PAINTED TRUTH
by Lise McClendon
Copyright © 1995 by Lise McClendon
Published by Thalia Press publishing at Smashwords
© 1995 Lise McClendon. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.
First published by Thalia Press in paperback in 2009.
First published in the United States of America in 1995 by Walker Publishing Company, Inc.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Canada, Limited, Markham, Ontario
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McClendon, Lise. Painted truth : an Alix Thorssen mystery / Lise McClendon.
p. cm. ISBN 0-8027-3271-2 (he)
I. Title.
PS3573.E19595P35 1995
Acknowledgments
Thanks to everyone who helped in the process, including Larry McCann of the Billings, Montana, Fire Department; Tom Minckler of Thomas Minckler Galleries; Evan and Nick for the comics; Marvel Comics and everyone at The Mighty Thor; and as always Kipp.
May you always have heroes.
Painted Truth
by Lise McClendon
Prologue
HE LIES WAITING. He is coming, he knows. His eyelids are too heavy to open. He tries to remember where he is. Not home, no. There is his mother then, in the kitchen of the house on Fremont Street, the white one with green shutters, and his dog, a wrinkled mutt named Hitch. When he remembers Hitch he feels like crying. But no tears come.
In the dark he smells things that frighten him. He wants to run, to go far away, to go home. But his legs won't work, his arms lie leaden and useless at his side. The fog in his brain keeps the thoughts from connecting. Then he smells the smell that scares him the most, and the scream that he tries to make stick deep in his throat.
He wishes his nose couldn't smell, wishes he could just lie back and sleep. How he wants to sleep, a soft bed, a pillow. God, what he would give for a pillow. But instead the hard floor makes him listen and smell, his only senses that work. The eerie silence is punctuated by muffled voices and the cry of a baby far away. A dog barking fills him with sorrow. It could be Hitch.
The odor makes no sense. It reminds him of a birthday once when the candles made green puddles on the cake. Sweet like sugar, it's comforting. For a minute the fear subsides. He is young again, eight or nine, and can smell the waxy leather of a new baseball glove.
Then a pop, a whoosh, then another louder pop. The heat closes in like a suffocating blanket. His face feels shielded from it but his legs and arms get hot, hotter. He wants so badly to run; the scream builds inside his chest. With enormous effort he tries to move but even his mind refuses to obey. As his clothes burst into flame he is confused. This didn't happen at his birthday party. He isn't here. This is a dream, a bad, horrible dream. Just before he slips into unconsciousness he hears one last sound, strangely near yet far, far from him.
It sounds like the end of the world.
1
LATE JULY, A Thursday. The kind of day where you make deals with the weather gods to never again complain about February if July could just stretch out ninety days long. The first truly summery day we'd had in Jackson Hole. June had been rainy and cold, and July had only just begun to bounce back. The wildflowers along the riverbanks broke hibernation in pink and blue. A striped-faced badger washed his lunch in a clear green eddy, while in a sky so warm you wanted to wrap yourself in it and sleep, a bald eagle let the wind lift his wings as he glided over the river. The kind of day where you expect birdsong and moments of penetrating contentment. Not twists of fate that make you mistrust your instincts.
Instincts don't come easily. I have to listen hard. I tried to listen to the river today; results were mixed. A snapping turtle with a brain and a bra, one boyfriend called me, right before he left me for a raven-haired tootsie. A left-brainer, I know it, even though I own an art gallery in one of the most beautiful valleys in the West, in the world. The irony hasn't escaped me.
We were in Pete's car, the three of us, driving back through the Snake River Canyon into town, rehashing the white-water run, when I realized we'd been lulled into believing the day could be perfect. Driving was Pete Rotondi, my kayak instructor, a lanky, athletic guy, not my type but appealing in a rugged sort of way. Eden Chaffee, friend and witness to today's escapade, sat wedged in the back among the gear, chattering about the photographs she'd taken. Pete was kidding me about the alabaster quality of my tan-resistant body, saying the only way I could get any color at all was to let a paddle flatten my nose. Which I had done today, upside down in my kayak. I could thank Kahuna, the Snake's meanest wave, for giving my face color, although two black eyes weren't exactly what I had in mind.
The river run had been such blessed relief from the midsummer madness that was Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that I didn't even mind the black eyes. My lungs ached from all the river water I'd sucked down. My nose felt fat. But I was thrilled to have done the Snake River Canyon, a mean bronc-busting stretch of white water that attracts serious kayakers and intrepid vacationers from all over. I was glad to have had a break from the Second Sun Gallery, to be able to give the problems there some perspective.
I had spent the morning trying to find the truth of our troubles. My partner, Paolo Segundo, had refused to discuss them. Part of the mess was the promise I'd made, a promise I would have to break. The poor season, bad sales, and the rock we'd gotten through the front window hadn't helped.
The truth, of course, is a slippery thing. Take, for instance, the truth of who you are at any particular point in time. Today I am Alix Thorssen, semiprosperous art dealer, so-so kayaker, single girl, thirty-something. Tomorrow I might dye my hair purple, kayak the Amazon River, marry a half-naked native hunk with creative body paint, and live in the jungle forever. It's doubtful, at least the marrying part, but anything is possible. So who am I? Who is anyone? Some questions float around us like clouds of confusion, grabbing our attention when we least expect it.
The truth of a place is subject to the same confusion. And when a land has been mythologized as much as the West has, as a place of desperation, freedom, and majesty, the waters are plenty muddied.
Some people see the West the way Albert Bierstadt did, as a hidden paradise where sunlight tastes like honey and rainbows remind us we're only human. But that's only one truth. For other folks it's Indians or loneliness or the smell of latigo. Whatever your view of the West, you can bet it is right — and wrong. The truth isn't necessarily what you see, but how you see it.
Eden Chaffee leaned forward. "I got a great shot of you upside down in Kahuna, Alix."
