The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery)

by Charlotte Elkins

  “That’s beautiful,” she said, stopping in front of it. “It’s extremely moving.”

  She caught a narrow, darting look from Cruz, which didn’t surprise her. Almost every layperson seemed to assume that any real art expert would ex post facto look down her nose at sentimental, old-fashioned representational art. But when he saw that she meant it, he thawed. “It is, isn’t it? Gets me every time I walk by it.”

  “Is it based on a real incident?”

  “No, it’s a memorial to two of our officers killed in the line of duty at different times. But trust me, there have been plenty of real incidents just like this.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Anyway, it’s beautiful.”

  “Certainly is.” If she hadn’t been certain that Cruz liked her before, she was now.

  Once through the entrance lobby, he led her into a corridor lined with office cubicles, each of which held a compact, cluttered desk, a couple of rolling chairs, a corkboard bulletin board with the usual jumble of memos, photos, cartoons, and paper scraps pinned to it, and a metal filing cabinet, all in a space that was no more than eight by eight. She hoped—but doubted—that Cruz had something larger in which to work because he would have had a hard time squeezing himself into one of these.

  “You were about to ask about that skull thing before? That’s him right there, the All-Knowing Skull.”

  He was pointing at a plastic Halloween fright skull, the kind that has eyeballs dangling out of their sockets on springs. Someone had mounted a pair of nerdy, Clark Kent-ish spectacles on this one, which sat atop one of the partitions separating the cubicles, its popped and bouncy eyeballs looking down into one of them. “The way it works is this. It’s moved once a week to face a different cubicle. And when a new case comes up, whoever’s cubicle it’s looking into at the time, he’s the assigned—the lead investigator. It happened to be gazing into mine when the first Phantom burglary occurred, and into mine again when Calder got himself killed.”

  Alix looked sideways at him. “I know you’re kidding.”

  “I am not kidding. What’s more, I think it’s a great system. It’s fair, it’s impartial, and it’s understandable.”

  She shook her head, laughing. “I suppose so, but I have to say, you people certainly have your own way of doing things.”

  “I prefer to think of us as trendsetters. Come on, I want to hear more about this argument you heard.” He took her to an interview room, as utilitarian a space as could be imagined: a small plastic-topped table, three chairs, and a wastepaper basket. The matte white walls were blank except for a rectangle about the size of a light switch plate mounted at eye level on one of them. In its center was what appeared to be a lens.

  “A camera?” Alix asked. “Are we video-recording this?”

  Cruz nodded. “Any objection?”

  “None, record away.”

  Cruz tested the recording system, then stated the date, time, place, and participants. “Okay, Alix, suppose you just tell us what you started to tell me at the museum.”

  Alix took a moment to order her thoughts. “Yesterday morning my friend Chris LeMay and I went to see Clark about Chris buying one of the auction items before it actually went to auction, and as we got there we overheard him having what sounded like an argument with someone on the phone.”

  “About . . . ?” Cruz asked.

  “Well, we really weren’t listening that hard. It’s just that there’s no door on his office. But we heard enough to know it was something about an arrangement of some kind that the other person wanted to change. ‘A deal is a deal,’ I remember Clark saying. And he wasn’t happy about it. But the person on the other end must have been pushing him, because Clark, um, let’s see . . .” After a second it came to her. “Oh, that’s right. The other guy—well, I don’t know if it was a guy or not—the other person asked for seven at first and Clark said that was out of the question, and then after listening for another minute he said all right, six was possible, and that seemed to settle it. He didn’t like it, though.”

  “Six what? Hundred dollars, thousand dollars, million dollars?”

  She shrugged. “Six dollars, for all I know. Or six paintings, or six tickets to a baseball game. I have no idea. You understand, we weren’t really listening, we were just . . . overhearing.” She thought for another few seconds. “And that’s about it. Oh, no, wait a minute. He called him by name! It was . . . it was . . .” She grimaced, raking her mind. “. . . Seymour . . . Milton . . . something like that, something old-fashioned . . . Stanley . . . Morton . . . no, Melvin, that was it!” she cried triumphantly.

