A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) (12 page)

“No offense, Ms. London, and I’m sure your opinion is invaluable—” he was being equally disagreeable, “—but if the police ask
my
opinion I will suggest they not depend upon opinions at all, but rather submit the picture to a forensic laboratory for examination. With the aid of chemical and spectrographic pigment analysis, for example—”

God, the man was windy too, along with his many other faults. “If this was supposed to be an eighteenth-century painting,” she said crisply, “scientific analysis would be helpful. The pigments in use three hundred years ago were quite different from the ones available today, as were the canvases, which would have been handwoven at that time—”

“Yes, I’m aware of all that, but—”

“There would be
craquelure
to be analyzed for authenticity, as well as dust and grime. But in this case, the painting is supposedly only forty-some years old. The pigments in use then were the same ones available today. The same is true for brushes, canvases, stretchers, and the rest. There is no
craquelure
to be analyzed, no grime to be aged. Moreover, unless the person who painted this is completely incompetent, which he obviously is not, he will have used the very same materials and techniques that O’Keeffe would have used. He would have—”

Hey, you can be pretty windy yourself
, she thought, and stopped. In any case, de Beauvais looked very satisfactorily snowed.

“Okay if I turn it around?” she asked Hooper, who was seated off to the side, silently observing. “Sure. Just don’t drop it. Three million bucks. Whew.”

She turned it with care and set it back on the easel, making sure that it was the frame and not the canvas that came in contact with the support. The backing, like the backings of most paintings that have been around for a while and have changed hands, had a few stuck-on labels, yellowed and curling, and various indecipherable stamps and scrawls. One of the ink scrawls was the anticipated “signature,” a simple
OK
in a loose, five-pointed star. That proved nothing one way or the other. In fact, the
lack
of a signature would have been a better indication of authenticity. Not only were O’Keeffe’s initials the easiest thing in the world to fake, but whereas a good many famous artists didn’t sign all their work, no
forger
of famous artists would think of leaving one of his fakes unsigned.

One instance in particular came unbidden to her mind and made her smile. A small but elite European museum had been in the process of acquiring an elaborate, sinuous El Greco painting that bore a strikingly bold “El Greco” signature in the lower right-hand corner. Until, that is, someone had pointed out that El Greco himself—“the Greek”—naturally enough signed his pictures with his actual name, Domeniko Theotokopoulos—in Greek.

Her smile brought quizzical looks from the two men, and she quickly sobered her expression and concentrated on her examination. The stamps were mostly illegible, but one of the two labels was from an art gallery:
Galerie Xanadu, 1421 Central Avenue NE, Albuquerque, NM
. So it had a history after all; at some point in the past, it had passed through a dealership or auction house called Galerie Xanadu. That was interesting and worth following up. She borrowed a pen and notepad from the detective and jotted it down.

The other label was right smack in the center of the back:
The Cliffs at Ghost Ranch, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1964.
She thought about that for a moment and then spun toward de Beauvais. “You’ve already seen this label, haven’t you? That’s why you were so sure about the
1964
and the rest of it. You saw it when you were in Liz’s office yesterday, didn’t you?”

He blinked back at her, all aggrieved innocence. “I should say not. I assure you I have never set eyes on this label before.”

“Okay, then she told you the name of it.”

“She most certainly did not, and I must say, I resent your implication. I mean, really…!”

She ignored him, making it as pointed as she could. To Hooper she said, “I may be wrong about its being a fake, but I don’t think so. But give me a couple of days and I should be able to give you something more definitive. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to leave now.”

“Fine with me,” Hooper said. “We’d appreciate it if you could stay in the area for a few days. We might want to talk to you again.”

“I will. And Lieutenant Mendoza has my cell phone number.”

Hooper rose to let her out, and at the steel-barred door, out of de Beauvais’ hearing, she said, “If I were you, Detective, I wouldn’t let that man out of my sight in there.”

Hooper nodded solemnly. Behind him she saw de Beauvais still staring at the painting with an unreadable frown on his face.

The unreadable frown was still there twenty minutes later as Ted sat in El Canon, the coffee shop at the Hilton hotel. In front of him was a grande cappuccino, untouched and cooling. Beside it his fingers drummed quietly on the table as he tried to reassess the convictions that only an hour ago had seemed like certainties.

The session in the property room had upended everything. He had guessed from the beginning that the painting was a fake, and his hunch had turned into a lead-pipe cinch the minute he learned that the London woman was involved with it. His brief look at the picture in Liz’s office the previous afternoon had done nothing to change his mind, but then, this morning, with his chance to examine it at length, those certainties started getting fuzzy around the edges. It was a finer piece than he’d thought at first: arresting and evocative, and done with the unmistakable painterly flair that a previous case had taught him was Georgia O’Keeffe’s and Georgia O’Keeffe’s alone.

