Brush With Death (7 page)

My mind's eye conjured the image of petite Cindy Tanaka leaping onto the back of the man in the Halloween mask. On this drizzly spring morning the ghoulish encounter seemed even odder than it had last night. Perhaps Cindy was not all she seemed.

Ostrich rescued—safe but sporting a bad case of road rash—and on its way to a new life on a ranch in Pacifica, traffic began to move. I inched toward the tollbooth and handed over my three dollars. Once past the metering lights, traffic picked up speed and I zipped across the bay, exited at Ninth, and drove along surface streets toward the district known as Cow Hollow. A long time ago farm animals grazed these hills, but these days Cow Hollow's location near Russian Hill, the Presidio, and the Marina made it one of San Francisco's pricier neighborhoods. In a city where even ramshackle dwellings commanded upwards of a million dollars, that was no small thing.

I nosed my pickup into the driveway of a scaffold-encrusted Edwardian mansion. Alongside the three-quarter-ton Chevy and Ford trucks near and dear to the hearts of contractors everywhere, my dusty Toyota looked like a four-cylinder newborn. But its collection of dents, and the magnetic TRUE/FAUX STUDIOS signs stuck to its doors, gave me a little street cred.

Job sites are dusty, noisy, chaotic, masculine places. Those of the female persuasion who venture into this domain either leave in a great big hurry or cultivate a tolerance for country music played at earsplitting levels, the endless fascination with foul-smelling bodily functions, and monosyllabic jokes whose punch lines invariably referenced “hooters,” “jugs,” and/or “tits.” My boyfriend, Josh, was the general contractor on this job, and the rough-and-tumble crew overlooked his easygoing and nonsexist vegan ways because he was a talented carpenter who knew the construction business upside down and inside out. It didn't hurt that Josh also had a sixth-degree black belt in karate.

I'm no interior designer—those licensed professionals must be able to gush over each season's new fabrics, to swoon over furniture choices, and to enjoy shopping with a fervor that bordered on lunacy. But with my eye for color and form I found myself helping a growing number of my faux finishing clients who shied away from a “designed” look for their homes but needed assistance wading through the endless variety of styles for everything from bidets to duvets, faucets to window treatments. Best of all, artistic consulting paid better, and required less actual work, than faux-finishing.

The owner of this house, Aaron Garner, was lacking in both taste and a wife, and so had hired me as the job's artistic consultant. A hearty sort whose likeness one expected to see on a bottle of expensive gin, Aaron Garner styled his gingery hair in an elaborate swooping comb-over in the fond but misguided belief that it hid his creeping male pattern baldness. I had first met the wealthy philanthropist last winter when I was volunteering with the “Save Oakland's Fox Theater” campaign. Garner had offered to match any pledge to our cause, and when the community responded with enthusiasm, he'd paid every cent with good humor. Garner discovered I shared his love of art and history, and commissioned me to paint a portrait of his son. I had recommended Josh when Garner was looking for a contractor to preside over the high-end remodel of his Cow Hollow mansion.

Last week Garner had put me in charge of the renovation for a couple of weeks while Josh accompanied him to Aspen, where Garner was breaking ground on a new vacation home. Some of the macho construction crew chafed at taking orders from me, but in general they came to accept my supervision when they realized I was an artist, not a competitor.

Plus, every so often I brought them fresh coffee and baked goods. I knew which side my doughnut was glazed on.

As for me, putting up with fart and booger jokes was a small price to pay for a generous and steady paycheck. Stuffing my clipboard and papers in a vinyl tote to keep them from getting wet, I climbed out of the truck. As I made my way up the walk to the front of the house, I spied a man the size of a small grizzly bear at the top of the entry stairs, framed by dust billowing from the open front door behind him.

“How's it going, Norm?”

Norm had dirty blond hair, a complexion that reddened easily, pale gray eyes, and nicotine-stained teeth. He was dressed in a worn pair of dirty jeans and a faded navy T-shirt emblazoned WHO'S YOUR DADDY?

“You're late,” Norm growled over the high-pitched whine of an electric saw. “I'm s'posta fax those fireplace details to Italy by eleven. And the Spanish guys out back are goin' nuts about somethin', but I can't understand a goddamned word they're sayin'.”