"Yeah? My best side." I flipped down the visor to get a look at my face. Below my Norwegian blue eyes were their evil twins: tomboy, brackish as a primordial backwater, I-can-do-anything-you-can-do-better, ail-American shiners. I had only been blessed with basic Scandinavian looks, no candidate for the Swedish bikini team. God, wasn't I gorgeous now.
"What's that?" Eden said. She was a tiny person with a high voice that annoyed me when I first met her. "Shit."
Pete was craning his neck forward as I flipped the visor back up. "Looks like the square," he said.
Black smoke hung ominously over the town as we reached the Teton Pass turnoff and dissolved into the lines of traffic headed into the heart of Jackson. The sky darkened and the smell of burning reached us. I watched the smoke intensify, wondering what the hell was going on.
"You can't tell from here. Can you?" Eden asked. She didn't want to believe Pete. She owned an art gallery too, opposite mine on the town square. She had come to me for advice when she first moved here.
"Could be anywhere," Pete said. He exuded trust-funder sass, a ski-and-river bum more interested in a good time than money. His bleached-out brown hair hung over his forehead. He
was at least a few years older than me, with crow's-feet around his blue eyes. "Could be a grass fire."
The smoke was too black and concentrated for a grass fire; even my untrained eye could see that. Besides, it was in the middle of town.
Eden leaned forward again, gripping my shoulder. "Jesus God, it is the square."
Jackson's town square is a grassy park framed by arches on each corner built years ago from zillions of elk and deer antlers, lit up with twinkle lights at night. Boardwalks crisscross the grass. A bronzed bronc rider is installed in the center, with names of war veterans below, just like any small town. The square is the part of Jackson that changed the least, and because of that I liked it the most. The city planned to cut down a tree for purely aesthetic reasons last year and I made six urgent pleas to the city council before they reconsidered. I would have strapped myself to the old elm before they would change the square.
I bit my lip hard and tried hard not to envision flames licking the corners of the Second Sun Gallery, my home for the last eight years. All the problems at the gallery disappeared. The precarious checking account seemed manageable. My apartment over the gallery was dry and secure, even though the roof leaked, and I installed extra locks last winter after a break-in and stashed the handgun my mother sent from Montana in a kitchen drawer. And, of course, Paolo still loved me.
In my years in Jackson Hole, the Teton Mountains weren't the only peaks and valleys I'd seen. Business had a way of slamming you down just when you were getting ahead. This summer had been particularly difficult, with slow sales due to the recession in the East and who knows what else. Just plain consumer reluctance to buy art, I supposed. There were so many shops in Jackson now competing for the tourist dollar: souvenir shops, factory outlets, sporting goods, T-shirts, posters, jewelry, junk, you name it.
"Could be the pyro again," Pete said.
"What pyro? A pyromaniac?" Eden squeaked, running a hand through her unruly brown curls.
"Everybody hoped he'd given up. Or moved on." I turned toward Eden in the backseat. She had lived in Jackson just two years. The traffic around us had slowed to a stop about a half mile from the town square. "There were a bunch of suspicious fires in stores. About four or five over that many years. Nobody was ever arrested."
"And now he's back," Eden said, frowning.
"Let's just wait and see what's happening." I heard my voice, the calmness in it, and tried to reconcile that to the feeling in my gut. What if it was my gallery, my apartment above? What would I do? I pushed the thoughts aside and felt my nose, approaching zucchini squash status.
Pete looked over at me. "Nice shiners. They're coming right along." He smiled, as if the fire meant nothing. He didn't live in town. "Kahuna counted coups on you today."
I touched the bags under my eyes and frowned at him. My bangs hung in wet hanks over my thick brown eyebrows. I had forgotten to comb my hair after the aborted Eskimo roll in the Snake River. I doubted I even had a comb on me, patting the pockets of my damp river shorts helplessly. Instead I pulled on my Ray-Bans to cover my eyes and my olive green slouch hat to cover the river-whipped mess of almost blond, shoulder-length hair.
"It must have been my instructor's fault," I said.
Pete shrugged. "You can blame me if you want. I thought you looked great. What about that war whoop you let out just before Kahuna sucked you under?"
I opened my mouth to answer, slightly embarrassed at my exuberance on the river. On the other hand, I liked that kayaking brought out my wild side. Sometimes the art business was too sedate for my taste. Maybe that was why I'd been concentrating on insurance and fraud work for the past few years. It got me out of the white box gallery into the real world. Last year I had stared down the barrel of a jealous lover's pistol and tripped the light fantastic with a whacko medicine man. Maybe Big Kahuna's right hook was as much violence as I'd have to face this summer. But something about the smoke told me Kahuna was only the beginning.
The car hadn't moved for ten minutes. I looked back at Eden. She sat with her knees pulled up to her chest, her khakis rolled up over black rafting sandals. Her short, dark curls were wild and the delicate features of her face were pinched with worry. She was twisting the ring on her finger round and round.
"I think we should walk," I said. "What do you think, Edie, hon? This waiting is killing me." I've never been a patient person. It was one of those things I work on now and then, but this was no time for self-improvement. I put my hand on the door latch. "Park the car, Pete."
We hurried along the wooden boardwalks of Jackson, dodging baby strollers, ice cream cones puddling, gray-heads in small flocks, until we reached the edge of the crowd. It was dense and large, filled with cowboy hats, ball caps, porkpies, and big hair. We were still half a block from the corner of the square, and everything was obscured by dark smoke. The sky disappeared. We pushed through the crowd, my hands on Eden's shoulders, guiding her along since she was so short she couldn't see her way through.
I kept moving, blinking furiously from the smoke. Eden and Pete were coughing. I could see the commotion on the near side of the square, not near the Second Sun. It wasn't until I stopped, dropped my hands from Eden's shoulders, and let loose a "holy shit" that she looked up at the landmarks and realized that we were in front of the corner where her gallery, Timberwolf Arts, stood.
