by S. J. Rozan
The house was small but solid, yellow clapboard with white shutters and a big front porch. To the right of the drive a lawn slanted up to the house. On the drive’s other side, ten feet of lawn separated the chestnuts from a tangle of undergrowth and scrub trees sloping down to the forest. A hundred years ago someone had cleared the forest from that slope, probably intending to plant and harvest and prosper. But the ground was rocky and winters were hard. Some of the scrub trees were as tall as the house.
A muscular black dog came charging off the porch as I drove up. I parked behind a blue Ford pickup. In front of the house was another truck, a work-scarred red one. Eve Colgate, in a black sweater, hatless and gloveless, stood beside it talking with a thickly built man.
I got out of the car. The dog barked, planted his feet, growled deep in his throat like a dog who means business. I took a step forward. So did he. I stopped, waited.
“Leo!” Eve Colgate called. The dog looked to her, then quickly back at me, giving one wag of his tail. He didn’t stop growling. “Leo!” she called again, more sharply, and he hesitated, then went to her reluctantly, glaring at me over his shoulder.
Eve Colgate stood scratching the dog’s ears. I walked up the drive toward her and the heavy man. The dog bristled as I got close but he didn’t move.
Eve Colgate’s eyebrows rose slightly when she saw my face, bruised and unshaven. She looked from me to the man next to her; then she explained us to each other. “Bill Smith, Harvey Warner. The Warners have the next farm to mine. Mr. Smith is up from New York. He has a cabin near North Blenheim.” We shook hands.
“Well, I’ll call you,” Warner said to her. “If day after tomorrow’s good?”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll be sure to have read this by then.” She gestured with a folder of papers she was holding.
“Damn thing better be all it’s cracked up to be.” Warner spat in the dirt. “Else I swear I’m gonna sell them damn cows, go to sharecroppin’ for Sanderson like everybody else.”
“You swore that last year,” she smiled.
“Yeah, well, this year I’m gonna do it. Damn pipeline’s gonna ruin my best pastureland anyway. Or maybe I’ll just stick Sanderson with the whole damn place, retire to Florida before he figures out he’s out of his mind. To hell with it. I’ll call you.” He swung into the red pickup, drove off down the muddy drive. The dog chased after him, yapping.
Eve Colgate watched the truck go, then looked at me, her eyes probing my face as you might test an ice field before you walked out on it.
“What did he mean, sharecropping?” I asked, to be saying something under those eyes.
She turned back to the drive, watched the dog trotting up it. “That’s what they all call it. The small dairy farmers are all giving up. They’re selling their herds to whomever will buy them, and their land to Appleseed. Then they contract to Appleseed, putting the pastureland into vegetables. They grow what Mark Sanderson tells them to and he pays them whatever he wants.” She ran a hand through her blunt gray hair. “A lot of people are bitter about it. But they do it, because they’re farmers and this is what they know, even on land that’s no longer theirs.” She gestured with the folder in her hand. “Harvey’s grandfather settled that farm. But fifty cows aren’t enough anymore. I have even fewer. We’re talking about consolidating our herds and investing in new equipment.”
“Will that pay?”
“I hope so. I don’t know what Harvey will do if he has to sell his cows, or his land.”
“He says he’ll go to Florida.”
She said, “He’s never been farther than Albany.”
“What will you do?”
“I—” She paused. Her crystal eyes moved over the hills and pasture, ocher and charcoal and chocolate under the bright sun. “I have options Harvey doesn’t have. Don’t misunderstand me: this farm supports itself, it’s not a hobby. But neither am I totally dependent on it. I have no mortgage, no bank loans. I can weather bad times.” She turned away from the drive. “Shall we walk?”
I lit a cigarette, turning to shelter the match from the wind, and we headed down the slope behind the house. The dog sniffed at me. I showed him my hand and when he stuck his cold nose in it I carefully scratched his ears the way Eve Colgate had. He wagged his tail grudgingly and bounded away.
Eve Colgate watched the dog, then looked at me appraisingly. “He usually won’t let a stranger touch him.”
