False Impressions (17 page)

I
heard a scrambling sound. Then a fierce whisper. “Hello?” Madeline said.

“It’s Izzy.”

Silence.

“Madeline, it’s me. Izzy,” I said louder.

“Izzy. Oh, God.” Her voice was an even lower whisper now, but then she coughed. “I apologize, Isabel. I was…I was dreaming.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to wake you up. You left the club okay?”

“When that cop led you out,” Madeline said, her voice stronger now. “When I watched that police car pull away, it was awful.”

I glared at Vaughn who was glaring out the window at the snow.

“You’ve become important to me, Izzy,” she continued. I noticed that she’d called me “Izzy” twice now. “I’ve come to rely on you a great deal,” she said, “but I don’t think I realized it until I watched that police car.”

“Thank you. I—”

“Shit,” she said. It was the first time I’d heard her swear. “My cell battery is about to die, but—”

The call disconnected. I felt, suddenly, as if she had been about to say something important.
But what?

I stared at the phone. I hit redial. It went right to voice mail.

“All right, you’ve had your call,” Vaughn said, turning his torso around.

“I need another.” I dialed Madeline’s number. No answer. Just voice mail. I hit Redial again and again until Vaughn turned and snatched the cellphone from my hand.

“Hey!” I said.

But Vaughn ignored me and climbed out of the car. And once again started digging futilely at the snow.

42

D
ear God, that had been close. So close. So close.

Too close?

No. No, never.

The feeling left over from seeing her tonight was more powerful than any before. There was only one thing to do that would douse this feeling. Go to the closet. Extract easel, canvas, palette. Then finally, pull out the Darger. Madeline’s favorite Darger. She’d owned it for years, she’d told an interviewer for an art magazine. She’d always set the price astronomically high because she loved it so much.

But apparently, Madeline hadn’t found the right place for it at the Michigan Avenue gallery, or maybe she couldn’t bear to sell it, and so it had been languishing. Which meant there was more time with this one. More care could be taken with the reproduction; it could be made into a seduction rather than a race. But soon it would be ready to be returned to Madeline while the real one stayed.

Place the original Darger, depicting a group of pre-adolescent sisters, on another easel.

With every copied stroke, the enjoyment increased, the reminder that creation was occurring and that creation would also take away something from Madeline, something she loved. Just as she deserved.

43

A
fter refusing to let me call Mayburn, Vaughn got out of the squad car for another long stretch of time, waiting, he said, for “Garcia” to arrive.

Meanwhile, my mind ran around and around, but more and more often returned to Madeline. In particular, I kept snagging on the inheritance she’d recently told me about.

She’d told me that the inheritance had allowed her to open her first gallery in Chicago. Although she didn’t say it, I got the feeling that the money could have opened a number of galleries in Chicago. Which suddenly made me wonder—shouldn’t she just acknowledge the forgery situation, offer to have the rest of the art tested to ensure authenticity and then get on with it? It seemed suspicious, suddenly. But that was my lawyer side talking, not a budding art fan, and certainly not Madeline, who loved art and the gallery above all else, and wouldn’t risk her reputation in that world by admitting to the forgery.

My bladder began asking to be relieved of the lychee martinis. I pounded on the window. Vaughn was standing in the slashing snow, staring at the back of the squad car like he might be able to figure something out. I tried pounding on the back window, but found it was actually an internal layer of safety glass.

“Mother hen in a basket!”

Nope. The fake swear words wouldn’t cut it.

“Mother fucker!”

I turned back around and tried to calm myself.

What to do?
I wondered.
When I had nothing to work with but my own mind.

I’d been spending time at the gallery, listening to Madeline. One thing she she’d said was that art is anything that makes you shift your thinking from one plane to another, even if it’s the smallest shift.

And so I wondered,
Could I shift my thinking? What would that feel like?
Immediately the answer came to me.
It would be easiest if we could get rid of this anger.
This was true. My irritation about Vaughn, which was the usual emotion I felt when he was around, was ramping up, boiling to make a cauldron of anger. And I really didn’t like it. Anger had never done much good for me.

