by S. J. Rozan
“Last fall,” I said, “when he picked up Jimmy, what he really wanted to do was get his hands on Frank Grice.”
“The man you told me about?”
“Yes. He wants Grice badly. But he can’t make anything stick to him. Grice is always a step ahead. It drives Brinkman crazy.”
“Well, he is the sheriff, and this man Grice is a criminal.”
“It’s beyond that. This is Brinkman’s county. Grice isn’t just a crook, he’s an outsider. Like I am.”
Pushed by a strong wind, the heavy clouds were rushing west, but the sky they left behind remained dull and gray. I turned up my collar. Eve, beside me, wore only her sweatshirt over a sweater, and didn’t seem to mind the cold. Or maybe it really wasn’t that cold at all.
I went on. “Grice had people running drugs from Florida to Albany for an Albany boss, then ditching the courier cars here. That was Jimmy’s job, getting rid of the cars. Everybody knew it, but no one could prove it, and Jimmy wouldn’t talk. He was offered a deal but he wouldn’t take it. He was prepared to go to prison.” I shook my head.
“Honor among thieves?” Eve suggested.
“He’s a brave, stupid kid. He thinks he’s tough, but he’d’ve been eaten alive. But we were lucky. Brinkman wanted Grice so badly he beat the shit out of Jimmy—” I caught myself. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“About what? Your language? Don’t patronize me. Besides”—she smiled—“you should have heard yourself last night.”
“I can imagine. Anyhow, I got Jimmy a slick city lawyer and we parlayed Brinkman’s mistakes into a dismissed case. Brinkman lost Jimmy and he lost Grice and he looked like a fool.”
“And he blames you?”
“He’s right.”
We were walking the way we had walked two days before, through fields now oozing muddy water under every step. Twigs, leaves, and branches forced down by the storm lay on the earth among sprawling puddles. This way to the clearing was longer than the way straight down the slope— the way I’d fought my way up last night—but it was also easier and faster.
“You got quite angry when the sheriff talked about your piano,” Eve said, her eyes on me. It occurred to me that she might want to keep talking to keep her mind off where we were going.
“That he played it,” I said.
She nodded, but said, “Or that he knows now that you play it?” I didn’t answer. “We talked a good deal about music last night, but you never told me you were a pianist.”
My response to that was silence; hers, to my silence, was an ironic smile. “I suppose, coming from me, that’s an odd complaint.”
I smiled at that. “I don’t play for other people, ever. Very few people understand about that. Mostly I don’t care whether they do or not.”
“I understand,” she said.
“I know,” I answered.
We went on in silence for a time, the only sound the soft grasping noises made by the mud as our feet passed over it.
“Brinkman asked about the power,” I said. “Did the power go off last night?”
“Yes,” she answered. “Not long before I found you. I saw the lights go off in the house just when Leo ran back to me, barking.”
I’d seen the lights go off in the house, too. I wondered what it would cost me to get the 7-Eleven to deliver a doughnut a day to Leo for the rest of his life.
In the clearing the studio looked sturdy and deserted. I kept my hand on the gun in my pocket just the same.
“Stay here with Leo,” I told Eve. “Let me look around.” They stood on the edge of the clearing while I prowled the road that came up from the valley, but the rain had left nothing I could read.
I did the same in the clearing, looking for whatever I could find, but I couldn’t find anything. Eve joined me as I neared the studio door. Things looked in order, but when she put her hand on the padlock, it twisted open. It had been cut through.
A tingle went up my spine. I motioned Eve behind me, took out my gun. I lifted the lock off the door, slid the door aside, moving with it. Nothing happened: no shots, no booming voices. I stepped through the doorway in a quick crouch, swung first left, then right.
No one was there, but they had been.
I stood, pocketed the gun, stretched my arm across the doorway to bar Eve from stepping over the sill.
“My God,” I heard her say tonelessly behind me.
The floor of the studio was a storm of color. Paint swept across the wide boards, red and green and purple and blue, mud where they clotted together. Ropes of pigment squirted from stomped tubes across smears and swirls. White gesso puddled around broken quart jars, colors bleeding into it. Thick lumps of black were smeared over stains of crimson and magenta; a yellow pool near the window mocked the gray day. Cans and brushes and palette knives lay in the glistening mess like the branches the wind had brought down last night.
Just inside the door a broom lay in an eddy of paint. It had been used to push and pull and smear the colors on the floor; its paint-covered bristles were broken, sticking out in all directions.
There were no footprints in the paint. The broom had obliterated them.
“My God,” Eve said again. Her fingers dug into my arm and she started to move past me.
I grabbed her wrist. “Wait,” I said. “Look first.”
Her face was flushed. Her eyes flared as she said, “At what? Why?”
“At everything.” I searched the floor, starting from where we stood, my eyes sweeping slowly back and forth. “The painting.” I pointed across the studio to the half-finished canvas I’d seen Tuesday morning. “Is it all right?”
She stared across the room. “Yes,” she said, and I felt her relax slightly. I let go of her wrist.
“What else?” I asked. “What else is wrong?”
“How can I tell?” she exploded, her voice rough-edged. “How can I see through this? What do you want me to tell you? Get out of my way!”
