How to Paint a Cat (Cats and Curios Mystery)

by Hale, Rebecca M.

  • • •

  UNAWARE OF THE feline exercise routine that had just taken place inside the Green Vase, the niece continued her morning jog. She rounded the corner of Jackson and Montgomery, picking up speed as she turned toward the Italian neighborhood of North Beach.

  It was a regular busy day on Columbus Avenue. A steady stream of Muni buses rumbled through traffic, their brakes squeaking at every intersection and passenger stop.

  The niece powered through the packed sidewalk, threading between a pair of well-dressed women in fitted jackets and knee-high boots. Her ponytail swinging, she dodged around an elderly Asian couple bundled up in heavy parka jackets.

  The winter’s wet air captured the scents of the coffee shops and bakeries that lined the street. The decadent aroma of chocolate-stuffed croissants just out of the oven mixed with the hissing steam of brewing espresso beans and cinnamon-sweet cider.

  As the niece passed one of the many pasta joints preparing for the day’s meal service, a pulse of roasted garlic flooded the sidewalk.

  Maybe I’ll stop for lunch on my way back, she thought wistfully.

  She turned her head toward the storefront—and stopped short at the sight of her reflection in the window.

  This time, it wasn’t her nose that caught her attention.

  A feathery gray glow in the shape of a man appeared to be running along behind her.

  A nearby bus blasted its horn, and the niece jumped, instinctively turning her gaze toward the street. When she looked back at her reflection, the vaporous figure had vanished.

  Shaking her head, she resumed her jog.

  “Probably just the glare from the bus’s white siding,” she murmured, trying to reassure herself.

  And yet, as she jogged past the empty diner that had once housed Lick’s Homestyle Chicken, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being followed.

  Chapter 15

  THE DOCENT

  THE DRIPPING MIST thickened to a light rain as the niece reached the end of the Columbus Avenue restaurants. She turned into Washington Square and circled the park’s lower perimeter, a spray of droplets quickly coating her eyeglasses.

  “I would have been better off leaving these at home,” she said, whipping the frames from her face and tucking them in her shirt pocket.

  Without the specs, her nose felt naked—the bump particularly so. Beyond that, her vision was severely compromised. The second issue was of little concern. She knew the scene by heart.

  A Catholic church framed the park’s upper half; its cream and gold facade of delicate dual spires pointed emphatically at the sky. Down below, the playful shrieks of several uniformed schoolchildren could be heard inside a gated courtyard, evidence that the students were enjoying their recess break.

  Beneath the protection of the trees that lined the park’s outer edges, several Asian women practiced their morning tai chi. Oblivious to the increasing rain, or perhaps calmed by its rhythm, they swung their arms in slow synchronized motions, their palms pushing against invisible barriers of resistance.

  Near the park’s grassy center, a damp dog walker stood holding the leash of a pokey pug. The dog nosed the ground, curiously sniffing as its owner checked his watch, looked skyward at the darkening clouds, and pleaded for his pet to hurry.

  Above it all, Coit Tower’s nozzle-shaped cylinder rose like a beacon. Perched at the peak of Telegraph Hill, the quirky landmark was one of San Francisco’s most beloved fixtures—and the turnaround point for the niece’s run.

  • • •

  LEAVING WASHINGTON SQUARE, the niece veered into the quiet residential neighborhood surrounding Coit Tower and its encircling green space, Pioneer Park.

  There were a dozen or more ways to climb Telegraph Hill. Street signs marked a route for vehicular traffic that gradually wound up the steep incline, first in turns at square-cornered intersections, then, within the grounds of Pioneer Park, in a curling spiral to the peak.

  With only a limited number of parking spaces at the overlook, the line of cars often stretched all the way around the circular road. Tourists would sit for hours, waiting for one of the cherished parking spots to open up.

  It was far easier to hike up the hill.

  The niece left Washington Square, still jogging, albeit at a slower pace, and began the climb. As the streets steepened, the curbside parking switched from parallel to perpendicular alignment. The sidewalk itself transitioned to a pitched groove and, eventually, graded steps.

