The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery)

by Charlotte Elkins

  “The vastness of the universe?”

  “That, too, of course, but mostly I see the tarp under my eleven-year-old Volvo after I’ve finished its six-month maintenance.” He grinned, hearing her groan. “Seriously, though, you’re talking to the wrong guy. Artistic value just isn’t my line, but I can tell you this much: People must like it because it’s the museum’s number-one attraction. As determined by the latest thing in eyeball mono-macro-moto-ridiculization.”

  “I don’t even want to know what that means. But the thing I’m after is . . . are you satisfied it’s an authentic Pollock?”

  Now a look of genuine surprise. “You’re not?”

  She pulled in a deep breath. “I’m not, no.”

  “Okay, you got me. What’s wrong with it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said miserably. “Not specifically, not yet. But I do have some serious doubts—”

  “Hello there, children. Should you be dawdling like this? Staff meeting resumes in ten minutes, and you know Mrs. B,” a new voice interjected.

  “Not my problem,” Jerry said. “Nobody invited me.”

  “Fortunate man,” said the tall, dignified newcomer with a smile.

  He was the curator of Paintings, Prentice Vandervere, for whom Alix had developed genuine admiration—a sort of platonic, scholarly crush—during her three years at Harvard almost a decade before, when she had taken several classes from him. Kind, modest, and thoughtful, it was Vandervere who had instilled in Alix some of her most fundamental ethical and aesthetic values. The monthly Sunday afternoon teas (complete with crumpets and finger sandwiches) that he and his wife held at their house for students and faculty were among her happiest memories from her Harvard days. Learning that he was at the Brethwaite had been a great surprise and was probably the nicest thing that had happened to her since coming to Palm Springs. She was pleased to find him little changed from those days: his hair had thinned and receded, but his bearing was as erect as ever, notwithstanding the unbendable knee he lugged around as a souvenir of his service to his country; his straight, strong prow of a nose projected as proudly as ever; and his Clark Gable mustache was as meticulously trimmed as it had been ten years ago, if grayer.

  “Prentice,” she said (she was having trouble calling him anything but ‘professor,’ but he had gently insisted), “what’s your opinion of this painting?”

  “As you know, Alix, the post-war movements are not among those I claim to understand or even really appreciate, so—”

  A memory of one of his musing, conversational Harvard lectures suddenly jumped up in her mind and made her laugh. “When I encounter a de Kooning, or a Twombly, or a Pollock in the company of students,” he had said, “I find myself in a quandary. Should I pretend I understand what it’s saying, or should I say what I honestly think? Or should I simply throw in the sponge and suggest we go and have lunch? I am ashamed to say I usually choose the last.”

  The first few times she’d heard him say this kind of thing, she’d reacted with the indignation that such narrow-minded observations from hidebound old professors deserve—especially from a liberal-minded young representative of the new generation. But it hadn’t taken long before she was seeing things his way.

  “So I am dubious about the worth of my opinion in this case,” he continued now. “But aside from that, I most certainly do have a problem with it. More to the point, however, what is your opinion?”

  “Frankly, when I look at it, I’m a little—”

  “A little overwhelmed?” inquired the blond, good-looking man who had come noiselessly up behind them: Clark Calder, slimly built, boyishly handsome, with a stylishly shaggy, Ivy League haircut, a confident air, a winning smile that crinkled up the corners of his eyes, and—as far as Alix was concerned—an altogether too pleased-with-himself quality, like a snake that has just made a satisfying dinner of a mouse. Or is about to. “A little awestruck? A little—”

  “A little concerned, actually.”

  “Oh? In what way?”

  “Well, well,” Prentice said, “I’d better be off to the meeting. I prefer to be on the early side.”

  Clark grinned at him. “Want to be sure to get your paws on those yum-yums before the rest of the gluttonous horde, eh, Prentice?”

