The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery)

by Charlotte Elkins

  Alix sank to the floor again, her anger and adrenaline-induced strength melting away and pouring out of her like water down a swimming pool drain.

  “Sorry,” she called weakly to her irate neighbor. “It won’t happen again.”

  “I certainly hope not.” And a window slammed down.

  “I’ll drink to that,” she mumbled and dragged herself to the telephone to dial 9-1-1.

  A good game, a nail-biter, the Yankees leading 3 to 1 in the eighth, but the Angels with the bases loaded, only one out, and Mike Trout coming up. Joaquin Maximilian Cruz was so engrossed that he didn’t hear the phone ring, didn’t hear his wife come into the den with the cell.

  “Jakie, is for you.” And with a sympathetic shrug: “Is Lieutenant Mitchell.” She held out the phone.

  Cruz turned from the game with exactly the why-me look you would expect from a police detective who had put in a long and productive day’s work in the service of the citizens of Palm Springs, had come home to a hearty, home-cooked meal of Tex-Mex fried chicken, red rice, beans, and tortillas, and had only twenty minutes ago sat down to digest same in front of the TV with his belt buckle comfortably undone and his second Coors Light yet to be opened beside him . . . and who had now been told that his lieutenant was on the phone demanding to talk to him.

  “Thanks, Marita,” he said glumly and took the phone from her. She gave him another sweet, sympathetic shrug.

  “Spike?” he said into the phone.

  “Yeah, Jake, sorry to bother you at home, but I thought you’d want to know. Looks like your boy is at it again.”

  That focused his attention. He signaled to Marita to turn off the television set and straightened up. “The Phantom?”

  “Well, we don’t know that, but it has all the markings. This would be what, the third one this month already?”

  “Only the second, assuming it’s the same guy. But four last month and three the month before. So where was this latest one? And when?”

  “Villa Louisa, you know it? One of those little old-time places below East Baristo, near—”

  “I know the place.”

  “Call came in twenty minutes ago. I’ve sent the property detectives and the crime scene techs over there for prints or possible DNA, or whatever, and to canvass the neighbors for witnesses. The detectives will be back in the morning, when it’s light, to follow up. It’s Denny Campbell’s beat; he should be over there by now, taking the victim’s statement, so the bases are pretty well covered.” He cleared his throat. “Pregnant pause at this point.”

  Cruz filled it in for him. “But,” he said.

  “But I thought as lead detective on this character’s cases you’d want to know and maybe—”

  “Maybe get my ass over there too?”

  “Amazing, you read my mind. I’ve already let the sarge know about it, and don’t worry, we’ll put you down for overtime. Listen, there’s a difference this time around. The woman whose room it is—she came in and caught him in the act. They wrestled around before he took off. So for once there might be some forensic evidence—blood, skin, DNA, who knows?”

  “He actually physically tussled with her? Hey, that’s great.”

  “I’m not sure she’d agree with you on that.”

  “Oh, hell, you know what I mean, Spike.”

  “I know what you mean, Jake,” Lieutenant Mitchell said, laughing. “You mean that, technically, we’re not just dealing with just another two-eleven. This time he’s upped the ante to strong-arm robbery and he’s in major trouble. I like that too.”

  “He’s in major trouble if we ever catch him,” Jake amended. “The girl, the woman—she’s okay?”

  “Woman. Alix London, some kind of consultant. She’s here doing something for the Brethwaite. And as far as I know, yeah, she’s okay. Couple of bruises, I guess. She’s refused to go to emergency, says it’s not necessary.”

  “Okay, that’s good, and I assume we’ve got a few units prowling the streets for anything that catches their eye?”

  “Yeah, sure, two of them, but unless he’s running or starts yelling ‘Arrest me, I give up, I did it!’ I don’t know what they’re going to see.”

  “They don’t know what he looks like? If she wrestled with him, she must have seen him.”

  “No, it was dark and he was wearing some kind of sack or bag on his head, or so she says.”

