Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 135, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 823 & 824, March/April 2010

The Girl in the Golden Gown by Robert S. Levinson

Before turning to mystery writing Robert S. Levinson was first a news-paperman and then in the PR business. He pioneered independent PR support services in the music industry, and he often turns to the music business for material for his fiction. His 2008 novel In the Key of Death was said by Kirkus to be “stuffed with action, violence, sex, music-business savvy...” His latest novel (2010) is entitled The Traitor in Us All.

“I’m told you find missing persons.”

I shrug and say, “I’m involved, they’re not missing, only temporarily misplaced.”

He sends a confused look across the clean surface of his Texas-sized mahogany desk, then realizes what I said was a gag and laughs politely.

“I get you,” he says.

“You will if the price is right.”

He gets the gag faster this time and asks how much.

I quote my usual high five figures.

Without hesitation, he pushes back in his executive chair, opens the pencil drawer, and pulls out a leather-bound checkbook, followed by a Mont Blanc pen from the billfold pocket of his Armani jacket. “My personal check okay?”

“Half will do it for now, Mr. Cutler.”

“To show you how much confidence I have in you and your reputation, I’m giving it all to you up front.”

“You understand there’ll be out-of-pocket on the back end. I’m in for a lot of travel anytime I’m talking missing persons, plus gas costing what people once paid for diamonds. Motels thinking they’re the Taj Mahal. At the greasiest of the greasy spoons, it’s a sawbuck minimum before the tip. My reports include receipts and—”

He stops me with a hand signal.

“Not necessary,” he says. “You come highly recommended; by a mutual friend who swears that, of all the private investigators he’s ever used, you’re the only one who always finds the needle in the haystack.”

He shares the name, a high-powered Beverly Hills attorney.

I uncork a smile. “One of my friends without much originality.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You get that opinion from a lot of my friends,” I tell him. It’s not exactly the truth and nothing but, but the truth might turn him nervous, wondering if I come with a money-back guarantee. Fat chance. Not with my gambling jones and the deadline I’ve been facing on a marker held by a professional knee-breaker, born when my aces over nines fell to his four ladies. “So, Mr. Cutler — Tell me who — what — this is about.”

“I’ll show you,” Cutler says, using the desk to push up from his chair. He’s a good six-six, with maybe three hundred pounds buried inside his three-thousand-dollar suit. A wreath of silver-gray hair surrounds a bald dome and runs down past his collar in erratic strands, giving him the appearance of a poet in disguise while adding a good ten years to what I’m guessing his age to be, somewhere around fifty.

Unsteady on his feet, he pads cautiously across the oak-paneled office, past neatly arranged rows of diplomas, certificates, and photos to an oil painting on solitary display on the wall opposite his desk. The painting is relatively small in size, maybe thirty by thirty inches, encased in a simple wooden frame and bathed by an overhead spotlight that makes it the center of attention.

It’s the portrait of a beautiful girl, eighteen or twenty years of age, standing regally erect, wearing an exquisite ball gown the same shade of spun gold as the shoulder-length tresses framing a porcelain doll face the color of freshly drawn cream; her hypnotic ocean blue-green eyes and marshmallow lips forming an expression that hints at secrets she has no intention of ever sharing.

It reminds me of pictures I saw at the county museum by this painter Degas, who spread the bright colors around on ballet dancers looking like they could tippytoe off the canvas. Not as true-to-life as Norman Rockwell did his paintings, but close enough to win my nod of approval.

Cutler winces when I tell him this, like he’s been stung by a bee, or maybe because I follow up by asking, “Your daughter here, she the one’s missing?”

“Missing, but not my daughter.”

“Who then?” I say, joining him. Up close the girl is even more beautiful. She makes the oil paint smell like sweet perfume.

“I don’t know her name. We never met.”

“She’s not your kid, you never met, you don’t know her name, but you’re shelling out all this bread for me to find her... What don’t I know that I should know, Mr. Cutler?”

“I love her,” he says, staring at the portrait, his hand three or four inches away from the canvas, tracing the outline of the girl’s face. “And that already is more than you have to know.”

“I go for older women myself,” I say, concerned about what this geezer might have in mind for the kid after I find her and deliver her to him.

He catches my drift.

