A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) Page 8

  Chris’s eyes opened wider. “Are we talking about the Whipple-Pruitts here?”

  Alix nodded. “Of Boston, Watch Hill, and Palm Beach. Benefactors of the arts, regulars on the society pages, taste-makers and trendsetters all.”

  “Wow, no kidding.” Chris drew Alix aside, into a workroom filled with mailing and packing material. “Mrs. Paynton Whipple-Pruitt,” she repeated. “That’s really…wait a minute, did I hear you right? Did you say ten days?”

  “Almost eleven, actually.”

  “Oh, eleven. Well, that’s different.”

  Alix could laugh about it now, but it’d been far from funny at the time. She’d been engaged to Paynton for two months when her father’s infamous and stunningly unexpected downfall had turned her world upside down. The truth of the matter was that she’d already begun to have serious doubts about her fiancé. The longer she knew him the more clearly she saw that he was very much a chip off the old Whipple-Pruitt block: priggish, snobbish, and condescending. And snooty. And not very bright. Still, when he’d offered to go ahead with the wedding despite the unconcealed displeasure of his family, she’d gratefully accepted. More than gratefully—it had been as if she’d been about to go down with the Titanic and he’d come up with a seat for her on his own private, well-equipped lifeboat.

  No doubt she should have realized things were less than promising when his family insisted she sign a prenuptial agreement allowing her nothing in the event that the marriage lasted less than a year. But still in a state of shock over her father’s disgrace—and yes, to be honest, the financial calamity that had engulfed her—she’d plunged right in. It had taken her four days of wedded “bliss” for the truth to get past her defenses and sink in: the marriage was an unmitigated disaster.

  The whole thing, it seemed, had been a misunderstanding. Poor Paynton’s offer to go ahead with the wedding had been prompted by a misguided sense of noblesse oblige; he had offered, yes, certainly, but he had fully expected her to do the decent thing, considering the altered circumstances, and turn him down. When she hadn’t, Paynton, now in his own state of shock, had taken what seemed to him the manly course: he’d girded his loins and gone through with it. Once this became clear to Alix, of course, it was impossible to continue. On the fifth day of their life as man and wife, they had formally separated. On the eleventh day they had filed for divorce. The collective sigh of relief from Paynton and his family could be heard all the way to western Connecticut.

  But she wasn’t about to go into all that with Chris. Maybe sometime, but not now. “And it was a long eleven days,” was all she said.

  “Aahh, I see. And Rollie de Beauvais reminds you of him. Although to tell you the truth,” she said with a tiny smile, “I think I could last a lot longer than eleven days with a guy that looked like de Beauvais and had the Whipple-Pruitt money.”

  “Well, yes, but Paynton had this manner, this way of…of…” She shook her head. “It’s hard to explain. It was just—”

  Chris gently held up her hand. “Alix, I’m sorry for being so damn nosy. Look, sometime, if you ever do feel like talking about it, you’ve got a sympathetic listener right here. Until then, let’s forget it. Okay?”

  “Deal,” Alix said gratefully. “Listen, I shouldn’t have gotten up on my high horse the way I did in there. If I didn’t want to have a drink with him, I should have just said so, I certainly shouldn’t have ruled it out for you too. Why don’t we go back? If he’s still there, you can—”

  “Uh-uh, not a chance. Now that I think about it, there was maybe something a little too cool about him. Or too oily. Or too something. Come on, let’s go look at the opening. Maybe I’ll find something else I’d like to buy. It’s always exciting to—” She stopped, blinking, as they entered the room. “Whoops, no, I don’t think so. Sheesh.”

  Sheesh, indeed, Alix thought. “The brilliant young Gregor Gorzynski’s” creations were prime examples of what her father contemptuously referred to as Euro art trash: absurdist, pretentious, pseudo-intellectual works, mostly by anarchistic young males who were more interested in hooking a wealthy patron—preferably a gullible, needy female of a certain age—than they were in pursuing their “art.” In the center of the room, Gorzynski himself, in a scuffed leather jacket and artfully torn jeans, was vigorously and histrionically expostulating in heavily accented English on the subtle merits of his creations—oversized, unframed canvases with ragged edges and irregular shapes, splattered with long, swirling globs of glue, string, and what were clearly M&M’s. Scattered around were several sculptures (using the term loosely) of two-by-fours jury-rigged together and decorated with string, Cheerios, and frayed rope. Draped over the strings, Dali-like, were limp-looking but stiffened strands of transparent rice noodles.

