Brush With Death

by Lind, Hailey

  One other possibility, Rachel suggested, was that full-sized early American portraits often showed women wearing a miniature. If we could match the columbarium’s miniatures with such paintings their value would skyrocket. To determine this would require extensive research, and Rachel would do only so much without being paid. I wasn’t much good at research. Or computers. Not to mention I had a million other things on my To Do list.

  But something about Chapel of the Chimes tugged at my heart. It was unique, a testament to turn-of-the-century Oakland’s wealth and ambition to be taken seriously as a cultural center. Architect Julia Morgan’s mosaic-encrusted Gothic design was stunning, and even the newer section, whose crisp lines and soaring heights harkened more to Frank Lloyd Wright, was soothing and reflective. As final resting places went, the columbarium was a gem.

  “Well, keep me posted,” Cogswell continued. A spark lit up his blue eyes. “Or perhaps I might drop by later. Are you and Mary painting tonight?”

  “It might be more convenient if I swing by your office tomorrow morning,” I replied. Mary would not be able to conceal her impatience with the columbarium’s smitten director, and I feared the diffident Roy would be slow to recover from her sharp tongue.

  Roy nodded and shuffled into a small conference room, where I glimpsed the columbarium’s accountant, Manny Ramirez, chatting with two gray-suited men.

  “I’ll be surprised if we’re open past June,” a dour woman announced in clipped tones as she stared at me over the rims of her rhinestone reading glasses. Roy Cogswell’s intimidating administrative assistant, known to all and sundry as “Miss Ivy,” liked nothing better than to ambush anyone foolish enough to pause on their way past the redwood counter and subject them to lengthy doomsday monologues. The employees referred to this as “Miss Ivy’s office arrest.” I used to think it was funny.

  “Mmm,” I responded, trying not to encourage her.

  “Building’s falling down about our heads as it is,” she continued, smoothing her leopard-print miniskirt over her thin thighs. Miss Ivy was fifteen years my senior, worked in a mortuary, and never cracked a smile, but she dressed like a Las Vegas hooker on her day off. It was disconcerting, to say the least. “I’m sure you’ve seen the state of the glass ceiling tiles. Been that way since the eighty-nine earthquake. Can’t afford to fix ’em. Mark my words, it’s only a matter of time until they close this place down. If you could see what I’ve seen—”

  “Is the situation really that dire?” I interrupted. “I would think there’s no shortage of demand.”

  “Oh, sure, people die every day,” she said, as if announcing late-breaking news. “But what with those so-called environmentalists kicking up a fuss about the smoke from the crematorium, and advocating those ‘green burials’ that don’t even use caskets, no better than the heathen Hottentots, well, I ask you, how are we supposed to turn a profit? Now, it seems to me—”

  “Miss Ivy, do you know anything about the columbarium’s artwork?”

  “Do I look like a tour guide?”

  “No, but I thought you might—”

  “I’ll tell you one thing, the management would do well to focus less on aesthetics and more on the day-to-day operations of—”

  “Such a shame. Such a shame,” I babbled, backing out the door. “I think I’m coming down with something. Must be that plague that’s going around. Gotta go!”

  I beat a retreat and ran to my truck, looking askance at the sky. An unseasonable drizzle had started to fall. It wasn’t supposed to rain after early April in this part of California. That was part of the deal: we paid exorbitant rents and lived with overcrowded freeways in exchange for sunny, beautiful weather almost year-round.

  Motoring down Piedmont Avenue, I doubled back through a complicated maze to reach the hidden on-ramp to 580. Oakland had numerous freeway exits but only a handful of poorly marked entrances. Normally during off-hours I could whiz from Oakland to San Francisco in under fifteen minutes, but not today. Screeching to a halt half a mile from the toll plaza, I switched on Alice’s morning show for a traffic update.

  “Here’s a good one. An ostrich is loose in the westbound lanes of the Bay Bridge, and traffic is at a complete standstill. I’m talkin’ zee-ro miles per hour. But fear not, our heroes from Cal Trans are working with officers from Animal Control to capture the critter. So roll up your window, don’t try to pet Big Bird, and remember it could be worse. You could be livin’ in LA.”

