Like any serious art person, he’d spent time in Santa Fe, browsing and buying and dining at Geronimo. Picking up a few minor O’Keeffes and a Henning that he turned over within days. Enjoying the food and the ambience and the sunlight, but bemoaning the lack of a seriously good hotel.
It would be nice to have his own spread. Bargain real estate prices clinched the deaclass="underline" For one-third of what he’d paid for his co-op ten years ago, he could get an estate.
He bought himself a six-thousand-square-foot heap of adobe on five acres in Los Caminitos, north of Tesuque, with low-maintenance landscape and a rooftop-deck view of Colorado. Decorating all thirteen rooms with finesse, he set about filling the diamond plaster walls with art: a few Taos masters and two O’Keeffe drawings brought from Connecticut to get the tongues wagging. Mostly, he went in a new direction: neophyte contemporary Southwest painters and sculptors who’d sell their souls for representation.
Strategic donations to the right charities combined with lavish parties at the mansion cemented his social position. Within a year, he was in.
His physical presence didn’t hurt, either. Olafson had known since high school that his size and his stentorian voice were God-given resources to be exploited. Six-three, lean, and broad-shouldered, he’d always been thought of as handsome. Even recently, with his hair gone but for a white fringe and a ponytail, he cut a fine figure. A cropped, snowy beard gave him the look of confidence. Opening night at the opera, he circulated among the rich in his black silk suit, collarless white silk shirt fastened at the neck by a turquoise stud, custom ostrich-leg clogs worn without socks, a young brunette on his arm, though the whispering class asserted this was pretense. For serious company, it was rumored, the art dealer preferred the lithe young men he hired as “groundskeepers.”
Santa Fe had always been a liberal town in a conservative state, and Olafson fit right in. He threw money at an assortment of causes, some popular, others less so. Recently, less so had dominated: Olafson had made the papers after joining the board of an environmental group named ForestHaven and spearheading a series of lawsuits against small ranchers grazing on federal land.
That particular cause had generated lots of acrimony; the papers ran a couple of mom-and-pop-struggling-to-make-ends-meet heart-tugging articles. When asked to comment, Olafson had come across arrogant and unsympathetic.
Steve Katz brought up the story as he and Two Moons drove to the scene.
“Yeah, I remember,” said Darrel. “I’d be pissed, too.”
Katz laughed. “No sympathy for the sanctity of the land, chief?”
Darrel motioned at the windshield. “The land looks just fine to me, rabbi. My sympathy is with regular folk working for a living.”
“You don’t think Olafson worked for a living?” said Katz.
“Doesn’t matter what I think or what you think,” Two Moons snorted. “Our job is to figure out who bashed his head in.”
Olafson Southwest sat atop a sloping lot on the upper end of Canyon, well past the gourmet aroma streaming from Geronimo and the U-pay outdoor parking lot run by the city to capitalize on tourists’ SUVs. The property was large and tree-shaded, with gravel paths and a fountain and a hand-fashioned copper gate. In back was an adobe guesthouse, but the building was dark and locked, and no one was able to tell Katz and Two Moons if anyone actually lived there.
The gallery was divided into four whitewashed wings and a large rear room filled with paintings and drawings in vertical racks-what looked to be hundreds of pieces of art. The detectives drifted back. All that pale plaster and the bleached floors and the halogen lights positioned between the hand-hewn vigas lining the ceiling created a weird pseudo-daylight. Katz felt his pupils constrict so hard his eyes hurt. No sense browsing. The main attraction was in room number two. The body was laid out where it had fallen, stretched across the bleached pine floor.
A big, nasty still life.
Larry Olafson lay on his stomach, right arm curled beneath him, the left splayed and open-fingered. Two rings on the hand, a diamond and a sapphire, and a gorgeous gold Breguet watch on the wrist. Olafson wore an oatmeal-colored woolen shirt, a calfskin vest the color of peanut butter, and black flannel slacks. Blood splotched all three garments and had trickled onto the floor. Buckskin demi-boots covered the feet.
A few feet away was a piece of sculpture: a huge chrome screw on a black wooden base. Katz inspected the labeclass="underline" Perseverance. An artist named Miles D’Angelo. Two other works by the same guy: a massive screwdriver and a bolt the size of a truck tire. Behind those, an empty pedestaclass="underline" Force.
Katz’s ex-wife had figured herself for a sculptor, but it had been a while since he’d talked to Valerie or any of her new friends, and he’d never heard of D’Angelo.
He and Darrel got close to the body, and they both inspected what had once been the back of Larry Olafson’s head.
Tan, hairless skin had been turned to mush. Blood and brain tissue crusted the white fringe and the ponytail. Stiffening the hair, turning it deep red, a blood henna job. A few specks of blood, a light spray, had made it to a nearby wall, to Olafson’s right. Serious impact. The air was coppery.
All of Olafson’s untouched jewelry said robbery was doubtful.
Then Katz berated himself for limited thinking. Olafson trucked in high-end art. There were all kinds of robbery.
That empty pedestal…
The coroner, Dr. Ruiz, had stuck a thermometer in the liver. He looked at the detectives, then sheathed his instrument and inspected the wound. “Two, three hours tops.”
Two Moons turned to the uniform who’d greeted them at the scene. She was a rookie named Debbie San-tana, a former Los Alamos clerk on the job less than a year. This was her first d.b. and she looked okay. Maybe working with nuclear stuff was scarier. Darrel asked her who had called it in.
“Olafson’s houseboy,” Debbie replied. “He came by half an hour ago to pick up the boss. Apparently, Olafson was working late, meeting a client. He and the houseboy- Sammy Reed-were supposed to have dinner at ten, over at Osteria.”
“Client have a name?”
Debbie shook her head. “Reed says he doesn’t know. He’s pretty hysterical, can’t stop crying. He says he found the door locked, used his key, called out Olafson’s name. When no one answered, he walked in and found it. No signs of forced entry. I guess that fits his story.”
“Where’s Reed now?”
“In the cruiser. Randolph Loring’s watching him.”
Katz said, “So it went down between eight and ten.”
“Approximately,” said Dr. Ruiz. “Stretch it on the front end to seven-thirty.”
Two Moons left the room and returned a moment later. “The door says the gallery’s open till six. Olafson must’ve thought the client was serious to stay two hours late.”
“Or he got conned,” said Katz.
“Either way, if he thought there was serious money involved, he’d stay as late as it took.” Darrel bit hard on his lower lip. “That guy loved his money.”
The hostility in the remark was out of place. Santana and Ruiz stared at Two Moons. He ignored the scrutiny and began checking out the paintings on the wall. A series of blue-gray abstractions. “What do you think of these, Steve?”
“They’re okay,” said Katz. He was still kneeling by the body. A little surprised by the hostility but not shocked. For the last few days, Darrel had been grumpy. It would pass. It always did.
He asked Dr. Ruiz about the bloodstains.
Ruiz said, “I’m no spatter expert, but there’s no blood in any of the other rooms, so it’s pretty obvious he got hit right here. Cracked right across the occiput-back of his head-over to the right. Looks like one blow. I don’t see any signs of struggle. He got whacked and he crumpled.”