The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery) (11 page)

It had been meant for Alix, Chris, and Geoff, but Priscilla heard it and cornered him to plead. “Just don’t one-star us, please. Just tell me what we did wrong and if there’s something we can do to improve it.”

“Yeah, don’t let anybody sit on the can,” Tiny grumped.

By the time the tour ended it was three thirty. Geoff and Tiny were scheduled for a five o’clock commercial flight back to Seattle, so Alix drove them to the airport, first swinging by the museum to let Chris off—she was staying in Palm Springs another day—to do a little more exploring on her own. Tiny, with his guidebook tightly gripped in his huge fist, resumed his edifying lectures on the way there. (“Look, there’s Leo Durocher’s house. Wow, you know who lived there? Carmen Miranda! Look . . .”)

In the airport parking lot, Geoff leaned back into the driver’s side window for a final word to Alix. “I want you to put me on speed dial, my love.”

“You’re already on speed dial, Geoff.”

“I’m glad to hear it. But you know what I’m getting at. I want your promise that you will let me know at once should you have any more problems with phantom burglars.”

“Or vice versa,” Tiny contributed, hefting both their bags.

“I promise, Dad.”

Calling him “Dad” always brought a sentimental softening to his features, although it was Geoff himself who had first instructed her to use his given name, against the wishes of her mother. That had been when Alix was twelve, and only recently had she begun to try an occasional “Dad.” It still felt awkward, but she knew it pleased him so she kept working at it.

“Good. And if I can be of any use at all, you know that I’ll be there at once.”

“I know. Thank you, Geoff. Dad.”

A kiss on the cheek from Geoff, a “
Stai bene, principessa mia
” from Tiny, and they were gone.

When she arrived back at the museum, she found Chris in the break room, a mug of coffee in her hand, fidgeting in front of the window that looked down on the atrium.

“It’s about time!” she declared. “Come with me, I have to show you something!”

What she had to show Alix was the object destined to be Lot 22 in th
e auction. Having been buried in storage for years, it had been pull
ed out of the basement and was on a temporary easel with a few of its fellow travelers, awaiting shipment to the Endicott Auction Galleries
in San Francisco. Unassembled picture crates, each one custom-made for its particular contents, stood along one wall, giving off the pleasant scent of freshly cut raw wood. No glue smell, though, as most muse
ums
were on the fussy side about getting glue anywhere near their art pieces. No hammers allowed either; the crates would be sealed with screws that would be inserted into predrilled holes.

Lot 22 was a dark blue felt–covered panel about two feet by three, on which were mounted twelve small oval portraits in three rows of four each—six women, four men, and two children, all in mid- or late-eighteenth-century dress. The largest of them was less than three inches in height, the smallest about an inch and a quarter. Alix had passed by them once or twice before, but they hadn’t caught her interest and she hadn’t looked closely at them.

“Aren’t they lovely?” Chris asked. “Look at those tiny little faces. They’re so appealing, so . . . so damn
lovable
! Especially the two kids at the bottom, on the right, they break my heart.”

“Sure they’re lovable, they’re supposed to be lovable. They’re portrait miniatures.”

“Are they made to be pendants? There are those little metal loops on most of them.”

“Right, for a cord or chain to wear around the neck. Or if you were a man, it’d have a cover on it like a watch cover and you’d keep it in a vest pocket. These things weren’t like regular full-size portraits, Chris. They weren’t painted to hang on a wall for anybody to see, but strictly as personal, private keepsakes—lovers, parents, children. They’re mostly watercolors on ivory, and that, I’m afraid, pretty much exhausts my store of knowledge on portrait miniatures.” She leaned closer to the rows of gentle, minuscule faces that looked back at her so very innocently and openly across two-and-a-half centuries. “And yes, they are affecting, aren’t they?”

