The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery)

by Charlotte Elkins

  “Of course I did.”

  “And?”

  “And I received a letter from their personnel director giving the date he began, the positions he held, and the date he resigned. Nothing more—some sort of privacy agreement they have with their employees. So I based my decision on my personal judgment, which, until that time, at any rate, had usually been quite reliable.”

  “Austin doesn’t have a privacy agreement with its employees, Lillian—just with Clark,” Ted said. “A mutual non-disclosure agreement. He doesn’t talk about them, they don’t talk about him. And yes, technically he did resign—but it wasn’t voluntary.”

  It was his recommending and overseeing the purchase of the fake Whistler that had gotten him into trouble. The museum was greatly embarrassed when the painting was proven to be a fake, of course, and they were anxious to put the affair behind them. The picture itself was gone—Lord & Keen had taken it back—but they wanted Clark gone too, and with as little fuss as possible. So he agreed to resign “without prejudice”—and with a small financial settlement—and both sides had signed on to the non-disclosure agreement.

  “Good heavens,” said Mrs. B. “You’d think they’d have told me.”

  “They couldn’t. They were bound by the agreement.”

  “Nonsense. They told you, didn’t they?”

  “Sure, but things are different when it comes to a criminal investigation.”

  “Of course they are,” Mrs. B snapped. “Don’t you think I know that? But when it’s something of this magnitude—”

  “My God,” said Alix.

  They both swiveled to stare at her. Four eyebrows went up in unison.

  “Ted,” she said. “That fake Whistler at the museum in Austin—do you happen to remember what it was a picture of?”

  “Yeah, I think I remember—where are you going with this, Alix?”

  “Was it one of his Nocturnes?”

  “I believe it was; one of the ones with the fireworks. At that park in London. In Knightsbridge, I think.”

  “No, Chelsea. Cremorne Gardens. My God.”

  “That’s right, Cremorne Gardens. How do you know that?”

  “My G—”

  “If she says it one more time,” Mrs. B rasped, “I will strangle her right here and now, with my own hands, I swear it.”

  “Never mind, I’ll do it for you,” Ted said. “Alix, damn it, what’s going on?”

  Alix spoke dully, stunned by what she’d just realized. “I know why Clark was writing those reviews.”

  “What?” Mrs. B asked.

  “I know why he tried to kill me.”

  “What?” Mrs. B was two-thirds out of her chair, her palms flat on the desk.

  Alix had forgotten that the director was out of the loop when it came to the recent determinations that Clark had been both the blogger and the intruder—she wouldn’t even have known about Alix’s suspicions—so this took a few minutes of explanation, at the end of which Mrs. B flopped back into her chair, looking totally at a loss for once in her life, but then after a second she called: “Richard! We need some coffee in here!”

  Bustling sounds in the outer room indicated that he had heard and was obeying.

  “The thing is,” Alix went on, still a bit dreamily, “he lost his job at Austin because of me.”

  “Alix,” Ted said, “that was five months ago, long before you even knew who he was.”

  “Yes, that’s right, but I did know—I still know—Millie Somers, one of the associate directors. She’s an old friend from Harvard, and when I was in Austin on something else six or seven months ago, I stopped in to see her and she showed me around the place. Well—it’s getting to be a familiar story now—and that Whistler Nocturne struck me the wrong way and I said something to Millie about it. From what you’ve been telling us, inside of a month or two, the picture was gone and so was Clark.”

  “And you think it was on account of your comments,” Ted said thoughtfully.

  “I know it was. Millie told me so. Well, she didn’t tell me about firing anyone, but on the strength of what I’d said, they had some forensic testing done, and it turned out that one of the pigments was titanium white—”

  “Which wasn’t developed until what, the 1940s?” Ted said.

  “Nineteen thirty, actually, but it still eliminates James McNeil Whistler as the painter unless he did it thirty years after he died.”

