Shooting Gallery

by Lind, Hailey

  “Thank you for arranging the meeting,” I said as we skirted the lush forest of Golden Gate Park.

  “What’s our next step?” Bryan asked. “File charges, or what?”

  “No, Bryan, we don’t file charges,” I said. The condescension in my voice reminded me of the tone Annette had used with me earlier that day, and I continued more gently. “The police didn’t take her suspicions seriously at the time. I can’t imagine why they would now.”

  “So you’re saying we just let him get away with it?” Bryan’s handsome face was a study in moral outrage. “And isn’t Beverly LeFleur your mother?”

  I jockeyed with a shiny silver Mercedes for position on Oak Street, called the pinstriped driver a few choice names, and turned back to the still misty-eyed Bryan.

  “The problem is we don’t know what really happened. We’re talking about a death that took place more than thirty years ago.” I shook my head and said, as much to myself as to him, “No, it’s just none of our business. What we should be focusing on is your situation with the Brock. Has anything new happened?”

  Bryan was peeved.

  “Bryan?”

  “No,” he replied grudgingly. “The cops told me not to leave town, but I haven’t heard anything else.”

  “Get a load of this, my friend,” I said. “Inspector Crawford told me the police had received a tip that the painting was being kept in some former Nazi’s house in Switzerland.”

  “Get out!” Bryan’s dark brown eyes widened.

  “First the Middle East, now the Nazis. Something weird is going on, don’t you think?”

  “You ain’t kiddin’, sugar pie.”

  “Bryan, tell me something. How did you hear about the Stendhal Syndrome?”

  “Our guide—Michael Collins?—told us about it. He spent his childhood in Florence—he calls it Firenze—and knows how truly sensitive people respond to great art.”

  I’ll just bet he does, I thought. But I still couldn’t figure out why Michael would have bothered orchestrating the Stendhal faint-in. As he said himself, that particular Chagall was hardly worth stealing.

  “Annie!”

  “What?” I swerved.

  “Pull in here! I need some really big pots for my espaliered pear trees.”

  “Don’t ever yell at me like that unless I’m about to hit something, okay?” I snapped as we careened into the pitted parking lot of the Mischievous Monkey Garden Supply.

  It was the store that had issued the receipt I saw on Pascal’s desk.

  It was kismet.

  The Mischievous Monkey consisted of an office trailer surrounded by row upon row of brightly glazed ceramic pots from Asia and painted terra-cotta pots from Mexico. Stone Buddhas, plaster saints, and cement birdbaths and fountains abounded, ranging in degree of fussiness from the pure and simple to the baroque. The large yard was posted with Beware of Dog! signs, and I wondered if there really were thieves willing to hoist multi-hundred-pound clay pots over a ten-foot cyclone fence topped with vicious-looking razor wire.

  Bryan hopped out to look around while I lingered in the truck and called Mary. “Any messages?”

  “Some incredibly gorgeous hunk named Michael stopped by,” she said with a breathy laugh. “Now there’s a work of art.”

  “Oh yeah?” I swallowed hard and cleared my throat. “What did he want?”

  “He said you two have a date tomorrow night and you’ll probably try to weasel out of it ’cause you’re so shy. I go, ‘We talkin’ about the same Annie Kincaid?’”

  “That right?”

  “So he’s like, she has this ‘winsome smile.’ Then he goes on about your cute butt.”

  Cute butt? I yanked the rearview mirror toward me and smiled. Was that winsome?

  “Who is he?” Mary demanded. “This guy is too hot for words.”

  “He’s too old for you.”

  “Aside from the fact that he’s got it bad for you, I don’t have a winsome smile or a cute butt.”

  “You have a fabulous smile, as you should know from your legion of fans.” Mary and her band had a devoted following even though she really did not sing very well. I was willing to bet her popularity was based on something besides her voice.

  “So you’re saying my butt’s really huge and ugly.”

  I’d walked right into that one. “Your butt’s adorable, and you know it. That’s why you shake it so much when we go out dancing.”

