The Whole Enchilada

by Diane Mott Davidson

  I said, “I catered a gallery reception many years ago, where you were the featured artist. So I’m not a stranger either to you or your work. Okay, let’s find an electrical outlet.”

  Yurbin followed us into the kitchen. His plain white T-shirt, black sweatpants, and ancient sneakers spoke precisely of what Chris had told us: Yurbin’s artwork might be good, but the man definitely lacked a sense of style.

  I plugged in the ice-cream maker, removed the frozen inner container from my cooler, poured in the custard mixture, and let ’er rip. “Okay!” I announced. “Now, that will take about half an hour. Mr. Yurbin?” I said, as if I’d just thought of something. “I still remember those gorgeous collages you made for that gallery showing all those years ago. You began teaching, too, right? But then I heard that you quit that. Did you also stop having shows?”

  Yurbin crossed his arms, lifted his chin, and stared at the wall.

  “Actually,” Marla gushed, “I own a collage of yours from fifteen years ago! I’ll bet that piece is worth megabucks now!” She smiled brightly to reinforce her lie.

  Yurbin exhaled but did not look at her. “It should be worth megabucks.”

  “But,” said Marla, with exaggerated puzzlement, “why wouldn’t it be? You’re so talented.”

  That did it. The other thing I’d learned about artists in my years of catering was not only were they neatniks, they had ultrasensitive egos.

  “Well,” Yurbin said, relenting. “Thank you.”

  “Oh,” I said, feigning excitement. “I knew it! Would you show us your studio?”

  Yurbin’s gaze traveled from Chris, who said, “Aw, go ahead,” to Boyd, who managed a shy, well-acted grin, to Marla and me, who were nodding enthusiastically.

  “I suppose,” he said finally, then blushed. “Since you’re fans.”

  “We’re definitely fans,” I said emphatically. “Why do you think I’m making you gelato?”

  “I’ll stay here and hunt up bowls and spoons,” Chris volunteered.

  Yurbin pretend-grumbled under his breath, but then led the way up a flight of wooden, uncarpeted stairs. Boyd followed directly behind him in the narrow space. As we all turned a corner and climbed another flight, I wondered when the last time I’d worked out was.

  “Do you think it’s possible this guy is the father of Drew?” Marla whispered, right next to me.

  I stopped, panting. “I have no idea.”

  Yurbin led the way into the airy space of what must have once been an attic. Skylights had been installed in the ceiling to allow studio-quality light. The floors and walls had been painted a pale blue. A long worktable was set against one wall, underneath which sat neatly stored plastic bins. An oversize corkboard hung above the table, with several newspaper articles tacked to it. An easel was set up, but empty.

  Yurbin walked with uncharacteristic quickness over to the corkboard, ripped off the articles, and stuffed them in a pocket of his sweatpants.

  “Oh, you’re so humble,” said Marla. “I’ll bet those were articles about you and your work!”

  “No,” he replied, then looked up at a skylight.

  “You won’t show them to me?” asked Marla, acting dejected.

  “Maybe this was a bad idea. I think it’s time you left,” Yurbin said, as he moved his gaze to the floor.

  I said, “But your gelato will be ready soon. It’s creamy, and sweet, and absolutely luscious.”

  Marla walked up to the easel and stared at it. “I thought we could see one of your collages in progress. Are you not working on anything now?” she asked, acting hugely disappointed. “Oh, that’s such a shame.”

  “Well . . .” Yurbin began, but then clamped his mouth shut. He reflected for a moment, then said, “I could show you a few raw pieces, but nothing really worked out. I’ll be starting on a big project again very soon.”

  I asked, “What sort of project?”

  He lifted his chin in what appeared to be defiance. “I’ll be giving a one-man show in the near future. Maybe . . . Christmas.”

  And then. And then. I spied something in one of those plastic boxes. “Is that Chris calling from downstairs? Maybe he can’t find the spoons,” I said. Yurbin moved toward the staircase, while Boyd placed himself casually between the muscled artist and me. I raced over to the worktable and pulled out the bin I’d noticed, popped the top, and pulled out pieces of Patsie Boatfield’s blue-striped dress.

