Dead Man's Mistress Read online

  “I don’t see any of that in the Wykoff paintings,” I said.

  “Neither do I.”

  * * *

  Perrin poured Knob Creek Smoked Maple Bourbon, a little sweet by my standards but tasty nonetheless. While we drank she pulled a large volume with the title Randolph McInnis: Scenes from an Inland Sea off the shelf behind her desk. She opened it to a page near the front.

  “Flonta,” Perrin said. “The man who bought the collection was named Bruce Flonta. He contributed an essay to the book. In fact, he published the book.”

  I made a gimme gesture and Perrin slid the tome across her desk. I picked it up. The damn thing weighed five pounds if an ounce. I started paging through it. Paintings and drawings of Louise Wykoff sitting by a window, standing next to a tree, staring at Lake Superior, walking along a rocky path, kneeling next to a fire, shielding her eyes from the sun, stretching on a bed …

  “I remember the first time I met Louise,” Perrin said. “I looked into her eyes, studied her face, tried to find the qualities of character and mood that McInnis had put into the paintings of her, only I couldn’t. I’ve seen her a few times since, we’ve even Skyped. Obviously, she’s an attractive woman. There’s a kind of a glow about her. Yet I’ve never seen the woman in the paintings. I wonder—the warmth, the humor, the courage, the resilience, the strength—did McInnis actually see those things in Louise and find a way to render them to canvas or were all those qualities inside of him and Louise was merely the mechanism for how he chose to express them?”

  “That’s a question you’re asking a guy who has a bachelor’s degree in criminology?”

  Perrin thought that was funny.

  “It’s the kind of thing that art majors talk about all the time,” she said.

  “You guys must be fun at parties.”

  “We have our moments. McKenzie, what happens now?”

  “First thing tomorrow morning, I’m going back up to Grand Marais and see if I can find those damn paintings. Just don’t ask me how I’m going to do it. Questioning Wykoff’s students, friends, acquaintances—ah, man.”

  “You can’t tell when people are lying?”

  “I can when they’re not very good at it, only the people who aren’t very good at it are the least likely to break into someone’s house and steal their stuff. If the thief had stolen other things as well I could check out the pawn shops and antiques stores to see if he had attempted to unload them, get a line on him that way. ’Course, if the thief is a professional—very little stolen merchandise actually ends up in pawn shops these days. Besides, I can’t picture the guy carrying three canvases into Pawn America and announcing, ‘make me an offer.’ I can’t see him listing three priceless McInnis paintings on eBay, either. At least it’s a place to start.”

  “Whoever stole the paintings will try to sell them to someone, though. Right?”

  “Eventually, yes.”

  “How about the man who had tried to buy the Jade Lily, the one you told me about? Should we talk to him?”

  “El Cid?”

  “Yes.”

  “For the time being at least, we’re trying to keep this a secret. Cid—tell a big-time fence like him that there are three priceless paintings in the wind and by tomorrow morning every grifter in the country will be trying to lay their hands on them. By the day after, you’ll have a substantial criminal element from Europe joining in.”

  Perrin sipped her bourbon thoughtfully before she spoke.

  “I don’t want you to get hurt,” she said.

  “Thank you, Perrin. I appreciate it. I’m not sure That Wykoff Woman cares one way or the other.”

  “Like I said, I don’t know if she’s the same person as the one in the paintings.”

  “We’ll see.”

  * * *

  Perrin lent me her book. She said there were plenty more copies available in the museum’s gift shop. I took it to the high-rise condominium in downtown Minneapolis that I shared with Nina Truhler. She wasn’t home, though. She owned a jazz joint on Cathedral Hill in St. Paul and spent more time there than she did here.

  I sat behind the desk in the office area. The condo was wide open. We didn’t have rooms so much as areas—dining area, kitchen area, TV area, music area where both my stereo system and Nina’s Steinway stood. The entire north wall was made of tinted floor-to-ceiling glass with a dramatic view of the Mississippi River where it tumbled down St. Anthony Falls. You’d think one would never grow tired of it. After eighteen months, though, I find that I don’t look as often. Instead, I started paging through Scenes from an Inland Sea again.

  It read almost like a primer on how to make art. There were thirty-four sections and each one featured a series of drawings and sketches of a specific subject from different perspectives concluding with the painting that eventually came from them. They were accompanied by notes written by Randolph McInnis explaining what he was going for.

  The first section was labeled Sea Monster and depicted the bow of a huge freighter escaping from a fog bank as it bore down on the narrow canal that led from Lake Superior to the Duluth Harbor Basin.

  “When I first saw the freighter emerge from the fog I found its size both majestic and frightening at the same time,” McInnis wrote. “I wanted to capture that. I also wanted to express what I was feeling at the moment the ship appeared to me. I felt inadequate.”

  Louise Wykoff didn’t appear in the book until the seventh section, the one labeled Lonely Heart. She was fully clothed and sitting on a rock while gazing out at the great lake, the iconic Split Rock Lighthouse prominent over her shoulder. McInnis wrote “People are not very good at being alone. It makes us feel sad. It makes us search the horizon especially in our darkest hours for the flickering light that will lead us home.”

