Still Lives

by Maria Hummel

  I bear my grandmother’s name: Margaret. She was Margie and I’m Maggie. My grandmother is with me at all times, yet, like the earrings, I don’t feel her presence unless I press against it. Last night, it was Margie who stopped me from going into that third gallery, who felt I’d seen enough. Six years ago, it was Margie who refused to believe what would happen to my source, Nikki Bolio.

  It was I, Maggie, however, who decided to flee overseas afterward, and then never to go back to the career I once dreamed of having, of recording people’s stories, writing their difficult truths. I don’t know what my grandmother would have decided in my shoes. She came from a different generation, with narrower ideas of what a woman could do.

  A figure appears in my doorway. A woman with thick eyebrows, a high waist, hair that seems deliberately plain. One of the LAPD detectives.

  “Got a minute?” she says, and introduces herself as Alicia Ruiz. She’s carrying a notebook, but she doesn’t uncap her pen as she sits down. “I hear you know Greg Shaw Ferguson?”

  “We lived together.” I hate the squeak in my voice.

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “At the Gala.”

  Her brows knit. “Before that?”

  “Sometime in late February.” Greg came then to pick up a few boxes he’d left in our garage. Summer clothes, books. I tell Ruiz this. She doesn’t write it down. She glances over her shoulder, leans in. Her brown eyes are warm. She wants me to trust her.

  “You ever feel threatened by him?” she asks.

  “God, no.”

  “Did you ever threaten him?”

  “Of course not.”

  She opens her notebook, uncaps the pen, and scribbles something. Even with her gaze averted, there’s that deep absorbency about her, soaking me in. Me, the angry ex. The angry ex? I was the doormat ex.

  “Where do you think Kim Lord is?”

  I don’t like this. It’s a speculative question. Jay Eastman taught me to ask speculative questions if I thought my source was lying. Listen to the story, then ask something to try to get an opinion out of the witness. Opinions need justifications. Justifications lead back to facts.

  “I have no idea. Am I supposed to guess? I last saw her leaving the museum on Wednesday.”

  She notes this. “What time?”

  “Late morning? I saw her from the stairway when I was going down to the mailroom.” I point toward the view, but Detective Ruiz is focused hard on me. I fumble to describe that little jump Kim had done, as if something had bitten her. “She looked like she was in a hurry,” I say.

  The detective nods, waiting. What else does she want me to say?

  “She was going fast.” I’m starting to sweat.

  There’s a clattering noise in the kitchenette near my office.

  Detective Ruiz’s attention suddenly breaks. She taps her pen against her notebook and rises. “Thank you for your time, miss,” she says.

  “I really hope you find her,” I say. Only when she leaves do I realize that my face is sore from holding the same fake, worried expression.

  My phone rings, Yegina’s extension. “That guy you thought was a stalker? He’s a private investigator, working for J. Ro,” she says.

  “What? How’d you find out so fast?”

  “He wants to interview me.” She sounds reluctantly intrigued.

  “You?” Why am I surprised? “I just got interviewed by the LAPD.”

  “About what?”

  My phone blinks with a second call.

  “Nothing, really. I’ll phone you back,” I say, and click over to the other line.

  “How much time can you get off for lunch?” says a deep voice. Kevin, the reporter from the Gala last night. It surprises me when my stomach flutters.

  “Can’t,” I say. Development needs me to copyedit some fund-raising manual.

  “Thirty minutes?” says Kevin. “I want to show you something.”

  “You can’t get anywhere in L.A. in thirty minutes.”

  He asks if I know the order in which Kim Lord’s paintings were made. Which one was last.

  “The big still life. Why?”

  “It could make a difference in finding her.”

  “You should tell the police, then.”

  “They don’t have time to hear speculation. It’s just a theory for a story, but I need your help. Please. I’ll bring burritos.”

