The Big Picture: A Mike Dodge Mystery

NOTE: Only Jill Bolte Taylor is real. We graduated together from Terre Haute South Vigo High — a memory now wiped from this brilliant, inspirational woman’s mind.

Professor Deshpande and I were seated in buttoned club chairs before a massive flagstone hearth that might have accommodated a black rhinoceros on a spit. Robust flames devoured the cellulose and oxygen within its gaping maw, relishing the meal. The spines of the gilded volumes flanking the fireplace were aligned as if with a micrometer.

The professor was unexpected but welcome company, despite the Kindle now wedged between my padding and the chair’s. Saanvi was a scholar and student in human instinct and intent, and she inquired as to my reading material.

“Murder at Christmas,” I reluctantly mumbled.

“Ah, Monsieur Poirot,” the normally quiet woman exuded in a perfect French patois. Or Belgian, I guess.

“You don’t strike me, ah…”

“As an enthusiast of Agatha Christie?” Saanvi smiled. “Even in the emancipated ‘colonies,’ we appreciate a ripping British mystery as much as we might a cricket match or a perfectly steeped cup of Earl Grey. Or as you would a Chicago-style deep-dish.”

“I suspect we had different colonial experiences. A snowy night, in front of the fire with a warm minimart cocoa – a snowbound house party seemed right.”

“It’s more atavistic than that,” Saanvi murmured. “Polly Wiessner at the University of Utah took detailed notes on hundreds of day and nighttime conversations among the Ju/’hoan Bushmen of Namibia and Botswana. Daytime talk focused almost entirely on economic issues, land rights, grievances about others. Eighty percent of ‘firelight’ conversations were devoted to storytelling, including tales about people from other Ju/'hoan communities. By extending the day, fire enabled us to expand our minds, unleash our imaginations. Come, have you ever even attended a snowbound house party?”

I considered for a moment, tonguing a particle that felt nothing like a cocoa nib. “How about a snowbound gallery?”

**

The guest of honor that evening was Robert Gyllenhall, at one time the Sammy Sosa of microbiology, the Alexander Fleming of Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, potentially the Schweitzer of orphan and obscure diseases. Of course, Gyllenhall didn’t know anything about that. 

One dark and stormy night in 2013, on his way home from a long evening’s research, Gyllenhall split an I-55 guardrail to the tune of two broken legs, a ruptured spleen, and the mother of all strokes. That’s according to the Cook County cops, the Loyola University Medical Center trauma crew, and the Netflix documentary on the good former doctor. Bob Gyllenhall had to take their word for it -- Robert died effectively on the gurney.

The crack-up had kicked loose some abnormal, congenital connection in the left hemisphere of Gyllenhall’s brain. A former high school classmate had suffered a similar massive stroke and, after eight years of recovery, she’d become a renowned guru on the brain’s structure, function, and human impact. Robert Gyllenhall went a different direction. Gyllenhall credited art therapy with bringing him back to the world – one where his oils attracted critical interest first for the novelty value and then for their bizarre esthetic merits.

Honoring his Millington roots, he pumped the proceeds of his gallery sales, Netflix deal, and USA Today pick The Full Canvas into a near-downtown gallery, converted from a faux-Frank Lloyd Wright home and dedicated to fostering young, disadvantaged artists. I only spotted the place by the plume of questionably attainable smoke pouring from the chimney.

And that’s how Mike Dodge wound up at an art exhibit, perusing the raw and sporadically impressive works Deanngela Hofstra had drawn from her Millington Youth Arts kids. To me, though, the magnum opus was the centerpiece of a silent auction table at the rear of the whitewashed gallery – Bob’s own Rappaccini’s Mind. I’d been forced to spend precious fifth grade afterschool hours in some library torture session called Great Books Club, and Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of maybe six authors whose works I could throw out in Scattergories.

Gyllenhall’s work was stunning -- a tangle of lush vegetation, rotting leaves and putrescent fruit, vines tangled into a kind of ladder reaching skyward, even as new growth and fungal spots and insect damage fought for dominance.

“It’s really…awesome,” I critiqued.

