Feint of Art: (31 page)

I tossed his business card onto the pile of flotsam behind my seat. Although it seemed kind of premature to worry about retirement when I barely had a functioning business, who knew? Maybe I’d find those drawings, maybe I’d win the lottery, maybe a long-lost relative would turn toes up and leave me stinking rich, and I’d actually end up having some money to invest.

Swinging into the building’s parking lot, I was pleased to see Frank’s Jaguar in its usual spot. I sashayed to his office and pushed open the door.

“Morning, Frank,” I crooned. “I’ll need you to sign off on some insurance forms. Will you be around later?”

Frank’s eyes swept over me and he stared for a long moment, not speaking. The Plan was In Play.

“Uh, sure. Be happy to.”

For some reason Frank seemed nervous. “Thank you so much. See you later, then?”

“Um, yeah.”

And with that the masked faux finisher was off. It wasn’t an invitation to the gala, but the wheels were in motion.

I climbed the stairs, fought for a moment with the sticky outer door, and clacked down the hall to my studio, opening the damaged door to find the place dark and silent. A wave of nostalgia washed over me. I missed my old life. I missed Pete’s happy demeanor over espresso first thing in the morning. I missed seeing him blush at Mary’s jokes. I missed the way things used to be before some idiot came and trashed my studio.

The euphoria of yesterday’s progress ebbed with the realization of all that remained to be done. I’d forgotten that I needed to move the furniture back inside, and I could hardly do that in my girlie clothes. I needed to replace some supplies. I needed to harass my insurance agent.

I needed to kick somebody’s ass.

“Knock, knock,” came a voice from the doorway, and in walked Pedro, loaded down with black canvas bags, presumably his computer equipment. “Not bad,” he said, looking around. “I’ve seen worse after some of our parties.”

“Yeah, but we didn’t get invited to this one.” I gave him a hug.

“Wow, look at you,” he said, holding me at arm’s length. “You got a hot date? You smell good, too.”

“Thanks, sweetie. Maybe I got dressed up for you,” I teased. “Ever think of that?”

“Naw, Elena would kill you. Besides, you know I love you just as you are.”

I started getting misty. Man, I really was a basket case. “Thanks for coming, Pedro. You’re a lifesaver.”

Pedro stretched his arms out in front of him and wiggled his fingers. “Just leave it to the maestro, kiddo,” he said, sitting down at the computer and switching on the CPU. “Oh, you know that e-mail you asked me about? Piece of cake. The sender didn’t encode or anything. It was sent from a hotel up in St. Helena. The Gray Goose. Here, I wrote it down. And I wrote down that Ernst guy’s address, too.”

He handed me a folded piece of yellow legal paper. So Harlan Coombs had been in Napa at the same time Michael and I were there? Quite a coincidence.

“And that Quiana chick?” Pedro continued as his fingers flashed across the keyboard. “Last name’s Nash. Doesn’t really go with ‘Quiana,’ does it? She does the occasional bikini photo shoot, strictly small-time catalogue stuff. Gets mentioned a lot in the papers, so maybe she’s a debutante. There’s money somewhere, ’cause she’s got a place in Mendocino and drives a Lexus. Easy on the eyes, I’ll give her that.”

He handed me a photo he’d downloaded from the Internet. Those feline eyes were hard to forget. I remembered Joanne lying among blood-soaked, forged drawings. I wondered whether Quiana had been involved with Joanne’s death but then dismissed the thought. They were sisters, after all. But how exactly was Quiana linked to Harlan?

That thought reminded me that I still hadn’t heard from Inspector Crawford about the phone numbers I’d asked her to trace. I tried calling her office and was informed that she was out, presumably pursuing bad guys—hopefully no one I knew. I settled for leaving a message insinuating that I had some information about the upcoming Brock unveiling.

Pedro informed me that the computer was history but he could retrieve the data. I watched, fascinated, as he took a screwdriver, opened the outer shell, and unscrewed something he said was the hard drive, a revelation to me, since I hadn’t realized that a hard drive was an actual
thing
that could be removed and reattached elsewhere. I thought computer stuff existed in a theoretical cyberspace.

