The Fool's Run Read Free

her information, money, and long athletic legs. All management tools, properly deployed, well under control. It was mildly irritating.
    Letting it percolate for a moment, I looked down at the battered, grass-green fiberglass hull of my boat, the brilliant white D’Arches paper, the black handles of the watercolor brushes. It was all I really wanted to do; I didn’t want to fool with some rich guy’s computers. But a bigger boat would be nice, and money would buy more time to paint. And New Orleans is a pleasurable place.
    “It sounds illegal,” I said after a while.
    “I don’t know what you did for Jack Clark,” she said, “but I got the impression that the police wouldn’t be happy about it. When I talked to him, he was grinning like the cat that ate the canary.”
    “I could call Jack and ask who your boss is,” I said.
    “He wouldn’t tell you,” she said promptly.
    “Five thousand?” I’d been rubbing my hands with an old T-shirt, now a paint cloth. She handed me the envelope, absolutely sure of herself.
    “In twenties and fifties,” she said. “See you at the airport in an hour?”
    “Make it an hour and a half,” I said, giving up. I tucked the money into my hip pocket. “I’ve got to pull the boat out of the water, and make arrangements for the cat . . . take a shower.”
    She looked at her watch and nodded. She started to walk away, then changed her mind and turned back to the ruined painting.
    “I went to an opening a few weeks ago,” she said. “Oil paintings, though, not watercolors. They had holes cut in the middle of them. Like that one. My friend and I spoke to the artist. He said the holes represented his contempt for the conventional form that has trapped painting for so long. He said the American Indian, for instance, often painted on irregularly shaped war shields. . . .”
    It was the kind of talk that gives me headaches.
    “Miss, ah, Smith?” I said when she slowed for a breath.
    “Yes?”
    “If we have to fly to Chicago together, if I take this job, do me a favor?”
    “Yes?”
    “Don’t talk to me about art, okay?”
    Her face froze up. Offended, she looked down at her watch and said, “An hour and a half. Please be prompt.”
    She started stiffly across the sandbar toward the willows, but loosened up after a few feet, and even gave it a little extra effort, knowing I’d watch. Which I did. At the base of the levee she stopped to put on her shoes, glanced back, and nimbly climbed the bank.
    I keep a pair of 8 x 50 binoculars in the boat, so I can get a closer look at landscape structures. When she disappeared over the levee, I got the glasses and jogged after her. A car door slammed as I scrambled up the levee and put the glasses on her car’s license plate. It was a Minnesota tag, probably a rental. Back at the boat, I wrote the number on the cash envelope with a nice vibrant black made of alizarin crimson and hooker’s green.
    Then I went off to call Robert Duchamps, pronounced Doosham, and usually called Bobby.

Chapter 2
    T HE CAT, A tiger-striped tom, had moved in a few months after I bought the apartment. He was waiting now on the back of the living room couch, gazing out the window toward the river. He was doing the same thing one day when a pigeon, one of the big blue and white numbers, smacked headlong into the glass. He came off the couch like a bullet and hid under the kitchen sink for the rest of the day. He hasn’t trusted a pigeon since.
    “I’m going out of town,” I told him. “I’ll leave the flap open. Emily will feed you.” He looked at me, yawned, and turned back to the window.
    Emily Anderson lives in the apartment below mine. She’s seventy years old and a damn good painter. Most Wednesday nights we hire a model and drink beer and draw and argue. I walked down the stairs and knocked on her door. When she answered, I told her about the trip. She agreed to take care of the cat.
    “Though you ought to pay me for taking care of the smelly