“Eve,” I said, and took her hand.
She stood trembling for a moment in the doorway, her eyes moist; then she wiped them with the back of her hand. Her fingers closed on mine and she was still.
“I’m not sure,” she said huskily, after a few moments. “Except for the floor, and the paints and brushes from over there, everything looks all right. The big painting is all right. I can’t tell about the ones in the rack from here, but they don’t look as though they’ve been touched. Is that what you want to know?”
“Yes,” I said. “It looks that way to me, too.” The smells of oil paint and mud mingled in the open doorway. The windows weren’t broken; they’d come and gone through the single door. In the city, in the middle of this much deliberate ruin, I’d have expected taunting words, filthy phrases scrawled on the walls, but that hadn’t happened either. There was only the sea of paint, submerging the floor. “Let me check around out here once more; then we’ll go in.”
“Bill,” she said suddenly. “Last night you had paint on your neck and chin. Not a lot. I thought it was mud, but it wouldn’t come off with water. Is that from when they hit you?”
“It could be.”
I circled the building, examining the ground for anything that wasn’t mud or leaves or broken branches, but they were all I found.
We went into the studio, Eve and I. Eve told Leo to stay outside and he did, whining. He lay down with his paws on the threshold, followed our movements with his head.
Inside, Eve stopped, stood, as though unsure of what to do. I searched in corners and under furniture for something that would help.
There was nothing.
It took us an hour to clean up.
“There’s no reason for you to have to stay,” Eve said. “But I can’t leave it like this.”
I stayed. Eve picked through the paint with an archaeologist’s concentration, evaluating each brush and palette knife according to criteria I didn’t understand. Some she dropped into the garbage bag I was filling; others she left covered with turpentine in a
shallow tray.
We scraped the floor and scrubbed it with turpentine-soaked rags until a streaky purplish film was all that was left of the mess. Then we opened the windows to let the turpentine fumes out, and we left too.
“I’ll paint it,” Eve said, as we walked back up the hill to the house. It was close to midday, but the skimmed-milk sun was having trouble fighting its way through the clouds. “In a couple of days, when it’s really dry, I’ll get deck paint and paint it.” She’d been like a taut wire since we’d entered the studio and we hadn’t spoken. But as she talked about the next step her mouth relaxed and the deep creases on her forehead smoothed out, the way it happens, unconsciously, when you step from a dark, unfamiliar space into one that’s lit. “A new lock; maybe even a security system. And I suppose I’ll have to go into the city, to get more paints and things. That’s all right. I would have had to go soon in any case.”
“Why?”
“I’ve completed a painting; in fact it’s been done for weeks. I made the mistake of telling my dealer it’s done. He’s too much of a gentleman, and an old friend, to bother me about it, but I know he’s anxious to see it.”
“Sternhagen?”
“Ulrich, yes.”
“He’s a friend of yours?”
“Probably my oldest. He was my dealer thirty-five years ago; we were friends in art school, before I had anything to sell. He’s the only person in New York who knows where to find me—where to find Eva Nouvel, I mean.” She paused to look at me. “How did you know who my dealer was?”
“You’re famous.”
“Do you know who Robert Rauschenberg’s dealer is?”
“No.”
She waited. I said, “The investigator I called in New York thought your gallery would be an obvious place to check, to see if anyone had tried to sell your paintings there. She told me.”
“Had they?”
“No.”
“It would be a pretty stupid thing to do.”
“Not necessarily. It’s not that easy to unload stolen art. They might take a chance that your gallery would be interested in splitting the profits on six new paintings without having to cut you in.”
“Ulrich would never do that.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure! He’s a marvelous man and a good friend. If he hadn’t been willing to cooperate with me in this—eccentricity—for thirty years, I could not have managed to live the way I have. The way I’ve wanted.”
At the side of the house I dumped the garbage bag in a buried can. We walked around front. On the porch, as she unlocked the door, Eve turned to me. “Ulrich has been good to me in more ways than you can know. I don’t think I like the idea of someone bothering him, possibly worrying him on my account.”
If she didn’t like that idea she’d hate some of the others I was having.
“Eve,” I said as I followed her into the living room, “Lydia did some checking in New York, some things I hadn’t asked her to do, but I’m glad she did. One of those things was a background check on Sternhagen and his gallery.”
She spun to face me, her eyes flashing. “She did what? How dare you!”
“She told me he takes an unusually large share of the profits from your work.”
Color choked her cheeks. “My arrangements with Ulrich are not your business! I hired you to protect my privacy, not to pry into my life!”
“Lydia’s instincts are good,” I said. “Maybe it has nothing to do with anything else, but it’s unorthodox and she thought I should know. And if you can tell me, I’d like to know why.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” She was taut and trembling, the color gone from her face. The night she’d spent keeping me alive and the morning she’d had and the last six days were suddenly crashing over her like a tidal wave. She was fighting it with anger and the anger was aimed at me, and maybe I deserved it. Nothing good had happened since I’d started working for her.
