A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) (24 page)

“I’m sorry,” she said, “did you ask me something?”

“I asked if you knew him.”

“I, um, think I ran into him once,” Alix said.

She wasn’t so excited that it spoiled her appetite, however, so before making the call to Ted she sat down, alone in the big room (technically, breakfast wasn’t served until eight o’clock), and did justice to a huge platter of pancakes, maple syrup, and bacon. Two over-easy eggs as well, although they had to go on another plate. And more coffee. And one more of the delicious little almond sweet rolls, or maybe it was two. Then, stuffed and revivified, she lavished sincere gratitude and approbation on the two beaming cooks, got a coffee refill in a cardboard cup, and went out to the cobblestoned front portico of the house. There she stood for a few moments, contentedly digesting, sipping coffee, breathing in the clean scents of what she took to be an approaching desert rain, and—most of all—relishing the amazement and approbation that Ted was about to lavish on
her
when he heard that she had identified the forger of
Cliffs at Ghost Ranch
, who also happened to be the very man she and Chris had encountered in the act of stealing the very same painting from the Blue Coyote after Liz’s murder as well. And, to make everything as easy as possible for the FBI, Mr. Teal was available right there in Taos for a friendly little tête-à-tête at Ted’s convenience. Everything was working out just fine.

Why, I’m happy
, she realized. It was as if the morning’s developments—the call from Katryn, the eye-opening flash of insight into Geoff’s motivations, the picture in the stairwell—had combined to shake loose the self-centered mopeyness that had dogged her for so long. The long night’s sleep and the great breakfast hadn’t hurt either. She felt as if a hundred-pound boulder had been unstrapped from her shoulders, as if she’d unexpectedly emerged from a long, dark tunnel that she’d dug for herself. It was all a question of perspective. The world was endlessly fascinating, if you looked at it right, with twists, and screw-ups, and surprises, delightful and otherwise, at every turn. What was so terrible about that? When things got wacky enough, as they’d certainly been lately, about all you could do was laugh.

She was young, healthy, and talented. She was
alive
. What was her beef? So things weren’t working out careerwise. Big deal. She could always go back to Italy, romantic, delightful Italy, and work and learn alongside the great Fabrizio Santullo, couldn’t she, and how many twenty-nine-year-olds could say that? He’d practically begged her to stay; he’d be thrilled to have her back.

There was something else that was warming her too, a glow she only now recognized for what it was. She’d had time to process what Ted had told her—how it had been her father who’d orchestrated practically all the good things that had been happening to her—and she saw things differently now. What in the world had there been to be resentful about? There was Geoff, ruined, shunned by everyone (including his only child), watching his remaining years waste away behind bars, and where had his thoughts been? With her, with Alix. He had used up what little professional capital he had left, not for himself, but to scrape up opportunities for her. And he had done it with no thought of gratitude or credit, but only for love. She felt the tears working their way up.

The chirping of her cell phone startled her and headed off any waterworks. She sat herself down on one of the portico’s blue wooden benches and flipped it open.

It was Ted, sounding as if he’d been awake every bit as long as she had. “Hi, Alix, I thought we’d better get straight on plans for today. The conference opens—”

“Wait,” she said, brimming with excitement, “I have some things to tell you, and I think you’re going to like them. There’s a small painting here that caught my eye, and when I took a closer look at it…”

It took five minutes to explain, and Ted was gratifyingly impressed, both by her discovery and the rationale for her conclusion, but his reaction to the big news itself wasn’t what she’d expected. It was, in fact, pretty lukewarm. Yes, it was nice that we now knew who the forger was, and Ted would most certainly look forward to a “chat” with him, but it wasn’t the forger he was after; Teal was very likely a minor figure in this, probably hired for a fixed fee. It was the major players that Ted wanted.

“But isn’t it possible that Teal can give you that information?” Alix asked.

“Possible,” Ted said doubtfully, “but usually a ring like this, assuming it is a ring, operates on the need-to-know principle. The less the minor players know, the better. I’d guess this guy was probably out of the loop altogether.”

“Okay, but what about him killing Liz? Isn’t that something you—”

“Teal didn’t kill Liz,” Ted said.

“What?” She’d started, inadvertently knocking the almost-full cup off the arm of the bench and splattering coffee over the cobblestones. “How can you say that with such certainty? We caught him coming—
running
—out of her office—”

“Yes, but two hours after Liz was killed.”

“Two hours?” she echoed. “I thought—”

“The ME’s finding at the scene was that she’d been dead two hours or less. Mendoza got the autopsy report yesterday: turns out two hours was just about right.”

