He yelled into the tube, “I’ll be right down!”
I followed him into the stairwell and caught him by the arm. “If anyone else comes to you asking about Ashley, anyone that you don’t know, you don’t know her, you don’t know anything. Knowing her could get you hurt.”
“You’re starting to sound just like her, man.”
I followed him down the stairs where a plump blonde was waiting, wearing glasses with the geeky black-plastic birth-control frames that had inexplicably come into fashion forty years after never having been fashionable in the first place.
“Oh,” she said when Masello opened the door, “I didn’t know you had—”
“I’m on my way out,” I said.
She offered me a hand and a genuine smile. “You are . . . ?”
“I’m nobody.” I gave Masello a quick handshake. “I was never even here. Thanks.”
“Right on. Good luck, man.”
I went down the hill without looking back. Considering that I had learned about Masello from Dalton’s notes, considering that Dalton was dead, considering that Susan had obtained the notes, undisturbed, from Dalton’s apartment, considering that Susan was dead—I hoped that no other players would find Masello and he would live to create more bad art.
11
I was hungry. I took in the air and walked back down to Mission, cut up to 19th, and ducked into Cancún, the best damn taqueria in the city. The place was jumping, as usual, the long wooden tables crowded with strangers peeling the tinfoil from their monstrous burritos, bad salsa music blaring from speakers with blown woofers.
“Hola, Hernando.”
“Hey, Da-veed, qué pasa? Long time no see.” I’d helped his sister with a green card years ago and he always remembered me.
“Been busy.”
“Better than dead.”
“You?”
“Mucho trabajo, every day. Whatcha need?”
I ordered a super chicken and a horchata, grabbed a tray of chips with spicy green salsa, and wedged into a table next to a pretty girl who had a Chihuahua in the bag over her shoulder. She never looked at it, just ate her burrito; the dog looked up at me as if I were furniture. My number was called and I bit into a hot tortilla majestically wrapped around a perfectly balanced mixture of grilled chicken, black beans, Monterrey Jack cheese, guacamole, sour cream, and pico de gallo. Best lunch in town, and still under five bucks.
Something about the way the little dog looked at me reminded me of Dalton; the way he’d flinched when Sharkskin appeared in his doorway, like a dog being scolded. Then he’d composed himself and ushered me out, as if he knew what was coming and had accepted it. It was stupid to fixate on it, but with Dalton on my mind I looked around the room, eyeballing my fellow diners, especially the table near the door that was full of Mexican construction workers. Sharkskin looked nothing like these small, dark Sonorans. Maybe he was Spanish.
I finished up and tossed my trash. The place had thinned out a bit, and Hernando was leaning on the counter, almost imperceptibly moving his lips, singing along to the radio.
“Hey, Hernando. How can you tell if a guy is Spanish or just a light-skinned Mexican?”
He grinned. “You got a joke for me?”
“No, no,” I said, laughing. “I met this guy and I can’t figure out where he’s from. It’s driving me crazy.”
He shrugged. “Hard to tell just by looking. Most Mexicans have some Spanish blood. What did he sound like?”
“I didn’t hear him speak any Spanish.”
“What about his English? Deed hee talk like thees?”
“Not at all. Just a slight accent, heavy on the h’s and r’s.”
“Show me.”
I’d only heard Sharkskin say a single sentence, but I remembered it exactly. I did my best, trying to hit the right spots, trying not to sound Jewish or like Peter Lorre. “I didn’t rhealize you chad a visiturr, Mr. Dalton. So surrhy to inturrhupt.”
Hernando nodded, a tiny head bob becoming a vehement shake. “I know this guy. And I know why you don’t.” He turned and yelled toward the back of the kitchen: “Oye, Pablito, ven aquí!”
A short, skinny teenager in rubber gloves came out—the dishwasher. “Repita para mi amigo en inglés.” He pointed at me. “Say it again, David.” I did.
