False Impressions (25 page)

She paused, and I let the silence stay there, sensing she would fill it.

“I constantly get requests from art and design schools.
Become a mentor!
they say.
Give back to the art community!
But to be honest…” She took a breath. “I felt like
I
needed a mentor. No one had helped me in this business. I taught myself, then I went to art school, then I did studio work for a few years. When I realized I wanted to be on the other side of the business—the business side—I went back to school, and I had to learn a whole other scene, a whole other network of people. And it was exhausting.”

At this, she turned to me. Her eyes were open wide, pleading for understanding.

“I know what you mean. I do,” I said honestly. “You’re so scared you’re failing that it’s hard to imagine what wisdom you could impart to someone else. You’re not sure yet that you’re doing anything right.”

“Exactly.” She looked at me. “You fear that you might, in fact, give the
wrong
advice to a mentee.”

I nodded.

“I’d followed Madeline’s career from afar since she got to Chicago,” she said. “I thought she was brazen, really smart, fascinating. I really was, career-wise, ahead of her at the time. As I grew more successful, I thought,
Now I feel ready. Now I feel ready and contented enough to share what I have.
” Her eyes dipped.

“She rejected you?” I said.

Jacqueline returned her eyes to me. “Madeline was friendly with my overtures, but yes, she rejected me. And I took it personally.”

Jacqueline clasped her hands, as if praying, and put them in her lap. The confession continued. “To make it worse, it seemed like Madeline hogged the PR spotlight, always being featured in one magazine or another, even national magazines, even when she didn’t have an exhibition or an opening to publicize,” she said. “Every magazine covered her.
Her,
not just her gallery—
Michigan Avenue, CS, Chicago Magazine,
the
Trib,
the
Sun-Times, Architectural Digest, Vogue, New York Times.
The list went on and on.”

“Wow,” I said. I didn’t know Madeline had garnered such professional respect for herself. But I understood why.

“Wow,” Jacqueline repeated. “Exactly. She represented something to me. In her love and appreciation for art? I saw that she was on an entirely different level than me. Professionally and personally. I knew enough to see that much. But I also knew…” Jacqueline’s body seemed to shrink and hunch over all at the same time. “I knew,” she said, “that I would never reach the state that Madeline was at. Not in my lifetime.”

“That’s what you meant by ‘she obliterates,’” I said, keeping any judgment out of my voice. The truth was, I really didn’t have any judgment.

“Yes.” A beat went by. “She showed me what could be, and at the same she time obliterated any hope that I could be that way myself.”

“I don’t think you’re analyzing this correctly,” I said. “Madeline is simply a different person than you are.” I leaned forward again, wanting to give Jacqueline Stoddard, who looked so very defeated right now, some kind of comfort. “Isn’t that all you recognized in that situation? Aren’t we all different?”

She shook her head. “I distinctly saw her as
above
me. That’s how I viewed it—she showed me what could be, and at the same time, she showed me that I would never be that. I could not get those impressions out of my head, and I starting resenting her.” Jacqueline was talking louder and faster. “And then I started
disdaining
her, and meanwhile, I’m acting so…inauthentic. I’m acting like all is fine, because why would a professional and accomplished and creative person like me be envious, jealous, of
anyone?
Hadn’t I accomplished enough not to have to deal with that kind of burden?” Her words just stopped for a while. Finally, she continued, but in a softer voice. “And that made me hate Madeline.”

“Sounds like a vicious circle,” I said.

Her eyes met mine. They were exhausted again, defeated.

I hated to do it, but I had to ask. “The knife,” I said. “The sculpture in that picture. Was that yours? Was that a threat, reminding Madeline that you could return the ‘obliteration’?”

Jacqueline shook her head. “No.” She appeared definitive and I was inclined to believe her, given the statements that had been pouring from her mouth. I put aside the knife sculpture for the moment.

“You said you did studio work,” I said.

“Yes.”

“So you had the skills to forge the Dudlin. And the other piece.”

“Ha. No. I left studio work because I didn’t have the chops. I wasn’t a great artist by any stretch.”