  “Melvin,” Cruz echoed. “Mean anything to you?”

  “Nothing. Sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about, but is there anything else you remember? Even if it doesn’t seem like anything?”

  “Yes, I think—”

  “Hold it,” Jake said, reaching into a shirt pocket for his cell phone, which must have been on vibrate, because Alix had heard nothing. “Yeah, Spike, sure,” he said into it. “No kidding, is that right? Damn . . . Look, I kind of have my hands full right now. Could you maybe give this to Booker? He’s familiar with it all. Okay, thanks.”

  When he closed the phone there was a wry little smile on his face. “Guess what. Another burglary, just a few minutes ago. With the Phantom’s M.O. plastered all over it.”

  “Ah.” Alix’s wry smile matched his. “So would I be correct in thinking that Clark is now off the hook as far as being the Phantom Burglar goes?”

  “I’d have to say you’re right about that. And that it makes what you were saying before a lot more probable.”

  So she wasn’t paranoid after all. That raised her spirits. “Does that mean you think he did come after me because I said the Pollock—”

  Jake lifted his hand. “Let’s not get back into that right now, Alix. I need to think about it some more. For the moment, let’s stay with his murder. You were about to tell me about something else you remember.”

  “That’s right. The person he was talking to on the phone—just before he hung up, Clark said, ‘All right, Melvin, see you there.’ As if they were going to get together, or at least be in the same place at the same time. I don’t think he said when, so I guess he could have been talking about some meeting or conference a year from now.”

  “Or last night.”

  “Yes.” She shrugged. “And really, I think that’s everything.”

  “Thank you, Alix,” Cruz said, but he looked disappointed, as if he’d been hoping there’d be more meat in what she had to say. “If you remember any more at all, even a couple of words, you’ll call me?”

  “I will. And I’ll talk to my friend Chris and see if she remembers anything I forgot.”

  “Thanks for coming in, then,” he said rising. “Let’s get you back to the museum. I have to get over there myself. Want to talk to the staff.”

  “Jake, if it’s all the same to you, could you drop me off downtown instead, on the way? I’m meeting Chris there.”

  Chris was presumably still working in her room when Jake dropped Alix off. Chris had recently discovered IRMA, the Geneva-based International Register of Missing Art, and had offered to help them modernize their digitized database, which was huge but antiquated and hard to access. They had snapped her up, of course, and she had brought the project with her; her intention was to put in a few morning hours at it on her laptop at the Colony Palms. The two women had agreed to meet for a ten-thirty break at the Coffee Bean, on the northeast corner of North Palm Canyon Drive and East Tahquitz Canyon Way, which was about midway between the Colony Palms and the Villa Louisa and within easy walking distance of each.

  This was of course right at the “heart of the heart” of downtown. Directly across the street from the coffee shop was the Marilyn Forever statue, once again surrounded by camera-clicking tourists and their busses.
But this side of Palm Canyon Drive was quieter, and Alix, arriving first, had no trouble finding an umbrellaed sidewalk table to which to carry her iced tea lemonade.

  A few feet to her left, and no more than a hundred feet from Marilyn, was a far smaller (merely life-sized) patinaed bronze sculpture of a seated Lucille Ball. Lucy occupied the left half of a bronze bench, leaving the right side free for people to have their pictures taken sitting beside her, within the curve of her outstretched arm, which lay across the top of the bench. This relatively modest statuary, probably once the highlight of this particular corner, was now half-hidden behind boxed shrubbery and under the Coffee Bean’s awnings. The bench wasn’t getting many takers, probably because Lucy, dwarfed and diminished by the statue across the street, understandably looked as if she were just a little put out.

