A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) Page 6

  “Well, all right,” Chris said. “I guess it doesn’t matter.” She looked at her watch. “Two fifteen. Canyon Drive is less than ten minutes from here. Shall we meet here in the lobby at four fifteen? We can walk, if you’re up to it.”

  “Absolutely. I could stand to stretch my legs.” But on second thought, two hours of solitary decompression might be more than was good for either of them. “Wait, what do you say we meet at three instead? The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum should be right around the corner—”

  “It is,” said Caitlin. “Well, a couple of blocks.”

  “Great. What do you say we spend a little time there before we go look at your painting, Chris?”

  “I’d like that, yes.”

  Caitlin plinked the bell on the desk, and in about two seconds a couple of bellmen materialized, one of them loading Chris’s bags (she’d brought three) onto a cart, and the other, younger one taking Alix’s single soft-sided suitcase outside and stowing it into the back of a pink golf cart with a fringed awning to match.

  “Climb in, I’ll drive you there. Easy to get lost if you haven’t been here before.”

  He was a chubby, friendly, rosy-cheeked kid (Tommy, his nameplate said) who looked as if he’d be more at home riding a tractor on a farm in Indiana than a gussied-up golf cart in Santa Fe. Clearly, he enjoyed zipping around in the cart, but as soon as he noticed that she was shivering, he let up on the accelerator.

  “It’s the elevation. Everybody thinks we’re, you know, warm, like Phoenix, but we’re not. We’re seven thousand feet here,” he said with pride. “It can get a lot colder than this. Where are you from?”

  “Me?” Not such an easy question, she thought, and took the simplest way out. “Seattle.” As good an answer as any.

  “They get a lot of rain there,” Tommy said sagely.

  “That they do,” she agreed.

  At the casita he hopped out. “I’m gonna get the fireplace going. Get you toasty in no time.”

  She followed him into the room, immediately liking the place: curving adobe walls, exposed viga-wood ceiling beams, an arched, kiva-type propane fireplace, Southwestern furnishings…Midway across the red tile floor, she stopped, her brow wrinkling. “Wait. Do you smell something?”

  Kneeling at the fireplace, poised to turn the switch to light the gas, he lifted his pug nose and sniffed. “Like something died?”

  “Like rotten eggs,” she declared. “Let’s get out of here. That smells like a propane leak. We need to go back to reception.”

  “Naw,” he said, “can’t be that.” His hand was still extended toward the switch. “Propane don’t have any smell. I know because—”

  “Tommy, stop! Don’t light that damn thing!” she yelled. “Let’s go!”

  He blinked and retracted his hand. “Yes ma’am. Um…you don’t want me to put your bag in the room?”

  Her answer was a vigorous, two-handed tug at his collar that jerked him to his feet. “Let’s go! Now!”

  Back in the cart on their return to reception, calmer now and wondering if she’d overreacted, she said, “I’m sure it’s nothing, Tommy. It’s just, while you’re right, propane doesn’t have any smell—that’s exactly why they add an odorant to it, so you can tell when there’s a leak. When I lived in Italy, they used these awful little propane tanks they called bombalas, which was a good name for them, because if you weren’t careful—”

  A millisecond before she heard the tremendous explosion, she felt a sudden blast of heat on the back of her neck. Before she could make sense of it, the sound came, a huge detonation—no, a rapid series of detonations, like a string of Chinese firecrackers, only deeper, bigger, immensely more powerful.

  Stunned, Tommy stomped on the brake and they both spun around. They were in time to see the pieces—she recognized fragments of the wooden ceiling beams—on their way back down. The casita itself was a mass of sooty flames that spouted like geysers, windows broken out, door tumbling to the grass ten yards away, the roof, as far as they could tell, completely gone.

  “Holy mackerel,” Tommy said wanly. “If you didn’t…if you hadn’t…we coulda been…we woulda been…”

  “Yes, killed,” she said grimly. “Dead.”

  He nodded dumbly, staring at the flaming, steaming, hissing ruin. “As a frigging doornail,” he said wonderingly.

