Arsenic and Old Paint

by Hailey Lind

  “Heya, Norm. What’re you up to?”

  “Oh, ’bout two hundred pounds,” he said. “Hey, what the hell happened over to the F-U? McAdams called for another reference to finish up their job. I got Marisco on it.”

  “Mauricio, not Marisco.”

  “What’s the diff?”

  “Marisco means seafood, whereas Mauricio is actually a man’s name. Like Maurice.”

  “And your point is...?”

  “It’s...nothing. So they hired him to finish the job I started?”

  “Yeah. This sorta thing doesn’t look great for me, ya know. Anyhoo, glad you’re here. I gotta ask you about a gold gilt dealio in the master. Mauricio—” he enunciated in an exaggerated fashion “—is up there if you want to talk to him.”

  Upstairs we entered a huge room that served as the master bath. Mauricio was a young man with a slight build and a quick smile; he was covered in dust from sanding what may well have been lead paint, given the age of the house. We had all worked together a couple of months ago on a job in Pacific Heights.

  We talked shop for a few minutes: I mixed a Venetian red base color for Mauricio, and gave him a few pointers on how to restore the gold and silver gilt on the bathroom mirror frames. The original base for gilding was clay, which was dampened and made slick and smooth as glass before the tissue-thin sheets of metal were applied. These days we use a poor substitute, red oxide acrylic paint, but if done correctly the overall effect is superb. The secret is to make the base as smooth as possible, and to “age” the final gilt surface with steel wool and a coat of burnt umber varnish or amber shellac.

  Watch out, I thought, wrenching myself back from the paints and brushes and sample pieces laid out on a temporary work table. I yearned to stay and play, but I wasn’t being paid, after all. And if I gave away all my faux-finish secrets to house-painters I’d wind up losing all my bids, and then I’d have to make my living as an investigator.

  “So, you’re working on the Fleming Mansion?” I asked Mauricio.

  He nodded eagerly. “They told me it was a rush job. I been there all yesterday. Removed most of the paper but haven’t started painting yet. I got two men there today just sanding and filling, doing prep.”

  “In the attic rooms?”

  “And the second floor, too.”

  “The second floor? Where?”

  “A couple bedrooms had water damage like in the attic.”

  “Do you remember which rooms? The numbers?”

  “Two-twelve and two-ten, I think. Two-twelve was the worst. We were there all yesterday. I wasn’t feeling that great this morning, so I came here instead.”

  “Do you have any of the wallpaper scraps?”

  He gave me an odd look. “No, we took ’em to the landfill already. Cleanup’s part of the job.”

  “Right. Did you wear masks?”

  He shook his head.

  “You and your workers should really wear protective gear, Mauricio. This sort of thing can catch up with you.” I glared at Norm. “OSHA, for example, might have a few thoughts on the subject were it to stumble upon this jobsite after, say, receiving an anonymous tip from a good citizen.”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay,” Norm gave me a glare. “Marisco, get some masks for you and the boys.”

  “Not just cheap dust masks,” I put in. “You need respirators with cartridges that are rated for lead dust and fumes.”

  “Yeah, whatever the princess says,” Norm grumbled before leading me out of the room and down the stairs. “You’re a bleeding-heart-liberal pain in my ass, you know that?”

  “That’s why you like me so much,” I said. “So, about the F-U boys. Anything about them seem odd to you?”

  “You mean a bunch of super-rich guys playing house together? It’s all weird, you ask me. They should just marry each other and make it official. That’s legal now, ain’t it?”

  “Not quite. Did you know they had a private art gallery there?”

  “Nah, but it weren’t like they were giving me the grand tour. Alls I did was put on a new roof, a little electrical and plumbing, some finish work. And send them a huge bill.”

  Our conversation paused while we walked past a compressor drowning out all conversation with its ear-splitting wail. We went out the front door and Norm closed it behind us, quieting things down a tad.

  “This one time I went in? Emergency call, leaking roof. Flunky hustled me upstairs but not before I saw what they were doing.”

  “Human sacrifices?” I guessed.

