The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery)

by Charlotte Elkins

  “Oh, good.” And then, after a short break. “So how’re things going out in Seattle?”

  Typical Ted, Jamie thought, tossing it out as if he couldn’t be less interested. And managing to ask about her without even using her name.

  “Alix is doing fine, but she’s not in Seattle, she’s in Palm Springs.”

  “She’s moved?”

  “No, she’s down there for a couple of weeks, doing some conservation work for a museum.”

  “In Palm Springs? An art museum?” She could practically hear his frown. “Not by any chance the Brethwaite?”

  “Yes, the L. Morgan Brethwaite Museum of Art, why?”

  “Am I mistaken, or hasn’t their name shown up somewhere in the Lord & Keen investigation?” The rustling she heard suggested he was thumbing rapidly through the Lord & Keen case file.

  Lord & Keen was an upscale, long-established art dealership in Lower Manhattan that was now under federal investigation. At issue was its suspected involvement in the sales of several forgeries of works by major early and middle twentieth-century European and American artists, including Seurat, Matisse, Rothko, Pollock, and de Kooning. As far as Ted was concerned, there was no “suspected” about it; they were in it up to their eyeballs. So—and this was more common than not—the difficult part of the job was not so much to determine guilt as it was to come up with proof that would a) first be accepted into evidence by the judge, and then b) convince the jury. So far, he hadn’t been doing too well.

  The rustling continued, but Jamie only had to think about it for a couple of seconds before she came up with what he was looking for before he did. “You know what, you’re right. I knew the name rang a bell. The Brethwaite, they’re one of the outfits that did some business with Lord & Keen, aren’t they? But they’re not subjects of the investigation, or are they?”

  “Subjects, no. They didn’t sell anything through Lord & Keen, they bought something from them, so if anything, they’re victims.” The rustling stopped. “Yeah, here they are, right on their list. We just haven’t gotten around to them. It’s a long list.”

  “Hunh,” Jamie said.

  “Hunh, what?”

  “Hunh, pretty coincidental that Alix is down there working for them right now.”

  “Sure is,” Ted said. “Look, I better get back to work. Anything else you wanted to talk about?”

  Yes, plenty, but Alix made me promise I wouldn’t. “No, nothing important,” she said.

  And then, to herself, as she put the phone down, a resolute and self-assured look on her face: “But she didn’t make me promise that I wouldn’t look into it.”

  The look on Ted’s face when his phone clacked into its cradle was anything but self-assured. He leaned uneasily back in his chair with a rare sigh. Alix London. Had he ever botched anything as badly as his relationship with Alix? He’d thought he was doing her a favor by dropping a glamour job in her lap for her first assignment, with promise of more to come, but it hadn’t worked out that way. It damn near hadn’t worked out at all.

  Some glamour assignment. Yes, there was a lovely cruise among the Greek islands on the sumptuous Artemis, and a supposedly undemanding task that perfectly fitted her abilities and tastes. But it had wound up a nightmare.

  And it was his fault, it really was. From the first he’d done everything wrong: It was her first assignment for the Bureau and he’d put her out there, innocent, untrained, and unarmed, all alone with no backup, no partner, and only minimally informed about what she was getting herself into. As far as the job was concerned, she’d done good work, but it was sheer luck he hadn’t gotten her killed. Even thinking about it now made his temples throb. He was the head of the Art Crime Team, for Christ’s sake, he had almost a decade’s experience at it, he’d been on over a dozen undercover assignments himself, more than any other member—how could he not have known better?

  He’d been toying absently with the Lord & Keen case file, and now he threw it disgustedly down on the desk. Deep down he knew exactly why he’d been so rash, and it wasn’t because he didn’t know better. Over the few days that he’d been in her company in New Mexico, Alix London had gotten to him in a way that no woman had, not since the days of his sappy teenage crushes. And he’d done precisely what you’d expect from a sappy, love-struck teenager: He’d tried to impress the hell out of her. Hey, look at me, how cool I am, what a high mucky-muck I am in the FBI. I can get you these fantastic, exciting experiences; I can put you in a world of opulence and luxury that to most mortals is as remote as the rings of Saturn. And all it takes is my say-so.

