A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) Page 15

  Chris practically beamed. “When I get back to Santa Fe, we’re going to get together and have dinner. And I have the feeling we might get a second chance…nothing that he specifically said, but, you know, a feeling. A woman can tell, you know that.”

  I wouldn’t know, it’s been too long, Alix almost said, but she was too happy for Chris to spoil things with her own sorry story. “That would be wonderful,” she said sincerely, and it would. It’d mean that at least something good came out of this consulting job from hell.

  “So where is this place already?” Chris asked. “Did we miss a side road or something? There’s not a sign of civilization in sight.”

  They’d driven a mile from the turnoff, and, indeed, they were still in open, empty country: a wide desert plateau with whitish cliffs on either side, with no sign of development other than the primitive road they were on.

  “We haven’t missed anything,” Alix said. “We’re there; we’re just not at the conference center yet. Ghost Ranch is huge, over twenty thousand acres. The conference center is just a tiny part of it…oh, hey, look, there’s a sign of civilization for you right there.”

  She was pointing to a derelict rough-hewn log cabin a few yards from the road, and Chris laughed. “Civilization circa 1870 or so, I’d say.”

  “No, wait!” Alix said with sudden urgency. “Stop! I want to show you something.”

  “But it’s just an old—”

  “I’m not talking about the cabin now. Just stop the car, will you?”

  “There aren’t any pull-offs. Where am I supposed—”

  “There also aren’t any cars, if you haven’t noticed. Will you just stop the car, already?”

  Chris complied, and a veil of the road dust they’d created drifted back over them. “Okay, what’s up?”

  Alix got out of the car, to be followed by Chris, who came to stand beside her. “Now look over there,” Alix instructed, pointing at a wall of cliffs two or three miles away.

  Chris peered in the indicated direction. “Okay, I’m looking…”

  “You don’t see anything interesting?”

  Puzzled, Chris shook her head. “See what?”

  “Those photos of the painting that Liz sent you—do you have them with you?”

  “Yes, in my bag.”

  “Let’s see ’em.”

  Chris shrugged, retrieved her bag from the car, and handed over a few postcard-sized photographs of the O’Keeffe. Alix selected one that showed the entire painting and held it up at arm’s length. “Now. Look at the picture, and then look at the cliffs. See the two main fissures? Look at the one on the right and imagine you can see—barely see—what looks like the figure of a man half hidden in the shadows at the bottom. Do you—”

  “My God, that’s my painting!” Chris exclaimed, obviously thrilled. “Those are my cliffs!” She looked from cliffs to postcard and back again, and then, more subdued, said, “Alix, I know this sounds crazy, but even if it does turn out to be a fake, I’d kind of like to have it. It is beautiful, and somehow it makes the cliffs themselves more…more real.”

  “That’s true; that’s what art does. And I agree, it’s a very fine painting, a wonderful evocation of those cliffs. And very Georgia O’Keeffish. But you’ve agreed to pay almost three million dollars if you decide to take it, and I don’t think you want to do that if it’s not genuine.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Chris said with a sigh. She put the pictures back in her bag. “But O’Keeffe really did do pictures of this area, didn’t she?”

  “Many.”

  “Then, assuming it turns out to be a forgery, your next job is to find a real one for me. Would that be all right?”

  “More than all right. It’d be a pleasure.”

  “Excellent,” Chris said crisply. “Consider it a done deal. Now let’s go find this supposed conference center and check into our rooms.”

  A little more driving took them down a dry, shallowly sloping hillside, over a log bridge that crossed a wooded creek, and along a stony ridge. They rounded the ridge, and there in front of them was the conference center. Sheltered by the cliffs and surrounded by multihued, fantastically shaped buttes, the one-story buildings circled a broad, grassy plaza. With groups of people strolling deep in conversation, and others sitting clustered in the lacy shade of cottonwood trees, it looked like a small college campus miraculously sprouted in the middle of the desert.

