A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) Read online

  “The problem is,” he said, “they have none of my work! Nothing! I am not even mentioned. Can you believe it? My Constables were every bit as good as Keating’s, were they not? My Rouaults were far better than Hebborn’s. Yet their work is generously displayed, and I—I am not even mentioned? It’s outrageous, positively criminal.”

  Alix closed her eyes and took a deep breath. How many people in this world, she wondered, had fathers who went around grousing—Geoff London had a twinkly, jovial way of doing it, but it was still grousing—because they didn’t get their due respect as world-class forgers? And how in the world could he have retained all of his old verve after what had happened to him?

  She shook her head, remembering how she’d assumed that, having been convicted of forgery, theft, and interstate fraud, he would emerge from his eight-year prison term a broken man, a shriveled shell of his former self. He had, after all, been a much-respected conservator and restorer on the New York art scene—for four years a senior curator at the Met, no less—and much in demand socially. His delightfully silky, English-accented voice, his sparkling, kindly brown eyes, his ruddy charm (an article in The New Yorker had once referred to him as “cuddly,” one of the few times she’d seen him express real irritation), and his obvious pleasure in socializing had made him a sought-after guest at the cocktail parties, salons, and soirées of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

  But when he got out of prison, or so she’d thought, he’d be just one more ex-con. He’d still be in demand, all right, but it would be by an army of wronged, extremely peeved art collectors with lawsuits under their arms.

  “Do you want to know what I think is behind it?” Geoff was still at it. “It’s simple, unadorned spite, no more, no less. Petty jealousy—”

  She shook her head and sighed. Clearly, she’d underestimated him. Now, almost a year out of the federal medium-security facility at Lompoc, California, lawsuits settled, he’d apparently had the same idea she’d had about a new life out West and—was he trying to ruin her life again?—had shown up in Seattle himself, where he had used what little money he had left to buy a failing trading company somewhere in the city’s grimy, freeway-slashed industrial section. Venezia, its name was, and it specialized in supplying hotels and restaurants with schlock-art imports, or so he said. What exactly he did there she didn’t know and she didn’t want to know, but it didn’t strike her as a good sign that his employees all seemed to be old pals from his art-forging days. Ex-cons, mostly, just like him, although few ex-cons could manage Geoff London’s effervescent, unfailingly upbeat personality and—she had to admit it—his essential likability.

  “Yeah, well, you did annoy quite a few people in the art world, you know.”

  “Didn’t I, though,” he said quietly, and she knew he had that puckish, irresistible, inarguably charming smile on his face. She smiled herself, imagining it, and for a moment she wished she could see it in person. She had loved her father, loved him dearly. But now…

  Time to change the subject. “Speaking of the art world,” she said, unable to stop herself from showing off a little for him, “I have a meeting with a collector tonight. At a donor’s reception at the museum. If all goes well, this could be the entrée I’ve been hoping for.”

  “Oh, yes? More cleaning, is it?” He had never put it in so many words, but she knew that he thought the cleaning of paintings was beneath her abilities.

  “No, not cleaning. Advising. Consulting. She wants some help—some expert advice on a purchase—and somewhere or other she’s heard that I’m the one for the job.”

  “Well, it’s about time people started recognizing your eye,” he said with fatherly pride. “You’re a natural, my dear. I like to flatter myself by thinking it’s in the genes.”

  He just might be right about that, she thought. She’d been living and breathing art as long as she could remember. As a teenager, she’d spent many an enchanted after-school hour (before she’d discovered boys) in the workrooms of the Met watching and eagerly learning from her father. That much, at any rate, she owed him.

  “And what does this mysterious collector of yours collect?” he asked. “Not more Victorian shaving mugs, I trust.”