And that reminded me to call my insurance agent, who also seemed to exist only in the theoretical sense. He was remarkably more helpful today. It probably cheered him up to inform me that my policy had a substantial deductible.

At about eleven Mary trudged in, dressed in faded jeans and a torn concert T-shirt touting a group called Three Boring Ladies and One Pompous Ass. Unkempt and half asleep, she still looked cute. I stifled the urge to ask her whether or not she had slept last night, reminding myself that I was not her mother, and we set off to pick up Pete from the hospital, leaving Pedro to continue working his magic.

“Do you mind if we make a quick stop?” I asked as we headed across town. I wanted to scope out Ernst’s place, and there was plenty of time before Pete was scheduled to be released.

“We’re not going back to that Chinatown place, are we?” Mary asked. “ ’Cause you’re not gonna be able to run in those shoes.”

“No—it’s not that place. And,” I added hopefully, “there won’t be any running involved. I learned yesterday that an old friend of mine from the Brock—Ernst Pettigrew—was found dead. The cops say it was suicide, but I don’t believe it. I don’t know what I’m looking for, I just want to go by his place in the Marina District. It’s not far from the hospital.”

It was in fact quite a ways from the hospital, but for a bike rider like Mary, distance was relative.

Twenty minutes later, we pulled up in front of Ernst’s condo, in a white stucco fourplex with a beautiful view of the bay and easy access to what passed for a beach in this part of the City. The building’s entry, which was filled with lush exotic plants and a tasteful koi pond, had two doors leading to the first-floor units, and a stairway leading to the upstairs units, both of which were fronted by balconies. Access from the street was cut off by the kind of barred security gate that always reminded me of a prison.

I double-parked, flicked on the emergency blinkers, and we climbed out, peering through the bars into the courtyard. Since units A and B were visible on the ground floor, I was betting Ernst’s condo, C, was upstairs.

Mary pressed the doorbell next to PETTIGREW on the entry panel.

“He’s not home, Mary,” I said impatiently. “Remember? He’s dead.”

“So maybe someone else is home.”

“Yeah, well, the last time that happened things didn’t turn out so well. I can’t run in these shoes, you said so yourself.”

“So why are we here?”

She had me there.

“You know, I’ll bet we could climb up to that balcony,” Mary mused.

“Are you insane?” I said.

“
You’re
the one who drove clear ’cross town to stand in front of a dead guy’s condo,” Mary pointed out with a shrug.

She was right. Ernst was dead, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. “I’m sorry, Mare,” I said. “I just don’t know what’s going on.”

“I’m starved. How about we grab some food and sit on the beach for a few?” Mary suggested, throwing a long arm around my shoulders and turning me away from Ernst’s place. “That way we can live up to the world’s stereotype of Californians having picnics by the ocean in February.”

When in Doubt, Eat
was a motto that had served generations of Kincaids and LeFleurs well, so who was I to argue? I moved the truck into a newly vacated space near the corner, then we grabbed sandwiches and sodas from the Safeway, crossed the boulevard, and sat on a faded wooden bench at Marina Green Park, the Golden Gate Bridge to our left and Alcatraz off to our right.

“It blows that your friend died,” Mary said, her voice soft.

Mouth full, I nodded. It did indeed blow. It was hard to avoid the thought that I was somehow connected to his death. His and Dupont’s and Joanne’s. And I didn’t know how. There was something missing, but I didn’t know what.

“Hey, s’up? Spare change?”

A skinny, sandy-haired adolescent approached, wearing an oversized Oakland Warriors sweatshirt and torn jeans so low on his hips that we were invited to inspect his red boxer shorts.

“Go away, kid,” Mary said curtly. “How come you’re not in school?”

“School sucks.”

“So does your vocabulary,” Mary replied. “Scram.”

“Give me some green and I go away.”

“Go away or I kick your butt,” Mary said flatly. When she’d first arrived in San Francisco, penniless and jobless, Mary had lived on the streets for a few weeks. The experience had left its mark.

“Okay, okay. Chill,” the little delinquent said, holding up his hands but standing his ground. “How ’bout if I tell you something, you give me some money. Straight trippin’.”

I had to give him points for persistence.

“Maybe. If it’s good.” Mary took a swig of her soda, her eyes never leaving the kid.