All four county fire trucks, a full contingent of our local cops, and every tourist who remembered the song about Smokey the Bear filled the square. Beyond the excited crowd, crying children, barking dogs, and a whole lot of official mayhem, stood Eden's gallery, ablaze. The building, a blue frame two-story with a square front facade and yellow awnings on two upstairs windows, was, as they say, completely involved. Flames licked at the tops of the windows. The roof had disappeared in smoke and thin air. The sign that read "Timberwolf Arts" with a howling wolf was half burned and hanging off the facade. We stood, speechless, watching what was left of Eden's dream go up in smoke.
Eden Chaffee had come to Jackson two years before from upstate New York with her inheritance to invest in a gallery, her first. She had romantic notions about art and galleries, the same ones I once had of bringing beauty to the masses, of brightening the ugly workaday world. Maybe I felt the need to recover that old passion; I took her under my wing, taught her a few things about art, about the business, about the tourists and rich and not-so-rich art buyers.
Despite my efforts and her warm personality, Eden was not a great businesswoman. She didn't have a feel for what would sell, what people wanted. She had become discouraged lately and immersed herself in photography. She often took off in the afternoons to catch the sunset over Mount Owen or the Grand, or frame up an elk against the aspens. She usually hired someone to fill in for her on the days she went off shooting pictures.
A confusion of yellow-slickered firemen had strung hoses from the red pumpers parked haphazardly in the street. Thick smoke poured out the windows. Above, attic insulation was exposed and wiring hung over the once-blue wood siding. The firefighters wet down the facade and roof of the neighboring cafe. I could see Billy, the grill cook, nearby in his greasy white apron, biting his nails. Arcs of water poured from gray canvas hoses into the broken second-story windows of the gallery. As I watched, a fireman wielded an axe and broke down the front door. The sound tore through me physically.
"Oh, Alix." The tiny words escaped Eden's small, ashen face, a reflection of the grayness around us. I put my arm around her shoulders and tried to think of comforting words. None came to mind. None ever came to mind on the spot, the curse of the Norwegian. To be stoic, calm, rational in the face of chaos and tragedy: that was the ideal growing up with my mother. If the possibility existed for something awful, she would become rigid and start to clean. By the time the outcome was clear, good or bad, the baseboards were wiped, the kitchen floor shining, and the simple pine furniture rubbed with lemon oil. No time was wasted on emotion that might not be appropriate and certainly was unwelcome and embarrassing.
Eden turned to me and began to cry. I held her, the only thing I could do. Pete touched her hair briefly, looking down on her childlike body from his height, and shrugged at me. Around us, tourists bored of the spectacle and filtered off, thinking, of course, that the worst was over.
Pete gave Eden a polite hug and said good-bye, begging off because of a dinner invitation. The firemen scurried into and out of the frame storefront, windows gone, gray smoke belching through the holes. Timberwolf Arts had never had as much attention as it did today. Despite Eden's hard work, my experience, and a great corner location, something never clicked. When she was not out taking photos, Eden stared out the window and sighed, "They never said it'd be like this back in Lackawanna."
At least the Second Sun had its good years. Eden just had no sense of style, no flair for choosing art. That was evident in her current show, a comeback for a once-great artist. She thought he was a big enough name to rescue Timberwolf Arts. But once again, she was wrong.
Eden pulled away and wiped her face with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Her eyes slowly moved from the chaos of the fire to my face, then back. A crash inside the building made her lurch forward, blinking her big black eyes. I put my arm around her shoulder again, and for ten minutes we watched the firefighters move into the building, knocking down walls, dragging hoses and debris. The fire was out now. The stench of soggy, smoldering wood blew over us in a cloud.
Inside the building the firefighters suddenly began shouting. One ran out, his long yellow coat slapping against his black rubber boots. A new siren split the air, whining, raising the hair on my neck. The couple in front of us chose this moment to leave.
" 'Scuse, please. ‘Scuse," the husband said. Since no one opened up around us, I dropped my arm to let them wedge between me and Eden. A well-matched elderly couple, Indiana or Michigan, I guessed. His porkpie hat, weighed down with hundreds of pins, flashed in the late sun breaking through the smoke as he pushed his blue-haired consort ahead of him. "Keep moving, Thelma. Keep moving," he mumbled.
By the time the remaining onlookers had reassembled, I was behind Eden. A surly teenager with overgrown shoulders had squeezed into my spot. I peered over Eden's head in time to see Charlie Frye emerge from the crowd. He stood out among the well-built firemen with his ever-present gray suit, baggy and worn, white shirt, and black string tie. He looked more like the stoop-shouldered insurance agent that he had been before his appointment to chief of police. I had done plenty of work for his agency, appraising art, stolen, damaged, and just insured, before the mayor had elevated Charlie to crime fighting.
Frye followed two firemen into the Timberwolf's dark interior. At five forty-five in late July plenty of daylight remained. But between the smoke and the charred interior of the building we could see nothing after they disappeared into the gloom.
Eden opened her mouth to say something. Nothing came out. Ash sifted down on her dark curls, giving her a powdered look. I felt so bad for her. She had lost her inheritance. She had paid too much for the building two years ago, coming into the market unaware, then spent more fixing it up. She had sunk her heart and soul into Timberwolf Arts. Her dreams — and her finances — were reduced to a pile of ash.
At last Charlie Frye appeared, talking rapidly and gesturing in a group of men, some of whom were firefighters. Others looked liked cops, or at least public officials. I recognized Danny Bartholomew, a reporter for the Jackson Hole News, who had somehow infiltrated the official circle. I watched them for a moment, saw that the boundary deputies had gone, then grabbed the yellow plastic barrier tape.
"Go, Eden!" I pushed her under, shuffling and stiff, and followed. She hesitated, clutching her camera bag. "Come on," I said, pulling her. "It's your place. You have a right."
