Free Murder as a Fine Art by John Ballem

Smith.
    Erika was right about the colony coordinator’s reaction. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair as she told him about her increasingly alarming encounters with the performance artist.
    â€œYou certainly are being harassed,” he said when she had finished. The bureaucrat in him seemed to take comfort from that categorization of John Smith’s actions. Harassment was an officially defined offence and could be dealt with on that basis.
    Two hours later Kevin Lavoie reported back to Erika in her room. “Well, I’ve had my little talk with John Smith.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œI don’t think what I had to say made any impression on him whatsoever. He seems to have an ability not to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.”
    â€œYou don’t suppose he’s got one of those fixations you read about in the papers — you know, where a man gets the wild idea that a movie star is madly in love with him and writes her letters and follows her everywhere. Not even the threat of being sent to jail can convince him he’s wrong about her secretly loving him.”
    â€œSomething like that. It’s as if he can’t bring himself to admit that you really object to what he’s doing.”
    â€œBut he knows that I complained to you.” Erika bit her lip. “That could have been a mistake. It might make him worse.”
    â€œI doubt it.” Lavoie said reassuringly. “If he’s convinced himself you really don’t mind what he’s doing, he’ll have to ignore the fact that you spoke to me. I know it’s annoying, but I don’t think it’s serious enough to worry about.”
    â€œIt’s more than annoying,” Erika told him as he got up to leave. “It’s goddamn dangerous.”
    Lavoie had decided there was no point in telling Erika that as John Smith exited his office he was muttering, “The little bitch! She’s no better than the rest.”
    As he let himself out a side door of the residence, Lavoie saw an RCMP cruiser pulling away. Christ. Were the police still looking into Montrose’s death? Drunks falling down stairwells and a weirdo harassing a female writer. What had he ever done to deserve a job like this — nurse-maiding a bunch of adult delinquents? So far, the media had treated Montrose’s deathas an accident. There had been no follow up to the initial story. But if it turned out not to be an accident …! And if John Smith actually attacked Erika—which was how these things often turned out!
    It didn’t bear thinking about, and it couldn’t be happening at a worse time. After a long courtship by Alec Fraser, the Centre’s charismatic president, it looked as though the Chinook Foundation was finally ready to come through with a munificent donation. Alec was hoping for three million. The chairman of the Foundation was due to visit the Centre in a little more than a couple of weeks, and the provincial minister of culture was coming down from Edmonton at the same time. Everything would be in place for the big announcement. Somehow he would have to keep the lid on until then. The Chinook board of directors were notoriously conservative.
    While Kevin was thinking these gloomy thoughts, Laura stepped back from a canvas and slipped out of her paint-smeared apron. Assailed with a mild case of guilt from taking the day off, she had gone to her studio directly after an early dinner. Instead of working on the painting she had begun to block out, she retouched a still life, deepening the green of the leaves to put them more in the background.
    She wondered what the art world would make of her new works. Isaac, her excitable New York dealer, would have a bird when he saw the still lifes instead of the abstracts he was expecting. And the critics would probably say she should have stuck with the abstracts for which she was so well known. To hell with it. She needed a change of pace and the