“All right, but how does that prove he didn’t kill her?”

“It doesn’t prove it, Alix, but murderers don’t stick around after whacking someone. They want to get the hell out of there as soon as they can. Think about it: why would he be hanging around for all that time? It doesn’t make any sense. He’d just take the painting and go. No, somebody else killed her. Then Teal came along later, took advantage of the situation, and grabbed the picture.”

Alix sighed. Ted was right; they were still a long way from the bottom of things. “That raises something else that doesn’t make sense, though,” she said thoughtfully. “Why would he steal his own painting?”

“Now
that’s
a good question,” Ted agreed. “I’ll make that topic number one when we have that little chat. Alix, the conference opens with a ten o’clock continental brunch. We’d better be there for that. There’s bound to be lots of talk about Liz.”

“Okay, I’ll see you there.”

“Well.” He cleared his throat. “That gives us a few hours. Have you had breakfast yet?”

Had she had breakfast yet! More like breakfast, lunch, and dinner put together.
“I had a bite, yes,” she replied, then realized she’d blown what was going to be an invitation to join him. “But I could meet you for coffee?” she added brightly.

Apparently she’d taken too long to come up with it. “No, that’s okay,” he said. “I generally don’t have much of a breakfast anyway.” Pause. “So what are your plans for the morning?”

“I thought I’d get out and see a little of the area. The ladies in the kitchen told me about a nice park just down Morada Lane. I was thinking I might take a stroll there.”

Now it was Ted who’d been given his cue—
Oh, really, well, why don’t I join you?
—but he dropped the ball as clumsily as she had. “Yes, that’d be Kit Carson State Park. He lived here, you know, Carson did. Died here too, for that matter.”

“Oh, really.”

This was getting too ridiculous for words. They were circling around each other like a couple of sixteen-year-olds, interested but too ham-fisted to get anything going, and neither one of them could seem to figure out how to make the first move. He knew she was single, of course (he knew everything else about her), and her instincts, always so reliable, told her that he wasn’t married either, and that he found her attractive too. Or could it be that those famous intuitive powers of hers were reading him totally wrong? As with D. H. Lawrence, perhaps her aptitudes were better in some areas than in others.

“Well, I’ll see you later then?” she said. And there it was, one more opportunity for him to take the ball and run with it if he wanted to.

But apparently he didn’t. Or couldn’t. “Right,” he said, and the phone went dead.

“Fine,” she grumped into the mouthpiece although he wasn’t there to hear it. “A business relationship is what you want? A business relationship it is. Plenty of other fish in the sea.”

She needed a walk in the park now more than she had before the call, but first she thought she’d better change out of her good slacks and relatively new flats and get into sneakers and a pair of jeans in case she did get caught in a shower. Her windbreaker too. No sooner was she back in her room, however, than she started yawning. Impossible as it seemed after all the sleep she’d had, the bed looked wonderfully inviting. Well, why not? There was plenty of time for a nap before that continental brunch. She slipped out of her shoes and slacks, crawled gratefully between the sheets, sighed once, and drifted off again, undisturbed by Mabel’s ghost.

Ted had placed the call to Mendoza about Brandon Teal as soon as he’d finished talking to Alix, and then he went downstairs to breakfast in the Casa Benavides dining room. What he’d told Alix about not eating much in the morning was true—generally just coffee and a bagel or an English muffin—but he liked to take his time with them, reading a newspaper over his second cup of coffee. But this morning, although he had the week’s
Taos News
open in front of him, he was merely going through the motions. Why had he been so stiff, so stupidly obtuse with Alix? It wasn’t like him; he liked women, enjoyed their company, and there was something about Alix that he liked more than most. What then? Surely not her dubious pedigree? No, he wasn’t as hidebound as that; people were themselves, they weren’t carbon copies of their parents. Sure, a couple of days ago he’d said to Mendoza that he believed in guilt by association, but it wasn’t true; he’d just been rationalizing at the time, looking for a reason for his instinctive dislike of her. (How quickly things could change.)

No, his problem this morning had nothing to do with reasoning. It was strictly gut-level. He’d been tongue-tied because he’d been so anxious not to blow it by seeming too interested in her that he’d blown it by coming across as totally, utterly uninterested. And uninteresting.

The beep of his cell phone was a welcome interruption. On the other end was Mendoza, who wasted no time getting down to business. “Teal’s dead, Ted.”