  That was as close to sarcasm as he ever came. He was referring to her previous consulting job. Little did he know that Victorian shaving mugs were a step up from the one before, which she’d gone out of her way not to mention to him. She’d been advising a client on aquarium furniture, the little ceramic knickknacks—overflowing treasure chests, and deep-sea divers that bubbled, and mermaids—that people put in their aquariums. Who knew there was even a name for them? Or that people actually collected them? She’d taken it on mainly because the client was a high-level Microsoft executive, and she was hopeful that he’d give her referrals to other dot-comers for something a little more along her line. She’d done a good job for him too, spending hours on the Internet and in libraries to get up to speed on the subject, although now she wondered how many of her valuable brain cells were filled up with the junk.

  “No. Not quite,” she said with a certain amount of pride of her own. “It’s Georgia O’Keeffe she’s interested in.”

  Indeed, he was impressed. “Oh, I say. Now there’s an artist one can get one’s teeth into. You’ll tell me if you can use any help, won’t you? Tiny is very much an O’Keeffe expert. He might well be able to give you a few words of advice.”

  Tiny (six-four, three-hundred-plus pounds) was one of Geoff’s ex-con employees and almost as charming, in his own slow, good-natured way, as Geoff. He could have been a superb mixed-media artist—watercolors and pastels—in his own right. Unfortunately, he had liked creating Homers and Whistlers more. Which was why he was now an ex-con. When Alix had been a child he had been her “Uncle Beniamino,” and although not really a relative, he had been the favorite by far of all her “uncles.” But a lot of water had flowed under the bridge since then, and she was no longer a child.

  “Thanks, Geoff, I’ll keep him in mind. I’ve got to go now. Still need to do a little more work on this Utrillo.”

  “Utrillo, is it? Do you know, I remember knocking off a Utrillo in a day and a half that was as good as anything Utrillo ever did—better, if we’re going to be honest. I could do an O’Keeffe too, when you come right down to it. Perhaps not in a day and a half, but give me the subject, and of course the period, and—”

  “Bye, Geoff.”

  What to wear for the reception.

  She chose the timeless, elegantly simple, basic black skirt-suit from Prada, with a slender chain-link necklace to set it off; the Givenchy lapelled jacket with its ivory-and-black floral jacquard weave and its subtly padded shoulders; and the gleaming Salvatore Ferragamo three-inch black slingbacks to add a little pizzazz. The perfect getup for an occasion that was part business meeting, part glitzy cocktail reception.

  Picking the outfit had taken all of two minutes. It was, in fact, the only outfit she had for part-business-part-glitzy-cocktail receptions. Or for business meetings in general. Or for cocktail receptions, glitzy or otherwise. Or for just about anything else that involved being seen in public. Alix’s wardrobe might’ve been classic, but extensive it was not. It wasn’t new either. Almost everything in it was from consignment sales at Le Frock Vintage Clothing, the secondhand shop in Capitol Hill’s lowrent zone, practically under the I-5 freeway.

  There had been a time, she thought dreamily, when her clothes had come straight from the designer showrooms. How long ago it seemed now, almost as if it had been someone else’s life. How easily it had all come to her, how much she took it simply as her due to grow up on Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side, to have a family box at the Metropolitan Opera, to spend the family summers in Rhode Island’s elite and exclusive beach community of Watch Hill (“straight out of The Great Gatsby,” her father liked to say, to the extreme annoyance of Alix’s mother), to move effortlessly among the rich and the influential. But all that had come to a crashing end with Geoff’s indictme
nt. The family money had vanished down the bottomless rat hole of lawyer’s fees and settlements, quickly becoming a distant memory. What a rude shock that had been. The only bright spot, if you could call it that, was that her mother’s death two years earlier had spared her the scandal.

  Alix had been in her senior year at Harvard at the time, and although the sixty thousand dollars left in her college fund had been untouched by the lawyers, she’d dropped out anyway and arranged to have the money, every cent of it, put aside for Geoff, the only provision being that he was not to know who or where it was from. (His gratitude was not something she wanted weighing her down.) Instead, he was to be told it was the residue of his one-time assets. Quitting school had hurt, but he was still her father, and he would be almost seventy by the time he got out of Lompoc, disgraced and impoverished. The sixty thousand and its interest would at least give him something to help him last out his remaining years. It had, too; he’d used it to jump-start his new business.

