Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

Terence Faherty’s new story for EQMM introduces to the magazine a character who has already appeared in several novels, one of which won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award. Series sleuth Scott Elliott is a former actor and World War Two veteran who finds employment, in 1950’s Hollywood, with a security firm. In this outing, the firm’s client sends him on an errand in the wild countryside of New Mexico.

1

“But there was a vase once. It just got rubbed off.”

“Nope. No vase.”

Patrick J. Maguire, known to about everyone in the Hollywood of 1950 as Paddy Maguire, was sceptical. He set down his drink — three fingers of Irish whiskey, neat — and got up from his chair, no small job in itself. He crossed to the table where the painting was propped up in a splash of evening light, bent at the waist, and stared at it, his cigar held respectfully behind his back.

“Painted over?” he asked.

“Never there,” the second speaker, one Torrance Beaumont, said with a wink at me. Beaumont was a tough-guy movie star with a taste for the better things in life. He’d been to our offices, the offices of the Hollywood Security Agency, once before to drink and smoke an evening away. Then the subject had been the death of a human being and the likely death of a motion picture. Tonight we were discussing fine art, a restful change of pace.

Paddy snorted and returned to his seat, unblocking my view of the unframed canvas. He could have single-handedly blocked a pair of paintings its size: about two feet by two and a half. Mostly it was a cityscape, a stylized one, the towering buildings only black and gray slabs. There was a suggestion of a windowsill in the foreground and a smudge of river in the distance, a gray, dead river. All of that you noticed by and by. What caught your eye was the rose, a perfect red one, suspended in the gray air above the sill. It was this feat of levitation that offended my employer, whose taste in art ran toward stags, at bay and otherwise.

Paddy cleared his throat. “Mind if I ask what you paid for it?”

Beaumont surprised me by telling him, and the figure made Paddy whistle. I was tempted to myself.

“Worth every nickel, if it really is by Gladys Glenn Racine,” the actor said. “Know her?”

“Do we, Scotty?”

I tried to rouse myself. It had been a long day. “Modern artist. Lives in the Southwest somewhere. New Mexico, I think. Paints desert landscapes and flowers and cow skulls, bleached.”

“That’s why I keep coming back here,” Beaumont said. “The tone. Also the liquor.”

He leaned forward so Paddy could refill his glass. As he poured, my boss attacked the painting from a new direction. “That’s no desert landscape. It looks like a view of the East River from a cold-water flat.”

“Very perceptive,” Beaumont replied. “This happens to be from Racine’s New York period. Early nineteen twenties. Back then she was the protégée of a windbag poet named Hiram Kinkade. He’d found her painting away down in Texas and talked her into coming to New York so the world could get a look at her. And so she could warm up Kinkade’s bed, not coincidentally.

“She never fit in very well in Gotham. You can see that in this little gem. She was still painting the canyons and mesas she loved, but in the guise of skyscrapers. She painted them in funereal colors because she’d lost them. And she injected bits of nature, like this rose, to point up how dead the rest of her world was.”

Our lecturer sipped his drink self-consciously and added, “That’s what my Ph.D. art dealer told me anyway. Around 1925, she got fed up with it all, burned most of her paintings, and moved back West. The only New York pieces that survived were the ones in private collections, like this one.”

“So the survivors are worth a pile,” said Paddy, who understood supply and demand as well as the next man. “What’s the problem?”

Beaumont was lighting himself a cigarette. I wondered if the timing of that was a coincidence or if, after so many years spent acting in melodramas, he automatically inserted the pregnant pause.

“The problem is, Racine didn’t always sign her work. Especially her early work. The experts say this is a Racine, and that would be enough if she were dead. But she’s alive and rich and crotchety. She saw a photo of this painting in the catalogue of the dealer who sold it to me. Ever since then, she’s been telling all her artist cronies that it’s a fake, the hack work of an art student she’d had underfoot back then, a Mabel Tuohy. According to the aforementioned dealer, the painting did come from this Tuohy’s estate.”

“So you want us to talk with the art dealer regarding a refund?” Paddy asked, seizing what he took to be a handle on the situation.

Beaumont showed his teeth in his trademark grin as he shook his head. “No. I don’t want you to bump off Miss Racine, either. After a lot of haggling, she’s agreed to look at the actual painting. I want young Mr. Elliott here to take it to her. In Agujero, New Mexico.”

“Me?” I was roused now but good. “Why don’t you go yourself?”

“ ’Cause I’m off to Africa in the morning. Four weeks of bugs and bad food just to get a little footage we would have shot in a couple of afternoons on the back lot at Warners in the good old days.