  Mary laughed. “So? You’re not going to stand him up, are you? I mean, you haven’t had sex for what, months? Maybe years? And oh my God! What are you going to wear?”

  Trust my practical assistant to get to the heart of the matter. No love life and no decent wardrobe. Could the two be connected?

  “No, I’m not going to stand him up.” Unless Pedro comes through for me, I thought. “As a matter of fact, he’s paying me to go out with him.”

  “Are you serious?! You’re working as an escort?”

  “No, Mary, I . . .”

  “I had a girlfriend who did that, and she said it was okay as long as you could say no to the creepy ones. Hey! I know! We could offer a full-service studio! We wouldn’t even have to change the name—”

  I cut her off before she could transform True/Faux Studios into a kinky art brothel, which wasn’t such a terrible idea except for that pesky morals thing. “I am not, repeat, not working as an escort. Michael is a, um, colleague who needs someone to accompany him to a business meeting. That’s all.”

  “Uh-huh. A colleague. Like you went to school with him?”

  “Um, well, no . . .”

  “Worked with him at the Brock?”

  “No . . .”

  “Painted for him?”

  “Um . . .”

  “So would this be one of your grandfather’s kind of colleagues?”

  Despite her unconventional past, or perhaps because of it, Mary was no slouch in the intelligence department.

  “Michael’s a colleague of sorts. Let’s just leave it at that. But you’re right that I don’t have anything to wear. Sam and I are going shopping tomorrow morning. Want to come?”

  “Totally. But I want to hear more about this guy. You should go to bed with him once, you know, just to see. Maybe he’s one of those guys who looks great but doesn’t have much to offer when it really counts. Maybe he’s—”

  “Got to go, Mary,” I interjected before she could stir up any more inappropriate images in my already fevered brain. “My battery’s beeping. See you tomorrow.”

  I set off in search of Bryan. I wanted to get on the Bay Bridge and home at a decent hour, and it was already almost six. Dusk was falling, but the bright outdoor lighting lent the garden statuary and pots a gay, almost festive air. I found myself admiring one pot after another and wondering if I should move to an apartment with a garden.

  Great, something else to do with my spare time that required regular infusions of cash. Dream on, Annie.

  I came to the end of a row of cobalt blue oil jars and stopped dead in my tracks. There, under a tin roof shelter, was a clutch of three-foot-tall plaster sculptures. Pascal’s sculptures. Or, if Francine Maggio was to be believed, Eugene Forrester-inspired sculptures. They were much smaller than the ones I’d seen in Pascal’s studio, but the style was distinctive.

  “What did you find?” Bryan came up behind me. “I think they’re ugly, Annie, to tell you the truth. I don’t even get a tingle, and you know I’m sensitive to those Stendhal feelings.”

  “Help me turn one over,” I said, grabbing a miniature of none other than Head and Torso. It was heavy, but with some grunting we managed to lay it flat on the ground. Kneeling, I examined it closely. I was betting the statue had an empty core because a solid one would have been heavier still, and started scratching at the statue’s base with my car keys to see if I was right.

  Just then a slight Asian man came up to us. He cocked his head to the side, trying to see what I was doing. “Help you?” he asked in accented English. “My nam
e Van. You ask price on something?”

  “Hi,” I said, standing and tucking the keys into my jeans pocket as Bryan wandered off. The man could faint in a museum, but an awkward social situation mortified him. “I’m curious about these sculptures. Where do you get them?”

  “Local artist. Old man. Kind of mean. You like them?”

  “Can you tell me his name?”

  “Aaaah . . .” Van shook his head. “I know what he look like, but no name.”

  “Is there anyone here who would know?”

  Van led the way to the small office trailer where an elderly man, wrinkled and white haired, sat at a desk working on some papers. Van spoke to him in a staccato language I recognized as Vietnamese. I’d learned a few phrases during my frequent visits to Vietnamese restaurants and attempted a formal greeting. “Chào Ông.”

  The men smiled politely, but I could tell they were trying hard not to laugh. Tonal languages were problematic for the tone deaf.

  I reverted to English. “What is the name of the artist who makes those sculptures?”

