St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder

eyelids lowered. “You’re distracting me.”
    “Same goes.” She smiled up at him, traced the pulse beating in his neck, and moved back.
    His slow smile was a warning and a promise. He opened the door, stepped through while chimes sang a sweet welcome, and held the door open for Jill.
    “I’ll be right with you,” the woman called out before she picked up her phone.
    “No problem,” Zach said, smiling.
    The woman blinked, startled by the gentle voice and smile coming from a rough-looking man wearing enough stubble to make a movie villain envious. She smiled back at him, then began talking on the phone in a low voice.
    Jill drifted off to look at a wall of Impressionist-style paintings. A few depicted the American West that no longer was. Most of the paintings showed Siberia in a storm, Paris in a spring rain, dancers stretching at the barre in the manner of Degas. Still other paintings offered the rural haystacks that Monet’s many imitators had turned into a cliché.
    She half expected to find a vase of sunflowers in homage to van Gogh.
    Zach glanced at the paintings and then looked away with an attitude that said he’d seen them all before and hadn’t been impressed that time either.
    The woman’s voice murmured in the background. Her low, cultured tones couldn’t be overheard.
    Curious, Jill looked at the cards that named the artists who clearly had been thoroughly schooled in classic Impressionism. Every name was Russian. Every painting was nineteenth or twentieth century.
    The asking prices were all well into six figures.
    No matter what the subject, the Russian painters had flawless technique, rather like the superstars of ice, gymnastics, and ballet that the Soviet Union once had been famous for producing.
    “You’re frowning,” Zach said to Jill. “Something wrong?”
    “Nothing. That’s the problem.”
    He raised an eyebrow. “It is?”
    “The academics of these pictures are perfect. Light. Shadow. Color. Proportion. Brushstrokes. Everything.”
    “Makes you nervous, doesn’t it?” he asked dryly.
    “It makes me remember something you mentioned earlier about Russian Impressionism and”—she looked quickly at the woman, who was still talking—“the mafyia .”
    “Yeah, this kind of stuff has been flooding the market by the container load,” Zach said heading for another wall, this one with scenes of the American West. “It’s one way for the new Russian oligarchs to get cash out of the former Soviet Union.”
    “Amazing.” Jill leaned closer to a painting.
    “The prices?”
    “That, too.”
    Zach’s smile wasn’t comforting. “The big problem is that nobody knows for sure which are historic paintings and which are being cranked out by painting factories in modern Russia.”
    “The Italians of Leonardo’s day did the same sort of thing. One big name. A herd of ‘student’ painters doing the work.” She moved on to the next painting, sunlight over water. “Really awesome technique.”
    “I like yours better.”
    Her head turned toward him so fast that her hair flew out. “My what?”
    “Technique. The one you did of the horse with its rump to the wind really made me feel the bite of the desert winter—and that was just a JPEG I was looking at.”
    She tilted her head slightly. “Are you talking about the painting at Pomona College?”
    “You’re too modest. They have six of your paintings hanging in various rooms. With a few breaks and a good handler, you could have a career in the commercial arts. If the critics fell in love with you, you’d become a ‘fine’ arts painter.”
    Jill shrugged. “Decent painters are as common as horseflies. Check any fine arts department.”
    Zach shook his head. “You’re one hell of an uncommon horsefly.”
    “Thanks. I think.”
    “Do you have more paintings around?” he asked casually, but his eyes were clear, hard.
    “I used to,” she said, studying—yes—a vase of sunflowers. “I gave them all to friends when I went back to the river.”
    “Landscapes?”
    “Most of them. A few portraits.” Then Jill went very still. “You’re thinking that I painted Modesty’s landscapes.”
    “It occurred to me.”
    It was foolish to feel angry, much less hurt, but Jill did. “Thanks for the vote of no confidence.”
    “If I hadn’t investigated the possibility that you were the painter, I’d be working for some fast-food joint rather than St. Kilda. Never overlook the obvious is the oldest rule in the