“Professional courtesy,” I said.
She continued to look at me for a short time, absorbing me with her colorless eyes. Then she laughed.
“They say I’m eccentric, Mr. Smith,” Eve Colgate said as we paced over yielding earth criss-crossed by papery yellow grasses.
“Is it true, or just convenient?” I asked her.
“It’s true enough.”
“Where are we going?”
“I need to show you something.”
We didn’t speak again, striding side by side through last year’s field. As we walked I could feel Eve Colgate’s mood change. She grew distant, tense.
Finally we came to a small outbuilding, weathered siding and corrugated steel roof in a clearing where a dirt road curved up from the valley. We stopped at the padlocked door. Eve Colgate looked at me, looked down at the mud at her feet; then, her lips drawn into a thin line, she pulled a single key from her back pocket and thrust it into the lock, jerked it open. She pushed the wide sliding door just enough to make an opening a person could fit through and she went inside.
I followed her into a single square room, flooded with unexpected brightness from a skylight. Unexpected, too, was the fact that the interior was finished: sheetrock walls and ceiling, white; gray deck paint on the broad-plank floor; double-glazed frosted windows, allowing light but no view out or in; and heat, electric heat from baseboards running all around the place.
The warmth and closeness of the air, after the sharp cold of the morning, was unpleasant, and it intensified the strong, heady smell of turpentine that rolled toward me as I came through the door. But that wasn’t what stopped me dead two steps inside. What did that was the canvas leaning on the wall before me.
Six feet high, eight feet wide, unfinished, but already with the power of a nightmare, barely contained. Brutal, slashing lines; sullen, swollen forms whose weight seemed to threaten the canvas that held them; a darkness, a lack of clarity that made you want to shake your head, clear the film from your eyes. When you did that, when you stared long and deep enough, the thick grays and decaying browns, even the black, began to unfold, revealing the taut wires of color within them—blood red, cobalt, the green of a Kentucky sky in the minutes before a twister hits, other colors I couldn’t begin to name.
I had seen paintings like this before. They were in the Museum of Modern Art, at the Whitney, at the Tate. There had been at least one in every large twentieth-century show at every major museum for the last thirty years. Landscapes, I’d heard them called, but that was only by people who needed distance, needed to name and so deflect the pain and anger that lashed out from these paintings to rip open the places inside you where you hid things you had let yourself believe were gone forever.
“Jesus Christ,” I said finally, and then again, “Jesus Christ.” I looked at Eve Colgate, who was standing in front of me, a little to one side. Her back was rigid, as though she were expecting a blow, bracing herself. “You’re Eva Nouvel.”
She turned to face me. Two hot spots of red shone on her cheeks, but her eyes were completely calm. “Yes,” she said, in a voice that matched her eyes. “And now you know something that not a half dozen other people in this world know.” She pushed past me and out through the narrow opening. I turned back to the unfinished canvas for a long look, then stepped over the threshold, joining her in the crisp, bright day.
* * *
In silence we skirted a pasture where black-and-white cows nosed at a carpet of hay. Beyond the pasture was an apple orchard, where new, mature, and ancient trees ran in parallel rows up
and over the hillside. We walked beneath them under branches studded with buds. The dog threaded in and out as though stitching the orchard together.
Eve Colgate, without looking at me, spoke. “You recognized my work. I didn’t expect that. It may make this easier.”
At the edge of the orchard a low stone wall curved sinuously along a ridge. Eve Colgate leaned on the wall, her arms hugging her chest, her back to the sun. I leaned next to her, watching the shadows of the high, cottony clouds move across the hills.
“If you know my work,” she said quietly, “perhaps you know my reputation.”
“Eva Nouvel is a recluse. A hermit.”
“That’s right.” She put her hands on the wall behind her and slid onto it, cross-legged. The black dog settled into a round pile in the sun.
