Die in Plain Sight (29 page)

“It’s not your job to please them,” Ian said. “Pleasing me, now, that’s different.”

She blinked, then accepted his gentle, outrageous statement, letting it defuse her sadness and anger at her family. “So good to finally know my mission in life.”

“I’m here to serve.” He smiled, and his dark eyes were very serious. He turned back to Brody. “If I’m doing my math right, your father was about forty when you were born.”

Brody nodded.

“Is your mother still alive?”

“No. And we weren’t close while she was. She said more than once that if she hadn’t had me, she’d have left the son of a bitch. When I was sixteen, she decided I was old enough to take care of myself, so she left.”

“No other kids?” Ian asked.

Brody laughed curtly. “No. Just as well. Neither of them was any good as a parent.”

“Did he have a wife before your mother?”

For a moment Brody looked startled. “No. At least I don’t think so. If he did, he never talked about it.”

“What about his own parents?”

“Never mentioned them,” Brody said.

Ian raised his eyebrows. “Not a close family.”

“I guess not,” Brody said. “I think he ran away from home. Or at least left home real early. He would have been in his teens in the Depression years. Maybe there wasn’t enough money to raise him, so he hit the road and never looked back. It happened to a lot of young men like that. Go in the army or go on the bum. He could have gone the army route. I just don’t know. He never talked about it.”

Ian studied Brody in silence. “Most men talk about themselves at some point to their son, even if it’s something they’d rather not have
their wives overhear. Can you remember anything at all about your father as a young man?”

“Other than the usual way-too-late talk about condoms, he didn’t say much. You have to understand—my father had contempt for everyone he met except Lacey. He saw in her a reflection of himself that he’d never seen in me. She loved painting and she loved him.” Before Ian could ask another question, Brody held up his hand. “What’s the point of all this raking over the muck of the past?”

Before Ian could answer, Lacey did. “Murder.”

Pasadena

Sunday afternoon

D
ottie and Brody stared at their daughter.

“What on earth?” Dottie asked sharply.

“Sorry,” Lacey said, wincing. “I didn’t mean to just plop it out like that. But you remember the paintings Grandfather did of death by fire, by auto wreck, and by drowning?”

“No,” Dottie said, appalled. “Which ones?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Brody said impatiently. “Landscapes, yes, sure, hundreds of them. But nothing like murder. This is really too much, Lacey. Why do you insist on upsetting your mother?”

“Hell,” Lacey said under her breath. Then, to Ian. “I knew we should have brought some with us.”

“The sheriff would have, um, plotzed,” Ian said dryly. “That’s why I took the photos instead.”

He stood up and went to the table where he had set aside his small
computer. He turned it on, called up the electronic files, and carried the computer back to the coffee table, where everyone could see the screen.

“What is it?” Brody asked. “A fire?”

“A car accident,” Lacey said. “It happened on Savoy Ranch at a place called Cross Country Canyon.”

“I ran the license plate I found just to be sure,” Ian said. “I was right. Three Savoy died in the wreck.”

Brody shot a narrow look at Ian. “Are you saying it was murder?”

“Alcohol, according to the authorities,” Ian said. “Apparently, Three liked to get ripped and then race around the ranch in his old hot rod.”

Dottie started to speak, then closed her mouth and looked away from the screen.

“What is it?” Ian asked.

“Nothing,” Dottie said.

“Nothing is what we have,” Ian said. “What we need is information.”

“Oh, just old gossip,” she said, waving her hand. “My mother’s sister married a Moreno County developer. She mentioned something…” Dottie frowned, then shook her head. “I can’t remember. Just the fact that there was gossip. Go on. It will come back to me sooner or later.”

Without saying anything, Ian clicked through the other wreck paintings. Brody and Dottie looked baffled.

“Why would he paint so many?” Dottie asked after a moment.

“We were wondering the same thing,” Ian said. Then, to Brody, “Was your father big on the Savoy-Forrest family?”

“I don’t understand,” Brody said.

