A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) (18 page)

Yeah, right, Mr. Moral Responsibility
, she thought sourly. It was amazing the way the man could make her laugh one moment and infuriate her the next. Again, she almost said something but held her tongue.

He clucked his incredulity, then paused. She could tell he was thinking. “Alix, is the name Clara Simons familiar to you?”

“No, should it be?”

“She used to be a curator of documents at the Smithsonian, where she was often called upon by the FBI to evaluate questioned documents. Now, as luck would have it, she’s on the art faculty of the College of Santa Fe. We’re old friends of a sort, and I thought I might ask her to go and have a look at that catalog and see what she thinks. What’s the gallery name and the date? And the name of the painting?”

“Galerie Xanadu, November 1971,
Cliffs at Ghost Ranch
—but don’t do it on my account. I’m not
that
interested.” This wasn’t strictly true, but it felt good to let a little petulance slip through.

He emitted a long, sad sigh. “Where, oh, where,” he groaned, “did I go wrong?”

One of these days I’ll tell you
, she thought. There was a whole lot yet to be gotten off her chest, a truckload of baggage to be put on the table, opened, sorted through, and, dealt with.

But not now. “So long, Geoff, thanks for your help. Take care,” she said with more affection than she could have called up even a few days ago. And more than would have seemed even remotely possible a few years ago.

“Drive carefully, my dear,” were his final words.

Chris took the news equably enough. “Well, it’s not as if it’s a big surprise,” she said philosophically. “After the way you’ve been talking, I would have been surprised if it turned out to be the real thing. So I guess you’ll just have to find me another one.”

She was sitting contentedly in one of the Adirondack deck chairs just outside their room, taking in the view. As promised, it was spectacular. It was still an hour to sunset, but the sky was tinged with rose, and the slanting afternoon light lit the crags with color and brought the canyons into sharp, shadowed relief. The air itself was as clean and crisp and sparkling—but not as cold—as a sunny morning in January with a fresh layer of glittering white snow on the ground.

“It really is beautiful here,” Alix murmured, taking it in.

“Mm.” Chris pointed to a wooden side table on which was a cold-frosted ice bucket with a bottle of white wine sticking out of it. “Pinot Grigio. Good Italian stuff. I never travel without the essentials. Didn’t bring glasses, though. Go get one from your bathroom, help yourself, and have a seat.”

Alix did so gratefully, and for a while they both sipped the cool, crisp wine from plastic glasses and took in the view.

“It was quite a ride anyway, wasn’t it?” Chris said at length. “Most exciting thing I’ve been involved in for a long time.”

“Me too. People don’t try to blow me up all that often. Knock on wood,” she added, following through on the arm of her chair.

“Do you still think it was Liz?”

“I do,” Alix said after another swallow. “That look, that ‘What are
you
doing here?’ she gave us when we walked in. That said everything.”

“And you think it was because she was afraid you’d recognize the picture for a fake?”

“I do, indeed.”

“But there were so many other things she could have done that wouldn’t amount to murder. She could have just said she changed her mind about selling it.”

“You had a contract.”

“Yes, but she would have known I wouldn’t fight her on it. For that matter, all she had to do was say she’d concluded it was a fake on her own, and that I shouldn’t buy it. There were probably a hundred other things she could have done. But the idea that she’d try to kill you instead…” Chris shook her head. “It’s just not rational.”

“Well, frankly, she didn’t strike me as the most rational person in the world. Certainly not the most sober. I think she just wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Could be. Makes sense, I guess. It’s certainly true she wasn’t the Liz I remember.”

“Besides, you notice nobody’s been trying to kill me since she died. That should tell us something.”

“Yeah, almost two whole days now. Reach over to the bottle and pour me a little more, will you? You have some too.”

“So the question now is, who killed Liz?” Alix said as she finished pouring.

“And why.”

“And why,” Alix repeated, musing. “And I don’t have a clue to either one, do you?”

Chris shook her head. “Hey, do you think we ought to call Mendoza and let him know you’ve concluded the picture’s a fake? It might be important.”

“I already did, as soon as I finished talking to Geoff. I also told him where we were—I just didn’t like the idea of pretending we were still in Santa Fe.”

“And he said…?”

“Nothing, really. Asked me to come in when we get back there tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? Tomorrow we’ll be in Taos.”

“You mean you still want to go to Taos? But there isn’t any reason to now.”

“But aren’t you curious to see the place? Check out this Mabel Dodge Luhan House?”

That made twice in the last hour that Alix had been more or less accused of being incurious. “Of course I’m curious,” she said testily, “but you’re the one who’s paying the tab on all this, and I just figured you’d want to skip it now.”

