Feint of Art:

by Hailey Lind

  “I was about to ask you the same thing,” he snarled in return.

  “You scared the hell out of me.”

  “You didn’t exactly soothe my nerves either, screaming like that,” he retorted as we reached the rear of the house.

  Michael tried the door handle and then the windows, but they were all locked. He pulled up the doormat.

  “Like she’d leave a key under the mat,” I jeered.

  “You’d be surprised.”

  I spied a bronze elf with an evil grin in a flower bed to the left of the back door. Seemed promising. I knocked it over with my foot. Nothing.

  Michael looked under some potted plants, a coiled garden hose, a few plastic lawn chairs. No luck. Finally, he banged on the back door and demanded that someone open up. No one did.

  So he picked up the heavy elf and smashed a pane in one of the windows next to the door.

  I screamed. Just a little. More like a screech, really. Faux finishers don’t normally do a lot of breaking and entering.

  Michael glared. “Will you shut up already?”

  I bit my tongue. Literally. I think I was a little pumped on adrenaline.

  The X-man reached through the broken windowpane, flipped the latch, and slid the double-hung window up. Then, taking off his padded windbreaker, he wrapped it around his hand, brushed the glass shards away, and spread the jacket on the sill before effortlessly hoisting himself onto the four-foot-high ledge, swinging his long legs around to the inside, and dropping out of sight.

  “Michael? Hello?”

  I had a sneaking suspicion that if I was waiting for a hand up I was going to wait a very long time. Grumbling to myself, I walked over to the window, put my hands on the jacket-covered ledge, and hoisted away.

  I managed to get about six inches off the ground. I tried to “walk the wall” the way Ms. Ortone had shown us in eleventh-grade gym class, but since that maneuver didn’t work any better now than it had then, all I accomplished was a lot of straining and huffing and banging on the siding with my shoes. I let go and dropped back down to the flower bed.

  Grumbling aloud now, I dragged a blue garden chair over and positioned it beneath the window. I stepped cautiously onto the frame of the seat as it rocked from side to side. Fortunately, a lifetime of foolishness had inured me to public humiliation. I did not mind looking stupid so long as the odds of success were reasonable.

  Using my rib cage as leverage, I managed to get my upper body past the windowsill, and ended up hanging facedown inside the house. Unfortunately, my hips were still stuck on the ledge. I was trying to wriggle free when I looked up to find Michael’s face about six inches from mine.

  He had crouched down and was contemplating me as I hung there, head down and butt in the air like Pooh stuck in Rabbit’s hole. A smile spread slowly across his face, making his green eyes go ever so slightly crinkly.

  “I opened the door for you,” he said simply.

  “Ah,” I said, wondering whether it would be less foolish to go forward or backward. Either option pretty much sucked. Retreat seemed to endanger the fewest body parts, so I went for it, but my feet could not find the chair. I tossed them around a bit, but to no avail, so I tried to scoot backward. This was an unfortunate decision, because the windowsill was pressing hard into my diaphragm, which meant that each time I kicked or scooted, air was forced out of my lungs and I grunted like a pig.

  “What in the world are you doing?” Michael asked in wonder.

  The only way the situation could possibly have been more embarrassing would have been if I’d had a sudden attack of uncontrollable flatulence. Given the way this day was going, the odds were not in my favor.

  Michael sighed, went outside, grabbed me by the hips, and guided me backward.

  “Thanks,” I said, wiping my hands on my jeans nonchalantly.

  “Any time,” he said, handing me a pair of latex surgical gloves. “Put these on.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, although you and I know we’re not criminally inclined, the fact is we have no right to be here,” he said. “I think it would be best if we didn’t leave our fingerprints all over everything.”

  While I struggled with my gloves, he snapped his on with brisk efficiency, then wiped the windowsill and door with a blue-striped handkerchief. Clearly, this was not his first breaking-and-entering. Michael gestured “after you” with his latexed hand, and I preceded him through the back door.

