The Trouble with Mirrors (An Alix London Mystery Book 4)

by Charlotte Elkins

  “I have no idea, really. This kind of thing—well, art in general, for that matter—has just about no inherent value. It’s worth what the buyer thinks it’s worth. If somebody likes it enough he might be willing to pay five hundred dollars, maybe more. Who knows, maybe a thousand. But even if he was—”

  “No, ma’am, I’m thinking a whole lot more than that.” He picked up the magazine to show the mirror more clearly. “I’m way out of my league when it comes to art, but this sure looks to me like something you’d see in a museum, something from the fifteen or sixteen hundreds.”

  “I can see why you’d say that, and plainly, that was Tiny’s intention. But I can assure you, it was made in the 1990s by my friend.”

  “Can you? How positive are you that it isn’t the real thing—some genuine, really valuable old piece by some artist from back then?”

  “Completely.”

  Chris cut in. “Anyway, why would anybody give something that valuable to a twelve-year-old girl?” she asked Durando. “Especially without even bothering to tell her what it was.”

  “That I don’t know. But I do know that people have a way of seeing what they expect to see, and if you were told when you were twelve that your uncle or whoever made it for you, and you believed it—and why wouldn’t you?—well, then, from then on, wouldn’t you—”

  Chris had begun to laugh. “Detective, I don’t think you realize who you’re talking to here.” She tapped the magazine’s cover. “This is the Art Whisperer herself. She can tell the difference between the real thing and a fake at forty yards.”

  Alix demurred. “Twenty yards, maybe.”

  “Okay, twenty yards. In fact, that’s exactly what the FBI uses her for. When they don’t know what they’ve got, they call Alix.”

  Durando held up both hands. “Okay, you win. It was just an idea. Who am I to argue with the Art Whisperer? Either of you got any explanation for what was behind this, then?”

  They didn’t.

  He nodded, picked up his cup and drank most of what was left, although it must have been cold by then. “Well, ladies—”

  “Do we need to keep from touching anything?” Chris asked, seeing that he was wrapping up. “Are we expecting some crime scene people?”

  His expression went from poker-faced to a sort of tolerant resignation. This was something he heard a lot—the CSI effect, cops called it: the unfortunate perception, derived from TV programs, that police forces had available to them an infinite supply of DNA analysts, crime scene analysts, forensic chemists, pathologists, anthropologists, and every other kind of -ist that you could name, and that they were used as a matter of course.

  “Ma’am, I have to tell you,” Durando said, “our crime scene resources are kind of stretched at the moment. In a case like this, where nobody’s been threatened or harmed, and there’s not much probability of catching the guy, and the only property damage is a bent window catch and some holes in the wall, and according to you the value of the missing items is pretty minimal, well—”

  “We shouldn’t expect them any time soon,” Chris finished for him.

  “That’s about it, but don’t tell my sergeant I said so. It’s a question of resources and priorities.”

  “Detective,” Alix said, “that mirror I was talking about has an awful lot of sentimental value to me. Would you truthfully say there’s any chance at all of getting it back?”

  He gave her a friendly, apologetic smile. “Well, to be perfectly honest . . .”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Don’t get the idea that I’m saying we won’t be on the lookout, ma’am. We’ll do what we can, really, and who knows, things might work out. You wouldn’t have a photo of it you could let me have, would you?”

  “No, I’m afraid—”

  “Sure you do,” Chris said. “Right here.” She picked up the magazine. “You can have this, Detective.”

  He took it. “Pretty piece, that mirror,” he said. “I’d miss it too.” He stood up. “Okay, I’ll keep an eye out, I promise. Hey, thanks for the coffee, that hit the spot.” He gave each of them his card and was gone.

  “Whew,” Alix said. “This is really exhausting. Ah, well, I guess I’d better call Geoff now and tell him about it.”

  “Alix,” Chris said, in a change of voice that indicated she was assuming the role of Elder and Wiser Sister, which she took on when she felt it necessary. “Your father is no doubt fast asleep, and there is no reason in the world why he has to know at this particular moment. It’ll hold until tomorrow.”

