Arsenic and Old Paint

by Hailey Lind

  However, as one of my mature-beyond-his-years nephews noted, the kind of people who like to get naked in public are rarely the kind of people one would choose to see naked.

  Reggie rattled the paper. “All I’m saying is, sex is on everybody’s mind all the time. I’m a trained social worker. I know these things.”

  Sam dragged in, sleepy and grumpy. One of the things I like about my Jamaican friend is that despite her typical equanimity, she is as cranky in the morning as I.

  “There she is,” Reggie announced. “My own little ray of sunshine. Make us some breakfast, woman.”

  “Oh sure, I’ll get right on it,” Sam said with a snort.

  Reggie smiled at me and winked.

  “Last thing they need in Russia is a sex museum,” Sam muttered. “Like they don’t need, say, an economic infrastructure first.”

  “Nothing wrong with a museum of any kind,” Reggie argued. “And there’s nothing wrong with erotica and healthy sexuality. You two are prudes, is all.”

  “That’s me in a nutshell,” I said.

  “Prude is my middle name,” Sam echoed, smiling at me over her steaming mug of coffee. “I’m still stunned we had children, Reggie my love.”

  Reggie ignored us and rattled his paper again. “Says here that local entrepreneur Victor Yeltsin is to donate a Gauguin.”

  I looked at the newspaper more closely.

  “It’s not his to donate.” Looked like I should place a call to Jarrah Preston.

  After a quick shower I asked to borrow fresh clothes from Sam. She offered me a brown-and-cream patterned African mudcloth caftan I had always admired on her tall, elegant form. On my average, slightly less chic physique it looked like I was acting in a play of some sort, or perhaps taking part in an experimental performance piece making subtle, cutting fun of the fashion-challenged. But since I had been wearing the same wrinkled clothes for two days, I decided it would have to do.

  I met Jarrah at Caffe Trieste in North Beach. His dark eyes flickered over my outfit, but he remained politely mute. We took our creamy lattes to a small table in the corner.

  “Victor Yeltsin contacted me, offering to buy the Gauguin back,” Jarrah said.

  “The fake one?”

  “That’s what the man said.”

  “Do you think he’s trying to get it out of the country?”

  “Seems like. He also mentioned that he was going out of town, and that he would be back in touch with me. He refused to meet in person. Truth to tell, he sounded scared.”

  “When I met with him yesterday, he seemed genuinely surprised to hear that the painting was fake,” I mused. “But according to Anton, Victor hired him to copy it himself. So he must have known there was a fake. You think there was some kind of honest mix-up?”

  “I doubt honesty enters into it in any form. Listen, I wanted to talk to you about something else: I’ve checked out Balthazar, and as much as it pains me to say so, he looks clean in all of this.”

  “Really.”

  “I know he’s unlikable. Tell the truth, I was looking forward to busting him myself, but I’m afraid in this case he’s innocent. It seems Elijah nicked the Gauguin from the club’s collection one night, simple as that. Which means that the club had been given a forgery with provenance papers, and the real one is still out there somewhere.”

  “The club acquired the fake Gauguin around the same time as Victor was invited to join. Do you think his donation of the painting was what won him admittance?”

  “Very possible. I think he probably had the painting copied with the intent to give the club the proper Gauguin, got mixed up, and instead perhaps sold the real one to someone else, or God forbid, destroyed it under the assumption that it was a fake.”

  If I were Catholic I would have crossed myself. A Gauguin masterpiece being deliberately destroyed was unthinkable, yet such things happened. Not so long ago a French waiter named Stephane Breitwieser had stolen hundreds of pieces of historic, one-of-a-kind artwork, including paintings by Watteau, Brueghel, and Boucher. While he was in jail awaiting trial, his mother attempted to destroy the evidence by shredding the paintings in her garbage disposal or tossing them into a canal.

  “What about Anton?” I asked.