“Not a chance. Don’t you want to use the only bathroom in the world with windows painted by D. H. Lawrence?”

“The writer?”

“The writer. He used to stay with Mabel, too, like every other visiting
artiste
, and the idea of see-through windows in her upstairs bathroom apparently scandalized him, so one day he got a couple of buckets of paint and covered them over with some kind of weird designs. I’d sure like to see that.”

“This is the
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Lawrence?
That
guy was scandalized by a few uncovered bathroom windows?”

“Oddly enough, apparently he was a bit of a prude when it came to his private life. Also maybe a little paranoid, because what he was afraid of was that someone would climb up onto the sunroof outside the bathroom and look in. He tried to get Mabel to quit sunbathing nude on the flat roof upstairs too. No success there, however. Mabel wasn’t exactly easy to persuade to stop doing something she wanted to do. She had a steamy affair with this Tewa Indian mystic and let him put up his tepee at the foot of the outdoor steps that led up to her bedroom. This was while she was still married to her third husband, Mr. Sterne—but later she divorced him and married her Indian—that’s where the Luhan comes from. But back to the bathroom: that’s also where Robinson Jeffers’s wife tried to shoot herself over an affair he was—”

“Chris, how do you know all this?”

“Oh, the woman I spoke to when I made the reservation—she was full of information. Couldn’t stop talking.”

Alix smiled. “Yes, I know somebody else who can be like that. Look, Chris, I would love to spend the night there, so if you really want to, then of course, let’s do it. We can leave right after breakfast. There’s nothing more we need to do here now.”

“Well, to tell the truth, there’s another reason too,” Chris said a bit hesitantly. “I wouldn’t want—”

“—Craig to think you were rushing back to Santa Fe a day early because you couldn’t wait to see him,” Alix finished for her.

Chris did one of her eye-rolls. “I guess I’m just going to have to get used to hanging around with someone who’s a mind reader.”

“I’m no mind reader,” Alix said, and her smiled widened. “I’m just getting to know you better.”

“Now that
really
worries me,” Chris said, pushing herself out of her chair. “Come on, I’m starving. Let’s go down the hill to the chuck wagon or the campfire or wherever it is you get dinner around here.”

Nobody would call Eddie Sierra the brightest bulb on the block (you didn’t get a nickname like Yo-yo for nothing), but he wasn’t the dimmest one either, and he’d put a lot of thought into how he was going to handle things the next time around. So when the call eventually came, as he knew it would, he was primed and ready.

“I’m afraid it’s gonna cost you more this time,” he said when Harry had laid out what he needed done.

“And why would that be?” Harry wanted to know. Eddie didn’t know Harry’s last name. Probably didn’t know his first name either, but who cared as long as he was good for the money? Which he was.

“For one thing, because you want it done tomorrow, man. No planning time, no—”

“Planning! How much planning does it take? Just do it the way you did it last time.”

“Yeah, but I got other things on my plate, other things I gotta take care of, all kinds of things I gotta change.” He’d have to bring his laundry over to his mother’s on Monday instead of tomorrow, for example. “It’ll be six thousand this time.” He held his breath.

“Okay, six thousand,” Harry said.

Shit. He
knew
he hadn’t asked for enough. “And another thousand to take care of the damage to my truck from last time,” he tacked on. “That cost me twelve hundred bucks.” Well, it would have cost twelve hundred if he’d taken it to a legitimate repair shop instead of to Gus’s place, where it cost him only a few auto parts he’d picked up here and there. “Take it or leave it.”

This time there was hesitation at the other end. Oh, Jesus. Eddie had begun to silently curse himself before Harry spoke again. “All right, seven thousand, but that’s it. Don’t push your luck. I can find somebody else if I have to.”

Seven thousand dollars!
Eddie exulted. Of course he’d have to give two thousand to Joey (who thought he was getting half), but even so, five thousand dollars! That was more than he got in six months from Human Services, even when you added in the food stamps.

“This time you’re looking for a car with two women in it,” Harry said. “They’ll be going south, hitting the Chama sometime in the morning. I don’t know when, exactly, so you better be up there waiting for them as soon as it’s light.”

Eddie stifled his instinctive protest at having to get going before dawn. For five grand, he could get up in the dark for once in his life. “So how’m I gonna know it’s them?”

“How’re you gonna—tell me, Eddie, how many cars go by there? Ten a day? And how many of them have a couple of women in them? Look, this will be the two of them, heading south, both maybe thirty, a good-looking blonde and a fairly good-looking brunette—”

“Wait, the brunette—is she, like, huge?”