  Yurbin heard the noise and whirled. “What do you think you’re doing? That’s my property. You had no right.”

  I held up the fabric in accusation. “I recognized this dress. It belonged to a friend of mine. She gave it to Holly to use in a collage for her. You weren’t just Holly’s former art teacher, were you? You were her business partner. She found the clients and obtained the materials, but you created the actual collages. That’s why no one knew where her studio was located, because this”—I indicated the spacious loft—“was where the work was done.”

  “Did Holly tell you that?” demanded Yurbin.

  “No,” I admitted. “But she said you were trying to manipulate her. I’m guessing your partnership had gone sour and you wanted more money. Twenty-five thousand, to be exact. Was that what you expected from Holly? Was it why you showed up at her son’s birthday party, the night she died?”

  Yurbin said, “I want a lawyer.”

  I said, “You don’t need a lawyer. I’m not a cop. Holly was my friend and I just want to know what happened to her. You may need a lawyer later, though, after I tell the cops what I saw here, and they get a warrant to search this workshop. You lied to them about your relationship with Holly and you may have been trying to blackmail her.”

  “I wasn’t blackmailing her,” Yurbin protested. “And you came here under false pretenses.”

  “No,” I countered. “That sugar-free gelato is still churning away down in your kitchen. And I did want to talk about Holly. And about your art. Is that what those articles you put in your pocket are about? How successful Holly was with her collages? That must have made you kind of resentful, her getting all the glory.”

  Yurbin’s face fell. “It’s none of your business.”

  “I can just reach into your pocket and we can find out,” Marla said, her tone menacing.

  Yurbin spun around, fists clenched. His biceps bulged under his T-shirt, but then he stepped away from her. “Leave me alone!” he cried. “Go away.”

  “The truth is going to come out, Mr. Yurbin,” I said, “one way or another. If you offer your side of it, you won’t have to keep living a lie. Were you the talent behind Holly’s success?”

  He looked at the fragment of Patsie’s dress still dangling from my hand and seemed to be calculating what to say. “Yes. Yes,” Yurbin said. “All right? She had the beauty and the body and the ability to promote herself, to promote my work. She was making big bucks off my collages. I wanted to be fairly compensated.”

  “How much did she pay you for each piece?” I asked.

  Yurbin gazed at the skylight. “Just two, sometimes three, thousand dollars each.”

  “And do you know how much she sold them for?”

  “Lots,” he replied, his tone again enraged.

  “Between four and six thousand dollars each,” I said calmly. “And she came up with the ideas for the projects. She did the promotion and dealt with the clients. Remember, I saw your work at your opening.” I didn’t mean for my voice to sound as derisive as it came out. “Your work wasn’t popular. Holly found a way to make it appealing to a wide audience.” When Yurbin glared at me and crossed his arms, I went on: “But you wanted to confront her, and wanted far more than what had been the going rate for the collages.” I tilted my head at him. “Maybe what you missed was the attention, the prestige that came to Holly, instead of you.”

  He flicked this remark away as if it had no bearing on the matter. “If Holly didn’t tell you about me, how did you know I asked for twenty-five thousand dollars for this last piece?”
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  “You put a note with that amount typed on it in the box that held the last collage. It was delivered to Holly’s porch the day she died. The police have it, and the collage with part of this dress in it, and they know that the box was mailed from Clarkson Shipping. And now we know for sure that Chris mailed that box and others to Holly for you.”

  “She promised me,” he continued stubbornly, “that our arrangement would be a fair partnership. She assured me that she would help me promote other art projects under my own name. But she just kept taking all the credit for my work.”

  “Heads up, Yurbin,” said Marla. “You and Holly were collaborators. She never cheated you. And now all you have are crappy collages no one else wants.”

  “You’re wrong,” he insisted. “I’m going to have a one-man show and give you all a lesson in what superb art really is.”

  I said, “Mr. Yurbin, you’re going to have to talk to the police eventually. We know from Chris that you left Denver on Friday morning. He didn’t see you again until Monday. I’m pretty sure I saw you near Marla’s house on Friday. You darted out from behind a bush, and to avoid you, I steered my van into a boulder. You ran away, but we know you were at the party Friday night, because we saw you there.”