“Thanks,” as average a sixty-something bald guy as I could badly imagine said. I’d seen him on Netflix.

“I mean, it’s a cool juxtaposition,” I tried again as Bob Gyllenhall consulted a sheet taped to the tablecloth under the painting’s easel. “You, know, life and death.” It came out as a question.

“That’s better than the top bidder did,” he assured me. “But he’s a geneticist and a pretty dull one at that. I’m supposed to know him, which coming from me isn’t demeaning. You are…?”

I stuck a hand out. “Mike Dodge. Great you put on this exhibit.”

Gyllenhall shrugged. “I was in their spot -- a clean slate trying to discover who I was. Thanks for coming out on such a hellish night. Please be careful driving home. I guess I ought to know.”

I laughed when I got it, but by then, he was headed across the gallery to examine an adolescent self-portrait that told me Deanngela might want to lean in more on student self-image.

 “The duality of life and death,” the diminutive young woman beside me murmured abruptly. “Sorry. Nothing more boring than amateur art criticism.” She glanced fleetingly at the bid sheet.

“Rachel Trocheck?” Her eyes widened behind no-bullshit wire rims. I tapped the sheet. “Looks like you better get moving. I think they’re closing the bidding in a half-hour or so.”

Rachel smiled pensively. “I didn’t really think I’d have a shot, anyway. Then that guy Osmund jumped from $200 straight to $3,000, and boom, I was out.”

“You an artist?”

“My dad read Mr. Gyllenhall’s book after he had a stroke in 2021, and he started sketching and doing watercolors. Mr. Gyllenhall helped bring Dad back from the brink, so I drove from Peoria in this mess to meet him. I saw online about his painting going up for auction, and I kinda hoped I could get it for dad. I work at a florist’s, so oh well.”

“Jeez, you’re not driving home in this,” I stated.

“I already got a room at the Hampton, no worries,” Rachel reassured. “Oh, Mrs. Gyllenhall’s finally free!”

“Go, go!” I urged. Rachel’s quarry was a tall woman with Chico’s catalogue brushed nickel hair. Gemma Gyllenhall had welcomed the maybe seven guests who’d braved Illinois on the Gulag for the showing, in a breezy Brit accent with smashing superlatives for her husband. I didn’t know much beyond her chairing some statewide arts consortium.

I was entertaining bidding on a basket of flavored EVOs when the stocky man materialized at my elbow, consulted the sheet, then regarded Rappaccini’s Mind with a shake of his shaggy head.

“Not your thing, huh?” I inquired. He turned, eyed me warily, then relaxed.

“I’m sure it’s wonderful, but the last time I even noticed art was when my niece talked me into seeing The DaVinci Code,” The guy paused, glanced again at the spiraling vines and rotting pears. “Charles Osmund. It’s just, honestly, I can’t help feel what a waste this is. I worked with Bob at Northwestern — I now head his former unit — and when I see what that brilliant, brilliant mind has come to…”

Thank his ass he didn’t share that sentiment with Deanngela. “So why would you shell out $3,000 for Mr. Gyllenhall’s frittering?”

Osmund chuckled. “Look, not everyone has Bob’s former left-brained capacity, and if it keeps some of these kids constructively distracted, then more power. Plus, you know, it kind of speaks to me. You aren’t bidding, are you?”

I brushed a bit of stray bruschetta from my best Target polo. “Yeah, no. Kind of you to suggest, though.”

**

Things wrapped, but the show went on as the snow and winds created a blanket between the guests and anything beyond the wide front porch. Fortunately, or unfortunately, they found Osmund on this side of the veil, face down on the rehabbed planks. Snow had been accumulating on the scientist’s back and in a ring around the still-warm spot where his skull had been opened. The heavy oak doorframe told the story – the wood was dented in a pattern that fit that braincase, with a splash of blood for pop.

“Gawd, he musta slipped,” a local chiropractor whispered.

“Don’t go out there,” I warned. “Look, you see any sign he stumbled or slipped in the snow? Nobody’s left – no tracks off the porch -- and I’m not sure he was leaving, either. He’s got a scarf but no coat.”

