Maxi headed back toward Beverly Hills. Since she’d gotten no clues to the whereabouts of the cross from Sally Shine, she would start at the place where it had resurfaced in the public eye twenty years after the movie was made. Maybe the Sotheby’s people could tell her something. It was a remote possibility, she knew, but she had no leads, no other avenues to pursue.
She entered through the ornately carved double doors and stepped into Sotheby’s elegantly appointed lobby. A chic receptionist looked up over a pair of black-rimmed glasses and smiled. Maxi introduced herself, told her she was from Channel Six News and that she needed some information about the auction of Jack Nathanson’s effects that they’d held on Saturday.
“Maxi Poole! I saw you there, and I saw the report you did on the auction that night,” the woman said. “I’m Lenore Baines. If you tell me what information you need, I’ll know who best to steer you to.”
Maxi told her she wanted to find out anything she could about the cross that was a prop in Black Sabbat, the item she’d featured in her news story, which was purchased by the actress Meg Davis.
Lenore Baines nodded solemnly. Most of the city, in fact most of the country, was aware of the shocking, brutal killings and Meg Davis’s suicide in the few days since the auction, that Meg Davis was the suspected killer, and her Black Sabbat cross was the suspected weapon. “Let me try Gabby in Decorative Arts,” she said, picking up the phone and punching in a number. Almost immediately a cheerful young woman, tending a bit toward plump, with curly red-orange hair and a spattering of freckles, came through the inner door.
“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.”