Duma Key(94)

"You always make me feel better," she said. "That's why I call. I love you, Daddy."

"I love you too."

"How many bunches?"

How many years since she'd asked that? Twelve? Fourteen? It didn't matter, I remembered the answer.

"A million and one for under your pillow," I said.

Then I said goodbye and hung up and thought that if Carson Jones hurt my daughter, I'd kill him. The thought made me smile a little, wondering how many fathers had had the same thought and made the same promise. But of all those fathers, I might be the only one who could kill a heedless, daughter-hurting suitor with a few strokes of a paintbrush.

xi

Dario Nannuzzi and one of his partners, Jimmy Yoshida, came out the very next day. Yoshida was a Japanese-American Dorian Gray. Getting out of Nannuzzi's Jaguar in my driveway, dressed in faded straight-leg jeans and an even more faded Rihanna Pon De Replay tee-shirt, long black hair blowing in the breeze off the Gulf, he looked eighteen. By the time he got to the end of the walk, he looked twenty-eight. When he shook my hand, up close and personal, I could see the lines tattooed around his eyes and mouth and put him somewhere in his late forties.

"Pleased to meet you," he said. "The gallery is still buzzing over your visit. Mary Ire has been back three times to ask when we're going to sign you up."

"Come on in," I said. "Our friend down the beach Wireman has called me twice already to make sure I don't sign anything without him."

Nannuzzi smiled. "We're not in the business of cheating artists, Mr. Freemantle."

"Edgar, remember? Would you like some coffee?"

"Look first," Jimmy Yoshida said. "Coffee later."

I took a breath. "Fine. Come on upstairs."

xii

I'd covered my portrait of Wireman (which was still little more than a vague shape with a brain floating in it three-quarters of the way up), and my picture of Tina Garibaldi and Candy Brown had gone bye-bye in the downstairs closet (along with Friends with Benefits and the red-robe figure), but I had left my other stuff out. There was now enough to lean against two walls and part of a third; forty-one canvases in all, including five versions of Girl and Ship.

When their silence was more than I could bear, I broke it. "Thanks for the tip on that Liquin stuff. It's great. What my daughters would call da bomb."

Nannuzzi seemed not to have heard. He was going in one direction, Yoshida in the other. Neither asked about the big, sheet-draped canvas on the easel; I guessed that doing that might be considered poor etiquette in their world. Beneath us, the shells murmured. Somewhere, far off, a Jet-ski blatted. My right arm itched, but faint and very deep, telling me it wanted to paint but could wait it knew the time would come. Before the sun went down. I'd paint and at first I would consult the photographs clipped to the sides of the easel and then something else would take over and the shells would grind louder and the chrome of the Gulf would change color, first to peach and then to pink and then to orange and finally to RED, and it would be well, it would be well, all manner of things would be well.

Nannuzzi and Yoshida met back by the stairs leading down from Little Pink. They conferred briefly, then came toward me. From the hip pocket of his jeans, Yoshida produced a business-size envelope with the words SAMPLE CONTRACT/SCOTO GALLERY neatly typed on the front. "Here," he said. "Tell Mr. Wireman we'll make any reasonable accommodation in order to represent your work."

"Really?" I asked. "Are you sure?"

Yoshida didn't smile. "Yes, Edgar. We're sure."

"Thank you," I said. "Thank you both." I looked past Yoshida to Nannuzzi, who was smiling. "Dario, I really appreciate this."

Dario looked around at the paintings, gave a little laugh, then lifted his hands and dropped them. "I think we should be the ones expressing appreciation, Edgar."

"I'm impressed by their clarity," Yoshida said. "And their... I don't know, but... I think... lucidity. These images carry the viewer along without drowning him. The other thing that amazes me is how fast you've worked. You're unbottling."

"I don't know that word."

"Artists who begin late are sometimes said to unbottle," Nannuzzi said. "It's as if they're trying to make up for lost time. Still... forty paintings in a matter of months... of weeks, really..."

And you didn't even see the one that killed the child-murderer, I thought.

Dario laughed without much humor. "Try not to let the place burn down, all right?"

"Yes that would be bad. Assuming we make a deal, could I store some of my work at your gallery?"

"Of course," Nannuzzi said.

"That's great." Thinking I'd like to sign as soon as possible no matter what Wireman thought of the contract, just to get these pictures off the Key... and it wasn't fire I was worried about. Unbottling might be fairly common among artists who began later in life, but forty-one paintings on Duma Key were at least three dozen too many. I could feel their live presence in this room, like electricity in a bell jar.

Of course, Dario and Jimmy felt it, too. That was part of what made those f**king pictures so effective. They were catching.

xiii

I joined Wireman and Elizabeth for coffee at the end of El Palacio 's boardwalk the next morning. I was down to nothing but aspirin to get going, and my Great Beach Walks were now a pleasure instead of a challenge. Especially since the weather had warmed up.