The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery)
Page 12
“And which—while perfectly legal—would create the impression of having given certain people special treatment. Nobody else but Chris got a chance to buy anything ahead of time. That would—”
“You had no qualms about that with the Hartleys,” Alix pointed out.
“Of course not, the catalogues hadn’t gone out yet.”
“In other words,” Alix said, “the problem isn’t that the miniatures were being sold ahead of time, the problem is that people would know about it.”
A big smile, a conspiratorial wink, somewhat complicated by weeping, swelling eyes. “By George, I think she’s got it!”
“Well, I’m disappointed, sure,” Chris said a few minutes later, “but it’s no big deal. I can just bid along with everybody else and hope for the best. If I can’t get to Frisco, I’m sure I can do it on the phone.”
They were in two of the lawn chairs scattered about the central atrium, with coffee they’d brought down from the staff break room. With her mug cradled in both hands on her lap, Chris turned her face up to the sky. “Oo, that desert sun feels good. Guess what it was doing in Seattle when we left.”
“Mm, that’s a hard one. Let me think . . . This is a wild guess, but was it raining, maybe?”
“Raining, definitely.” She shifted a little, stretching out her long, jeans-clad legs. “Can I take back what I said about Clark earlier? About his being hot? Well, no, he is hot—even all clogged up with that terrible cold—but there’s something awfully . . . slick about the man. Fishy. Not to be trusted. Do you get any sense of that?”
“I do,” Alix said, seizing on the comment to raise something that had been on her mind but was almost too silly to say out loud. “In fact—now, I know you’ll say I’m crazy, but I’ve been wondering—”
“I would never say that about you, Alix. If anyone in this world has both feet on the ground, it’s you.”
“I’m glad you feel that way, because what I was wondering was whether Clark could be the man who attacked me last night.”
Chris jerked upright in her chair. “Are you crazy? The senior curator of the Brethwaite Museum is the Phantom Burglar?”
“No, I’m not saying that. I never thought that. What I’m saying—what I’m wondering—is if he’s the man who attacked me last night.”
“You’re losing me. I thought the guy who attacked you was the Phantom Burglar.”
“No, that’s just what the police think.”
“Well, if they think it was the Phantom—”
“Chris, for God’s sake, forget the Phantom Burglar for one minute, will you? Pretend you never heard of him. Just think about Clark.”
“Yes, but—”
“Hear me out. Yesterday his nose was just fine. No sign of red, no sign of a cold. Last night I socked somebody in the nose, hard, right through his stupid mask. Today, suddenly, Clark’s nose looks like a pink potato.”
“Alix, the man has a world-class cold. Didn’t you see all that sniffling? And his eyes were getting red and puffy, the way they do when you have a bad cold. Didn’t you notice?”
“Yes, but do you really develop a cold like that overnight? He was fine yesterday. And today it wasn’t only that his eyes were red, there was a kind of bruising around them too,” Alix said, “sort of purplish, like a couple of black eyes starting to develop. Didn’t you notice that?”
“Frankly, no,” Chris said more loudly. She was starting to look a little alarmed. “Look, think for a moment, Alix. Why in heaven’s name would Clark want to steal your laptop?”
“Maybe to make it seem to the police that he was the Phantom Burglar. Maybe what he was really there for was to . . . I don’t know, to kill me, maybe?”
“Kill you?” Chris shook her head. “Alix, you’re starting to worry me.”
“I’m telling you, the more I think about it, the more it hits me that that’s exactly what he was trying to do. That ashtray he had in his hand—that wasn’t one of Geoff’s Bangladesh knockoffs, it was heavy. Solid stone. There was a dent in the floor where it hit. There would have been a dent in my head, too, believe me.”
“All right, think about that. If he was there to kill you, wouldn’t he have brought something more appropriate with him, not just looked for whatever he happened to find in the room? Explain that to me.”
