The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery)

by Charlotte Elkins

  What the lizard had in mind was the securing of a fat, blue-blacked beetle for its midday meal. The beetle was minding its own business on the sun-drenched pavement of the road a few inches from the edge. The lizard, immobile except for its shifting, conical eyes, watched from a foot away, its scaly brown-and-tan-speckled skin making it almost invisible against the desert landscape. It took two seconds for its primitive brain to make the necessary distance and direction calculations, and then the ribbonlike tongue snapped forward, almost too fast to see, and unfurling as it went. Whether the beetle saw it coming at the last millisecond or just happened to move at that precise moment is uncertain, but move it did. The tongue missed, the beetle flew clumsily off with a brittle whirr-rr-rr of its wings, the humiliated lizard pretended the whole thing had never happened and slunk away into the desert to seek its lunch elsewhere, and that was the end of it.

  But . . .

  . . . not for Pete Menendez, a weary commercial plumber heading back to Palm Springs in his van after an all-night maintenance job at the visitor center atop the mountain, who caught the sudden roadside movement out of the corner of his eye. Half-asleep at the time, he overreacted, jerking the steering wheel hard left to avoid the whatever-it-was on the road. The car instantly obeyed, lurching over the double yellow line, into the opposing lane of traffic, and directly into the path of an oncoming Subaru hatchback. Paralyzed with shock, he could only stare, popeyed, as the hatchback seemed to leap out of his way and into the lane he had come from and then flash away behind him.

  After another frozen second, his ability to move returned and he quickly pulled the wheel right, dragging the van back into its proper lane.

  “Hoo boy,” he breathed once he got his breath back, and then, relieved and chastened, went on his way with decreased speed and increased alertness, making it home without further problems.

  But . . .

  . . . leaving a lulu behind for the hatchback. With Alix London at the wheel, it had been zipping along at 70 miles an hour, the California limit. She would have been going even faster if there hadn’t been a rather hard-nosed law enforcement type in the seat beside her. The road was uncrowded and rail-straight for the most part, the day clear, the desert empty and flat. And Alix did love to drive fast. A weakness, to be sure, but (as Alix saw it) one without undue risk, since she was not your average driver. She knew what she was doing. She had been trained, after all, by a former race car driver—the middle-aged son of the expert restorer who had mentored her during her apprenticeship in Italy. The son, Giancarlo Santullo, had put a lot of emphasis on safety; no wonder, since he was allowing her the unprecedented privilege of weekend soloing on the nearby Amalfi coast in his prized Lamborghini Gallardo LP 560, the car with which he’d once finished second in his class at Le Mans. Eager to get her hands on the wheel of the gorgeous Lamborghini, Alix took to the lessons with enthusiasm and application.

  So she knew a lot about driving and a lot about cars and engines, she was an extremely attentive driver, even an expert one, and her reflexes were quick. Those reflexes were called into action the split second that Menendez’s van began its swerve into her lane. She was aware of the danger even before she was aware that she was aware. Without anything that might be called conscious thought, her brain made much the same kind of instant calculations that the fringe-toed lizard’s brain had made, of which she was no more conscious than the lizard had been. The two vehicles were about three hundred feet apart. She was going 70, Menendez about 50, so they were closing at a rate of around 120 miles an hour—almost 200 feet per second. That gave her a little over one second to react. Both instinct and expertise agreed on the necessary strategy: Get the hell out of the way and do it in a hurry. They came up with contradictory tactics, however.

  Instinct: Jam on the brakes and yank that steering wheel left. Expertise: No, dear, not at this speed. Both stopping and turning require friction—traction—between tires and pavement, and there is only so much of it to go around. Try to both steer and brake at 70 miles an hour, and you won’t get much of either. You’d better decide which it’s going to be . . . and do it fast.

  Alix went with expertise and chose steering, which got her into the opposite lane, the lane the van had come from, and out of its way, but it was a close thing. The right side of the van caught the passenger-side mirror of the Subaru and snapped it cleanly off. Alix never felt the impact, any more than Menendez had, but the Subaru did. There was a shockingly loud bam! and the passenger-side curtain airbag popped open, whacking Ted in the ear and bringing a yelp from him.

  Alix, meanwhile, was still going almost 70—the whole thing had taken only that single second—and their troubles were far from over. They were in the wrong lane, but that was the least of it; the nearest oncoming car was half a mile away. More pressingly, a few yards ahead was a jog in the road, first to the right and then back to the left, about thirty degrees each way. Under ordinary circumstances, an inconsequential squiggle, even at her current speed. What did make it a problem was that her quick dodging of the pickup had left them traveling on a diagonal path relative to the road, a sharp one, perhaps forty-five degrees leftward. If not for that upcoming jog she would have been able to straighten the car and then get it back where it belonged, but when the forty-five degrees she was already fighting were tacked on to the jog’s thirty, they added up to a curve she couldn’t possibly negotiate. They would lurch off the road and very likely turn over.

