by Lind, Hailey
“I know who he is,” I explained. “I was hoping you could use your unique talents to see if he’s been up to anything unusual.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, maybe making large bank deposits or something? He’s a security guard at the Brock Museum. He’s worked there for almost twenty years.”
“He an illegal?” Pedro asked, using the aggressively politically incorrect term. Although he was a second-generation American himself, Pedro didn’t hold with illegal immigration and had never even visited Mexico, his mother’s homeland. I imagined that his pugnacious attitude added spice to his relationship with his long-term girlfriend Elena Briones, a fiercely progressive Chicana lawyer who worked for the Oakland Public Defender’s office.
“You got somethin’ on this guy, Annie?” Pedro asked, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.
“I’m just trying to figure out how he fits into something I’m looking into. Sorry to be so vague, but I don’t know much myself yet.”
I heard the furious clicking of a computer keyboard in the background.
“Okay, chica, looks like Jimenez lives not far from here, off International Boulevard. You want me to go talk to him?” Five feet, six inches tall, Pedro weighed maybe 145 pounds, dripping wet. He looked more like a medieval scholar than a badass, but much preferred to think of himself as a hard-boiled private investigator than a soft-handed computer programmer.
“You found that out already? What are you, Pedro Super Sleuth?” I teased.
“Aw, you’d be surprised to find out how easy it is,” he said modestly. “But then you’d never call me anymore. You want me to go over and shake him down?”
First Tom and Pete, now Pedro. I was starting to feel like a purveyor of macho adventures for my otherwise civilized friends. Maybe I should start a sideline business running men’s retreats, I thought. I seemed to have a knack for encouraging mild-mannered suburban males to dream up crazy schemes of intimidation against alleged miscreants. It could be the new millennium’s answer to the drumming circles of the 1980s.
“Thanks, but it’s not really a shakedown situation. I just want some information on him. Anything out of the ordinary.”
“If you insist.” He sighed good-naturedly. “I’ll call you with the results, okay?”
“Great. One more thing. Speaking of unusual names, I’m looking for a woman named Evangeline . . .”
“Now we’re talking.”
“But I don’t know her last name.”
“Oh boy.”
“She’s the niece of Robert Pascal, a sculptor with a studio on Tennessee Street. They’re related through his sister, so she probably has a different last name.” I filled him in on the little I knew about Evangeline. He promised to check it out, and I promised to treat him to dinner.
Teatime. I scrubbed the marble dust from my hands and face, and pulled on a pair of clean jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt from the old oak armoire. I tried to keep clean clothes on hand for the times when I was too messy—even by my loose standards—to meet with clients. Standing before the wardrobe mirror, I calmed my curly brown hair with a spritz of tap water and a wide-toothed comb, and applied a little lipstick. I’d read somewhere that lips pale as one ages, and for some reason the thought bothered me. God forbid I have pale lips.
I was now officially late, but hesitated. I should call Pascal’s studio in case Evangeline answered.
“Yeah?” the old sculptor said brusquely after the second ring.
“Um . . .”
“Jose?”
I was tempted to pretend to be Jose but didn’t think Pascal would fall for it. I’ve been told that on the telephone I sound like a fifteen-year-old girl.
“It’s Annie.”
He hung up. I hit redial.
Pascal picked up but didn’t speak, so I dropped my voice as low as I could and said, “Jose here.”
“Fuck off,” he swore, and hung up.
This was kind of fun. I hit redial once more.
He picked up. Whoever Jose was, Pascal did not want to miss his call.
“May I speak with Evangeline, please?” I asked sweetly.
Slam.
I rushed across town and found Bryan tapping his foot on the sidewalk outside his Mission District apartment building. Dressed in buff-colored wool pants tucked into glossy knee-high black boots, and a stark white shirt topped by a brocade vest, he carried a tweed jacket folded casually over one arm.
“What, no jodhpurs?” I teased as he opened the passenger door.
“Very funny. Take the scones.” Bryan handed me a basket of still warm baked goods that smelled scrumptious. His smile faded when he got a gander at my outfit. “Oh, baby doll, I wish we had time! You don’t look at all the thing!”
