The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery) (12 page)

“Bingo.”

When Alix had told Chris that she’d pretty much exhausted her fund of knowledge on miniatures, she’d been telling the truth, so she didn’t have much more to say on that subject, but she promised to look into it and, at the very least, to provide Chris with some good reference material. That, plus getting Chris settled in her room, took them almost to five o’clock. Alix asked if that would allow time for her to show Chris a little of Palm Springs on their way to the Vanderveres’. “The heart of downtown, anyway,” was the way she’d put it.

“That won’t take us long,” Alix said as she started up her rented Dodge compact. The heart of downtown Palm Springs, she explained, and then demonstrated, lived up to its vibrant, glittery reputation: lots of foot and vehicular traffic, plenty of good restaurants—mostly jammed—and a surfeit of trendy, busy shops. But the whole thing was only four blocks long: the half-mile of Palm Canyon Drive that ran north and south from Tahquitz Canyon Way. And the heart was all there was. No limbs, no ribs, no head. Go two blocks above Tahquitz to Amado Road, or two blocks south to Baristo, or leave Palm Canyon Drive in any direction, and you run out of downtown in a hurry.

Except for the occasional restaurant, or hotel, or shopping center, Alix had learned during the last few days, the rest of this city of nearly fifty thousand consisted of thirty-two precisely and officially defined residential neighborhoods, a few of which were supremely elegant and luxurious (Vistas Las Palmas, where they’d been a few hours earlier, was an example), but most of which were not supremely elegant and luxurious. As with any city.

“And which one do the Vanderveres live in?” Chris asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve never been there. I’m trusting the GPS to get us there. It doesn’t look too far, but we’d better head over now. I’ve saved the epicenter, the very
heart
of the heart of downtown, to show you on the way back.”

A
s expected, the Vanderveres lived in a very nice neighborhood, on a quiet cul-de-sac.
When Alix pulled into the driveway alongside an aging but beautifully maintained Lexus, she was struck by what a long way this house was—geographically, culturally, and historically—from where the Vanderveres had lived just off the Harvard campus in the old days. There, their house dated from the 1760s and looked it: a small, clunky, wood-shingled saltbox right around the corner from the Longfellow House. The poet’s home, now a National Parks histo
ric site, had served as General Washington’s headquarters during the siege of Boston, and one of Washington’s colonels had been billeted for several weeks in what would become the Vanderveres’ home a couple of centuries later.

Here, their house, low-slung and sleek, with white stucco walls and a pebbled roof, had probably been built in the 1950s, when Western ranch style had been the rage. Alix couldn’t say it was one of her favorite architectural fashions, but she had to admit that the stark design aesthetic went well with the desert ambience. Still, it was strange to think of Prentice and Margery, so elegant and cultivated and old-fashioned—so
Eastern
—living here.

Alix and Chris were met at the door by a slim, middle-aged Hispanic woman in a white uniform dress. “Professor and Mrs. Vandervere are waiting for you on the patio, if you will follow me.”

They were taken through a living room and dining room sparely furnished with Scandinavian-designed chairs and tables, clean-lined and modern, and mostly made of sand-colored teak. The Vandeveres must have left their heavy, dark, old furniture behind when they’d come out here to all this sun and open sky, Alix thought, and all things considered, it had probably been the right decision.

“You know, that’s what I need,” Chris whispered as they trailed the woman. “A maid. And maybe a butler too.”

“What, no footman?” Alix whispered back. “No groundskeeper?”

Prentice and Margery Vandervere were sitting in the shade of the awninged patio with tall highball glasses on the table in front of them, and a smiling Prentice stood up to greet their guests when they were ushered outside. But Margery didn’t get up. Time had been harder on her than on Prentice. She was in a wheelchair now, drawn and pinched, and with a lightweight summer blanket over her legs. She had dyed her hair a jet black that Alix thought unfortunate. And whereas Prentice had kept the pink-cheeked, smooth complexion that so many of the rich and wellborn seemed to retain into their later years, Margery’s face was age-mottled and wrinkled. To see her this way came as a sad surprise. Back in the Harvard days, Mrs. Vandervere, unashamedly gray-haired then, had been a fixture at the afternoon teas; active, lively, and funny.

But that had been ten years ago, after all, and she had probably been seventy then.
Tempus fugit.
Even at thirty, Alix had learned that the older you get, the faster it
fugit
s.

“Hello, Mrs. Vandervere,” Alix said, extending her hand. “It’s wonderful to see you again.”

