“What do you mean?”
“My dear child, did it not cross your mind that catalogs can be forged as easily as paintings? Far more easily, I should say.”
That stopped Alix cold. No, the truth was, it hadn’t occurred to her. A fake catalog? “But Geoff, I didn’t see this in some sleazy gallery—or even some fancy gallery—this was in the archives, the locked archives, of the Southwest Museum of Twentieth-Century American Art.”
“Oh, I see,” he said archly. “Your point being that anything residing in an art museum must therefore be authentic. By definition, as it were.”
“Well, no, of course not, but look, there were a good forty pages in it, each devoted to its own painting, all with photos, and provenances, and technical specs. Are you suggesting they were all fakes?”
“Not necessarily. Just the one you were looking for.”
“What? But how could—”
“Did it not occur to you that, while the catalog as a whole may well have been authentic—very likely was authentic—the particular page on which this particular painting appeared might not have been?”
“What?” she said again, weakly. “I don’t understand. It was the exact same painting I saw. I was looking at it just this morning. The measurements were exactly the same, the—”
“Of course they were the same. That’s because your painting would have been painted first. Then it was photographed. Then it was measured. And only then would the false page have been prepared with that photo, those measurements, an invented provenance of some sort, and a few descriptive remarks. After that, all that remained, and this would have been the only ticklish part, would have been to somehow gain access to the archives, remove a preselected page from the preselected legitimate catalog, and replace it with the altered one.”
“But Geoff, the catalog pages have page numbers on them, and they’re all formatted the same way, with the same size pictures and the same fonts and all. A new page would stand out, it would be different, and this one wasn’t.”
“Ah, but you see, that’s where the preselection would have come in. The process requires two visits to the archives, the first to choose and surreptitiously photograph a page in the catalog—both sides of the page, of course, or all four sides if it’s folded in quarto. That way, the scoundrels would be able to reproduce the pagination, the formatting, the material on the reverse side, on the attached page or pages, and so forth. The second visit would be to remove it and substitute the altered page for it—the page with the ‘newly discovered’ painting on it. A simple process, really, but clever, wouldn’t you say? After all, one might foresee a dodge of some sort involving things being taken from a museum. But things being put into one? Hardly likely to be anticipated.”
She absorbed this for a few seconds. It was no wonder that archivists like Clyde Moody were so vigilant and so protective of their catalogs if they had to worry about people sneaking in to “alter” them. Though how on earth could such a thing have been accomplished under Moody’s eagle eye? Very clever indeed.
“You sound as if you’re pretty familiar with this ‘process,’ Geoff,” she said wryly.
“I’ve heard talk of it,” was his bland response.
“All the same, I have to say it sounds pretty improbable to me. Too complicated.”
“If it weren’t improbable, it wouldn’t be very likely to succeed, would it? Now then. Let me make a few guesses: the gallery is no longer in existence.”
“That’s true.”
“The seller was anonymous.”
“Well, yes.”
“The provenance is, shall we say, on the scant side.”
“Yes, that’s certainly true, too.”
“The gallery owner has either shuffled off this mortal coil or is otherwise unreachable for verification.”
“Well…”
“And given all that,” he asked gently, “you didn’t think to perform at least a cursory examination of the page? Did it have a watermark? If so, did the watermark differ from the rest of the pages? What about the gloss, the penetration of the inks? The—”
“No, Geoff, I did not think of any of that,” she said, exasperated. “Strangely enough, although I may be Geoffrey London’s daughter, my mind runs toward establishing authenticity, not fakery. Clearly, I am sadly unschooled in the intricacies of the forger’s trade.”
He took this, as usual, in good, even high spirits. “How unkind of you,” he said with that damnably appealing chuckle, “to throw my failure as a father in my face.”
She stiffened. Was that what he saw as his failure as a father? In her opinion, he had a few more serious ones than that. He was joking, but he was treading on dangerous ground here all the same.
