Arsenic and Old Paint

by Hailey Lind

  “I can’t talk to the police again! You promised you’d help me! Hide me!”

  “You don’t have any idea who did this?”

  “The brethren! Duh!”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  “It doesn’t matter! They take care of their own problems!”

  I made a decision, for better or worse.

  “Bryan, will you take her out of here?”

  He looked almost as though he was going to balk, but then hustled her down the alley. Mary and Wesley followed.

  * * *

  “I haven’t been in this place for years,” Inspector Annette Crawford said, her perceptive gaze sweeping over our surroundings. We were sitting in the “private” booth where I had tried to interrogate Destiny not so long ago.

  “You’ve been to the Power Play before?” I asked.

  “I used to work Vice, remember?”

  “Oh, right. Lots of problems here?”

  “Very few, actually. In general this group is quite law-abiding, just want to be left alone to pursue their lifestyle, as they say. They have security on staff, safe words, lots of oversight, no alcohol...all night spots should be so sane. I imagine as a woman alone you’d be safer here than at your average bar.”

  I thought of the ducklings, who had been eager and interested but not aggressive, and decided she was probably right.

  “Just like you came here tonight, all alone, right?” Annette’s tone was casual, but her dark eyes had me in their tractor beam.

  “I...uh...”

  “Before you go too far with lying to the police you might remember that they keep records at the front desk. No lone women came in tonight. They would remember. In fact, Mr. Happy over there remembers you quite well, says you were with a ‘buff black man’ and another couple.”

  “I can explain—”

  “I’m sure you can. I’m waiting. I’m tired of half truths, Annie. I want to know everything you know, and I want to know yesterday.”

  “Should I call my lawyer?”

  “Have you broken any laws?”

  I thought about that one for a long moment.

  “I don’t think so...but I think I might need a lawyer, just in case.”

  Annette stared at me for a long moment. “Talk to me, Annie. I’ll stop you if you’re about to incriminate yourself.”

  I told her that Kyle Jones had worked at the Fleming-Union, and what Destiny had told me. I didn’t mention that Destiny had been here not long ago and that I had a friend spirit her away...so I guessed I really had broken the law. Sometimes it was hard for me to remember.

  “So Destiny used to be part of these bacchanalian festivals at the Fleming-Union, and now she continues to help set them up and provide the girls,” Annette summarized.

  “That’s what she said.”

  “At least the F-U is offering her a certain amount of job security. Kind of makes a person feel warm and fuzzy inside.”

  Annette’s humor was so dry it was sometimes hard to tell whether she was kidding.

  “Yeah. A lot about the F-U made me feel that way.”

  “And you have no idea where Destiny is at the moment?”

  “None at all,” I said. That was the truth. Pretty much.

  “So you’re thinking, what? That one of these parties got out of hand and Elijah ended up dead in a tub like a painting?”

  “No. I think he died of arsenic poisoning.”

  She shook her head. “According to his brother and friends, Elijah Odibajian had been ill for some time.”

  “He may have been. But I think Balthazar put him in that room, number two-twelve, on purpose. I think the wallpaper was very old, and full of an arsenic-based pigment that reacts with mold and mildew.”

  “You’re losing me.” Annette frowned.

  “Old wallpaper manufacturers—even the famous William Morris—sometimes used forms of arsenic green as a pigment, as did painters in the old days. But damp plaster and water leaks can create mildew, which reacts with the arsenic, causing arsine gas. Whole families died from the effects.”

  “Gas like what we found in your uncle’s studio?”

  “No, this would have been much more subtle than that, building up over time. But Destiny said Elijah was made to stay in his room, and he was essentially a prisoner there for months.”

  “These are some pretty serious allegations,” Annette said. “And virtually impossible to prove.”

  “The Fleming Mansion’s leaky roof was deliberately hosed down from time to time. How strange is that? And now they’ve fired me, and hired some guy who doesn’t know anything to take all the paper down, to get rid of the evidence.”

