The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery)

by Charlotte Elkins

  “Pay no attention to that boy,” Cruz said. “He’s still finding his way. Now: the more I see here, the more I believe it is our elusive Phantom Burglar—whoever he might be. Your running into him may not have been the most pleasant experience you’ve ever had—”

  Not the worst, either. It had been anything but pleasant at the time; it had been shocking and frightening and deeply upsetting, but in retrospect, other than losing the laptop and bruising her hip, it had been . . . well, kind of enjoyable. Exciting, anyway. She’d gotten in a few good licks, and they’d felt marvelous. At the very least he was going to have a few sore spots when he woke up tomorrow morning.

  “—but it was a break for us. We now have this shoe cover, for one thing, and I’m hoping he put it on before he put on the gloves so we might be able to turn up some prints. And I’d be really surprised if he didn’t leave some DNA in your room. It’s hard to wrestle around with somebody on the floor without leaving some of yourself behind, so to speak. We’ll want to check your hands and fingernails and so on too, as soon as we’re finished here, if you don’t mind, and we’ll want to collect the clothes you were wearing—well, I guess that would be the clothes you’re wearing now. I don’t suppose you were considerate enough to bite him?”

  She shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. And at least now we have some confirmation on how it was he could pull off all those burglaries without leaving any kind of evidence. Covers his head, covers his hands, covers his feet. We figured as much, but we didn’t know it before. Now let me ask you another question. Apparently, you never screamed or yelled for help. Why not?”

  “I didn’t? No, I guess I didn’t, did I? I suppose I just didn’t think of it. I was too busy fighting with him, and it was all over in what, not even a minute.”

  “Huh,” was his non-committal response, and then: “Well, next time, scream like hell, that’s my advice.”

  “I will certainly take it into consideration, detective,” Alix said coolly. She didn’t like being told what she should have done any more than anybody else does, especially when you know the person who’s telling you that is right. “I will also make sure to bite him first. Or do you recommend it the other way around?”

  “No, seriously, screaming your head off is your best bet for bringing help, but more than that, most bad guys will turn tail if you do it loud enough. And if he doesn’t run, then at least you know what kind of person you’re dealing with: You’re in big trouble and you better be ready to go all out and fight for your life.” He eased up a little and smiled. “Which I admit, you did just fine. End of lecture.”

  He looked up, surprised, to see young Campbell, who had left only a minute ago, back at the door. “Well, that was fast.”

  “I didn’t get to the main building yet, Jake. I stopped at the first dumpster I came to. No gloves, but . . .” From behind him, as if he’d been hiding a present, he produced another plastic bag, this one with a rubber mask in it. Alix instantly saw that she’d been wrong about the cutout sack. This was what he’d been wearing over his head, a rubber mask, a crude one.

  Cruz stared at it, scowling, then looked at Campbell. “Butthead!”

  Campbell quailed, not play-acting this time. “Sir . . . ?”

  “No, I’m not calling you names, Denny, I’m telling you who this mask is supposed to be. Didn’t you ever see Beavis and Butthead?”

  “Well, yeah, sure, I . . . hey, you’re right, Jake. It is Butthead. Sonofagun.”

  “Is this what your man was wearing, Ms. London?” Cruz asked.

  “It is, yes. I’m not sure why I thought it was a canvas sack or something—because it’s so crudely done, I guess.” She was glaring at it as if the intruder’s head was still inside it.

  “Yeah, well, Butthead was a pretty crude kid,” Campbell said. “I always liked him, though.”

  “I only saw a few clips of it,” Alix said. “I thought it was pretty bad, to tell you the truth.” No, the truth would have been that one clip had been enough and she’d thought it was beyond inane, and repulsive as well, but she didn’t want to hurt the young officer’s feelings.

  Cruz was smiling. “I guess we should consider you lucky that it wasn’t Beavis you ran in to. He was the really nasty one.”

  “I don’t agree, Jake,” Campbell said with a smile of his own. “I think Ms. London would have beat the crap out of him too.”