  “It’s possible that what happened to him isn’t connected to the Gauguin at all,” Jarrah said, sympathy playing in his dark eyes. “He has a sketchy past, a lot of enemies. Or there’s still the possibility that it was an accident, after all.”

  Great. Now Jarrah Preston was jumping on the “it was an accident” bandwagon.

  “I want to pay you for your time. You’ve really worked this case, Annie, we appreciate it.”

  “But I haven’t found the Gauguin.”

  “At this point, the firm feels it would be throwing good money after bad. I’m just going to finish up a few things myself, then close the case.”

  “Why would Elijah Odibajian have been arranged to look like Marat in the tub?”

  “I have no idea. But I have to be honest here: that’s not my problem. It’s not yours, either. That’s an issue for the police. I was here looking for a work of art that looks lost...unless I can track Victor down and get the truth out of him.”

  “Another person of interest up the boohai? Did you check the other tubs in the mansion?”

  Jarrah smiled ruefully and handed me a fat check. “Not yet. Still haven’t been granted access. That’s a tough place.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  * * *

  It was only midmorning by the time Jarrah and I went our separate ways. It dawned on me that I had been letting my regular work obligations slide for the last couple of days. I didn’t have any current projects in progress, but there was always plenty of prep work to do. That was the thing about owning one’s own business: the demands never stopped, no matter that my uncle had been poisoned and I had criminals to catch and a masterpiece to save.

  I checked my pocket agenda, following the lines and arrows to figure out what I was supposed to be doing this week in my professional life. As Mary pointed out to me ad nauseam, normal business people maintain devices like BlackBerries or iPhones so they don’t have to try to read through erasures and scratched-out appointments. But in this regard I take after my Uncle Anton, if not quite as bad as he: Anton is such a technophobe that he won’t even leave a message on voicemail, much less install a machine of his own.

  I called Mary and asked her to drop the new sample boards off with our client on Lyon Street; and to run the “ideas portfolio” over to a Russian restaurateur out in the Richmond; and finally to pick up the supplies I ordered from the San Francisco Gravel Company for a mural project that required traditional fresco: painting with dry pigments onto wet plaster walls.

  While in North Beach, I figured I might as well take the newly painted rusty-railing sample over to the strip club off Broadway.

  “Are you Fred?” I asked the big man standing outside the main doors, smoking. He looked about eight and a half months pregnant in his pale blue embroidered guayabera. An intricate tattoo ran up his bicep, disappeared under the shirt, and reappeared on his bulky neck. “I’m Annie Kincaid, the painter.”

  “Oh, right. You just called? That was fast.”

  “I was in the neighborhood. Here’s the sample,” I said as I handed it to him and brought out my measuring tape and camera. I took measurements of the short span and snapped a few digital photos. This was the sort of simple, quick job that would take Mary and me all of an afternoon to complete. I gave Fred a verbal quote for the work.

  “Sounds fair,” he said. “Management just wants it done fast. Come on into my office and I’ll give you a deposit.”

  I loved it when people didn’t want to bother with opposing bids.

  Though it was only nine-thirty, inside the venue it could have been three in the morning: it was dark, the bass thumped, and the lights pulsed. I was surprised to see a woman dancing on the stage this early, and customers already hunkered down low o
ver their drinks.

  The girlie show put me in mind of what Norm had mentioned about the strange event with the “hoes” at the Fleming Mansion.

  “This might seem like an odd question,” I asked Fred as he handed me a check with my required fifty percent deposit, “but you wouldn’t happen to know of any juicy gossip with regards to the F-U, up on Nob Hill?”

  “Sure,” he said with an unpleasant grin. “Some of the girls go up there from time to time.”

  “What sorts of things do they do?”

  His pale eyes drifted over me as though assessing whether I could pass stripper muster.

  “You ever hear of any strange parties, that sort of thing?” I asked.

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Carton of Marlboros.”

  “Deal.” I was getting off cheap—I thought he was going to ask me to paint the railing for free. “I’ll bring them by when I do the railing.”

  “Sure, they put out a call for girls every once in a while. Some weird shit up there.”