He whips around and leans into my face, fists clenched, blue veins growing at his temples, spittle raining on me, demanding, “Don’t you dare insult me with your innuendo.” He throws a finger at the lower right corner of the painting, where the artist has signed and dated the work.

I can do the math without counting on my fingers.

The painting was made twenty-five years ago, meaning the girl in the golden gown was now almost the same age as Cutler.

He says, “You find her, I mean to marry her if she’ll have me.”

“And if she can’t or she won’t?”

Tears well in his eyes; the only answer he has for me.

“In that case—” I offer him back his check and begin wondering how much longer I’ll have healthy kneecaps.

He waves off the gesture, asking, “Have you ever been in love? Really in love?”

“More than both of my ex-wives, and that’s saying a lot, Mr. Cutler.”

“Then you might understand me when I say love is a word for an emotion beyond definition and often beyond redemption. Falling in love, who’s to say when it will happen? When it happens, it happens. Who it happens with? Another conundrum, wouldn’t you agree?”

The way he’s chewing his words, it takes a second for me to realize he had not said condom. “For me it happened both times working cases, Mr. Cutler. I’m a Grade-A sucker for damsels in distress. You?”

His mind retreats to the past. “A month ago, I’m in New York on business and take a few hours off to check out what’s happened to SoHo. You know SoHo?”

“Not personally.”

“Down between Houston and Canal and Sixth Avenue and Broadway. Used to be the center of the art gallery scene before it moved to Chelsea, between Sixth and Tenth Avenue, from Fourteenth to Thirty-Fourth.”

“Of course,” I agree, like I know the layout of the city beyond the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Times Square, and One Police Plaza.

“I’m exploring the changes since my last trip East a year ago and wander over to an antiques store tucked between a God-awful trendy clothing store and an overpriced bistro. The painting is hanging in the window for all the world to admire. One look and my heart crashes through the plate-glass window to embrace the girl. I am mesmerized by the sight of her. When I see the date on the painting and understand she is my age, I know that fate has intervened. I must possess this painting, just as I must possess her. I must find her and make her my bride.”

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:

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 to 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 another.

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.”

That gets my attention. “A favor?”

“The guy didn’t come off looking like your average junkie; eyes wild as pinwheels but smelling more like turpentine than a garbage truck. Was short on cash to cover his rent and to buy paints, canvas, and stuff is what he said. He said he didn’t feel like being cheated on what the pawn shops and art galleries were offering him for his Godowsky, is what he said. The boss took the painting on consignment and meanwhile wrote him a nice check as an advance. He’s like that, the boss, a big heart and all. No spring chicken, but he’s going to make a fine and loving daddy.” She gently patted what only a fertile imagination could call a baby bump.

“You said two paintings.” I describe the girl in the golden gown.

“The other,” the clerk says, nodding. “Looked to be the same model he used, who sort of somewhat resembles your lady friend here. Went into the window and sold faster than you can spell Godowsky, so I wouldn’t think twice about grabbing this one up, I was you.”

Irma steps forward and shouts an excited, “Yes. What are you asking?”

The clerk tells her and explains, “We’ll need cash or traveler’s checks, ma’am. My boss isn’t one for personal checks or credit cards from anyone but trade regulars.”

The answer elicits a moan from Irma. She shoots me the kind of soulful stare puppy dogs engineer when they’re begging for table scraps. The price is more than I’m carrying in bills. I haul out my roll and peel off ten Ben Franklins. “Will this hold it for us until I find an ATM?”

“Certainly shows good intentions, sir. I’ll go make you out a receipt.”

“And something else I’ll need.”

“Oh?”

“The name and address of the man who brought the painting to you.”

She looks like she’s about to quote some store policy against revealing customer information to anybody outside law enforcement and the IRS. I peel off another pair of Franklins and dangle them. She hesitates before trading in the deep furrows between her sculptured eyebrows on a toothsome smile. “It’s not far from here,” she says, tucking the bills inside her dress, down around her nonexistent breasts.

The four-story factory building is a leading candidate for teardown, its regiment of walled-over truck docks decorated in graffiti and new and disintegrating one-sheets, a relic from SoHo’s past subdivided into cheap loft living. Once through the unguarded entrance, the outdoor city smells give way to a mix of indefinable noxious odors. A narrow stairway that threatens collapse with every cautious step takes us past derelicts sleeping in corridor alcoves to the top floor loft of Bo Goodwin.