“I was just thirty when I left New York, Mr. Smith. I came here and bought this farm and I have lived here since, alone. I stopped painting when I came here and did not paint for some years after.” She picked up a twig lying on the wall, dug it into the joint between two stones. “That’s not quite true. Within weeks of establishing myself here I did a series of six canvases. I—” She drew a deep breath. “Before I came here I had been in the hospital for—for a long time. I had been seriously injured in an automobile accident in which my husband was killed. The accident was entirely our fault, my fault, I was driving. We had been drinking heavily.” She paused again, stared into the distance, past the valley, past the hills.
To my mind, sudden, unwanted, and unavoidable, came the screech of brakes, the shattering of glass, sirens and shouts. Not Eve Colgate’s accident, but another one, seven years ago: the crash when Annie died. An accident I hadn’t seen, hadn’t even known about until days later. I’d been away then, out of town on a case, and hadn’t called anyone to say I was leaving, to say where I’d be.
The sun was high by now, shining through a silence broken only by the drone of a distant plane. Eve Colgate spoke again. “The paintings I made when I first came here . . .” She stopped, restarted. “It doesn’t matter. They were not successful. They couldn’t have been. I stopped painting then, and did not paint again for almost five years.” The twig in her hand lodged between two stones and snapped. “When I came here I brought almost nothing from my days in New York. Most of my husband’s things, and mine, I disposed of. The few things I couldn’t part with I brought here, packed in the steamer trunk we had taken on our honeymoon. The trunk went into a storeroom and I never looked at it again. When I realized the paintings I had made were not good, I intended to destroy them, as I do all my unsuccessful work, but I couldn’t. I crated them and put them in the same storeroom.” She threw the broken twig away.
“Four days ago—two days before I called you in New York—I had a burglary. I’m a prosperous woman in a poor county, Mr. Smith; it’s happened before. I expect it and I survive it. But this time the storeroom was broken into. The trunk and the crate were taken, as well as some other things: tools, equipment. I don’t care about any of it, not even Henri’s things, which were in the trunk. I don’t need to have them anymore.”
She fell silent, empty clear eyes staring out over the far hills. Then she turned to me, and I saw that her eyes weren’t empty. Something gleamed deep within them like gems locked in ice. “But I want those paintings back. Do you know why?”
I looked into her eyes, saw amethysts, rubies, sapphires, sparkling, infinitely distant. “I think I do.”
She waited, still and silent.
I said, “Because they’re not good.”
She nodded, let her breath out slowly. “I want you to find those paintings, Mr. Smith. Can you do that?”
“I don’t know. Have you told the police?”
She shook her head. Then she gestured over the orchard, the pasture, the hills. “Do you know what this is?”
I answered a different question. “It’s beautiful.”
She was quiet for a very long time. Then she spoke. “It’s mud,” she said. “Manure. Hay. Snow. Eight-hundred-pound cows that have to be helped to calve. Eggs that have to be collected every morning in a henhouse that stinks. Apple trees that lose their blooms in a frost, or their fruit in a hailstorm. Or produce so much fruit you can’t hire help enough to pick it, at any price.” She unfolded her legs, slipped off the wall to stand again on the rocky ground. The black dog leapt to his feet, tail wagging. Eve Colgate looked at me. “It’s why I can paint.”
We started walking again, back through the orchard, toward the house. “Eva Nouvel is famous,” she said. The dog dropped a stick at her feet. She picked it up, threw it in a high, curving arc. The dog charged after it. “But Eve Colgate is a farmer. She splits wood and wrings chickens’ necks. And she’s the one who paints.” The dog trotted back, dropped the stick. I bent down for it. He lunged but I was faster. I lifted it into the air, let him jump at it; then I sent it flying end over end through the sunlight. He raced away.
“Thirty years ago,” Eve Colgate went on, “I made an arrangement with myself. It was based on my opinion of the world as I knew it. I’ve had no reason to change that opinion.” She didn’t speak again until we came up the hill behind the house, trim and solid against the blue of the sky. “Fame is a disease, Mr. Smith. I don’t want it; I won’t have it. Nor will I have those paintings dissected, discussed, exposed—!”
