Feint of Art:

by Hailey Lind

  “Naomi!”

  “She had access and she was gullible. Useful qualities in a dupe.”

  I recalled Naomi carrying on about the divine Colin Brooks, and felt sorry for her.

  It passed.

  “So who killed Dupont and Joanne Nash?” I asked. “Harlan Coombs?”

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t have thought Harlan capable of such a thing, but then I also thought I could rely on him in this deal, and clearly I was wrong about that.” He shook his head. “It could have been someone else. Maybe those goons from New York, or someone else Harlan double-crossed. I just don’t know.”

  “Was Dupont in on the deal? Do you think that Dupont’s murder was related to my identifying The Magi as a fake?”

  “I hope you’re not thinking that was your fault, Annie,” Michael said. “Things got a little crazy, that’s all.”

  I knew he was right, but I couldn’t help thinking that if I hadn’t confirmed Ernst’s suspicions about The Magi that night, Stan Dupont and Joanne Nash might still be alive. The esoteric knowledge my grandfather had so lovingly taught me may have led to two murders. It was a sobering thought.

  I’d been so engrossed in our conversation that I hadn’t been paying attention to the passing scenery. We had left the freeway and were speeding down a two-lane highway that led past the chichi town of Tiburon on the way to the exclusive island of Belvedere, which boasted multi-million-dollar views of San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge, Oakland, and the entire East Bay up to Richmond. You couldn’t touch a place on this island for less than several million dollars.

  “So, you never told me where we’re going,” I said.

  “We need to make a house call,” Michael said enigmatically. He stopped once to consult his Thomas Guide, then drove along a narrow, twisty lane lined with lovely estates. He checked an address on the piece of paper in his hand as we passed an Italianate brick-and-cream palace on our left. Driving well past it, he made a U-turn, and we slowly rolled by it again. Then he kept driving.

  “I thought we were making a house call,” I said.

  “We are. First we need to prepare, though.” Michael pulled the Jeep over to the side of the road and brought out his cell phone. There was no question in my mind that he remembered to charge his batteries. He punched in a number and waited while it connected. When he spoke, it was with a lilting Irish accent.

  “Angela? ’Tis Patrick. How are you, darlin’?” He listened for a minute, laughing softly. “Me too. It was brilliant. Listen, I need a full personal on a Camilla Culpepper, 12 Oakmoor, Belvedere.” He spelled the first and last names, as well as those of the street and town. “Uh-huh. An hour, you say? Brilliant. Ta, luv.”

  I was stunned at his lack of self-consciousness.

  “Patrick?” I asked scathingly. “Ta, luv? Tell me something, Mr. Johnson, do you ever get your names or personas mixed up?”

  “Rule Number One, Annie: never forget who you are.”

  “Or who you’re not?”

  “Precisely.”

  “You’re very scary, you know that?”

  “Hungry?” Michael asked.

  “Sure.” I was easily distracted by food, something Michael seemed to have noticed. “You’re buying, though.”

  “But of course, Annie, me darlin’,” he said suavely as he steered the Jeep confidently around the island’s hairpin turns. “I know just the place.”

  Ten minutes later we pulled up in front of a restaurant called Guaymas, on the water in Tiburon. A couple of years ago I’d had the worst date of my life here, a setup with a nuclear physicist named Bradley whose best friend was married to my sister Bonnie’s best friend. Bradley spent the entire evening detailing the wacky hijinks he and the other nuclear fizz majors had perpetrated at Cal Tech and explaining why time travel was a practical impossibility. Not that I’d asked. Soon enough, though, I was willing to volunteer as a time-travel guinea pig, if it meant being far, far away from Bradley.

  Despite the company, Guaymas was possibly the best Mexican restaurant I had ever been to, serving such specialties as duck in pumpkinseed mole, and enchiladas made of huitlacoche, a mushroomlike fungus that grew on ears of corn. I was willing to bet that my lunch with Michael the Thief would be an improvement over my dinner with Bradley the Boring.

