J. Jance: Partner In Crime

“Five months or so,” Dee answered. “As I said, Bobo Jenkins met her first – I’m not sure how – and he introduced us. He knew I was getting ready to open the gallery. He thought Shelley and I would hit it off. Which we did, of course. She was such a nice person, for an ex-Marine, that is. I’m more into peace and love,” Dee added with a self-deprecating smile. “But then, by the time Shelley made it to Bisbee, so was she – into peace and love, I mean.”

“Where did she come from?”

Dee Canfield frowned. “This may sound strange, but I’m not sure. The way she talked about being glad to be out of the rain, it could have been somewhere in the Northwest, but she never did say for certain. I asked her once or twice, but she didn’t like to talk about it, so I just let it be. I had the feeling that she had walked away from some kind of bad news – probably a creep of an ex-husband – but I didn’t press her. I figured she’d get around to telling me one of these days, if she wanted to, that is.” Dee frowned. “Now that I think about it, maybe she has,” she added thoughtfully.

“What do you mean?”

Dee countered with a question of her own. “What do you know about art?”

“Not much,” Joanna admitted. “I had to take the humanities course at the university, but that’s about all.”

“Remember that old saw about writers writing about what they know?”

Joanna nodded.

“The same thing goes for artists,” Dee continued. “They paint what they know. Shelley painted portraits. Her subjects glow with the kind of intensity that only comes from the inside out – from the inside of the subject and of the painter as well. The titles are all perfectly innocuous – The Carver, The Pastor and the Lamb, Homecoming – and yet they’re all painted with the kind of longing that puts a lump in your throat. Shelley was painting far more than what she saw. She was also painting what she wanted – a time and place and people she wanted to go back to, but couldn’t. Does that make any sense?”

Joanna nodded. “She never talked to you about any of the people in her paintings?”

Dee shook her head. “Not really. ‘Somebody I knew back home,’ she’d tell me without ever bothering saying where ‘back home’ was. But I did notice that there’s no rain in any of her pictures. Wherever home was, it must not rain very often, or else she just didn’t like to paint rain.”

“Maybe Rochelle Baxter didn’t tell you where she came from because she had something to hide,” Joanna suggested.

“Like maybe she had done something wrong? Something illegal?” Dee demanded.

“Possibly.”

“No!” Dee replied hotly. “Nothing like that. I’m sure of it. I’m an excellent judge of character, Sheriff Brady. Psychic, even. Shelley was as honest as the day is long. If she had done something bad, I would have known it.”

“You said she was an ex-Marine. Did Rochelle mention anything to you about where she served and when?”

“She’d been in the Gulf War,” Dee answered. “I remember something about her being an MP, but again, she wasn’t big on details.”

“Do you have any idea about the people in the paintings?” Joanna asked. “Who they might be?”

“Maybe you should come up to the gallery and see for yourself,” Dee suggested. “I assume they’re people from Shelley’s past. They’re all painted in a wonderful sort of summer light, but not the light we have here in the desert. The shadows don’t have the same hard edges that desert shadows do. This is much softer. And speaking of soft, that’s how she spoke, too – with a soft drawl that makes me think she must have come originally from somewhere down south, but then she’d say something about being glad her bones were finally warming up, so I really don’t know.

“If that’s all you need, I’d better go,” Dee added, extracting a car key from the fringed leather purse that hung from her shoulder. She edged away from Joanna toward a wildly colored, custom-painted Pinto station wagon.

“I still need to go get gas,” she said, “but I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to go through with the show’s grand opening tonight after all. For one thing, it’s too late to call off the caterer. Even if I canceled, I’d still have to pay for the food. So we’ll have an event anyway, even if it’s more like a wake than anything else – a wake with paintings instead of a body. But before it opens, I’m going to redo all the prices.”

“Redo them?” Joanna asked. “What do you mean?”

“I’m going to raise them,” Dee Canfield returned decisively. “Those fifteen pieces are all I have to sell of Shelley’s work. With her gone, that’s all there’s ever going to be, which makes a big difference to collectors. It means the paintings are more valuable.”

“There aren’t any others?”

“Only one,” Dee replied. “But that one’s already sold.”

“But I would have thought there’d be others, either here in her studio or in storage…” Joanna began.

Dee shook her head. “Shelley was something of a perfectionist, you see. She’d paint one canvas over and over until she got it right and moved on to the next one. Maybe she was just cheap, but she didn’t believe in letting canvases go to waste.”

“How do art galleries work?” Joanna asked innocently. “Do you get a set fee and the artist receives all the rest?”

“Of course not,” Dee said. “Shelley’s and my agreement works on a percentage basis, fifty-fifty.”

“So, if you raise the prices on Rochelle Baxter’s work, her heirs will receive more, but so will you.”

“Believe me,” Dee said, “I’ll see to it that Shelley’s heirs receive the additional proceeds, if that’s what you mean.” She paused, and her eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. Are you suggesting that I may have had something to do with Shelley’s death – that I killed her so I could make more money off her paintings?”

“I wasn’t implying anything of the kind,” Joanna replied evenly. “But whenever we encounter a suspicious death like this, we question everyone. It’s the only way to find out what really happened.”

Joanna’s response did nothing to calm Dee Canfield’s sudden anger. “You can take your questions and your not-so-subtle hints and go straight to hell!” she fumed.

With that, Dee got in her car and slammed the door behind her. On the second turn of the key, the old engine coughed fitfully to life. Jerking and half-stalling, the Pinto lurched away from the curb and bounced through an axle-bending pothole.

As the Pinto shuddered out of sight, Joanna Brady jotted into her notebook: Who is Deidre Canfield and where did she come from?

DAVE HOLLICKER CAME OUTSIDE and heaved yet another set of plastic bags into his waiting van. “How much longer do you think you’re going to be?” Joanna asked. “Probably several more hours,” he said.

Joanna nodded. “All right, then. I’ll leave you and Casey to it. In the meantime, I’m going back to the department to try to herd my day into some kind of order.”

As she drove toward the Justice Center, Joanna recalled the last time she had seen Bobo Jenkins. It had been several months earlier, on the occasion of Angie Kellogg’s marriage to Dennis Hacker. The wedding ceremony had taken place in the parsonage of Tombstone Canyon United Methodist Church, with the Reverend Marianne Maculyea presiding. Bobo Jenkins, Angie’s employer at the Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge, had given away the bride.

Recalling the event, Joanna remembered that Bobo Jenkins had seemed buoyantly happy as he told Butch about his plan to sell the Blue Moon to Angie and Dennis. He said he was looking forward to his second early retirement.”