  After the interview, Cruz took Alix back to her cottage for a walk through with him at her side, and then to provide the crime scene people with the clothes she’d been wearing, and with various biological specimens that might prove helpful in analyzing and identifying any trace evidence they came up with: fingernail scrapings, blood sample, hair sample, and so on. It wasn’t until one a.m. that the police began to wrap up, and the manager, who’d been anxiously hovering outside, immediately offered to move her to another room where she might feel safer. Alix said no. She thought it extremely unlikely that the guy would strike again, and in any case she didn’t want to give Mr. Phantom the psychological victory of running her out of her room. So she preferred to stay right where she was, if the manager didn’t mind. But it was Detective Cruz who minded, saying that in his experience she’d get a better night’s sleep if she spent the rest of the night elsewhere. So she accepted the manager’s offer of the Joan Crawford Bungalow, which was bigger and very much nicer, he emphasized, practically wringing his hands, and which ordinarily went for a much higher rate, but would be given to her at no additional charge for the remainder of her stay.

  It was bigger, she realized when she went back, a full-scale apartment, really, with a kitchen and two bedrooms instead of one, which meant she’d have a home office to spread out in if she needed it. And yes, nicer too. Unlike the Ginger Rogers Bungalow, its pipes didn’t clank. And it looked as if the rugs had been replaced sometime since 1926. Luxury.

  She’d hoped to get a few hours’ sleep, but she was far too wired, mind and body. It was impossible for her to stay still for more than twenty seconds at a time, let alone sleep.

  Lying on her back, staring at a ceiling that was too dark to see, she fidgeted and sighed, replaying the events of the night in her mind and then doing it again, an unending loop of increasingly agitated what-ifs. What if she’d failed to kick the ashtray out of his hand? What if her neighbor hadn’t called out? What if—

  At two thirty she gave up, climbed out of bed, and used the biggest mug in the kitchen to make herself some hot tea. She spent the rest of the night over her iPad (which had remained safe in her purse), successfully resisting the pathological urge to check her reviews, and instead digging into the techniques and materials of John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, and Thomas Eakins, the three artists whose paintings she would be taking on. Toward morning, she used the Internet to order next-day delivery on the bare essentials she needed to get started on the work: cotton swabs, brushes, disposable chloroprene gloves, a few types of cleaners, a few different adhesives, a variety of varnish softeners and removers. Given a day or so, she’d be able to determine what else would be needed. Fortunately, the museum already had a good table-mounted binocular magnifier stowed away under a dust-coated plastic cover in a corner of the storeroom. No one seemed to know what it was doing there, but she’d make good use of it.

  She stuck with these chores until six a.m.—nine o’clock on the East Coast—and then put in a call to FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, in response to an e-mail that had shown up on her late lamented laptop the day before. For over a year, Alix had been on the list of approved consultants to the FBI’s Art Crime Team (the “art squad,” as everybody called it, including the team members), and she had been on three assignments for them. The first one had almost been her last. She’d been playing a supposedly undangerous, semi-undercover role on the Artemis, a fabulous mega-yacht in the Mediterranean, more of a luxury vacation than a work assignment (so she was
told), but a few little flies in the ointment had turned up, starting with her getting knocked senseless on the first night, very shortly continuing with the murder of a crew member, and winding up with an outstanding grand finale, an all-too-close encounter with a wild, gun-waving Albanian mafioso. But she’d come out of it only slightly bruised, and, from the FBI’s point of view, she’d done a fine job.

  From her point of view, it had been a disaster.