  “Your rooms are ready for you,” the receptionist told them once they’d found the administration building. “They’re in the Coyote block. It’s up the hill on the mesa. Just follow the road on the left up and around. Good view. Make sure you sit out and enjoy the sunset. I’m Barb. Just ask me if you have any questions.”

  “Barb, have you worked here long?” Alix asked.

  “Going on twenty years.”

  “Do you happen to remember a man named Henry Merriam? He used to take courses here pretty regularly. He owned an art gallery in Albuquerque—Galerie Xanadu.”

  Clyde Moody’s contact in Albuquerque had said that she thought he’d been dead for over twenty years—“fairly certain” was the phrase she’d heard Moody repeat on the telephone—but that left some room for doubt. Not much, of course, but here she was at Ghost Ranch, so why not ask?

  “Of course, I remember him,” Barb said. “He was here just a few months ago. Sweetest old man in the world.”

  Alix was stunned. “A few months ago…?”

  Barb nodded. “August,” Barb assured her. “Two months ago, almost to the day. He was standing right where you are.”

  This was almost too much to hope for. “Would you happen to know where I can get hold of him?”

  “Not in this world, I’m sorry to say. He passed away. Nice old guy, too.”

  Alix sighed. Too much to hope for, all right. But to learn that he’d still been alive, been available, only two months ago, that really stung. “When exactly did he die?” she asked, more out of politeness than anything else.

  “It was the very next day.” She nodded to herself, thinking back. “That’s right. See, he owned that art gallery years and years ago, and there was some kind of mix-up about whether he did or didn’t sell some kind of painting or something…I don’t know, something like that. So he was driving down to Santa Fe to straighten it out—I think it was Santa Fe; maybe it was Albuquerque. Well, he had a bad heart, you know? And he picked the wrong place to have a heart attack—right in that curvy section on 84, up in the cliffs where it runs along the Chama River. You probably drove over it yourselves to get here.”

  “We sure did,” Chris said. “I damn near had a heart attack myself.”

  “Yeah, I hate driving it too. Anyway, whether he had a heart attack because he went over the edge, or he went over the edge because he had a heart attack, they say he was dead before the car hit the bottom. It was a blessing, in a way. He’d been pretty miserable since his wife got Alzheimer’s and he had to put her in a, you know, facility.” She smiled pensively. “It was pretty weird, really. You know the last words he said to me?”

  “No,” Alex said. “What did he say?”

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly to me, it was on the phone, and it wasn’t exactly his very last words, but pretty close. He said, ‘I assure you, I am not dead.’”

  Chris wrinkled her nose. “‘I assure you, I am not dead.’ That is strange.”

  “I’ll say. ‘I assure you, I am not dead.’ And then, not even twenty-four hours later—he was, just like that. Fate, I guess.” A matter-of-fact clearing of her throat and she was back to business. “Your rate includes meals. Dinner is from five thirty to six fifteen. Not haute cuisine, but good and healthy and plenty to eat. You have private baths, but there aren’t any TVs, radios, or telephones in the rooms.”

  “What about cell phone reception?” Alix asked. She found she wanted to check in with Geoff.

  “Just about nonexistent. Afraid you’re in the boonies here.” At Alix’s frown of concern, she added,
“You’re welcome to use the pay phone there on the wall, though. Takes cards.”

  Alix looked at it. “Um, well…”

  Barb gave her a sympathetic smile. “Not real private, is it, honey? Well, if you don’t mind driving back out a little way, there’s a spot with just about the best cell phone reception in the world. It’s the only building you’ll see between here and the highway, a log cabin on your left that’s got its own mini-cell-phone tower or whatever they call it built right into it—”

  “Are you serious?” Alix asked. “That place must be a hundred years old. Why would—”

  “It’s not even twenty years old,” Barbara said, laughing. “You remember City Slickers?”

  “City Slickers?”

  “The movie.”

  “The movie?”

  “She doesn’t get out much,” Chris quietly interceded.