  Cognac in the middle of the afternoon was hardly an everyday event, but then neither was coming that close to being as dead as a frigging doornail. It was with deep pleasure that Alix took her second long swallow and felt the welcome heat of it slide soothingly down to her stomach.

  “Nice to be alive,” she said.

  Chris, indulging in a gin and tonic, nodded approvingly. “See, I told you a drink would do you good. It’s not doing me any harm either.” She shook her head, lowering her voice another notch. “What a day, and it’s not over yet.”

  Alix smiled, taking another sip. “Well, I’ve had enough excitement to last me for the rest of the day, thank you very much, so I hope we have a nice, extremely boring evening.”

  The hullabaloo after the explosion had been tumultuous but reassuring. Sirens, firemen, efficient, concerned staff response—even someone noticing her shivering and bringing a beautiful, warm serape that she was able to wrap three times around her shoulders—all helped to calm her nerves and bring her heartbeat back to normal. Add to that Chris’s near-motherly solicitousness, and Alix willingly gave way to the luxury of being cosseted. After so many year of aloneness—largely self-inflicted, of course—it felt surprisingly good to let herself be taken care of.

  She had been reassigned to a room in the main building (“There will be no charge for your stay, of course, madam”), her bag had been carried up to it, their drinks had been provided gratis, and Chris had let her talk herself out about it all. Now they sat in amiable silence in the Hacienda’s otherwise empty Cottonwood Bar, sprawled in comfortable armchairs next to the fireplace—a real snapping, crackling, log-burning one, not propane, thank God—sipping their drinks and luxuriating in the pleasure of the world righting itself.

  “Alix…” Chris said; it was the first time Alix had heard anything like hesitation or uncertainty in her voice. “…I owe you an apology. I was rotten company on the way over here today, and I wouldn’t want you to think it had anything to do with you.”

  “I didn’t think that, Chris.”

  “It’s just that…” She was rotating her glass between her fingers and staring down at it. “It was just…oh, damn it, just that…”

  Alix hesitated as well. It wasn’t much more than an hour ago that she’d lectured herself about steering clear of other people’s problems, but now things were different. She was alive when she might so nearly have been dead, and Chris was quickly beginning to seem like a friend, a real friend…

  She took a breath and dived in. “Just that you and that pilot, Craig, had something going once upon a time,” she said. “And Liz was in the middle of it somehow. Or maybe Craig and Liz had something, and you were in the middle of it. Some kind of triangle, anyway. Is that pretty close?”

  Chris burst out laughing. “Was I that transparent?”

  Alix smiled. “I’m afraid so. So which way was it?” She had another slug of brandy. “If you want to talk about it, that is.”

  “I do,” Chris said. She swallowed the last of her drink and held up her glass to the bartender to signal that she wanted a refill. “Light on the gin this time,” she called. “And could we get some chips or something?”

  Chris settled back in her chair and turned to Alix. “You were right the first time. Craig and I were an item, but it was an odd situation. I was actually his boss for a while.”

  “That must have been a little uncomfortable.” Alix gave the bartender a negative wave of her hand when he inquired with a lift of his eyebrows whether she wanted another drink.

  “A little, but not as much as you might think. It was only for a couple of months. See, with the project management
approach Sytex had, the lines of authority were always changing. Besides, it was a pretty laid back company, and they didn’t care very much—at all, really—about personal relationships between employees, even bosses and subordinates, as long as you were professional at the office. Considering we were all working crazy hours, seven days a week, it made sense. Who had time for anyone outside the company? Oh, and I was also Liz’s boss at the time, as it happens.”

  “The plot thickens,” Alix observed.

  “Just a little. Thank you,” she said to the bartender, who had placed a fresh gin and tonic on the side table between their chairs, along with a sectioned tray of potato chips and nuts. Chris chomped on a handful of the nuts and took a swallow of her drink, chewing away and studying Alix over the rim of the glass. “You were studying in Europe, weren’t you, during the tech bubble?”