The bell doesn’t work, and there’s no response to my knocking on the rusted metal door until I bang harder and holler for Goodwin by name. The spy hole opens for several seconds. It’s another minute before the door slides open and we’re staring back at a young man in boxer shorts, barefooted and bare-chested, his body and arms freckled by oil paint residue; chiseled features punctuated by restless brown eyes, crooked yellow teeth, and an unruly beard the color of mud.

“You’re an hour early,” he says, his voice soggy with sleep. “C’mon, entrez vous.” His French pronunciation is lousy, on a par with my own.

I nod confirmation to Irma, who’s also recognized Goodwin has mistaken us for somebody else, as we enter a vast expanse of loft space with living areas defined by bits and pieces of furniture and appliances, a stove and fridge by a sink loaded with pots and dishes, a sagging sofa and a decrepit armchair over by one wall, a disheveled bed pushed against another wall; clothes strewn about, the floor for a closet; overall, a nightmare of a bachelor pad. A painter’s easel — a color-splattered bed sheet covering the canvas — and a cluttered work bench dominate the center of the room.

Goodwin ponders Irma. “I didn’t know you’d be bringing company,” he tells me. “Is this some kind of a setup?” He shifts his weight from foot to foot, on sudden guard against what I don’t know or care to know. Through the years, minding my own business has kept me healthier than any HMO. He’s obviously confused me with someone else. I tell him so, explaining what brought us here:

“The Godowsky portrait at Treasures Island? We just bought it and will be taking it back to L.A. with us.”

His tone lightens. “Bought it, huh? It wasn’t cheap.”

“Worth every dollar. The clerk sent us over to see you when she learned we collect Godowsky, thinking you might have others for sale.”

Goodwin’s eyes glide to the easel and back to us, while he weighs the possibility, a study in indecision until: “It would cost you another bundle, ’cause I’d still owe the store a commission.”

“No problem, assuming it’s as good as the portrait in the window.”

“Guaranteed,” he tells us, his head bobbing agreement while he quicksteps across the room to a group of canvases stacked against the wall. He exercises care rifling through them until he locates the one he’s been searching for, emits a victory noise, and displays the canvas.

It’s another rendering of the girl in the golden gown that caused Cutler’s infatuation and locked me into this search for Michelle Ballard. Irma and I recognize it immediately as a forgery, dated the way Godowsky never dated any of his works.

“One more for you to see,” Goodwin says. He settles the oil against the base of the easel and returns to the canvas stack. After another minute, he removes a second portrait of Michelle signed and dated by Godowsky. It’s a smaller canvas, a nude, Michelle gaunt and wasted, her face a study in turmoil, her once hypnotic blue-green eyes blinded by defeat.

Irma locks her arms around herself and, shaking, screams, “Michelle! Oh, my dear Lord. My dear Lord. What’s happened to you?”

Goodwin, puzzled by her reaction, asks, “Michelle? Who’s that?”

I tell him, “The girl in the painting.”

“No,” Goodwin says. “Micki was her name. Her name was Micki.”

Irma explodes into tears. “Was. Oh, my dear Lord. He said was. He said was.”

“She was my girl, Micki was, and she left me cold,” Goodwin says. Now he’s also shedding tears by the bucketful. “I woke up one morning and she was gone. Over a year ago. I finally got around to painting Micki from memory, how I remembered her looking on the day she arrived here knocking on my door. Our last night together. The good times in-between.”

“Imitating Godowsky’s style, signing his name,” I say, like it’s a fact that doesn’t need validation.

“He was my uncle,” Goodwin says, “my father’s brother, only he kept the original family name, from the old country. All I learned about painting was from my uncle, until finally I could match him stroke for stroke. Dealers ignored my work as second-rate imitations, except when I copied Uncle Ivor’s style and signed them with the Godowsky name; like whenever I need scratch to survive.”

“Habits are a luxury.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, lifting his palms to the bright copper ceiling surrounding the skylight twelve feet up that’s showering us with late afternoon sun in a cloudless sky.

“And forgeries put you in prison.”

