A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) (22 page)

“Does Chris know that my father was involved?” she asked, tight-lipped.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

Alix shook her head speechlessly, replaying what she’d just heard. It was a few moments before she could talk again. “You said he set me up ‘in so many things.’ What else did he set me up in?”

“Alix, I’m not sure I should be the one to—”

“Just tell me, damn it!”

Another shrug, unwilling but acquiescent. The apprenticeship in Italy had not been the simple lucky break she thought it was; it had come about because her father had called his old friend Santullo and talked him into giving her a one-month trial. Fortunately, she’d passed muster, but the chance would never have come without his input. And as for that condo-sitting job in Seattle—

She held up her hand. “Enough.” Her mind was whirling; she could feel all the little spinning wheels starting to go wobbly. All these years she’d thought that she’d been the one secretly helping Geoff to get on his feet—that precious sixty thousand dollars from her college fund. And now she finds out that
he’d
been secretly helping
her
all along, pulling strings and calling in obligations! It was too much to take in. She was going to need time to process it.

“Ted, why do you know so much about me?
How
do you know so much about me?”

“Well, our ops specialist dug it up. I had her look into it for me.”

“You had your ops specialist…? Okay, I want the truth now: am I or am I not a suspect in this thing?”

“Listen, Alix—”

“This line you fed me about my coming to Taos to provide you with my ‘invaluable’ counsel—is that actually on the level, or is it just a way for you to keep me in your sights, see if you can catch me red-handed at, at—”

“Absolutely not, Alix. Do you really think I’m that two-faced—”

She couldn’t help laughing. “Pardon me, you were saying what, Mr. de Beauvais?”

He hissed his frustration. “The FBI is not trying to catch you red-handed at anything,” he said stiffly. “I assure you, the FBI has no interest in you except as a consultant—”

“A consultant? Oh, then am I receiving a fee for my expertise?”

“If you want to be paid,” he said, looking levelly at her with those chilling eyes, “I’m sure something commensurate with your qualifications can be arranged.”

“Oh, go to hell, I don’t want your stupid money.” To her extreme annoyance, she was close to tears.

“You want out then? Is that what you want?”

“Careful, Ellesworth, you’re losing your Roland de Beauvais cool.”

He stiffened a little more yet. “All right, Miss London, how about if we just forget the whole thing? Thank you very much for your time. I’ll see that transportation is arranged—”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said disgustedly, “I didn’t say I wanted out. I said I didn’t want your money.”

He looked uncertain. “So—?”

“I have to say good-bye to Chris and tell her what’s going on. Then we’d better get going if we want to get to Taos this afternoon. I’ll meet you at your car in twenty minutes.”

She turned on her heel and headed back to the hospital, straight across the parking lot. The expression on his face had been impossible to read. Angry/befuddled was about as close as she could come, and it was probably the same one she was wearing. Despite the palpable irritation on both sides, there was something exciting in the air between them, no denying that, a titillating chemistry she hadn’t felt in a very long while. But at the same time, this guy had a real knack for irritating the absolute hell out of her. And it was obvious that it worked both ways.

One way or another, the next couple of days in Taos were going to be something.

It had taken a while, but the events of the day—of this surpassingly strange week, for that matter—had finally caught up with her almost the moment she sank into the passenger seat of Ted’s rented red-and-white U-Haul.

“Sorry about the plebeian conveyance,” he said. “Ordinarily, when I’m being a crooked art dealer I get to drive something a little classier. But Mercedes and Porsche rentals are a little scarce in Española, and this was the best—the only—thing they could come up with in the whole town.”

“I’ll try and live with it,” she said. “I may doze for a while after we get going, anyway.” Before he’d turned the key in the ignition, even before she’d gotten her seat belt secured, her eyelids were drooping. She managed to murmur an apology—slurred with fatigue but genuine enough—for losing her temper and Ted did the same. By the time he’d turned north on Highway 68 for the hour-long drive to Taos, she was deeply, deeply asleep, so much so that when she sensed at some level that the car had come to a stop and the engine had been turned off, it wasn’t enough to bring her out of it. It took the gentle pressure of Ted’s touch on her shoulder and his quiet voice—“Alix, we’re here…Alix?”—to get her up from the black, bottomless well into which she’d fallen.

She awoke disoriented, thinking for a few confused moments that she was a little girl again, that she had fallen asleep on the long drive her family made several times each summer between their Manhattan condominium and the summer house in Watch Hill. It had been impossible to completely awaken her then, and among her most treasured memories was the snug, warm, protected feeling of being carried upstairs, her eyelids glued together, still three-quarters asleep, in her father’s safe, strong arms, with her head on his shoulder, and then tucked tenderly into bed. The memory was so real and so compelling in her dozy mind that it was all she could do not to ask Ted to carry her upstairs in
his
strong, safe arms and tuck her in. Preferably tenderly.

