LUCY LIM: One night, it was sometime in January, Addy calls me from New York, and she’s crying. Really sobbing.
“Somebody’s trashed my studio.”
“Trashed it?”
“Destroyed, Lulu.”
“What? What are you talking about?” I’m shouting into the phone. I can’t believe what she’s telling me. I can barely understand what she’s saying, she is crying so hard. Addy’s not a crier. But what I finally got out of her was that someone had broken into her workspace in Chelsea and ruined everything. Her sketches, charcoals, studies, and this portrait she’d been working on, a portrait of her mother, another of Lincoln. Works she’d never inventoried, things she’d never reproduce.
“I’m sure this is Zach. Or one of Zach’s hired goons,” she said.
“Don’t jump to conclusions, Addy.”
But Addy was sure that Zach had done it as payback—and all because Lincoln had thrown that punch.
OZO FRATEPIETRO: My wife made my name famous. I myself have very little to do with the art world. Carine and I divorced several years ago. I make my home half the time in Paris, and the other half in Montepulciano. My soul is Tuscan. It is where I go to disappear.
One night, I get a call on my private phone. This private phone line, it rings maybe four times a year. It is the girl Addison Stone. I recognize her name. I know that my ex-wife is compelled by her art and thinks she is some kind of a genius. I know that she has been in a volatile relationship with my son. But I myself have never met this girl. How does she even have this number?
What Addison Stone said on the telephone about Zachary … these things are not repeatable or printable. It is hard to communicate the disrespect of her diatribe. She was threatening me. Her belief was that Zachary had destroyed her artwork and her livelihood.
I hung up the phone and considered calling the police. Then I thought better. I would not stoop to her level. I am not a child.
ERICKSON MCAVENA: She was biting and snapping at everyone. I heard she even got hold of Zach’s father—ha, I’d loved to have eavesdropped on that call. I’ve got no extra knowledge on whether Zach himself was to blame for all that monkeyshines with Addison’s studio. But Addison was one hundred percent positive and bent on revenge.
Around that time, if Addison wasn’t over at Lincoln’s, then she’d be with Gil Cheba, either outside on the fire escape or in the shared courtyard space, so that Gil could smoke. I never let him smoke in the apartment. Or, if it was too cold, they’d be heads-to-tails on our velvet sofa, drinking some nasty cocktail they called “rummy-dums” that Gil’d brewed up on our stove. Rum, butter, cloves. Simmer for seventeen hours. They’d drink and plot. And that was no good, for Addison, since one tablespoon of rum could just about knock her sideways.
I’d come home and say, “How’s the diabolical master plan to kill Zach going?”
And they’d play all innocent. “We weren’t talking about Zach.”
And I’d say, “That’s not possible. You two are always talking about Zach.”
And then they’d both look guilty as a three-dollar bill.
That month is the only example I can give from Addison’s life where she was wasting time. And it was all Gil Cheba. Wasting his own time, and everyone else’s he could pull down with him.
Gil Cheba and Addison Stone in Brooklyn together, winter, courtesy of Erickson McAvena.
LINCOLN REED: Nothing about Gil Cheba washed right. Growing up around artists, I’ve seen too many of them lose to alcohol and drugs. Those anti-psychotic medications, the kind I knew Addison was on, just don’t mix with recreational habits. Cheba is also known as a “connector”—somebody who can get you Cuban cigars or guns or your own personal harem.
He swore to everyone he’d cleaned up, but everything about that guy smelled like an addict to me. He could rationalize and simplify and excuse everything. It killed me that Addison was intrigued by him. She always liked the brink, and anyone who was standing on it. She knew he was dangerous. Gil was exhausting to be around, even though he didn’t do anything much, he always wanted to distract himself—sex, booze, chatter, parties, music, feuds. The guy had no impulse control. But where Addison saw a charismatic renegade, all the rest of us only saw a bad seed.
ANONYMOUS: You already know I met Stone through Cheba. Me and Cheba, we’ve been buddies for years, from old days, way back. Not to get too much into the background of who I am, but what I like to say is I’m an upstanding, can-do guy working on the other side of the law. Call me a revenge handyman. I get shit done, and not for cheap.
The night we met, I liked Stone right away. She did not fool the f**k around. She says to me, first thing, “You gotta torch this house for me.”
“Sure, I’ll do it. For a price.”
“Name it,” she says.
Turned out to be a guest cottage on a piece of property out in Wainscot. That’s a pretty big job, but doable.
Stone said, “I’ve got the cash.” She was not intimidated, this one. She wasn’t a pushover. She wanted to video-record the whole thing, too. When I said that’d cost extra, she told me, “I’ve got all the extra you need.” It was a risk. But yeah, I did it. Pretty clean job, in the end.
ZACH FRATEPIETRO: Look, I can only go into this so deep. Our family has been advised not to get into conversations about Cloud Walk, since we’re working on a settlement with Addison’s estate. But I got that call at about 2 A.M. from my mother. Who got the call from our groundskeeper, the police department, and the fire department.
Treetops Cottage was one of three guest houses at Cloud Walk—that’s our family estate in the Hamptons. It had been burnt to a crisp. Arson. Nobody was there at the time. I knew who’d done it. We all did.
The funny thing is that I knew I wouldn’t press charges. I might have made threats, but burning down that house was Addison’s demented love letter to me. You want to know something I never told anybody? Treetops was the very same cottage where Addison and I had stayed for a weekend last summer, over the Fourth of July weekend. The place was symbolic to her.
MARIE-CLAIRE BROYARD: The whole game of escalating revenge between Addison and Zach was crucial for Zach. It was the way he could stay in Addison’s life. In contrast, Addison was excited by the by-product of her revenge, which was performance art. I’m sure she also enjoyed the spectacle of burning down Zach’s family’s property. It was interesting, brutal, destructive, dramatic—and not much to do with Zach at all.