A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) (13 page)

“I’m thoroughly familiar with all the Albuquerque galleries. There is no Galerie Xanadu.”

“It may not exist anymore—”

“It
does
not exist anymore. If it ever existed at all.”

“—but I was hoping the archives might go back far enough to include it.”

“The archives go back to 1932.” Pause. “I myself do not, however.”

Humor? Was he being funny? She tried a tentative chuckle.

Indeed, that seemed to make him a bit more affable. “Well, let me check the index files,” he said more kindly. “Galerie Xanadu? Spelled in the French manner?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know how the French spell
Xanadu
,” she offered, thinking a small joke of her own might ease things still more, and indeed, there was an arid sound that might be his version of a chuckle. Or not. “Yes,” she added quickly, “
galerie
with an
ie
.”

Silence for a minute and then: “As a matter of fact, we do have some material from them.” He sounded surprised. “Apparently they were in business in the fifties and sixties. We have four…five…six exhibition catalogs.”

“That’s great!” Alix exclaimed, her excitement rising. “Can I come in this morning and look through them? At eleven, say?”

“Eleven fifteen would be better. I should be free then.”

“Eleven fifteen it is. Thank you so much. I’ll see you then.”

“Yes, I’ll have them out for you. Ms. London? Did I understand you to say you were a friend of Elizabeth’s? I’d like to offer my condolences on last night’s events. Just horrible.”

“Actually, no, we weren’t friends. I only met her yesterday.”

“Oh. Well, my condolences in any case.”

Returning to La Plazuela, Alix sat down thoughtfully at her table, on which her coffee still sat, now cold. Before she could do much cogitating, though, the chair across from her was pulled out and Chris’s six-foot-two frame flopped into it. She had slipped a note under Alix’s door sometime during the night suggesting that they meet at the restaurant for an early lunch, so Alix had been expecting her.

“Morning, Chris, how are—”

“Coffee,” Chris croaked. “I am in need of coffee. Urgently.”

“Here, have mine. I haven’t touched it yet. Going to be cold, though.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Chris grabbed for the cup with both hands the way someone who’s been in a lifeboat at sea might grab for the first mug of fresh water she’s seen in three days, downed most of it in a series of greedy gulps, and let out a grateful sigh. “There, that’s better. Life as we know it. Well, well, good morning to you too,” she said a little more brightly.

Obviously, Chris had not had a restful night, but as far as her clothes went, she looked, as always, totally pulled together, nouveau Southwest-style: a trendy, raw-silk Navajo-tailored blouse, a silver and turquoise Navajo lotus-blossom necklace, matching earrings, a couple of silver ring bracelets, jeans, and high-heeled boots. But when she lifted her designer wraparound sunglasses to her forehead, leaving the earpieces stuck in her hair, her bloodshot, tired eyes gave her away.

She shook her head. “Whew, what a night.”

“What time did the police finally let you go?”

“One o’clock. What about you?”

“One! I was back here by ten thirty.”

“Well, Liz and I go back a long way. There was a lot they wanted to know.”

“Did you—” Alix hesitated. “Did you tell them about the thing, you know, with Craig?”

Chris played with her bracelets and chewed on her lip for a moment, then shrugged. “Yep.”

“The whole story?”

“Yep.” She finished the coffee. “I felt rotten about dragging him into it—obviously, he couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it—but the police really do need to know that kind of thing.”

Alix nodded. “I suppose they do. Besides, if they found out about it later—”

“Which they would have.”

“—they’d have started wondering why you hadn’t happened to mention it.”

“Exactly. Still, I feel bad, you know? I bet they’ve already called him in for an interrogation. I just hope he doesn’t hold it against me.”

“He won’t hold it against you. You did the right thing, Chris.” She wasn’t quite as sure of that as she made it sound, but Chris could obviously use the support. And Alix could use a painkiller. “Chris, you wouldn’t happen to have any aspirin on you, would you? I have a bit of a headache.”

Chris shook her head. “Not on me. There’s a gift shop here, though. Do you want to—”

“No, it can wait; it’s not that bad. Let’s have something to eat.”

They ordered more coffee, huevos rancheros for Alix, and steak and shrimp fajitas plus a Caesar salad for Chris. While they waited, Alix filled her in on this morning’s visit to the police station to look at the painting. When she came to de Beauvais’s being there, and about overhearing his temporary shedding of the la-di-dah accent, Chris’s interest perked up, but what really got her attention was telling her that the O’Keeffe was looking like a fake.

“A fake? A
forgery
? Liz was trying to…to swindle me?”

