Brush With Death (30 page)

Curly Top was nowhere to be seen, so I fired up the truck and started across town. I wished I could have seen the painting Dick was trying to show me. Surely it couldn't be an original Raphael that Helena had squirreled away in a cardboard tube. She didn't need the money, her worship of Tim O'Neill suggested she had no taste, and it would be an awfully risky thing to do. Still, I didn't trust her.

I pulled into the parking lot of my studio building and parked next to Frank's shiny Jaguar. As I climbed the stairs I ran through today's To Do list but couldn't remember what was on it. That was the problem with mental To Do lists.

I flung open the door to find Mary sitting on the wood plank floor, Louis' metal box in her lap and its contents scattered around her.

“I don't see what they were so excited about,” Mary said as she helped herself to a blue Peeps marshmallow chick from a package she'd bought for half off at the after-Easter sale at Long's Drugstore. “It's just junk.”

“You went back and dug it up, after what happened the other night?”

“Dante did it for me. Got back this morning and boy, was he pissed about me going without him and almost getting arrested!” Mary smiled. “He said he just dug it right up, 'cause he blended in with a bunch of Bosnians.”

I jumped at the sound of the espresso maker spitting. Speaking of Bosnians . . . “Is that you, Pete?”

“It's Evangeline,” Mary said. “She's scared to look at this stuff. Says it's unnatural.”

“I ain't takin' no chances,” Evangeline called out. “I'll jes' stay back here.”

“Sounds like you've got the espresso machine working,” I said. The only other person who was able to manage it was Pete. The two might well be a match made in heaven.

I sank to the floor, helped myself to a Peeps, and sat cross-legged next to Mary. My assistant was right: the contents of the metal box were something of a letdown. There were a couple of lead soldiers, an old pocket watch, a lock of hair tied with a blue silk ribbon, and a couple of dingy letters. I skimmed them. They appeared to be from Louis Spencer's relatives. Sad, but hardly enough to justify chasing a person around a columbarium, much less killing a young graduate student. “That's it?”

“Some crappy baseball cards,” Mary said, pulling an envelope from the bottom of the box.

“Baseball cards?” I said. They would have to be from the 1920s and '30s at the latest. “That has possibilities. The last time my nephews visited we went to Collectors' Corner to buy Pokemon cards. The baseball cards in their display case were worth hundreds of dollars.”

“Serious?” Mary said, popping another Peeps in her mouth and shrugging. “Maybe there's a Babe Ruth card. Babe Ruth's a good candy bar, but I like Abba Zabba better.”

I nodded. “I like Three Musketeers.”

“What, are you's two kiddin' me?” Evangeline's face was a picture of indignation as she poked her head around the kitchenette partition. “Is it mint?”

“You mean the flavor?” Mary said.

“You mean the color?” I said.

Evangeline made a production of rolling her light blue eyes and letting out an exasperated sigh. “Like, ‘mint condition'? Duh.” She fixed me with a look. “I thought you was Ms. Smarty-Pants.”

I didn't recall applying for the position. In fact, depending on if I'd had enough sleep and when I'd last eaten, I was sometimes Ms. Dopey-Pants.

“Evangeline, how much would a mint-condition Babe Ruth baseball card be worth?”

“Dunno. Hundreds of thousands, pro'ly. Maybe more.”

“Serious?” Mary said again.

“Is there a Honus Wagner?” Evangeline asked, relenting and coming over to check out the stack. “That's the Mona Lisa of baseball cards. One sold for more than a million bucks on eBay. They're rare on account o' they put his card in tobacco pouches, but he was against using tobacco, so they had to pull it.”

A million bucks? Now, that was a treasure worth killing for.

Mary reached for the cards, but Evangeline intervened. “Gimme that. Your fingers are blue. Look at 'em.”

We looked. Her fingers were a bright Peeps blue.

Evangeline sorted the cards but found no Honus Wagner. No Babe Ruth either. And none were “mint,” having gotten moldy and brittle after decades in a dank tomb. Nonetheless, I asked Evangeline to show the cards to a dealer. Couldn't hurt to have all the facts.

