A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) Read online

  Chris and Alix looked at each other. They understood exactly what he was saying: Liz was schwacked.

  Some clouds had built up under the moon, so the pathway lights were helpful. They followed the winding path around some handsome, half-life-size bronze animal sculptures set on plinths—a wild boar, a mountain goat, a crouching cougar—to the single door in the back of the building.

  “It looks as if it’s dark in there,” a puzzled Alix said. “Why would she have the lights out?”

  “As he said, taking a nap,” Chris said, rattling the doorknob. “Liz!” she called, switching to foghorn level. “Are you in there?” For good measure she rattled the knob some more.

  “Maybe,” Alix said, “we should—”

  The door burst open, slamming hard into Chris, who slammed hard into Alix, who went tumbling over backward, with Chris falling on top of her. With everything dark, and with flailing arms and legs all over the place, it was hard to tell which way was up, let alone what was going on. But it was impossible to miss the man—it was a man, all right, he was huge—who came hurtling through the doorway, only to trip over one of Chris’s size elevens. Whatever it was he’d been carrying went sailing into a clump of miniature piñon pines a few yards away.

  “Ouch!” said Chris.

  “Damn!” said the man, who managed to keep to his feet but floundered into the bronze cougar headfirst, with a sound like a mallet hitting a good-sized bell. “Shit!” He sank to his knees with a groan, both hands pressed to his forehead.

  “Hey!” Chris yelled at him, trying to get her own feet under her while Alix, still partially pinned by Chris’s considerable bulk, struggled to move at all. By the time they’d gotten untangled from each other after falling one more time—it was like one of those old Laurel and Hardy shticks—the man had pulled himself together, staggered up, and gone lurching back toward Canyon Road, hands still held to his head, and quickly disappeared around the edge of the building.

  “What the hell—” Chris began, but Alix was already at the grouping of piñons. “It’s what I was afraid of,” she said, sliding out the object she’d seen land there and leaning it against the bushes. With the moon just beginning to glide into an area of thinning clouds, there was no mistaking what it was.

  “It’s my O’Keeffe!” Chris exclaimed. “Oh, no, is it…is it…”

  “I don’t see any damage,” Alix said, “but let’s get it inside, in the light.”

  “My God,” Chris mumbled angrily, as Alix gathered it carefully up, “he was stealing it—my painting. If we hadn’t come along at just at that moment…”

  She stopped, and from the expression on her face Alix could see that the same thought had belatedly struck both of them.

  Liz. Where was Liz? What had happened to her? Why hadn’t the commotion awakened her?

  They ran into the office. “Liz, are you here? Where are you?” Chris called, while Alix fumbled along the wall for the light switch.

  Once she’d found it and the bright ceiling fluorescents had flickered on, Chris’s questions answered themselves. Along one wall, behind the now-empty easel, was a burgundy leather-covered couch. Liz was stretched out on it with her mouth open and her eyes closed. Her arms and legs were flung awkwardly and unnaturally about, like a puppet’s, and her body was sharply twisted at the hips. On the floor behind her head lay a burgundy pillow from the couch.

  “Liz?” whispered Chris, cautiously approaching. She knelt beside the couch, grasped Liz by the shoulders, and shook gently; then less gently. “Liz!”

  Alix had never seen a dead body before, other than at a funeral, but there was no doubt in her mind about what she was looking at now. She put a hand on Chris’s arm. “I don’t think she’s going to answer,” she said quietly, reaching for her cell phone. “I think we need to call 911.”

  The next two hours went by in an exhausting blur. A fire department emergency vehicle arrived almost before Alix had hung up, and a police car with two uniformed cops showed up no more than a minute later. Then a crime scene van, then a private car from which a Detective Wilkin emerged, and then another car with a deputy medical examiner who hurried into the office to look at Liz’s body.

  Alix and Liz were separately questioned by the two officers, and then again, more extensively, by the detective, who used a tiny tape recorder to take down their statements. They were driven to the police building on Camino Estrada, where they were again separately questioned, even more extensively, by a Lieutenant Mendoza.

