A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) (10 page)

Ted Ellesworth had been around long enough to know that police officers tended to be protective of their turf, especially when it was the FBI that was doing the trespassing. And, if truth be told, this was understandable; the Bureau could sometimes be just a wee bit overbearing and officious. But if Santa Fe Detective Lieutenant Eduardo Mendoza was annoyed by Ted’s presence in his office the next morning, he didn’t show it. The Santa Fe police department had been called by Washington earlier that morning (at Ted’s request) and told that Special Agent Ellesworth was in town and would like to pay a courtesy call on the officer in charge of investigating the previous night’s homicide at the Blue Coyote Gallery. Mendoza, who must have been up to his ears in details, had nevertheless cleared the hour from eight to nine a.m., his first hour back in the office, for Ted, and had received him with all good grace. Coffee was offered and accepted. Donuts were offered and turned down.

Once Ted had explained what he was doing in Santa Fe, and after they had amiably assured each other that neither had any intention of stepping on the other’s toes, they got down to business. A horse-faced, long-nosed forty-year-old wearing a frayed University of New Mexico Lobos baseball cap, Mendoza had shown real interest on hearing that the FBI was in the middle of a fraud investigation involving Liz’s gallery. Indeed, he had as many questions for Ted as Ted had for him, so it wasn’t until almost eight thirty that they got to the murder. Ted had been forthcoming with information, and Mendoza proved to be the same.

“Okay, the two of them called 911 at 8:06,” Mendoza was saying, “and according to them it couldn’t have been more than three, four minutes after they ran into the big guy with the painting—or vice-versa, I guess I should say. They think he hurt his head when he took his tumble, so that might turn out to be a help in finding him. We contacted the hospital emergency room, but the only head injury they had all night was a fly fisherman who hooked his own ear.”

“There’s fly-fishing around here?”

“Sure, plenty.”

“Well, could the women provide a description?”

“Yeah, a pretty good one, considering. They both agree he was male, they both agree he was big—six-three or six-four, two-hundred-plus pounds. Beefy, not fat. White. Short red hair. The London woman thinks he had a reddish beard too, but LeMay doesn’t remember it. And they both remember he stank of tobacco. London’s pretty sure it was pipe tobacco.”

Ted nodded. “Not bad, but are you sure it’s not all a fish story? I mean, do you think it’s possible that they might have done it themselves and invented this guy to lead you off on a wild goose chase?”

“No way. We considered it, of course, and for more reasons than I have time to go into, it doesn’t compute. No, their story holds up. And then our CSI guys got some fresh blood off the statue they said he smacked into, so that holds up too. And that should also provide us with some DNA, but, you know…” He shrugged.

“Right,” Ted said. “It’s not going to do you much good unless you have something to match it against. Any fingerprints?”

“The picture’s full of them, but most of them are London’s and a few of Coane’s. Then some others that might be promising, pretty clear too, but, you know, same problem—”

“Not going to do much good unless you have something to match them against,” they both said together.

“What about TOD?” Ted asked.
Time of death.

“ME says she’d been dead no more than two hours when he got to her. That’s all he’s willing to say until he does the autopsy. That, and that the cause of death was suffocation, probably done with the pillow that was on the floor.”

“So you’re pretty sure this guy is your killer?”

Mendoza waggled his hand, palm-down—a maybe, maybe not motion. “That’s the most probable scenario around here, yeah. Either she caught him stealing the picture and he killed her—”

“Or he had some other reason for killing her, and he took the picture to make it look like a robbery.”

“You got it.” Mendoza got up to pour himself more coffee from the pot on a side table and held the pot up. “Want some more?”

Ted covered his mug with hand. “No, thanks.” The coffee had been a typical police-station brew, too strong to start with, and too long in the pot; one mug of it was plenty. “You said ‘most probable scenario.’ Does that mean you have some less probable ones?”

