What can I say?
I've dealt with looser screws than Cutler.
Besides, those lousy aces over nines.
I need the payday.
Need breeds greed.
I say, “The store couldn't tell you who they acquired the painting from or anything that would help you?"
"Nothing, only who the artist is and that was already evident."
"I'll start with the store and see if I can do better. What's the name?"
"I don't remember. It was no place I expected to visit again."
"The name would be on a receipt they gave you or a credit card or bank statement."
"The owner insisted on cash. I was carrying more than enough in my billfold."
"Tell me the name of the artist again, Mr. Cutler."
He tells me.
Later, back at my apartment, I grab a couple brews from the fridge and jump onto the Internet.
* * * *
Cahuilla Sands is a sleepy community of six or seven hundred residents risking skin cancer in the sun-baked high desert between Rancho Mirage and the California-Nevada border, inland a mile north of the 60 freeway. It's reached on a pitted two-lane concrete access road that peters out at the base of the San Gorgonio mountain range.
The sign at the city limit, paint chipped and flaking, letters dulled by years of neglect and exposure to the elements, boasts:
WELCOME TO CAHUILLA SANDS
A BOOMTOWN LIKE NO OTHER
HOME OF IVOR GODOWSKY
Ivor Godowsky.
Who I'm here to find—
The artist who painted Cutler's obsession.
Who better to identify the girl for me, maybe tell me where she is now? If all he can give me is an ID, I'll be using the blessed Internet to track her when I get back to L.A., doing in a few hours or less what once took weeks or months of legwork. (If Godowsky had a listed phone, this trip might not have been necessary.)
Trailer parks line both sides of the road, full of mobile homes sitting on permanent foundations, faded white picket fences or chicken wire enclosing weed-infested gardens of heat-resistant fruits and vegetables. Tumbleweed the size of boulders drift with the breeze, sometimes bouncing off the agave, saguaro, and fishhook cacti, creating the impression that Mother Nature is engaged in a fanciful game of pinball.
I have no trouble locating Main Street.
It's the only street in town, three blocks long.
Cahuilla Sands—
Definitely a boomtown like no other.
A two-story city hall dominates a mixed bag of well-kept wood-frame and brick-and-mortar buildings of architectural irrelevance, not a franchise among the storefronts. I angle my SUV into a parking slot, tread carefully up plank stairs that squawk with sounds of imminent collapse, and enter to the smell of dust and desert history.
It takes about five minutes for someone to respond to my nagging on the brass bell at the information desk, a slope-shouldered octogenarian out to break the Olympic record for strolling while he buckles the straps on the blue denim bib overalls he's wearing over a red union suit.
"I was doing number two,” he says, like he's reporting to an old friend. “Third time today. One prune too many with my breakfast bran flakes. I'll never learn. Bananas, too. I could fertilize the whole valley, it ever came to that. So, what can I do you for today?"
I tell him what's brought me to Cahuilla Sands.
"Godowsky, yep,” he says. “He painted my picture a couple of times, once naked as a jaybird. Paid me with a six-pack; imported stuff. Heard later they're hanging in museums, but I don't remember which. You a collector?"
"In a manner of speaking. Can you tell me where to find him?"
"I'll write up the directions for you,” he says, reaching for a pad and pencil, wetting the tip of the pencil with his tongue before he starts scribbling.
The directions take me a mile out of town, closer to the San Gorgonio foothills and a gated cemetery the size of two basketball courts, headstones and grave markers bunched tightly together along jagged pathways. The oldest ones visible from the road date back to the mid 1800s.
I hop over the waist-high slatted wood fence and wander the narrow aisles, raising a river of sweat under the relentless heat until I locate Godowsky.
An engraved bronze plaque embedded in the sunburned grass features his name in tall capital letters and no other information, as if Godowsky had never been born or died, but somehow existed at one time or other.
Back in town, the look on the face of the ancient clerk at City Hall says he knew I'd be returning. Before I can complain about the wild-goose chase he sent me on, he has an answer.
