Painted Truth Page 5

  “Say what?”

  “Do you have a suspect? Or is this Tantro the one?” An impatient voice.

  Frye took over. “We don’t think Mr. Tantro would have been capable of the arson at this time.”

  “Why not?”

  “Margaret?” Frye held out his hand for the woman behind them to step forward. “This is Margaret Elliot, county coroner.”

  Margaret was a fiftyish woman with steel gray hair in tight permed curls around her pale face. Her air was one of officiousness, propriety, right down to her thick ankles. Her lips were colored a hideous peach, an impertinent slash across her iron countenance.

  “The victim had a high blood level of barbiturates, pentobarbital, to be exact.”

  “How high?”

  Margaret blinked at the interruption. “About two grams. High enough to cause respiratory failure, circulatory collapse, and coma. Even if he hadn’t had a blood-alcohol level of point one-oh.”

  Charlie interrupted Margaret, who clamped her mouth shut irritably. “We found liquor bottles and a syringe at the scene, consistent with the coroner’s findings. Excuse me, Margaret.” He smiled at her, waving gallantly for her to continue.

  She nodded her reluctant acceptance. “As I was saying, we suspect the victim plotted to take his own life by injecting a lethal dose of barbiturates and drinking alcohol. A common and fatal combination.”

  “Did you do the autopsy, Ms. Elliot?” a reporter said.

  “No, that would be Dr. Miller,” she said.

  “Will there be an inquest?”

  “Yes,” Frye said. “Tomorrow. But we expect no further evidence to surface. It will be ruled a suicide.”

  As Frye and entourage disappeared back into the building and the reporters filed out the door, I had a few more questions. Who had set the fires? Wasn’t the motive for the fire as important as the motive for Tantro’s suicide? And what was that? There were so many things left hanging. I waited as the news people packed up, muttering.

  Ten more minutes passed before I could get one of the secretaries to take me back to see Charlie about the appraisal. When I arrived in what passed for the squad room—a dirty white coffee room with a metal desk shared by the two policemen—the police chief was talking to Scanlon over a cup of coffee. I waited at the door, trying to eavesdrop nonchalantly. At last, Scanlon looked up.

  “Hi, Rex,” I said, trying to be pleasant. “Charlie, can I talk to you for a minute? I’ve got this appraisal.”

  Rex excused himself as Charlie sat on the edge of the desk, pushing aside a dying plant and a framed picture of towheaded kids.

  “I can’t be doing this insurance crap,” Charlie sighed, setting down his coffee cup to rub his face. “I got all I can do here with fires and people dying. And all these dick-heads that work for me can think about is jaywalking and loose horses.”

  He wouldn’t have enjoyed that press conference. Unpleasant death was never fun. He should have stayed in insurance. But fires and dying were part of that too.

  “Will Dalton be back soon? Maybe I should just wait and talk to him,” I offered, seeing a way out of my own problem of the inadequate appraisal.

  “Who the fuck knows?” Charlie took a sip of coffee. “His mama got sick in Gillette. Supposed to be dying. I can’t very well tell him to get his rear end back here till she buys the ranch.” He looked at me for the first time. “What the hell happened to you?”

  My hand flew to my undereye decor. “A little mishap with the business end of a paddle.”

  “Jesus, looks like the way I feel,” he said, frowning. “Anyway, I wish I knew when Dalton was getting back. When his mama dies, I suppose.”

  More people dying. It must be getting to Charlie. “Bad weekend?”

  He sighed, the bags under his eyes slightly violet, a nice complement to my own hues. He stared at the file in my hands. “Let me see it.”

  I pulled it to my chest. “I was thinking of working on it some more. Scanlon wouldn’t let me go upstairs. I couldn’t get any comparisons for the art. That Tantro …” I shook my head. “Did you find out anything about him?”

  “Not much. His mother came up and identified him, but she wouldn’t say much.”

  “Came up from where?”

  “South. Star Valley, I think. She was pretty broke up.”

  “Is she going to bury him down there?”

