A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) Read online

  Obviously, Chris had not had a restful night, but as far as her clothes went, she looked, as always, totally pulled together, nouveau Southwest-style: a trendy, raw-silk Navajo-tailored blouse, a silver and turquoise Navajo lotus-blossom necklace, matching earrings, a couple of silver ring bracelets, jeans, and high-heeled boots. But when she lifted her designer wraparound sunglasses to her forehead, leaving the earpieces stuck in her hair, her bloodshot, tired eyes gave her away.

  She shook her head. “Whew, what a night.”

  “What time did the police finally let you go?”

  “One o’clock. What about you?”

  “One! I was back here by ten thirty.”

  “Well, Liz and I go back a long way. There was a lot they wanted to know.”

  “Did you—” Alix hesitated. “Did you tell them about the thing, you know, with Craig?”

  Chris played with her bracelets and chewed on her lip for a moment, then shrugged. “Yep.”

  “The whole story?”

  “Yep.” She finished the coffee. “I felt rotten about dragging him into it—obviously, he couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it—but the police really do need to know that kind of thing.”

  Alix nodded. “I suppose they do. Besides, if they found out about it later—”

  “Which they would have.”

  “—they’d have started wondering why you hadn’t happened to mention it.”

  “Exactly. Still, I feel bad, you know? I bet they’ve already called him in for an interrogation. I just hope he doesn’t hold it against me.”

  “He won’t hold it against you. You did the right thing, Chris.” She wasn’t quite as sure of that as she made it sound, but Chris could obviously use the support. And Alix could use a painkiller. “Chris, you wouldn’t happen to have any aspirin on you, would you? I have a bit of a headache.”

  Chris shook her head. “Not on me. There’s a gift shop here, though. Do you want to—”

  “No, it can wait; it’s not that bad. Let’s have something to eat.”

  They ordered more coffee, huevos rancheros for Alix, and steak and shrimp fajitas plus a Caesar salad for Chris. While they waited, Alix filled her in on this morning’s visit to the police station to look at the painting. When she came to de Beauvais’s being there, and about overhearing his temporary shedding of the la-di-dah accent, Chris’s interest perked up, but what really got her attention was telling her that the O’Keeffe was looking like a fake.

  “A fake? A forgery? Liz was trying to…to swindle me?”

  “Well, we don’t know that she was in on it, Chris. It’s a well-done piece of work, and she may have been fooled too.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Well, it’s possible. And remember, at this point I’m not a hundred percent certain that it is a fake. I’ve been wrong before.” She smiled. “Not often, of course.”

  Chris sipped the newly poured coffee and reflected. “So what’s your advice?”

  “Tell me,” Alix responded, “what exactly is your situation with the painting? Is the arrangement you made with Liz still good now that…well, now that she’s dead?”

  “Sure, it’s good. It’s a bona fide, signed contract. The estate will have to live up to it. And so will I.”

  The waitress came back and set their orders on the table. Neither of them made a move to eat. “And what the contract says,” Alix said, “is that it’s yours if you decide to take it, but you can still decline, is that right?”

  “Not exactly. It becomes mine unless I decide, by the thirteenth—Wednesday—not to take it.”

  “So you have three days.”

  “Right. So what do you advise? Hey, the food’s getting cold; let’s eat.”

  Alix had thought she wasn’t hungry, but the smell of the eggs, cheese, and green chiles had gotten her salivary glands going, and for a few minutes she and Chris dug into their meals with gusto. About halfway through, Alix returned to the subject at hand. “What do I advise,” she said, pondering. “Well, I have to say that I feel it to be my moral duty to advise you to get out of it. There are too many ifs, too many issues. There’ll be other O’Keeffes available; why mess with this one? Too much weirdness here, Chris. Go back to Seattle. Save your money for something else. That’s my advice—my moral-duty advice.”

