“Sounds labor-intensive for you.”
“Not if you do the steaks and the booze. I’m also in charge of the treats for the other woman in your life, talk about saintly.”
After dinner, we shifted outdoors and lounged on the front terrace looking at trees and night sky and listening to the occasional hoots of owls preparing to dine. Blanche curled between us, recumbent but wide awake and hoping for more tidbits.
Robin obliged by crumbling bits of a chewy thing that claims to help dogs develop strong joints. Whether or not it’s true, Blanche loves them. Then again, she’s not picky. As bulldog flews vibrated, the two of us tuned in to the quiet and made our way slowly through second añejo Manhattans. The key, according to a barkeep I know, is chocolate bitters.
Years of treating patients has made me tolerant of silence but Robin’s naturally quiet nature gave her the edge and, as usual, I was the first to speak.
“How’s the Torres going?”
“Wonderful. It’s a work of art.”
“Speaking of art, what do you think it means when a painter creates something totally different from their other work?”
“Hmm. They could be trying to stretch creatively. Or to shift gears completely. Jackson Pollock started off as a realist.” She smiled. “If it’s old and you ask an art expert, they’ll try to tag anything different as a fake.”
“No appreciation for creativity?”
“Not unless they’ve actually created something other than academic articles. I always get a kick when I see some specialist squinting at brushstrokes or underpainting and drawing huge conclusions. Artists aren’t automatons and art’s not just about producing, it’s about diverging.”
She sipped, placed her hand on my knee. “That was pretty puffed up.”
I kissed her cheek. “Could it also mean the artist had come up with something personally meaningful?”
“Sure, that would be the motivation. This sudden interest, why do I think it relates to something nasty? Who’s the artist in question?”
“The female victim was an amateur painter. She left behind a few canvases in her home studio, mostly bland, genre stuff. Her husband found out she’d cheated on him and we found everything dumped in the trash, intact. Except for one painting that looked divergent to me. That, he sliced up.”
“Pretty hateful. He’s the main suspect?”
“If he was involved, he hired someone, but even that’s not clear.”
“Sliced,” she said.
“Corner to corner.” I pantomimed the X.
“Sounds like obliteration,” she said. “But no damage to the others?”
“No, he just tossed them.”
“So obviously that one meant something to him.”
“Whatever the case, Milo’s not impressed.”
“Milo,” she said, “is a saint among saints but when he’s doing his bloodhound thing, it can be hard to budge him away from the main scent. Especially when he’s frustrated.”
She reached down and ruffled Blanche’s neck. “Unlike this wolf descendant who can always be distracted by momentary pleasure.” Crumble, drop, slosh.
Robin added, “What’s different about the slashed one?”
“The others were full of color and there was no doubt what they depicted. This one was gray, black, white, abstract, and sketchy. Maybe that’s all it was, a sketch, and I’m overthinking.”
We held hands, sipped. Robin put her head on my shoulder. “You don’t have to ask.”
“Ask what?”
“For me to take a look at the screen shot in your phone.”
I stared at her.
“Oh, c’mon, we’re not in Sherlock territory. Actually, I must have a look. You’ve gotten me curious.”
I retrieved my phone from my office, had the image loaded by the time I got back.
She said, “That’s a ghost orchid.”
“A flower?”
“Yes, indeed. I know because I read a book about orchids a few years back, got curious and looked it up.”
“The journalist you said wasn’t mean.”
“Susan Orlean,” she said. “Very light touch. As opposed to.”
I studied the gray rectangle. “Don’t see anything floral about it.”
“You and everyone else, darling. It’s not exactly your cheerful sprig in a vase. What can you tell me about her?”
“Not much.” I summed up the little I knew.
She said, “Manipulative, illusive, and downright deceptive if she needed to be. Okay, makes sense.”
“What does?”
“Her identifying with the ghost orchid. It’s a very strange flower, Alex. Blooms infrequently, has stalky scales instead of leaves and this twiggy deal here for a stem that’s so thin it’s nearly invisible. More to the point, it doesn’t root in soil, just attaches itself to tree trunks and dangles. Gives nothing back to the tree, so it’s basically a parasite, though it does no harm.”
“Where does it grow?”
“Remote pockets of the Florida swamps. People looking for it have walked right by. As if it’s determined to hide.”
“Illusive and rootless,” I said.
“Sounds like your poor woman, no? Not that botany’s going to help you find out who killed her — let’s go inside, I don’t want to get too drowsy.”
I knew better than to say, For what?
Chapter 31
The following morning, after a two-mile run that barely hurt and a shower, I ate toast and drank coffee and deliberated telling Milo about the ghost orchid.
Botany won’t help.
If he was in a decent mood, he’d thank me and move on. If not, he’d grunt absently, thank me, and move on.
So put it aside for now. I spent a while doing my own reading about the flower, starting with the Orlean book then checking to see if anything new had surfaced on the Web since its publication.
It hadn’t. Nor had Robin omitted anything of substance.
That left me with a painting that had meant something to Meagin. And maybe to Doug.
An art chat between the two of them seemed unlikely. Despite Meagin’s evasiveness, had she told him something personal about the painting that made him determined to destroy it?
Had she somehow identified with a strange, parasitic organism and let that slip? Or was I way off and it had been something trivial.
Look, honey, isn’t this a great little weird thing. I’m going to paint it.
Sure, whatever.
A third possibility: the link being more concrete. And that led me to geography.
I paired Meagin’s name with florida swamp and found a huge state park called the Fakahatchee Strand where a decades-old ghost orchid had been discovered a few years back.
Coming up empty, I redirected the search to the town nearest the park, a former logging town called Copeland. Nothing. I cast the net wider: meagin southwest florida. Earned myself big bites of air sandwich.
That was likely to continue because why would a woman vanish in order to reinvent and leave her given name intact.
Detective rule number one: without knowing your victim, your chance of solving a murder is dismal.
No sense reminding my friend.
I took a coffee break then got to work on a nearly completed report, interrupted myself by answering the phone because of the caller.
Judge Julie Beck said, “Morning, hope it’s not too early.”
“Been up for a while.”
“Good,” she said. “New development on Ruffalo hates Ruffalo: neither of them wants Derek evaluated.”