“You don’t have to be a good artist to copy, do you?”

“On the contrary, you have to be
gifted.
And I was definitely not gifted. Or even good.”

She shook her head again. But this time her look was different. This time, if I was correct, she was scared.

I looked a little inside myself. And what I saw was that I was scared, too.

Because if Jacqueline was telling the truth, and she hadn’t been responsible for the knife sculpture, if she hadn’t sent that email and stolen the artwork, then who had?

63

I
got back to my condo and I was
frustrated.

I paced around. I made a fire and sat in my yellow-and-white chair. I gazed into the fire, searching for stillness and clarity. But my thoughts bounced from Jaqueline Stoddard to Syd, to Jeremy and the Fex, to Amaya and everyone else I’d met while working on this case. And to add to the list, tomorrow morning, I had a meeting with Margie Scott, the art-moving specialist.

I was getting nowhere, so I decided to put the case out of my mind for a while. Instead, I got up and cleaned out some closets. I found all sorts of Theo’s adventure gear. Currently, I possessed a wind-surfing vest, a bike pump, a tent and a lot of nylon straps.

Would Theo ever want these things in the future? Had he discarded them, in his mind at least? Would he ever be back for them?
I left those ideas to sift around as I unloaded the closet, discovering more of Theo’s stuff.

When that was done, I paced some more. I left a message for my dad. Maybe I would talk to him about…what? The case? But he hadn’t worked on it since its inception. Dating? I would tell him that I had gone out a few times with a guy named Jeremy? That I hadn’t heard from him since his wife was in the gallery? Or the fact that I really didn’t mind that much. Jeremy was charming. Beyond. But I didn’t miss him when he wasn’t around.

I looked longingly at Theo’s gear. I was struck with the feeling that I hadn’t appreciated him enough when I had him. Was that right? Or was I simply missing someone around the house to talk to?

Who else could I call? Maggie had told me that she and Bernard were having a date night, introducing him to more of Chicago.

I tried Charlie. No answer. I tried my mom and Spence. Same thing. My dad preferred texts, so instead on calling again, I sent him one, which was quickly answered with
Love to see you. Tomorrow?
I stared at the word—
love.
My father hadn’t said he loved me since he returned. He wasn’t the type. But that word meant a lot to me.

I sighed, sat down in the yellow chair again.

I thought of another person to call.

Bunny Loveland answered immediately. “Yeah?”

“Bunny, it’s Izzy,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, but this time there was the slightest touch of excitement in her voice. “Whatcha got goin’ girl?”

“Umm, I’m…”

“What are you calling me for?” Classic Bunny Loveland. And her hostility, based in love I knew, always made me feel better.

“I just wanted to say hi,” I said. “See what’s going on.”

Bunny Loveland was the housekeeper my mother hired when we moved to Chicago. I was eight and my brother, Charlie, five. My mom thought Bunny was going to be the maternal type. She certainly looked the type with her curled gray hair. She seemed a sturdy woman who didn’t fluster easily. Well, she was that, but she certainly wasn’t the maternal type. Bunny was one of those people to whom you didn’t ask a question unless you
really
wanted an answer.

And for decades, nothing much had been going on in Bunny’s life since an inheritance from a distant relative allowed her to quit cleaning and doing “other peoples’ child caring.” Her home in West Lincoln Park—a squat, old brown cottage on Schubert Avenue—was overgrown with trees and hadn’t been painted since the early seventies. It was one of those places the neighbors wanted to torch in the middle of the night.

“I bought a bar,” she said.

“What?” Bunny was in her late seventies and rarely left her house. Bunny didn’t go to bars, much less own them. “You bought a bar?”

“Yep. You know that place a few blocks from me on Southport?” Her voice bore its usual strongly graveled tone.

In my mind, I strolled Bunny’s neighborhood. “You mean the place next to the vacuum cleaner store?” I asked. That bar was a decrepit old place, with a bulletproof frosted window. There was no way to look inside from the street.

I liked dive bars—really, really liked them. But even I was a bit freaked out by that particular place. It had never had a name that anyone knew. And not in the way that Saga’s secret place didn’t have a name. If I was thinking of the right one, the bar only had a sign that said
Old Style,
as if
Really, what else is there to say?