"You asked if I knew where you could find Ivor, not the condition that you'd find him in,” he says. His laughter punctuates every word and splashes my face with the heavy scent of garlic. “I can make it up to you if you want, but it's going to cost you a six-pack of the imported, in the cold case down at Geller's Grocery and not cheap.” His smile exposes two rows of tobacco-stained teeth too perfect to be his own.
* * * *
Irma Ballard laughs when I introduce myself to her at Irma's Snack Emporium, a coffee shop with walls tanned by years of griddle grease, and tell her who sent me to find her. She moves around the counter from the cash register and lands her shapely behind on the stool next to mine. “Herb, he's a card, that one,” she says. “Loves messing around with strangers, anybody, anytime he figures he can trick a six-pack out of them. I suppose it's got something to do with the mad Russian."
"Ivor Godowsky."
"What is it this time?"
"This time?"
"You think you're the first one to come chasing after him here, looking to wheel and deal him out of any of his paintings? Getting Moses to part the Red Sea was easier, except whenever Ivor needed bread to buy supplies. Money and fame meant nothing to him. You could say he died to put an end to all those interruptions.” She eyes the dessert carousel and points. “Interest you in the fresh apple pie; great hot with a slab of homemade vanilla ice cream? Both made by yours truly."
"Sounds delicious, but I'm counting calories."
Irma breaks out a pout, so I change my mind in the interest of bonding. Besides being one delicious dish herself, Irma looks like she knows more than she's telling about Ivor Godowsky. She slips off the stool and heads back behind the counter with a wiggle in her walk befitting the soda-parlor-style outfit, out of a fifties Frankie and Annette movie, that wraps provocatively around her awesome curves. She's in her mid to late thirties, around my age, and that statistic adds thoughts that have absolutely nothing to do with why I'm in Cahuilla Sands. She studies me with a knowing look that promises nothing and everything and lingers while I make a show of enjoying her pie and ice cream.
Swiveling around on the stool in a way that connects her thigh to mine, Irma says, “You haven't answered my question yet. What is it about Ivor that brought you all the way out here?"
I dig for my iPhone and show her the photo I'd snapped before leaving Cutler.
Irma takes the phone from me for a closer look. Magnifies the image. “Definitely not Ivor's work,” she says. “It's one of those phonies that sometimes shows up, the same way there are hundreds of Dali and Picasso fakes always being passed off as the genuine article."
"How do you know that?"
"For one, see the date?"
"What about the date?"
"Exactly. If you knew anything at all about Ivor's work you'd know he never dated his paintings, not one of them."
"There couldn't be an exception?"
"Not here. The date someone put on the painting would make the girl older than her mother is today."
"You know her mother?"
"I am her mother."
Too surprised to speak, I take back the iPhone and weigh her appearance against the girl in the portrait. I can see the resemblance, particularly in the shape of the face, the blue-green color of her eyes, the ripe lips. Or is it only my imagination responding t
o the power of suggestion?
Irma Ballard reads my expression correctly and draws a bright smile that puts quote marks at the corners of her mouth and deepens the crevices on her cheeks and elsewhere on her sun-darkened complexion. “Her name's Michelle,” she says. “Like in the Beatles song.” She hums the melody and then sings the words, Michelle, ma belle, straining both times to stay on tune. “Only she's been calling herself ‘Micki’ ever since the ninth grade. You know anything at all about teenagers, you don't need to ask how come."
"I'd like to see Micki, talk to her?” I say. The idea is to come away with a photo of the kid I can show to Cutler, proof his dream wife isn't what he expected me to bring back to him.
"So would I,” she says, her husky come-hither voice suffering a melancholy break. “Only she went missing a week after Ivor finished the painting, same time as the painting went missing from our motor home."
"She took it with her?"
"Would seem so. The paint was hardly dry. A gift from Ivor, same way he gifted me with some of the ones of me he'd done over the years."
"More than once?"
"Whenever he couldn't pay the tab he'd run up at the Snack Emporium, which was most of the time."
