The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery) (9 page)

The three of them, Geoff, Tiny, and Chris, had stepped back from the building and were waiting outside, on the lowest of the four stone discs that formed the stairway leading up to the entrance. They were pointing at different parts of the structure and jabbering away at each other.

Tiny was the first to spot her, and his face lit up.
“
’Ey,
mia cucciolin
a
!” My little puppy
.
He’d been born over a barbershop in the Bronx’s Little Italy, but he frequently reverted to the epithets and ejaculations of his Sicilian mother and father, and he always had some Italian term of affection at the ready for her. And they always warmed her heart.

There were hugs all around, and Chris explained that, since she had the whole Gulfstream to herself and didn’t enjoy traveling alone, she thought that Geoff and Tiny might like to fly down with her, and on the spur of the moment she’d invited them along.

“And on the spur of the moment, we accepted,” Geoff said brightly, “and here, as you see, we stand before you . . . and before this, ahem, unusual structure.”

“That is one weird place,” Tiny agreed, tilting his head up at it.

He had a point. The Brethwaite, built on an uneven, markedly sloping site, did have the look of four gigantic stone wheels that had dropped down out of the sky and haphazardly landed in an intersecting circle, each one slightly overlapping the one to its left and being overlapped by the one on its right. The low roofs were all slightly canted too, none of them exactly at the same angle or in the same direction, and no two of them were exactly the same size. In the center sat a surprising, pleasant little open-air atrium with a neatly cropped lawn and a few picnic tables for visitors to have coffee or snacks that could be bought at the small café.

“Is that thing really an art museum,” Chris asked, “or are we looking at a pileup at the Flying Saucer Airport?” That made everyone laugh, it was so apt.

“Well, why don’t we all go in?” Alix suggested. “We’d better head up to those Marsden Hartley drawings first, Chris. I saw Clark in his office when I came in just a few minutes ago, so we can probably catch him if you still want to make an offer after you see them. And then I can show everyone around the place, although there isn’t a lot on the walls right now.”

Chris, Tiny, and Geoff were issued clip-on visitor passes at the security desk, and then Alix led them up two levels (each level being a few inches higher than the one to its left, so that you had to mount a single, wide, curving six-inch step to get to it) to the small bay that had held the Drawings gallery. Many of the items that had been on the walls were no longer there, having been demoted to racks in the storage room, probably never to emerge. What was left was a largely undistinguished smattering of mountains, deserts, horses, Native Americans, and one lonely, unsmiling Mongolian herder in a fur hat and a long, padded tunic. In their company the Hartleys, rough as they were, stood out as the work of a genuine artist.

The four of them quietly studied the two small drawings, their attitudes restrained and circumspect—except for Chris, for whom restraint and circumspection were behaviors that went against nature.

“I
love
them!” she declared. “I want them! I
need
them!”

Tiny was less impressed, bordering on disdainful. “Hey, if what you want is Cézanne imitations, I can knock off a couple of them for you, in, like, one afternoon, that are better than those. And that includes a coffee break.”

Alix saw his point. Both of them might have been homages to Cézanne, especially the one with the mountain, which was very obviously Mt. St. Victoire, near Aix-en-Provence, the subject of never-ending fascination to the great French artist, who had painted it more than seventy times. These two pictures showed the enormous influence Cézanne had had on the young Hartley.

“Now, Tiny,” Geoff said with a smile, “you really shouldn’t go around saying such things. Not everyone might understand that those days are long behind you.”

As with Geoff, Tiny’s disputes with the law—every one of which he’d lost—had been the result of his brilliantly executed forgeries and the not-so-brilliant frauds stemming from them. And as she did with Geoff, Alix still had the occasional nervous-making misgiving about just how “rehabilitated” he was.

But Tiny responded to Geoff with umbrage. “Hey, come on, I wasn’t gonna
charge
her. I was gonna do it for free. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Geoff immediately apologized. “Indeed, there is not. Forgive the implication.”

The big guy wasn’t altogether mollified. “And I
could
do better Cézannes than those,” he grumbled, “and you know it.”

“I never said you couldn’t. But these aren’t Cézanne copies, Tiny, or imitations either. Look at them more closely. Hartley has used Cézanne as a starting point, yes, but he’s added something of his own, a touch of the vibrancy of America, of the American West, that one does not find in the very Gallic, very European Cézanne.”