“She’s tall, maybe six-two.”

“I seen them!” Eddie exclaimed. “Yesterday, right here in Española. At the Taco Bell. They were going north on 84.”

“That’d be them. They were on their way to Ghost Ranch. Fine, then you know what they look like.”

“They’re driving a Lambo,” Eddie said, suddenly hushed. “Jeez, it’s a shame to total something like that.”

“They’re driving a what?”

“A Lambo. You don’t know what a Lambo is, man?”

“Let me guess. A car.”

Eddie snickered. “A car, yeah, but calling a Lambo just a car is like calling a, a…” But similes weren’t his forte, and his imagination failed him. “Come on, you must have heard of a Lambo. It’s short for…I can’t remember, Lambogonia, Lamburgeroni, something like that.”

“A Lamborghini? That’s a sports car, isn’t? Don’t they do over a hundred miles an hour?”

“Over two hundred, man.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“What’s the problem?”

“What’s the problem! Are you—how the hell are you two ding-a-lings in your broken-down wrecks going to catch a car like that? They’ll leave you in the dust.”

At that, Eddie laughed out loud. “Let me tell you something. I seen the way they drive. You ever seen one of them little old ladies with blue hair, can barely see over the steering wheel, driving her big old Lincoln Continental, like, ten miles an hour and looking like she’d have a heart attack if she went any faster? Well, that’s how they drive their Lambo. Trust me, it’s a piece of cake, man.”

“We’ll see,” Harry said.

After breakfast the next morning they loaded up the car, got in, and swung closed the winglike doors. Chris inserted the key in the ignition but didn’t twist it. She turned to Alix.

“How would you feel about taking the wheel this morning?”

Alix had been stoically preparing herself for the teeth-grindingly slow drive that lay ahead as they made their way ever so cautiously to Taos, wasting all the potential of the powerful and responsive creature at their command. But now, with those words, a dazzling light suddenly flooded her immediate future.

“Um…I wouldn’t mind, but why? I thought you were enjoying it.”

“So did I, but I got up this morning with a screaming neck ache, and I realized it was from the tension of driving this thing yesterday. You know that Camry with the ‘Baby on Board’ sign you mentioned? Well, I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that that’s more my speed than one of these things. This baby is just too much for me, too…I don’t know, muscular. I guess when it comes to certain things I’m a weenie at heart.”

She laughed just a little ruefully as they climbed back out to exchange seats. “Besides, I woke up a couple of times during the night thinking about that wiggly section where that old guy went over the edge. I’d rather do that part with my eyes closed, if it’s all the same to you, and if I did, it would probably work out better for all concerned if I wasn’t the one doing the driving at the time. So if you would kindly take all this horsepower off my hands I’d appreciate it. At least I’ll know you know what you’re doing.”

“You think so? Let’s see how you feel about it by the time we get to Taos.”

Chris began to laugh again but stopped short. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m kidding,” Alix said, settling gratefully behind the wheel. “Believe me, Gian-Carlo put me through some truly intensive training before he ever let me take one of his precious beauties out alone.”

For the drive down the dirt access road she restrained herself, maintaining a steady ten or twelve miles an hour. Gravel dings in the flawless, satiny finish would not be looked upon kindly back at the rental agency. So by the time they reached the highway, she was aching to put the car to the test.

She lived with the ache for two or three miles, but when they rounded a curve and a three-or four-mile stretch of ruler-straight road lay ahead, she glanced at Chris. “What would you think about my putting this baby through its paces? It couldn’t be safer than right here. There isn’t another car in sight.”

“Sure,” Chris said agreeably, “I’m curious myself, not that I—
urk
!” Her head jerked back against the headrest as Alix downshifted to build more RPMs and bore down on the gas pedal.

It was as if the car itself reared back, gave a deafening, Hallelujah-I’m-free-at-last whoop, and accelerated like a 767 roaring down the runway. Alix’s heart soared right along with it. As a rule she was not a reckless driver, not a reckless person, not even particularly given to temptation, but every rule has its exceptions, and for Alix London the exception came when she got behind the wheel of a truly fine sports car. It was a passion she’d come by relatively late; she’d been twenty-six when Gian-Carlo Santullo had introduced her to the thrill and challenge of his Lamborghinis. As in most things, she was a quick study, and for the rest of her stay in Italy it was those weekends in Ravello with their splendid, solitary drives along the winding, windy Amalfi Coast that she looked forward to most eagerly.