  She’d thought back then that perhaps she’d be able to return to Harvard at some point, but life, and the need to earn a living, had gotten in the way. The only—

  She jerked her head. Enough. Water under the bridge, she told herself for the second time in two hours. It was the future she needed to be concerned with now.

  And yet she couldn’t stop thinking about Geoff. He hadn’t had the nerve to actually appear on her doorstep yet, but he called regularly, blithely ignoring the chilly receptions he got and the obvious fact that she never called back. Clearly, it was going to take some kind of a scene, a face-to-face meeting, for him to get the message. It was a prospect that filled her with dread.

  So, by his lights, apparently, he was doing fine—or, at least he did a very good imitation of someone who was. Her “career,” on the other hand, and her life, for that matter, left a lot to be desired. But Alix, like her father, was not merely a survivor, but a survivor who persisted in looking on the bright side. Well, most of the time. Look at the way things were working out now for her, for example. Here she was, living in this absolutely fabulous Seattle condo. Signor Santullo, the wonderful old man she’d apprenticed with in Europe, had set it up for her from Rome, before she’d even left to return to the States: a year’s stay in the place while Katryn was off in France, in Provence, in return for cleaning and restoring six paintings from her formidable Post-Impressionist collection. Was that lucky, or what? The work, hardly full-time, even allowed her to take on other jobs for her few expenses. And only today a wonderful new opportunity had presented itself—

  She drew herself up. A final check in the full-length mirror, a brief touch at a stray tendril at her temple, a tug at her waistband to make sure it was straight, and it was time to go.

  On with the show.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Seattle Art Museum, or SAM, as the locals called it, was one of Alix’s regular haunts. Not being a donor, she had never been to a donor reception before, but she was a member (at the least expensive level), and with the building only a short walk from the condo, she was there a few times a week, either to use its library or to prowl happily through its collections. Yet in all this time there was one space, the main atrium, into which she would never have set foot if hadn’t been necessary to go through it in order to reach the exhibits. Even then, she usually sailed through at warp speed, looking neither right nor left, and especially not up.

  The reason for this was that to pass through it one had to walk under what was inarguably the most sensational installation in the museum. “Inopportune: Stage One,” it was called, and although she didn’t altogether understand the meaning, she thought it highly fitting. “Inopportune: Stage One” was a stomach-churning cascade of nine tumbling white Ford Tauruses—real, full-size Tauruses—suspended from the ceiling by scarily slender steel rods that didn’t really seem up to the job, in her opinion. The cars “took off” from the Brotman Forum on one side of the atrium and “landed” in the South Hall on the other side. In between, they leapt and twisted and plunged across the ceiling, radiating sprays of colored lights that made them look as if they were exploding. Indeed, she had read that they were meant to suggest the progress of a single automobile in the process of being blown up, caught in nine separate cinematic frames. She had also read that their Chinese creator, Cai Guo-Qiang, had stated that the grim theme he had in mind was car bombings and terrorism, and how we all go placidly on with our lives despite them.

  However, it wasn’t the theme that had kept her from lingering in the atrium; art was a pretty eclectic business these days, and she was willing to allow room for tastes other than her own. No, it was simply the idea of standing any longer than she absolutely had to underneath a bunch of one-ton automobiles precariously dangling forty feet above her head, in a region of the country well known for its earthquakes. Alix wasn’t a particularly fearful person, but the idea of earthquakes had her spooked. She was from New York State, and other than the rare, watered-down hurricane that came up from the south, the only climatic phenomena to worry about were the nor’easters that blew out of New England in the winter—the difference being that, unlike an earthquake, if you simply stayed indoors, a nor’easter wasn’t going to kill you.

