Free Duby's Doctor by Iris Chacon Page A

and
close, Hector smiled broadly. “Guess dinner will be late.”
    Outside, Mitchell strode beneath the banyan
tree canopy on a sidewalk corrugated by thick tree roots. Streets
were narrow in Coconut Grove, and the beams of mercury lights
fought their way from their tall poles down through thick foliage
toward the pavement with only intermittent success. Mitchell relied
on the light of her cellphone as she pulled a business card from
deep within the purse she had slung hurriedly over her shoulder on
her way out of the house.
    She referred to the rumpled card and punched
a number into the phone. When she heard a click indicating the call
was answered, she did not wait for a hello. “You told me to call if
I got a name out of him, so I’m calling,” she snapped. “Would you
like to hear the name?”
    A muffled grunt came through the phone.
    Mitchell summoned all the irony she could
force into a single word: “Stone.”
    She hung up. She didn’t even want to hear
whatever cockamamie response Frank Stone would spout. The man lied
for a living, when he wasn’t threatening or blackmailing.
    She jammed the phone and business card into
her purse, adjusted its strap on her shoulder, and marched back
over the wavy concrete toward home. Whatever Jean remembered,
whatever she felt about Jean’s almost kissing her, and whatever
Stone would do or not do, Mitchell still had a dinner to serve.
     
    Stone did not contact Mitchell in the weeks
following her call. She and Jean had relaxed and settled into a
routine of work-filled days, pleasant evenings, and carefully
separate nights. They never discussed the hug and near-kiss that
had almost raised their relationship to a different level.
    On Commodore Plaza, in Coconut Grove, a small
art gallery displayed – and often sold – Jean’s paintings and
sketches. Mitchell knew Stone had undoubtedly forced the gallery
owner to cooperate initially, but when Jean’s art began selling,
the owner was happy to be his exclusive representative.
    Frank Stone was familiar with the owner of
the Barnacle Gallery because Frank had arrested her once upon a
time. That had been all the leverage Frank needed to get Jean’s
work into the gallery. The owner had started a new life in a new
city; she needed Frank’s continued silence about her mottled
past.
    The arrangement had turned out to be
surprisingly profitable for the Barnacle. Stone had no further
communication with the gallery after his single conversation with
the owner. No further coercion had been necessary. In fact, since
that ominous conversation had taken place elsewhere, Stone had
never actually visited the Barnacle Gallery. Until this day.
    On this day, he stood on the sidewalk outside
and looked through the Barnacle Gallery’s plate glass window at a
Jean Deaux original watercolor: “Girl With Rabbits.” Stone studied
the painting, marveling at the accuracy and beauty of the likeness.
Then he sauntered into the store.
    The snobbish saleswoman inside was not the
owner, which suited him just fine. He was pleased to remain
anonymous while he made his purchase. He asked the saleswoman about
an artist named Jean Deaux. She led him to a section of the gallery
where a number of Jean’s works were featured.
    “Yes, he is one of our newest discoveries,
and he is already quite popular,” the saleswoman intoned. “Such a
refreshing innocence in his work, don’t you think?”
    Stone glanced over the selections on the
wall. He saw the same girl on many of the canvases, but none of
them were as imposing as the larger painting he had seen from the
sidewalk.
    “How much for the one in the window?” he
asked.
    The saleswoman quoted a figure that might
have shocked a lesser man, but Agent Stone did not react.
    “Hmm,” said Stone, mentally calculating his
checkbook balance and Visa card credit limit. “How much without the
frame?”
    The saleswoman looked at him as if he were a
cockroach in her soup. At the Barnacle Gallery, there were no