The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery)

by Charlotte Elkins

  The waiter was back with their main course, big bowls of steamed mussels with crushed tomatoes.

  Alix tilted back her head to get a good whiff of the fragrance and sighed. “Mm. Garlic. Saffron. This smells too good to spoil with theories about scamming and murder and such. Besides, enough is enough. What do you say we just eat?”

  “Best idea I’ve heard today,” Ted said, and they tore into their portions, making a primitive feast of it. Fingers soon came into play. Additional linen napkins were requested, and a second order of rolls was used to sop up the juices.

  There was laughter and good conversation (none of which Alix could remember afterward), and more wine was drunk, although it came as a surprise to both of them when their waiter tipped the bottle up to pour and it turned out to be empty.

  “May I bring you more?”

  They were both quick to turn down the offer. Alix liked wine, but she wasn’t much of a drinker; this was more than she’d had in a long time, and she thought the same was true for Ted. They smiled at each other over their coffees, and Alix began to think that perhaps things between them had repaired themselves on their own, and maybe this night was heading somewhere, somewhere good.

  But when they got to the Villa Louisa a little after ten, still glowing from the wine, they said brief good nights, warm but polite—no touching—and went to their separate doors some ten feet away from each other. Alix hadn’t invited him in for coffee or a nightcap and he hadn’t either suggested it or stood around waiting for it.

  Having closed her door behind her, she leaned giddily back against it, letting the room swim around her, and broke out laughing.

  What a couple of hopeless prudes they were.

  Ted had promised to join Alix at the hotel’s breakfast buffet at nine the next morning, but instead she got a call from him (on the hotel phone, since hers wasn’t turned on) just before she was ready to leave her room.

  “I’m at the police station. I talked to Jake, told him what the two of us came up with last night. Jake’s got the guy in the interview room now, and I’m sitting a couple of doors down with Lieutenant Mitchell, watching it live. I don’t expect to get back till eleven or so, so you’re on your own for breakfast, but I thought we could do something after that. I’m not flying back till tomorrow, and I should have the rest of the day free.”

  He paused, waiting for her to say something, and she said it. “That’s wonderful. How about giving the mountains another try?” Alix could hear the tension in her own voice. She was scared to death she was going to spoil everything again.

  “That sounds good,” Ted said, and she thought she heard a similar unease from his end of the line. “Are you sure you can afford to take another day off from the museum, though?”

  “You bet. I’ve given myself plenty of time to get the work done.” And even if I hadn’t . . .

  During most of the drive to the tram, they talked—that is, Ted talked—about what had transpired at the police station. Possibly it was because she’d been through an excitement overload in the last few days and her nervous system was fed up with it, or maybe because, with everything that had been happening to her in the last year, this kind of thing was starting to seem routine. Either way, she found herself strangely impatient with it, as if it had all happened a long time ago to someone else; so impatient that she was having a hard time focusing. She was able to grasp the main points, however.

  The key for Jake had been Ted’s suggestion that he check with the local rental agencies to see if anyone had turned in a damaged Ford Focus in the last couple of days. A survey of the Palm Springs agencies produced nothing, but when they extended it to the surrounding communities, they hit pay dirt at Hansen Motors in Cathedral City. A green 2012 Ford Focus had been returned the previous night with a battered front end; according to the driver, he had hit a deer. The client’s name: Jerry Swanson.

  Fortunately, the car was still on the lot, awaiting repair and repainting. It had been run through a car wash, probably more than once, and cleaned by Hansen after Jerry had brought it in. But blood is one of the most difficult substances in the world to remove completely from any surface. Chemical testing can reveal it at dilutions of one part in fifteen million. If it was the car that had killed Clark, there would be human blood on it, and it would be detected.