  Mendoza was a resourceful interrogator, and under his expert, persistent probing Alix was able to dredge up from her memory a few details about the man who had crashed into them and run off: He was big, at least six-three, and big-boned. Reddish hair, short reddish beard. Or it could have been blond; the light hadn’t been that good. And he was a pipe smoker, a heavy pipe smoker. Geoff had once been a heavy pipe smoker too, and she was familiar with the way the pipe tobacco saturated his clothing. Mendoza, interested, asked her if she recognized the kind of tobacco, but all she could tell him was that it wasn’t the same blend her father smoked. She was finally allowed to leave a little after ten. Chris was being kept longer—because, Alix assumed, she could provide more background information about Liz.

  Mendoza sent her back to the Hacienda in a car, but she asked instead to be dropped off at the central plaza, still fairly lively at this time of night. She thought that seeing ordinary people ambling around the square, eating at the restaurants, doing ordinary things, might settle her nerves a little, which it did, but only a little. She strolled around it twice and then walked the few blocks to the hotel. There she left a note for Chris to call her if she got back from police headquarters by midnight. At twelve thirty, with no word yet from Chris, she gave up and went to bed. She lay staring at the beamed ceiling for another hour, nerves buzzing away, before she finally drifted off into an on-again, off-again sleep.

  Twenty miles south of Santa Fe, on the road to Albuquerque, in the old mining town of Los Cerrillos, Brandon Teal was also having trouble getting to sleep. He was sitting in the dark, rocking disconsolately back and forth, on the rickety porch of what had once been the offices of the Spanish Belle silver mine, but was now his home and workshop. Brandon Teal was a painter, and a good one, which made his current predicament—“predicament” was putting it mildly—all the more appalling. His head continued to throb despite the four aspirins, and the clumsily bandaged four-inch gash at his hairline continued to seep blood, but these were the least of his worries.

  Questions for which he had no answers racketed around his skull like ball bearings in a can. Had they seen his face? Could they identify him? Who were they? Were the police already hunting for him? Should he go off somewhere else for a while, or would leaving suddenly only call attention to him? The same went for the beard: shave it off or not shave it off? Above all—and this one would never be answered—how could he have been stupid enough, and greedy enough, to get himself into this horrible mess?

  He reached down beside him for what had been an unopened pint-bottle of Wild Turkey when he’d taken it out of the cabinet, but was now half empty. He gagged as it went down. Teal was no drinker, and all the alcohol was doing was making him sick and muddying his brain. What he needed—needed desperately—was someone to tell him what to do.

  He stumbled into his studio, found one of the telephones, and clumsily punched in a number with deadened fingers that felt more like wood than flesh.

  CHAPTER 9

  Ted Ellesworth had been around long enough to know that police officers tended to be protective of their turf, especially when it was the FBI that was doing the trespassing. And, if truth be told, this was understandable; the Bureau could sometimes be just a wee bit overbearing and officious. But if Santa Fe Detective Lieutenant Eduardo Mendoza was annoyed by Ted’s presence in his office the next morning, he didn’t show it. The Santa Fe police department had been called by Washington earlier that morning (at Ted’s request) and told that Special
Agent Ellesworth was in town and would like to pay a courtesy call on the officer in charge of investigating the previous night’s homicide at the Blue Coyote Gallery. Mendoza, who must have been up to his ears in details, had nevertheless cleared the hour from eight to nine a.m., his first hour back in the office, for Ted, and had received him with all good grace. Coffee was offered and accepted. Donuts were offered and turned down.

  Once Ted had explained what he was doing in Santa Fe, and after they had amiably assured each other that neither had any intention of stepping on the other’s toes, they got down to business. A horse-faced, long-nosed forty-year-old wearing a frayed University of New Mexico Lobos baseball cap, Mendoza had shown real interest on hearing that the FBI was in the middle of a fraud investigation involving Liz’s gallery. Indeed, he had as many questions for Ted as Ted had for him, so it wasn’t until almost eight thirty that they got to the murder. Ted had been forthcoming with information, and Mendoza proved to be the same.