  “Wow,” I exclaimed as we surveyed the damage. “This is terrible. What do you think they were looking for?”

  “Same thing you are,” he replied.

  “Did you know Johnson is the most common last name in the U.S.?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Yes, I did. It just seems an odd thing to bring up.”

  “Not really. Who did you say you worked for?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, right. Pardon my grammar. For whom do you work?”

  Finally, he smiled. “Raymond Ozeki,” he told me.

  “Raymond Ozeki? What kind of name is Ozeki?”

  “What is it with you and names? I didn’t christen the guy, I just work for him.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “No you don’t.” I could keep this up all day. I had been a bratty younger sister once. The X-man was out of his league.

  “I don’t?”

  “No you don’t, because you’re not a PI!”

  “Yes I am.”

  Hmm. He was better at this than I had thought. Maybe he had been a bratty younger brother once.

  “No you’re not. There’s no use denying it.”

  “Then what am I?”

  “You’re trespassing, that’s what.”

  “And you’re not trespassing because, what, Joanne Nash is practically your aunt?”

  I glared at him. He smirked at me. The trashed antiques shop came back into focus.

  “What a mess,” I said. Michael was standing next to a long counter near the rear wall that Joanne Nash appeared to have used as a desk.

  “Check behind the counter,” I said. “I had a visual of her keeping the drawings there.”

  “You had a vision? What are you, a Psychic Friend?”

  “Not a vision, moron, a visual.”

  Michael’s temper seemed to get shorter the longer he was around me. I was having that effect on a lot of people lately.

  “Just look,” I said.

  “I’m looking, I’m looking,” he groused. “It’s not as though I’m the first. If there was anything obvious to be found, it’s been found already.”

  Nonetheless, we sifted through the bric-a-brac and combed the scattered contents of upside-down drawers. I found a bunch of old drawings and started sorting through them, in case the precious sketches had been hidden “in plain sight” among less valuable ones. Time passed slowly. It was dusty, tedious work—never my strong suit.

  Next I began searching Joanne’s many canvas paintings, in case the drawings had been tucked into the frames or between layers of canvas. It was an old smugglers’ trick to disguise great art behind wretched art.

  “So,” I said, for conversation’s sake, as I abandoned the canvas search and pawed halfheartedly through a hatbox overflowing with old lace, most of which was stained, ripped, or moth-eaten. “What brings you to Napa?”

  “You,” he answered without hesitation.

  I looked over to where he stood flipping through a stack of picture frames, and felt a smile tug at the corners of my mouth.

  “Really?” I asked, pushing aside a Tiffany-style lamp and opening an old tooled-leather trunk with brass fittings.

  “Really,” he said, moving on to a battered file cabinet covered with orange and pink flowered stickers circa 1972. “You mean you didn’t notice a bright red Jeep following you all the way from the Brock Museum? It’s amazing you’v
e survived this long, you know that?”

  “I don’t believe you,” I protested. “I would’ve noticed a bright red Jeep. I hate Jeeps. They’re always owned by people who live in the city and have no use for four-wheel drive.”

  “Whether you hate Jeeps or not is immaterial. The fact remains that I followed you here.”

  “So what were you doing at the Brock Museum, anyway?” I demanded, climbing over the trunk to get at a carved walnut sideboard that had been overturned.

  “Appreciating art, of course. I am a great admirer of beauty.” He tossed a leer in my direction.

  I wasn’t buying it. My grandfather had taught me the many uses of flattery to distract a listener.

  “Uh-huh. Then why’d you decide to leave the museum and follow me?”

  “Oh, just curious. Besides, I had nothing better to do.”

  I glared at him as he stood hunched over an open file drawer. I had covered half my self-selected search quadrant, while Super Sleuth was stuck with his head in the file cabinet. “What’s taking you so long over there?”

  “I like to be thorough,” he replied softly.

