit of jewelry, but I doubt if it’s terribly expensive. It’s hard to tell with a painting like this what size and quality the stones actually are. I would guess white gold rather than platinum. With platinum the stones are usually bigger.”

  “Have you seen the bracelet before now?” Ian asked.

  “I’ve seen the heart design used a lot, of course,” she said. “Who hasn’t? These days it’s a tacky cliché, like the love knot. I don’t remember seeing intertwined diamond hearts and solid metal hearts, but there would be no reason to remember if I had. It’s hardly an astonishing piece of jewelry.”

  “Brody?” Ian asked.

  “No.”

  “It wasn’t something your mother had or your father kept as a memento?”

  Brody snorted. “My father wasn’t a sentimental man. My mother had a plain gold wedding band. It was the only jewelry I ever saw her wear.”

  Ian didn’t need to ask Lacey; if she’d recognized the bracelet, she would have said something before now.

  “The Savoy Curse,” Dottie said. “Now I remember.”

  “What?” Lacey asked.

  “Accidental death due to far too much alcohol or meds,” Ian said, thinking of the newspaper archives he’d searched through Rarities. “The curse of the wealthy class. The high-toned newspapers whispered it and the bottom of the pack bayed it in the headlines every chance they got.”

  “Yes, that’s what my aunt talked about,” Dottie said. “The Savoy Curse. The second Benford Savoy died in middle age in a tragic hunting accident. The third Benford Savoy died in middle age in a fiery car wreck. The Savoy matriarch died in a riding accident, although what a woman of her age was doing racing stallions over the countryside…well, anyway, it was tragic. Then the granddaughter, Gem, rumored to be drunk when she drowned in her fancy spa. Again, middle-aged. So sad. All that money and no happiness.” Then Dottie added briskly, “Not that poverty brings bliss to anyone. It’s just that people expect money to make them happy.”

  “Which brings me back to my original question,” Ian said. “Why was David Quinn obsessed with these three particular deaths but not with the others in the Savoy family?”

  Brody looked everywhere but at Lacey.

  “It was nine years ago,” Ian said calmly to Brody, “but do you remember where your father was in February then?
Particularly on the ninth?”

  “What?” Dottie asked, shooting to her feet. “Of all the—”

  “It’s all right,” Brody said, cutting across his wife’s anger. “Considering the paintings, it’s a fair question, don’t you think?”

  Instead of answering, Dottie started pacing. The click of her heels over wood alternated with the muted hiss of leather soles on expensive oriental rugs.

  “The man is dead. The people in the paintings are dead. What good is all this?” she demanded.