  I am not so different from you, I tell the departed Detective Ruiz and her curiosity, which coats my office like fingerprint dust, making even my stacked catalogs, my scuffed gym bag, the little Zen garden on my windowsill gleam with possible evidence. If Detective Ruiz suspects Greg, then she suspects me, at least as an outside player in whatever drama has ripped Kim Lord from her presently successful life. Detective Ruiz suspects, so she watches and waits.

  I can watch, too, I think as I turn the pages of the Rocque’s new membership brochure, letting the errors appear, as they always do, as tiny breaks in the patterns of punctuation, sentence, style. Copyediting bores most people to tears. This is why—before I got hired—the Rocque printed ten thousand copies of a gallery guide for a show before anyone caught the missing l in its title, Public Offerings. This is also why the Rocque hired me, even with no museum experience. I was the only candidate who aced their copyediting test.

  Detective Ruiz watches me, Maggie Richter, known ex-girlfriend, but part of her dismisses me because I am female. Most violent perpetrators are male. Most killers of women are family members or intimate partners. The police went after Nikki Bolio’s ex-boyfriend first, but he had a solid alibi, and evidence to arrest anyone else was insufficient. Local witnesses clammed up. Jay Eastman and I might have helped the case, except that Jay destroyed Nikki’s tapes. He said he was doing it out of principle. He did not approve of the way that Vermont law coerced journalists into testifying in criminal cases. When he did speak to the cops, he left my name out of his statements. You’re my assistant, he said. That’s the only responsibility you have in this. All right? It wasn’t all right. I couldn’t sleep for fear of a break-in, so I moved in with my parents and then across the world.

  Nikki appears often in my dreams: sitting on a bench by Lake Champlain, her arms folded, legs sprawled out in pale-blue skintight jeans. She sees me approach and buckles as if someone just kicked her lightly in the stomach. Then I’m right beside her, and she is looking over at me: long-jawed, slightly dopey, acne pitted, and solemn. Nikki is the type who hangs at the back of a room, the corner of a party, her blond hair thin and limp, pulled back hard in a barrette because she thinks it makes her eyes look exotic. She risks brown eyeliner. She keeps a small assortment of cheap jewelry but rarely wears it because she is embarrassed at longing to be beautiful. Vermont’s long winter makes her skin lunar and her bones achy, but Nikki doesn’t believe she can move elsewhere. Only women who seek their own importance leave her circle of family and friends. She is no one until she dates Keith, and then she is his, a figure at the center of a circle of new cars, huge TVs, and a four-hundred-dollar leather jacket for her birthday that makes her feel tough and as sexy as a Hollywood movie. Then Keith dumps her and she is no one again—until I find her and ask her to tell me her story.

  In my dreams, we sit side by side, staring at the lake and its islands. Nikki opens her mouth and says Maggie, wait.

  But she never says anything else.

  At noon I am standing outside the Rocque when Kevin pulls up in a blue convertible. He has shed his tweed and pipe for a dark T-shirt and jeans, but he somehow retains the earnestness of an overgrown student. After several tries, he squeezes into an illegal spot beside a hydrant and waves to me. It’s the only open space on the whole street. The line for Still Lives has been steady all day, from older men in biker jackets to pretty bankers in pressed suits on lunch break, all checking out their shadowy reflections in the Rocque’s glass entrance as they wait for their timed entry.

  I smell fresh leather as I climb into the car.

&nb
sp; “You’re living the dream,” I say.

  “I know, I know. I got a little spendy with the rental,” he retorts. “But it’s thirty degrees today in New York.” He squeezes into the traffic behind a massive tour bus, and we follow the avenue past the new concert hall, its silvery billows catching the light, and under the jacaranda trees losing their sticky purple-blue flowers.

  “How far are we going?” I ask, surprised when he cruises over the freeway to the end of the avenue, where it meets the start of Sunset Boulevard.

  “How much L.A. history do you know?”

  “Once upon a time, everything was orange groves,” I say. “And some other stuff.”

  “Yeah?” he says, and looks at me in that warm, intent way of his and darts us forward through a yellow light.

