The Trouble with Mirrors (An Alix London Mystery Book 4)

by Charlotte Elkins

  “For maybe one more week,” Alix said, “until the next issue of that damn magazine comes out.”

  “But, really, that man had no idea of who I am. Wouldn’t you think the owner of a prominent art gallery would at least . . . ah, well, fame is fleeting, my child. Enjoy it while you may.”

  Alix was laughing. “Most people would be thrilled not to be instantly recognized as the world’s most notorious forger. Not my father. Him, it makes crabby. Amazing.”

  “It’s only that people forget so quickly. Three or four years ago, he would have recognized me the second I walked in.”

  “I’d say that’s a moot point. Three or four years ago you wouldn’t have been walking in. You were still doing time at Lompoc.”

  “Well, yes, there is that,” Geoff allowed.

  The stairs led up to a pleasant, carpeted hallway with several open storerooms and a single polished door with an empty nameplate on it. There was a buzzer, which Moira pressed, and then, after a few seconds, pressed again. When there was still no answer she inserted her key and turned the knob. Alix felt a knot forming in her stomach. Please, God, don’t let . . .

  Her unfinished prayer, if that’s what it was, was answered. No body on the floor, no body in the bed. She breathed more easily.

  The wood-floored, brick-walled apartment was monklike; sparingly furnished, but spic-and-span, with nothing out of place. Bed crisply made; no dirty dishes in the kitchen sink (or even clean ones on the drain board); no clothes lying around. Depressingly neat, really, like a motel unit that had just been through its between-guests servicing. All it needed was that germicidal deodorant smell.

  The living room closet was filled with clean, tidily hung shirts, trousers, and jackets, and a shelving unit held socks and underclothing, all smartly folded. A partition in the closet separated the clothes from a washer-dryer combination. On the little shelf above it were an opened box of Tide, a measuring cup, and a plastic bottle of Downy Spring Lavender fabric softener. She realized suddenly and with shame that she had never, not once in all these years, given any thought to where or how Tiny might live, and the sight of these homely instruments of domesticity moved her. Did that big-hearted, slow-moving, slow-thinking, oversized lunk really troll the supermarket aisles with his cart, searching for his favorite Spring Lavender fabric softener—as opposed, say, to the April Fresh line? The image made her want to laugh and cry at the same time.

  Moira had gotten antsy. “Everything looks all right to me,” she said as they walked through the bedroom. “There’s no sign of any problem. Are you ready to go?”

  As she spoke, Alix noticed a small leather tray on top of the bedroom dresser. In it, in addition to a comb, a few coins, and a couple of ballpoints, was an object that made her breath catch in her throat. She touched Geoff on the arm to point it out. His barely perceptible nod told her that he had already seen it for himself.

  “Yes, thank you, we can go now,” he said to Moira.

  CHAPTER 8

  Once out in Occidental Mall again, Alix was the first to speak. “Not good.”

  “Not good at all,” Geoff answered. “He’d never have left it behind.”

  “Not willingly, no.”

  What they were talking about—what had so seized her attention on the dresser—was the nineteenth-century musical pocket watch Alix had mentioned at the Umbria. It had been a gift to Tiny from her, and he had very clearly treasured it as much as she had the mirror that he’d given to her so many years earlier. It had taken her months of Internet searching to find just the right one: gold, engraved, and—most importantly—with a tiny music box inside that tinkled Vieni sul Mar, the lilting old Italian barcarolle that Tiny had so sweetly sung to her while she’d sat on his lap as a four-year-old. He loved the song a lot, he’d told her, because when he’d been even younger than she was, his grandfather had had a pocket watch that played it, and Nonno Luigi had taught him the words and had delighted him by letting him open the cover and play the music all by himself.

  When Alix had given it to him last year and he’d pressed the tab that opened it, and the lovely melody had come floating out, she’d seen how his Adam’s apple pumped and his eyes glistened. Ever after, he was a changed man. Until then one of the least time-conscious people in the world—he didn’t wear a wristwatch—he now rarely passed up an opportunity to haul out the old timepiece and check the time. Alix loved watching his slow, closed-eyed grin whenthe lid clicked open and the tune began to tinkle out.

