A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) (15 page)

“Wait, that rings a bell. Didn’t you tell me Liz was the power behind that?”

“That’s right.”

“But how can they…I mean, Liz has just been…and they’re holding it anyway?”

“Yes, they thought about canceling, but it would have been impossible to reach everyone in time, and then there are the flight reservations, the hotel reservations, the income to the city—it would have been a calamity, so they’re putting it on as a kind of memorial to Liz.”

“Interesting.”

“Yes, but I haven’t gotten to the real surprise. It turns out that the Luhan House has had to cancel one of the reservations after all, and it happens to be for the best room in the house, Mabel’s very own bedroom. More like a suite, they say. More than enough space for two—and I’ve booked it. You can wander around the place to your heart’s content.”

The news perked Alix up again. “Chris, that’s terrific! I wonder whose room it…oh. Liz’s?”

“Liz’s,” Chris confirmed. “There’s some kind of poetic justice at work there, wouldn’t you say? Or maybe I mean poetic symmetry, or poetic—”

Alix could feel Moody’s irritated glare boring into the back of her neck. Time to get off the phone. “I better get back to work, Chris. I should be done within the hour and we can head right up to Ghost Ranch. Then tomorrow we can take off for Taos in the morning. I think that should give us enough time in each place.”

“Good. I’ll make the reservations and register us for the conference. Oh, and wait till you see the car I’ve rented for us. That’ll be another surprise. Bye, now.”

Another apologetic face-shrug for Moody and back to work. She found what she was looking for in the fourth newsletter she searched, the November 1971 issue. The monthly sale was called
Masters of the Desert
, and in pride of place on the left-hand center page was a large color print of the picture. It would have been impossible to miss it, even without the extensive printed entry below, which began with:

Georgia O’Keeffe (b. 1887)

Cliffs at Ghost Ranch
, 1964

Inscribed ‘OK’ within star (on backing)

Oil on canvas

36 x 30 in. (91.4 x 76.2 cm.)

Bingo
. She made a little fist-pumping gesture of triumph. She’d found it! This was it, all right. Eagerly, she read on.

Provenance

Private Collection, 1964–1971 (Gift of the artist)

Guarantee of authenticity

Painting has been submitted to two recognized O’Keeffe experts and has been authenticated as genuine. These notarized evaluations will be provided to buyer.

That brought a small puff of frustration, of disappointment. Damn, there was exactly nothing to go on here. The picture had been in a private collection, but whose? It had been certified by “recognized experts,” but who were they? And who, if anybody, had bought it in 1971? She scanned the rest of the page, but it was all padding: “In this striking painting the artist depicts the craggy cliffs near her home with a subtle range of ochres, Naples yellow, orange, purples, and…Tonal variations are infused with the bold yet delicate contrasts that are the hallmark of her…The awe-inspiring vastness of the landscape has been transformed into something comprehensible on the canvas by the…” Blah, blah, blah.

Nothing. The trail both began and ended here. All the same, she scanned the remaining three newsletters in hopes of learning more, but there was no further mention of the painting. But two things in Merriam’s “Meanderings” caught her eye. First, his smiling photograph appeared at the head of the columns, and he looked to be relatively young, in his early forties, perhaps. For some reason she had automatically assumed he’d be older, in his sixties, which would have meant that by now he probably would have gone to meet his maker. After all, the gallery had closed thirty-five years before. But if he’d been in his forties back then, he’d be in his seventies or eighties now, no spring chicken, but likely to be still around. The trick would be to find him.

And that’s where the second thing came in. The final paragraph of his July 1972 Meanderings said: “As usual, the Galerie Xanadu will be shuttered and dark in August while Ruthie and I make our annual pilgrimage to Ghost Ranch for a month of education and ‘re-creation’ (in its literal and original sense). We will reopen the first week in September, however, and we will open with a bang. From September 3 to…”

Ghost Ranch. Why, she would be at Ghost Ranch herself before the day was out. Merriam had written about an “annual pilgrimage.” That meant he went regularly, right? Well then, wasn’t it possible, even probable, that his address or telephone number—or some other lead to getting hold of him—resided in some file there?

“Are you finding what you’re looking for?” Moody asked from his desk. “Is there anything else you need?”

“Thank you, no,” she began, but changed her mind. “Mr. Moody,” she said with what she hoped was an appealing smile, “this friend you have in Albuquerque—do you suppose she might know what happened to Henry Merriam after he closed up shop? Where he went?”