“What’s your point?” Gemma Gyllenhall demanded. Her arm was still wrapped around Rachel Trocheck’s shoulders. Rachel was wearing a coat – she’d given up the ghost, and was heading to the Hampton with the consolation memoir Bob had given her when she happened on the body blocking her egress.

“My point is, I’m calling 9-1-1, and with any luck, they’ll send this guy I know. Curtis will kill me and probably a few others if anyone leaves. Anybody see what Osmund was wearing when he came in? OK, then – process of elimination. Grab your coats from the rack.”

The remaining guests pulled their coats from the pegs on the extended wall where a parlor probably had been. At the far end, a fireplace had been sealed and a video monitor above the telltale brick skirt. Gemma released Rachel, and the young woman hugged her burgundy woolen coat tighter.

Only one coat remained – an XL parka with the tips of a pair of leather gloves protruding from one pocket. I borrowed a pen from the gallery sign-in table, and prodded the other pocket open.

“Yup,” I concluded. I inserted the pen and pulled free a length of charcoal tweed like a hack magician. “I thought that scarf looked maybe a little pastel-ish for Osmund. OK, you can hang your stuff back up. Hey, Rachel, lemme help you with that.”

Trocheck backed away. I nodded slowly.

“What are you trying to hide?” Gemma asked quietly as Bob looked at me. “What have you got?”

“It’s what she’s not got,” I clarified. “C’mon, let’s go back into the gallery to wait for the police.”

Deanngela looked like she wanted to bolt, but she trudged through one of the two arched gallery entries.

“SHIT!” Bob roared as he crossed the room. I tracked his open-mouthed stare to the auction table. The absence of its verdant, mordant centerpiece was glaring. “Who took my fucking painting?” he demanded, grappling for a seat.

**

“One might conclude Rachel Trocheck murdered Dr. Osmund,” Saanvi stated as applause erupted in the corridor beyond. “Her scarf undoubtedly was wrapped about the neck of the deceased. It’s unlikely Osmund took another’s scarf if even just to step outside for a cigarette in a howling January wind. This might suggest Osmund and his killer stepped outside for privacy. One might conclude Rachel’s scarf was employed as a weapon.”

I tapped my nose. “I think the killer and the doctor had business not for prying ears, and the killer suggested they adjourn to the porch. But as Osmund stepped outside, the murderer looped the first scarf available around Osmund’s neck and yanked back, bashing his head against that hard oak until he was dead.”

“Rachel would not use her own scarf and leave it with the body.”

“Unlikely. And what about the missing Rappaccini’s Mind? Again, Rachel might seem the major suspect. But where might she stash the painting?”

“Perhaps Dr. Osmund, having won the painting and wishing to return home, claimed what was his prematurely, and Rachel’s covetousness exploded into an act of revenge. Maybe having used her own scarf to kill Osmund as a logical reverse alibi, she simply pitched the painting into the blinding snow, hoping to recover it after the police had gone.”

“Wet and likely ruined. And remember -- Osmund was not dressed for the weather.”

“I presume you would not spin this fireside tale without a fitting resolution. How did you determine our killer?”

“Well, you know what they say. Where there’s smoke…”

**

“What was strange to me was that as I looked at the painting, I recognized a pattern,” I related. “It’s a chaotic piece of work, in a good way, but something registered subconsciously. I wouldn’t know a Van Gogh from a Von Helsing, so it wasn’t any familiar artistic pattern. When it hit me, I went back to the website promoting the silent auction, and did a little math.”

“Math?”

“Mr. Kelly’s junior biology, Terre Haute South Vigo High,” I said. “There was a code in your painting.”

Bob remained neutral.

“Those climbing vines, some green, some dead or spotted with blight. Intertwined like a spiraling ladder into the sky. A ladder with 23 rungs. You had no idea at the time, did you? But it seemed too gonzo a coincidence you’d nail the number of chromosomal base pairs in the human double helix. Joe Kelly was a real dickweed, but the man did know his double helix. What I saw in your painting was the genetic code. Forty-six chromosomes per human cell, or 23 pairs glued together with something I don’t remember. Nucleo-somethings...”

