About five minutes passed, during which I contentedly sat. Then I began to look around the crowd. Madeline had said that many people from the art world—artists, managers, gallery owners, collectors, print makers, art writers—could be found there.
Another five minutes passed.
When the waitress came, I asked for a glass of water. I wanted to stay a little longer. I wasn’t quite ready to stop basking in the light that was Madeline’s attention when she shined it on you.
The water was delivered. More time passed. No Madeline. I looked at my phone—no texts or calls from her.
I got up and went to the restroom, but she wasn’t there, either. I walked around the club, scanning the crowd. It was small and quickly evident that she wasn’t to be found.
When I returned to our table, Muriel came up. “How was your night?”
“Delightful,” I answered. “I love your place. I wouldn’t have known about it if it wasn’t for Madeline.”
“Madeline,” Muriel repeated with a smile. “Isn’t she incredible?”
I nodded quickly. “She is.”
“She paid the bill,” Muriel said, “so stay and enjoy yourself as long as you want. Let us know if we can get anything for you.” She smiled beatifically.
It was only then I realized Madeline was gone.
7
As I left the club, two doormen stood there, both huge, dressed in shearling coats and hats.
“Hi guys,” I said. “Did you see a woman leave here recently?”
“Uh, yeah,” one said, and I could tell he wanted to add, duh.
Muriel had said she didn’t know why Madeline left, but that nothing had seemed odd. Madeline had told them to put everything on her tab, and that was that.
“She’s a Japanese woman,” I said to the bouncers.
Neither responded.
“She’s really beautiful,” I said.
“Lotta pretty women here,” the other bouncer said.
I thanked them and left, stepping onto the sidewalk. Like a dark painting, the canvas outside was mostly black. Steel charcoal-gray beams slashed back and forth overhead, carrying lit boxes—the El train carting people east and west. Aside from the train, the neighborhood was desolate, very few cars.
Suddenly I wondered if Madeline was sick. Could that be why she had left so quickly? I walked up the block, looking in alleys. No sign of her.
I walked back, past the club and down a few blocks, doing the same thing. I was thankful I didn’t find her throwing up in an alley, but I was still worried.
I pulled my phone out of my purse. I texted, Hi, it’s Izzy. You okay?
I paced the sidewalk again, hoping for a reply. An occasional car passed. It had snowed a little since we were inside, and the tires from each car shot a little spray of slush onto the street.
I tried calling her. Nothing.
I tried again. This time I left a message. Hi Madeline. Sounds like you left. I just want to make sure you’re okay. Can you call me?
I couldn’t shake what she had described—feeling like someone had been in her place.
One more round of pacing the sidewalk, then I decided it was time to go. I started searching for a cab but saw none.
I was making my way back to the club, to ask the doormen for help, when a sudden flurry of white and blue pulled to the curb. A Chicago police car.
The front door opened. A man stepped out. He wore a big gray jacket, bulky, not because he was fat but because he was wearing a bulletproof vest. You got used to the look in Chicago.
He turned to me. And I got a flash of a memory.
I opened my mouth. I could find only one word. “Vaughn.”
8
Neither of them noticed anyone but each other that night, not Madeline or the redhead.
For nearly two hours they talked, a friendship seeming to grow on the spot. How easy it was for Madeline to connect with people when she wanted. It was always about what she wanted.
They drank the martinis Madeline loved, their camaraderie, their growing interest in each other obvious.
Then the redhead was alone. She was looking around, apparently for Madeline, who had been gone from the table for quite a while. It was almost laughable. At least someone else was being treated badly by Madeline Saga, being ignored and made to feel as if they were nothing.
So, really, it wasn’t surprising that neither of the women had noticed someone watching them.
But the cop who had shown up? That had been a surprise. The redhead was walking up and down the street when the police car had arrived.
She and the cop talked, then the redhead got into the car. What had the woman done? And yet, the redhead hadn’t been handcuffed. Was she being taken in for some kind of questioning? Could this be about what was going on with Madeline’s art? What was going on here?
A short time ago, just inside the club, there had been amusement that someone else was being treated poorly by Madeline Saga. And yet now there was only fear, a sense of being out of control.
There was a measure of relief when the police car pulled away.
9
“This is my first time in the back of a cop car,” I said.
Vaughn had offered me a ride home. Since there was a dearth of cabs, I agreed. But I had to ride in the back. “Protocol,” he’d said.
From the front, I heard Vaughn scoff. “Seems like you would have seen a lot of that real estate back there.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yeah,” he said, “for all the trouble you find yourself in.”
“Excuse me?” I repeated. “I do not find trouble.” That was untrue, but I wasn’t about to admit anything to Detective Damon Vaughn.
Detective Vaughn had made my life hell a couple of times—first when Sam had disappeared and second when he’d suspected me of killing one of my friends. In a stroke of brilliant luck (or maybe just the gods in my universe doling out some karma) I’d gotten the chance to cross-examine him at a trial recently. And let’s just say it was the best cross of my career. We’d mended fences after that, even shared a couple of cocktails. But the fact remained that no one could irk me like Vaughn.
