False Impressions (11 page)

I
t was enraging, literally enraging. Who was this woman? This woman with the long, orange hair who had grabbed Madeline’s attention like never before? Their connection at the club had been obvious, when they were drinking lychee martinis and paying no attention to anyone around them. And now Madeline was introducing her to people in the art world, her many devotees. Or were they her friends? It was hard to tell with Madeline, who cared so little about anyone else.

So was this woman simply a new favorite pet? Or was she more?

It was that thought—the thought of Madeline developing a relationship with someone, when she’d denied so many others—that made the rage overwhelming.

23

T
hat night, I couldn’t sleep. I was, I realized, sexually riled up. I had been in a relationship for so long—first with Sam, then Theo—that I’d forgotten the desperation that can accompany those moods. The throb that won’t quiet, the one that grows with the thought that you might not be able to fulfill it. Unless on your own. Which wasn’t a bad option. Not at all. But still, when things have gotten past a certain point....

I threw back the covers and switched my bedside light on. I couldn’t help but turn and look at the other side of the bed—smooth sheets and blankets, when they used to be twisted with heat, with a man.

I shook my head to shake away the image. I tugged on some comfortable socks, pajama bottoms and a robe and made my way to my home office. Bristol & Associates had recently bought me a slim, white notebook that was synced with their network so I could work from home. But I wouldn’t be able to focus on work. I woke the computer, pulled up a search engine.

Now, what to do? What to do to get my mind back into my mind and away from my body?
But the question only registered at the end—the word
body
—and then I thought of the artist that Syd and Madeline wanted me to work with.

I typed in
Axel Tredstone.
Immediately the screen proliferated into a sea of images, most of women, stunning in ways that embodied power and sex.

I found the work Syd and Madeline had spoken of—where the women’s bodies were painted so that they looked clothed, as if in a bodysuit that detailed what you might see inside the women, their emotions, as if you could even peer through their skin, into their layers.

One showed a woman in shades of peaches and pinks. Clouds swirled up and down her arms. Her breasts had been painted as if she wore a bandeau top with a string around her neck, but if you looked closer the string was actually a rope.

Another showed a woman with a mass of contradictory colors in her torso but her legs had been painted blue with fins, and she reclined on her side, her feet hidden. She looked like a contemporary mermaid.

I clicked through some of the other images. I found Tredstone’s bio and a series of articles about him.

Axel Tredstone
was born in Munich, Germany. He came to the U.S. when he was 18 to attend the School of the Arts Institute. There he met former students Jim Nutt and Art Green, who took him under their artistic wing. However, instead of focusing on Chicago Imagism, the world that Nutt and Green inhabited, Tredstone’s development as an artist led him on a different path, one that turned an adoring yet analytical eye on women.

He started with portraiture. Later, he used a technique in which different parts of the subject were removed and shuffled, so that the end result was a painting that had been cut and reassembled, like puzzle pieces that didn’t exactly fit together. Or did they?

I stopped there and read the last paragraph again, focusing on the word
cut,
then seeing it in the email Madeline had received. Was Tredstone someone to explore as a suspect?

The piece concluded that Tredstone became unsatisfied with his new, reassembled portraiture. It still did not capture the mystery of women. The article went on to explain how Tredstone’s technique evolved to painting directly on the women’s bodies, using his intuitive abilities to capture what he saw, felt, heard, smelled for each subject.

I sat back and wondered what Axel Tredstone would see in me.

24

T
he next morning, I was back at the computer, settling quickly into work, emailing Maggie to update her on certain cases. When that was finished, I opened the email Madeline had received yesterday and that I’d forwarded to myself. I read it again.
You will never be forgiven for what you did.

After meeting Sydney last night, I wondered if the writer could be him. It seemed apparent that he still craved Madeline Saga. Madeline had said that their breakup had almost killed him. Was that true? Could Madeline’s rejection have devastated him so much that he wanted to destroy her in some way? Or maybe he knew that stealing her artwork would kill
her
and her business.