  Louise wasn’t in sections eight through ten, appeared again in number eleven, and reappeared in section fourteen. She was in all of them after that. My favorite was section eighteen, which featured a nude Louise sitting in a chair, her elbow propped on a windowsill as she looked outward. The painting was titled In Her Eyes, even though you couldn’t actually see her eyes, and about it McInnis wrote, “Sometimes you can gaze at one thing and see the world entire.”

  My inner voice asked, Exactly what were you gazing at, Louise—I glanced at the bottom-right corner of the page and read the number—when McInnis painted number seventy-two?

  “Wait,” I said aloud.

  It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that all of the sketches, drawings, and paintings in the book were numbered one through one hundred and thirty-three and presented in chronological order. Plus, the notes from McInnis—How is that possible? He was long dead when the volume was published.

  I returned to the front of the book. There was a preface, a foreword, and an introduction followed by twenty pages of text that waxed fondly on the artist and his work and where each stood in the canons of American art. Near the end of the text I found a paragraph explaining that “the meticulous McInnis, as was his habit going back to his days as an art student, had carefully documented the drawings and paintings that comprised the Scenes from an Inland Sea as well as what he was thinking when he drew and painted them.”

  Apparently, McInnis had decided early in his career not to allow his work to be defined “by the fevers of imagination” found in art criticism, so he and his wife Mary Ann worked diligently to control his legacy. That included “expressing his artistic style, personal preoccupations, and work habits in his own terms.”

  “I think businesspeople call that branding,” I said aloud.

  The sound of a door handle caused my head to turn. I looked up just as Nina came through the door.

  “Hey, you,” she said. “How was Grand Marais? Did you bring me donuts?”

  “In the refrigerator.”

  Nina dropped her bag and coat on a chair, went to the kitchen area, found a couple of chocolate-frosted cake donuts in a bag, and heated them briefly in the microwave.

&nbs
p; “Don’t I even get a hug?” I asked. “It was like a nine-hour drive round-trip.”

  “Ah, poor baby.”

  Nina not only hugged me, she kissed me in a way that made me think of our master bedroom. She let me go, however, the moment the microwave pinged.

  “God, I love these,” she said, her mouth full of donut. “World’s Best Donuts might actually make the world’s best donuts.”

  “So, how’s business?” I asked.

  “Not bad, could be better,” which was Nina’s standard reply to the question during all of the nearly seven years that I’d known her. In an unguarded moment she might confess that Rickie’s, the jazz joint and restaurant that she named after her daughter Erica, was doing very well indeed, although she nearly always added a qualifier—“for now.” Despite her success, Nina nursed a nagging concern that the next new restaurant or club that caught the public’s imagination would be the one that put her out of business. It was why getting her to take a vacation for longer than a week at a time was like signing up for elective dentistry.

  “Did you meet her?” Nina asked. “That Wykoff Woman?”

  “I did. She told me to call her Louise.”

  “How was she?”

  “Very pleasant.”

  “Is she still gorgeous?”

  “Yes, although not as gorgeous as you.”

  “Who is? Don’t answer that. What did she want?”

  I had promised Louise that I would keep her secret. On the other hand, I had promised Nina that I would never keep secrets from her and that promise came first. I told Nina everything.

  “You’re off on another treasure hunt then,” she said.

  “First thing in the morning. Want to come with?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You love Grand Marais.”

  “I love it when we’re hanging out, enjoying the lake, the rivers, the woods, the bars, the restaurants. Are we going to be doing any of that?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Well, then…”

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

  “Just as long as you come back in one piece, that’s the main thing.” Nina held up the paper bag. “Oh, and bring more donuts.”

  THREE

  Most people know Grand Marais as a tourist town with a sheltered harbor guarded by a small lighthouse and iconic bars and restaurants with names like the Angry Trout, Crooked Spoon Café, and Sven and Ole’s Pizza. It also hosts a vibrant and renowned art colony that attracts visitors from around the US and Canada. Yet it has a residential and community life as well. There are grocery stores, pharmacies, hospital and clinics, several churches, a high school with the nickname Vikings, a weekly newspaper, a public library, a bookstore, a playhouse, a historical society, a county courthouse, a sheriff’s department with a dozen active deputies, volunteer firefighters and first responders, a dog pound, a nine-hole golf course, and a municipal liquor store.

  The traffic was heavy driving Highway 61 into town at 1:00 P.M., which didn’t surprise me a bit. In autumn, tourists mob the North Shore of Lake Superior in search of spectacular colors. Yet I was surprised when I couldn’t find an empty parking space in front of the Wykoff Art Academy. Instead, the spots were filled with various vehicles including a white van that was not the same as the white van I had seen the day before. Its doors were open and after I parked down the street and walked back I could see lights, grip stands, small sandbags to keep the stands from falling over, tripods, rags and frames, reflectors, generators, electric cords, microphones, and a lot of other equipment I couldn’t identify both inside the van and lining the boulevard between the street and the sidewalk. My first thought, TV news. Only there were no garish call letters painted on the van’s sides.

