Shooting Gallery

by Lind, Hailey

  “So if he’s such a jerk, why are you seeing him?” Trust Sam to get to the point.

  “Well, I—”

  “Because he’s paying her, that’s why,” Mary’s voice chirped. “Annie’s his escort. We’re gonna open up an escort service. Isn’t that awesome?”

  “We just lost Teri,” Sam said with a muffled chuckle.

  “I’m gonna go meet with LaTanya so she can take my measurements,” Mary said.

  “Girl, how in the world did you convince Neiman Marcus to give you a personal shopper?” Sam asked.

  “I told them I was Francis Ford Coppola’s niece. You know, Nicolas Cage’s younger sister? They live around here. It’s plausible.”

  I opened the door.

  “Now, that is a fabulous dress,” Mary said. Mary seldom offered compliments—she claimed it was a Norwegian thing, but I think it was more a Midwestern thing—which made it all the more meaningful when she did.

  “Oh, honey,” Sam added. “You look incredible.”

  I evaluated myself in a three-way mirror, twisting and turning to get the full effect. I did look good, though my back was mostly bare and my modest cleavage was on display. “You’re sure I don’t look like a stuffed sausage?”

  “You look good enough to eat,” Mary agreed. “What? Edible’s good, right?”

  “If you want to keep this guy’s hands off you tonight, this might be the wrong dress.” Sam commented. “Try this on.”

  She handed me a short, stretchy black jacket covered in tiny black jet beads. It appeared to be made from some NASA miracle fabric, probably one of those things that helped the Apollo 13 astronauts get home. The jacket hugged my shoulders and breasts, and fell away becomingly, hinting at my now-famous butt.

  “I believe our work here is done,” Sam announced.

  I nodded. “Now for the moment of truth.”

  I looked at the price tags and winced. The dress and jacket together cost half a month’s rent. Oh well, I thought as I waited for the shock wave to subside. It was Michael’s money, after all. No doubt he was accustomed to spending exorbitant amounts on women’s clothing.

  The loudspeaker, which had been emitting only intermittent bings and boops, suddenly squawked. “Security, report to Personal Shopping. Security to Personal Shopping. Code four.”

  Sam and I exchanged a look. “Best get a move on, love.”

  We hailed Teri, who rang up my purchases as Mary stomped past accompanied by two highly pumped security guards. An unpleasant aroma followed in her wake.

  “What will they do with her?” I asked Teri. Before I spent a fortune on evening clothes I wanted to be sure I wouldn’t need the money for Mary’s bail.

  “They’ll just escort her outside. Kids these days,” she said, shaking her head. Teri must have been all of twenty-five years old herself.

  I swallowed hard at the total—I’d forgotten to include the astronomical local sales tax in my mental calculations—and handed over a fistful of hundred-dollar bills. Teri looked surprised and a bit disapproving, and I imagined the cash transaction added to my reputation as a call girl.

  As Teri hung the dress and jacket on hangars and swaddled them in plastic it occurred to me that unless I really was going into the escort business I wouldn’t have much use for the outfit after tonight. I wondered if it would be ethical to return the clothes in the morning. If I were careful not to spill anything on them, no one would be the wiser.

  After all, what could possibly happen at a Hillsborough cocktail party?

  Chapter 13

  For the working forger, the only good art is saleable art.

  —Unnamed “deep background” source, “Fabulous

  Fakes: An Epidemic of Forgery Rocks the Art World,” New York Times

  “Was that totally random, or what?” Mary grinned as we joined her on the sidewalk. She glared at the gawking tourists, one of whom snapped her photograph to share with the folks back home. “You guys so totally freaked when I walked past with those Wide World of Wrestling rejects. I nearly lost it.”

  “So did we.” Sam grimaced.

  We trooped back to the truck and jammed ourselves in. Mary’s signature fragrance filled the small cab despite the open windows, and by the time we reached the DeBenton Building even Mary was looking a bit green. Gravel spurted as I roared into a spot, yanked up the parking brake, and threw open the door. The three of us tumbled out.

