The Painted Gun. Bradley Spinelli
I haven’t seen him in a month and he just drove in and I wasn’t off work yet, so Mr. Dalton let me go.”
“Right, I remember.”
“But when I came back, this guy was locking the front door. He said Mr. Dalton had to leave, and he was locking up for him—he said he was a business associate. I—I didn’t think . . . I was just so happy to leave and see my boyfriend.”
“What did this guy look like? Medium height, dark, sharkskin suit?”
“Yeah. You saw him?”
“Only for a minute. What else?”
“That’s all. I just . . . It’s all my fault!” More waterworks, more holding the shivering bird.
“It’s not your fault, Serena. You couldn’t have done anything. If you had stayed, you’d probably be dead too. It’s okay.” I held her a minute more and she seemed to calm down for good. “Is your boyfriend still in town?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Go see him. You’ll be fine. Want me to call you a cab?”
“No . . . it’s close.”
Something came to me. “You still have a job, right?”
“Mr. Dalton’s sister is taking over. She said we’ll reopen in a week or so.”
“That blond woman inside?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Thank you, Serena.” I handed her my card. “Listen, if you think of anything else, anything at all, please call me. Call me before you call the cops.”
“Why?”
“Because the cops won’t find the killer.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they don’t know why he killed him.”
“Do you?” Those green eyes hit me like an interrogation spotlight.
“No. But I’m going to find out.”
I figured Dalton’s sister would be easy to find and would manage to stay alive for a while. I didn’t want to wear out my welcome and risk running into Mr. Salami Eater. Just seeing that lizard slice my portrait off its frame made me angry all over again. I could have simply turned him in to the cops—he’d been in my house, he had to know something. But getting him picked up wouldn’t get me anywhere.
* * *
I had to find Ashley. Maybe McCaffrey had hired me to do his dirty laundry, but this was quickly becoming something else. I had to know why Ashley was painting me. I had to know who she was.
I had to find Al.
I walked over to Powell and Market, by the cable car stop, and hit a pay phone in the midst of swarming tourists to call my old friend Shelley at the San Mateo DMV.
“David?” I could hear the smile creeping up the sides of her pouty lips. “Is that you?”
“It’s me, Shelley.”
“So when are we going out?”
I’d been baiting Shelley ever since I first started asking her for favors. I think she knew it was never going to happen, but I had to keep up the charade. It was the silently agreed-upon game. “Next week. For sure. I’ll give you a call.”
“I bet you will. Where you been? I haven’t heard from you in aaaages.” She dragged that last bit out. Someone sometime must have told her it was cute.
“Oh, you know, here, there.”
“Uh-huh. Hold on a minute.” She cupped a hand over the receiver and her voice came through a little muffled. “I am talking to a customer. Just a minute.” She cleared up again. “I’m back. What can I do for you, Mr. Crane?”
I gave her Al’s license plate number and asked her to get me everything she could.
“I’ll need a couple hours. Give me your cell phone number, I’ll call you back when I get it.”
“Shelley, I don’t have a cell phone.”
She sucked a little air through her teeth. “You just don’t want to give me the number.” She was cute, you had to hand it to her.
“No, sweety, I really don’t have a cell, and I won’t be home until long after you get off work. I’ll call you back by the end of the day.”
I grabbed a slice at Blondie’s, walked back to Delores, drove her home, and went upstairs to try to take a nap, but sleep wouldn’t come. I remembered the gallery guide and dug it out, spreading it across my knees and reading it in bed like an invalid.
The exhibition was a group show of Bay Area 2D artists, and the only other common element was that all submissions had to be six feet by five feet. I hadn’t noticed at the gallery, hadn’t looked closely at any work but Ashley’s—a rookie move. Most were oils, some were ink, some acrylic, but they were all on canvas, six by five. The gallery wanted to explore the possibilities of artists unafraid to work on a large scale, blah blah blah . . . bios of the artists. Ashley’s read like a ransom note from another dimension:
Ashley is not: an acronym or an anagram. Ashley does not: work with acrylic, steel, or clay. Ashley will not: sell out or fade away. Ashley was born, is living, and will someday die. Ashley admits to being fixated on one particular subject matter. It’s a phase. Enjoy.
It made me shiver, it made me understand all the more why she drove Dalton crazy. I reached down and absently stuck the guide under my mattress, and tried again to fade away to dreamland. No dice.
But I knew what was bothering me. It was staring me in the face and I couldn’t look away. That was why I couldn’t drop the case. It had nothing to do with McCaffrey’s twenty-five Gs, it had nothing to do with two thugs sticking a gun in my face.
It was Ashley.
Why the hell was this girl painting portraits of me? How did she know what I looked like? How the devil did she know where I was on New Year’s Day? How did Al and Lizard and Sharkskin seem to know more about this than me? Fixated on one particular subject matter—how many more of these paintings were there?
I’d lived in San Francisco long enough to get my fill of new age theologies, crackpot philosophies, and cockamamie mystical ideas about the universe. I’d heard about astral projection, tantra, the Kabbalah, ESP—it was all a load of hooey. But this . . . this was too weird. What could explain it? Was I next on The X-Files? Was this young girl somehow tapped into my mind? Could she see me from a distance? Did she dream about me, and paint her dreams like Dali?
I remembered an article I’d read about remote viewing, a paranormal, ESP method of seeing something hidden from view, or something happening very far away. The phenomenon was explored at the Stanford Research Institute in the seventies and later funded by the CIA. The government’s twenty-million-dollar research program—with the unlikely name of the Stargate Project—was shut down, and documents were declassified a couple of years back. The scientific debate was predictable: proponents swore it worked and that valuable information could be gained; detractors called it pseudoscience and either said that more research was required or that it was a straight-up hoax. The truly spooky part is that proponents imply that RV is a technique that can be taught and learned by anyone, psychic or not. It doesn’t take an extraordinary amount of paranoia to wonder if the CIA is still fooling around with mind tricks, but my own paranoia begs the question: why would a young girl, even a CIA operative, be spying on me? Everything about it sent a creeping skeletal hand up the back of my spine.
Somehow it would be easier to accept if she lived in Wisconsin and had no idea that the paintings she was cranking out depicted reality, but that note . . . if it really did come from Ashley, my Ashley, then she knew who I was and how to find me. She lived in California, somewhere—or did until recently.