  “Well, hey, that’ll make it easier. All they have to do is look for a suspicious-looking guy with a bag on his head. Listen, could she at least say whether he—”

  “Jake, what are you asking me for? I already told you everything I know. Go ask her.”

  “Right, lieutenant. I’m on my way.”

  He set the TV on Record so he could watch the rest of the game when he got back (although he knew himself well enough to realize he wouldn’t have the patience; he’d just fast-forward to the end), popped the beer back in the refrigerator, and kissed Marita.

  “I’ll be back when I get back, honey,” he said. “Don’t wait up.”

  “I wait up,” she said.

  “Babe, it’s not necessary. It’s just an interview.”

  She kissed one of his cheeks and patted the other. “I wait up. Don’t shoot nobody.”

  Palm Springs patrol officer Dennis Campbell was the youngest, sweetest-looking cop Alix had ever seen. Slender, intense, smooth-cheeked, he looked as if he were wearing his big brother’s uniform.

  “Ma’am,” he said, having introduced himself and the officers with him, “we’ve arranged with the manager to use a nearby bungalow where I can take your statement, so we can get out of the way while these officers here process the crime scene, if that’s all right with you.”

  Is that what her homey little bungalow was now, a “crime scene”? Suddenly, it wasn’t so homey any more. “Fine,” she said, “let’s go.”

  She followed him down the row of cottages to the Joan Crawford Bungalow, according to the wooden plaque on the door. She was glad when they sat down at the round dining room table. With the adrenaline rush having dissipated, her legs felt as if they didn’t have any bones in them. She’d been surprised by how unsteady she’d been on the brief walk from the Greta Garbo cottage.

  Campbell took the seat opposite, pulled out a notebook, and set a small recorder on the table between them. As he did, a hank of straight brown hair flapped down over his forehead, turning him even more into a fifteen-year-old. He smiled, quite appealingly. “Ready?”

  She nodded.

  Campbell turned on the recorder. His expression composed itself into something more formal. “This is Officer Dennis Campbell. I am speaking with Ms. Alix London. This interview is being conducted on February 7, 2014, at the Villa Louisa in Palm Springs . . .”

  And on it droned. Alix was having a hard time focusing. I could really, really, use a cup of coffee, she was thinking. There was a twenty-four-hour urn in the lobby, its contents stale and bitter by now, but the stronger the better at this point. “Officer Campbell,” she said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I am in real need of—”

  At which moment the door swung open and an older man in civilian clothes came in. “Sorry to interrupt. Hello, Dennis. Ms. London, I’m Detective Cruz. I’ll be sitting in on the rest of this, if it’s all right with you.”

  If Campbell looked like a kid playing a cop in a high school play, the shambling, bearlike Cruz more than made up for it by looking exactly like the detective everybody knows from having seen him a dozen times in movies or TV crime series; not the dashing lead, but the second banana: the decent, slightly tired, older family man who’s been talking about his retirement party next week, but who you just know in your heart is going to walk into that decrepit, supposedly empty apartment and get himself killed.

  He sank into a chair with a washed-out sigh. He was wearing a rumpled gray suit, a tired white dres
s shirt open at the neck, its collar points limp and wilted from a few dozen launderings too many, a loosened tie, and a world-class five-o’clock shadow. He made a go-ahead motion to Campbell. “Please continue.”

  The young officer looked surprised. “Me, sir? Not you?”

  “No, young Dennis, you go right ahead and do it the way they taught you. I’ll just sit right here and apprise you of your mistakes so you can learn from them.”

  “Thanks a bundle, sir. I appreciate this opportunity to partake of your wisdom.”

