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The man sitting in the client chair in my office was, I deduced, an artist. The clues made it easy: the red beret and the long cigarette holder, fortunately without a cigarette in it.
“I’m Mike Angelo, Mr. Tuff. I’m the curator of the local art gallery, the Blandsville Louvre.” It had been funded by two wealthy spinster sisters, Prudence and Patience Wilde. Each year they take a holiday to a different exotic place and return with an idea for a copy of something in Blandsville. The pagoda serves as a tourist information centre, while a miniature Golden Gate Bridge spans Trickle Creek at the edge of town. We fear what will happen if the Wildes ever see the pyramids or the Great Wall of China.
Their visits to the art galleries in London and Paris produced our local Louvre. When town growth surrounded Zeke George’s Aberdeen Angus Farm, Zeke’s land was expropriated and he happily sold it and retired to California to await his end from natural causes or the collapse of the San Andreas Fault. The Wilde sisters bought part of the land, had the big barn renovated into an art gallery with a spacious parking lot, and appointed Mike Angelo to run it.
“How may I help you?” I asked.
“We’ve had a lot of vandalism at the at the gallery recently,” he said, waving his cigarette holder like an epee, as if he wanted to skewer the vandals.
“What kind of vandalism?”
“All kinds. Illegible graffiti on the walls. Pictures defaced with spray paint. Moustaches and horns added to faces.”
The gallery, Mike explained, was in sections: landscapes, urban scenes, portraits, children’s art, photographs, but all by local artists. “They even drew a moustache and beret on Cleo Patter.”
I had met Miss Patter on a previous case. She was a local woman who had done well in a beauty contest. She had wanted to pose nude, but the acquisitions committee, three women and two men, had vetoed the idea, three to two. It was, after all a family gallery.
I suggested that we go and look at the damage. There was nothing in the collection of much value; in fact, much of it was artistically awful. As I looked at the defaced art, I wondered if the vandal or vandals had not, in some cases, improved it.
“We accept almost anything,” Mike said unnecessarily.
I had taken a course in the history of art at university and I was shocked by the vast distance between Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Picasso and the works on display at the Loo, as locals call it irreverently.
“What have you rejected recently?”
“A child’s drawing called ‘Snowstorm.’ It was a sheet of white paper, blank except for the artist’s name. His father was bitter. He comes in when there are people here and walks around making nasty comments about the works on display: ‘This artist has taste-bad taste’ and ‘This painter must be colour-blind.’”
Maybe he’s an art lover, I thought, but he’s an obvious suspect – too obvious, maybe.