Could it be genuine, after all? He was inclined now, despite London’s assertion to the contrary, to believe that’s just what it was. Something funny was going on with it—that certainty still remained—but whatever nefarious doings Liz had been up to, this painting, he thought with growing conviction—this one, at least—was the real thing. The come-on for a scam? A kind of loss-leader to snare other buyers of “yet-to-be-discovered” O’Keeffes? One authentic one to sell ten fakes? Could be; it was an old enough scam.

Absently, he stirred the frothed-milk topping through the cappuccino, took his first long sip, and sighed. The London woman—she was troubling him too. Jamie’s call this morning telling him that Alix’s reprobate father was involved, albeit behind the scenes, had confirmed that there was some kind of con going on, all right, and Alix was in it up to her eyebrows.

But.

If she was in on a con, wouldn’t she have declared the painting to be authentic? What possible percentage could there be in her saying it was a forgery? And yet that was exactly what she’d done in there. Was he wrong about her too? Could she be on the level? And if she was on the level, could it be that she was right about the painting? That it
was
a fake?

He shook his head. “Jeez,” he murmured aloud.

And then, what about that weird business of the exploding casita? According to Mendoza, she believed Liz was behind it. Well, whoever was behind it—assuming anybody was behind it—what was that all about?

Another swallow of coffee, followed by another shake of the head. For a reasonably cut-and-dried fraud investigation, this case was turning out to have quite a set of legs.

He could well say the same about Alix London, he thought with a smile that was at once turned into a recriminatory scowl.

Let’s not go there.

Three blocks from where Ted Ellesworth was staring at his cappuccino and trying to make sense of things at the Hilton, Alix London was staring at her coffee and trying to make sense of things in La Plazuela, one of the restaurants in La Fonda, the stately, eighty-year-old grande dame of the city’s hotels. Originally, it had been the hotel’s courtyard but now, roofed over by a skylit ceiling, it was a handsome, sun-dappled dining room that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Granada: red flagstone floor, rustic, hand-carved wooden tables and chairs, a couple of potted, full-grown ficus trees, a gently gurgling tiled fountain in the center—none of which registered in Alix’s perception. She was, if anything, more perplexed than Ted was.

It was unbelievable. In the last twenty-four hours—no, fewer than twenty-four; she hadn’t even arrived in Santa Fe until yesterday afternoon—she’d come within a hair of being blown through the roof of her casita; she’d been trampled by an escaping thief and murderer; along with Chris, she’d discovered the body of his victim; she’d been grilled by the police; and—here was the ironic twist to it all—a few minutes ago she’d concluded, tentatively anyway, that the painting that was surely at the root of it all was nothing but a lousy fake. Well, no, not a lousy fake, a good fake, but a fake, nonetheless.

There were so many questions to be answered: Had Liz known the picture was a forgery or had she been tricked herself? Had the explosion really been an attempt to kill Alix? (
Yes!
something inside her declared.) And if so, had it really been Liz’s doing? (Another resounding
Yes!
) But if Liz had tried to kill
her
, who had killed Liz? Or could the two events be unrelated? Were there two unconnected scenarios being played out?

That seemed to be Lieutenant Mendoza’s theory—that Liz had been killed only because she’d had the bad luck to catch the guy in the act of stealing the painting; a wrong-time, wrong-place kind of murder. That, or the killer was one of Liz’s dumped artist-lovers or wronged colleagues and the theft of the picture either had nothing to do with it or was an attempt to throw them off. As to the propane explosion, he hadn’t expressed an opinion, but it was clear that he didn’t take very seriously the idea that it was a botched attempt at murder.

Alix couldn’t have disagreed more. She believed in unrelated coincidences, yes, but not on this scale. The explosion, Liz’s murder, the theft of the painting, the fact—if it was a fact—of its being a forgery—they were all connected, and the appearance of the double-dealing slimeball Roland de Beauvais in the middle of it all was no accident either. And at the heart of it all, she was more certain than ever, was the O’Keeffe itself. It was the one element that linked everything.

The painting. The damn painting.
Was
it really a fake? She wasn’t quite as positive as she’d been at the police station, and it wasn’t the picture itself that had her wondering, it was the back—that Galerie Xanadu stamp. It apparently showed that it had passed through and probably been sold by a (presumably) legitimate Albuquerque gallery. Surely it must have been subjected to authentication at the time, and seemingly it had passed muster. That made her think twice. Could that trusty old connoisseur’s eye of hers have blown it this time?

On the other hand, being handled by a reputable gallery was no guarantee of authenticity, especially in Georgia O’Keeffe’s case. Not long ago, twenty-four of twenty-eight “newly discovered” O’Keeffe watercolors had been sold for five million dollars to R. Crosby Kemper, a Kansas City philanthropist, by a well-known and highly regarded dealer. Kemper then donated them to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, where they hung for several years. Before then, they had been scientifically authenticated by a variety of experts, and had even been on prominent display for two years at the National Gallery, enthroned as the
Canyon Suite
. Nonetheless, in the end they turned out to be fakes, every last one. It had all been a scam.