  Alix nodded. “Yes. Oh, I’d hear things about new tech companies, IPOs, stock options—the Italians were pretty big players, as well—but it’d go in one ear and out the other. I still don’t even know what an IPO is. It just had no relevance to me. I bet it was exciting, though, to be in the middle of it.”

  “It was really something. Sytex was just one of a whole lot of start-ups then, but we all felt that we were part of something that was going to be big, and that made it tremendously exciting. It’s impossible to describe the climate; everything was possible. Anyway, Craig and I weren’t engaged or anything—we were all too busy to think about stopping long enough to get married—but everybody understood that we were together, or so I thought until one Saturday when the three of us and a few others were working on a big presentation over the weekend. I left at about five, but on the drive home I realized that Liz had some material I needed to review before a Monday morning meeting. So, okay, I walk into her office and—”

  At the memory, the corners of her mouth turned down. “And I find the two of them…oh, Christ…I find them…screwing on the carpet, right on the floor, like a couple of goddamn animals in heat.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Oh yes,” Chris muttered.

  “What did you do?”

  She laughed bleakly. “The same thing you would have done. I turned around and walked out. I was mortified.”

  “Of course. I meant—”

  “I know what you meant,” Chris said in a low monotone.

  “Chris, there’s no need for you to talk about it if you don’t want to. I’m sorry if I—”

  But Chris barreled grimly ahead. “Naturally, I was as mad as hell at both of them, but Liz came to me later that afternoon, as contrite as a little mouse: she hadn’t meant for it to happen, they’d never done it before, but Craig had been giving her signs for weeks—an ‘accidental’ touch here, a little-too-long handshake there, lingering glances that were unmistakable—and in a weak moment—he was awfully attractive, after all—her hormones had taken over and she just plain gave in to him.” Chris shrugged. “She was in tears, she felt horrible, she’d never have done anything like that to me if she’d been in her right mind, or if Craig hadn’t been so persistent, and on and on. She begged me to forgive her.”

  “And?”

  “And I forgave her.” Another weary shrug. “We were old friends—I’d known her a lot longer than Craig—we’d done so many things together. Craig…Craig was a different story.”

  He had told her he was sorry, yes, and he’d seemed to mean it. But that was it. No defense, no denial of what Liz had said, no explanation other than that he’d made a bad mistake and it wouldn’t happen again. He said that if Chris preferred not to be around him, he’d quit Sytex and move on. All she had to do was say the word.

  “So I said it,” Chris said softly. “I was terribly hurt; I couldn’t believe he’d let me down that way. I never wanted to see him again. And I guess part of it was that I wanted to make him pay. I was really angry.” She smiled. “Boy, did I make him pay. Eight months after he left, the company went public, Liz and I wound up making a fortune, and Craig was just one more unemployed techie. When the tech bubble burst a few months later, he was one more unemployable techie.”

  An image of Craig’s open, likeable face flashed through Alix’s mind. It was hard to picture him rolling around on the floor with the frowzy, silly woman who had met them at the airport. But of course, Liz wouldn’t have been frowzy then. Still…

  “Ouch,” was all she said.

  “Ouch is right. Liz and I came away with millions. Craig, after all the work he put in, came away with zilch. Truthfully, I feel kind of bad about that.”

  “Well, he’s not exactly poverty-stricken. Being a pilot for ShareJet surely isn’t minimum-wage.”

  “No.” A pause, and once again Alix picked up a sense of hesitation. “He doesn’t know it,” she said, her eyes lowered, “but I’m responsible for him getting that job.”

  “How do you mean?” This plot keeps thickening, Alix thought.

  “Well, I’d worked with one of the execs at ShareJet, and I knew that Craig had been an amateur pilot, but without enough flying hours to commercially fly people solo, so I convinced my pal to let him copilot while he worked on getting his commercial license. Of course, Craig never knew my fine hand was involved. Then, if they thought he was working out, they’d hire him for solo flights. He did, and they did. You look confused.”

  “I am, a little. If you never wanted to see him again, how come you use ShareJet and not some other company?”

