False Impressions

by Laura Caldwell

  On the opposite wall was a lone portrait that depicted a woman who looked a lot like Madeline—distinctive pink lips, long, shiny black hair.

  A tufted purple chair sat in front of Madeline’s black lacquer desk. Madeline nodded at it.

  As I sat, she pushed a latch and lifted up a panel that was built into the desktop. I craned my neck and saw that behind the panel was a tablet computer. Very James Bond, I thought.

  It occurred to me that the panel hiding the technology was also very Madeline Saga—a woman who rejoiced in life and art and love and sex but, I assumed, had other parts that she kept hidden. It seemed obvious that Madeline Saga held layers of complexity—like so many pieces of her artwork.

  After touching a few things on her tablet, Madeline swiveled the panel around until it faced me, then she slid it forward, nearer to me. I saw that the screen had been opened to an email.

  The email had been sent from an address that was a random jumble of numbers and letters. The subject line was empty. I read the body of the email.

  You will never be forgiven for what you did. For your falsity and selfishness, you should be cut and stretched like a canvas.

  “Whoa,” I said.

  I read it again. You should be cut and stretched like a canvas. “Whoa,” I repeated. The words were cold, clinical…scary.

  I looked up at Madeline, who looked very scared herself. “Any idea who sent it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Do you think it’s the same person who left the comments on your website?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The part about ‘falsity.’ Do you think they’re referring to the forgeries?”

  “I don’t know! This—cut and stretched like a canvas? Why would someone say that?” She turned the panel around, reread the words herself.

  “Let’s go see Mayburn,” I said.

  “I can’t right now.” She explained about two appointments at the gallery that day that couldn’t be canceled. The first was with an interior designer and his high-maintenance clients, who’d been in about ten times already to visit a sculpture. This, she hoped, was the day they would make a purchase. The other appointment was with a journalist from an art magazine. She’d already rescheduled the interview twice.

  Madeline put her head in her hands. I felt helpless.

  Before I could say anything, she raised her head and looked at her watch. “The designer should be here shortly. I need to pull myself together.”

  “Do you want me to get you a coffee?” I offered.

  She shook her head.

  “Something to eat?”

  Again, she shook her head.

  “Vodka?”

  She laughed. “Now you’re talking.”

  I smiled at her. “I’m sorry you’re going through this.”

  “I am, as well.” A sigh. “But I’m glad you’re here to go through it with me.”

  I felt something different between us enter the room. I wasn’t sure what it was. “Me, too,” I said.

  I tried to think of what I could do for Madeline in the short-term, before her appointment arrived. I decided that getting her talking about art would be best. It would put her in the right frame of mind for her appointments.

  I looked up at the portrait on the otherwise white wall. “Were you the subject for that?”

  She smiled. “No. It’s actually from one of my favorite Japanese artists. He created it in the fifties, a woodblock print.”

  It appeared as if the woman in the portrait was looking out a window, but instead of the sea, like the other painting, the outside was full of flowers. Lush red flowers with yellow centers.

  “I always thought that if my world looked like that, I would look outside all the time, too,” Madeline said.

  We heard the bell of the front door.

  “Can I stay in here?” I asked. “I’d like to use your computer to study the email some more. Do some research.”

  Madeline Saga didn’t say “yes” or “sure” or anything like that. Instead, her eyes closed for a longer second, then opened and focused on mine. A calm expression graced her face. She said one word. “Please.” And then two more. “Thank you.”

  19

  I read the email again. And then again. Who could have written it? If “falsity” was referring to the forged paintings, then the author had to be someone who knew about the forgeries. According to Madeline, Jeremy was the only person—other than Mayburn and I—who knew. Madeline was working to determine if she’d sold fakes other than Jeremy’s, but she didn’t know anything yet.

  But the thought of Jeremy writing the email didn’t sit right with me. We’d been out only once, granted, but the words didn’t seem like what I knew of him.

  I read them again. You should be cut and stretched like a canvas.

  The person was clearly threatening violence against Madeline. And yet Madeline, though rattled, was now dazzling the designer and the couple who had just come in. From the gallery, I could hear Madeline’s laughter trilling as she described a sculpture. I could hear the joy in her voice. “Of course,” she said. “You may see something entirely different than the artist did. That’s art. That’s good.”

  I heard her voice change as she showed a different piece. Because she saw everything as unique, her enthusiasm for one thing often sounded very different than her excitement for another.

  “Isn’t it remarkable?” I could hear her saying. “And you know, he usually does nudes.”

  The designer gasped. “That’s right!”

  “They’re stunning,” Madeline said.

  “Stunning,” the designer echoed.

  “But he’s moving on to other mediums,” Madeline said.

  I peered back at the email. Cut and stretched like a canvas…cut and stretched like a canvas…cut and stretched like a canvas.

  I called Mayburn and updated him, then sent him the email.

  “I’ll analyze the wording,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “The cadence of the words, the use of certain vocabulary, patterns, repetitions.”