  It seemed to Alix a pretty cavalier way to begin, especially with her sitting right there, but then maybe they were just more laid-back in Palm Springs and this kind of badinage was routine. In any case, the young police officer, not observably rattled by Cruz’s oversight, couldn’t have been more professional and efficient with the interview. He was considerate, too, charmingly so. When he asked if the intruder had “tried to take advantage of you in a sexual manner,” he’d apologized for the question and might even have blushed. Cruz offered no direction or questions of his own, merely listening amiably and non-judgmentally, and jotting an occasional note in a pad of his own; he could have been watching a TV show that he’d seen before but that still held some points of interest. Despite the world-weary, seen-everything look, he couldn’t have been more unthreatening.

  Somehow, the moment when it had seemed appropriate to ask about coffee had passed, but at about the twenty-minute mark, the worried resident manager showed up with a cart loaded with a thermal coffee carafe, cups, and a dozen or so cookies on a plate. Alix went for the coffee the way a drowning man goes for a life ring. Cruz poured himself some as well, but not Campbell. No takers on the cookies.

  “Does this matter have to be in the paper?” the manager wanted to know. “Are we going to have TV reporters all over the place?” A hesitation and then an eager whisper: “Was it the Phantom?”

  He was sent on his way with sincere thanks for the coffee and not-so-sincere prevarications on the questions, and Campbell resumed the interview, which took fifteen more minutes. Cruz had yet to ask a question or make a comment of his own, but once Campbell had finished, he took command with easy assurance.

  “Dennis, go and see if anything’s turned up over at the other bungalow, and then give the techs a hand searching around the outside, will you? Crime Scene will be back out in the morning when it’s light, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a look now, while everything’s fresh. Pay special attention to the area around the patio, especially to the ground on the other side of the brick border, where the lady says he stumbled over it. Might have dropped something when his foot caught, or something might have popped out of his pocket.”

  “Will do.” Campbell unholstered his flashlight and pulled on a pair of plastic gloves as he left.

  “Oh—” Alix suddenly said. “He was wearing plastic gloves too. I forgot. Or maybe rubber.” After another second she said, “So there won’t be any fingerprints, will there?”

  “Not if he was wearing gloves, no. But then there never are, with this guy.”

  “‘This guy?’ You think he’s this Phantom Burglar I’ve been hearing about?”

  “That,” he said, “is the working hypothesis. Subject to change at any moment, of course.” He was sitting back in his chair with his hands folded over his stomach, looking wise and canny. “So. You said your laptop’s missing—probably in that duffel bag you saw. I don’t suppose it has built-in tracking, or did we get lucky for once?”

  “Uh . . . I don’t know.”

  “Is it an Apple?”

  “No, something else. HP, I think. No, Acer . . . oh, wait . . .”

  “And you never subscribed to a service that . . . no, I can see that you didn’t. I hope you had all your data backed up in the cloud somewhere,” he said, obviously doubting it.

  “Actually, I do.” Chris had insisted on teaching her how to set that up on SkyDrive and once done, it took care of itself. Now all she would have to do was get a lesson on how to retrieve it.

  “That’s good. Okay, your answers to Officer Campbell’s questions were very clear. I just have a couple more. You’ve said he was a male.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you couldn’t see his face, and he wasn’t especially big or strong, and he never said anything, so you never heard his voice. So how do you know it wasn’t a woman?”

  “It wasn’t,” she said with certainty. “Women and men have different ways of moving, of gesturing. You can’t always tell, but when you can, you can, even if you can’t explain exactly how. And this was a man.” The good old connoisseur’s eye, in other words.

  Cruz seemed to accept this. “More coffee?” At her nod, he topped off both their cups. “So, listen, how do you think he got inside? No signs of a forced entry. Did you possibly leave those doors unlocked?”

  “It’s possible, but I really don’t think so. But remember, during the day, there’d be staff coming in and out. Someone might have accidentally left them unlocked.”

  “Where do you keep your room key when you’re out?”

  “In my bag. It’s back in the other bungalow right now.”

  “But in general, does it stay with you all day?”

  “You think someone got the key out of my bag to get in?”

  “The thought crossed my mind, yes. So, does it stay with you all day?”