  “Why did they hire you in the first place?”

  “I’m not sure. I think I was being set up as a fall-guy for something, maybe the theft of the Gauguin, something like that?”

  Annette had her blank cop face on, but I could tell she was skeptical.

  “Listen, just have Elijah Odibajian’s body tested for arsenic poisoning. Apparently it’s very easy to detect. I think he was poisoned, and then arranged postmortem to look like a painting.”

  “Why would someone take the trouble to make him look like that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You’re still not off the hook with the whole stolen-paintings scandal,” Annette admonished. “Tell me about that.”

  “Sam, Evangeline, and I were working up in the attic. I swear to you, I didn’t even know there was a Fleming-Union art collection. I still don’t know where it is, or was. I think they’re trying to pin it on me, or at least insinuate that I was involved to discredit me...or something.”

  Annette seemed to be mulling this over.

  “From what I understand,” I added, “the paintings weren’t even particularly valuable. Frank said the club didn’t report their loss to the FBI.”

  “That’s true. It made me a bit skeptical, as well. Still and all, I need to chat with your business partner. He is one of the few with the requisite knowledge to overcome the security system.”

  “Besides the F-U members who had the code,” I pointed out.

  “Yes, besides them. But they were all in the woods when the theft occurred.”

  “Alleged theft.”

  Annette gave me a half smile. “Alleged theft. Anyway, I haven’t been able to track Michael Johnson down, though I did receive a call from your handler at the FBI.”

  Michael and I had a handler. Like we were rare white tigers. That cracked me up. I think I was getting a little punchy.

  “Okay, let’s get you on back to the station, and you can call your lawyer.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I appreciate the information you’ve given me, Annie, but there are some serious holes in your story, especially concerning the friends you came in with tonight. I just want to make sure we have everything we need from you before I lose track of you again. It really bothers me when you don’t answer your phone.”

  A mere two hours later Destiny was headed for a safe house; Bryan, Mary, and Wesley were off the hook; Elijah’s body was being tested for arsenic poisoning; I had spilled everything I knew about everything; Elena told me she’d send me a hefty bill...and I was royally pissed off.

  * * *

  “Do you have any idea what time it is?” Mary asked over the phone.

  “It’s a little after one in the morning. You weren’t asleep, were you?”

  “Nah. You know me, never go to bed before dawn unless your mean boss makes you get up early.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  “So a visit to a sex club and a dead guy in an alley aren’t enough for one night? You want me to crawl through tunnels with you? Right now?”

  “Alleged tunnels. They might not actually exist, or we might not find them even if they do. Do you think you could get your locksmith boyfriend to join us?”

  “Ex-boyfriend.”

  “Do you think he’d be game? We may have to do a little breakin
g and entering.”

  “Sounding better all the time. I can’t think of the last time anyone’s asked me to crawl through creepy old sewage tunnels.”

  We met a block from Cameron House, and walked toward the building together. The neighborhood was quiet at this hour, the buildings dark. I noted alarm service stickers in the street-level windows, but one thing I had learned from hanging around thieves like Michael was that if you were fast enough, alarms didn’t much matter. In many cases, success had more to do with speed than finesse.

  Mary’s locksmith ex-boyfriend made short work of the basement door lock. He showed Mary how to jimmy it, then closed it up again. In the process they set off the alarm. That was no problem—I would have done it on purpose anyway. We hunkered down, observing the response time. From our hiding place behind a large ripe-smelling Dumpster, we could hear the phone ringing inside. It took the security guard a full four minutes before he made his way to the basement. Another nine until a black-and-white pulled up. A cop climbed out and spoke with the security guard, made a cursory inspection of the basement room, then left.

  Once the security guard was settled back at his post on the main floor, Mary jimmied the basement door and set the alarm off again. Same procedure, but this time with a lot of grumbling about a faulty alarm system. It took the cops longer to arrive this time, for a total of seventeen minutes. The security guard was visibly irritated.