“They found a dead body over there yesterday,” he said, pointing to the beach.

I looked at my pastrami-on-rye distastefully. Talk of corpses just killed my appetite.

“Sick,” Mary said, taking a big bite of her marinated tofu on whole wheat.

“Yup. They said he prob’ly jumped off the Bay Bridge and drifted this way with the current. Trippin’. All white and bloated and shit.”

“That’s
really
gross,” Mary said. She took another bite.

“Then this crazy bitch? She comes runnin’ from over there”—the kid pointed at Ernst’s condominium—“says she knows the homey, and starts looking through his pockets.”

“No way,” Mary interjected.

“Straight up,” the kid insisted. “The cops had to drag her off, said she had to come to the station for his belongings and shit if she was a relative. That was one weird chick. I mean, the dude was covered in flies and . . .”

I tuned him out. Was that Ernst he was talking about? My heart started pounding, and my lunch sat like a lump in my stomach.

“Well, it’s been great chatting,” I said, wrapping up my mostly uneaten sandwich. “But we have to run.”

“What about my money?”

I pulled a crumpled dollar out of my purse and handed it to him.

“That’s it?” he sneered.

“See ya, kid,” Mary said menacingly, and he wandered down the beach, probably on the prowl for tourists to harass. I tossed the remnants of my lunch in the nearest trash can, and we hurried back to the truck.

“Whaddaya make of that?” Mary asked as we belted ourselves in. “Do you think he was talking about your friend?”

“It seems like it,” I conceded. “San Francisco isn’t the Barbary Coast anymore—it’s not like bodies are fished out of the bay every day.”

But if it was Ernst,
I thought to myself,
then who had been looking through his pockets, and why? How long had he been dead?
The kid said the body was white and bloated and crawling with flies . . . My artistic imagination generated a visual, and I fought to push it aside.

“So, listen, about Pete,” Mary said, and I was glad to be distracted. As we drove to the hospital we worked out the Pete-sitting arrangements. The doctor had said Pete would be back on his feet in a few days. Until then Mary would stay with him, and I would spell her in the evening if she had a gig.

Pete was delighted to see us. A little high from the painkillers, he insisted on lustily singing Bosnian folk songs all the way home. What he lacked in vocal skill he made up for in volume, a musical style that Mary could appreciate. Although to my certain knowledge she did not speak Bosnian, the two of them sang several rousing choruses of something that sounded like “Bucket Me Want Cracker Die.”

It was a
long
trip.

After Mary and I maneuvered Pete up to his apartment, I ran to the grocery store for food and to the pharmacy for his medications. When we left an hour later, he was happily settled in with painkillers, videos, and lots of food and drink.

After a couple of hours of paperwork back at the studio, I ran the samples over to Linda’s office on Polk Street—saving that business contact was paramount—then took the harlequin and woodgrain sample boards to Irene Foster’s house in the Richmond District. Cross those two items off my To Do list.

Driving back to the studio, I tried to keep my mind off of Ernst’s death by thinking about Grandfather’s phone call. It was now late Wednesday afternoon and I had a million things to do before Saturday, including wangling the invitation to the Brock gala. It was madness to think I could fit in a trip to Chicago. I didn’t have the time, and I definitely didn’t have the money.

I pulled into the studio parking lot at five thirty. Frank was just getting into his Jaguar but stopped when he saw me, and waited as I climbed out of the truck.

“Is that for my benefit?” he said without preamble.

“Is what for your benefit?” I asked, mincing toward him.

He made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “The getup.”

“It’s not a ‘getup,’ Frank,” I said, striking a subtle pose. “For your information, sometimes I dress for messy work, and sometimes I dress for clean work.”

“Hmm,” he responded ambiguously.

“What does ‘hmm’ mean?”

“What do you think?”

What the hell,
I thought,
go for broke.
“I think it means you’ll take me to the Brock gala on Saturday.”

“I knew it was for my benefit,” he said with an enigmatic smile. “Keep it up. I like it.”

And with that he eased into his shiny car and took off.

“ ‘Keep it up, I like it,’ ” I mimicked as I climbed the stairs. That did it. The warm feelings prompted by Frank’s heroics the other day were gone. He was officially back in the scumbag category.