The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery) (4 page)

Those who took this position, and they were the majority, had a lot of history on their side. The pronouncements of so-called connoisseurs, including many of the most respected ones, had in the end been proven wrong again, and again, and again. Alix was well aware of this, but held fast to her confidence in her own instinctive judgments. Like plenty of others, she had the training, scholarship, and experience it took to offer a credible opinion on whether a painting was fake or not, but like hardly anybody else, she was also blessed (or cursed, it sometimes seemed) with the innate ability to unconsciously reduce it all into an instant, totally intuitive judgment call that she couldn’t back up with words—not at first. She couldn’t do it with every painting or every painter, but when the feeling was there, and when the artist concerned was an artist she “connected” with, there was no mistaking it. This was the fifth time her connoisseur’s eye had spotted a fake where none had been suspected, and so far she was batting four for four. Every single one had turned out not to be what it was supposed to be.

There was one thing that was making her nervous this time around, though. Jackson Pollock was an artist with whom she
didn’t
connect. She didn’t especially like his paintings, and she’d never worked on one of them. So what could she possibly “see” in
Untitle
d
? That worried her, made her uncertain.

“Listen, Alix,” Clark said more seriously, “are you planning to bring this up at the staff meeting?”

“No, I don’t think so. I want to give it some more thought before I say anything to Mrs. B. I probably shouldn’t have said anything to you yet either, but you sort of caught me thinking out loud.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that. This painting is her pride and joy, Alix. Between you and me, I don’t think it’s one of his best works, but it’s terribly dear to her. I know she comes off as a tough old bird, but behind those hawk-like eyes she’s a pretty vulnerable old woman, and something like this would just . . . well, it’d be a hell of a blow.”

“I know, but . . . well, don’t you think I have an obligation—”

“I’m not sure if I see it as an obligation, but I understand where you’re coming from, and you have to do what you see as the right thing. Look, how about this: You keep thinking about it, see if you can figure out what it is that’s bothering you, and in the meantime I’ll gather up the materials we have on the painting—provenance, evaluations, forensic testing, and so on. It’s pretty weighty stuff, you’ll see. Then let’s meet again . . . today is Thursday, so give it a few days, and let’s say, oh, Tuesday, first thing in the morning, and compare notes. After that, if you still feel that Mrs. B needs to hear, then be my guest. You have my blessing.”

“That’s fair enough. I’d like to have more to go on too before I say anything.”

“Good. And now we’d better be off to the meeting.”

“Hey, Alix,” Jerry called after them as they started across the room.

He stood glowering at her from behind those big glasses, with his arms sternly crossed. “Where’s my nickel?”

“Wait, hold up a second, would you, Clark?” she asked as they went by a wall of drawings.

“A second’s about all we have. What is it?”

“These two drawings,” Alix said, pointing. They were displayed one above the other, in simple wooden frames, each about ten inches by twelve. One was of a basket of pears, the other was of a mountain, both done in pencil, rather roughly; more than sketches but less than serious studies. They were both by the early twentieth-century American artist Marsden Hartley.

“Uh-huh, what about them?”

“I understand they’ll both be in the auction.”

“Yes, yes, that’s right. Come on, we’d better get moving.”

“Jerry told me yesterday they’d be sold as a single lot and the estimate would be fifty to seventy thousand,” she said as he hustled her off. “And I was thinking: I have a friend—a collector—who might be interested in bidding on a couple of Hartleys. Would there be any problem with her coming down and looking at them here, before the official viewing at the gallery in San Francisco? She’s got the time right now, but I don’t know about—”

“Not a problem at all. If she likes them enough”—and the gleaming killer smile flashed—“she could make us an offer I couldn’t refuse right on the spot and not have to bid against anybody later on. She could take them home with her. But it’d have to be in the next day or two, before the catalogue’s mailed out.”

“Seriously? She could do that? Is that legal?”

It seemed impossible, but his eyes crinkled up even more. “Surely you’re not suggesting that I would propose anything extra-legal? No, seriously, yes, of course it’s legal. These—”

His cell phone buzzed before he could finish. “I see,” he said into it. “I understand. Certainly.” He snapped it closed. “Mrs. B’s gotten held up. Meeting’s postponed until eleven fifteen. All in a day’s work. I’ll see you then. Be there.” A convivial wink, and he was gone.