  Alix had taken a dislike to Clark the first time she’d met him, when he’d been delegated by Mrs. B to show her around the museum. He’d done so, but with that phony, bright-eyed smile plastered on his face and the air of a man who could hardly believe how sexy he was, and who had a million really important things he needed to be doing. And now, seeing this guy, this shallow, callow bean counter, treat her revered, eminently civil old professor this way, she bristled anew. Creep, she thought.

  But Prentice responded only with a polite, strained smile, and left.

  “You know, Jerry,” Clark said, watching him go, “I don’t think that man likes me.” The smile broadened, the crinkles deepened. Alix expected a wink and she got one.

  “Don’t look at me,” Jerry said. “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

  “Really, it surpasseth understanding,” said Clark. “But Alix, what ‘concerns’ you about our prize possession here?”

  “The museum’s number-one attraction, so I hear,” Jerry offered. “As determined by the latest thing in eyeball mono-macro-moto-ridiculization.” Never let a good line go to waste, that was Jerry’s motto.

  Clark smiled. Alix didn’t. She hesitated before taking it any further without something more than a feeling to go on, but inasmuch as the cat was halfway out of the bag . . . “I assume you’re satisfied it’s a genuine Pollock?” she said.

  “And you’re not?” Theatrically, he clapped his hand to his forehead. “God help us, the Art Whisperer strikes again!”

  This time she did smile, but weakly. Lately she was hearing more references to herself as the Art Whisperer, and while at first it had amused and even flattered her, it was getting a little old now.

  “I wondered how long it was going to take,” Clark went on playfully. “I mean, I knew it was going to happen, of course—your reputation precedes you—but do you really have to do your thing with our Pollock? Couldn’t you pick another one? Any other one? Please? There’s a Childe Hassam in Gallery Two that’s always gotten on my nerves. Let me show it to you and maybe you could—”

  “Clark, I’m serious. There’s something . . . something not right with this picture. I know it’s there, I can almost see it, it’s trying to jump out at me, but—”

  “But at this point you can’t say what it is. Am I right?”

  She nodded dejectedly. “Yet.”

  “Ah, the old connoisseur’s eye.” He threw an amused wink at Jerry.

  Connoisseur’s eye, another term that was starting to bug her. Or not the term so much—it had once been used with respect—but the implied derision that often went along with it nowadays. To a lot of people in the art world—and Clark’s manner indicated he was one of them—the idea that anyone could claim such a faculty was either snake oil or, more tolerantly, self-delusion. The only ways to determine the authenticity of a painting, so the prevailing wisdom went, were through painstaking scholarship and rigorous scientific analysis—evidence—and not some nebulous, mysterious “expert” first impression that was too woolly to put into words.

  Those who took this position, and they were the majority, had a lot of history on their side. The pronouncements of so-called connoisseurs, including many of the most respected ones, had in the end been proven wrong again, and again, and again. Alix was well aware of this, but held fast to her confidence in her own instinctive judgments. Like plenty of others, she had the training, scholarship, and experience it took to offer a credible opinion on whether a painting was fake or not, but like hardly anybody else, she was also blessed (or cursed, it sometimes seemed) with the innate ability to unconsciously reduce it all into an ins
tant, totally intuitive judgment call that she couldn’t back up with words—not at first. She couldn’t do it with every painting or every painter, but when the feeling was there, and when the artist concerned was an artist she “connected” with, there was no mistaking it. This was the fifth time her connoisseur’s eye had spotted a fake where none had been suspected, and so far she was batting four for four. Every single one had turned out not to be what it was supposed to be.

  There was one thing that was making her nervous this time around, though. Jackson Pollock was an artist with whom she didn’t connect. She didn’t especially like his paintings, and she’d never worked on one of them. So what could she possibly “see” in Untitled? That worried her, made her uncertain.