  When we were seated in a private corner of the dining room, I stopped salivating long enough to order the duck, and had just started stuffing my mouth with tortilla chips and salsa when I heard Michael order two margaritas on the rocks, with salt. That seemed unwise. The last time I had spent an evening with good old Patrick, I had drunk so much I’d lost my truck.

  “Iced tea for me, thanks,” I said.

  “Oh, bring her a margarita anyway,” Michael said gaily. The waitress beamed at him and scurried off.

  “It’s bad form for a grown man to manipulate young women.”

  “I’m not manipulating anyone. And you’re not that young.”

  “You know what I mean.” I leaned back and studied him. Michael was the kind of man who had a woman at every computer terminal. So why would someone so intelligent and attractive do what he did for a living?

  “Doesn’t your line of work ever bother you?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “How could it not?” I persisted.

  The waitress simpered over with the margaritas in glasses big enough to dunk your face in. She smiled at Michael, caught my scowl, and left.

  Michael lifted his glass in a toast. “To us.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  He looked wounded, the big fake. “All right, then, to success.”

  We clinked glasses and drank. The mixture of tart lime, rock salt, and cold tequila made me feel like relaxing on the beach for a week. Or ten.

  “It’s like this,” he told me. “I take only from the very wealthy, and I rarely go after museums. It’s not as though I damage the art. I simply make it possible for it to be embraced by a new audience.”

  I interrupted this self-serving claptrap with a noise commonly referred to as a raspberry. Juvenile, but apropos.

  Michael ignored me.

  “And in the case of this job,” he continued, “the idea was to replace The Magi with a forgery everyone would believe to be genuine. The Brock Museum would have an ‘original,’ and the buyer would have the original. Everybody would be happy. I’m just spreading the wealth around.”

  I raspberried again. Michael looked somewhat distressed, so probably I had misgauged the saliva content.

  “You sound like my grandfather,” I said, “and everyone knows he’s full of—”

  “Georges LeFleur is a brilliant man.”

  “Oh, that’s right, you know him. Well, pull up a four-leaf clover, Paddy my boy, and I’ll tell you what my grandfather is: he’s a crook, you hear me? That’s what he is.”

  The thread of a first-rate dressing-down was lost in favor of the succulent food laid before us. My duck was to die for. Michael’s lunch was shrimp in a cilantro and tomatillo sauce, with a side of mushrooms in chipotle, and we shared bites. The flavors were sublime. Even the intrigue of art theft and murder could sometimes take a backseat to really good food and drink.

  By the time we left an hour later I was sober, sated, and mellow. I waited in the car while Michael called Angela again. He stood by the Jeep, using the hood as a desk as he jotted down notes. His side of the conversation consisted mostly of “uh-huh’s” and chortles that made me roll my eyes. I did catch something about some unfortunate soul named “Pookie” and an appointment. Another “Ta, luv,” and the X-man got into the driver’s seat.

  I’d strapped myself in and was ready to go when I realized that Michael was not starting the car. Instead, he was staring at his notes. After several long moments he took out his cell phone and turned to me.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” he said. “I want you to get on the phone and say that you are Emily Caulfield, Camilla Culpepper’s assistant, and that Mrs. Cul
pepper has to cancel her appointment for today. If the massage therapist is already on her way, she is to be recalled immediately. That is very important. Mrs. Culpepper is not to be disturbed under any circumstances. Got that?”

  I nodded. As my grandfather always said, “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well enough not to get caught.”

  Michael dialed and handed me the phone.

  The part of me that had always wanted to be a star of stage and screen surged to the forefront, and I repeated Michael’s words in a slightly nasal voice. The woman replied that she would call Pookie on her cell phone immediately, and assured me that Mrs. Culpepper would not be disturbed. I thanked her, hit the OFF button, and turned to Michael, who was looking at me with the approval that my grandfather had shown when I sold my first forgery.

  “You know, Annie, you might have a real career ahead of you,” he said.

  “I already have a real career, thank you very much,” I replied snippily. “One that does not involve running from law enforcement.”

  While we drove toward Belvedere, I used Michael’s phone to check my voice mail. Linda Fairbanks had called to inquire, pleasantly but firmly, where the hell her samples were, Irene Foster wanted me to confirm that I was still “on track” with her harlequin and wood-grain samples for her home in the Richmond District, and the phone company computer told the phone company voice mail that my account was delinquent.

