by Jack Lynch
Dodge looked up. “Yeah? That’s something.” His eyes went back to the drawing pad. “There is one thing you’ve done for me, Bragg. You got me to verbalize on some things I’ve been trying to hold down. Maybe it’ll help my head some.”
He swung around the easel so I could see what he’d been working on. It was a strange and bleak combination. The lower part of the sheet had a charcoal sketch of a man’s arms reaching into the drawing from below, fingers gripping a window sill. Beyond the window he’d drawn, beyond a pale wall, a bursting world of color. Blue sky and brilliant green knoll in the distance. Atop the knoll was a single cow, looking back toward the window, as if wondering about it.
“For eighteen months,” Dodge said quietly, “this was the only thing I saw of the outside. You could see this from the prison library. Barely. That’s why, you talk about stolen money, I don’t think of it that way. Least not the money I had. Who does it really belong to? The insurance company, since they had to make good on it? What did the insurance company do for me? It sent me to prison for a year and a half on a bum rap. That figures out to be a little more than a hundred dollars a month. I don’t call that stolen. I call it hard-earned.”
He wiped his hands on a rag and stared at the drawing.
“How about Jerry Lind?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“Did you know him?”
“Sure. From Santa Barbara, same as Allison.”
“Were you good friends?”
“More like acquaintances. He couldn’t paint very well. But he liked to hang around people who could. As if he’d pick up something that way.”
“You didn’t keep in touch, since Santa Barbara?”
“No. I hadn’t seen him in years until a couple weeks ago.”
“You saw him here in Barracks Cove?”
“Yeah. Bumped into him on the street one afternoon. We were both surprised. Went in and had a beer together.”
“Did you tell him about the Corrigan money?”
“No. He didn’t ask.”
“That’s hard to believe. He was looking for the source of the bill you gave the doctor.”
Dodge shrugged. “I would have told him the same thing I told you, if he’d asked.”
“What day was this?”
“It was the day after he saw Allison. We talked about it on the phone just a bit ago. Neither of us had thought to tell the other about seeing Jerry.”
“That’s interesting. That puts him around here a day later than I’d heard of before. I wish Allison had told me about it back at the restaurant.”
“Allison’s playing guardian angel for me. I’m not putting her down for it, God knows. She’s been good to me. She tries to soothe the hassles she knows I’ve been through. She was still down south when I went to prison. She used to write. We’ve always respected each other’s work.”
“Did you tell Lind you’d been to prison?”
“No. I don’t tell anybody I’ve been to prison.”
“And he didn’t mention the stolen money to you?”
“No.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Santa Barbara days. Painting…” The expression on his face changed. “Hey, that’s something.”
“What is?”
“You keep talking about the money, but Jerry wasn’t looking for that. At least it wasn’t all he was looking for. He was trying to find a cop. Maybe it was this—what did you say his name was, Dempsey?”
“That’s right, and Dempsey was looking for the source of the money.”
“But that’s not what Jerry said. He said the cop was looking for a painting that had been stolen in San Francisco. The museum people told him about it, and about the cop. Jerry was trying to find that same stolen painting.” Dodge shook his head and lit another cigarette. “I couldn’t see it myself. It was a bizarre little piece, but it didn’t have much else going for it.”
The chemical works I carry around inside was beginning to make a fuss. “How did you see the painting?”
“Jerry had a transparency of it. He said the company photographs all the pieces they write a policy on. Jerry wanted to find out why the cop was so interested in it.”
By now the chemical works was making a major assault on the lining of my stomach and everything else in reach. If Dodge was telling the truth, I’d just spent the past twenty-four hours running in the wrong direction.
EIGHTEEN
At 10:30 the next morning I was back in the office of Dean Bancroft at the Legion Palace Museum in San Francisco. I told the wiry, tense man behind the cluttered desk and overflowing ashtray about what I’d been told in Barracks Cove. That Jerry Lind had expressed interest in a cop who’d been looking into the theft of a painting. That Jerry had found out about the cop from somebody at the museum.
“You didn’t mention that, Mr. Bancroft.”
“Because it never happened,” Bancroft replied.
“Think about it some. Maybe it slipped your mind.”
“I did think about it, after you were here before. Trying to be the good citizen and all that jazz. You left me your card and asked me to give a call if I remembered anything more. Well, I just plain haven’t.”
Sometimes when I don’t get enough sleep, my face or eyes or something tends to betray my feelings. My disappointment must have shown. Disappointment not only in Dodge, but in Allison’s trust of him as well. The whole thing just kept getting worse.
“What’s wrong?” Bancroft asked.
I dismissed it with a tired wave. “Just job problems. If what you say is right, it means somebody else lied to me. I didn’t want that to be the case.”
“I can see that,” Bancroft said quietly. “Let me think about this some more.” He got up from his desk and wandered over to a window facing north. His mind might have been groping all the way to Barracks Cove, getting a sense of the good and the bad up there.
“There could be one thing,” Bancroft said, turning to push a button on a call box. “Mary, find Artie for me, will you?”
