A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) (9 page)

“You okay, miss?” an older gentleman asked. “Can I help you?”

“Oh…no, I’m fine, thank you. I was just…thinking.” She began walking again, slowly, lost in a maze of memories, her thoughts conflicted and contradictory. Almost as if it had gotten there without her help, she found her cell phone in her hand. What would it be like to telephone him? Right now, this minute? A new thought occurred to her. The morning he’d called her after her meeting with Chris? The call during which she’d said she didn’t want to speak with Tiny and she’d exasperatedly rung off? That was the last time he’d called. It had been three days, a long time for him. She’d been so absorbed in doing her O’Keeffe research and preparing for Santa Fe that she hadn’t noticed. No, that wasn’t true. She’d purposefully blocked thinking about him or about her own decision-making, promising herself she’d do some serious contemplating about everything later.

Had he at long last given up on her? Had he interpreted her rejection of Tiny as her way of finally telling him to bug off? To leave her alone? She didn’t know what she wanted, but she didn’t want that dismal exchange to be their last contact.

She moved out of the flow of foot traffic, sat on a low adobe wall, flipped open the phone, and began, with trembling fingers, to dial, then abruptly stopped. She couldn’t call him; she didn’t have his number. She didn’t have his address either. To have recorded either of them would have been, to her way of thinking, like opening a door to him, an admission that, at some point in the future, they would have a real relationship again.

She continued to sit there awash in a muddle of contradictory feelings. Was she disappointed or relieved to be unable to call? She honestly didn’t know. The whole thing had been a kind of emotional spasm, a seizure, a nostalgia attack brought on by seeing that father and daughter. But they were a block away now, out of sight and hearing. She could practically feel the coldness re-settle around her heart and was grateful for it. Those long-ago times had been wonderful—
he
had been wonderful, there could be no arguing with that. But once-upon-a-time childhood memories couldn’t make up for his risking everything—his own hard-won reputation, his very freedom, Alix’s welfare—to use his rare, God-given skills to become a crook, pure and simple—a swindler, a parasite.

No, maybe the time would come, or maybe not, when she could put all that behind her. But not yet. Not yet.

She got slowly to her feet and put away the phone with the feeling that she’d narrowly missed making a mistake. She also felt as if she’d been put slowly through a wringer. That glass of wine with Chris was starting to sound good after all.

In the event, she had a glass of wine, a cup of coffee, and a couple of the fancy tapas that Chris enthusiastically recommended: chorizo sausage with fig aioli, and skewered Moroccan spiced pork. It was over their coffees that Alix was struck with a bizarre thought.

“Chris,” she said slowly, “when we first walked into Liz’s office, do you remember what she said?”

“Sure, she said she was surprised to see us.”

“No, she said, ‘What are you doing here?’”

Chris frowned, clearly puzzled as to what Alix was driving at. “Well, isn’t that the same thing?”

“Not exactly. Who did she say it to?”

“What kind of a question is that? To us. Alix, what are you—”

Alix shook her head. “No. I just realized she was staring straight at me when she said it. ‘What are
you
doing here?’ Emphasis on the
you
.”

“All right. And your point is?”

Alix toyed reflectively with her coffee cup for a few moments. “I think it was me she was surprised to see, not us.”

Chris folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. “Alix, you have totally lost me.”

“I’m just wondering,” Alix said, “if she was surprised to see me because she assumed I’d be dead.”

It took a moment to sink in, and then Chris stared at her. “You think the explosion…you think Liz…you think she tried to blow you up?” Her voice went up an octave on the last few words.

“No, I doubt that, but I’m wondering if she didn’t try to poison me with a propane gas leak, but the leak was bigger than she expected and there was an explosion.”

Chris’s eyes were bugging out now. “Are you nuts? She tried to kill you? Why?”

“To keep me from looking at the painting?” Alix said. It came out as a question because the idea had started to seem silly to her too. “Because the painting is a forgery?”