“More than I can count.” Mendoza sighed as he dropped back into his chair. “Our victim here was not what you would call a well-liked lady. She changed men like other women change shoes, and apparently there are a lot of pissed-off guys out there, mostly so-called artists. And the other gallery owners weren’t crazy about her either. She stiffed a lot of people over the years, one way or another. A lot of ’em have grudges. We already have a dozen people in town we want to talk to about it, and there’ll probably be more before we’re finished.”

“Uh-huh. But if it was one of these others who killed her, where does the guy who was taking the painting fit in?”

Another shrug from Mendoza. “I don’t know—crime of opportunity? He shows up for some reason or other, sees she’s dead, sees the painting, figures what the hell, and takes off with it.”

“And has the rotten luck to run smack into the two women,” Ted said doubtfully. “Could be, I suppose.”

“Yeah, I think it’s a long shot too, but I don’t want to rule it out. We’ve got some out-of-town possibilities too: this LeMay woman and a guy named…” He checked an open file folder on his desk. “Templeton, Craig Templeton. He piloted the plane that got her here. Him, LeMay, and Coane go back a long way, and they got themselves into some kind of a messy love triangle four or five years ago. Those things can get nasty.”

“Tell me about it,” said Ted with a smile.

“Now LeMay was pretty open about it with us. Haven’t talked to Templeton yet. He’s being interviewed right now, I think.”

“Four or five years ago? For a crime of revenge or jealousy, that’s an awfully long time to wait, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yeah, I would. Ordinarily. But look at it this way: the two of them show up in Santa Fe at two o’clock in the afternoon—along with this Alix London—and by eight o’clock Coane is dead. Kind of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, I guess I would,” Ted said slowly. “And as for Alix London—look, I don’t mean to be telling you your job, but if I were you I’d check her out pretty carefully too.”

Mendoza frowned. “Yeah? Why?”

“The name ‘London’—is it familiar to you?”

“You mean before yesterday? No, I don’t think so. Why?”

“You don’t remember Geoffrey London? This would have been in New York, eight or nine years ago—”

Mendoza held up his hand. “Oh, oh, yeah, I remember. This was that high-society art expert or whatever he was that turned out to be a big-time forger? He bilked some people out of a lot of—wait a minute, he’s related to her? Uncle? Father?”

“Father.”

“Ah. Well, look, Ted, that’s interesting, but I don’t believe in guilt by association.”

“You don’t? I do, or at least in suspicion by association. But there’s more. I got a call from our op specialist this morning just before I came over. She did some digging, and it turns out that the power behind the scenes, the one who arranged it so that LeMay ‘just happened’ to settle on Alix London to be her consultant out of all the people she could have chosen, was…I’ll give you one guess.”

“Her father,” Mendoza correctly mused. “Mm, so what are you thinking? That maybe the picture is a fake that her daddy made and Alix is here as his accomplice—to certify it
isn’t
a fake?” His chair creaked as he leaned back in it. “You know, to tell the truth I was wondering if there was something a little hinky about her myself. One of the things she told us was that she thought Liz Coane might have tried to kill
her
.”

“
Kill
her? That’s crazy.”

“Well, not altogether. The watchamacallit, the casita she was in at her hotel? Damn thing blew up this afternoon. I heard the explosion from here. Propane leak. Missed her by less than a minute.”

“No kidding,” Ted said thoughtfully. “But you don’t really think—”

“I don’t know,” said Mendoza. “Ordinarily, I’d say she was just being a little paranoid about it, which’d be understandable, but with Coane herself getting killed a few hours later…well, I don’t know.
Something’s
going on.”

Ted sat back and reflected for a moment. “Eduardo,” he said, “the homicide case you’re working on and the fraud case I’m working on—has it occurred to you that they might be different parts of the same story? That maybe Coane was killed because of her part in the scam she was involved in?”