  I want to tell him that if we kept driving down Sunset we’d reach the Short Stop Bar, where Rampart cops celebrated their bloody shootings. We’d reach the faux Egyptian arches of the mall that was D. W. Griffith’s movie studio. We’d pass the parking lot that was once the site of the Garden of Allah, with its discreet clay-roofed villas and Black Sea–shaped pool for the rich and famous, where F. Scott Fitzgerald drank away any possibility of succeeding in Hollywood. We’d coast by upscale storefronts that once were jitterbug clubs like the Trocadero, and Sherry’s, a gin-swilling site with a long, ruffled awning that overlooked the 1949 attempted assassination of gangster Mickey Cohen. Glamour, corruption, violence, dust—this street is a trail of dreams twisted into might-have-beens. It is the mythic L.A. that people arrive from all over the world to see, and some to spend their lives in. But there’s also another L.A., a city I didn’t notice until I started working on the Still Lives catalog. It’s the city where murderers come to hide—where the Black Dahlia’s killer cut her mouth all the way up to her ears and slipped away, never to be found; where a figure once called the “Southside Slayer” turned out to be multiple serial killers murdering poor African American women in South Central for decades.

  But it’s all too much to say, so I just reply, “Yeah, I read some books on it.”

  Kevin looks disappointed, but he nods and we lapse into an awkward silence, staring at strip malls. He eventually turns off Sunset, glides a couple of blocks, and slows down before a large white building notable for its roundness and mass.

  “Recognize this?” he says.

  “Church?” I say doubtfully. The churches of my New England childhood are narrow brick-and-wood affairs, built skyward, for small audiences. But this place runs the width of a block and looks vaguely governmental. Entrances and arches line the first stories. Flags from many different nations jut from poles above. Then come the stripes of smaller windows. A little cross perches on a lunar dome, almost like an afterthought.

  “The Angelus Temple,” he says, as if I should know the name.

  “Are we going in?”

  “You didn’t see that third room in Still Lives, did you?” says Kevin. “Or did you go back later?”

  “I didn’t go back.” I don’t know why I feel defensive about this. I had a right to decide I’d had enough.

  Kevin doesn’t notice my scowl. “Well, you know the painting ‘Disappearances’?”

  “No.” A week ago I proofed the wall labels for Still Lives. Each painting bore the name of its victim, except for the last, the largest still life, entitled “Anonymous.” I tell this to Kevin.

  He frowns. “Well, it was called ‘Disappearances’ last night, and it’s full of objects. That’s what’s causing all the buzz. People think Kim was leaving clues to her vanishing.”

  No wonder Lynne had looked so furious at the press conference. She hates that sort of Da Vinci Code stuff—conspiracies and quests embedded in paintings.

  “Kim Lord’s only been gone forty-eight hours,” I say. “It’s hardly even a police case yet.”

  “She’s a famous person and she didn’t appear at her own party. That makes people very nosy.” Kevin pulls out his notebook, reading, “‘The typical still life gives the artist more freedom of arrangement than landscapes or portraits do.’ Freedom of arrangement. Clues.”

  “Wow. Rock critic graduates to investigative reporter,” I say sharply.

  Kevin grabs a greasy brown bag from the back seat and offers me a foil-wrapped burrito. “Why not?” he says. “I know how to track down leads. But it’d be helpful to hear your take. You know a lot more about this world than I do.”

  I accept the burrito, but I’m bothered by his words. Tracking down leads. Like that’s the job. Getting quotes and facts. Never look for the what, Jay Eastman told me. Find the who. Who gets hurt. Who gains. Whose life will never be the same.

  I clutch the warm saggy package in my palm. “My take is this: A couple of years ago, an artist barricaded the entrances to his gallery on opening night. He wanted all the fancy insider guests to experience the exclusion of the art world,” I say. “That’s the kind of stagy thing they do these days. They don’t make treasure maps.”