I heard that a lot.
“Hey, these jeans are clean! Just because we’re invited to tea doesn’t mean we’re being transported to Jane Austen’s England.”
He snorted in a most un-Mr. Darcy-like fashion.
I knew of no easy way to get from the Mission to the Avenues, so I skirted Laguna Honda Hospital, passed through the Forest Hill neighborhood, and went up Noriega to Thirty-first. This section of town was known as the Sunset, which was something of a misnomer considering how often the thick banks of fog hunkered down along its streets, obscuring the sunset along with everything else.
The Maggio house was typical of the neighborhood: a two-story, stucco-covered bungalow, with the garage and entrance at street level and the living quarters on the second story. Francine Maggio met us at the gate, a plump woman in her mid to late fifties with a round, attractive face, warm brown eyes, and blond hair liberally shot through with gray. She wore a floral dress topped by an immaculate lace apron, ecru stockings, and sturdy lace-up black shoes. Smiling graciously, she waved us through a flower-filled courtyard and up the stairs.
I paused in the foyer, taking in the scene. Every inch of wall space was papered in a riot of pink cottage roses and pale green stripes, the mahogany-trimmed furniture was upholstered in rose-colored brocade, and an oil painting of a big-eyed cocker spaniel hung with pride of place above the living room mantel. My eyes searched the shadows for a shrine to at least one member of the British royal family.
Francine urged us to have a seat on a hideously uncomfortable Victorian settee, bustled into the kitchen, and returned moments later with Bryan’s scones arranged on a silver tray alongside what she referred to as “finger sandwiches.” She sat in a Queen Anne armchair and commenced an elaborate tea-pouring ceremony. Bryan seemed at ease, but I felt like an anthropologist observing an alien culture.
“One lump or two?” she asked me, a pair of delicate silver tongs hovering over the painted china sugar bowl.
“Just plain, please,” I replied.
“Surely some milk, then?”
Bryan caught my eye and inclined his head.
“Yes, please,” I said. “Thank you.”
Francine diluted the tea with milk and handed me the eggshell-thin china teacup, a teaspoon perched precariously on the matching saucer.
The brew was an unappetizing shade of beige. I took a sip. Tasted beige, too.
“Thank you for meeting with us, Mrs. Maggio,” I said, relinquishing my tea to the coaster on the low table in front of us. “I know this must be difficult for you, but we were hoping you could shed some light on what happened between Robert Pascal and his assistant Eugene Forrester.”
Francine took a fortifying sip of tea and dabbed her lips with an embroidered linen napkin. “Eugene and I had been seeing each other for about two years,” she began. “We were both students at Berkeley. He was an art major with an emphasis in sculpture, and I was English lit. The fiction of Jane Austen was my specialty!”
Bryan and I nodded encouragement while Francine took a hearty bite of scone.
“Why, these are delicious!” she exclaimed. “Currants?” Bryan nodded, pleased. “Anyway, Eugene landed an apprenticeship with Robert Pascal, wh
ich was considered quite a coup at the time. Pascal was only a few years older than we, but already had a reputation as an up-and-comer. Eugene was very good, you know, immensely talented. Everyone said so. And we were so happy. . . .”
Her voice trailed off as she stared into space for a moment. She caught herself, picked up a silk-covered album from a side table, and handed us a photograph of a young man with light brown hair and long sideburns. Handsome and rather dashing despite the dated fashions, his eyes were bright and alert, brimming with life as if he were poised to race off someplace exotic and do something exciting.
Francine’s eyes grew moist. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and I suddenly caught a glimpse of the young woman she had once been, head over heels in love with her long-haired artist. “I married a fine man and raised two wonderful daughters. I’ve had a blessed life. But I’ve never forgotten Eugene. Sometimes I think . . .”
“What? What do you think?” I asked a little too eagerly.