The kid looked up at me vacantly and, without emotion, said, “I didn’t realize you had a visitor, Mr. Dalton. So sorry to interrupt.” It was spooky. It was almost exactly as I’d heard it that day in the gallery, only more exaggerated. Sharkskin spoke better English than this kid, but they were from the same part of the world.
Hernando dismissed his young charge. “Entonces?”
“That was it. That was dead on.”
“You’re way off. Your friend isn’t Spanish. He’s Guatemalan.”
* * *
I retrieved my car and drove west, preoccupied, and when I found myself on the tail end of Market I decided, for no good reason, to take a detour up to Twin Peaks. The road snaked around, climbing steadily upward, finally reaching the park with impeccable views. I parked and walked up the hill to take a look.
It was a clear day, the sky as blue as true optimism, the City laid out for me in all its splendor, nestled comfortably into the bay, looking calm and innocent from such a remove. I tried to pick out the Chronicle building at 5th and Mission, my old downtown stomping grounds, remembering a different time, full of deadlines and carpal tunnel syndrome and hurried lunches at Tu Lan, that fantastic pho joint around the corner on 6th, late nights stumbling out of the office, walking up Nob Hill to that great apartment I can’t believe I ever gave up. From such a vantage, it was almost impossible to imagine the street view, the hard pavement, the tilting asphalt . . . like looking back in time.
The Golden Gate loomed in the distance, a testament to ingenuity and basic human stubbornness, the Marin Headlands a gloriously green backdrop. I remembered my last serious girlfriend—the last time I had a steady on the hook—and the night we drove over the bridge and parked at the lookout, with magnificent views of the City sparkling over the bay, got into the backseat and got right into it, top down and everything. She was sitting on top of me when another car parked beside us—teenagers, girls, who actually apologized for “intruding.” Better times, before the alcoholism began to take its crippling toll, when I still fantasized about winning a Pulitzer, when Herb Caen was still alive and kicking, on the page and off, before he died and I wasn’t even invited to the wake, all my bridges burned behind me. A bountiful civilization perched on a peninsula, jutting into a crystalline-blue halo, banked by beauty on all sides . . . a frontiersman’s fantasy come to life. God’s country, my grandmother used to call California. God’s country.
And the death of Susan Dalton hanging over it all, a bleak shadow of uncertainty and menace.
I grabbed the painting from the trunk, left my car, and walked down the hill, letting the panorama vanish as I slowly descended to the level of the beaten and the miscreants. The steep hill dropped me onto Twin Peaks Boulevard, and I followed it around to Portola, making my way down into West Portal. I always liked this neighborhood, felt it would have suited my personality better than Nob Hill—or South City. Snuggled in between the mansion-riddled Forest Hill and St. Francis Wood, the neighborhood still has an unpretentious look and feel, with low buildings, a true “main street” with real shops, not chains, and residences lined up like soldiers, painted in muted tones. Not as cookie-cutter as Daly City, and not as far away as South City; peninsula living, but a short Muni ride away from downtown.
I found the art restoration shop and walked into a small receiving room with reproductions of famous works on the walls—Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Vermeer—along with a few modern oil paintings by unknowns. The door gave a little jingle as it closed behind me and a small but clear voice rang out from the back—“I’ll be right with you!” I took a closer look at one of the oils on the wall, leaning in and allowing myself to be slightly mesmerized by the topog
raphy of the brushstrokes.
“How can I help you? . . . Oh, Mr. Crane! Nice to see you again.”
“Katie, right? And it’s David.”
She was textbook: small and rather plain, with medium-length dark hair pulled back in a pragmatic ponytail and librarian glasses, wearing the obligatory hooded sweatshirt half-zipped over a baggy T. She was more tomboy than butch, cute with absolutely no effort, someone totally invested in a parallel world with little reason to pay attention to much else, and her eyes sparkled with a piercing intelligence. She had helped me research an artist for a potential buyer when she was still in grad school.
“David. Hi.” She gave me a wry grin. “So, did your buyer ever make a decision?”
“He went another way. But I still got paid.”
She gestured to my package. “What have you got?”