  “Weird?”

  “Sometimes all they do is pose ’n’ shit. Like it’s some sort of living painting, costumes ’n’ shit. Half those guys prolly can’t even get it up anymore.”

  * * *

  On my way out of North Beach I drove down Green Street. Not long ago I found out that my scalawag of a grandfather had been maintaining a pied-à-terre in a two-story stucco building on this street, not two blocks from Columbus. I love Oakland, but I would give my eyeteeth to live in a place like this, right in the heart of one of my favorite neighborhoods in San Francisco. I hadn’t yet managed to get a key, but Michael, of course, doesn’t let little things like keys stand in his way. He once took me there, pretending it was his place.

  Since then, whenever I happened to be in the neighborhood, I drove by. No reason. Except that I was morbidly fascinated by the fact that Michael wouldn’t tell me where he lived. He and my grandfather both swore he was no longer staying in Georges’s apartment, but since I didn’t know where else he was...

  A tall dark-haired man was standing outside the building, laughing and looking down into the face of a very beautiful woman with shiny, thick honey-blond hair that fell halfway down her back. I rolled forward, not believing what I was seeing.

  Michael?

  14

  Dearest Georges, Greatest Forger in the World: I want to be famous like you! What advice can you offer me?

  —Yearning to be like Georges LeFleur

  Dear Yearning: Give up. True fame comes only to those who do not seek it. But keep painting...always, always paint!

  —Georges LeFleur, “Craquelure”

  Michael never laughed like that! Michael laughed in a cynical “I’m so much cooler than you’ll ever be” kind of way. He was looking at this woman like...like he cared about her.

  My stomach dropped. I stomped on the brakes and gaped.

  Even though I turned the man down as frequently as twice a day, I was the one he was supposed to be sexually harassing. Who was this woman?

  She was gorgeous, of course. Only a couple of inches shorter than Michael, with legs up to here and breasts out to there. No belly. Boyish hips. The face of a Madonna/whore, no doubt depending upon the circumstances.

  They looked magnificent together: two demi-gods amongst the earthly gremlins.

  I glanced down at the too-big African mudprint caftan I was wearing, thought of my wild hair and lack of makeup, and felt like something that had crawled out from under a rock.

  Michael’s face was split by a huge grin at something the woman said, and then he scooped her up in a big bear hug and twirled her around. My heart, already turning green, sank to my toes.

  Suddenly Michael glanced up at the truck, and at me. Without missing a beat he put his hand on the woman’s shoulder and escorted her quickly in through the front door, closing it firmly behind them both.

  He had seen me, clear as day, and yet he turned and walked away. With a beautiful woman. Laughing.

  I let the truck idle in the middle of the street for a minute, weighing my options. I could bang on the door and ring the doorbell, but given that Michael had just ducked into the apartment when he spotted me, I doubted it would do much good. I could call him and leave a threatening message. So far that tactic hadn’t gotten me as far as I would have liked, either.

  I could wait until he left and somehow pick the lock—or more likely, hire someone to break in there for me... Mary had an ex-boyfriend who was a locksmith—and ransack the apartment under the guise of looking for the F-U’s stolen paintings. Maybe the unrepentant thief had them after all. Annette Crawford suspected him, as did Frank, so why was I so certain that he couldn’t have them? And if I happened to snoop a little in bureau drawers looking for women’s underwear or an extra toothbrush while I was in there, well, that would be part of the search for art.

  Or I could be a grown-up about this whole thing, acknowledge that the man had a private life, and leave it at that. Respect his privacy.

  Jeez, I hated being reasonable sometimes.

  Fine. I blew out a deep breath. Best channel this energy into something useful, like trying to find stolen paintings.

  The Fleming Mansion wasn’t far. I wanted to get in and take a look at the room Elijah Odibajian had been found in. I had the XRF spectrometer Brianna had lent to me; I could check out whatever remained of the wallpaper, see if it contained arsenic, and get the information to Annette Crawford. That would be useful. And maybe I would stumble upon a secret cache of paintings the Fleming-Union brethren claimed were stolen.

