Brush With Death

by Lind, Hailey

  I dropped Sam at her Chinatown apartment, crossed the bridge into Oakland, and trudged up to my apartment, where I made a dinner of a pear and gorgonzola cheese. I ate in bed, wearing the oversized T-shirt that served as my night-gown, and was falling asleep when Evangeline and Mary called to report that Collectors’ Corner had offered nearly ten thousand dollars for the baseball cards.

  The contents of the metal box now totaled thirty-five thousand dollars. Had I missed anything else of value? Perhaps the toy soldiers were worth something to a collector, or the letters and photos to a museum. It wasn’t a bad night’s work, but it wasn’t Blackbeard’s treasure chest.

  The phone rang again and I jumped on it, hoping it was Grandfather. Instead, it was our old pal Donato Sandino, checking on my progress—or lack of progress, I thought to myself—with La Fornarina. The Italian reminded me of what was at stake: my grandfather’s freedom. I spent another restless night.

  The next morning, in deference to a break in the rain and because I wasn’t planning on climbing scaffolding, I dressed in a flowered skirt, a bright blue tank top, and sandals. I would be catching up on paperwork and finishing the pirate drawings at the studio, so I should manage to remain presentable. I hoped the out-of-character attire would lift my mood. Cindy’s death still bothered me, I wondered about Donato Sandino’s plans for Grandfather, and I worried that Helena might have rolled up Raphael’s masterpiece like a cheap poster. I could almost hear the centuries-old varnish crackling.

  Since I had a little extra time this morning, I decided to visit Mrs. Henderson and ask about Helena and about the legend of treasure in Louis Spencer’s crypt. The retirement community looked and smelled as it had the other day. When I approached the front desk, the same blue-haired receptionist was chatting on the phone. She looked up with a smile, but the smile shook when she recognized me. She hung up.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m here to see Mrs. Henderson.”

  “Oh dear,” the woman said. “She’s gone.”

  “Hairdresser’s again?”

  “Oh, goodness, no,” she said, avoiding my eyes. “She’s . . .”

  “What?” I urged, starting to worry.

  “I’m so sorry, dear, she . . .”

  A nurse who had been smoking outside walked up to the counter. “Are you family?”

  “I’m her niece,” I lied.

  “She was taken to Summit Medical Center in a diabetic coma.”

  “A what? She was fine . . .”

  “These things can come on quickly. She came back from an outing on Sunday—”

  “Yes, I know. We went on a picnic.”

  The woman’s lips formed a straight line of disapproval. “You should have watched what she ate. She loves sweets.”

  “She seemed very careful, and when we got back she checked her blood sugar. The machine said everything was fine.”

  “You must have read it wrong,” said the nurse. “I’m sorry.”

  She hustled down the hallway, her ample hips chugging from one side to another.

  “There, there, dear,” clucked the blue-haired woman. “Nurse Ratchett has a rather blunt way of putting things. She means well. It wasn’t your fault.”

  An elderly woman with a strawberry-blond rinse accompanied by a stooped man with a hearing aid joined us. “What wasn’t whose fault?”

  “Mrs. Henderson,” the receptionist replied in a loud voice.

  “Shame,” the man croaked. “She was so happy about writing her autobiography, too.”

  The two women nodded.

  “Was someone helping her?” I asked.

  “Pardon?” The man reached up and fiddled with his hearing aid.

  “Was someone helping her?” the receptionist repeated loudly.

  “Chinese girl. Pretty as a China doll.”

  “She wasn’t Chinese, Ned. Not every Asian is Chinese, for heaven’s sakes,” said the strawberry blonde with a fond but exasperated smile.

  “Korean, then,” Ned said.

  “Did she have an accent?” I asked him.

  “What’s that?”

  “An accent,” I shouted. “Did she have one?”

  “Nope. Mrs. Henderson was as all-American as apple pie.”

  “No,” I said loudly, “the girl. The Asian girl.”

  “Don’t suppose she did, come to think of it.”

  “Could she have been Japanese-American?”