  Chris wasn’t due for another fifteen minutes, and being early for anything was not part of her genetic makeup. That gave Alix some time on her own, for which she was grateful. Things were getting crazier by the hour and she needed some quiet time to sort things out. Clark Calder. She hadn’t known him from the Man in the Moon until a few days ago; she hadn’t even known he existed. Yet two nights ago he had inexplicably tried to murder her (she no longer had any doubts about that), and last night he himself had been murdered. The first was bizarre enough by itself; the second was even more so. Could it possibly be that the Pollock was at the root of both, after all? But if not, what other connection did she have to—

  Five lively orchestral tones, emanating from her bag, startled her out of her ruminations: deet-deet-da-dah-dah, the opening notes of the “Toreador Song” chorus from Carmen. This was the ring tone she’d assigned to contacts whose calls might be important, that were to be picked up on the spot, if possible.

  As always, after the initial startlement came a smile. Alix’s mother had been a dedicated opera fan with season tickets to the Met. She had taken the willing Alix with her often, and sometimes Geoff as well. Geoff enjoyed opera, but there had always been a subversive streak to him, and (out of her mother’s hearing) he often taught her little parodies of the lyrics of the most famous arias. Pure doggerel, but they had made a twelve-year-old girl laugh, and they still made a thirty-year-old smile. She still remembered his version of the “Toreador Song.”

  Torayador-ay,

  Don’t spit on the floor-ay.

  Use the cuspidor-ay.

  That is what it’s for . . . HAY!

  There were only three numbers with this ring tone: Geoff’s for one, and Chris’s, and the person’s whose call this turned out to be: Jamie Wozniak, the operations specialist for the FBI’s Art Crime Team.

  “Hi, there, Jamie,” she said, incipient laughter still playing around her lips. Jamie’s calls were always welcome. Usually, they meant that an interesting consulting job was in the offing if she was in the market for one.

  Not this time. “I have news for you,” she said, sounding excited herself, which was unusual for the imperturbable Jamie. “We’ve found the SOB.”

  “Which SOB would that be?” Alix asked, her mind back on Clark.

  “The one who’s been dissing you on the Web, of course. The Art World Insider himself, the dastardly blogger, Peter Bakeworthy.”

  “You found him?” A sudden thought chilled her. “Jamie, you promised—you swore—you wouldn’t get Ted involved.”

  “And I kept my promise. I just pushed a few buttons on my own. I do have certain competencies, you know.”

  “But I thought it was next to impossible, that it took months—”

  “Alix . . .”

  “—and even if you did get the PSI or the UPS, or whatever it is—”

  “Alix . . .”

  “—it still took a court order, and in order to get a court order—”

  “Alix!”

  Alix blinked. “Sorry. What?”

  “Thank you. It is hard, and it generally does take months—for the average person. But permit me to point out that we are the FBI, after all.”

  “Good point.” Alix laughed, having settled down a little. “So then—who is Peter Bakeworthy, really?”

  “His name is Clark Calder, and he—”

  Alix had thought she had used up her capacity for astonishment for one day, but not so. “Clark Calder?”

  “Yes, you know him?”

  “Yes, sure. He’s—he was—the senior curator here at the Brethwaite.”

  “Well, apparently you did something to get on his nerves.”

  “Obviously. He tried to kill me a couple of nights ago.”

  “He—?”

  “Only now somebody’s killed him.”

  Alix imagined she could hear the perplexity at the other end. Jamie, she thought, was waiting for a punch line to follow.

  “I’m serious, Jamie. It’s true,”

  A shocked “My God,” was all Jamie could muster. And then, a second later, a shrill: “What is going on out there? Are you okay? Are you safe?”

  “Yes, I’m fine, don’t worry about me. But as for what’s going on, I’m totally in the dark, and so are the police. I hardly knew the man and barely interacted with him at all. The only thing we argued about—differed about; you couldn’t even call it an argument—was this Pollock the museum has—” A new thought hit her. “Jamie, wait. Clark couldn’t have been the only one whose nerves I’ve gotten on. There’s somebody else. There has to be. Those book reviews—he couldn’t have been responsible for them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ve only known him for a week—not even a week. Those reviews go back months.”