“Was he a fan, a groupie, an enthusiast?” Ian asked. “Did he follow the society pages or clip out pictures or talk about the family a lot?”

“Not to me.” Brody looked at Lacey. “How about you? You spent more time with him than anyone.”

“Not one word,” she said simply. “He never talked about Moreno County, either. In fact, until Susa identified some of the paintings as depicting the ranch, I thought that he’d only painted in San Diego and the desert and Santa Barbara, with a few side trips to L.A. and San Francisco. Which, come to think of it, is odd.”

“San Francisco or L.A.?” Ian asked. “What’s odd about that, the fact that they’re cities?”

Lacey shook her head. “I meant it’s odd that he never painted or
talked about painting on Savoy Ranch. It had, and still has, a lot of cachet with the gallery set. But he obviously did paint there sometimes.”

Mentally Ian added that fact to the growing list in his head under the category of
David Quinn, artist, grandfather—and murderer?

“Okay, here’s a new take on a way to die,” Ian said, opening the file holding photos of all the burning house paintings. “We believe it depicts the death of Lewis Marten.”

Brody hissed something under his breath. “Why do you think that?”

“The date on the front matches Marten’s death date,” Ian said. “The scene matches the small amount of information we’ve gotten on where Marten lived and painted.”

Lacey’s parents looked at the screen and then at Ian. He clicked through the rest of the burning house paintings.

“I fail to see the point,” Brody said.

“Marten died on Savoy Ranch,” Lacey said. “The ranch that Grandfather never talked about and supposedly never painted. The ranch that is central to California Impressionism.”

Brody made an impatient gesture, but before he could say anything, Ian did. “Lacey calls this one
Scream Bloody Murder
.”

As he spoke, Ian opened the drowning file. If the idea of murder had been merely whispered in the other paintings, it was brutally clear in this one.

Dottie’s breath came in with a hissing sound. “Dear God.”

Brody’s mouth turned down. “
Scream Bloody Murder
. Aptly named, Lacey. Mother of God. Whatever possessed my father to paint this?”

“We think this depicts Gem Savoy Forrest’s murder,” Ian said evenly. “She died on the ninth of February.” As he spoke, Ian tapped a fingernail on the screen, indicating the numbers that had been painted in red: 9.2.

Dottie recognized the name before her husband did. “But she wasn’t murdered. She died of an accidental overdose of alcohol and medications. That”—Dottie flicked a glance at the computer screen—“is the imagination of a sick mind.”

“Always a possibility,” Ian said before Lacey could fall into her reflexive defense of Grandpa Rainbow. “Note the bracelet.” He clicked on that area of the photo and it zoomed into larger size, but not so large that the shape of the bracelet was lost. Dottie leaned forward.

“Interesting bit of jewelry, but I doubt if it’s terribly
expensive. It’s hard to tell with a painting like this what size and quality the stones actually are. I would guess white gold rather than platinum. With platinum the stones are usually bigger.”

“Have you seen the bracelet before now?” Ian asked.

“I’ve seen the heart design used a lot, of course,” she said. “Who hasn’t? These days it’s a tacky cliché, like the love knot. I don’t remember seeing intertwined diamond hearts and solid metal hearts, but there would be no reason to remember if I had. It’s hardly an astonishing piece of jewelry.”

“Brody?” Ian asked.

“No.”

“It wasn’t something your mother had or your father kept as a memento?”

Brody snorted. “My father wasn’t a sentimental man. My mother had a plain gold wedding band. It was the only jewelry I ever saw her wear.”

Ian didn’t need to ask Lacey; if she’d recognized the bracelet, she would have said something before now.

“The Savoy Curse,” Dottie said. “Now I remember.”

“What?” Lacey asked.

“Accidental death due to far too much alcohol or meds,” Ian said, thinking of the newspaper archives he’d searched through Rarities. “The curse of the wealthy class. The high-toned newspapers whispered it and the bottom of the pack bayed it in the headlines every chance they got.”

