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

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.