  “Oh. Well, see, they filmed the movie here, and that cabin’s just a prop they built. Anyway, here comes this huge Hollywood crew out here, and you can imagine how freaked out they get when they can’t make all their super-urgent phone calls. So, being Hollywood, they just spent whatever it took to have the cabin wired up as their phone reception area. And when they left, they left it in place. Works great. The only place in twenty miles you can get decent reception. Sometimes when I drive by I see five, six people standing around talking on their phones. I keep telling my boss we ought to put in a Starbucks.”

  Chris glanced at her watch as they went back down the steps toward the car. “We’ve got time before dinner if you want to make your call, but would you mind driving yourself? You could drop me off at the room and I could put my feet up. I’m bushed. Driving that thing takes it out of you! If I ever get one I’ll make sure it has automatic transmission.”

  “If you do, all your fellow Lamborghini owners will ostracize you.”

  “Oh, that really worries me.” She handed over the keys. “Drive slow, will you? I don’t think I was supposed to take the thing on dirt roads at all. And this isn’t the Amalfi Coast.”

  Life’s little ironies, Alix thought after she’d dropped Chris off. She finally gets another chance to get behind the wheel of one of these beauties, and it’s on a burro trail on which she wouldn’t dare drive faster than fifteen miles an hour even without Chris’s warning. Not that it wasn’t a pleasure anyway, she thought, moving the chrome gearshift lever smoothly from first to second. There were six gears on the LP 560, and Chris had never gone higher than fourth. Alix itched to drive all the way to the highway and give all six a workout just for the hell of it, but that didn’t seem right, not without getting Chris’s okay.

  She pulled up at the faux log cabin and sat looking at it for a few moments. The set-builders had done a terrific job. Even from a few yards away there was nothing to suggest that it was anything but a moldering, rough-hewn old homestead from pioneer days. When she opened the door to have a peek inside, however, there wasn’t any inside. That is, there was a three-foot-wide platform on the other side of the door—just enough to let them film somebody going in or coming out—and then a two-foot drop-off to rocky, sandy desert soil. No floor at all. Hollywood magic in action.

  She went back outside to a shady corner of the splintery porch, sat carefully down on the edge, and dialed Geoff’s business number.

  “Venezia Trading Company. Can I help you?” Slow, dense, unmistakable. Apparently, Tiny now served as Venezia’s telephone receptionist.

  “Hi, Tiny, this is—”

  “Hey, la mia nipotina!” he exclaimed happily. My little niece.

  “Yes, it’s me again, Zio Beniamino.” Uncle Beniamino. Well, what the hell.

  “You wanna talk to your father? I’ll—”

  “No, wait a minute, Tiny, it’s you I’m actually calling. I’ll talk with him later.”

  That pleased him. “About that O’Keeffe?” he said with interest. She could hear a leather chair groan in protest as he settled his great bulk into it.

  “Yes, I’d really appreciate your opinion on a couple of things.” It was true, too. Making up questions hadn’t been necessary after all.

  “Okay, shoot.”

  “Well, the thing is, I’m working with this woman who’s thinking about buying it, but I have my doubts, very strong doubts, that it’s authentic. That is, I’m almost certain it’s not—there’s something missing, something that ought to be there but isn’t, only I can’t quite put my finger on it, if you know what I mean. It’s as if—”

  “I know what you mean. This is what, one of them flower pictures?”

  “No, it’s a landscape.”

  “Yeah? That’s interesting.” She smiled, remembering that she’d always liked the way Tiny said “interesting.” He was the only person she knew who gave it its full four syllables, equally stressed: in-ter-est-ing. Somehow it made whatever they were talking about sound more…in-ter-est-ing. “Mostly they fake the flower pictures. Beats the hell out of me why; the landscapes are a whole lot easier. I guess it’s because most of the marks—excuse me, the potential, you know, customers—are, like, more familiar with the flowers.”

  “You’re probably right. But as to this one—”

  “You got a picture you could e-mail me?”

  “Yes, I do. Shall I do that?”

  “Yeah, but for now just go ahead and tell me what it’s like. You know, describe it.”

