The Painted Gun. Bradley Spinelli
Bay was mine. It was refreshing, the city grit and dirt blowing out of my hair, the bay glorious and blue with white peaks, safe passage to my little chunk of sanity.
None of it added up. Some ditzy twenty-one-year-old artist chick disappears and is suddenly worth fifty grand. McCaffrey hires me—a guy who hates him. The girl likes to paint me, yet I’ve never sat for a portrait. I get lucky and find her in an art show. Thin-lipped gallery owner knows nothing—or isn’t talking—and five minutes later gets dead. No doubt Sharkskin did it, but who the hell was he? And why would anyone want harmless old Dalton dead?
Then the big question hit me: why didn’t Sharkskin clip me?
Hold on, Crane, this is reality and you’re no shamus. Get a grip and quit thinking like any of this has anything to do with you. Wrong place, wrong time. Lucky you got out before the cops started sniffing.
* * *
When I came in the phone was already ringing. I let it ring, thinking the voice mail would get it, before I remembered that I discontinued that service. The phone was still ringing, ten rings and counting; had to be McCaffrey. Better play this one like a private dick—close to the vest.
“Hello?”
“Itchy! Glad I caught ya!” McCaffrey, of course, doing his faux-cheery bit.
“Just getting in.”
“I don’t have another number for you, Itchy. You still don’t have a cell phone?”
“Never needed one.”
“Well, I didn’t hear from you this morning. Does that mean you got my check?”
“Yeah, I got it. Hasn’t cleared yet, though. Jury’s still out on you.”
“It’ll clear, it’ll clear. So, how’s it going up there? You all right?”
He sounded fishy, fishier than usual. “Yeah, it’s all right.”
Pause the size of Yosemite.
“Find out anything so far?”
“Nothing to speak of. You got anything else for me or what?”
“Wish I did, pal.”
“Well, as much as I’d love to chat with you, McCaffrey, I have an assignment to work on.”
I hung up on him. Then I poured myself a drink. Dead bodies and all, seemed like the right thing to do.
I flipped idly through my mail as I sipped. Unpaid bills, disconnection notices, the usual drivel. Then, a robin’s egg–blue envelope, lettered evenly bottom to top: Don’t open this in your house. It was written over and over again, forming a pattern, the words disappearing when seen from arm’s length, my printed name and address clearly legible over the top. It was addressed to me in even, simple, slightly effeminate cursive handwriting, no girlie curlicues or rounded dots, postmarked from San Francisco two days earlier. I took a stiff pull of my drink. The whole racket was beginning to give me the creeps.
I put on a sweater, grabbed a fresh pack of cigarettes and the blue letter. I walked up my street and around the corner and up to Sign Hill Park. If you’ve ever driven from SFO International Airport to San Francisco proper, you’ve seen the big hill off the 101 emblazoned with the words, SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, THE INDUSTRIAL CITY. It’s a block from my house, and kids go up with flattened cardboard boxes and slide down the letters—the hill is steep, and the letters are sixty feet high. South San Francisco was incorporated in 1908, and even the town’s name reflected the industrial plans of its founders. G.G. Swift, who had picked out the territory for stockyards and a cattle market, wanted the site’s name to parallel that of his Western Meat Company’s plants in South Chicago and South Omaha. Bethlehem Steel and Fuller Paint came to South San Francisco, and the two world wars brought a hefty, if short-lived shipbuilding industry. The sign is now, like many great landmarks, a bit of an anachronism.
I went over to the I in Industrial and copped a squat. The lights of the airport were visible off in the distance, as were the blinking beacons from planes coming in for a landing as a slow fog crept in from Half Moon Bay. I shook my head, called myself a fool, and took the crinkled blue envelope out of my pocket.
I slit it open with a finger and took out a single page and unfolded it. Same handwriting.
David:
Somehow I fell in love with you. Your phone is tapped. Be careful. Don’t tell anyone about this letter—burn it.
Love,
Ashley.
I cursed myself, calling the entire affair a fat load of hokum even as I took out my Zippo and lit the page, holding the envelope to the flame and letting it catch, holding it up against the view of the bay and the airport and the speeding red tracers of the 101, thinking, Ashley, my ass. My fingers got singed and I dropped the ashes and stomped it all out on the I.
Ashley’s in love with me? This crazy girl that I’ve never met? The girl who’s gone missing and McCaffrey hired me to find? The girl who’s—somehow, someway—painting me? My phones are tapped? Am I supposed to take any of this seriously? Is she in some kind of trouble? And the hell with her, am I in some kind of trouble? What the hell did McCaffrey get me into? And what does any of this have to do with me?
I walked down to the Schoolhouse Deli and bought a fifth of Old Crow. One way or another I was going to need it.
5
It must have been about three in the morning, as I was sleeping the joyous, dreamless sleep of the bourbon drunk, when I heard the three beeps. I once had an alarm system in my house, but the alarm company doesn’t come and rip it out when you can’t pay the bill, it just becomes a glorified smoke detector. Whenever a door opens in my house—the front door, or even the door to downstairs—the old alarm sounds three annoying beeps. I jumped out of bed and went to the closet for my gun, realizing that it wasn’t loaded. I must have been standing just behind the door to my room, because when it opened suddenly I caught it right in the side of the head.
I barely had a chance to moan before a hand grabbed me and dragged me into the living room, sitting me down hard on the couch and attacking me with a piercing bright light. When my eyes adjusted I was looking at a face like a slab of meat.
“You Itchy Crane?”
“Not even sure you got the right guy?”
I got a slap in the face for that.
“Don’t get smart with me. I don’t like smart guys.”
“What, they make you feel dumb?”
I caught another slap for that, one that broke my drunk’s rude awakening and brightened me up enough to take an interest in the speaker.
“You gonna cut out that smart lip?”
I pondered the question, taking advantage of the opportunity to look at the five-foot, three-hundred-pound side of beef standing in my living room. I was thinking maybe I could take the bastard when a tall, cool character came drifting in from the kitchen, eating a salami sandwich and chewing it loudly. “Just cover him, Al, lemme do the talking.”
Of course there would have to be two. Thugs always come in twos in the funny pages. I thought I’d say nothing for a change.
“Nice digs you got here,” the cool one said. He was dark-haired but fair-skinned, with a high Irish forehead and chiseled features. He didn’t look dangerous from a physical standpoint, but the Colt in Al’s hand made me forget about trying to take either of them.
“Glad you like the place,” I said, pressing my fingers to my temples to try to clear my mind of the buzzing sound from either the bourbon or Al’s fist, or both. “Why don’t you make yourself a sandwich or something—you know, make yourself at home.”
“Thanks,