“Besides, I’m counting on the Elliott charm to soften the old girl up.”

“Why would she need softening?” I asked. “Either she painted the damn thing or she didn’t.”

“Nothing’s that simple. Not in the art world. There’s always been this rumor floating around about Racine’s real reason for leaving New York. Seems she might have found her poet lover in bed with another woman. Mabel Tuohy, to be precise.”

2

Late the next afternoon, I kissed Ella, my very pregnant wife, goodbye and caught a Santa Fe Railroad sleeper out of Union Station. I switched to a local in Albuquerque for the short hop north to the railroad’s namesake city, which, ironically, was no longer on the main line.

Santa Fe was a sleepy town and squat, the buildings no taller than the trees and everything dwarfed by the surrounding mountains. I didn’t waste much time rubbernecking. I’d gotten my fill of scenery as I’d breakfasted on the Super Chief. Most of the passing territory had been brown and barren, the month being February. A very dry February, according to the character in the Gene Autry shirt who rented me an old Ford coupe with canvas bags of emergency radiator water slung across its hood.

Gene gave me directions to Agujero, telling me to drive north to Española, make a left, and keep going until I came to a town.

“Suppose I don’t come to a town?” I asked.

“Then drive till you see an ocean. You’ll be back in California. Sell the car and wire me the money.”

New Mexico through the Ford’s windshield was an improvement over what I’d seen through a train window. A few miles north of Santa Fe, the mountains came close enough for me to spot the snow in their shaded folds. There were dark blue mesas and towering pink buttes that would have set John Ford’s heart atwitter. The foreground was still dry sage and drier grass, but there were pine trees for variety, hundreds of fat ones, widely spaced and the height of a man on horseback.

Great country for an ambush, I thought, and the feeling stayed with me.

Agujero’s suburbs was a stand of cottonwood trees along a stony riverbed. The downtown consisted of a collection of adobe buildings around an adobe church. Exactly two human beings were in sight, men in straw hats who were drinking beer from cans in the middle of the main drag. I thought of asking them for one, but settled for directions to Gladys Glenn Racine’s house.

What I found just north of town was more a compound than a house. The buildings were one story and adobe, the main ones surrounded by a low mud wall that was itself surrounded by the best stand of trees I’d seen since leaving Santa Fe’s plaza: oaks and spruce and a giant mulberry.

I parked outside the waist-high outer wall and walked to an inner one, a wall of the house itself. It was holding up an old wooden gate right out of a Zorro movie. The Fairbanks silent version, not the Tyrone Power talkie. There was a man-size door set in the gate. I knocked on it, though I’d already seen some movement through gaps between the weathered boards.

Sure enough, the door was opened right away by a young man who made me think the gateway might be a shortcut back to Hollywood. He was handsome in the way old Hollywood had defined the term for the world, his features small and fine, his hair and brows black, his eyes not much lighter. His smile, on the other hand, was a pre-nicotine white, set off by a complexion that was a shade my side of Cesar Romero.

Tastes in leading men had changed since the war, as I knew from bitter experience. Pretty boys like Jose — as he introduced himself — could be found in every menial job around movieland. Jose had found his in Agujero. He was Gladys Glenn Racine’s assistant. And student, he added bashfully. I couldn’t help thinking of the late Mabel Tuohy.

“Torrance Beaumont wired us you were coming,” Jose said, mouthing the actor’s name reverently. He led me across an inner courtyard and through the room on its far side, the living room, Jose called it, though the only furnishings were adobe benches that flowed out of the whitewashed walls. When artificial light was needed, it was provided by a naked bulb that hung by its cord from the ceiling.

We exited through the back of the house and followed a pebbled walk to a smaller, lower outbuilding. “Gladys’s studio,” Jose said.

Also her bedroom. Off the entryway that Jose ushered me through, I caught a glimpse of a cot. The monk’s cell that held it was the size of the sleeping compartment the Santa Fe Railroad had rented me the previous evening.

Then I was in the equally barren studio, in the presence of the great woman herself. Gladys Glenn Racine was sixty-something and looked every day of it. Her straight gray hair was pulled back from a face that was all sharp edges and severe angles. Her skin was as sun-damaged as any I’d seen, and I lived in a town that worshipped the sun like nobody since the Aztecs.

Racine was seated on a stool before an easel, wearing an untucked and faded blue shirt and dungarees that looked brand new. She was facing the easel’s canvas, giving me the benefit of her hawk’s-bill profile. The artist acknowledged Jose’s presence first, flashing him a smile that took ten years off her. Twenty maybe. I received a damped-down version and a question.