Not one was smiling or laughing, but not one had on a “public face” either. They reminded her of the kind of semicandid snapshots that might be taken at a family gathering today: “Hey, Uncle Ed, look over here for a minute!” All of them had convex glass covers—“crystals”—and were framed in gold, most of them simply, some more ornately. The majority appeared to have been done by eighteenth-century “limners,” self-taught painters who were closer to artisans than artists, and who went from town to town peddling their services. These were pleasant to look at, with a naïve folk-art quality. But a few of them, including the two that had drawn Chris’s attention, exhibited the subtleties and nuances of accomplished artists, all the more impressive for having been rendered on a three-square-inch surface.

“Lovely,” Alix murmured.

“The boy and girl are a set,” Chris said. “The cases match, do you see?”

Alix nodded. “Probably brother and sister.”

“Do they cost a lot?” Chris asked.

“I don’t think so, no. On a guess, I’d say you could get the whole panel for a lot less than what you paid for the Hartleys.” She straightened up and threw a sidewise look at Chris. “Wait a minute, don’t tell me you’re thinking about buying these, too.”

“Hm, do I note a certain disapproval in your tone?”

“You can buy whatever you want, Chris, but they’d be anachronisms. Where would they go in your collection? They’re completely different from anything else you have.”

“I like them, they appeal to me, isn’t that reason enough? I’d like to have them on my wall to look at. Is something wrong with that?”

“No, of course there isn’t, but . . . well, in a way, there is, yes. You’re a collector, right? And you’ve worked hard. You’ve got a wonderful collection going that’s getting better all the time—”

“But . . . ?” Chris was standing erectly, feet wide apart, arms folded across her chest. One eyebrow was lifted.

“Quit looming, Chris. You’re plenty intimidating as it is.”

Chris laughed and relaxed. “I can’t help it. It’s what I do when somebody makes me mad.”

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to do that, but look, here’s my ‘but.’” She paused to get her thoughts together. “All right. An art ‘collection’ isn’t just any old bunch of paintings or drawings, you know that. To be a collection it has to have a theme, a focus. It has to be
about
something. And yours is American Modernism, first half of the twentieth century. The Marsden Hartleys are a great addition to that. But these”—she gestured at the panel—“sure, they’re attractive, but they’re from a different time and from a wildly different culture. If O’Keeffe and the rest had been influenced by artists like these, you’d have a point, but they came at their work with a totally—
totally
—different set of aims, and values, and techniques. There’s no connection. If you—”

“Say, do I get to say anything here? Of course, I realize that it’s only
my
collection, and
my
money I’d be spending, so maybe I don’t have the right—”

Alix smiled. “Okay, your turn.”

“It’s just this: I
like
these miniatures, Alix. It makes me feel good to look at them. Somebody’s going to wind up with them, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be me.”

“Let me put it differently,” Alix said. “Where are you heading with this? Where would you rather be in five years, surrounded by a comprehensive, orderly
collection
, or just by a hodgepodge of things that make you feel good to look at?”

Chris looked blankly at her, eyes opened wide, and Alix stared right back, and both of them broke out laughing.

“Do I really need to answer that question?” Chris choked out.

Alix shook her head until she was able to speak. “Point made,” she said. “And you know”—she leaned closer to the panel again—“those two children are really beautiful, really well done. They’re almost like Peales, or even—”

“John Singleton Copleys,” said Jerry Swanson, who had materialized behind them. “Am I right?”

Alix turned. “You are right. That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

“If only,” Jerry said, prayerfully turning his eyes to the ceiling, “Nope, they’re by a guy named Joseph Dunkerley. You know him?”

Alix shook her head. “Not a familiar name.”

“Well, neither does anybody else who doesn’t specialize in miniatures. American, last half of the eighteenth century. Born in England, I think, but mostly worked in Boston. As far as I know, miniatures were all he did, and as you can see, he’s pretty good—better than most. I’ve valuated his stuff before, and the Copley question usually comes up somewhere along the way, because he does paint a lot like Copley—in this teeny-tiny version, anyway—but it always gets shot down. These particular ones, they’ve got an ironclad provenance that goes all the way back to the day when Dunkerley sold them . . . back to the original commission, in fact, if I’m not mistaken.”

“No such thing as an ironclad provenance,” Alix said. “You ought to know that.”

