Shooting Gallery (6 page)

“I wouldn't say you're an ogre, exactly,” I continued as we crossed the parking lot. “But you have to admit that you have occasional flashes of unexplained grouchiness.”

“My alleged grouchiness is most often attributable to certain unreasonable tenants,” he said as he held up my key ring and shook it so it jingled.

“How did you . . . ?”

Frank raised an eyebrow. “You think you're the only one with skills?”

“Why, Frank,” I purred, snatching the key ring and unlocking my truck. “I had no idea you were so talented.”

“My dear Annie,” he replied, closing the door as I started the engine. “You
still
have no idea.”

 

“The single most important thing about stealing art is knowing where to find the art,” Frank lectured the next morning as I followed him up the stairs to my studio, stifling a yawn. “Ergo, it follows that if a thief can't find it, a thief can't steal it. Simple as that.”

I knew from experience that foiling art theft was not that simple, ergo or otherwise, but kept my mouth shut. What Frank didn't know about my past couldn't hurt me.

“Where should we put it?” I asked, unlocking the door and ushering him inside. “Shouldn't you invest in a safe or something?”

“All a safe does is announce, ‘The good stuff's in here!'” he replied jovially. “No, the safest place for this baby is right over there with the rest of the junk.”

The man was positively glowing, I thought as I disarmed the security system with the code he had given me downstairs. Where was the grumpy-pants landlord I knew and loved to provoke?

“You feeling okay, Frank?”

“Just super,” he replied, rummaging around under one of the worktables. “Thanks for asking.”

My spacious art studio took up one corner of the DeBenton Building. The light, bright space included a fifteen-foot beamed ceiling punctuated by three skylights and two ceiling fans, as well as the original wide plank floor and redbrick walls. A bank of tall, double-hung windows along the northern wall let in a soft natural light that was perfect for painting. Near the door was a sitting area where I entertained clients and friends. In a fit of whimsy one rainy afternoon I had painted a faux fireplace on the wall, complete with a cozy roaring fire. In front of the fireplace I had arranged an old Persian rug, a faded velvet couch, two flea market chairs reupholstered with discarded fabric samples and my trusty staple gun, and a wicker trunk that doubled as a coffee table and storage for blankets for the nights I was too tired to drive home safely.

Most of the studio, though, was devoted to my work. Several large easels held paintings in varying stages of completion; a motley collection of garage-sale bookcases were jammed with art reference books, cans of paint, jars of applicators, cartons of brushes, and scary-looking bottles filled with scary-acting noxious chemicals; and along the rear wall were three large worktables, a light box, a steamer, and several heat lamps. Beneath the worktables were covered plastic bins packed with an assortment of faux-finishing tools masquerading as junk: goose feathers gathered from Oakland's Lake Merritt that were perfect for painting the squiggly veins of faux marble; old plastic sheeting for creating a wonderful texture when pressed into wet glaze; and Styrofoam blocks for stamping “bricks” into murals. Wherever I went I kept an eye peeled for odd bits of rubbish that I could use to create new effects.

Frank decided to stash his multimillion-dollar Picasso beneath a pile of Belgian linen canvas tucked behind a large carton full of plaster bunnies. I had acquired the bunnies at an auction two years ago for pennies on the dollar in what I could only describe as a triumph of creative optimism over practical sense. My assistant, Mary, had taken one look at the ugly rodents and informed me that I was no longer allowed to attend auctions.

“Safe and sound,” Frank said as he patted the plaster bunny box. “Just don't spill anything on it.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. Coffee. Paint remover. Sticky buns.”

“Sticky buns?”

“Just by way of example.”

“Tell you what, Frank,” I said. “If you'll install those window locks and let me get to work, I'll keep away from the Picasso when I eat my usual breakfast of coffee, sticky buns, and toxic solvents, okay?”

Frank laughed, picked up his toolbox, and got to work. I watched, impressed, as he efficiently unscrewed the old brass fittings, sanded down and puttied over the screw holes, drilled new holes, and screwed in tamper-proof steel locks. My landlord had never struck me as the type of man to know his way around power tools. Then again, last night he had extracted the keys from my locked truck neatly enough.