I watched her struggling for control. I might have gone to her, held her, given her the illusion of safety that someone else’s arms can give; but control is different from safety, though they sometimes feel the same. I turned, went quietly out the door, past Leo, who wagged his tail uncertainly as he looked from Eve to me.
I sat on the porch steps, lit a cigarette. I weighed my options, Eve’s options, Tony’s and Jimmy’s options. On the broad sweeping lawn bare tendrils of forsythia were moving lightly in the wind. When the right time came they would flower, flaring like solid sunlight around houses all over these hills. Forsythia lived easily among us, nestling against buildings and fences. It didn’t need much care, but it didn’t do well alone.
The cigarette was almost gone when I heard the door open behind me. Eve crossed the porch, came and stood near me, arms wrapping her chest as though now she were cold.
“I’m sorry,” she began.
“No.” I cut her off. “You haven’t got anything to apologize for. I’d expect you to be upset and I don’t blame you for being upset with me. I haven’t done you a hell of a lot of good.”
She sat on the step above mine, stared into the distance. “I’m frightened.” They didn’t sound like words she was used to. “What’s happening, Bill? Is it—am I a target for somebody?”
Admitting she was scared gave me an opening I wouldn’t get again, for one of those ideas I knew she’d hate. “Eve, there’s something I want you to do. Hear me out before you decide.”
Her crystal eyes were uneasy. “What is it?”
“I don’t want you to be alone for a while. I want to bring someone up to stay with you.”
She looked at me blankly for a moment; then, unexpectedly, she laughed. “You have to be crazy,” she said. “I’m the person with two names, for God’s sake. I’m an eccentric recluse. I’m a hermit. I’m the person who’ll do anything to protect her privacy, even hire a private detective!” She laughed again.
“No,” I said. “Eva Nouvel is all those things. Eve Colgate is a farmer. She’s the least sentimental person I’ve ever met. She makes decisions and doesn’t look back. And she’s scared.”
The laugh had subsided into a smile; now the smile faded. She looked away. “I don’t want this,” she said.
“I know you don’t.”
We watched the forsythia sway with the wind. She said, “You don’t think it’s vandalism. You don’t think it’s coincidence.”
“No, and you don’t either.”
“No.” She tried a small smile. “But I was hoping you did.”
“If there hadn’t been a murder,” I said, “if Mark Sanderson’s daughter hadn’t been fencing your things from a truck that rolled over the ravine last night, if everybody I met weren’t so anxious to get his hands on Jimmy Antonelli, then I’d say sure. I’d say someone stole the paintings, then got curious about where they came from. They came back to have a look. Maybe they were drunk or stoned and found they could make a hell of a mess and were just getting into it when I came around.” I lit another cigarette, cupping it against the wind. “And maybe that’s what happened. Maybe the only thing that’s tying all these things together in my head is my inability to mind my own business.” I turned, faced her. “I don’t think so, but of course I wouldn’t. Make your own decision; but I can tell you it will affect what I do from now on.”
“How do you mean?”
“If you don’t let me get you some protection, I’ll spend a lot more time and energy keeping an eye on you, and concentrating on the people I think might be a threat to you. That might not be the same thing as solving your case, or figuring out what the hell is going on around here.”
“What if I don’t want an eye kept on me?”
“Fire me.”
That one dropped to the ground between us.
“Maybe the police will figure out what’s going on,” she said.
“Maybe they will. But they’ll only figure out what they need to know to solve the crime they know about.”
�
�You would feel more free to act,” she said slowly, “if I had a baby-sitter?”
“Bodyguard.”
“I can’t even bring myself to say that. It’s so ridiculous.”
I didn’t answer that. She thought silent thoughts and I smoked and the forsythia danced.
“Who?” she asked me finally.
“Lydia.”
“That same detective? The one who snooped into Ulrich’s accounts? Living in my house?”
“She’s good,” I said. “She’s done this kind of thing before. She can stay by your side and keep out of your way at the same time. You’ll like her.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Eve, remember, when she checked out Sternhagen, she didn’t know who my client was. She still doesn’t.”
“You didn’t tell her?”
“No. I told her the client had lost six uncatalogued Eva Nouvels. That’s all she had to go on. She was trying everything she could think of, and your gallery was a smart idea.”
She stood, hands in her back pockets, and paced. Stopping, she said, “How long?”
“I don’t know. I hope not long. I can’t tell, Eve.”
She paced some more, but not much. “All right,” she finally said. “All right. Because I am scared. And because you didn’t tell her who your client was.”
“Good. Let’s call her now.”
She hesitated. “I’ve lived alone for thirty years. Now you want me to have someone with me twenty-four hours a day. I won’t be good at it.”
“Lydia will.”
We went back inside. Eve lit the fire in the stove, put on water for coffee. I dialed Lydia’s number. I said a prayer, keeping in mind the danger of answered prayers, and when the phone was picked up I got what I’d prayed for: it wasn’t the machine and it wasn’t her mother.
“Oh,” Lydia said coolly, once she knew it was me. “Hello. I wasn’t expecting you to call until later. I got Velez, but he’s only just started. Should I call him and call you back? In case he has something already?”
“No, that’s not why I called.”
“Why did you?”
“There’s trouble up here, and I need help. Can you come?”