  Pastel-colored apartment buildings made up most of the residential housing. Like much of San Francisco, the architecture ranged from Mission-style stucco to Edwardian stick, and pretty much everything in between—the unifying factor being the adapted use of bulging bay windows to draw in as much natural light as possible.

  Few modern day residents could afford the luxury of a Telegraph Hill apartment. What had started out in the Gold Rush era as undesirable squatters’ land (due to the landscape’s extreme slope) was now one of the most sought-after locations in the city. On a midweek day such as this, the rent-paying apartment dwellers were all at work, earning their keep.

  As the niece chugged up the sidewalk, she glanced at the fog that had begun to drop down over the hill, graying the sky and blurring the edges of the nearby buildings.

  The place was eerily silent.

  There was no one around . . . no one except for an unseen presence, which constantly caused her to look over her shoulder.

  • • •

  TRYING TO SHAKE off the creepiness, the niece cut around to the bay side of the hill and started up one of the many sets of wooden stairs that scaled its near-vertical face. Her feet pumped from one step to the next as she hit the steepest portion of the climb.

  Every inch in elevation increased the span of the view, a sweeping panorama of the waterfront, the bay, and the isolated fortress of Alcatraz. But the vista was lost in the haze that had seeped over the city, and the niece kept her limited vision focused on the slickening steps.

  Flight after flight of stairs passed through the exclusive neighborhood. Spared the fire sparked by the 1906 earthquake that engulfed much of San Francisco, the hillside contained several tiny wooden cottages that were built in the mid-1800s. The homey structures, with their shaker siding and overgrown gardens, stood side by side with contemporary town house–style mansions. Both properties were valued in the multimillions—and both clung precariously to the side of the cliff, as if the slightest quake might send them tumbling all the way to the Embarcadero.

  Panting and nearly out of breath, the niece reached the summit of the last set of stairs and stepped over the curb onto the asphalt path leading to Coit Tower’s front drive. A chattering swarm of green parrots swooped through the mist as she walked the remaining hundred yards to the monument’s entrance.

  The center of the small parking lot was manned by a bronze statue of Christopher Columbus. Depicted with an (unlikely) tall, brawny physique, the tarnished green figure looked across the bay toward the Golden Gate, a place the explorer might possibly have heard of, but certainly never ventured.

  Despite being soaked from the rain, the niece was ready for a drink. She reached beneath her rain jacket for a zippered pocket sewn into the waistband of her leggings, pulled out a dollar, and headed for the tower’s front lobby to buy a bottle of water from the convenience store inside.

  A series of stone steps led up to the tower’s square base and an entrance marked by a concrete casting of a phoenix. The bird’s symbol of rebirth through flames had been enthusiastically adopted by fire-prone San Francisco, a city accustomed in its early days to the constant threat of flame-born disaster.

  The niece passed beneath the phoenix as she weaved through a small crowd gathered around the main door, waiting for a docent tour to begin.

  Slipping past the throng, she proceeded into the convenience store, a round room centered at the tower’s core. Bypassing the souvenirs and trinkets packed into the shop’s minimal square footage,
the niece grabbed a bottle from a tiny refrigeration unit. After a quick stop at the cashier stand, she carried her purchase out of the store’s rear door and into a hallway that ringed the inner edge of the tower’s ground level.

  Behind her, a window of plated glass opened up the east-facing wall. The rest of the hallway’s vertical space was completely covered with painted murals.

  With an apologetic glance at a sign forbidding food and beverage in the mural area, the niece discreetly unscrewed the lid and took a long sip.

  Given the noise in the front foyer, it appeared that the docent for the morning tour had arrived. A woman’s voice echoed through the hallway.

  “Crowd around, ladies and gentlemen, and we’ll get this thing started. Congratulations are in order for everyone who made the trek up Telegraph Hill. As some of you may already know, the hill is named for the signal station positioned here back in the Gold Rush days. This was, in fact, the site of the first West Coast telegraph.”