Francine started at the sound of my voice, as if she had forgotten we were there. Bryan leaned forward and rested a reassuring hand on her forearm. “You just tell us your own way, honey,” he said, casting me a quelling look. It seemed I needed to repeat Interrogation 101.
“It was hard to put to rest because of the scandal. The police said it was suicide. Why, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. Eugene was not the type to commit suicide.”
I was not convinced. Francine would never admit that the love of her youth had been miserable enough to kill himself. Who would?
“Francine,” I asked carefully, “do you have any kind of proof? Any tangible indication that something criminal happened?”
She shook her head. “I tried so many times to get the police involved. I did everything I could think of, but I was only twenty-one. What did I know? I even went to talk with someone in legal services, you know the free clinic they used to have in Berkeley? That’s how I met Grady, my husband.”
A man named Grady Maggio, I mused, seemed like an odd match for a woman with a passion for cottage roses and finger sandwiches.
“Grady pressured the police to investigate and tried to get the press interested. But Eugene had no immediate family and I was just the girlfriend, which didn’t carry much weight with the authorities in those days.” She shrugged. “And then Grady and I . . . Well, life went on.”
“How can you be sure that Eugene didn’t commit suicide?” I asked.
Anger shadowed her face. “He wasn’t gay—I should know. The man wanted sex morning, noon, and night.”
Bryan and I exchanged glances. It felt somehow unseemly for the demure Mrs. Maggio, nibbling at finger sandwiches in her starched lace apron, to speak so openly of sex. Then again, she and Eugene had been together in the late 1960s, an era that could teach current generations a thing or two about free love.
“And I suspect I wasn’t the only woman he was seeing. Eugene always said I was a prisoner of bourgeois values and was free to see other men, but I never wanted to. He loved women. How could he have been gay?”
“Um, well, yes, but . . .” My turn to trail off. Now wasn’t the time for a lecture on bisexuality.
“Plus, the police said Eugene shot himself,” she continued. “Where did he get a gun? Eugene hated violence; we all did. He was prepared to declare himself a conscientious objector if he was drafted. He was not the type to shoot anyone, including himself.”
Desperate people do desperate things, I thought.
“And besides, if Eugene was suicidal—without me or any of his friends or professors noticing—he would have overdosed on pills and alcohol, like every other Berkeley suicide. There were pills everywhere back then.”
She had a point.
“Bryan, Annie,” Francine beseeched us. “I know you’re skeptical. I would be, too. But what you must understand is that Eugene hated Pascal, and vice versa. The apprenticeship went sour almost from the beginning.”
“How so?” I asked, so absorbed in her story that I absentmindedly took a gulp of the nasty beige tea. I forced myself to swallow it and crammed a chunk of scone into my mouth. Bryan watched, amused. He was a seventh-generation Southerner from Louisiana whose mother had brought him up to be a gentleman.
Caught up in her story, Francine was oblivious to my gaucheness. “Eugene was working on a special piece, a large marble sculpture. Pascal hated it, and they had a huge row over it. And Eugene told me that Pascal hadn’t been producing anything.”
We waited for the denouement.
“Don’t you see?” she asked.
We shook our heads.
“The sculpture. Eugene’s sculpture! After Eugene’s . . . body was found, Pascal sent me his things from the studio. But there were only a few small maquettes, nothing on the scale of what Eugene had been working on for months. I went by Pascal’s studio to ask about it, but he wouldn’t even open the door. Wouldn’t answer the phone. Nothing.”
“What did you do?” I asked, betting the answer would not be, “Sang the score to My Fair Lady until he cracked.”
“I bided my time until Pascal’s next show. And there it was,” she said. “Eugene’s sculpture was the centerpiece of Pascal’s opening. Pascal called it Head and Torso, though Eugene had called it Francie—that was his pet name for me.”
Francie seemed like a better name for a Barbie doll than a massive piece of carved marble, I thought, pawing through my backpack until I found the newspaper Samantha had shown me earlier. “Is this the sculpture?”