  Jake and his partner hadn’t waited for that, however. They got a photograph of Jerry from Endicott Galleries and took it to Melvyn’s, where they showed it to the cocktail waitress, along with several photos of similar-looking men. The waitress unhesitatingly fingered Jerry as the man she’d seen arguing with Clark shortly before he’d been run down and killed two and a half blocks away. That had been enough for Jake, who had come straight from the bar to make the arrest. By the end of the night Jerry had been charged with Clark’s murder—no action yet on the attempt on Alix—and had engaged a lawyer. At first he had stuck to his “I hit a deer” story, but as of this morning, with his lawyer’s counsel, he was admitting he had indeed argued with Clark, and that it was Clark he’d hit, and not a deer, but that it had been an accident; he’d had a couple of drinks—the waitress verified this—he’d been rushing to catch up with Clark to talk some more, and must have hit the accelerator instead of the brake pedal when he tried to stop. He hadn’t gone to the police because he’d realized how bad it would look for him.

  As to what it was that they had argued about and what exactly was going on with the Copleys, that was still undergoing revision by Jerry and his lawyer, but Jake had pulled enough from the various versions to come up with a working scenario: Jerry had not long ago completed valuating two full-size Copley portraits for an earlier Endicott sale, which had involved a lot of looking at other works by the artist. The two Brethwaite miniatures in question had caught his eye right away and he had gone to Clark to suggest that maybe they were not Dunkerleys after all. In Jerry’s telling of it, his purpose was strictly to inform the Brethwaite that they were far more valuable than they’d realized. Clark had done some research and determined for himself that they were indeed Copleys. He had prodded Jerry into keeping the information to themselves and instead scamming their way into becoming millionaires.

  Who had prodded whom was open to question, but Jake had little doubt about the bones of the enterprise. Jerry would keep the estimate low for the auction and they would find a proxy to buy the panel for them. (This was where the shadowy gentleman from Mitteleuropa came in; an acquaintance of Jerry’s, it had been Jerry who had brought him into it.) Once the panel had been bought, they would get rid of ten of the twelve miniatures and stow the Copleys away for a while. They would scratch the glass covers or dump some varnish on them, or mar them some other way. When enough time had passed they would use another proxy to consign them to a country antiques fair or something like it. Then either Clark himself or Jerry would purchase the blurry things under his own name for next to nothing—and get a legitimate receipt that proved he’d bought it at the fair. Let a little more time go by and the new owner would have the fogged glass covers replaced, whereupon he would be astounded and delighted to find out that they were actually Copleys.

  When they auctioned them again—this time for millions—there would be little risk involved. Almost no living people had ever seen them, and without the panel itself there was virtually no chance of their being recognized as having come from the Brethwaite. They were on nobody’s watch list because they had never been stolen. And Jerry or Clark could prove that he had come by them honestly, at some dinky, quaint antiques fair—See, here’s the receipt.

  Alix hadn’t said ten words through all this, and once Ted had covered the main points, he looked curiously at her. “Are you all right, Alix? You’re being awfully quiet.”

  “Oh, sure, I’m fine. So why did he kill Clark? I understand why he tried to kill me, but why Clark?”

  “Well, remember, he hasn’t admitted to that, but Jake’s conclusion
is that he no longer liked the split they’d arranged and he wanted a better share, and Clark wouldn’t go for it; that would have been the telephone conversation you overheard. So he killed him.”

  “I see. Or couldn’t it simply be that he realized he didn’t need Clark anymore? Clark still needed Jerry because Jerry was the one setting the auction price. But why did Jerry need Clark? Jerry was the one who’d engaged the proxy, Ferenc what’s-his-name, right? Not Clark. So Clark didn’t really have any function anymore, other than to keep half the profit or whatever percentage they’d agreed to. If he was out of the picture, it was all Jerry’s.”

  “That’s a good point, Alix. Maybe Jerry offered to buy him out of the whole deal, so to speak, for a percentage of what they’d agreed to before, or maybe some fixed amount, and that’s what they were fighting about. Clark told him to go to hell and Jerry killed him. No partner to share with, no partner to worry about.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Alix, your mind really is somewhere else.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “Well, I don’t blame you. You’ve been through a lot these last few days, enough to give anybody something to think about.”