“What do you think of my home, Mr. Elliott?”

“It’s a touch underfurnished,” I said. Never too early to get off on the wrong foot.

Racine’s voice was high and flat, and so was her laugh. Even so, it got Jose smiling. “Exactly as I like things,” she said. “Underfurnished. The more empty space you have, the more beauty can sneak in.”

She glanced toward the window behind her, and I realized that the subject had switched from her house to her adopted land. There was certainly a lot of empty space in sight, most of it deep blue sky. The lower half of the view consisted of chalky cliffs, which were represented on Racine’s canvas by wavy white lines.

“I’ll be in shortly, Jose,” she said.

He bowed and left us, taking the artist’s warmth with him.

“Is that the painting?” she asked, pointing to the flat case Beaumont had provided, the one that had made me feel like a traveling checkerboard salesman. “Leave it, please.”

When I hesitated, she said, “Don’t worry. I won’t throw paint on it. For one thing, that would make it a genuine Racine. At least in the minds of some critics. I’ll give you my verdict at dinner.”

“I’d hoped to be back in Santa Fe by then,” I said ungraciously. “Nonsense. It will be dark soon. You don’t want to drive that road in the dark. You can get a room for the night at the cantina. We dine at eight.”

3

I looked for Jose outside the studio, but he wasn’t there. Without him, I was hesitant to reenter the house. I circled it instead, passing several dormant garden patches connected by stone-lined irrigation ditches that looked as old as the adobe walls.

I made a left when those walls turned and entered the grove of trees I’d admired as I’d parked the Ford. As soon as I did, I spotted Jose standing near the trunk of the tallest oak. With him was a young woman who, for looks and coloring, might have been his sister. Might have been, except for the way he was holding her, which was tightly enough to knock her bright red shawl off her bare shoulders.

I altered course toward the setting sun to give the couple back a little of their privacy. As I did, Jose nodded to me, nervously. The woman just stared me down, imperious, though all of eighteen.

The Lost Mine Cantina had a room ready and waiting for me, having been forewarned by Jose, who had actually flashed the proprietor Torrance Beaumont’s telegram. My host’s name was Reyes, and he pumped me for information about Beaumont and other Hollywood lights while I sat at the cantina’s bar. I was content to be pumped, since Reyes’s beer was ice cold and I was waiting for a long-distance call to Ella to go through on the Lost Mine’s — and Agujero’s — only telephone. Besides which, Reyes was pushing fifty, and the stars he asked about were the ones I was fondest of, the ones who’d been big when I’d first hit Hollywood in the thirties.

In exchange for my gossip, Reyes, who was a short man with grizzled hair around his ears and none elsewhere on his scalp, told me the history of his cantina, how it had prospered back when the local silver mine had been worked and how he hoped it would prosper again. Those hopes rested on the Atomic Energy Commission, which was buying up a lot of land nearby, and on Gladys Glenn Racine, who had told Reyes of her plan to found an artists’ colony. While he talked, I examined the blackened tree trunks that served as the room’s ceiling beams and ran a finger along the rough scrollwork carved into the varnished boards of the bar. And I thought that the Lost Mine would be a hopping joint if the physicists and the flower painters showed up on the same night.

Reyes excused himself after drawing my second beer. I passed the time by working out what I’d tell Ella, not that I had much to tell. Toward the end of the beer, I got around to noticing that the cantina was filling up. That is to say, a dozen people, some of them genuinely elderly, had wandered in. It was my stomach that first alerted me to the change. A woman was ferrying platters of food between a back room and a long table set up in front of a modest bandstand. The food’s spicy fragrance was singing a siren song that overcame the empty space between the buffet and my lonely end of the bar.

I looked over my shoulder, willing the long-distance operator to ring the office phone before the party started and I ended up on some grandmother’s dance card. When I gave it up and looked back, Reyes was on the bandstand, calling the proceedings to order.

“Friends,” he said. “I’ve asked you here tonight to share some happy news. Some very happy news. I am to be married. Hector and Esperanza Baerga have consented to give me the hand of their lovely daughter Maria.”

Under the cover of more murmuring than applause, Reyes motioned for the Baergas to join him onstage. A man who ate no fat climbed up, followed, after an awkward interval, by the wife who ate no lean. She had the reluctant bride-to-be in tow. I’d missed the girl’s entrance, probably while I’d been willing the phone to boil. Now I recognized the young beauty of the red shawl, whom I’d seen in Jose’s arms less than an hour earlier.