A woman’s voice said that she would, and Bancroft stared at me with pursed lips.
“Who’s Artie?”
“My chief operational aide. He’s the one who actually took that Lind fellow down the hall and showed him where the stolen painting had hung. I was, as usual, up to my nervous ass in several other things.”
The door opened and in came a young fellow with long, braided hair wearing an Indian headband and puka shell necklace and staring out at the world through thick eyeglasses.
“Artie, this is Mr. Bragg, a private investigator. He’s interested in that Pavel work that was stolen.”
“Oh yeah. That was a piece of bad stuff.”
“What Artie means, Mr. Bragg, is that he liked the Pavel piece.”
“That’s what I said,” said Artie.
“Okay, Artie, I’m also interested in an insurance investigator named Jerry Lind who was looking into the theft. Mr. Bancroft here says you showed him where the painting had hung.”
“Right, I remember him. And he in turn was interested in the cop.”
“And that,” put in Bancroft, “is what I want to know about, Artie. What cop?”
“The cop who came through a day or so before then and asked all the questions about the Pavel piece.”
“That sounds like somebody I didn’t see,” Bancroft told him.
“That’s right,” Artie agreed. “It was the day Mrs. Munser came popping through asking for the twentieth time when you were going to find room on the walls for that ratty stuff her late husband left us.”
Bancroft sat down with a little moan. “I remember that day.”
“Right,” said Artie. “Your ulcer turned over.”
“And I went home early,” said Bancroft.
“That’s why you didn’t see the cop and I did,” said Artie.
“Was it a local officer?” I asked.
“No, man, he was from down south. That’s why it knocked me out that h
e should show such interest in the Pavel piece. He showed more interest in it than anyone. Which made me feel he might have been a little weird himself.”
“Why is that?”
“You sit in a room staring at it all day and you’d know what I mean.” He half shuddered. “Man, I loved it.”
“You don’t remember the cop’s name, do you?”
“No, but I have his card here,” said Artie, reaching for his wallet. “Here it is. Robert Dempsey. Rey Platte, California.”
I got out the photo of Dempsey. “This man?”
“Right. Mean-looking mother. I mean, he was pleasant enough and all, but he sort of impressed you that you’d better not give him any shit or he’d break all your fingers.”
“Tell me what you can remember about what he said. What he asked. What you told him.”
Artie weaved his head and grimaced. “He asked maybe three thousand different questions. My mind was reeling. I answered as best I could. First he wanted to know everything about the theft. What day, time of day, what hours we were open, how our lighting setup works, the foot traffic we had going through, how the frame was hung, where the guard station and routes were. You’d think he was going to shoot a movie or something. He was very interested also in what the stolen painting depicted, and whether we had a copy of it. We didn’t, but I described it as best I could.”
“Which would be pretty good,” said Bancroft. “Artie has a good eye.”
“The painting showed a woman looking off a porch with a shock on her face?”
“Shock?” repeated Artie. “More like two seconds from a cardiac arrest. Then he wanted to know where the exhibit had come from and if we knew who owned the painting and all. I told him the owner was this guy Bo somebody in Santa Barbara.”
“Did Dempsey make a note of that?”
“No. He seemed to already know about him.”
“Did he give any idea of why he was so interested?”
“Oh no, he was very good at dummying up himself, while pumping me like a girl’s arm at the Grange dance. He only said he’d been a fan of the guy who did the work for a long time. And that he’d read about the theft in the papers down south.”
“How long did he spend here?”
“An hour or more. And he looked at the other Pavel works we had in the exhibit. Seems he’d seen two of them before, but the third one captured his interest. He took notes on it.”
“What did it show?”
“A guy looking out at you as if he’d just seen his mother run over. Whew!”
“Did Lind question you about the cop’s interest?”
“Quite a bit, yeah. I don’t know if he asked about the technique, though, or whether I even thought to tell him.”
“What about technique?”
“The cop asked if there was anything peculiar about the Pavel works, other than the subject matter. So that if he did some other subject matter, there would maybe be something recurrent to identify it.”
“And you saw something?”
“There was one quirky thing on both the painting that was stolen and on one of the others. They were outdoor scenes. This guy, whoever he was, had a peculiar way of doing grass. Not that there was a lot of it, but when he depicted individual blades they appeared thin where they sprouted from the ground and thick at the top. And he had a mathematical sequence of painting broken blades. I don’t remember exactly, but from one broken blade, the next one would be four blades over and three up, or something like that. But it was consistently that way. In both of the paintings that had grass in them.”
Artie chuckled. “You know how it is. Some guys get a little goofy in their work. Of course that guy Pavel, whoever he was, the people he painted—he must really have been a wacko.”
I made a phone call to Mr. Bo Smythe in Santa Barbara. Mr. Smythe was in. I said I was looking into the disappearance of his painting and asked if he’d be home the rest of the afternoon. Smythe sounded a bit eccentric and he spoke with an irritating rasp, but he said he’d be at home and he told me how to get there. I didn’t tell him I was phoning from San Francisco International. I just told him I’d be there in a couple hours. Then I phoned the office. Ceejay told me there hadn’t been any calls relating to the Lind case, and they were the only sort I wanted to hear about just then.