  “Frankly,” Chris said, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to have anything like this in my house, even if the prices weren’t ridiculous. Or would my newly engaged art advisor care to advise me otherwise?”

  “Your newly engaged art advisor would not,” Alix whispered. “Your newly engaged art advisor will instead give you a simple rule that should serve you well through the years: it is not recommended to hang anything biodegradable on your walls.”

  “You mean M&M’s are biodegradable?” Chris said, laughing. “Who knew?”

  Beside them, a youngish, blond-bearded man and a woman were peering thoughtfully at a composition of string, glue, and M&M’s on brightly painted blue particle board. “What I like,” the woman was saying, “is the way he left the little M’s right on them, as if to blur the distinction between reality and the thought of reality, as expressed in art.”

  “Yes,” the man responded after an appreciative pause. “And you notice how he uses the field of blue as the one unifying element of rationality and order, so that not only the formal-structural aspects are brought out, but the symbolic implications as well?”

  Chris and Alix looked at each other. “Do you think they really believe that bullshit,” Chris whispered out of the side of her mouth, “or are they just showing off?”

  Alix smiled. “It reminds me of something my father used to say. He said that the reason there’s so much unintelligible drivel written and spoken about today’s so-called art is that without it, how could you tell it from garbage?”

  “Smart guy, your father,” Chris said.

  Whatever Alix was going to answer was cut off by Liz’s strident voice, practically in her right ear. “Cul-lyde! Come on in, Cul-lyde. Look around, have a glass of champagne.”

  “No champagne for me, thank you,” was the prissy reply. “I’m here simply to pick up a couple of catalogs. As you should know by now, I don’t drink alcohol.”

  The speaker was a balding, waspish man, the first man Alix had seen in Santa Fe in a suit and tie, and not only a tie, but a zebra-striped bow tie—the pre-tied kind that fastened with a clasp, but a bow tie nonetheless.

  “Suit yourself,” Liz said. “Clyde, this is Chris LeMay, an old friend who’s just getting started as a collector—she’s the one who’s purchasing that O’Keeffe you were helping me with—and this is her consultant, Alix London. Ladies, meet my esteemed friend and associate Clyde Moody. Clyde’s the librarian at the Twentieth Century.”

  The Twentieth Century, of course, would be the renowned Southwest Museum of Twentieth-Century American Art, a couple of blocks from Santa Fe’s central plaza.

  “Archivist,” Moody amended with some asperity. “And among the many and varied responsibilities of that position,” he explained to Chris and Alix, “I am expected to keep copies of art exhibition catalogs from major New Mexican galleries, even when, in my humble opinion—” he cast a meaningful glance around the room, “—they have as much to do with art as Garfield has to do with the Mona Lisa.”

  This brought gales of bleary laughter from Liz, which in turn brought angry stares, and fingers to lips, and even a Shh! or two from visitors who had no idea that the loud woman with the coarse laugh was their host and the provider
of the goodies they were scarfing down. Liz didn’t notice any of it. She draped an arm over Moody’s narrow shoulders despite his obvious discomfort with the familiarity. “This guy only sounds like a wet blanket, guys. Underneath that gruff exterior there lies—”

  “Yes, I know,” Moody said, trying without success to wriggle out from under her robust arm. “A heart of gold, pure and unalloyed. Elizabeth, if you please, all I’m here for is a catalog, so perhaps I could—”

  “This guy,” Liz said with an affectionate squeeze of a captive shoulder, “this guy might not look like much, but in that pointy little head of his is the brain of a giant. The man is a walking encyclopedia. I don’t know what I’d do without him. It would amaze you what he can come up with from those musty old archives of his, just amaze you.” She threw him coy, conspiratorial look. “Why, I could tell you stories—”

  But Moody had managed to squirm free at last and was scuttling toward the door. “Bye, Cul-lyde,” a laughing Liz called after him, then drifted off to stand adoringly next to Gorzynski, her arm entwined in his, and sharing in his glory.