  She’d been under the long-distance supervision of Ted Ellesworth, the FBI agent whom she’d first met a few months earlier, while helping Chris look into a questionable Georgia O’Keeffe landscape being offered by a gallery in Santa Fe. After a rocky start in New Mexico, she and Ted had hit it off, Ted had been impressed with her abilities, and it was he who had recommended her to his boss as a consultant to the Bureau and gotten her the assignment on the Artemis. Halfway into the cruise it turned out that Ted was needed on the yacht as well, and he’d come unexpectedly down from the sky in a noisy racket of rotor blades. They had been able to spend a little time together over the next few days, and there had been a renewal of the lovely spark of mutual attraction that had flitted between them in New Mexico. There, on the juniper-scented, sun-soaked Aegean, it had been on the verge of really turning into something. With both of them being on the undemonstrative side, however—Ted even more so than she was—they hadn’t yet gotten around to doing anything about it. They hadn’t even done anything that could reasonably be called flirting, not in the twenty-first century. Probably not the twentieth, either. The nineteenth, maybe.

  But it was in the air, it was in the air.

  Until, on what should have been a romantic post-cruise lunch at the fountained Garden Court of the National Gallery in Washington, she’d totally, thoroughly, irrevocably, unconditionally, and single-handedly screwed it all up. All with a few ill-chosen words. To his great surprise and obvious disappointment, instead of excitedly accepting the new plum assignment he had gotten for her, she had responded with a vitriolic . . .

  No, she wasn’t going to go there, not again. It never got her anywhere, and it didn’t matter anymore anyway. Since then, he’d kept his distance. In all these months she’d never seen or heard from him again, and she’d known better—or had more pride—than to try and get in touch. The two consulting jobs she’d been offered since then had been arranged and managed by one of his assistants, a bright, vibrant woman named Jamie Wozniak, whose job Alix had never gotten straight—she wasn’t at the special-agent level—but she pretty much seemed to pull all the strings, much in the way that the resourceful executive secretary of a CEO might pretty much pull the strings in the company. The e-mail Alix had received yesterday had been from Jamie, and had been seven words long: “Lookin’ for work? Give me a call.”

  As usual with Jamie, the phone seemed to be picked up almost before it rang.

  “Ever been to Fairbanks, Alix?”

  The abruptness, the lack of a greeting, didn’t bother her. Over the year they’d been in occasional contact, they’d become friends, and Alix had learned that with Jamie, when it was business, it was all business. And business meant they wanted her for another assignment.

  “Fairbanks, Alaska? No.”

  “Wanna go?”

  Hell, no, she didn’t want to go. She’d damn near been killed a few hours ago, she hadn’t slept all night, and she was still finding new scrapes and bruises. The last thing she needed was to put herself at risk on another “safe” FBI venture. Maybe in a few months she’d be ready to give it a try, but she’d need time to think about it.

  She was still trying to figure out how to get all this across to Jamie without having to unpack for her all that had happened—she just wasn’t up to it—when Jamie said, “Alix? You there?”

  “Yes, I’m here. Sorry.”

  “We’re not talking about right now, this minute,” Jamie said. “Couple more weeks.”

  “It’ll still be February. Isn’t it dark for, like, twenty hours a day? And freezing cold?”

  “I believe I may have heard such rumors.”

  “Then pardon my asking,” Alix said, “but why would I want to go to Fairbanks?” And a moment later: “Why would anyone?”

  “Anyone, I don’t know, but for you, we’ve got a pretty good inducement: Anthony van Dyck. There’s supposed to be a lost—or should I say ‘newly found’—late Van Dyck up there, that turned up in a junk shop—excuse me, an antiques gallery—a big-as-life, knock-your-eye-out Charles I on Horseback. It’s a little beat-up, but if it’s authentic, it’s the find of the decade. But our respected coterie of Flemish Baroque experts are split down the middle. Half say fake, half say it’s the real thing. They’ve practically come to blows. As for forensic tests—and I know this will shock you—they’ve been inconclusive: maybe real, maybe not.”

  She was surprised to find herself beginning to waver. She greatly admired Van Dyck’s work, she knew it well, and she had a good feel for it. It would be wonderful to work on one of them, even a purported one. Maybe, now that she thought about it, an interesting new case and few days in an exotic new environment might be just the ticket.

  “So as you can imagine,” Jamie was saying, “Ted would very much like to have your opinion.”

