“Where does the painting fit in?”
“Dunno. A stack of search warrants is on its way up from Española. Given Miss Racine’s reputation, I figured I’d need a few. In the meantime, I’ve sent for Fernandez. You’re welcome to sit in if you want to.”
I’d related a little of Hollywood Security’s history to Gentry by way of establishing myself as one of the good guys. Too much, maybe, if the sheriff now saw me as an asset. Even so, I took him up on the offer.
Jose came in nervous and got steadily worse. Yes, he knew the knife. No, he didn’t know how it had gotten out of its velvet box and into Reyes. He glanced my way contemptuously when Gentry asked him about Maria. “I love her,” he said. “And she loves me. I don’t care who knows it.” That was all he would say on the subject.
When Gentry ran out of questions, I stepped in. “Been in the service?”
Jose treated it as a silly question, there being few men of draft age who avoided the service in these interesting times. “Of course. The army. Got out six months ago and came here.”
“For Maria Baerga?” Gentry asked.
“No. For a chance to work with Glad — I mean Miss Racine. I met Maria at her house.” He remembered then that he wasn’t talking about Maria and shut up.
Gentry let him go for the moment, there being no place in Agujero to lock him up and no reason to improvise one. A desert town served by a single road was jail enough.
“What’s his military service got to do with this?” the sheriff asked when Jose had gone.
“Were you army?”
“Damn right. Scenic Italy.”
“How’d they teach you to stick a man with a knife?”
Gentry grasped an imaginary bayonet and thrust it upward. “Get in under the rib cage,” he said.
“Reyes’s killer didn’t know to do that.”
“He didn’t have to, with that razor of a knife. Besides, you forget things when you’re in a fit of passion.”
I didn’t like that “fit of passion.” It made it sound like Gentry was already rehearsing for his press conference. “Does a guy in a fit of passion get shorter?”
“Huh?” the sheriff said.
“Jose’s my height. Reyes carried a lot of his height horizontally.”
“Meaning what?”
“If I’d wanted to hit that spot in his chest, I’d have had to strike downward. So would Jose. There’s no sign of a downward blow.”
Gentry took up his make-believe weapon again and practiced a straight thrust from the shoulder. “Someone his height,” he said.
“Or less.”
7
We killed what remained of the morning with a few more interviews. The most interesting was that of Maria Baerga, and not just because she was all shining hair and flashing eyes. She was without her red shawl for once, which left her with only a simple white dress. The color was inappropriate for an almost widow. But Maria denied being one.
“The betrothal was my parents’ doing, not mine. I wanted no part of that. I decided to go away.”
“Alone?”
“Not alone,” she said defiantly. “With Jose Fernandez. We were going to go to California. So there was no reason for Jose to hurt that old man.”
I wondered how serious the plan was, since Jose hadn’t mentioned it in his own defense. But then, he’d gotten touchy on the subject of Maria pretty quickly. I asked, “How did Jose feel about giving up his job with Miss Racine?”
“Job?” Maria all but spat back. “Jose is not her assistant. Not her student even. He is her pet. He knows if he does not want to become more than a pet — worse than a pet — he must leave Agujero too.”
Gentry settled back in his chair, signaling me to carry on now that I’d gotten her dander up. “Why was Gladys Racine involved in your engagement to Reyes?” I asked.
“Because she is an old busybody. Because she sees herself as the great lady and the rest of us as her peons. Because she was jealous of Jose and me.”
“Is that why she fired you?”
“Yes. As old as she is, she still thinks she could have Jose if I were gone. But moving me from her house wasn’t enough. So she got me engaged to a fat old man no girl would look at twice. She would do anything to keep Jose and me apart. If it meant losing Jose herself forever, she would do it, just to deny me.”
Shortly after that pronouncement Maria left us, carrying herself like anything but a peon. Gentry watched her go, shook it off, and said, “Guess it’s time we spoke to the local celebrity.”
By then we were armed with a search warrant. Gentry took along a deputy to do the actual poking around. As the three of us made the hike to Racine’s, the sheriff asked me again about my business with the artist.
He listened carefully to my rundown, and then asked, “If the painting really is hers, could she have wanted it back enough to steal it? Or if it really was painted by this other woman, the one who beat Racine’s time with her patron back in the twenties, could Racine have stolen it as a way of striking back?”
“At a dead woman? And speaking of dead, if this is all about the painting, how did Reyes get killed?”
“That’s what I’m saying, Elliott. Maybe we’re going at this backwards, trying to find who had it in for Reyes. Maybe he just wandered into trouble. He caught Racine walking out with the painting, and she killed him.”
With a knife that couldn’t fail to be identified as her property? Why was she carrying it in the first place? In case I was a light sleeper? And why did she leave it behind?
Before I could voice any of those objections, Gentry was shaking the idea out of his head. “The target had to be Reyes,” he said, almost to himself. “It had to be Reyes.”
8
Racine came out to her gate to greet us. So she could get a jump on berating us, it turned out.
“How dare you come here to persecute that boy?” she demanded of Gentry. I was ignored and content to be. The artist was back in her paint-stained fatigues, but no less commanding for that. “Jose had nothing to do with the death of Paul Reyes.”
“How about the theft of the rose painting?” the unfazed Gentry asked. “I have a warrant here empowering me to search for it. While my deputy is doing that, perhaps we could talk.”
Racine received us in her courtyard, not wanting us to sully her house. It was an empty gesture, as we could hear Gentry’s deputy sullying each of the surrounding rooms in turn as we chatted. The ruckus didn’t rattle Racine any more than the exterior setting bothered Gentry. Or me, the day being warm and still.
Racine sat on the edge of an old well. In addition to the artist, the rounded lip held a collection of animal skulls and horns, each waiting patiently to be immortalized in oils.
The preliminaries regarded the knife. Racine admitted that its description matched one she owned. And that her knife was missing, something she’d determined the moment Jose had returned from his questioning. The silver was kept in an unlocked cabinet in the unlocked kitchen, crime being previously unknown in Agujero.
When we got around to discussing human beings, things heated up. “I was happy to help arrange the match between Paul Reyes and Maria,” Racine said in response to Gentry’s least friendly question to date. “It was very advantageous to her family, who frankly are quite poor. I’ve felt bad about them since I had to let Maria go.”
“Why did that happen?” the sheriff asked.
“I’d rather not say.”
“We’ve been told that it was because you were jealous of the girl and Jose. That true?”
“She told you that. Maria.”