Was that crazy, or what? Fortunately, she came all the way awake before she gave in to the urge, but it was a near thing and it left her flushed with embarrassment. When he offered to help her with her bag she gruffly refused, leaving him staring at her with an understandably surprised look on his face as she hurried away into the adobe-style building.

There appeared to be a cocktail hour in progress in the main downstairs room, with a dozen or so people sitting in groups or standing around chatting. A few of them she knew. She recognized Gregor Gorzynski, he of the Cheerios, rice noodles, and M&M’s, who was wearing the same scuffed leather bomber jacket he’d worn at the reception, and what looked like the same tight, laddered, threadbare jeans. (Did he special-order them that way?) He was in full, rhapsodic flight, performing for a middle-aged, over-mascaraed blonde who followed his every grand gesture. Who was seducing whom was unclear and probably immaterial.

A few feet away in an armchair sat Clyde Moody, the archivist from the museum, looking on with undisguised disdain, while an older couple jabbered in his ear, laughing unrestrainedly at their own stories. Poor Moody looked as if he wished he were anywhere else but couldn’t figure out how to get away. Alix offered a tentative wave that he either ignored or failed to see. As she turned to leave a young man she didn’t know came up to her with something between a sidle and a swagger. In his hand was a martini on the rocks.

“Well, hello there, pretty lady,” he said, breathing gin fumes into her face. “Do I know you?” He wore black Levi’s and a form-fitting black T-shirt that showed off a lovingly sculpted torso and muscular arms. The accent was insinuatingly intimate and southern—Mississippi, Alabama, maybe Louisiana.
Do ah know yuh?

“I’m afraid not.” She took a step back.

He took a step forward. “
Will
I know you?”

Another step back. “I doubt it very much.” She caught a glimpse of the stick-on name label just below his collarbone—“Hi! I’m Cody Mack Burley.” It took a moment to register. Wasn’t that the name of Liz’s artist protégé, the painter whose works Chris had turned down for display at her bar? She remembered Chris’s heartfelt assessment: “weird, twisted women…with their insides showing…yech.” Alix stepped back even further.

Cody Mack, unmindful, held up the martini. “So, can I get you a—”

“Maybe another time. Excuse me, I haven’t registered yet,” she said, turning away, but managing at the last second to manufacture a smile. It could be that she’d want to talk to him after all, given his closeness to Liz. But she’d think about that later, not now. All she wanted to do now was flop into bed and dive deep down into sleep again.

“You’re in the big room upstairs, Mabel’s old room,” Janet, the woman at the reception desk told her.

“That’s right,” Alix said, although she’d forgotten.

“And will Ms. LeMay be coming later?”

“No, she had to cancel. There was an accident. It’s just me.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I hope she’s all right.”

“She’s all right,” Alix said. She didn’t doubt that Chris, probably being flown back to Seattle by an attentive, concerned Craig at this very moment, was feeling considerably more than all right, raccoon face or no raccoon face.

The stairs to Mabel’s second-floor room started behind the reception desk. The unexpectedly low, cramped stairway ran up all four sides of a square stairwell. Heavy-eyed, she hardly paid attention to where she was going, and at the first turn she bumped her head on the underside of the upper staircase. Obviously, she wasn’t the first to do it, because it was well-padded for just such an eventuality. Still, it stung. Normally, Alix loved the quirkiness of old buildings, but tonight she had a few choice words for this one. She made it to the top without further incident, though, and once there her impressions ran sleepily together: an old wooden door, a huge, wood-floored room with a massively columned bed, and then nothing but the wonderful smoothness of clean, cool linens and a lovely, enveloping softness as she floated down, and down, and down.

She didn’t surface again until the irresistible aroma of brewing coffee called to her, thin tendrils of fragrance curling up from the kitchen through the cracks between the old floorboards. Was it morning then? Could she have slept all that time? She opened her eyes and saw that indeed she had. It wasn’t light yet, but the red numbers on the bedside clock said 6:11 a.m. She’d been solidly asleep for twelve hours. Amazing—she couldn’t remember having slept so long before. Of course, she’d never had a day like yesterday before, either. Well, unless it was the one two days before that, when her casita had blown up.

It sure has been one hell of a week
, she thought with a long, delicious stretch that would have put a cat to shame. The lure of coffee was powerful, and she was starving—she could smell pancakes now too—but first some serious attention to appearance and hygiene was required. Last night she’d fallen into bed without even taking off her clothes, washing her face, or brushing her teeth. She rolled over and got up, yawning, feeling more like a creature that had slept out in the rain than someone who’d spent the night in what had to be the world’s most comfortable bed.

Twenty minutes later, while she was blow-drying her hair, it occurred to her that she hadn’t checked her telephone messages in a while. Unzipping the front panel of her overnight bag, she pulled out the cell phone that Chris had thrust at her when they’d parted at the hospital. It took the usual hassle to get to her own voice-mail box, and when she did, she found a dozen calls from people whose names she didn’t know—the press, she assumed—which she flicked through and deleted without listening to more than two or three seconds of each.