“Oh, I don’t believe he went anywhere. It seems he had a massive heart attack. That’s why the gallery closed, you see. My friend didn’t know him all that well—this was some thirty-five years ago, long before she opened her own gallery—but she’s fairly sure he died soon after. In any case, he certainly never returned to the art scene. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, that’s okay, Mr. Moody,” she said, replacing the newsletters in the file box. “Thank you very much for your help.”

Another dead end, she thought with a sigh. It looked as if she wasn’t going to get any help at all from secondary sources. She was going to have to rely one hundred percent on that elusive, enigmatic intuition of hers.

It was, in other words, back to square one.

“Whoa,” said Tommy, the Indiana-farm-boy bellman, gawking. “A Ferrari!” He had carried out their bags to load into the rental car, but once having seen it he just stood there bug-eyed, a bag in each hand.

“A Lamborghini, actually,” Chris said casually. “Nice, isn’t it?”

“I’ll say,” Tommy breathed, “it looks like a frigging Batmobile.”

Alix watched, amused. It
did
remind one of a Batmobile, she thought: a sinister matte black, sleek, and low, with flat planes rather than curves, and altogether strangely, seductively beautiful. With the vertical passenger doors flung up and open like a couple of wings, though, a stealth bomber might have made an even better comparison.

Once the bags were loaded and the two of them had climbed in—the car was so close to the ground it was more crawl than climb—Chris patted the steering wheel and grinned at her. “So what do you think?”

“It’s gorgeous,” Alix said truthfully, “but why in the world would you rent a Lamborghini just to drive up to Ghost Ranch?”

“Why not? It’ll be fun.”

“But it must cost a fortune.”

“It does.”

“And isn’t it a little, um, conspicuous for these parts?”

“Well, of course it’s conspicuous. Don’t be dense, that’s the point. I’m a member of the nouveau riche now, you know. Certain things are expected of me. I have to act the part.”

Alix smiled to herself. How much Chris was like her father, himself an ex-member of the nouveau riche—easygoing, flamboyant, bigger than life. And, she thought, not for the first time, how much she herself was like her mother, Rachel, born into old money; low-keyed, reserved, traditional…almost stuffy. Not like her in the larger aspects of her life, which were anything but traditional, but in the little things, the refinements. To this day Alix would have been instinctively uncomfortable wearing serious jewelry (if she had any) before five p.m. or being seen in public in white after Labor Day. And as for those jangly bracelets and colorful shawls and flowing, silky, eye-catching slacks that Chris wore—well, they looked fine on Chris, but they weren’t for Alix.

Her mother, though, had been traditional in all things, the big as well as the little. Falling in love with Geoffrey London had been the one wild thing Rachel had ever done, and it had cost her dearly. Not in money, for she had her own inheritance, but in her family’s affections. From the first they had refused to accept this roguish, jolly Britisher of hers as one of their own, so it was no surprise that only a single uncle had come to her mother’s funeral, and he was the sole other black sheep of the family: in the 1950s Uncle Julian had divorced his first wife and entered into an extremely short (and extremely expensive) Las Vegas marriage to a leggy dancer at the Flamingo. Afterward, much chastened, he had come humbly back to wife number one, but the damage had been done. Rachel’s family, the Van Hoogerens, were not big on forgiving and forgetting.

So it was certainly no surprise to Alix that after her father’s arrest, not one offer of help, not one expression of commiseration, had come from that side of the family. She was not likely ever to forgive them for that. Or to forget.

“Well, here we go,” Chris said, those silver and turquoise bracelets jingling softly as she turned carefully onto St. Francis Drive, heading north. She drove prudently in the right lane, checking the mirrors every few seconds and keeping well away from the vehicles around them.

Alix was amazed. If she’d had to predict what kind of driving problems Chris might have, overcautiousness would have been the last one she’d have come up with. On the sidewalks, people stopped to goggle at the car. Alix would have preferred a bit less conspicuousness herself, considering that there might well be a would-be killer on her trail, and it would have been nice not to stand out quite like that. But Chris was obviously loving it, so she kept her peace.

Even when St. Francis Drive morphed into Highway 84, Chris continued to creep along in the right lane, at a painfully slow forty-five miles an hour, her body as tense as a piano wire stretched to its absolute limit. Clawed fingers squeezed the black-suede-covered steering wheel as if it might get away from her if she loosened her grip.

“Chris,” Alix said suspiciously, “you’ve never driven one of these before, have you?”

Chris made a point of looking offended. “Sure I have, what do you think?”

