Shooting Gallery

by Lind, Hailey

  Pascal pulled a dirty rag from a rear pocket, wiped his hands, and nodded. I followed the sculptor inside and shut the door firmly behind us.

  One corner of Pascal’s sculpture studio was devoted to a paper-strewn desk next to a clutch of boxy brown armchairs surrounding a low coffee table. A partially opened door to the right revealed a tiny room containing an unmade army cot and a stack of cardboard boxes. The rest of the space was given over to a huge workroom. Along one wall were five magnificent windows that stretched from floor to ceiling and cast light and air across the otherwise uninspired venue. Mounted on a track like a sliding barn door, the windows could be rolled open and, with the help of the stout winch that projected from the building, Pascal’s heavy sculptures could be hoisted in and out of the third-floor studio.

  Two worktables were piled with empty Cup o’ Noodles containers, maquettes of various shapes and sizes, and an array of sharp tools that would have been at home in a medieval torture chamber. Several large objects—presumably sculptures in progress—were hidden beneath canvas drop cloths. Marble dust covered every surface like so much powdered sugar sprinkled by a mad baker.

  Pascal gestured to an armchair facing the windows and took a seat opposite me. Clouds of dust poufed up from the cushions as we sat down.

  “Coffee?” he asked politely.

  “No, thank you,” I replied, relieved at his courteous manner. Maybe this would be easier than I’d thought. “You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here.”

  “You’ve come to screw with my mind.”

  Maybe it wouldn’t.

  “Seriously, Mr. Pascal,” I continued. “I’m an artist, too. In fact, I have a studio not far from here. Isn’t that a coincidence?”

  Pascal’s weary, red-rimmed eyes revealed nothing.

  “So anyway, I was at Anthony Brazil’s gallery the other day and I met Janice Hewett—”

  “No,” he interrupted.

  “Excuse me?”

  “No. They can’t have it back,” he said dispassionately. “Not now.”

  “Not now?” I echoed. “Does that mean you’ll give it back later?” I heard a muffled banging sound, but since it did not seem to emanate from the hallway I ignored it.

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Not at the moment, anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t fucking want to.”

  “But you must know it’s driving the Hewetts crazy.”

  “I don’t care. It’s my goddamned sculpture.”

  “Mr. Pascal, don’t get me wrong—I’m a strong supporter of the integrity of an artist’s vision. But Head and Torso belongs to the Hewetts. You sold it to them in 1968, and surely the check’s cleared by now—”

  “They’re morons. They don’t appreciate it.”

  My brief interaction with Janice Hewett inclined me to share Pascal’s assessment, but that was not the point. If intelligence were a prerequisite for owning art, most of the world’s finest palaces would have nothing on their walls except spiderwebs.

  “They paid only twenty-five hundred dollars for it,” Pascal continued. “It’s worth nearly half a million now.”

  “I think I understand,” I replied, choosing my words with care. “I know how hard it is to part with something that comes straight from your soul. But in the society we live in . . . well, the people who buy the stuff get to keep the stuff. Are you aware that the Hewetts are threatening a lawsuit if you don’t return the sculpture?”

  There was a scuffling sound high overhead, followed by a muted pounding, but Pascal either did not hear the noise or chose to ignore it. He appeared to have admirable powers of concentration.

  Pascal sighed heavily and shifted in his chair, his sad, red-rimmed eyes watching me.

  I changed tactics. “Did you hear about Seamus McGraw?”

  “What about him?”

  “He was found . . . uh . . . dead last night.”

  I thought Pascal paled a bit, but since he was already deathly white I could not be sure.

  “McGraw’s an idiot,” he said. “An untalented hack.”

  “Do you suppose his death had anything to do with Head and Torso?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” he snapped. “What could his death have to do with me?”

  “I don’t know. The timing just seemed odd, that’s all.”

  “Take some advice from an old friend of your father’s,” he said with an avuncular air. “Mind your own goddamned business.”

  “But—”

  “Do you have any idea, Annie, what it’s like to be a sculptor in a culture that doesn’t appreciate art?”