  “Whooo-eeee!” Mary yelled at the top of her lungs and stomped around the parking lot, shaking her head and flapping her arms. Sam and I stood hunched over like a couple of winos, hands on our knees, gasping for breath. Frank emerged from his office, sipping a bottle of sparkling water and eyeing us with a curious expression on his face. I straightened up and wondered if it was possible for me to look more foolish around the man.

  “There was a little accident at the perfume counter,” I explained. Mary snorted.

  “How are you, Frank?” Sam asked, showing a great deal more poise. Frank smiled at her while Mary and I slunk up the stairs. I disarmed the alarm, hung my purchases in the oak armoire, and hit Play on the answering machine.

  “Stop asking questions,” a sinister voice hissed. “Or suffer the consequences.”

  “What the hell was that?” Mary demanded.

  “Just some creep making crank phone calls,” I said, erasing the nasty message. “It happens all the time.”

  “No, it doesn’t. What’s going on, Annie? Are you involved in something again?” For someone who had spent a summer picking up trash from the side of the highway as punishment for “borrowing” a car without the owner’s permission, Mary was remarkably disapproving of my forays into the seamier side of life.

  “It’s nothing, Mary.”

  Sam stuck her head in the door. “Annie, love, when will you be going home? I have an idea for some earrings that will be perfect with your new outfit.”

  “Probably around four, four thirty.”

  “Are you going to tell her?” Mary demanded, her arms crossed.

  “Tell me what?” Sam asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Mary’s blowing something way out of proportion.”

  “‘Nothing’ my ass,” Mary said. “Annie got a threatening phone call.”

  “What?” Sam turned to me, a cut-the-crap-this-instant look on her face.

  “It’s no big deal,” I dissembled. Loving, caring, insightful friends could be such a pain sometimes. “Threatening phone calls are rarely followed with threatening behavior.” I had heard that on a talk show once.

  “ ‘Calls’?” Sam said. “How many threats have you gotten?”

  “Listen you two, I appreciate your concern. I do. But I’ve got everything under control.”

  My friends glared at me.

  “Really.”

  “Annie, you’re a grown woman, you’ve made your decision, and I have to respect that,” Sam said. “But if anything happens to you, I want you to know that I will hunt you down and I will kill you.”

  “And I’ll desecrate your body,” Mary added, glowering at me.

  Sam went to her studio, and Mary and I settled in to work. A well-funded local charity was sponsoring an interdenominational holiday festival at a children’s center and had hired me to create the displays. We’d finished crafting the menorahs and were concentrating today on gilding the winged plaster cherubs I had carved and poured last week. I did make an occasional foray into the three-dimensional world of sculpture. I forayed into just about anything that meant getting paid for making art.

  Classical water gilding technique calls for covering an object with a thin layer of earth-red clay called bole and floating tissue-thin sheets of real metal on top. Done properly, it yields a stunning—and expensive—finish. Real gold gilt was too pricey for today’s project, so we cut corners by painting our cherubs with a red oxide acrylic base and applying composition gold and silver leaf with a water-based glue called sizing. When the sizing was dry we lightly sanded select portions to allow t
he red base color to show through, and aged the objects with a coat of burnt umber glaze. The glaze pooled in the pockets and recesses of the carvings, mimicking the grime that would accumulate over time. Next we spattered the cherubs with dark gray paint and sealed the finish with a coat of amber shellac.

  The work went well, and by the time I looked at the clock it was after five. I felt a stab of panic. I had to get home, shower, and dress—with stockings, no less—by seven. Mary offered to clean up, insisted I take her illegal can of Mace “just in case,” and shooed me out the door. I rushed down the hall to Samantha’s studio, where she handed me a pair of gorgeous asymmetrical chandelier earrings of naturally misshapen dove gray pearls and jet-black beads. I thanked her effusively and thundered down the outdoor staircase just as a sleek maroon Jaguar drove out of the parking lot.

  “Careful, Frank,” I called out to my landlord, who was standing in the doorway of his office. “That looks like a newer Jag than yours. You wouldn’t want anyone to show you up.”