  I tried to catch a glimpse of what promised to be an entertaining sight, but saw only a sea of red taillights. At least a free-ranging ostrich was more benign than the time last fall when a flatbed truck transporting brimming Port-o-Potties tipped over, closing the Bay Bridge until spacesuit-clad Haz Mat workers cleaned things up. For weeks afterward, I’d sworn the bridge smelled funky.

  Armed with a commuter mug of Peet’s French Roast coffee and three crumpled dollar bills for the toll, I watched the rain and used the delay to think. Had Michael absconded with the columbarium’s nineteenth-century copy and hung the mass-produced version in its place? A good hundred-plus-year-old copy might be worth several thousand dollars, a great one tens of thousands. But it seemed out of character for him. Art theft was a business for Michael, which was why from time to time he teamed up with my grandfather for high-risk but highly lucrative forgery-and-switch schemes. Michael was unlikely to consider a Crispin Engels worth stealing. On the other hand, the columbarium’s pitiful security system meant the downside of theft—arrest—was negligible. Still, Michael had a genuine love of art; it was hard to imagine him unleashing $179.99 digital prints upon the world.

  I checked my cell phone for the umpteenth time, closed my eyes, and sent Cindy Tanaka telepathic messages to call me. What did she know about La Fornarina—or rather, what did she think she knew? It was one thing for an untrained eye to be fooled by a nineteenth-century copy, which would look genuinely old; quite another to assume an obvious digital reproduction might be real. Still, it was hard to imagine her making up the tale out of whole cloth. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to know who had sent her—and by extension, me—on such a wild-goose chase, and why.

  I also wondered how the cemetery personnel had responded when Cindy told them about last night’s break-in at Louis Spencer’s crypt. Who would rob a crypt—while dressed as a ghoul, no less? What was in that metal box? I had hoped to ask Roy Cogswell about the break-in, but he might not have heard anything, anyway. The cemetery and the columbarium were owned by the same corporation, but had separate management.

  My mind’s eye conjured the image of petite Cindy Tanaka leaping onto the back of the man in the Halloween mask. On this drizzly spring morning the ghoulish encounter seemed even odder than it had last night. Perhaps Cindy was not all she seemed.

  Ostrich rescued—safe but sporting a bad case of road rash—and on its way to a new life on a ranch in Pacifica, traffic began to move. I inched toward the tollbooth and handed over my three dollars. Once past the metering lights, traffic picked up speed and I zipped across the bay, exited at Ninth, and drove along surface streets toward the district known as Cow Hollow. A long time ago farm animals grazed these hills, but these days Cow Hollow’s location near Russian Hill, the Presidio, and the Marina made it one of San Francisco’s pricier neighborhoods. In a city where even ramshackle dwellings commanded upwards of a million dollars, that was no small thing.

  I nosed my pickup into the driveway of a scaffold-encrusted Edwardian mansion. Alongside the three-quarter-ton Chevy and Ford trucks near and dear to the hearts of contractors everywhere, my dusty Toyota looked like a four-cylinder newborn. But its collection of dents, and the magnetic TRUE/FAUX STUDIOS signs stuck to its doors, gave me a little street cred.

  Job sites are dusty, noisy, chaotic, masculine places. Those of the female persuasion who venture into this domain either leave in a great big hurry or cultivate a tolerance for country music played at earsplitting levels, the endless fascination with foul-sm
elling bodily functions, and monosyllabic jokes whose punch lines invariably referenced “hooters,” “jugs,” and/or “tits.” My boyfriend, Josh, was the general contractor on this job, and the rough-and-tumble crew overlooked his easygoing and nonsexist vegan ways because he was a talented carpenter who knew the construction business upside down and inside out. It didn’t hurt that Josh also had a sixth-degree black belt in karate.

  I’m no interior designer—those licensed professionals must be able to gush over each season’s new fabrics, to swoon over furniture choices, and to enjoy shopping with a fervor that bordered on lunacy. But with my eye for color and form I found myself helping a growing number of my faux finishing clients who shied away from a “designed” look for their homes but needed assistance wading through the endless variety of styles for everything from bidets to duvets, faucets to window treatments. Best of all, artistic consulting paid better, and required less actual work, than faux-finishing.