"Did he paint Micki more than once?"
"Just the once I know about. Two years ago. Been two years since I saw or heard a word out of Michelle. Not a note or nothing the day she disappeared, just up and gone, like that.” She snaps her fingers.
The last of the customers is at the cash register.
Irma excuses herself to settle his bill and follows him to the door.
She turns the lock and throws the cardboard window sign to “Closed Until” after dialing the clock hands ahead two hours.
"Follow me on over to my place and you can see for yourself,” she says.
* * * *
Irma's motor home is a permanently docked high-end gas-guzzler the size of a Greyhound bus, the garden-fresh smell of its spit-and-polish interior tainted a bit by the lingering odor of what my practiced nose tells me is cannabis.
Paintings of modest size hang from what little available wall space there is, a few of the smaller ones on counter and table surfaces. They're all by Godowsky and they're all of Irma. Eight in total. Irma ages from image to image, progressing from about Micki's age to the sensuous woman I met earlier today. Her expression varies from a teasing smile to a cipher worthy of da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Her costumes match her mood. In all of the portraits—not one of them dated—her resemblance to her daughter is uncanny.
"The one of Michelle was over there, covering the window,” she says. “In here's my favorite, come see.” She pushes open the accordion door to the master bedroom at the rear of the motor home. The door glides closed behind us and I find myself staring at a painting of a full-figured Irma reclining in the buff. “What do you think?” she says, like she already knows the answer. “It was the first one he did of me, younger than Michelle, but mature for my age in body and soul, if you know what I mean. I've held Mother Nature to a draw ever since."
"Gorgeous,” I say.
"You are,” Irma says. She steps forward, throws her arms around me, and settles an electric kiss on me before I can protest, or at least pretend. “I've needed someone like you coming around for a long time,” she says, and throws herself into a lingering kiss. “Felt the vibe the second I laid eyes on you,” she says. She steps back and begins undressing. “Want you, sweetheart; want you now. Strictly recreational. What do you think?"
I'm too much the gentleman to refuse.
Later, lounging under the covers and sharing a fat joint of premium Hawaiian, Irma is telling me, “Michelle was always complaining top of her lungs about being trapped here without a future, how she had no intention of taking over and running the Snack Emporium the way I did after my dear mommy and daddy were murdered, what keeps me here to this day, stuck with boredom and the need to scratch out a living."
"Your mother and father were murdered?"
"In cold blood. The robbers got away with about a hundred dollars from the register and never were caught. Why I bought a gun and learned how to use it from a deputy sheriff who used to patrol out here and loved my mommy's peach cobbler. Toddy turned me into a mean shot and I wanted the same for Michelle, but she was having none of it. She wouldn't kill a bug, that one. Step on an ant, not her. Oh, how I miss her. I miss her so much."
I stash the joint, pull Irma closer to me, and finger-wipe away her tears.
I haven't felt this comfortable with or protective of a woman since my last wife, and that turned into a disaster. Maybe there's something more than an accidental fling going on here, or is the Hawaiian playing tricks with my emotions?
I tell her, “I'm going to find your daughter for you."
"You can do that, sweetheart?"
"I can do that."
"How, sweetheart?"
"Micki—"
"Michelle, ma belle," she says, and drifts into even breathing punctuated by snorts and groans that informs me she's fallen asleep.
I gently extricate myself from her, slip out of bed, and aim for the fridge. I have an appetite that needs appeasement, a rampaging sweet tooth and a thirst begging for a brew. I have to be satisfied with the bedraggled remains of a lettuce, tomato, and mushroom salad drenched in oily French dressing, a small cup of strawberry yogurt, and what's left in a pour carton of cheap sauvignon blanc that tastes like cheaper mouthwash.
I settle at the dining table and study Godowsky's paintings while struggling to recall what it was I intended to tell Irma, my plan for finding Michelle, her belle; not easy, since I have no plan. Not exactly true. I do so have a plan, it's just I can't remember what the plan is right now. This Hawaiian weed—
Killer stuff.