  “Actually, I’m an artist myself so—”

  “I’ll tell you what it’s like,” he said, and gazing at a point on the wall beyond my left shoulder he launched into a rambling discourse on the creative and monetary trials of an artist’s life.

  As if this was news to me.

  I was listening with half an ear, waiting for him to finish, when I saw a thin vertical line in the center of one of the windows. The line moved. What the hell was that? A rope?

  “—cannot imagine the challenges—” Pascal droned on.

  A pair of black motorcycle boots appeared at the top of the window frame.

  “—all over again, were I to have another chance at—”

  Faded denim jeans lowered into view, followed by a black leather jacket, and the figure clutching the rope slowly started to spin.

  Hoping to keep Pascal from turning around and witnessing the further antics of the stakeout flake outs, I nodded at him encouragingly.

  “—career was a success, or so I thought, but in the art world there is no such—”

  Tom’s big blond head finally appeared as well as his broad hands, white-knuckled from their death grip on the rope. The spinning increased and was augmented by a pendulum motion. I watched, morbidly fascinated, as Tom began to swing from one side of the window to the other.

  “—Sheila left me, which was probably as much a blessing as—”

  Back and forth and round and round went my friend on the rope outside the window. The brief glimpses I caught of Tom’s face revealed a mixture of nausea and terror.

  “—financial success is, of course, important in the—”

  Tom started yanking on the rope in what I hoped was a signal to Pete on the roof.

  “It’s my hands, you see,” Pascal said. “They’re useless.”

  He held up Exhibit A. I noticed a few liver spots and one really nasty blister, but they were not gnarled with arthritis as my great-grandmother’s had been. According to the sculptor, though, his hands were too damaged to do the work that had been the great passion of his life.

  I felt a surge of sympathy. When all you had was your work and your Cup o’ Noodles, what did you do if you were forced to give up sculpting?

  Pascal proceeded to tell me, droning on and on in excruciating detail.

  “—clinic in Guadalajara—”

  My gaze flew to the window as swirling bay breezes pushed Tom away from the building until Newton’s Third Law of Thermodynamics pulled him back in. Blue eyes widened in a greenish face as Tom headed toward the glass before veering off a split second before impact.

  My face must have registered my shock because Pascal turned to look at the window a split second after Tom swung out of sight.

  “Beautiful view,” I improvised. “Really amazing.”

  Pascal faced me again, frowning, and Tom drifted back into view. My eyes were weary from darting between the window and the sculptor. Pascal must be convinced that I either had some kind of eye trouble or severe attention deficit disorder.

  I tried to refocus. “So have you thought about bringing in an assistant? You could do the design and detail work, and let the assistant do the heavier stuff.”

  “I had an assistant once,” Pascal grumbled. “Years ago. Damned fool fell in love with me, so I fired him, and he went and killed himself. Pain in the ass, if you ask me. I’ll n
ever have another sculptor in here.”

  Tom’s heavy boots were braced against the window frame as he attempted to scale the building. After a brief struggle he flipped over and hung upside down for several excruciating seconds before gradually righting himself. Suddenly the bay breezes caught Tom again and flung him toward the window.

  “I’d love to see Head and Torso!” I exclaimed, jumping up. “Is it here?”

  “Of course it’s here,” Pascal growled as he led me toward the rear of the studio. “Where else would it be?”

  Tom hit the window with a thud, but thankfully the glass withstood the impact. Sneaking a peek over my shoulder, I saw one side of Tom’s face pressed against the window, his breath fogging the glass. The rope started to jerk, and Tom inched skyward.

  Pascal tugged on a fabric drop cloth to reveal a marble sculpture nearly seven feet tall and three feet wide. This was no head and torso as one saw them in nature, but a grouping of spheres meeting hard angles, softly polished surfaces meeting rough finishes, and naturalism meeting geometry. When it came to sculpture I was more a sixteenth-century, Donatello kind of gal, but there was no denying the power of this piece, which combined an unmistakably human form and a mechanical shell in a manner both alienating yet intriguing.