  The owner of this house, Aaron Garner, was lacking in both taste and a wife, and so had hired me as the job’s artistic consultant. A hearty sort whose likeness one expected to see on a bottle of expensive gin, Aaron Garner styled his gingery hair in an elaborate swooping comb-over in the fond but misguided belief that it hid his creeping male pattern baldness. I had first met the wealthy philanthropist last winter when I was volunteering with the “Save Oakland’s Fox Theater” campaign. Garner had offered to match any pledge to our cause, and when the community responded with enthusiasm, he’d paid every cent with good humor. Garner discovered I shared his love of art and history, and commissioned me to paint a portrait of his son. I had recommended Josh when Garner was looking for a contractor to preside over the high-end remodel of his Cow Hollow mansion.

  Last week Garner had put me in charge of the renovation for a couple of weeks while Josh accompanied him to Aspen, where Garner was breaking ground on a new vacation home. Some of the macho construction crew chafed at taking orders from me, but in general they came to accept my supervision when they realized I was an artist, not a competitor.

  Plus, every so often I brought them fresh coffee and baked goods. I knew which side my doughnut was glazed on.

  As for me, putting up with fart and booger jokes was a small price to pay for a generous and steady paycheck. Stuffing my clipboard and papers in a vinyl tote to keep them from getting wet, I climbed out of the truck. As I made my way up the walk to the front of the house, I spied a man the size of a small grizzly bear at the top of the entry stairs, framed by dust billowing from the open front door behind him.

  “How’s it going, Norm?”

  Norm had dirty blond hair, a complexion that reddened easily, pale gray eyes, and nicotine-stained teeth. He was dressed in a worn pair of dirty jeans and a faded navy T-shirt emblazoned WHO’S YOUR DADDY?

  “You’re late,” Norm growled over the high-pitched whine of an electric saw. “I’m s’posta fax those fireplace details to Italy by eleven. And the Spanish guys out back are goin’ nuts about somethin’, but I can’t understand a goddamned word they’re sayin’.”

  “They’re not Spanish, they’re Mexican. I’ll see if I can figure it out.”

  Last January Norm had handed me a gift certificate for a three-month, intensive Spanish language course at the University of San Francisco. He claimed to have been moved by the holiday spirit, but a few discreet inquiries—I took his lead carpenter out for beer and nachos on Chestnut Street and grilled him mercilessly—yielded the information that Norm had intended to take the class himself but chickened out. He had given me the certificate so he could write its cost off his taxes as a business expense. Since I had just been through an adventure where speaking Spanish might have saved me considerable grief, I was willing to be a pawn in Norm’s IRS dodge.

  Norm grunted and ducked back into the disemboweled house. I nodded at the electrician and exchanged a few words with the men pouring the concrete slab in the garage before picking my way down the house’s narrow side alley to the backyard.

  “Buenos días,” I said to the men in the garden. “Que pasa?”

  Two dark-eyed workmen, one in a Raiders cap, the other sporting a 49ers windbreaker, leaned on their shovels and launched into rapid-fire Spanish. I must have looked as befuddled as I felt because the crew’s leader, Ricardo, slowed down and began supplementing his words with gestures. He led me over to a pile of marble stepping stones the crew had found in the weeds and, holding one up, used a blue bandana to brush off mud and grass. I crouched down and peered closely. A string of carved letters was barely legible, and the top portion of the stone had broken off. Ricardo held up another piece, this one with deeper engraving: . . . MEMORY . . . ETH ANNE . . . VING MOTHER. These marble “stepping stones” looked a lot like old gravestones. I understood only a portion of what Ricardo was saying, but the meaning of mortuaria wasn’t hard to guess.

  A shiver went up my spine. Why would anyone use gravestones as garden decorations? Had Aaron Garner’s home been built atop an old graveyard?

  And what was it with me and cemeteries lately?

  Chapter 4

  The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

  —Salvador Dali (1904-1989), Spanish painter

  To be a fool for love is the essence of being human.

  To be a lousy poet is unforgivable.

  —Georges LeFleur

  “Goddammit,” a gruff voice swore behind me. “Annie, I gotta get these fireplace doohickies finalized. Damned rain’s screwing up the schedule as it is. Can we get a move on?”