“Well, we don’t know that she was in on it, Chris. It’s a well-done piece of work, and she may have been fooled too.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Well, it’s possible. And remember, at this point I’m not a hundred percent certain that it
is
a fake. I’ve been wrong before.” She smiled. “Not often, of course.”

Chris sipped the newly poured coffee and reflected. “So what’s your advice?”

“Tell me,” Alix responded, “what exactly is your situation with the painting? Is the arrangement you made with Liz still good now that…well, now that she’s dead?”

“Sure, it’s good. It’s a bona fide, signed contract. The estate will have to live up to it. And so will I.”

The waitress came back and set their orders on the table. Neither of them made a move to eat. “And what the contract says,” Alix said, “is that it’s yours if you decide to take it, but you can still decline, is that right?”

“Not exactly. It becomes mine
unless
I decide, by the thirteenth—Wednesday—
not
to take it.”

“So you have three days.”

“Right. So what
do
you advise? Hey, the food’s getting cold; let’s eat.”

Alix had thought she wasn’t hungry, but the smell of the eggs, cheese, and green chiles had gotten her salivary glands going, and for a few minutes she and Chris dug into their meals with gusto. About halfway through, Alix returned to the subject at hand. “What do I advise,” she said, pondering. “Well, I have to say that I feel it to be my moral duty to advise you to get out of it. There are too many ifs, too many issues. There’ll be other O’Keeffes available; why mess with this one? Too much weirdness here, Chris. Go back to Seattle. Save your money for something else. That’s my advice—my moral-duty advice.”

Chris swallowed a chunk of rolled-up tortilla stuffed with steak, onions, and green pepper, washing it down with more coffee. “And I respectfully decline to accept it. I’m in this up to my neck already, and I’m not about to walk away from it as if none of it ever happened. Not while we still have three days. I’ve formed an attachment to that painting, and I would like to
know
whether it’s real or not before I throw in the towel. So tell me, what’s plan B? Screw your moral responsibility.”

Good for you
, Alix thought with a surge of feeling. “My feelings exactly. Well, plan B would start with my going over to the museum archives to see what I can learn about the painting’s history. And then use the rest of those three days to see if we can determine for
sure
whether it’s real or not. After that—follow wherever it leads us.”

“And you can do that—determine for sure if it’s authentic—in three days?”

Alix shrugged. “Won’t know till I’ve tried. But I think so, yes.”

“But how? I thought it took weeks to get back the lab results on…on…I don’t know, materials, pigments, whatever…”

“Oh, sure, but I wouldn’t be fooling around with things like that,” she said, treating Chris to an abbreviated version of the lecture she’d given de Beauvais in the evidence room. “So I’d be depending more on—”

“The old connoisseur’s eye thing?”

“That’s it.”

Chris had finished her meal. She accepted yet more coffee from the waitress and looked seriously at Alix. “The connoisseur’s eye,” she repeated. “You started to explain it to me once and I said to save it for another time. I think maybe it’s time. What is it, exactly?”

“Exactly? That’s not so easy to explain.” Alix finished off the last few bites of her own breakfast while she gathered her thoughts. “Basically, it stems from an ability to get inside an artist’s head, to see what he or she saw, to understand what they were trying to say, to see the way they said it—the colors, the composition, the way the paint was laid down—and whether they all truly fit the artist involved.”

Chris was frowning. “But why is that anything special? Isn’t that what any art expert would do?”

“Yes, but if you have the eye, it’s pretty much instinctive, or at least it feels that way. You don’t have to go back to the books or compare the painting with the artist’s other works, or anything. You just know.”

Chris’s frown was now a dubious scowl. “Alix, no offense, and I trust you and all, but…well, that has a little bit of a sleight-of-hand sound to it. Like some kind of hocus-pocus. I mean, ‘You just
know
’? That’s not exactly confidence-inspiring.”

“You’re not the only one that feels that way,” Alix said, laughing, “and very few people do have the ability. It’s not something you can learn, although you need the learning to make it work. In my case, it’s something I apparently inherited from my father.”

“Yes, but, honestly, ‘You just know’?” She shook her head. “It just doesn’t—”

“Look, let me ask you a question. If I showed you two handwriting samples, one of which was yours and one that wasn’t, you’d be able to pick your own out with no trouble, wouldn’t you?”

“Sure, anybody would.”

“True. But how—
exactly
—would you know that it was yours?”

“Well, let’s see…” Chris pulled out a ballpoint, scrawled a few words on a napkin, and studied them. Okay,” she said, looking at what she’d written. “There are certain things that distinguish my handwriting. I loop the bottom of my
g
’s but not my
y
’s; I think that’s unusual. And I dot most of my
i’s
, but not all, with a little circle, and—”

Alix snatched the napkin away. “So without something like this—a sample to compare—you wouldn’t be able recognize your own handwriting?”

