Blue Smoke and Murder

28

SEPTEMBER 15

9:30 A.M.

Zach switched his headphone from sat/cell input to the plane’s passenger intercom. As he did, he frowned at the battery reading on his sat/cell phone. No way to recharge in the air. Hopefully, there wouldn’t be any need.

Leaning over, he switched Jill’s headphones from canned music to passenger intercom. She glanced at him in silent question.

“Nothing on Blanchard,” he said.

“I’m shocked.” She tried not to yawn.

“Ramsey Worthington is the new big thing on the Western fine arts circuit. He’s planning to go public, turning himself into a kind of Western Sotheby’s.”

“Fascinating.” She covered another yawn.

“No blots on Worthington’s record. Not so much as a speeding ticket. Big on the charity circuit, whether it’s Mormon or Catholic or Hollywood.”

“Hollywood is a religion?”

“Believe it,” Zach said. “If you don’t genuflect at the altar of Hollywood’s latest cause du jour, you’re dog food.”

“Good thing I don’t plan to be a movie star.”

He smiled. “Yeah. No one has responded to your JPEG queries.”

That got her attention. “I didn’t give you my e-mail password.”

“Looks like you’re being ignored by the Western art literati.”

“Zach, I didn’t give you my-”

He kept talking. “A few months ago, one of Worthington’s colleagues sold a Charles M. Russell oil. It was described as ‘one of his better, but certainly not his best work.’ It went for nearly seven million dollars.”

Jill’s lips moved but she was too shocked to say anything. Finally she managed, “I grew up with Russell’s pictures from old feed-store calendars. He understood horses and wild animals, but…”

“So did everyone in the non-urban West,” Zach said. “Most of the scenes we think of as ‘Western’ came from Russell and Frederic Remington art, or John Ford/John Wayne movies, arguably another kind of art.”

“First you hack into my e-mail, then you talk about various genres of art.”

“Utility infielder, that’s me.”

His off-center smile would have been charming if she hadn’t noticed the piercing intelligence in his eyes.

But she did.

She was fascinated, not charmed.

She thought about pursuing the subject of having her e-mail hacked, then decided it wouldn’t do any good. She’d asked for help. She’d got it, and its name was Zach Balfour.

Nobody said she had to like everything about it.

“Russell understood the West that was,” she said, sticking to the relatively neutral topic of art, “from the land to the Indians, and the Europeans who replaced them. Nobody was a god. Nobody was a devil. Just people going about their lives.”

“You’d get an argument from the modern critics who condemn Western art as bigotry on canvas.”

She shrugged. “Beats being ignored.”

Zach gave a crack of laughter. That was the beauty of a smart woman-she went right for the jugular while other folks were still trying to figure out what was happening.

“You’re right,” he said. “Some Western art is now accepted as world class, which means a whole new carcass to carve up for the folks with advanced educations and sharp academic knives. Plus new piles of money for art sellers.”

“Still, nearly seven million dollars is way out there, isn’t it?”

“When Gustav Klimt sells for an eighth of a billion dollars, everything on canvas starts heading up in price, even a painter once dismissed by Eastern critics as ‘a mere illustrator.’ Yesterday’s stratospheric price is today’s bargain.”

Jill just shook her head. “So the cost of Western art rose because everything else did?”

“Partly. Mostly it was the simple fact of money moving west. The center of financial gravity shifted, and with it the idea of what is and what isn’t art. Blue smoke billowed and high prices followed.”

“Who bought the Russell?”

“I can guarantee that the new owner doesn’t live full-time on the East Coast,” Zach said dryly. “But there’s a lot of money out west these days. New tech millionaires and billionaires with Western roots want to make statements about those roots and themselves. You have to decorate those second and third mansions, right?”

“So Western art has become positional art?”

“You learn fast. According to Ms. Singh, Worthington is the first dealer west of the Mississippi to have a vision of fine Western art as the new new thing in a world that is full of old old things. He’s hoping to raise a few hundred million with his public offering.”

“To buy art?” she asked.

“To create a big gallery and auction-house business specializing in fine arts, emphasis on the West.”

For a time Jill was silent and motionless but for her fingers worrying a scrap of canvas that had crept free of her belly bag’s straining zipper. “Sounds like a big money business.”

“It is. A few years ago I worked on a case involving Russian art. Some high-end galleries in the West were importing container loads of Russian Impressionist art, trying to create a market for it here in the United States.”

“Did it work?”

“The project is still under construction.”

The ironic tone of Zach’s voice made Jill wince.

“What happened?” she asked.

“The gallery importers ran up against the Russian mafiya, which was laundering money through Russian Impressionist art in its own American galleries. Those dudes don’t play well with others. Transnational crime is a down-and-dirty business.”

“God…” Jill let out a long breath. “Modesty had no idea what she was getting into. She just wanted to raise a few thousand for taxes. Instead, she raised a whirlwind and ended up dead.”

“Oh, we do real well with our own homegrown thugs,” Zach assured her. “The Russians are just some of the newer crooks at the international art money buffet.”