At the Santa Barbara airport I rented a car and followed Bo Smythe’s directions, driving out east of town and into the fancy hills that caught on fire every couple of years. Smythe didn’t live too far into them. He was high enough so you could see the Pacific Ocean from the road out front. The grounds and driveway leading to a parking area were guarded by high hedges. Smythe came out from his yard to greet me as I was getting out of the car. He was a hard-looking little guy from sixty to seventy years of age with skin the color and texture of old saddlebags. He wore a Mexican sombrero, bright plaid walking shorts, leather sandals and a withered goatee.
“Bragg? I’m Smythe.”
He had a calloused hand capable of imparting a firm grip and impish crinkles at the corners of his eyes.
“What do you think of her?” he asked, gesturing toward the big, pink stucco house overhead. The roof was red tile and there was a large green and yellow Yin and Yang painted on the wall facing the drive.
“It catches a fellow off guard,” I told him.
“You bet. Where you from, Bragg?”
“I work out of San Francisco.”
“Good. I don’t worry about folks passing through. It’s the idiot locals I can’t abide to have hanging around. Boy, the things you have to do for a little privacy, if you can’t afford electrified fences and your own corps of bodyguards. C’mon into the garden.”
It was a pleasantly bewildering place. A white pebble path meandered around bird baths and fountains and statuary sprinkled among beds of roses, palm trees and big, shiny green-leafed things I didn’t know the name of. The area was a pastiche of Luther Burbank sincerity and Southern California luck.
Smythe led me to some wrought iron furniture painted white and motioned for me to sit down. He watched my looking around.
“Something, isn’t it?” he asked. “Worked forty-two years so I could find a place like this and do it up the way I wanted. Don’t really care what others think. I like it.”
“It’s all that should matter.”
“That’s how I feel about it.”
“Are you married, Mr. Smythe?”
“Sure. Why, you want to talk to Thelma? You didn’t say so on the phone. She’s in town having her hair done.”
“No, I just wondered if she likes the way you’ve done things.”
“She doesn’t have to. She has her own garden over on the other side of the house. What was it you wanted to talk about?”
I reeled my mind back in. “The Pavel paintings you loaned out. I was wondering how you acquired them.”
“I bought them, at various places. First one I saw was at an art fair down at Laguna Beach. Picked up another at a little gallery in Long Beach. Different places like that.”
“How about Santa Barbara here?”
“No. Never saw any in this area.”
“I’m curious why you’re so fond of them.”
“Fond? You think I’m crazy, young man? No, not fond. Fascinated, perhaps. I’m a doctor of psychiatry, Bragg. When I was active at it, I spent very little time in private practice. I couldn’t find the stimulation there. I did a lot of work in prisons, with disturbed children, things like that. I didn’t make as much money that way, but I left it all with a feeling of satisfaction at my life’s work. And these paintings you ask about, or at least the man who did them, fascinate me the way some dark and twisted mind would fascinate me. I take ’em out and look at them from time to time, but good heavens, it isn’t the sort of thing you hang over your bed now, is it?”
“No, it isn’t, Doctor.”
“Call me Bo. What’s your name?”
“Pete.”
“Okay, Pete. I’m thirsty. Want a bee
r?”
“Sure, I’d love one.”
“I have five more of those Pavel things. Want to see them?”
“I’d appreciate it.”
He led me across a patch of lawn to a basement door. He went over to a refrigerator. It was filled with beer and white wine and fruit juices.
“The paintings are under that tarp over there,” he told me, indicating a bench along one wall. “Bring ’em on outside.”
The paintings were all about two-by-two-and-a-half feet. I lifted them in a stack and carried them outdoors.
“Gotten so I don’t even like to look at them inside any more,” Smythe told me. “They give me the willies. Just stand them up against the serving cart over there.”
I did as he asked. It was a dark undertaking even among the bright greenery and chirping birds overhead. They were the way the other paintings had been described. They showed men of various ages and means in different settings. Only the terror on their faces was the same. One of them depicted a man in front of a cabin. There was a patch of grass beside it, and it had the telltale details that Artie, back at the museum, had described. Individual blades grew from a thin, reedy base to a thick, outer blade. Even the broken blade pattern was there. Artie had it just backward. From the lowest broken blade, the others were three blades over and four up. I went back to my chair and took the beer Smythe handed me.
“Beauties all, hey?”
“What do you make of them?”
“Oh, God, who knows? Obviously something haywire about the man who did those. I could see a fellow trying one or two of those things, to get something dark out of his soul, but not a whole string of them. I tried to run down the man who did them, unsuccessfully.”
“Did you learn his name?”
Smythe took a tug at his beer, then lowered it with a nod. “John Roper, it was. At least that’s what somebody at one of the galleries told me.”
“What else did they tell you about him?”
“Very little. Nobody I talked to had ever met him. There was always a third party of some sort, either peddling the work at art fairs, or approaching the galleries about displaying them.”
“Did you find out where he lived?”