What’s the opposite of anger?
I thought.
Laughter?
But how could any of this—being stuck on a
really
uncomfortable plastic seat in the back of a squad car, having been arrested for I didn’t know what, trapped in a blizzard, with
Vaughn
—be viewed as funny?

I decided to give Vaughn and his pointless attempt at snow management a musical soundtrack. I tried a screeching heavy metal song. Oops, that was the anger again.

I channeled Monty Python and hummed “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” Nope. Couldn’t go that far.

Then I thought of a Charlie Chaplin-like French number I’d heard in a boutique last week. And it stuck. I kept humming.

The song had so much whimsy that as I watched Vaughn, as he paced back and forth along the car, peering at one tire after the other, my mood began to shift.

By the time Vaughn slid back into the front seat, clapping his gloved hands for warmth, I was smiling. Genuinely.

He turned around and looked at me. “Why are you such a whack-job lately?”

My good humor evaporated. “Whack-job?” I repeated with indignation. “Why would you say that?”

“Are you fucking kidding?” He turned around farther to face me. “You’re in the back of a goddamned police car, McNeil.”

“I have been wrongfully accused! And inanely so, I might add.”

“Jesus, don’t start…” He turned around.

I shifted on the hard plastic seat, trying to cross my legs and gain some semblance of dignity.

“Honestly,” he said, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “What’s going on with you? First, you’re walking in a shitty neighborhood in the middle of the night, acting like a pro. Then a short time later, you piss off some bouncers and refuse to pay for admission.”

“And let me guess? You’re friends with the owner of that bar, too?”

“Same owner. He owns about twelve bars in the city.”

I shrugged. Sighed again.

“Honestly,” he said. “I want to know. What’s going on in your life lately?”

This was asked without scorn, with what sounded like actual curiosity. But still.

“I don’t have time for chit-chat. I need to get out of here.”

He gestured outside. “Not anytime soon.”

His voice was even-keel.
Sounds like a shift of mental plane.

“All right. Fine. What can I say? It’s just been a little stressful dealing with my friend’s situation. I’m about to take more responsibility at the law firm. And I’m dealing with a breakup.”

I made myself stop then. No matter how he was acting, Vaughn wasn’t the kind of guy to whom you made emotional confessions, and he already knew all this stuff.

But he surprised me. “Yeah.” He held my gaze in the mirror. “I know how it is.”

“So anyway,” I said. “What were you saying about my whack-job status?”

He grunted. “Okay, fine, maybe that’s not a nice way of saying it.”

“And what would be the nice way?”

He paused, appeared to be thinking about it. “You seem a little lost when I’ve seen you lately.”

“Both times have been late at night,” I said, annoyed.

“Yeah, I know. It just seems like someone should be taking care of you.”

His statement landed with a thud in the middle of the squad car.

I debating saying,
Thanks. In a weird way.
Or retort with an
I’m taking care of myself just fine, thanks,
but my circumstances seemed to rebut that.

“I’d like another phone call,” I said to Vaughn, as if I hadn’t asked before. “To someone different.”

He shook his head, as if he just didn’t know what to do with me.

Finally, he turned. “You know, you make it really hard.”

“Really hard to what?”

“To help you.”

“Help me? Is that what you’re doing? I am trying to help a friend. A friend who might really need me right now, and you have me trapped in a squad car for a lousy fifteen dollar cover. How in the hell are you
helping
me?”

His mouth was a tense line, lips clamped together.

“Honestly,”
the blonde said, unable to help herself. “How are you helping me?”

“I’m trying to show you that you have to get your shit together.”

“Excuse me?”

“Look, forget it. I shouldn’t have even tried. I am a drama-free zone right now.”

“You’re a ‘drama-free’ zone?”

Now he faced me again. “Yeah. You don’t see that? You don’t
get
that?”

“No, I
don’t
get it. All
you
do is bring drama to my life. To me, you’re the Goodyear Blimp of drama.”