  “A Japanese porcelain doll. I was stationed over there during Korea, you know.”

  “We know, Ned, we know,” the receptionist said, winking at me. I was starting to like Blue Hair.

  “Was her name Cindy?” I asked the group. “Was she a graduate student at Berkeley?”

  “That sounds right,” the strawberry blonde said. “My grandson went to Cal.”

  “Good school,” Ned said. “Go, Bears.”

  “I graduated from Stanford,” the strawberry blonde said. “Go, Indians!”

  “Bears!”

  “Indians!”

  “They’re called the Cardinals now,” Blue Hair interjected.

  And I thought my crowd’s conversational style was linearly challenged.

  “Come to think of it,” the receptionist added before the Cross-bay Big Game rivalry flared up anew, “she hasn’t been around in a few days. Not since Wednesday, at least. She used to come every other day.”

  “What about Mrs. Henderson’s autobiography? Was there a manuscript?” I asked.

  “Nope, she was a widow woman,” Ned replied.

  “Ned, hush,” the strawberry blonde said. “No, dear, I don’t think they’d gotten that far. The girl used a tape recorder, tiniest little thing you’ve ever seen. Amazing what they can do with technology these days.”

  “So how come they can’t fix this d-a-m-n hearing aid of mine?” Ned barked.

  Blue Hair rolled her eyes.

  I thanked the folks for their help and rushed out to my truck. At Summit Medical Center, I found Mrs. Henderson still unconscious, her sister and a handful of nieces and nephews surrounding her bedside. She was in serious condition, they reported, but the doctors were optimistic.

  “I don’t understand it,” I said. “We checked her blood sugar the minute we returned from the picnic. The nurse even checked it. The machine said she was fine.”

  “Did you notice anything odd about her behavior?” asked Mrs. Henderson’s nephew, Abe, a physician’s assistant.

  “She seemed a little, well—inebriated. But I know for a fact that she wasn’t drinking.”

  “That’s a common insulin reaction,” Abe said. “We see it in the ER all the time. It’s easy to confuse an insulin reaction with intoxication.”

  “But the test strips were normal. The nurse said so.”

  “It can come on suddenly,” Abe said, and his wife placed a comforting hand on my shoulder. I was glad to know that Mrs. Henderson had such a loving family. “Diabetes is unpredictable, and at her age it’s a delicate balance. You can’t blame yourself.”

  I went out to my truck and sat for a long time, thinking. The “Japanese doll” was dead and the columbarium’s long-term secretary was in the hospital. Suicide and diabetic comas, my ass.

  There was a killer on the loose.

  I headed north, to UC Berkeley. This time there was no Pink Man to lead me to the Chemistry Department, but a clutch of anxious-looking students pointed me in the right direction. A bored-looking work-study student sent me to the TA office when I asked for Brianna Nguyen.

  I wouldn’t have pegged this young woman as a graduate student, much less a chemist. She looked about twelve years old, and was dressed in tight jeans and a bright pink blouse. Her arms were covered with sheaths of material, but her shoulders were bare. Either the sleeves had been ripped off her blouse or something had chewed off the fingers of her gloves, I couldn’t decide which. She sat hunched over a large three-ring binder, two composition books, and a stack of loose papers, a Star Wars pencil bag jammed with fluorescent high-lighters besid
e her on the Formica-covered table.

  Brianna did not seem surprised when I asked about Cindy, and reviewed a stack of cramped, neatly written lecture notes while she spoke.

  “Omigod, I was so shocked. Omigod. I’m, like, so grossed out right now?”

  Highlight in blue, highlight in green.

  “Anyway, omigod,” she said. “I am, like, so glad I didn’t go to med school like my folks wanted? Sweartogod, I would’ve barfed every day. I nearly barfed when I saw Cindy. I had to, like, identify her? It was terrible. Omigod.”

  She exchanged the green highlighter for a bright purple one.

  “I saw Cindy a couple of nights before it happened,” I said. “She seemed fine then. Can you think of anything that was bothering her?”