“What's this?” Mary asked, as she pulled something from beneath the silk lining.

It was an exquisite miniature portrait on an ivory oval that looked as if it might be by Rosalba Carriera herself. Could this be what all the fuss was about?

My studio neighbor and friend Samantha poked her head in the door. “Knock, knock.”

“Sam!” we said in unison.

“The three of you look like naughty children,” Sam said in her soft Jamaican lilt as she sank gracefully onto the Victorian sofa. “What you got there?”

“It's a miniature portrait. Isn't it lovely?”

“It's beautiful.”

“How late is Mayfield's Auction House open?”

“It's almost closing time, but it's not far. Should I give Rachel a call?”

Rachel agreed to spare us a few minutes if we hurried over. Despite the rain, Mary and Evangeline took off on the motorcycle to investigate the worth of the baseball cards, while Sam and I piled into my truck. We pulled up to the warehouse near the San Francisco Design Center, snagging a rare parking space right in front.

Samantha's former assistant Rachel had learned a lot in her two years at the auction house. She wore her honey-colored hair in a neat coil at the back of her neck and a fine gray wool skirt in place of her old jeans. Pulling on a pair of clean white cotton gloves, she spread a velvet cloth on a worktable and switched on a gooseneck lamp. She examined the miniature with a magnifying glass and returned to her desk to search for comparable sales on the computer.

“This is older and higher quality than the others at the columbarium. Much higher quality.”

“Is it a Rosalba Carriera?”

“Could be. Could very well be. Assuming it's genuine and the provenance can be established, it should fetch a pretty penny. A pretty penny indeed.”

Sam and I shared a smile at Rachel's tendency to say everything twice.

“How much?” I asked.

“Brace yourselves,” she said, looking up at us with a bright smile. “Up to twenty-five thousand dollars.”

Chapter 16

—Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Swiss painter and sculptor

—Georges LeFleur

I remembered when twenty-five thousand dollars seemed like a fortune. True, it was a lot of money for a tiny piece of painted ivory, but it hardly seemed sufficient to justify kidnapping Mary and me and threatening us with bullets and rats. On the other hand, I had read that the average bank robbery nets only three thousand dollars, so perhaps it was all relative.

I dropped Sam at her Chinatown apartment, crossed the bridge into Oakland, and trudged up to my apartment, where I made a dinner of a pear and gorgonzola cheese. I ate in bed, wearing the oversized T-shirt that served as my night-gown, and was falling asleep when Evangeline and Mary called to report that Collectors' Corner had offered nearly ten thousand dollars for the baseball cards.

The contents of the metal box now totaled thirty-five thousand dollars. Had I missed anything else of value? Perhaps the toy soldiers were worth something to a collector, or the letters and photos to a museum. It wasn't a bad night's work, but it wasn't Blackbeard's treasure chest.

The phone rang again and I jumped on it, hoping it was Grandfather. Instead, it was our old pal Donato Sandino, checking on my progress—or lack of progress, I thought to myself—with
La Fornarina.
The Italian reminded me of what was at stake: my grandfather's freedom. I spent another restless night.

The next morning, in deference to a break in the rain and because I wasn't planning on climbing scaffolding, I dressed in a flowered skirt, a bright blue tank top, and sandals. I would be catching up on paperwork and finishing the pirate drawings at the studio, so I should manage to remain presentable. I hoped the out-of-character attire would lift my mood. Cindy's death still bothered me, I wondered about Donato Sandino's plans for Grandfather, and I worried that Helena might have rolled up Raphael's masterpiece like a cheap poster. I could almost hear the centuries-old varnish crackling.

Since I had a little extra time this morning, I decided to visit Mrs. Henderson and ask about Helena and about the legend of treasure in Louis Spencer's crypt. The retirement community looked and smelled as it had the other day. When I approached the front desk, the same blue-haired receptionist was chatting on the phone. She looked up with a smile, but the smile shook when she recognized me. She hung up.

