The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery)

by Charlotte Elkins

  “The Stubbs,” Alix said. “Chestnut Stallion with Two Spaniels.”

  “Yes, the Stubbs. Can you explain?”

  “Explain what?” asked Madge Temple. “What about the Stubbs?” The word issue had grabbed her attention. If there was an issue in the making, she wanted in on it.

  “Alix declined to clean it,” said Clark, who had apparently been briefed earlier.

  “You declined?” Madge said. “Why? It’s our oldest painting and it looks like hell. The varnish has turned so yellow the damn stallion looks like Lassie. And then there are all those fly specks, and what about the paint blisters that are starting—”

  “I didn’t ‘decline’ to clean it, Madge, I said it can’t be cleaned.”

  “Which means you can’t clean it,” Drew said. “Maybe we need to find another—”

  “No, I meant that you couldn’t find any knowledgeable, reputable conservator who would even try.”

  “Then we know what has to be done. Our course is clear,” Alfie contributed with a swig of his bourbon-laced coffee. “Only where do we find a disreputable one?”

  Mrs. B ignored him and spoke to Alix. “Explain, please.”

  “Of course—”

  “Are you aware,” Clark interrupted, “that the Stubbs is the cornerstone of our auction, the unit that is projected to bring the greatest return?”

  “No, I wasn’t aware of that,” Alix said. “And frankly, that surprises me. It really isn’t one of his better works.”

  “That’s so,” Prentice said. “It’s little more than an oil sketch.”

  Clark’s friendly, boyish, snaky smile gleamed. “I agree with you both—I mean, who am I to disagree with you two?—but the pertinent fact here is that Stubbs’s Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath sold at Christie’s London not very long ago for more than thirty million dollars, the third highest Old Master price in auction history. So as you can imagine, that brings everything by Stubbs, including doodles on napkins, into the best-of-breed class when it comes to sales. Quality is not the issue we should be concerned with here.”

  “Quality is not the issue we should be concerned with?” Prentice echoed. “What are we aspiring to be, a used-car company, a—”

  “All very interesting,” said Mrs. B, “and pertinent, I’m sure, but can we get back to my question? Alix: Why can’t it be cleaned?”

  “It’s because of the materials he used in some of his paintings from this period, and unfortunately this is one of them.”

  George Stubbs had been a late eighteenth-century English painter known for his pictures of animals, and especially for his portraits of famous horses, the champion Gimcrack being the prime example. But apparently in an attempt to make his paintings on wood panels as smooth as enamel, he had experimented with various arcane waxy materials—some of them so obscure that they had never been identified—to thin and smooth his pigments. The problem, as Alix now told them, was that no one had yet come up with a solvent that could safely dissolve the darkened varnish without also dissolving the wax-impregnated paint underneath. Unfortunately, as Alix had determined, Chestnut Stallion was one of these paintings.

  “Well, all right, perhaps not a thorough cleaning,” Mrs. B said, “but surely a light application of mineral spirits would help at least a little without doing any harm.”

  “Not even mineral spirits. Not even water,” Alix said. “And as for pressing out the blisters, Madge, you need heat to do that, and whatever Stubbs was using has a melting point of about 140 degrees. It simply starts flowing at anything over that. Obviously, it’s been tried before with Chestnut Stallion, probably in the nineteenth century, probably more than once, which is why it looks the way it does now.”

  “Muzzy,” opined Alfie, who was half off in his own world.

  “Muzzy is the word,” agreed Alix.

  “Couldn’t you at least see if you can get rid of those damn fly specks?” Madge asked. “They’re really disgusting.”

  “I’m sorry, my opinion is that anything we do would make things worse.”

  “Prentice,” Clark said, “why have you never thought to mention this?”

  “I didn’t know it until now.”

  “You didn’t know it? You’re our curator of Paintings.” He was still smarting from his put-down by Mrs. B, Alix thought, and Prentice was taking the brunt of it. “You’re supposed to be—”

  “Yes, but I’m no conservator. I believe I have mentioned the need for a conservation specialist here at the museum.”