  That he might sometimes leave the watch in his room when he went to the Umbria for breakfast was believable; that he would leave it behind if he were going away for days was not.

  “Unthinkable,” said Geoff, as if he’d been tuned directly into her thoughts. Then he stood there looking a little muddled, as if he’d lost track of what they were talking about. Alix’s throat suddenly tightened. She worried about him these days. He’d come out of prison a lot frailer—a lot older—than he’d been when he’d gone in. His mind was certainly still sharp; he was as witty and charming and seemingly capable as ever. But there was about him now a vulnerability, a fragility, that hadn’t been there before. It didn’t surprise her—prison would do that to a person, she supposed, and so would being in one’s seventies. Still she couldn’t help cosseting him a little, although she did her best to hide it.

  Casually, she pointed to a couple of folding chairs that someone had placed near the two decorative totem poles in the center lane of the mall. “I could stand to get off my feet for a while, Dad. Why don’t we sit down for a minute and go over what we know and see if we can figure out what we’re dealing with.”

  “Why, certainly, if you need to rest,” he said, lifting one eyebrow to let her know the old boy knew when he was being patronized.

  She laughed. Hiding what she was thinking—especially from Geoff—would never be among her strengths. “All right,” she said as they sat down, “we know that, wherever Tiny’s gone, and for whatever reason, he left unwillingly—and suddenly. The watch tells us that much. And the closet full of clothes.”

  “Unwillingly, yes, but not involuntarily,” said Geoff. “No one dragged him out of that apartment—kidnapped him—without his cooperation. He left of his own volition.”

  “I don’t follow you. Why would you think that?”

  “The apartment. The place was neat as a pin; I’m surprised you didn’t notice. No sign of a struggle at all.”

  “I did notice, but how much struggle would there have been if someone had walked in on him with a gun? Or two or three guys with guns?”

  Geoff smiled. “It could have been six men with guns, as far as that goes, or ten. Tiny wouldn’t have gone quietly, I assure you. The place would have been a wreck.”

  She sensed he was right, although the only side of Tiny she’d ever seen was the amiable, tame-bear one, the Zio Beni one. If he’d ever been angry about anything in her presence, she had no memory of it.

  “I hope you’re right, Geoff.”

  “I’m right. I’ll tell you what I think. I think that, for reasons of his own, Tiny is running away from something. Or someone.”

  Alix hunched her shoulders. “Could be. So where does that get us?”

  It didn’t get them anywhere. Neither of them wanted to suggest that he might have been waylaid, not in his apartment but elsewhere, and that he might perhaps already be lying dead in some out-of-the-way drainage ditch, although these possibilities were in both their minds. Tiny had been on the wrong side of the law for a long time, and even Geoff didn’t know all the details. Who knew what his associates had been like, who knew how many people were out there with scores to settle and payback to be collected? And once you got beyond those awful possibilities, everything else was groundless speculation, and dead-end speculation at that. No, they agreed, best to stick with their working hypothesis: Tiny was alive—alive, and on the run.

  “Which implies,” Alix said, “that he doesn’t want to be found, even by you. Otherwise, he’d
have called you, if only to let you know he was all right.”

  Geoff nodded. “Nor by the police, I would suspect. Perhaps especially not by the police.”

  “What do you mean? Why especially not by the police?”

  Geoff gave her his quizzical look, peering skeptically out from under his brow, with his chin dipped. “You haven’t considered the possibility that it might be the police from whom he’s running?”

  Alix stared at him. “Geoff, are you saying that Tiny still . . . that he’s still engaged in . . . in some kind of . . . of . . .” But she couldn’t get the words out for fear of what he might answer.