  The niece nearly choked on a gulp of water. She recognized the voice at once. It belonged to one of her uncle’s comrades, the first of his crew to surface in over two months.

  After a difficult swallow, her eyes widened with intrigue. She tiptoed toward the edge of the group and whispered softly, “What’s Dilla doing here?”

  • • •

  A SHORT DISTANCE away, Spider’s soggy spirit staggered over the top step of a Telegraph Hill staircase and onto Coit Tower’s asphalt drive. His barely visible disturbance in the pattern of raindrops bent over, gasping for breath—or whatever substance it was that energized his supernatural being.

  With unaccustomed fatigue, Spider shook his head. The brown-haired woman had smoked him on the steep steps. Before his untimely demise, he routinely rode his bike straight up San Francisco’s most daunting hills, but his ghostly persona wasn’t in nearly as good a shape as his human form had been.

  Righting himself, he lifted his baseball cap to wipe his forehead. He then focused on the concrete structure at the end of the drive.

  Coit Tower.

  He suspected he knew what Oscar’s niece was doing there.

  The run, he reasoned, was just a ruse. She was taking the same path he had followed during his research in the weeks before his death.

  Chapter 16

  A FEATHERED LADY

  INSIDE COIT TOWER, the niece pulled out her glasses, wiped off the lenses with her shirttail, and tried to see over the heads of the tour group gathered by the front entrance. Still lacking a direct line of sight, she pushed herself up onto her tiptoes as the docent launched into a brief discussion of the landmark’s history.

  “Now, you’ve all observed the tower’s overall shape. It’s visible from a good many vantage points throughout the city. If you were to ask the casual observer, ‘What shape is Coit Tower?’ nine out of ten would tell you, without hesitation, that it looks like a fire hose.”

  The niece spied a clump of peacock feathers bobbing back and forth in the middle of the crowd. The blue and green plumes stuck straight into the air, part of an elaborate arrangement affixed to the docent’s hat.

  She couldn’t see the face beneath the elaborate headgear, but Dilla Eckles was the only person she knew who would wear such an eccentric accessory.

  The niece edged closer to the tour group as the docent continued her monologue. Dilla was also one of the few people who might be able to tell her where her uncle had been hiding out and when he might plan to reappear.

  “The fire hose shape seems like a logical conclusion,” Dilla continued. “After all, the tower was built with funds from the estate of Lillie Hitchcock Coit, a woman who had a great fondness for firefighters. When Lillie was a young child, she was saved from a raging house fire by one of the city’s volunteer fire departments. From that day forward, she became an enthusiastic supporter of the local firefighting heroes. She cheered their units whenever she saw them go by, and she eventually became the official mascot for fire truck number five.”

  The niece shuffled to one side, finally gaining a view of the woman beneath the heavily plumed hat. Her ears hadn’t led her astray. It was definitely one of her uncle’s coconspirators.

  What was Dilla doing working as a park service docent, the niece wondered.

  And then a second thought crossed her mind: she’d been taking the same running route for the last several weeks.

  Was their meeting here at the tower a coincidence or was this one of her secretive uncle’s attempts to communicate?

  • • •

  THE NIECE WATCHED Dilla corral the tour group in the foyer, gathering them around her so that they didn’t miss any of her spiel.

  A bubbly woman with a wild flair for fashion, Dilla was easily the most unusual character in any given room. She put the e in eccentric.

  In addition to the feathered hat, today Dilla’s plump, pear-shaped figure was clad in a bright blue sweater, green velvet skirt, and matching horizontal-striped stockings—a relatively tame outfit, by her standards. In the two years since they’d first met, the niece had seen Dilla in far more elaborate get-ups.

  A lifelong resident of San Francisco, Dilla’s family tree was as colorful and varied as her wardrobe. She’d been married multiples times—the niece had never managed to obtain an accurate count on the total number of ex-husbands. And she had married on both sides of the law: one of her exes was locked up at San Quentin, while her current spouse was a retired policeman.