  Better . . . safer . . . not to attempt to turn, but to brake, keeping the wheels straight, and let the car follow its present diagonal momentum off the road and into the desert, where the added friction of the gravelly sand would help bring it to a safe stop before it got very far. There was a long, sloping ridge four or five feet high running parallel to the road only thirty or forty yards away (suddenly the desert didn’t seem so flat any more), but Alix thought she could stop before they reached it, or if not, then she would maneuver along its flank until she could stop, with nothing more than a little cosmetic damage to the Subaru, and—knock on wood—none at all to them.

  She pressed hard on the brake pedal, and felt with gratitude the momentary catch that marked the point at which the antilock system kicked in to prevent a locked-wheel skid. Which was fine. What wasn’t fine was the “momentary” part. It was like stepping on an overfilled balloon. A split second of resistance, then pop!—and then nothing. The pedal broke through and her foot rode without resistance all the way down to the floorboard. Not only was the antilock system kaput; there were no brakes at all.

  She couldn’t stop the car. She couldn’t even slow it down.

  “No brakes,” she managed to grind out as they jounced off the road and onto the rocky desert floor.

  “Fun and games,” she thought she heard Ted mutter.

  She did her best to turn before they reached the ridge but it was hopeless. Even with her twisting the wheel as hard as she could, the hatchback flew straight up the slope. An instant later they were airborne, seemingly weightless. All she could do was hang on to the wheel, terrified, powerless, and waiting tensely for the impact when they hit the ground again.

  The slope had acted much like a well-placed ramp in a movie, where a car—usually a police car, for some reason—racing down an alley is suddenly launched into the air, only to come down on an equally well-placed pile of cardboard cartons or packing crates, or maybe a rickety wooden outbuilding. The difference was that there weren’t any sheds or packing crates here, just rock-studded desert.

  Fortunately, the car hadn’t nosed over in flight. It plopped down on its underside. Hard. Bam!Bam!Bam!Bam! Who knew modern cars had so many airbags, coming from so many different directions? However many were left, they all went off now, pushing Ted’s and Alix’s faces into suffocating air pillows, but only for a moment. The bags immediately deflated, leaving them free to move, but Alix had no control over the car, which took three clanking, bone-rattling bounces a
nd then finally rocked to a halt, leaving the two of them shaken up but apparently unhurt.

  Alix switched off the ignition. The automobile was now filled with the airbags’ powdery, sulfurous residue. It was on their clothes and in their nostrils, but they continued simply to sit there without moving, not even opening the windows.

  “You all right?” Ted asked after a while.

  “I think so,” she said, exploring her molars with her tongue and not finding any cracks. “You?”

  “Same,” he said. “My brain might have shaken a little loose, though. I don’t think anybody’s going to notice.”

  “Afraid we’re not going to make that lunch,” Alix said after a few more seconds.

  “No.” Another couple of beats. “Well, at least I was half-right.”

  “About what?”

  “This afternoon. Didn’t I say it’d be exciting?”

  They sat for another minute without moving, and then Alix switched on the ignition long enough to open the windows. Neither of them was quite ready to be up and about yet, but they needed the fresh air.

  “Alix,” Ted said, “what the hell just happened?”

  “We lost our brakes.”

  “Yes, but I mean why did we lose them?”

  “How would I know? I’m no expert, Ted.”

  “You know a lot more about cars than I do. That makes you the consultive expert of the moment. Why do brakes fail?”

  “Oh, a whole lot of things. I don’t know . . . Low hydraulic fluid levels, overheated brake pads, or worn calipers, or the rotors could fail, or any of the parts could fail.”

  “Any ideas on which it was?”

  “None of the above,” she said. “Not all of a sudden, like that. There would have been signs ahead of time—squeaks, spongy stops, something. And there weren’t any; I would have noticed. Besides, I got this car from Marathon; they’re a big agency, they would have checked it before they let it out. And I doubt if I’ve driven twenty miles since then. So then . . .” A shrug.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said solemnly. Clearly, his mind was working toward the same conclusion hers was. They each knew what the other was thinking, but neither wanted to say it. It was Ted who took the leap. “So then . . . what? Did someone cut the brake line or something?”

  “Like in those old movies?”

  “Frankly, I’ve only seen it in old movies myself, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen outside of them.”

  “Actually, it does.”

  “It does happen?”

  “No, it does mean it doesn’t happen.”

  This was too much for Ted to handle in his present woolly state. “It does mean it doesn’t . . .”

  “Happen outside of them. Old movies.”

  They were both more or less aware that the conversation they were having was not only faintly ridiculous but a little surreal. They’d just been through as hair-raising and dangerous an experience as one could expect to live through and emerge with all bones intact, and yet their conversation was calm and quiet, without expression, and they sat not looking at each other but still staring blindly through the windshield. They probably weren’t technically in a state of shock, but they were pretty numb.

  “And the reason it happens only in old movies,” she said, “is because, back in the forties and fifties, there was a single brake line that came out of the master cylinder, which then split into four different lines, one to each wheel. So all you had to do was cut that single line, and the brakes on all four wheels failed.”

  “And now?”

  “Now there are either four separate lines that come out of the master cylinder, or two lines that then split into two each—I think that’s what these Subarus have. So cutting a single line would still leave the brake pads operating on at least two wheels—and we had nothing, believe me.”