“Whoo,” she heard Chris murmur, her foghorn voice a couple of notches lower than usual and uncharacteristically subdued. When Alix turned to look at her she saw that Chris was still sitting rigidly upright, apparently holding her breath, her eyes like saucers, her head still pressed against the headrest.

She slowed at once and pulled over to the side. “Chris, are you okay?”

Chris let out the air she’d been holding in. Her posture relaxed, and her eyes returned to normal size. “I’m okay, yes. It’s just that I always feel a little peculiar when the gravitational pressure exceeds five Gs.”

“I’m
sorry
,” Alix said sincerely, “I didn’t—”

“Don’t be sorry, it was great! How fast were we going?”

“Not that fast, really. A little under ninety. But it took less than ten seconds to get there. That’s what you were feeling.” She thought it best not to mention that one of the gauges on the dashboard actually measured G-forces.

“What was all that noise? Is that normal?”

“That noise was four hundred pound-feet of torque, five hundred and twenty horsepower, and seven thousand rpm. And yes, it’s normal. It’s all part of the Lamborghini experience. Did it scare you? I should have warned you.”

“Damn right it scared me.” She grinned. “I also absolutely loved it. Come on, let’s do it again. Can we do it any faster? What a kick.”

“With pleasure. We still have a fair amount of straightaway before the curves, and not another car around. Want me to take it to its limit?”

“You bet, but I’d rather not get airborne, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I don’t think that’ll happen, but you never know.”

“Oh, hell, I’ll chance it.” Chris set herself back against her seat again, gripped the raised edges, compressed her lips, and stared straight ahead. “Let ’er rip!”

This time, with Alix having grown re-accustomed to the car’s unique electronic gearshift “paddles,” they got up to ninety even faster. At twelve seconds they hit a hundred and twenty, and after that she had to stop looking at the gauges and concentrate on the driving. They were just short of a hundred and fifty miles an hour, still going up, when she finally eased up as the road began to climb a ridge and gently curve to their left.

“I never thought I had the fast-driving gene,” Chris said, a bit short of breath, “but I have to admit, that was terrific.”

Alix nodded happily, more relaxed than she’d been since they’d left Santa Fe the day before. “Maybe we’ll get some more open road after we get through the next patch.”

The next patch constituted the precarious, swinging, cliff-edge curves that ran above the Chama River, the area where Henry Merriam had died, and Alix instinctively slowed even more. On the left, up against the ridge and just coming into view, was a decrepit rest stop that she hadn’t noticed on the way up and wouldn’t have noticed now if there hadn’t been a truck parked in it and a dark-haired young man leaning nonchalantly back against the hood with a
campesino
’s straw hat down over his eyes. He looked oddly at his ease in this lonely, forlorn spot, with his arms folded and one foot propped comfortably behind him on the bumper. But what caught her attention was how intently he appeared to be watching them—almost as if he were watching
for
them—from under the shadowed brim of his hat, despite the apparently relaxed pose. Something was off here. The skin on the back of her neck crawled.

Chris had her eyes on the rest stop too. “That truck—we’ve seen it before. Yesterday, in Española.” She stared hard. “That’s it, all right,” she said when they drew close enough to read the name beneath the painting on the passenger door. “Bimbi. Remember?”

“We’ve seen the guy too,” Alix said. “He’s the one who wanted a ride.”

“He’s
looking
at us,” Chris said nervously. “What is this about? This can’t be a coincidence, can it?”

“I wouldn’t think so. What I’m afraid is that he wants to play. That’s the downside of a car like this—the idiots in their souped-up junk heaps that want to race you.”

“But how could he know we’d be here?”

Alix shook her head. “No idea.”

“He’s talking on a cell phone,” Chris said as they drew abreast. “Why would he be talking on a cell phone? Oh God, look, now he’s jumping in the truck. What’s going on? He’s still looking at us!”

“Chris, I don’t have a clue, but I sure don’t like it.” The crawly sensation had crept halfway down her spine. If they hadn’t already been entering the first of the curves she would have turned and headed back the way they’d come. On the straightaway she could leave him in the dust. On the curves, it would be a different proposition altogether, more dependent on nerve and outright craziness than flat-out speed. That was especially true because the narrow road was quickly climbing the ridge. Already there was a sheer, eighty-foot drop-off on their right, with the shallow, gleaming river winding its way through the desert at its base.

In the rearview mirror, she saw the pickup bumping onto the road and turning toward them. He was only a couple of hundred yards back, and she could see that he was gunning the engine. This was not good; damn these stupid macho kids. “Better make sure your seat belt’s tight,” she told Chris, checking her own.