“He’s
what
?” Ted looked quickly around, biting his tongue. He’d inadvertently slipped out of his Roland de Beauvais persona. Only two words, but two words, heard by the wrong people, and his cover was wrecked. Fortunately, none of the other diners seemed to have noticed. He got up, hurried outside into the courtyard, and stood beside the plashing Moorish fountain.

“I sent a couple of my people out to talk to him,” Mendoza went on. “The landlord let them in. They found him in his bathroom—”

“Eduardo, when you say
dead
, do you mean dead as in
killed
?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. It was set up to look like an accident, like he slipped coming out of the shower and hit the back of his head on the washstand, but the job was seriously botched. It took the ME about five minutes to come up with homicide.”

“Good God,” Ted said, “this just keeps going on and on.” He shook his head. “I’m assuming the time of death was at least a couple of days ago, would that be right? Saturday or before.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because the news has been out since Saturday night that the painting’s a forgery. There’s no reason to kill anybody over it anymore.”

“Well, I guess there is. Doc says he’s been dead over twelve hours, under twenty. He’ll give us more details—”

“But…but that means he was killed
yesterday
!”

“Yeah,” Mendoza said slowly, “which tells us what, exactly?”

“That somebody’s still out there killing people—that getting out the word that we know the O’Keeffe’s a forgery didn’t put an end to it!”

“Well, yeah, obviously…”

“Which means I was wrong—Alix
isn’t
out of danger. Somebody might still be trying…and I’ve brought her here, where they all are, and let her wander around without any protection. Any one of them could…Jesus, Eduardo, what have I gotten her into? I have to go find her!”

Kit Carson State Park is more playground than park, with tennis courts and baseball diamonds, but there are also groves of trees and sweeping green lawns. That morning, with the low clouds threatening rain at any moment, Alix had the place to herself with the exception of a few kids playing a pickup game on one of the diamonds, a couple of solitary joggers, and one or two other walkers. She was on the circular jogging path, having stopped beside a group of cottonwoods to listen to a sound she didn’t remember ever having heard before: the gentle, agreeable clacking of their crisp, yellowing leaves in the breeze.

She waited for a Spandexed jogger to lope by her before starting to walk again; one or two more circuits of the track and she’d head back to the Luhan House to change and then head over to the conference center. She was annoyed at herself for having slept clear through the regular breakfast hours and missing the opportunity to tune in on the chatter, and she intended to make up for it by getting to the conference early.

“Why, it’s Miss London, isn’t it? Alix?” a dry, familiar voice said, and there was Clyde Moody, looking lost in a voluminous trench coat that would have done Humphrey Bogart proud. On his head was a capacious blue denim Greek fisherman’s hat pulled down to his ears. He looked ready for the storm of the century. His usual bow tie (little penguins and mini-icebergs on a field of blue this morning) peeped out from between his lapels.

“Yes, it is, Mr. Moody. How are you this morning? I tried to say hello last night, but you were surrounded by hordes of admirers and didn’t notice me.”

“Surrounded by admirers? Oh, I doubt that. The last time I was surrounded by hordes of admirers was in my high school physical education class when I knocked myself unconscious trying to use the chin-up bar.”

Alix laughed. Apparently Moody was in, what were for him, positively exuberant spirits. “Oh, there was something I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “I understand you weren’t able to find the catalogs I was looking at the other day and you thought I might have—”

“Oh, I assure you, I wasn’t implying…that is to say, there was no question of your intentionally taking them. I thought only that you might have accidentally left with them.”

“No, I left them right there in the middle of the table, in their folder. You don’t remember?”

“Actually, I thought I did remember that, but when the folder wasn’t in its place afterward, or anyplace nearby, or anyplace that made any logical sense at all—and I searched carefully, believe me—well, I wondered if you might have it. It was just a hope, really.” His narrow shoulders lifted in a despairing shrug.

“I’m sorry,” she said sympathetically. “I hope you find them.”

“Oh, I’m sure we will,” he said with a sigh. “These things happen, I suppose.” He smiled. “Only they’re not supposed to happen to me.” They stepped out of the way to allow another runner to jog by. “Well,” he said, “it’s been nice speaking with you. I’m on my way to pay my respects to Ms. Luhan.” He tipped his cap to her, something else you didn’t see very much these days.

“Ms. Luhan?” Alix repeated.

“Yes, she’s buried here in the park, didn’t you know?”

“In the
park
?”

He smiled. “Why, yes. Kit Carson State Park is somewhat unusual, a combination of town commons and town cemetery. Technically, the cemetery part—the Kit Carson
Memorial
Park—is a sub-unit within the larger park. It’s that area over there, where you see the fencing and those trees. Mr. Carson’s grave is there, as you might expect, but it’s Mabel that I go and see. An extraordinary force, a tremendous benefactor of the arts.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Ah…well…would you care to accompany me?”

