Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,75

and how various media looked. I’d learned that lesson while following the two of them through Santee Alley and flea markets. There’d been a few times when I stopped to look at a painting that drew my eye, only to have one of them yank me away from the booth once the artist started talking to me about buying it.

Jae often chided me about how an artist would never display their paintings out in the sun, and more importantly, purchasing an original piece of art was sometimes extremely pricey. I’d been to his gallery shows, and the price tags on his photos—placed there by the gallery owner—made me blink so much my eyes were dried out by the time I finished walking the floor. I was as proud as hell of his work, but it boggled my mind that somebody would pay thousands of dollars for a black-and-white picture of my torso he’d taken while I was standing in the shower.

But one of the most important things Jae and Ichi taught me was that I shouldn’t be able to see the uninterrupted pattern of canvas in an oil painting. Thankfully, Ichi was there to catch me before I spent eight hundred dollars on a reproduction printed on a piece of canvas. There should have been paint, swoops of brushstrokes and passes of a palette knife, the surface uneven and marked by the artist’s efforts. It was something I wouldn’t have looked for, and I was thankful for the education.

As well as not spending that eight hundred dollars.

So that’s how I knew—or at least based on what little I knew—that the woman with one breast out, swaddled in red cloth and holding what looked like a dead bird while surrounded by oddly happy people wasn’t a reproduction. To one side of her was a trio of men, one particularly demonic-looking one in the forefront holding a basket of produce, with another two slightly behind him, seemingly caressing his arm with loving touches.

“Bet he got distracted by the booby and didn’t notice the two gay guys on the side,” I muttered to myself, and Muncie grunted, agreeing with me as he plopped his butt down to begin a rigorous investigation of his privates.

The painting looked old, aged in a way I’d seen in museums and not with the bright splashes of colors I’d seen in Ichi’s and Jae’s pieces once I began paying attention to what they were doing. It could’ve just been the different style of art, especially since I was pretty ignorant about historical pieces, but it still wasn’t something I’d have thought Watson would hang in his living room. I could’ve been wrong, and his wife—the smiling woman in the photos—insisted on having it up to compete with the television taking up most of her living room, but still, it was at odds with practically everything in the room, including the man sitting in a recliner, gesturing with his beer can as he talked.

“You like that?” Watson’s voice boomed through the living room, startling both me and Muncie. The dog yelped and scrambled off, his toenails doing a frenetic salsa on the wood floor. “Arty gave it to me after I fixed his dishwasher. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was one of you guys, but he’s okay. Fruity as hell what with painting all the time, but from what he said, most of the classical painters back then were men, so it is what it is. Told me to pick one out, so I grabbed that one. Had a naked woman on black velvet when I married Marie, but she made me take it down, so I figured I could at least get one tit out with this one, and she couldn’t say a thing because it’s all foo-foo and shit.”

Bobby rolled his eyes, and I silently congratulated myself for correctly guessing why Watson liked the painting.

Taking another look at the painting, I spotted Brinkerhoff’s signature, a bold yellow scrawl over a black rectangle on the lower corner. Despite his small stature and unassuming personality, it seemed like he was proud of his work, at least based on the size of his autograph. Something bugged me about it, but I couldn’t figure out why.

“Did he tell you anything about it?” I looked over my shoulder at Watson, who’d gone back to his conversation with Bobby. There was little hope of steering the man toward any other topic besides himself, but I really needed Bobby to pump