“Did you find out something useful?” Jean-Paul asked, taking my arm.
“More than I hoped for,” I said.
He glanced at his watch and asked, “Would you like a coffee?”
“I would.” My hands were cold.
He told me that he spoke with his son every Sunday evening. In Paris, it was already evening. We found a small espresso bar in old El Paseo, a 1920s-era shopping plaza a half block off the beaten path, and claimed an outdoor table under a propane heater.
My telephone had been buzzing in my pocket all morning. While Jean-Paul spoke with Dom, I took out my phone to see who had called. Max left a message: Lana was meeting with him first thing Monday morning; he had called both Fergie and Guido and they were fine with the terms he would demand. Ecstatic is the word he used. Some friends called; Ida Green again, twice, and Roger Tejeda. I called Roger.
“Important business first,” he said as greeting. “My mom held off on the tamales until this evening so that you and your mom could come. Four-thirty, five work for you?”
I told him I could probably make it, but could I bring someone?
“Of course, Mags. We’re all dying to meet him.” He dropped his voice. “And hear all about last night.”
“Dear God.” I needed to take a few breaths before I asked, “Who’s the spy?”
“Let me see.” He cleared his throat. “When you spoke to your mother this morning, she heard his voice in the background. She mentioned this to your daughter when they spoke afterward. Casey passed this to Kate when Kate called to invite her and her roommate for dinner.”
“And everyone will be at your house tonight?”
“Of course. Max is picking up your mom, so don’t worry about that.”
“You’re some fine detective, Roger,” I said. “What can we bring?”
“Where are you?”
“Santa Barbara.”
“Wine, then.”
I called Max. He had the grace to say nothing about Jean-Paul, though I’m sure he had been included in that particular information loop. Whenever he showed up with a new woman, which happened fairly regularly, I did not tease him or comment about her, unless asked.
He told me that he had given Lana a thirty-six-hour option, for which she paid handsomely. They should have contracts ready to sign by Monday night.
When I put my phone in my pocket, Jean-Paul was gazing into his coffee with the strangest expression on his face.
“Is Dom all right?”
A little head wag-maybe yes, maybe no-was accompanied by a puzzled smile.
“Dom told me that it was all right with him that I spent last night with you.”
“You told him?”
“He knew,” he said, and held up both palms, meaning how is that possible?
I thought for a moment. “My guess: my mom heard your voice at my house this morning, she told Casey, who speaks with her grandmother Élodie in Paris every Sunday, who then called whom?”
“My mother,” he said, all things suddenly clear, if mystifying just the same. “Who told my sister, at whose home my son is staying.”
“It’s a small world, Jean-Paul.” I reached for his hand. “Did your son also tell you that my friends are expecting you for dinner tonight at their home?”
He laughed. “No, he seems to have missed that. But tomorrow I’m sure he’ll tell me whether I had a good time.”
The Snow Gallery was on De la Guerra, two doors up from State Street. Our chatty gallery owner down the way had been correct about this gallery being the top of the heap. Not a seascape to be seen. Instead, on a freestanding screen facing the front doors, there was a pair of beautiful Millard Sheets Pomona Valley landscapes that dated from the 1930s, a watercolor and an oil on canvas, as well as one of his colorful renderings of a stack of rickety wooden Bunker Hill tenements and their inhabitants painted during the same decade.
Jean-Paul and I stood in front of them, gawking, for a long, quiet moment. I did not recognize any of those paintings specifically, but I knew the artist, and liked his work enough to have invested in a good-quality print of a painting very similar to the oil-on-canvas landscape. In the print hanging on my living room wall, the background was the sensuous golden hills that are typical of California: their tones were like sun-ripened human flesh, their outline reminiscent of the curves of a naked woman lying on her side. In the foreground there were a red barn, a windmill, and two grazing horses. It was late in the day and the shadows were long. The gallery’s painting suggested the same time of day, but there were three horses, no windmill, and the hills were seen from a slightly different angle.
“You have that one.” Jean-Paul pointed at the gallery’s version.
“Same artist, different painting,” I said. “And mine is just a print.”
“You like this very much?”
I nodded. “Very much. None of the places in these three paintings exists anymore as you see them. Plowed under, stuccoed over, every one.”
He peered more closely at the tiny price card posted on the screen beside the paintings. Wagging his hand, he turned to me and said, “Oh-la-la.”
The bite was high-five figures, each.
“Those are very fine pieces, sir.”
The woman who suddenly appeared beside us was exquisite, ethereally so. Eurasian maybe, or Asian with good eyelid surgery. She was slender, wearing a simple black jersey sheath with a gold chain draped around her narrow hips. Her sleek blue-black hair was fastened at the back of her neck and fell in a straight silken shaft halfway to her waist.
She offered her hand to me. “Clarice Snow.”
I took her cool fingers and said, “Margot Duchamps,” which was my pre-TV legal name. “And this is Jean-Paul Bernard.”
He took her hand and gave her a little French bow.
“We are fortunate to have these,” she said, turning our attention back to the paintings. “They are estate pieces from the private holdings of a prominent California family. The owners were very knowledgeable collectors who frequently recognized young talent. They purchased these from the painter when he was still quite unknown outside of a small circle of local plein air painters.”
She turned to us with a demure smile. “It is always exciting to be able to add previously unexhibited works to the artist’s known catalogue.”
Jean-Paul asked, “No one knew these paintings existed, then?”
“They were known, yes,” she said. “But only by description and anecdote. Other than the owner’s family and guests to their home, including the artist himself, no one has seen them for over seventy-five years.”
“They are beautiful,” I said.
A very well-dressed couple entered the gallery. Clarice Snow nodded to them, and said to us, “I’ll leave you to look around. If you have questions, do ask.”
Jean-Paul whispered in my ear, “Shall we take all three, dear?”
I had to look at him, find the twinkle in his eye to be sure he was kidding-he was. I hadn’t the slightest idea how much money he had. Or didn’t have.
He tipped his head toward the right and whispered, “The bronze bowling pin you told me about. It is there.”
I turned and saw it, exhibited on a low dado in a far back corner, with no spotlight to show off its contours or call attention to its presence.
The piece was big, maybe six feet tall, bottom-heavy, with a dull, rough, unfinished-looking surface. I wondered what it weighed.
We walked closer, made a circuit around it, found no charm. It seemed to absorb all the light around it, a black hole of a piece. I agreed with Bobbie Cusato and Lew Kaufman that it would not have been an asset to the bright and airy lobby of the college administration building, and would look better spouting water in someone’s garden.
The price card on the wall behind it had a little red sticker over the numbers; it was sold.