  “Hey, Norm, have you seen these?”

  He leaned in to examine the broken stone Ricardo was holding. “I’ll be damned,” Norm said, his pale eyes lighting up. “I’ve heard about this. My dad told me that when they moved the graveyards years ago they used the unclaimed headstones to build other stuff. The city parks are full of ’em, I guess.”

  I frowned. That seemed to be taking California’s “reduce, reuse, recycle” motto a bit too far. “Which cemeteries were moved?”

  “Whole bunch of ’em,” Norm replied, turning over anotherstone and brushing off the grime to read the engraving. Norm was a proud sixth-generation San Franciscan and, according to Josh, waited impatiently for the Big One to strike and send the yuppie interlopers scurrying back East.

  “I grew up off Turk, in a neighborhood built on an old Catholic graveyard,” Norm mused. “But they had places for everybody—Jews, Chinese, even them Mason guys. Didja know the pet cemetery near the Presidio used to be an Indian graveyard?”

  “Someone turned a Native American burial ground into a pet cemetery?” I glanced at Ricardo, who looked as appalled as I.

  Norm shrugged. “Hell, they’re dead. What do they care? Okay, back to work, men. A trabajo, amigos. Capisce?”

  “That’s Italian, Norm.”

  “What?”

  “Capisce is Italian. You mean comprende.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “Norm? Since the gravestones weren’t moved, dare I ask what happened to the bodies?”

  “Paved over ’em would be my guess. Don’t make sense to move the bodies but not the headstones.”

  Ricardo and the man in the Raiders cap made the sign of the cross. I would have, too, but I always forgot which shoulder to touch first.

  Norm’s story sounded like the opening scene of a lousy horror movie, and I hoped it was another of his tall tales of old San Francisco. Only last week the cantankerous carpenter had tried to convince me the abandoned federal prison on Alcatraz Island was haunted.

  In my broken Spanish I asked Ricardo to clean the stones and set them aside. Maybe a local history group would be willing to take them. I would have to make a few calls.

  Yet another item for the To Do list.

  I spent the rest of the morning going over trim details with Norm, confirming the lighting plan with the electrician, and detailing the bathroom tile patt
erns with the stone-masons. At one o’clock the project’s architect, Ethan Mayall, arrived. Ethan was a prim, tucked-in young man who wore his hair short, his shirtsleeves long, and his John Lennon glasses perched upon his long, straight nose. He was the kind of guy whom everyone assumed was gay, but wasn’t. The type who would marry a raving witch who dressed him in suspenders and cut up his meat for him.

  For the next forty-five minutes I stood hunched over a roll of blueprints spread out on the temporary plywood kitchen counter, mediating between Ethan, who had vision but scant knowledge of the hands-on aspects of construction, and Norm, a skilled carpenter with the aesthetic sensibility of a sewer rat. I did my best, but if Josh didn’t return from Aspen soon I feared we were in for bloodshed, à la West Side Story. I imagined a rumble on the quiet streets of Cow Hollow between Ethan and his gang of tweedy architects, brandishing hand calculators and straight-edges, and Norm and the rugged carpenters, armed with levels and awls.

  I just hoped that didn’t make me Maria.

  It was nearly two o’clock by the time I headed across San Francisco to my art studio in the once-affordable neighborhood known as China Basin. I breathed a sigh of pure satisfaction as I pulled up in front of the DeBenton Building, a converted chair factory with old redbrick walls, huge multi-paned windows, and wide-plank wood floors. In the past few years the building’s tenants had formed a close-knit, creative community. On the ground floor was an artisan bakery; the corporate offices of DeBenton Secure Transport; three potters who shared a kiln; and a birdhouse maker who never seemed to sell anything. In the upstairs studios were my good friend Samantha Jagger, a brilliant jewelry maker; a weaver who made itchy, tentlike dresses out of hemp; a freelance photographer; a novelist who liked to talk about writing more than he liked to write; and a clutch of architects and computer graphics people. As far as I was concerned the architects and computer folks didn’t count as artists, but since they paid more in rent than all the rest of us combined I kept my mouth shut.