Still, he was such a charming old bastard that she couldn’t help laughing. “Well, look, none of it matters anyway. At this point we know the painting is a fake. So as soon as I’ve told Chris, which will be a few minutes from now, I will have completed my job.”
“Your job, yes, but aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know for certain about the catalog?”
“Sure I am. When I get back to Santa Fe, I’ll see if I can make some time to get over to the museum again and check it out.”
“There’s more than your curiosity at stake, you know,” he said with a touch of severity. “Don’t you feel a moral responsibility to inform the museum of this?”
Yeah, right, Mr. Moral Responsibility, she thought sourly. It was amazing the way the man could make her laugh one moment and infuriate her the next. Again, she almost said something but held her tongue.
He clucked his incredulity, then paused. She could tell he was thinking. “Alix, is the name Clara Simons familiar to you?”
“No, should it be?”
“She used to be a curator of documents at the Smithsonian, where she was often called upon by the FBI to evaluate questioned documents. Now, as luck would have it, she’s on the art faculty of the College of Santa Fe. We’re old friends of a sort, and I thought I might ask her to go and have a look at that catalog and see what she thinks. What’s the gallery name and the date? And the name of the painting?”
“Galerie Xanadu, November 1971, Cliffs at Ghost Ranch—but don’t do it on my account. I’m not that interested.” This wasn’t strictly true, but it felt good to let a little petulance slip through.
He emitted a long, sad sigh. “Where, oh, where,” he groaned, “did I go wrong?”
One of these days I’ll tell you, she thought. There was a whole lot yet to be gotten off her chest, a truckload of baggage to be put on the table, opened, sorted through, and, dealt with.
But not now. “So long, Geoff, thanks for your help. Take care,” she said with more affection than she could have called up even a few days ago. And more than would have seemed even remotely possible a few years ago.
“Drive carefully, my dear,” were his final words.
CHAPTER 14
Chris took the news equably enough. “Well, it’s not as if it’s a big surprise,” she said philosophically. “After the way you’ve been talking, I would have been surprised if it turned out to be the real thing. So I guess you’ll just have to find me another one.”
She was sitting contentedly in one of the Adirondack deck chairs just outside their room, taking in the view. As promised, it was spectacular. It was still an hour to sunset, but the sky was tinged with rose, and the slanting afternoon light lit the crags with color and brought the canyons into sharp, shadowed relief. The air itself was as clean and crisp and sparkling—but not as cold—as a sunny morning in January with a fresh layer of glittering white snow on the ground.
“It really is beautiful here,” Alix murmured, taking it in.
“Mm.” Chris pointed to a wooden side table on which was a cold-frosted ice bucket with a bottle of white wine sticking out of it. “Pinot Grigio. Good Italian stuff. I never travel without the essentials. Didn’t bring glasses, though. Go get one from your bathroom, help yourself, and have a seat.”
Alix did so gratefully, and for a while they both sipped the cool, crisp wine from plastic glasses and took in the view.
“It was quite a ride anyway, wasn’t it?” Chris said at length. “Most exciting thing I’ve been involved in for a long time.”
“Me too. People don’t try to blow me up all that often. Knock on wood,” she added, following through on the arm of her chair.
“Do you still think it was Liz?”
“I do,” Alix said after another swallow. “That look, that ‘What are you doing here?’ she gave us when we walked in. That said everything.”
“And you think it was because she was afraid you’d recognize the picture for a fake?”
“I do, indeed.”
“But there were so many other things she could have done that wouldn’t amount to murder. She could have just said she changed her mind about selling it.”
“You had a contract.”
“Yes, but she would have known I wouldn’t fight her on it. For that matter, all she had to do was say she’d concluded it was a fake on her own, and that I shouldn’t buy it. There were probably a hundred other things she could have done. But the idea that she’d try to kill you instead…” Chris shook her head. “It’s just not rational.”