I retrieved my hat from the stool beside me and slipped it on, tugging the brim down low. Maybe there’d be something to tell Ella after all, I thought.

4

A little before eight I walked the short distance to Racine’s house under more stars than MGM had bragged of in its glory days. I’d only packed the lightest of topcoats, having forgotten how the high desert bleeds its heat away at sunset. I drew the coat tight and set a healthy pace and still found myself knocking on the old wooden gate with some urgency when I finally reached it.

A less chipper Jose answered my knock. I understood his change of mood, so I didn’t ask him about it. We again entered the house through the bus-station living room, where the apprentice took my coat and hat. Then he led me through a connecting doorway whose height forced us both to duck our heads.

On the other side was the dining room, where a mesquite fire burned in a tiny hearth. The narrow table was custom built of plywood. It was painted white, as were the mismatched chairs. Above the table hung a Japanese paper lantern of white and red.

Three places were set and set elaborately, the china so fine it was almost translucent and the silver heavy, each piece ending in a twisted silver handle topped by a turquoise knob. Jose stationed me at the end of the plywood nearest the living room and left me. He returned with Racine on his arm. She was wearing a simple black dress and a silver belt with links the size of quarters. Under her free arm, she carried Beaumont’s painting. Jose took the canvas from her without a word and placed it on a shelf overlooking the unset side of the table. Our fourth for dinner.

Racine didn’t greet me or comment on the painting. I was in no hurry to ask her about it, now that I was stuck in Agujero for the night. In any case, I was more curious about the grin she was grinning. If she’d been a cat, I’d have patted her down for canary feathers. Her eyes kept stealing to the forlorn Jose, who had taken the seat between us after filling the wineglasses.

“I hear you had some excitement down at the cantina,” the artist finally began. “Paul Reyes announcing his engagement to our local beauty, Maria Baerga. Quite the social event of the season.”

For a second I was sure she didn’t know how much that announcement had cost Jose. Before I could tip her, something in her wicked grin tipped me, told me she knew all about it, that she was twisting the knife deliberately and loving it. The victim drained his wineglass as she rattled on.

“She worked here for quite some time, Maria. Until very recently. I had to let her go. She’d become headstrong. Disruptive.”

While our soup — a corn chowder — was being served by a woman whose wrinkles topped Racine’s, the artist picked up a thread of our earlier conversation in her studio.

“Do you remember me saying that I couldn’t splash paint on that canvas you brought because some critics would then dub it a genuine Racine? I wasn’t joking. That’s the level to which some art criticism has descended. I’ve always been careful to destroy my failures and sketches for fear the collectors would snatch them up. But the other day I was applying a fresh coat of wash to this table,” — she laid the long fingers of her left hand down beside her straw place mat — “and it occurred to me that I’d have to leave instructions for the table to be burned when I die. Otherwise it might end up in some New York gallery: ‘Painted by Gladys Glenn Racine during her furniture period.’ ”

“Just tell people your assistant painted it,” I said, not taking my eyes off her grin. It didn’t lose a watt.

“Do you know what’s wrong with an aesthetic sense that can’t tell this table from a work of art?” Racine asked. “It has things exactly backwards. It defines art as something — anything — an artist produces. Backwards. An artist is someone who manages to create art. The work justifies the title of artist, the title doesn’t sanctify the work.”

She turned her haughty profile toward the disputed canvas for the first time. “Do you think that bestows the title of artist on its creator?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Because it’s beautiful?”

“No. Because it holds out the promise of beauty. In a world that isn’t beautiful. The artist found something wonderful in an unlikely spot. That’s the proof of it.”

The soup bowls left and baked chicken arrived. It had less flavor than the air back at the Lost Mine.

Racine picked at her plate for a time. Her grin was gone, and I wasn’t sure why. Then she said, “So you’re an advocate after all, and not just a delivery boy. But your eye is no better than Torrance Beaumont’s. That so-called painting is a fake. A fake Racine. It’s a genuine Mabel Tuohy, not that that name means anything to the world.”

“Mabel Tuohy?” I repeated. Then I took a bite of chicken I could chew contemplatively. My business for Beaumont was a bust, so there was no reason not to strike a blow for the heartsick Jose. “Seems I’ve heard of her. Wasn’t she the mistress of a second-rate poet named Kinkade? Hiram Kinkade? Maybe the rose represents his iambic pentameter.”

Racine came close to dropping her heavy fork on her fragile plate. She gathered herself and said, “Dinner is ended, Mr. Elliott. Take your painting and go.”

