St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder

hard to tell the pros from the wannabes. A whole lot of kicking and gouging going on at this point.”
    “And the last one standing wins,” she said unhappily.
    “Pretty much.” Zach stretched his shoulders and legs. Charter planes were better than cattle class on commercial flights, but the seats still weren’t designed for long-legged people. “Research had some interesting things to say about Dunstan, too.”
    “Such as?”
    “He was one of the few Western artists who actually came from the West.”
    She blinked. “Really? Where did the rest of them come from?”
    “Moran and Bierstadt were Hudson River School. Easterners.” Zach swirled coffee in his plastic cup, then drank the rest.
    Jill waited.
    “Most of the painters of the time were the same,” he said, holding out his empty cup, looking expectant. “City boys. Paris trained, or learned at the knees of teachers who were schooled in Paris. The new kids on the block illustrated government surveys of the West and Eastern magazine articles to make a living. Or they taught.”
    “For someone who claims not to have a degree,” she said, pouring the last of the coffee into his cup, “you sure know a lot about Western art.”
    He shrugged. “Like I said, I can bullshit with the best of ’em.”
    “It’s more than that.” She capped the empty thermos. “Why are you so prickly on the subject?”
    Because I learned at the knee of one prickly son of a bitch. But all Zach said aloud was “Dunstan was Western born and bred. He specialized in what today is called the Basin and Range Country, with forays into Taos, Santa Fe, and the Colorado Plateau country for variety. Studied back east, came home to paint. But you probably already know that.”
    She shook her head. “Modesty never talked about her sister, much less her sister’s lovers. And Mom…Mom was ashamed to be born outside of marriage. She rarely talked about her mother, and never said one word about the man who might or might not have been her father.”
    “Sound like you had to stumble around some mighty big lumps under the family rug.”
    Jill smiled, surprising both of them. “You trip a few times and then you learn to walk around the lumps. It’s called growing up.”
    “Not everyone gets around to it.”
    “You did, prickly and all.”
    “Thomas Dunstan didn’t. He drank. He was born in Wyoming, son of a hard-luck rancher.”
    “There are a lot of hard-luck ranchers in the West,” Jill said. “Fact of life in a dry land.”
    “No argument from me. My mother’s family wasn’t dirt poor, they were dust poor. Do you want to know more about your grandmother’s sometimes lover?”
    “I think it’s past time I learned about him.”
    Zach handed Jill his half-full coffee cup. Then he opened the computer, selected the Dunstan file, and began reading parts of it to Jill, who might or might not be the granddaughter of the drunk who happened to be a fine painter when he was sober.
    “…regarded as a chronicler of the empty quarter of the West, a painter capable of capturing the majesty of land before the white man came and blah blah blah,” Zach said, condensing what was in the file.
    She snickered and sneaked a sip of his coffee.
    He noticed, winked at her, and went back to picking facts from the computer file.
    “…painted and destroyed canvases until he produced one that he liked. Sometimes it was years between new canvases.”
    “Too bad more painters didn’t cull their work before it went public,” Jill said. “Picasso and Dalí come instantly to mind.”
    Zach laughed and kept picking out tidbits. “Sold well for the era, despite the scarcity of paintings. He drank. A lot. And this was noticed at a time and in a place where hard drinking wasn’t remarkable.”
    “Sounds like the money he made from art went into booze.”
    “Back then, booze was cheap. Having a family and a mistress is expensive.”
    “Don’t expect me to feel sorry for him.”
    “I don’t. A man is born with two heads. Dunstan listened to his dumb one.”
    Jill almost choked on another stolen sip of coffee.
    “…sold for as much as ten thousand dollars a painting before hedied,” Zach continued blandly. “Back then, ten thousand was today’s half million. Hell, maybe a million. Inflation happens.”
    She cleared her throat. “Does the file say who collected him?”
    “In the beginning, mostly cattle barons and railroad tycoons, the kind of Western men who saw themselves as powerful