Frye saw us coming and conversation stopped. The faces of the firefighters were blackened and weary. The policemen's expressions held a curious mixture of excitement and repulsion.
"Alix, please. Behind the line," Charlie Frye said. A fireman took my elbow.
"This is the owner," I said, tugging Eden's sleeve. She stared at them, a horrified look on her face. "She wants to know what's going on."
The men's eyes bounced from face to face. The fireman dropped his hand. Danny, slight and dark with a scratchy beard, scribbled something in his spiral notebook, leaning forward to catch every word. Eden stood up straighter. She cleared her throat, the most conversation she could muster.
"Did you have an employee working in the building this afternoon?" Frye said. He glared at her with drooping gray eyes. "Miss Chaffee, is it?"
Eden nodded.
"You had an employee?" he said. Another nervous nod. "Who was it?"
I stepped back, glancing into the black depths of the gallery. The cause of the commotion inside was suddenly clear. My breath caught in my throat. On the same wavelength, Danny B. scribbled furiously. Eden stared at Frye, then at the firemen in their yellow slickers and helmets, their tired, smudged eyes.
"Who?" I whispered to her. "Who was it?"
She looked at me, blinking furiously. "Ray."
"Ray Tantro?" She nodded. He was the artist whose pieces she had been showing for the last several weeks, horrible, abstract stuff that hadn't been popular, hadn't sold at all. I kept my opinion of his work to myself, which may or may not have helped Eden. It made no difference now."
"The artist," I told Frye. He frowned at me, the gray stubble on his head moving forward to meet black eyebrows. "The artist who was showing at the gallery,’1 I explained. "Ray Tantro. He was big in the seventies. Trying to make a comeback."
"But he didn't come in," Eden said, her voice cracking. "He was supposed to show up at three so I could go with you, Alix. I was taking photographs of Alix on the river. But he didn't come in."
"You didn't see the employee, this Ray?" Frye asked.
"I just locked up," she said, looking guiltily at me. "Business was slow."
"What is it, Charlie? Was he...?'' I glanced at the burned hulk of the building.
Charlie's face was a flat, controlled mask. "Looks that way," he said.
They brought out the body zipped into a black plastic body bag on a stretcher. We couldn't see it, thank God. Frye said he was burned pretty badly, not much left. He figured Ray Tantro showed up late, opened up with his own key, and proceeded to burn the place down. A dramatic way to kill yourself, Charlie mused, but effective. Probably drank himself unconscious in the process, from the looks of the debris.
We watched as the ambulance crew loaded up the charred remains of the once-great artist. Slowly, without fanfare, the ambulance pulled away.
Ray Tantro did not leave this earth in a pleasant way. The old Norsemen would say that human existence is a difficult, painful thing, followed by destruction. That man must struggle, with the help of his gods who control his all-too-certain fate. Odin, the benevolent father, even tested poor Thor, making even gods prove themselves worthy of Valhalla.
I wasn't sure, as I held Eden Chaffee on the evening of the destruction of her dreams, whether the old Norsemen knew what the hell they were talking about. There had to be pleasure, didn't there? The Norsemen, for sure, never experienced the thrill of Kahuna in a little purple kayak. They were more practical. Their lives weren't concerned, as mine was, with the pursuit of beauty and truth, two of the most illusive and spectral worldly elements. Life was more simple to the Norsemen, more black and white. Existence had no silver lining. Maybe Ray Tantro felt the same.
At any rate Tantro probably would have agreed with my cantankerous big brother, who once during a family reunion while well lubricated with aquavit and lutefisk summed up the Norse mentality in his inimitable fashion: Life's a bitch, then you die.
2
AS NIGHT FELL, Eden and I hunkered down upstairs over the storefront of the Second Sun Gallery, in the apartment I call home. For a while after Paolo moved out it seemed too spacious. But the space is only two rooms and a bath, with a main room that includes living, dining, and kitchen. When we first moved in I painted the walls indigo blue and stenciled silver stars and gold suns up by the ten-foot ceiling. I am sick of those stars and the gloom of the dark blue walls, but the thought of getting up on ladders again and repainting makes me tolerate them. A thrift-shop sofa is slipcovered in a wrinkled natural linen that I let my decorator friend Darlene talk me into; the verdict is still out on the home grunge look.
Behind the sofa stands the only bookshelf I have room for. The low pine case is filled with my collection of books on Norse mythology and the Mighty Thor comic books I have collected since I was nine, kept clean in plastic cases. When my father died I retreated for one summer into the world of the Norse gods, spending long days in the hammock lost in Asgard. I played fantasy games all by myself against invisible foes, with me playing the courageous and brave heroine—the Mighty Thorssen.
The bimonthly installments of the comic held me together that summer and I continued to collect them, always with a soft spot in my heart for the blond superhero, the Thunder God, Thor. In some way they connected me with the real life-hero I lost that year.
Lately I'd been looking out my tall Victorian windows at the wooded hills that ring the Hole we call Jackson and thinking about a cabin. The close proximity of the gallery downstairs, the tension and anxiety it had been producing, made me want to escape. Somewhere open and sunny and private, with trees and flowers. It wasn't just the mess with finances in the gallery, although like in any business when the money's bad, nothing else really matters. My partner cut me no slack just because we had been lovers once. And then there were the tourists, thick as fleas on a dog's butt at high summer, and just as much fun.
I tucked Eden in on the couch, her small, sunburned face flushed with wine but peaceful at last. She began to snore, musically at first, then in earnest. I turned from the window and looked at her in the pale light from the half-moon. I should complain. What would she do? All she could think about was Ray Tantro, her client and friend.
