A Trace of Gold: Murder Chicago Style

A Trace of Gold (chapters 13, 14, 15)

THIRTEEN

An opening at a Michigan Avenue art gallery wasn't the sort of event that McKinney was used to frequenting, and he was impressed that one of Carla's sculptures was being exhibited at a snooty place like the Halston. He was happy to be on his second date with her in less than a week. On their first date her charm had won over the regulars at the Cermak Lounge. All the old bluesmen had flocked around her. Reverend Emmett pulled up a bar stool and sat with them the entire evening and a guitar player called Mumbles had talked to her for twenty minutes straight. McKinney couldn't understand a word the man said but Carla claimed they had a "lovely conversation." Even the club's owner, a crusty, old hippie-type named Kenny, took a shine to her. "You oughta hang on to this one, McKinney," he'd growled. "It's the first time in months I've seen you smile."

Tonight they were hobnobbing at the other end of the social scale, not that McKinney minded. He liked Carla and was pleased to be invited. Besides, it was a good way to get his mind off work. He had moved on from the Drenon and Burdett cases, but he was still convinced that the two were related; the shoeprints indicated that. What did those two people have in common? And the big question: why were they tortured and killed? He hadn't heard any more from Detective Boadu, and he was relieved. He was glad to be out of it.

The gallery space was a large fourth-floor room with framed art hung on a couple of freestanding walls and sculptures displayed on blocky white pedestals. The wall closest to Michigan Avenue was solid glass, an enormous window that offered an unrestricted view of the Magnificent Mile from the Old Water Tower almost to the river. McKinney looked out on the last of the shoppers heading home with their bags from Tiffany and Nieman Marcus. Carla was across the room, standing in front of a big, lime green painting, drinking red wine and talking with some of the other artists represented in the show. McKinney decided to wander, going from piece to piece, taking them in—miniature oil paintings, life-size nudes, an installation made of one thousand jelly jars. He stopped to study Carla's sculpture. She primarily worked with metal and had jewelry for sale at several boutiques around the city, but this piece was something special, a foot-tall statue of a little girl playing in the rain. It had been cast in bronze from her original clay sculpture, and both the mold and the original had broken during production. It was the only one that would ever be made and it was priced at eight thousand dollars. As he studied the piece McKinney called on his ability to be an objective observer; he didn't want whatever feelings he had for Carla to prejudice his opinion of her work. He moved back, then came in close. He ran his fingertips across the cool, smooth metal.

The girl was about five or six years old and she was splashing through a puddle. Her wet face was turned up to the sky, eyes closed, grateful smile. The folds of her dress accentuated the motion of her kicking leg. Detail had been sacrificed for mood. It was an Impressionist statue. McKinney decided that he liked it, but he still couldn't be sure how much he was influenced by knowing the artist, or by having a daughter whom he'd seen playing in the rain. One thing was certain—the statue evoked feelings in him that shattered his efforts to remain objective. Any woman who had the ability to capture a child's exuberance in a lump of metal was worth getting to know better.

He continued his trek around the room, examining one piece after another, finally stopping in front of a painting of a black cat. The cat was curled in a ball, sleeping on a wooden floor next to a rocking chair. A heavyset man wearing a dark blue Armani suit with an orange and green striped tie walked up next to him and gestured toward the painting. A few drops of martini sloshed out of the glass in his hand, narrowly missing the canvas.

"Whadaya think?" he asked.

"I like this one," McKinney said. "It's deceptive. At first glance it just looks like a painting of a cat, but look..." he said, pointing, "the cat's tail is under one of the rockers. You can't see whether or not anyone is sitting in the chair but, if someone is and they lean back, the rocker will catch the cat's tail. There's some implied tension there."