No one answered the bell next to the door so we walked down the driveway along the side, following the sound of metal clashing against metal. Further along, flashes of silver-blue light shot out from an open doorway. A welding torch, maybe.
A young man wearing a welder’s face shield and leather apron came out of the side door. He flipped up the shield and challenged us. “What do you want?”
“Is this the studio of Franz von Wilde?” I called as we walked toward him.
“Who?” Then the light dawned and he said, a bit incredulously, “You mean Frankie?”
“Is he here?” I asked.
Scowling in apparent puzzlement, he asked, “Why?” in a way that seemed to question why anyone would want to see Frankie rather than asking what our business was.
I pulled out the postcard from the gallery. “We saw his sculpture at the Snow Gallery.”
He smiled broadly at that. “Did you like it?”
“Is Mr. von Wilde here?” Jean-Paul asked again.
“Yeah, sure.” He beckoned for us to follow him inside as he shouted, “Frankie. Visitors.”
The door we passed through was similar to the big delivery door on the front of the building. It opened into a long, narrow work room, a space partitioned from the large warehouse. At the far end there were several metal sculptures that could have been cousins of the bronze bowling pin-big, oddly twisted, and dark.
The welder took off his shield and set it on a workbench next to what looked like a large iron gate.
Jean-Paul asked, “What are you working on?”
“The driveway gate,” he said, running his hand over a welded seam. He seemed affable enough, mid-twenties, I guessed, more biker than Bohemian. “Some asshole rammed it the other night. Probably drunk.”
He punctuated his statement by yelling for Frankie again.
“Otherwise, you couldn’t have walked down this way,” he said. “We always keep the gate closed. That’s why I was surprised to see you; no one ever comes down here.”
“I would think people who visit the gallery might come by to see the studio from time to time,” I said.
He grinned. “Never happened before.”
A door at the back opened and a face under a mop of uncombed black hair peered in. The welder heard the door and turned toward it.
“Didn’t you hear me, Frankie? I said, you have visitors.”
A young man about the same age as the welder, twenty-something, sidled in and shut the door behind him. He looked like he might have just rolled out of bed, barefoot, rumpled jeans and holey T-shirt, eyes puffy and unfocused. He switched those sleepy eyes back and forth between Jean-Paul and me a couple of times as if deciding whether he would stay or not.
“They were at your mom’s gallery,” the welder said. “They saw the sculpture and wanted to see what else you got.”
Frankie aimed his dark eyes at me. “What do you want?”
“I just told you,” the welder said as if speaking to a slow child. “They saw the sculpture-”
Frankie snapped, “I heard you, Eric. Now shut up.”
“Jeez, just trying to tell you something. You don’t have to bite my head off.”
Frankie ventured a few more feet into the studio. He kept his eyes focused on me.
“I know who you are,” he said, sounding angry. “What do you want?”
Jean-Paul slid his hand under my elbow and pressed close beside me protectively.
“We’d like to speak with you,” I said.
“Is it about Dr. Holloway?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“Hey, look.” He came all the way into the room but stopped some distance from us. “I know it was you found him, I saw it on the news. And I’ve seen your shows, I know what kind of stuff you do. I also know that you’re some kind of friend to that kid, Sly.”
“Do you know Sly?”
He shook his head. “I know who he is. People are saying he threatened Dr. Holloway, and maybe he killed him.”
Reflexively, I put my free hand over Jean-Paul’s where it rested on my arm, something solid to hold onto.
“What people?”
“The usual assholes.”
“You used to attend Anacapa College,” I said.
“That was my mom’s idea. I wanted to go to NYU.”
“Hah!” Eric, the welder, interjected. “Like you could get in.”
“I told you to shut up, Eric.”
“Asshole,” Eric muttered. He put his face shield back on the top of his head and picked up his welding torch. “You want to take your powwow somewhere else so I can get this finished? If we don’t get the gate back up by tonight there will be hell to pay. Hell to pay.”
“Who’s stopping you?” Frankie said. To me, he said, “I got nothing to say to you.”
Then he turned and went out the way he came in.
Chapter 12
Roger rolled my inky fingertips, one at a time, onto a fingerprint card. The Sheriff’s Scientific Services technicians had dusted the administration building for prints and wanted sets of exemplars from everyone ever known to have been in the building.
“Detective Thornbury was going to have you go down to the Sheriff’s Malibu station to give a set of your prints,” Roger said. “But when I offered to get them when you came over tonight for dinner, he went along. He’s figured out that his life will be easier during the investigation if he drops the hardboiled-cop shtick and plays nice with the locals.”
“Locals meaning you and your department?”
“Yep.” He handed me an alcohol wipe to clean my fingers with.
“How pleasant for you,” I said with a definite lack of sincerity. “Having them underfoot.”
“It works out for him,” Roger said. “The closest Sheriff’s substation to Anacapa is down the freeway in Lost Hills. Didn’t take Thornbury long to figure out how much time he was going to spend stuck in freeway traffic if he had to go back and forth. So I told him that if he could mind his manners and take turns washing and refilling the coffeepot like the rest of us, he and Weber could have a desk in our station. He accepted.”
“And does it work out for you?”
He nodded. “The Sheriffs took over the investigation. But it’s still my community.”
“Watch your back, Roger,” I said, putting the used wipe in the hand he held out for it. “I don’t trust the guy. From what I’ve seen of him, I just don’t think he’s as smart as he needs to be to get this case right.”
“Maggie?” From the paternal tone in his voice, I knew something pithy was coming so I looked up into his face and waited. He put a hand on my shoulder, leaned his forehead against mine, looked into my eyes, and said, “They can’t all be Mike.”
I tapped his cheek. “Good thing. Can you imagine life if they were?”
“That would be scary.” He laughed as he straightened up, wadded the used wipe into a ball and flicked it into a trashcan. “But what fun, huh?”
While he put away his fingerprint kit and slipped my exemplars into a protective envelope, he asked, “That kid, Frank Wiedermeyer, actually told you people are saying that Sly killed Holloway?”
“Might have killed Holloway,” I said. “And he’s no kid; my guess is he’s somewhere between twenty-five and thirty.”
“The angry young artist?”
“Artist? I’m not so sure. He’s not scuffed up enough. His friend Eric’s hands were black and calloused, what you’d expect for a metal worker. You can’t wash that black off with a little soap and water,” I said. “But Frank? From what I saw, his hands were clean and smooth.”
“What did that mean to you?”
“Either he quit working with metal a long time ago, or Eric is the sculptor and Frank is his front. Eric seemed very pleased when I told him we were there because we had seen that thing everyone is calling the bronze bowling pin. But Frank didn’t seem to care.”
“I’ll check them out. And I’ll see what I can find out about the rumor mill.” He was smiling at me like a fond parent with a clever child. “Anything else I should look into, Nancy Drew?”