  But now she was faced with a dilemma. On the one side was her unease about the cars; on the other was the fact that the buffet tables were set up directly underneath them. Also the fact that the buffet looked terrific. Also the fact that she was suddenly starving. Not to mention the additional little detail that her food budget for the week was in tatters—she’d been a little down in the dumps on Monday and had splurged on a Dungeness crab lunch. As a result, dinner at home tonight would mean canned lentil soup and a grilled cheese sandwich.

  So if she wanted some of those wonderful-looking salmon-stuffed endive leaves, or the cream-cheese-filled pea pods, or the teriyaki chicken satay, or—especially—the brie en croute (she could smell it from here!), she was just going to have to risk it. Either that or stay hungry.

  The brie en croute won out. What the hell, you can’t live forever, she told herself, and if nothing else came out of the evening, at least she’d have had something good to eat. She strode boldly up to the tables to begin filling a plate with two each of the delectable cheese puffs, vegetable spring rolls, and what she was fairly sure were spinach tartlets. As she was reaching for a napkin, someone spoke—bellowed—in her ear.

  “I understand you’re Alix London.” A hand was stuck out toward her. “Well, hello, I’m Chris LeMay.”

  Alix turned to see a big, rawboned woman in her late thirties, with a dramatic black-and-yellow-striped shawl artfully draped over a turtlenecked black sweater, and her legs in flowing black slacks. Alix had seen her earlier, greeting friends or associates with gusto, slapping one man on the back so zestily that the olive he’d just popped in his mouth popped back out. Alix had noticed her not only because of the energy she radiated, but because she was the tallest woman in the room, a strapping six-two, and that was in flat heels. It hadn’t occurred to her that this jovial, hearty, imposing person might be the Christine LeMay she was looking for because, on the Eastern art scene, collectors simply didn’t look like that. They ran instead to painfully (some said fashionably) thin, languorous size fours, any two of whom could have fit into Chris’s sixteen-plus with room to spare.

  At five-nine, and wearing three-inch heels, Alix wasn’t used to looking up at other women, but unless she wanted to climb up on the table, with Chris there was no way around it.

  She set down the plate and shook the proffered hand, expecting to wince, but Chris took it easy on her. “I’m so glad to meet you, Chris. And thank you for getting me an invitation to this.”

  Chris brushed the thanks aside.

  “Yum, what are those? Whatever they are, they look good.” Her voice had an unusually throaty, husky quality—a honking quality if you wanted to be unkind—but it was oddly pleasant to listen to, as if there was a laugh bottled up inside just waiting for an excuse to come
bubbling out. “Let me get a plate and load up, and then let’s find someplace else to talk—” Chris’s eyes rolled up toward the hanging cars, “—before we have an earthquake.”

  Alix grinned. She already liked the woman. “I’m glad to hear you say that. I thought it was just me. I’m from New York. I’m not used to the idea of earthquakes.”

  “If you ever find someone who’s used to the idea of earthquakes, I’d like to meet him,” Chris said, piling on the hors d’oeuvres. “Oh, look, is that champagne?” She had spotted a waiter sliding sideways between clumps of people, his tray of tulip glasses held aloft. With Alix trailing after her, she made directly for him and snared glasses for both of them. “Let’s get ourselves one of those,” she said, gesturing with her chin toward some small tables set along one wall. “I think they might be out of the range of falling vehicles.”

  They threaded their way through a noisy and still swelling crowd of mostly well-dressed people, many of whom obviously knew Chris and greeted her, but the last empty table was snatched up just before they reached it.

  “Oh well, looks like we’re going to have to juggle,” Chris said. “Life is a bitch, ain’t that the truth?” They found a marble windowsill to do duty as a sort of table, and Chris used a toothpick to spear a tartlet, popped it in her mouth with an eye-roll of pleasure, took a swallow of champagne, and looked directly at Alix. “So. You’re Geoffrey London’s daughter, right?”

  Alix’s throat went dry. Practically the first words out of this woman’s mouth, and they were about—what else?—her father. Was he forever going to be an albatross around her neck, wherever she went, however remote from Manhattan? In this age of Google, of the instant and pervasive availability of information, the answer was probably yes.