Partner In Crime

Prologue

“WELL?” DEIDRE CANFIELD ASKED, as she mopped her dripping forehead and straightened the last picture. “What do you think?” Rochelle Baxter stood back and eyed the painting critically. It was one of sixteen pieces in her first-ever gallery showing. With occasional heavy-lifting help from Dee’s boyfriend, Warren Gibson, the two women had spent the previous six hours hanging and rehanging the paintings in Dee’s recently remodeled and – for anyone doing physical labor – incredibly overheated Castle Rock Gallery in Bisbee, Arizona. For Dee it was a new beginning. For Rochelle, it was something else.

“It’s fine,” she said. Then, seeing how her lack of enthusiasm caused a cloud of concern to cross Dee’s broad face, Rochelle added quickly, “It’s great, Dee. Really, it’s fine.”

“I’m glad you like it,” Dee said. “And don’t worry. I know this show is going to be a huge success. You heard the phone calls that came in about it just today. I’m betting we’ll have an overflow crowd for tomorrow’s grand opening.”

Deidre Canfield may have been convinced, but Rochelle wasn’t so sure. “I hope so,” she said dubiously.

Dee grinned. “What’s wrong, Shelley? Sounds like you’re suffering from a case of opening-night jitters.”

“Maybe so,” Rochelle admitted. “In fact, probably so.”

“Take my word for it,” Dee assured her. “I’ve been managing art galleries for years. I know what people like, and I’m telling you, they’re going to love your stuff. What worries me is that we’ll sell out so fast that some people will go away disappointed. I’m a lot more concerned about that than I am about no one showing up.”

Turning away, Dee walked over to her desk and picked up her purse. “ Warren wants me to give him a lift to the house, and I have to stop by the bank before it closes. Want to ride along?”

Rochelle shook her head. “You two go ahead. If you don’t mind, Dee, I’d rather stay here. I want to be alone with the paintings for a little while.”

Dee smiled sympathetically. “It must seem like saying good-bye to a bunch of old friends.”

Rochelle nodded, but she kept her face averted so the tears welling up in her eyes didn’t show. Dee ’s comment was far closer to the mark than Rochelle Baxter wanted to admit. “Something like that,” she murmured.

Dee shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said. “Stay as long as you like. I’ll be back in forty-five minutes or so. I also need to do some last-minute consulting with the caterer. I’ll lock the door and put up the closed sign. If someone wants in, ignore them. Don’t bother opening the door. Eventually they’ll get the message and go away. If you have to leave before I get back, pull the door shut behind you.”

“Will do,” Rochelle replied.

Dee and Warren left then, walking out into the warm autumn weather of a late-October Arizona afternoon. They made an incongruous, Jack Sprat sort of couple. Warren was tall and lanky and looked as though he’d never eaten a square meal in his life. Dee was short and almost as wide as she was tall. He wore a faded denim shirt, frayed jeans, and equally worn tennis shoes. Dee ’s roly-poly figure was swathed in a flowing tie-dyed smock that covered her from her plump neck to the toes of her aging Birkenstocks. The only similarity lay in their hairdos. Both wore their hair pulled back into single braids, although Dee’s gun-metalcolored plait was a good two feet longer than Warren ’s.

The afternoon temperature was a mild eighty-three degrees. Nevertheless, Dee insisted on keeping a reflective sunshade inside the windshield of her elderly Pinto station wagon. Rochelle watched as Warren pulled the sunshade out of the window and stowed it in the backseat. Then he climbed into the rider’s side of the multicolored rattletrap vehicle whose dented panels had been painted in vivid shades of lacquer that almost rivaled Deidre’s equally multicolored smock. Dee crammed herself behind the steering wheel.

After three separate tries, the touchy old engine finally wheezed to life. Driving with little-old-lady concentration, Dee eased the Pinto into what passed for rush-hour traffic in Bisbee and headed down Tombstone Canyon, leaving Rochelle to marvel at how a plump, wide-faced, oddly dressed white woman had, in the last few months, become both her good friend as well as an enthusiastic and unflagging artistic booster.