  She highlighted an entire paragraph in purple. “Maybe the painting deal. And some jerk-off was harassing her. Plus, she was seeing this guy? And he was, sort of like, married? But only sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Separated, I guess. Anyway, they seemed really happy.”

  Her highlighter squeaked and my skin crawled.

  “What was his name? You knew him?”

  “Met him once. He was kind of old, but well preserved.” She giggled. “I mean, not crotchety or anything. White guy. Blond hair, pretty buff.”

  “How old? Forties? Fifties?”

  “Forties maybe. Dunno.”

  “What about his name?”

  She shook her head. “If I knew I woulda told the cops. They searched her room for clues to his identity, ya know, like on all those shows? Cindy and I used to watch CSI. The shows never say what a mess the forensic guys make, though. There’s, like, fingerprint powder everywhere. Cindy’d be pissed if she could see it.”

  “I’ll bet. What did you mean by the ‘painting deal’?”

  “She was doing a project with this old lady? And the old lady thought there was this total masterpiece at the cemetery place where Cindy was working. I guess she tried a coupla times to get experts to look at it, but they didn’t believe it was real. She was afraid someone would take it. I guess it’s worth a lot of money or whatever.”

  “Did she take any notes? What about the tapes?”

  “Tapes?”

  “She was taping interviews.”

  “Oh. That’s weird.” Highlight in pink.

  “What’s weird?”

  “There were some of those minicassettes in some cartons? And the tape was pulled out of the cartridges. Like she was despondent, least that’s what the police said. But it wasn’t like her. She was real neat and tidy.”

  “Could I see her room?”

  “Nothing to see,” Brianna said, highlighting in green. “Cindy’s family came by yesterday and went through everything. They didn’t want any of her, like, books or notes or anything. Just took it all to the Dumpster. It was pretty sad. I mean, my folks would rather I go to med school, but at least they’re interested in what I’m doing.” For the first time since I’d entered the room, Brianna stopped highlighting and met my eyes. “Why are you asking? Who are you again?”

  “I met Cindy the other night, and she asked me about the painting, which made me wonder. You said someone was harassing her?”

  “Yeah.” The chemist turned to her notebooks. “She didn’t say much, just not to tell anybody where she was. I was, like, whatever. I told the police but I couldn’t tell them anything, ya know, concrete.”

  “Do you know if it was a man or a woman?”

  She shrugged. “Mostly she was worried about the painting deal. She brought in some pieces for me to analyze. That’s not my specialty? But I, like, ran a couple of tests for her.”

  My heart sped up. “Pieces of the painting?”

  Brianna nodded.

  “What did the tests show?”

  “That it was pretty old. I found lead in the white paint, and it, like, breaks down with age? So I calibrated the breakdown. It was a few hundred years old.”

  By itself, the test didn’t prove anything. A forger could fool the chemical dating process by mixing new pigments with scrapings from an old lead lantern. But it did rule out the more innocuous explanations. Crispin Engels wouldn’t have bothered with lead scrapings because he never claimed his copy was an original.

  “There was something else. . . .” Brianna scratched her nose with her highlighter, leaving a fluorescent orange streak. “Something about the linen was off.”

  “The linen fibers from the canvas?”

  “Yeah. I think the linen dated like from the Renaissance.”

  Crispin Engels also would not have used a Renaissance-era canvas. But Raphael—or an ambitious forger—would have.

  “Brianna, could I get a copy of the report?”

  “What report?”

  “The report on the tests you ran.”

  “There wasn’t, like, an official report. It was just a printout. I gave it to her professor.”

  “Dr. Gossen?”

  “Uh-huh. He said he’d give it to Cindy ’cause I was on my way out of town.”

  “When was this?”

  “Must’ve been last Tuesday. Wait—Wednesday. I guess.” I thanked her and left her to her frenzied highlighting. Dr. Gossen was not in his office and the administrative assistant had a few choice words for people who lied to hardworking secretaries. I decided not to ask her for Gossen’s home address.

