Bad Blood (21 page)

He made an innocent face. “We had a warrant. Nice place, too. Nice piano. Course, alls I can play is ‘Chopsticks,’ none of that culture stuff you city folks go in for. But it sounded pretty good. Didn’t it, Art?” Behind his sunglasses the deputy nodded.

The thought of Brinkman’s long, mean fingers banging on my piano brought hot blood to my face. “Brinkman—” I started, stopped as Eve’s hand closed on my arm.

Brinkman smiled, walked back around the cruiser, pulled the door open. “Get that car taken care of, Smith,” he said. “That’s a bad stretch, and I don’t want no more trouble on that damn road.”

“No more than what?”

He leaned on the top of the car. “You folks had better things to do last night than listen to the radio, huh?

“Well, seems someone else had a problem, too. Someone in a blue Chevy truck. Ran off the road down there in the valley, flipped into the gorge. We’re pulling it out now. Made a helluva mess.” He grinned a grin that showed me all his teeth.

My heart jolted. “Who?” I asked. He didn’t answer. “Goddammit, Brinkman, who was in the truck?”

“What the hell you getting so excited about? Who’re you expecting was in the truck?”

I started to move down the steps toward him, but Eve held my arm.

“Sheriff, who was it?” she asked.

“Well, ma’am,” Brinkman drawled, “well, that’s the strange thing.” He adjusted his hat again. “Doesn’t seem to have been anyone in it.”

“What the hell is this, Brinkman?”

“You tell me, city boy. Why would someone send a new Chevy four-by-four into the ravine, just to stand there and watch it fall?”

“How do you know no one was in it?”

“Shape that truck was in, if anyone’d been in it we’d be scraping ’em off the insides now.”

“Maybe the driver was thrown.”

“Well, now, we thought of that, too. Checked the area, but damned if we didn’t come up empty.” He started to get into the car, paused as if struck by a sudden thought. “Now, no one being in that truck doesn’t mean it wasn’t interesting.”

“In what way?” I asked. My hands were clenching and unclenching themselves.

“Two ways. One, seems to be a little blood smeared on the seat. Not a lot, just a little. And the other, there’s this nine-millimeter automatic we pulled from the cab.” He grinned a final grin, said, “See you around, Smith. Miss Colgate, you take care of yourself.”

He and the deputy climbed back in the car. They U-turned in the driveway, drifted slowly under the bare chestnuts back to the road.

“Why does he dislike you so?” Eve asked as we headed down the hill behind the house, Leo charging back and forth beside us.

“Last fall,” I said, “when he picked up Jimmy, what he really wanted to do was get his hands on Frank Grice.”

“The man you told me about?”

“Yes. He wants Grice badly. But he can’t make anything stick to him. Grice is always a step ahead. It drives Brinkman crazy.”

“Well, he is the sheriff, and this man Grice is a criminal.”

“It’s beyond that. This is Brinkman’s county. Grice isn’t just a crook, he’s an outsider. Like I am.”

Pushed by a strong wind, the heavy clouds were rushing west, but the sky they left behind remained dull and gray. I turned up my collar. Eve, beside me, wore only her sweatshirt over a sweater, and didn’t seem to mind the cold. Or maybe it really wasn’t that cold at all.

I went on. “Grice had people running drugs from Florida to Albany for an Albany boss, then ditching the courier cars here. That was Jimmy’s job, getting rid of the cars. Everybody knew it, but no one could prove it, and Jimmy wouldn’t talk. He was offered a deal but he wouldn’t take it. He was prepared to go to prison.” I shook my head.

“Honor among thieves?” Eve suggested.

“He’s a brave, stupid kid. He thinks he’s tough, but he’d’ve been eaten alive. But we were lucky. Brinkman wanted Grice so badly he beat the shit out of Jimmy—” I caught myself. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“About what? Your language? Don’t patronize me. Besides”—she smiled—“you should have heard yourself last night.”

“I can imagine. Anyhow, I got Jimmy a slick city lawyer and we parlayed Brinkman’s mistakes into a dismissed case. Brinkman lost Jimmy and he lost Grice and he looked like a fool.”

“And he blames you?”

“He’s right.”