  People carried equipment in and out of the converted church. I dodged a couple of them until I reached the entrance. I peeked inside. Louise Wykoff was dressed in a long dark blue skirt and light blue sweater. She was sitting on the same stool as the day before, directly across from a man who sat in a canvas chair. Lights and a handful of cameras were pointed at Louise from a variety of angles, yet none were filming him. Another man, about twenty-five and in good shape, held a boom mic above Louise’s head.

  She said, “Often he would have me paint the same scene as he was painting and critique it. I thought I understood composition, perspective, how to lead the viewer’s eye, color, the value of light and dark. I knew nothing. I didn’t even know how to hold a brush properly until he taught me. Four years I studied art at UMD. Randolph taught me twice as much in four months. He paid me while he did it, too. I almost felt guilty taking the money. Only then he would have one of his tantrums and I’d think I’m not getting enough for this.”

  “These tantrums,” the man said. “Were they about his work?”

  “Almost never. At least not about the Scenes. Instead, they were nearly always about the life he was living outside of Duluth, about the images the public, the critics, and his wife expected him to churn out on a regular basis.”

  Someone pulled my arm, a young woman. If she had told me she was selling Girl Scout cookies I might have believed her except for the tattoo of flower petals that seemed to reach out from beneath the collar of her shirt and grasp her throat.

  “Mister, you can’t be here,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  I let her take my arm and lead me down the steps away from the church entrance to the sidewalk.

  “Why not?” I repeated.

  “We’re filming.”

  “Filming what?”

  “A documentary.”

  “On Louise?”

  “On the Scenes from an Inland Sea. Do you know what that is?”

  “I’m familiar.”

  “It’s the thirty-fifth anniversary.”

  “Of the paintings or Randolph McInnis’s death?”

  She didn’t answer.

  I offered my hand.

  “My name is McKenzie. I’m an acquaintance of Louise. In fact, I have an appointment to see her.”

  “I’m Jennica. I’m an assistant to Mr. Mehren.”

  “Jennica?”

  “My parents couldn’t decide between Jennifer and Jessica, so they compromised. Someone told me once that it was a real name, that it meant ‘white wave,” but I didn’t believe him. I’m sorry about your appointment. Ms. Wykoff knew we would be filming most of the day. I don’t know why she didn’t tell you.”

  “Artists, am I right?”

  “Huh? Yeah, artists.”

  “Mind if I hang around? I promise I won’t get in your way, I won’t make a sound.”

  “I guess it’ll be okay. Just don’t let Dad see you.”

  “Dad?”

  “Mr. Mehren.”

  “I’ll keep out of his line of sight.”

  “He won an Oscar, you know. For We Gotta Get Out of This Place about the Vietnam War.”

  “I seem to remember that. When was it? Ten years ago?”

  “Nearly twenty. I was an infant at the time. I didn’t even know about it until years later so I’m never surprised when other people don’t know about it. My mom said the awards ceremony was very la-di-da. She met Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg.”

  “Cool.”

  “So, just—okay … If I get a chance I’ll tell Ms. Wykoff that you’re here. McKenzie, right?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  Jennica scrambled up the steps to the church and cautiously peered inside before entering. I moved to a tree on the boulevard and leaned against it while I accessed my smartphone. Coverage in Cook County was iffy at best. Stay within Grand Marais and you were fine. Drive five minutes in any direction and suddenly you were cut off from the rest of the world. There was a time when that wouldn’t have bothered me. Like most people I would have preferred it. Now we’re so thoroughly connected that when we lose connection even temporarily we feel anxious. Go figure.

  I Googled Mehren. There were a couple hundred thousand results includ
ing a Wikipedia page:

  Jeffery James Mehren is an American director, producer, screenwriter, and editor. He is best known for directing documentary films. He received an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for directing We Gotta Get Out of This Place (If It’s the Last Thing We Ever Do) (1999). He has also received numerous awards from film festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival and Los Angeles Film Festival.

  It turned out Mehren had shot a couple of dozen documentaries since We Gotta Get Out of This Place, named for the 1965 song by the Animals that was featured throughout. Yet none of them had achieved the status of his award-winner, although the films he made immediately afterward were well received. Much of his later work was poorly reviewed, however, with at least one critic lambasting him for his self-indulgence while another lamented that he had squandered his gifts as a filmmaker. His most recent documentary was called The Poison in Our Water and dealt with the poisoning of groundwater due to fracking. Someone had written that “Mehren’s tedious pacing made the audience yearn to drink the water.”

  “I need this,” I said aloud. “I really do.”

  At the same time my inner voice asked, Why didn’t Louise tell you that a documentary filmmaker was lurking about? What’s next? Reporters from The Washington Post?

  I had been hanging around for nearly a half hour when another white van approached, moving slowly. A garage door opened across the street from where I was standing. The van slid inside the garage and the door closed behind it. Less than five minutes later, a woman left the house. She moved easily as she walked toward me like someone who got plenty of exercise. She wore tight shorts and a tight T-shirt and I thought it was a pretty skimpy outfit given the temperature.

  On the other hand, my inner voice said. If you lived in a place that averaged 39.8 degrees Fahrenheit, 64 might feel downright balmy.

  “I take it you’re not with the film crew,” she said.