  “You’re right,” Alix said gratefully. “I’ll drive over in the morning and tell him in person, so he sees for himself that I’m all right.”

  “Good thinking. Right now, what you need is dinner: a good, healthy, nutrition-packed meal to renew those depleted energy resources. Did they give you any food on the plane?”

  “I don’t know that I’d call it food. Just the usual bag—”

  “I didn’t think so. What are you in the mood for, that might be open at midnight?”

  “Truthfully, I don’t feel up to going out, Chris. Besides, I need to do something about the window.”

  “That won’t take much. It just needs to be wedged with something so it can’t be slid open from the outside. While you do that I can go out and pick us up something. We’ll eat here. What sounds good to you?”

  “How about Mama Wu’s? I’m pretty sure that’s a twenty-four-hour place. But not a whole dinner, I just want a bunch of appetizers we can graze on—egg rolls, rumaki, crispy wonton . . .”

  “Excellent choices all. Salt, sugar, and fat, nature’s three essential food categories.” She grabbed her bag and Alix’s keys. “You grab a shower and get comfortable. Back in twenty.”

  “And barbecued ribs, don’t forget the barbecued spare ribs,” Alix yelled after her, but the door had already closed.

  “Rats,” Alix grumbled on her way to the shower. This was definitely not her day.

  CHAPTER 5

  But luck was with her this time. Chris had heard, after all. Alix could smell the barbecue sauce from the bathroom, where she’d just finished showering and had changed into a comfortable T-shirt and roomy sweatpants. When she came out she saw that Chris had found the place mats and was setting out dishes, plastic utensils, and opened cardboard cartons in the dining nook.

  “What a feast!” Alix exulted when she saw it all laid out on the table.

  Those were the last words that were spoken for a while. Alix was hungrier than she’d realized, and Chris, a rangy, raw-boned six-footer (six-two in her bare feet, actually), was a reliable trencherman, so a few minutes went by in which their only utterances were grunts and murmurs of appreciation.

  It was Chris who made the return to intelligible speech. “All right, time for the important stuff. Now you have to tell me. What’s better than getting a badge and a gun?”

  Alix looked up serenely from using her chopsticks to haul in her third wonton. “Getting a man who has a badge and a gun.”

  Chris looked back at her with a slight frown and with her head tipped to one side, like a dog that’s trying its best to figure out what you’re saying, but not having any luck. “Um . . . I’m not sure I understand?” The doubtful uptick at the end seemed to mean she thought she did understand, but couldn’t quite believe it.

  “Chris, I’m married!”

  Chris eyed her, continuing her thoughtful chewing. “You’re serious.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And it is Ted you’re talking about.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  Chris put down her chopsticks. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Chris, take my word for it. We were married in Maryland on Saturday morning. By a deputy clerk of the circuit court. We had a two-day honeymoon over the weekend. In Virginia.”

  “No, I mean I believe it, all right. I . . . just . . . don’t . . . believe it, if you know what I mean.”

  Alix, who was enjoying this immensely
, knew very well. She would have been amazed if her friend hadn’t been amazed. Ted Ellesworth, Alix’s husband of three days and eighteen hours now, was the FBI special agent in charge of the Bureau’s art squad, and it was he who had recognized the value of Alix’s unique skills and gotten her onto the approved list of FBI consultants. They had first met a couple of years ago in New Mexico and had taken instantaneous gut-level dislikes to one another. It hadn’t been pretty, and Chris had been right there to see it. Their relationship improved a little with the passage of time, but then took another nosedive a few months later, when they wound up together on assignment on a Mediterranean cruise—so much so that, afterward, both had gone to extreme and sometimes excruciatingly elaborate measures to avoid encountering one another on any of the next three FBI assignments that she had taken under his nominal supervision. A mutual attraction had been there, all right—in spades—and both of them knew it, but a slew of frustrating misunderstandings, misperceptions, and mistaken assumptions had kept them at loggerheads.