I struggle to focus on Godowsky's paintings.
He never dated any of them. No date on any, ever, except for the fake, the girl in the golden gown; her, the girl in the painting in the window of the antiques store in New York. Whoever painted the fake had to have the original to copy. The original disappeared from Cahuilla Sands when Irma's belle, Michelle, disappeared from Cahuilla Sands with the only portrait of her ever painted by Godowsky. Meaning—
Michelle had the painting and took it with her to New York, how it wound up at the antiques store in SoHo where Cutler saw the painting and fell in love with the painting and bought the painting.
Cutler said he couldn't recall the name of the antiques store.
I will have to do better.
I will go to New York, go to SoHo, and find the antiques store.
Find the antiques store and find the artist who copied the Godowsky painting.
Find out how he got the original and who from.
Continue working from Z to A until I have Michelle in sight.
Reunite her with ma belle, Irma.
Provide Cutler with proof his money has been well spent, even if the end did not justify his means.
I polish off the vino, stumble back to the bedroom, and whisper in Irma's ear, “My plan for finding Michelle, you want to hear how?"
She rouses at the sound of my voice. I tell her what I have in mind. Her smile melts my heart. Before drifting back to sleep, she says, “I want to go with you, sweetheart, please let me."
I crawl under the covers alongside her thinking it's not a good idea.
Thinking: So what?
Thinking: We have chemistry going for us, Irma and me.
Thinking: Maybe we have more going for us than a one-nighter.
Thinking: This is me talking to me, me, not the weed, the cannabis, the ganja, the Mary Jane, until the free-floating three-dimensional light show of late afternoon somehow turns into early morning and I wake up sweating from the already oppressive heat attacking the walls of the motor home.
* * * *
SoHo is like Los Angeles on speed.
People and street vendors crowd the sidewalks, cabs honk for jurisdiction as they maneuver from one gridlocked lane to ano
ther.
It's morning, two days since we flew here.
Irma and I have been wandering the northern section like the lost tourists we are, hoping to stumble across the antiques store Cutler had described to me, located between a clothing store and an overpriced bistro.
Our problem: Too many antiques stores, clothing stores, and bistros, but none so far one-two-three next to one another.
After more than two hours of foot-weary failure and frustration, we navigate south to the less trendy, not as pricey part of SoHo along Grand and Canal streets. There are cast-iron warehouses off the cobblestone streets that talk to the years before lofts filled up with artists, art galleries abounded, and real estate prices aimed for the moon.
We're not having better luck here after an hour, talking about quitting for the day as the temperature turns chilly and rain clouds ripen in the overcast sky, when Irma grabs me by the elbow and points across the narrow street to a shop nesting between a Chinese hand laundry and a patisserie sending out the smell of fresh pastries and sweets.
"Oh, my dear Lord. Sweetheart, look!” she says, her voice rising from a murmur to a shout.
The flag hanging above the shop entrance reads Treasures Island, but what has excited Irma is the oil painting hanging in the display window.
She zigzags across the street to a symphony of angry car horns, me in pursuit, and stands slack-jawed in front of the window, staring hard at a portrait of the girl in the golden gown. The girl isn't standing this time, showing off her royal bearing. This time she sits on a high-backed throne wearing a crown encrusted with diamonds, emeralds, and rubies, and an expression more precious than any of the stones. The portrait is signed by “Godowsky.” Like the earlier one, it's dated twenty-five years ago, but it's unquestionably Michelle. Not the same antiques shop, however, unless Cutler got his landmarks wrong.
We learn he did a few minutes later, when the young clerk tells us, “It's the second Godowsky we've ever had as long as I've worked here, going on three years.” She's a pink-haired six-footer and string-bean thin, legs like stilts; flat-chested under a sheer silk, floral-patterned tent dress that quits above the knees; her voice a birdlike twitter; looking out of place in a showroom filled with period furniture and decorative indoor bronze and marble statuary. “My boss took it as a favor."
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