  Perfect.

  Committing felonies always made me think of Michael. Who was that woman he was with? Push it to the back of your mind, Annie, I told myself. Now was the time for breaking and entering, not romance.

  “Here’s the deal,” I told Mary after her ex-boyfriend went home, leaving her with a small kit of locksmith tools. “We’ll need to dash through the basement, over to a little cubby, then climb on something to get in the tunnel. Then we’re all set. If the guard even bothers to come downstairs, we should be long gone.”

  “Then what? Do we know where the tunnels lead?”

  “We don’t. Not really. We might have to make our way out the way we go in, but again, I’m thinking the guard’s already decided it’s a faulty system. The alarm company’s gonna have some ’splainin’ to do.”

  “What?”

  “ ’Splainin’. You know, ‘Luu-cy, you’ve got some ’splainin’ to do.’ ”

  Still nothing.

  “From I Love Lucy. It’s a classic.”

  “Before my time.”

  “It was before my time, too, but surely you’ve seen reruns?”

  “Not really. I’ve seen reruns of Three’s Company, though. It always makes me think of you, me, and Pete. One blonde, one brunette, one guy who’s, ya know, gay but not really.”

  “All right, to each their own. Well, here we go. Carpe diem. Seize the day.”

  “Carpe noctem, more like.”

  I looked at her, eyebrows raised in question. “Seize the night?”

  “Bingo.”

  “I always forget you know Latin.” That reminded me... I pulled Wesley’s card out of my pocket. “Can you translate this?”

  She took the card and I watched her lips moving as she read it to herself. “It’s kinda weird...something about revenge and cold food?”

  “ ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’?” I asked.

  “That sounds about right.” She turned the card over. “This is Wesley’s card?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s a weird saying to have on your card, isn’t it?”

  I nodded again.

  Mary opened the back door for us. No alarm went off this time. Maybe they turned it off, assuming it was malfunctioning. We snuck across the basement floor. I had a backpack, and for once in my life I had come prepared: flashlights for Mary and me, extra batteries, and an emergency backup flashlight just in case. Travel-sized hairspray, one for each. A box cutter, a small crowbar, a screwdriver set.

  The alarm screamed.

  I opened the cupboard door, pulled open a stepladder conveniently placed there, knocked paper towels out of the way, and scrambled up.

  Mary stacked the paper towels neatly so no one would notice, and pushed me up by my butt.

  This was not going to work. I’m no waif. There was no way I was going to make it through that opening, and if I couldn’t, Mary couldn’t. I looked at my watch. It had been two minutes.

  “Let’s try the closet.” We moved the equipment onto the floor as quietly as possible, and I felt the wallboard. Depending on its thickness, this stuff was akin to sturdy Styrofoam. Easy enough to bash through. I even came prepared with a box cutter in my bag of tricks, but as I got really close to the wallboard, I noticed tiny hinges. I pressed the other side of the wallboard, and it swung open. A hidden door.

  I shone my high-powered flashlight into the pitch-black rectangle. Then I crawled in.

  This was a tunnel, sure, but it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind: a rather romantic arched tunnel like the ample sewers of Paris, which made you think of the Paris Resistance movement, or lovers sneaking out for trysts. This was more like a tight, cement-and-stone animal burrow. We could pass, but only on our hands and knees.

  I hadn’t thought to bring knee pads and gloves. Rough cement shards, dirt, and gravel pressed into our palms and knees as we crawled. Even more fun were occasional bits of wire and scrap metal...and cockroaches.

  “You okay, Mare?” I asked.

  “Yup. Just keep going, ’cause there’s no backing out of here.”