“Why do you always have to be so nasty?” I asked.
“I’m not. I’m just stating the truth. You get in a lot of trouble.”
“Oh, fork you, I do not!” Again, I was shading the truth. Trouble did find me, but I didn’t usually bring it upon myself. At least, to my mind.
“You could have gotten into some trouble at that bar,” Vaughn pointed out. “That’s why I showed up there.”
“What do you mean?” I asked the back of Vaughn’s head as he turned the car on Franklin Street. His hair was shot through with gray, but he was one of those guys who had a lot of hair, probably always would.
“The owner is a buddy of mine,” Vaughn said. “He calls me when he’s got issues but doesn’t want to involve 911. He had an issue tonight.”
“What kind of issue?”
“Suspected prostitution.”
“Really? Yeah, I guess that’s a good way for a bar owner to get closed down—having girls making money that way.”
Vaughn stopped at a light, turned around. He had a rugged face and brown eyes. Those eyes were squinting at me. He shook his head. “You’re the girl he thought was trying to make money that way.”
“What?”
“He said that they had this girl walking up and down the street over and over, as if she was looking for someone. In general, that’s pretty indicative. That’s why they call it ‘street-walking.’”
“My friend was gone,” I said. “I was looking for her! She just disappeared without saying anything. She paid the bill, but I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t have let me know she was leaving. I was afraid she was sick or something.”
The light turned green and Vaughn shrugged, turned around and drove through it.
We remained quiet for a few blocks.
“Tell me what happened with your friend,” I h
eard Vaughn say.
I felt a shiver of relief for the help. I told him about the night. As I spoke, I took out my phone. Still no texts or calls from Madeline. “So what do you think?” I asked, when I’d finished.
Another shrug from Vaughn. “What’s she like?”
“Unique.” I told him what I knew of Madeline Saga, what I’d learned and noticed about her since I met her.
“I wouldn’t worry too much,” he said.
“Really?”
“She probably got boozed up and took a header.”
“What’s a header?”
“When you realize you’re wasted and have to put yourself to bed, and you just leave because you don’t want people talking you out of it, and you’re in no shape to say goodbyes. It’s usually a guy thing.”
“She wasn’t wasted.”
“When are you supposed to see her next?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Call me if she’s doesn’t show.”
Eventually Vaughn turned up North Avenue, heading east, then turned left on Sedgwick and another left at my street, Eugenie. He pulled over to the curb and put the car in park.
“Well,” I said, “you certainly seem to know exactly where my house is.” I noticed immediately that a fair amount of sarcasm had come out with my words. What was it about Damon Vaughn that got under my skin?
He turned around, his face a snarl of irritability. “Listen, McNeil, I was at your house recently for a couple of break-ins. Remember? And, wait, oh yeah, a murder.”
He had a good point. My neighbor had been killed last year in my apartment, and Vaughn had soon been on the scene, taking care of it.
“So yeah, I remember where your place is,” he said. “I’m not an idiot.” He sounded not so much irritable now as he did hurt.
“I’m not saying you’re an idiot. I’m sorry if it sounded like that.”
Nothing from Vaughn.
I opened the door. “Hey, I’m grateful for the ride. Thanks.”
He picked up his hand as if to wave goodbye, but he didn’t turn around.
“Really,” I said. “Thanks.”
A pause, then, “No problem, McNeil.”
And that, I supposed, was the best relationship Detective Damon Vaughn and I were going to have.
10
I woke up the next morning to the sound of my cellphone. I hadn’t turned it off in the hope that Madeline would call.
The display read, Charlie. Cell. My brother.
In days of yore, the sight of a call from my brother first thing in the morning would have induced fear. For years and years, he lived off a worker’s comp settlement and nursed a back injury. He regularly slept until two in the afternoon, giving himself a solid three hours before he would open a bottle of red wine.
But in the last year, he’d landed a job in radio and then branched into other sound-production projects.
“How are you?” I answered.
“I’m fine.” That wasn’t a surprise. Charlie was always fine. He was one of those people—admittedly the only one I knew—who was always, generally, content.
“But it’s Dad,” Charlie said then. Another little shock.
Our father had returned to our lives, and to Chicago, only six months ago. So the word dad was a bit jarring. That word had been used when Charlie and I were kids, but once our dad disappeared, with no one else. We had grown up believing he had died, but in truth he had gone undercover to protect us. We’d always called our eventual stepfather, Spence, by his first name.
Another little recognition settled in. This was the first time, strangely, that my brother and I had talked, just the two of us, about my father directly. It was as if we were both feeling our way in the world of having a father again, neither wanting to disturb the other’s development, both of us knowing, somewhere deep within, that we both had our own journeys.
“He’s thinking about leaving,” Charlie said.
“Leaving?”
“Moving. Out of Chicago.”
“When did you hear this?”
“Last night. Met him for dinner.”