"I should have saved him," she had cried as we made our way across the damp, ashy grass of the square to my apartment. The crowd had gone home, all but a few die-hard voyeurs. "I should have been there." Tears streamed down her cheeks. I put my arm around her shoulder again, at another loss for words. Nobody cried like this at home. My mother never shed a tear in front of me.
"I knew he drank too much," Eden sobbed. "Just last week I saw him at the rodeo, hanging around the stands with the cowboys drinking beer. He yelled at me, something obnoxious, you know. I didn't know what to say so I just ignored him. Pretended I didn't hear." Her cries deepened, her face contorted. I took her hand and led her through the gallery and up the back stairs to the apartment, the hollow sound of our footsteps on the wooden stairs making me lonely.
"Did he seem depressed or anything?" I asked.
She shook her head. "He sometimes got down when he drank. Usually he wanted to go dancing." She started to cry again, squeezing her eyelids together as she sat on the edge of the sofa. "I think I kind of loved him."
"Oh, hon. I didn't know," I said, sinking into the armchair facing the couch.
"I'm not sure, you know," she said through sobs. "And now I'll never find out."
I covered my battered eyes with my hand, careful not to press too hard. Ray Tantro, burned to death. Lost love. Lost gallery. I didn't see how it could be worse.
"You didn't know he was going to do this. And even if you had, what could you do? You can't save somebody who really wants to kill himself. I'm sure you made him happy, Eden. I mean, you tried." I heard myself talking, talking, just saying anything to stop the tears.
To my surprise she sniffed hard and stopped crying. "You think so?" She blew her nose on a tissue. "I guess you're right. What could I do? He was a strong man."
The crying was over as fast as it began. Then her face reddened and she pounded the arm of the sofa. "I just wish he'd talked to me. About the gallery and everything. I only wish I knew ..." Her voice trailed off.
"... Why he burned down the gallery too?" It did seem odd. Most people commit suicide in the privacy of their own homes. "I wonder. Maybe it was those new paintings," I said. The paintings he'd done twenty years ago were exquisite masterpieces compared to this crap. I was trying to picture his early works, thinking of shows I'd seen and articles I'd read, when I remembered the small Tantro oil I bought back in the seventies. I had it stored away. I'd forgotten all about it.
Eden was glaring at me, her dark eyes red-rimmed but fierce. "What's that supposed to mean?"
I shrugged it off. "Nothing. Just that maybe his comeback wasn't, ah ... coming back?" Eden looked like she was going to cry again. "Only a thought."
She pulled a cigarette from the box in her purse. "Got any matches? Oh, never mind." She took out a matchbook and lit her cigarette. "Jesus, Alix, what a day."
I watched her face as she drew on the cigarette and tried to calm herself. Then I moved to the sofa and sat next to her.
"I'm sorry about everything, Eden. It's terrible." There, I felt a flutter of nerves, then relief that I had finally said how I felt.
She looked at me, then blew smoke the other way. "It's a piece of shit, is what it is. Not just the gallery. I did like him but..." She slammed her fist on the arm of the chair. "It makes me so mad. That bastard Ray Tantro. What the hell was that all about?"
I shook my head. "I don't know. But I promise you, Eden, I will find out."
Her eyes held mine, clear for a moment. "Your eyes just turned that steely blue color they get when you latch on to something. Like when you latched on to me, and whipped the Timberwolf into shape." Her anger had disappeared. She bit her lip, slumping into the chair. "I'll never forget that, Alix."
It had been a long day. I was still wearing my swimsuit and river shorts under my yellow chenille bathrobe. The pizza box sat gaping on the coffee table, the pizza barely touched. Eden smoked, angry and exhausted. She drank three glasses of wine and passed out. I covered her up with a goose-down comforter, stubbed out her last cigarette, and turned out the light.
FROM MY BEDROOM window I can look out across the town square. Through the tall pines and elms that shade the grass and antler arches from the moon's glare I made out movement in the light in front of the blackened hulk of Timberwolf Arts. They would be digging around in there all night, I supposed. I wondered what changes the fire would bring to the square, if a fancy new structure would fill that corner. I was missing Eden's charming old building already.
I peeled off the swimsuit and got into old sweats that provided security on cold or lonely nights. (Okay, yes, I wear them just about every night.) I pulled my arms tight around my ribs. The evening was still. I could hear the faint sound of the honky-tonk band at the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar across the square. It had been months since I'd straddled the saddles that doubled as barstools there.
Jackson can be boisterous and rowdy and then turn around and sleep for weeks, a town of mercurial fits of energy. During slow months you could spit across the square and not hit a soul. When summer starts the locals slap on their "Bring Back Off-Season" bumper stickers and both curse and rejoice in the mayhem. On summer nights flatlanders roam in packs, searching, laughing, spending.
I looked down on the deserted streets. No flatlanders tonight. The events of the day had put a reality-crimp into vacation bliss. No airing the baby, no necking couples, no cruising for trinkets tonight.
Ray Tantro, once a wunderkind in the art world, a man destined for greatness before he dropped from sight, was now just an unidentifiable carbon form, roasted like so many marshmallows. Had he been despondent about the new paintings? Sick about his lost affinity with the lucid light of morning? Maybe I was romanticizing his suicide. Who knows, maybe he wanted to go out like a martyr. I wondered about his last years, his last thoughts.
I hoped Ray's ride down life's big river had its rollers and curls and thrills in the heady days of his early fame and glory. I had to believe it did.
THE PHONE ON my desk rang early the next morning, before opening. Eden had been up with the birds, showered, and dropped off the film of my kayaking run at the photo shop before I emerged from the bathroom. What I'd seen in the bathroom mirror hadn't cheered me. My nose was still swollen. I could hardly breathe through one nostril. And my eyes had gone technicolor, greens, blues, and yellows. I did what I could with makeup even though it hurt to rub it on. I took three aspirin and cursed Pete Rotondi for good measure.