  “Are the brake lines easy to find? Would you have to take the engine apart to get at them?”

  “What? No, you could just pop the hood or else get underneath without doing even that. Why?”

  “Well, what would stop somebody from cutting all the lines? Might have taken a lot of work in the old days, but a cordless hacksaw or shears would make pretty quick work of today.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” she said thoughtfully. “Still, I’d say it’s impossible in this case.”

  “So then, what did happen?”

  She shrugged.

  They sat for another few moments, continuing to surface from their dazes. “I have a brilliant idea,” Ted announced.

  “Mm?”

  “Let’s get out of the car and look under the hood and see if they’ve been cut or not.”

  “Would you even recognize what a brake line looks like?”

  “No, but I bet you would.”

  They both laughed, and that seemed to ease them out of their zombie-like states. Alix pulled the inside hood release and they climbed out of the car, each with a few grunts acknowledging bruises they hadn’t been aware of. The car was even worse off than they’d realized, with a twisted frame, a broken front axle, four flats, and pieces that led all the way back to the road, like the bread crumb trail in Hansel and Gretel, only this one was made of broken lights, bumper parts, hubcaps, and assorted pieces of undercarriage.

  The hood had buckled, but the outside catch still worked. Once Ted wrestled the hood open and got it propped, Alix leaned over and looked into the engine compartment. Ted leaned over and looked at Alix.

  “They are cut,” she murmured incredulously. “Both of them. Somebody actually cut them. I can’t . . . I don’t . . .” She shook her head.

  “Show me,” he said.

  She indicated two pre-bent metal tubes, each about the thickness of a pencil, that emerged from a steel cylinder—the master cylinder—and disappeared into the recesses of the interior in different directions. Both of them had inch-wide gaps in them a foot or so after they came from the cylinder, where they would have been easy to reach, either from above or below.

  Alix was scowling down at them. “I see it, but I don’t believe it. I’m telling you, this couldn’t have caused it.”

  “Alix, I don’t understand.” Ted was showing a glimmer of impatience. “These tubes, they transmit the brake fluid, the hydraulic fluid, to the, what are they, the brake pads—”

  “To the calipers, actually, which transmit the force to the pads, which press on the drums or the discs, which—”

  “All right, all right. The end product is, it’s the pressure from the fluid that stops the wheels from turning, right? So if the lines are cut, the hydraulic fluid doesn’t get through and the wheels keep going round and round and the car doesn’t slow down. That would be the point of cutting them, wouldn’t it? And that’s what happened to us. So what am I missing here?”

  “Well, think about it. When would the lines have been cut?”

  “I don’t know. What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Whenever it was, obviously it had to be before we started out from the museum, correct?”

  “Obviously. Probably during the night. Where do you park it?”

  “On the lot at the hotel, and there’s no lighting, so it wouldn’t have been that hard to get at without being seen, so let’s assume that’s when it was done. And it had to be last night, not before. I only got this car yesterday.”

  “Okay. Last night. So?”

  “So how did I get to the museum this morning? How did I stop when I got there?”

  “All right, maybe somehow it was done after you were parked at the museum. I know that’s more unlikely, but—”

  “So then how did we get all the way out here before the brakes finally failed? I stopped at the Villa to change, I slowed to turn onto Palm Canyon, I stopped for the light at Amado, stopped for the light at San Rafael just before we turned onto this road, sl
owed down probably two dozen times on the way. Did I do all that without any brake fluid? No way.”

  “Ah.” Ted leaned back against the side of the car, nodding. “I see what you’re saying,” he said slowly. “Damn. Well, we’ll—”

  He broke off for the third or fourth time to give a smile and an A-OK sign to a passing driver who had slowed to offer assistance. Funny, Alix thought, the van, the vehicle that had been directly involved, had gone on its way without a backward glance, as far as it was possible to tell, but now, almost everybody driving by was showing concern.

  “I better make a couple of calls,” Ted said, taking out his cell phone. “Marathon, you said the agency was? They’ll want to send out a tow.”

  While he did that Alix scowled hard at the cut lines—and there was no question about their having been purposely, maliciously severed. Brake lines were made of heavy-gauge stainless steel; they simply did not burst or tear on their own. That got her thinking . . .

  “Okay, they’re on their way,” Ted said. “And let me call Jake too. He’ll probably want to come out himself if he’s available.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. This would be a new case. The All-Knowing Skull may have other ideas on who to send.”

  He looked at her, one eyebrow raised. “I have no idea what that means, but I want Jake, and I’m betting I can get him out here.”

  “You know, I feel like I’m personally keeping the Palm Springs Police Department in business,” Alix said. “I wonder what they used to do before I showed up.”

  Ted smiled at her. “Things do seem to have a way of, er, becoming interesting when you’re around, don’t they?”

  “It’s a knack I’d be glad to give away if I could. Listen, let’s go back to where the car was when the brakes failed. There’s something I want to look for.”

  They walked back to the approximate spot and Ted made his call to Jake while Alix systematically scoured first the road itself (nothing) and then the swaths of desert on either side of it. There were more waves and smiles to motorists on their way to and from the tram.