  “Some kind of nefarious behavior? Back to his old misguided ways, you mean? No, no, that’s over and done. But, you know, there are still a few, well, let us say, unresolved matters from his past that, perhaps, it might be time for you to know about. You see—”

  “I don’t care about what he did or didn’t do back then,” Alix said to head him off. She didn’t want to hear about his past. She knew who he was now, who he’d been for the last twenty years, and that was more than enough to earn her love and her trust.

  “I understand, but isn’t it possible the police may have some unanswered questions—lingering questions that he would prefer not to have put to him?”

  “I suppose so,” she allowed. “But I don’t see that that makes any difference.”

  “Well, good for you, my dear. And neither am I, by the way,” he added with a smile.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Back to my old, misguided ways—just to put your mind at ease. In case you were wondering. Not, of course, that you were.”

  Another socko performance of his mind-reading act, because that was exactly what she’d been wondering. It was something she never stopped worrying about: that the two of them might veer off the straight-and-narrow and forge a painting or two, not out of malice or greed, but out of, well, mischief. Fun. To see if they could still pull it off and get away with it. They both had that rascally streak in them that was never far below the surface.

  “In any case,” Geoff went on, “I think Tiny would prefer that we didn’t bring the police into it.”

  “All right, I’ll go along with that—for now, anyway. But I’m still concerned about him.”

  “And you think I’m not?”

  “No, I know you are. And so I’m going to call my . . . my contact at the FBI.”

  Now both his eyebrows shot up. “The FBI! Didn’t you just agree—”

  “Relax, a strictly informal call. Nothing official—not to get them to do anything on their own, but maybe find out things for us that we could never find out by ourselves. Maybe give us a lead on where he is.”

  Geoff was shaking his head. “Alix, really, don’t you think—”

  “Whether you approve or not,” she said sharply, perhaps a little more so than intended.

  It stopped him cold, but then he surprised her with an agreeable laugh. “Well, that certainly puts the old fellow in his place.”

  “Dad, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound so—”

  Geoff waved her apology aside. “I must say, though . . . the FBI. You’re certainly becoming awfully chummy with your dad’s old nemesis, aren’t you?”

  You don’t know the half of it, Alix thought. “Well, they do have a lot of resources,” she said, “and we can use whatever help we can get. We’re kind of stuck right now. I mean, where do we go from here?”

  “I have an idea,” he said brightly. “If you think you are sufficiently rested—”

  “Ha, ha.”

  “—then why do we not return to the Umbria? One of their double-shot lattes would go a long way toward sharpening my thinking processes, I can tell you that.”

  Alix smiled. “And one of their almond croissants too, maybe?”

  “Definitely. And one for you as well. This will be my treat. Our spirits can stand a lift.”

  They found a table that sat a little removed from the others, alongside a wide brick pillar that separated the café into two sections, and sat down with their espressos. Geoff had his croissant too. Alix had settled for the little gold-foil-wrapped square of dark chocolate that came along with the coffees—one more typical touch of il madrepatria vecchio, the old country. On the way from the counter Alix caught a glimpse of her own face smirking back at her from the magazine rack on the wall. “Just a minute, Geoff,” she said, setting the cups down on the table. She grabbed the well-thumbed magazine (this was an arty part of town), returned, and slapped it down beside the cups.

  He looked at it fondly and smiled. “My daughter, the celebrity.”

  But she was serious. “Geoff, it’s got to be this.”

  He tore his eyes from the image. “What’s got to be what?”

  “Tiny’s disappearance . . . whatever happened to him . . . everything.” She thumped the magazine with her knuckles. “It’s the magazine. Consider. Everything’s fine, no problems. Then this thing comes out, and before the week is out, Tiny disappears, my condo’s broken into, and the mirror’s stolen. Surely, that can’t be mere coincidence.”

  “What are you suggesting, Alix?”

  “I don’t really know, but . . . well, I’ve been denying this ever since it happened, but now I’m starting to wonder if everybody else could be right—”

  “Everybody else? Who might that be? And right about what?”

  “The detective who talked to us, for one, and . . . well, just the detective, I guess. He thought that the mirror could be something more than we think it is—something worth stealing. Maybe Tiny didn’t make it. Maybe it’s real. Maybe—”

  “A real what? A real mirror? Well, what if it is? If there’s any high-value market for that sort of thing, I’m not aware of it.”