I thought that going to work early would take my mind off my rearranged face. I put on my sunglasses and settled into my cubbyhole office, a former walk-in closet in the back of the gallery. The Second Sun occupies a storefront in the middle of the block facing the square, with a glass-filled front wall and a porch overhang above the boardwalk, and cream-colored side walls in the undivided front gallery. Paolo and I had sanded and refinished the wood floors several times over the years and put in new track lighting last winter. We were due for a new paint job when the summer season ended, but the place looked good: clean, warm, minimalist in the best sense, with a focus on Art with a capitals. Despite our fondness for Bierstadt and Russell, we favored more affordable contemporary art with modern techniques and styles—stylized landscapes, impressionism, graphics, ceramics, and weavings.
I arranged the piles of messages into two groups, In and To Do, scanned the blotter covered with phone numbers, and dusted the old brass piano lamp before the phone rang. My old wooden desk with its scratched-in names—Gus, Tony 43, Laura, Go Tigers—was like a member of the family. I bought it from an old rancher who said his father used it in a railroad office back in Ohio and brought it west with him. In my office I kept no clock, no radio, no stereo, no television. Last year I had given in to a fax machine, but it sat expectantly idle most of the time, like a wallflower waiting for an offer to dance.
Above the desk two bookshelves are filled with reference books, directories, and art books: my library. Next to the books a giant Rolodex holds all my contacts in the business. Under the shelves, the only decoration, hangs a framed silkscreen print by Bill Schenck of a cowgirl in sunglasses with shirt agape, a pretty sneer on her lips and a six-gun up by her shoulder ready to blast the next guy that looks at her cross-eyed.
I had been expecting an hour of quiet—time to think about the events of yesterday, dab extra makeup around the eyes, and rub my desk—so when the old black telephone rattled at me I was annoyed.
"Good morning," a male voice said on the line. I hesitated, too long. "It's me."
By this time I recognized both the sexiness and the slight irritation in the voice. It was Carl Mendez, my on-again boyfriend and Missoula cop, whom I talked to on the phone almost enough to recognize his voice.
"I knew it was you," I said. "No one else would call this early."
"Are you ready to run the river?"
I groaned, not softly enough.
"What's that?" Carl asked. "You're not backing out?"
Carl had been taking kayaking lessons in Missoula so that we could run the Snake River together. I'd been doing the same here, putting in numerous hours at the high school pool with Pete. And of course yesterday's river run.
"Of course not. I'm just busy. I got a new roommate and two new shiners yesterday. There was a terrible fire at my friend Eden's gallery. And on top of all that, I got caught in Kahuna." I took off my sunglasses and gingerly felt my sore nose. The Ray-Bans were too heavy, I was just going to have to brave the questions about my new battle scars. "I felt the raw power, I can tell you that."
"The Big Kahuna? Oh, man. I've heard about that one, and Lunch Counter. The waves up here are nothing like that I can't wait till I get down there." He paused, whistling through his teeth.
His enthusiasm was catching, despite my bashed face. I had to remind myself that I had a lot of work to do before he arrived. Carl had scheduled his first-ever two-week vacation, saving up all winter to spend it kayaking with me. It began in a week. Eden should have her finances and insurance figured out by then. Last summer's backpacking weekend with Carl had been wildly adventurous, at least inside the pup tent. It would be good seeing him again.
Then I could see that wave again, feel the thrill and surge of its rollers. "Listen, Carl—"
"I know you've got to work," he interrupted. "Captain's staring at me right now too. I just had to talk to you for a second. Can't wait to hit the river! Call you later and we'll get the details figured out." He hung up.
The receiver was heavy in my hand. One of these days I'd have to get a neat, slim portable phone like everybody else had. But now there was no money for telephones. I hung up, making myself concentrate on my immediate crisis—I pulled out the account book and pawed through it. It was the third time this week I'd stared at the figures, trying to make them change.
The problem was simple: Expenses exceeded income. We had a decent reserve to tide us over the lean months, assuming there weren't too many of them. The big problem was a mess of my own making and its name was Ditolla. Martin Ditolla was a local artist I had been bringing along and felt was ready for the big time. I had agreed to buy four of his paintings that we would both sell and make into posters for the gallery. If we paid him the $10,000 for the four originals as agreed, plus went ahead with the lithography so we could recoup our money and hopefully make a profit, well, we'd be scraping bottom. Broke. No groceries, no electricity. It wouldn't matter if we had a telephone or not.
I rubbed my forehead, trying to erase the headache centered around my nose. How had this happened? This was July, supposedly the busiest month of the year. I tried to imagine what we had done wrong. Were the Ingrid Wistmiller pastels too weak, too strong, too cold, too overpriced? Did we have too many expensive bronzes and not enough pottery? Not enough western-theme stuff? Too much? I was ready to tear out my hair. Paolo had always been so good at his "mix," a delicate blend of contemporary and traditional, exotic and familiar, high-priced and affordable. Had he lost his touch, or was I just hopelessly out of the loop?
I took a deep breath. It wasn't going to help to start blaming Paolo—or myself. Or to panic. Maybe things would bounce back. Maybe we'd have a buying frenzy of oil-rich Texans even though the oil business had gone to hell in a handbasket. The Texans who still came to Jackson weren't shelling out the derrick dollars like in the old days.
The lock turned in the front door. That would be Paolo. I closed the account book, since nothing I could do would help there, and rolled my office chair across the floor to look into the gallery proper.
"Morning," I called.
"Did you hear about the fire?" he yelled back. He was starting coffee on the counter behind his desk. I could hear the water running.
"We were there. Eden and me."
The bell rang on the front door then, and I saw Eden step into the gallery. I got up and joined her. She smelled of baked goods, which she carried in two white sacks.
"I brought breakfast," she said, smiling.
Paolo frowned at her and at the chocolate muffins she was extracting from the sack. "I ate already."
"He's kind of a health nut, Eden," I said. "But I'll take a muffin."