  Chris swallowed a chunk of rolled-up tortilla stuffed with steak, onions, and green pepper, washing it down with more coffee. “And I respectfully decline to accept it. I’m in this up to my neck already, and I’m not about to walk away from it as if none of it ever happened. Not while we still have three days. I’ve formed an attachment to that painting, and I would like to know whether it’s real or not before I throw in the towel. So tell me, what’s plan B? Screw your moral responsibility.”

  Good for you, Alix thought with a surge of feeling. “My feelings exactly. Well, plan B would start with my going over to the museum archives to see what I can learn about the painting’s history. And then use the rest of those three days to see if we can determine for sure whether it’s real or not. After that—follow wherever it leads us.”

  “And you can do that—determine for sure if it’s authentic—in three days?”

  Alix shrugged. “Won’t know till I’ve tried. But I think so, yes.”

  “But how? I thought it took weeks to get back the lab results on…on…I don’t know, materials, pigments, whatever…”

  “Oh, sure, but I wouldn’t be fooling around with things like that,” she said, treating Chris to an abbreviated version of the lecture she’d given de Beauvais in the evidence room. “So I’d be depending more on—”

  “The old connoisseur’s eye thing?”

  “That’s it.”

  Chris had finished her meal. She accepted yet more coffee from the waitress and looked seriously at Alix. “The connoisseur’s eye,” she repeated. “You started to explain it to me once and I said to save it for another time. I think maybe it’s time. What is it, exactly?”

  “Exactly? That’s not so easy to explain.” Alix finished off the last few bites of her own breakfast while she gathered her thoughts. “Basically, it stems from an ability to get inside an artist’s head, to see what he or she saw, to understand what they were trying to say, to see the way they said it—the colors, the composition, the way the paint was laid down—and whether they all truly fit the artist involved.”

  Chris was frowning. “But why is that anything special? Isn’t that what any art expert would do?”

  “Yes, but if you have the eye, it’s pretty much instinctive, or at least it feels that way. You don’t have to go back to the books or compare the painting with the artist’s other works, or anything. You just know.”

  Chris’s frown was now a dubious scowl. “Alix, no offense, and I trust you and all, but…well, that has a little bit of a sleight-of-hand sound to it. Like some kind of hocus-pocus. I mean, ‘You just know’? That’s not exactly confidence-inspiring.”

  “You’re not the only one that feels that way,” Alix said, laughing, “and very few people do have the ability. It’s not something you can learn, although you need the learning to make it work. In my case, it’s something I apparently inherited from my father.”

  “Yes, but, honestly, ‘You just know’?” She shook her head. “It just doesn’t—”

  “Look, let me ask you a question. If I showed you two handwriting samples, one of which was yours and one that wasn’t, you’d be able to pick your own out with no trouble, wouldn’t you?”

  “Sure, anybody would.”

  “True. But how—exactly—would you know that it was yours?”

  “Well, let’s see…” Chris pulled out a ballpoint, scrawled a few words on a napkin, and studied them. Okay,” she said, looking at what she’d written. “There are certain things that distinguish my handwriting. I loop the bottom of my g’s but not my y’s; I think that’s unusual. And I dot most of my i’s, but not all, with a little circle, and—”

  Alix snatched
the napkin away. “So without something like this—a sample to compare—you wouldn’t be able recognize your own handwriting?”

  “No, of course I’d be able to. I’d recognize it in a flash. I was just trying to explain to you—”

  “How would you recognize it in a flash?”

  “I don’t know how, Alix, I just would.”

  “Bingo,” declared Alix, “you’ve just described a connoisseur’s eye. When it comes to your own handwriting, you have it, everybody has it. There are a hundred reasons you recognize it—looped g’s, unlooped y’s—but you don’t have to consciously sort through them one by one and see if they match. It happens by itself, and it happens instantaneously. You take one look…and you just know.”

  Chris’s frown had melted away. “I see. And you can really do that with paintings?”

  “Not every artist, no, but a fair number, and O’Keeffe is one of the ones whose aesthetic sensibilities I seem to be attuned to.”

  “I won’t even ask what that means.”

