Shooting Gallery Read online

  “What do you mean?” I asked, mesmerized by the sight of the creamy white glob slowly sliding down her pointy chin.

  “They’re just too much trouble.” She wiped her face with a cocktail napkin and I relaxed. “Give me a nice painter any day. You can usually deal with them, unless they eat their paints. You know, like van Gogh?”

  “Van Gogh was pretty unstable already,” I objected. Poor Vincent, I thought. A good dose of Prozac might have eased his suffering but could also have dulled his artistic vision, depriving the world of his astonishing genius. It made me wonder whether Seamus McGraw had been similarly tortured by creative demons.

  “Anyway,” Janice said, lunging for the last bacon-wrapped water chestnut. A portly man across the steam table glared at her before slurping up a raw oyster with a loud smack of his rubbery lips. A wave of nausea rolled over me, and I tried to concentrate on what Janice Hewett was saying. “We’ve recently had a run-in with a sculptor, another in dear Anthony’s stable of artists. Brilliant but quite mad, you have no idea. He’s a contemporary of McGraw’s, but not as well known these days. Robert Pascal. Have you heard of him?”

  “Why yes, he’s an old acquaintance of my father’s,” I said, surprised. I hadn’t seen Robert Pascal since I was ten years old. I remembered begging him for one of his horrid little maquettes—small-scale models of sculptures that artists make to work out problems of scale and composition before taking a chisel to a block of stone or putting flame to metal—because it was perfect for my dollhouse installation, Tattooed Barbie and Biker Ken. My father had taken one look at that dollhouse and sent me into therapy.

  My opinion of Pascal’s work had not improved over the years. He was very much in Seamus McGraw’s Life Is a Suppurating Cesspool school of art, which was not surprising since the two had studied together in Berkeley in the 1960s. To my eyes, though, Pascal’s sculptures were colder than McGraw’s, more disaffected than gruesome. Still, I remembered Pascal as a nice old man and had wondered if he would be here tonight.

  “You know Robert Pascal? Personally? What luck!” Janice gushed, hitching up her dress. I braced myself. In my experience, people who gushed inevitably caused trouble. “Pascal stole our sculpture!”

  “What sculpture?”

  “Head and Torso,” she replied, trying and failing to sound modest. Head and Torso was Robert Pascal’s most famous piece, and by far his most haunting. Completed when he was a young man, it had generated considerable buzz and established him as a major new talent. Sadly, Pascal had never lived up to that early promise, a fact the more uncharitable art critics regularly pointed out with glee.

  “Why would an artist steal his own sculpture?” I asked, but her reply was interrupted by the shrill blare of an alarm. My heart sank when I realized the sound was emanating from the Brock Museum next door. I had noticed the museum’s elderly, autocratic director, Agnes Brock, chatting with Mayor Green earlier this evening, but she and I had assiduously avoided each other in a manner befitting old adversaries.

  “Suicide here! Art theft there!” Janice burbled dramatically, her watery blue eyes gleaming with excitement. “And my own kidnapped sculpture! What could possibly happen next?”

  I eyed her with distaste. I had been around plenty of art theft in my time, and more death than I cared to think about, and had found nothing thrilling about any of it. Janice placed a limp hand on my shoulder, leaned toward me, and whispered like the vapid sorority girl she must once have been, “Andy, will you do it?”

  “Do what? And the name’s Annie.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Anyway, will you talk to Pascal for us? We need Head and Torso returned before the Thanksgiving symphony fundraiser next week! He was only supposed to repair some minor damage; I don’t know what is taking him so long. It has left such a hole in our collection, you have no idea!”

  “Why don’t you talk to him yourself?” I said, my attention drawn to the commotion unfolding outside in the sculpture garden. Uniformed officers swarmed into the flower-filled yard and started cordoning off the oak tree with yellow police tape. A sour-faced man in a rumpled brown suit was speaking with Anthony Brazil, who kept pointing toward the gallery. Uh-oh, I thought. I really should get out of here.