T
he thick, poured-concrete walls of the museum made cell-phone reception iffy, so Alix went out to one of the four twelve-foot-wide stone discs that served as entrance steps, where she knew reception was good. There wasn’t a right angle or a straight line in the place; everything was curved, and the four interlocking discs at the entrance mimicked the four giant discs that made up the building itself. Alix sat down on one to make her call. She dialed a number in Seattle.

“Alix? Hi, what’s up?”

The woman on the other end was her friend Christine LeMay. When they’d first met a little over a year earlier, Chris had recently resigned from her job as an IT systems/communications analyst at Sytex, an “international health care information technology advisory consultancy.” Considering that those alarming muddles of multisyllabic words were beyond the comprehension of a non-techie like Alix, and that Chris knew next to nothing about art, which was Alix’s specialty, they made an unlikely pair. More than that, Chris was big and raw-boned, a talkative, outspoken six-footer-plus with a startling honk for a laugh, given to flamboyant shawls and serapes and multiple rows of jangling bracelets. She was at her sparkling, noisy, funny best in crowds. Alix was the opposite. At five-nine, she was low-key and reserved, and she dressed conservatively (“classically” was the way she preferred to think about it). She kept her thoughts largely to herself, and she liked the quiet life. Well, to a point.

Chris had made a great deal of money when Sytex had gone public and her options had matured; she was bent on using some of it to develop a respectable art collection, and a curator friend at the Seattle Art Museum had suggested that Alix London was just the person to help her build it. Whatever the reason, they had hit it off from Day One, and Alix had wound up doing a lot more than help her with her art collection. It had been a subtle intervention or two on Alix’s part that had gotten Chris to mend her threadbare relationship with Craig Templeton, the man who had once been the love of her life and who was now her husband. Chris had been enormously grateful and was to this day determined to repay the favor. Nothing she’d come up with had come close to panning out (they had different tastes in men), but Alix appreciated her intentions and they were now close friends. They worked well together, too, on Chris’s budding art collection—Alix a patient teacher, Chris an eager student—and Chris was now well on the way to developing a fine collection of American Moderns (that most permeable and vague art classification), including Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Hart Benton, George Bellows, and Grant Wood.

But no Marsden Hartleys.

She was excited the moment she heard. “Of
course
I’m interested. Are they really any good?”

“They’re not what you’d call ‘finished,’ but they’re nicely done. There’s a liveliness to them, and they’re . . . interesting; historically, I mean. You can see Cézanne’s influence all over them.”

“Fifty to seventy thousand, huh? For
both
of them? Does that seem in the ballpark to you? Sounds kind of cheap to me. Oh, my God, listen, to me, seventy thousand dollars is
cheap
. I’ve become a terrible person.” And there was the honk. “Who woulda thunk it?”

“Well, we all have our crosses to bear, you know, and yours is being nouveau riche. My heart aches for you. Anyway, the reason it sounds so cheap to you is that you’re used to paying for oil paintings. These are pencil, and they don’t bring nearly as much; people aren’t that interested. And don’t forget, art market prices don’t have much to do with quality. They—”

“I know. You’ve been telling me about once an hour for the last year: Art market prices depend on art market prices. Whatever they went for at the last auction is your best predictor for how they’ll be priced at the next one. Except higher.”

“Very good. I didn’t realize you’d been paying attention. I’ll tell you this, though: They’re workmanlike and attractive, and I certainly wouldn’t mind having them on my own walls. They have a kind of rough energy—”

“Okay, okay, you’ve sold me. I want to see for myself. I’ll be there tomorrow. What time would be good for you?”

“Whatever’s convenient for you.” Chris had a membership in an outfit called ShareJet, giving her a one-sixteenth time-share in a very snazzy Gulfstream 200, which meant she could fly just about anywhere she wanted almost any time she chose, and do it in fantastic comfort.

“Well, let’s see . . .” Alix could hear her clicking away at a computer keyboard. “. . . It’s about a thousand miles, so I’d have to allow about three hours, all told. How about eleven? I imagine I could drag myself to the airport in time to fly out at eight. It won’t be easy, mind you.”

“Wonderful! Call me before you land and I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

“No, not necessary. I’ll just get a taxi and have it drop me at the museum. Okay, eleven o’clock, see you—no, wait, I’d better book a hotel reservation for a couple of nights. Where are you staying?”

