A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) (23 page)

“What’s his name?” Alix asked. “Would I have heard of him?” She was getting a funny feeling about this.

“As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t be surprised. Maybe you’ve even met him! That’s one of the things I wanted to ask you.”

The funny feeling intensified. Surely, it couldn’t be, it wouldn’t be—

“According to his tweets, he was about to have a show, his very first American exhibition, at the Blue Coyote, right there in Santa Fe, so I couldn’t help wondering—”

It couldn’t be, but it was. Alix’s heart sank. “Gregor Gorzynski,” she said dully.

“Gregor
Stanislav
Gorzynski,” Katryn corrected coyly. “Stani for short.
Did
you have a chance to meet him? Did you get to see his work? Isn’t it fantastic?”

“Katryn,” Alix began, but Katryn cut her off, which was a good thing because she didn’t know what she was going to say, but whatever it was Katryn wouldn’t have appreciated it. “Oh, Alix, I have to go. We’ll talk later.
Au revoir, ma cher.
I’m
so
excited!”

Alix stood there staring out the window for a few moments, then limply sat down on the bed. Angrily, she deleted all three of Katryn’s messages. Nausea had welled up in her throat. Was this a sick joke someone had gotten Katryn to play on her? Or were there more cosmic forces at work? What goes around comes around? Chickens coming home to roost? History repeating itself? The sins of the father visited on the daughter? The, the…but she’d run out of clichés.

The thing was, this was exactly what had happened to Geoff, what had driven him over the edge, if you believed his story. His forgeries had all been copied from paintings that had been entrusted to him for cleaning or restoring. And the fakes were so beautifully done that he was able to get away with returning them to the owners in place of the originals. Did they somehow seem different—newer, brighter? Well, of course, that was what a skillful cleaning did. He then sold the originals to sometimes gullible, sometimes shady collectors, all at enormous profit to himself.

The evidence against him had been so cut-and-dried that there had been little point in his claiming innocence, and he didn’t. He had, however, offered an eloquent saving-Western-civilization defense of his behavior. He had pointed out that every one of the paintings involved, sixteen in all, was being worked on prior to its planned sale to provide the owner with funds to buy something else. And that something else, in each case, was one or more twentieth-century postmodern monstrosities. “Monstrosities” had been his word for them. Sometimes it was Neo-Dada, sometimes Neo-Expressionist, sometimes Deconstructionist, sometimes something without a name. And the idea of selling, say an Ingres nude, in order to replace it with a “statement” made of wires and shellacked animal entrails had outraged his sensibilities. As he saw it, he said with his usual flair, he was rescuing art, taking it from Philistines who didn’t care, and who didn’t know the difference anyway, and putting it instead in the loving custodianship of those who appreciated its beauty and value.

At the time, all Alix’s thoughts had been summed up in five one-syllable words that she remembered muttering aloud while reading about the trial:
What a crock of shit.
He was a crook, and his self-proclaimed objective of saving art from the barbarians had not so incidentally made him a lot of money. (All gone now, of course.)

But that was then. Katryn’s call had shaken things up. For the first time she understood something of what Geoff had felt. No, she wasn’t about to justify what he’d done, but…sell that exquisitely rendered Utrillo she’d been slaving over so lovingly and replace it with…with…M&M’s and rice noodles? Geoff was right, the Philistines were taking over.

The nausea hadn’t gone away, and now there was a gripey kind of pain in her abdomen as well. But the source of them wasn’t quite as high-minded as she’d assumed, she now realized. The last time she’d eaten had been at breakfast the day before; she was
hungry
.

Cosmic forces would have to take a back seat to coffee and pancakes.

When she stepped out into the hall, she found herself looking through a half-open door into an old-fashioned bathroom flooded with a diffuse rainbow of colors. Assuming it had stained-glass windows, she peeked in curiously, only to find that the windows were of ordinary glass, but thickly painted over with primitive images—an Indian headdress, a chicken, another animal (cat? dog? chipmunk?), along with various geometric abstractions—all jumbled together in an eye-searing hodgepodge of reds, yellows, blues, and greens. This, then, was the celebrated bathroom painted by D. H. Lawrence, scandalized by his hostess’s practicing her ablutions in full view of any (unlikely) passerby. An inscription in one corner confirmed this:
D. H. Lawrence painted this window.

Well, she had learned a long time ago that geniuses generally were wise to keep to whatever their specialty was, and it certainly applied here. It was a good thing for Lawrence that he hadn’t decided to pursue a career in art. All the same, it was quite something to see, and although the bathroom went with the room down the hall, she promised herself that she would at least brush her teeth there before she left. Just so that she could say she had.

On the way downstairs she remembered bumping her head in time to duck where the stairs turned and there wasn’t enough headroom. Bending down brought her face to face with a small painting on the wall that she hadn’t noticed yesterday. Mesas, buttes, desert. It was quite well done, and her first thought was that it might even be a Georgia O’Keeffe that the painter had left when she’d stayed with Luhan. But no, on second glance it was O’Keeffelike, all right, but too pretty, too plainly decorative to be the real thing—just an “in-the-style-of” piece intended as an attractive wall decoration. It was a nice rendering, though, deserving of a better display place than a shadowy staircase landing. The picture was modestly signed in blue paint at the lower right: Brandon Teal. The name was unfamiliar.

She had reached the bottom of the steps and turned left, following her nose toward the coffee and pancakes—and now bacon too;
slurp!
—when she stopped stone-still, her mind churning. There was something about…

She dashed back up the stairs to the painting. There was a small picture light attached to the top of the frame. She flicked it on and stared hard.
Yes!
There, at the base of one of the buttes, clothed in shadow, was the barely visible figure of a man in profile. The same figure—the same
exact
figure—that had been on
Cliffs at Ghost Ranch
and marked it as the fake that it was.