In a way, this kind of thing had been the artist’s own fault. She’d been a notoriously secretive woman. No one had been allowed to visit her studio or see her at work. Consequently, no one knew how many pieces she might have created—if any—that she had privately stowed away without ever revealing. The number in her studio, it turned out after her death, had been staggering: well over a thousand. That is, over a thousand previously unsuspected works that we now knew about—and what about the ones we
didn’t
know about? The ones she might have given to relatives or friends (not that she had too many of either) or sold privately? No one could say how many of those there might be or where they were, waiting to be “newly discovered.”

As a result, go-getting forgers had a fertile field to plow. And experts, including one Alix London, had to keep a very open mind when looking at a previously unrecorded O’Keeffe. Maybe snap judgments weren’t the best idea in the world.

But it wasn’t any of this that was the reason for the dull ache at her temples, the hollow feeling in her chest. It was, of all things, her so-called career that had her so befuddled and anxious. How had this wonderful godsend of a job offer turned into such a nightmare? She had thought it would be a first step toward crawling out from under the baggage of her last name. Instead, here she was, entangled in a murder case—the murder of a major art gallery owner, no less—that was sure to create a sensation in the art world, if not the national news. And as if murder wasn’t bad enough, now it seemed she had a forged O’Keeffe to contend with. How long would it be before everybody in the know, from San Francisco to New York, began exchanging raised-eyebrow glances and saying, “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. You do know who her father is, don’t you…?”

And once that happened, the gossips and rumormongers would take over and do what gossips and rumormongers do: embroider, embellish, and insinuate. Good-bye, fledgling career. No one would touch her once they’d done their work.
After all,
people would say,
where there’s smoke…

She closed her eyes and massaged her temples in slow circles. It didn’t do much good. The tongues, she thought, were probably already wagging away.

Well, let them wag. There was nothing she could do about it. She supposed the police would get to the bottom of it all eventually, but “eventually” was going to be a long time if they had to work through their dumped-lover and aggrieved-colleague hypotheses first.

She sighed. The headache was getting worse, close to where she’d want to take something, but otherwise it was good to be sitting in the warm, light-filled space, especially after the last few days of gloomy Seattle gray. Had she really still been in Seattle yesterday at this time, innocent and excited and happy? It seemed impossible. She closed her eyes to better hear the soft music of the fountain…

And sat up with a start. Wait a minute, what had she been thinking? Who said there was nothing she could do about it? What kind of defeatist attitude was that? Leaving it to the police wasn’t merely
not
her only option, it was a lousy option. For one thing, they had blinders on. For another, what did they know about researching a painting? Zilch, that’s what, and they obviously couldn’t care less about it anyway. But she did know, and did care, and she had skills that could be put into play. If the painting was at the root of it all, who better than Alix London to dig into it?

And where better to start than right here in Santa Fe, this very morning, in the archives of the Southwest Museum of Twentieth-Century American Art, not three blocks from where she was sitting? According to Clyde Moody, the archivist they’d met last night at the reception, the archives retained exhibition catalogs from important galleries throughout the state. If the Galerie Xanadu had handled an O’Keeffe it was an important gallery practically by definition, wasn’t it, and wasn’t there a high likelihood that the picture had appeared in one of their catalogs? And if it was in a catalog there’d be some background information on it, and the more background information she had, the more focused and trustworthy those intuitive skills of hers would be. The question was, how far back did the archives ago, and just when did the Xanadu have the painting? It couldn’t have been before 1964, of course, because that was the supposed date of its creation. On the other hand, if it was—

She jerked her head impatiently. Why sit here asking herself questions when the horse’s mouth was available a telephone call away? Leaving her barely touched coffee on the table, she went back into the lobby, looked up the museum’s number, dialed it on her cell phone, and asked to be put through to the archives.

Moody himself answered. “Archives.” He sounded preoccupied, annoyed at being interrupted at some daunting archival task.

“Mr. Moody, this is Alix London. We met briefly at the Blue Coyote last night?”

She paused for him to say “Oh, yes, of course, how are you?” or something like it, but he remained mute. She could hear the scratching of a pencil or ballpoint pen. Whatever it was he was doing, he hadn’t stopped for the phone call.

“I’m an art consultant,” she said (the first time she’d ever uttered that sentence and probably the last), “and I’d like to stop by the archives today, if that’s all right. I’m working with Ms. LeMay, whom you also met last night, advising her on a Georgia O’Keeffe painting that Liz Coane had for sale. I’m calling because I thought it would be best to inquire first whether…Mr. Moody, are you there?”

“I’m here, yes.” There was an exasperated sigh, and then a rattle as he threw down the pen. “Ms. London, what is it exactly that I can do for you?”

Alix held in her own irritation. She’d run into other people like the irascible Mr. Moody, museum archivists or art librarians who treated the materials in their custody as if they were their private property and got thoroughly ticked off when researchers (for whose use the collections were presumably created) had the nerve to interrupt their fussy, fastidious, mundane little chores and ask to actually
use
the archives.

Some people
, she thought. “I’m interested,” she said pleasantly, “in anything you might have on an Albuquerque gallery, the Galerie Xanadu—”