“I just moved a couple of days ago to a lovely little place, the Villa Louisa, built in 1926, by some big silent-movie director, with a bunch of guesthouses around the swimming pool. I’m in one of the guesthouses.”

“You moved? Why? Where were you before?”

“Oh, they put me up at the Colony Palms. Very nice and everything, but awfully . . . I don’t know, not for me. A big, fancy place, ultra-hip and trendy, bright colors everywhere, the bars jumping at eleven in the morning. Rock music playing all day at the swimming pool, tons of Beautiful People dressed in up-to-the-minute—no, make that up-to-the-second—fashions. You know.”

“Uh-huh. And at the Villa Louisa it’s ugly people dressed in 1926 styles?”

“No, normal everyday people dressed like normal everyday people. It’s quiet there. Restful, understated, an old wood-burning fireplace in my bedroom, another big river-rock one out on the patio. No bar. No TVs. At night they show classic movies under the stars. Last night I watched a Cary Grant from 1932. They have these lounge chairs you can lie back and snooze in if you want.”

Chris was quiet for a few seconds. “You know,” she said thoughtfully, “that really does sound like my kind of place.”

“Good, I’ll call them and make a reservation for you right now. I think the bungalow next to mine is free.”

“No, not there! Good heavens! I meant the Colony Palms. Are you kidding me?”

A
lix had been in Lillian Brethwaite’s presence no more than fifteen minutes in total: once when she was offered the job, and then later, when she’d arrived to go to work, a five-minute welcoming to introduce her to the curatorial staff. Still, she knew a lot about the director, mostly gleaned during a lunch at a taqueria just south of downtown that garrulous, slightly boozy Alfie had treated her to on her first day. He’d hardly paused for mouthfuls of shrimp fajita between witty, rambling observations about the institution’s shortcomings, dysfunctionalities, and appalling policy changes, especially since—here he stopped to make obeisance with upraised hands—“the coming of the Boy Wonder, blessed of God, all praise him.” Later there had been a couple of coffee breaks with Madge and Drew, who had been equally forthcoming. Added to that, she’d simply overheard enough griping among the staff to know that all was not well at the Brethwaite, and that the new senior curator was unloved.

Thus it was with sharp anticipation that she sat herself down in a creamy leather chair in the richly furnished boardroom, with a cup of coffee and an almond biscotto in front of her. She sat at one of the long sides of the table, between Prentice and Alfie and facing Madge and Drew, all with coffee and biscotti of their own. Some were abstractedly fingering their biscotti, but nobody was eating. Alfie was leafing through the
Desert Sun
newspaper without really reading it. The others were silent and frowning, sunk in their own thoughts. Neither Clark nor Mrs. B had shown up yet.

When several minutes had passed without anyone saying anything, Alix, having grown uncomfortable, said: “People? Is anything wrong? Has something happened?”

“Don’t ask,” Alfie said, without looking up from his paper.

“Yes, ‘something’ has happened,” Drew said with an arid laugh.

“There are a few organizational changes being considered,” Prentice said.

“Ha.” Drew again.

Another thirty seconds of silence, and then Madge, whom Alix already knew to be an eager gossiper, couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Oh, there’s no reason to keep the poor woman in suspense. It’s not exactly a secret.”

“And if it were, you wouldn’t exactly be the one to keep it, would you?” Drew said meanly.

Over the past few days, Alix had chatted often with the curators and had learned a lot about them. From her standpoint, Drew Temple was the least likable of the bunch, a dour, unhelpful, vaguely reptilian man with a long nose that drooped at the tip, like a cartoon witch’s, and a thin-lipped, extraordinarily wide gash of a mouth that made her think of a Muppet, but without the sunny disposition. He said little, but what he did say was unfailingly critical or negative, and delivered with a condescension she found immensely irritating. Behind the tiresome, rote carping, she sensed someone who was keeping a tight lid on a long, meticulously maintained list of bottled-up grievances.

His comment had no effect on his wife, who explained the morning’s bombshell clearly and succinctly: The Photography department had already been scrubbed and its curator dumped—that was now history. But beyond that, Prints and Drawings (Alfie’s department) was to be combined with Paintings (Prentice’s department) into a single department of Paintings and Drawings; and Decorative Arts (Drew’s department) and Costumes and Furnishings (Madge’s department) would become a single department of Costumes and Decorative Arts.

