Then he remembered the visit of the man who said he was from Small-scale Railroader magazine and he realized with sinking heart that it was his own railroad he had inquired about buying. He turned away from the awful sight of the two women in front of his pharmacy and ran into the big house, where he closed the front door behind him and stood leaning against it as if to hold out intruders. When he heard the doors of the Chevrolet banged shut one after the other, he waited a few minutes before opening the door a crack. The back of the Chevrolet was disappearing on the driveway in the direction of Gulf Boulevard. He knew it would return on Monday when the pharmacy opened.
On the following Monday morning at ten o’clock the Chevrolet was again parked in front of Dr. Frank’s pharmacy. The building was closed and its door locked.
“Not here yet,” said Mrs. Treadle. “Get back in the car,” she ordered, “so he don’t see us when he comes.”
By ten-thirty she began to realize he was not coming. It occurred to her that the P.I. Fred Eagle had let them down. He had submitted a very large bill for services and expenses, which she had paid after selling Ham’s railroad. Mr. Eagle had failed to say that the pharmacy hours were so unusual. Was it open during those hours only by appointment?
At eleven o’clock, Olive announced she was hungry and needed to go to the bathroom.
“We’ll have to ask at the house,” Mrs. Treadle decided. “We’ll say we need a prescription filled.”
Leaving the car parked where it was, the mother and daughter walked over to the main house. The big, fancy automobile they had noticed parked in front of it on their fruitless first visit was not there. Curtains were drawn over all the windows; it looked as if there was nobody at home.
“Let’s look around,” Mrs. Treadle said to Olive.
They walked to the side of the house. There was no sign of life at the back of 5020, but a dog began to bark on the dock at the waterfront, where a houseboat was moored. By the swimming pool of the house next door a man and woman were reclining on deck chairs, reading. Mrs. Treadle and Olive approached them across the grass.
“Pardon me, lady,” Mrs. Treadle began.
The woman looked up from the newspaper she was holding. “Yes?”
“I wonder if you can help us,” said Mrs. Treadle. “We’re looking for Dr. Johnston, the one with the pharmacy.”
She had the instant attention of both the man and the woman. “Do you know anything about him?” the man asked, getting up to face the two strangers.
The dog on the dock had stopped barking and was now bounding across the lawn between the houses. It was a handsome golden retriever. It made for Olive and began to jump all over her.
“Down, Rex!” the man ordered, taking the retriever by the collar to pull him off. “He’s just being friendly,” he explained. “He’s Doc’s dog. He doesn’t understand what’s happened. Do you know anything?”
“Why, no — we was just looking to have a prescription filled, that’s all, and he don’t seem to be in his shop.”
“He’s been missing since last Thursday,” said the man. “Marie — that’s his wife — is beside herself with worry. He just disappeared, took nothing with him. The police suspect foul play. They found the Lincoln parked at the airport, but Doc wasn’t on any flight leaving last Thursday or any flight since.”
Olive uttered a kind of howl, tottered forward a step or two, and looked as if she might faint. Her mother quickly moved to prop her up. “It’s all right, baby, it’s the heat — we’re not used to the heat, all this sun. We’ll find someone else to give us the medicine — come along—” And she led her sobbing daughter away, back to the shade of the towering palm trees and the car parked in front of the abandoned pharmacy.
The Authentic Rose
by Terence Faherty
Terence Faherty’s new story for EQMM introduces to the magazine a character who has already appeared in several novels, one of which won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award. Series sleuth Scott Elliott is a former actor and World War Two veteran who finds employment, in 1950’s Hollywood, with a security firm. In this outing, the firm’s client sends him on an errand in the wild countryside of New Mexico.
1
“But there was a vase once. It just got rubbed off.”
“Nope. No vase.”
Patrick J. Maguire, known to about everyone in the Hollywood of 1950 as Paddy Maguire, was sceptical. He set down his drink — three fingers of Irish whiskey, neat — and got up from his chair, no small job in itself. He crossed to the table where the painting was propped up in a splash of evening light, bent at the waist, and stared at it, his cigar held respectfully behind his back.
“Painted over?” he asked.
“Never there,” the second speaker, one Torrance Beaumont, said with a wink at me. Beaumont was a tough-guy movie star with a taste for the better things in life. He’d been to our offices, the offices of the Hollywood Security Agency, once before to drink and smoke an evening away. Then the subject had been the death of a human being and the likely death of a motion picture. Tonight we were discussing fine art, a restful change of pace.
Paddy snorted and returned to his seat, unblocking my view of the unframed canvas. He could have single-handedly blocked a pair of paintings its size: about two feet by two and a half. Mostly it was a cityscape, a stylized one, the towering buildings only black and gray slabs. There was a suggestion of a windowsill in the foreground and a smudge of river in the distance, a gray, dead river. All of that you noticed by and by. What caught your eye was the rose, a perfect red one, suspended in the gray air above the sill. It was this feat of levitation that offended my employer, whose taste in art ran toward stags, at bay and otherwise.
Paddy cleared his throat. “Mind if I ask what you paid for it?”
Beaumont surprised me by telling him, and the figure made Paddy whistle. I was tempted to myself.
“Worth every nickel, if it really is by Gladys Glenn Racine,” the actor said. “Know her?”
“Do we, Scotty?”
I tried to rouse myself. It had been a long day. “Modern artist. Lives in the Southwest somewhere. New Mexico, I think. Paints desert landscapes and flowers and cow skulls, bleached.”
“That’s why I keep coming back here,” Beaumont said. “The tone. Also the liquor.”
He leaned forward so Paddy could refill his glass. As he poured, my boss attacked the painting from a new direction. “That’s no desert landscape. It looks like a view of the East River from a cold-water flat.”
“Very perceptive,” Beaumont replied. “This happens to be from Racine’s New York period. Early nineteen twenties. Back then she was the protégée of a windbag poet named Hiram Kinkade. He’d found her painting away down in Texas and talked her into coming to New York so the world could get a look at her. And so she could warm up Kinkade’s bed, not coincidentally.
“She never fit in very well in Gotham. You can see that in this little gem. She was still painting the canyons and mesas she loved, but in the guise of skyscrapers. She painted them in funereal colors because she’d lost them. And she injected bits of nature, like this rose, to point up how dead the rest of her world was.”
Our lecturer sipped his drink self-consciously and added, “That’s what my Ph.D. art dealer told me anyway. Around 1925, she got fed up with it all, burned most of her paintings, and moved back West. The only New York pieces that survived were the ones in private collections, like this one.”