  “Cremation, I think she said. Makes sense.” He raised his furry eyebrows to make the point. I got it.

  “Maybe I could talk to her for the appraisal. If I could find out what some of his recent stuff has been going for it would be better. You know, the prices he and Eden put on that stuff were pretty far-fetched.”

  Charlie was barely listening. He nodded and sipped, somewhere else.

  “Doesn’t really matter now, Alix.” He paused and looked up. “The A word—arson.”

  “So somebody torched the place. You mean the insurance is no good if someone burns you out?” The thought gave me a serious chill. “What about Jack Dennis?” When Jack’s sporting goods shop had burned a few years ago, he relocated across the square and was back in business within months. “I always thought, I mean, didn’t his insurance pay?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Not mine, but from what I hear that one was the pyro. But listen, hon. There is one main reason for arson. That is for the owner to collect. You may not want to think that about your friend, but open those big blue eyes and smell the coffee.”

  I squinted instead. Smell coffee with my eyes? “You don’t seriously think Eden burned down her own gallery?”

  “Don’t know. She’s a suspect. Being the owner, she’s at the top of the list.”

  “But that gallery meant the world to her.” I thought of her sobbing in my arms. “Anyway, she was with me, down in the canyon.”

  “Nobody was nearby by the time the place went up. Didn’t you hear Scanlon?”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “Somebody planned their alibi. It was very slick.” He ran his hand over the brush of gray on his scalp, sighing again.

  “If it was so slick, how come Ray Tantro was found burned to a crisp inside?”

  “Okay, listen, Miss Alix Thorssen. You keep working on the appraisal. It may come out like Jack’s place, the happy pyro. Who knows? But tell Ms. Chaffee to start counting her pennies and getting her lawyer lined up.” He slurped his coffee and looked at me over the rim of the plastic cup. “Now get out of here.”

  5

  SINCE WE BROKE up I often think about how Paolo Segundo and I ever got together. We were both living in New York, which is a prescription for never meeting anyone attractive who isn’t married or gay. Maybe it was just the shock of finding someone handsome and available that threw me over. I used to come into the gallery where he worked in the Village, and we’d talk about the paintings, what we liked, what we were doing ourselves. Both of us still dabbled then. I was slaving at the Met, taking tickets and seeing all the installations for free, and in my spare time trying to get the colors mixed right on my own palette. Paolo’s paintings were terrible. Violent like something he had to get out of his system. In person he was gentle, very sweet. But he had a tumultuous history. His family in Argentina was powerful and wealthy. They owned a huge ranch, kept a string of polo ponies, were active in politics. Paolo went to an expensive prep school until he was sixteen and his father was murdered in a coup led by the army. His mother, sister, and he fled to Costa Rica. They sent him to the U.S. for college. He went to Columbia for a year, until the money ran out. The art gallery was his sixth or seventh job but one that he succeeded the best in because of the absolute inability of rich women to withstand the onslaught of his charm.

  Okay, the same could be said for me. I fell for him like a ton of bricks, madly. He moved into my apartment within two hours. All right, two weeks. When we decided to move to Jackson, it was as if we had embarked on our personal mission of the soul, our life journey. We would travel in each other’s shoes. This was it.

>   Of course, we never legalized it. It never occurred to either of us. But the point came when I couldn’t tolerate the other women. I suppose they had always been there. I must have refused to see them, but all at once that was the only thing I could see.

  We still worked well together, victims of habit, of knowing each other’s strengths. But it wasn’t what it had been, and there was no denying that.

  In the afternoon, Paolo asked me to come over to his place for a drink that evening. I thought he wanted to talk about the Ditolla prints and what I’d done about them. We were in the gallery, enjoying a lull in the afternoon traffic.

  “We have to talk,” he said, grabbing my arm while a couple in matching Eddie Bauer outfits, duck boots to camouflage hats, debated the merits of a group of hand-colored intaglios by a Native American artist from Montana. She thought the green one would go better in the bathroom. He liked the power in the orange one.