Alix nodded. “I see.” No wonder they all seemed so worried. “So then, what used to be four departments will become two.”

“Clever woman,” Drew observed. “Not much gets by her.”

Alix ignored him. “Are there only going to be two curator-level positions then?”

Not even Madge seemed eager to answer that question, and it was Prentice who finally did. “Yes, only two. According to Clark, Madge will be the Costumes and Decorative Arts curator, and Drew will become assistant curator responsible for the decorative arts segment. As for Paintings and Drawings, it has yet to be decided as to whether Alfie or I will assume the mantle.”

Alix stared at him. Was he serious?
Has yet to be decided?
Prentice Vandervere or
Alfie
?
She liked Alfie, she had nothing at all against Alfie, but compared to Prentice . . . !

Alfred Carpenter Wellington, she had learned (from Alfie himself), had been born to wealth and status, the scion of an old Virginia family. He had done well in school, but everything had come too easily and he had grown lazy and bored. He was sent to Yale, where he partied and enjoyed himself, working all the way up to a PhD in art history without expending much time or effort. After that he’d taught at an exclusive Connecticut prep school for a while but didn’t enjoy it, and quit. He’d married an aspiring singer who later joined a rock band that came up with a huge hit. From then on she had been a celebrity and Alfie had shrunk into a sort of hanger-on. It wasn’t long before he’d started drinking. One too many of his scenes in public soon led to a divorce. From there things continued to go downhill. He lost most of his money in the stock market crash of 1987, and had taken on a succession of jobs he couldn’t hold on to. In 1998, the Brethwaite came through with a surprise job offer and he’d been there ever since: still in the same job after sixteen years. Still the same person too: still bright, still lazy, still unambitious (this is all Alfie talking), and still a boozer, though a more moderate one than he’d been before.

Still an amiable person, too, and pleasant to be around, but miles shy of Prentice in experience, ability, presence, and everything else. What kind of game was Clark playing at?

Alfie had obviously been asking himself the same question. “Does anybody here seriously think Clark would put me over you, Prentice?” He shook his head. “Get real.”

“It’s hardly as ridiculous as you make it sound, Alfie,” said Prentice. “You have a good many—”

“Of course it’s ridiculous! It’s his nasty little joke, Prentice. He’s just saying it to demean you, that’s all.”

“And what makes you think he won’t
do
it to demean him?” Drew asked.

Alfie took a swig from his suspect mug. “If he did, I’d never accept the position,” he said with dignity. “Prentice is a legend. The museum is lucky to have him.”

“I don’t agree with you, Alfie,” Prentice said, “and I sincerely urge you not to do that. But I want you to know how much I appreciate your words.”

“Oh, I’ll do it, all right,” Alfie said and went back to his newspaper. “It would be a travesty.”

Well done, Dr. Wellington
, Alix thought with a swell of affection,
good for you
. But, she wondered, what about the other change that was in the works: the one that would make Madge her husband’s superior and, presumably, boss? Drew didn’t strike her as the kind of man who’d be able to handle that. It wasn’t altogether a matter of chauvinism, either. In some ways he could make a pretty good case that, on paper anyway, the curatorship was going to the wrong person. He, too, was a Yale PhD in art history, and had been an adjunct professor at Brown when he applied for the position at the Brethwaite. Madge, by comparison, had no “Dr.” in front of her name and wasn’t really an art historian at all. She had an MS in costume design and technology from the University of Cincinnati and had worked in theater and taught continuing education courses at a community college in Providence when Drew had been at nearby Brown. When Lillian Brethwaite had hired Drew, Madge—then his fiancée—had come along as part of the package, to install and head the new, relatively small Costumes and Furnishings department, which had since grown considerably. Alix had no doubt that Madge herself thought she was fully competent to curate the entire new Costumes and Decorative Arts collection and was the right choice for the job. That Drew saw it that way was doubtful in the extreme.

Alfie was now reading the newspaper with more attention, and Alix glanced at the front-page story that seemed to have caught him up: “Phantom Strikes Again: This Time the Ocotillo Lodge.”

“The Phantom,” Alix said, making conversation. “What is
that
about?”

“Actually, it’s interesting, there’s this thief, the Phantom Burglar, they call him, he never leaves a clue, the police don’t—uh-oh.” He set down his cup and straightened up. “Gird thy loins,” he whispered, “man the bulwarks, hoist the . . .”

