I spread my hands. “I don’t know anything. Like I said, we just met.”
Part of me wanted to tell them everything, and a bigger part of me wanted to tell them I was on a case but bait them along so they would keep me abreast of whatever they found out. I wasn’t yet convinced that Ashley was the reason the Daltons got killed, but it all looked sufficiently sinister to keep me from dropping her name. All I needed was a couple of cops stumbling around, getting Ashley whacked before I could figure out what was really going on. Clearly, these two had no clue. It never even occurred to them to look at the artists hanging in Dalton’s gallery.
Willits handed me his card. “If you think of anything else, give us a call.”
“I will.”
* * *
The pay phone was free, and the lobby of the cop shop was busy enough that I figured no one would notice me. There just wasn’t any time to waste.
“The flowers are beauuuu-tiful,” Shelley said when I got her on the line. I’d called a florist before coming downtown and sent her a bouquet of stargazer lilies—they were powerfully odorous, would make all the ladies at the DMV jealous. “You must need something pretty bad.”
“I do, Shelley, and you know I feel awful about pestering you, but this one just won’t wait.”
“Well, you know the way to a girl’s heart.” She lowered her voice. “My coworker’s on break, so shoot. I’ll look it up right now.”
I lowered mine. “Ashley Fenn, two n’s. Last known in San Francisco, born in LA. Anything you can tell me.”
I watched a couple of boys in blue taking out an obviously homeless black woman who didn’t seem so keen on being released.
Shelley quietly hummed to herself as her fingernails tapped the keyboard. “Oh.”
“Oh what?”
“Oh. She’s dead, David.”
“What?”
“She’s dead. Sorry. You didn’t know her, did you?”
“No, no—when did she die?”
“Almost three years ago.”
My head was spinning. All of a sudden there were cops everywhere, like a Gonzo nightmare. “I gotta call you back. Wait—what’s the last known address?”
“Um . . . 490 Jamestown Avenue. Wait, why does that sound familiar?”
It wasn’t fishy, it was a whole can of tuna. “It’s not a residence, Shelley. It’s the address of Candlestick Park.”
I needed a drink, and that drink was going to need a lot of friends.
10
I woke up with my head in a bowling-ball bag, strikes ringing in my ears. I chain-smoked and went over everything I had to look at. I went through McCaffrey’s original fax. I dug the gallery guide from Dalton’s out from under my mattress and read it over five times to be sure I hadn’t missed anything. I read Dalton’s file on Ashley and I read it again. If there was one thing about this case that hung together, it was that everyone who came in contact with Ashley thought she was touched—or at the very least a little bit strange. There was nothing else to go on, nothing that I could see with my face pressed so tightly against it. But perhaps Ashley acted strangely for a reason. As the dead bodies piled up, so did reasons to give her the benefit of the doubt.
The smell of Susan’s skin was still fresh in my mind, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that her murder was on my hands. I could see Sharkskin’s grin and almost hear him on my heels. He was a ghost, motives unknowable. The only players I could begin to unravel were Conrad and McCaffrey.
Conrad knew I had been hired to find Ashley, but did he know McCaffrey? If McCaffrey wanted her found and Conrad wanted her lost, they weren’t playing for the same team. And either way it didn’t compute—whether you wanted Ashley dead or alive, why annihilate the only known connection to her? Was I completely off base in thinking that Ashley was the reason the Daltons were dead? One thing I knew for sure: neither Conrad nor McCaffrey were art collectors. But it tied them together. It all came back to the painting.
Ashley couldn’t be dead. Not my Ashley, anyway. Even if it were true—if the woman named Ashley Fenn had been dead for three years—the painting was newer than that. The letter she sent me. The show at Dalton’s gallery—even Dalton’s notes. This girl, this mysterious creature, whatever her name, was still out there. I could feel her. I could almost smell her.