We were walking the way we had walked two days before, through fields now oozing muddy water under every step. Twigs, leaves, and branches forced down by the storm lay on the earth among sprawling puddles. This way to the clearing was longer than the way straight down the slope— the way I’d fought my way up last night—but it was also easier and faster.

“You got quite angry when the sheriff talked about your piano,” Eve said, her eyes on me. It occurred to me that she might want to keep talking to keep her mind off where we were going.

“That he played it,” I said.

She nodded, but said, “Or that he knows now that you play it?” I didn’t answer. “We talked a good deal about music last night, but you never told me you were a pianist.”

My response to that was silence; hers, to my silence, was an ironic smile. “I suppose, coming from me, that’s an odd complaint.”

I smiled at that. “I don’t play for other people, ever. Very few people understand about that. Mostly I don’t care whether they do or not.”

“I understand,” she said.

“I know,” I answered.

We went on in silence for a time, the only sound the soft grasping noises made by the mud as our feet passed over it.

“Brinkman asked about the power,” I said. “Did the power go off last night?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Not long before I found you. I saw the lights go off in the house just when Leo ran back to me, barking.”

I’d seen the lights go off in the house, too. I wondered what it would cost me to get the 7-Eleven to deliver a doughnut a day to Leo for the rest of his life.

In the clearing the studio looked sturdy and deserted. I kept my hand on the gun in my pocket just the same.

“Stay here with Leo,” I told Eve. “Let me look around.” They stood on the edge of the clearing while I prowled the road that came up from the valley, but the rain had left nothing I could read.

I did the same in the clearing, looking for whatever I could find, but I couldn’t find anything. Eve joined me as I neared the studio door. Things looked in order, but when she put her hand on the padlock, it twisted open. It had been cut through.

A tingle went up my spine. I motioned Eve behind me, took out my gun. I lifted the lock off the door, slid the door aside, moving with it. Nothing happened: no shots, no booming voices. I stepped through the doorway in a quick crouch, swung first left, then right.

No one was there, but they had been.

I stood, pocketed the gun, stretched my arm across the doorway to bar Eve from stepping over the sill.

“My God,” I heard her say tonelessly behind me.

The floor of the studio was a storm of color. Paint swept across the wide boards, red and green and purple and blue, mud where they clotted together. Ropes of pigment squirted from stomped tubes across smears and swirls. White gesso puddled around broken quart jars, colors bleeding into it. Thick lumps of black were smeared over stains of crimson and magenta; a yellow pool near the window mocked the gray day. Cans and brushes and palette knives lay in the glistening mess like the branches the wind had brought down last night.

Just inside the door a broom lay in an eddy of paint. It had been used to push and pull and smear the colors on the floor; its paint-covered bristles were broken, sticking out in all directions.

There were no footprints in the paint. The broom had obliterated them.

“My God,” Eve said again. Her fingers dug into my arm and she started to move past me.

I grabbed her wrist. “Wait,” I said. “Look first.”

Her face was flushed. Her eyes flared as she said, “At what? Why?”

“At everything.” I searched the floor, starting from where we stood, my eyes sweeping slowly back and forth. “The painting.” I pointed across the studio to the half-finished canvas I’d seen Tuesday morning. “Is it all right?”

She stared across the room. “Yes,” she said, and I felt her relax slightly. I let go of her wrist.

“What else?” I asked. “What else is wrong?”

“How can I tell?” she exploded, her voice rough-edged. “How can I see through this? What do you want me to tell you? Get out of my way!”

“Eve,” I said, and took her hand.

She stood trembling for a moment in the doorway, her eyes moist; then she wiped them with the back of her hand. Her fingers closed on mine and she was still.

“I’m not sure,” she said huskily, after a few moments. “Except for the floor, and the paints and brushes from over there, everything looks all right. The big painting is all right. I can’t tell about the ones in the rack from here, but they don’t look as though they’ve been touched. Is that what you want to know?”

“Yes,” I said. “It looks that way to me, too.” The smells of oil paint and mud mingled in the open doorway. The windows weren’t broken; they’d come and gone through the single door. In the city, in the middle of this much deliberate ruin, I’d have expected taunting words, filthy phrases scrawled on the walls, but that hadn’t happened either. There was only the sea of paint, submerging the floor. “Let me check around out here once more; then we’ll go in.”