“Same explanation,” Alix said. “To make the police think later that he was just there to burgle, and it was an accident that he got caught in the act.”
“Okay, he wanted to mislead the police, that I can buy. But why would he want to mislead you?”
“How did he mislead me?”
“He wore a mask. Why would he do that if he intended to leave you dead?”
“In case he didn’t succeed. He didn’t want me to be able to identify him. Which, may I point out, is exactly the way it turned out.”
Chris shook her head. “You have answers for everything, I’ll say that for you.” Soberly, she placed her hand on Alix’s wrist. “Alix. Now listen to me. For your own good, don’t go around saying these things to anybody else. Even to me it sounds, well . . .”
“Paranoid. I know,” Alix said with a sigh. “But wait, there’s something else—I forgot. The detective that came out said he thinks whoever did it probably got my hotel key out of my bag, and the only times that bag was out of my sight—the only possible times he could have done that—were during the day when I was away from my desk for one reason or another—in the museum. That would mean it almost certainly had to be somebody from the museum, wouldn’t it? And if—”
“Stop right there, Alix. I just heard one ‘probably,’ one ‘thinks,’ and one ‘almost certainly’ in less than three complete sentences. And there was an ‘if’ in there not very long ago too. You’re reaching, kid.”
“But if you put all the ‘ifs’ and ‘mights’ together—”
Chris put a hand to her lips. “Sh. Company.”
It was Prentice, who had come from the building and was approaching. “Hello, again, Chris,” he said, having apparently run into her earlier in the day. “Alix, I wanted to ask you: The gentleman I saw you with earlier today—not the large one, but the other, the older one—wasn’t that your father?”
“Yes, it was.”
“Ah, I thought so. He’s changed a bit, of course, but then a couple of decades does that to a man.”
To say nothing of ten years in prison, Alix thought, not that Prentice would be ill mannered enough to mention it.
“I did have several opportunities to chat with him years ago—a delightful and accomplished man, and I would dearly love to do it again. On the off chance that the four of you are free later this afternoon, Margery and I would like very much to have you all to cocktails. We’d make that a dinner invitation, but we have later obligations ourselves.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Prentice, Tiny and my father have already left. I know they would have loved to come. They’ll be sorry to have missed it.”
Chris’s glance indicated that she knew Alix was lying through her teeth. They would never have accepted. Geoff had been chastised and snubbed too many times by the art world elite to chance getting burned again (not that Prentice would ever have done it), and Tiny was unhappy around aristocrats like the Vanderveres on general principle.
“Oh, dear, that’s really too bad,” Prentice said. He looked glum for a moment, then brightened. “But how about the two of you? Are you available? Would you like to come?”
“We’d love to!” Chris practically yelled, speaking for both of them.
“Excellent. You have our address, Alix. This will be entirely informal, just the four of us. What you’re wearing is fine. Shall we say five thirty?”
Chris was smiling as he left. “What a nice man. A gentleman of the old school.”
“You’ll never meet anybody nicer—or more worth listening to when it comes to art.”
Alix nodded. “That’s the question, all right, and I don’t have a clue. I’ve never harmed him. I hardly know him. But there’s something about the guy. The more I think about it, the stronger the feeling gets. Not only that so-called ‘cold,’ but his whole manner, the way he looks at me when he thinks I’m not watching him—”
“Halt! Stop right there. Consider. You’re constructing one hell of a case against someone on the basis of what? A red nose. All the rest is conjecture, and pretty wild conjecture at that, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
Alix took a sip of her coffee, the first in a while, but it was stale and cold, and she grimaced. “You’re probably right. You know, last night shook me up pretty good. Maybe it made me a little strange.”
“You’re not going to go to the police with this, are you? They’d probably put you away.”
“No, I won’t go to the police. Come on, I’ll drive you to the Palms. You can check to see that they’ve really brought your bags up to your room and then we can just kick back and talk for a while around the pool before we head for Prentice’s.”