  Richard came in with the coffee and set it on the desk. These weren’t the thick, white open-source mugs that hung on a pegboard in the break room, or the very slightly finer ones used for staff meetings. These were slender, elegant, willow-patterned cups, so thin-walled they were translucent. Alix was afraid she was going to break one just by picking it up. Matching saucers came with them, as fragile as the cups.

  “So you think those reviews were . . . what?” Ted asked Alix. “Revenge? Spite?”

  “That’s exactly what I think. I got him in trouble, he wanted to bring me down too.” She shook her head. “And I didn’t even know he existed.”

  Mrs. B was very slowly stirring two packets of Sweet’N Low into her cup. She seemed really shaken. “But to try to kill you? It was all over and done with . . . it just seems . . .”

  “No, not over that,” Alix said. “Over the Pollock. He knew I thought that was a fake too. He thought I was going to do it to him again.”

  “Cost him his job, you mean?” She shook her head. “Let me be frank. The Brethwaite is at best a second-tier museum in a small city in the middle of the desert. I don’t find it persuasive that he would have resorted to murder in order to keep his job here. There must have been more than that to it.”

  “There was,” Ted said. “This would have been the second time he’d engineered the sale of a fake, an extremely expensive fake, from Lord & Keen. He had to know there was an investigation going on, and he’d know that a fake Pollock would bring us down on him like a ton of bricks. There’s no way it could be an innocent coincidence. He was working with them, he was part of the operation, and he knew he’d be going down with them. Is that what you were thinking, Alix?”

  “I hadn’t really thought it through that far yet, but yes, I do think that.”

  “Lillian,” Ted said, “a few minutes ago you said Calder seemed like a breath of fresh air at the time. Did that imply that your opinion of him changed later on?”

  Mrs. B seemed to hesitate.

  Alix jumped up. “This is none of my business. I’ll wait outside until you want me again.”

  Mrs. B waved her back into her seat. “Nonsense, you sit yourself right back down. I have no objection to your hearing this.” She raised her cup and seemed surprised to find that it was empty. “Richard!” she called, “We could use a warm-up.”

  Alix had had only a couple of sips and Ted’s cup was still brim-full. They both refused fresh cups. Mrs. B used the three or four seconds it took for her secretary to appear with the pot, and the few more that it took to stir in sweetener, to put her thoughts in order—or to decide what to say and what not to say.

  “He was a breath of fresh air,” she began after inhaling the coffee’s fragrance and sipping, “and he had ideas that had never been heard in these parts, ideas that made sense and still do. But . . .” The cup was carefully placed on its saucer. “But, as attractive as he was, he wore on one after a few months, you see.”

  After about two minutes, in my case, Alix thought.

  “He was always . . . what is the phrase? . . . pushing the envelope, overstepping his limits. What he was trying to do was important, but his attitude needlessly offended the staff and had begun to get on my nerves too.” She laughed, the first time Alix had heard her do it; a funny little old person’s hee-hee that didn’t fit her at all. “Possibly, these aren’t the sort of things I should be saying while the police are still hunting for his murderer
.”

  “Oh, I don’t think Detective Cruz suspects you, Lillian,” Ted said with a friendly chuckle of his own. With Ted it was impossible to tell if he was being genuinely friendly or was playing her along, cop-style. And why not the latter, Alix suddenly thought. Why wouldn’t Jake have her on his suspect list? Whatever close relationship she and Clark might have had in the past had obviously soured. Alix had seen that when Mrs. B had cut him down to size on his graphic novel idea, and now Mrs. B herself had said as much.

  “Alix,” Ted said, “perhaps this is the time for you to tell us about the Pollock.”

  Alix did, showing them the illustrations of Pollock’s real signature and the fake ones, and she could see that both of them were impressed—and, in Mrs. B’s case, also angry and a little sick.

  “If you had your suspicions from the start,” she said sternly, “don’t you think you should have come to me with them?”