“Yeah, but you haven’t seen this one. Oh, it’s the real thing, all right. Trust me, we’d
love
to be able to at least say ‘attributed to Copley.’ That alone would quadruple the price. Thought about ‘school of Copley,’ and I suppose we could have gotten away with that, but, I don’t know, it seemed like it was reaching a little. Copley didn’t really have a ‘school,’ did he?”

“No, he wasn’t a unique or original painter in that sense. He just painted in the classical English style—only better than ninety-nine percent of the Brits did.”

“What I thought. According to the records, these two right here were commissioned by Mr. Jeremiah Hobbie, Esquire, of Oldham, Mass, 1770. The kids’ names are . . . oh, hell, I forget—Alfred and something—but it’ll be in the catalogue. Anyway, if you look at them closely, like with a magnifying glass, you can see they’re not anywhere near as delicate as Copley’s miniatures.” He laughed. “That’s what they tell me; what do I know?”

“Well, who’s looking at them with a magnifying glass?” Chris asked. “I think they’re beautiful. I think they’re all beautiful. What’s the estimate range on this lot?”

“Twenty to forty thou, and most of that is based on those two kids. Good Dunkerleys go for about ten thousand each, and these are good. The others aren’t worth much, between you and me.”

“I think they’re wonderful,” Chris insisted.

“You should put in a bid at the auction, then. Well, I’d love to stay and chat, ladies, but duty calls.”

The moment he left, Chris rubbed her hands together. “I
want
them,” she said in a low growl. “Let’s go see the Man.”

“How much are you expecting to get them for this time?” Alix asked. “It’s more interesting to watch if I know where you’re going.”

“I don’t know, but if I can’t get them for thirty, I’ll be very surprised.”

“He’ll probably nail you for that fifteen-percent premium again.”

“And I’ll pay it if I have to, which I probably will. I really love these little guys.”

T
hey found Clark hunched over a putter, stroking balls into a spring-loaded contraption that popped them back to him. “One second,” he said, and hit one more that rolled off to the left and missed. “Darn, that’s what happens when I have a gallery.” He leaned the putter against the wall. “So. Something more I can do for you?”

Again, Alix felt uncomfortable around him. She thought briefly about excusing herself, but decided her interest in watching the negotiations outweighed her repulsion and she took the same seat she’d had earlier.

He and Chris had the hang of each other’s styles now, so things went more smoothly than they had the first time. In five amiable minutes they’d settled on exactly what Chris had predicted: The miniatures were hers for $30,000 plus fifteen percent, for a total of $34,500. Chris was obviously delighted, and Clark seemed pleased too.

“Our printer’s going to love me when I do this to him,” he said merrily, dabbing at his nose. This was a monster cold, all right. His nose was even redder than it had been in the morning, and his eyes were heavily bagged. She almost (but not quite) sympathized with him.

“They chewed me out about the Hartleys, but”—big boyish grin—“if I’m not good at sweet-talking, then what am I good for? Piece of cake. Let me do it right now.”

He wasn’t on the phone thirty seconds before his fragmentary comments made it clear that things weren’t going well.

“You’re joking . . . But you had no trouble with the Hartley page, why would there be . . . ? You did? Already? As fast as that? . . . Well, can’t you get them back before they’re actually sent out? We’ll pay for the additional costs . . . Okay, all right . . .Yes, I understand. Goodbye, Sal.”

He put the phone down, his electric smile nowhere in sight. “Can’t be done. I’m sorry. The catalogues have already been mailed, two hundred and seventy-five of them. They went out an hour ago.”

“You mean they printed them up, bound them, and mailed them off between eleven o’clock this morning and one o’clock this afternoon?” Chris asked. “That’s kind of hard to believe.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said. But according to them, the printing and collating only took an hour, and they’re not bound, they’re just center-stapled. All they had to do after that was to slip them into pre-addressed envelopes and drop them off at the post office. Just two hundred and seventy-five of them, all told. I’m really sorry, Chris.”

“Clark,” Alix said, “why is this a problem? Couldn’t you follow up with an announcement—a correction—saying that this particular lot is no longer available?”