Alix considered. “Why, yes, I would, thank you. I’d like to pay my respects to her too.” It was the least she could do to thank Mabel for not haunting her.

Moody nodded, pleased. “Come.”

The cemetery was like most old small-town cemeteries, cared for but not overly cared for, with worn, sparse grass and weathered, time-tilted gravestones placed not in rows but willy-nilly—all of which contributed a poignant atmosphere of bygone times and vanished ways. They had the place to themselves and stopped briefly at the grave of Kit Carson, where there was a plain headstone with a little decorative carving around the edges and a simple inscription: “Kit Carson, died May 23, 1868, aged 59 years.”

Mabel’s memorial was even more modest, a rectangular tablet of veined marble, not even knee-high, on a flat base, with an equally terse inscription: “Mabel Dodge Luhan, Feb. 26, 1879, Aug. 13, 1962.” Other than the inscription, it was plain as plain could be, with no ornamental carving, no ornamentation of any kind. It sat in a particularly forlorn corner of the cemetery, far from the graves of Carson and the other town notables.

Alix was surprised. Knowing what she knew of Luhan—of Mabel, as everybody here seemed to call her—Alix had expected either something grand or something outrageous. “They kind of put her in the lowrent district, didn’t they?” she said.

“Yes, it does seem that way,” Moody said as they stood on either side of the stone. He seemed deeply affected—agitated, in fact—to be in Mabel’s presence. His hat had been respectfully removed, and now he twisted it in both hands. “I mean, for a woman who did so much for, for…” He clamped his mouth shut and his eyes as well, and just stood there shaking his head.

Oh, brother,
Alix thought,
don’t let him start crying!
“Still,” she said quickly, “it’s nice to see that people haven’t forgotten her. Look at all the stones.” She was referring to the rounded river rocks and pebbles that people had placed on top of the gravestone as remembrances.

Moody jerked his head up and down in agreement. “You know,” he said, speaking very fast, even stammering a little, “that custom—leaving stones on graves—originated in ancient Judaic tradition as a way for people to participate, so to speak, in building a memorial to the deceased because at that time, of course, there were no headstones as we know them but rather rock cairns, but in recent times, in recent times, it’s become a means of, of, of, of remembrance to, to indicate…” He was practically choking on the torrent of words.

What is all this about?
Alix wondered, growing more and more uneasy as he rattled crazily on.
Is he having a breakdown of some kind?
She was suddenly deeply aware of how alone they were, with no one in sight, no one within earshot. She moved back a step. There was something very wrong here—

Crack!
She jumped at the sound, and at the same instant something stung her on the outside of her right thigh. She slapped at it with her hand, thinking it was a bee, but when she touched flesh instead of cloth she looked down to see a two-inch rent in her jeans, under which was a shallow, inch-long, greasy-looking furrow in her leg. As she stared uncomprehendingly at it, droplets of blood began welling along its length.
A bullet graze?
She looked up at Moody, who stood there looking more shocked than she was.

“Did you just
shoot
me?”

“I, I…”

But now she saw the hole in the center of the hat he held, the curl of smoke still coming from it. She looked wildly around for a place to run, a tree to hide her, but now he had thrown down the hat and had the pistol pointed squarely at the center of her chest. He was trembling so hard that the gun was jumping up and down as if it were being jerked on a string, but even so there was no way he could miss—not from six feet away. And she recognized the gun as a semiautomatic, which meant that if he did miss, he could pump out another shot, and another, and another, as fast as he could pull the trigger.

Despite knowing how stupid it was, she put her hands up in front of her face. It was all she could think of to do. “Mr. Moody…”

He extended his arms and took aim. “I’m really sorry about this. It’s your own doing, really…”

She stared numbly at him, shaking her head “no” as if that were going to stop him. “But…but why…?”

But she already knew why. It had come to her as she asked, a conclusion so simple, so blindingly obvious, that she couldn’t believe it had never crossed her mind. The faking of the Galerie Xanadu catalog—Moody hadn’t been
victimized
by the fraud, he had
perpetrated
it…along with God knew how many other frauds. And Alix had had the rotten luck to catch him at it.

“I’m sorry,” Moody said again. “I have no choice.” He clamped his mouth shut.