Both Charlie and I had been trying to have regular visits with our father, trying to help incorporate his new life in Chicago into ours. Even our mom and Spence had done the same. But the fact was, Christopher McNeil was not a social animal. If anything, he was a loner. He’d left Chicago long ago to save his family and spent most of his life abroad.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“Not much. You know how he is.”
“Yeah.”
“I asked him a few more questions, but I didn’t get too far.”
I tried to let Charlie’s news travel from my ears to my mind and from there to my heart and gut to see what I felt. But there were all sorts of blockages, too many feelings and wrong-way turns. For so long, I had kept my father compartmentalized. I didn’t know what to feel about this news.
In the meantime, I needed to get to the gallery. I needed to find out where Madeline had disappeared to.
“I don’t know what to think, Charlie. I’ll have to call ya later.”
When I walked in the gallery I was relieved to see that Madeline was there.
She stood at the back, talking to a man about a series of photographic prints hanging on the wall. Each showcased a mocked-up magazine cover, the model in each representing different ways women are viewed—from mother to whore and so many other things in between. I didn’t think I understood the photographs, but I had been intrigued when Madeline showed them to me the day before.
I went into the back room and was slipping my arms out of my coat when I heard the ding of the door opening—probably the client leaving—and then the sound of high heels clicking gently toward me. Madeline.
When I turned to greet her, I expected an apology for her disappearing act.
“Last night…” she said. I nodded, interested in her explanation. “Didn’t you say you wanted to meet someone?”
“Someone…?”
“A man. Someone to date.”
I thought about it. “Yeah. I guess at some point in our discussion I did. I also said I thought I was fine being on my own, though.”
“Well, anyway, I’ve got someone coming in for you,” Madeline said, sounding pleased.
“What?”
“Don’t worry about it.” She gave me a sly wink.
I wasn’t sure I was ready to meet a possible new date, but I was still too distracted by the previous night to dwell on it with her.
“Okay, but Madeline,” I said, hanging my coat on a rack, “what happened to you last night?”
She stood by the file cabinet, her hand on the drawer. She turned. “What do you mean?”
“You disappeared.”
“What do you mean?” she repeated.
“You got up, I assumed just to go the bathroom since you didn’t say goodbye, but instead—bam!—you were gone.”
“Bam?” Madeline said, in a funny, slightly mocking tone.
“Well, that’s how it felt, like suddenly you’d just disappeared.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Thanks for the drinks and everything, by the way. I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but I was worried.”
“Of course,” she said. She opened a drawer, flipped through some files. “Isabel, I’m sorry. I do that sometimes.”
“Do what?”
“I find I’m done with the night, and I leave. It’s nothing to do with you. It’s a bad habit of mine. And I apologize.” Something struck me as slightly false about her words, but I couldn’t put my finger on what. Madeline sighed. “I find goodbyes to be pedestrian. They don’t add anything to life.”
I wanted to ask her where she’d gone after she’d left the club—home?—but Madeline pulled out a file, then brought it to a table in the center of the room and opened it. Inside were photos of a sculpture of sorts, tall and oblong and made of white glass swirled with silver.
The photos made me remember something. “My friend Maggie bought a sculp
ture last summer that was a little bit like this. At the Old Town Art Fair. Do you show there?”
I looked at Madeline and saw her lips, encased today in a pale pink gloss, suddenly purse. “No,” she said. “I don’t.” The implication was clear—there was no chance she would show art at the Old Town Art Fair.
I thought about the fair, which happened in Chicago every June. The nucleus was at the intersection of North and Wells. The fair spread from there spanning blocks and blocks in every direction, holding stands showing art work, sculpture, sketches, prints and furniture.
“Those are local artists,” Madeline said.
“You don’t represent anyone from Chicago?”
“No, I do, it’s just that, in general, those artists are amateurs. I represent a different level of art.” She didn’t sound haughty about it, just matter of fact.
“I didn’t always,” Madeline continued. “I began my career working with what’s called outsider art.”
“Outsider art,” to my unknowledgeable ears sounded like art that was sold outside—like, say, at Old Town Art Fair.
But Madeline clarified the concept for me. An outside artist, she said, was one who had no classical education in traditional channels. Instead, what was prized about great outsider art was its naiveté, which led, somehow, to pure aesthetic genius.
She seemed in a reflective mood, so I stayed silent.
“I liked the discovery and the thrill of finding outsider art,” she said, as she arranged the photos of the sculpture on the table. “I liked finding something no one else had realized was so wonderful. I opened a gallery in Bucktown showing original works. But eventually my tastes evolved and I got into secondary market work.”
“What’s that?”
“Put simply, it’s buying dead artists’ works from around the country and Europe.”
The reason for getting into secondary art, she said, was not because she had some highbrow vision of what art should be. Rather, she became mesmerized by technique, by artists who had either studied their particular techniques for years or occasionally by current artists who had shown mastery of technique in a short time. From there, her tastes and her gallery had grown eclectically in all directions.
False Impressions Page 4