  “I understand why you don’t want to give it up,” I said again, meaning it this time. I was a damned fine artist but had never created anything so compelling. And if I ever did, I could not imagine selling it to someone like Janice Hewett.

  A movement at the window caught my eye again. This time it was Pete swinging past, staring into the studio and mouthing something at me, and I feared disaster could not be far behind. Time to rein in my macho minions.

  “I appreciate your speaking with me, Mr. Pascal,” I said. “And I do apologize for the noise; I didn’t think you were here.”

  “So you decided to have a party?”

  “Um, that’s kind of hard to explain. . . .” I trailed off. My eyes fell on several steel chisels and soft iron hammers sitting by a marble block. They reminded me of McGraw. “Mr. Pascal, can you think of any reason someone would kill Seamus McGraw? Sculpture doesn’t seem like a profession where one makes enemies.”

  Pascal looked incredulous. “What kind of art world do you live in, toots?”

  “I meant lethal enemies. Most artistic types are content with stabbing each other in the back figuratively, not literally.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I have nothing to do with Seamus McGraw.”

  “But you knew him, didn’t you?”

  He grunted.

  “You studied together,” I pointed out. “And you were both represented by the Brazil gallery.”

  Another grunt.

  “Did you two use the same stone supplier, Marble World?”

  “Seamus worked in metal, not stone. They’re very different media, technically and aesthetically, as you would know if you’d ever worked in three dimensions,” he said, escorting me to the door. “Look, I appreciate your efforts on my behalf. But tell the Hewetts I said to go fuck themselves.”

  “Why don’t I just tell them you’ll think about it?” I hedged. “They’re ready to start legal proceedings. Imagine a bunch of strangers in here with a warrant, pawing through your stuff, confiscating Head and Torso and who knows what else.” Did I know how to hit an artist below the belt, or what?

  Pascal’s pale visage reddened under his heavy five-o’clock shadow. “And tell your goddamned friends to stay out of my hallway and away from my windows,” he said angrily. “You guys can’t sing for crap, either. Oh, and have a nice day.”

  The door slammed shut behind me.

  Out in the hallway, I found Bryan and Levine sprawled on the red satin pillows sipping wine, Mary and Sherri slouched against the wall eating the last of the chocolates, and Pete and Tom in the stairwell breathing hard, ropes slung over their shoulders.

  “Proud of yourselves?” I asked the two adventurers. “Just what did you hope to accomplish with that stunt? Did you even notice that I was trying to talk with our elusive sculptor?”

  Tom refused to meet my eyes and Pete looked abashed. What a couple of goofballs, I thought fondly. “Let’s pack it up and head home, guys. I’d say our first stakeout has been a qualified success.”

  Chapter 6

  True egg tempera reads like a recipe for salad dressing, and indeed should be cooked up in your kitchen. Separate the egg yolks from the whites, and add eight to twelve drops of lavender oil for each yolk. Pour small quantities of the egg mixture into a glass bowl, whisking it, drop by drop, with sun-bleached linseed oil.

  —Georges LeFleur, in What’s Cookin’, California?

  After tidying up the hallway outside Pascal’s studio, the party broke up. Mary had a gig at a new club downtown, and Sherri and Tom tagged along for moral support. Pete took off for his mother’s house in Hayward in anticipation of tomorrow’s big Sunday dinner, and Bryan and Levine opted to head to the Mission District for some tequila-lime fish tacos.

  I was more tired than hungry, so I decided to head home. Hopping into my truck, I drove across the Bay Bridge to Oakland, exited at Grand Avenue, and veered right toward Lake Merritt. The meandering lake was highlighted by a necklace of romantic white lights, and even at this hour its two-mile path was crowded with energetic joggers, strolling lovers, and cranky Canada geese. It was one of those warm, clear, late-November evenings that explained why rents were so high in the San Francisco Bay Area.