  “Maybe not.” Kevin shows me his notebook, filled with small sketches. “But I counted twenty-seven objects in ‘Disappearances.’ Most of it is food: apples, lemons, that sort of thing. But she also included this.” He flips a page to a drawing of a circular object with smaller circles on it. “Recognize it?”

  I tell him no.

  “It’s an old-time microphone, the kind used by Aimee Semple McPherson. It’s in many of McPherson’s pictures. The artist even painted a faint cross on this one.” He nods at the temple, and I finally connect the name with the female radio evangelist who amassed a huge following giving sermons here in the 1920s and ’30s.

  I scan the building. The small windows at the top unnerve me. They look like they belong on a prison. I can’t remember McPherson’s whole life, only that it didn’t end well.

  “Was she murdered, too?”

  “Abducted. Take a bite and I’ll tell you,” says Kevin.

  The burrito is tangy and delicious, and Kevin tells me the whole sordid story. The year is 1926 and Aimee Semple McPherson—in her midthirties, overworked, and embattled in local politics—goes for a swim at Venice Beach and disappears. Her followers flock to the coast to search for her body. One drowns. A diver dies of exposure. The media circus reaches a zenith when the Los Angeles Times hires a plane and a parachutist to search the ocean. A little over a month later, McPherson reappears in a small Mexican town, walking out of the desert, claiming she was drugged and kidnapped by an outlaw couple named Steve and Mexicali Rose. Not only is McPherson’s story full of holes, but it also comes to light that a woman who looked very much like the evangelist spent several weeks in a Carmel hotel with McPherson’s married radio engineer, Kenneth Ormiston.

  “But the truth of her abduction was never proved,” says Kevin.

  “So the last painting is about abductions,” I say. “But what would be Kim’s motivation for faking her own?”

  “When was her last major show?”

  “Ten years ago.”

  “Isn’t that a long time between big shows? Wouldn’t she need this one to make a splash and drive her prices high?”

  I would love to bust Kevin’s theory by telling him about the press release that Jayme showed me, but I can’t. It’s too big a secret to share with a reporter, let alone one I hardly know. “What does your editor think of your angle?” I ask.

  Kevin rubs his beard and gazes up at the temple. “I haven’t told her yet. I need more time here.” Then he holds out his hand for my crumpled burrito wrapper. “And, yes, I detect the subtle sarcasm in your voice. She is my fiancée. Of five years.”

  “More inquiry than sarcasm,” I say. “Five years?”

  “It’s a long story.” He glances at me. “You have one, too, I think.”

  “Had.” It’s my turn to avoid eye contact. We both lapse into silence.

  “I should get back to work,” I say, brushing tortilla crumbs from my skirt.

  Kevin sighs and taps the steering wheel, as if remembering some
musical beat, then restarts the car.

  “She’d have to have deceived everyone she knows, and risk the backlash when she reappears,” I say. “It would be a huge price to pay.”

  A woman in a white dress enters the temple, her head bowed as if she’s already starting to pray. The park and the lake beyond the building make a quiet oasis in the city, without the distracting parade of cars and ads for jeans. I wish I could stay in this pocket of calm.

  “But it’s enough of a theory for your story,” I add. “You should write it.”

  “Yeah.” Kevin sounds relieved to be back on topic. “There are some holes, I admit. What would you pitch to an editor?”

  We pull out into traffic again.

  “I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” I say before the silence gets too uncomfortable.

  My phone pings and I open it to see a text from Greg.

  I need to talk to you.

  I close the phone and let the breeze wash over me.

  “If she really is missing, your boy may end up needing a lawyer,” Kevin says, driving us through panels of sunlight and shade. “My sister, Cherie, went to Loyola. She could help.”

  Failure: it never interested me before moving to Los Angeles. Yet after Greg moved out, I saw it everywhere, like dark matter, holding the city together. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people who come to L.A. eventually fail—at acting; at screenwriting; at modeling, painting, surfing, skating; at opening trendy restaurants, galleries, bars; at writing books; at finding love.