can tell he’s lying.’ She paused. ‘So then I think maybe Alex is a girl. In New Orleans. How he got a girlfriend in New Orleans is beyond me, but I’m telling you because I sure ain’t telling David Power. You want the number he called?’
‘Yes, ma’am, I do.’ She gave it to him and he jotted it down.
‘You tell David Power he better fucking treat me nicer next time he sees me, or I’m filing a complaint. I got a lawyer now, what with getting the divorce, and I am in a filing mood.’
‘I sense your resolve, Mrs Bird. Thank you.’
‘You set bond on my brother last year,’ she said. ‘An amount we could handle. We appreciated it. I’m voting for you next time.’
He thanked her, stared at the phone number, nearly laughed.
Suzanne Gilbert opened the front door as he headed up the stairs. She wore black jeans, a black T-shirt, black sandals. Idiotic in this heat, Whit thought. Artist mourning clothes. She was very fair, attractive, a good five or six years older than Lucy. Her cheekbones and chin and nose were all precise and perfect, as measured as an architect’s drawing.
She greeted Whit with a brief hug, so quick he wondered why she’d bothered. Whit suspected that Suzanne wanted to pat his blondish hair flat or put him in a suit, tidy him up for Lucy. He saw her eyes take in his clothes with disapproval: the faded polo shirt, the rumpled khakis, the sandals.
‘How are you holding up?’ he asked.
‘Barely am,’ she said in a tone that meant anything but.
Whit followed her into a high-ceilinged foyer and then to a living room. The furniture was modern and expensive, imported teak, leather surfaces of tan and black, the carpet a creamy white, brave for a beachside house. Abstract art filled the walls, lined the bookshelves. But all painted with the same crude hand, no eye for detail or form. Savagely mixed, the colors selected to hurt the eye. Jackson Pollock without the restraint. Whit sensed a sudden meanness in the pictures. They were ugliness disguising themselves as talent. He hated the pictures on first sight.
He followed her to an immaculate, steel-dominated kitchen. A man who looked like he might drag his knuckles when he walked stood by the granite kitchen counter, drinking a bottle of Dos Equis. Big, thick-necked, with a shaved-bald head and wearing a black T-shirt and faded denim overalls. A bracelet of intertwining tattoos whirled around one melon-shaped bicep.
‘I don’t think you’ve met my boyfriend, Roy Krantz. Hon, this is Whit Mosley. He’s the coroner and the JP here and he’s conducting the inquest into Uncle Patch’s death.’ No, he hadn’t met Roy. The few parties and events where Lucy and Suzanne crossed paths, Roy was always at home or sleeping or working on a sculpture. Roy shunned limelight, it seemed to Whit. Perhaps he had trouble fitting through the front door.
Whit offered a hand; Roy shook it and didn’t try to squeeze Whit’s fingers into pulp.
The phone rang. ‘Excuse me,’ Suzanne said. ‘News has spread, and people want to bring over casseroles and cakes. You know how it is when you have a death in the family. Everyone swarms over with comfort foods and you gain ten pounds.’
As though weight gain were her biggest worry. Whit thought she needed a cheeseburger. But he gave his solemn, conducting-the-inquest nod. ‘Of course.’ She left the kitchen, scooped up a phone in the living room, spoke in a low voice.
‘You’re Lucy’s guy,’ Roy Krantz said. His voice was low and flat and sounded like it had been honed in a prison yard.
‘Yes.’
‘How’s she holding up?’
‘She’s talking to the police right now.’
Roy raised an eyebrow. ‘And what’s she saying?’
‘Family secrets, probably.’
Roy made a noise of thick beer-swallow, kept staring at him.
Suzanne returned. ‘Something to drink, Whit?’ Her voice glimmered a little too cheery, a little too hostess- bright.
‘No, thank you. May we talk now? Privately?’
‘Sure.’ Suzanne glanced at Roy, then led Whit down a hall thankfully empty of abstract art-pukings. Two doors opened off the hall: one to a concrete-floored room cluttered with small iron sculptures of gulls, palm trees, flamingos, and assorted equipment; the other to another studio, bright windows framing the view of the bay. A huge canvas leaned near one window, covered with a stained dropcloth. A worktable stood nearby, dotted with oil paint in blues, mustards, venomous greens, as though poison dripped on its surface. Finished paintings – more of the obnoxious scribblings that hung in the living room – decorated the walls.
In one corner a huge roll of paper lay unfurled, with smears of bright acrylic paint dried on the paper. Whit glanced at it, then glanced again. Two round magenta globes looked like they’d been pressed on the paper from small, pert breasts. A roll of lime paint looked like a hip; multiple handprints lay in blue and pink. Other blobs resembled kneeprints, footprints, and one squat figure eight looked like apple-green testicles. Suzanne wore a bent little smile on her architectural face.
‘You’re very prolific’ Whit nodded toward the calmer paintings on the wall. It was the only compliment he could think of.
‘I get bored working on a painting too long, so I paint quickly. But they sell quickly, too.’ An offhand shrug.
‘They’re very interesting.’
Interesting apparently didn’t cut it; she frowned. She sat on a paint-splattered stool and he settled on its twin across from her.
‘You’re probably wondering why I don’t paint the bay, with a wonderful view.’ Suzanne crossed her legs, dangled a black sandal off one alabaster foot.
‘No. But you want to tell me.’
She gave a solemn smile. ’Everyone here paints the bay. Every stupid little dabbler who can barely hold a brush between their fingers. And the required frisky gulls, little boats, swaying palms. Tiresome.’ She pointed at one small painting, framed in silver, a violent swirl of purple spirals, gray crosses, and white froth that looked like nothing more than idle slapping of paint by an angry child. ‘That’s the bay. My interpretation of it. No adorable dinghies, no fishing grannies, no endangered whooping cranes winging back to the refuge. The bay as it is. Hard. Cruel. Like life is.’
He didn’t think she knew diddly about hard life in this grand house. Maybe he should have her call Linda Bird. ‘I’d like to know about your relationship with Patch.’
‘Are you asking as a judge or because Lucy’s said an unkind word or two?’
Now that was interesting. ‘As a judge.’
‘I loved Patch. Who didn’t?’ She tucked her sandal back on her foot. ‘Artists live up to our stereotype now and then, get moody and mean when the work sucks. Patch always pulled me out of the blues, gave me a slap on the fanny when I needed it.’ She spoke with the air of the artist, playing out each nuance until it wasn’t a nuance anymore. But he saw in the dusky light how brittle her eyes and mouth looked under the fresh makeup. She had cried and cried hard.
‘Did he ever help you in other ways? Say financially?’
‘You ask that like you know the answer already.’
Whit shrugged.
‘You know, Lucy doesn’t make it easy to love her sometimes, does she? She does have a mouth.’ She lit a cigarette, a thin, ladylike coffin nail in a pink pack, then offered him one. He declined.
‘She told you garbage about me with great reluctance, right? Much wringing of hands? She got a vibe, right?’
Whit said nothing.
‘Lucy was born with a finger pointing at someone else. Artists see patterns, honey, and I’ve seen plenty of this one.’
‘She said you asked Patch for a large loan.’
‘I was a little short on cash between paintings and asked Patch for help. He said no, I said fine, we were
