Still Lives

by Maria Hummel

  By the time I pass Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, my head is finally clearing. The sharp pagoda roof and red columns draw my eyes, dizzy, upward into a massive relief of a dragon, while below my feet the handprints and shoe prints of Hollywood stars look absurdly small. Their signatures and well wishes loop in the concrete, made childish by the thickness of their lines. Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Nicholas Cage, Myrna Loy. These are the names of those who made it in L.A., and they made it by falling in love and shooting one another and dancing and dying on giant screens for everyone to see. They made it by being someone else entirely, and being their own selves writ large, by the same powerful transference I saw in the galleries: Kim as Nicole Brown Simpson as Kim. Kim as Roseann Quinn as Kim.

  Beside me, a flash of red and blue. A conspicuously unmuscular Superman flexes for a photo with a family wearing pasty midwestern complexions and jean shorts. Batman lurks behind him, tall, gangly in the thighs, another aspiring actor waiting to be discovered by no one, because no one comes to Hollywood by day but the tourists. I don’t know if a temp agency hires the superheroes or if they arrive of their own accord, but seeing their fixed fake grins ends my brief sugar high and plunges me into my hangover again. My hip aches from last night’s useless leap from the horse.

  On the far west side of the theater’s maze of celebrity prints stands Skanky Spider-Man, with his ripped costume and duct-taped mask. Skanky Spider-Man is a frequent feature of this edge of the edge of fame. His ersatz getup and jumpy gestures tend to scare the tourists, so the other superheroes always pose a safe distance from him, with their backs turned, as if he belongs to his own cruddy parallel universe. He can’t possibly make any money, but he shows up anyway. I don’t like to think about what peculiar obsession drives him to shove his legs and arms through his stained blue nylon suit day after day.

  Once Greg offered to buy the guy lunch. Greg loves buying lunch for panhandlers and transients—“A real lunch,” he always says.

  “No offense, man, but I’m done with that,” said Skanky Spider-Man.

  “I’m done with that. I’m done with that. What does that mean?” Greg kept asking me later, shaking his head.

  It means what it says. I’m done. As I pass Skanky Spider-Man, I remember how he said it to Greg, brash and unapologetic, as if Greg were the one who didn’t get it. Greg never gets it. He asks his exgirlfriend to believe him when he says he knows nothing about his current lover’s sudden disappearance. And then he gives that ex a key piece of evidence—a flash drive he shouldn’t have in the first place—and asks her to hide it. He’s either stupid or too trusting or cunning or insane. I don’t want to find out which.

  I’m done, too.

  I’m going to send the flash drive back to him. I’m not going to spy on Bas. I’m not going to answer Greg if he calls. I can’t help him, and I don’t want to suspect him either. Let the professionals step in and handle this. I’ve got five more blocks in this dusty lemon light, five more blocks of loud traffic and gawkers and shoppers, and then I’ll turn off Hollywood Boulevard to my palm-lined street and stroll the last block to my quiet bungalow to enter alone. I’ll eat my salty takeout and jump in the shower. I’ll curl up on my yellow couch and read until I fall asleep. And Kim Lord will soon be found by the police. And Kim Lord will be alive, unscathed, and she’ll be the biggest story of the year in the art world: the artist who vanished and then returned to give all her paintings away.

  My phone rings as I’m waiting to cross La Brea. I don’t recognize the number, but the traffic light is taking forever, so I answer it.

  “Is this Maggie?” says an alto female voice, and then without waiting for my answer, “This is Cherie Rhys, Greg Shaw Ferguson’s attorney.”

  The hello is barely out of my mouth before Cherie relates that Kim Lord’s phone has been discovered, and that a search warrant for Greg’s properties has turned up a bloody cloth in the basement of one of his studios.

  A bloody cloth. The phrase snags and doesn’t process.

  “At the moment, Shaw has just been placed under arrest, but it is likely that he’ll be arraigned and held in custody without bail. I’m working on the bail part.” She pauses. “On my advice, he isn’t speaking to anyone, but he wanted you to know.”