  Frank tucked his hands in the pockets of his charcoal gray pinstriped suit. “Thanks for the warning. Oh, about the intruder this morning? Clive in 212 said he saw a man on your fire escape. Brown hair, nice build, good-looking. Ring any bells?”

  “Let’s see . . . Brown hair, nice build, good-looking. Gee, Frank, you weren’t on my fire escape this morning by any chance, were you?”

  “So you’re saying I’ve got a nice build?”

  “It’ll pass muster. Not that I notice that kind of thing. I mean, you are my landlord.”

  “True,” Frank said, his eyes flickering over me. “Samantha tells me you bought a sexy new frock. Have fun tonight. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  “Why, Frank,” I said, jumping into my truck. “You know me. I’m the soul of propriety.”

  The soul of propriety was running late. Traffic on the eastward span of the Bay Bridge had congealed as the result of a minor fender bender, and we all got to share in the joy while a couple of Type-As vying for lane position decided whether to exchange insurance information or law-suits.

  I finally squeezed past the holdup, crossed the bridge, zipped off the freeway at Grand Avenue, tooled up the street to my apartment, parked in the gravel lot out back, took the stairs two at a time, and flew in the door. I checked the clock on the mantle of my nonfunctioning fireplace: Michael was due at seven and it was now a little before six.

  I hustled into the bedroom, hung my new “frock” in the closet, and headed for the shower, tugging off my clothes as I went. By the time I finished washing and drying my hair it was twenty minutes to seven and I still had to get dressed and do my makeup. I hurried down the hall to the kitchen and poured a glass of wine to calm my nerves. Ten minutes later I knocked the glass over reaching for a tissue and speared myself in the eye with the mascara wand, smearing black goop everywhere.

  The front door buzzer rang. I ran into the kitchen in my underwear, mascara-smeared eye squeezed shut, and threw open the window. “Go away!”

  “I’m your date,” came a muffled reply.

  “You’re early!”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “I’m not ready.”

  “I’ll help you dress.”

  “In your dreams,” I hollered into space, hoping my words fell in the direction of the front door. “You wait there like a good boy until I’m ready for you.”

  I slammed the window, darted into the bedroom, and wriggled into my dress. The short black velvet sheath with peekaboo back felt tighter now than it had in the store. The Chinese dumplings I’d eaten for lunch may have been a bad idea. I left it unzipped as I returned to the bathroom and cleaned up the wine-and-mascara mess, wishing I were crawling into bed with a pint of ice cream instead of rendezvousing with a suspicious character like Michael X. Johnson.

  “Almost ready?” a deep voice queried.

  “Michael!” I jumped, narrowly avoiding another mascara mishap, and glared at his handsome reflection in the mirror. I grabbed more tissues. “How did you get in here?”

  “I do this sort of thing for a living, remember?”

  “I could have shot you.” Mascara in place, I reached for the tin of face powder.

  “You don’t have a gun.”

  “You don’t know that I don’t—”

  Warm fingers caressed my bare skin and zipped up my dress. A shiver ran up my spine.

  “That is one fabulous dress,” he growled.

  Our eyes met in the mirror. His lean body was dressed in formal black tie, his wavy brown hair was combed and styled, and his green eyes glowed beneath dark eyebrows.

  “Get out of here, Michael,” I ordered. “There’s wine on the kitchen counter; help yourself. I need a few minutes. No joke.”

  “Your wish is my command.”

  “Since when? And by the way—did you set off the alarm in my studio this morning?”

  His reply drifted down the hall. “I’m shocked, shocked that you would accuse me.”

  “Some thief you are,” I muttered, finishing up my toilette with deep red lipstick, a color that was too dramatic for daytime but perfect for tonight. I hoped.

  Now for the hair.

  “How was I to know your studio had an alarm? It didn’t the last time I went in the window.” Michael leaned against the bathroom doorframe, wineglass in hand.

  “You might have been tipped off by the fluorescent green Premises Protected by Evergreen Alarms stickers on the windows,” I mumbled through a mouthful of bobby pins.