The spots of red appeared in her cheeks again, but her voice stayed low, controlled. “I want you to find those paintings, and do whatever you have to do to get them back. Pay the market price, if you have to. I can do that.” She smiled a small, bitter smile; then it faded. “But who I am is my business.”
We rounded the house, stopped at the porch steps. I looked at her. Her boots were caked with mud. Her eyes were like crystal creatures caught in the net of lines around them.
“The paintings,” I said, watched her eyes. “Who would recognize them as yours? An expert? A layman? Are they signed?”
“They’re not signed. An expert would certainly know them. An educated layman, possibly. My work is distinctive, Mr. Smith. There are recurring images, themes that don’t change.”
I searched for the right way to put my next question. “If it were necessary to destroy the paintings to preserve your privacy, would that be all right?”
She didn’t speak right away. Finally she said, “I don’t know.”
Simple and clear, that answer; and I’d made my decision. I said, “There are some things I’ll need.”
“What things?”
“Descriptions of whatever was in the trunk. And I’ll need to bring someone else in.”
She stiffened. “Why someone else? No.”
“If I’d stolen your stuff, I’d forget about selling the paintings—assuming I didn’t know what they were worth— and try to unload whatever looked valuable: silver, old photographs, things like that.” And probably dump everything else in the county landfill, but I didn’t tell her that. “But if I were smart enough to know what the paintings were worth, I’d also know I couldn’t sell them up here. I’d take them to New York. I want to call someone, check that out. I could go down there myself, but I think I’m more useful up here.”
She was silent for a time, her eyes roving over the sloping lawn, the drive, the tangles of forsythia. “All right,” she said quietly. “I’m hiring you as a professional. If you think this is necessary, do it. But understand that total discretion is as important to me as the return of those paintings.”
I couldn’t help grinning. If I hadn’t gotten that message already it would have been a good time to tear up my license and go fishing.
3
IT WAS EARLY for lunch at Antonelli’s. Tony was alone inside except for two T-shirted guys wolfing down beers, burgers, and a mountain of fries. Tony, leaning on the bar, looked up from his newspaper as I came in.
“Jesus,” he said. “You look like hell.”
“And you don’t. Why is that?”
He grunted. “Clean livin’.” He folded th
e paper, put it aside. “You okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “Just thirsty. Let me have a Genny Cream.” He opened a bottle and put it on the bar with a glass. “Listen, Tony, I need to talk to Jimmy. Where can I find him?”
“Trouble?” His mouth tightened.
“No. Just something I need to know.”
“From that punk?” He gave a humorless laugh. “If you can’t drink it, drive it, or steal it, he don’t know nothin’ about it.”
“Oh, Christ, Tony, there are some things he’s good for, if you’d cut him a little slack. He cooks as well as you do. And he’s better than anyone I know with a car.” I was sorry the minute I said it.
Tony’s face flushed. “Yeah. He can fix ’em, smash ’em, or cool ’em off if they’re hot.”
Oh well, I was in now. “That what Frank Grice was here about last night? Something to do with the quarry?”
“That’s none of your fuckin’ business!” He slammed his open hand on the bar. The T-shirts looked up from their fries. Tony shifted his eyes to them, then back to me. He dropped his voice. “You saved my ass last night. I owe you, okay? But keep out of this. I can handle Grice.”
“His type doesn’t handle, Tony. You give him what he wants or you shut him down.”
“What the hell do you know?”
“Not much,” I said. “I only know Grice by reputation. But I’ve met a lot of guys like him. I do it for a living.”
“Then stick to the payin’ customers.”
I drained my glass, turned it slowly between my palms. Tony gestured at it. “You want another?” I nodded. He opened a bottle, filled my glass. I drank.
“I’m sorry, Tony,” I said. “I have trouble minding my own business. And guys like Grice make my skin crawl.”
“Forget it.” He took the empty bottles, put them in slots in the cardboard case under the bar. “Jimmy’s been workin’ a coupla days a week at Obermeyer’s garage over in Central Bridge. Call over there, maybe you can get him.”
“Thanks.” I stood. “Okay if I tie up the phone for a while?”