  He would, he said, test his data against the comments that had been posted on the website. We hoped his research would show that the same person wrote both, and we’d have enough evidence to figure out who it was.

  “How is she?” Mayburn had asked near the end of our call.

  “I don’t know for sure.” I thought about it. “I could tell the email freaked her out, but she’s out in the gallery right now with clients, and she sounds fine.”

  I thought I heard Mayburn sigh. “Yeah, that’s how she is. And that’s good. Because if she still has the ability to care about art, that means she’s okay.”

  We both fell silent then, both thinking of that email—cut and stretched—and hoping Mayburn’s words would turn out to be the truth.

  20

  When Madeline was done with her clients, I updated her on my talk with Mayburn and what my father had told me about danger points. She nodded as I spoke, agreeing with everything. I asked her about her move from Bucktown to Michigan Avenue. “The artwork that was forged, did Jeremy buy those after the move?”

  Madeline, behind her black lacquer desk, nodded. She told me how Jeremy and his wife (the Fex, I thought involuntarily) had looked at the pieces when she was in Bucktown, but purchased both a few months after the move.

  We both fell silent, trying to work out what, if anything that could mean.

  “Speaking of Jeremy,” Madeline said. “How was your date?”

  “Great,” I said. I thought about that kiss. “Great.”

  “What did the two of you do?”

  “Dinner at Girl and the Goat.”

  “Nice. And then?”

  “And then he drove me home. And…” If Maggie or Q had been sitting in front of me, I would have launched into details. I would have described the exquisite kiss. But this was Madeline—not quite a yet friend, but more than just a professional colleague. “He asked me out aga
in,” I said.

  “Excellent.”

  I remembered how Madeline had seemed eager for me to go out with Jeremy. “You mentioned his wife. Do you know her well?”

  She nodded. “She and Jeremy became quite the collectors. Very knowledgeable. Very intuitive about art.”

  Something occurred to me. “Jeremy said it was his lawyer who hired the appraiser, leading to the determination of forgeries. Did they apprise his wife or her attorneys of this yet?”

  “I don’t believe so. He told me he would wait until I…figured this out.”

  “What is she like? Personally?”

  Madeline cocked her head to the side. “It’s hard for me to say. She’s not someone I would choose to spend time with. I find her a little hard to access, like she’s got some kind of resin that coats all parts of her.”

  “That’s surprising. Jeremy seems so warm.”

  “Well, some people really seem to enjoy her. And maybe Jeremy is one of the people she opens up with.”

  “What have you heard about their divorce?”

  “Amicable,” Saga said.

  “The waitress at the restaurant told me she’d heard otherwise.”

  Madeline’s black eyebrows arched. “Really? Interesting. Waitstaff do hear a lot of things while they’re working.”

  “I know.”

  We fell into a contemplative pause.

  “What about Jeremy?” I asked.

  “What about him?”

  “Could he have written you the email?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Don’t protest too fast,” I said. “Trust me, I like Jeremy, and I don’t have a gut instinct that it was him, but he is the one with the fakes. Maybe he’s not as amiable about it as he seems. Maybe he’s pissed off.”

  Madeline paused to consider this. She shook her head. “It was his wife who adored those works more than him. And if you think about it, he’s probably excited in a strange way—if those paintings aren’t worth as much, that reduces his net worth for purposes of the divorce.”

  “And, therefore, reduces the amount of money he has to pay his wife.”

  Madeline’s lips pursed. “I see what you mean.”

  I thought about it. “He’s been the one who made their money?” I asked.

  Madeline nodded. “But she’s the true collector in the family. Like I said, she loved those pieces.”

  “Just another reason to fake them to get back at her.”

  Madeline said nothing.

  “So maybe she wrote the email.”

  “I really don’t think Jeremy told her yet about the forgeries yet. He promised me he wouldn’t tell anyone until we could get a handle on this.”

  A handle on this. Thinking about that gave me a cold feeling. We had a lot of suppositions flying around, but we weren’t close to having any concrete knowledge.

  “Assuming it’s not him, will you see Jeremy again?” Madeline asked.

  “Yes. Maybe I’ll hear more about the divorce then. But in the meantime, we need to make a list of everyone that was involved in any way with your move from Bucktown to Michigan Avenue.”

  I still had Madeline’s tablet in front of me, so I created a document and began to make a list—movers, packers, armored car drivers. We talked some more and added the commercial real estate people who had found the gallery for her, and as a result had access to the space.

  “How would they enter the gallery usually?” I asked.

  “Through the back.”

  “The video feed Mayburn has—does that show who comes and goes back there?”

  “Not necessarily, unfortunately. The previous owners installed it, mostly to show cars that were blocking access to the delivery door. It shows most of the alley, but if you walk down the alley close to the wall, you won’t be seen. It doesn’t show who’s at the door.”

  “Okay. Who else to put on this list?”

  Madeline explained that she’d hired a specialist, a woman whose sole job was moving art.

  “Her name?”

  “Margie Scott. She was highly recommended.”

  I typed the name in the document, along with the phone number Madeline gave me.

