Bryan was gym-toned and gorgeous, but the thought of his going toe-to-toe with anyone, even a little old sculptor, seemed ludicrous. Levine, meanwhile, was decidedly elfin and looked as if he could be blown away by a strong gust of wind. On the distaff side, Mary could likely inflict some real damage, and there was no telling what I could do given the proper motivation. After all, I had once knocked out a bad guy with a bronze garden elf. And Sherri, though petite, had a cooler head and more common sense than all the rest of us put together. If a brawl were to break out in the hallway, it seemed to me the women were likely to carry the day.
For several moments the hallway was quiet as we watched the sky outside the window change from a gaudy pink to a bright orange to a flaming red. Then Bryan started humming the overture from
My Fair Lady,
and before long we were performing “Wouldn't It Be Loverly,” starring Bryan as Eliza Doolittle and featuring the rest of us as assorted street people, skipping up and down and singing off-key in atrocious cockney accents. We collapsed on the floor, laughing, and had just swung into a rollicking rendition of “I Could Have Danced All Night” when Pascal's studio door smashed open and a short, balding, unshaven man in a dirty white sleeveless undershirt and baggy cargo pants stepped into the hallway. So pale that his skin had a bluish cast, Robert Pascal was covered in stone dust and quivering with rage.
“
What
in the name of
God
in
heaven
is going
on
out here!” he screamed. “Will you people
please
shut the fuck
up
!”
“Mr. Pascal, Iâ” Scrambling over the detritus from our picnic, I knocked over a glass of wine and stumbled on a satin pillow. Bryan leaped up to steady me but stepped on a plate, sending shrimp canapés skittering across the linoleum, stomped heavily on Levine's sandal-clad toes, slipped on a rind of brie, and landed on the floor with a splat. Levine began hopping around screeching, holding his injured foot in the air, and when Sherri and Mary leaned over to help him they knocked their heads together with an audible thunk that made even Pascal wince.
“Oh my
gawd
! Are you all right?” Bryan cried and, rubbing his bruised flank, dragged himself over to the wine bucket and started distributing ice to the wounded.
Mesmerized by our antics, Pascal failed to notice as I sidled up and placed my foot on the threshold to prevent his slamming the door shut.
“Mr. Pascal,” I said, ignoring the moans and groans behind me. “I'm Annie Kincaid, Harold Kincaid's daughter. We met years ago, do you remember?”
The sculptor's gaze was unfocused. Was he sick? Drunk? Appalled?
“Mr. Pascal?” I repeated more loudly. Seeing him now with the eyes of an adult I realized he was not nearly as old as I had imagined, probably only in his early sixties.
“Annie Kincaid?” he said vaguely. “Well, well. How long has it been?”
“I think I was about ten when we met.” I smiled ingratiatingly, as if to say what's a mere twenty years between passing acquaintances?
“That's right,” he replied, watching Bryan apply ice to Levine's foot while Mary and Sherri rubbed their heads. “What in holy hell are you doing in my hallway?”
“Um . . .” I glanced at my tipsy and injured friends, the spilled wine, the scattered food, the general air of debauchery, and ignored the question. “Why don't we talk in your studio?”
Pascal pulled a dirty rag from a rear pocket, wiped his hands, and nodded. I followed the sculptor inside and shut the door firmly behind us.
One corner of Pascal's sculpture studio was devoted to a paper-strewn desk next to a clutch of boxy brown armchairs surrounding a low coffee table. A partially opened door to the right revealed a tiny room containing an unmade army cot and a stack of cardboard boxes. The rest of the space was given over to a huge workroom. Along one wall were five magnificent windows that stretched from floor to ceiling and cast light and air across the otherwise uninspired venue. Mounted on a track like a sliding barn door, the windows could be rolled open and, with the help of the stout winch that projected from the building, Pascal's heavy sculptures could be hoisted in and out of the third-floor studio.
