Perfect Pigment

I walked into another room. Paintings everywhere. Paint everywhere. Paintbrushes, everywhere. The man was a machine. When did he eat or sleep? How could anyone create this much work in such a short time?

“Hey, do you have a count on how many pieces there are in the apartment yet?”

“We’re working on it but my current estimate is close to three-hundred canvasses.”

“And no sign of Blue Prairie, of course.”

“Nothing. It’s not that big, so we’ll have to look everywhere, but so far it doesn’t seem likely that it’s here. Everything is out in the open and, despite the sheer volume of work, it’s not a hoarder situation. I bet that if you asked him, he could find any painting he’d done right away. There’s a pattern to all of it.”

I gingerly sat down on a chair, white at some point but drip-colored into a muted kaleidoscope. It held my weight.

“So we’re running out of options then. Nothing in the car, no other properties or vehicles, and he was seen with it yesterday, before the accident.”

“No sir, it looks like we’ll have to chip away at this one for a while.

I stood up. Chip away—of course! The walls were plaster. The painting could be hidden in a wall, and any painter could cover up wet plaster with a little paint and you’d never know it had been recently disturbed.

I walked slowly throughout the apartment, looking for any sign of recent plaster work. A patch of wall by the fire escape window caught my eye. The light reflected off of it just a little bit more.

“Tap that lightly and see what you think” I directed the detectives. The did, and the wall sagged slightly. Bingo.

As we pulled away at the loose and still-soft plaster, a bright blue canvas revealed itself. The painting was wrapped in heavy plastic, but I could tell it was right. The team worked their way along the wall, peeling back more and more of the painting’s covering. As they did, the canvas dislodged and slid further down, dipping almost out of view.

Several tedious minutes of scraping later and we ran into a problem: one of the beams in the wall was blocking us from getting at the painting.

I leapt to the window, determined to come at it from another angle. Working my way outside and onto the fire escape, I managed to chip some pieces of older external wall away, giving me plenty of room to reach the base of the painting and hoist it back up into the waiting hands of the detectives.

I stood up, cracking into the next level of fire escape. My head burst into a roar of pain. I stepped back, lost my footing, and tumbled off of the metal structure, still clenching my teeth to fight the agony ringing through my skull and down my spine.

The detectives watching me all had their mouths open, shouting, but I couldn’t hear a thing as I plummeted. I looked at my hand. Yellow blood? No, I must have touched a wet paintbrush somewhere in there.