A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) (16 page)

“Chris, I never did thank you for working out the logistics. Getting us in here, and then Mabel Dodge Luhan’s bedroom, wow! You did a great job digging it up and hooking it for us. So thank you!”

“Hey, I’m the one who should be thanking you,” Chris said as they turned onto the primitive dirt road. “You’ve done me a hell of a favor.”

“You’re more than welcome, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a favor. You’re paying me pretty well.”

“Oh, I’m not talking about the stupid painting, I’m talking about what you did for me with Craig. I got up my nerve and had it out with him while you were in the archives. I laid my cards on the table. I asked—”

“Chris, did I miss something here? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about what you said yesterday about my maybe jumping to conclusions and getting the wrong impression of what really went on between Craig and Liz.”

“And you talked to him about it? This morning?”

“That I did. After you left for the museum. I caught him coming back from his interrogation with Mendoza and we went for coffee.” Her face reddened slightly. “Everything you said was true—not only about him and Liz, but about
him
. Gallant, that’s what you called him, and gallant is what he is. I had to pump him to get him to say anything at all, but I finally dug it out of him. Liz had been coming on to him—she was very attractive back then, remember—and he eventually succumbed. No excuses, even now. A moment of weakness; just what you said. That’s what he told me, and I’m convinced it’s true.”

“I’m glad.”

“I’ll tell you the truth, it’s lucky for Liz she’s already dead, because if she wasn’t I’d kill her myself.”

“If you have any further conversations with the police, I think it might not be a very good idea to convey that thought to them.”

“Don’t worry,” Chris said, laughing. “And let me tell you what kind of a guy he is. You know, Mendoza asked him to stick around for a few days—”

It suddenly occurred to Alix that he had asked
them
to stick around for a few days too. She hoped that Ghost Ranch was considered “sticking around.” What the hell, he had their cell phone numbers. They could be back in Santa Fe in not much more than a couple of hours without him ever knowing they’d been gone.

“—and so I said that of course I’d pay the rates on the plane while he was here and also pick up his expenses. Well, he kind of flared up at that. If I wanted to pay the company for the plane, that was my business, but he damn well wasn’t going to let me pay for his food and lodging. And he meant it.” She smiled. “He can be very masterful too.”

Alix detected a sort of proprietary pride in Chris’s voice as she talked about him, and a new liveliness that was good to hear. “So what happens now?” she asked.

Chris practically beamed. “When I get back to Santa Fe, we’re going to get together and have dinner. And I have the feeling we might get a second chance…nothing that he specifically said, but, you know, a feeling. A woman can tell, you know that.”

I wouldn’t know, it’s been too long
, Alix almost said, but she was too happy for Chris to spoil things with her own sorry story. “That would be wonderful,” she said sincerely, and it would. It’d mean that at least something good came out of this consulting job from hell.

“So where is this place already?” Chris asked. “Did we miss a side road or something? There’s not a sign of civilization in sight.”

They’d driven a mile from the turnoff, and, indeed, they were still in open, empty country: a wide desert plateau with whitish cliffs on either side, with no sign of development other than the primitive road they were on.

“We haven’t missed anything,” Alix said. “We’re there; we’re just not at the conference center yet. Ghost Ranch is huge, over twenty thousand acres. The conference center is just a tiny part of it…oh, hey, look, there’s a sign of civilization for you right there.”

She was pointing to a derelict rough-hewn log cabin a few yards from the road, and Chris laughed. “Civilization circa 1870 or so, I’d say.”

“No, wait!” Alix said with sudden urgency. “Stop! I want to show you something.”

“But it’s just an old—”

“I’m not talking about the cabin now. Just stop the car, will you?”

“There aren’t any pull-offs. Where am I supposed—”

“There also aren’t any cars, if you haven’t noticed. Will you just stop the car, already?”

Chris complied, and a veil of the road dust they’d created drifted back over them. “Okay, what’s up?”

Alix got out of the car, to be followed by Chris, who came to stand beside her. “Now look over there,” Alix instructed, pointing at a wall of cliffs two or three miles away.

Chris peered in the indicated direction. “Okay, I’m looking…”

“You don’t see anything interesting?”

Puzzled, Chris shook her head. “See what?”

“Those photos of the painting that Liz sent you—do you have them with you?”

“Yes, in my bag.”

“Let’s see ’em.”

Chris shrugged, retrieved her bag from the car, and handed over a few postcard-sized photographs of the O’Keeffe. Alix selected one that showed the entire painting and held it up at arm’s length. “Now. Look at the picture, and then look at the cliffs. See the two main fissures? Look at the one on the right and imagine you can see—barely see—what looks like the figure of a man half hidden in the shadows at the bottom. Do you—”

“My God, that’s my painting!” Chris exclaimed, obviously thrilled. “Those are my cliffs!” She looked from cliffs to postcard and back again, and then, more subdued, said, “Alix, I know this sounds crazy, but even if it does turn out to be a fake, I’d kind of like to have it. It
is
beautiful, and somehow it makes the cliffs themselves more…more
real
.”

“That’s true; that’s what art does. And I agree, it’s a very fine painting, a wonderful evocation of those cliffs. And
very
Georgia O’Keeffish. But you’ve agreed to pay almost three million dollars if you decide to take it, and I don’t think you want to do that if it’s not genuine.”