  “I do now, Mrs. B—”

  “Oh, call me Lillian, will you, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Thank you—but at the time that’s all they were, suspicions. More gut-level than brain-level, so I went to Clark instead. He said he’d be setting up a meeting for me with you, but first he wanted to gather the records for me to look at—the forensic testing report, the—”

  “What forensic testing report? There never was an independent forensic assessment. We just went with Lord & Keen’s evaluations.”

  After all of Clark’s lies, one would think that one more wouldn’t surprise her, but this Alix hadn’t anticipated. This was yet another reason he wanted her dead and wanted it done in such a hurry. It had been on Thursday that he’d promised to show her the forensic report in a few days—the following Tuesday (tomorrow, actually; how astonishingly much had happened in so few days)—and he knew he couldn’t deliver because it didn’t exist. So she had to go before Tuesday came around. He’d made his attempt on her that very Thursday night and had had no chance to try again because he was on the other end of a murder himself the very next night; a successful one, this time.

  A quick glance and a dip of the chin from Ted showed that he was thinking the same thing. The sharp-eyed Lillian spotted both glances but misread them.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “What kind of ninny would spend a fortune on a piece of art without being absolutely certain that it was the real thing? At this moment I am having exactly the same thought.”

  “If it makes you feel any better,” Ted said, “the museum in Austin didn’t do any independent forensic checking on their Whistler either—not until Alix showed up and alerted them. It happens all the time, Lillian. I don’t have any statistics to back me up, but I’d bet that most art purchases, individual and institutional, are made without getting an independent forensic lab in on the act. Especially when the seller is somebody as reputable—as supposedly reputable—as Lord & Keen.”

  “That may be, but knowing that others were equally stupid does not make me feel any better. I suppose I was somewhat under Clark’s sway at the time, but I can’t really blame him for it. In the end, it was my decision.”

  She rubbed her temples; thumb squeezing one side, two fingers the other. When she lowered her hand, there were red dents left in her skin where her fingertips had pressed. Her eyes were closed. The white band collar, snug about her neck when they’d come in, now hung loose, as if her neck had shriveled since then.

  Alix would never have expected to feel sorry for the Iron Lady, but she was sorry for her now. “Lillian,” she said gently, “what Ted said is true. This is something I know about. Most buyers don’t demand scientific testing. As with you, they fall in love with something; they want so much for it to be the real thing that they don’t want to take a chance that it might not be. It’s like wives or husbands hiring private detectives to spy on their spouses. They don’t do it at the beginning, when they’re in love and full of wonderful thoughts about the future. They only do it after the relationship has gone bad—when it’s too late.”

  “Thank you for that, child.” Lillian smiled sweetly at her. Good heavens, the woman was becoming more human by the minute. “But I still feel like the chump of the century. Ted, will we be able to recover our money from Lord & Keen?”

  “I hope so, Lillian, but I can’t promise. There’s going to be a long line of people wanting the same thing. I suggest you have that picture examined by a reputable forensic lab right now, get their report as soon as possible, and get yourself at the head of that line.”

  “I can put you in touch with the best of them, if you want,” Alix said.

  Lillian sadly nodded her acceptance of the offer and turned to look out the window on her left. “Ah, me,” she sighed.

  Ted and Alix started talking at the same time as they exited the museum, en route to the parking area. “I have a question,” Alix said. “I have an idea,” Ted said, and then, after they both laughed: “What’s your question?”

  “About Clark getting murdered. Are you assuming it had to have something to do with the Pollock too?”

  “With the Pollock in particular? I’m not sure, but I’m betting it’s got something to do with his flimflam operations with Lord & Keen in general. There were a lot of transactions, and we don’t yet know how many of them he was involved with. But even if you take just the Pollock and Austin’s Whistler, you’re talking about a tremendous amount of money changing hands—well over twenty million between the two of them. I think Jake needs to look into that. He might be focusing too much on Clark’s relations with the museum people here.”

