Brush Back by Sara Paretsky Page B

artist—you’ll see his work upstairs. I was a curator and a collector and a wannabe—it was hard to admit that my only talent lay in admiring it in others. Anyway, I was working at the Field Museum, they were doing a special exhibit on the history of calligraphy as art, and two of Ken’s pieces were included. And then I had an incredible piece of luck: I recognized a raku pottery cup at a garage sale. Seventeenth-century work, very rare,” he explained, seeing my blank expression. “I bought it for a dollar and sold it for—let’s just say enough to buy this building and start collecting and selling.”
    I made the noises we always make when we know nothing about the subject someone else is passionately discussing. Rafe led me up a broad wood staircase, pointing out lacquer in niches along the wall. The top of the stairs opened onto Ken’s studio, where Ken, in jeans and a sweatshirt, was closing the big glass doors to the balcony. Rafe went to help him and then introduced us—Kenji Aroyawa.
    Rafe went to an alcove and fussed with a charcoal heater to make tea, leaving Kenji and me watching the lake through the glass window: it was starting to boil up, waves rocking back and forth, spume beginning to form.
    “When it’s like this, it’s like Hokusai’s print of The Wave— you’ve seen it? The great wave that looks as though it could swallow the world?”
    “Do you try to paint the water?” I asked. “I don’t know how an artist captures the motion.”
    “Like this.” Ken turned to an easel set back from the front. He dipped a brush in a pot of ink and after a few short strokes, the water came to life on his sheet of paper.
    My enchantment with seeing him work took my mind briefly from the question I’d been chewing on since Rafe’s comment about Mandel and Annie.
    “You like it?” Ken said.
    “I’m completely blown away,” I said. “I won’t pretend I can make an intelligent response, though—it’s the first time I’ve seen this kind of painting.”
    Ken laughed and clapped his hands.
    “You brought me a new disciple, Rafe,” he called. “Now sit down—what do we call you? Vic? I think Rafe has finished smelling up the place. Powdered green tea—I hate it, maybe from too many obligatory events as a child—my father was in Japan’s diplomatic service—but green tea is part of Rafe’s attempt to remind me I’m Japanese, or maybe to turn Japanese himself.”
    He gave another loud laugh, then said he assumed I wasn’t with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, since Rafe had spent so much time with me.
    “She works with another kind of witness,” Rafe said. “You know, law, courts.”
    Ken cocked his head at Rafe. “Is someone suing you? Do you need to put all the art in my name?”
    Rafe gave a perfunctory smile. “She’s a detective. She cares about a very old case where I was a witness to the torment of one of the lawyers.”
    “Joel?” Ken asked.
    Rafe turned his teacup round and round without looking at either of us. “I believe the dead past should bury the dead, but Vic wants to dig it up. I thought someone from my father’s old temple had sent her here to paw through old gossip about Joel and me, but she’s after different gossip. What exactly are you hoping to learn?”
    “It’s that old trial,” I said. “But now—I can hardly say what I do want. If you’ve seen the news reports, you know that Stella Guzzo is saying she found a diary her daughter kept, implicating my cousin in her murder.”
    “Rafe doesn’t watch the news; he thinks it’s vulgar,” said Ken, “but I do, I know what you’re talking about. Your cousin was the hockey star?”
    Ken’s English was accentless and idiomatic. Perhaps the result of his childhood in Japanese consulates.
    “Right.” I took a sip of the tea and decided I wasn’t crazy about it, either. “Stella Guzzo has a long history with my family and I let her rattle me. I don’t know why she’s trying to prove her innocence now,