“Hello,” I said. “I'm here to see Mrs. Henderson.”

“Oh dear,” the woman said. “She's gone.”

“Hairdresser's again?”

“Oh, goodness, no,” she said, avoiding my eyes. “She's . . .”

“What?” I urged, starting to worry.

“I'm so sorry, dear, she . . .”

A nurse who had been smoking outside walked up to the counter. “Are you family?”

“I'm her niece,” I lied.

“She was taken to Summit Medical Center in a diabetic coma.”

“A what? She was fine . . .”

“These things can come on quickly. She came back from an outing on Sunday—”

“Yes, I know. We went on a picnic.”

The woman's lips formed a straight line of disapproval. “You should have watched what she ate. She loves sweets.”

“She seemed very careful, and when we got back she checked her blood sugar. The machine said everything was fine.”

“You must have read it wrong,” said the nurse. “I'm sorry.”

She hustled down the hallway, her ample hips chugging from one side to another.

“There, there, dear,” clucked the blue-haired woman. “Nurse Ratchett has a rather blunt way of putting things. She means well. It wasn't your fault.”

An elderly woman with a strawberry-blond rinse accompanied by a stooped man with a hearing aid joined us. “What wasn't whose fault?”

“Mrs. Henderson,” the receptionist replied in a loud voice.

“Shame,” the man croaked. “She was so happy about writing her autobiography, too.”

The two women nodded.

“Was someone helping her?” I asked.

“Pardon?” The man reached up and fiddled with his hearing aid.

“Was someone helping her?” the receptionist repeated loudly.

“Chinese girl. Pretty as a China doll.”

“She wasn't Chinese, Ned. Not every Asian is Chinese, for heaven's sakes,” said the strawberry blonde with a fond but exasperated smile.

“Korean, then,” Ned said.

“Did she have an accent?” I asked him.

“What's that?”

“An accent,” I shouted. “Did she have one?”

“Nope. Mrs. Henderson was as all-American as apple pie.”

“No,” I said loudly, “the girl. The Asian girl.”

“Don't suppose she did, come to think of it.”

“Could she have been Japanese-American?”

“A Japanese porcelain doll. I was stationed over there during Korea, you know.”

“We know, Ned, we know,” the receptionist said, winking at me. I was starting to like Blue Hair.

“Was her name Cindy?” I asked the group. “Was she a graduate student at Berkeley?”

“That sounds right,” the strawberry blonde said. “My grandson went to Cal.”

“Good school,” Ned said. “Go, Bears.”

“
I
graduated from Stanford,” the strawberry blonde said. “Go, Indians!”

“Bears!”

“Indians!”

“They're called the Cardinals now,” Blue Hair interjected.

And I thought
my
crowd's conversational style was linearly challenged.

“Come to think of it,” the receptionist added before the Cross-bay Big Game rivalry flared up anew, “she hasn't been around in a few days. Not since Wednesday, at least. She used to come every other day.”

“What about Mrs. Henderson's autobiography? Was there a manuscript?” I asked.

“Nope, she was a widow woman,” Ned replied.

“Ned, hush,” the strawberry blonde said. “No, dear, I don't think they'd gotten that far. The girl used a tape recorder, tiniest little thing you've ever seen. Amazing what they can do with technology these days.”

“So how come they can't fix this d-a-m-n hearing aid of mine?” Ned barked.

Blue Hair rolled her eyes.

I thanked the folks for their help and rushed out to my truck. At Summit Medical Center, I found Mrs. Henderson still unconscious, her sister and a handful of nieces and nephews surrounding her bedside. She was in serious condition, they reported, but the doctors were optimistic.

“I don't understand it,” I said. “We checked her blood sugar the minute we returned from the picnic. The nurse even checked it. The machine said she was fine.”

“Did you notice anything odd about her behavior?” asked Mrs. Henderson's nephew, Abe, a physician's assistant.