I described the sign to Bunny.

“That’s the place,” Bunny said. “And I need some customers. Bring some suckers in tonight.”

64

I
didn’t know any suckers, but I needed to get my mind off Madeline’s case and I knew someone who probably felt guilty enough to meet me at a really crappy bar on a Monday.

“Hey,” Vaughn said when I called the station. I almost said,
We answer my calls, do we?
But I realized it was a good sign that he’d done so.

I gave him the basics of Bunny and her new bar. “What time do they let you leave there?” I used the word
let
in order to stir up what I now knew was a dislike for his job.

And it worked.

“I leave when I want to,” he said.

“Great. I’ll see you there at seven.”

I stepped into Bunny’s bar at six forty-five. I’d gone early to catch up with Bunny. She was behind the bar, her gray hair looking like she might have had it colored and set at the shop recently. And Bunny was laughing.

Now that was something I’d seen only a few times before.

It took one or two steps for me to realize who she was laughing with—Vaughn.

She saw me, waved at the bar stool near Vaughn and kept talking. “Sure, I knew Gacy!”

I gripped the bar when the stool’s rickety legs felt like they might give away.

“I went to a few parties at his place,” she said.

“Hi,” Vaughn said to me, smiling, then looking back at Bunny. “C’mon,” he said.

“Seriously!” Bunny said.

“You guys aren’t talking about John Wayne Gacy, are you?” I asked.

“Yeah, my husband and I knew him.”

She and Vaughn chatted a little more—just light, Chicago bar chat about one of the most prolific serial killers in history. Bunny put an Old Style draft in front of me, without asking what I wanted, then went to the end of the bar to help a lone patron. Vaughn had a mug of the same beer in front of him.

“Cheers,” I said, raising my drink.

He clinked glasses with me. “Cheers.”

Two hours later, there was barely a lull in the conversation. Who knew how fun it could be to hang with Vaughn? He had a million stories, of course, about criminals, both stupid and chillingly smart. We now knew a number of the same people since I worked in criminal defense. We traded stories and laughed our asses off.

“You know,” I said to him, “you’re exhibiting another trait of a lawyer.”

“What’s that?” He looked interested.

“War stories. We love telling ’em.”

“Ah, that’s a cop thing, too.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “A lot of the stories you’ve been telling me end up in the same place.”

“Where’s that?”

“With you in court.”

Vaughn thought about it. “Huh,” he said. “I guess that’s true.” He took a sip of beer. “Huh.” He looked at me. “You’re pretty smart.”

“Thanks.”

“And you’re pretty cool.”

“Thanks.”

A pause.

“Is this your way of hitting on me as an alternative to arresting me?” I asked.

He looked like he might be pissed off, then decided to let it go. He laughed. “Yeah. How’s it going for you?”

I thought about it. “Good,” I said. “I’m giving you good reviews.”

“Yeah? And so what would you recommend I do now?”

I looked at him. And I can’t believe what I said next. “I’d recommend that you kiss me.”

65

B
unny eventually kicked us out.

“This is not why I opened a bar,” she said, exasperated.

We’d been smooching on and off at the bar for at least thirty minutes by then. Time had taken on a weird quality, and I had to distract myself from pondering the bizarro-ness of it all. I’d never kissed three different people in the span of only a few weeks, and who would have thought one of them would be a woman. Or that I would
ever
kiss Vaughn?

I knew part of me was feeling rejected by Madeline’s cold behavior after what we’d shared. But damn, the guy could
kiss,
and so Vaughn was definitely helping matters.

“And you,” Bunny said, disapprovingly, shaking her head at Vaughn, as if to say,
I expected more.

“Hey,” he said to her. “Now that we’re friends, I’m always at your service. Always.”

“Yeah,” I said, standing and slipping my arm into my coat. “He’s got a lot of friends who own bars, and he’ll do anything for them. Like arrest people for really ridiculous reasons.” I laughed.

But Vaughn didn’t. Oops. I had taken it too far.