  Heading back to Oakland, I followed Martin Luther King Boulevard under the BART tracks, got caught at a red light, and noticed the sign for Lois’ Pie Shop. I liked the idea of a shop dedicated to pies even though I wasn’t much of a pie fan. I liked chocolate. Leave the fruit out of dessert, was my motto. It occurred to me that Billy Mudd’s office was nearby—I had been there once during the Save the Fox Theater campaign. I drove around until I spotted the small sign for Precision Builders. It was located down a long driveway, behind another single-story office structure, in a utilitarian cinder-block building.

  White Chevy trucks sat in the driveway and men bustled back and forth loading lumber onto the truck racks. I nodded as I passed them and went through the metal doors into the shop, which was fragrant with the aroma of freshly milled wood. The shop was a single huge room jammed with wood-working equipment, stacks of lumber, and unfinished wood trim, cabinets, and furniture. Wood shavings littered the concrete floor, and in one corner a Latino man pushed two-by-fours through a table saw.

  A place like this is Josh’s dream, I thought. Too bad Billy Mudd was such a pig. They might have been good friends.

  A corner of the space had been sectioned off into an office, where I found Billy pacing like a caged lion and screaming into the phone. He rolled his eyes when I walked in but ignored me until he’d vented his rage at the unfortunate soul on the other end of the line and slammed down the phone. “What the hell do you want?”

  “Good to see you, too, Billy. I have a few questions.”

  “Why would I answer any of your questions?” The phone rang again and Billy snatched up the receiver. “What!”

  While he bellowed at this new intrusion, I snooped. There were a handful of photos on his desk, which I assumed to be his ex-cheerleader wife and their two adorable towheaded children. The bookshelves held binders of building codes, relics of the historic buildings he had razed—a section of a carved wooden banister, a stone corbel from a fireplace— and numerous cardboard blueprints tubes. I recognized the fleur-de-lis insignia of Ethan Mayall’s architectural firm on one, and pulled it out.

  “Put that down,” Billy said and snatched the cardboard tube from my grasp.

  “I’m working with Ethan on a job in the City.”

  “Bully for you,” he said, tossing the tube into a box on the floor. He returned to his desk and threw himself into his desk chair. Mudd’s eyes were rimmed in red, and he looked haggard beneath his tan.

  “What are you working on with him?”

  “None of your goddamned business.”

  “Just wondering. Seems like a coincidence.
By the way, I thought I saw you at Fisherman’s Wharf the other day. How do you know Professor Gossen?”

  “Annie, you’re a pain in the butt. Always have been. Your mouth’s too goddamned big and your nose is just as long.”

  What could I say? I didn’t like the man, but he was not altogether lacking in judgment.

  “You came here to ask me about the architects I work with?”

  “No. I came to ask if you were planning to build a development on cemetery land.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Wouldn’t you have to buy the land first?”

  He stared at me, and his phone rang again.

  “You’re a busy boy, Billy.”

  “No shit, Sherlock. So you’ll understand when I tell you I don’t have time to chat. I’m not endangering any historical buildings, I’m just going about my business making a living. Maybe you should do the same and leave me alone.”

  “Did you know Cindy Tanaka?”

  “Get the fuck out of here,” he hissed, a sound more threatening than his bellow. He grabbed me by the elbow and dragged me toward the door. The Latino man stopped sawing, but made no move to intervene. “I’m a happily married man. Now stay out of my goddamned business.”

  I blinked in the sunshine. “How ’bout you guys?” I called out to the workmen loading the truck. “Any of you like to contribute to a fund-raiser for women’s equality in the trades?”

  No one spoke. I took that as a no.

  Back on the road, I realized Billy had not denied knowing Cindy Tanaka, only that he had done anything wrong. Since Billy described himself as a “happily married man,” it seemed doubtful he was planning to dump Mrs. Mudd and the mini-Muddites to run off with a graduate student. Billy made my stomach heave but I imagined he seemed masculine and confident compared to the pasty academics Cindy spent most of her time with. Otherwise intelligent young women fell for married sleazoids every day. So perhaps the suicide scenario was plausible.