  The old man spoke to Van, who translated. “He will look in the file.”

  After a moment of paper shuffling, the old man handed me an invoice. I was right. An internationally renowned sculptor was casting plaster knockoffs of his work and selling them for fifty bucks a pop to a garden supply store. According to the invoice, Pascal had delivered fifteen of the sculptures last month.

  “Does he bring this many every month?”

  “He say ten to twenty every month,” Van translated. “He say they sell very well. You want one? Only two hundred dollars.”

  “I’m not really looking for a sculpture. But thank you for your help.”

  “You want some pot?” Van asked.

  “Excuse me?” I wasn’t current on the etiquette of drug dealing, but Van’s approach struck me as rather forward.

  “I see you like blue pot,” he replied. “I give good price.”

  “Oh, right.” Pots, not pot. “Yeah, okay, maybe one or two.”

  Bryan screamed.

  Van and I bounded out of the trailer. In my absence Bryan had decided to explore the miniature Head and Torso. And found something.

  “What is it?” Van asked, grimacing at the blackish mess that spilled from a hole in the base.

  “Call the police,” I said and swallowed hard. “Tell them you found something in a piece of garden sculpture. Tell them it looks like fingers.”

  Chapter 12

  The contemporary artist can too easily become overwhelmed by color choices. The great Hals and Rembrandt used only four colors: Flake White, Yellow Ochre, Red Ochre, and Charcoal Black.

  —Georges LeFleur, “Modern Art or Modern Mess?” Time

  “Bryan, listen to me,” I said, thinking rapidly as Van ran to the trailer. “We have to get you out of here. Go to the diner across the street and call a cab. I’ll deal with the police.”

  “But, Annie—”

  “Bryan, please. After what happened at the Brock last week, I don’t think it’s a good idea for the cops to find you here.”

  “Those are fingers, Annie. Somebody’s fingers,” he protested. “I won’t leave you here to face this alone.” Bryan might be a screamer, but he was no coward.

  “Don’t worry. You’re not,” I reassured him. “I’m going to call Inspector Crawford. Now go, please.”

  I did not have long to wait. A black-and-white cruiser screeched into the parking lot a few minutes later. One cop cordoned off the scene while the other began taking the names of witnesses. I was correcting his spelling of “Kincaid” for the third time when I heard a familiar voice.

  “Well, well. Look who’s here,” Inspector Crawford said with just a hint of sarcasm. “Imagine my surprise.”

  “Hi, Inspector.”

  She contemplated the gruesome sight. “Annie, tell me: how is it you happened to be shopping for yard decorations? Did I fail to notice a garden at your third-floor apartment or your second-story studio?”

  “She buy some pot,” Van said, and I sighed. Even in San Francisco pot dealing was a no-no.

  “He means flower pots,” I assured Annette. Van nodded and gestured to the hundreds of vessels surrounding us. “I thought it would really brighten up the fire escape.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Annette replied. The cop who couldn’t spell murmured something to her, and she turned back to me. “Who was the man that Mr. Van here says found the body parts in the sculpture?”

  “Gee, that’s hard to say,” I lied.

  She fixed me with the stink-eye. “African American male, thirties, about six feet tall, dressed in a vest and black boots? Ring a bell?”

  “Doesn’t sound familiar.”

  “You didn’t know him.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Did you at least notice him? Maybe, say, when you ran out here to investigate why he was screaming?”

  It seemed Van had been quite helpful to the police. “Mm, not really. I think I was distracted by the, um . . . Those are fingers, right?”

  “Look like fingers to me,” she muttered and, snapping on a pair of surgical gloves she’d pulled from her jacket pocket, she bent over to examine them up close. After a moment she straightened and spoke into her radio.

  “Annette, what is it?” I asked. “What did you see?”

  She ignored me.

  “Annette?”

  “Annie, did anyone ever tell you that you are a pain in the ass?”

  “All the time, actually.”

  “Add me to the list,” she said. “All right. Those are fingers and, judging by their size and hairiness, I would say they are a man’s fingers. Furthermore, based on a description of the ring on the index finger, I would hazard a guess that these are the fingers of the recently deceased sculptor, Seamus McGraw.”