And so I’m going to die now
, she told herself woodenly, not really believing it. How could her life end in Kit Carson’s graveyard, shot to death by a…by a crazed museum archivist? No, it was too absurd, it couldn’t…

And didn’t. When he pulled the trigger, nothing happened. Alix had instinctively squeezed her eyes shut, but when she heard the little click they popped open. He tried again. Another click. He gave a little cry of frustration and shook the jammed gun the way you’d yank a ketchup bottle to get the contents flowing.

Alix came to life. She grabbed a golf-ball-sized rock from the top of Mabel’s stone, flung it at his head, and launched herself at him. Moody managed to duck the rock, but not Alix. Head down, she slammed into him at belt level, wrapping her arms around him and driving with her legs. Alix didn’t weigh much less than he did, so the force of her tackle sent him staggering backward, with her attached, limpet-like, her legs churning. Next to Mabel’s grave was another memorial stone, a black basalt boulder, and when he stumbled back into it his feet were knocked from under him. Up and over it flew Moody. Up and off to the side flew the gun. Moody landed on his back, crumpled into a triangular space between the boulder and the corner of the fencing, with Alix sprawled on top of him. The gun landed a few feet away, near the fence.

Alix was off him and after it in a flash, leaving him struggling to extricate himself from the corner. In two seconds the gun was in her hand, aimed squarely at the center of his face. He had barely gotten himself turned over.

At first he quailed, shrinking further into the corner and raising his hands in surrender, but then he thought better of it, gave a nervous little giggle, got his legs under him—

“I’m telling you, don’t move!”

—and stood all the way up, his hands no longer raised. Strangely, he seemed calmer, more self-assured, without the gun than with it. “What are you going to do?” he asked, taking a step toward her. “It’s jammed. You can’t shoot me.” Another step.

Alix, stubbornly controlling her own trembling, stood her ground. She slammed the heel of her left hand against the butt of the pistol, then quickly yanked back and released the slide. She’d hoped the sinister
snick-snick
of the racking action would be enough to stop him, but it didn’t seem to penetrate. He hesitated for only a fraction of a second, then kept coming toward her. She aimed the gun at the sky, offered a wordless little prayer, and pulled the trigger.

Either the prayer or her attempt to clear the gun worked, because it fired. The sharp
crack!
was like music, the jarring recoil a caress.

Moody halted in mid-step, eyes popping. “How did you…it was…”

“TRB,” Alix said with all the laid-back élan she could muster. “Tap, rack, and…
bang
. Essential first aid for a jammed semi.” She patted the gun with something like affection, showing off like crazy in hopes of convincing him that she was an old, sure hand with these things. In point of fact, she’d taken two hours of training years ago, after the divorce from Paynton, when she’d considered buying a handgun for herself—this same Glock 30, the world’s most popular pistol, as it happened. But she’d decided against it, and this was the first time she’d had a gun in her hand since. For some happy reason, it was the instructor’s harping on “TRB” that was about the only thing that had stuck with her. Tap, rack, and…
bang
.

“Yes, but you won’t shoot me,” Moody said, but Alix could see that the balance of power had shifted. He wore a wan, scared look now. He was bluffing.

Alix was quick to take advantage. “The hell I won’t,” she growled, coming toward him. “Back off, or so help me, I’ll kill you.” She brandished the gun at him. “Believe me, it’d be a pleasure.”

Alix was bluffing too, but after all a bluff with a gun beats a bluff without one. Still, would she really shoot him if she had to?
In a heartbeat
, she told herself and realized she meant it. He’d tried to murder her, hadn’t he? Twice, apparently. And probably killed Liz too. She wouldn’t hesitate. Moody evidently read her frame of mind in her eyes. He backed prudently away.

She advanced on him, step for step. Her mind continued to work. “You had Mr. Merriam killed too, didn’t you?”

“I never heard of any—”

“Oh, yes, you did.”

More pieces were falling into place as she spoke. From what Barb had told them at Ghost Ranch, the sequence of events wasn’t hard to infer. Merriam had learned from his friend’s son that
Cliffs at Ghost Ranch
was being sold at the Blue Coyote in Santa Fe and part of its supposed provenance was an old Galerie Xanadu exhibition catalog now in the archives of the museum. Merriam knew that he’d never handled any such painting and had called the archives to say so. He’d spoken to Moody, who would have been highly upset to hear that he was not only still alive but ticked off, and was on the verge bringing the entire scam down around their ears. That had been enough to stamp the old man’s death warrant right there.

“That was you he was on the phone with that day, wasn’t it? That was you he was driving down to see. You killed him right on that same stretch of highway you tried to kill
me
on.” She jabbed the gun at him. “
Didn’t
you?”

“I—” Moody’s hands jumped up in alarm. He leapt backward.