  “Good, because I’m not sure I know either. I’ve got it, I know that, but I wouldn’t want to try to explain it—or analyze it too closely. It’s sort of like having a goose that lays these golden eggs for you. Not a smart idea to dissect it to see how it works.”

  Chris nodded slowly, finishing her coffee and absorbing what she’d heard. “Okay, I get it more or less, but, well, you’ve already looked at the painting. You’ve come to your conclusion: it’s a fake. What more is there to do for the next three days?”

  “See if I can verify it,” Alix said promptly. “I told you I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure—” she smiled, “—only about ninety-seven percent—and what I need to do now is actually step into O’Keeffe’s world as deeply as I can. I need to see it through her eyes, to feel it. The picture is of Ghost Ranch, which is way the hell in the boonies, two or three hours north of here. She fell in love with the place and bought this isolated little shack and plot of land up there, at the foot of the cliffs, away from everything—miles from any of the ranch buildings—and lived and worked there for fifty years—from her forties into her nineties. I’d like to go there and see the area for myself.”

  “She was still painting when she was in her nineties?”

  “And only stopped then because she went blind.”

  “Yeah, I guess that would throw a small crimp in things.”

  “And even then she became a potter and did that right up until she died—a few months short of her ninety-ninth birthday.”

  “Some lady,” Chris said.

  “You don’t know the half of it.” Alix was very glad now that she’d boned up on O’Keeffe after she’d gotten Chris’s call. “Anyway, Ghost Ranch is now a conference center—has been for more than fifty years—and if they have rooms they’re not using, you can book them for the night, which is what I want to do.”

  “So you intend to drive up there, or what?”

  “I do, yes. But on the way I also want to stop at Taos. Taos was the first place she spent time up here. Did you ever hear of Mabel Dodge Luhan?”

  Chris frowned. “Vaguely…rich, colorful, avant-garde…the big kahuna of the Taos arts scene back in the twenties and thirties, is that who you mean? Knew everybody—D. H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, Martha Graham…”

  “…and Georgia Totto O’Keeffe,” Alix said. “Right, Luhan was a famous hostess, a big party-giver, and no cultural pooh-bah passing through Taos could escape spending a few nights at her house. Well, O’Keeffe was one of them, and it was the very first place she stayed in New Mexico. Stayed more than once, in fact, and did quite a few paintings of scenes right on the property, and it’s obviously where New Mexico got into her blood. I’m sure I read somewhere that the house is still standing, and I’m hoping that whoever owns it now will let me wander around the place a little and get the feel of it. I need to try to see it through her eyes, to see if I can get some understanding of what it was that made her decide to pull up stakes and leave her very comfy, very successful life in New York.”

  “Well, that’s all very interesting, but I repeat—can you do all that in three days?”

  “I can sure try—three days, two places, and the furthest is only a few hours from here. Seems doable,” she said confidently, then hesitated. “One problem, though.”

  “Namely?”

  “I’m afraid I’ll need at least a partial payment on my fee. Rental car, two overnight stays—”

  “Sure, you can have it, but it’s not necessary. You’re working on my behalf; I’m not going to let you pick up the tab.”

  “That’s not entirely true, Chris. I’m working on my behalf too. Probably more on mine than yours.”

  “No, I don’t see it that way. This is still basically my affair, and I have a lot of dogs in this fight. Somebody’s maybe tried to stick me with a forgery, somebody’s killed one of my oldest friends, and somebody’s tried to kill one of my newest friends. I want to find out what’s going on. So it’s my nickel. End of discussion. I’m also going with you, by the way, just in case you were thinking otherwise.”

  Alix had indeed been thinking otherwise. “I don’t know, Chris,” she said slowly. “One person’s already been killed over this, and I’m still alive only by the skin of my teeth. Who knows what’s coming next? I wouldn’t feel right about getting you involved—”

  “Getting me involved? Are you kidding? I’m the one that got you involved, and I am not about to let you go gallivanting around up there in the boondocks on your own. And there’s something else too.” Her jaw firmed. “I need to find out if I was nothing but an easy mark for Liz to sucker into paying three million bucks for a fake. I guess I’ve come around to thinking you’re probably right about what happened between Liz and Craig, which would make this the second time she’s suckered me. But I want to know. I need to know. So I’m tagging along whether you feel right about it or not. It’s not your choice.”

