Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight

shrugged.
    “Why?” Susa asked.
    “It doesn’t matter,” Lacey said. “I’m just sure.”
    Gnawing at her lip, she looked at the three canvases and wondered how long her father had known that Grandpa Rainbow was a forger.

Painter’s Beach
    Wednesday morning
12
    S tacks of paintings leaned haphazardly against the wall and one another in the elegant ballroom of the Savoy Hotel, the latest in a series of four hundred dollars a night and up—way up—hotels studding the glorious southern California coast. The hotel wasn’t open for business yet. Electricians still chased ghosts in the wires and decorators were still unwrapping crates of “accents” to add to the public areas. But for a few very important people, the hotel was open for business. Any member of the Forrest family was one of those important people. Any guest of theirs was another.
    Savoy Forrest looked at the chaos and wondered how the place would be ready in time for the auction on Saturday, but he knew it would be. His father had made it a personal crusade, and nobody wanted to face Ward Forrest with a handful of excuses as to why a job wasn’t done on time. Ward would listen, say something savage, and fire people. Failurewasn’t a word that he accepted, especially on one of the few Savoy development projects he’d managed to get built despite all the protests.
    “Mr. Forrest, how wonderful of you to stop by,” Mr. Goodman said, all but rubbing his hands together at having one of the wealthy art-buying Forrests within reach.
    “I kept hearing rumors that Susa Donovan was excited about some of the paintings,” Savoy said. “If anyone would know about it, I figured the past president of American Figurative Artists Association would.”
    Goodman nodded. “Absolutely. I do.”
    Savoy smiled. It wasn’t likely there was any connection with the paintings and those that the Savoy Museum already owned, but if they were by the same elusive artist, he wanted to place the first and last bid before some collector or art gallery beat him to it. It wasn’t often he got a chance to give his father something he’d really love to have.
    “If she’s excited, I’m damned curious,” Savoy said as he surveyed the chaos. “Are the paintings here?”
    “No, these are the donated paintings for the auction. The exhibition-only paintings are in the main conference room.”
    “Anything that might be of interest to the museum in this lot?” Savoy asked, waving a hand toward the leaning paintings.
    “Actually, there are several rather nice early landscapes,” Goodman said, smoothing a long strand of hair across his otherwise bald head. “Not world-class, of course, but La Susa thought enough of them to write a note and tape it to the back of each canvas. That alone should add several hundred dollars or more to the final price of each painting.”
    “Let’s see them. I’m always on the lookout for art for our museum. We own quite a few works by relatively unknown painters.”
    Goodman smiled eagerly. The Forrests were the foremost—and most unpredictable—collectors of plein air paintings in a state full of wealthy, eccentric art collectors. “I’ve set aside some of the most interesting paintings over here.”
    He led Savoy to a corner overlooking the zero-rim swimming pool at the cliff’s edge and the whitecapped ocean beyond. Savoy dodged a decorator and two carpenters stringing a long, tight wire above eye level across the wall to hang the canvases. At the moment, some of them were leaving marks against the base of the newly painted wall. Goodman stopped at along eighteenth-century library table where paintings were carefully stacked.
    “This one is especially sweet,” he said, lifting up a small landscape.
    Savoy took the landscape and shifted position until he found the best light pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The surface of the landscape badly needed cleaning, but beneath decades of grime the colors of golden light and equally golden hills whispered of lazy, sunny afternoons and a time when steam trains were the fastest thing on earth. On the back there was a piece of paper taped to the canvas that gave Susa’s reasons for singling the painting out for special attention. She mentioned elegance and simplicity of composition and “unself-conscious, almost naive brushwork. This is a genuine act of creation rather than simply an imitation of a popular artistic style.”
    “I believe that’s the hill where the Savoy