  More recently, only two months ago, they’d been more or less thrown together again in Palm Springs, on a matter involving a suspect Jackson Pollock painting. They’d taken advantage of the situation to sit down with one another and try to figure out what had gone wrong. They’d succeeded, too, with heartfelt mea culpa from both sides for the misapprehensions they’d held or inadvertently fostered. And the result had been—well, the result had been that they’d gone and gotten married this past weekend, on Alix’s very next trip east.

  “It’s not that I’m not happy for you,” Chris said, “because I am—I think it’s wonderful. And you know how much I love Ted. But isn’t it a little, uh, rash? You’ve just gotten back on speaking terms after staying miles away from each other for months and months. Okay, you took that sailing trip together after Palm Springs—for what, a week?—but is that enough to get married on? You hardly know each other.”

  “Well, you know, I’m a little on the conservative side when it comes to . . . um, affairs and such—”

  Chris honked. “No kidding, tell me about it.”

  “—and, believe it or not, Ted is too.”

  “I do believe it, and that’s what’s so surprising about all this. I would have expected a couple of poky old straight-arrow types like you to be a bit more, well, prudent.”

  “Prudent how?”

  “Well, I believe I’ve heard somewhere that people who want to get married sometimes get engaged for a while first. Now there’s an idea for you.”

  Alix shook her head. “We’re not a couple of nineteen-year-olds, Chris, who don’t know what they like or what they want out of life. We weren’t halfway through dinner that first night in DC before we came to the conclusion—both of us did—that there was no point in putting things on hold. We couldn’t be more right for each other and we knew it. So the next morning we went over to Maryland—you can go through the whole process in one day there—got our license, went to the local courthouse, and we got married.” Just hearing herself say those last few words brought another smile to her face.

  “Okay, that’s hard to argue with,” Chris said, “but here’s my next question, and this one I’m almost afraid to ask. Does this mean you’re going to be leaving Seattle for DC?”

  “Absolutely not. I’m not going anywhere.” She popped one of the two remaining spring rolls into her mouth.

  “Ted’s getting himself transferred here?”

  “Unfortunately, that’s not possible, not with him being in charge of the entire unit. It’s got to be done from Washington. So—” She gave a resigned sigh. “—We’re both staying where we are, on opposite sides of the country.”

  Chris put down the barbecued rib she’d been gnawing on and stared at her. “It’s going to be a long-distance marriage, then? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Come on now, don’t look at me like that. I don’t like it either, and neither does Ted, but it’s the best we can do under the circumstances. Me, I love my life here, and I do not want to live in the DC area. As for Ted, the DC area is where his work is—and he loves his work—so that’s where he lives. Besides, that work of his is anything but a forty-hour-a-week job, and when it’s undercover it can keep him away and incommunicado for weeks at a time. He couldn’t really commit to anything like a normal marriage, not right now, anyway.”

  “So . . . ?”

  “We’ll alternate. I’ll go back east once a month—more, if I can line up a consulting job that takes me there—and Ted will just come on out here and be with me whenever he can get away for a few days. As long as we can afford it, anyway.”

  “I guess that’s fair enough. So how long will it be now before the newlyweds get to see each other again?”

  “Well . . .” Alix hesitated. Even to her own ears, the more she got into the details, the more untenable they sounded. “The fact is, I don’t exactly know. I don’t even know the next time I can talk to him. He went out on an assignment this morning, an undercover one, which probably means he’s going to be completely out of touch for at least—well, I don’t really have any idea.”

  “You mean you’re not even allowed to talk to him on the telephone?”

  “Unfortunately, that’s exactly what I mean. You know Ted, he does it by the book. And the book says that while you’re undercover you don’t break that cover, except in an emergency. A real emergency.”

  “Like what, if somebody’s life depends on it?”

  Alix nodded. “That’s it.”

