J. Jance: Partner In Crime

Of all the portraits hanging in the gallery, that was the only one with the telltale red dot that indicated it was already sold. LaMar, subject and purchaser, hadn’t wanted the painting to be exhibited at all, but Dee had insisted. For her, having sixteen pieces represented some kind of magic number. Without LaMar’s portrait, entitled simply Car and Driver , the show would have been one painting short. So there it was.

Looking at it – seeing LaMar’s engaging grin and the reined-in strength of his powerful forearms – caused a lump to grow in Rochelle’s throat. She had done something she never should have done, something she had countless times forbidden herself to do – she had allowed him to get too close and, as a result, had become too involved. That kind of involvement was dangerous for both of them now that LaMar “Bobo” Jenkins was about to run for mayor of Bisbee.

The next municipal election was almost a year away, but Rochelle understood the necessity of distancing herself now rather than later. Once LaMar Jenkins officially declared his candidacy, he would be newsworthy. He would be an African-American running for office in a town where everyone considered himself part of an oppressed minority. That was bound to attract attention to LaMar as well as to anyone connected with him.

During the months Rochelle Baxter had lived in the community of Naco, Arizona, a few miles outside of Bisbee, she had noticed how the lady county sheriff, Joanna Brady, and her family were routinely covered in both local and statewide media venues. When the sheriff had remarried, the wedding itself had made headlines in the local paper, The Bisbee Bee . Sheriff Brady was, after all, a public figure. Several months earlier, when the sheriff’s young daughter and a friend had stumbled over the body of a murdered woman while on a Girl Scout campout, that, too, had been front-page fodder – and not just in Bisbee, either.

Rochelle couldn’t afford to live in the unblinking focus of a media microscope. Being a part of that kind of associated publicity – where a picture of Rochelle accompanying LaMar to some campaign event might well be beamed all over the country – was something she could ill afford. She had made up her mind. No matter how much it hurt, she would break off the relationship. And the breakup had to come soon. Now. While she could still do it and make it stick.

Sighing, she turned away from LaMar’s portrait and wandered through the building to view the other pictures hanging on the freshly painted stuccoed walls. Castle Rock Gallery occupied a series of small buildings that had been cobbled together over time. Rochelle theorized that a previous owner or owners had added on and stitched the pieces together in a haphazard fashion, as both spirit and funds had allowed. As a result, the rooms – of various sizes and shapes – were arranged with wildly varying floor elevations. With an eye to forestalling a potential lawsuit from some crusading Americans with Disabilities Act activist, Dee and Warren had installed a complex series of ramps that linked the rooms and uneven floor levels together.

Around the corner from LaMar’s grinning portrait but in another room altogether hung Rochelle’s favorite piece, one titled A Boy and His Dog . The two figures sat side by side on the edge of a large porch overlooking a sun-drenched front yard with a tree-lined paved street beyond a picket fence. One of the boy’s arms was flung casually across the golden Lab’s sturdy shoulder. Sitting with only their backs showing, they were framed by a doorway as though the artist, standing just inside the shadowy house, had painted them from that vantage point.

Of course, the boy was not really “a boy” at all. It was really Tommy, Rochelle’s younger brother. And “his dog” was really Scooter. Rochelle remembered coming out through the front door one summer’s day and seeing them sitting together like that. Tommy had been only ten at the time and Rochelle twelve. What hadn’t shown then – and what didn’t show now in the painting – was the leukemia that was already robbing Tommy of his childhood and obliterating his ability to play outdoors on that carefree summer’s day. What also didn’t show on that warm and lazy Georgia afternoon was how, a few months later, when an ambulance carrying Tommy to the hospital was speeding away from the house, lights flashing and siren blaring, Scooter went racing after it down the street, where he was struck by a car two intersections away. None of that showed in the picture, but it was all there, twenty-three years later, etched deeply into Rochelle’s still-grieving heart.

Two pictures away was another favorite. In it, Rochelle’s niece, Jolene, crouched, ball in hand, beneath a basketball hoop fastened high over her grandfather’s garage door. Her skin gleamed with sweat and her dark eyes glittered with clear determination. Her cornrows shone in the sunlight. The painting was titled Making a Basket , although the ball was still poised on the ends of Jolene’s fingertips as she prepared to spring upward.

A viewer would simply have to take it on faith that she had actually made the ball swish effortlessly through the hoop, but Rochelle didn’t. She knew for sure. She had been there, home on leave after Operation Desert Storm, playing a predinner pickup game with her sister’s teenage daughter. Jolene was married now and had two children of her own. Maybe three, for all Rochelle knew, but in her artist’s eye, Jolene was still young and innocent and with a world of possibility open to her.

Rochelle moved from one room to another, strolling up and down the various ramps. Standing in front of each painting, she allowed the images she had captured there to speak to her once more. In The Pastor and the Lamb she saw her father again. Roundly middle-aged and dressed in his bright red summer preacher’s robe, he leaned down to shake hands with a shy little boy who gazed worshipfully up at him over the grubby white Bible he clutched tightly in his other hand.

Next to that picture was one called Napping . In it, Rochelle’s grandmother, Cornelia, drowsed peacefully in her rocking chair while rays of early-afternoon sunlight streamed in through the sheer window curtains and transformed her silvery hair into a glowing halo.

Around the corner from Napping was the The Carver . An old man – Rochelle’s grandfather, his vitality not yet drained and his mahogany skin not yet tinged with the jaundice of kidney disease – sat on a kitchen chair and sharpened his knife on a soapstone while curls of newly whittled wood littered the floor around his feet.

A few feet away from The Carver was Homecoming . In that one, Rochelle’s mother, dressed in a suit and looking determinedly elegant, walked toward the front steps late one afternoon carrying her leather-bound briefcase balanced effortlessly in one hand. The slight smile on her lips showed that although she loved her work, she was nonetheless grateful to be coming home to her family – to her husband and children.

Concealed under the paint of that picture and three of the others in the gallery was a never-finished self-portrait. Rochelle had tried to paint that one over and over again. Each time she had given up in frustration and covered the unfinished work over with some other painting. That was the magic of working with oils. If a painting didn’t come together, you could always render it invisible by burying it under layers of other colors. Gazing at her mother’s well-remembered and equally well-rendered features, Rochelle realized why she had never succeeded in painting herself. She knew who her mother was, but when it came to Rochelle Baxter, the artist wasn’t so sure.

Sighing, she turned away. Dee had been absolutely right when she said selling the paintings must be like saying good-bye to a group of old friends, but for Rochelle it went far beyond that. In painting the portraits, she had recalled those loved ones from the past and remembered why she had loved them. Now, knowing she would never see any of them again, it seemed as though she was letting go of them forever at the same time she was letting go of their portraits. Hail and farewell.