I made a few notes about Syd on a white notepad, some other questions I wanted answered.

Next, I thought over some of the other information Madeline had given me about the move from the Bucktown gallery to the new one.

I did an online search for “Margie Scott,” “art specialist” and “moving.”

She was easy to find. Ms. Scott, I learned, was the owner of a company called Chicago Fine Arts Courier. I read the information on the company’s website.
Packing and transporting fine art, from painting and sculptures to rare antiquities, requires attention to detail beyond measure. Ordinary moving companies do not possess the necessary expertise. Chicago Fine Arts Courier employs specialists to delicately pack your works of art, using temperature-controlled vehicles and other state-of-the-art moving equipment and security to ensure your art is secure, every step of the way.

Every step of the way.
I thought about how many—
many—
steps my father had listed that were involved in the art-moving process. That would give someone from Chicago Fine Arts Courier a lot of opportunity.

I clicked on the site’s link for the owner. Margie Scott, it said, had a degree in art history, was a licensed architect and also an artist with a successful following in her own right. In fact, it was when a relocation of some of Scott’s architectural art pieces went awry that she decided to form her company.

I sat back from the computer and thought about that. Margie Scott was an artist and knew, from her own experience, how and where the process of moving art could go wrong.

I pulled up the document I’d created with Madeline and bolded Scott’s name. Then I thought of something else I could do about the email. Or rather, I thought of
someone.
Vaughn.

I dialed his number. Voice mail. It was a Sunday, but Vaughn had said something the other night about having to work weekends. I listened to his message, then left my phone number.

He called back within a few minutes.

“So what do you do?” I said, trying to joke around. “Do you sit in your office and wait for someone to leave a message and then check it?”

“Hell, yeah,” he said, sounding cranky. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of shit calls we get over here.”

This wasn’t how I wanted things to go. “Hey, I was just calling to say thanks for that ride home. I know you were irritated with me, but I really mean it—I’m grateful.”

He was quiet for a second. “Well, thanks,” he said. “It’s part of my job, you know?”

“Yeah? Well, I was actually calling because I was wondering about another part of your job.”

He made a reluctant grunt for me to continue.

“I know from cross-examining you,” I said, “that you’re a
very
accomplished detective, who has solved all sorts of crimes.”

“Cut the crap, McNeil.”

“No, really,” I said. “You’ve worked a lot of different cases, including stalking, right?”

“You mean cyber-stalking or the old-fashioned kind?”

I thought about that. “A little of both. I need another favor.”

The phone was silent for a moment. “Is it about the friend who disappeared from the bar?” he asked.

“It is. She was around the next day. I guess you were right—she took a header or whatever you called it. But now she’s gotten this threatening email.” I briefly explained the circumstances, not mentioning any names or the art world.

“You want me to take a look at it?” Vaughn asked. “Forward it. I can look at it now on the phone. If it’s short.”

Vaughn gave me his email address, his personal one, and that felt oddly intimate.

I forwarded the email to him. I listened to his soft breathing as he took a minute to read it.

“My guess is, it’s a woman,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“The whole ‘cut and stretched’ thing. It’s passive.”

“What do you mean?”

“If a guy had written this, he would have said, ‘
I
want to stretch you, and
I
am going to cut you. When men are feeling violent toward someone, particularly a woman, they decide what
they
would do. But this person is saying someone, maybe someone else,
should
cut her. They don’t talk about doing the action themselves. So I think it’s a woman.”

“Any other reasons you think this might be authored by a woman?”

“No. That’s all I got.”

“That’s not much,” I said. I immediately regretted it. Vaughn always took things from me so personally it seemed.

But not that time. “Sorry,” he said.

“What do you think I should do from here?” I told him that I was waiting on data analysis of the email without mentioning Mayburn. I let him think this was all for a case I was working on at the law firm.