“Yes, that’s what my aunt talked about,” Dottie said. “The Savoy Curse. The second Benford Savoy died in middle age in a tragic hunting accident. The third Benford Savoy died in middle age in a fiery car wreck. The Savoy matriarch died in a riding accident, although what a woman of her age was doing racing stallions over the countryside…well, anyway, it was tragic. Then the granddaughter, Gem, rumored to be drunk when she drowned in her fancy spa. Again, middle-aged. So sad. All that money and no happiness.” Then Dottie added briskly, “Not that poverty brings bliss to anyone. It’s just that people
expect
money to make them happy.”

“Which brings me back to my original question,” Ian said. “Why was David Quinn obsessed with these three particular deaths but not with the others in the Savoy family?”

Brody looked everywhere but at Lacey.

“It was nine years ago,” Ian said calmly to Brody, “but do you remember where your father was in February then? Particularly on the ninth?”

“What?” Dottie asked, shooting to her feet. “Of all the—”

“It’s all right,” Brody said, cutting across his wife’s anger. “Considering the paintings, it’s a fair question, don’t you think?”

Instead of answering, Dottie started pacing. The click of her heels over wood alternated with the muted hiss of leather soles on expensive oriental rugs.

“The man is dead. The people in the paintings are dead. What good is all this?” she demanded.

It was Lacey who answered. “If people were murdered, it’s a simple matter of justice. If there weren’t any murders, I want to know that. I want to know what Grandpa Rainbow was or wasn’t. I
need
to know.”

Dottie looked at her daughter’s stubborn chin and determined eyes. “And the devil with what the rest of us need.”

Lacey flinched but didn’t back down. “You hated him. What would it matter to you if he was a killer or a saint?”

“Not everyone is dying to have a murderer in their direct ancestry,” her mother shot back. “If he were still alive, I’d say go find the truth and then hang the son of a bitch from the highest tree you could find.”

Lacey’s eyes opened in shock. She’d never heard so much as
hell
from her mother.

“But he’s dead and the only ones who can be hurt are the living,” Dottie said. “If you don’t care about yourself, think of your sisters.”

“I think my sisters will do just fine,” Lacey said. “If their society friends dump them for what their grandfather did, then they weren’t much in the way of friends, were they? Besides, why can’t he be innocent and just a closet groupie of the rich and famous of Moreno County?”

“This is pointless.” Dottie stalked out of the room.

“
Damn it
,” Lacey said, smacking her hand on the coffee table. “It always ends up the same way.”

There was a long, unhappy silence.

Ian was just getting to his feet to leave when Dottie strode back into the living room carrying her portable computer under her arm. Without a word, she popped open the screen and pointed to the date listed on an elaborate professional calendar.

“David Quinn wasn’t here,” she said. “I know, because my mother’s funeral happened to be on that day.”

Lacey closed her eyes. She’d hoped her grandfather had been in Pasadena. She certainly hadn’t expected to be able to prove that he
wasn’t
so quickly, so definitely.

“What about the other two dates?” she asked painfully.

“That was before your father’s time,” Ian said. “And, apparently, before your grandfather’s.”

“What?”

“As far as I can find, David Quinn never existed in any official file until he married SaraBeth Courtney forty-eight years ago.”

Savoy Ranch

Sunday afternoon

R
ory rubbed his face wearily, leaned back into the soft leather couch, and stared at the gas fire in the hearth. He hadn’t wanted to bring Bliss to the ranch to discuss old death with Ward and his two children, but she hadn’t been able to let go of it.

Defensively Bliss flipped through the nearly decade-old coroner’s report for the fifth time and dumped it on the coffee table in front of Savoy. “So she was alone in the spa, drinking vodka on the rocks and popping painkillers. So what? She did it all the time and she didn’t drown.”

Ward said something under his breath and shook his head.

Savoy picked up the old report and glanced through it. He didn’t find anything new. He didn’t expect to. He took a drink of his beer and set the bottle on a coaster on the coffee table.

“Well?” she challenged.