“When?”

“Today,” she said. “I drove from the rental place on Cerrillos Road all the way to the Hacienda, almost four miles. But I’m doing okay, aren’t I?”

“Okay for a Toyota Camry with a ‘Baby on Board’ sign maybe, but not so great for a Lamborghini Gallardo LP 560.”

“You even know the model?” Chris said, surprised.

“Yes, I do. I’ve actually driven one—an earlier version.”

“No kidding. Where?”

“In Italy, as a matter of fact. In July and August Fabrizio used to drag me up to his family’s summer place in Ravello most weekends. He thought I was getting to be too much of a hermit, which I was, and I needed to spend more time relaxing with people, which I did. I loved it too; the Santullos were marvelous and Ravello is something else. Well, his son Gian-Carlo had been an amateur race car driver and he had a collection of
six
sports cars, including two of these. He took me out for a few days of instruction, said I was welcome to treat one of them as my own when I was in Ravello, and I took him at his word. I spent quite a few Saturday mornings cruising down the Amalfi Coast. It was grand—gorgeous mountains on one side, the Mediterranean, blue and sparkling, on the other…beaches, villas…”

“Cruising down the Amalfi Coast,” Chris repeated dreamily, “in a Lamborghini LP whatever. Sounds like a dream.” She threw an arch glance Alix’s way. “And were you alone while doing this cruising, or was this fascinating Gian-Carlo chap with you?”

“This fascinating Gian-Carlo chap was forty-nine, bald, five-foot-five, and two hundred pounds. And married. With five children.”

“Oh,” Chris said. Then, after a pause: “Not that that makes him a bad person, of course.” And they both laughed.

“Alix, am I doing something wrong?” she asked uneasily a few moments later. “I’m getting these funny looks from passing drivers.”

“No, you’re not doing anything wrong. It’s only that they’ve never passed a Lamborghini before. Lamborghinis aren’t supposed to be passed, they’re supposed to do the passing. They’ve probably never seen one in the right lane either.” Neither had Alix.

Chris laughed, but it was through clenched teeth. “Well, the truth is, this thing scares me a little. Correction, a lot. The guy at the rental agency? He wanted to take me out in it, show me the ropes, but it ticked me off. Like what, I can’t drive this thing because I’m a poor, helpless female? So I said no thanks, I can handle it.”

“And?”

She shrugged. “And I couldn’t handle it. Not for the first fifty yards, anyway. I barely
touched
the accelerator and it took off like a rocket. I almost had an accident before I got out of the lot. So, since then, I’ve been driving, um, somewhat on the slow side. You know, till I get the knack. Paying attention to the speed limit.”

“Sure, Chris. Naturally.”
But twenty-five miles
under
the speed limit?
This was a Lamborghini, after all, capable of doing two hundred miles an hour, capable (as Chris now knew) of going from zero to sixty in four seconds. It was practically a sacrilege to hobble it like this. Well, she thought with a sigh, let her drive it this way for a while, build up her confidence in the car’s wonderfully smooth city driving capabilities.

“That’s the right idea, Chris. You’re doing fine.” She smiled at her friend and settled into her soft, deep, enveloping seat to enjoy the scenery as best she could. Maybe after Chris had had her fill of driving, if you could call this driving, she’d let Alix take the wheel for a while. She could feel it under her fingertips now, imagine the thrilling way the car seemed to respond instantly to your thoughts, the way a well-trained thoroughbred responded to the slightest pressure of its rider’s knees.

They continued their excruciating crawl past the Pueblo villages of Pojaque and Nambe, and into the gritty sprawl of Española (“Lowrider Capital of the World,” the welcoming sign proclaimed), where they stopped for lunch at a Taco Bell. Word of the Lamborghini traveled fast; in the few minutes it took them to eat, six or seven low-slung, flamboyantly painted cars and trucks arrived in the parking area, spilling a dozen young Hispanic men out to stand in a murmuring, admiring circle around it.

When Chris and Alix came out of the restaurant still carrying their drinks, most of the young men withdrew respectfully, never taking their avid, adoring eyes from the Lamborghini. The one exception was a thin, dead-eyed kid of twenty or twenty-one, in a T-shirt and tight, dirty jeans, who stood leaning arrogantly against his truck, an unlit cigarillo stuck in his mouth. The truck was one of the less garish ones; the only paintwork they could see, aside from a few wreathlike odds and ends, was of a sweet-faced girl in a string bikini (you had to look twice to find the strings), surrounded by the usual orange-and-blue flames. “Bimbi,” the flowing pennant beneath said.