  “It’s a landscape, as I said, a desert scene, a cliff face—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “—very painterly, almost abstract. The horizontal striations in the rock are shown mostly in oranges and yellows, with some ochres thrown in—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There are a couple of vertical clefts—cracks—running down the face—”

  “Uh-huh”

  “—and at the bottom of one of the clefts, in the shadows, you can barely make out the figure of a man—”

  “It’s a fake.”

  “—in profile, apparently looking off to the right…What did you say?”

  “It’s a fake.”

  “How…wh…?” But even as the question tried to form itself in her mind, the answer was there, waiting for her where it had been all along. “The figure!” she breathed into the phone.

  The figure, of course, the figure! She’d had it backward: the problem wasn’t that there was something missing from the painting, some subtle touch that should have been there and wasn’t. It was the opposite: something that shouldn’t have been there but was. And not very subtle, either.

  “She didn’t put people in her paintings, did she?” she said more calmly.

  “Not a one. Never.”

  “Tiny, are you positive? Not a single one?”

  “What kinda question is that? Sure I’m sure. Damn thing’s a fake. Okay, you got anything else you need to ask me?” More squeaks as he got out of the chair. “Something else I can do for you?”

  “No,” she said, laughing, “that takes care of everything quite nicely at present, thank you.”

  “Okay—for Christ’s sake, Geoff, quit pullin’ on my elbow—I mean, I’m still—”

  There were some scuffling sounds, presumably Geoff wrenching the phone away from Tiny, and then her father’s merry voice came on. “Hello, my dear. I gather our resident O’Keeffe authority has been of some use?”

  “He sure has, Geoff. I should have spotted the problem myself, but I didn’t. The painting has this figure of a man—”

  “O’Keeffe didn’t have figures in her paintings.”

  She almost sighed, but laughed instead. “That’s the point, all right. I knew something was wrong, but it took Tiny to give me something I could put my finger on. I should have talked to him about it before.” She hesitated, then added softly: “Or to you. I was stupid.”

  “Nonsense. Putting one’s finger on it, as you choose to call it, is merely the final step, the icing on the cake. Pah, anyone can do that, given enough time. But recognizing it as inauthentic in the first place, ah, that
’s the important thing, that’s what separates you from the rabble of so-called, self-proclaimed experts. And in that regard,” he said with transparent pride, “you came through with flying colors—thanks to the genes you inherited from me, may I modestly point out.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.” She leaned against a wooden post, feeling strangely good, not certain whether she was basking in the warmth of the afternoon sun or of her father’s approval. “I hereby thank you for passing them along.”

  “And you’re in O’Keeffe country now?” he asked.

  “Yes, I am, and it’s glorious. Golden sunshine, mesas, buttes, every color of the rainbow…”

  “I envy you. Would you like to guess what it’s doing in Seattle?”

  “Raining?”

  “Correct. And how long will you be staying?” After so many years of estrangement, she thought, he was finally making small talk, pleasant everyday talk, with his daughter and he was reluctant to see it end.

  So was she. “Just today. I’m with Chris, and we’ll be leaving for Taos tomorrow morning sometime—although, come to think of it, she might want to go straight back to Santa Fe instead, once she hears for sure that the painting’s not genuine.” She paused, frowning. “You know,” she said slowly, “there is one angle to this that still troubles me a little.”

  “Oh, yes?” Here I am, ready and eager to help, he was saying.

  “Well, the thing is, this painting was shown during O’Keeffe’s lifetime—in 1971—in what was a prominent gallery, right here in New Mexico. Now, recluse or not, she kept a very sharp eye on her works—especially on one like this, which she was supposed to have given as a gift. Wouldn’t you think she’d have declared it not to be hers at the time?”

  “Yes, I would, but how do you know it was shown?”

  “Because I saw the exhibition catalog myself.”

  “What do you mean, you saw it?”

  “I mean I saw it. It exists. I spent an hour over it this morning.”

  Geoff laughed happily. “Oh, I’d hardly call that confirmatory.”