  Home sweet home was a once-grand Victorian built for a prosperous grocery merchant in 1869 and chopped up into apartments for working stiffs one hundred years later. I lived on the third floor in what used to be the maid’s quarters, tucked up high under the eaves. What the building lacked in modern conveniences, such as decent electrical wiring, it made up for in graceful details, such as the intricate fantail window in the foyer and the elaborately carved newel posts on the stairs. The old Victorian’s faded elegance was warm and welcoming, like the embrace of a beloved elderly aunt, and at the end of a long day I always looked forward to coming home.

  I parked in the lot behind the house, let myself in through the solid mahogany front door, grabbed my mail from the hall table, and trudged up two flights to my apartment, my footsteps echoing in the silence. The building’s other tenants were also single professional women who spent most of their waking hours on the job or out with friends, so I was not surprised to have the house to myself. But when I rounded the turn on the second-floor landing I came to a sudden halt. A light shone from under my door and the dead bolt lock had been thrown.

  Someone was in my apartment.

  I hesitated to call the cops. Among my varied acquaintances were one or two who were capable of breaking in and making themselves at home, and certainly none of my grandfather’s felonious cronies would allow a mere dead bolt to stand in their way. I would never hear the end of it if I had one of Georges’s friends thrown in the slammer. Surely a stranger bent on evil deeds would not be so blatant as to leave the door unlocked and the lights blazing.

  I hoped.

  Moving stealthily, I mounted the last few steps. On the landing next to the door was a brass spittoon where I stashed umbrellas and similar outdoor junk, including a sturdy oak stick I used while hiking last summer with Mary in Wildcat Canyon. I picked it up, slowly turned the doorknob, pushed the door open, and flattened myself against the wall. Nothing happened.

  Okay, I thought, this is ridiculous. I was tired, crabby, and wanted a nice, long bath to wash away the residue of the gritty hallway, the dusty studio, and the miasma of Pascal’s grim hopelessness. I was going in.

  Holding the walking stick high in my right hand, I peered into the living room. The futon couch had been made up with my old blue-and-white striped flannel sheets and a yellow plaid wool blanket. My burglar was remarkably domestic.

  “Honey!”

  “Mom?” My voice was muffled by a Chanel-scented embrace. “What are you doing here?”

  A styl
ish blond woman in her late fifties, Beverly LeFleur Kincaid held me at arm’s length and looked me over from tip to toe. “What’s the wizard’s staff for, dear? And why are you covered with dust?”

  “I, er . . .” I dropped the heavy stick in the brass spittoon and shut the door.

  “You’re looking awfully thin these days, honey. Are you sure you’re eating enough?”

  I loved my mother.

  “Mom, what are you doing here?” I asked. “Why didn’t you call?”

  She shrugged and started straightening the mélange of books and magazines on the coffee table. “Oh, I just needed to get away for a couple of days, and you gave me a spare key to your apartment, remember? I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No, of course I don’t mind. But are you and Dad okay?”

  She moved on to the messy bookshelf, efficiently alphabetizing my collection of cheap paperback mystery novels. “Why do you ask?”

  I was the only one of my peers whose parents were still married, and with a shock I realized how much I counted on their normality to balance out my eccentric life.

  “Just wondering,” I said evasively. “You’ve never needed to get away before.”

  “Well, here I am. So what shall we do?” My mother’s sweet, slightly husky voice betrayed her excitement. “Oh no! How thoughtless of me! Do you have a date tonight?”

  I could not bring myself to admit to my mother that her wild artist daughter had planned to take a long soak and go to bed early, just as she had for the past few weekends. I glanced at the rhinestone-encrusted Krazy Kat clock on the kitchen wall: It was a quarter of eight on a Saturday night and I was ready to pack it in.

  I was more middle-aged than my mother.

  “Are you all right, dear?” she asked with concern. “We could stay in if you’re tired.”

  “No, no, I’ll be fine. I just need a quick shower to freshen up. What did you have in mind for tonight?”

  “Something exciting. I know! Let’s go to Berkeley!”

  Only someone from a small Central Valley college town like Asco would stand within a stone’s throw of San Francisco and opt to go to Berkeley in search of A Good Time. Then again, my mother had been a student at the University of California in the late sixties, so her experience with the town was no doubt more avant-garde than mine.