The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery) (20 page)

“You don’t think he was—?” Alix said.

“Killed? Yeah, maybe he was killed or hidden away, or there could have been some kind of accident. But remember, he was an illegal, he was scared, and when the FBI started showing some interest, he disappeared. Not exactly unusual.”

Lord & Keen themselves had at first declared that all the paintings in question had received their usual thorough review before being offered for sale; they had been submitted to recognized authorities who had confirmed they were what they were purported to be. Then later, when two of the paintings—a Whistler and an O’Keeffe—had subsequently been determined to be fakes, the dealership had claimed to be as aggrieved as the buyers and had immediately taken the pictures back and made full reimbursements. They had also removed the “authorities” they’d used from their list of consultants.

Ted didn’t buy any of it, and more recently, as the net around them tightened, Lord & Keen had been refusing to speak with the FBI at all and they had hired a top-notch criminal law firm to keep it that way. Ted and his team, undeterred, were now looking into things from the other end of the chain, slowly going through the list of institutions and individuals that had bought major works from them in the last several years, and contacting them one by one to get whatever information they could about their purchases. The Brethwaite, having bought the Pollock from them, was on the list, but Ted hadn’t expected to get to Palm Springs for several more weeks.

“And yet here you are,” Alix said.

“Sure, because of what happened with Clark Calder.”

“So Jamie told you, after all,” she said tightly. “I assume she also told you he attacked me a couple of nights ago.”

“She did.” Ted eyed her. “And this annoys you.”

“Yes, after I explicitly asked her not to!”

“And what exactly is so annoying about her telling me that somebody attacked you?”

“What’s so annoying about it! It’s just that I expected . . . that I thought . . . that I didn’t want you to think you had to . . . well, that I . . . Rats,” she finished, scrambling for words and trying to remember just why she’d been so adamant about keeping him out of her life. She certainly wasn’t sorry to have him here beside her now.

“I see. Well, that certainly clears things up,” he said, looking her steadily in the eye. She fought to keep her own gaze level. “But I’m a little annoyed myself, Alix. In the first place, I would have thought that if somebody tried to kill you, you might have let me know, don’t you think? Regardless of what you happen to think of me personally—”

What I think of you personally
. So the things she’d said at that lunch
were
still on his mind. Well, what else could she realistically expect?

“—I do have some pretty good resources at my command.”

“But it had nothing to do with what I think of you personally,” she blurted, screwing up her courage. Here was her opening, a chance to explain, to apologize, to get a start on making things right. “In fact, if I’m going to be honest, my feelings toward you—”

He wasn’t even listening. “And second, I didn’t know anything about what was going on down here until yesterday. Jamie didn’t tell me until after we heard about him getting killed.”

This struck her as dishonest. “Oh, really? You knew about that? You follow the local news from Palm Springs, do you?”

“No, we don’t,” he said coolly, “but we’ve been following the news about Clark Calder ever since we connected him to the purchase of a major Lord & Keen painting back when he was with a museum in Austin.”

“Oh,” she said lamely. When would she learn that trying to be snide never worked for her? She always wound up with her foot in her mouth.

“In fact, it was the fake Whistler I was talking about a minute ago.”

She thought about that. “So . . . assuming this one is a fake too, it’s the second time he’s been at least circumstantially involved with Lord & Keen in a forgery?”

“A lot more than circumstantially. He was the senior curator on the Whistler as well, and the one who was primarily responsible for arranging the sale.”

“I believe that was the case here too,” Alix said.

“It
was
the case. I talked to Mrs. Brethwaite on the phone last night and she confirmed it.”

“Wow.”

“And now he’s been killed.”

She nodded.

“And a few nights ago he tried to kill you. Aside from any concern I might have for you—and whether you believe it or not, I do have considerable concern—it was obvious that something was going on with the guy and it was time for me to check it out.”

Believe it or not, I do have considerable concern
?
That got Alix’s mind reversing direction and taking off in a dozen new ones, but now wasn’t the time to pursue them.
“
Well, it certainly looks to me as if he was the one who broke in, but I don’t have any evidence. And the police don’t agree with me.”

“Oh, it was him, all right, and the police do agree. Before I came here I spent half an hour with the detective working on it—”

“Jake Cruz.”

“Right, good guy. They came up with some prints on the plastic shoe cover your man left behind, and they matched the ones on an old employment record of Calder’s. The blood on the inside of the mask is undergoing DNA testing too, but with the fingerprints, it’s a foregone conclusion.”

“So I was right,” she mused. “Ted, I still don’t understand how you got here so fast. Clark was killed the night before last. You just heard about it yesterday. Yet here you are, you’ve already talked to Jake Cruz—”

“Red-eye from Dulles. Flew all night, got here at the break of dawn. My eyeballs don’t always look like this, you know.”

Your eyeballs are beautiful
, she thought inanely, barely suppressing an idiotic little grin.

They turned at the sound of one of the glass double doors that opened into the courtyard.

“Mrs. B will see you now,” said Richard, doing his usual Jeeves impersonation.

A
nd that’s about where we stand on things, Lillian,” Ted said, having
gone over what he’d just been telling Alix. Astonishingly, Mrs. B had asked him to call her Lillian inside of two minutes, a privilege that no one else at the museum had been accorded. Not even Clark. Not even (as far as Alix knew) Prentice.

They were in the director’s office, Mrs. B looking tiny behind her big oak desk, but no less raptorlike; a sort of mini-bird-of-prey. She was wearing another mannish outfit: a black, buttoned-up Nehru jacket over a stark white shirt with a band collar. It made her look like a priest—but not the mellow Bing Crosby kind. More along the lines, say, of Torquemada.

Alix and Ted were across the entire breadth of the room from her, primly seated at opposite ends of a heavily brocaded Second Empire sofa that could have held four.

“And you think our Pollock is one of these forgeries,” Mrs. B said without expression.

“At this point I’m not sure what I think about that. I believe Alix has some new information for us, but let’s save it for a minute.” They were so far from each other that they were practically shouting.

“Bringing us more good news, no doubt, eh, Miss London? I can hardly wait.” Mrs. B had swung her head to focus those sharp, hooded eyes on Alix.

Alix felt like a butterfly pinned to a specimen chart and resented it. “I’m simply doing what any honest—” she began hotly, but Ted interceded.

“How did you meet Clark Calder, Lillian?”

“It was at a conference of private museum directors a few months ago. Clark had just resigned from the Austin Museum of American Art, and he was full of exciting new concepts that I thought could help us get out of the financial bind we’d gotten ourselves into. And bring us into the twenty-first century at the same time. We’re rather a fusty old bunch here, you see, and set in our ways. And I include myself in that. Clark . . .” She shook her head, thinking back. “Clark seemed like a much-needed breath of fresh air at the time.”

“Did you check with the Austin museum about his tenure there?”

“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.