  Paolo and I stood in the doorway to my office. I felt the heat of his hand on my arm unexpectedly and jerked it away. I don’t like people touching me unaware, even Paolo. To let him touch me would be to admit a lot of things I wasn’t ready for.

  “Why do you do that?” Paolo frowned.

  “Do what?”

  “Pull away like I got cooties or somezing.” His accent hardened when he was angry.

  I turned from my desk, sighing. “What is it you want?”

  “Just to have a drink and talk. Is that so much?” He glanced out at the Eddie Bauers, smiling at them in his sweet, phony way, and turned back to me. “We are partners. We need to talk.”

  “Isn’t this talking?”

  “You are so busy, in and out, in and out. Talk, talk, talk on the phone. What are you working on?”

  “The Ray Tantro appraisal. For Eden’s settlement. Did you see my little Tantro?” I pointed to it propped up on my desk. Paolo leaned over to look at it.

  “Nice. I remember it from your apartment in New York. That one time you let me stay over.” He straightened, heat in his eyes.

  “It was more than once, I seem to recall.”

  “Do you, now?” His smirk was self-satisfied. I was sure he would have continued, his machismo heating up notch by notch, but just then the Eddie Bauers picked the green bathroom print and wanted it wrapped.

  PAOLO LIVED IN a house he’d bought after moving out of my apartment a couple of years ago. The small, creamy white bungalow with a rose-colored door sat at the base of Snow King Mountain, in an area of town where you were just as likely to see a guy living in a camper up on blocks as a family living in a renovated, gingerbread Victorian with a white picket fence. When Paolo bought the house, it had been a rental for twenty years and showed every year of wear and tear. Holes in the walls, ancient, food-encrusted range, no refrigerator, leaking toilets, and bad plumbing.

  But it had charm. I remember the day he took me to see it, about a week after he’d bought it. Even through the mess and stench of the four ski bums who were camped out in it, the charm was real. Carved woodwork, a real wood banister curving up to dormered bedrooms upstairs, wood floors, all the nuts and bolts for a great place. Not big, just three rooms down and two up, but perfect for a single guy. Hell, I’d even helped paint the walls three shades of peach, I’d been so eager to prove that we could be friends after the romance was over.

  I sunk into the mauve leather sofa that felt like butter in a bed of feathers, a gin and tonic in my hand. The kitchen door was open to the backyard, a handkerchief lawn with wonderful flower beds Paolo had been working on little by little, getting them into shape like an athlete readying for a marathon. Minutes before I had walked around in them in the soft evening light, admiring the white phlox, the orange-faced pansies, the astilbe, tall and proud under the aspen by the back fence. This was the kind of solitude I needed. I imagined the backyard of my own dream cabin, filled with flowers and birds and scents hanging on the breeze like sugar candy.

  The gin and tonic stung my tongue, not unpleasantly. Paolo sat down on the edge of an antique oval-backed chair covered in exquisite needlepoint. He looked at me intensely, and I squirmed a little under his stare.

  “Alix.” He ran his hand through his black hair. He wore jeans and an orange silk shirt, as casual as he ever got. I had wondered about the clothes when I came in. He used to dress that way years ago, for me.

  “You’re scaring me, kid,” I said, trying to tease him and convince myself it wasn’t true.

  He leaned back and crossed his legs. “Sorry. This is just hard for me to say.”

  “You’ve got a disease.” I smiled to show him it was just a joke. “I warned you about that.”

  “This is serious, Alix.” He took a sip of his drink. “Okay, here it is. I’ve been thinking of selling my share of the gallery.”

  He gave his sweet smile, covered with apologetic dark eyes. He was serious. I couldn’t believe it. I could imagine him telling me he was getting married, or buying a new car, or wanting a month off to visit his mother, or climbing Mount Everest. But not this.

  “Say something,” he said, looking sheepish.

  “Okay. You can’t. I won’t let you. You have to sell to me or nobody. That was our agreement.”

  “Okay, I sell to you.”

  I blinked. “I don’t have the money, Paolo. You know that.” I stared at the lime in my drink. “You don’t need the money, do you? I thought your relatives sent you that pile when your grandmother died.”