There had been a perceptible stiffening in the room as those in it sensed the director’s imminent entrance, which she made with long, quick, confident strides and more than a hint of swagger.

The Iron Lady, they called her, and she looked the part, a keen-eyed, wiry old woman with a face full of crosshatched wrinkles, weather-beaten and parched by nearly six decades of desert sun. She wore the same expression Alix had seen during their single face-to-face interaction, one eyebrow slightly arched in a lemme-see-you-try-and-put-one-over-on-me-pal look. She wore her straight, gray-streaked hair long and bound in a none-too-neat, old-fashioned bun with a nasty-looking dagger of a tortoiseshell comb stuck through it. When Alix had seen her before, she’d been wearing a mannish, well-tailored pantsuit. This time she was in a beat-up denim jacket and jeans worn over an old, much-laundered, open-throated white shirt. She looked as if she’d just arrived from breaking in a stubborn horse or two that had been too much for the hands down at the ranch. As a matter of fact, she did own a ranch a few miles south of town, so who knew, maybe she had.

Twenty years earlier, in her mid-forties, she had married a manufacturer of plastic barrels for ballpoint pens, a man with the unlikely and uniquely unsuitable name of Lillienburger, but, to no one’s surprise, marriage didn’t suit her. Soon divorced, she had quickly and understandably discarded the “Lillian Lillienburger” name and gone back to “Brethwaite.” At the museum, she preferred to be addressed as Mrs. B (“not Miz, if you don’t mind”), and so it was.

Her approach to running the museum fit the “Iron Lady” sobriquet too. She was the founding director, having been handed the reins directly by her father when it opened in 1996. The museum consisted almost entirely of his own collection, and she had indeed ruled it with an iron fist and a protective, frostily possessive attitude. She was demanding and domineering with the staff and no less dictatorial with museum visitors. There were strictly enforced, prominently displayed standards of dress and deportment for those members of the public who ventured onto the premises.

These premises had been her childhood home, after all. She had grown up with most of the works of art that were on the walls now, so as far as she was concerned, visitors were little more than vulgar interlopers and rubberneckers to be tolerated only because her father had so willed it, and only so long as they behaved themselves. She was famous for having once called the police to demand that some poor guy be arrested and hauled off for “willfully despoiling private property.” He had been eating a donut and drinking a carton of milk—while leaning against his car, out in the parking area.

As to the board of trustees, they were local businessmen and -women whom she herself, as its chair, had appointed, and at whose pleasure they served. A dozen years ago, two of them had stood up for themselves and voted against her on some now-forgotten issue. By the next day they had been dismissed, and since then no further insurgencies had arisen. People didn’t mess with Lillian Brethwaite.

But according to what Alix had been hearing, things had changed four months ago, which was when Mrs. B had met Clark Calder at a meeting of the Association of Private Museums. She had been impressed (or charmed, or smitten, or conned, depending on whom you talked to) by the glib, patently ambitious Clark to the extent of creating a new position for him as senior curator. He had taken up the job within the week, and it quickly became clear to the others that he could do little wrong in Lillian’s eyes. Almost everything he proposed had either been implemented or was scheduled for implementation: relaxing the dress code to the extent that nothing short of showing up topless or with bare feet would deny you entrance; extracting a $15 “suggested donation” from visitors (admission had previously been free); creating Patron-level and Fellow-level museum memberships at $250 and $500 respectively, whereas there had previously existed only the $50 General level (shortly to become $75); and various other changes to remedy the museum’s dire financial situation.

And of course it had been on Clark’s recommendation that IMS be brought in to do the two-month study of “client interface experience” that had resulted in the monumental shakeup now under way: the deaccession by auction of many “surplus” works of art (the first deacessioning in the museum’s history), the banishment to storage of many others that failed to meet monetized eyeball criteria, and the resultant shrinking of curatorial departments. It was also Clark who had engaged Endicott to handle the auction, and who was now negotiating terms and arrangements with them.

Through all of this, so Alix had heard, Mrs. B had sat back as her Golden Boy implemented his twenty-first-century business marketing strategies. And to his credit (this was said grudgingly, with qualifications), the
desperate financial circumstances that the Brethwaite, along with so many other non-profits, had found itself in with the recession had markedly improved since his arrival, and it appeared that the museum might actually be in the black again in the not-too-distant future.