  Alix smiled and let herself relax. “I’m glad. It’ll be nice to have company,” she said sincerely, then added, “Even if it does tend to get a little bossy from time to time.”

  “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. Well, then.” With the flat of her hand Chris slapped the table and stood up. “Come on, expert, time’s a-wasting. Let’s get you those aspirin, and then we probably ought to get going, head for Taos. We’re burning daylight here. It’s nearly eleven.”

  Alix got up as well. “Fine, but I need a little time at the museum archives first. I found out this morning that the painting passed through someplace called the Galerie Xanadu in Albuquerque at some point, and according to Mr. Moody, they have some of their catalogs. I’m hoping there might be some information.”

  “Mr. Moody? Who’s Mr. Moody?”

  “We met him last night at the reception. The museum archivist; bow tie, bald—”

  “Oh, yeah, squirrely little guy,” Chris said, nodding. “Yeah, I remember him. Well, if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll pass on the pleasure of further acquaintance with the gentleman and spend the time getting us a rental car and booking rooms for us at Taos and Ghost Ranch.”

  “Good idea.”

  “What you said a minute ago about doing this more on your own behalf than mine,” Chris said as they walked through the lobby toward the gift shop, “what did you mean?”

  She listened uneasily as Alix explained about the effects this all might have on her career. “Oh God, I was so busy thinking about me that I didn’t give a thought to what it might mean for you. But look, maybe the reports won’t mention our names. We just found her body, that’s all.”

  Alix chuckled humorlessly. “They’ll mention mine once they learn who my father is.”

  “But how would they find out?”

  “Oh, they’ll find out. They probably already have.”

  “Have you looked at this morning’s Santa Fe paper to see what it says?”

  Alix shook her head. “I didn’t want to know.”

  “Well, I do.�
� While Alix bought her aspirin, Chris plunked half a dollar down on the counter for the morning’s Santa Fe New Mexican. “Whoa, Liz made page one: ‘Police hunt for killer of Canyon Road gallery owner,’” she read aloud, then skimmed down the column, opened it to the continuation on an inside page, and spread it out on the counter. She read silently for a few moments longer, then sighed. “I’m afraid you’re right. They mention us both as having found Liz’s body, and then they say: ‘This newspaper has learned that London is the daughter of Geoffrey London, the notorious New York restorer convicted nine years ago in a celebrated art fraud case. Ms. London is still believed to be in Santa Fe, but her whereabouts are unknown. Messages left on her Seattle answering machine have gone unanswered. Calls to her father, who has operated an art importing business in Seattle since leaving prison earlier this year, have also been unsuccessful in reaching him.’”

  “They’ve been calling Geoff?” Alix said, wincing. “So he knows what’s happened. He must be worried sick about me.”

  “But it says they haven’t been able to reach him.”

  “Chris, my father is the last person in the world to turn down an opportunity to talk to the media. If he’s unreachable now, it’s because some other reporter did get to him first, and he knows what the rest of them are calling him about. I bet he’s left a dozen messages on my answering machine.”

  “But if he couldn’t get you there, wouldn’t he have tried your cell phone?”

  “Well…” Alix felt the warmth of a flush rising into her cheeks. “Actually, I’ve, um, never given him the number.”

  “Your own father doesn’t have your…?” She caught herself. “Sorry. Not my business. Come on, let’s head back to the Hacienda.”

  “It’s just that—”

  “Alix, there is absolutely no need to explain. It’s none of my business,” she said again.

  Alix sighed and offered a pale smile. “It’d probably take too long to explain anyway.”

  The Hacienda Encantada was two blocks from La Fonda, and they made it in a couple of minutes. As they entered the main building, Alix looked at her watch. “Okay, I should be finished up at the museum by twelve thirty or so. We can take off for Taos then.”