  Stupid. Juvenile.

  And the kicker was that he hadn’t impressed her at all. She’d grown up with wealth—not in the Artemis class, but plenty rich enough. Then, when her father had gotten himself into that forgery mess ten years ago, every cent of the family money had gone to lawyers’ fees and civil suits. From what she’d told him, the whole affair had devastated her, and estranged her from her father, but there were no signs of that now. After a few rocky years, her relationship with Geoffrey London (who was still a bit dodgy if you asked him) had repaired itself, and they had become close again. And as for missing her old world of wealth and privilege, he couldn’t see any sign of that either. As much as anyone he’d ever known, she had put the past behind her with all its regrets and missteps. She was intelligent, amusing, and capable, and she was focused on the present and the future, no longer on the past. She was charming, upbeat, sexy, and just plain nice to be around.

  She was, in other words, as close to the perfect woman as he was likely ever to run into. So, for once in his life, he’d waded right in . . . and promptly screwed it up. Their last meeting had been a lunch at the National Gallery in Washington a few days after the cruise. He had come to it with an attractive new undercover assignment to offer her, this time with adequate preparation at the Quantico training center, and with an experienced partner (he himself) on the job itself. There was almost no chance of things turning nasty, and in the unlikely event that they did, he would get her out of there in a hurry. Along with all this was the unspoken likelihood that there would be more undercover work with him to come, that they would almost be . . . well, long-term partners. He’d thought that was an absolutely terrific notion.

  And yet he’d been nervous about presenting it. He had yet to absorb how harrowing her experience on the cruise must have been for her, but he did sense a certain aloofness, a coolness toward him that hadn’t been there the last time they’d been together a few days before, dining on salmon and champagne on a romantic, moonlit night among the millennia-old ruins of the Minoan palace of Knossos. The feeling made him hesitate with the offer of the job—what if she refused?—but he sucked it up and plowed ahead anyway.

  And she refused. She came up with a bunch of wordy reasons, none of which made a lot of sense, but the underlying message was clear. He had blotted his copybook and she was uninterested in risking her life again in his company or under his so-called tutelage. That her aversion was to him was personal and not directed at the Bureau as a whole was clear enough; since that time she had accepted two more assignments with the art squad—but none of them undercover (Ted was the lead on all undercover operations), and none of them on cases in which he had any personal involvement. He had gotten the message, and had kept out of her way.

  “What the hell, it’s over and done,” he muttered. He picked up the Lord & Keen file again. Let’s just hope whatever she’s doing for the Brethwaite people will also be over and done if it turns out the case requires me to go down to Palm Springs to talk to them.

  On the other side of the continent, two-and-a-half thousand miles distant, in Palm Springs, California, the scene in Ted’s office was being almost exactly duplicated, this time by a young woman who sat in a swivel chair, staring at a telephone without seeing it, the furrow between her eyebrows marking the intensity of her thoughts. Even the su
bject of those thoughts was the same as the one on Ted’s mind: that misbegotten lunch at the National Gallery. Her perspective, however, couldn’t have been more different. Like Ted—like anyone—Alix’s memory was selective, whimsically so. Sometimes it chose to retain only the positive things, the things that brought pleasure, that made her feel good about herself. Sometimes not. This was definitely a “not.”

  This is the way she remembered it: Over a meal of roast beef, chicken potpie, and root vegetables (the luncheon theme that month was American), Ted had offered her a new undercover job. She could tell from his animated manner that he was excited about it and he was sure she’d see it as the terrific assignment he thought it was.