“Well, frankly, she didn’t strike me as the most rational person in the world. Certainly not the most sober. I think she just wasn’t thinking straight.”
“Could be. Makes sense, I guess. It’s certainly true she wasn’t the Liz I remember.”
“Besides, you notice nobody’s been trying to kill me since she died. That should tell us something.”
“Yeah, almost two whole days now. Reach over to the bottle and pour me a little more, will you? You have some too.”
“So the question now is, who killed Liz?” Alix said as she finished pouring.
“And why.”
“And why,” Alix repeated, musing. “And I don’t have a clue to either one, do you?”
Chris shook her head. “Hey, do you think we ought to call Mendoza and let him know you’ve concluded the picture’s a fake? It might be important.”
“I already did, as soon as I finished talking to Geoff. I also told him where we were—I just didn’t like the idea of pretending we were still in Santa Fe.”
“And he said…?”
“Nothing, really. Asked me to come in when we get back there tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? Tomorrow we’ll be in Taos.”
“You mean you still want to go to Taos? But there isn’t any reason to now.”
“But aren’t you curious to see the place? Check out this Mabel Dodge Luhan House?”
That made twice in the last hour that Alix had been more or less accused of being incurious. “Of course I’m curious,” she said testily, “but you’re the one who’s paying the tab on all this, and I just figured you’d want to skip it now.”
“Not a chance. Don’t you want to use the only bathroom in the world with windows painted by D. H. Lawrence?”
“The writer?”
“The writer. He used to stay with Mabel, too, like every other visiting artiste, and the idea of see-through windows in her upstairs bathroom apparently scandalized him, so one day he got a couple of buckets of paint and covered them over with some kind of weird designs. I’d sure like to see that.”
“This is the Lady Chatterley’s Lover Lawrence? That guy was scandalized by a few uncovered bathroom windows?”
“Oddly enough, apparently he was a bit of a prude when it came to his private life. Also maybe a little paranoid, because what he was afraid of was that someone would climb up onto the sunroof outside the bathroom and look in. He tried to get Mabel to quit sunbathing nude on the flat roof upstairs too. No success there, however. Mabel wasn’t exactly easy to persuade to stop doing something she wanted to do. She had a steamy affair with this Tewa Indian mystic and let him put up his tepee at the foot of the outdoor steps that led up to her bedroom. This was while she was still married to her third husband, Mr. Sterne—but later she divorced him and married her Indian—that’s where the Luhan comes from. But back to the bathroom: that’s also where Robinson Jeffers’s wife tried to shoot herself over an affair he was—”
“Chris, how do you know all this?”
“Oh, the woman I spoke to when I made the reservation—she was full of information. Couldn’t stop talking.”
Alix smiled. “Yes, I know somebody else who can be like that. Look, Chris, I would love to spend the night there, so if you really want to, then of course, let’s do it. We can leave right after breakfast. There’s nothing more we need to do here now.”
“Well, to tell the truth, there’s another reason too,” Chris said a bit hesitantly. “I wouldn’t want—”
“—Craig to think you were rushing back to Santa Fe a day early because you couldn’t wait to see him,” Alix finished for her.
Chris did one of her eye-rolls. “I guess I’m just going to have to get used to hanging around with someone who’s a mind reader.”
“I’m no mind reader,” Alix said, and her smiled widened. “I’m just getting to know you better.”
“Now that really worries me,” Chris said, pushing herself out of her chair. “Come on, I’m starving. Let’s go down the hill to the chuck wagon or the campfire or wherever it is you get dinner around here.”
Nobody would call Eddie Sierra the brightest bulb on the block (you didn’t get a nickname like Yo-yo for nothing), but he wasn’t the dimmest one either, and he’d put a lot of thought into how he was going to handle things the next time around. So when the call eventually came, as he knew it would, he was primed and ready.
“I’m afraid it’s gonna cost you more this time,” he said when Harry had laid out what he needed done.