Vaughn’s face turned snarly. He opened his mouth to say something awful, I was sure, something biting. I steeled myself for his lambasting.

But Vaughn closed his mouth and something gurgled from his throat. A chuckle. Then it became a laugh. “Seriously?” he said, incredulous, still laughing. “The Goodyear Blimp of drama?”

I thought about it. “Did I take it too far?”

“Just a bit.”

I cracked up. “It seemed like a good metaphor. You’re so dramatic. You just hijack a situation and you hover over everything.”

His laughter stopped. “That’s how you see me?”

“Yeah, of course. I—” But my words trailed off. I suppose I hadn’t seen Vaughn as so terrible
all
the time.

He turned around. The silence grew cold. I tried to think of something to shift the plane again

“Hey, look, you’re a decent cop at heart, right? I know that.”

Nothing. Why was it I wanted him to feel better?

“And you love your work, right?” I said. “That’s great. You’re one of those people who loves his job and that’s why you’re good at it, and…”

He turned around. The cold in his eyes stopped me. “I do not love my job. My divorce is too expensive to quit, and I got a kid starting college.”

“A kid.
You?
”

“Yeah, me.” His voice was aggravated. “Why do you have to say it like that?”

“I just don’t see you as a father.”

A heavy pause. I thought he might growl.

“Although I’m sure you’re quite capable,” I added.

More weighty silence.

“Probably a very good father,” I said. And I was surprised to find it feeling like I was speaking the truth. Vaughn might not be a walk in the park for me to deal with, but I suppose it would feel good to have someone like him have your back, to support you and discipline you and encourage you.

He took his cellphone out of his pocket and tried a few numbers. “Garcia,” he said. “Fucking finally. Where you been?” He paused maybe two seconds. “Yeah, I don’t give a shit about that. I’m stuck.” He glanced at me. “And I have an arrestee present.”

The drama blimp appeared on the horizon.

“Good,” Vaughn said. A beat went by. “Sooner!” he barked into the phone. He gave our address. “See you in fifteen.”

He opened his glove compartment and began removing a messy array of department forms and going through them.

“Is that it?” I said. “We’re done talking?”

“Yeah,” Vaughn said. “Oh, yeah.”

44

A
fter her phone died, she thought she saw ghosts again. No, that wasn’t exactly true. She felt them. So, in her dark apartment, the winds howling against her pre-war windows, Madeline Saga pulled on winter clothes and boots.

She put on a hat and a heavy coat. She hurried out into the snowy night, the wind even more furious and lashing outside, the snow falling heavier and faster.

She trudged through the knee-high snow. No one had yet shoveled the sidewalks in her Gold Coast neighborhood. But her destination wasn’t far—just on the opposite side of LaSalle Street. If she could get there.

She looked behind her. But of course, no one was out on this night—not even the diehards who loved a good blizzard. And yet she felt as if someone were there. She knew, from the letter she’d gotten, that she was being followed. And then that dream. But when she looked, there was no one there. No one at all. It made her feel crazy.

Now the edges of paranoia cut deep, causing real heart palpitations, causing her stomach to want to reject anything inside it. Causing her to feel the ghosts.

It occurred to her then that she supposed she should have expected this type of haunted feeling at some point in her life. Being adopted, after all, probably should have caused more soul-searching. She must have, she realized, demons. Ones she couldn’t see or feel.

A loud horn sounded and Madeline stopped, gasping, her hand on her heart.

A snowplow hauled past her, driver leaning on the horn, almost hitting her. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t heard it coming.

Madeline panted. She looked behind her. The snow was even thicker. She could see even less.

She saw no one. But she could feel them.

She put her hands in her pockets to find her phone. She would call Izzy back. She would at least text her to report where she was.

But she’d forgotten her phone in her haste to get out of the house. And it was dead anyway.

Get away from the ghosts.

Madeline only wanted comfort from this disquieting evening, from the dreams. And after she had hung up with Izzy, she had craved more human comfort.