Mendoza smiled. “Nope, not until half an hour ago, when you walked in and laid this forgery stuff on me. Now, I think: could be. We don’t get too many homicides in Santa Fe, you know, and we don’t have a whole lot of exploding casitas either. To get both of them on the same day, involving the same set of people, well…”

Ted nodded. “Right, you have to wonder. And who’s the link between them? Alix London.” A thought struck him, and after a moment he said thoughtfully: “The painting that the guy was taking from Coane’s place. What was it?”

“It was a painting. What do you mean, what was it?”

“I mean do you know who painted it, or what it was of?”

Mendoza consulted his file again but came up empty this time. He rose, went to the door of his office, and opened it to talk to one of his detectives in the bullpen. “Hey, Jock, the painting from the Coane investigation—does it have some kind of a name or something?”

Ted heard paper shuffle for a few seconds, and then the answer floated back through the doorway. “Yeah, it’s got a label on the back, Lieutenant. It says, ‘
Cliffs at Ghost Ranch
, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1964.’”

“I knew it!” Ted exclaimed. “That’s the painting that was sitting on the easel in Coane’s office when I was there in the afternoon. She told me the name of it. LeMay’s supposed to be buying it, and London’s the ‘expert’ she’s brought along to evaluate it.”

Mendoza nodded thoughtfully. “Interesting.”

“You know,” Ted said, “I’d love to look at it again, if that’s all right.”

“Sure.” Mendoza raised his voice. “So Jock? Where is it now? We have it, don’t we?”

“Of course we do, what do you think?” said the aggrieved Jock. “It’s in the evidence room. We’ve got one of the two women coming in to verify it’s the one they saw the guy running away with.”

“Which one?” Ted asked Mendoza. “LeMay or London?” He was aware that he was treading on Mendoza’s turf, but it was starting to look as if it was going to have to be shared turf after all. Still, he felt constrained to politely say to Mendoza’s back: “I mean, if you don’t mind telling me.”

Mendoza shrugged and forwarded the question to Jock. “It’s the good-looking one, London,” the detective called. “Should be here any minute. Hooper’s taking her in.”

“Good. Oh, and tell Hooper she asked for an easel. Tell him to get the one out of the conference room.”

“Will do.”

“And tell him to let me know how it goes.”

“Right.”

“Okay, thanks, Eduardo,” Ted said as Mendoza was closing the door. When the lieutenant had returned to his desk, he said with some urgency, “You know, I had a feeling she’d be in this up to her ears. Look, would it be all right with you if I just happen to show up in the viewing room when she’s there?”

Mendoza hesitated. “Uh, no offense, Ted, but I’d just as soon handle this on my own. You know—”

“Of course!” Ted said. “I have no intention of getting involved in the homicide part of it, believe me. It’s strictly the fraud case that I’m interested in.”

“Well—”

“I just want to see what she has to say about the painting, that’s all. It would help a lot. I’d really appreciate it.”

“Yeah, okay, I can see that,” Mendoza said. “Okay, let’s head you over there. We can say we wanted you to identify it as the picture that was in Liz’s office when you were there in the afternoon. Which is true, come to think of it.”

“Great, thanks a million. Don’t forget, though, she thinks I’m Roland de Beau—”

The telephone on Mendoza’s desk buzzed, and the lieutenant picked it up. “Yeah? Yeah? No kidding, is that a fact? Okay, tell her thanks for the heads-up.”

He put the phone down and looked with sudden seriousness at Ted. “That was one of my guys. London just asked him to call me. She says I need to know about this fishy character that she’s pretty sure is right in the middle of this whole mess. She just saw him right here in the station.”

Ted was puzzled. “Who?”

The laughter that Mendoza could no longer control came out in a snort. “You.”

The first thing that had surprised Alix when she entered the detectives’ bullpen area was the sight of Roland de Beauvais. Lieutenant Mendoza was standing in the open doorway of his office talking to one of the detectives, and seated at the lieutenant’s desk, where she’d sat last night, was de Beauvais, in shirtsleeves, looking very much at home. The second, which happened as Mendoza was closing the door, was hearing de Beauvais say to him, “Okay, thanks, Eduardo.”