  “So? Holly and I had a business dispute and I was trying to resolve it. I never threatened her. She used to be my student, after all.”

  “Holly was your student,” I said slowly. “At one time the two of you were close. Was there more between you than art? Maybe long ago? Before her divorce, even?”

  Yurbin’s brow furrowed. “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

  I said pleasantly, “I’m talking about you and Holly having an affair. Maybe when she was in art school the first time, say, eighteen years ago? Then she got married. Did you keep up a relationship?”

  Yurbin said, “You’re sick.”

  I persisted, “Perhaps you felt rejected in more ways than one. Seventeen years ago, Holly had a son, Drew. It was his birthday party you decided to crash. If you and Holly had a thing, there’s a very real possibility that Drew is your son.”

  Yurbin’s jaw dropped, but he gave away nothing. “I’ve lost my taste for gelato. And I’m done answering your questions.”

  Boyd, who’d been quiet through this entire exchange, said, “That’s our cue.”

  Yurbin gestured to the narrow staircase. His tone was frigid when he said, “Take your ice cream and get out. Don’t come back. Ever.”

  23

  We took the gelato home. I wasn’t going to leave it with a creep who hadn’t cared about Holly, even if he was a diabetic. On our way back up the mountain, I called Tom and left a detailed voice mail summarizing our visits with Nan at the gift shop, Chris at the Cathedral Grocery, and Yurbin, that arrogant collaborator. Boyd was writing his own version of them in his notebook, so there would be two records of what we’d witnessed.

  Plus, I’d kept the scrap of Patsie’s dress. I knew it was probably not worth much as actual incriminating evidence. Still, I wanted Yurbin to think we had something on him.

  On the way home, Marla and I speculated, yet again, as to who had killed Holly and why. She’d been trying to get money out of someone, that much was clear. Whether it was to pay Yurbin his newly hiked-up prices, we did not know. Nor were we any closer to figuring out who Drew’s biological father was, or if this information was even relevant to the case. Boyd contributed nothing to the discussion. He was actually looking a bit haggard, which was the way I felt, too.

  Once we were back in my kitchen, I heated Julian’s leftover fudge sauce. Boyd declined a sweet fix, as did Julian. So I doled out large scoops of the creamy vanilla gelato for Marla and me. Julian cluck-clucked over our little detour from strict nutritional guidelines. Marla countered that we needed the dessert for emotional, not dietary, reasons. Julian smiled, said nothing, and whipped around the kitchen preparing our family dinner: fresh corn chowder and my signature chef salads, grilled chicken optional.

  I felt a delightful shiver from eating the chocolate. Was my mind kicking back into gear, or was I imagining it? Who cared? I licked my spoon and set my empty bowl aside. “We know Holly studied with Yurbin after her divorce, when she was in art school. But she may also have studied with him before she married George, back before she had to drop out the first time.”

  “Could Tom check?” Marla asked.

  “He can try. Let me send him a text.” When I’d done this, I said, “We don’t know if Yurbin and Holly were sexually involved. But for someone who says he’s innocent, he’s acting awfully guilty.”

  “Agreed,” said Marla. “But he might be feeling a twinge of conscience for demanding more money for the collages.” We left hanging the unspoken question, about whether poisoning Holly could be weighing on Yurbin’s soul. If he had one, that is.

  I said, “Let’s go back. Holly dropped out of art school when she married George. We have no idea whether Yurbin was her teacher at that time, and we have no further idea whether she’d been sleeping with him—”

  “So Yurbin may or may not be the father of Drew.”

  “Right. She got pregnant around the time of the medical conference in Boulder, which would mean Neil Unger or Warren Broome could still be the father—”

  Marla said, “You’re right. But let’s not forget Yurbin. Say Holly studied with him and put him on a pedestal. So say their sexual relationship continued, after she divorced George and moved to Denver. If he was the man Nan was talking about, why would he dump Holly?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The guy is arrogant but talented. He could have dumped Holly, and then, years later, had regrets. That could explain why he showed up at the party, or why he suddenly got all pissy about the prices for collages. But going back, Holly could have become pregnant anytime in July, eighteen years ago. You know how unpredictable this forty-weeks-of-pregnancy statistic is.”