  “No, I’m not talking about the mirror itself, the glass part. That probably came from a second-hand store. It’s old, but not that old: no bubbles in the glass, no wavy distortions, and only a little veining. But it’s the panel that it’s set in that I’m talking about, the painted part—the cherubs, the clouds.”

  “Alix, I have to tell you, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Look, have you ever heard of a competent forger spending his time faking the ornamentation on old mirrors? No, you haven’t and the reason is there’s no money in it. One doesn’t find an old mirror in an art gallery, one finds it, as you say, in a second-hand store, and second-hand stores are not where the big spenders go. That’s the trouble with mirrors: they’re simply not worth the effort.”

  But Alix had gotten herself into high gear and pushed on. “What if it’s not just the borders that are painted, what if the entire panel—the part behind the mirror—is painted too? You know, if it’s all one painting and the mirror was just glued over it with removable adhesive. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  He hunched a shoulder. “In its own way.”

  “Couldn’t it be . . .” She thought for a moment. “Couldn’t it be . . . I don’t know, a Boucher, a Fragonard, or one of their followers? Or even a Tiepolo? A genuine one, I mean. And once Tiny stuck the mirror to the front of it, nobody ever thought about what might be behind it one way or the other? Don’t you see? That’s why it would have been worth stealing.”

  Geoff smiled throughout her little speech. “A twelve-by-sixteen-inch Tiepolo? Now that would be something.”

  “I’m not saying it’s a whole painting. It doesn’t look like one, but I do think it could be a fragment of a larger panel. I can easily imagine—”

  “No, my darling daughter, I’m sorry. It’s quite impossible, I assure you.”

  His smug certainty had gotten under her skin. “I don’t agree. How can you make a blanket statement like that?”

  “I can make it,” Geoff said mildly, “because I was there. I saw him paint it. I stood at his shoulder and watched.”

  Alix stared at him. “You . . . you . . .”

  “Watched him paint the thing, yes. I . . . was . . . there.”

  Talk about demolishing
a plausible, well-reasoned hypothesis with three one-syllable words. Alix blew out a breath and fell back against her chair. “Damn.”

  “And the reason I remember,” Geoff said, “is because I took him to task over it. I asked him—a bit tartly, I admit—if he realized that he had French Rococo cherubs floating around on Italian Mannerist clouds.”

  “He did?” Examining the mirror in her mind’s eye, she frowned for only a moment, then nodded. “Yes, you’re absolutely right. I just never gave it any thought before. The clouds, the sky—they couldn’t be any more Mannerist if they tried, could they? That coloring—purples, grays, whites—lurid, harsh, and gloomy all at the same time. The clouds themselves look like they’re in pain, stretched out beyond endurance. The whole sky is . . . unquiet, threatening.”

  “Indeed it is. It could be the morning of Judgment Day.”

  “But those cheery, rosy little cherubs, they belong in a bright pastel sky, all pinks and cornflower blues with puffy white clouds, and ribbons, and birds, and—”

  “Correct, but nobody painted them like that until Fragonard and Watteau and the rest of that crew came along, and that was in another country and not for another two hundred years.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” she said again. “What is it, Geoff? You look . . . concerned.”

  “No, not really,” he said a little diffidently, “but, well, you’ve had the mirror since you were twelve years old, Alix, almost twenty years. And until today, this minute, you never realized this before? I should have thought, with that famous connoisseur’s eye of yours, that it would have jumped out at you long ago. I’m a little surprised, that’s all.”

  “Geoff, I’ve never studied that mirror, never analyzed it, never deconstructed it into schools of art. I simply loved it and took it for what it was, a beautiful present from my Uncle Beni.”

  “Which is what it was, my dear.”

  Alix swallowed a minute sip of her coffee while she thought this new development over. “Why did he combine Mannerist and Rococo elements like that, do you know? He certainly would have known better.”