  For once Clark decided not to engage with him. “According to Jerry,” he said, appealing to Mrs. B, “if it were spruced up, even a little, it could go for millions. In its present condition . . . a few thousand at best. Probably no more than five figures.”

  “Then that’s the way it is,” said Mrs. B. “Clark, you will please have it removed from the auction. It was one of my father’s favorites and I really was not happy with seeing it leave us.”

  “But—”

  “Please do as I ask. The matter is closed.” She burrowed into him with those raptor eyes of hers, daring him to challenge her. Alix began to think that the reports she’d been hearing about Mrs. B’s infatuation with Clark were seriously overblown.

  “Of course, if that’s what you want,” he said now, but he wasn’t able to manage a smile this time.

  “Very good. Alix, you may leave now. Oh, one more thing. The narrative budget you turned in for the cleaning work was adequate for its purpose, but I would appreciate it if you would put together an itemized line-item budget for the restoration work and leave it on my desk before you go for the day.”

  “It’ll be there. Thank you.”

  “And now, before we move on to the agenda,” Mrs. B said, addressing the others as Alix got up, “I wish you all to understand that the organizational and personnel changes Clark discussed with you earlier today have my approval and are not open to discussion or reconsideration. Furthermore . . .”

  Alix got a brief, wan nod from Clark as she got up. Poor guy, he wasn’t having much of a day and Mrs. B wasn’t making it any easier for him. Alix almost felt sorry for him.

  Clark wasn’t the only one having a lousy day. Alix’s wasn’t going too well either. She’d known for a while now that she’d been developing a reputation for being trouble. At first it was because of her father’s notoriety; lately, she’d been earning it on her own, and this morning was a good example of why. In the space of a single hour, she had declared her suspicion that the most popular exhibit in the museum—the Pollock—was a fake, and that the item they were counting on to bring them the most money at auction—the Stubbs—wasn’t fit to go on the block and nothing could be done about it. Quite a morning’s work. They would soon start to wonder if they didn’t have a Manchurian Candidate on their hands, sent to ensure the destruction of the Brethwaite.

  She sighed and shook her head. Well, what was true was true, and she wasn’t going to pretend that everything was all right when it wasn’t. If people didn’t like it, or didn’t like her on account of it, that was their problem, not hers. Her independent-minded mother had drummed that into her head when she was still in pigtails, and even if Alix had learned that it was hardly a universal truth, she did try to live by it.

  But for now she had other things on her mind. Mrs. B’s request for an itemized line-item budget on her desk by morning had come as a surprise. She’d thought the general estimate that she’d already submitted—admittedly, rather vague; so much for materials, so much for time required, so much for travel—had been all that was required. It had taken exactly sixteen lines, and it was as much as she’d ever had to do for any previous job. This itemized budget thing, this was something else.

  There went her afternoon, she thought glumly; it would have been the first substantial chunk of free time she’d had, and she’d been hoping to take the aerial tramway up into the
San Jacintos for a few refreshing hours in the snow. Well, she’d be around for a while, the San Jacintos weren’t going anywhere, and, this being February, the snow wasn’t going to melt any time soon. She got herself a cup of coffee from the break room (you’d think a fine-art museum’s break room coffee would be something special, but it was run-of-the-mill at best, as in every other break room she’d ever been in), sat down at her worktable, and mulled things over, planning the best way to approach the task. After a couple of minutes she nodded decisively. She knew exactly where to begin.

  She picked up the telephone and dialed.

  “Chris,” she said, “what the heck is an itemized line-item budget, exactly?”

  A lot of work, as it turned out, half-and-half mind-numbing drudgery and finger-in-the-air guesswork. It not only took her the rest of the afternoon, but carried well into the evening so that she had to renege on her acceptance of the dinner invitation she’d accepted from Prentice and his wife. It was almost nine when she wearily closed her laptop, got the four densely printed sheets out of the printer, put them in Mrs. B’s mailbox, and drove to her hotel, where she tossed the laptop on the bed, popped a couple of aspirin for her itemized-line-item-budget-inspired headache, and headed out to a late dinner at Lulu California Bistro, a highly recommended Art Deco restaurant on Palm Canyon Drive, Palm Springs’ main street.

