The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery)

by Charlotte Elkins

  “Ms. London? It’s Jock downstairs. I got these people here for you.”

  “People? Plural?”

  “Well, there’s this lady, Christine, uh—”

  “LeMay. Yes, but she’s the only one I was expecting.”

  “Well, there’s two guys with her. One of ’em’s your father. I know because that was the first thing that came out of his mouth. He couldn’t wait to tell me.” He switched to a wildly off-base simulation of Geoff’s plummy English accent. “‘Alix London, why, yes, she’s my daughter, don’t you know.’ And the other one, I didn’t get his name, but I tell you, I don’t know about that one. He looks like the Incredible Hulk—”

  “You mean he’s green?” She had recovered enough to make a small joke, and she had every intention of putting that miserable blog out of her mind, for now at least.

  “No, not green, but he’s gotta be three hundred pounds and he’s built like a, like a stand-alone freezer.”

  “I know who he is, Jock. Don’t worry, he’s harmless. I promise, he won’t break anything. Be right down.”

  So Geoff had flown down with Chris, she thought as she jogged around the three spiraling levels to the entrance. Well, that was a surprise, and a pleasant one at that. They’d come a long way, she and Geoff, since their estrangement after his stupid, reckless (but brilliant) string of forgeries. For almost a decade, she wouldn’t even let herself think about forgiving him, but eventually, maturity and time had done the trick . . . along with Geoff’s warmth, his damnably irresistible lovability, and his genuine goodness. But it had taken her a long, long while to come to grips with the notion that being a genuinely good man—even an ethical one—and being a crook weren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

  Even as short a time recently as a couple of years ago, after he’d served his eight years at Lompoc Federal Penitentiary in California and had moved to Seattle, he’d never have dropped in on her without an invitation, and if he had, he’d have been unwelcome. Now, here he was popping up without warning in Palm Springs.

  And she couldn’t have been more pleased.

  As for the Incredible Hulk, she had no trouble guessing who that might be, and he was equally welcome, the man she loved most in the world after Geoff, a three-hundred-pound ex-con gorilla named Beniamino Guglielmi Abbattista, but now predictably known by one and all as Tiny (except by Alix when she would occasionally revert to childhood and call him “Zio Beniamino”—Uncle Benjamin). He wasn’t actually related to her, though; he was an old, old friend and “business associate” of Geoff’s who now worked for Geoff’s business, the Venezia Trading Company, “purveyor of authentic, high-quality reproductions of fine objets d’art, in quantity and at reasonable prices.” (Most of his clients, as might be expected, were second-rate motel chains interested in arty-looking furnishings that didn’t cost an arm and a leg to replace when light-fingered, absentminded guests happened to leave with them. Geoff’s biggest seller, by a country mile, was their hard-plastic “Aztec-style synthetic onyx soap dish,” which he got by the pallet—and sold by the gross—from a family manufactory in Bangladesh.)

  The three of them, Geoff, Tiny, and Chris, had stepped back from the building and were waiting outside, on the lowest of the four stone discs that formed the stairway leading up to the entrance. They were pointing at different parts of the structure and jabbering away at each other.

  Tiny was the first to spot her, and his face lit up. “’Ey, mia cucciolina!” My little puppy. He’d been born over a barbershop in the Bronx’s Little Italy, but he frequently reverted to the epithets and ejaculations of his Sicilian mother and father, and he always had some Italian term of affection at the ready for her. And they always warmed her heart.

  There were hugs all around, and Chris explained that, since she had the whole Gulfstream to herself and didn’t enjoy traveling alone, she thought that Geoff and Tiny might like to fly down with her, and on the spur of the moment she’d invited them along.

  “And on the spur of the moment, we accepted,” Geoff said brightly, “and here, as you see, we stand before you . . . and before this, ahem, unusual structure.”

  “That is one weird place,” Tiny agreed, tilting his head up at it.

