Shooting Gallery (22 page)

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 intimate 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.

“Thank you for arranging the meeting,” I said as we skirted the lush forest of Golden Gate Park.

“What's our next step?” Bryan asked. “File charges, or what?”

“No, Bryan, we don't file charges,” I said. The condescension in my voice reminded me of the tone Annette had used with me earlier that day, and I continued more gently. “The police didn't take her suspicions seriously at the time. I can't imagine why they would now.”

“So you're saying we just let him get away with it?” Bryan's handsome face was a study in moral outrage. “And isn't Beverly LeFleur your mother?”

I jockeyed with a shiny silver Mercedes for position on Oak Street, called the pinstriped driver a few choice names, and turned back to the still misty-eyed Bryan.

“The problem is we don't know what really happened. We're talking about a death that took place more than thirty years ago.” I shook my head and said, as much to myself as to him, “No, it's just none of our business. What we
should
be focusing on is your situation with the Brock. Has anything new happened?”

Bryan was peeved.

“Bryan?”

“No,” he replied grudgingly. “The cops told me not to leave town, but I haven't heard anything else.”

“Get a load of this, my friend,” I said. “Inspector Crawford told me the police had received a tip that the painting was being kept in some former Nazi's house in Switzerland.”

“Get out!” Bryan's dark brown eyes widened.

“First the Middle East, now the Nazis. Something weird is going on, don't you think?”

“You ain't kiddin', sugar pie.”

“Bryan, tell me something. How did you hear about the Stendhal Syndrome?”

“Our guide—Michael Collins?—told us about it. He spent his childhood in Florence—he calls it
Firenze
—and knows how truly
sensitive
people respond to great art.”

I'll just bet he does
, I thought. But I still couldn't figure out why Michael would have bothered orchestrating the Stendhal faint-in. As he said himself, that particular Chagall was hardly worth stealing.

“What?”
I swerved.

“Pull in here! I need some
really
big pots for my espaliered pear trees.”

“Don't
ever
yell at me like that unless I'm about to hit something, okay?” I snapped as we careened into the pitted parking lot of the Mischievous Monkey Garden Supply.

It was the store that had issued the receipt I saw on Pascal's desk.

It was kismet.

The Mischievous Monkey consisted of an office trailer surrounded by row upon row of brightly glazed ceramic pots from Asia and painted terra-cotta pots from Mexico. Stone Buddhas, plaster saints, and cement birdbaths and fountains abounded, ranging in degree of fussiness from the pure and simple to the baroque. The large yard was posted with
Beware of Dog!
signs, and I wondered if there really were thieves willing to hoist multi-hundred-pound clay pots over a ten-foot cyclone fence topped with vicious-looking razor wire.

Bryan hopped out to look around while I lingered in the truck and called Mary. “Any messages?”

“Some
incredibly
gorgeous hunk named Michael stopped by,” she said with a breathy laugh. “Now
there's
a work of art.”

“Oh yeah?” I swallowed hard and cleared my throat. “What did he want?”

“He said you two have a date tomorrow night and you'll probably try to weasel out of it 'cause you're so shy. I go, ‘We talkin' about the same Annie Kincaid?'”

“That right?”

“So he's like, she has this ‘winsome smile.' Then he goes on about your cute butt.”

Cute butt?
I yanked the rearview mirror toward me and smiled. Was that winsome?