  It was a rotten choice for a solitary diner. “At Palm Springs newest and hippest restaurant” was the way it described itself on the menu, and the diners were working hard to make it so. Everybody in the place seemed to be having such a hip, noisy good time Alix thought it might make her grumpy, so she asked for a table on the sidewalk terrace instead, where the darkness and the relative quiet suited her mood better.

  Not a good idea. Although there were a couple of other lone diners, they were mostly couples enjoying a quiet, romantic dinner in the velvety evening air: laughing, clinking glasses, gazing at each other with those adoring sheep’s eyes that look so wonderful when you’re on the receiving end, and so utterly sappy when you’re on the outside looking in. It brought home all too strongly the dearth of romance in her own life. Careerwise, she was doing fine. Relationshipwise, it was another story. To put it in a nutshell, her love life was nonexistent. In the last year, Chris had several times convinced her to go out with one of her high-tech friends. “Alix, you’re petrifying right before my eyes, and you’re too damn young, and too pretty, to be a fossil,” Chris would say, or some variation of it. And Alix would go out with some perfectly nice guy, but find halfway through the evening that her smile was calcifying and she wished she were home with a good book. It wasn’t that any of them were creepy or strange—Chris never once picked a real loser—but there just wasn’t anything there. Zero sparks, zero desire to ever see the guy again. Was it today’s men? The strange, evolving times? Her?

  No, not her. She was capable of feeling sparks, all right. It was only a year ago that Ted Ellesworth had made that clear, and the pang that came with thinking about him now was almost a physical ache. How could she have thrown that budding relationship away with a few stupid, thoughtless comments? Why hadn’t she taken them back on the spot? And if she hadn’t been able to do that, why in God’s name hadn’t she apologized and explained afterward? What kind of idiot was she?

  No, stop right there. She wasn’t going to go there. Much, much too late now.

  A bowl of shrimp gazpacho, a glass of Chardonnay, and back to her hotel.

  Palm Springs has no shortage of distinguished old resort hotels dating back to the town’s heyday as a refuge for Hollywood stars in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. Some have remained quite grand and chic, even through the town’s doldrums in the ’70s and ’80s; some have turned into dowagers—still respectable, even stately, but threadbare and down at the heels; while others, once opulent or in vogue, are now downright seedy. A very few others, small ones, had started off as modest, unpretentious places, more like B&Bs than hotels, and had managed to last, thanks to a dedicated clientele through the decades. The Villa Louisa, where Alix was staying, was one of those. It consisted of a main house with a dozen or so rooms, and a set of eight cottages around a swimming pool. Everything was clean and well tended, but it had been a long time since any real money had been put into it. Faucets leaked, pipes clanked, carpets were frayed. In Alix’s view, this made the place homier, and as she’d told Chris, she liked it. Her cottage, the Greta Garbo Bungalow, named for the actress who had supposedly stayed in it for a week in 1928 when the cottages were still houses for guests of the owner, suited Alix just fine. Nothing fancy, but a big two-room place with a lovely wood-burning fireplace, which she’d lit on two of the frostier nights she’d been there.

  She’d walked the five blocks to and from the restaurant, had gotten chilled on the way back, and was looking forward to having a fire tonight too. And maybe another glass of wine in front of it, along with something good on her Kindle. If luck was with her the fire had already been laid, as it had on other days, and all she would have to do would be to press the button for the gas flame that set it alight. She’d do it the minute she walked in. But when she opened the door and flicked on the entryway light switch, nothing happened; the room stayed black.

  Damn. Well, she was familiar enough with the layout to know where the switch for the living room lamps were, and she fumbled her way along the wall toward it. She could see a little; her eyes had adapted to the dark during her walk—once one gets even a block away from the busy downtown routes, the old streets of central Palm Springs are not oversupplied with streetlights—and the soft lighting around the hotel’s pool had only slightly diminished her ability to see in the darkness.