“Not possible, Alix. The implication would be either that we’ve withdrawn it because of some problem with it—authentication, condition, who knows—which would cast doubt on all the rest, or that we had presold it to a customer with special access—”

“Which would be the case,” Alix said.

“And which—
while perfectly legal
—would create the impression of having given certain people special treatment. Nobody else but Chris got a chance to buy anything ahead of time. That would—”

“You had no qualms about that with the Hartleys,” Alix pointed out.

“Of course not, the catalogues hadn’t gone out yet.”

“In other words,” Alix said, “the problem isn’t that the miniatures were being sold ahead of time, the problem is that people would know about it.”

A big smile, a conspiratorial wink, somewhat complicated by weeping, swelling eyes. “By George, I think she’s got it!”

“Well, I’m disappointed, sure,” Chris said a few minutes later, “but it’s no big deal. I can just bid along with everybody else and hope for the best. If I can’t get to Frisco, I’m sure I can do it on the phone.”

They were in two of the lawn chairs scattered about the central atrium, with coffee they’d brought down from the staff break room. With her mug cradled in both hands on her lap, Chris turned her face up to the sky. “Oo, that desert sun feels good. Guess what it was doing in Seattle when we left.”

“Mm, that’s a hard one. Let me think . . . This is a wild guess, but was it raining, maybe?”

“Raining, definitely.” She shifted a little, stretching out her long, jeans-clad legs. “Can I take back what I said about Clark earlier? About his being hot? Well, no, he
is
hot—even all clogged up with that terrible cold—but there’s something awfully . . . slick about the man. Fishy. Not to be trusted. Do you get any sense of that?”

“I do,” Alix said, seizing on the comment to raise something that had been on her mind but was almost too silly to say out loud. “In fact—now, I know you’ll say I’m crazy, but I’ve been wondering—”

“I would never say that about you, Alix. If anyone in this world has both feet on the ground, it’s you.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, because what I was wondering was whether Clark could be the man who attacked me last night.”

Chris jerked upright in her chair. “Are you crazy? The senior curator of the Brethwaite Museum is the Phantom Burglar?”

“No, I’m not saying that. I never thought that. What I’m saying—what I’m wondering—is if he’s the man who attacked me last night.”

“You’re losing me. I thought the guy who attacked you
was
the Phantom Burglar.”

“No, that’s just what the police think.”

“Well, if they think it was the Phantom—”

“Chris, for God’s sake, forget the Phantom Burglar for one minute, will you? Pretend you never heard of him. Just think about Clark.”

“Yes, but—”

“Hear me out. Yesterday his nose was just fine. No sign of red, no sign of a cold. Last night I socked somebody in the nose, hard, right through his stupid mask. Today, suddenly, Clark’s nose looks like a pink potato.”

“Alix, the man has a world-class cold. Didn’t you see all that sniffling? And his eyes were getting red and puffy, the way they do when you have a bad cold. Didn’t you notice?”

“Yes, but do you really develop a cold like that overnight? He was fine yesterday. And today it wasn’t only that his eyes were red, there was a kind of bruising around them too,” Alix said, “sort of purplish, like a couple of black eyes starting to develop. Didn’t
you
notice that?”

“Frankly, no,” Chris said more loudly. She was starting to look a little alarmed. “Look, think for a moment, Alix. Why in heaven’s name would Clark want to steal your laptop?”

“Maybe to make it seem to the police that he
was
the Phantom Burglar. Maybe what he was really there for was to . . . I don’t know, to kill me, maybe?”

“
Kill
you?” Chris shook her head. “Alix, you’re starting to worry me.”

“I’m telling you, the more I think about it, the more it hits me that that’s exactly what he was trying to do. That ashtray he had in his
hand—that wasn’t one of Geoff’s Bangladesh knockoffs, it was
heavy
. Solid stone. There was a dent in the floor where it hit. There would have been a dent in my head, too, believe me.”

“All right, think about that. If he was there to kill you, wouldn’t he have brought something more appropriate with him, not just looked for whatever he happened to find in the room? Explain that to me.”

“Same explanation,” Alix said. “To make the police think later that he was just there to burgle, and it was an accident that he got caught in the act.”