  “I suppose it is,” she said again, but that wasn’t where her mind was at all. They were nearing the end of Tramway Road now. The tram parking lot was up ahead, and Mt. San Jacinto reared up in front of them. It was the top of the mountain she was thinking about again: the intimate lunch, the laughing, merry snowball fight, the warming up with Irish coffees in front of a crackling fire; the finding of just the right moment and the right words to finally set things aright.

  “You know, Ted,” she would say, “about that lunch we had in DC—I said some things . . .”

  You know, Ted, about that lunch we had in DC—I said some things . . .”

  “Uh-oh,” Ted said, “sounds serious.”

  So far, everything had gone according to plan, as if they were actors following the directions in a script. They’d had a good lunch at the restaurant, they’d had their snowball fight and gotten good and chilled, and now they were sitting in leather wingback chairs in front of a snapping, crackling log fire. They had warmed up, they were about halfway through their Irish coffees, the glow was spreading through their bodies, and the world was good.

  “It is serious,” Alix said. “But it needs to be said.”

  Shadows and orange highlights from the fire flickered over his face. “Am I going to like it?”

  “I hope so.”

  Ted put his cup down on the cocktail table beside him and rearranged himself in the chair to face her more directly. “Fire away.”

  It was easier than she’d anticipated. The words flowed, systematically and coherently. Encouraged by his serious, focused gaze, she got it all out too: how sorry she was for what she’d said at that lunch and the self-righteous way she’d said it; how bad she felt about her arrogance and presumption in lecturing him on the duplicity and treachery of “befriending and betraying,” and how far above such perfidious behavior she herself was; and on and on, until she’d gotten everything out.

  He sat through all of it, contemplative and very still, but with a frown slowly building, and then, when she was done, a single slow shake of his head.

  “Well, say something,” she said nervously.

  “I’m trying to figure out what to say. The thing is . . .” He stopped, scowling at the floor with an unreadable expression. Annoyance? Confusion? Displeasure?

  A sudden gust of queasiness swept through her. I blew it. I unloaded too much on him. He was coming around, he was forgetting that damn lunch, I know he was, and now I’ve brought it all back, center stage. Will I never learn to shut my mouth? All I had to do—

  “The thing is,” Ted said, and now he lifted his eyes to hers, “I don’t remember any of that.”

  Her jaw dropped. “You don’t remember it?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t believe you. You’re trying to make me feel better.”

  “Alix, I’m telling you, I do not remember. It was a year ago, for Christ’s sake. Oh, sure, I remember the lunch, all right, but those things you said you said? Not really, no.”

  “Well, then why did you avoid me all this time?”

  “I didn’t avoid you, you avoided me.”

  She was flabbergasted. If things got any more bizarre she’d know she was dreaming. “How can you say that? You never talked to me again after that lunch, not once. You made sure to be out of the office anytime you knew I was coming in. You—”

  “Sure, because I was trying to do what you wanted.”

  She jerked her head in frustration. “Ted, why would I want to avoid you?”

  “Because you were rightfully ticked off at me for the way I screwed up on that cruise assignment. I was like some stupid kid trying to make an impression on you—Hey, look what a big shot I am—and so I put you in with no backup and no training, and I damn near got you killed. I let you in for what had to be the worst experience of your life.”

  “But I never thought that, not for a minute. That cruise was one of the best, most exciting—exhilarating—experiences of my life.”

  They had been leaning earnestly forward, toward each other, and now Ted sagged back in his chair and puffed out a breath. “I’m a little confused here.”

  Alix fell back too. “I’m . . . I don’t know what I am.”

  “I’ll tell you what I do remember about that lunch, Alix. I remember how cold and distant you were.”

  “And superior? And condescending?”

