Charlie Lee Stillwater was a old friend of Walt’s. Lived at the nearby Wyoming’s Soldiers and Sailors Home. The administrator calls Walt with the bad news that Charlie passed away. Heart attack most likely. With no nearby kin, Walt is called in to go through Charlie’s effects. Within all the junk that clutters our lives are two items of note. One is a scrap of an old painting. The other is an old shoe box, make that a big boot box, stuffed to overflowing with non-sequential, hand-wrapped $100 bills. The bank counts it up - $1 million. Word is that Charlie’s only surviving relative is an LA-based grandson (a mostly part-time studio guitarist) who is entitled to all of Charlie’s remaining belongings – minus what Uncle Sam will want in taxes.
Being the skeptic that he is, Walt wonders if the painting scrap and the money are related. And if so, maybe Charlie didn’t die of natural causes. Off he goes on a convoluted trail learning about art, how it’s prepared, displayed, valued, and sold through legal and less than legal means.
A museum conservator is queried about the scrap and, after some challenging investigation, says that the scrap is indeed old and that it bears a remarkable resemblance to a long lost painting called Custer’s Last Fight.
The late-1880s Cassily Adams painting is somewhat notorious. A huge canvas that was acquired by Adolphus Busch (the beer magnate) who duplicated hundreds of thousands of prints that were given to bars throughout the country as a promotional gimmick. The original was lost in a 1946 fire, but the best copy still hangs at Anheuser Busch corporate offices. The scrap that Charlie had was part of a practice canvas the artist used in prep for the actual painting. The scrap was essentially worthless, but the conservator causally mentions that the original, were it still intact, might be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million.
What was once a curiosity now becomes the focus on Walt’s investigation. Could Charlie actually have the original painting, who might be a potential buyer, and who could broker such a deal?
Along the way we cross paths with the Count (an art broker), the wavers (4 wheelchair-bound residents of the Home who sit by the highway and wave to travelers), a former KGB thug, the aforementioned grandson, the head of Wyoming’s SBI, Cheyenne tribal elder Lonnie Littlefeather, a tribal police officer Lola Long and her little brother Barrett (whom she lobbies Walt to hire), plus the usual cast: Vic, Henry Standing Bear, Ruby, and Cady from a distance.
This chapter in Walt’s life is less like his other cases in that the intensity of investigation is well down the list. It certainly is more light-hearted with a number of side stories that do not detract from the main issue, like Vic’s plans to replace her beaten down truck, or Walt having to attend a cowboy formal event (tux shirt/jacket/tie/cuff links/studs) over jeans, boots, and the requisite hat, or the level of performance that one with some mechanical know-how can raise a motorized wheelchair.
So, enjoy this leisurely stroll through Absaroka County while learning more details about Custer’s demise than you ever knew. My fav is the name of the battle. Each side has their own name (like the North called it the Battle of Antietam and the South called it the Battle of Sharpsburg). The ‘whites’ refer to it as Custer’s Last Stand. The natives call it The Battle of the Greasy Grass.
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now this is odd. Blogger duplicated the post. First time I've included two images to a post so I guess that has something to do with it. Oh, well.
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