  “You’re looking at it.” He waved his hand to indicate the bungalow he loved so much.

  “All of it’s gone?”

  He nodded, glum.

  “But what would you do?”

  “Go back to the city. To New York. You know I miss it. This place is too… you know, too rustic for me.”

  I felt empty, the gin now churning in my stomach. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine my life without Paolo. I was proud of my independence, and fiercely protective. Still my mind resisted the notion of being free of him.

  “Listen,” I said, “if this is about Martin’s paintings, and all that, I’m working on it. I’m speaking to him tomorrow about it. I’ll explain and—”

  “Have you set up an appointment with him?”

  “Well, no, but I plan to. I couldn’t take it on my conscience, knowing and not telling him. I’ve just been so busy with the Tantro appraisal.”

  Paolo sighed, his shoulders sagging. “This is part of it. We don’t have the same focus anymore. Remember when we worked together, when everything we did was for us, for the gallery?” I was stunned by his emotion, his dismissal. He held his fist half clenched as if clutching at something just out of reach. “Now you do your thing, your appraisals and stolen art and all that. That’s fine. But I want to do my thing too. I remember that, Alix. And I need that kind of commitment again. No, no, not from you.” He must have seen my eyes bug out. “Commitment to my work, to my art, to nurturing artists. I need that.”

  “And you’re not getting that here?” I said quietly.

  He went to the back window, then turned back. “I’ve tried, Alix. It has been grand, good, whatever you call it. But my heart isn’t in it anymore.” He walked out the kitchen door into the garden and sat on a wrought-iron bench in the grass next to stately blue delphiniums. I followed, sitting beside him.

  “Remember the time we hung all those abstracts, the ones by that weirdo from Idaho—what was his name?” I smiled.

  “Vincent?”

  “Yeah. With the Van Gogh complex.” I laughed, remembering. “We hung them all upside down by mistake and when Vincent came in for the reception he was half crocked. Remember? He didn’t even notice for about an hour.”

  Paolo smiled. “Then he exploded. The prima donna.”

  “Threw his drink against the wall. We had to repaint. And you were so worried he was going to cut off his ear.” I laughed too hard, too long. Then it was silent again, with the gulf of years shared and not shared. “Maybe we just need to regroup, Paolo,” I said
softly. He looked at the flowers mournfully. The night air was heavy and still. “I want to nurture artists too. We want the same things.”

  He shook his head. ‘This thing has been inside me for months. The time has come.”

  He had made up his mind. What could I say to change a stubborn Argentine’s decision? I felt hollow and tried to take a deep breath of the cool mountain air. I hated change. I felt sick.

  Paolo turned to me, examining my face as he held my shoulders in his hands. “You don’t need me. You know that. We have …” He paused and frowned. “Stop with those sad eyes.” He pulled me toward him and tenderly kissed my eyes. “There, now. Better?”

  I pulled away and stood up. I would be fine without Paolo. It was just such a shock. We had been operating independently for some time. I would survive. “Don’t start—it’ll be all right, Paolo. I understand. I really do. I just need to know your plans. What you want to do.” I heard myself talk, talk, to calm the hurricane blowing inside me.

  He stood up and we walked together back toward the kitchen door. The lines on his face deepened as he took my arm. “I know somebody who might be interested in my half. Someone you know, you get along with. I think it would work. Of course, you have to agree.”

  We stepped into the kitchen. I turned to him in the harsh light, frowning. “I don’t know if I could have another partner. You’ve spoiled me, Pao—” A lump formed in my throat. As I swallowed hard, trying to maintain composure, the doorbell saved me. There on the threshold was Eden Chaffee dressed in something new, a black, floaty number with skintight legs and chiffon over. She swept into the room, bubbling about the beautiful evening, then saw us staring morosely at the floor.

  “Well, Alix, I didn’t expect to find you here,” she said, a touch of jealousy in her voice. Paolo caught it too, looking quickly at me, then smiling wanly at Eden.