It was Dee Canfield who, after seeing Rochelle’s paintings, had decided on mounting a one-woman show. “Reminiscent of Norman Rockwell,” Dee had pronounced upon viewing Rochelle’s collection of work. “People won’t be able to keep from buying it. It has that same old-fashioned, uncomplicated look and feel to it. There are a lot of people out there who are sick and tired of so-called artists who throw globs of paint on canvas and pronounce it ‘fine art.’ “

Rochelle didn’t entirely share Dee ’s confidence about the salability of her work. There was good reason that her paintings were “reminiscent of” Norman Rockwell. As a child growing up in Macon, Georgia, Rochelle had pored over a book – one of her grandmother’s coffee-table books – that was chock-full of Norman Rockwell’s paintings. She had paged through each picture one by one, focusing all her attention and wonder on the occasional black people she saw depicted there – children and old people and ordinary adults whose appearance resembled her own.

Those few dark-skinned people in the paintings, like Rockwell’s other subjects, were caught while engaged in the most mundane of behaviors – standing outside a barbershop, riding in a wagon, playing with a ball, blowing on a harmonica. She had studied each picture with painstaking care, noticing how the artist had used light and dark to create the subtle variations of skin color. She had marveled at how Rockwell had captured intimate scenes in a way that made her feel as though she, too, knew the people depicted there. But most of all, seeing Rockwell’s work had made her want to emulate him – to paint her subjects with the same respect and dignity he had accorded those he had painted.

Now Rochelle had. Her paintings were finished and framed and hanging on the walls of Dee ’s gallery. But would anyone buy them? That she doubted. In a community populated by precious few African-Americans, Shelley wondered how much commercial appeal her work would have. Based on demographics alone, it seemed unlikely to her that there would be an overwhelming demand for the paintings. Still, she had allowed herself to be dragged along by Dee ’s unbridled enthusiasm as well as by the encouragement and stubborn-minded insistence of her new friend, LaMar Jenkins.

As far as Rochelle knew, LaMar was the only other African- American currently living in Bisbee. Everyone else called him Bobo, but Shelley preferred the quiet dignity of his given name.

If Deidre Canfield was Rochelle’s booster and cheerleader, LaMar Jenkins was her champion. It was no accident that the picture she turned to now was one of him, grinning amiably and leaning, with studied ease, against the back gate of his prized bright yellow El Camino. LaMar was a man in his late forties. His well-conditioned, muscle-hardened body may have belied his age, but there was wisdom in the lines that etched his face, and a sprinkling of gray peppered his short-cropped hair. Behind him and just overhead hung a wooden sign that said blue moon saloon and lounge, the Brewery Gulch watering hole he had recently sold.

Of all the portraits hanging in the gallery, that was the only one with the telltale red dot that indicated it was already sold. LaMar, subject and purchaser, hadn’t wanted the painting to be exhibited at all, but Dee had insisted. For her, having sixteen pieces represented some kind of magic number. Without LaMar’s portrait, entitled simply Car and Driver, the show would have been one painting short. So there it was.

Looking at it – seeing LaMar’s engaging grin and the reined-in strength of his powerful forearms – caused a lump to grow in Rochelle’s throat. She had done something she never should have done, something she had countless times forbidden herself to do – she had allowed him to get too close and, as a result, had become too involved. That kind of involvement was dangerous for both of them now that LaMar “Bobo” Jenkins was about to run for mayor of Bisbee.

The next municipal election was almost a year away, but Rochelle understood the necessity of distancing herself now rather than later. Once LaMar Jenkins officially declared his candidacy, he would be newsworthy. He would be an African-American running for office in a town where everyone considered himself part of an oppressed minority. That was bound to attract attention to LaMar as well as to anyone connected with him.