Two worktables were piled with empty Cup o' Noodles containers, maquettes of various shapes and sizes, and an array of sharp tools that would have been at home in a medieval torture chamber. Several large objectsâpresumably sculptures in progressâwere hidden beneath canvas drop cloths. Marble dust covered every surface like so much powdered sugar sprinkled by a mad baker.
Pascal gestured to an armchair facing the windows and took a seat opposite me. Clouds of dust poufed up from the cushions as we sat down.
“Coffee?” he asked politely.
“No, thank you,” I replied, relieved at his courteous manner. Maybe this would be easier than I'd thought. “You're probably wondering what I'm doing here.”
“You've come to screw with my mind.”
Maybe it wouldn't.
“Seriously, Mr. Pascal,” I continued. “I'm an artist, too. In fact, I have a studio not far from here. Isn't that a coincidence?”
Pascal's weary, red-rimmed eyes revealed nothing.
“So anyway, I was at Anthony Brazil's gallery the other day and I met Janice Hewettâ”
“No,” he interrupted.
“Excuse me?”
“No. They can't have it back,” he said dispassionately. “Not now.”
“Not now?” I echoed. “Does that mean you'll give it back later?” I heard a muffled banging sound, but since it did not seem to emanate from the hallway I ignored it.
“I don't know.” He shrugged. “Not at the moment, anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don't fucking want to.”
“But you must know it's driving the Hewetts crazy.”
“I don't care. It's my goddamned sculpture.”
“Mr. Pascal, don't get me wrongâI'm a strong supporter of the integrity of an artist's vision. But
Head and Torso
belongs to the Hewetts. You sold it to them in 1968, and surely the check's cleared by nowâ”
“They're morons. They don't appreciate it.”
My brief interaction with Janice Hewett inclined me to share Pascal's assessment, but that was not the point. If intelligence were a prerequisite for owning art, most of the world's finest palaces would have nothing on their walls except spiderwebs.
“They paid only twenty-five hundred dollars for it,” Pascal continued. “It's worth nearly half a million now.”
“I think I understand,” I replied, choosing my words with care. “I know how hard it is to part with something that comes straight from your soul. But in the society we live in . . . well, the people who buy the stuff get to keep the stuff. Are you aware that the Hewetts are threatening a lawsuit if you don't return the sculpture?”
There was a scuffling sound high overhead, followed by a muted pounding, but Pascal either did not hear the noise or chose to ignore it. He appeared to have admirable powers of concentration.
Pascal sighed heavily and shifted in his chair, his sad, red-rimmed eyes watching me.
I changed tactics. “Did you hear about Seamus McGraw?”
“What about him?”
“He was found . . . uh . . . dead last night.”
I thought Pascal paled a bit, but since he was already deathly white I could not be sure.
“McGraw's an idiot,” he said. “An untalented hack.”
“Do you suppose his death had anything to do with
Head and Torso
?”
“Don't be stupid,” he snapped. “What could his death have to do with me?”
“I don't know. The timing just seemed odd, that's all.”
“Take some advice from an old friend of your father's,” he said with an avuncular air. “Mind your own goddamned business.”
“Butâ”
“Do you have any idea, Annie, what it's like to be a sculptor in a culture that doesn't appreciate art?”
“Actually, I'm an artist myself soâ”
“I'll tell you what it's like,” he said, and gazing at a point on the wall beyond my left shoulder he launched into a rambling discourse on the creative and monetary trials of an artist's life.
As if this was news to me.
I was listening with half an ear, waiting for him to finish, when I saw a thin vertical line in the center of one of the windows. The line moved. What the hell was that? A rope?
“âcannot imagine the challengesâ” Pascal droned on.
A pair of black motorcycle boots appeared at the top of the window frame.
“âall over again, were I to have another chance atâ”
Faded denim jeans lowered into view, followed by a black leather jacket, and the figure clutching the rope slowly started to spin.
Hoping to keep Pascal from turning around and witnessing the further antics of the stakeout flake outs, I nodded at him encouragingly.