5

I returned to the Lost Mine with the painting tucked away in the case Jose had retrieved for me. As he’d shown me out, the young man had thanked me. I entered the cantina still wondering whether the thanks had been for mouthing off to Racine or for not mentioning the oak tree tryst I’d interrupted earlier in the evening.

Reyes was behind the bar. He waved to me hopefully, but it had been another long day. I went to my room — up a flight of stairs only a little more evolved than a ladder — and climbed out of my suit. I opened the case and set the painting on the washstand. Then I lit a Lucky Strike and settled in for some art appreciation mixed with self-recrimination. Three cigarettes later, I still hadn’t thought of the magic words that would have made Racine acknowledge the painting. But I’d convinced myself that she’d painted it, that she’d denied it for the same reason she’d tortured Jose. Because it had pleased her to.

I gave it up then and went to sleep, making up for all the tossing and turning I’d done on the train the night before. The room was lit by a predawn glow when I awoke, but it wasn’t the light that broke the spell. It was the sound of a woman screaming.

I was on my feet before I realized it, struggling into my pants and heading out the door before I made sense of something I’d seen in the room. I mean, something I hadn’t seen. The rose painting. The washstand where I’d propped it up now held nothing but my shaving kit.

By the time I realized that, I was stumbling down the crude staircase. The screaming was still building to a crescendo when I arrived in the cantina’s main room. The source was the woman who had catered Reyes’s engagement party the evening before. She was standing at the end of the bar, over a figure spread-eagled on the floor. Paul Reyes, dead.

I thought I’d have to slap the woman to break through her terror, but one look at me shut her down completely. That and the arrival of another recent sleeper, who turned out to be her husband and Reyes’s relief bartender. While she stammered to him in Spanish, I examined their late employer.

My lightning assessment of his condition had been based in part on his eyes, which were open and fixed and dull. The second clue was the knife planted in his chest. It was a carving knife from a very nice silver service. A service I recognized, oddly enough. The heavy handle ended in a turquoise orb, like the flatware I’d used at dinner.

“She just found him like that,” the husband said to me. “She didn’t touch him.”

“Good. Where’s the nearest law?”

“Española.”

He went off to make the call, taking his wife with him. I stayed behind to watch Reyes and let my pulse settle. I also gave the knife a second look. It was driven in perpendicular to Reyes’s chest. Exactly so. I checked the bloodstained cloth above and below the blade for some sign that the blow had actually been delivered at an angle, but there was no telltale slit in the fabric.

The bartender came back sans wife. He opened a fresh bottle of bonded whiskey, which he took from beneath the bar. I guessed it to be the owner’s private stock. He poured us each a stiff drink, and we knocked them back without speaking.

I left him to handle the second round alone. I climbed up to my room and searched it for the painting. It was still gone.

6

By L.A. standards, the turnout was light. Two sheriff’s deputies rolled in, followed by the sheriff himself, who was followed in turn by a crack forensics team: a country doctor and a fingerprint man from Santa Fe. The latter found lots of prints around the bar, including mine, but nothing on the knife handle, whose twisted design made it less than an ideal surface. The doctor wasn’t much more help. He said only that Reyes was still dead and that it had probably happened closer to the bar’s midnight closing time than dawn.

I was front and center through most of the preliminary investigation, being the man who had found the woman who had found the body. I was also the guy who had lost an expensive painting around the time Reyes was losing his life, a coincidence even an average sheriff would note.

My sheriff was better than average, from what I saw of his early work. At least he wasn’t prone to posing or bossing people around for the sake of it. His name was Gentry, and he was ex-World War II issue, which is to say, my age. He had a Dick Tracy jaw, which he carried slightly raised, and blue eyes almost as pale as Ella’s, which he wore wide open.

After Reyes had been carted off, Gentry joined me for a late breakfast in a quiet corner of the cantina. The huevos rancheros were served by my friend the screamer, whose name turned out to be Martha. We were pals, Martha and I. I’d shown up when she’d needed me, and she’d gotten me off the hook with my conscience. She’d done it by telling Gentry that the fatal carving knife belonged to Gladys Glenn Racine. Martha was very familiar with the fancy cutlery, her sister being Racine’s wrinkly cook.

Gentry ate a good breakfast, but it didn’t keep him from quizzing me steadily. I didn’t let that ruin my meal. I was a stranger in town. I’d met Reyes. I’d been in the cantina when the murder had taken place. I’d had access to Racine’s knife, at least in theory. And I’d reported a stolen painting. Those were too many interesting bits for the sheriff to ignore, though he was having a hard time fitting them together. During our second cup of coffee, he gave up trying.

