“This is Gabrielle Modine—Gabby,” Lenore Baines said. “She processed that purchase for Ms. Davis.” She introduced Maxi and
explained what the reporter was after.
“Mmmm.” Gabby’s pretty face clouded. “Why don’t you come to my office and I’ll tell you what I can, although I’m afraid there
isn’t much to tell beyond what you had on the news.”
She led the way back through a maze of corridors to a small, charming office. Maxi noticed the classic Louis XVI desk with
the high-backed chair, the set of antique French cabinets, and the colorful Tibetan rug that partially covered the high-gloss
hardwood floor. The two sat on a plush, damask-covered love seat, and Maxi’s eyes gravitated to the canvas on the opposite
wall. She gasped. It was an original Pierre Bonnard, a painting of a homey kitchen, a woman sitting with her needlework, a
cat curled up on a chair, and a view out the open door of what looked like miles of glorious French countryside.
“Oh, don’t be impressed.” Gabby giggled, following Maxi’s gaze. “That one goes on the block in January, with some really wonderful
French Impressionist pieces we’ve taken on consignment. They like to hang some of the best ones here and there. If we ever
did, God forbid, have a burglary, they figure the bandits would go right to the storerooms; it wouldn’t occur to them to strip
the stuff off the walls. Hide ’em under their noses, so to speak.” Her hand suddenly flew to her mouth. “Oops! That’s supposed
to be a secret, and here I go telling the press!”
“Don’t worry,” Maxi said, laughing. “That information will never leave this room.” She liked Gabby Modine immediately.
“Deal.” Gabby smiled. “Now, how can I help you, Maxi?”
“Tell me everything you remember about Meg Davis, anything she might have said to you when she purchased that cross.”
“To tell you the truth,” Gabby said, “I thought she was on drugs. She didn’t say much at all. As you know, her bid took the
piece. Later, she came over to me to arrange to pick it up. I was concerned about the credit card she presented—it wasn’t
in her name—but when I checked with American Express it was valid, and she was listed as an authorized user.”
“Did she chat at all, say why she wanted the cross, what she was going to do with it?” Maxi asked.
“You know, our typical auction patron is friendly, outgoing,
does
chat,” Gabby remarked. “This woman was definitely not a schmoozer.”
“Is there
anything
else you can tell me about her?”
“No… Wait, there
is
one thing that might help,” Gabby said, brightening. “Remy Germain, the artist, came in after you’d left with your crew.
She had done a few of the pieces in Nathanson’s private collection, and she bought a couple of her paintings back that night.
Anyway, I do remember that she had her sketch pad out, and she was sketching this and that. And I specifically remember her
sketching Meg Davis while I was processing her purchase.”
Maxi got up, thanked her, and took a last, loving look at the Bonnard. “What a treat, working in a room with
this
for inspiration,” she said, her eyes lingering on the lush reds and oranges accenting the country scene. “The Channel Six
concept of inspiring art on the newsroom walls is our courtroom artist’s renditions of infamous killers,” she remarked, as
Gabby walked her back out to the front doors.
“You know,” Gabby confided as she was leaving, “I get the chills every time I think that I held that cross in my hands, and
now it’s been used to kill people so savagely. I hope you find it, but please be careful.”
Heading east down Wilshire Boulevard, Maxi called the Remy Germain Studio on Melrose Place in West Hollywood. Ms.Germain was
in, a receptionist said, and she put the call through. Maxi asked about the sketches, and the artist graciously told her to
come on over and she would get them out for her to look at. By the time Maxi clicked off her phone she was at the address.
Several of the artist’s
avant
paintings were displayed in a small front showroom. The receptionist sat behind a desk, attending to customers and answering
phones. She recognized Maxi, and took her back into the huge expanse of Remy Germain’s working studio.
The artist was sitting on a stool in front of an easel, brushes in hand, dabbing at a canvas that depicted a man and a woman
standing beside a jewel-like swimming pool, holding hands and unabashedly undressing each other with their eyes.