“âcareer was a success, or so I thought, but in the art world there is no suchâ”
Tom's big blond head finally appeared as well as his broad hands, white-knuckled from their death grip on the rope. The spinning increased and was augmented by a pendulum motion. I watched, morbidly fascinated, as Tom began to swing from one side of the window to the other.
“âSheila left me, which was probably as much a blessing asâ”
Back and forth and round and round went my friend on the rope outside the window. The brief glimpses I caught of Tom's face revealed a mixture of nausea and terror.
“âfinancial success is, of course, important in theâ”
Tom started yanking on the rope in what I hoped was a signal to Pete on the roof.
“It's my hands, you see,” Pascal said. “They're useless.”
He held up Exhibit A. I noticed a few liver spots and one really nasty blister, but they were not gnarled with arthritis as my great-grandmother's had been. According to the sculptor, though, his hands were too damaged to do the work that had been the great passion of his life.
I felt a surge of sympathy. When all you had was your work and your Cup o' Noodles, what did you do if you were forced to give up sculpting?
Pascal proceeded to tell me, droning on and on in excruciating detail.
“âclinic in Guadalajaraâ”
My gaze flew to the window as swirling bay breezes pushed Tom away from the building until Newton's Third Law of Thermodynamics pulled him back in. Blue eyes widened in a greenish face as Tom headed toward the glass before veering off a split second before impact.
My face must have registered my shock because Pascal turned to look at the window a split second after Tom swung out of sight.
“Beautiful view,” I improvised. “Really amazing.”
Pascal faced me again, frowning, and Tom drifted back into view. My eyes were weary from darting between the window and the sculptor. Pascal must be convinced that I either had some kind of eye trouble or severe attention deficit disorder.
I tried to refocus. “So have you thought about bringing in an assistant? You could do the design and detail work, and let the assistant do the heavier stuff.”
“I had an assistant once,” Pascal grumbled. “Years ago. Damned fool fell in love with me, so I fired him, and he went and killed himself. Pain in the ass, if you ask me. I'll never have another sculptor in here.”
Tom's heavy boots were braced against the window frame as he attempted to scale the building. After a brief struggle he flipped over and hung upside down for several excruciating seconds before gradually righting himself. Suddenly the bay breezes caught Tom again and flung him toward the window.
“I'd love to see
Head and Torso
!” I exclaimed, jumping up. “Is it here?”
“Of course it's here,” Pascal growled as he led me toward the rear of the studio. “Where else would it be?”
Tom hit the window with a thud, but thankfully the glass withstood the impact. Sneaking a peek over my shoulder, I saw one side of Tom's face pressed against the window, his breath fogging the glass. The rope started to jerk, and Tom inched skyward.
Pascal tugged on a fabric drop cloth to reveal a marble sculpture nearly seven feet tall and three feet wide. This was no head and torso as one saw them in nature, but a grouping of spheres meeting hard angles, softly polished surfaces meeting rough finishes, and naturalism meeting geometry. When it came to sculpture I was more a sixteenth-century, Donatello kind of gal, but there was no denying the power of this piece, which combined an unmistakably human form and a mechanical shell in a manner both alienating yet intriguing.
“I understand why you don't want to give it up,” I said again, meaning it this time. I was a damned fine artist but had never created anything so compelling. And if I ever did, I could not imagine selling it to someone like Janice Hewett.
A movement at the window caught my eye again. This time it was Pete swinging past, staring into the studio and mouthing something at me, and I feared disaster could not be far behind. Time to rein in my macho minions.
“I appreciate your speaking with me, Mr. Pascal,” I said. “And I do apologize for the noise; I didn't think you were here.”
“So you decided to have a party?”
“Um, that's kind of hard to explain. . . .” I trailed off. My eyes fell on several steel chisels and soft iron hammers sitting by a marble block. They reminded me of McGraw. “Mr. Pascal, can you think of any reason someone would kill Seamus McGraw? Sculpture doesn't seem like a profession where one makes enemies.”