“Okay, he wanted to mislead the police, that I can buy. But why would he want to mislead you?”

“How did he mislead me?”

“He wore a mask. Why would he do that if he intended to leave you dead?”

“In case he didn’t succeed. He didn’t want me to be able to identify him. Which, may I point out, is exactly the way it turned out.”

Chris shook her head. “You have answers for everything, I’ll say that for you.” Soberly, she placed her hand on Alix’s wrist. “Alix. Now listen to me. For your own good, don’t go around saying these things to anybody else. Even to me it sounds, well . . .”

“Paranoid. I know,” Alix said with a sigh. “But wait, there’s something else—I forgot. The detective that came out said he thinks whoever did it probably got my hotel key out of my bag, and the only times that bag was out of my sight—the only possible times he could have done that—were during the day when I was away from my desk for one reason or another—
in
the museum. That would mean it almost certainly had to be somebody from the museum, wouldn’t it? And if—”

“Stop right there, Alix. I just heard one ‘probably,’ one ‘thinks,’ and one ‘almost certainly’ in less than three complete sentences. And there was an ‘if’ in there not very long ago too. You’re reaching, kid.”

“But if you put all the ‘ifs’ and ‘mights’ together—”

Chris put a hand to her lips. “Sh. Company.”

It was Prentice, who had come from the building and was approaching. “Hello, again, Chris,” he said, having apparently run into her earlier in the day. “Alix, I wanted to ask you: The gentleman I saw you with earlier today—not the large one, but the other, the older one—wasn’t that your father?”

“Yes, it was.”

“Ah, I thought so. He’s changed a bit, of course, but then a couple of decades does that to a man.”

To say nothing of ten years in prison
, Alix thought, not that Prentice would be ill mannered enough to mention it.

“I did have several opportunities to chat with him years ago—a delightful and accomplished man, and I would dearly love to do it again. On the off chance that the four of you are free later this afternoon, Margery and I would like very much to have you all to cocktails. We’d make that a dinner invitation, but we have later obligations ourselves.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Prentice, Tiny and my father have already left. I know they would have loved to come. They’ll be sorry to have missed it.”

Chris’s glance indicated that she knew Alix was lying through her teeth. They would never have accepted. Geoff had been chastised and snubbed too many times by the art world elite to chance getting burned again (not that Prentice would ever have done it), and Tiny was unhappy around aristocrats like the Vanderveres on general principle.

“Oh, dear, that’s really too bad,” Prentice said. He looked glum for a moment, then brightened. “But how about the two of you? Are you available? Would you like to come?”

“We’d love to!” Chris practically yelled, speaking for both of them.

“Excellent. You have our address, Alix. This will be entirely informal,
just the four of us. What you’re wearing is fine. Shall we say five thirty?”

Chris was smiling as he left. “What a nice man. A gentleman of the old school.”

“You’ll never meet anybody nicer—or more worth listening to when it comes to art.”

“Back to what we were talking about,” Chris said, her smile fading. “Let me ask you just one more question.
Why
would Clark Calder want to kill you? I seem to have missed that part.”

Alix nodded. “That’s the question, all right, and I don’t have a clue. I’ve never harmed him. I hardly know him. But there’s something about the guy. The more I think about it, the stronger the feeling gets. Not only that so-called ‘cold,’ but his whole manner, the way he looks at me when he thinks I’m not watching him—”

“Halt! Stop right there. Consider. You’re constructing one hell of a case against someone on the basis of what? A red nose. All the rest is conjecture, and pretty wild conjecture at that, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

Alix took a sip of her coffee, the first in a while, but it was stale and cold, and she grimaced. “You’re probably right. You know, last night shook me up pretty good. Maybe it made me a little strange.”

“You’re not going to go to the police with this, are you? They’d probably put you away.”

“No, I won’t go to the police. Come on, I’ll drive you to the Palms. You can check to see that they’ve really brought your bags up to your room and then we can just kick back and talk for a while around the pool before we head for Prentice’s.”

“Sounds good to me. I need you to tell me more about portrait miniatures.”

“You mean in order to better plan your orderly, comprehensive hodgepodge?”