  He had a point. The Brethwaite, built on an uneven, markedly sloping site, did have the look of four gigantic stone wheels that had dropped down out of the sky and haphazardly landed in an intersecting circle, each one slightly overlapping the one to its left and being overlapped by the one on its right. The low roofs were all slightly canted too, none of them exactly at the same angle or in the same direction, and no two of them were exactly the same size. In the center sat a surprising, pleasant little open-air atrium with a neatly cropped lawn and a few picnic tables for visitors to have coffee or snacks that could be bought at the small café.

  “Is that thing really an art museum,” Chris asked, “or are we looking at a pileup at the Flying Saucer Airport?” That made everyone laugh, it was so apt.

  “Well, why don’t we all go in?” Alix suggested. “We’d better head up to those Marsden Hartley drawings first, Chris. I saw Clark in his office when I came in just a few minutes ago, so we can probably catch him if you still want to make an offer after you see them. And then I can show everyone around the place, although there isn’t a lot on the walls right now.”

  Chris, Tiny, and Geoff were issued clip-on visitor passes at the security desk, and then Alix led them up two levels (each level being a few inches higher than the one to its left, so that you had to mount a single, wide, curving six-inch step to get to it) to the small bay that had held the Drawings gallery. Many of the items that had been on the walls were no longer there, having been demoted to racks in the storage room, probably never to emerge. What was left was a largely undistinguished smattering of mountains, deserts, horses, Native Americans, and one lonely, unsmiling Mongolian herder in a fur hat and a long, padded tunic. In their company the Hartleys, rough as they were, stood out as the work of a genuine artist.

  The four of them quietly studied the two small drawings, their attitudes restrained and circumspect—except for Chris, for whom restraint and circumspection were behaviors that went against nature.

  “I love them!” she declared. “I want them! I need them!”

  Tiny was less impressed, bordering on disdainful. “Hey, if what you want is Cézanne imitations, I can knock off a couple of them for you, in, like, one afternoon, that are better than those. And that includes a coffee break.”

  Alix saw his point. Both of them might have been homages to Cézanne, especially the one with the mountain, which was very obviously Mt. St. Victoire, near Aix-en-Provence, the subject of never-ending fascination to the great French artist, who had painted it more than seventy times. These two pictures showed the enormous influence Cézanne had had on the young Hartley.

  “Now, Tiny,” Geoff said with a smile, “you really shouldn’t go around saying such things. Not everyone might understand that those days are long behind you.”

  As with Geoff, Tiny’s disputes with the law—every one of which he’d lost—had been the result of his brilliantly executed forgeries and the not-so-brilliant frauds stemming from them. And as she did with Geoff, Alix still had the occasional nervous-making misgiving about just how “rehabilitated” he was.

  But Tiny responded to Geoff with umbrage. “Hey, come on, I wasn’t gonna charge her. I was gonna do it for free. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  Geoff immediately apologized. “Indeed, there is not. Forgive the implication.”

  The big guy wasn’t altogether mollified. “And I could do better Cézannes than those,” he grumbled, “and you know it.”

  “I never said you couldn’t. But these aren’t Cézanne copies, Tiny, or imitations either. Look at them more closely. Hartley has used Cézanne as a starting point, yes, but he’s added something of his own, a touch of the vibrancy of Americ
a, of the American West, that one does not find in the very Gallic, very European Cézanne.”

  Tiny didn’t hesitate with what he thought about that. “Sheesh,” he opined, but Alix supported her father. “That’s so,” she said. “Hartley was nowhere near the artist that Cézanne was, but he came at things a different way. A Cézanne still life is, well, still . . . settled . . . but when you look at Hartley’s bowl of pears here, they only seem to be resting for a minute. You get the impression that if you turned around for a second and then looked back at it, they would have rearranged themselves.” This was the kind of airy-fairy art talk that Alix generally deplored and she was a bit embarrassed to hear herself doing it. “Sort of,” she added by way of amends.

  “Enough already,” Chris said. “The majority vote says go for it.” She clapped her hands together, a single snapping clack. “Let’s go talk to this Clark person, Alix.”