  “Nope. The men were all dressed in old-fashioned costumes and the women were all hoes. And get this: they were all sittin’ round like they’s at an indoor picnic. Weird.”

  “How do you know the women were hoes?”

  “They were all naked. Butt-naked.”

  “Ah.”

  “ ’Cept for some leaves.”

  “Got the picture.”

  He gave a wolfish grin. “The weird part was that they made, like, fake trees n’ shit, and rolled out some sod—I’m not kiddin’ you, real honest-to-God sod right there on the floor—and had set up a whole picnic. You wanna picnic, don’t you go to Golden Gate Park or somethin’?”

  “Not if you want the women naked.”

  “I guess you got me there.”

  “What did they do when you saw them?”

  He shook his head. “They didn’t see me. Figured they weren’t in the mood to talk shop, so I just left.”

  “Did you ever meet Elijah Odibajian?”

  “Oh, that the guy they found in the bathtub? I saw that on the news.” He shook his head. “I dealt with McAdams, same as you. The only strange thing was, he asked for you by name.”

  “McAdams asked for me? I thought you gave him my name.”

  Norm shook his head. “I woulda, don’t get me wrong, but he said he knew we’d worked together on the Garner place and asked for you. That’s why I don’t get why he wanted somebody else. Whadja do? Take a dump in the men’s room and not flush?”

  “Norm, you’re something else.”

  He grinned, flashing nicotine-stained teeth. “Hey: I’m here, I drink beer, get used to it.”

  * * *

  The upside to running afoul of the law over the past few years is that I now have a network of friends and acquaintances with useful expertise. Elena-the-lawyer, for instance, and Annette-the-cop, who, if she weren’t suspecting me of crimes and whatnot, would be especially useful. But more to the point at the moment: I knew a chemist.

  Brianna Nguyen was a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. We’d met only once, when her roommate got involved with some bad types at Oakland’s historic Bayview cemetery. It was a difficult time, but I was pretty sure she’d remember me, and I needed her expertise. I drove up past the magnificent Claremont Hotel, through the university campus, and finally found a metered parking spot not too far from Hildebrand Hall, one of several buildings housing the College of Chemistry. I made my way to an institutional beige break room frequented by graduate students, and found Brianna almost exactly as I had the last time we spoke: huddled over a huge notebook, making notes in tiny, neat little columns of words and numbers.

  “Brianna?” I said.

  “Oh my God!” she said as she looked up, pushing long, straight, shiny hair out of her face. She looked all of fifteen years old in her fashionable jeans and gauzy floral blouse, and she spoke like a true California Valley Girl, but I knew from experience she was a knowledgeable scientist. “It’s been, like, forever. Did someone else die?”

  “As a matter of fact...”

  “Oh. My. God.” She gasped. One hand flew up to her cheek, her jaw dropped, and her eyes widened. “I was just kidding! You have, like, the worst job ever.”

  I could think of a few worse ones—cleaning out the sewer plant, for instance—but I saw her point.

  “I was hoping you could help me. I need to know the specifics on arsenic poisoning. How long does it take? What are the symptoms?”
>
  “I’m no expert,” she said with a little shrug of her slim shoulders. “I mean, as far as I know arsenic poisoning basically involves the allosteric inhibition of essential metabolic enzymes, the ones that require lipoic acid as a cofactor, such as pyruvate and alpha-ketoglutarate dehydrogenase. On account of that, the substrates before the dehydrogenase steps accumulate, such as pyruvate and lactate.”

  I must have been staring.

  “What is it?” Brianna asked.

  I cleared my throat. “Sorry, I know you were speaking English but I have no idea what you just said.”

  She rolled her eyes. “It screws with your circulatory system and brain, causing neurological disturbances and leading to death from multi-system organ failure.”

  “Okay, that I get. How hard is it to detect?”

  “Used to be hard, which is why it was so popular for killing your family members. White arsenic used to be called ‘inheritance powder,’ can you imagine? It’s pretty standard to test for it now, though. In fact, they can find traces in hair so they can even dig up old bodies and run the tests if someone makes allegations of foul play after death. Oh my God, are you digging up bodies again, like you did in Bayview Cemetery?”