  “I’m ready to go if you are,” Alix said. “I’ve seen all of the show I want to see.”

  “More than I want to see,” Chris agreed. “Let’s scram.”

  With nearly three hours to go before they were due back to look at the O’Keeffe, Chris suggested that they find a restaurant, but Alix demurred. For one thing the aftereffects of the explosion on her nervous system had killed whatever appetite she might have had. For another, she’d been hearing for years about Santa Fe’s Canyon Road and its celebrated Friday art walk, and with only a brief taste of it on their stroll to the Blue Coyote, she was eager to experience more.

  “Tell you what,” Chris said, as they strolled out. “There’s a restaurant up near the top, El Farol. Let’s stroll up that way, taking in the sights. Then you can drop me off there for a bite, keep ambling to your heart’s content, and swing by again at seven fifteen or so for a glass of wine, and then we’ll head back here from there. How’s that for a plan?”

  “That’s perfect, but I’m not going to want any wine. Coffee, maybe. At most.”

  On the brick patio at the front of the gallery they stopped for a moment to get their bearings. The sun was low in the sky, throwing long shadows from the cottonwoods onto the adobe-lined street, now filled with chatty, sauntering groups of varying sizes, moving down the street or entering and exiting the galleries. Alix was enchanted by it all: the exhilarating high desert air, the pretty, curving street (lane was more like it), the people, and the wonderful clarity of the light even at dusk.

  With four gallery stops it took them over an hour to get up to El Farol. Eager to see still more, Alix left Chris at the restaurant and continued on her own as darkness came on and the street-lights lit up. As she was passing one of the contemporary galleries, she saw a middle-aged man and a pretty little girl of ten or eleven emerge from it, holding hands and prattling away. Both of them laughing merrily, they had eyes only for one another, the girl’s filled with adoration, the man’s with a pride and tenderness that took Alix’s breath away.

  Literally. It was as if a fist had closed around her heart and squeezed. She stood stock-still, submerged in a sudden wave of emotions. How many times had she and Geoff come out of galleries or museums holding hands and laughing like that? Looking into each others’ faces with all that love?

  The girl and her father passed her still form without seeing her. “That was funny, Daddy!” she heard the little girl say through her giggles. Geoff had had a wonderful ability to make Alix laugh too—the silly jokes, the riddles, the muddled-word fairytales. She could still remember how his hilarious take on Cinderella would double her up with laughter no matter how many times he wrote it down for her (“Center Alley worse jester pore ladle gull hoe lift wetter stop-mutter an too heft-sea stars…”). Even now, she could feel the giggles building up deep down in her throat—but along with something tight and constricted, and bitter as well.

  “You okay, miss?” an older gentleman asked. “Can I help you?”

  “Oh…no, I’m fine, thank you. I was just…thinking.” She began walking again, slowly, lost in a maze of memories, her thoughts conflicted and contradictory. Almost as if it had gotten there without her help, she found her cell phone in her hand. What would it be like to telephone him? Right now, this minute? A new thought occurred to her. The morning he’d called her after her meeting with Chris? The call during which she’d said she didn’t want to speak with Tiny and she’d exasperatedly rung off? That was the last time he’d called. It had been three days, a long time for him. She’d been so absorbed in doing her O’Keeffe research and preparing for Santa Fe that she hadn’t noticed. No, that wasn’t true. She’d purposefully blocked thinking about him or about her own decision-making, promising herself she’d do some serious contemplating about everything later.

  Had he at long last given up on her? Had he interpreted her rejection of Tiny as her way of finally telling him to bug off? To leave her alone? She didn’t know what she wanted, but she didn’t want that dismal exchange to be their last contact.

  She moved out of the flow of foot traffic, sat on a low adobe wall, flipped open the phone, and began, with trembling fingers, to dial, then abruptly stopped. She couldn’t call him; she didn’t have his number. She didn’t have his address either. To have recorded either of them would have been, to her way of thinking, like opening a door to him, an admission that, at some point in the future, they would have a real relationship again.