  Instead, he’d gotten a lecture. Did he remember a book he’d recommended to her by the founder of the art squad, Robert Wittman? Did he remember how Wittman had described the essence of undercover work? First you befriend, and then you betray. Did he recall that Wittman had expressed the feeling that either you were cut out for undercover work or you weren’t? (She wasn’t actually shaking a finger at him by this point, but she might as well have been.) Well, she hectored him: She wasn’t cut out for betrayal, for schmoozing first and gaining your new “friends’” trust and amity, and then dropping a ton of trouble on them, and, frankly, she was surprised that he could stand it. (That had been then. Now, a year later, she’d come to the conclusion that there were quite a few sleazeballs she’d betray in a heartbeat.)

  The longer she talked, the more sober and restrained he became, and no wonder. She’d done it in a self-righteous, better-than-thou way that no self-respecting man with an ego (and Ted had plenty of that) could have taken in any way other than as a put-down, personal and professional. She should have apologized on the spot and she knew it, she’d known it even then, but . . . she hadn’t. The words were out there and when she tried to take them back, they had stuck in her throat. And afterward, the more time that passed, the more impossible it became.

  There hadn’t been any “scene.” In fact, they had parted with smiles and best wishes. But the deed had been done. Ted still valued her expertise—thus the continuing consulting offers—but he himself had dropped out of her life.

  When she was startled by a sudden jerk of her head, she realized that she’d dozed off. The need for sleep had finally caught up with her. Quickly, before it passed, she lay down fully dressed and was asleep instantly. She didn’t awaken until almost nine, much refreshed.

  After soaking under a long shower and wolfing down every crumb of an enormous waffle-and-bacon breakfast at a bakery restaurant on the way to the museum, she told the security man who let her in that she was expecting a visitor in an hour or so, and if he would buzz her, she’d come to the entrance to meet her guest.

  In the meantime, her intention was to sit down with a mug of tea in front of the easel that held the Cassatt and begin thinking about where she wanted to start, but that “really awful new blog” that Jamie had mentioned had been rattling away inside her head, so instead she logged in to the desk computer to find it. It didn’t take long. When she searched for her own name in Google’s blog search engine, the second blog title that came up was The “Art Whisperer.”

  Steel yourself, she thought. The term art whisperer could go either way, but if you put quotation marks around it, the clear implication was that the person so described was a faker, or a poseur, or both. Or maybe worse. From Jamie’s tone when she’d mentioned it, that’s what Alix was expecting: worse.

  She clicked through to the blog itself. The Art World Insider, the well-designed logo read, and then, underneath:

  The Continuing Saga of the “Art Whisperer”

  By Peter Bakeworthy

  PETER BAKEWORTHY IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY AS WELL AS AN ART CONSERVATOR AND RESTORER IN PRIVATE PRACTICE.

  One of the conundrums of today’s ingrown world of art conservation is the continued, persistent presence of self-described “art whisperer” Alix London on the scene. Discredited and scandalized again and again, she simply refuses to go away. Most recently, London (also fondly known as the Harbinger of Disaster) has been contracted for some sort of unspecified restoration project by Palm Springs’s L. Morgan Brethwaite Museum of Art, a heretofore well-thought-of institution. Apparently, the Brethwaite people don’t read the art news. If they did, they would know that the celebrated Ms. London has been nothing if not consistent. Everything she touches winds up being a police matter one way or another and leaving behind a trail of human wreckage: prison sentences, ruined reputations, lost fortunes—to say nothing of the horrendous damage she’s inflicted on the works entrusted to her.

  Let’s look at a few pertinent facts—

  Shocked and incensed, she stopped reading to search for a few facts—a few answers—of her own: What else did this Art World Insider discuss other than Alix London’s villainy and incompetence? What kind of history did the blog have? Answers: None and none. There was only one entry and this was it.

  For answers to other questions—When had this been published? Who was Peter Bakeworthy?—she left the blog itself and went back to the search engines. The blog, it turned out, had been published February 6—yesterday! As for “Peter Bakeworthy,” in all the world there was no such entity, unless both Google and Bing had missed him; an impossibility for someone who was both an art history professor and a professional conservator. The man didn’t exist.