Tiny didn’t hesitate with what he thought about that. “Sheesh,” he opined, but Alix supported her father. “That’s so,” she said. “Hartley was nowhere near the artist that Cézanne was, but he came at things a different way. A Cézanne still life is, well,
still
. . . settled . . . but when you look at Hartley’s bowl of pears here, they only seem to be resting for a minute. You get the impression that if you turned around for a second and then looked back at it, they would have rearranged themselves.” This was the kind of airy-fairy art talk that Alix generally deplored and she was a bit embarrassed to hear herself doing it. “Sort of,” she added by way of amends.

“Enough already,” Chris said. “The majority vote says go for it.” She clapped her hands together, a single snapping
clack
. “Let’s go talk to this Clark person, Alix.”

“Wait, before we do, there’s a painting I’d like everybody to have a look at. It’ll just take a minute. It’s on the way.”

It was the Pollock that she took them to, of course, and from twenty-five feet away, Geoff said, “Oh, I didn’t know the Brethwaite had a Pollock. From the drip period, obviously, perhaps 1948 or ’49?” The question was addressed to Tiny.

“Ehhhhh . . . I don’t think so.” Tiny was looking at it, his head to one side. “A little later, I think, just before he got, you know, darker. I’d say 1951 or ’52.”

“Very good, Tiny,” Alix said. “According to the plaque, it’s 1951.”

Tiny beamed. “Nothin’ to it. It’s a knack I picked up. In my former life.”

After they’d gotten closer and had a chance to view it from a few different angles, Geoff asked: “Is there a particular reason for our looking at this, Alix?”

“I wanted your opinions. There’s something about it . . .”

“You think it might not be genuine?” Chris asked.

Alix nodded. “But I can’t point to anything very substantive; nothing that would convince anybody. It’s not much more than a kind of mental tickling, a gut feeling.”

“And we all know about your gut feelings, my dear,” Geoff said, stepping back for a broader view. “One would be wise to take them seriously.” After half a minute of intense study, he spoke again. “As you know, Abstract Expressionism is hardly my métier
.
When I was at the Met, I did do a little work on a Pollock of theirs, but it was a sort of Indian sand painting, but done in gouache and colored pencil in 1941. Nothing at all like this, so I don’t know what my opinion is worth, but I would have to say that nothing leaps out at me that would make me suspect it. It may not be one of his most striking works, but it looks fine to me.”

“What about you, Tiny?” Alix asked. “Did you ever do anything with Pollock?”

“Uhh . . .”

She smiled. “In your former life, I mean.”

“Well, actually, if you want to know, I almost gave it a shot once.” Like Geoff, Tiny didn’t have to be coaxed very hard to talk about his old career, as long as it was in the right company. “This lady wanted one about like this one here. So I studied Pollock’s techniques and his materials and stuff—everything. But I finally turned the job down.”

“Too big?” Chris asked. “Too much work?”

“That’s exactly right! Way too much work for the money, when I could do a Picasso knockoff—or a Cézanne, for that matter—in one afternoon and get paid just as much. And it costs too much to do, too. Look at all the paint that’s on there, even if it’s just plain house paint.”

“He used
house paint
?” Chris said.

“For the drip paintings? Sure. In gallon cans. Straight from the nearest hardware store. Then he went stomping around with the can in one hand and spritzing it all over the place with the other.”

“Tell me, though, Tiny,” Alix said impatiently. “Does it seem to you something might be wrong with this one?”

He looked uncomfortable. “I can see you’d like me to say yeah, honey, but the truth is, I don’t. It looks okay to me too. Sorry.”

“Alix,” Geoff said, “a moment ago you said you couldn’t point to anything very substantive. Does that mean there’s something
un
substantive you can point to?”

She hesitated. “Well, yes, a couple of things, but they’re so nebulous I don’t like—”

“Spit it out,” Chris said. “You’re among friends.”

“All right. First point: To my eye, it’s too neat, too pretty for a Pollock.”

They waited for her to enlarge on this subject, but that’s all she had. On to point number two.