“And why would that be?” Harry wanted to know. Eddie didn’t know Harry’s last name. Probably didn’t know his first name either, but who cared as long as he was good for the money? Which he was.
“For one thing, because you want it done tomorrow, man. No planning time, no—”
“Planning! How much planning does it take? Just do it the way you did it last time.”
“Yeah, but I got other things on my plate, other things I gotta take care of, all kinds of things I gotta change.” He’d have to bring his laundry over to his mother’s on Monday instead of tomorrow, for example. “It’ll be six thousand this time.” He held his breath.
“Okay, six thousand,” Harry said.
Shit. He knew he hadn’t asked for enough. “And another thousand to take care of the damage to my truck from last time,” he tacked on. “That cost me twelve hundred bucks.” Well, it would have cost twelve hundred if he’d taken it to a legitimate repair shop instead of to Gus’s place, where it cost him only a few auto parts he’d picked up here and there. “Take it or leave it.”
This time there was hesitation at the other end. Oh, Jesus. Eddie had begun to silently curse himself before Harry spoke again. “All right, seven thousand, but that’s it. Don’t push your luck. I can find somebody else if I have to.”
Seven thousand dollars! Eddie exulted. Of course he’d have to give two thousand to Joey (who thought he was getting half), but even so, five thousand dollars! That was more than he got in six months from Human Services, even when you added in the food stamps.
“This time you’re looking for a car with two women in it,” Harry said. “They’ll be going south, hitting the Chama sometime in the morning. I don’t know when, exactly, so you better be up there waiting for them as soon as it’s light.”
Eddie stifled his instinctive protest at having to get going before dawn. For five grand, he could get up in the dark for once in his life. “So how’m I gonna know it’s them?”
“How’re you gonna—tell me, Eddie, how many cars go by there? Ten a day? And how many of them have a couple of women in them? Look, this will be the two of them, heading south, both maybe thirty, a good-looking blonde and a fairly good-looking brunett
e—”
“Wait, the brunette—is she, like, huge?”
“She’s tall, maybe six-two.”
“I seen them!” Eddie exclaimed. “Yesterday, right here in Española. At the Taco Bell. They were going north on 84.”
“That’d be them. They were on their way to Ghost Ranch. Fine, then you know what they look like.”
“They’re driving a Lambo,” Eddie said, suddenly hushed. “Jeez, it’s a shame to total something like that.”
“They’re driving a what?”
“A Lambo. You don’t know what a Lambo is, man?”
“Let me guess. A car.”
Eddie snickered. “A car, yeah, but calling a Lambo just a car is like calling a, a…” But similes weren’t his forte, and his imagination failed him. “Come on, you must have heard of a Lambo. It’s short for…I can’t remember, Lambogonia, Lamburgeroni, something like that.”
“A Lamborghini? That’s a sports car, isn’t? Don’t they do over a hundred miles an hour?”
“Over two hundred, man.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“What’s the problem?”
“What’s the problem! Are you—how the hell are you two ding-a-lings in your broken-down wrecks going to catch a car like that? They’ll leave you in the dust.”
At that, Eddie laughed out loud. “Let me tell you something. I seen the way they drive. You ever seen one of them little old ladies with blue hair, can barely see over the steering wheel, driving her big old Lincoln Continental, like, ten miles an hour and looking like she’d have a heart attack if she went any faster? Well, that’s how they drive their Lambo. Trust me, it’s a piece of cake, man.”
“We’ll see,” Harry said.
CHAPTER 15
After breakfast the next morning they loaded up the car, got in, and swung closed the winglike doors. Chris inserted the key in the ignition but didn’t twist it. She turned to Alix.
“How would you feel about taking the wheel this morning?”
Alix had been stoically preparing herself for the teeth-grindingly slow drive that lay ahead as they made their way ever so cautiously to Taos, wasting all the potential of the powerful and responsive creature at their command. But now, with those words, a dazzling light suddenly flooded her immediate future.
A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) Page 16