  “Listen, Alix,” Clark said more seriously, “are you planning to bring this up at the staff meeting?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I want to give it some more thought before I say anything to Mrs. B. I probably shouldn’t have said anything to you yet either, but you sort of caught me thinking out loud.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that. This painting is her pride and joy, Alix. Between you and me, I don’t think it’s one of his best works, but it’s terribly dear to her. I know she comes off as a tough old bird, but behind those hawk-like eyes she’s a pretty vulnerable old woman, and something like this would just . . . well, it’d be a hell of a blow.”

  “I know, but . . . well, don’t you think I have an obligation—”

  “I’m not sure if I see it as an obligation, but I understand where you’re coming from, and you have to do what you see as the right thing. Look, how about this: You keep thinking about it, see if you can figure out what it is that’s bothering you, and in the meantime I’ll gather up the materials we have on the painting—provenance, evaluations, forensic testing, and so on. It’s pretty weighty stuff, you’ll see. Then let’s meet again . . . today is Thursday, so give it a few days, and let’s say, oh, Tuesday, first thing in the morning, and compare notes. After that, if you still feel that Mrs. B needs to hear, then be my guest. You have my blessing.”

  “That’s fair enough. I’d like to have more to go on too before I say anything.”

  “Good. And now we’d better be off to the meeting.”

  “Hey, Alix,” Jerry called after them as they started across the room.

  He stood glowering at her from behind those big glasses, with his arms sternly crossed. “Where’s my nickel?”

  “Wait, hold up a second, would you, Clark?” she asked as they went by a wall of drawings.

  “A second’s about all we have. What is it?”

  “These two drawings,” Alix said, pointing. They were displayed one above the other, in simple wooden frames, each about ten inches by twelve. One was of a basket of pears, the other was of a mountain, both done in pencil, rather roughly; more than sketches but less than serious studies. They were both by the early twentieth-century American artist Marsden Hartley.

  “Uh-huh, what about them?”

  “I understand they’ll both be in the auction.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s right. Come on, we’d better get moving.”

  “Jerry told me yesterday they’d be sold as a single lot and the estimate would be fifty to seventy thousand,” she said as he hustled her off. “And I was thinking: I have a friend—a collector—who might be interested in bidding on a couple of Hartleys. Would there be any problem with her coming down and looking at them here, before the official viewing at the gallery in San Francisco? She’s got the time right now, but I don’t know about—”

  “Not a problem at all. If she likes them enough”—and the gleaming killer smile flashed—“she could make us an offer I couldn’t refuse right on the spot and not have to bid against anybody later on. She could take them home with her. But it’d have to be in the next day or two, before the catalogue’s mailed out.”

  “Seriously? She could do that? Is that legal?”

  It seemed impossible, but his eyes crinkled up even more. “Surely you’re not suggesting that I would propose anything extra-legal? No, seriously, yes, of course it’s legal. These—”

  His cell phone buzzed before he could finish. “I see,” he said into it. “I understand. Certainly.” He snapped it closed. “Mrs. B’s gotten held up. Meeting’s postponed until eleven fifteen. All in a day’s work. I’ll see you then. Be there.” A convivial wink, and he was gone.

  The thick, poured-concrete walls of the museum made cell-phone reception iffy, so Alix went out to one of the four twelve-foot-wide stone discs that served as entrance steps, where she knew reception was good. There wasn’t a right angle or a straight line in the place; everything was curved, and the four interlocking discs at the entrance mimicked the four giant discs that made up the building itself. Alix sat down on one to make her call. She dialed a number in Seattle.

  “Alix? Hi, what’s up?”

  The woman on the other end was her friend Christine LeMay. When they’d first met a little over a year earlier, Chris had recently resigned from her job as an IT systems/communications analyst at Sytex, an “international health care information technology advisory consultancy.” Considering that those alarming muddles of multisyllabic words were beyond the comprehension of a non-techie like Alix, and that Chris knew next to nothing about art, which was Alix’s specialty, they made an unlikely pair. More than that, Chris was big and raw-boned, a talkative, outspoken six-footer-plus with a startling honk for a laugh, given to flamboyant shawls and serapes and multiple rows of jangling bracelets. She was at her sparkling, noisy, funny best in crowds. Alix was the opposite. At five-nine, she was low-key and reserved, and she dressed conservatively (“classically” was the way she preferred to think about it). She kept her thoughts largely to herself, and she liked the quiet life. Well, to a point.