  “He wanted me to know …,” I repeat, faltering over where to begin. He wanted me to know? Did something happen in his basement? Who found her phone?

  “If you wish to communicate with him about anything,” Cherie adds, “you’ll need to do it through me.”

  My curiosity boils over. “Did he find her phone? Did he know about the … the blood?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t divulge many details right now,” says Cherie. “But no, detectives found the phone in Echo Park.”

  “You don’t believe Greg—Shaw—did anything to hurt her, though.”

  “Of course not.” Cherie’s answer is smooth and quick. I realize she must say this for every client. “Do you have anything you wish to communicate to Shaw?”

  I cross La Brea, my mouth growing drier by the second. Does he want me to say something about the flash drive? About Bas and the stalker?

  “Um, do you have any questions for me?” I say.

  “Not at this time,” she says. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Is he okay?” I ask, but she has already hung up.

  “Call the rock critic,” Yegina says in a muffled voice. It’s past noon now, but she is the queen of sleeping in. “He’s got to know something.”

  I am back in my tranquil kitchen, exhuming my takeout and nibbling tiny bites of the spring rolls. “I did. He didn’t answer,” I say. “Should I call Cherie back? I feel like I blew my chance to ask her any real details.”

  Yegina makes a soft sliding noise, like someone burying herself deeper in her pillows. She’s one of those people who always has a fluffy, soft, floral-smelling bed, while mine invariably resembles gym mats.

  “She won’t tell you anything,” she says. “Call Kevin again.”

  “I don’t want him to feel forced.”

  “He has the hots for you.”

  I set down my spring roll. “What?”

  “In our interview, I asked him if he liked you—”

  I start to interrupt, but she cuts me off.

  “And he said he thinks you look like a young Marlene Dietrich. But it doesn’t matter because he’s been engaged for five years to a rich girl he met in Tanzania when he was studying abroad and she was in the Peace Corps. Mindy’s older than he is. She kept him a secret from her family until he graduated college, and now he needs a big career leap or he’ll shame her.”

  “And then I suppose you told him about me and Greg,” I say.

  “Why are you so afraid of what people think?” Yegina asks.

  Her exasperation hurts. I open the rice container and pour the curry on it. I eat a spoonful. The warm coconut flavor clogs my mouth.

  “Just call him,” says Yegina.

  “All right.” I swallow. “But—”

  “Good.” Yegina gives an enormous yawn and makes that burrowing noise again. “I’m really tired.”

  “Did Rick the ranch hand stay over?” As soon as the question slips out, I regret it.

  There is a silence, and then Yegina says slowly, “If you hadn’t gotten so bombed last night, you might know.”

  My phone feels hard against my cheek.

  “Rick the ranch hand has a wife and a daughter,” says Yegina. “And I am pursuing Hiro, the new grant writer. Hiro is very courtly and hasn’t proposed a date yet, but I can sense his interest from the delicate increase in his stammering.” She pauses. “What happened with you and Greg anyway? Did he stay over?”

  “No.”

  “Something happened.”

  “Nothing happened,” I lie. I can’t tell her about Greg giving me the flash drive. I don’t want to entwine her in anything dangerous, and since Cherie’s call, Kim’s disappearance feels more dangerous than ever. But I never lie to Yegina, and it m
akes my weak stomach quiver.

  “And how was it?” she murmurs. “The nothing?”

  “Greg told me that he’s the police’s main suspect. That’s all. He was pretty upset.” In my mind’s eye I see my kitchen window last night and, in it, Greg’s rage-distorted face, watching me. What was he seeing?

  Yegina yawns again.

  “He isn’t guilty,” I say, my voice shaking because I don’t know what to believe.

  She snorts. “Not of murder,” she says. “He isn’t innocent either. Now please go eat your crinkly lunch alone and let me sleep.”

  13

  Of all the startling news I’ve received in the past twenty-four hours, Greg’s comments and behavior nag me most—what he and Kim fought about, why he possessed the flash drive, and what or who spilled blood in his studio basement. I should be thinking about what to do next—send Cherie the flash drive? Use her to get a message to Greg? How does he need me now? Why does he need me? Deep down, do I still believe he’s innocent?