  Any thought of Anthony van Dyck flew out of her mind. “. . . Ted?” Oh, Lord, tell me my voice didn’t really crack when I said that. But she knew it had and she knew it wouldn’t get by Jamie.

  Not that Jamie would let on, of course. “Well, yes, Ted’s the lead agent on this, but I should tell you—”

  —he probably won’t be up in Fairbanks at that particular time.

  “—he’s got another assignment going and he won’t be able to be there then.”

  Good, no possibility of an awkward meeting. That was a relief. Yeah, right—if she was so relieved, then why the unsettled, fluttery feeling in her stomach? Was she disappointed that he wasn’t going to be there? Could you be relieved and disappointed about something at the same time? Apparently, you could.

  What was going on here? Was she really that hung up on this guy? She knew she’d made a bad mistake with him, but she’d truly believed she’d put it behind her. Well, maybe not “truly,” because every now and then, on some solitary evening, she’d rehearse in her mind just how she’d frame her apology and smooth things over if their paths ever did cross again. And now that the possibility of running into him had so suddenly popped up and just as suddenly been snatched away, it had left her not knowing what she felt. Or what she wanted.

  All right, you’re not over it, you might never get over it. Big deal. Live with it, put it behind you, get on with your life. Enough already. “Okay, I’m interested,” she told Jamie. “Tell me more.”

  Arrangements were quickly made. Alix would fly up at the end of the month, would be oriented and escorted by Special Agent Jacobs from the FBI’s satellite office in Fairbanks, and would be put up for two nights at the Westmark. Compensation and expense reimbursement would be as provided by her contract.

  “Listen, Alix . . .” The softening of tone announced that they were about to shift to something more personal. “. . . I know this is a touchy subject, but I was wondering about, you know, these nasty reviews you’ve been getting, and now that really awful new blog that’s out there, and I was thinking, well, we’re the FBI here, we’ve got a lot of resources on hand, maybe we can do something about it, maybe I should talk to Ted about the possibility of looking into—”

  Alix headed her off. “No-no-no-no-no,” she said. “No, no, no. Absolutely not.” Jamie’s interest in her reviews was a personal thing, the concern of a friend. She had assured Alix that she’d never once spoken to Ted about them, and although Alix had taken her at her word, the possibility of it happening still worried her. “I do not want Ted involved. I do not want the FBI involved. Forget it,” she finished.

  Jamie sighed. “Honestly, Alix, I wish you
’d just come out and tell me what you really think.”

  Alix wasn’t ready to joke about it. “I do not want Ted involved. Please, Jamie, promise me you won’t talk to him about it.”

  “Well, I think you’re making a mistake, but all right, if that’s what you want, I promise.”

  “Say it like you mean it.”

  “I promise. Sheesh, Alix.”

  “All right, then. Ah, look, Jamie, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the thought, it’s just that . . . well . . . you know.”

  “Excuse me?” Jamie said after a couple of soundless beats went by. “We seem to have a bad connection. I didn’t quite get that. It’s just that what?”

  “I’ll tell you when I figure it out,” Alix said, laughing now. “In the meantime, I expect you to keep your word.”

  “I will. And I’ll be in touch on Fairbanks within the week.”

  It was only when Alix had shut the telephone that one of Jamie’s remarks hit home.

  She glowered at the phone, chewing on her lip. What really awful new blog?

  Jamie was in a rare bad mood when, without putting down the telephone, she pressed Ted’s number. At heart, behind the wisecracks and banter, and despite a mere thirty-five years of age, she was a motherly old soul, and it just plain annoyed her these two people of whom she was extremely fond couldn’t get their act together. If any two people were ever made for each other—needed each other—then Alix London and Ted Ellesworth were the ones. It was perfectly clear to her. Why couldn’t they see it? Well, heck, they did see it, she knew that; they just wouldn’t admit it. You didn’t have to be as good as she was at reading people to know—

  He was on the line. “Hiya, Jamie, what’s up?”

  “I wanted to let you know that Alix accepted the Van Dyck assignment. She’ll fly up at the end of the month. I just finished talking to her.”