A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) Read online

  “Great. I’ll have the car here, ready and waiting by then.”

  “But first,” Alix said, “I have to call my father.”

  CHAPTER 12

  But first I have to call my father.

  What a simple, unremarkable statement that was. What could be more natural? Thousands of people said it every day. But when was the last time it had come from Alix’s mouth? A decade? At least.

  She tossed her purse onto the bed, opened the French doors to the slate-floored patio, brushed a litter of golden, newly fallen leaves from one of the rattan chairs, opened her cell phone, got the number of her father’s business from Information, and accepted the offer to be put right through. Best to get it done right away, even before taking those aspirin. If she gave herself time to think about it, she’d probably do what she’d done last night: change her mind and snap the phone closed, putting it off for another time.

  In fact, that might be a good idea. She realized that her throat was dry. What harm would there be in—

  “Venezia Trading Company. Can I help you?” Slow, labored, like a kid reciting something he’d worked hard to memorize.

  Tiny.

  “Hello, Tiny, this is Alix.”

  The voice came cautiously alive. “Alix? No kidding? Hey, mia cucciolina, how’re you doing?”

  Mia cucciolina. My little puppy. It was what he used to call her a million years ago when he was Uncle Beniamino and she loved to sit on his lap and blabber away up at that big, dumb, good-natured face. So suddenly she never saw them coming, tears were running down her cheeks. Only with an effort did she manage to get a few words through a painfully tight throat.

  “I’m fine, Tiny, how’re you? It’s been a long time.”

  “Hey, you know me, I’m always fine.”

  She laughed. “I know. Tiny, is my father there? Can I talk to him?”

  “Sure, you can talk to him. Lemme put him on. As soon as I figure out which button to…”

  “Oh, and Tiny? You know, I’m working with someone who wants to buy a Georgia O’Keeffe.”

  “Yeah, I heard. Good for you.” Not a trace of resentment there, even though she knew she’d hurt his feelings when she’d told Geoff she didn’t want his help. What a thoroughly nice, decent guy he was. Well, if you didn’t mind the part about his being a master forger. Or rather having been a master forger, assuming you bought the current story.

  “Well, you know, I have a few questions I’d really like your opinion on. Can I call you about them in a couple of days?”

  She could practically hear him purr. “Anything for you, piccolina.”

  Piccolina. Little girl. Tiny had been born on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx and generally spoke with an accent that showed it, but he loved to sprinkle his speech with the terms of his ancestral Sicily. Sometimes, with a glass or two of Chianti in him, she could swear he developed an Italian accent.

  “Thanks, Tiny, I appreciate it.” She jotted down a mental note: she was going to have to make up some questions for him.

  A moment later, her father’s voice came on. “Alix? I’m glad you called. I was concerned.” And in fact, she could hear the strain in his voice. I’m glad I called too, she thought but couldn’t quite bring herself to say it. “Reporters have been calling me all morning. What in the world have you gotten yourself into out there? Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m perfectly fine, Geoff.”

  She spent a few minutes answering his questions, mostly simply to reassure him, since it turned out he knew almost as much about the previous day’s events as she did. She considered telling him that she now thought the painting was a fake, but some part of her pulled back, knowing that he would be eager to get involved—to help—and she wasn’t up to dealing with that yet.

  “What about the explosion in your—what did they call it—casita?” he asked. “You don’t think that was an attempt to…to…?” He was worried about her, all right. Geoffrey London did not very often find himself unable to complete a sentence.

  “The police seem pretty sure it was just an accident, Dad. A faulty pipe.”

  Dad? Had she just called him “Dad”? Where had that come from? She’d been calling him “Geoff” since she was twelve; she’d just started one day on her own, in a fit of self-assertion, and he hadn’t expressed any objection. She prayed that he wouldn’t notice the switch.

  Apparently, he didn’t. “I don’t give a fig about what the police think. What do you think?”