I had two decent leads: Ashley’s old partner in crime, and the painting itself. Jason Masello was easy to find— he was listed. He lived on Hill Street in the Mission, a one-block road between Valencia and Guerrero. And the painting I could take to an art restoration shop I knew in West Portal. I went downstairs to the garage and, taking a page out of Conrad’s book, cut the painting off the stretcher. I rolled it up, wrapped it in an old shop tarp, and tossed it in the trunk of my car.
I kept an eye on the rearview all the way to the City, watching for tails. I took the old Army exit—Cesar Chavez now, but always Army to me—and cut into the low, flat panorama of the Mission. I circled the 24th Street BART station, taking in the busy visage of hipsters and Mexicans running errands, voices rattling under the clear sky, the squeak of the 14-Mission lurching to an electric stop, the vague, lingering scent of a taqueria.
I found a parking place on Mission, fed the meter, and walked over to Valencia and 21st, and then up the steep incline of the aptly named Hill Street, my smoker’s lungs heaving. I rang the buzzer and waited. I noticed the place had one of those antiquated intercom systems—a hole in the entryway that was essentially a tube leading upstairs. The door led into a stairway, and I saw Masello running down the stairs toward me in baggy, paint-spattered jeans and a grimy concert T-shirt, with long, unkempt hair. He saw me through the glass and stopped a moment, then opened the door a crack.
“Yes?”
“Are you Jason Masello?”
“Who wants to know?”
Smart lad. I showed him my card. “David Crane. Sorry to bother you, I was hoping you might have a minute. I’m working on a story about Ashley, and I understand you used to work with her.”
He looked at me over the card in his hand and shook his head. “Ashley. Fuck. Yeah, come on in.”
I followed him up the stairs. The apartment was nice, large for one person. We came into a short hallway leading left to the kitchen with a bedroom beyond, or right into a small sitting room with a futon and stacks of records.
“Give me one second.” He went through the sitting room to a small room behind it, his studio. I watched from the doorway as he took up a brush and viciously attacked a small canvas on an easel. The piece looked like stale buffalo dung propped up to salute. There were other paintings scattered about the room, more of the same ilk. Abstract, unrecognizable, representative of nothing and suggestive of only black moods and despair. The black paintings of Goya without the skill or precision: pure, fetid ego.
“I just have to finish this glaze before it gets all hard on me.”
“No problem.” I watched as he covered the canvas top to bottom in wide, even strokes. Now it looked like shellacked buffalo dung. He dropped the brush on a mangy palette and wiped his hands on his pants. He had a wide, sincere face, with expressive brown eyes. He waved me back to the sitting room, and as I entered it with him behind me, I heard a soft click that sounded like glass. He offered me a bottle of water sitting on the table. I declined. He motioned to the futon and we both sat. Near the door to the studio was a small shelf with what looked like a picture frame, facedown.
“What do you want to know about Ash?”
“Anything you can tell me, really. She’s proving to be a bit of an enigma.”
“Yeah . . . that’s her M.O. One of these artists who hopes to get famous by being all mysterious. Like if no one knows who she is or what she’s about, everyone will want to buy her stuff.” He shrugged. “Guess it’s working for her, if you buy into all that bullshit.”
“You don’t?”
He squirmed a bit on the futon. “Naw. I don’t think she’s all that mysterious. She’s just half-crazy, that�
�s all.”
“Crazy how?”
“You know that Thurber story, ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty?’”
“Yeah . . . the Danny Kaye film.”
He shook a battered Camel out of a soft pack and lit it clumsily from a book of matches. “She’s like that. She thinks she’s living this storybook fantastical life or some shit, but it’s all in her fucked-up little head.” He tapped the side of his head with an index finger.
“Well.” I lit a smoke of my own. Our twin strands of sidestream played with each other up near the ceiling. “Tell me about the collaboration.”
“It wasn’t much of one, really. The idea was that I’d do base coats, like backgrounds, and then she’d paint figures, and after, I’d do glazes. I’m good with glaze.”
“And?”