  “And who recommended Margie Scott?” I asked. I was starting to warm to our task. Making this list reminded me of taking depositions, something I’d gotten good at in my days of civil litigation.

  “Jacqueline Stoddard,” Madeline said. “The gallery owner I introduced you to.”

  “What’s Jacqueline’s number?”

  Madeline gave it to me.

  “And the name of her gallery?”

  “Stoddard Gallery.”

  I typed that in, too. “Now, that day you introduced me to Jacqueline, didn’t she mention something about a former assistant of yours?”

  “Yes, Sydney Tallon.”

  “And Sydney is a man,” I said.

  “Oh, yes.” A small—and sexy?—smile.

  “Was he involved with the move?”

  A brisk nod. “Very.”

  I gave Madeline a raised-eyebrow look.

  “Syd is not stealing from me,” Madeline said. “I know that. I know that deeply inside me.”

  “I don’t mean to sound skeptical, but that’s what we hear from the Chicago police department all the time. They believe, in their gut, that they have the right suspect, so they don’t consider anything that might either exonerate the suspect or point the finger at someone else. It’s a widely studied phenomenon. It’s tunnel vision.”

  Madeline looked at me curiously, openly. And that made me like her even more, the attitude that kept her constantly attuned to new information in her galaxy.

  She nodded. “Okay. I’ll consider that. But I just know Syd. I know he wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t steal my artwork. He couldn’t be responsible for the forgeries. He wouldn’t try to bring me down like that.”

  “Would he have the expertise to copy the pieces?” I asked, my voice determinedly casual.

  “Yes. He’s highly educated in the art world and is an interesting artist himself.”

  “Okay.” I tried not to sound a little triumphant. “And you said he had access to the galleries. Do you mean he still has keys?”

  Her lack of reply said it all.

  Madeline paused. She seemed to be weighing the import of this. And I held my breath, because while there certainly were a lot of “danger points” in the transporting of Madeline’s artwork, who had more time and accessibility than an assistant?

  “I should tell you something else about Syd,” Madeline said. “We dated. We were lovers.” She pulled out her cellphone and showed me a photo of a man with dark skin, haunting dark eyes and cut cheekbones beneath shiny black hair. He looked like an Arabian prince.

  “When did you date? Before or after the move to Michigan Avenue?”

  “Before and during. He was a fantastic assistant. He researched acquisitions and kept records. He wrote catalogues and organized exhibitions. He helped me budget. He gave presentations to groups and schools to raise awareness about openings and eventually the new gallery.”

  “How long were you together?”

  “Three years.”

  That sounded pretty long for Madeline Saga.

  “It felt like such a partnership,” Madeline said. “And then it became a real one. We fell in love.” She let out a long breath. “It was wonderful.” She gazed up then as if she could see, above her, the pages of the story of her and Syd.

  I thought of Mayburn telling me that Madeline lived only for art and love. “That must have been amazing for you.”

  “It was the perfect romantic situation for me. Except for one thing. I knew he desperately wanted to have children, and I did not. I’ve never wanted kids.”

  “I haven’t, either.”

  She looked at me, surprise in her expression. “Really?”

  “Really. What’s that look?”

  She blinked, appraised me. “You’re different than I thought you would be.”
r />   “How did you think I would be?”

  “More…typical. A typical Chicago girl.”

  “There’s no typical Chicago girl. We’re all unique.”

  She laughed. “Maybe.” She sighed. “But kids were very important to Syd, and I simply couldn’t be the person to provide that. So we ended things.”

  “And you broke up after you moved?”

  “No, we’d broken up during the planning of the move. But he stayed on to help me complete it.”

  “Who did the breaking up?” I asked.

  “I did,” she answered.

  I said nothing. I didn’t have to.

  Madeline shook her head. “It’s not what you think. He wasn’t mad.”

  “What was he?”

  “Sad. Our breakup killed him in a way. But he would never want to hurt me.”

  I must have made a disbelieving face, because Madeline spoke with a defensive tone. “If you met him, if you saw us together, you’d understand. He wouldn’t do that.”

  “So maybe I should meet him,” I said.

  “I agree.”

  “When?” I said.

  She reached for her phone, typed something in.

  Seconds later her phone dinged and she read a message. “Tonight,” she said.

  21

  We landed at a secret club that night.

  “What is this place?” I asked Madeline as we disembarked from a cab at a bizarre location near the soon-to-be closed Belmont Police Station. The building hunched under two highway overpasses. There was no sign on the front door, and the glass blocks in front of the establishment had been painted black.

  “We try not to give it a name,” Madeline said.

  “We?”

  “A group of my friends have owned it for years and included all of us in the planning of it. Sometimes we change the place a little, sometimes a lot. The patrons tend to be art types.”

  “Like a joint piece of art,” I said.

  She gave me an appreciative smile. “Yes. But we have found that when we put labels on the place—when we say it’s a champagne bar or an art bar or a dance club or a salon or…” She shrugged. “Or anything. Well, then it’s not as good as when it’s organic.”

  “Ah, so, it’s an organic bar. It’s green.”