The Painted Gun. Bradley Spinelli
ratio among journalists looks enough like a whole number to guarantee it will never appear on a racing form. But it was a bullshit reason to quit. I was just tired of endless deadlines writing useless copy that would only end up lining a birdcage. One particularly drowsy afternoon I did the math and worked out how many trees in the dwindling rain forests I was personally responsible for felling and couldn’t eat for two days. Besides, the writers for the Guardian were getting all the hot stories; I worried I wasn’t read by anyone under sixty.
So I moved to South San Francisco and set up shop in a decent little house with two bedrooms upstairs, a spacious living room with bay windows offering nice views of the house across the street, a real kitchen large enough to actually have a kitchen table, and a faux-marble staircase leading to the street. The downstairs was a large garage with an unfinished room in the back. South City is a bedroom community where the pace of life feels slower and more private than in San Francisco proper, and I liked the idea of slowing down and having more time to think. There were few restaurants and fewer bars, and the likelihood that I would stumble into trouble was negligible. This is the kind of place where one moves to raise a family—or, I thought, build a business.
After years of snooping and scooping facts for the paper, I had a pretty good nose. I printed up some business cards and started a PR campaign. I billed myself as a jack-of-all-knowledge, and for a fee would answer any question put to me. I put an ad in the Guardian, some friends at the Chronicle placed a nice blurb about me in the Sunday edition, and pretty soon I had a nice clientele going. All kinds of gigs: mapping out elaborate travel plans to unusual destinations for people with unusual tastes; sexual fetish information; property ownership inquiries for investors; the occasional person-search for law firms serving subpoenas; even helping students with research projects on obscure subjects. I was like a private dick with very little legwork—and I never got shot at. I even got a couple cushy reconnaissance missions, literally taking some hotshot’s vacation for him, all expenses paid, to work out the perfect weekend in Oahu or Cabo so he wouldn’t run the risk of staying at a less-than-divine resort. Those were the days.
Then I made the mistake of ghostwriting a cover story in one of the weeklies about nude beaches in the Bay Area. I knew the kid working the story and the money was right. Turns out my directions to one of the harder-to-reach Marin beaches—nude beaches are off the beaten path, even in California—got flubbed somewhere between me, the credited writer of the article, the editor, and the fact-checker. A young couple missed the crucial turn that had been omitted from the printed directions and fell sixty feet to the rocks. Their bloated corpses washed up at low tide and scared the piss out of a couple of Chinese fishermen.
It could have all blown over—should have all blown over—but the girl’s mother got word about what the couple were doing out there. She tried, unsuccessfully, to sue the paper, did a lot of grade-A snooping, and made the writer’s life hell until he finally confessed that he didn’t know the swimming hole but had gotten his information from me. The woman launched a personal vendetta—placed slanderous ads next to mine, got on radio talk shows. I became a headline: “Ghostwriter Blamed in Young Girl’s Death.” No one ever asked me for comment. The last two years had been a long, slow slide into insolvency.
I was scraping bottom and I knew it.
My brain was halfway to sending my hand back to the phone to star-69 McCaffrey when the front doorbell rang three times in a row and stopped. I made it to the door in time to see the UPS driver gun his engine and pull his truck away from the curb. I opened the screen to yell at the driver but it caught against something and bounced right back into my face. I took a step back and saw what had impeded me: a flat box, barely four inches thick but six feet high and standing on end, leaning against the outdoor railing.
I muscled the thing downstairs, opened my garage door, and set it up on my workbench. It was addressed to me, overnight delivery, and the return address was missing a name but I recognized it as McCaffrey’s Santa Monica digs. I didn’t like it. He was playing me, one way or another.
I took a mat knife and ripped into it, cut the top of the box away, and started in on the bubble wrap. When I was all but buried in packing materials I realized I was looking at the backside of a stretched canvas. I stood it up, turned it around with some difficulty, put it up on the bench, and stepped back to light a smoke and have a look.
I never got the smoke lit.
It was a painting of me.
2
“McCaffrey Investigative Agency. Can I help you?” She sounded blond, past her prime, and tragically Los Angeles.
“Give me McCaffrey.”
“Mr. McCaffrey is busy at the moment. If you’ll leave your name and number I’d be more than happy to—”
“I’m more than happy to talk to him now, lady. Tell him it’s David Crane on the line.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Crane, but Mr. McCaffrey is quite bus—”
“Miss Moneypenney, tell Mr. McCaffrey that the gentleman on the line is making obscene sexual demands. It won’t be a lie if you don’t quit talking to me and start talking to him.”
There was a short but pregnant pause and the line clicked and my ears were assaulted with an instrumental version of Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney’s “The Girl Is Mine.” It only lasted about ten seconds.
“Itchy! What’s the good word?”
“You tell me. It isn’t my birthday, and I don’t believe it’s the first of April.”
“I wanted to be sure that I have your attention, that’s all.”
“You’ve got it.”
“All right. I could really use your help on this one. It’s a simple missing-person case but I’ve got nothing to go on. Girl up and bailed. She’s of age so the cops won’t touch it. Everyone seems to think she just doesn’t want to be found—no foul play, no intrigue. But her family is desperate and the money is right.”
“That’s all very interesting.” I let it lie just a moment until I heard him take a breath to speak. “But why do I have a portrait of myself sitting in my garage?”
“So I do have your attention.” He laughed a small, threatened laugh that I wished I could have beaten out of him. “That’s why I called you, Itchy. I figured you wouldn’t be able to pass this one up. You’re too damn vain.”
“Tell me something useful.”
“Itchy, I don’t know anything more. This is one of the paintings the girl did before she disappeared. The family gave it to me as a possible lead. I thought it looked an awful lot like you, so I sent it along. Thought you might know her. Do you?”
“Well, let’s see . . . do I know a girl—no name, no face, no description—who paints portraits of me?”
“Hey, either you sat for the picture or you didn’t. You must have, it’s too good otherwise.”
“She could have done it from a photograph.”
“If you didn’t sit for it then you know everything I do. The family wants to remain anonymous, so I don’t even know the girl’s last name. She’s probably traveling under an alias anyway. Apparently she hasn’t used her real name since she was in kindergarten. All I have is a first name and a little background information.”
“What’s the name?”
McCaffrey took a sip of something; I heard what sounded like a shot glass clink against the receiver.
“Ashley. The name’s Ashley.”
* * *
My first thought when I put the phone down was that there was a lot I didn’t like about the situation. No last name. McCaffrey’s cagey drink. The painting. Then I realized that there wasn’t anything I did like about it. McCaffrey had agreed to have his assistant fax over everything he