Gyllenhall shook his head with a smirk. I wasn’t trying to trap him – I didn’t think his conscious knew what his subconscious was doing.

“Your buddy Osmund talking about The DaVinci Code got me thinking about the big guy himself. Scientist and artist all at once, drinking out of the left and right hemispheres simultaneously...”

“You’re not really much of a neurobiology guy, either, are you?” Gyllenhall pushed up, strolled to the upstairs fireplace. “You mentioned South Vigo High School a few minutes ago. You didn’t graduate with Jill Bolte Taylor, did you? Dr. Taylor was a great inspiration for me in recovery. What do you remember of ‘Jill’?”

“We didn’t really travel in the same circles.” Jill’s massive stroke in 1996 wiped 30 years’ memories. I wonder what Dr. Taylor or I might say if we ever did meet, stranger now to stranger. “I did Kindle Whole Brain Living and then My Stroke of Insight.” 

“Which made you reflect on the duality between left brain rationality and right-brain instinctive, sensual responses, and creativity. Between control and the lack of it, between solitude and society.”

I understood why he’d moved to the fireplace. Solitude and society and control.

“The various chromosomal strands masquerading as vines – I wonder if those spots of rot and damage might be genetic disease markers. Whatever’s in that painting could point the way to gene therapy, a cure for, I dunno, whatever. But Osmund would have. I’m thinking he heard about your show, and discovered the pattern in your painting on the event website. Drive down from Chicago in this shit, to shoot the shit with what amounts to a stranger? He would have won the bidding, and in a few years, he’d publish a paper on how he’d cured cancer, maybe sign on with one of the big Pharma companies. But he didn’t, did he? He told you everything. Osmund didn’t want this for himself – he wanted you to have it.”

 “He thought with therapy, I might complete my ‘work,’ maybe claim a Nobel Prize,” Gyllenhall breathed. “Name a wing at Mayo or Cedar Sinai for me, get my smiling face on the cover of Time, chat with Anderson Cooper. Put the weight of all that hope and expectation back on my shoulders.

“Had liver issues two years ago, and the doc says they had to be related to heavy drinking. I asked around -- every kid and mom and suffering soul he’d disappointed sent Gyllenhall into fits of depression. I’ll bet he sent the blood alcohol meter into the red the night they found him in that highway ditch. That’s who Chuck wanted to raise from the dead. No. No, sir.”

“And you decided to kill him.”

“He wanted to kill me. Hell, he thought he was saving me. Insisted on saving me. Then it hit me. If Chuck could find that fucking -- what did you call it, code? -- others could, too. I had to get rid of Chuck and the painting, before he could get his hands on it. I couldn’t just withdraw it from the auction – too many questions. So when everyone was focused on Chuck’s body, I grabbed the painting, ran up here, and—”

I stared at the flames behind him.

And that’s when I spotted the poker in his hand.

**

“Did you survive?”

Saanvi did not customarily engage in deadpan snark, and I snorted. “Gyllenhall wasn’t going to kill me – murdering Osmund shattered the peace he’d found in forgetting. He poked around in the fireplace to show me what was left of Rappaccini’s Mind. Then we waited for the cops.”

“I wonder if it occurred to Mr. Gyllenhall how many future lives he may have taken along with Dr. Osmund’s,” Prof. Deshpande concluded, smiling up as a handsome graying man emerged from the Conference Center with a clutch of academic types.

I shrugged. “He was no longer a big picture guy.” She began to comment, but a college kid in his yellow Durer’s Chateau tie stepped between us apologetically, reached behind the faux books to the left of the hearth, and pointed a remote at the big screen management had installed in the former fireplace. The flames disappeared instantly, replaced by the NBA.

“Well,” I said.

“Well,” Saanvi replied, as she rose to peck Anand Deshpande on the cheek and disappear into the frigid Central Illinois night.

Sarah would be out soon. She’d protested attending the retirees reunion, but after I said I wanted to do some browsing on the Beltway and that I’d stay within text’s length, she’d relented.

Which was fine. I had my stories.