  After a couple of steps she blinked and stared. Across the living room, the French doors that led out onto a back patio were open, and not just open, but wide-open. She stopped. Dead bulb, doors open when she was positive she hadn’t left them that way . . . no, no, this wasn’t good. She spun back around to make for the front door but was shocked into freezing when she found something—someone—directly in her path, barring her way. A person, a man, crouched and crablike. But instead of a face, he had a . . . what was it . . . a sack of some kind? . . . covering his head, with a horrible, rudimentary face painted on it: sinister little holes for the eyes, two dark, big circles for nostrils, and a mouth like a carp’s but crammed with pointy teeth, the whole thing misaligned and off-center, like one of those crude, frightening masks from some jungle midnight ritual in New Guinea or Africa, made of burlap, and meant to scare the bejesus out of adolescent initiates.

  Well, it sure did the job with her. “Hey . . . !” she yelled, more an involuntary shriek than a word.

  He switched on a tiny Maglite and threw its brilliant, blue-white beam straight into her eyes. It hit her like a blow, seeming to light up the inside of her skull, and she swatted at his hand, caught it in a lucky shot, and sent the flashlight flying across the room to hit the brickwork surrounding the fireplace and then blink out. But the brief flash had left her worse than blind, in a pulsating ocean of swirls and sparks and sizzles. Like being submerged inside that Pollock, she thought inanely.

  Her entire body was thrumming with the sudden rush of adrenaline, but her mind remained clear and steady, or at least it felt that way. This was no simple burglar caught in the act. If he’d been that, he would have run as soon as he’d heard her key in the lock, but he’d stayed to meet her head-on, and he was assuredly not there to explain himself or wish her well. He blocked her way back to the entry door, but across the room were those open French doors. What with that flash, she couldn’t see them now, but she remembered well enough where they were and ran for them. She couldn’t see the heavy wooden pedestal table and chairs that were in her way either, but unfortunately she hadn’t remembered those. Two running steps and she barreled into them hard, the table gouging her hip and drawing another yelp. Two of the chairs went clattering over the wood floor and Alix sp
rawled across the table, which tilted from her weight and dumped her facedown onto the floor as well.

  He was on her the instant she hit, scrambling and groping at her with ice-cold hands, and for a second her heart seemed to stop. Oh my God . . . was he trying to rape her? But just for a second. The next second, spurred more by anger and by sheer affront—the hell you are!—than by fear, she was kicking and flailing her way out of his grasp. Her fist smashed into his face and she felt something give way . . . his nose? She hoped so. And when he gasped with the pain or shock of it, she felt like a boxer who’d just seen his opponent stagger. She went at him with everything she had—both hands, both knees, her elbows, even her head. Grunting, panting, they struggled on the floor. She sensed a faltering, an indecision, in him, as if this wasn’t what he expected and his heart was no longer in it, and now he would run if given the chance.

  Oh, no, I’m not through with you yet, was her immediate thought, but she was sensible enough to know that was not a wise attitude to take, and she rolled away to give him room. With her returning eyesight, in the dim light coming through the doors she saw at once that neither flight nor rape was what he was thinking about. They were still sprawled on the floor, a foot apart; his arm was raised over her, and in his hand the heavy, rectangular onyx ashtray that had been on the table. Was he out of his mind? He’d crack her skull open if he caught her a good blow with that thing. She kicked out ferociously, catching him in the wrist and drawing another satisfying gasp, so that the ashtray popped out of his hand and bounced noisily off the floor. She—

  “Hey, in there! What the hell is going on?” The voice came from the next cottage, just a few feet away, and it immobilized both of them. “It’s after ten o’clock, for Christ’s sake. We’re trying to get a sick kid to go to sleep. How about showing a little consideration?”

  The intruder stared at her for a moment, or rather she thought he did. What with those dead black eye holes, it was impossible to tell. Then he jumped up and bolted for the French doors, leaping across the patio, on the way grabbing a duffel bag he must have stashed there. He took a stumble over the foot-high brick wall that served as a border, quickly recovered, and was onto the path that led to the main building and out of sight in no more than two seconds.