  Time for a white lie. “Oh, they’re probably right…Geoff.” She threw the last word in just to try and wipe that “Dad” out of both of their minds. “I can’t think of any reason for anyone to do me harm.”

  “All the same, I don’t like the sound of it,” he said. “Not one little bit. Not at all. I can’t tell you how sorry I am for getting you into this, my dear.”

  “Getting me into this? You didn’t get me into this.”

  “Oh, I did, I did. Well, perhaps not directly, but in a way, a very real way, it is all my fault. That is, I mean, ah, not directly, of course, but…in a way. If you take my meaning.”

  No, she didn’t take his meaning, and it wasn’t like him to repeat himself or to natter on like that. A shivery chill crawled up her spine and settled, tingling, at the base of her neck. “Geoff,” she said hesitantly, “you haven’t…you and Tiny haven’t been faking any Georgia O’Keeffes lately, have you?” She tried to make it sound like a joke, but her voice went higher and higher until it practically squeaked at the end.

  His bark of sudden, surprised laughter was genuine enough to set her mind at ease. “Good heavens, no! What an idea! My dear woman, I am now the very model of a modern model citizen. So is Tiny. So are we all.”

  “What did you mean then? How is it your fault?”

  “I was referring to—I’m not sure what I was referring to. The entire course of your life, I suppose. If not for my questionable influence, you wouldn’t be in the art world at all; you’d have found yourself some respectable profession in which to engage. Worse, if not for my misdeeds, you’d still be married to that charming fellow, what’s-his-name, and be planning society luncheons on Beacon Hill, rather than working at all. And you’d have a très élégant hyphen in your last name.”

  The playful twinkle was back in his voice, and it made her smile and play along. “You mean Paynton Whipple-Pruitt? As I recall, you called him a pompous, overbearing, self-absorbed ass.”

  “I did no such thing.”

  “You most certainly did.”

  “I most certainly did not. I called him a puerile, overbearing, self-absorbed ass.”

  “Sorry, I stand corrected,” Alix said, laughing.

  “Alix, what will you do now? Are you returning to Seattle?”

  “No, I have a few, uh, doubts about the painting, actually. I think it would help to see the O’Keeffe country for myself, and I’m going to drive up a little later today.”

  “That’s an excellent idea, but by yourself, off alone in the desert? Given what’s occurred? You know, I have a little free time. Would you like me to—”

  “Chris LeMay is going with me,” she said, heading him off. She was feeling nearer to him than she had in a long time, but she wasn’t ready for three solid days of close company yet. “In fact, I’ve got to go get ready to leave.”

  “I’m glad you called.”

  “I’ll call again soon.”

  “Yes, do that, my dear. Good-bye. Bless you.”

  Thoughtfully, she closed the phone. Wouldn’t any other parent who hadn’t received a call from a daughter in ten years or so have called attention to it and jabbed in the needle just a little? Not Geoff. He was just plain happy to have finally heard from her and to let it go at that.

  New leaves had drifted down onto her shoulders and lap. She brushed them off and went inside to pack so that she’d be ready to leave as soon as she was finished at the archives.

  Strangely, her headache had disappeared.

  Gaining a
ccess to the archives of the Southwest Museum of Twentieth-Century American Art was only marginally easier than getting into NORAD Central Command. The room was located behind a locked door at the back of the museum library, and before Alix would be permitted to enter she had to present herself at the reference desk. There, after showing her driver’s license to prove she really was who she purported to be, she was required to fill out a two-page form starting with “home address” and ending with “purpose of archival perusal,” to sign another document indicating her agreement to abide by various proscriptions (no scissors or pens could be taken into the sacred chamber, no archival materials taken from it), and to leave the license and her purse with the librarian for security.