  “So do I need to tell him about all that, or will you?”

  “I will.”

  “Thank you. So what’s your idea?”

  “About what?”

  “A minute ago you said you had an idea.”

  “Oh, right,” Ted said. “I was just thinking, let’s go have some lunch.”

  Alix smiled. “I don’t know. The last lunch we had together didn’t work out all that well.”

  He gave her a polite, pro forma smile in return. Did he really not understand what she meant, or was he tactfully pretending not to? Either way, it seemed to bode well.

  “Sure,” she said, “let’s. I know some nice places just a few minutes away.”

  “No, I have a better idea. Do you have to get right back, or can you take a few hours off?”

  Where was this leading? Was she kidding herself or was he trying to set them on a new footing, or rather back on their old footing? Or was she reading more into this than was there? Ted was the hardest damn man to read that she’d ever met. Well, she supposed, the thing to do was to go with the flow and see where things led. “No, I can take a few hours. In fact, I can take the whole afternoon,” she ventured a bit more boldly. “I’m not on an hourly schedule. I have a due date to get the work done, and I’ve allowed myself plenty of time.”

  “Good. Because I was also thinking that you’ve had a stressful few days here, and it’d do you good to get away from things for a while. See some different scenery.”

  Alix laughed. “That’s exactly what Chris said we should do yesterday.”

  “And did you?”

  “Yes, she thought it would relax me, put things into perspective.”

  “And did it?”

  “Yes, actually, it did. We went to this lovely desert canyon. We could certainly go back there, if that sounds good to you. It’s not that far.”

  He was shaking his head. “No, I’m not nuts about the desert, to tell you the truth. I like green, I like to see water in my rivers, and I wouldn’t mind getting out of the heat. Aren’t there some oases around here?”

  “Yes, but what would you think of taking the aerial tramway up to Mt. Jacinto instead? You’ll see more white than green, but it’s supposed to be beautiful, and it’s what I was hoping to do today anyway. It’ll certainly get us out of the heat, and
there’s a restaurant at the top, so we can get something to eat there.”

  “Perfect, let’s get going.”

  “Did you bring any warmer clothes?”

  “My bags are still in my car. I’ve got a couple of sweaters. I’ll put one on.”

  “I’d put them both on, if I were you. And we can swing by the Villa Louisa so I can get a coat. I’ll drive. I know the way.” She smiled up at him. (Had he always been this tall?) “This’ll be fun—we can have ourselves a snowball fight, and then go in for a hot lunch. No, let’s change the order. I’m starving.”

  “Either way, sounds exciting.” He smiled at her. “And enjoyable.”

  Getting to the tramway took a straight four-mile shot up North Palm Canyon Drive to where the streets thinned out, and empty lots started to outnumber houses, and the desert began to intrude. Then a turn onto the two-lane Tramway Road for another four miles, the first half through unlovely, boulder-strewn desert, and then up along the floor of a valley that ascended through increasing scrub and even a few clumps of greenery, to the aerial tramway’s base station at 2,600 feet. The famous rotating tram itself would then lift them to almost nine thousand feet, where it was winter ten months of the year.

  While Ted put in a call to his office to apprise his people of the latest developments, Alix’s mind had already soared to the top of the mountain. There was a cocktail lounge up there, she knew, adjacent to the restaurant, and it went without saying that such a place could be counted on to have a roaring log fire going. They would have a good lunch, have their snowball fight, and then come back inside, into the lounge, laughing and pink-cheeked from the cold. They would sit in a warm place, relaxed and pleasantly tired, staring quietly into the fire and listening to the crackle of the wood, slowly sipping Irish coffees, or maybe Ted would be having a cognac. And Alix would quietly say, “You know, Ted, about that lunch we had in DC—I said some things . . .”

  But . . .

  . . . they never got that far. They didn’t even make it to the tram. A ten-inch-long Coachella Valley fringe-toed lizard had plans of its own.