“You’ve done good. So far,” Vaughn said. He mentioned a few other avenues to try.

I told him I’d call him if we needed him. And I hung up, feeling bleak at the thought that I was pretty sure we would be calling Vaughn again, soon.

25

I
’d promised my mom and Spence that I would come over to their house for a “late Sunday lunch,” which was Spence’s way of labeling an occasion that would invite the opening of wine.

As I was walking up North Avenue toward the lake, I called Mayburn. I asked about his analysis of the email, and he told me that he was “ninety percent sure” that the
“cut and stretched”
email had been written by the same person as the comments under the Dudlin painting on Madeline’s website.

I told him what Vaughn had said about suspecting the author of the email was a woman.

“Could be.” A pause. “But since when do you ask Vaughn for help?”

I passed by Wells Street, trying not to slip on some of the snow-turned-black-ice. “Do I sense professional jealousy there?”

“No.” Mayburn sounded irritated. “What you sense is that I don’t like the guy because he was a
douche
to you. Remember that?”

“Yeah,” I said, letting my own irritation show. “Yeah, I remember.” And with that reminder of the Vaughn of old, some really nasty anger flooded in.
Damn, thought I got rid of that.

“Hey, Lucy’s been telling me to say hi and that we need to get together,” Mayburn said.

“I agree. Tell her ‘hi’ back.” I took a breath. “And really, I haven’t forgotten about the jackassery Vaughn has sown before. But I do think he can contribute to this case.”

“Fine. Cool. Look,” Mayburn said, “on that front, my own analysis shows a probability that it’s a woman who wrote those emails. But that’s not conclusive. Still, we should ask Madeline about this, about any women she knows who she thinks could have done that.”

“But it could be a man?” I asked, thinking of Syd and Jeremy.

“Absolutely.”

Mayburn also reported that the email address, from what he could tell, was registered under a bogus name and fake identifying information. Millions of people used the site anonymously, he said. And the company’s privacy policy was notoriously strict.

I called Madeline on her cellphone and told her what we’d learned from Mayburn and Vaughn. I took a right onto State Street and headed toward my mother’s place.

“A woman?” Madeline said, surprise in her voice.

“That was just Vaughn’s opinion.” I explained Vaughn’s reasoning, and also told her about the odds, according to Mayburn, that it could be a woman.

“Mayburn said his analytics aren’t definitive. No one’s are,” I said. “But I need you to think of any women in your life who might do something like write those comments and the email.”

“No,” she said quickly. “There’s no one like that. Absolutely not. I mean, I don’t have lots of girlfriends, but I adore
the ones I have. I’m not one of those women who says she can’t stand other women.”

“I’m not, either.”

We ran through a list of any women who had worked at Madeline’s gallery, or any outside contractors who might have spent enough time there to know the ins and outs.

I reached the iron fence outside my mom’s elegant graystone at the corner of Goethe Street.

I told Madeline I was going out with Jeremy that night, and that I would see her tomorrow. But the conversation weighed on me as I neared my mom’s house. I hoped very much, for Madeline’s sake, that she was right; that whoever was threatening her, whoever had forged her artwork, was not someone she considered a friend.

26

I
t felt good to be in my mother’s kitchen, tucked behind the bay window table, a soft lap blanket on my legs, sipping red wine and chatting with her.

My brother, Charlie, a frequent guest and drop-in at the house, loped into the kitchen. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said in return. I noticed that his hair was looking redder as he got older, as if he was in the autumn of his life.

“Mom, is Cassandra coming over?” Charlie looked at my mother with a bit of a smirk. Without waiting for an answer, Charlie turned to me, “Did Mom tell you she’s setting Dad up with Cassandra?”

I blinked at my brother. Then I blinked at my mom. “Wait. Did I just hear right? You’re…” I let my question fade, and then got my focus back. “You’re setting up your ex-husband with your best friend?” I heard my own incredulousness.