Finished with the window locks, Frank reminded me once more to set the alarm whenever I left the studio, and departed just as my friend Pete arrived. The two men nodded coolly, unconsciously puffing out their chests as they passed.

“How do you do, Annie?” asked Pete as he headed for the small kitchen enclosure. “Cuppa Joe to clench your thirst?”

Originally from Bosnia, Pete honed his English by watching soap operas and memorizing his word-a-day calendar, resulting in an impressive, albeit eclectic, grasp of American idioms, history, and culture. But whatever his linguistic quirks, Pete operated my fussy secondhand espresso maker with the skill of a master croupier at a roulette wheel. This was a very good thing because I had a serious caffeine addiction, and the rest of the gang put together could scarcely manage to boil water.

“Espresso, Americano, latte, cappuccino?” he asked.

“Double cappuccino, please.”

Although he was six feet, six inches of rippling muscle, Pete was more teddy bear than grizzly bear, his animosity toward our landlord being a notable exception. Mary claimed it was due to a testosterone-driven territorial fixation and urged Pete to go ahead and pee around the perimeter of the studio. He had found Mary's suggestion bewildering but not altogether out of the question.

While Pete ground aromatic beans and noisily steamed water and milk, I checked my phone messages and my calendar. I needed to update sample books for the interior designers I worked with, finish the holiday displays for a local charity, and follow up on a bid for a “castle in the clouds” mural for a little girl's room in the St. Francis Wood neighborhood. I also needed to see how Bryan was doing. Oh, and find a stolen Chagall.

First, though, I called Janice Hewett to make arrangements to be paid one hundred and fifty dollars an hour to speak with a recalcitrant sculptor. She chattered for several minutes about last night's excitement before giving me the phone number and address of Robert Pascal's studio on Tennessee Street, which was not far from the DeBenton Building. I called the number twice, but there was no answer, not even voice mail. Looked like it was time for a field trip.

“Mornin', Annie,” my twenty-something assistant said as she breezed in and threw herself onto the velvet couch. Mary Grae was a tall, striking blonde who believed that, when it came to clothes and eye makeup, any color other than black was unnecessarily complicated. Today was her day off, but I wasn't surprised to see her. She often took refuge at the studio to escape the crowded apartment she shared with the members of her pseudopunk band.

Close on Mary's heels was Sherri, her best friend since kindergarten. A few years ago the pair had hitchhiked cross-country from a small town in Indiana, where they had outraged their elders by dying their hair, sporting tattoos, and forming truly wretched bands. Mary insisted the only things of value she and Sherri had learned in three years of high school were how to smoke, forge their mothers' signatures, and pee in a cup.

In San Francisco they seemed positively quaint.

“Mornin', Annie,” echoed Sherri, a dark-haired pixie whose high, tobacco-roughened voice sounded like Minnie Mouse on a pack a day.

“Hello, young ladies,” Pete called from the kitchenette. “And how do you do today?”

Mary rolled her eyes at Pete's outmoded gallantry, but the better socialized Sherri returned his greeting and elbowed Mary in the ribs.

“What's up?” I asked, ripping open the mail in the vain hope that I'd won the Publisher's Clearing House sweep-stakes.

“We were just—” Mary's reply was interrupted by the sound of heavy boots clomping down the hallway. Two young men—one tall and baby-faced, the other short and snickering—ducked through the open door. Their black leather jackets, black jeans, and spiky hair clued me in to their friendship with Mary. The bronze art-nouveau Tiffany lamp bases in Babyface's arms clued me in to the purpose of their visit.

“We made a bet that you couldn't tell which was the fake Tiffany and which was the real one,” Mary said, bouncing up from the sofa and staring at me fixedly. “You have ten seconds.”

“
Dude
, no way she can tell in ten seconds,” Snickers said.

I sighed. I didn't pay Mary enough to refuse her the occasional moneymaking favor, and besides, I had spotted the fake the second the boys walked in.