  “Pascal won’t answer his phone. Have you ever heard of such a thing? My Norman got so angry that he sent our man over to the studio, but Pascal wouldn’t come to the door, either! There’s nothing for it now but to initiate legal proceedings,” she concluded with a theatrical sigh, leaning against the silk-draped bar and languidly spearing a boiled shrimp and watercress canapé.

  “You mean a lawsuit? Against a little old sculptor?” I finally gave Janice my full attention. “Surely that’s premature. Maybe he wasn’t home when your, uh, ‘man’ called. Maybe he was working and didn’t want to be disturbed. Maybe he’d fallen and couldn’t get up.”

  “So you’ll help us, then?” A broad smile displayed her huge teeth, decorated with bits of greenery. “That is such a relief, you have no idea.”

  “Really, Janice, I don’t . . .”

  “I’ll pay you for your time, of course,” she said, shrewdly targeting my Achilles’ heel.

  “I charge one hundred fifty an hour,” I blurted, doubling my usual rate because Janice and Norman Hewett could obviously afford it.

  Plus, I didn’t like her.

  “Done,” she said.

  Rats. I should have gone for triple.

  Janice reached into a spangly evening bag and handed me an engraved card with her phone number on it.

  “I’m willing to talk to Pascal, but I can’t promise he’ll return Head and Torso . . .” I said, the rest of my sentence trailing off as I spotted a young cop pushing his way towards me through the milling crowd.

  “You the one discovered the body?” he asked when he reached me. His lovely features were almost feminine, his angular face and long limbs reminiscent of the beatific young men in Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna and Child with Angels. But he spoke like a cop.

  I nodded. “It had been there for a while, but everyone thought it was just another sculpture. It’s a rather gruesome exhibit.”

  “No shi—I mean, you ain’t kiddin’,” he replied. The cop’s beautiful eyes looked me up and down, and I was torn between feeling flattered and annoyed. He was too young and too pretty for me, anyway. “The caterer said the body’s been there at least since last night. Weird, huh?”

  “Shocking,” I said, ignoring Janice, who was watching us avidly.

  “Stick around, the inspector’s gonna wanna talk with you. Name and address?” He jotted down my information and turned to Janice, who was eager to share her lack of knowledge with a new audience.

  Now that the authorities knew where to find me, it was time to vamoose. It could be hours before the inspector got around to interviewing me, and I saw no reason to wait. I didn’t know anything more than I had already told the angelic cop. I had worked all day at my studio, and I had no earthly idea why nobody else had noticed the figure in the oak tree was a corpse.

  To hell with Brazil’s entreaties, I was breaking out of this joint.

  Since the front entrance was probably teeming with cops, I scanned the room for an alternate exit, finally spying a door on the far side of the gallery. Biding my time until I was hidden by the ebb and flow of the crowd, I edged around the room, and slipped through the door which was marked private.

  A narrow hallway led past a maze of administrative cubicles and Brazil’s private office, beyond a tiny employee lunchroom and a grungy restroom, to a rear storage area jammed with wooden crates, packing materials, and surplus artwork. I threaded my way through the mess to the fire exit, which was partially blocked by a sofa-sized painting whose untalented creator had been enamored of cobalt blue and the letter R. Shoving the hideous thing aside, I struggled to throw the latch, but the heavy metal door was nearly rusted shut. I grabbed a strong oak stretcher bar off the floor and used it to bang on the latch. With a mighty heave I managed to pry the do
or open about ten inches before it squealed and stuck again.

  Dammit!

  The night air poured in, cool and tangy with the salt of the Pacific Ocean, tempting and invigorating me. I shoved my right arm and leg into the narrow opening, and, bracing myself against the doorjamb, pushed with all my might. A lesser woman might have made it through, but my curvy hips had been fortified over the years by too many seafood enchiladas and pad thai noodles. Frustrated, I began grunting and swearing, using the stretcher bar as a fulcrum to force the door open just a few more inches.

  “Leaving so soon, Annie?” A woman’s deep voice rang out behind me.

  Chapter 2

  Experts agree that nearly one-third of museum holdings are forgeries, and that many of these fakes are superior to the originals. Am I less an artist than Paul Gauguin if I create a work of greater beauty than he? Should I be reviled for lending my talent to his fame?