  Chris had made a great deal of money when Sytex had gone public and her options had matured; she was bent on using some of it to develop a respectable art collection, and a curator friend at the Seattle Art Museum had suggested that Alix London was just the person to help her build it. Whatever the reason, they had hit it off from Day One, and Alix had wound up doing a lot more than help her with her art collection. It had been a subtle intervention or two on Alix’s part that had gotten Chris to mend her threadbare relationship with Craig Templeton, the man who had once been the love of her life and who was now her husband. Chris had been enormously grateful and was to this day determined to repay the favor. Nothing she’d come up with had come close to panning out (they had different tastes in men), but Alix appreciated her intentions and they were now close friends. They worked well together, too, on Chris’s budding art collection—Alix a patient teacher, Chris an eager student—and Chris was now well on the way to developing a fine collection of American Moderns (that most permeable and vague art classification), including Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Hart Benton, George Bellows, and Grant Wood.

  But no Marsden Hartleys.

  She was excited the moment she heard. “Of course I’m interested. Are they really any good?”

  “They’re not what you’d call ‘finished,’ but they’re nicely done. There’s a liveliness to them, and they’re . . . interesting; historically, I mean. You can see Cézanne’s influence all over them.”

  “Fifty to seventy thousand, huh? For both of them? Does that seem in the ballpark to you? Sounds kind of cheap to me. Oh, my God, listen, to me, seventy thousand dollars is cheap. I’ve become a terrible person.” And there was the honk. “Who woulda thunk it?”

  “Well, we all have our crosses to bear, you know, and yours is being nouveau riche. My heart aches for you. Anyway, the reason it sounds so cheap to you is that you’re used to paying for oil paintings. These are pencil, and they don’t bring nearly as much; people aren’t that interested. And don’t forget, art market prices don’t have much to do with quality. They—”

  “I know. You’v
e been telling me about once an hour for the last year: Art market prices depend on art market prices. Whatever they went for at the last auction is your best predictor for how they’ll be priced at the next one. Except higher.”

  “Very good. I didn’t realize you’d been paying attention. I’ll tell you this, though: They’re workmanlike and attractive, and I certainly wouldn’t mind having them on my own walls. They have a kind of rough energy—”

  “Okay, okay, you’ve sold me. I want to see for myself. I’ll be there tomorrow. What time would be good for you?”

  “Whatever’s convenient for you.” Chris had a membership in an outfit called ShareJet, giving her a one-sixteenth time-share in a very snazzy Gulfstream 200, which meant she could fly just about anywhere she wanted almost any time she chose, and do it in fantastic comfort.

  “Well, let’s see . . .” Alix could hear her clicking away at a computer keyboard. “. . . It’s about a thousand miles, so I’d have to allow about three hours, all told. How about eleven? I imagine I could drag myself to the airport in time to fly out at eight. It won’t be easy, mind you.”

  “Wonderful! Call me before you land and I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

  “No, not necessary. I’ll just get a taxi and have it drop me at the museum. Okay, eleven o’clock, see you—no, wait, I’d better book a hotel reservation for a couple of nights. Where are you staying?”

  “I just moved a couple of days ago to a lovely little place, the Villa Louisa, built in 1926, by some big silent-movie director, with a bunch of guesthouses around the swimming pool. I’m in one of the guesthouses.”

  “You moved? Why? Where were you before?”

  “Oh, they put me up at the Colony Palms. Very nice and everything, but awfully . . . I don’t know, not for me. A big, fancy place, ultra-hip and trendy, bright colors everywhere, the bars jumping at eleven in the morning. Rock music playing all day at the swimming pool, tons of Beautiful People dressed in up-to-the-minute—no, make that up-to-the-second—fashions. You know.”