  She continued to sit there awash in a muddle of contradictory feelings. Was she disappointed or relieved to be unable to call? She honestly didn’t know. The whole thing had been a kind of emotional spasm, a seizure, a nostalgia attack brought on by seeing that father and daughter. But they were a block away now, out of sight and hearing. She could practically feel the coldness re-settle around her heart and was grateful for it. Those long-ago times had been wonderful—he had been wonderful, there could be no arguing with that. But once-upon-a-time childhood memories couldn’t make up for his risking everything—his own hard-won reputation, his very freedom, Alix’s welfare—to use his rare, God-given skills to become a crook, pure and simple—a swindler, a parasite.

  No, maybe the time would come, or maybe not, when she could put all that behind her. But not yet. Not yet.

  She got slowly to her feet and put away the phone with the feeling that she’d narrowly missed making a mistake. She also felt as if she’d been put slowly through a wringer. That glass of wine with Chris was starting to sound good after all.

  CHAPTER 8

  In the event, she had a glass of wine, a cup of coffee, and a couple of the fancy tapas that Chris enthusiastically recommended: chorizo sausage with fig aioli, and skewered Moroccan spiced pork. It was over their coffees that Alix was struck with a bizarre thought.

  “Chris,” she said slowly, “when we first walked into Liz’s office, do you remember what she said?”

  “Sure, she said she was surprised to see us.”

  “No, she said, ‘What are you doing here?’”

  Chris frowned, clearly puzzled as to what Alix was driving at. “Well, isn’t that the same thing?”

  “Not exactly. Who did she say it to?”

  “What kind of a question is that? To us. Alix, what are you—”

  Alix shook her head. “No. I just realized she was staring straight at me when she said it. ‘What are you doing here?’ Emphasis on the you.”

  “All right. And your point is?”

  Alix toyed reflectively with her coffee cup for a few moments. “I think it was me she was surprised to see, not us.”

  Chris folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. “Alix, you have totally lost me.”

  “I’m just wondering,” Alix said, “if she was surprised to see me because she assumed I’d be dead.”

  It took a moment to sink in, and then Chris stared at her. “You think the explosion…you t
hink Liz…you think she tried to blow you up?” Her voice went up an octave on the last few words.

  “No, I doubt that, but I’m wondering if she didn’t try to poison me with a propane gas leak, but the leak was bigger than she expected and there was an explosion.”

  Chris’s eyes were bugging out now. “Are you nuts? She tried to kill you? Why?”

  “To keep me from looking at the painting?” Alix said. It came out as a question because the idea had started to seem silly to her too. “Because the painting is a forgery?”

  “But that makes no sense. What would stop me from getting someone else? Would she kill him too? And the one after him? And how could Liz get into your casita to mess with the propane before you arrived? She drove us there, remember? She was with us right up until we checked in. And how would she even know which casita you were staying in? And why would she—”

  “Okay, you’re right,” Alix said with a sigh. “I guess I’m getting a little paranoid.”

  “Well, who wouldn’t be, after what happened to you today? But I really think you’re barking up a nonexistent tree on this one. Liz might not be the most lovable person in the world, but a killer? Uh-uh.”

  Alix nodded. “You’re right,” she said again. “I think I need a good night’s sleep. Forget what I said. Come on, let’s go look at your painting.”

  By the time they got to the Blue Coyote, however, one of Liz’s assistants was out in front of the darkened gallery, locking the door. “Oh, I’m sorry, we’re just closing up.”

  “I understand. I’m Chris LeMay, and this is—”

  “Oh, right. Liz is expecting you, but would you mind going around to the patio behind the building? There’s a back door to her office there, and it’s the way people go when they just want to see her. The outdoor lights stay on all the time, so you won’t have any problem.”

  “Fine. Thank you.”

  “Um…” The young man hesitated. “If she doesn’t answer right away, you might have to knock kind of loud. I’m pretty sure she’s, uh, taking a nap, and she can be a pretty hard lady to wake up sometimes.” He shrugged, as if in apology.