“Nice,” he said, looking at the car. “You wanna take me for a ride?”

They ignored him, of course, to which he responded with a studiedly insolent grin that turned into a laugh as they got into the car. “I don’t know about this,” Chris said to Alix as they snapped on their seat belts. “I’m not sure I like having a car that’s sexier than I am.”

North of Española the countryside grew more bleakly beautiful, with bare, rocky, mauve and rose-colored mountain ranges rising in the distance. There were fewer and fewer other drivers. Alix had the map out and was doing the navigating and color commentary. “Those are the San Juans on our right, Jemez Mountains on the left.”

“I don’t want to know about right and left. I’m having enough trouble concentrating on the road.” They were at the edge of an escarpment now, and the road had turned curvy, following the contours of a winding river that ran along the foot of the cliff, about a hundred feet below. Chris was now driving at about twenty miles an hour and sitting tensely upright, alert and focused, like the one meerkat in the group that’s been stuck with the watchdog assignment.

“Chris, if you’re getting a little tired,” Alix offered hopefully, “I’ll be glad to take over for a while.”

“Maybe later if you want to, but right now I’m not tired at all. I’m really enjoying this.”

“Yeah, I can tell. The white knuckles are a dead giveaway.”

Chris laughed tightly. “Well, yes, I suppose this thing still scares me a bit. It’s so…responsive. I feel like it’s a part of my body. It’s as if it knows what I want to do—”

“Before you do,” Alix finished for her with a sigh. “I know the feeling.” Obviously, it was going to be a while before Chris let her have a go at driving it, if she ever did. “Oh, hey,” she said, consulting the map again, “the river down there—that’s the Chama!”

“The Chama? Is there something special about it?”

“Yes, it means we’re in genuine O’Keeffe country now. She painted it several times. Pretty much this very view in at least one of them. She must have been standing right along the roadside here.”

“Oh, really?”

But it was clear that Chris wasn’t listening. It was the road that held her complete attention, and that was fine with Alix. With all its twists, and the sheer drop-off on the left, and the cliff face pushing in on them on the right, this tricky, dangerous section of Highway 84 demanded one’s concentration. Had Alix been at the wheel, she wouldn’t have been driving that much faster herself. Not having any choice, she left it to Chris, sat back, and began to do what it was she was coming up here to do: to “connect” with this clear, bright, high-desert atmosphere. She had been other places where the light was famous for being conducive to works of art: the golden lowland light of the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish masters, the watery marine light of J. W. Turner, the vivid orange-green hues of Van Gogh and Cézanne in the south of France.

This was different. Not rich or vivid at all, but thin and pale—pastel skies, pastel mountains. As it happened, she knew the atmospheric reasons for this. As in all deserts, the rainfall here was minimal, so there were virtually no light-distorting droplets of moisture in the air. Unlike most other deserts, however, this one was at an elevation of nearly eight thousand feet, so the air had less than a quarter of its sea-level density. The result was a remarkable clarity, a transparency Alix hadn’t run into before. According to her map, the surrounding mountains were twenty-five miles away. They looked as if they were five. And like everything else in sight—the river, the mesas, the buttes—their shapes were crisper and cleaner than they had any right to be, as if a Botticelli or a Breughel had outlined them in pen and ink. She began to get her first inkling of what O’Keeffe—

“Hey, stop, we’re here!” she said.

Startled, Chris brought the car to a sudden halt that had them both straining against their seat belts. She lifted her eyes from the long ribbon of asphalt in front of them to take in the arid, empty landscape on either side. “Where?” she asked blankly.

“Ghost Ranch. We just passed the turnoff. You were driving so fast you never saw it.”

Chris didn’t get the joke. “I sure didn’t,” she said, working at levering the car laboriously back and forth until she could get it turned around. Alix cringed at every grinding of the gears. They drove back to the turnoff, where a dirt road led toward a range of cliffs, no buildings in sight. Over the road was one of those wooden entrance “arches” made of two vertical wooden poles and one horizontal one across the top—the kind of thing that should have said “Bar-X Ranch.” In this case the incised wooden sign said “Ghost Ranch.” The open gate below, made of metal piping, had a triangle in the center the size of a highway Yield sign, but this one was ornamented with the Ghost Ranch logo: a stark white steer skull, very much à la Georgia O’Keeffe, on a black background. Self-styled marksmen had obviously found it attractive. It was well-peppered with dings and dents.