During the months Rochelle Baxter had lived in the community of Naco, Arizona, a few miles outside of Bisbee, she had noticed how the lady county sheriff, Joanna Brady, and her family were routinely covered in both local and statewide media venues. When the sheriff had remarried, the wedding itself had made headlines in the local paper, The Bisbee Bee. Sheriff Brady was, after all, a public figure. Several months earlier, when the sheriff’s young daughter and a friend had stumbled over the body of a murdered woman while on a Girl Scout campout, that, too, had been front-page fodder – and not just in Bisbee, either.

Rochelle couldn’t afford to live in the unblinking focus of a media microscope. Being a part of that kind of associated publicity – where a picture of Rochelle accompanying LaMar to some campaign event might well be beamed all over the country – was something she could ill afford. She had made up her mind. No matter how much it hurt, she would break off the relationship. And the breakup had to come soon. Now. While she could still do it and make it stick.

Sighing, she turned away from LaMar’s portrait and wandered through the building to view the other pictures hanging on the freshly painted stuccoed walls. Castle Rock Gallery occupied a series of small buildings that had been cobbled together over time. Rochelle theorized that a previous owner or owners had added on and stitched the pieces together in a haphazard fashion, as both spirit and funds had allowed. As a result, the rooms – of various sizes and shapes – were arranged with wildly varying floor elevations. With an eye to forestalling a potential lawsuit from some crusading Americans with Disabilities Act activist, Dee and Warren had installed a complex series of ramps that linked the rooms and uneven floor levels together.

Around the corner from LaMar’s grinning portrait but in another room altogether hung Rochelle’s favorite piece, one titled A Boy and His Dog. The two figures sat side by side on the edge of a large porch overlooking a sun-drenched front yard with a tree-lined paved street beyond a picket fence. One of the boy’s arms was flung casually across the golden Lab’s sturdy shoulder. Sitting with only their backs showing, they were framed by a doorway as though the artist, standing just inside the shadowy house, had painted them from that vantage point.

Of course, the boy was not really “a boy” at all. It was really Tommy, Rochelle’s younger brother. And “his dog” was really Scooter. Rochelle remembered coming out through the front door one summer’s day and seeing them sitting together like that. Tommy had been only ten at the time and Rochelle twelve. What hadn’t shown then – and what didn’t show now in the painting – was the leukemia that was already robbing Tommy of his childhood and obliterating his ability to play outdoors on that carefree summer’s day. What also didn’t show on that warm and lazy Georgia afternoon was how, a few months later, when an ambulance carrying Tommy to the hospital was speeding away from the house, lights flashing and siren blaring, Scooter went racing after it down the street, where he was struck by a car two intersections away. None of that showed in the picture, but it was all there, twenty-three years later, etched deeply into Rochelle’s still-grieving heart.

Two pictures away was another favorite. In it, Rochelle’s niece, Jolene, crouched, ball in hand, beneath a basketball hoop fastened high over her grandfather’s garage door. Her skin gleamed with sweat and her dark eyes glittered with clear determination. Her cornrows shone in the sunlight. The painting was titled Making a Basket, although the ball was still poised on the ends of Jolene’s fingertips as she prepared to spring upward.

A viewer would simply have to take it on faith that she had actually made the ball swish effortlessly through the hoop, but Rochelle didn’t. She knew for sure. She had been there, home on leave after Operation Desert Storm, playing a predinner pickup game with her sister’s teenage daughter. Jolene was married now and had two children of her own. Maybe three, for all Rochelle knew, but in her artist’s eye, Jolene was still young and innocent and with a world of possibility open to her.

Rochelle moved from one room to another, strolling up and down the various ramps. Standing in front of each painting, she allowed the images she had captured there to speak to her once more. In The Pastor and the Lamb she saw her father again. Roundly middle-aged and dressed in his bright red summer preacher’s robe, he leaned down to shake hands with a shy little boy who gazed worshipfully up at him over the grubby white Bible he clutched tightly in his other hand.

Next to that picture was one called Napping. In it, Rochelle’s grandmother, Cornelia, drowsed peacefully in her rocking chair while rays of early-afternoon sunlight streamed in through the sheer window curtains and transformed her silvery hair into a glowing halo.