“Do you really think Mother was murdered?” Savoy asked.

Bliss’s mouth set in a stubborn line. Then she looked at her new husband, seeing the tension and fatigue in the line of his shoulders. She stopped pacing and went to sit next to him.

“No,” she said. “I guess not. It’s just…it was so shocking to see that bracelet.” She shivered. “And I keep wondering how the painter knew about it.”

“Intertwined hearts aren’t exactly a rare jewelry design,” Savoy pointed out.

“But the bracelet itself is unique,” she insisted. “It was commissioned for Grandmother’s engagement.”

Ward just shook his head. “Savvy’s right. Go into any jewelry store and you’ll find heart bracelets and rings and whatnot. Besides, the painting’s not photographic. Even if your bracelet had looked a lot different, you still could have seen it in the painting.”

She knew he was right and it pissed her off. “Don’t you care that Mother could have been murdered?”

Ward took a long swallow of beer, set the bottle down with extreme care, and gave his daughter a look that had her wishing she was still standing so she could back up.

“It would have been easier on me if she had been murdered,” Ward said. “Rory and I spent a lot of time and political favors keeping Gem’s suicide from dragging the Forrest name through every sleazy tabloid in the county, state, and nation.”

Bliss went white. “I heard whispers, but I never really believed she killed herself.”

Rory put his arm around Bliss. “Sugar, your mother took after her father, and he wasn’t real stable after he hit the bottle. Your dad and I worked hard to keep down the gossip about her. When she wasn’t drying out in one resort or another, she was drinking and partying hard. I threw the worst of her gigolos out of the county and paid off the rest of them.”

Bliss looked at her brother. “Savvy?”

He looked like he’d bitten into something sour. “When Mother was sober, she was a wonderful woman, laughing and witty and beautiful.”

Ward grunted. “You got a longer memory than mine, boy. All I remember is the drunk.” Then he waved his hand abruptly. “Oh, hell, Gem was all right when she wasn’t drinking, but she just didn’t spend much time sober and refused to pull herself out of the booze.”

Savoy didn’t argue. It was the unhappy truth.

Bliss gnawed on her thumb, looked at her bracelet, and gnawed some more.

Gently Rory tookher hand between his own. “I know it’s hard, but look at it this way,” he said to Bliss. “No one benefited from her death. There weren’t any jealous lovers who’d want to kill her, because they’d all been paid off and were happy to take the money. As for a jealous husband—”

Ward gave a crack of sardonic laughter. “I didn’t care who she screwed, as long as she didn’t fuck with the ranch.”

“Maybe she was just trying to get your attention with all her lovers and drinking,” Savoy said bitterly.

Ward gave him a hard glance. “Then she didn’t know me very well, did she?”

“Does anyone?” Savoy asked.

“The point,” Rory said before an argument could explode, “is that there wasn’t any motive for murdering her. No one was better off because Gem was dead. Not you, not Savvy, not even Ward. He already voted her shares in the business, because Gem just didn’t give a damn as long as there was plenty of money for expensive clothes, booze, pills, and younger men.”

Bliss winced. Her stomach clenched as she wondered if her mother had looked in the mirror one day, seen the ruins of beauty, and decided that living was more trouble than it was worth. Or maybe she’d simply killed herself a little at a time until there wasn’t anything left.

And the daughter couldn’t help wondering if she’d been on the way to doing the same.

“It’s so ugly,” Bliss said hoarsely.

“It’s over, sugar,” Rory said, kissing her hair.

“But why would anyone paint such a cruel image?” she asked.

“Ask your father,” Savoy said. “He collects the damn things.”

Bliss looked shocked. “What are you talking about?”

“The family’s private collection,” Savoy said. “We have a lot of death paintings by this artist.”

“You bet we do,” Ward said. “And that collection is the best proof of all that your mother wasn’t murdered.”

Bliss turned toward him. “I don’t understand.”

“Simple,” Ward said. “Your mother died nine years ago. The artist who painted the drowning woman has been dead for almost fifty years.”