I gestured with my pen. “The one on the right's the reproduction.”

“Dude!”
Snickers punched his friend in the arm. “She didn't even look! Lucky guess!”

“It's not a guess,” I said, taking the heavy bronze lamp bases and turning them over. “See how the
Tiffany Studios New York
stamp is raised on this one? On real Tiffany bronzes of this period the maker's mark is die stamped, which means it's recessed into the metal. The real one also includes the model number. See there?”

Pete arrived with a tray of espresso drinks, doled out napkins, and joined the impromptu lesson on spotting forged Tiffany bronzes.

“Also, note the patina—see how the fake has some chipping along the edges and at the tip of the nose? That's a dead giveaway,” I explained. “Real patinas develop over time as the metal slowly oxidizes, but fake patinas are painted on. If you rubbed acetone—that's just fingernail polish remover—on the fake one, the patina would come right off.”

“But you hardly even looked at them!” Babyface protested in a high, adolescent tenor, and I realized why he was the silent type.

“I didn't need to. Look at the features on the fake: the hands aren't fully modeled and the hair is crudely detailed. Tiffany would have melted down such sloppy work. Now look at the eyes. Most reproductions are made in Asia, so the eyes have an Asian cast.”

I handed the bronzes to Snickers, who kept shaking his head and repeating “Dude” while Babyface dug a crumpled twenty-dollar bill out of his jeans pocket.

“Where did you get those, anyway?” I asked, gathering my things to head over to Pascal's studio. “The real one's worth a lot of money.”

“It's my grandma's,” Babyface squeaked. “She really loves it, so I wanted to get her another one. You know, like a matched set? So I bought one at the Ashby flea market, but Mary said it was probably a fake.” He shook his head in disgust. “I paid fifteen bucks for it, too. Flea market dude said it was hot. He
lied
to me, man.”

I watched silently as the boys clomped out of the studio.

“Mary?”

“Yes, Annie?”

“Let's make it a policy not to deal with those who traffic in stolen goods, shall we?”

“Does that policy include your grandfather?” she sassed, delicately sipping her espresso.

“It
especially
includes my grandfather,” I replied, downing my coffee and setting off to make some easy money courtesy of Janice Hewett.

—Georges LeFleur, in answer to the query, “Are you any different from a common thief?” on the BBC radio program
Ask the Experts

 

“Mr. Pascal! It's Annie Kincaid! Remember me? Dr. Harold Kincaid's daughter?”

I had been banging on the door of Robert Pascal's third-floor studio for ten minutes, with no discernable results. Maybe Pascal didn't care whose daughter I was. Maybe this was the butler's day off. Maybe the racket I was making had given Pascal a stroke and he was lying on the floor, cursing my name with his dying breath.

Someone was in there. The sleep-deprived denizens of the Internet start-up company on the first floor told me they had heard the whir of a pneumatic drill all morning. Those sounds ceased abruptly when I knocked.

Frustrated, I slid down the wall and sat cross-legged on the floor, drummed my fingers on the dull linoleum, and told myself I was being paid one fifty an hour to waste my time like this. Besides, I felt a tug of loyalty to a fellow artist. The Hewetts were prepared to sue Pascal, and their pockets were surely deeper than an elderly sculptor's.

Which reminded me: why wouldn't Pascal return
Head and Torso
? Artists were usually delighted to sell their old stuff so they could afford to create new stuff. And if they hated to part with something, well, there was nothing to stop them from making a copy, as long as they were up-front about it. After all, Edvard Munch had painted four versions of his famous
Scream
. So what was different about this sculpture? I wondered whether there might be a connection between Pascal's reclusive behavior and Seamus McGraw's peculiar death. Both had studied at Berkeley and were represented by Anthony Brazil . . .

But so what? The sculpting community was a small one, so it wasn't surprising their training had overlapped. And many artists aspired to be represented by Brazil, who owned one of the top galleries in northern California. Still, it did seem odd that Pascal had not come to the show last night if only—like me—to curry favor with potential clients. Had he somehow known not to go? Or was he just avoiding the Hewetts?