  Only then was Mr. Moody paged. He appeared moments later. The bow tie and dark, old-fashioned suit were not only for social occasions such as art receptions, she saw; they were his work outfit too. A small, unexpected touch of whimsy was supplied by the bow tie, on which tiny images of Wile E. Coyote chased Road Runner up and down desert mesas and buttes. There was no whimsy in his manner, however. He greeted her with a perfunctory nod. (Did he or didn’t he remember meeting her the previous day? Impossible to tell.) Then he led her to the door of the locked room, where he punched the opening combination into a keypad, first making sure with a scowl that she was not surreptitiously recording the numbers. To please him, Alix turned completely away, as if entranced by the library shelves behind them.

  Inside the room, there was a metal desk and chair at one end, a single library table with a legal pad and a few blunt pencils on it, and six rolling steel bookshelf cabinets along one wall. Moody motioned her to a chair at the table, went to the desk, and returned with a cardboard magazine file in which there were a few catalogs. “I’ve pulled these for you to save you the effort of having to go through the files yourself.”

  “Thank you,” Alix said, although she was fairly sure he’d done it because he couldn’t stand the idea of intruders like her prowling freely through the shelves of his domain on their own and doing who knew what dastardly deeds in there: writing on things with pens, maybe.

  “I also called an old friend, a long-time art dealer in Albuquerque, to find out what I could for you about the gallery. It was, according to her, quite well thought of, opening in 1962 or 1963 and closing in about 1975. The owner was a man named Henry Merriam, something of an authority on Southwest graphic artists, I understand. I hope that’s helpful?”

  That she did appreciate. “Thank you,” she said again, with more conviction this time. Since he continued to stand there, she said, “Well, I guess I’ll—”

  “Yes, I have more work to do myself,” he said, went to his desk, sat down, and began shuffling papers.

  He had been somewhere else when he’d been called, so she assumed he was now remaining in this room to keep an eye on her. From the desk he could unobtrusively watch his visitors, just in case they should sinisterly produce a pair of gleaming scissors or try and stuff something into their shirts. Ah, well, who was she to frown on attention to one’s responsibilities? She put his sidewise glances out of her mind and got on with her own work, searching for some mention of Cliffs at Ghost Ranch in the catalogs. There were six issues altogether, and they were not so much catalogs as glossy, expensively produced color newsletters—Xanadu Doings—that included occasional informal columns from Merriam—“Meanderings (and Maunderings) of a Dilettante”—along with information on the gallery’s exhibitions, sales, and openings.

  She had been through the first two without success when the phone on Moody’s desk chirped, and after a second he called to her. “It’s for you.” He pointed to another telephone at the far end of her table. “You may take it there.” Both tone and gesture made it clear that the idea her receiving a telephone call in the archives was highly irregular and was not to be repeated. She responded with a “thank you” and an apologetic shrug.

  “Alix, hi,” Chris said when she picked up the phone. “Slight change of plans and I wanted to check with you before I booked the rooms. Does it make any difference if we do it backwards? First Ghost Ranch and then Taos? Ghost Ranch has some new courses starting tomorrow and they’ll be all filled up, but they have rooms tonight. And then we can go back down to Taos tomorrow instead. Would that be okay?”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  “Wonderful. And now I have a surprise for you. I checked on hotels and things in Taos and the Internet turned up an interesting fact. You know that Mabel Dodge Luhan house you were hoping was still around? Well, it is, and the owners run it as a retreat center and a bed-and-breakfast.”

  “Great!” Alix exclaimed. “Wonderful!”

  “However, starting tomorrow there’s a conference in town, at the Taos Convention Center—who knew Taos had a convention center?—and all the Luhan rooms have been booked for weeks.”

  Alix sagged. “Oh. Not so great. Still, at least we’ll be able to—”

  “The conference is called New Directions 2010: The Emerging Art Market in the New Economy,” Chris said, talking over her. “It’s the third annual New Directions conference—”

  “Wait, that rings a bell. Didn’t you tell me Liz was the power behind that?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But how can they…I mean, Liz has just been…and they’re holding it anyway?”

