Arthur had said he lived on Elk Path. Bouncing along the snow-pocked street, I saw signs for the Elk Ridge Nature Trail and Picnic Area, and followed them to a parking lot. I wound between day-skiers unloading equipment from the backs of sport-utility vehicles. A couple of fellows directing traffic did not understand my question, and said I was on Elk Path. Maybe the elk can find it just fine, but I’m having problems, I longed to retort, but didn’t.
It was nine o’clock. I wasn’t due at Arthur’s until ten. One sure way of finding any residence in Killdeer was to locate the street on the town map. It was a smaller version of Big Map, and it was conveniently located next to Cinda’s Cinnamon Stop. Come to think of it, I could get a quadruple-shot espresso there, too! A mind-clearing detour could help, especially since I’d just discovered all kinds of things about Arthur Wakefield that had never emerged in our five weeks of work together.
I parked in one of the gondola lots, trod carefully across the snowpack to the Killdeer map, and found Elk Path. I had missed a turnoff that I had mistaken for a driveway; Arthur’s house was less than five minutes away. I growled and headed for the back of a lengthy walk-up line at Cinda’s. If no one was allowed to ski until the cops finished their investigation, I couldn’t imagine what kind of boom was happening for the shopkeepers and restaurant folks at the base. From inside the shop, though, a waiter recognized me and waved. A moment later, he brought out a quadruple-shot espresso. “PBS lady, right? No charge.”
“Public television has great fans.” I thanked my benefactor, a diminutive fellow with gray eyes set in a freckled face topped with curly red hair. I wondered if this was Davey, but he wore no nametag. I sipped the dark, hot, life-giving stuff. Fantastic. “What’s your name? I want to tell Cinda how nice you were.”
“Ryan,” he said with a grin and a wink.
“Well, Ryan, is Cinda in?”
“Naw, she had a doctor’s appointment for her knee.”
“It’s flaring up again?”
“Yeah. Old boarding injuries never really heal. She lives with a lot of pain. That’s why she opened the shop,” he added helpfully. “She can wash down a painkiller with espresso and feel sorta normal in twenty minutes.”
I thanked Ryan again and moved off toward the Killdeer Art Gallery, where a floppy black-and-white ribbon bow tied on the door had caught my eye. Next to the bow was a calligraphy note.We’re open in honor of our dear departed critic, Doug Portman. Come in and see the artworks he honored as “Best of Killdeer” over the last five years.
When I peered into the gallery, I saw a fur-clad customer and what looked like a saleslady. I pushed through the door and tried to shed my nosy-caterer persona to take on the air of a short, female tycoon. A wealthy patron of the arts, just sipping her espresso …
The fur lady departed. In my backup quilted parka (my better one having been torn in my plummet down the hill) and black ski pants, it was pretty clear that I hadn’t done anything in the presence of a tycoon except serve barbecued ribs. After ten minutes of being ignored by the saleslady, I wandered down “Prize Row,” so indicated by another black-framed calligraphy note lauding the late Doug Portman.
I frowned at the twenty works displayed there. Maybe I was missing something, but I didn’t like them. Then again, what did I know? I stared at the paintings. Some commonsense inner critic was announcing that the work Doug Portman had liked ranged from imitative to mediocre to terrible. I walked past a bad-rip-off-of-Peter-Max acrylic-painted canvas of a racing skier exploding through a snowbank, a Monet-ish drizzly watercolor featuring a rain-soaked elk, and a Dutch-style still-life of a gun cabinet full of rifles. Finally, there was a slashing-brushstroke oil of a bucolic cabin in a daisy-strewn mountain meadow. Bor-ing, as Arch would say. Yet from the right corner of each frame dangled a sometimes-dusty “Best of Killdeer” blue ribbon or bright red ribbon declaring, “Honorable Mention.”
I finished my espresso and yearned for another. Failing that, I thought, eyeing the paintings, a shot of Arthur Wakefield’s Pepto-Bismol.
I yawned and took a third trip down prize row. All but three First Prizes and two Honorable Mentions were still for sale for sums in excess of a thousand dollars. Signs announced that the others were on loan. This left me with a question: If these prizewinners are so good, how come they haven’t sold?
But really, the problem was the pretensions of poor, dead Doug. His own paintings had been mediocre and derivative, and he’d believed they’d make him rich. How then could he judge what was good? I felt sorry for him, even in death.
When another five minutes elapsed and I still hadn’t been asked if I needed help, I meandered to the rear of the store to find a trash can for my paper coffee cup. Beside a water cooler, above the garbage receptacle, three collages hung on the wall. They were all by the same person, the artist whose collages I’d seen at the bistro and in Eileen’s home. For some reason, these works of art made me smile. “Spring Detritus” featured torn photographs of bright-white snow melting on churned-up soil, ski poles speared into patches of matted neon green grass, and dirty lilac mittens caught up in the teeth of a yellow snowcat. “Ski Patrol at Dusk” was crowded with images of ski runs in a blizzard, blurred inmotion images of athletic uniformed skiers, a snowmobile hauling a sled with an injured, faceless skier, and dark, forlorn-looking crossed skis, the signal for help.
Finally, there was “Celebrity on the Mountain.” Pieces of photographs showed hordes of burly guards speaking into walkie-talkies, a stand of metal microphones gleaming in the sunshine, a photograph of half of the vice-president’s face. The other half of the veep’s face lay underneath an ad for a videocamera. I laughed aloud, and this finally brought a saleswoman to my side.
“Is there a problem?” she asked. Short and compactly slim, she wore heavy matte makeup on a face framed with chic-cut jet black hair. Her clothes, a black turtleneck and pants edged at the neck and cuffs with faux tiger fur, seemed to have been form-fitted.
“No,” I replied with a very slight smile and a glance at my watch. I had been in the gallery almost twenty minutes. “No problem at all.”
She considered the collages, then sniffed. “They make me want to puke.”
“Puke? If you feel that way, why do you have them here at the gallery? I think they’re wonderful.”
She sneered at me. “They’re saccharine. Do you prefer decoration to art?”
I looked back at the collages. “How’re you defining ‘decoration’?”
“Doug Portman, our critic, used to say Boots Faraday’s art is purely decorative,” the woman commented with an if-only-you-understood shrug. “We handle Boots because she accounts for half of our profits. Most of it goes to decorators, of course.…”
“So is that how you define ‘decorative’? Who buys it? Or what critic says it’s ‘decorative’?”
Her face turned smug. She looked me and my noncouture outfit up and down. “It’s too complicated to explain.”
“How much for ‘Spring Detritus’?” I demanded impulsively.
Startled, the saleslady took a step away from me. “Uh, two-fifty. That’s two hundred and fifty dollars. You’re going to buy it? Today? Now?”
“Yes,” I said. “Now,” I added decisively. It would make a great Christmas present for Tom, debts be damned.
The woman took down the collage and swaggered to the front counter. I whipped out my credit card and ventured aloud, “To tell you the truth, I think the stuff Doug Portman picked as being good is pretty awful.”