Around the corner from Napping was the The Carver. An old man – Rochelle’s grandfather, his vitality not yet drained and his mahogany skin not yet tinged with the jaundice of kidney disease – sat on a kitchen chair and sharpened his knife on a soapstone while curls of newly whittled wood littered the floor around his feet.

A few feet away from The Carver was Homecoming. In that one, Rochelle’s mother, dressed in a suit and looking determinedly elegant, walked toward the front steps late one afternoon carrying her leather-bound briefcase balanced effortlessly in one hand. The slight smile on her lips showed that although she loved her work, she was nonetheless grateful to be coming home to her family – to her husband and children.

Concealed under the paint of that picture and three of the others in the gallery was a never-finished self-portrait. Rochelle had tried to paint that one over and over again. Each time she had given up in frustration and covered the unfinished work over with some other painting. That was the magic of working with oils. If a painting didn’t come together, you could always render it invisible by burying it under layers of other colors. Gazing at her mother’s well-remembered and equally well-rendered features, Rochelle realized why she had never succeeded in painting herself. She knew who her mother was, but when it came to Rochelle Baxter, the artist wasn’t so sure.

Sighing, she turned away. Dee had been absolutely right when she said selling the paintings must be like saying good-bye to a group of old friends, but for Rochelle it went far beyond that. In painting the portraits, she had recalled those loved ones from the past and remembered why she had loved them. Now, knowing she would never see any of them again, it seemed as though she was letting go of them forever at the same time she was letting go of their portraits. Hail and farewell.

Finally, it was all too much. Walking through the empty gallery, a half-sob escaped Rochelle’s lips and she knew she was about to lose it. That shook her. If it could happen to her when she was all alone in the gallery, how would she manage to maintain her composure tomorrow night at the opening-night party, when the place would be crowded with people, all of them – according to Dee – potential buyers? What would she do if some nice lady asked the artist who that little boy was, sitting on the porch with his dog? And what if someone else wanted to know about that nice old lady napping so peacefully in her rocking chair?

Feeling the first subtle heart-pounding, breath-robbing symptoms of an oncoming panic attack, Rochelle bolted out of Castle Rock Gallery, slamming the door shut behind her. Anxiously she scanned the parking lot, afraid Dee and Warren might return before she could make good her escape. Her closed Camry had been sitting in full afternoon sunlight. Shivering and sweating at the same time, she sank, gasping for breath, into the cloth seat and welcomed the comforting warmth that surrounded her. She grasped the steering wheel and held on, hoping the heated plastic would help still her quaking hands. After a few long minutes, the panic attack subsided enough to allow her to start the car and drive away.

Leaving Old Bisbee behind, she drove past the remains of Lavender Pit, around the traffic circle, and then southwest out of town toward Naco. When her case manager had asked her where she wanted to go – where she would care to settle – Rochelle had chosen the Bisbee area for two reasons: It was known as a place where artists were welcome. It was also surprisingly affordable.

After only a day or two of prowling around, she had stumbled on the tiny border community of Naco, seven miles south of Bisbee proper. She had spotted the for sale sign on a crumbling but thick-walled adobe building that had, in previous incarnations, served as a customhouse, a whorehouse, and – most recently – a nightclub. She had purchased the place and had then remodeled it into part studio, part living quarters. That’s where Rochelle headed now – home to Naco.

Mexico ’s towering San José Mountain loomed in solitary majesty over the valley floor below. Behind it arched a cloudless blue sky. The summer rains had barely materialized that year, leaving all of Arizona brittle and dry. Naco was no exception. Turning off the short and poorly paved main drag, Rochelle entered a dusty dirt alleyway that ran parallel to the paved street. She parked in the makeshift carport that had been tacked on to the back of the building. Bullet holes from the Mexican Revolution still scored some of the adobe bricks that passing time had denuded of countless layers of stucco.