“At the same time, it has no center, nothing that focuses the eye. It just wanders off toward the edges and kind of flows away and disappears over the sides. That’s not typical of Pollock.”

“I don’t know, Alix,” her father said.
“
‘Not typical’ and ‘fake’ are two different things.”

“I know that, but taken together—”

“What else you got?” Tiny asked.

She had kept the strongest, such as it was, for last. “The straight lines. They’re
too
straight.”

“But lots of Pollocks have straight lines,” Geoff said, and Tiny nodded.

“Not his drip paintings, not this many, not that I’ve ever seen. Sure, you can get an occasional random straight line from dripping or flipping paint onto the canvas, but not easily. This has them all over the place, some of them fairly long. Someone must have laid them down with a brush or some kind of tool, I think.”

“Anything else?” Tiny said, unimpressed.

“That’s it. Now you know why I don’t feel ready to talk to the director about it yet. It really does all come down to the feeling I get.” She shook her head. “Only what am I doing getting a feeling about a
Pollock
?”

“It
is
a bit nebulous,” Geoff agreed gently.

“Hey,” Tiny said, “isn’t there this foundation that specializes in Pollock authentications? I forget the name, but I remember they have a good reputation. Maybe they could help?”

“The Pollock-Krasner Foundation,” Geoff supplied. “But they stopped doing it years ago, probably for fear of being sued. Just announced that all genuine works by Jackson Pollock had been accounted for and anything new that turned up therefore had to be a fake, and disbanded. Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t be so sure.” He hesitated. “You know, child, I still know some people who might very well be helpful in establishing certainty one way or the other. Would you like me to look into it for you?”

“Thanks, Geoff, but I don’t think so, not yet, anyway. Let me sit on it a little longer. Maybe I’m just imagining things.”

“If so, it’ll be the first time,” Geoff said stoutly. “You’ve always been right in the past. Four out of four, if I’m recalling correctly.”

“Yes, right about a Manet, an O’Keeffe, a Renoir, a Titian. But Pollock? That’s another kettle of fish. No, I just want to let it percolate in the back of my mind for right now. I’ll be talking to Clark about it next Tuesday, and we’re going to go through all the paperwork on the thing. Maybe things will be clearer after that.” A beat, and then: “Or maybe I’ll just drop it. I’m out of my element here.”

“And speaking of Clark,” Chris said, “let’s go find the guy and you can watch me negotiate the socks off him.”

G
eoff and Tiny were left to explore the museum on their own for half an hour, at the end of which time Alix would find them and then take everybody out to lunch. In the meantime, the two women headed to the level where all the senior staff cubicles were, including Clark’s. (Ironically, Alix was the only person other than Mrs. B whose workspace had solid, honest-to-goodness walls that reached to the ceiling, and a real door that closed and opened.)

They could hear Clark’s voice as they approached his cubicle. He was turned three-quarters away from them in his swivel chair and speaking into the telephone. Although his voice was dialed down, his whisper carried, and there was no mistaking the anger in it.

“Absolutely not, a deal is a deal, let’s just stick to it. . . . No, I do
not
want to take into consideration . . . We made an agreement, and I intend to . . . (Sigh) Okay, I grant you that. All right, maybe we can. What did you have in mind? . . . No, I’m sorry, seven is out of the question. I can’t . . . Six? . . . Six is possible, yes. All right, we’ll say six.”

At this point, he spotted Chris and Alix out of the corner of his eye. Without turning, he raised one arm and lifted a forefinger:
Give me just a second
. They stopped where they were, about fifteen feet from him.

“Don’t push your luck,” he said into the telephone, his voice lower but still audible. “I said okay, didn’t I? . . . I have to go . . . I know . . . All
right
, Melvin. See you there. Jesus.” Clark slammed the phone down in its cradle. “God damn it,” he said to the ceiling. “Some people.”

“You know,” Alix whispered to Chris, “this might not be the best time to negotiate the socks off him.”

“You just watch me,” Chris said and urged Alix forward. “Come on, into the lion’s den.”

Alix rapped on the edge of one of the cubicle’s entrance partitions to make sure that they really were welcome.

“Yeah, come on in,” Clark said, swiveling slowly toward them. “I swear, some of the things you have to deal with . . .” He shook his head.