  These reminders that I had a business to run, Mary and myself to support, a scorched and waterlogged studio to clean up, outstanding bills to pay, and a rent hike to talk my way out of produced a tightening in my gut. I had no business having lunch with an art thief and conning my way into a rich woman’s home. The contentment of the meal and the margarita ebbed away as I stared reality in the face.

  I looked over at Michael, who seemed to be lost in thought.

  “Listen, I really need to take care of some things at my studio,” I said. “Any idea how long this will take? Do I wait here, do I drive the getaway car, do I fall down and sprain an ankle to distract the guards?” I was toying with the thought of stealing the Jeep while he was inside the Culpepper place. See how he liked being stranded.

  “Why, you’re the star attraction,” he replied. “I need you to find the painting and tell me if it’s real.”

  “I’m the star attraction? What if Camilla recognizes me?”

  “You know her?” Michael asked.

  “Not really,” I admitted. “I saw her at a board meeting just a few days ago, but she seemed pretty distracted. Plus, she wasn’t wearing her glasses, so I doubt she would recognize me. Still, I’m not what you’d call cool under fire. I tend to scream, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “How could I? Look, Annie, it’s simple. I’ll keep Camilla busy while you nose around. You’d be amazed how many people keep something like this out in the open, on the dining room wall for all to see. I’ll case the joint and find a way to get back in and steal it. But I hate to go to all that bother if it’s not what we’re after.”

  “Michael—”

  “Annie, Camilla Culpepper bought a stolen masterpiece. At least she intended to. Just think about that for a moment. You don’t owe her anything. Not even common courtesy.”

  He had a point. If Camilla Culpepper had the real Magi, I would be helping to return it to its rightful owner. After all, we weren’t breaking any laws. We were just taking a quick look around, right?

  Michael pulled over in the same spot as before, circled to the rear of the Jeep, opened the back, and began digging through a green athletic bag. As I joined him, curious, he took off his leather jacket, pulled on a sweatshirt emblazoned with the Nike swoosh, kicked off his boots, put on running shoes, and hung a clean white towel around his neck.

  “Stand still,” he snapped, whipping an Indian-style scarf out of the same bag and tying it around my head like a turban. When he finished, I looked at myself in the Jeep’s side mirror. The effect wasn’t half bad, if you ignored the faint bruises and scratches on my face. I looked kind of exotic, with wisps of curls sneaking out from under the beautiful fabric. Rummaging in his bag once more, Michael brought out a large, chunky necklace of lapis lazuli and fastened it around my neck. “We’ll go for ethnic, instead of athletic,” he announced. “Suits you better.”

  I was afraid to ask what that meant.

  Ten minutes later we were driving up the circular driveway. As Michael and I got out, he grabbed a few more towels. Gargoyles leered at us from either side of the two-story front door, and I was ready to hightail it out of there. Michael only looked bored.

  The bell was answered by a young woman who I assumed was the real Emily Caulfield, Mrs. Culpepper’s assistant. She was about my age, but slender and buttoned-down, her pretty blue eyes hidden behind severe tortoiseshell glasses. Michael turned on the charm, and within minutes they were pals, commiserating over poor Pookie, whose car had been stolen an hour ago, and discussing the hands-on training I was getting by accompanying Bruno here on his rounds. Bruno complained loudly that Pookie’s massage table had been in the stolen car, and he did hope Mrs. Culpepper had her own.

  Emily led us down a flight of stairs to a ground-floor exercise room, where a professional massage table was set up. She asked if we needed anything, told us Mrs. Culpepper would be with us shortly, and left.

  By the time Camilla Culpepper arrived by elevator a few minutes later, Michael had already scoped out the ground floor. It consisted of utilitarian rooms like laundry and storage and a computer room. Not a Caravaggio in sight.

  “Oh, Mrs. Culpepper,” Michael gushed at the woman with the brittle, pulled-tight look of the undernourished and overexercised. It was a look I saw a lot in my line of work. Clearly Camilla Culpepper had been pampered within an inch of her life. “We’ve had such excitement this morning, have you heard? Poor Pookie had her car stolen!”