“But that makes no sense. What would stop me from getting someone else? Would she kill him too? And the one after him? And how could Liz get into your casita to mess with the propane before you arrived? She drove us there, remember? She was with us right up until we checked in. And how would she even know which casita you were staying in? And why would she—”

“Okay, you’re right,” Alix said with a sigh. “I guess I’m getting a little paranoid.”

“Well, who wouldn’t be, after what happened to you today? But I really think you’re barking up a nonexistent tree on this one. Liz might not be the most lovable person in the world, but a killer? Uh-uh.”

Alix nodded. “You’re right,” she said again. “I think I need a good night’s sleep. Forget what I said. Come on, let’s go look at your painting.”

By the time they got to the Blue Coyote, however, one of Liz’s assistants was out in front of the darkened gallery, locking the door. “Oh, I’m sorry, we’re just closing up.”

“I understand. I’m Chris LeMay, and this is—”

“Oh, right. Liz is expecting you, but would you mind going around to the patio behind the building? There’s a back door to her office there, and it’s the way people go when they just want to see her. The outdoor lights stay on all the time, so you won’t have any problem.”

“Fine. Thank you.”

“Um…” The young man hesitated. “If she doesn’t answer right away, you might have to knock kind of loud. I’m pretty sure she’s, uh, taking a nap, and she can be a pretty hard lady to wake up sometimes.” He shrugged, as if in apology.

Chris and Alix looked at each other. They understood exactly what he was saying: Liz was schwacked.

Some clouds had built up under the moon, so the pathway lights were helpful. They followed the winding path around some handsome, half-life-size bronze animal sculptures set on plinths—a wild boar, a mountain goat, a crouching cougar—to the single door in the back of the building.

“It looks as if it’s dark in there,” a puzzled Alix said. “Why would she have the lights out?”

“As he said, taking a nap,” Chris said, rattling the doorknob. “Liz!” she called, switching to foghorn level. “Are you in there?” For good measure she rattled the knob some more.

“Maybe,” Alix said, “we should—”

The door burst open, slamming hard into Chris, who slammed hard into Alix, who went tumbling over backward, with Chris falling on top of her. With everything dark, and with flailing arms and legs all over the place, it was hard to tell which way was up, let alone what was going on. But it was impossible to miss the man—it was a man, all right, he was huge—who came hurtling through the doorway, only to trip over one of Chris’s size elevens. Whatever it was he’d been carrying went sailing into a clump of miniature piñon pines a few yards away.

“Ouch!” said Chris.

“Damn!” said the man, who managed to keep to his feet but floundered into the bronze cougar headfirst, with a sound like a mallet hitting a good-sized bell. “Shit!” He sank to his knees with a groan, both hands pressed to his forehead.

“Hey!” Chris yelled at him, trying to get her own feet under her while Alix, still partially pinned by Chris’s considerable bulk, struggled to move at all. By the time they’d gotten untangled from each other after falling one more time—it was like one of those old Laurel and Hardy shticks—the man had pulled himself together, staggered up, and gone lurching back toward Canyon Road, hands still held to his head, and quickly disappeared around the edge of the building.

“What the hell—” Chris began, but Alix was already at the grouping of piñons. “It’s what I was afraid of,” she said, sliding out the object she’d seen land there and leaning it against the bushes. With the moon just beginning to glide into an area of thinning clouds, there was no mistaking what it was.

“It’s my O’Keeffe!” Chris exclaimed. “Oh, no, is it…is it…”

“I don’t see any damage,” Alix said, “but let’s get it inside, in the light.”

“My God,” Chris mumbled angrily, as Alix gathered it carefully up, “he was stealing it—my painting. If we hadn’t come along at just at that moment…”

She stopped, and from the expression on her face Alix could see that the same thought had belatedly struck both of them.

Liz. Where was Liz? What had happened to her? Why hadn’t the commotion awakened her?

They ran into the office. “Liz, are you here? Where are you?” Chris called, while Alix fumbled along the wall for the light switch.