“Do you know a Jose Fernandez?” Gentry asked me.

“Racine’s assistant?” I asked back, all innocence. Jose was the reason I’d been hesitant to identify the knife. Jose, whose neck I saw as stuck out a mile. Martha had resolved that moral dilemma, but she’d also given the sheriff an earful of gossip.

“Jose Fernandez is in love with the dead man’s intended, a Maria Baerga,” Gentry confided. “Seems the match was her parents’ idea, with the Racine woman acting as matchmaker. Maria’s opinion wasn’t asked, which made it that much harder for Fernandez to take. The engagement was announced yesterday. Today Reyes is dead.”

“Where does the painting fit in?”

“Dunno. A stack of search warrants is on its way up from Española. Given Miss Racine’s reputation, I figured I’d need a few. In the meantime, I’ve sent for Fernandez. You’re welcome to sit in if you want to.”

I’d related a little of Hollywood Security’s history to Gentry by way of establishing myself as one of the good guys. Too much, maybe, if the sheriff now saw me as an asset. Even so, I took him up on the offer.

Jose came in nervous and got steadily worse. Yes, he knew the knife. No, he didn’t know how it had gotten out of its velvet box and into Reyes. He glanced my way contemptuously when Gentry asked him about Maria. “I love her,” he said. “And she loves me. I don’t care who knows it.” That was all he would say on the subject.

When Gentry ran out of questions, I stepped in. “Been in the service?”

Jose treated it as a silly question, there being few men of draft age who avoided the service in these interesting times. “Of course. The army. Got out six months ago and came here.”

“For Maria Baerga?” Gentry asked.

“No. For a chance to work with Glad — I mean Miss Racine. I met Maria at her house.” He remembered then that he wasn’t talking about Maria and shut up.

Gentry let him go for the moment, there being no place in Agujero to lock him up and no reason to improvise one. A desert town served by a single road was jail enough.

“What’s his military service got to do with this?” the sheriff asked when Jose had gone.

“Were you army?”

“Damn right. Scenic Italy.”

“How’d they teach you to stick a man with a knife?”

Gentry grasped an imaginary bayonet and thrust it upward. “Get in under the rib cage,” he said.

“Reyes’s killer didn’t know to do that.”

“He didn’t have to, with that razor of a knife. Besides, you forget things when you’re in a fit of passion.”

I didn’t like that “fit of passion.” It made it sound like Gentry was already rehearsing for his press conference. “Does a guy in a fit of passion get shorter?”

“Huh?” the sheriff said.

“Jose’s my height. Reyes carried a lot of his height horizontally.”

“Meaning what?”

“If I’d wanted to hit that spot in his chest, I’d have had to strike downward. So would Jose. There’s no sign of a downward blow.”

Gentry took up his make-believe weapon again and practiced a straight thrust from the shoulder. “Someone his height,” he said.

“Or less.”

7

We killed what remained of the morning with a few more interviews. The most interesting was that of Maria Baerga, and not just because she was all shining hair and flashing eyes. She was without her red shawl for once, which left her with only a simple white dress. The color was inappropriate for an almost widow. But Maria denied being one.

“The betrothal was my parents’ doing, not mine. I wanted no part of that. I decided to go away.”

“Alone?”

“Not alone,” she said defiantly. “With Jose Fernandez. We were going to go to California. So there was no reason for Jose to hurt that old man.”

I wondered how serious the plan was, since Jose hadn’t mentioned it in his own defense. But then, he’d gotten touchy on the subject of Maria pretty quickly. I asked, “How did Jose feel about giving up his job with Miss Racine?”

“Job?” Maria all but spat back. “Jose is not her assistant. Not her student even. He is her pet. He knows if he does not want to become more than a pet — worse than a pet — he must leave Agujero too.”

Gentry settled back in his chair, signaling me to carry on now that I’d gotten her dander up. “Why was Gladys Racine involved in your engagement to Reyes?” I asked.

“Because she is an old busybody. Because she sees herself as the great lady and the rest of us as her peons. Because she was jealous of Jose and me.”

“Is that why she fired you?”

“Yes. As old as she is, she still thinks she could have Jose if I were gone. But moving me from her house wasn’t enough. So she got me engaged to a fat old man no girl would look at twice. She would do anything to keep Jose and me apart. If it meant losing Jose herself forever, she would do it, just to deny me.”