“This one is a little different.” I put my package on the counter and peeled off the tarp, and she helped me unroll the canvas with small, well-worn hands. She smoothed it out and leaned her head back and to the side to take it in.
“It’s fantastic.”
“Uh . . . thanks. It’s not mine, of course.”
“Well, whoever did it, it’s very good. What’s wrong with it?”
“What?”
She laughed only slightly. “It doesn’t seem to be in need of any repair. If you want it framed, I can recommend—”
“No, no. I want you to . . . tell me about it.”
“What do you want to know?” She gave me a look of such simple curiosity that I almost didn’t know how to answer.
What didn’t I want to know? “The artist is a bit of a mystery . . . I don’t know who she is, I barely know anything about her, and I have someone who wants to buy more of her work. I’m hoping there might be some clue in the painting as to who she is, maybe even how she can be found.”
She nodded slowly. “Okay.”
“I know it sounds crazy, but from what I’ve heard about the artist, she’s a little . . .” I put out one hand, fingers spread, and waggled it unsteadily. “I think there might be something hidden in this painting. Maybe something in the materials—I don’t know.”
“I can analyze it, tell you about the paint, the canvas.” She shrugged her shoulders. “If there is actually something hidden beneath the paint . . . I’d have to take it to the conservation laboratory at the Fine Arts Museum.”
“Can you do that?”
“Sure. They have a spectrometer, X-ray . . . we use their facilities from time to time, but it’s expensive, and it’s not likely that I’ll find anything.”
“I don’t care about the cost. I really want to know everything—anything you can tell me.”
She smiled, and made a cracking noise out of the corner of her mouth. “I’ll need a couple of days.”
* * *
I wanted to think; I didn’t want to think anymore. Susan Dalton kept swimming laps in the pool in my head, and some Guatemalan was playing lifeguard. The Pearl Paint lead was likely a dead end; it could wait. I needed something like a full-body yawn just to get my soul screwed on straight.
I walked back up to Twin Peaks, grabbed my car, rolled all the way down to Pier 39, and paid too much for parking. I spent a couple of hours leaning on the wooden railing, watching the sea lions sunbathing on the docks off the pier, listening to the bulls bray. It wasn’t quite enough to drown it all out.
12
I woke up early, fried some eggs, and took a long, hot shower, thinking about the Death Master File. I knew a young computer wizard named Sobczyk I could ask about it—this shit was right up his alley—but he knew everything about everything; he’d talk my ear off.
I got dressed and dug into the Internet. Masello was on the level. There really is such a file, named like something out of a pulp novel or a Star Wars sequel, and they really do make mistakes.
On one hand, the money the government and corporations—mostly banks and insurance companies—lose by paying out millions in benefits to people who are already dead is a real problem. The actual reporting of the dead varies so widely from state to state that not everyone makes it into the Death Master File, or DMF, due to con-artistry or straight-up stupidity.
On the other hand, a simple human error in the data entry of a Social Security number can make a living person dead on paper. “Keystroke error.” The error rate is tiny, between a third and a half of one percent. But 2.3 million people died in the US last year, which means that in 1996 alone, it’s fair to assume that at least seven thousand people were declared dead but are still walking around dealing with it. You lose your house, you lose your bank account. You lose your pension, your health benefits—of course you lose your Social Security. And since Social Security sells the list to creditors and debtors, the damage is done even if you get yourself resurrected at the DMF level. Your death has trickled down the chain of information. Good luck convincing your bank that they should give you your money back.
I read a horror story about a woman who lived in her car for a while and spent five years trying to get herself declared legally alive, then I shut off the machine. Ash was unlucky, sure, but she was a scrapper. And I would find her.
* * *
I decided not to drive—it’s impossible to park in Chinatown—so I walked down to the bus, rode to the BART, picked up and skimmed discarded newspapers on the train, got out at Montgomery, and hiked up the steep hill. Grant. Chinatown . . . tourists strolling and junk stores blaring crappy noise-making toys, with incense and fireworks and San Francisco–emblazoned everything. I’ve always liked Chinatown—the Chinese locals shoving tourists out of the way, the allure of cheap dumplings, a hanging duck through a dirty window, the crackle of Cantonese.