  —Georges LeFleur, in “Barbara Walters Presents: The Fascinating World of Art Forgery”

  “Hello, Annette. I mean, Inspector.”

  I tried to sound nonchalant, which was no mean feat considering I had been caught, red-hipped, fleeing the scene of a suspicious hanging. On the plus side, I no longer hyperventilated every time I saw the inspector. In my world, that passed for “personal growth.”

  SFPD Homicide Inspector Annette Crawford and I had met last spring when she was investigating a series of art-related murders. A well-built woman in her late thirties, Crawford had flawless mocha skin, a piercing intelligence, and an innately imperial demeanor that encouraged criminals to confess their crimes and save themselves a world of hurt. I liked to refer to Annette as “my friend in the SFPD,” but I was never sure if the feeling was mutual. A faux-finisher with a rap sheet didn’t convey quite the same cachet as a cop, friendship-wise.

  “Annette, I had nothing to do with anything . . .”

  “Save it,” she said shortly, though her sherry-colored eyes softened slightly. “Come along. Someone wants to speak to you.”

  I resumed banging on the door with the stretcher bar as I struggled to dislodge myself. Annette watched for a minute before sighing and giving me a hand.

  “Thanks!” I said as I popped out.

  “Anytime,” she replied dryly.

  I trotted behind the inspector as she led the way through Brazil’s now nearly empty gallery. Outside on the street, half a dozen cop cars were parked next door in front of the massive Brock Museum. Their blue lights were flashing, and uniformed officers milled about beneath the large scarlet banners advertising the museum’s extended Friday evening hours. The chaotic scene brought back unpleasant memories from last spring, when a custodian had been found murdered at the Museum.

  I did not want to go to the Brock. Bad things always happened to me at the Brock.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, hurrying to keep up with Annette’s long stride.

  “Two things. Maybe related, maybe not,” she replied curtly. “A body at the gallery and a theft at the Brock.”

  I hoped the thief was no one I knew. “I had nothing to do with anything . . .”

  “So you said.” Annette fixed me with a stern look as we mounted the museum’s wide granite steps. “Annie, stop babbling before you implicate yourself in something I don’t want to know about. Anthony Brazil confirmed that you were at his gallery all evening, so as far as I’m concerned you’re off the hook. Not that you would have been a suspect in the first place. One day I’ll have to give some thought as to why you have such a guilty conscience.”

  I hoped not.

  “And,” she continued, “no one is suggesting that you were anything more that the only person smart enough to tell the corpse from the tree.”

  “Hey! Annette, did you just make a joke?”

  She flashed me a rare, beautiful smile. “It happens.”

  “Not bad,” I conceded. “Sick, but not bad.”

  When we reached the museum’s ornate bronze doors, Annette held up her gold badge, and a guard waved us through. The normally sedate institution was in an uproar, its grand hall filled with wary cops, bewildered museum personnel, and excited visitors. Agnes Brock’s distinctive caw rose above the chatter of voices and static of police radios and bounced off the polished marble walls. Annette steered me toward a small office near the coat check station.

  Bryan Boissevain sat huddled in a chair, a sky-blue blanket draped around his shoulders and tears coursing down his smooth brown face.

  “Bryan!” I exclaimed, rushing to his side. “What in the world is going on?”

  “Oh, baby doll, I cannot tell you the night I’ve had!” Bryan cried, his Louisiana bayou accent thickened by distress. “I knew Inspector Crawford was your friend in the SFPD. That’s what I said. Isn’t that what I said?” Bryan sniffed loudly and dabbed his eyes with a white silk handkerchief. “Oh, Annie, what am I going to d-o-o-o?”

  I looped one arm around Bryan’s shoulders. Years ago, after Agnes Brock fired me from the internship at the museum, Bryan had loaned me money, let me sleep on his couch for two weeks, and stayed up with me until four a.m. three nights in a row while I worked through my rage and humiliation. When I decided to open my faux-finishing business, he helped me find a studio space and threw a party to introduce me to his circle of well-heeled friends. And when I needed to infiltrate the Brock gala last spring, Bryan convinced a transvestite pal to lend me a gorgeous ball gown, devoted an entire day to getting me ready, and forgave me when, predictably enough, I completely ruined the dress. Bryan was a prince among friends.