Shortly after that pronouncement Maria left us, carrying herself like anything but a peon. Gentry watched her go, shook it off, and said, “Guess it’s time we spoke to the local celebrity.”

By then we were armed with a search warrant. Gentry took along a deputy to do the actual poking around. As the three of us made the hike to Racine’s, the sheriff asked me again about my business with the artist.

He listened carefully to my rundown, and then asked, “If the painting really is hers, could she have wanted it back enough to steal it? Or if it really was painted by this other woman, the one who beat Racine’s time with her patron back in the twenties, could Racine have stolen it as a way of striking back?”

“At a dead woman? And speaking of dead, if this is all about the painting, how did Reyes get killed?”

“That’s what I’m saying, Elliott. Maybe we’re going at this backwards, trying to find who had it in for Reyes. Maybe he just wandered into trouble. He caught Racine walking out with the painting, and she killed him.”

With a knife that couldn’t fail to be identified as her property? Why was she carrying it in the first place? In case I was a light sleeper? And why did she leave it behind?

Before I could voice any of those objections, Gentry was shaking the idea out of his head. “The target had to be Reyes,” he said, almost to himself. “It had to be Reyes.”

8

Racine came out to her gate to greet us. So she could get a jump on berating us, it turned out.

“How dare you come here to persecute that boy?” she demanded of Gentry. I was ignored and content to be. The artist was back in her paint-stained fatigues, but no less commanding for that. “Jose had nothing to do with the death of Paul Reyes.”

“How about the theft of the rose painting?” the unfazed Gentry asked. “I have a warrant here empowering me to search for it. While my deputy is doing that, perhaps we could talk.”

Racine received us in her courtyard, not wanting us to sully her house. It was an empty gesture, as we could hear Gentry’s deputy sullying each of the surrounding rooms in turn as we chatted. The ruckus didn’t rattle Racine any more than the exterior setting bothered Gentry. Or me, the day being warm and still.

Racine sat on the edge of an old well. In addition to the artist, the rounded lip held a collection of animal skulls and horns, each waiting patiently to be immortalized in oils.

The preliminaries regarded the knife. Racine admitted that its description matched one she owned. And that her knife was missing, something she’d determined the moment Jose had returned from his questioning. The silver was kept in an unlocked cabinet in the unlocked kitchen, crime being previously unknown in Agujero.

When we got around to discussing human beings, things heated up. “I was happy to help arrange the match between Paul Reyes and Maria,” Racine said in response to Gentry’s least friendly question to date. “It was very advantageous to her family, who frankly are quite poor. I’ve felt bad about them since I had to let Maria go.”

“Why did that happen?” the sheriff asked.

“I’d rather not say.”

“We’ve been told that it was because you were jealous of the girl and Jose. That true?”

“She told you that. Maria.”

“She also said you’d do anything to keep her and Jose apart. Even if it meant losing him yourself.”

Racine’s only reply was to grin her cat’s grin. It wasn’t a smart move, Gentry being largely canine.

“Are you in love with this Jose Fernandez?” he demanded. “Did he tell you he was leaving town with the Baerga girl? Is that why you framed him for murder with a knife you knew would be tied to this house?”

Gentry had found his link between Racine and the murder in Maria’s tale of the artist’s all-or-nothing jealousy. The theory explained why the gaudy knife had been used and why it had been left behind. I was impressed.

So was Racine. Her grin was deader than any of the trophies on the well’s edge. Her “You’re joking” came out as a whisper.

The deputy entered then, his timing as deft as his searching had been clumsy. Clumsy but effective. He carried Beaumont’s painting before him, like the front half of a very small sandwich board.

“Found it in the sitting room. Behind another painting. A big painting.”

“You got greedy, didn’t you?” Gentry said to the artist. “Had to ruin the boy and get that painting out of circulation, too.

“Show me where you found it, Chapman. Elliott, watch her till we get back.”

9

Gentry and his man were crunching off across the courtyard’s pebbles before Racine launched her belated defense. “Mr. Elliott, you don’t think—”

I cut her off. “We don’t have much time. Tell me about Mabel Tuohy.”

“Why? What has she to do with this?”

“She’s the one part of this story you know. Make it fast.”

“Mabel was my student. My protégée. I discovered her as Hiram Kinkade had discovered me. Mabel was my answer to Kinkade, in a way.”

“I’m not following.”

“I didn’t like being a protégée. Anyone’s protégée. In Texas, I was my own woman. In New York, I was Hiram Kinkade’s woman.”

His kept woman, she meant. “Go on.”