  It got much cooler the farther we crawled, dank and chill. After an eternity the tiny tube we were in opened onto a much larger space. About five feet tall by three feet wide, we still had to hunch over to walk, but at least we were on our feet. This looked like the old sewer Will Chan had talked about. There was a gutter in the center, and what was known as rat rails on the sides to walk along. The arched brick roof showed the skill of a bygone era. Other than a little murky water in the gutter, the sewer didn’t seem to be used for anything anymore. It didn’t even stink.

  “Let’s stop a second and try to figure out where we are,” said Mary. “And where we’re going.”

  “How are we going to do that, exactly?”

  “Camp Good News survival training. They used to tell us that out in the woods, God will help you find your way back. Him and a compass and map, of course.”

  Mary started rooting through the equipment in my backpack. She looked at the compass, approximated the distance we had traveled, then consulted the map of the city, and came up with a possible location.

  We continued on. My back was starting to ache from being hunched over for so long, and the creepiness of the damp, enclosed space was starting to give me the willies. I tried to distract myself by thinking of the evening’s annoying police interrogation, and how Anton was doing, and why Jarrah Preston was giving up on finding the real Gauguin.

  “You know, I was thinking,” Mary said. “Down here, there’s no one to hear you if you scream.”

  “Don’t think, Mare, just navigate.”

  “Didja ever take that vampire tour of Nob Hill?” Mary asked.

  “Uh...no.”

  We walked a few more yards in silence.

  Great. Now I was thinking about vampires. Almost never did I think about the undead, and I certainly never gave them credence. But now that I was wandering down deep in the bowels of San Francisco, in the dark and the muck, they were harder to laugh off.

  Finally, I had to ask: “Why?”

  “It’s just that...well...the guide said the vampires nested in the tunnels under Nob Hill.”

  “You’re saying vampires live down here?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Wait. Isn’t this the woman who insists she’s a hundred-twenty-seven years old?”

  “I think so.”

  “Does she look a hundred-twenty-seven years old to you?”

  “Not really. I’d say thirty-fivish.”

  “Mary, you ever hear that phrase, consider the so
urce?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’m thinking vampires aren’t the worst of our problems,” I said, my flashlight picking out yet another fork in the tunnels ahead. I was getting the willies. What if we never found our way back out? “For instance, do we have any idea where we are?”

  I waited while Mary hunkered down with the map again, moving her flashlight beam back and forth between the map and the compass.

  “I’m pretty sure we’re under Nob Hill now,” Mary said as she stood and looked around. “We’ve been moving pretty steadily uphill, and I’ve been counting steps. I think if we take the tunnel to the right, we might actually wind up under the Fleming Mansion.”

  The opening to the right led to an unlocked iron gate, and beyond that it opened onto an ample nine-feet-wide, eight-feet-tall arched tunnel. We stood up and stretched.

  “This is really wild,” Mary said. “I love hanging out with you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I mean, a sex club, a murder, and underground tunnels, all in one night... Setting up a biker bar in Thailand was like a walk in the park. Hey—” She shone her flashlight on a section of the wall. “Check this out.”

  Scratched into the stone wall, as though by use of another rock, were Chinese characters. Their white lines were faint and chalky, but they were easy to make out.

  “Chinese graffiti?” Mary asked.

  “Looks like,” I said, extracting my digital camera and snapping photos of the symbols.

  We moved ahead, Mary taking the lead.

  “Eeeee!” she screamed, dropping her flashlight into the water in the central gutter where it flickered briefly, then extinguished.

  17

  To view a great painting is to see something that has been loved; no artist can create a work of art without falling in love with every centimeter, every inch, every foot. Therefore a great artist must be a great lover.

  —Georges LeFleur, “Craquelure”

  “What? What?” I yelled.

  “A rat! A rat! Eee! Another one!”

  Mary was moving backward at a rapid clip, and I was scrambling so as not to be trampled. “Wait, Mare!”

  She brought out the Lady Clairol and sprayed for all she was worth. Sounds of squeals and scurrying echoed off the tunnel walls. After a few moments, there was silence. I passed my flashlight beam all around.