  Surely he (or she) also had to be the person behind those malevolent book reviews. How could more than one person hate her this much? It had seemed to her before that some of the names of the “reviewers” were contrived as well. Helga McGhee? Please. She’d be amazed if they weren’t all fakes.

  She tabbed back to the blog itself and found that there was no contact address for Mr. “Bakeworthy” or any way to get in touch with him. She returned to her reading.

  Let’s look at a couple of pertinent facts:

  Fact: London has a cloudy but well-documented association with the infamous Albanian mafia.

  Fact: In the last year alone she has managed to be “a person of interest” to the FBI in three (yes, three) major forgery cases.

  Now, a charitable person might point out—

  There was a brisk double-rap on the open door behind her. “Alix, do you have a minute?”

  It was Mrs. B; the first time she’d gone out of her way to find Alix.

  “Of course, come in, Mrs. B.”

  The director was dressed cowhand-style again: faded denims, threadbare at the elbows and knees; old white shirt with a ragged collar edge; and scuffed lizard-skin cowboy boots. In her hand she was brandishing a typewritten sheet of paper. “You need to see this,” she said and plopped it down on the desk.

  Alix reluctantly took it. What now? You need to see this was not generally a precursor to anything good.

  Mrs. B stood, rigid and straight-backed, her bony, sun-browned hands on the back of a chair, her thin lips pursed. Definitely not good, Alix thought. And it wasn’t. It was, in fact, a printout of The “Art Whisperer”, the very blog page to which her computer was open.

  “It was in my e-mail in-box this morning,” Mrs. B said. “I don’t know who sent it, and I don’t want to know.”

  “I was just reading this myself,” Alix said, turning the computer so the older woman could see. “And I have no idea what this is about. I hope you know that everything I’ve read so far is . . . is . . .” She flicked the sheet with the back of her fingers. “‘A well-documented association with the infamous Albanian mafia’? Well, sure, if by association he means being used as a shield and choked practically to death by an Albanian thug trying to get away from the Albanian police. And, and calling me a person of interest when I was actually—”

  “Alix, I don’t want to hear your explanations.”

  Alix felt the back of her neck grow warm. “But surely you can’t believe—”

&nb
sp; “You misunderstand.” There was a slight easing up, a barely perceptible warming of tone. “I detest cowardly, anonymous mischief-making like this. Even if I didn’t know you, I would never believe a single word of it. Believe me, my opinion of you is the same as it was before I saw this, and that is very high, indeed. I’m bringing this to your attention only because I think you should know that someone is actively trying to do you harm.”

  “Thank you for that, Mrs. B,” Alix said humbly.

  “What do you intend to do about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If it were I,” said Mrs. B, leaning over the back of the chair and speaking confidentially, “I would find out who the bastard is and tell my lawyers to get on his case and stay on his back the way shit sticks to a blanket, pardon my French.”

  Alix couldn’t help laughing. “I’ll certainly keep that in mind. Thank you again.”

  What in the world did the staff have against Mrs. B, she wondered afterward. As far as Alix was concerned, the Iron Lady was a sweetie.

  She returned to the blog.

  Now, a charitable person might point out that she has never been arrested or convicted, that all of this is strictly coincidental, an unlucky tendency to turn up in the wrong place at the wrong time. But where there’s smoke there’s fire, says the old maxim, and Alix London’s professional life has been one smoke signal after another. Who else do you know who . . .

  She shut the site down and sat there, her heart pumping angrily away. This was far worse than the reviews; not just opinions and value judgments, but outright lies and contorted half-truths. And not about the book, but about her. There wasn’t a single sentence in that blog, not one, that was true. Not one of those “facts” was even close to being factual. Surely, nobody could believe—

  She jumped at the sound of the telephone buzzer, took a deep breath, and let it out through her mouth. It seemed to settle her, and she picked up the phone.