  “Yes, they thought about canceling, but it would have been impossible to reach everyone in time, and then there are the flight reservations, the hotel reservations, the income to the city—it would have been a calamity, so they’re putting it on as a kind of memorial to Liz.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Yes, but I haven’t gotten to the real surprise. It turns out that the Luhan House has had to cancel one of the reservations after all, and it happens to be for the best room in the house, Mabel’s very own bedroom. More like a suite, they say. More than enough space for two—and I’ve booked it. You can wander around the place to your heart’s content.”

  The news perked Alix up again. “Chris, that’s terrific! I wonder whose room it…oh. Liz’s?”

  “Liz’s,” Chris confirmed. “There’s some kind of poetic justice at work there, wouldn’t you say? Or maybe I mean poetic symmetry, or poetic—”

  Alix could feel Moody’s irritated glare boring into the back of her neck. Time to get off the phone. “I better get back to work, Chris. I should be done within the hour and we can head right up to Ghost Ranch. Then tomorrow we can take off for Taos in the morning. I think that should give us enough time in each place.”

  “Good. I’ll make the reservations and register us for the conference. Oh, and wait till you see the car I’ve rented for us. That’ll be another surprise. Bye, now.”

  Another apologetic face-shrug for Moody and back to work. She found what she was looking for in the fourth newsletter she searched, the November 1971 issue. The monthly sale was called Masters of the Desert, and in pride of place on the left-hand center page was a large color print of the picture. It would have been impossible to miss it, even without the extensive printed entry below, which began with:

  Georgia O’Keeffe (b. 1887)

  Cliffs at Ghost Ranch, 1964

  Inscribed ‘OK’ within star (on backing)

  Oil on canvas

  36 x 30 in. (91.4 x 76.2 cm.)

  Bingo. She made a little fist-pumping gesture of triumph. She’d found it! This was it, all right. Eagerly, she read on.

  Provenance

  Private Collection, 1964–1971 (Gift of the artist)

  Guarantee of authenticity

  Painting has been submitted to two recognized O’Keeffe experts and has been authenticated as genuine. These notarized evaluations will be provided to buyer.

  That brought a small puff of frustration, of disappointment. Damn, there was exactly nothing to go on here. The picture had been in a private collection, but whose? It had been certified by “recognized experts,” but who were they? And who, if anybody, had bought it in 1971? She sc
anned the rest of the page, but it was all padding: “In this striking painting the artist depicts the craggy cliffs near her home with a subtle range of ochres, Naples yellow, orange, purples, and…Tonal variations are infused with the bold yet delicate contrasts that are the hallmark of her…The awe-inspiring vastness of the landscape has been transformed into something comprehensible on the canvas by the…” Blah, blah, blah.

  Nothing. The trail both began and ended here. All the same, she scanned the remaining three newsletters in hopes of learning more, but there was no further mention of the painting. But two things in Merriam’s “Meanderings” caught her eye. First, his smiling photograph appeared at the head of the columns, and he looked to be relatively young, in his early forties, perhaps. For some reason she had automatically assumed he’d be older, in his sixties, which would have meant that by now he probably would have gone to meet his maker. After all, the gallery had closed thirty-five years before. But if he’d been in his forties back then, he’d be in his seventies or eighties now, no spring chicken, but likely to be still around. The trick would be to find him.

  And that’s where the second thing came in. The final paragraph of his July 1972 Meanderings said: “As usual, the Galerie Xanadu will be shuttered and dark in August while Ruthie and I make our annual pilgrimage to Ghost Ranch for a month of education and ‘re-creation’ (in its literal and original sense). We will reopen the first week in September, however, and we will open with a bang. From September 3 to…”

  Ghost Ranch. Why, she would be at Ghost Ranch herself before the day was out. Merriam had written about an “annual pilgrimage.” That meant he went regularly, right? Well then, wasn’t it possible, even probable, that his address or telephone number—or some other lead to getting hold of him—resided in some file there?