  Yet instead, as I drift on my yellow couch, listening to a helicopter ratchet the southern sky, my brain keeps routing me to a different question: why Kim would suddenly want to donate her entire show to the Rocque’s permanent collection. Also, why hadn’t she told Greg? The loss of millions would weigh on her mind, wouldn’t it? She didn’t strike me as rich. Neither is Greg, and it’s quite possible that she owed him for living expenses. It’s also quite possible he’s leveraged to the hilt right now. Was that what they really fought about—money?

  Yet Greg genuinely didn’t seem to know about Kim’s plan until I told him, and his reaction would be typical of any gallerist. The donation makes terrible business sense, short term and long term. Even if Kim can swallow the financial blow, she will sacrifice a pivotal reputation-building moment with collectors eager to purchase her work. It took years for her to complete this show. The Kim Lord I know is deeply ambitious. And her gift to the museum flies in the face of a main objective of artist and gallerist: to develop a wealthy and steadily more glamorous provenance.

  Provenance is the chronology of ownership of a work of art. Who owns what. Who bought what from whom. The record of exclusive possession. Ownership is listed on every wall label, and it’s written in a history that accompanies every object when it’s sold. If a famous collector buys a sculpture, that sculpture will sell for a higher price the next time it goes on the market, sometimes hundreds of thousands more. Dealers know this. They keep long waiting lists of purchasers so that they can control who gets what, and which sales are known to the press. In Britain, collector Charles Saatchi practically made the career of Damien Hirst when he bought the artist’s first major animal installation, a glass case with maggots feeding on a rotting cow’s head. Saatchi later paid for Hirst to create his famous formaldehyde shark. Public display of the works catapulted them both to fame. And some could say that Hirst made Saatchi, because if Saatchi ever sells the shark, he’ll probably get millions. The artist-dealer-collector triad is a symbiotic relationship, soaked in cash. Most of the time, the transactions happen behind closed doors.

  Who owns Kim Lord’s work? Who wants to own it? Could a collector have frightened her with his demands, with his obsession, enough to make her decide not to sell any of Still Lives? It’s not easy to find the right information to illuminate the situation. Kim’s gallerist, Nelson de Wilde, might know, but he would never share anything about his clients, and sometimes, especially when an artist’s value is declining, different gallerists and consultants can sell a piece several times in quick succession, and it’s hard to keep track of who owns it.

  My cell starts buzzing. It’s still lying on the floor, where I dropped it after I hung up on Yegina, and I have to strain to reach. The number on the screen has a New York area code. Kevin. Reluctantly I answer.

  “Can’t tell you anything. I mean nada. Cherie doesn’t breach her clients’ privacy,” he says. “But can we meet somewhere cool? I’m flying out tonight and I want to give you something.”

  For a repository of dreams, the Chinatown wishing well is a surprisingly dumpy sculpture: a hunk of lumpy grottoes, smiling gold Buddhas, and blue-lettered luck signs. The well resembles an altar instead of a hole, and although it’s supposed to replicate some famous cave in China, it seems more like a shrine to a bygone era when Chinatown bustled with actual Chinese residents. Pennies and pigeon droppings scatter the tin cups placed in front of WEALTH, LOVE, and VACATION. Nearby, shops sell bamboo plants, brass tins of tea, and hoary brown roots in big barrels. In the distance, the freeways carry constant streams of cars downtown. Yet here, by the well, it is perpetually hushed and still. Whenever Yegina and I walk past it on the way to our favorite dumpling shop, I feel like we are walking sideways through time, that we are connected to neither past nor future.

  I’m staring at the sign for LOTTO, wondering about my choice of meeting place, when a penny sails over my head and plinks a metal cup.

  “I got it in SUERTE,” a voice says from behind me. “What’s suerte?”

  Kevin’s wearing his tweed again, but it works tonight because there’s a chill, and because he’s going home to New York.