“You’re right, of course,” Chris said with a sigh. She put the pictures back in her bag. “But O’Keeffe really did do pictures of this area, didn’t she?”

“Many.”

“Then, assuming it turns out to be a forgery, your next job is to find a real one for me. Would that be all right?”

“More than all right. It’d be a pleasure.”

“Excellent,” Chris said crisply. “Consider it a done deal. Now let’s go find this supposed conference center and check into our rooms.”

A little more driving took them down a dry, shallowly sloping hillside, over a log bridge that crossed a wooded creek, and along a stony ridge. They rounded the ridge, and there in front of them was the conference center. Sheltered by the cliffs and surrounded by multihued, fantastically shaped buttes, the one-story buildings circled a broad, grassy plaza. With groups of people strolling deep in conversation, and others sitting clustered in the lacy shade of cottonwood trees, it looked like a small college campus miraculously sprouted in the middle of the desert.

“Your rooms are ready for you,” the receptionist told them once they’d found the administration building. “They’re in the Coyote block. It’s up the hill on the mesa. Just follow the road on the left up and around. Good view. Make sure you sit out and enjoy the sunset. I’m Barb. Just ask me if you have any questions.”

“Barb, have you worked here long?” Alix asked.

“Going on twenty years.”

“Do you happen to remember a man named Henry Merriam? He used to take courses here pretty regularly. He owned an art gallery in Albuquerque—Galerie Xanadu.”

Clyde Moody’s contact in Albuquerque had said that she thought he’d been dead for over twenty years—“fairly certain” was the phrase she’d heard Moody repeat on the telephone—but that left some room for doubt. Not much, of course, but here she was at Ghost Ranch, so why not ask?

“Of course, I remember him,” Barb said. “He was here just a few months ago. Sweetest old man in the world.”

Alix was stunned. “A few months ago…?”

Barb nodded. “August,” Barb assured her. “Two months ago, almost to the day. He was standing right where you are.”

This was almost too much to hope for. “Would you happen to know where I can get hold of him?”

“Not in this world, I’m sorry to say. He passed away. Nice old guy, too.”

Alix sighed. Too much to hope for, all right. But to learn that he’d still been alive, been available, only two months ago, that really stung. “When exactly did he die?” she asked, more out of politeness than anything else.

“It was the very next day.” She nodded to herself, thinking back. “That’s right. See, he owned that art gallery years and years ago, and there was some kind of mix-up about whether he did or didn’t sell some kind of painting or something…I don’t know, something like that. So he was driving down to Santa Fe to straighten it out—I
think
it was Santa Fe; maybe it was Albuquerque. Well, he had a bad heart, you know? And he picked the wrong place to have a heart attack—right in that curvy section on 84, up in the cliffs where it runs along the Chama River. You probably drove over it yourselves to get here.”

“We sure did,” Chris said. “I damn near had a heart attack myself.”

“Yeah, I hate driving it too. Anyway, whether he had a heart attack because he went over the edge, or he went over the edge because he had a heart attack, they say he was dead before the car hit the bottom. It was a blessing, in a way. He’d been pretty miserable since his wife got Alzheimer’s and he had to put her in a, you know, facility.” She smiled pensively. “It was pretty weird, really. You know the last words he said to me?”

“No,” Alex said. “What did he say?”

“Well, it wasn’t exactly to me, it was on the phone, and it wasn’t exactly his very last words, but pretty close. He said, ‘I assure you, I am not dead.’”

Chris wrinkled her nose. “‘I assure you, I am not dead.’ That
is
strange.”

“I’ll say. ‘I assure you, I am not dead.’ And then, not even twenty-four hours later—he
was
, just like that. Fate, I guess.” A matter-of-fact clearing of her throat and she was back to business. “Your rate includes meals. Dinner is from five thirty to six fifteen. Not haute cuisine, but good and healthy and plenty to eat. You have private baths, but there aren’t any TVs, radios, or telephones in the rooms.”

“What about cell phone reception?” Alix asked. She found she wanted to check in with Geoff.

“Just about nonexistent. Afraid you’re in the boonies here.” At Alix’s frown of concern, she added, “You’re welcome to use the pay phone there on the wall, though. Takes cards.”

Alix looked at it. “Um, well…”

Barb gave her a sympathetic smile. “Not real private, is it, honey? Well, if you don’t mind driving back out a little way, there’s a spot with just about the best cell phone reception in the world. It’s the only building you’ll see between here and the highway, a log cabin on your left that’s got its own mini-cell-phone tower or whatever they call it built right into it—”

“Are you serious?” Alix asked. “That place must be a hundred years old. Why would—”

“It’s not even twenty years old,” Barbara said, laughing. “You remember
City Slickers
?”

“
City Slickers
?”

“The movie.”

“The movie?”

“She doesn’t get out much,” Chris quietly interceded.

“Oh. Well, see, they filmed the movie here, and that cabin’s just a prop they built. Anyway, here comes this huge Hollywood crew out here, and you can imagine how freaked out they get when they can’t make all their super-urgent phone calls. So, being Hollywood, they just spent whatever it took to have the cabin wired up as their phone reception area. And when they left, they left it in place. Works great. The only place in twenty miles you can get decent reception. Sometimes when I drive by I see five, six people standing around talking on their phones. I keep telling my boss we ought to put in a Starbucks.”