Francine stared at the grainy image of Head and Torso and started to cry. “Yes. That’s Francie. I posed for it. See the hip, here? That’s me.” She pointed to a curve in the stone. “But when I told everyone at the opening that Pascal had stolen Eugene’s sculpture, I was laughed out of the room. I had no way to prove it, and after all, Eugene was just an apprentice. Here, I kept a file of clippings.”
She handed me a collection of yellowed newspaper articles from the Oakland Tribune. I skimmed them: “Young artist takes own life . . . single gunshot to the head . . . body discovered by the cleaning woman, Irma Rodriguez.”
Could it be true? Had Robert Pascal murdered his young assistant thirty-something years ago because he was suffering from sculptor’s block and wanted to claim Head and Torso as his own? If so, then the style Pascal had become famous for—that curious melding of machine and nature—had originated with Eugene Forrester, and Pascal’s entire career was a sham.
That was a secret worth killing for. Had Seamus McGraw stumbled upon the truth and been murdered to ensure his silence? But if so, why—and how—would Pascal have hung McGraw’s body from a tree in Anthony Brazil’s sculpture garden?
This was news, big news. If it were true.
Bryan held Francine’s hand and murmured comforting words. I was anxious to leave the cloying rose-covered room, but there was one other thing I had to ask.
“Francine, did you know any of Pascal’s contemporaries, such as Beverly LeFleur or Seamus McGraw?”
“Yes, of course. They were art graduate students, and although Eugene and I were undergrads, it was a small department and we all socialized. Eugene even took a class with Seamus, and they shared studio space for a little while before Eugene started working with Pascal. In fact, Eugene went to Seamus when he thought Pascal was getting hooked.”
“Hooked?”
“On drugs. Most of us experimented a little back then. I know how that sounds, but it truly was a different time,” she added. “Eugene was afraid Pascal was getting in too deep. Seamus and Beverly tried to intervene, there was a huge row, and their friendship with Pascal was never the same.” She gazed at the cocker spaniel portrait, a wistful expression on her face. “I heard Seamus died recently. Is that true?”
I nodded.
“Do you know if anyone is publishing his papers?”
“What papers?”
“Seamus always carried a notebook that he sketched and wrote in almost compulsively. He said it was an inti
mate record of the artistic process and talked about having his notebooks published as his legacy to the art world. I know he published excerpts here and there, but I wondered if he kept the project going all these years.”
“I really don’t know,” I replied, thinking of the stack of black notebooks I’d knocked over in Pascal’s studio.
“Oh well,” she sighed. “Beverly LeFleur went on to marry a young man named Harold, which surprised all of us because we thought she would marry Seamus. She was lovely, and oh, so intelligent. I think even Pascal had a crush on her. Anyway, that art show was the last time I saw Pascal. People say he became a recluse. Perhaps he is living in his own private hell.”
I remembered Pascal’s hopeless, red-rimmed eyes, and thought she might be right.
“This is all we have of our lost loved ones, you know,” Francine concluded with a loud sniff. “Memories. Remembrances of things past.”
When your host starts quoting Proust, my grandfather once told me, it’s time to leave.
At the door Bryan gave Francine a hug and promised to send her his recipe for currant scones. Francine grabbed my shoulders and enveloped me in a rose-scented embrace.
“You get him for me, Annie,” she whispered fiercely. “You get that bastard Pascal.”
As we crossed the courtyard, I glanced back at Francine. Behind her was the image I had been searching for earlier: a large photo of Princess Diana in a gold gilt frame lit by a spotlight and surrounded by candles. I wondered what the defiant Eugene Forrester would have made of it all had he lived to see his twenty-second birthday.
“So what do you think?” I asked Bryan as we pulled away from the curb. “Do you believe her?”
“Oh, baby doll, no one could make up something like that,” he said, brushing away a tear. Bryan was a sucker for lost love.
Maybe I had an overly active imagination, or maybe Bryan needed to watch more soap operas, but Francine’s story didn’t seem all that hard to fabricate. I didn’t think Francine was consciously lying, but I wasn’t ready to trust the interpretation of thirty-year-old events by someone who kept a shrine to a dead princess.