He tapped an ash angrily. “It was bullshit. I could do reds, blues—didn’t matter. Her figures were all the same. She was always painting this one guy—” He broke off, staring intensely at me suddenly. “Wait a minute . . . you’re the guy, aren’t you? You know Ash already. What’s this about?”
I shook my head and grinned as sincerely as I could. “I promise you, it’s coincidence. Actually, I got hired to research her because the journalist writing the piece thought the same thing. Really, we’ve never met. I’ve never sat for her. I don’t know a damn thing about art.”
He blinked but bought it. “Weird. Well, that was the thing. It wasn’t a collaboration because her part of it was always the same shit. I kept telling her she was crazy, that she couldn’t get hung up on one subject. And, yeah, she never had a model that I knew of. I figured she just dreamed the guy up. But she always said, He’s real, I know he’s real. Weird dream-life nonsense. Fucking Walter Mitty.”
“So she had an imaginary friend.”
“No, that’s the thing. She used to say that her paintings were important. These are going to save him, wooo,” he made a faux-spooky sound and waved his hands at me. “Like her shit is so much more relevant because she’s on some kind of mission, like a spy or something. She said the paintings could save her too. Get her out of her crazy life. Save her from an untimely death.” He laughed, a bitter, rancid chuckle. “An untimely death. She said that all the time, like people were after her, jealous of her talent or something. Like she was too good to live. Drove me nuts so I called it all off. Three months working together, and I got nothing to show for it.”
“But you think she’s good, obviously.”
“Well, yeah, she can paint. And she really watched people—used it in her work. But what’s the use of painting if it’s just the same thing over and over again, like that dude in New Orleans always painting that blue dog—I mean, what’s the point? . . . I gotta piss.”
As soon as he was out of the room I went to the shelf and picked up the photograph he had evidently tipped over. It was him, next to a pool, shirtless with a broad grin across his face, one arm holding a girl close to him. It was Ashley, I was sure of it. She was the right height, with jet-black hair, just to her shoulders, and a shy smile that played with itself upon the most lovely face I’d ever seen in my life. Aqualine features, skin pale without being pasty, knowing, heavy-lidded green eyes, sharp nose, and defiant chin. Gorgeous. She was wearing a yellow bikini top and her collarbone was exquisite. I heard Masello coming out of the bathroom but I let him catch me.
“Hey—”
I just looked at him. “What else, Masello?”
“Look, I don’t know who you think you are—”
“Consider, just for a moment, that all that crazy stuff going around in her head wasn’t just her imagination. What if she were in some kind of trouble, and what if you were in a position to help her?”
“I don’t need this kind of shit.”
“Neither do I. But I’m not working on a story about her, and that’s all I’m telling you because two people are dead already. What else, Masello?”
His cigarette was still smoking itself in the ashtray and he sat down heavily and picked it up. “All right. We were lovers first. I mean, that’s how we decided to try to work together. I met her randomly, at the Pearl Paint on Market. She was just so hot, you know? I mean look at her, she’s a knockout. Crazy as hell, I knew it right away, but crazy chicks are great in the sack, right?”
I just nodded to keep him talking.
“So we hooked up, and that was nuts, but she was fun in a kooky kind of way, and then we started working together. But she was worse as a lover than she was to work with. I mean this guy, the guy who looks like you, whoever he is—she’s obsessed with him. She said that she was meant to be with him, that she was waiting for him, and that when the time was right . . .” He fell off and stamped out the smoke. “I mean, there’s only so much of that you can listen to before you, you know.”
“Kind of works against your self-esteem.”
“Yeah. Totally. Like she’s fucking you but she’s thinking of someone else. Too weird. So I cut it off—the collaboration, the . . . everything.”
“What about her family? You ever meet them?”
“Naw, wasn’t much. Her mother’s dead and she didn’t know her father. I heard she lived in squats for a while, but she didn’t like to talk about it. She had this uncle who was never around. I never met him, but I think he helped her with some bills.”
“How did her mother die?”