“You’re way too fast for me,” Remy exclaimed, glancing over her shoulder at Maxi in the doorway. She turned back to the work
in progress, added a few touches that couldn’t wait, then got up and extended a hand. “This is my heterosexual answer to Hockney,”
the artist offered with a mischievous grin, tilting her head toward the painting. Remy was slight, but the energy that was
packed into her ninety-something pounds fired up the room. She was sunny, with finely chiseled features and fair skin framed
by a wealth of ash brown hair. “You flew here by rocket?” she asked.
“I was just around the corner when I called.” Maxi smiled, appreciating the profusion of warmth and cheer this woman exuded.
The small storefront showroom that Maxi had passed so many times along that short, artsy stretch of Melrose Place belied the
enormous space within, where the artist worked. The
walls were painted Grecian white, and were hung with a profusion of her colorful canvases. A couple of collectors were quietly
browsing.
“Let me find those auction sketches for you,” Remy said.
Maxi followed her to a bank of brightly colored file cases stacked in an alcove at the far end of the studio. Remy opened
a drawer marked SKETCH PADS and pulled one of them out.
“You are really organized,” Maxi marveled.
“Have to be,” Remy said, laughing. “There’s such chaos in my head that if I don’t have order in my environment I can’t work
with any semblance of sanity.”
She brought the eleven-by-fourteen-inch sketch pad over to a drafting table, pulled out a couple of tall stools, and switched
on a panel of lights that lit up the space. She and Maxi settled on the stools, and Remy leafed through the pages.
“I have a few sketches of Meg Davis. Frankly, she was the most interesting subject at the auction, I thought. Poor woman”—she
frowned—“you couldn’t miss how troubled she was.” She pointed to pencil drawings of Meg Davis in various poses, looking glazed,
transfixed.
“Here she is with her friend,” Remy said, showing a sketch of Meg doing business at a cloth-covered table, behind which sat
a pleasant-looking young woman with a mop of curly hair, unmistakably Gabby Modine. Standing off to the side of Meg Davis
was the figure of another woman, seeming to watch her intently.
“Who’s the friend?” Maxi asked, studying the sketch.
“I don’t know; someone she was with,” Remy said. “What particularly struck me is how much alike they seemed. Alike, and both
totally out of place there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, look at the two of them in reference to each other,” Remy responded, waving a hand from one to the other on the paper.
“Both are tall, almost painfully thin, but more than thin, they’re frail. Not healthy-looking. And decidedly out of place
in
this world of wealthy Westsiders, the usual types who frequent these high-end auctions. See how disoriented these two look?”
Remy showed her more sketches of both the women together. Maxi focused on the dark-haired woman in the cropped black leather
jacket and torn jeans. Remy had captured the spacey demeanor she spoke of, but Maxi also saw anger and contempt in the angular
face, the defiant tilt of the head.
“What did they do after Meg Davis paid for the cross, did you notice?” she asked the artist.
“Yes,” Remy answered. “They both hustled out of there. And I must confess that my voyeuristic impulses compelled me to watch
them out the door. Evidently they’d come separately, because Meg Davis’s car was brought up first, and she waited until the
other woman’s car came. Then one followed the other out. There was something odd about their relationship.”
Maxi perceived how Remy Germain’s artist’s eyes could see so much more than the ordinary observer. “Will you do anything with
these sketches?” she asked her.
“I started a painting of Meg Davis,” the artist responded. “I was moved to do it after I was so taken by her at the auction,
and thanks to your news story that night, when I came to realize the significance to her of the piece she’d purchased, the
cross that was a symbol in the movie she’d starred in as a child. I call my painting
Lost Girl.
I’ll show you, if you’d like.”
“I would, thanks,” Maxi said. “Remy, would you let me take this sketch pad with me for just a day or two? I’d like to try
to find out who this other woman is, find out if she has any idea what happened to that cross.”
“How about if I make you copies of the sketches you want?”
“That’d be great,” Maxi said.
Remy called her assistant into the studio and asked her to run off the copies, then she took Maxi over to a canvas leaning
against a wall. It was an amplification of the sketch of Meg Davis
claiming her purchase at the auction desk, her soulful eyes staring fixedly ahead.
“I doubt that I’ll finish it now,” Remy murmured, and she involuntarily shivered. “In light of all that’s happened since,
it seems exploitive. Maybe someday I’ll fill in that tragic face,” she said, “if those eyes are still haunting me.”