I found the place easily, right where Masello said it would be, even if he didn’t know the name: The Empress of China. The downstairs was, indeed, a junk shop, with a spiral staircase and a Chinese dragon suspended inside its curve, mimicking the helix. I took the elevator to the sixth floor and walked out into the restaurant. I was standing in a small, almost circular foyer, decked out to look like the inside of a pagoda, and to my right was the dining room. To my left was the cocktail lounge, two sides of which were tall windows that offered views overlooking Chinatown. One wall separated the lounge from the restaurant, and was backed by the bar. The fourth wall, the short one to my left as I entered the lounge, was decorated with something that seemed shockingly out of place in a Chinese restaurant: a portrait of me.
It was less a portrait than a film still. I was bent over a woman, holding myself up with one arm while my other hand caressed her cheek. I knew the woman, of course; it was a recent lover, maybe a year ago—it didn’t last more than a couple months. We were in my bed together, visible only from the waist up, where the covering of the blankets began and the edge of the canvas soon ended. We were illuminated from the side by a candle that flickered ghostly at the edge of the frame. Her eyes were closed and her mouth half open in apparent bliss. Her face was barely an impression, almost unfinished; she was buried under my body, except for one exposed breast shamelessly facing the viewer. My eyes were wide open, staring at the face underneath me, harsh with intention. The light across my body was golden, majestic, making me look almost holy. The brushstrokes were lovingly applied, if there is such a thing, as if the artist were touching my body tenderly with every stroke, anointing my eyes with somber blessing, caressing my face more intensely and successfully than I could caress the face of my lover. It was as if she were there, as if the artist were in the room with us, like a slightly jealous voyeur, happy to be watching but would be happier to be beneath me. It was too much. I had to turn away.
And when I did, I was looking right into the face of an older, lovely Chinese woman, wearing a tight dress with a Mandarin collar and off-center frogs, smiling and handing me a folded beverage napkin.
I took it without a word, ready for anything. I opened it up and there again, in that tender handwriting, was a short message: Some
day we’ll sit here together. Have a plum wine. Look at the view. It’s lovely.
It was, and the plum wine was delicious. I sat at a low-lying table, right up at the edge of the enormous windows, looking out over Chinatown and North Beach, the bay beautiful and glaring, the Golden Gate just hidden in a shroud of lingering fog, and the Bay Bridge barely visible in the distance. Leaning over, I could clearly see the decorative Chinatown streetlight, dragon and all, just in front of the Kowloon Restaurant at the far corner of Grant and Washington.
I was dazed. There was something definitively unnerving about trying to find a woman who knew where I would be before I did. The waitress could only tell me that Ashley used to come and sit for hours, staring out at the view and drinking plum wine, but they never spoke other than customer-waitress niceties. Ashley’s last visit had been a few weeks ago, when she asked the waitress for a favor and left the note—and the painting—for me.
I stepped up for a closer look and checked the date in the corner: 11/15/96. Once again, that would be about right. Another snapshot from my life. I removed the painting from the wall and took it out with me. It was beautiful. It made me want to meet the woman who had painted it, to touch the hands that had touched the brush that touched this canvas. To look into the eyes that had seen this scene and seen only love.
* * *
I had to get the new evidence off to Katie. I half-ran down to the Montgomery station, jumped on the Muni, and rode under Market, popping out at street level at West Portal.
When I arrived at her shop I opened the door so fast I almost broke it. Katie was at the front counter with a phone in her hands.
“David, are you okay? I was just trying to call you.”
“I have another painting.” The door closed behind me and I caught my breath and my demeanor. “I’m . . . sorry. It’s been a crazy day already.”
“Tell me about it. You should . . .” She caught a look at the painting in my hands. “They are paintings of you, aren’t they? I didn’t want to say anything yesterday, but—”
The Painted Gun Page 7