“Sounds good to me. I need you to tell me more about portrait miniatures.”
“You mean in order to better plan your orderly, comprehensive hodgepodge?”
“Bingo.”
When Alix had told Chris that she’d pretty much exhausted her fund of knowledge on miniatures, she’d been telling the truth, so she didn’t have much more to say on that subject, but she promised to look into it and, at the very least, to provide Chris with some good reference material. That, plus getting Chris settled in her room, took them almost to five o’clock. Alix asked if that would allow time for her to show Chris a little of Palm Springs on their way to the Vanderveres’. “The heart of downtown, anyway,” was the way she’d put it.
“That won’t take us long,” Alix said as she started up her rented Dodge compact. The heart of downtown Palm Springs, she explained, and then demonstrated, lived up to its vibrant, glittery reputation: lots of foot and vehicular traffic, plenty of good restaurants—mostly jammed—and a surfeit of trendy, busy shops. But the whole thing was only four blocks long: the half-mile of Palm Canyon Drive that ran north and south from Tahquitz Canyon Way. And the heart was all there was. No limbs, no ribs, no head. Go two blocks above Tahquitz to Amado Road, or two blocks south to Baristo, or leave Palm Canyon Drive in any direction, and you run out of downtown in a hurry.
Except for the occasional restaurant, or hotel, or shopping center, Alix had learned during the last few days, the rest of this city of nearly fifty thousand consisted of thirty-two precisely and officially defined residential neighborhoods, a few of which were supremely elegant and luxurious (Vistas Las Palmas, where they’d been a few hours earlier, was an example), but most of which were not supremely elegant and luxurious. As with any city.
“And which one do the Vanderveres live in?” Chris asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve never been there. I’m trusting the GPS to get us there. It doesn’t look too far, but we’d better head over now. I’ve saved the epicenter, the very heart of the heart of downtown, to show you on the way back.”
As expected, the Vanderveres lived in a very nice neighborhood, on a quiet cul-de-sac. When Alix pulled into the driveway alongside an aging but beautifully maintained Lexus, she was struck by what a long way this house was—geographically, culturally, and historically—from where the Vanderveres had lived just off the Harvard campus in the old days. There, their house dated from the 1760s and looked it: a small, clunky, wood-shingled saltbox right around the corner from the Longfellow House. The poet’s home, now a National Parks historic site, had served as General Washington’s headquarters during the siege of Boston, and one of Washington’s colonels had been billeted for several weeks in what would become the Vanderveres’ home a couple of centuries later.
Here, their house, low-slung and sleek, with white stucco walls and a pebbled roof, had probably been built in the 1950s, when Western ranch style had been the rage. Alix couldn’t say it was one of her favorite architectural fashions, but she had to admit that the stark design aesthetic went well with the desert ambience. Still, it was strange to think of Prentice and Margery, so elegant and cultivated and old-fashioned—so Eastern—living here.
Alix and Chris were met at the door by a slim, middle-aged Hispanic woman in a white uniform dress. “Professor and Mrs. Vandervere are waiting for you on the patio, if you will follow me.”
They were taken through a living room and dining room sparely furnished with Scandinavian-designed chairs and tables, clean-lined and modern, and mostly made of sand-colored teak. The Vandeveres must have left their heavy, dark, old furniture behind when they’d come out here to all this sun and open sky, Alix thought, and all things considered, it had probably been the right decision.
“You know, that’s what I need,” Chris whispered as they trailed the woman. “A maid. And maybe a butler too.”
“What, no footman?” Alix whispered back. “No groundskeeper?”