“Blanchard? The good old American thug? Is he one of the pros?”

“Maybe. It’s hard to tell the pros from the wannabes. A whole lot of kicking and gouging going on at this point.”

“And the last one standing wins,” she said unhappily.

“Pretty much.” Zach stretched his shoulders and legs. Charter planes were better than cattle class on commercial flights, but the seats still weren’t designed for long-legged people. “Research had some interesting things to say about Dunstan, too.”

“Such as?”

“He was one of the few Western artists who actually came from the West.”

She blinked. “Really? Where did the rest of them come from?”

“Moran and Bierstadt were Hudson River School. Easterners.” Zach swirled coffee in his plastic cup, then drank the rest.

Jill waited.

“Most of the painters of the time were the same,” he said, holding out his empty cup, looking expectant. “City boys. Paris trained, or learned at the knees of teachers who were schooled in Paris. The new kids on the block illustrated government surveys of the West and Eastern magazine articles to make a living. Or they taught.”

“For someone who claims not to have a degree,” she said, pouring the last of the coffee into his cup, “you sure know a lot about Western art.”

He shrugged. “Like I said, I can bullshit with the best of ’em.”

“It’s more than that.” She capped the empty thermos. “Why are you so prickly on the subject?”

Because I learned at the knee of one prickly son of a bitch. But all Zach said aloud was “Dunstan was Western born and bred. He specialized in what today is called the Basin and Range Country, with forays into Taos, Santa Fe, and the Colorado Plateau country for variety. Studied back east, came home to paint. But you probably already know that.”

She shook her head. “Modesty never talked about her sister, much less her sister’s lovers. And Mom…Mom was ashamed to be born outside of marriage. She rarely talked about her mother, and never said one word about the man who might or might not have been her father.”

“Sound like you had to stumble around some mighty big lumps under the family rug.”

Jill smiled, surprising both of them. “You trip a few times and then you learn to walk around the lumps. It’s called growing up.”

“Not everyone gets around to it.”

“You did, prickly and all.”

“Thomas Dunstan didn’t. He drank. He was born in Wyoming, son of a hard-luck rancher.”

“There are a lot of hard-luck ranchers in the West,” Jill said. “Fact of life in a dry land.”

“No argument from me. My mother’s family wasn’t dirt poor, they were dust poor. Do you want to know more about your grandmother’s sometimes lover?”

“I think it’s past time I learned about him.”

Zach handed Jill his half-full coffee cup. Then he opened the computer, selected the Dunstan file, and began reading parts of it to Jill, who might or might not be the granddaughter of the drunk who happened to be a fine painter when he was sober.

“…regarded as a chronicler of the empty quarter of the West, a painter capable of capturing the majesty of land before the white man came and blah blah blah,” Zach said, condensing what was in the file.

She snickered and sneaked a sip of his coffee.

He noticed, winked at her, and went back to picking facts from the computer file.

“…painted and destroyed canvases until he produced one that he liked. Sometimes it was years between new canvases.”

“Too bad more painters didn’t cull their work before it went public,” Jill said. “Picasso and Dalí come instantly to mind.”

Zach laughed and kept picking out tidbits. “Sold well for the era, despite the scarcity of paintings. He drank. A lot. And this was noticed at a time and in a place where hard drinking wasn’t remarkable.”

“Sounds like the money he made from art went into booze.”

“Back then, booze was cheap. Having a family and a mistress is expensive.”

“Don’t expect me to feel sorry for him.”

“I don’t. A man is born with two heads. Dunstan listened to his dumb one.”

Jill almost choked on another stolen sip of coffee.

“…sold for as much as ten thousand dollars a painting before he died,” Zach continued blandly. “Back then, ten thousand was today’s half million. Hell, maybe a million. Inflation happens.”

She cleared her throat. “Does the file say who collected him?”

“In the beginning, mostly cattle barons and railroad tycoons, the kind of Western men who saw themselves as powerful enough to tame the wilderness. But lately…” Zach called up another file.

Jill waited, sipped more stolen coffee, and watched the dry land race by beneath the airplane’s wings. She was having a hard time understanding that her wild-child grandmother’s life had intersected with that of a man who became an iconic artist of the West.

A very expensive artist.

Zach’s soft whistle came through the earphones, distracting her.

“What?” she asked.

He turned the computer screen so that she could see the record of Dunstan sales from the time of his death to the most recent sale a year ago.

Five hundred thousand dollars in the late twentieth century.

Four million dollars last year.

One painting.

Jill felt like the airplane had dropped out from under her. She swallowed hard. Then she turned to Zach, who was watching her with narrowed, intent eyes.

“Four. Million. Dollars?” she asked, her voice rough.

“Yes.”

She shook her head sharply. “I’m having a tough time grabbing hold of this. I mean, I can’t believe our family has twelve Dunstans, much less that they’re wildly valuable.”

“We don’t know that they’re Dunstans.”

“Well, they sure got someone’s attention,” she said, thinking of her poor old car. And the slashed-to-ribbons painting. And Modesty Breck.

Dead.