  “Because we used them at Sytex and I just stuck with them afterward. There’s supposed to be an understanding that he’s never to be my pilot. I don’t know what went wrong; he never was before. Aren’t you going to have any of these chips? They’re delicious—thick-cut.”

  Alix shook her head. “My stomach’s still a little fluttery. But about Craig—you mean today was the first time you’d seen him since…since the thing with Liz?”

  She nodded. “You can imagine how I felt, with him suddenly walking in out of the blue, after so long. The last person in the world I ever wanted to see again. It just threw me for a loop. I just…oh, hell.” She looked down at her glass and grimaced. “What a mess.”

  Why, you’re still in love with him, Alix thought.

  “I’ve been going over and over it all day,” Chris said tiredly. “Did I blow it back then? Was I too quick to take Liz at her word, too unforgiving, too quick to dump Craig?”

  “Could be,” Alix said. “People have weak moments. People do make mistakes.”

  Chris thought about it, then shook her head. “No, this was more than a mistake. The lingering glances he was giving her, the ‘accidental’ touching…that went on for weeks.”

  “According to Liz.”

  Chris peered at her. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that’s Liz’s story. She’s the one you heard it from, not Craig. Maybe it’s not the whole story. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe she was chasing him.”

  “And that’s supposed to make a difference—who was chasing whom?”

  “Well, sure. Wasn’t that your basis for keeping Liz as a friend and dumping Craig?”

  “I didn’t dump him,” Chris began, then shrugged. “Well, yes, okay, I guess I did,” she said uncertainly. She was silent for a moment. “To be honest, I think I did have my doubts about Liz. Even in those days, there was something about her that…But it’s all moot, Alix. I gave him a chance to defend himself, to explain, to blame it on Liz if that’s the way it was. Deep down I was praying that he would—but he didn’t. Why not?”

  “You’re right, I am just speculating here, but couldn’t it be because he was trying to do the gentlemanly thing? That he felt he should take responsibility for his actions? That shifting the blame to Liz wouldn’t have been—I don’t know—gallant?”

  Chris laughed her seal-bark of a laugh. “Gallant! Now there’s a word you don’t hear very much these days.” Slowly, she sobered. “But you know,” she said wistfully, “I suppose he actually is the kind of guy to whom
something like that would matter.”

  “There you are then.”

  “I am? Where? And how come, by the way, you’re taking Craig’s side in this and not Liz’s?”

  “I’m not taking anybody’s—”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Okay, I suppose I am.”

  “Well, why?”

  “Because—” But she didn’t feel she could very well say that it was mostly because she liked Craig on sight and disliked and distrusted Liz from the moment she saw her. “Because I saw the way he looked at you when he first came out of the cockpit.”

  “How did he look at me?”

  “Like he was excited to see you. Maybe a little nervous, a little uncertain, but eager and happy. For about one second, anyway. But during that second, let’s just say I sure got the impression that if you wanted to be friends again, he wouldn’t take much convincing.”

  Chris was genuinely surprised. “Are you kidding me? He just rattled off a canned speech—here’s the exit, there’s the toilet—and stumped back into the cockpit.”

  “True, but that was only after you started muttering and doing your clam imitation.”

  Chris frowned, considering. “Alix, is that really the way it was? It’s not the way I remember it.”

  “That’s the way it was, Chris.”

  “Oh God,” Chris sighed and sagged back in her chair. “My brain is numb. I’m going to have to sleep on all this. But as for right this minute, I’d a lot rather go and look at my O’Keeffe than sit around stewing. Are you still in the mood for a walk?”

  Alix was out of her chair before the question was finished. “Desperately,” she said.

  CHAPTER 5

  “‘Roland de Beauvais, Fine Art Acquisitions, Boston,’” Liz read aloud from the embossed, linen-textured card that Michael, one of her two assistants, had placed on her desk. Below that a telephone number. That was it. Expensive linen stock but simple black font, no logo. Understated but classy. She laid the card on her desk, unable to resist a smile of satisfaction. It hadn’t taken long for the fish to jump for the bait. She’d figured he wouldn’t show until tomorrow.