“Bill,” she said suddenly. “Last night you had paint on your neck and chin. Not a lot. I thought it was mud, but it wouldn’t come off with water. Is that from when they hit you?”

“It could be.”

I circled the building, examining the ground for anything that wasn’t mud or leaves or broken branches, but they were all I found.

We went into the studio, Eve and I. Eve told Leo to stay outside and he did, whining. He lay down with his paws on the threshold, followed our movements with his head.

Inside, Eve stopped, stood, as though unsure of what to do. I searched in corners and under furniture for something that would help.

There was nothing.

It took us an hour to clean up.

“There’s no reason for you to have to stay,” Eve said. “But I can’t leave it like this.”

I stayed. Eve picked through the paint with an archaeologist’s concentration, evaluating each brush and palette knife according to criteria I didn’t understand. Some she dropped into the garbage bag I was filling; others she left covered with turpentine in a shallow tray.

We scraped the floor and scrubbed it with turpentine-soaked rags until a streaky purplish film was all that was left of the mess. Then we opened the windows to let the turpentine fumes out, and we left too.

“I’ll paint it,” Eve said, as we walked back up the hill to the house. It was close to midday, but the skimmed-milk sun was having trouble fighting its way through the clouds. “In a couple of days, when it’s really dry, I’ll get deck paint and paint it.” She’d been like a taut wire since we’d entered the studio and we hadn’t spoken. But as she
talked
about the next step her mouth relaxed and the deep creases on her forehead smoothed out, the way it happens, unconsciously, when you step from a dark, unfamiliar space into one that’s lit. “A new lock; maybe even a security system. And I suppose I’ll have to go into the city, to get more paints and things. That’s all right. I would have had to go soon in any case.”

“Why?”

“I’ve completed a painting; in fact it’s been done for weeks. I made the mistake of telling my dealer it’s done. He’s too much of a gentleman, and an old friend, to bother me about it, but I know he’s anxious to see it.”

“Sternhagen?”

“Ulrich, yes.”

“He’s a friend of yours?”

“Probably my oldest. He was my dealer thirty-five years ago; we were friends in art school, before I had anything to sell. He’s the only person in New York who knows where to find me—where to find Eva Nouvel, I mean.” She paused to look at me. “How did you know who my dealer was?”

“You’re famous.”

“Do you know who Robert Rauschenberg’s dealer is?”

“No.”

She waited. I said, “The investigator I called in New York thought your gallery would be an obvious place to check, to see if anyone had tried to sell your paintings there. She told me.”

“Had they?”

“No.”

“It would be a pretty stupid thing to do.”

“Not necessarily. It’s not that easy to unload stolen art. They might take a chance that your gallery would be interested in splitting the profits on six new paintings without having to cut you in.”

“Ulrich would never do that.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure! He’s a marvelous man and a good friend. If he hadn’t been willing to cooperate with me in this—eccentricity—for thirty years, I could not have managed to live the way I have. The way I’ve wanted.”

At the side of the house I dumped the garbage bag in a buried can. We walked around front. On the porch, as she unlocked the door, Eve turned to me. “Ulrich has been good to me in more ways than you can know. I don’t think I like the idea of someone bothering him, possibly worrying him on my account.”

If she didn’t like that idea she’d hate some of the others I was having.

“Eve,” I said as I followed her into the living room, “Lydia did some checking in New York, some things I hadn’t asked her to do, but I’m glad she did. One of those things was a background check on Sternhagen and his gallery.”

She spun to face me, her eyes flashing. “She did
what
? How dare you!”

“She told me he takes an unusually large share of the profits from your work.”

Color choked her cheeks. “My arrangements with Ulrich are not your business! I hired you to protect my privacy, not to pry into my life!”

“Lydia’s instincts are good,” I said. “Maybe it has nothing to do with anything else, but it’s unorthodox and she thought I should know. And if you can tell me, I’d like to know why.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” She was taut and trembling, the color gone from her face. The night she’d spent keeping me alive and the morning she’d had and the last six days were suddenly crashing over her like a tidal wave. She was fighting it with anger and the anger was aimed at me, and maybe I deserved it. Nothing good had happened since I’d started working for her.