  Ick, I thought.

  “Quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?” she asked. “First you find a body without fingers, then you find fingers without a body. Care to comment?”

  “I had nothing—”

  “—to do with anything,” she finished for me. “I know. You told me. Now tell me this: What can you tell me about the sculpture they were found in? I’m no expert, but this doesn’t look like McGraw’s work to me.”

  I saw no point in lying since she would find out anyway. “It’s by Robert Pascal.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Would that be the sculptor you called me about earlier? The one with the missing assistant?”

  “That would.”

  “And how is he connected to Seamus McGraw?”

  What to say, what to say. I didn’t want to implicate my mother, or Bryan, or myself. On the other hand, if the SFPD thought Pascal was capable of something like this maybe they would look for Evangeline.

  “The two men have known each other for years. I was hired on a completely unrelated errand to inquire about a sculpture that Pascal was repairing for a client.”

  “Mm-hmm. Client’s name?”

  “Isn’t that, like, confidential?”

  “The law doesn’t recognize the artist-client privilege, Annie. Spill it.”

  “Janice Hewett. Anthony Brazil has her contact information.”

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” she said, removing the gloves and snapping her notebook shut. “You’re going to wait for me while I attend to a few matters. Then you’re going to buy me a cup of coffee at the diner across the street and tell me everything you know about Robert Pascal and Seamus McGraw. If you do, and if I believe you, then maybe I won’t need to track down the well-dressed, screaming black man you claim you didn’t notice. Do we understand each other?”

  Hours later, awash in lousy coffee, I left the diner secure in the knowledge that Bryan was safe and that Annette was on her way to Pascal’s studio to interrogate the cantankerous and perhaps homicidal old coot. I limped back to Oakland, lumbered up the stairs to my apartment, and nearly cried when my key stuck in the lock. Ignoring the dirty dishes in the sink, the light flashing on
the answering machine, and the mail on the kitchen table, I downed two glasses of cheap Chilean merlot and fell into bed without brushing my teeth.

  Tuesday morning came much too soon. I batted at the alarm, sending my new bedside clock skittering across the crowded nightstand and onto the floor. Maybe this was why my clocks always stopped working within days of their purchase. I craved sleep but had arranged to meet Samantha at ten o’clock to go clothes shopping for what was sure to be a fun-filled evening with an international art thief.

  Unless Pedro Schumacher had come through for me. Maybe Carlos Jimenez had stashed the Chagall in a locker somewhere and posted a map to its location on some obscure chat room. Worth a shot. Without leaving the warmth of my bed, I dialed my tech-savvy friend.

  “Yo, chica. I didn’t find much,” Pedro said. He sounded remarkably cheerful for so early in the morning, which ticked me off. “Your guy owns a ten-year-old Ford Taurus, has gotten two speeding tickets in the last five years, is a registered democrat, belongs to the public library—he’s partial to science fiction, believe it or not—has a decent credit rating, lives within his means, and has a mortgage on a house in West Oakland that’ll be paid off in five years. His financial transactions for the past six months indicate nothing out of the ordinary—paycheck goes in, bill payments come out.”

  “That’s not very interesting, Pedro.”

  “Tell me about it. There is one weird thing, though: his gasoline card shows that he’s been traveling to a town near the Mexican border every month or so for the past several years.”

  “So?”

  “Doesn’t that seem strange?”

  “He’s from that area, Pedro. He’s probably just visiting relatives or something.”

  “Maybe—or maybe he’s running drugs from Mexico!”

  “Oh, very likely. He probably stuffs the trunk of his Taurus with kilos of high-grade cocaine and roars up I-5 because the CHP would never, ever suspect anything so clever,” I said with a touch of sarcasm. “Probably deals it out of the Brock Museum. Hell of a cover, wouldn’t you say?”

  “It could happen.”

  “Pedro, the man’s not a drug runner just because he goes to Mexico. It’s a beautiful country. Lots of people spend their vacations there.”