  Of course, the intractable blond guy wouldn’t let me in, for sure, but they had to have another parking attendant/security guard from time to time, right? Blond guy couldn’t be there every day, could he?

  I was right: there was another security guard on duty today. This one was a fortyish, buff, Latino guy. Unfortunately, he was Alert and On the Job and knew all about little old me. There was even a grainy photo of me tacked up on the small bulletin board, no doubt taken by a hidden camera at the front door when I was insisting upon testing the Backflow Prevention Device. I did not look my best.

  Unfortunately, I think I looked even worse today.

  As I stood arguing with the stoic and unrelenting guard, the parking lot’s ornate iron gates swung slowly open to allow entrance to a shiny red Aston Martin convertible.

  Driving it was the man who had originally hired me for the attic wallpaper job, Geoffrey McAdams. And in the passenger seat was Destiny-the-maid.

  McAdams left the car idling in the middle of the entrance. Before climbing out of the car he leaned over and said something to Destiny, who nodded and stared straight ahead.

  “Annie Kincaid,” he said as he oozed over to me and held out his hand to shake. His eyes flickered over my outfit, and once again I realized I wasn’t making the best impression. McAdams reeked of old money and entitlement, and had a way of talking that was simultaneously all politeness yet made you feel like you were the tiniest pawn in his chess game of life. “What a surprise. How are you?”

  “Hello Geoffrey.” I nodded and shook his hand.

  “Listen, Annie, did the police ever get a chance to speak with you further? There have been a few developments we all need to figure out.”

  “They’ve called, yes,” I evaded. “A few times.”

  “This is a terrible affair, all of it. Very distressing to us all.”

  I nodded, but my eyes met Destiny’s gaze.

  “Hi Destiny,” I said, ducking my head toward the passenger’s side window. “How are you?”

  “She’s a little shaken up, but just fine,” said Geoffrey, stepping in between us. “She insisted on coming back to work today, didn’t you, Ms. Baker?”

  Destiny Baker just nodded, remained mute, and looked away.

  “Speaking of working,” I said to Geoffrey, “I was wondering when I could get back to the attic job. No time like the present, I
always say.”

  “The brethren agree that the project shall be put on hold for the near future.”

  Oh really? Except for having it done by a fellow named Mauricio...

  “We have a contract,” I reminded him, wondering how far he would take this.

  “I assure you the terms of the contract will be fulfilled.” He took a billfold and pen from the pocket of his costly double-breasted suit. “I have my checkbook with me now; would you like me to pay you for your services immediately?”

  I must be doing something right, I thought. First I was hired on a no-results-necessary basis, and now people were paying me not to work.

  I cleared my throat and glanced back at the mansion. The security guard was watching with avid fascination.

  “Fifty percent is fair upon postponement of the project,” I said. “If it’s a cancellation, I’ll have to ask for the full amount. I don’t have the paperwork with me—”

  “I happen to have the contract right here,” he said, leaning in to the open window of his car to extract a sleek black leather briefcase. He took out the contract, handed it over, wrote out a check, and held it out to me. It was made out for the full amount of the original bid.

  “It was lovely seeing you, as always,” Geoffrey said as he moved back to stand next to the driver’s side door and met my eyes over the roof of the car. “Now, please go away, and don’t come back.”

  The frozen blue of his gaze chilled me to the core.

  We stared at each other for a long moment. Overlong. I blinked first.

  Destiny continued to stare straight ahead as Geoffrey McAdams climbed back into the driver’s seat. How in the world did someone as sweet as Wesley Fleming hang out with these guys, ancestral home or no? More importantly, why? I watched as the gate slowly cranked closed behind the gleaming, vintage machine, which glided into the parking lot and came to a stop right next to the rear door of the Fleming Mansion.

  The very door through which women and servants entered and exited, right alongside the groceries. And the trash.