Paolo had turned back to the coffeemaker and was pouring three cups of coffee. He handed me one silently, without looking at my face. Or at least not noticing the damage. I carried my cup back into my office while Eden began telling Paolo, with excitement and chagrin, about the wholesale destruction of Timber-wolf Arts. I didn't want to hear it again.
The top message on my To Do pile was from Martin Ditolla. He had called three times. I had been avoiding him for the last week or two, since Paolo and I had had the talk. I still couldn't bring myself to tell Martin that we couldn't help him, couldn't buy his paintings. He was getting so good and was incredibly excited about this new venture, as well he should be.
Martin was badly injured in a snowmobile accident that changed his life. A skier, hunter, and fireman before, he had broken his back, then dissolved into self-pity and the bottle before finding a new life in art. He deserved my help and I gave it freely. One of the great satisfactions of being an art dealer was to bring talent to recognition, to nurture and celebrate it. But now I was going to have to go back on my word. We wouldn't be able to buy Martin's pieces. I had to face that.
The phone rang again. Paolo picked it up out in the gallery. In a moment he appeared in the doorway to give me the message.
"It's Frye," he said. I turned and saw the unsmiling look on the well-formed Latin face. Ten years older than when I first met him and getting a few lines around his eyes, Paolo was still heart-stopping handsome with dark golden skin and wavy black hair that curled over the collar of his white button-down shirt. "I thought you couldn't work for him anymore."
As police chief, Frye was out of the insurance business. Conflict of interest and all that.
Paolo was staring. "What happened to you? You try to ride that wild horse of yours?"
"I'm not that stupid." I touched my nose self-consciously, hoping it was true. "More like a wild paddle."
"Just so none of your boyfriends is beating you up," Paolo said, half serious. "You tell me and I send a couple of my goons over to rough him up."
Tm flattered," I said, turning my chair to face him. "I didn't know you cared."
"You better wear those," he said, pointing to my Ray-Bans on the desk. "At least they make you look mysterious."
Paolo turned to go back into the gallery. In the last year his attitude toward life had lost its light frosting, as if our money troubles had darkened the whole world. Paolo loved the finer things in life and would do almost anything to make good fortune come to him and the gallery. No wonder his attitude was so bad, with our poor finances. Eden sat behind his desk, drinking coffee and munching muffins while she read the newspaper. Paolo got out window cleaner and paper towels, squirted the liquid on the new plate-glass window. I watched him as he moved gracefully in front of the window, rubbing the glass in circles. He could be a pain in the ass all right. But what an ass it was. Admiring it was one of the last perks as his partner.
I picked up the phone. Frye sounded impatient and irritated. "Goddamn Dalton is out of town. I'm supposed to be the silent partner in the insurance company now. This is sure putting me in a helluva spot," he grumbled.
"What can I do for you, Charlie?" He reminded me of a hard-edged Barney Fife, homey with a bitter undercurrent.
"It's the fire, that gallery. Your friend Chaffee. Dalton wrote a policy for the contents, a special one, just last, ah, let's see." He shuffled through papers. "Last June second. Covered this new show. And anything else she had in the way of fine art in there."
"You need some appraisal work done?"
"Yeah. That Tantro stuff. The guy we found. Christ, I hate to see somebody take their life like that. Against the Christian way, I say."
"I know what you mean." Charlie's mixture of epithets and piety had the effect of making me smile until I thought again about Ray. I doubted Ray Tantro was particularly religious. At least not yesterday afternoon.
"Anywaaaays," Charlie said, getting down to business, "I got to have an appraisal done for those paintings. Bonnie at the office said she called already this morning, all anxious. Ms. Chaffee, that is. I just want to get this over and done. No hassles. Monday, okay?"
I agreed and hung up. It was enough time, three days, to try to piece together what was in the gallery. It wasn't a big show, maybe twenty pieces, and I had seen it myself. Eden probably could remember most of it. I turned my chair around again to tell her, but she had disappeared. The two paper sacks were all that remained on Paolo's desk. Now where had she gone?
I peered into the gallery, not wanting to seem as if I was volunteering my sales services. Paolo was in the far front corner, gesturing and talking confidentially to a young couple with brand-new hiking boots and immaculate tans. No sign of Eden. I turned back to my handkerchief office and remembered suddenly what had come to me late last night.
Spirits lifting, I opened the door to the storeroom. Inside, old red-and-pink-flowered wallpaper hung limply on the walls. I flicked on the light switch that activated a single bare bulb. Simple wooden frames held paintings upright as they sat lined along the floor. Against the gaudy wallpaper from the frontier brothel that occupied this space a hundred years ago (I call it the House of the Grand Tetons) hung odd paintings that we didn't have room to display.
In the far corner, tucked away in the back, I found what I was looking for, my small, forgotten Tantro oil. In the days when I'd bought it I didn't have much money. (Some things change at glacial speed.) The hundred dollars I spent was an extravagance, but I'd just gotten my trust from my father and wanted something wonderful to remember him by. It had hung in every apartment I had until I moved to Jackson and somehow forgot to unpack it at all.
Kneeling on the dusty carpet, I slipped off the cardboard cover. It was a winter scene, a prairie in snow and pale light, framed in hunter green. I remembered the little shop where I'd bought it, in Livingston, Montana, a magical place that perhaps gave me the first inkling I might enjoy being an art dealer. I was still painting then. The small, eight-by-ten-inch oil painting had been dwarfed by the larger canvases Tantro had been selling like hotcakes. Lush, glorious landscapes in an impressionistic style. A penchant for white, for snow, a difficult artistic task that young Tantro handled with an unstudied genius.
Carrying the small painting into my office, I turned off the light and shut the door behind me. I set it at the back of my desk, against the wall, and admired it. It was still a beautiful piece, a little gem, a perfect composition. The gradations of purple and blue in the snow made the scene come alive with color. I pulled a soft rag from a drawer and lovingly wiped the dust from the canvas.