I
t was the day before Halloween. Richard Winningham and his crew were on their way to The Carousel on Melrose, the largest
and best-known costume shop in the city. It would be teeming with kids and their moms, dads, nannies, and pals, picking out
costumes, trying them on, choosing accessories, buying trick-or-treat bags, makeup kits, wigs, glitter, glue, and what have
you.
As a crime reporter, it sickened Richard to have to report after Halloween stories of youngsters biting into razor blades
in cupcakes, or becoming ill from poisoned cookies, or being struck by cars. This season he decided to do a Halloween piece
before
the fact, to warn parents not to let their little ones go out alone, not to let them nibble on their goodies before adults
had a chance to sort through them, and not to let them eat anything that wasn’t prepackaged and properly sealed.
His cameraman, Greg Ross, was acting like a kid himself in the huge emporium, trying on masks, scaring little kids and getting
them to giggle. The colorful, festive scene would make good visuals, Richard knew.
As Greg was laying out his shots, Richard was laying advice on some of the kids. To a little girl in an Olympic gymnast outfit,
“You’ll be cold in that costume tomorrow night, be sure you
wear a sweater under it,” and to a boy in an oversize bat mask, “Have your mom make the eye slits bigger so you’ll be able
to
see
in that.”
“Hey, when are you going to have kids of your own?” Greg asked him. “You know, you’re getting up there, old man.”
“I have
you
to bring up,” Richard countered. Greg was looking up at him through the eyes of a huge, hairy lion’s head.
“Better get
on
it, buddy,” Greg tossed back, “before you’re so ancient you can’t remember your little tykes’ names.” Richard took a swipe
at him but missed, as Greg dropped to all fours and did his lion act for a couple of five-year-olds. He roared, and they shrieked.
Greg shot B-roll inside the shop, lots of little faces in scary masks, and cute kiddies modeling the gamut of costumes. Then
he and Richard took the gear out front to do a stand-up. While Greg rolled, Richard stood on the sidewalk with a gang of kids
around him, witches and Spidermen, princesses and ghosts, several Barney Rubbles, two kids dressed up as one horse. Looking
straight into the camera, he ticked off his warnings, one by one, hoping parents would heed them.
As he was finishing, Maxi Poole pulled up to the curb in her black Corvette. “Hey, that looks like fun,” she called out the
window. Richard lit up. He told the kids to stay put on the sidewalk, and he walked around to the driver’s side of her car.
“Hi. What brings you down here?” he asked.
Maxi was smiling, but he could see the strain of the past few harrowing days behind her eyes. “I just left Remy Germain’s
art studio down the street,” she said. “I found out that she was at the auction of Jack’s things, and she happened to make
some sketches of Meg Davis buying that cross.” She showed Richard the copies of Remy’s sketches.
“Do they tell you anything?” he questioned, leafing through them.
“Only that Meg Davis was there with a friend.” She pointed
out the sketches of the two women together. “I’m on my way back to Sotheby’s now to see if they can identify this other woman.
Maybe I can contact her and see if she knows anything.” Richard looked dubious.
“Oh, I know it’s probably a wild-goose chase,” Maxi conceded, “but I can’t just do nothing.” Then she half whispered, “I’m
so scared.”
“Where are you staying tonight?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I can’t stay at home. Alison Pollock offered me a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, but with Janet Orson’s
murder there last night, that feels eerie….”
“Stay at my place,” Richard offered. “Hell, you almost know how to work the shower.” He grinned, trying to lighten her mood.
“Thanks,” she said. “Maybe I’ll take you up on that, just for tonight, till I figure out what to do. I can’t stay with Debra;
she’s not any safer than I am—”
The kids were jumping up and down on the sidewalk now, shouting, “Mr. Winningham, come on, Mr. Winningham, we want to be on
television, Mr. Winningham!” Maxi looked toward the youngsters, and suddenly the color drained from her face. She was staring
up at the shop window.
“What is it?” Richard demanded.
“That…that
costume!”
she said, pointing to a mannequin dressed as Dracula, its arms extended, displaying a wide black double cape. Richard followed
her gaze to the black-clad figure. “That’s what my intruder wore,” Maxi whispered.