  “Wait, before we do, there’s a painting I’d like everybody to have a look at. It’ll just take a minute. It’s on the way.”

  It was the Pollock that she took them to, of course, and from twenty-five feet away, Geoff said, “Oh, I didn’t know the Brethwaite had a Pollock. From the drip period, obviously, perhaps 1948 or ’49?” The question was addressed to Tiny.

  “Ehhhhh . . . I don’t think so.” Tiny was looking at it, his head to one side. “A little later, I think, just before he got, you know, darker. I’d say 1951 or ’52.”

  “Very good, Tiny,” Alix said. “According to the plaque, it’s 1951.”

  Tiny beamed. “Nothin’ to it. It’s a knack I picked up. In my former life.”

  After they’d gotten closer and had a chance to view it from a few different angles, Geoff asked: “Is there a particular reason for our looking at this, Alix?”

  “I wanted your opinions. There’s something about it . . .”

  “You think it might not be genuine?” Chris asked.

  Alix nodded. “But I can’t point to anything very substantive; nothing that would convince anybody. It’s not much more than a kind of mental tickling, a gut feeling.”

  “And we all know about your gut feelings, my dear,” Geoff said, stepping back for a broader view. “One would be wise to take them seriously.” After half a minute of intense study, he spoke again. “As you know, Abstract Expressionism is hardly my métier. When I was at the Met, I did do a little work on a Pollock of theirs, but it was a sort of Indian sand painting, but done in gouache and colored pencil in 1941. Nothing at all like this, so I don’t know what my opinion is worth, but I would have to say that nothing leaps out at me that would make me suspect it. It may not be one of his most striking works, but it looks fine to me.”

  “What about you, Tiny?” Alix asked. “Did you ever do anything with Pollock?”

  “Uhh . . .”

  She smiled. “In your former life, I mean.”

  “Well, actually, if you want to know, I almost gave it a shot once.” Like Geoff, Tiny didn’t have to be coaxed very hard to talk about his old career, as long as it was in the right company. “This lady wanted one about like this one here. So I studied Pollock’s techniques and his materials and stuff—everything. But I finally turned the job down.”

  “Too big?” Chris asked. “Too much work?”

  “That’s exactly right! Way too much work for the money, when I could do a Picasso knockoff—or a Cézanne, for that matter—in one afternoon and get paid just as much. And it costs too much to do, too. Look at all the paint that’s on there, even if it’s just plain house paint.”

  “He used house paint?” Chris said.

  “For the drip paintings? Sure. In gallon cans. Straight from the nearest hardware store. Then he went stomping around with the can in one hand and spritzing it all over the place with the other.”

  “Tell me, though, Tiny,” Alix said impatiently. “Does it seem to you something might be wrong with this one?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “I can see you’d like me to say yeah, honey, but the truth is, I don’t. It looks okay to me too. Sorry.”

  “Alix,” Geoff said, “a moment ago you said you couldn’t point to anything very substantive. Does that mean there’s something unsubstantive you can point to?”

  She hesitated. “Well, yes, a couple of things, but they’re so nebulous I don’t like—”

  “Spit it out,” Chris said. “You’re among friends.”

  “All right. First point: To my eye, it’s too neat, too pretty for a Pollock.”

  They waited for her to enlarge on this subject, but that’s all she had. On to point number two.

  “At the same time, it has no center, nothing that focuses the eye. It just wanders off toward the edges and kind of flows away and disappears over the sides. That’s not typical of Pollock.”

  “I don’t know, Alix,” her father said. “‘Not typical’ and ‘fake’ are two different things.”

  “I know that, but taken together—”

  “What else you got?” Tiny asked.

  She had kept the strongest, such as it was, for last. “The straight lines. They’re too straight.”

  “But lots of Pollocks have straight lines,” Geoff said, and Tiny nodded.

  “Not his drip paintings, not this many, not that I’ve ever seen. Sure, you can get an occasional random straight line from dripping or flipping paint onto the canvas, but not easily. This has them all over the place, some of them fairly long. Someone must have laid them down with a brush or some kind of tool, I think.”