  He was also a major drama queen.

  “Inspector Crawford, what’s going on here?” I asked.

  “A painting was stolen. No one knows much yet and no one is making any accusations,” she said, eyeing Bryan suspiciously. “Inspectors Fielding and Woo need to talk to your friend here, that’s all, but he became a little, um, overwrought. I thought you might be able to calm him down enough to give a statement.”

  “Bryan, did you hear that?” I crouched before him and rubbed his cold hands. “The police just want your statement.”

  “That’s not all they want, honey pie. Don’t you believe that. Uh-uh.” Following Bryan’s gaze, I turned toward the door to see two men in dull gray suits enter the room. Annette introduced them as Inspectors Fielding and Woo, and they nodded politely. Bryan was having none of it. “Monsieur Thing over there thinks we were in on it. He doesn’t believe in the Syndrome.”

  “You mean this involves a kidnapping?” Annette asked.

  “That’s the Stockholm Syndrome,” Inspector Woo, a neatly combed Asian man, replied. He looked at me. “Mr. Boissevain keeps referring to something called the Stendhal Syndrome. Have you heard of it?”

  Bryan squeezed my hands so tightly my knuckles popped.

  I wrenched free of Bryan’s death grip and stood to face the inspectors. I didn’t know much about biology, auto mechanics, financial planning, or gourmet cooking. But art? Art, I knew.

  “The syndrome is named for Marie-Henri Beyle, who wrote under the pen name ‘Stendhal,’” I lectured. “In the early 1800s Stendhal visited Santa Croce, the gothic Florentine basilica where Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo are buried. When he saw Giotto’s ceiling frescoes Stendhal had what he described as an extreme physical reaction to their extraordinary beauty, and fainted. Similar incidents have been reported in travelogues ever since, and for years it was known in Italy as the ‘tourist disease.’ In the 1970s a Florentine psychiatrist wrote up several cases and renamed it the Stendhal Syndrome, after the writer.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “So you have heard of it,” Annette said wryly.

  “In fact,” I continued, “a similar affliction has recently been identified as the Jerusalem Syndrome. . . .”

  “Thank you, Doctor, that’s quite enough,” Annette interrupted.

  “So, Mr. Boissevain, is it your statement that you were overcome by the Stendhal Syndrome and fainted at the
sight of”—Inspector Woo paused and flipped a page of his black spiral notebook—“Gauguin’s Parau na te varua ino?” He stumbled over the Tahitian words.

  “I’ve never seen that shade of violet before,” Bryan said, his puppy-dog eyes gazing up at the Inspector. “I never even knew it existed!”

  Woo and Fielding exchanged a cynical glance.

  “He’s right, you know,” I piped up. “Paul Gauguin’s mastery of color is truly astounding, and can be appreciated only when viewing his paintings in person. Gauguin attained that shade of purple, you see, by painting its complementary color—green—underneath . . .” The inspectors were staring at me now, so I wrapped up the art lesson. “Anyway, I take it Parau na te varua ino was stolen?”

  “Nope.” Inspector Fielding, a middle-aged balding white guy with a sizable paunch, spoke for the first time. “A Chagall.” He pronounced it “CHAY-gull.”

  “Shuh-GAHL,” I said, absentmindedly correcting his pronunciation. “So why are you detaining Bryan?”

  “They think we were a diversion,” Bryan fretted.

  “It wasn’t just Mr. Boissevain who was involved,” Inspector Woo explained. “A tour group from an adult-education class fainted in a pile on the floor and distracted the security guards. When everyone came to, the Chagall was gone.”

  “An entire tour group fainted?” I asked. The Stendhal Syndrome was described as an individual affliction, not a mass event. “Then why are you focusing on Bryan?”

  “The others were more cooperative than your friend here.”

  “But Bryan isn’t—”

  “Thank you for your assistance, Ms. Kincaid,” Inspector Woo cut me off. “Now that Mr. Boissevain is, um, calmer, we have a few more questions for him and then he’ll be free to go. Thanks for your help, Inspector,” he said to Annette deferentially.