“Not forgeries, sir. Godowsky’s still legally my name. Uncle Ivor never dated his works, so I do, using my birthday as the date. There’s no law against selling copies. And Micki’s portraits sell better than anything, my originals as well as my copies of the one by my uncle.” His words are racing. He looks desperate for acknowledgment. “She had that one with her on the day she showed up at my door unannounced, saying how my uncle sent her and she was looking for a better life than the one she was living now and how my uncle said I was the one to look after her for him.”

“And living with you turned her into a junkie. You call that a better life?”

“I’ve been living with that sin ever since, sir. Nothing I’m proud of. I loved Micki with all my heart and she loved me.”

Irma unbridles her anger again. “Michelle, damn you. Her name is Michelle, and I am her mother.”

“I see it, ma’am. She was always telling me how you looked alike, like sisters. How much she loved and missed you, but this was the life she needed, free to be herself.”

“Did she say where she was going before she left you? Did she leave a note? Have you heard from Michelle since?”

The questions rattle Goodwin. He averts his eyes from the blistering condemnation she is pouring on him. “I apologize for not making myself clear, ma’am. When I explained I woke up and she was gone, I mean she had passed on sometime during the night, in our bed over there, cradled in my arms like always.” His eyes are clouded with tears again. He chokes on his words. “The city took her and she was cremated and after that I don’t know what... God, I need a fix. I do, I do, I do... Where the hell is he?”

Before I can stop her, Irma grabs one of the sharp-edged palette knives off the workbench and launches at Goodwin. He sees the oil-crusted blade coming, but can’t move fast enough to avoid it completely. Irma’s thrust catches him below the neck, inches away from his heart. Blood seeps from the wound and mellows into his chest hair as she yanks out the blade and raises it to strike again.

“My little girl is dead because of you!” she screams.

I grab her wrist and force the blade from her grip, trap her in my arms.

Goodwin, bandaging the wound with his palm, shouting with pain and out of fear, stumbles backward. He bangs into the wall and slides down into a sitting position on the stained hardwood floor. The small diamond-shaped blade has done damage, but nothing permanent. He’ll need patching up, but he’ll live.

Irma is trying to wrestle free of me, trying to get to the workbench and another of the palette knives, demanding, “I want him dead. I want him rotting in hell.”

“No,” I tell her. “Enough.”

Without a backward glance at Goodwin, who’s cry-babying for his connection, I steer Irma to the door.

“Wait here a minute,” I say, and backtrack to the easel.

I pick up a palette knife and use the scepter-shaped steel blade to slash and shred the nude of a drug-bludgeoned Michelle out of existence.

As an afterthought, compelled by curiosity, I toss aside the shroud covering the canvas on the easel, revealing an elegant and vibrant Michelle projecting an intoxicating enthusiasm for life.

I return to Irma and hand it over, telling her, “We came to find your daughter and we’ve found her. It’s time to go home.”

Driving Irma back to Cahuilla Sands from LAX, Cutler’s office at One Wilshire in downtown L.A. is an easy one-stop off the freeway interchange. I call ahead, figuring it’ll take me five, ten minutes max to explain about Michelle Ballard and Godowsky’s portrait and square accounts with Cutler before we’re back on the road.

We’re barely settled in the waiting room after the receptionist announces me when Cutler comes charging out of his inner sanctum like an Olympian after a gold medal in the 100-meter dash. He reaches me and quits, bends over with his hands on his knees, huffing and puffing, sweat dripping onto the plush pile carpeting, insisting, “Tell me that you have good news, that you’ve found her.”

Before I can frame the best way to let him down gently, he notices Irma.

He’s momentarily transfixed.

Rising to his full height, sucking in enough air to reach his toes, he points to her like he’s identifying the suspect in a lineup. His lips are moving, but he can’t seem to get words out, until:

“Bless you, my good man, you’re a miracle worker, as good as I was told. Better. You not only found her for me, but you’ve brought her to me... Oh, my dear, you’ve aged exactly how I’ve imagined since I first set eyes on your portrait. The years have made you more beautiful than ever.”

Irma smiles nervously and, uncertain how to respond, turns to me for direction.

I know what I’d do, but I give her a look that says it’s her life, her decision to make.

Cutler reaches out for her hands.

She hesitates briefly before letting him take them.