  I spent the next few moments examining a Victorian fainting couch and wondering whether he did everything as thoroughly. Probably.

  I noticed some silver frames on a mahogany end table, most of which held sepia-toned prints. However, what stopped me in my tracks were the glamour shots of the elegant woman with catlike eyes whom I had last seen leaving Vesuvio’s in North Beach.

  I was about to say something when tires crunched in the gravel parking lot out front. For a long moment we gaped at each other, cartoon fashion, then Michael stepped from behind the counter, grabbed my arm, and pulled me into a shallow alcove beneath the stairs.

  “This seems strangely familiar,” he whispered, his breath tickling my ear as we crouched behind a dusty purple velvet curtain.

  We fell silent when the new arrival knocked on the front door and tried the knob. More gravel crunched as footsteps circled the house, approaching the back door.

  The door slowly swung open, flooding the room with the pinkish-orange glow of twilight. I held my breath. For several minutes we listened to a general banging around and shuffling of papers that suggested a search was being conducted. I had a sinking feeling that we might be stuck here a while if the newcomer decided to examine the same stuff we had been riffling through for the last hour and a half.

  I was beginning to regret squatting instead of sitting when I heard footsteps on the treads just above us. Our heads swiveled in unison as we followed the sounds of the intruder moving about upstairs. I heard a door open and then the creaking of the floorboards stopped abruptly, only to begin again, faster this time, as the intruder flew down the stairs and out the back door. An engine roared and I heard gravel spurting as the vehicle sped away.

  Michael and I stared at each other. Had the intruder found what he or she had been searching for—whatever that might be? Had I let the drawings slip through my fingers?

  “Maybe we should have looked upstairs,” I suggested.

  “You think?”

  Hiding seemed to bring out the X-man’s rude side. My knees protested as we stood up.

  “What is that?” I asked, my nose wrinkling, as we approached the stairs.

  “What?” Michael asked, looking around.

  “That smell. Gack.” I was nearly gagging, afraid I knew what it was. About a year ago, a rat had died under the eaves of my apartment house. The smell got pretty funky and I had had to sleep with all the windows open for days. The closer we got to the stairs, the more something up there smelled like that dead rat. And then some. Opening the windows was not going to solve the problem this time.

  I indicated that Michael should feel free to go first.

  The stairs led to a short hallway with three doors opening off it. It was hot and stuffy up here, and the smell was much stronger.

  Michael started down the hall and I followed, glancing over my shoulder somewhat compulsively. I bumped into him when he stopped to open a door.

  “Sorry.” I started to giggle nervously. Michael gave me a look. Grasping the door handle, he jerked it open to expose a small linen closet, which revealed nothing more sinister than Joanne’s fetish for embroidered sheets.

  We proceeded down the hall.

  Behind the next door was a bedroom decorated in a pretty, feminine style. Empty.

  We turned back to the hall.

  The last door, partly open, led to what appeared to be a study. Michael took a step into the room before his arm shot out to keep me from following him. Later I would think of this as a patronizing but endearing gesture. At the time, my response was to bat his arm aside and blunder in.

  I drew a sharp breath preparatory to a scream but ended up with a mouthful of cotton shirt when Michael grabbed me and pressed my face into his chest. I got a grip on myself and pushed him away.

  I had never seen a dead body that was not dressed up and surrounded by flowers, so I was uncertain what corpses looked like before the funeral home makeover. If this was it, it was not good.

  On the floor of the study was the woman we had seen at Anton’s studio yesterday. Poor Joanne lay on her side, her arms flung out as if in surrender. Dried blood matted her ash blond hair and formed a red halo around her head.

  I always thought that our last mortal act was to close our eyes. Joanne’s, on the contrary, stared at us unblinkingly. I recalled how attractive she had been yesterday—how vibrantly alive—and felt a wave of sadness at the death of a stranger.