“They're not Spanish, they're Mexican. I'll see if I can figure it out.”

Last January Norm had handed me a gift certificate for a three-month, intensive Spanish language course at the University of San Francisco. He claimed to have been moved by the holiday spirit, but a few discreet inquiries—I took his lead carpenter out for beer and nachos on Chestnut Street and grilled him mercilessly—yielded the information that Norm had intended to take the class himself but chickened out. He had given me the certificate so he could write its cost off his taxes as a business expense. Since I had just been through an adventure where speaking Spanish might have saved me considerable grief, I was willing to be a pawn in Norm's IRS dodge.

Norm grunted and ducked back into the disemboweled house. I nodded at the electrician and exchanged a few words with the men pouring the concrete slab in the garage before picking my way down the house's narrow side alley to the backyard.

“
Buenos días,
” I said to the men in the garden. “
Que pasa?
”

Two dark-eyed workmen, one in a Raiders cap, the other sporting a 49ers windbreaker, leaned on their shovels and launched into rapid-fire Spanish. I must have looked as befuddled as I felt because the crew's leader, Ricardo, slowed down and began supplementing his words with gestures. He led me over to a pile of marble stepping stones the crew had found in the weeds and, holding one up, used a blue bandana to brush off mud and grass. I crouched down and peered closely. A string of carved letters was barely legible, and the top portion of the stone had broken off. Ricardo held up another piece, this one with deeper engraving: . . . MEMORY . . . ETH ANNE . . . VING MOTHER. These marble “stepping stones” looked a lot like old gravestones. I understood only a portion of what Ricardo was saying, but the meaning of
mortuaria
wasn't hard to guess.

A shiver went up my spine. Why would anyone use gravestones as garden decorations? Had Aaron Garner's home been built atop an old graveyard?

And what was it with me and cemeteries lately?

Chapter 4

—Salvador Dali (1904-1989), Spanish painter

—Georges LeFleur

“
Goddammit,
” a gruff voice swore behind me. “Annie, I gotta get these fireplace doohickies finalized. Damned rain's screwing up the schedule as it is. Can we get a move on?”

“Hey, Norm, have you seen these?”

He leaned in to examine the broken stone Ricardo was holding. “I'll be damned,” Norm said, his pale eyes lighting up. “I've heard about this. My dad told me that when they moved the graveyards years ago they used the unclaimed headstones to build other stuff. The city parks are full of 'em, I guess.”

I frowned. That seemed to be taking California's “reduce, reuse, recycle” motto a bit too far. “Which cemeteries were moved?”

“Whole bunch of 'em,” Norm replied, turning over anotherstone and brushing off the grime to read the engraving. Norm was a proud sixth-generation San Franciscan and, according to Josh, waited impatiently for the Big One to strike and send the yuppie interlopers scurrying back East.

“I grew up off Turk, in a neighborhood built on an old Catholic graveyard,” Norm mused. “But they had places for everybody—Jews, Chinese, even them Mason guys. Didja know the pet cemetery near the Presidio used to be an Indian graveyard?”

“Someone turned a Native American burial ground into a
pet
cemetery?” I glanced at Ricardo, who looked as appalled as I.

Norm shrugged. “Hell, they're
dead.
What do they care? Okay, back to work, men.
A trabajo, amigos. Capisce?
”

“That's Italian, Norm.”

“What?”

“
Capisce
is Italian. You mean
comprende.
”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“Norm? Since the gravestones weren't moved, dare I ask what happened to the bodies?”

“Paved over 'em would be my guess. Don't make sense to move the bodies but not the headstones.”

Ricardo and the man in the Raiders cap made the sign of the cross. I would have, too, but I always forgot which shoulder to touch first.

Norm's story sounded like the opening scene of a lousy horror movie, and I hoped it was another of his tall tales of old San Francisco. Only last week the cantankerous carpenter had tried to convince me the abandoned federal prison on Alcatraz Island was haunted.

In my broken Spanish I asked Ricardo to clean the stones and set them aside. Maybe a local history group would be willing to take them. I would have to make a few calls.