“No, of course I’d be able to. I’d recognize it in a flash. I was just trying to explain to you—”

“
How
would you recognize it in a flash?”

“I don’t know how, Alix, I just would.”

“Bingo,” declared Alix, “you’ve just described a connoisseur’s eye. When it comes to your own handwriting, you have it, everybody has it. There are a hundred reasons you recognize it—looped
g
’s, unlooped
y
’s—but you don’t have to consciously sort through them one by one and see if they match. It happens by itself, and it happens instantaneously. You take one look…and
you just know
.”

Chris’s frown had melted away. “I see. And you can really do that with paintings?”

“Not every artist, no, but a fair number, and O’Keeffe is one of the ones whose aesthetic sensibilities I seem to be attuned to.”

“I won’t even ask what that means.”

“Good, because I’m not sure I know either. I’ve got it, I know that, but I wouldn’t want to try to explain it—or analyze it too closely. It’s sort of like having a goose that lays these golden eggs for you. Not a smart idea to dissect it to see how it works.”

Chris nodded slowly, finishing her coffee and absorbing what she’d heard. “Okay, I get it more or less, but, well, you’ve already looked at the painting. You’ve come to your conclusion: it’s a fake. What more is there to do for the next three days?”

“See if I can verify it,” Alix said promptly. “I told you I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure—” she smiled, “—only about ninety-seven percent—and what I need to do now is actually step into O’Keeffe’s world as deeply as I can. I need to see it through her eyes, to feel it. The picture is of Ghost Ranch, which is way the hell in the boonies, two or three hours north of here. She fell in love with the place and bought this isolated little shack and plot of land up there, at the foot of the cliffs, away from everything—miles from any of the ranch buildings—and lived and worked there for fifty years—from her forties into her nineties. I’d like to go there and see the area for myself.”

“She was still painting when she was in her nineties?”

“And only stopped then because she went blind.”

“Yeah, I guess that would throw a small crimp in things.”

“And even then she became a potter and did that right up until she died—a few months short of her ninety-ninth birthday.”

“Some lady,” Chris said.

“You don’t know the half of it.” Alix was very glad now that she’d boned up on O’Keeffe after she’d gotten Chris’s call. “Anyway, Ghost Ranch is now a conference center—has been for more than fifty years—and if they have rooms they’re not using, you can book them for the night, which is what I want to do.”

“So you intend to drive up there, or what?”

“I do, yes. But on the way I also want to stop at Taos. Taos was the first place she spent time up here. Did you ever hear of Mabel Dodge Luhan?”

Chris frowned. “Vaguely…rich, colorful, avant-garde…the big kahuna of the Taos arts scene back in the twenties and thirties, is that who you mean? Knew everybody—D. H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, Martha Graham…”

“…
and
Georgia Totto O’Keeffe,” Alix said. “Right, Luhan was a famous hostess, a big party-giver, and no cultural pooh-bah passing through Taos could escape spending a few nights at her house. Well, O’Keeffe was one of them, and it was the very first place she stayed in New Mexico. Stayed more than once, in fact, and did quite a few paintings of scenes right on the property, and it’s obviously where New Mexico got into her blood. I’m sure I read somewhere that the house is still standing, and I’m hoping that whoever owns it now will let me wander around the place a little and get the feel of it. I need to try to see it through her eyes, to see if I can get some understanding of what it was that made her decide to pull up stakes and leave her very comfy, very successful life in New York.”

“Well, that’s all very interesting, but I repeat—can you do all that in three days?”

“I can sure try—three days, two places, and the furthest is only a few hours from here. Seems doable,” she said confidently, then hesitated. “One problem, though.”

“Namely?”

“I’m afraid I’ll need at least a partial payment on my fee. Rental car, two overnight stays—”

“Sure, you can have it, but it’s not necessary. You’re working on my behalf; I’m not going to let you pick up the tab.”

“That’s not entirely true, Chris. I’m working on my behalf too. Probably more on mine than yours.”

“No, I don’t see it that way. This is still basically my affair, and I have a lot of dogs in this fight. Somebody’s maybe tried to stick me with a forgery, somebody’s killed one of my oldest friends, and somebody’s tried to kill one of my newest friends. I want to find out what’s going on. So it’s my nickel. End of discussion. I’m also going with you, by the way, just in case you were thinking otherwise.”

Alix had indeed been thinking otherwise. “I don’t know, Chris,” she said slowly. “One person’s already been killed over this, and I’m still alive only by the skin of my teeth. Who knows what’s coming next? I wouldn’t feel right about getting you involved—”