  “Anything else?” Tiny said, unimpressed.

  “That’s it. Now you know why I don’t feel ready to talk to the director about it yet. It really does all come down to the feeling I get.” She shook her head. “Only what am I doing getting a feeling about a Pollock?”

  “It is a bit nebulous,” Geoff agreed gently.

  “Hey,” Tiny said, “isn’t there this foundation that specializes in Pollock authentications? I forget the name, but I remember they have a good reputation. Maybe they could help?”

  “The Pollock-Krasner Foundation,” Geoff supplied. “But they stopped doing it years ago, probably for fear of being sued. Just announced that all genuine works by Jackson Pollock had been accounted for and anything new that turned up therefore had to be a fake, and disbanded. Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t be so sure.” He hesitated. “You know, child, I still know some people who might very well be helpful in establishing certainty one way or the other. Would you like me to look into it for you?”

  “Thanks, Geoff, but I don’t think so, not yet, anyway. Let me sit on it a little longer. Maybe I’m just imagining things.”

  “If so, it’ll be the first time,” Geoff said stoutly. “You’ve always been right in the past. Four out of four, if I’m recalling correctly.”

  “Yes, right about a Manet, an O’Keeffe, a Renoir, a Titian. But Pollock? That’s another kettle of fish. No, I just want to let it percolate in the back of my mind for right now. I’ll be talking to Clark about it next Tuesday, and we’re going to go through all the paperwork on the thing. Maybe things will be clearer after that.” A beat, and then: “Or maybe I’ll just drop it. I’m out of my element here.”

  “And speaking of Clark,” Chris said, “let’s go find the guy and you can watch me negotiate the socks off him.”

  Geoff and Tiny were left to explore the museum on their own for half an hour, at the end of which time Alix would find them and then take everybody out to lunch. In the meantime, the two women headed to the level where all the senior staff cubicles were, including Clark’s. (Ironically, Alix was the only person other than Mrs. B whose workspace had solid, honest-to-goodness walls that reached to the ceiling, and a real door that closed and opened.)

  They could hear Clark’s voice as they approached his cubicle. He was turned three-quarters away from them in his swivel chair and speaking into the t
elephone. Although his voice was dialed down, his whisper carried, and there was no mistaking the anger in it.

  “Absolutely not, a deal is a deal, let’s just stick to it. . . . No, I do not want to take into consideration . . . We made an agreement, and I intend to . . . (Sigh) Okay, I grant you that. All right, maybe we can. What did you have in mind? . . . No, I’m sorry, seven is out of the question. I can’t . . . Six? . . . Six is possible, yes. All right, we’ll say six.”

  At this point, he spotted Chris and Alix out of the corner of his eye. Without turning, he raised one arm and lifted a forefinger: Give me just a second. They stopped where they were, about fifteen feet from him.

  “Don’t push your luck,” he said into the telephone, his voice lower but still audible. “I said okay, didn’t I? . . . I have to go . . . I know . . . All right, Melvin. See you there. Jesus.” Clark slammed the phone down in its cradle. “God damn it,” he said to the ceiling. “Some people.”

  “You know,” Alix whispered to Chris, “this might not be the best time to negotiate the socks off him.”

  “You just watch me,” Chris said and urged Alix forward. “Come on, into the lion’s den.”

  Alix rapped on the edge of one of the cubicle’s entrance partitions to make sure that they really were welcome.

  “Yeah, come on in,” Clark said, swiveling slowly toward them. “I swear, some of the things you have to deal with . . .” He shook his head.

  But as he took them in, the annoyance that had been on his face vanished, and the Smile took its place. Alix realized for the first time that his smile for women was different from his smile for men: wider, more inviting, with more eye involvement. More genuine, Alix might have thought if she hadn’t known him. Actually, she wasn’t altogether sure that he liked women that much. And as cinematically good-looking as he was, she wondered if women liked him that much. Speaking for herself, he was starting to make her skin crawl.