  “Okay, the two of them called 911 at 8:06,” Mendoza was saying, “and according to them it couldn’t have been more than three, four minutes after they ran into the big guy with the painting—or vice-versa, I guess I should say. They think he hurt his head when he took his tumble, so that might turn out to be a help in finding him. We contacted the hospital emergency room, but the only head injury they had all night was a fly fisherman who hooked his own ear.”

  “There’s fly-fishing around here?”

  “Sure, plenty.”

  “Well, could the women provide a description?”

  “Yeah, a pretty good one, considering. They both agree he was male, they both agree he was big—six-three or six-four, two-hundred-plus pounds. Beefy, not fat. White. Short red hair. The London woman thinks he had a reddish beard too, but LeMay doesn’t remember it. And they both remember he stank of tobacco. London’s pretty sure it was pipe tobacco.”

  Ted nodded. “Not bad, but are you sure it’s not all a fish story? I mean, do you think it’s possible that they might have done it themselves and invented this guy to lead you off on a wild goose chase?”

  “No way. We considered it, of course, and for more reasons than I have time to go into, it doesn’t compute. No, their story holds up. And then our CSI guys got some fresh blood off the statue they said he smacked into, so that holds up too. And that should also provide us with some DNA, but, you know…” He shrugged.

  “Right,” Ted said. “It’s not going to do you much good unless you have something to match it against. Any fingerprints?”

  “The picture’s full of them, but most of them are London’s and a few of Coane’s. Then some others that might be promising, pretty clear too, but, you know, same problem—”

  “Not going to do much good unless you have something to match them against,” they both said together.

  “What about TOD?” Ted asked. Time of death.

  “ME says she’d been dead no more than two hours when he got to her. That’s all he’s willing to say until he does the autopsy. That, and that the cause of death was suffocation, probably done with the pillow that was on the floor.”

  “So you’re pretty sure this guy is your killer?”

  Mendoza waggled his hand, palm-down—a maybe, maybe not motion. “That’s the most probable scenario around here, yeah. Either she caught him stealing the picture and he killed her—”

  “Or he had some other reason for killing her, and he took the picture to make it look like a robbery.”

  “You got it.” Mendoza got up to pour himself more coffee from the pot on a side table and held the pot up. “Want some more?”

  Ted covered his mug with hand. “No, thanks.” The coffee had been a typical police-station brew, too strong to start with, and too long in the pot; one mug of it was plenty. “You said ‘most probable scenario.’ Does that mean you have some less probable ones?”

  “More than I can count.” Mendoza sighed as he dropped back into his chair. “Our victim here was not what you would call a well-liked lady. She changed men like other women change shoes, and apparently there are a lot of pissed-off guys out there, mostly so-called artists. And the other gallery owners weren’t crazy about her either. She stiffed a lot of people over the years, one way or another. A lot of ’em have grudges. We already have a dozen people in town we want to talk to about it, and there’ll probably be more before we’re finished.”

  “Uh-huh. But if it was one of these others who killed her, where does the guy who was taking the painting fit in?”

  Another shrug from Mendoza. “I don’t know—crime of opportunity? He shows up for some reason or other, sees she’s dead, sees the painting, figures what the hell, and takes off with it.”

  “And has the rotten luck to run smack into the two women,” Ted said doubtfully. “Could be, I suppose.”

  “Yeah, I think it’s a long shot too, but I don’t want to rule it out. We’ve got some out-of-town possibilities too: this LeMay woman and a guy named…” He checked an open file folder on his desk. “Templeton, Craig Templeton. He piloted the plane that got her here. Him, LeMay, and Coane go back a long way, and they got themselves into some kind of a messy love triangle four or five years ago. Those things can get nasty.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Ted with a smile.

