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

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.