  “Luck, I think.”

  “Why is everything else in English and SUERTE’s in Spanish?” he says.

  “Suerte sounds luckier, I guess.” I pull out my pennies and aim for MONEY’s metal cup, missing wildly.

  “You in shock?” Kevin says.

  “Yeah. I mean, I just saw Greg last night. Now he’s in jail.” I explain about the ranch, the ride, the fall, but not my drunken outbursts. “He’s not guilty. He didn’t even care that they were searching his gallery and studios.”

  We chew over the known details of Kim Lord’s disappearance, though I still don’t tell Kevin about the press release and Kim’s intended donation to the Rocque. I secretly think Kevin knows something about Greg that he’s not telling me. “Did your sister tell you if there’s going to be an arraignment tomorrow?”

  I understand a bit about police procedure from Jay Eastman, who was tracking the arrests and prosecutions of the drug dealers in Vermont. The fact that it’s Sunday today changes the usual timetable and gives the cops extra hours with Greg, but not many. They could hold him overnight, but if they’re not going to charge him by Monday afternoon, they have to let him go.

  “No idea. My sister is a vault,” Kevin says, but his voice rises.

  He’s lying. I wait, hoping.

  “You’ve given up on your Aimee Semple McPherson theory,” I say.

  “Entirely.” He looks grim. “I think the head box in ‘Disappearances’ is Colleen Stan’s,” he says. “Homemade torture instrument made by the guy who abducted her.”

  The head box? Homemade torture instrument? Just two days ago, Kevin was deep into his theory of Kim Lord cunningly staging her own vanishing. Now he’s decided on a different story in the same painting—the giant still life I have yet to view. It makes me skeptical that there’s anything to find.

  I ask what changed his mind.

  “You’ll see when you look at that painting,” he says. “The more you study it, the more it looks like a prediction of something very, very bad.”

  He fishes inside his coat and holds out a packet of papers. “I’ve got to catch my flight. I’m giving you my notes on ‘Disappearances,’ though,” he says. “I wish I could have made something from them myself, but”—he scratches his beard—“I can’t.”

  I take the papers. “This is what you wanted to give me?” I try not to sound disappointed.

  “You seem like you have a head for this,” he says. “Don’t you?”

  Kevin’s notes are a few loose sheets wrapped in rubber bands that make them heavier than they are. Inside I can see the shape of his handwriting: a jaunty, hasty print. I shrug.

  “You know you do,” Kevin says.

  “Why are you going home so soon?” I say. “I thought this was a big assignment for you.”

  Kevin runs a hand down his tweed
lapel and looks off to the freeway. “I can still focus on the Gala,” he says. “That first evening.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a cover story,” I say.

  His gaze remains on the distance. “I’ve encountered unforeseen complications,” he mutters. “My sister doesn’t want me writing about her client.” He pauses. “She doesn’t like what I’m seeing.”

  Kevin must mean that Greg looks guilty. He has to mean this, or why would it bother Cherie, Greg’s defender? My stomach drops, but I don’t say anything, studying Kevin’s bearded face, his broad, honest brow. The edges of his notes prick my palms. Faded red lanterns sway behind us, tossed in a gritty breeze from the east.

  When the silence gets too long, Kevin tells me that he’s also soon to be “embedded” with something that sounds like “secret rows” and he needs to prepare.

  I recover my voice. “You’re going to Iraq?”

  He chuckles and repeats the name. “Icelandic band on a big American tour. They’re blowing up and I’m going to be riding the bus with them.” He nods at the notes. “But this story is huge. And you know you’re in the perfect position to tell it.”

  Now it’s my turn to look away, to the wishing well, now collecting late-afternoon shadows.

  Kevin aims for WEALTH, and the penny pings the rim. “Never going to get in that one,” he mutters.

  I offer him a penny. “Try WISDOM,” I say.

  “Never going to get that one, either,” Kevin says. “Anyway, I’ve got to go.” He gives me a long glance, one that feels heavy on my face. “I wish you well, Maggie Richter.”