  “That may be, but he was responsible for them anyway.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Alix murmured. “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, we’re sure.”

  “But how? Clark wasn’t stupid. He’d know to cover up his tracks.”

  “He did cover them up, Alix. As far as we know, he didn’t submit anything from his own computer. Almost all of them turned out to have been sent from hotel or public library computers, in batches. So what I did was to look at the hotel guest lists to search for people that were registered there either that night or the previous one, and only one name came up more than once. That was Clark Calder, and he showed up five times. Hell of a coincidence, huh?”

  Alix couldn’t come up with anything in reply. She was still resisting the idea of Clark’s being behind them. It just made no sense.

  “And listen to this,” Jamie went on. “The last few reviews—and the new blog—all came from the library in Palm Springs, on Sunrise Way.”

  That settled it. Alix gave in. “Wow,” she said softly.

  “So what are you going to do?” Jamie asked when nothing more appeared to be forthcoming. “Can I help?”

  “I don’t know. I have to think about this, Jamie. This is very . . . mystifying. Thanks so much for doing all that work, and for letting me know.”

  “Alix, take care of yourself. If you need anything from us—”

  “I know, and I appreciate it. I’ll be in touch. ’Bye.”

  While Alix had been on the phone, Chris had shown up, had offered a carefree salute and a mouthed “Be right out,” and gone inside to get her morning caffe latte. She was comparatively underdressed for once, in a silver-threaded blue summer sweater, trim leopard-spot ankle pants that emphasized her long legs, and three-inch heels. Big, white-rimmed Lolita sunglasses. And only two or three jangly bracelets on her wrist. Her work clothes, apparently, Alix thought with a smile.

  When she emerged she had a formidable turkey and cheddar sandwich on her tray as well as the latte. “Forgot to have breakfast,” she explained as she settled down at the table. “I’m starving. So what was that phone call about? Is something wrong? You look a little weird.”

  “I’m not surprised. That call was a little weird and then some,�
� Alix said slowly. “That was my friend Jamie from the art squad. They found out who it is that’s been trashing me on the Web.” She sat scowling, trying make what Jamie had told her fit in with everything else that had been happening.

  Chris, not the most patient of women, let five seconds go by. “And are you planning to let me in on it, or is it a secret?”

  “It was Clark.”

  Chris had half the sandwich on the way to her mouth, but she laid it carefully down and took a moment before speaking. “Clark, the man we talked to yesterday. The head curator at the Brethwaite.”

  A nod from Alix. “Yes.”

  “The one you think tried to kill you.”

  Nod.

  “And he’s the one that sent out that awful blog? The FBI says so?”

  Alix sighed. “Chris, would you like me to write it down for you?”

  “I’m sorry, it’s just that it’s all so incredible. I didn’t believe you when you said it was him the other night, but now . . . I don’t know.” She shook her head. “But what in the world can he have against you?”

  “I’m trying to figure that out.”

  Chris took an abstracted nibble of turkey and cheddar and pondered. “Gotta be the Pollock,” she announced. “If it is a fake, and what Prentice said is true—that the museum paid millions for it on his advice—he’s in big trouble. He’s trying to discredit you to protect himself.”

  Alix shook her head. “That was the first thing that occurred to me too, but no, that’s not it.”

  “And why is that not it?”

  “Because, according to Jamie, those bogus book reviews are Clark’s doing too, and they’ve been going on for, what is it, two months, three months?”

  “But you didn’t even know him two months ago. You didn’t know him last week.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you have no idea at all—”

  “No, none.”

  “Well, you just have to confront him then, don’t you? Do you want me to come with you?” She looked pleased with the possibility of combat. And ready. And willing. All Alix had to do was to give the word and Chris would forget her sandwich and join her on the field of battle right now, this minute; that was the message that came across.