  “Those stickers are everywhere. They don’t mean anything.” He took a sip of wine and grimaced. “Remind me in the future not to let you pick the wine.”

  “You’re just spoiled. Now go away so I can finish. You’re making me nervous.”

  “I don’t know why,” he said silkily. “You look stunning.”

  “Just go, Michael, or whatever your name is. And by the way—what is your name? Your real one, I mean.”

  “Sylvester. Or maybe Wolfgang. I never could keep it straight.”

  He had not moved an inch, so I set my comb on the porcelain sink, shoved him into the hall, slammed the bathroom door, and flipped the flimsy lock. Even I could pick that lock with a paperclip, but I thought the symbolism was important.

  I piled my hair on top of my head, softened the effect with a few loose curls around my face and neck, and secured the mess with bobby pins. Testing it with a shake of my head, I decided it would hold unless Michael had a convertible.

  “Hey!” I cracked the door and called down the hall as I mulled over my small collection of perfumes. Mary’s escapade at the perfume counter had ruined me for anything dramatic. “Do you have a convertible?”

  “Would you like me to have one?”

  “Just answer the question, please.” I spritzed myself with a light floral scent.

  “I’ll get you one if you’d like. Foreign or domestic?”

  “It’s a yes or no question, Michael. I’m not asking you to steal one.”

  I heard him rummaging around in the living room. The thought was annoying, but I didn’t have anything to hide that he didn’t already know about. I struggled into black stockings and slipped on my black high heels. They felt okay for the moment but would become uncomfortable after about an hour and a half. I had timed it once. I donned my sparkly jacket, grabbed my black evening bag, and stuffed it with my ID, a handful of cash, lipstick, comb, and my cell phone. I considered bringing Mary’s can of Mace, but decided against it. At some point in the evening I might try to use it on Michael and get a snootful myself instead.

  Ready at last, I found Michael lounging near a bookshelf and leafing through a photo album. And I thought I was nosy. “Find anything interesting?”

  “You were a cute kid,” he said, snapping the album shut. His eyes roamed up, down, and over my hips and legs, lingered at my exposed cleavage, and finally met my gaze. “And just look at you now.”

  He was close enough that I could smell his heady mixture of soa
p and shampoo with just a hint of maleness.

  “Shall we?” I asked.

  “But of course.”

  As we emerged into the cold night air, I looked for the red Jeep he’d been driving last spring. Instead, Michael escorted me to a late-model champagne Lexus.

  “New car?”

  “Different persona, different car.”

  “Don’t you ever get tired of it all?” I asked as he expertly maneuvered the luxurious vehicle out of the tight lot and onto the street. “I mean, who is Seymour, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Who’s Seymour?”

  “You are. You said so earlier.”

  He merged onto the freeway and headed for the Bay Bridge. “I said Sylvester, not Seymour,” he corrected. “Please, Annie. Allow me some dignity.”

  “I’m serious. Don’t you ever get tired of that kind of life? The lies, the deception . . .”

  “The travel, the excitement, the meeting new people and having new adventures? That kind of life? Most people’s lives are fundamentally dishonest, Annie. The difference is that I only deceive those who deserve it. I love my life, just as it is.”

  I started to reply when Michael pushed a button on the dashboard and the lilting strains of The Marriage of Figaro filled the car’s plush interior. If he had intended to shut me up he had miscalculated. My grandfather was a Mozart fanatic, and I’d learned every word to The Marriage of Figaro . I proceeded to prove it. Loudly.

  I had to give Michael points for endurance. He lasted a good half hour, conceding defeat only when we reached the Hillsborough exit off I-280.

  “Tell me, Annie,” he said. “What’s new in your life these days?”

  “Work.” Suddenly I didn’t feel like chatting.

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Nope.”

  “How’s that Picasso coming along?”

  “Fine.”

  “Plan to finish it up soon?”

  “Did. Don’t have it anymore.”

  Wait a minute.

  “Is that why you tried to break into my studio this morning, you thieving scumbag?”

  “Whoa!” Michael said and turned toward me, his handsome face the picture of outraged honor. “I wanted to see you, that’s all.”