Once she’d found it and the bright ceiling fluorescents had flickered on, Chris’s questions answered themselves. Along one wall, behind the now-empty easel, was a burgundy leather-covered couch. Liz was stretched out on it with her mouth open and her eyes closed. Her arms and legs were flung awkwardly and unnaturally about, like a puppet’s, and her body was sharply twisted at the hips. On the floor behind her head lay a burgundy pillow from the couch.

“Liz?” whispered Chris, cautiously approaching. She knelt beside the couch, grasped Liz by the shoulders, and shook gently; then less gently. “Liz!”

Alix had never seen a dead body before, other than at a funeral, but there was no doubt in her mind about what she was looking at now. She put a hand on Chris’s arm. “I don’t think she’s going to answer,” she said quietly, reaching for her cell phone. “I think we need to call 911.”

The next two hours went by in an exhausting blur. A fire department emergency vehicle arrived almost before Alix had hung up, and a police car with two uniformed cops showed up no more than a minute later. Then a crime scene van, then a private car from which a Detective Wilkin emerged, and then another car with a deputy medical examiner who hurried into the office to look at Liz’s body.

Alix and Liz were separately questioned by the two officers, and then again, more extensively, by the detective, who used a tiny tape recorder to take down their statements. They were driven to the police building on Camino Estrada, where they were again separately questioned, even more extensively, by a Lieutenant Mendoza.

Mendoza was a resourceful interrogator, and under his expert, persistent probing Alix was able to dredge up from her memory a few details about the man who had crashed into them and run off: He was big, at least six-three, and big-boned. Reddish hair, short reddish beard. Or it could have been blond; the light hadn’t been that good. And he was a pipe smoker, a heavy pipe smoker. Geoff had once been a heavy pipe smoker too, and she was familiar with the way the pipe tobacco saturated his clothing. Mendoza, interested, asked her if she recognized the kind of tobacco, but all she could tell him was that it wasn’t the same blend her father smoked. She was finally allowed to leave a little after ten. Chris was being kept longer—because, Alix assumed, she could provide more background information about Liz.

Mendoza sent her back to the Hacienda in a car, but she asked instead to be dropped off at the central plaza, still fairly lively at this time of night. She thought that seeing ordinary people ambling around the square, eating at the restaurants, doing ordinary things, might settle her nerves a little, which it did, but only a little. She strolled around it twice and then walked the few blocks to the hotel. There she left a note for Chris to call her if she got back from police headquarters by midnight. At twelve thirty, with no word yet from Chris, she gave up and went to bed. She lay staring at the beamed ceiling for another hour, nerves buzzing away, before she finally drifted off into an on-again, off-again sleep.

Twenty miles south of Santa Fe, on the road to Albuquerque, in the old mining town of Los Cerrillos, Brandon Teal was also having trouble getting to sleep. He was sitting in the dark, rocking disconsolately back and forth, on the rickety porch of what had once been the offices of the Spanish Belle silver mine, but was now his home and workshop. Brandon Teal was a painter, and a good one, which made his current predicament—“predicament” was putting it mildly—all the more appalling. His head continued to throb despite the four aspirins, and the clumsily bandaged four-inch gash at his hairline continued to seep blood, but these were the least of his worries.

Questions for which he had no answers racketed around his skull like ball bearings in a can. Had they seen his face? Could they identify him? Who
were
they? Were the police already hunting for him? Should he go off somewhere else for a while, or would leaving suddenly only call attention to him? The same went for the beard: shave it off or not shave it off? Above all—and this one would
never
be answered—how could he have been stupid enough, and greedy enough, to get himself into this horrible mess?

He reached down beside him for what had been an unopened pint-bottle of Wild Turkey when he’d taken it out of the cabinet, but was now half empty. He gagged as it went down. Teal was no drinker, and all the alcohol was doing was making him sick and muddying his brain. What he needed—needed desperately—was someone to tell him what to do.

He stumbled into his studio, found one of the telephones, and clumsily punched in a number with deadened fingers that felt more like wood than flesh.