“She also said you’d do anything to keep her and Jose apart. Even if it meant losing him yourself.”
Racine’s only reply was to grin her cat’s grin. It wasn’t a smart move, Gentry being largely canine.
“Are you in love with this Jose Fernandez?” he demanded. “Did he tell you he was leaving town with the Baerga girl? Is that why you framed him for murder with a knife you knew would be tied to this house?”
Gentry had found his link between Racine and the murder in Maria’s tale of the artist’s all-or-nothing jealousy. The theory explained why the gaudy knife had been used and why it had been left behind. I was impressed.
So was Racine. Her grin was deader than any of the trophies on the well’s edge. Her “You’re joking” came out as a whisper.
The deputy entered then, his timing as deft as his searching had been clumsy. Clumsy but effective. He carried Beaumont’s painting before him, like the front half of a very small sandwich board.
“Found it in the sitting room. Behind another painting. A big painting.”
“You got greedy, didn’t you?” Gentry said to the artist. “Had to ruin the boy and get that painting out of circulation, too.
“Show me where you found it, Chapman. Elliott, watch her till we get back.”
9
Gentry and his man were crunching off across the courtyard’s pebbles before Racine launched her belated defense. “Mr. Elliott, you don’t think—”
I cut her off. “We don’t have much time. Tell me about Mabel Tuohy.”
“Why? What has she to do with this?”
“She’s the one part of this story you know. Make it fast.”
“Mabel was my student. My protégée. I discovered her as Hiram Kinkade had discovered me. Mabel was my answer to Kinkade, in a way.”
“I’m not following.”
“I didn’t like being a protégée. Anyone’s protégée. In Texas, I was my own woman. In New York, I was Hiram Kinkade’s woman.”
His kept woman, she meant. “Go on.”
“Part of my answer was to paint New York as a memory of the West. Of my time before Kinkade. Another part of my solution was Mabel. I was just another planet in Kinkade’s crowded solar system. In Mabel’s, I was the sun. I became everything to her that Kinkade was to me, and she everything that I was to him.”
“Including your lover?”
“Yes.”
“She was the one beautiful thing you found in the city. Your love was the beautiful thing.”
“Thank you for putting it that way.”
“But she betrayed you with Kinkade.”
“He seduced her. He couldn’t tolerate what she and I had found together. So he destroyed it by promising to make her his new project. The silly girl trusted him.
“It crushed me. Killed me. But I was reborn. Freed to come back to the West to work.”
“Not so fast,” I said. “Before you left New York, you destroyed every painting you’d done there. Every one you could get your hands on. Not because they weren’t good either. You did it because Mabel was in them. Your love for her was in them. You didn’t want that record to survive.”
“I didn’t steal the rose painting, Mr. Elliott. You have to believe me.”
“I have to understand this. You were willing to destroy your work, to kill part of yourself, just to kill part of her.”
Racine swayed on the edge of the well. I reached out to keep her from falling backwards. She didn’t seem to notice my hand on her shoulder. “So you believe the sheriff. You think I’d destroy Jose rather than lose him. But I could never do that. The revenge I took in New York in the twenties was the spiteful act of a passionate girl.”
Which brought us to the next order of business. “Tell me about Maria.”
“What about her?”
“What was she to you before Jose came along?”
“Exactly what you suppose. She’s a beautiful thing,” Racine added a little dreamily. “A perfect thing.”
“Not so perfect,” I said. “Not anymore. Your mistress took up with Jose the way you took up with Mabel Tuohy, for the chance to be the sun instead of a hanger-on. And you struck back the way Hiram Kinkade did, by dazzling your rival, Jose, right out of your lover’s arms. It was New York all over again, right down to the payoff.”
Racine saw the whole thing then. She clutched at her work shirt’s collar. Not far from her hand was a splash of white paint. I saw a splash of red.
Gentry was back and staring at us. “What’s happened?” he demanded.
“Got another search warrant?” I asked.
“What did you lose this time?”
“A red shawl.”
10
Chapman, the bloodhound deputy, came through again. He found the red shawl in a shallow grave behind the Baergas’ adobe. The shawl was brown and red now, as it was stained with the dried blood of Paul Reyes.
I got the word in the Lost Mine Cantina, where I was at my old stand at the end of the bar, staring down a beer that was the second coldest thing in the town of Agujero. Sheriff Gentry himself stopped by to tell me of the coldest thing: Maria Baerga.
“Once we showed her the shawl, she admitted everything. How she got the knife out of Racine’s kitchen last night while the cook was busy with you folks in the dining room. How she waited till the bar was empty to confront Reyes, walking right up to him smiling and him smiling back. And how she slipped the painting, which she’d heard about from Jose, out of your room and into the spot where Chapman found it. So we’d suspect Racine.
“She admitted all that and to hell with us. Never saw the like of that girl’s nerve. Hope I don’t again.”
I bought the sheriff a beer, although my experience had been that the local product wasn’t nearly strong enough.
“What did I miss, Elliott? What tipped you off?”
I knew Gentry wouldn’t sit still for the legend of Mabel Tuohy and Hiram Kinkade. So I just said, “She told me. Told us. Maria. When she said Racine would destroy Jose if she couldn’t have him, she was telling us how she felt about things herself. She set the murder up so she’d win either way. Either she’d frame Racine — and Jose was hers — or you’d take Jose — and Racine would lose him forever.”
The explanation lacked the classical symmetry of the solution I’d laid out for Racine — that the New York triangle had somehow recreated itself in dusty New Mexico — but Gentry wasn’t connoisseur enough to care. He had his killer, and that was that. He shook my hand, gave me an empty invitation to look him up next time I passed through, and left.
I was ready to leave myself. Despite Racine’s earlier warning about driving the road to Española after dark, I was determined not to spend another night in Agujero.
Before I’d managed to climb down from my stool, someone tugged at my sleeve. It was Racine’s elderly cook. She actually curtsied before handing me an envelope. It contained a note written in a faint wavy hand:
“To whom it may concern: The painting ‘A City Rose’ was done by me in New York in the spring of 1925. It was presented as a token of affection to my good friend Mabel Tuohy, who kept it until her death.”
The handwriting firmed up for the signature: “Gladys Glenn Racine, Agujero, New Mexico, February 1950.”
The Hunters
by J. F. Freedman
J. F. Freedman is the author of five very successful novels published by Viking, Dutton, and NAL, but he has never before had a short story published in a national magazine. This short fiction debut comes at around the time the paperback of his most recent novel, Above the Law, is due to appear in bookstores. EQMM extends a warm welcome to a writer we hope will devote more time to short stories in coming years.