Once out of the car, she hurried to the studio’s back entrance. Unlocking the dead bolt, she hurried inside and punched in the code on her alarm keypad. The system had been installed by the previous tenant. In the interest of saving money, she had kept the existing equipment, merely reactivating it and changing the code. Having a security system made her feel safe and allowed her to sleep easier at night.

The interior of the building consisted of two rooms – a bathroom dominated by an old-fashioned claw-footed tub and a large open space that Rochelle had divided into work, sleep, and eating areas by the strategic placement of a series of rustic used-wood screens. Eating, sleeping, and working in that one huge, high-ceilinged room suited her simple needs. In the months since she had moved here from Washington State, while waiting for the other shoe to drop, she had buried herself in her work, toiling at her easel almost around the clock, stopping only when exhaustion finally overwhelmed her now-chronic insomnia. Eating, too, had taken a backseat to feverish work.

A skylight in the middle of the ceiling suffused the white walls and the broad planks of the wooden floor with the soft pink glow of late-afternoon light, but with all the paintings hauled off to Castle Rock Gallery, the studio seemed strangely empty.

Ignoring the loneliness that threatened to engulf her, Rochelle stripped off her clothes and hurried into the bathroom, where she spent the better part of an hour soaking in the long, narrow tub. She had climbed out and was wrapping her hair in a turban when she heard a persistent knocking on the front door. It was times like this when living and working in the same place had its disadvantages. Pulling on a robe and leaving her hair wrapped, she hurried to the door and used the peephole to check on the identity of her visitor. She was dismayed to find LaMar Jenkins standing outside on the makeshift sidewalk. With his hands stuffed deep in his pockets, he rocked back and forth on his heels and looked distinctly unhappy. Sighing, Rochelle unlatched the dead bolt and let him in.

“We were supposed to have dinner tonight,” he reminded her in an aggrieved tone as he stepped inside. “You left a message on my machine saying that you couldn’t come. What happened? Did somebody make you a better offer?”

“Dee and I hung the show today,” Rochelle said lamely. “I knew I’d be tired and probably not very good company.”

“I would have been happy to help with the hanging,” LaMar said. “Why didn’t you ask me?”

Rochelle shrugged and didn’t answer. They were standing only inches apart. LaMar Jenkins was a tall man, but his eyes and Rochelle’s were almost on the same level. Feeling guilty and embarrassed, Rochelle was the first to look away.

“Can I get you something to drink?” she offered. “Iced tea? A beer?”

“No fair changing the subject,” he said. “But a beer would be fine.”

Rochelle walked away from him and disappeared behind the wooden screen that marked the line of demarcation between studio and kitchen. He followed her and took a seat at the old-fashioned Formica-topped table she had purchased from a nearby consignment store. She set a bottle of Bud in front of him, then went to the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of iced tea.

Without being asked, LaMar opened two packages of sweetener and poured them into her glass. It was exactly that kind of unasked courtesy and thoughtfulness that was driving Rochelle away from the man.

It disturbed her to realize that in the few months they had known each other, LaMar Jenkins had learned far too much about her. He knew, for instance, that she took two packets of sweetener in her iced tea, but none at all in her coffee. He knew that she preferred root beer to Coke and smooth peanut butter to any flavor of jelly. He knew she wanted her eggs fried hard and hated refried beans. Those were all little secret things she hadn’t wanted anyone to learn about her ever again. That had never been part of her game plan.

“How about a sandwich?” she offered. “ Bologna, BLT, tuna. I’ve got the makings for any or all.”

Shaking his head, LaMar reached out, caught her by the wrist, and drew her toward him. “I’m not hungry,” he said, pulling her down onto the chair next to his. “And I sure as hell don’t want a sandwich. Talk to me, Shelley. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m just nervous – about the show, I guess.”

LaMar studied her, his hooded eyes searching her face. “It’s not about the show, is it?” he said accusingly. “You and I have a good thing going, but now you’re pulling away from me, shutting me out. I want to know what’s going on, and how come?”

“I need some time for myself,” she said.

LaMar had been holding her hand. Now he released it and she let it fall limply into her lap. “That’s bullshit, and you know it,” he growled back at her. “But even if it’s true, you still haven’t told me why.”