  “True,” I admitted. “What we need to find out is who Holly was seeing in July, eighteen years ago.”

  “Good luck with that,” said Marla, setting aside her bowl.

  “So segue to when Holly went back to art school, after she divorced George. None of her pieces had sold up to that point. It was in that time period that I catered the gallery show where I saw Yurbin’s new work, the collages that reminded me of what Holly later started doing. At some point during that time, Holly also saw Yurbin’s work. She started studying with him again. She realized Yurbin’s work could be used for a new concept: the portrait-collage. She hired him, and because she was gorgeous and a good promoter, the work was a success, if not on the level of, you know, Rembrandt.”

  “Did Rembrandt even do collages?”

  “Marla, please. No. Okay, so. Eventually, Yurbin wanted a bigger piece of what turned out to be a pretty small pie. Or maybe he just wanted Holly back in the sack.”

  Boyd rubbed his forehead. “You two are so much worse than men.”

  Marla and I ignored this while we washed and dried our bowls and spoons. We hadn’t come up with any new ideas by the time Arch phoned and asked if Gus could come over for dinner. Julian heard the request, and nodded.

  “Tell him it’s cool,” he said. “I can make more chowder and salad, maybe add some focaccia I have frozen. And this afternoon I baked two more kinds of brownies using extra-bittersweet chocolate. One is flavored with ginger, the other with chile.”

  I said, “Sounds fabulous. Between the two of us, we’re going to come up with a great spicy brownie.”

  Julian just grinned.

  I told Arch that we were having corn chowder, chef salads, focaccia, and spicy brownies. Would Gus go for that?

  “Is Julian making it?” When I said he was, Arch said, “Oh, that’ll be fine, then.” It didn’t occur to me to be offended, because Julian’s cooking truly was amazing.

  “May I stay, too?” Marla asked. “I’ve been wondering about this spicy chocolate phenomenon. I mean, if they can put salt in caramel a
nd Parmesan cheese in ice cream, why not?”

  “Of course we want you with us, Marla,” I replied. “You, too,” I said, motioning to Boyd.

  Boyd said, “Thanks. I won’t be able to stay for supper. Although I do think your food is great, Julian.”

  Julian smiled, nodded, and went back to shucking corn.

  I tried to think while I was setting the table. At length, I asked Marla, “Do you think there could be anything else in the Amour Anonymous notes?”

  She groaned. “Oh, please. We’ve gone through those notes. I mean, I want to figure this mess out as much as you do. We need to protect Drew. It’s important to find out what happened to Holly and Father Pete and Kathie Beliar. But the Amour notes? Forget it.”

  “I just can’t imagine where else to look.” I turned this question over as we put out the dinner dishes. Finally, I said, “There might be a couple of long shots we haven’t yet investigated. Got to warn you, though, I think the chances of finding anything in either spot are pretty remote.”

  “Please tell me we don’t have to go back out today.”

  “Let me check my schedule, see what I have coming up.” The kitchen computer was already booted, so I scrolled through screens. Julian and I didn’t have anything planned until late Thursday afternoon, when we would take a food delivery. On Friday, we would prep for a wedding on Saturday, to be held at my conference center. I asked Marla, “How do you feel about tomorrow? Wednesday?” When she nodded, I said, “Let me call around, see if either of these ideas could pan out.”

  While Marla checked her own messages, I called the Shangri-la Spa in Cherry Creek. It was still in business. I could not remember the name of the colorist who had put the highlights in my hair all those years ago, when Holly had treated me to our day of pampering. My description of a short, thin, pale woman with curly blond hair did not sound familiar to the receptionist. When I asked if I could speak to the owner, she went and got him.

  “Sure, I remember that stylist,” said the owner, whose name was Phil. “Wendy Williams. A very talented woman.” When I took a deep breath and asked if he knew where she was working now, Phil said, “I’m sure we could put in some gorgeous highlights for you.”