  “Okay, that too, maybe, a little. But the main thing is, you flat-out turned down an assignment I really thought—I hoped—you’d love, along with the chance for us to work together again. That was more than enough for me. Who remembers what reasons you came up with? I took it to mean you didn’t want anything to do with me. That’s what I remember.”

  She gave her head a shake. This was too much, too fast. “Ted . . . a minute ago you said you were trying to make an impression on me. Why?”

  Ted put his coffee down again, wiped his hands on a cocktail napkin, straightened the shoulders of his sweater, cleared his throat, and cleared it again. He was taking his time, making a production of it. In the meantime, Alix truly grasped for the first time in her life what it meant to have one’s heart in one’s throat. Come on, Ted, she willed him, say it, say it!

  “Ted . . . !” she gritted through clenched teeth when she couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “Because,” he said at long last, “I love you, dimwit.”

  Her teeth unclenched, her heart went back where it belonged, and she burst out laughing. “That’s got to be the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

  “I’m glad you approve. Now, is there anything you would like to offer back in return?”

  “Yes, there is. I love you too, dimwit.”

  “I’ll take it,” Ted said with a smile. He reached out to grasp her hand and when they touched she felt a little shock. Was this the first time they’d ever touched, skin to skin? It seemed incredible, but she thought it might be.

  “We really have been a couple of dimwits, haven’t we?” she said.

  “We’ve wasted a lot of time, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “You know,” Ted said, and now he had both of her hands in his, “I’ve got a good idea as to how we might start making it up.”

  She waited. Had she ever been this happy before?

  “I have two weeks’ vacation time that I can take in March or April. My brother has a sailboat he keeps down in the Virgin Islands, on Tortola, and he’s not using it, so it’s mine if I want it. I was thinking about going down there and spending a couple of weeks just drifting around the Caribbean, seeing the sights, getting a tan. Lazy days, warm, starry nights.”

 
; “And?”

  “And while I’ve sailed it solo before, right now I’m thinking that it’d be nice to have some company, somebody to share the pleasures.”

  “And the grunt work.”

  “Absolutely. I know you know your way around sailboats, and it occurred to me that maybe you’d like to come along, if you can get free. It’s not another mega-yacht, I’m afraid, just a thirty-seven-footer. I thought it would give us a chance to get to know each other a little better, you know?”

  “Well, you’re right about that,” she said archly. “Two weeks on a thirty-seven-foot sailboat would give us plenty of chance to get to know each other.”

  “On the other hand,” Ted quickly added, “there’s lots of room for privacy, if you’re concerned about that. Two separate berth areas, one aft, one forward—”

  Alix put a hand on his forearm, and leaned even closer—about as close as they could get in the two big chairs.

  “And who said,” she whispered with the tiniest of smiles, “that I was concerned about privacy?”

  Acknowledgments

  Several skilled professionals have generously shared their expertise to help us get Alix London out of trouble (and into it as well) in The Art Whisperer. Our particular thanks to:

  Mitch Spike, Detective Bureau Lieutenant, Palm Springs Police Department (with our apologies for taking a few liberties with his name in the book)

  Barry Bauman, conservator; fellow, the American Institute for Conservation

  Patricia Siegel, forensic handwriting expert and certified document examiner, examiner, Patricia Siegel Enterprises, Inc.

  Arlin Lindstrom, Service Director, Wilder Auto, Port Angeles, Washington

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  With their backgrounds in art scholarship, forensic anthropology, and psychology, Charlotte and Aaron Elkins were destined to be mystery writers. Between them, they’ve written thirty mysteries since 1982, garnering such awards as the Agatha Award for the best short story of the year, the Edgar Award for the year’s best mystery, and the Nero Wolfe Award for Literary Excellence. The pair revels in creating intensively researched works that are as accessible and absorbing as they are sophisticated and stylish. Charlotte was born in Houston, Texas; Aaron in New York City. They live on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.