“Lung cancer. After they moved up here from LA. You know—she grew up in fucking Anaheim. Disneyland, man. Her mom even worked there. That’s where all that fantasy-land bullshit starts. Fucking Walt Disney. Those stories fuck up young girls.”
“When was the last time you saw her?
“Haven’t talked to her in months. Then I heard she was gone.”
“Heard how?”
“My girlfriend heard it from the guy at Pearl, at the paint counter. My girlfriend’s an artist too. Ash had an account there. For years she kept a running tab, then one day she came in and paid it all off, real dramatic-like, classic Ash, and said she wouldn’t come back. And she hasn’t. I ask when I go in—she paints all the time, so that place is like her grocery store. If she’s not shopping there she must’ve left town.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Few weeks maybe? Not so long, but it’s still fucking weird. I just hope I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
Vanity. “You didn’t. I can almost promise you that.”
“So, yeah, I just keep that picture to remind me. Just, you know . . . I hope she’s okay. Coz she’s a good person, just . . . a little crazy.”
“What’s the name of the guy at Pearl Paint?”
“I don’t know, but he’s always there. You can’t miss him—looks just like Elvis Costello.”
I chewed it over and decided to tell him: “Listen, Jason, I’m hoping to prove that it isn’t true, but there’s a chance that Ashley . . . is already dead.”
He burst out laughing. “Of course she’s dead!” He kept laughing, and actually slapped his knee. “Yeah, she’s dead, man! That’s why she’s gonna be so successful as an artist!”
I just looked at him.
“You don’t know?”
Clearly I didn’t.
“It’s that old thing of how artists are never recognized in their own lifetime. But she had an ace in the hole, because she’s already dead.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Keystroke error, she called it,” he said. “The Death Master File.”
My face was blank.
“Social Security,” he said. “They keep a list of everyone who’s dead. The Death Master File. If you don’t get reported dead, someone else can keep cashing your retirement checks or whatever. But if you do get reported dead, because some dumb clerk puts in the wrong Social Security number, then bang, you’re dead. Your bank account is closed, you lose your house, whatever.”
“This happened to Ashley?”
“Yeah.” He stopped smiling. “I make fun of it, because it’s just
so Ash, you know? But it did kinda suck. She got on that list when she was barely eighteen, so she couldn’t get off of it. She didn’t have a paper trail, you know? She couldn’t get a job unless it was under the table.”
I stood up to put the photo back in its place, looking one more time at her devastating face. I would recognize it when I saw it again, and I would be seeing it in my dreams for a long time to come.
“It’s crazy, man,” Masello said. “Look into it. The Death Master File. Cool name for a band.”
I sat down again. “Okay, Jason, here’s the deal. I’m going to walk out of here and I’m never coming back. And I’m taking this,” I picked my card up off the table, “with me. You won’t see me again. You’re a nice guy, and knowing me is really not a good idea right now. So one last thing: I have to find Ashley, and soon. So if there’s anything else you know, anything at all that can help me find her, you have to tell me now.”
He scratched his head quickly and fiercely, like a dog after a vigorous flea. “There’s one place. A special place for her, that she goes to sometimes. If she’s still in San Francisco, she’ll go there sooner or later.”
“Where?”
“Chinatown. Corner of . . . Washington and Grant. Some cheezy restaurant—Green Emerald? Emerald Princess? Something like that. You can’t miss it—the downstairs is a junk tourist store, with a big spiral staircase with a big spiral Chinese dragon in the middle of it. You take the elevator up to the top floor and there’s a restaurant, and a little cocktail lounge with big windows. You can see both bridges on a clear day. She took me there once. She loved it. Would just sit there for hours and stare.”
“You haven’t looked for her?”
“Naw. I got a new girlfriend now. I don’t really want to see Ash again. She drives me nuts. I just hope she’s okay.”
“Hellooooo!” It was a muted, weirdly distorted call, coming from the ancient intercom tube at the front door. Then the front door buzzer went off.
“That’s my girl.” He jumped up. “I thought you were her, actually. Little afternoon delight.”
The Painted Gun Page 6