  “Pretty much. I mean, I keep it in my desk at the Brethwaite. If I’m just going to be gone a few minutes, I do leave it there.”

  “Ah.”

  “Oh, wait a minute, detective, it’s the only place I ever leave it. And the museum isn’t open to the public right now. The only people who get in are the people who are supposed to be there. Surely you’re not suggesting that one of the Brethwaite staff—”

  “Well, I’m not discounting it. That’s my best guess yet as to how this guy’s been getting into these hotel rooms. He gets hold of a guest’s key card somehow, runs to their hotel, unlocks the door, and uses something—a match, a paper clip—to leave it propped open a crack. Then he runs back—if it’s in Palm Springs, it can’t be more than a few minutes away, can it?—and puts the card back wherever he found it, and returns to the hotel later, at his leisure, but while the guest’s out.”

  Doubtfully, she shook her head. “I don’t know, I think you’re on the wrong track there. I just don’t see one of the staff sneaking into my desk to steal my key so they can sneak into my room that night and steal my laptop. I just don’t see it.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Besides, if it’s the Phantom Burglar we’re talking about, he’s obviously been able to get in pretty much anywhere he wants. Why assume it has to be someone who works at the museum? Anyway, maybe he gets into the rooms some other way. Maybe they’re—I don’t know, inside jobs or something.”

  “Well, and so they may be,” he said agreeably. “As I said, it’s only a hypothesis. The entire notion of a Phantom Burglar—a single person behind all these thefts—is no more than a hypothesis. Could well be wrong. Hello, Dennis, lad, what have you got there?”

  Officer Campbell had returned, beaming and bearing aloft what Alix at first took for a plastic shower cap in a see-through plastic bag.

  “Oho, what do we have here?” Cruz asked again. Everything seemed to be a game to him. “Bring it here, Denny.”

  “It’s a, what do you call it, a shoe cover, isn’t it?” Alix said as Campbell placed the bag on the table. “The kind of thing they wear in operating rooms to keep them germ-free.”

  “In this case,” Cruz said, “I think the more apt comparison would be with our crime scene investigators, who are almost certainly wearing them this very moment a few yards from here, to keep from messing up the scene with their own DNA or anything else. Where exactly did you find it, Dennis?”

  “Exactly where you told me to look, Jake. I’m impressed.” />
  “Well, I am a detective, Dennis,” Cruz said nonchalantly. “It’s expected of me. Now, if you’re done out there, would you do me the favor of going to the main building and getting to that manager? Find out if they maintain any surveillance videos that we might look at.”

  “Sure thing, but I doubt it.”

  “I doubt it too, but do it anyway. And then move on to any garbage cans and dumpsters on the grounds. I want you to go look in every single one of them and see what you can find.”

  “And I am specifically looking for . . . ?”

  “Plastic gloves, another shoe cover, and some kind of sack or bag made into a mask. He wouldn’t want to be caught on the street with any of those. He’d get rid of them right away. And, if he’s panicked, there might be a laptop too. And anything else that catches your eye. Use your noodle.”

  Campbell turned to go, but Cruz stopped him and cocked a cautionary eyebrow. “And when I say ‘look’ in the dumpsters, that includes climbing in and rooting around with your hands if need be, which it probably will. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir, thank you, sir. And here I thought, being the new guy, that I wouldn’t get any plum assignments for months and months.”

  “Kiddo, I’ve been in more dumpsters than you’ve got years. The development of skilled dumpster investigation techniques and strategies is your pathway to becoming a big, important detective man.”

  “You mean like you, sir?”

  “Well, no. I wouldn’t shoot as high as all that. No point in setting yourself up to be disappointed.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, sir. Thank you for your valuable advice—your ceaseless, constant, all-pervasive, never-ending . . .” He was still coming up with adjectives as he exited. These two had quite a shtick going, Alix thought. Perhaps it was intended to relax people. If so, it was working with her. She was smiling.