She knew the point of the little figure too. Geoff had talked about it when she’d called him from Ghost Ranch. A “just-in-case alibi” was what he’d called it—an unobtrusive but unmistakable element that some prudent forgers added to everything they painted, whether fakes or their own originals (if any). The idea was that it served as a kind of Kilroy-was-here insignia to “prove”—if it ever became necessary—that the forger had had no intent to defraud. No, no, he had painted the thing as a copy, or an homage, or a study. When had he ever claimed it was anything else? Really, if forgery had been in his heart, surely the last thing he would have done would have been to insert something that a) didn’t belong, and b) was practically his own personal trademark. Of course, if some later owner, some unscrupulous scoundrel, had taken it upon himself to pass it off as a genuine Whoever, how was the poor, innocent artist to blame for that?

The longer she looked at the painting, the more her certainty grew that Brandon Teal, if that was really his name, had painted Chris’s “O’Keeffe” as well. This was absolutely incredible, a terrific development. She considered calling Ted then and there, but it was barely seven o’clock and she was pretty sure Ted Ellesworth was not the early-rising type. Or was she confusing him with Roland de Beauvais? But either way, it could wait. First things first. Pancakes.

The dining room was a spare, somber space that brought to mind the rectory of a monastery with its simple wooden furnishings, floor candelabra, and dull black and red floor tiles. The settings had been laid out, but no one had arrived yet. The big, old-fashioned kitchen opened just off this room, however, and there she found two cooks working away. The smells alone were enough to make her think that maybe, despite the craziness of the last few days, the world at large might still be normal. Add to that the cozy scene in general: two aproned, rosy-cheeked, flour-spattered, middle-aged women cheerfully cutting scone dough into wedge shapes, with a third, younger woman sitting on a high stool beside the tiled work table and quietly kibitzing, coffee cup in hand. This person Alix recognized as Janet, the receptionist who’d checked her in the day before.

She had barely said good morning to the three of them before they saw to it that she had her own cup of coffee, a fresh, warm sweet roll, and her own stool at the table. Heaven. For a while they made small talk: the weather, the fact that this was Alix’s first visit, stories about the house. One of the cooks had been working there when the actor Dennis Hopper had owned it for a while in the seventies. Did Alix know that he had refused to sleep in Mabel’s bed—the bed Alix had been in—because he’d believed it to be haunted by Mabel’s restless and vindictive spirit? No, Alix didn’t know (she was also having trouble placing Dennis Hopper, although she kept that to herself), but she could say with certainty that she had been unhaunted by Mabel. She’d slept like a stone.

Janet refilled her own cup. “I’ll bet. It’s no wonder you were wiped out last night. We heard what happened up near Abiquiu. Your friend—Ms. LeMay—is going to be all right, I hope?”

“She’ll be fine. No serious damage done.”

“Good. Uh…about Liz…” Janet put on a suitably sober face. “I can imagine how distressing her…her death must be. The two of you were old friends of hers, weren’t you?”

“Yes, we were,” Alix said smoothly, “although I didn’t know her quite as long as Chris did.”
Three hours, to be exact
, but she wasn’t going to squeeze out any confidences about Liz by telling them that. The only thing that was really distressing her at this point was her own good upbringing, which was preventing her from cramming the entire sweet roll into her mouth at once. She settled for a nibble and a slug of coffee. “Chris was really disappointed not to be able to come to this conference, that’s for sure. She was looking forward to meeting some of Liz’s other friends. I know I am. It’ll be a big help to be able to talk about the good things, share stories.”
When did I get to be such a facile liar?
Alix wondered.
One more talent no doubt inherited from good old Dad.

The three women nodded their sympathy and looked reflective, giving Alix the chance to down a few gobbets of almond-paste-centered pastry, far and away the most delicious thing she’d ever tasted in her life.

“Well,” Janet said, standing up, “I guess I’d better get to work.”

“Oh, I wanted to ask you something,” Alix said. “There’s a beautiful little painting in the stairwell, a desert scene—”

“Oh, yes, Brandon did that. He gave it to us. A gift. He’s
so
nice.”

Brandon?
“You
know
him? I mean, personally?”

“Brandon?” she said, resettling on her stool. “Sure, we see him all the time. He lives in Santa Fe. He’s signed up for the conference too. I’m sure you’ll see him around.”

“That’d be great. What does he look like?”

“Oh…” She rolled her eyes upward the way people do when they search for a mental image. “Well, he’s pretty hard to miss,” she said, smiling. “He’s a good six-four and burly besides, and he’s got red hair and this beard that looks like orange Brillo—”

Alix blinked.
Big, burly, orange beard
… “Does he…does he smoke a pipe?” she asked, doing her best to tamp down her swelling excitement.

“Like a chimney. Never seen him without one. He says it keeps him calm.”

“If that’s true,” said one of the cooks, “wouldn’t you just love to see him when he’s nervous?”

“That’s true,” Janet said, laughing. “Big as he is, poor Brandon’s a walking exhibit of raw nerves. He refuses to take his medication. He says it stifles his creativity. The funny thing is, what he doesn’t realize is that his problem is that he’s
too
creative. His work is all over the map. One year he’s a Post-Impressionist, the next year he’s a, a surrealist or something. Personally, I think if he could just develop one single style, his own style, you know, a Brandon Teal style…”

She finally noticed the odd look on Alix’s face. “Uh-oh, did I say something I shouldn’t have? Is he a friend of yours?”

Alix had heard practically nothing since the red hair, the orange beard, and the pipe.
My God!
It was stunning enough to make her forget about the sweet roll, at least for the moment.