She did listen to a brief message from her father: Had she accidentally made off with the Galerie Xanadu catalog she’d been looking at at the museum in Santa Fe? It seemed that when Geoff’s documents-expert friend went to look at it, it couldn’t be found, and Mr. Moody wondered if Alix, who was the last person to have seen it, might inadvertently have carried it away with her.

No
, Alix thought a bit huffily,
I did not carry it away with me, inadvertently or otherwise.
Pinching something from under the eagle-eye of Clyde Moody would have been quite a trick. She had left the folder on the table, just as he had asked. It was quite clear in her memory. She would surely run into him here in Taos today and she would set him straight on that.

There were also three messages from Katryn Lombard, the woman for whom she was restoring the paintings in Seattle. Alix’s first reaction was worry. Katryn had sent her one postcard and a couple of e-mails from Provence in the months she’d been away, but she had never before telephoned her. And now here were
three
messages, two left yesterday, one today (it was eight hours later in France), each one telling her to call back as soon as she could. Was she being booted out? Did Katryn need her condo back? But on listening to the messages a second time, she realized that the tone suggested otherwise. There was no hint of bad news in it—quite the opposite, in fact. Still, Alix was nervous about it and thought she’d better make a quick call to Provence to set her mind at ease, even before going down for some of that coffee and food.

“Alix, darling, I’m soooo glad you called,” Katryn said in her usual bright, emphatic, hurrying voice, as urgent as a doorbell buzzer. “I’ve been worried sick about you. I read about what happened in Santa Fe, and that you actually
found
the body! How perfectly gruesome.” She sounded absolutely thrilled and apparently realized it, quickly adding: “You
are
all right, aren’t you?”

Alix sighed. My God, were they even reading about her in Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, France? Her once-bright future as a reputable consultant grew dimmer by the minute. “I’m fine, Katryn,” she said. “I appreciate your calling.”

“Well, actually, that’s not the reason. I mean it’s not the only reason. Alix, how long do you think it will take you to complete the work you’re doing for me? Could you finish, say, in a month?”

Alix’s heart dropped another few inches. So Katryn wanted her out, after all. She could look forward to being homeless as well as jobless. Boy, when it rained…“Well…”

Katryn, who could be perceptive at times, recognized the hesitation for what it was. “Darling, I don’t want you to leave the condo. We agreed on a year, and a year it will be. But if you could speed up the process…?”

Whew
. “Well, the Signac’s finished, Katryn—I think you’ll like it—and I’m well into the Utrillo. But the Royle and the Luce—they’ll need quite a lot of work. I should be back in Seattle in—”

“Let’s say we put the Royle and the Luce aside for the moment. And the Malharro as well. How long would it take you to complete the Utrillo and do the Bonnard?”

Alix shrugged, although there was nobody to see her. “I don’t know…two months? No, better make that three to be on the safe side. You see, it’s not so much the work itself, it’s the drying times involved, and I might have to get some materials from Europe—”

“Three months is just fine!” Katryn said. “Three months is perfect.”

“But why the rush, Katryn? What’s going on?”

“Because I’m going to put them up for auction,” Katryn burbled, “and I want them to look their very best!”

Lee was shocked. The Bonnard and the Utrillo were the gems of the collection and the most valuable as well, worth more than the other four put together. “But why?”

“Because I’m fed up to here with these old Post-Impressionist hacks, aren’t you?”

“Well, no, not—”

But the question had been rhetorical. “They’ve had their day. Nobody cares about them anymore. I mean, they’re no longer relevant to today’s world, don’t you agree?”

Another question for which no answer was expected or desired. Alix waited.

“And so I’m going to be getting rid of them and investing in the
future
, not the past, not old, dead artists, but vibrant, brilliant new ones.”

“The future?” Alix asked gingerly. The thought of anybody’s getting rid of Bonnard’s glowing, sensuous
Woman Bathing
for any reason at all, let alone to replace it with something modern, dismayed her.

“Yes! There’s this wonderful new artist, a true visionary—I see him as Picasso’s heir, only totally, totally different. Ground-breaking. He’s going to change the very concept of what art
is,
and
I’m
going to be his American patron. Isn’t that amazing?”

This time an answer was expected. “It certainly is,” Alix said, unable to summon up much enthusiasm. “Congratulations.”

“He’s practically just this minute burst on the scene,” Katryn plowed on. “I’m lucky to have discovered him before anybody else has. I’m on his Twitter feed,” she said proudly. “And I’ve spoken with him on the phone—twice. He’s a wonderful man with a deep, deep intellect—a genius.” Alix heard a snuffly noise that might have been Katryn’s version of a girlish giggle. “And talk about hot! I’ve seen his video on YouTube.”