  “But I thought you told that detective you were going to tell Ted about the burglary. How are you planning on doing that?”

  “Not Ted himself, Chris. I don’t even know where he is, let alone what he’s doing. I’ll call Jamie Wozniak at his office in the morning, though. She’ll get the ball rolling in his absence.”

  “You don’t even know where he is,” Chris echoed wonderingly.

  “Right.”

  “And you don’t know when he’ll be back.”

  “Right.”

  “And you’re totally out of touch for you don’t know how long.”

  “’Fraid so.”

  “And you’ve been married for all of three days.”

  Alix sighed. “Look, Chris, we’ll just have to play it by ear and see how it goes. I certainly don’t expect it to stay this way forever.”

  “Well, I hope it works for you, kid.” Alix could see that she was trying to play down her doubts. “You know I wish you both the very, very best.”

  “I know you do, Chris, thanks. If we can have anywhere near as good a marriage as you and Craig have, I’ll be happy. And after all, you two have pretty much the same problems, and you deal with them just fine.”

  Chris’s husband was a pilot with ShareJet, a fractional jet ownership outfit. Although he was based in Seattle, his schedule was anything but predictable, and he was often off to destinations all over the world, sometimes for eight or ten days at a time, while he shuttled clients around or laid over waiting to make the return trip.

  “Oh, sure,” Chris said, while trying to snag a steamed mini-dumpling with her chopsticks. “We have exactly the same problems—except that I always know just where he is and what he’s doing, and when he’ll be back, and we’re in touch three or four times a day the whole time, with texting, or telephone, or email, and . . .”

  Alix knew all that, of course, and she was all too aware of how much more difficult the path that she and Ted had taken was going to be. It must have shown in her expression, because Chris, a first-rate reader of moods, stopped in the middle of her sentence. “Forgive me, Alix, what am I doing? Look, I know you and I know Ted, and I have no doubt, no doubt at all, that the two of you will make a go of it. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Good. Oh, the hell with it.” Chris tossed one of her chopsticks onto the table and speared the dumpling straight through the middle with the other one, then dipped it in hoisin sauce and popped it into her mouth. “What do you know, taste
s just as good this way.”

  They ate quietly for another minute or two, and then Chris suddenly sat up straight. “Whoa, it just struck me—wasn’t Ted part of the team that got your father convicted?”

  “He was, indeed.”

  “So how does he feel about having him for a son-in-law, or have you told him yet?”

  “Nope, haven’t told him yet.”

  “Oh, my. It was a long time ago and all, and long before you and Ted knew each other, of course, and Geoff is the sweetest man in the world, and I can’t imagine anyone who spent eight years in jail bearing less of a grudge about it—”

  “But?”

  “But I think there may be a teeny-tiny little difficulty there, a slight fly in the ointment.”

  “More like an elephant,” Alix said.

  “And is that why you’re not wearing a ring? I’ve been wondering.”

  “Well, two reasons. Ted did give me a beautiful ring, an antique, and I love it, but it’s too big, it’ll have to be resized. A jeweler’s got it now, and, truthfully, I’m not going to be putting any pressure on him to get it done. I need to figure out how to break the news to Geoff before I start walking around with it on my finger.”

  How Geoff was going to take the news was the one concern she’d had about her newly changed circumstances and it had been chafing away at her all weekend. Her father, Geoffrey London, had been a prominent and respected art conservator—at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no less—before morphing into the “most notorious forger of the decade” (thank you, New York Times), throwing away his reputation, eight years of his life, and every penny of the once-substantial family fortune in the doing. Alix had been nineteen at the time, and for a while it had seemed to her that her life had been destroyed as well. But now she was back on her feet, a long way from rich, but an even longer way from destitute. And quite astonishingly so was he, the owner and founder of not one but two perfectly legitimate (knock on wood), flourishing, art-related businesses in Seattle—with his old friend and fellow ex-forger, ex-con Beniamino “Tiny” Abbatista, her “zio Beni,” working productively alongside him.