  Camilla Culpepper smiled carefully as Michael nattered on and on, not allowing her a chance to get a word in edgewise. By the time he whipped off his sweatshirt and slowly rolled up the sleeves of his white T-shirt to better show off his muscular biceps, she was practically eating out of his hand. Within five minutes Camilla was facedown on the massage table, eyes closed and naked except for a towel across her hips. Michael began rubbing her back with lavender-scented oil.

  “So I said to Sir Elton, I don’t care what anyone says, ‘Candle in the Wind’ is the best song, like, ever—” He looked at me and jerked his head toward the door.

  I hesitated, loath to skulk around the cavernous house, not knowing who or what I might run into. But Michael’s pantomime took on a frantic quality, so I decided to go for it. Plus my sanity was at stake, since Bruno had launched into an analysis of the fashions worn at the recent Grammy Awards—“Did you see what Babs was wearing? She was a goddess. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, a woman doesn’t reach true beauty until her sixties . . .”

  I crept back up the small staircase to the front hallway, at one end of which was the kitchen. I headed the other way. Even the most casual collector wouldn’t hang a masterpiece in the kitchen, especially if, as seemed to be the case with Camilla, she never ate.

  I found myself in the dining room and hoped Michael’s earlier words were prophetic. They weren’t. There were several expensive oil paintings by third-rate artists, but no recently stolen Magi.

  A door on the opposite wall led to a broad corridor with various doors and halls leading off it. For a moment, I despaired of being able to find my way back to the exercise room, much less find an oil painting that measured only two feet by three and a half feet. Footsteps from the vicinity of the kitchen spurred me on.

  Sneaking down the corridor, I peered in the first open doorway, which led to a lovely, sunny sitting room with lots of windows, a couple of watercolors, and no oil paintings.

  The next door was shut, so I listened for a moment before gently pushing it open. It was a shadowy room that looked a lot like a study. I closed the door behin
d me, and groped in the dark for a light switch, finally locating one on the wall to the left. The light revealed that it was, indeed, a study, with built-in bookshelves, a huge walnut desk, and leather club chairs. There were no paintings on the paneled walls, other than the one over the fireplace, which portrayed an English hunting scene. Oh, puh-leeze. The lack of imagination among those who could best afford to be imaginative never failed to both surprise and depress me.

  I turned to leave, then stopped. What would Michael do? Maybe take a gander at the papers in the desk?

  The desk, like the English hunting scene, turned out to have been chosen by the decorator as a stage prop. There was nothing on it but an embossed leather desk set that appeared never to have been used. I tested the top drawer, which slid open smoothly. The drawers were empty.

  Switching off the light, I slipped back into the hallway. Other than some muffled clangs and bangs emanating from the direction of the kitchen, the house was eerily quiet. I wondered what it would be like to call such a beautiful mausoleum home and decided that, all things considered, I preferred my humble apartment.

  Proceeding down the corridor, I checked out an overdecorated living room, a self-consciously “country casual” family room, a second sitting room—people sat a lot in this house—a guest bedroom with a pastoral motif so over the top that it looked as if a florist’s shop had detonated in there, and a rather nice orangerie.

  But no Magi.

  I decided to head upstairs. I wasn’t sure if my search qualified as thorough, but I was getting antsy and, wanting to get the hell out of there, I scurried down the corridor toward the entry hall, which I remembered opened onto a sweeping staircase. I poked my turbaned head out and glanced around to see if I was alone, then scampered up the plushly carpeted stairs.

  I relaxed a bit in the upstairs corridor when I realized the thick carpeting must muffle the sound of my footsteps, until I realized that it would do the same for anyone else. I strained my ears listening for housemaids, footmen, butlers, governesses, chauffeurs, or even family members. Nothing. Taking a deep breath, I decided to start my upstairs search with whatever was behind the large set of double doors at the end of the hallway. I didn’t care what Michael said—if I had a stolen masterpiece, I would hang it in my bedroom. I pressed my ear to the door, heard nothing, and eased it open.