Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight

spoil her mood.
    “How about I give y’all a rain check?” he said instead. “I’ve got to make arrangements for those three paintings to be locked up.”
    “They’re not worth guarding,” Lacey said.
    “I disagree,” Susa said.
    “Look,” Lacey said wearily, “I appreciate all you’ve done, but you’re wrong about the paintings. They’re not by Lewis Marten.”
    “Have you had them appraised?” Susa asked.
    “No.”
    “I’ve made arrangements for Rarities Unlimited to appraise them,” Susa said. “If you’re right, I’ll bite my tongue and slink off into the sunset.”
    The light that had returned to Lacey’s eyes was gone as though it had never existed. “No. No appraisal.”
    “Why?” Susa asked mildly.
    Lacey simply shook her head.
    “What would you say,” Ian said to Susa, “if I told you that the paintings originally belonged to Lacey’s grandfather?”
    “What are you talking about?” Lacey demanded. “I never said anything like that.”
    “You never meant to,” he agreed. “But before you went back into your shop, you yelled something about saving your grandfather’s paintings. Then you came out carrying those three paintings. Nothing else. Not even your own work.”
    Lacey went pale, then red streaks of anger appeared over her cheekbones. “You’re wrong. I—I painted them!”
    “Show me.”
    “Go to hell. I painted them.”
    He almost smiled. “Darling, you don’t lie worth a damn.”
    “But you do, don’t you,” she said bitterly. “You act all gentle and kind, and all you can think about is springing an ambush so that your poor victim trips and falls flat, spilling everything.”
    He didn’t move, yet somehow he seemed to loom over her. “Is that what you think, that I seduced you to get some answers?”
    “Yes!” Then she remembered last night, the laughter and the passion and the peace. “No.” She crossed her arms over her chest and turned away. “Jesus, what a mess.”
    Susa looked at the tears of anger, fear, and exhaustion standing in Lacey’s eyes. “We want to help you. Do you believe that?”
    “Yes,” she said hoarsely. “But I can’t. I just can’t.”
    “But—” Susa stopped at a gesture from Ian.
    “Your grandfather’s dead,” Ian said. “What’s the problem? He collected some paintings and passed them on to you.”
    Lacey almost said that he hadn’t collected them, he’d painted them. Big difference. Then she realized that Ian was offering her an out, whether he knew it or not. “Look, Grandpa Rainbow was something of a, uh, character. Colorful. Really, really colorful.”
    Ian waited and wondered if she would ever trust him enough to stop lying, or at least trying to. She was so god-awful at it he would have laughed if he hadn’t been pissed off.
    “He drank too much sometimes,” Lacey said.
    Ian started listening because her body language said she wasn’t lying now.
    “And he went off on trips.”
    Ian waited.
    Lacey took a deep breath and stuck to as much of the truth as she could. “Sometimes he came back with paintings, but he never had any bills of sale from a gallery or an artist or anything like that.”
    “Where did he go?” Susa asked.
    “All over California.”
    “Any favorite places?” Susa asked.
    “Palm Springs, Anza-Borrego, San Francisco, Death Valley. Why?”
    “But not Laguna Beach or Painter’s Beach or Savoy Ranch?”
    “No. Why?”
    “Two of the three paintings you showed me were painted on the ranch,” Susa said. “Several galleries in Laguna and Newport feature early plein air painters who worked locally.”
    Lacey shrugged. “He never mentioned any part of southern California but the desert, so if he got anything anywhere else, I don’t know about it.”
    “I’m still not understanding the problem,” Ian said.
    “What problem?” Lacey asked.
    “Why you don’t want the paintings appraised.”
    She put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “How would you like your grandfather to be proved a crook?”
    “I’m not following you.”
    “What if he stole the damned things!”
    “What if he painted them?” Ian retorted. He watched color drain out of her face and swore. “Shit, I was afraid of that. He was a forger, wasn’t he?”
    “I never saw him copy anything,” Lacey whispered.
    “But he sure did paint in a famous dead man’s style, didn’t he? A man whose paintings sell for three hundred grand and up?”
    She hesitated, then nodded painfully. “Yes.