Because knowing me is dangerous, Rochelle wanted to say. Because when they come looking for me, they might come looking for you, too.

“You’re too intense,” she said instead. “And I’m not ready for that.” Even as she said the words, her body, in absolute betrayal, longed for nothing so much as to have LaMar Jenkins take her into his strong, capable arms and hold her tightly against his chest. Afraid she might yield to that temptation, she added quickly, “You’d better go.”

“Why? Don’t you trust me?”

I don’t trust myself, she thought. “Something like that.”

Taking a long drink from his beer, LaMar Jenkins showed no sign of leaving. “You never talk about the past,” he said. “Why is that?”

“The past doesn’t matter,” she said flatly. “There’s nothing to talk about.” She tried to sound cold – as though she didn’t care – but, like her body, her voice betrayed her. The past mattered far too much.

“Somebody hurt you, Shelley.” LaMar’s voice was suddenly kind, concerned. “Whoever it was and whatever they did to you, it wasn’t me. Let me help fix it. Talk to me.”

“You can’t fix it,” Rochelle said, shaking her head and fighting back tears. “Just go, please.”

Without another word, LaMar Jenkins carefully put down his beer bottle and stood up. He walked as far as the first wooden screen before he turned back to her. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. “At the show. And afterward, we’re having dinner. No excuses.”

She capitulated. “All right,” she said. “We’ll have dinner.”

“Promise?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

He left then. She followed him as far as the door, made sure the dead bolt was locked, and double-checked the alarm system. Then she returned to the kitchen table. For the next half hour, Rochelle Baxter sat at the gray Formica tabletop and thoughtfully sipped her iced tea while rehashing every word that had been said. She didn’t bother making herself a sandwich. She wasn’t hungry. Instead, she sat and wondered whether or not she would really go to dinner with LaMar after the show. Maybe by then she’d be able to find the resolve to tell him once and for all that she had to break it off.

When her tea was almost gone, Rochelle left the nearly empty glass and half-finished beer bottle sitting on the kitchen table and returned to her eerily denuded studio.

To combat the loneliness left by all the bare walls, Rochelle wrestled a new canvas out of storage and put it on her easel. It sat there staring back at her, waiting for her hands to fill it with color and give it life. Turning away from the empty canvas, she settled down at her drafting table and went through her sketchbooks trying to decide what she would paint next. Finally, around nine or so, she went to bed.

In her dream, she was back in Desert Storm. Oil-well fires, burning all around her, filled the air with evil-smelling smoke. She couldn’t breathe. She felt as if she were choking; her eyes were tearing. What woke her up, though, wasn’t the dream. It was a terrible cramping in her gut. Writhing in pain, Rochelle attempted to get out of bed, but before her feet touched the floor, her body heaved. The involuntary spasm hurled a spray of vomit halfway across the room. Falling back onto the bed, she grasped blindly for the phone. Somehow she reached it. Her stabbing fingers seemed numb and out of control, almost as though they belonged to someone else. Struggling desperately to manage her limbs, she finally succeeded in dialing.

“Nine one one,” the calm voice of an emergency dispatcher responded. “What is the nature of your emergency?”

By then Rochelle Baxter was beyond answering. Another wild spasm of vomiting hit her and sent her reeling back onto the bed. As she lay there, retching helplessly and unable to move, the phone clattered uselessly to the floor.

“Ma’am?” the operator said more urgently. “Can you hear me? Is there anyone there to help you? Can you tell me your location?”

There was no answer. By then Rochelle Baxter was beyond hearing as well. A few minutes later, medics dispatched by the Cochise County emergency operator arrived at the scene. When no one responded to their repeated knocking, they finally splintered the sturdy front door to gain entry. While a noisy burglar alarm squawked its insistent warning in the background, a young EMT located Rochelle in her vomit-splattered bed. Gingerly, he felt for a pulse, then looked at his supervisor and shook his head.

“We may have already lost her,” he said.