  “Now LeMay was pretty open about it with us. Haven’t talked to Templeton yet. He’s being interviewed right now, I think.”

  “Four or five years ago? For a crime of revenge or jealousy, that’s an awfully long time to wait, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yeah, I would. Ordinarily. But look at it this way: the two of them show up in Santa Fe at two o’clock in the afternoon—along with this Alix London—and by eight o’clock Coane is dead. Kind of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes, I guess I would,” Ted said slowly. “And as for Alix London—look, I don’t mean to be telling you your job, but if I were you I’d check her out pretty carefully too.”

  Mendoza frowned. “Yeah? Why?”

  “The name ‘London’—is it familiar to you?”

  “You mean before yesterday? No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  “You don’t remember Geoffrey London? This would have been in New York, eight or nine years ago—”

  Mendoza held up his hand. “Oh, oh, yeah, I remember. This was that high-society art expert or whatever he was that turned out to be a big-time forger? He bilked some people out of a lot of—wait a minute, he’s related to her? Uncle? Father?”

  “Father.”

  “Ah. Well, look, Ted, that’s interesting, but I don’t believe in guilt by association.”

  “You don’t? I do, or at least in suspicion by association. But there’s more. I got a call from our op specialist this morning just before I came over. She did some digging, and it turns out that the power behind the scenes, the one who arranged it so that LeMay ‘just happened’ to settle on Alix London to be her consultant out of all the people she could have chosen, was…I’ll give you one guess.”

  “Her father,” Mendoza correctly mused. “Mm, so what are you thinking? That maybe the picture is a fake that her daddy made and Alix is here as his accomplice—to certify it isn’t a fake?” His chair creaked as he leaned back in it. “You know, to tell the truth I was wondering if there was something a little hinky about her myself. One of the things she told us was that she thought Liz Coane might have tried to kill her.”

  “Kill her? That’s crazy.”

  “Well, not altogether. The watchamacallit, the casita she was in at her hotel? Damn thing blew up this afternoon. I heard the explosion from here. Propane leak. Missed her by less than a minute.”

  “No kidding,” Ted said thoughtfully. “But you don’t really think—”

  “I don’t know,” said Mendoza. “Ordinarily, I’d say she was just being a little paranoid about it, which’d be understandable, but with Coane herself getting killed a few hours later…well, I don’t know. Something’s going on.”

  Ted s
at back and reflected for a moment. “Eduardo,” he said, “the homicide case you’re working on and the fraud case I’m working on—has it occurred to you that they might be different parts of the same story? That maybe Coane was killed because of her part in the scam she was involved in?”

  Mendoza smiled. “Nope, not until half an hour ago, when you walked in and laid this forgery stuff on me. Now, I think: could be. We don’t get too many homicides in Santa Fe, you know, and we don’t have a whole lot of exploding casitas either. To get both of them on the same day, involving the same set of people, well…”

  Ted nodded. “Right, you have to wonder. And who’s the link between them? Alix London.” A thought struck him, and after a moment he said thoughtfully: “The painting that the guy was taking from Coane’s place. What was it?”

  “It was a painting. What do you mean, what was it?”

  “I mean do you know who painted it, or what it was of?”

  Mendoza consulted his file again but came up empty this time. He rose, went to the door of his office, and opened it to talk to one of his detectives in the bullpen. “Hey, Jock, the painting from the Coane investigation—does it have some kind of a name or something?”

  Ted heard paper shuffle for a few seconds, and then the answer floated back through the doorway. “Yeah, it’s got a label on the back, Lieutenant. It says, ‘Cliffs at Ghost Ranch, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1964.’”

  “I knew it!” Ted exclaimed. “That’s the painting that was sitting on the easel in Coane’s office when I was there in the afternoon. She told me the name of it. LeMay’s supposed to be buying it, and London’s the ‘expert’ she’s brought along to evaluate it.”

  Mendoza nodded thoughtfully. “Interesting.”