Yet another item for the To Do list.

I spent the rest of the morning going over trim details with Norm, confirming the lighting plan with the electrician, and detailing the bathroom tile patterns with the stone-masons. At one o'clock the project's architect, Ethan Mayall, arrived. Ethan was a prim, tucked-in young man who wore his hair short, his shirtsleeves long, and his John Lennon glasses perched upon his long, straight nose. He was the kind of guy whom everyone assumed was gay, but wasn't. The type who would marry a raving witch who dressed him in suspenders and cut up his meat for him.

For the next forty-five minutes I stood hunched over a roll of blueprints spread out on the temporary plywood kitchen counter, mediating between Ethan, who had vision but scant knowledge of the hands-on aspects of construction, and Norm, a skilled carpenter with the aesthetic sensibility of a sewer rat. I did my best, but if Josh didn't return from Aspen soon I feared we were in for bloodshed, à la
West Side Story.
I imagined a rumble on the quiet streets of Cow Hollow between Ethan and his gang of tweedy architects, brandishing hand calculators and straight-edges, and Norm and the rugged carpenters, armed with levels and awls.

I just hoped that didn't make me Maria.

It was nearly two o'clock by the time I headed across San Francisco to my art studio in the once-affordable neighborhood known as China Basin. I breathed a sigh of pure satisfaction as I pulled up in front of the DeBenton Building, a converted chair factory with old redbrick walls, huge multi-paned windows, and wide-plank wood floors. In the past few years the building's tenants had formed a close-knit, creative community. On the ground floor was an artisan bakery; the corporate offices of DeBenton Secure Transport; three potters who shared a kiln; and a birdhouse maker who never seemed to sell anything. In the upstairs studios were my good friend Samantha Jagger, a brilliant jewelry maker; a weaver who made itchy, tentlike dresses out of hemp; a freelance photographer; a novelist who liked to talk about writing more than he liked to write; and a clutch of architects and computer graphics people. As far as I was concerned the architects and computer folks didn't count as artists, but since they paid more in rent than all the rest of us combined I kept my mouth shut.

The artisan bakery turned out mediocre bread but filled the air with delicious aromas, and my stomach growled as I climbed the wooden outdoor stairs to the second floor, yanked open the sticky exterior door, and proceeded down the hall to my studio, number 206. I walked in to find Mary snoring on the red velvet sofa while Pete, a big man with kind brown eyes, cleaned out the espresso machine in the studio's tiny kitchenette.

“Annie! How are you?” Pete called out as he dried his large hands on a towel embroidered with a garish Santa Claus. “How does it go in the moratorium?”

“It's a
mausoleum,
Pete,” I said with a smile. Pete had emigrated from Bosnia at the age of fourteen, and his enthusiasm for new words, combined with his lack of formal education, created an entertaining take on American English. The other evening he had offered me a cup of “decapitated” coffee. “Where in the world did that ugly towel come from?”

“My mother, she makes it and sends it to you.”

Oops. Once more I reminded myself to engage my brain before engaging my mouth. “Oh! How sweet of her. It's just lovely!”

He beamed. “My mother, she is so gladdened about the restoration you achieved she begs you to join us to dinner on Sunday!”

Last month Pete had asked me to restore a cherished family portrait that had suffered extensive smoke and water damage during the family's difficult journey from Bosnia. I had been happy to do so, but refused to accept payment from a friend. Ever since, I had been dodging rapid-fire dinner invitations. I didn't want to hurt Pete's feelings by rejecting his family's hospitality, but the memory of his signature hot dish, which he brought to every potluck and Mary had dubbed “the Cabbage Rolls of Death,” made me hesitant. But Pete was undaunted, and his persistence was wearing me down.

“I have wanted you to taste our cousin—I mean our cuisine—from the gecko, and now is our chance!” Pete continued.

“You mean ‘from the get-go,' not ‘from the gecko,' ” I corrected him, praying I was right. Bowing to the inevitable, I crossed my fingers that Mama Pete's cooking had nothing in common with her bachelor son's. “Dinner on Sunday sounds lovely, Pete. Thank you.”