But as he took them in, the annoyance that had been on his face vanished, and the Smile took its place. Alix realized for the first time that his smile for women was different from his smile for men: wider, more inviting, with more eye involvement. More genuine, Alix might have thought if she hadn’t known him. Actually, she wasn’t altogether sure that he liked women that much. And as cinematically good-looking as he was, she wondered if women liked
him
that much. Speaking for herself, he was starting to make her skin crawl.

“Ah,” he said, eyeing Chris, “this must be the lady who’s going to make us a lovely, generous offer on our Marsden Hartleys and save herself the risk and effort of having to bid for them against a rapacious crowd of Hartley lovers. Please, sit.” His gesture took in both of them.

One of the great perks of the museum curator’s life is the opportunity to outfit one’s office with works of art not currently on public exhibit. Most of the curatorial staff at the Brethwaite had taken full advantage: paintings, drawings, desk sculptures, various objets d’art adorned their cubicles. Drew, as curator of Furnishings, for example, worked at a spectacular, silver-filigreed, nineteenth-century slant-top writing desk. But Clark’s surroundings were relentlessly, uncompromisingly utilitarian, more like a chief clerk’s office than a senior curator’s office: steel and Formica desk, laptop, steel filing cabinets, chairs of green vinyl and gray steel, a few books, a few folders, a printer. No art, none at all. It was a subject of debate among the staff as to whether he was making a point, had no taste, or just didn’t give a damn. Alix had yet to form an opinion, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t the second. He dressed too well for that.

Alix had wondered how Chris would react to Clark. Her friend, while very happily and faithfully married, had an unfortunate tendency to melt when in the presence of a good-looking male face, but maybe Clark was a bit too pretty, or oily, even for her, because she looked about as meltable as a glacier on Mt. McKinley. “No, I’m the lady who’s going to make a conservative but reasonable offer on your Marsden Hartleys that will save you both the expense of insuring and packing them, and the risk of having them go for an even lower price at auction or, worse, fail to be sold altogether.”

“Whoa,” said Clark, eyes widening. He grinned at Alix. “She’s
good
. I’ve known her all of two seconds and I’m already impressed.”

And well he might be. Chris at her forceful, confident best cut a formidable figure. Even sitting, she towered half a foot over the two of them, and the capacious blue-and-black-checked tartan shawl (cape? mantle? cloak?) that swathed her shoulders this morning made her loom even larger.

“So,” Clark said, “what’s your offer?”

“What’s your reserve price?” Chris shot back.

“The estimate, provided by the Endicott Gallery, not by us, is that the lot will go for fifty to seventy thousand dollars.”

Bracelets jangled as Chris dismissed this with a wave of her arm. “No, not the estimate—the reserve.”

Unlike the estimate, which is made public and typically appears in the auction catalogue, the reserve price is the real minimum price the seller will accept to let go of the item, and it is kept confidential until that price is actually reached in the bidding. If it isn’t reached, the item is withdrawn.

“Ah, well, you know,” Clark said playfully, “that’s a secret.”

But Chris wasn’t interested in game playing. “I’m going to assume it’s the usual: eighty percent of the low estimate. That means it’s forty-four thousand dollars.”

“Well, you’re not going to get it for that price,” Clark said. “I can tell you that. Damn summer colds, I hate them. Worse than what you get in the winter, why is that anyway?” He’d been sniffling and dabbing at his nose with a series of tissues since they’d come in.

“And I wouldn’t expect to,” Chris replied. “Here’s what I’m willing to pay: fifty-five thousand. That’s reserve price, plus twenty-five percent.”

Alix was impressed too. A year ago Chris had known as much about auctions as Alix did, which wasn’t much. Now she sounded like an old hand. And she had come prepared, as the figures that were popping so easily out of her mouth now proved

“It’s also just five thousand over the low-end estimate,” Clark said. “No, I’m sorry, I think we can do better than that at auction.”

“It’s fifty-five thousand dollars you can have right now, this minute. Bird in the hand . . .” She gave him her first smile.