Prentice and Margery Vandervere were sitting in the shade of the awninged patio with tall highball glasses on the table in front of them, and a smiling Prentice stood up to greet their guests when they were ushered outside. But Margery didn’t get up. Time had been harder on her than on Prentice. She was in a wheelchair now, drawn and pinched, and with a lightweight summer blanket over her legs. She had dyed her hair a jet black that Alix thought unfortunate. And whereas Prentice had kept the pink-cheeked, smooth complexion that so many of the rich and wellborn seemed to retain into their later years, Margery’s face was age-mottled and wrinkled. To see her this way came as a sad surprise. Back in the Harvard days, Mrs. Vandervere, unashamedly gray-haired then, had been a fixture at the afternoon teas; active, lively, and funny.
But that had been ten years ago, after all, and she had probably been seventy then. Tempus fugit. Even at thirty, Alix had learned that the older you get, the faster it fugits.
“Hello, Mrs. Vandervere,” Alix said, extending her hand. “It’s wonderful to see you again.”
Her manner must have given away what she was thinking, because Margery barked a short laugh. “Alix, please, despite appearances, I am not in extremis or even permanently wheelchair-bound. The reason you see me thus”—a graceful flutter of both hands took in the wheelchair—“is that my knees began refusing to follow orders despite my many threats and admonitions, and so I finally turned them in for a new pair. The operation was only last week, you see, and I haven’t yet gotten used to them. Nor they to me.”
“I hope we aren’t putting you to any trouble,” Chris said.
“No, no, none at all. I don’t really do anything even when all body parts are more or less operational. Prentice only keeps me around for ornamental purposes.”
So the old Margery was still in there, Alix was glad to see. And if she’d had both knees replaced a few days ago, then she had every right to look a bit drawn.
“Lena, God preserve her from harm, takes care of everything,” Margery said. She made a brief finger wave in the direction of the house and two seconds later Lena came hustling out.
“Now, what would you like to drink?” Margery asked them. “Prentice is having a Manhattan and I’m drinking a Tom Collins. Lena does them both very well.”
Alix couldn’t help smiling. They might have left their 1950s furniture back on the East Coast, but not their drink habits.
“Just a glass of red wine for me,” Chris said to Lena.
Alix asked for a Tom Collins, partly because she’d never had one, but primarily because it looked so good, thirst-quenching and crystal-clear in the ice-frosted glass at Margery’s elbow.
When the drinks came the
y chitchatted for a while, mostly about Alix’s career and Chris’s collecting. Prentice in particular was interested in Chris’s predilections within the American Modern ranks and showed obvious approval for her disinterest in the Abstract Expressionists among them. Chris spoke excitedly about the collection she was building with Alix’s help, and Prentice offered his own ideas on what made a sensible private art collection. Chris chose not to mention the miniatures she had tried to buy just that afternoon—a wise choice, in Alix’s opinion.
The Vanderveres were the same good hosts they’d been a decade ago, showing more interest in their guests than in talking about themselves, but eventually the conversation broadened and Alix found an opening for a question she’d been waiting to ask. “Prentice, you seemed really disappointed not to have had the chance to talk to my father. I can’t help wondering why.”
“Why would I not want to? A fascinating man, a man of principle. I have a great deal of admiration for him. Always have.”
Now there was a stunner. Of all the people in the world to be the first one in ten years—certainly the first establishment type—to express admiration for Geoffrey London, Prentice Vandervere would have been her last pick. Prentice himself was her model of probity and integrity, but as for Geoff, while there was much to admire (and love) about him, he was, to put it charitably, a little flexible when it came to matters of ethics.
“You look surprised,” Prentice said, laughing, “but what I said is true. I followed his trial with great interest, you see. It was extraordinary . . . unique, really. That a respected authority on conservation, a Metropolitan Museum conservator, should be accused defrauding his private clients out of millions was unbelievable.”
“But true,” Alix pointed out. “He did make exacting copies of those paintings, sixteen of them, and he did give the owners back the copies rather than the originals, and then he did sell the originals to other buyers for millions of dollars.” None of which was left after court costs and suit settlements, she might have added. “And he went to jail for eight years, and even he very readily admits it was justified. Legally.”