“Part of my answer was to paint New York as a memory of the West. Of my time before Kinkade. Another part of my solution was Mabel. I was just another planet in Kinkade’s crowded solar system. In Mabel’s, I was the sun. I became everything to her that Kinkade was to me, and she everything that I was to him.”

“Including your lover?”

“Yes.”

“She was the one beautiful thing you found in the city. Your love was the beautiful thing.”

“Thank you for putting it that way.”

“But she betrayed you with Kinkade.”

“He seduced her. He couldn’t tolerate what she and I had found together. So he destroyed it by promising to make her his new project. The silly girl trusted him.

“It crushed me. Killed me. But I was reborn. Freed to come back to the West to work.”

“Not so fast,” I said. “Before you left New York, you destroyed every painting you’d done there. Every one you could get your hands on. Not because they weren’t good either. You did it because Mabel was in them. Your love for her was in them. You didn’t want that record to survive.”

“I didn’t steal the rose painting, Mr. Elliott. You have to believe me.”

“I have to understand this. You were willing to destroy your work, to kill part of yourself, just to kill part of her.”

Racine swayed on the edge of the well. I reached out to keep her from falling backwards. She didn’t seem to notice my hand on her shoulder. “So you believe the sheriff. You think I’d destroy Jose rather than lose him. But I could never do that. The revenge I took in New York in the twenties was the spiteful act of a passionate girl.”

Which brought us to the next order of business. “Tell me about Maria.”

“What about her?”

“What was she to you before Jose came along?”

“Exactly what you suppose. She’s a beautiful thing,” Racine added a little dreamily. “A perfect thing.”

“Not so perfect,” I said. “Not anymore. Your mistress took up with Jose the way you took up with Mabel Tuohy, for the chance to be the sun instead of a hanger-on. And you struck back the way Hiram Kinkade did, by dazzling your rival, Jose, right out of your lover’s arms. It was New York all over again, right down to the payoff.”

Racine saw the whole thing then. She clutched at her work shirt’s collar. Not far from her hand was a splash of white paint. I saw a splash of red.

Gentry was back and staring at us. “What’s happened?” he demanded.

“Got another search warrant?” I asked.

“What did you lose this time?”

“A red shawl.”

10

Chapman, the bloodhound deputy, came through again. He found the red shawl in a shallow grave behind the Baergas’ adobe. The shawl was brown and red now, as it was stained with the dried blood of Paul Reyes.

I got the word in the Lost Mine Cantina, where I was at my old stand at the end of the bar, staring down a beer that was the second coldest thing in the town of Agujero. Sheriff Gentry himself stopped by to tell me of the coldest thing: Maria Baerga.

“Once we showed her the shawl, she admitted everything. How she got the knife out of Racine’s kitchen last night while the cook was busy with you folks in the dining room. How she waited till the bar was empty to confront Reyes, walking right up to him smiling and him smiling back. And how she slipped the painting, which she’d heard about from Jose, out of your room and into the spot where Chapman found it. So we’d suspect Racine.

“She admitted all that and to hell with us. Never saw the like of that girl’s nerve. Hope I don’t again.”

I bought the sheriff a beer, although my experience had been that the local product wasn’t nearly strong enough.

“What did I miss, Elliott? What tipped you off?”

I knew Gentry wouldn’t sit still for the legend of Mabel Tuohy and Hiram Kinkade. So I just said, “She told me. Told us. Maria. When she said Racine would destroy Jose if she couldn’t have him, she was telling us how she felt about things herself. She set the murder up so she’d win either way. Either she’d frame Racine — and Jose was hers — or you’d take Jose — and Racine would lose him forever.”

The explanation lacked the classical symmetry of the solution I’d laid out for Racine — that the New York triangle had somehow recreated itself in dusty New Mexico — but Gentry wasn’t connoisseur enough to care. He had his killer, and that was that. He shook my hand, gave me an empty invitation to look him up next time I passed through, and left.

I was ready to leave myself. Despite Racine’s earlier warning about driving the road to Española after dark, I was determined not to spend another night in Agujero.

Before I’d managed to climb down from my stool, someone tugged at my sleeve. It was Racine’s elderly cook. She actually curtsied before handing me an envelope. It contained a note written in a faint wavy hand:

“To whom it may concern: The painting ‘A City Rose’ was done by me in New York in the spring of 1925. It was presented as a token of affection to my good friend Mabel Tuohy, who kept it until her death.”

The handwriting firmed up for the signature: “Gladys Glenn Racine, Agujero, New Mexico, February 1950.”