  Dilla’s offspring, too, tended to polar opposites.

  Her daughter, Miranda Richards, was a high-powered San Francisco attorney, whom Oscar had appointed as the executor of his estate.

  The mere thought of Miranda’s prickly personality and acrid perfume made the niece cringe. She was unsure whether Miranda knew that Oscar wasn’t really dead, but the niece wasn’t about to voluntarily relay that information.

  Dilla’s son, on the other hand, was a far gentler if often misunderstood soul, who had inherited more of his mother’s quirky nature. Sam Eckles had worked for many years as a janitor at City Hall before finding his true calling as an amphibian consultant to the California Academy of Sciences. Known in biologists’ circles as the Frog Whisperer, Sam had disappeared along with Oscar the night the missing albino alligator was discovered at Mountain Lake—the same night the intern was slain at City Hall.

  The niece’s hand tightened around the water bottle as she recalled that both Sam and Oscar (or at least, the James Lick version of Oscar) were wanted for questioning in the Spider Jones murder.

  Straightening her shoulders with resolve, she took another step toward the docent.

  If anyone could shed light on the situation, it was Dilla.

  • • •

  DILLA TRAINED HER attention on the assortment of locals and out-of-town visitors who made up the tour group. She appeared not to notice the newcomer peeking around the far side of the crowd.

  “Given Lillie Coit’s love of firefighters and the tower’s obvious nozzle shape, you might think the tower design was intended to emulate a fire hose. But you’d be wrong.”

  A spectator standing next to Dilla took a feather to the face as she turned and motioned for the group to move into the entranceway.

  “Arthur Brown Jr., the architect of this and many other famous buildings and landmarks across San Francisco, swore to his dying breath that any resemblance between Coit Tower and a fire hose was pure coincidence. He insisted the fluted shape was, instead, a well-recognized Art Deco motif, and that it had absolutely nothing to do with firemen, fire hoses, or . . .”

  Dilla took a wide step out the door. Cocking one eye, she looked pointedly up at the phoenix mounted over the tower entrance. “Or any other fire-related symbols.”

  Returning to the foyer, Dilla’s gaze met that of the niece.

  The feather-topped woman gave the sweaty jogger a broad wink, as if she’d been expecting her arrival all along.

  Chapter 17

  MISMATCHED MONUMENTS

  T
HE NIECE FOLLOWED Dilla’s tour group through the hallway that circled Coit Tower’s base, puzzling over the fortuitousness of having stumbled across one of her uncle’s close colleagues during her daily run. She was growing more and more convinced that the meeting was not a coincidence.

  But if Dilla’s role as docent was an improvised performance, she showed no signs of it. She resumed her monologue with ease. Other than the conspiring wink, she made no indication that she’d recognized the niece or had expected to run into her during the day’s tour.

  “All of the fresco murals here in Coit Tower were painted under the New Deal Public Works program enacted during the Great Depression. The program was designed to provide short-term employment for out-of-work artists. Twenty-seven primary artists were given wall space within the tower, and each one brought several assistants. You can imagine that this hallway got a little cramped when they were all packed in here. No one believed that so many artists could work together productively and without conflict.”

  She swept her hands through the air, gesturing at the murals. “Not only did they manage to get along, but they painted in such harmony that most visitors believe that all these pieces were done by the same person.”

  Mingling with the rest of the tour group, the niece scanned the colorful images plastered across the walls.

  The murals depicted panoramic scenes from the 1930s, capturing Californians in various aspects of their regular life. There were agricultural landscapes featuring farmers tending their livestock, picking oranges, drying apricots, and processing grapes into wine. Industrial settings focused on engineers supervising the construction of dams and railroads, workers manning assembly lines, and welders forging metal. In the Sierra Mountains, prospectors panned for gold, and in laboratories, scientists pursued intellectual breakthroughs. Lastly, there were city scenes, showcasing examples of San Franciscans going about their daily routines.

  Dilla gave the tour group a few minutes to study the murals before moving on with her dialogue.