  “I swear to God, I don’t know what the art world is coming to,” Michael said, then looked at me. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Wait.” My voice was tinny and sounded far away. “There’s something underneath her.”

  “What?”

  “Something. Underneath her.”

  Poking out from under Joanne’s back were some drawings. From this distance, in the dim light, I could not tell if they were the originals or the forgeries. Michael swore softly, took a deep breath, stepped over to the body, and eased one of the drawings out from under an arm.

  It was one of the sketches stolen from my truck last night, now partially soaked in blood. Anton’s work. Michael held up a second drawing, but I had seen enough. “They’re Anton’s forgeries. Leave them.”

  Michael nodded. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said again.

  We hurried out of the room and started down the stairs, but as we neared the bottom we heard a scraping at the front door. The early winter evening was now upon us, and we saw a flashlight beam glinting through the transom.

  “Shit,” we whispered simultaneously.

  Flying back up the stairs, past the linen closet and the bedroom, we turned into the study and nipped behind the door. My heart was racing, my breath was labored, and I was trying, without success, to remember why I’d thought chasing forgers to Napa was a good idea.

  We stood there listening to someone rummaging around below. Time seemed to have stalled, and I could have sworn an hour passed. Then we heard whoever it was climb the stairs and come down the hall toward us. Magically, time sped up.

  Through the crack near the door hinges I stared at the shadow this new intruder cast on the wall. He looked even bigger than my old pal No Neck. The absurdly broad shoulders and square head were reminiscent of the Incredible Hulk, except I did not think the Incredible Hulk carried a gun. The shadow revealed that this hulk was clutching a really big one.

  Michael grabbed a Chinese porcelain vase from a bookshelf and held it high over his head.

  It all happened so fast. Just as the Hulk entered the room, Michael stepped out from behind the door and slammed the fragile porcelain onto the back of his head, shattering the vase into a thousand pieces. He followed up with what looked like a karate chop to the neck, a chop that the Hulk blocked with his gun hand while punching Michael in the gut with his other.

  Michael grabbed the gun and they wrestled
for control, walking in a strange embrace backward into the hallway, before falling to the ground and rolling toward the stairs. Michael was putting up one hell of a fight, but the Hulk outweighed him by at least fifty pounds.

  I could not tell what, if anything, Michael’s plan was, but I knew I was being no help at all. I grabbed a large, sharp piece of the broken vase with the idea of stabbing the Hulk with it, but the hallway was so narrow, and the two men were flinging themselves about with such energy, that it was impossible to be sure of landing a good jab without inadvertently wounding Michael. Just as I spied an opening and was moving in for the kill, the men started tumbling down the stairs.

  I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment and tried to discern whose grunts were whose. When I opened them again I saw that the men had landed at the bottom, where they continued their deadly duel, thrashing about amid the broken furniture and shattered pottery of the shop. I half ran, half slid down the stairs and looked about frantically for something better than a broken vase with which to attack the Hulk. A big leather book? A tacky watercolor? An evil elf?

  The elf statuette lay on the floor near the back window, where Michael had dropped it after smashing the windowpane in what now seemed like far more innocent times.

  The elf was bronze. It was heavy. It should work.

  I snatched it up and started circling the struggling fighters, trying to time their movements and work up my courage. Finally I took a deep breath and rushed in, swinging the heavy elf around and down somewhat at random.

  I might have screamed. I don’t remember.

  The evil elf glanced off Michael’s brow on its way to smacking firmly against the Hulk’s crown. Both men went down.

  The Hulk stayed down.

  Michael crouched on the ground, his rear in the air, groaning and swearing like a drunken sailor. After a moment he rocked back on his knees, pressed the heel of his right hand to an area just above his right eyebrow, and glared at me.

  “Jesus Christ, Annie! You hit me!”

  “I didn’t mean to. Besides, I hit him harder,” I said, pointing to the Hulk, who lay unconscious and bleeding on the floor. “Let’s try to see the big picture, shall we?”