Chris’s face was pale. “Thank God you’re driving. I’m having nervous palpitations and all I’m doing is sitting here. Alix, are you going to be able to deal with this?”

“Deal with what? He wants to race, we don’t want to race. End of story.” So why was her scalp itching like this? Why could she feel the adrenaline practically flowing into her fingertips? No, there was something more than a simple race going on here. He had picked what was probably the most dangerous, isolated stretch of highway between Santa Fe and the Colorado border. Did he want to play chicken, was that it? And if so, would he take no for an answer? And who was on the other end of that cell—

Chris had turned to stare out the back window. “He’s crazy!” she screamed. “He’s practically on our bumper! What is he
doing
?”

When Alix glanced into the mirror she was shocked. Indeed, the idiot was only a few yards back and closing fast. They were going about thirty miles an hour now, and they were well into the curves; this was really dangerous. Did he actually mean to bump her, was that it? Was this some insane form of counting coup the youths went in for around here?

But just as she was bracing for the impact, he swung left, into the lane for oncoming traffic, and drew level with them. If she hadn’t already decided he was genuinely crazy, that would have been enough to convince her right there, because the bends in the road and the jutting red-rock promontories limited his vision to just a few hundred feet. If something doing thirty or thirty-five miles an hour came around that next curve right now he was dead meat. She tried to get a look at his face in hopes of guessing his intentions, but the Lamborghini was too low and instead she found herself looking at the dusty passenger door panel, into the Kewpie-doll face of Bimbi, whose expression gave no clue.

Still, she didn’t get truly, deeply scared until Bimbi suddenly swerved directly at her as they rounded an outside curve. Alix jerked the steering wheel to the right, but the front right corner of the pickup still caught them a glancing blow just behind the left front wheel well, provoking a little gasp from Chris. Alix hung on, managing to maintain control, but now she was no longer in any doubt about what was happening to them. This wasn’t a joyride by a testosterone-crazed kid; this guy was out to kill them.

And now another vehicle, a lumbering, chugging eighteen-wheeler appeared rounding the bend just ahead, heading for them.
Directly
for them—for Alix and Chris—because the ponderous rig was in the wrong lane. Henry Merriam, the old art dealer, flashed across her mind. Was this what had happened to him?

The pickup on her left was already swerving toward them again, but her mind was working very fast. There was no place to go on the right, that was for sure—no shoulder to speak of and only a two-foot guardrail that didn’t look substantial enough to stop them from going over the side if push came to shove. And even if there had been a shoulder and she’d pulled onto it and stopped, what then?

To their left was the better option; even if the pickup was souped up, she had no doubt that with the Lamborghini’s fantastic acceleration and ground-hugging ability she could dart into the wrong-way lane ahead of him and quickly leave him behind. But that meant she’d be continuing around the bend in the wrong lane, with zero visibility. If that wasn’t worrisome enough, there was the monstrously wide semi itself that she’d have to get by. What would it do? If she played her cards right, it wouldn’t be able to switch lanes quickly enough to bring them into a head-on collision (which would probably put no more than a few dents in the semi but would pulverize the Lamborghini), but a simple, properly timed swerve to its right would mash them sidewise into the cliff wall. The question was, did the driver have the time and the reaction speed to bring it off?

Well, she was about to find out. “Hang on,” she said through clenched teeth. “Here we go…”

She took in a quick breath, downshifted, and stamped on the gas pedal. In two seconds they were fifty feet ahead of the pickup. She switched back to the right lane, which left them bearing rapidly down on the semi (or rather, vice-versa). They were close enough for her to see that the semi driver’s jaw had dropped; he couldn’t believe it. A line from
Man of La Mancha
flew into (and out of) her head: “Whether the rock hits the pitcher or the pitcher hits the rock, it’s going to be bad for the pitcher.”

“Alix…” a frozen, wide-eyed Chris squeaked. “We’re…we’re…”

Thirty yards before the impending crash, Alix lightly tapped the brake pedal so that she could accelerate into the curve, then swung abruptly left, into the opposite lane, accelerating as much as she dared. The semi driver, startled as he was, managed to haul the steering wheel hard to his right in an effort to crush them. Too late, though. She was already halfway down the forty-foot body of the truck-trailer, so that the cab went scraping along the rock wall five or ten feet behind her. For a fleeting second she exulted, thinking they were home free, but then, as in one of those slow-motion nightmares, the trailer came fishtailing around, straight for them and certain to mash them against the wall. She had no choice but to accelerate even more and shoot for the diminishing, dismayingly small opening between the back end of the truck and the wall of rock.