Thoughtfully, he dabbed at his nose. “Well, look at it this way. If you were to bid at the auction and manage to get it at that price, which I seriously doubt, you’d also have to pay the auction house their fifteen percent buyer’s premium, which would bring it to sixty-five thou or so—”

“More like sixty-three, actually. And let us not forget about the seller’s commission on the hammer price that
you’d
have to pay the auction house if you sell it through them. I’m guessing we’d be talking somewhere in the ten percent—”

He held up his hand. “All right, tell you what.” The Smile was back, collegial now, and accommodating. “You up your offer to the sixty-three you were just talking about and we have a deal that I think we can all live with.”

Chris didn’t hesitate. “Okay, then, I guess we have a deal.” She stood up and extended her hand.

He shook his head and warded her off. “No offense, but I wouldn’t advise shaking hands with me. I’m contagious.”

Chris pulled out her checkbook and wrote out the check. Clark said he would have the paperwork ready for her before the day was done and the drawings safely packed for carrying on the plane, and negotiations were closed.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” Chris said.

“Call again any time,” said Clark, waving the check beside his face as if it were written in old-fashioned wet ink. “I’ll call the printer’s right now and ask them to take it out of the catalogue.”

Chris frowned. “Could that be a problem?”

“No, there won’t be any problem,” he said while he dialed, “because they haven’t printed it up into hard copies yet, and with every lot on a full page of its own, all they have to do is to digitally delete this one page and then renumber . . . oh, hi, Sal, this is Clark Calder”—with his fingers he waggled a goodbye to them, and went on talking—“and I have a small change for the catalogue—”

“I’m glad you got the drawings,” Alix said when they were safely out of earshot, “but I’m not sure I know who came out better. He did a pretty smooth job getting you up to sixty-three thousand, I thought.”

“Are you serious? Listen, I walked in there fully prepared to pay seventy, maybe even seventy-five. I got away easy. The man’s a pussycat.” She smiled. “He is
hot
, though, I’ll say that for him. Whew.” She fanned her face with her hand.

“You really think so? There’s something about that guy that really repels me, something I don’t trust.”

“Who’s talking about trust? What’s ‘trust’ got to do with ‘hot’?”

Alix laughed. “Anyway, you could have fooled me,” she said. “Knowing you, I figured you might swoon when you met the guy, but there was never a sign.”

“I’ll withhold comment on that ‘knowing you’ crack, but I’ll tell you that where money is involved, I do not swoon.” She tugged exuberantly at Alix’s sleeve. “Hey, come on, I wanna look at my beautiful new possessions one more time. Oh, I
love
being rich.”

A few minutes later, Alix left Chris mooning over her new acquisitions and went to look for Geoff and Tiny to show them what she knew they were most interested in, namely, the three paintings she would be restoring. Both men made suggestions—not always in agreement—for solvents and methods for the different pictures, which Alix appreciatively and dutifully wrote down. They both supported her decision not to touch the Stubbs, which she also appreciated. Despite the sureness she hoped she’d projected, she had felt all alone and just a little bit out on a limb when telling Mrs. B and the staff about that.

“Thank you both, that was really helpful, especially on the Cassatt,” she said. “I feel more sure of myself now. And now let’s go see if we can tear Chris away from her new treasures for a while.”

They found Chris prowling around the second level, peeking into alcoves and corners and looking cross. “Don’t they believe in coffee in this place?” she grumbled. “I just gave them sixty-three thousand dollars and nobody’s offered me a cup.”

Alix took them to the break room, where they got mugs off the wall hooks, filled them, and took them out to one of the shaded picnic tables in the atrium.

Chris’s first sip brought back her usual happy humor. “I like this museum,” she said. “Different. And this outdoor area, this is pleasant.”

That started Tiny and Geoff off on a string of reminiscences about their favorite outdoor areas at Lompoc, accompanied by much laughter.

“I guess I better tell you about this,” Alix said as their stories wound down. “I had myself a pretty interesting experience last night. When I walked into my room.”

She tried to tell it matter-of-factly, playing down the physical part, and Chris remained calm, as Alix knew she would, but Tiny and Geoff were up in arms, pressing for details and bombarding her with questions. Why hadn’t she told them right away? Why hadn’t she called her father
last night
? What were the police doing about it? Was she sure she was all right? Why hadn’t she gotten herself checked over at a hospital? Had she heard back from the police this morning?