  “I never dug up bodies.”

  “Grave robbery, then.”

  “No, I’ve never...” I sighed. What shreds of a reputation was I trying to salvage, anyway? “Never mind. I’m just trying to understand what happened to my uncle. He’s still alive, but he was found—” it was still hard for me to get the words out “—poisoned by arsine gas.”

  “Arsine gas? Are you sure?”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “That’s, like, a whole different deal than eating it. That hardly ever happens anymore. Does he work in a metal factory, some kind of manufacturing that mixes metals?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s weird then. Does he live in a place with really old wallpaper?”

  Again with the killer wallpaper. “No. But how would that work?”

  “Back in the day, like the late eighteen-hundreds, this Italian biochemist named Gosio figured out that when Scheele’s green, a popular pigment at the time, is used in wallpaper and stuff, and it gets wet and then moldy, the latent arsenic in the green pigment can convert to vapor arsine, even dimethyl and trimethyl arsine. In these old homes, whole families were dying off, kids first since they’re smaller and closer to the floor. The gas is heavier than air. Some people think that’s what killed Napoleon when he was exiled on that island...what was it again?”

  “Elba?”

  “No...St. Helena. Anyway, he got exiled there and then got sick. Somehow they had a piece of the old wallpaper so they analyzed it to see if there was any arsenic green. By the way, the green darkens with exposure to oxygen, especially when it’s degrading, so the paper might not look green. It goes kinda brown or gray. You can always find out by using an energy-dispersive analysis, like the Niton Portable XRF spectrometer. There’s one around here somewhere. Want to borrow it?”

  “Could I?”

  “Sure. Just don’t tell anybody you’re not, you know, official UC. Want to test your uncle’s wallpaper?”

  “Actually, in his case I don’t think there was any wallpaper involved. But he was an artist, and he might have been mixing a pigment he got from a fireworks distrib—”

  I was cut off by Brianna’s quick intake of breath. “Oooh, nasty. You can still get those colors, like Paris Green and stuff, and if they mix with any kind of hydrochloric acid you’re in serious trouble. He’s in the hospital? Are they chelating?”

  “Even as we speak.”

  “That’s good, then. He’ll prob’ly be okay. It’s a good thing he was found in time. Does he like garlic?”

  “Garlic?”

  “They say people who eat a lot of garlic don’t absorb the arsenic as well, or pee a lot of it out or something. I read about it once. Arsenic’s a real problem in the drinking water in parts of India, so a lot of the information comes from there. The scientists there are probably the most knowledgeable on the subject these days. It doesn’t come up much around here, since arsenic has been outlawed from anything but rat poison for years. Oh, and fireworks.”

  * * *

  After stopping for a quick garlic-based lunch at a small trattoria on Hearst, I pulled the Gauguin case file out of my satchel. Time to talk to Victor Yeltsin, victim of art theft...or perpetrator of insurance fraud. I still had no idea how he might be involved with Elijah Odibajian’s fate, much less Anton’s, but there was no time like the present to find out.

  Cathy Yeltsin answered the phone and remembered our meeting in Huntington Park. I mentioned the remodeling project she wanted to talk about, and she invited me over to talk faux “right this minute.”

  Unfortunately there are no good traffic options to get from Oakland to Sausalito on a weekday afternoon. One choice was to take the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, cross the city on surface streets, then head over the Golden Gate Bridge; alternatively, you could head north and cross the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge, pass San Quentin Prison, take surface streets through Larkspur Landing, pick up the freeway again and drive another twelve miles or so to the west.

  I opted for the latter. It took me a good fifty minutes to arrive in quaint, tourist-clogged Sausalito, a small, historic fishing village on the bay just north of San Francisco.

  Cathy had given me directions, but I’m better with visuals: I followed Anton’s sketched map through the narrow, twisty roads etched out of the steep side of the mountain. The Yeltsins’ house was a modern structure that clung to what appeared to be a sheer cliff. It offered an amazing view of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge to the right, and Alcatraz and Angel Islands in the bay to the left.

