“Paint,” he said flatly. “If you want paint with real cobalt and real cadmium the only thing I sell is Winsor and Newtons. The best. Five ninety-five big tube three ninety-five small.” Shephard wondered if Frank had dropped commas from his vocabulary. “Aisle one,” Frank said in a blur, then threw back his head and went to help another young man struggling with a large picture frame.
Shephard found the paint tubes locked in a case on aisle one. He noted that Frank was correct in his prices. Leaning up to the glass, he spotted both Cobalt Blue and Cadmium Yellow among the uniform tubes. On the other side of the aisle were the paintbrushes. The camel hair brushes were moderate in price and came in a wide selection of shapes, sizes, and lengths.
As Shephard worked his way through the store, showing the Identikit to the clerks, he decided that the Art Mart must be the largest employer in the city. A toothy blond girl said he looked familiar but that she probably would have remembered because you have to unlock the case to sell Winsor and Newtons, and so far as she knew she hadn’t. A wide and serious woman with a head of healthy brown curls told Shephard that she had sold so many Winsor and Newtons in the last week that she couldn’t remember them all.
“Can you remember who bought them?” he asked earnestly.
“Come on, man,” she said. “I’m an artist, not a clerk. A face is a face.”
A red-headed boy with bright green eyes studied the Identikit sketch and pursed his lips grimly, as if wondering whether or not he should take a bet. He finally decided no and told Shephard to try Ella’s Corner because the best artists in town didn’t shop Laguna Art Mart anyway.
An hour later he merged onto Coast Highway and the slow knot of tourist traffic.
Ella’s Corner was just that, a nook filled with art supplies, owned and maintained by a substantial woman named Ella. She examined the Identikit patiently, once with her glasses on and once with them off. A poodle wearing a knit vest poked from behind the counter, smelled Shephard’s shoe, and clicked away.
“I didn’t exactly sell him the paints,” she said finally. “He said he didn’t have any money, so I took one of his works in trade. I do it a lot. That’s probably one of the reasons this is Ella’s Corner and not Ella’s place, house, or castle.” She smiled beautifully and leaned over the counter, watching her poodle wander toward the easels. The dog turned a pair of gooey eyes to Ella when she called its name. “The painting is hanging over there.” She pointed behind her and called the dog again.
Shephard picked his way through the crowded store to the far wall, which was covered with frames suspended on wooden pegs. Balanced above the top row was a large painting that grabbed his attention and sent a sparkle of nerves down his back.
It was done in reds and blacks, thickly applied, a dense canvas that was as visceral as any painting he had ever seen. In the upper left, a figure in black loomed from an angular bench of some kind, while below him a man with his back to the viewer gazed upward. Jutting from the center of the scene and disappearing off to the right was a thin stable of sorts, filled with beasts that had horses’ heads and the bodies of men. As Shephard stared at the presiding figure, it seemed at first to be a hooded man, then a demon, then perhaps a woman with severe black hair, then a large reptilian bird. Slashed in black across its shadowy form was a dark protrusion. An arm? Wing? Cape? And deep in the dark recess of the head, two deep red sockets glowed dully.
He started when Ella appeared beside him.
“Unsigned,” he said.
“Powerful,” she said, cocking her head gallery-browser style, “but rather opaque. I kind of liked it after all the chintzy seascapes we see in this town. This painting has guts. So what the heck. I give up fifty dollars’ worth of paint and fifty dollars’ worth of canvas and brushes so he can do another one. It’s a fair shake even if I can’t sell it. You don’t sell nightmares in Laguna. Of course we’ve got enough real-life nightmares to keep us busy for a while, don’t we, detective?”
Shephard shrugged and continued to study the painting.
“No offense,” she said pleasantly. “I recognized you from the television news.”
Shephard accepted a cup of herb tea and sat with Ella for nearly half an hour, asking her every question he could think of about the man who had done the painting. But in the end her information was thin: he had come in one afternoon early last week, gone straight to the best paints and supplies, stacked them on the counter, and said that he was a great artist with no money but a painting he could give her in trade. He had then gone back downstairs — she had watched from the window — and brought back the canvas, framed, from the trunk of an early model red convertible Cadillac parked at the curb in front.
“How many blocks are we from St. Cecilia’s Church?” Shephard asked.
“Just three,” she said, then talked more about the strange painting, the humorless intensity of the man, his very near resemblance to the Identikit sketch that she now studied again. After a long pause she took the poodle up onto her ample lap and stroked its head. “Did he kill the old folks here in town?” Her eyes looked resigned.
Shephard nodded and touched the fluff of the dog’s head. “How much would you like for the painting?”
It fit nicely into the trunk of Shephard’s own convertible, which was parked, as the Cadillac had been, at the curb in front of Ella’s Corner.
With the evening traffic at its worst, Shephard took to the city on foot, moving north on the crowded sidewalk to the neighborhood overlooked by St. Cecilia’s Church.
His pace was quick, despite the throngs of tourists and beach-goers. He angled through the crowd, a lanky figure in a loose jacket, tall enough to be almost conspicuous, but otherwise unremarkable except for the Band-Aid that graced the bald spot on the back of his head.
Through a break in the buildings he saw the ocean, a smooth plate of bronze in the windless evening. The same ocean that had cradled Jane and him, he thought, and the same one that had swallowed Burton Creeley. He paused for a moment, as the pedestrians eddied around him, and witnessed the ocean as an admirer, perhaps a friend. The sun had begun its slow descent over Catalina, and Shephard could see the profile of the island, as choked in smog as the city of Santa Ana had been a few hours before. Then, back to the street where the shadows were as long and solid as dashes of gray-green paint.
Two blocks short of St. Cecilia’s he stopped again to survey the task before him. The west side of the highway was a solid front of shops, galleries, and apartments. To the east, the highway sprouted two hotels, a bed-and-breakfast house, and more galleries, the windows of which caught the sun and threw it back at him in bright rectangles of copper. With the stack of Identikit sketches in hand, he slipped through the crowd and into the first gallery, an incense-reeking little place called Outer Visions.
He was met by a huge canvas that hung on the far wall and easily dominated the dingy room with its electric blue hues. In the center of the painting was a life-sized depiction of Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar right-handed. The gallery manager sat at a desk, swamped in the smoke of incense rising from a brass burner in front of her. She eyed Shephard suspiciously through the blue smoke and finally rose to approach him.
He complimented her on the incense, which she said was homemade and named Hodgepodge. She showed a momentary interest in the Identikit but hadn’t seen such a man and promised to call if she did. He left a card and stepped back out to the highway to cleanse his Hodgepodge-filled head with the sharp aroma of the ocean.
One door north was the Haitian Experience. The gallery windows were filled with small, bright, primitive works on canvas and wood. The owner introduced herself as Beverly Doan and spoke with a chipper British accent about the “primitive heathenism,” “sensual innocence,” and “magical visions” of the Haitian painters. She explained that her largest seller was S. W. Bottex, a Haitian known for his childlike enthusiasm and innocent energy.