Framed Read Free

locked up and closed. SHOWINGS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY, said a placard on the door.
    “Jeez. Well, excuuuse us.” Shading her eyes, Ronnie peered in through a schoolhouse window. “Jeez,” she said again, louder, for displayed at the window was a litho identical to the one she had framed, with a hand-calligraphy price tag: one thousand dollars.
    “A thousand bucks!”
    “Huh?” Lois came over, looked, and said, “Holy catalpas, I was going to put it out for thirty-nine ninety-five with frame.”
    “Who on earth would pay that much for a—”
    “For that piece of garbage?”
    “—for a litho of a barn and some cows?”
    “Around here? Nobody! He’s got himself priced right out of the local market.”
    “This whole place advertises For Snots Only,” Ronnie complained. “Do you think he’d let us in if he was here?” Lois rolled her eyes and copied the phone number on the door placard.
    On the way back to the car, Ronnie said, “And I always wondered how artists made a living.”
    “Most of them don’t.”
    “Maybe it’s like the kid with the lemonade stand, a thousand bucks a cup. All he has to do is sell one.”
    Lois shook her head and headed the Saab toward the frame shop.
    Ronnie said, “And this Tedder guy paid that kind of bucks? And put puce and fuchsia mats on it and didn’t pick up the order and has a false address?”
    “And you think he’s old from his name but those are definitely not old-person colors.”
    “So why should anything make sense?”
    When they walked into the shop, there sat Detective Llewellyn in the swivel chair at Lois’s desk, waiting to take Ronnie in for more questioning.
    * * *
    Ronnie handed the photo back to Llewellyn, feeling a bit sick. “Yeah, it’s her. Melinda.”
    He nodded and settled back into his desk chair. “How well did you know her?”
    “Not very well. Listen, can I make a couple of phone calls?”
    “You’re entitled to one.”
    “Not to a lawyer. If I can just talk to a few people, I think I can clear this whole thing up.”
    “No. That’s my job.”
    “But—”
    “Tell me about this Doerfler woman.”
    Melinda, he meant. Melinda Doerfler. “I only knew her to work with her. But I got the impression she was kind of wild—”
    The phone on Llewellyn’s desk rang. He picked up, listened, tightened his lips in a sour look and handed the phone to Ronnie. “It’s for you.
    “Ron?” Lois’s voice came across so breathless and loud that Ronnie felt sure Detective Llewellyn could hear it; he appeared to be listening. “The people down at the art center say this Gorog guy is a joke. He travels all over the place with those barn-and-covered-bridge lithos; he’s in Panama right now doing a show at some vanity gallery. The respectable galleries won’t touch him. Nobody understands who buys the stuff or what keeps him going.”
    The detective sat back, his expression thoughtful. Ronnie did not mind his eavesdropping in the least. She said to the phone, “Lois, I love you. Buy yourself a gigantic hot fudge sundae.”
    “I would if I could afford it.”
    Ronnie hung up the phone and looked at Detective Llewellyn, who stared back at her across his desk. She said, “Suppose a kind of shady artist needed a framer to hide something or other that he’s smuggling? Something small that could be sandwiched between the mats?”
    Llewellyn said nothing, but his stare intensified to the same pitch of interest it had shown when he had first noticed her callused hand.
    Veronica said, “I don’t think the Tedder guy ever existed. People who buy signed limited editions don’t just disappear without a trace. ‘Tedder,’ isn’t that German for manure or something? Horace Tedder. Horse crap.”
    “Are you German?”
    “No, but Melinda was. I think Melinda made up the Tedder order.” I’ve almost been framed, she thought, by a dead framer whose plan went wrong. “I think she felt that she was in danger, so she arranged revenge. She used those awful