The bell on the front door clanged three times. The tourists are coming! The tourists are coming! Reluctantly I tore my eyes away from the Tantro painting and pushed back my chair. I took a deep breath and braced myself for the day.
3
TIMBERWOLF ARTS, ONCE elegant space in a late Victorian storefront with two yellow awnings contrasting with the stained blue siding and ferns in the windows, now looked like a war zone. If only I could forget the way it looked before. I remembered too vividly the newly sanded hemlock floors, the quaint tin ceiling that Eden had spent hours detailing with gold paint, the open staircase with its delicate wrought iron-railing. The way the morning light made the room glow. The wine and cheese receptions, the laughter. All these images haunted me, echoes of the obliterated past.
I had worked the phones as much as I could between customers yesterday, trying to get some information on Ray Tantro. I had found an old listing through the local library of an article in an art magazine. The library in Cheyenne faxed it to me. Dated October 1974, it showed a young Tantro in a dark silhouette against a window in his Montana studio. Outside the mountains were graceful and commanding. The same could be said for young Tantro at the peak of his powers.
Eden had finally returned to the gallery after lunch, exhausted from trying to gather together her tenuous finances. She was too busy, she said, to talk to me about the appraisal. We would get to it tonight, I hoped. There wasn't much to it, but the lack of information on Tantro was disturbing. How much detail did Charlie Frye want? How little could I bear in good conscience?
I stood in the back doorway of Timberwolf Arts and wrinkled my sore nose. The smell of wet carbon, both acrid and sweet, was thick in the air. Rex Scanlon, Teton County fire investigator, slogged through the sticky, charred mess in pea green irrigation boots. Wearing jeans and a work shirt, Scanlon was well built like most firemen, but sagging a little. Despite the arsons over the years in Jackson, I'd never worked with him. He carried a clipboard and set a duffle bag next to the alley door.
"If you'll follow me," he said formally, then looked at my old, formerly white, leather athletic shoes. "Are those washable?" I nodded. I had washed them many times, being the type who gets attached to her clothes. My clothes and I need history together. Oh, the places we've been. I woke up this morning feeling better, still sore but rested and eager to dig into this assignment. My nose gave me the go-ahead. It now only resembled a battered banana. I followed Scanlon as he turned into the depths of the gallery.
The main room was the worst. I stood in the doorway from the back hall and stared. The floor was black with puddles of water standing in low spots on the warped wood boards. The walls, once pristine white, now were streaked with gray and black, Sheetrock sagged off them in slabs where the water from the fire hoses had hit hard. The pressed-tin ceiling was in decent shape, still showing a little of its green and gold color. The brass chandelier in the center of the old room lay smashed on the floor. Wires dangled from the spot where it hung. I wondered aloud if the building was safe.
Scanlon glanced back at me, then at the ceiling. "Safe enough. Power's shut off. I wouldn't go upstairs though." He stopped in the middle of the room near some unidentifiable debris. I tried to remember what had been in that spot. A chair, I thought, overstuffed variety. A floor lamp with a fringed shade and a small table. "You're just interested in the art? That's what Charlie said."
I nodded, venturing out into the room. The floor felt slick. The smell of wet ash and charred wood permeated everything. "I will need to go upstairs. Eden said she has a closet up there with some stuff in it."
Scanlon shook his head before turning his focus elsewhere. "Let us check it out first. Most of the art's down here, right?"
I agreed, taking out my notebook. I tried to count the canvases, most of which still showed a little pigment through burns, water damage, and smoky ash. All had fallen off the wall to the floor and been stomped on by firemen in their rush to put out the fire. I was relieved I disliked these paintings; seeing art destroyed did not make my day. It was sad what had happened to these paintings, but not mortally so. They could have been Picassos, although with Eden's luck, I doubted it.
Examining and measuring and counting and cataloguing, I made my way around the room, vaguely aware that Scanlon was concentrating on something else. The back room revealed a small stash of prints, most worth little to begin with. They had been ruined by water. I counted them, made notes of their sticker prices, and looked around for more. When I came back out into the main gallery, Scanlon was talking to a policeman. His brown shirt and pants blended into the shadows. They had their heads down, gesturing and looking at the floor. Their voices were low as they moved together and examined the floor again. They pointed at an odd marking on the wall, an arc of black ash.
The fire investigator had been in the news regularly whenever our local arsonist struck. In the paper he looked weary and disappointed. I had assumed it was because of the fires, but now I had the feeling that he always looked that way. Maybe it came from seeing so much. He had that hangdog look today. Scanlon and the policeman walked toward me, deep in discussion.
"I think you're right, Scan," the cop said, clapping Scanlon on the back.
"We'll know more when we get the samples back," Scanlon said, looking startled as he saw me, as if he had forgotten I was there. "Ah, Alix Thorssen, this is Gary Hayden."
I shook the policeman's hand. It was a big hand. Better than average haircut for a cop but of the type.
"She's doing the insurance work for Charlie," Scanlon explained.
"Well, then," Hayden grinned, puffing out his chest, "you're probably wasting your time."
Scanlon frowned, flicking his eyes to the policeman. "I don't think we can make speculations to the public at this time, Gary."
"Oh, oh, sure," Hayden said, nudging Scanlon with his elbow. Rex looked at me, with You see what I have to deal with? in his eyes. "Sure, we'll keep it under our hats till the reports come back. Give it your best shot, Scan-man."
Rex and I watched Hayden go out the back door and spend a good minute wiping his boots on a piece of wet carpet in the alley. When he finally left I turned to Scanlon. But he had returned to the center of the room.
"What was that supposed to mean?" I asked, looking at the charred debris next to where Scanlon kneeled. It came to me then that this had to be the spot where the body had bee n. Where Tantro had burned to death.