  So this is what undisclosed consulting work can get you, I thought. Maybe I should take up vague consulting for a career myself, and let Jarrah Preston keep his job.

  The door was already opening as I angled my truck into the apron of the driveway, trying to leave enough room for cars to be able to pass on the narrow street. I noted an alarm service sticker in the window, right next to a Cal Bears placard.

  A petite but perfectly muscled, tanned, dark-haired man with limited English skills stood at the door, beckoning me inside. Barefoot and wearing cut-off jeans, he looked like a pool boy in Acapulco—not that I would know from experience, not living the kind of life that allowed me to loll by pools in lush tropical settings. The case file referred to a statement from a “houseboy.” Would this be him? Kyle something?

  I followed the young man into the home, which featured plate-glass windows to take advantage of the view. Unfortunately, it was hard to notice the view because of all of the art, taking up every free inch of wall and floor space.

  Normally I was in favor of such things. But this art...

  There were wooden carvings from Africa with huge phalluses, and clay reproductions—or were they real?—of pre-Columbian artifacts with huge phalluses, and oils and acrylic paintings and drawings and etchings of everything from mythological satyrs to space aliens with huge phalluses. And everywhere in between were Indian paintings, sculptures, and woodcuts of couples enacting the Kama Sutra, and deities with huge phalluses.

  I was sensing a theme.

  I’m an art lover. And I’m no prude. But this stuff had me wishing I was tucked away in my studio or on some nameless jobsite faux-finishing banisters.

  Banisters made me think of huge phalluses.

  I tried to clear my mind.

  “Annie!” Cathy wore black Spandex pants and a stretchy shirt that formed a V to point out her spectacular cleavage. Pedicured feet were stuffed into leopard-print backless pumps with a puff of red feathers on the toe. She rushed over to me and gave me a big hug, as though we were fast friends instead of virtual strangers. “I am so glad you could come! I’ve been telling Victor all about you, and he’s beside himself as well. Wonderful, just wonderful. So glad you came.”

  I
wondered if Cathy might be playing fast and loose with the Prozac. No one was this happy all the time.

  “Ah, here he is now. Victor, lovey, come meet Annie Kincaid, the miracle worker who’s going to transform our basement for us.”

  “Good to meet you,” Victor said with a smile, holding his hand out to shake. Afterward, he held my hand in both of his, gazing into my eyes with a very warm welcome. Too warm. He was a powerfully built man in his early fifties, dressed in white pants and turtleneck, with a shining pink bald head.

  Like a penis.

  I looked away, desperate for someplace to rest my eyes without thinking about sex and nudity.

  “Great view,” I said, admiring the sights out the window.

  “Please, come in, have a seat. Jean-Paul,” he said in a deep, booming voice to the young man who answered the door, “get Annie a sherry.”

  “Oh, no thanks, I’m fi—”

  Before I could finish my protest, a small crystal glass was held out to me. I accepted it.

  Victor and Cathy took seats on a lipstick-red leather couch. She perched with her short, shapely legs crossed demurely. He relaxed with his arms up on the back of the couch and his knees splayed open, wide apart.

  I remained silent for a moment, trying to decide which approach to use. I’d had the entire traffic-clogged drive over here to come up with something to say, yet everything I had practiced seemed somehow inadequate when faced with Victor and Cathy in the House of Erotic Art.

  “You’re not here for a faux-finish job,” Victor said, breaking the long silence.

  “I’m not?”

  He shook his head and gave me a half smile. Cathy looked at me, then back up at Victor, making a distressed little moue.

  “Then what am I here for?” I asked. Heh. Frank’s interrogation technique—refusing to talk—really did work well. I could be as noncommunicative as Frank.

  “You’re working with Jarrah Preston. You want to ask about the stolen Gauguin.”

  “Oh dear,” whispered Cathy, frowning.

  “How did you know that?”

  “He told me you’d be calling. Why the subterfuge?”

  “I just wasn’t sure about the situation...and then I happened to meet Cathy in Huntington Park, and she asked me about the faux finish, and since that really is my main job, I thought I’d go with it.” So much for playing my cards close to my chest.