Her manner must have given away what she was thinking, because Margery barked a short laugh. “Alix, please, despite appearances, I am not in extremis or even permanently wheelchair-bound. The reason you see me thus”—a graceful flutter of both hands took in the wheelchair—“is that my knees began refusing to follow orders despite my many threats and admonitions, and so I finally turned them in for a new pair. The operation was only last week, you see, and I haven’t yet gotten used to them. Nor they to me.”

“I hope we aren’t putting you to any trouble,” Chris said.

“No, no, none at all. I don’t really do anything even when all body parts are more or less operational. Prentice only keeps me around for ornamental purposes.”

So the old Margery was still in there, Alix was glad to see. And if she’d had both knees replaced a few days ago, then she had every right to look a bit drawn.

“Lena, God preserve her from harm, takes care of everything,” Margery said. She made a brief finger wave in the direction of the house and two seconds later Lena came hustling out.

“Now, what would you like to drink?” Margery asked them. “Prentice is having a Manhattan and I’m drinking a Tom Collins. Lena does them both very well.”

Alix couldn’t help smiling. They might have left their 1950s furniture back on the East Coast, but not their drink habits.

“Just a glass of red wine for me,” Chris said to Lena.

Alix asked for a Tom Collins, partly because she’d never had one, but primarily because it looked so good, thirst-quenching and crystal-clear in the ice-frosted glass at Margery’s elbow.

When the drinks came they chitchatted for a while, mostly about Alix’s career and Chris’s collecting. Prentice in particular was interested in Chris’s predilections within the American Modern ranks and showed obvious approval for her disinterest in the Abstract Expressionists among them. Chris spoke excitedly about the collection she was building with Alix’s help, and Prentice offered his own ideas on what made a sensible private art collection. Chris chose not to mention the miniatures she had tried to buy just that afternoon—a wise choice, in Alix’s opinion.

The Vanderveres were the same good hosts they’d been a decade ago, showing more interest in their guests than in talking about themselves, but eventually the conversation broadened and Alix found an opening for a question she’d been waiting to ask. “Prentice, you seemed really disappointed not to have had the chance to talk to my father. I can’t help wondering why.”

“Why would I not want to? A fascinating man, a man of principle. I have a great deal of admiration for him. Always have.”

Now there was a stunner. Of all the people in the world to be the first one in ten years—certainly the first establishment type—to express admiration for Geoffrey London, Prentice Vandervere would have been her last pick. Prentice himself was her model of probity and integrity, but as for Geoff, while there was much to admire (and love) about him, he was, to put it charitably, a little flexible when it came to matters of ethics.

“You look surprised,” Prentice said, laughing, “but what I said is true. I followed his trial with great interest, you see. It was extraordinary . . . unique, really. That a respected authority on conservation, a Metropolitan Museum conservator, should be accused defrauding his private clients out of millions was unbelievable.”

“But true,” Alix pointed out. “He did make exacting copies of those paintings, sixteen of them, and he did give the owners back the copies rather than the originals, and then he did sell the originals to other buyers for millions of dollars.” None of which was left after court costs and suit settlements, she might have added. “And he went to jail for eight years, and even he very readily admits it was justified. Legally.”

“Yes, legally. Exactly. That was the aspect of his many reported comments that intrigued me: that legally he might be guilty of violations of the criminal code, but ethically, morally, his actions were actually commendable. It’s a topic I’d have liked to explore with him.”

It was also a topic that Alix had often explored—that is, argued about—with her father, and over time Geoff had brought her a lot nearer to his point of view. It was his contention—and the facts supported him in this—that the sixteen original owners he defrauded had all come to him to restore their beautiful seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century paintings in preparation for selling them in order to be able to buy late twentieth-century works (
monstrosities
was Geoff’s word for them) that in the current bizarre market were worth more in money and prestige than the works of the Old Masters themselves. It was Geoff’s position that he had “rescued” these paintings from Philistines who didn’t know the difference between art and junk, and put them into the loving hands of culturally literate people who understood and appreciated their artistic value. And the fact that his switcheroo had also happened to put those millions of dollars in his pocket? Irrelevant. Beside the point.

Maybe so, but it was what had sent him to jail; that, too, was a mere technicality. In his view he stood unconvicted of any ethical misdeeds. What he had done was illegal, yes, but he had done nothing
wrong
. It was what he’d maintained at his trial and it was what he maintained today.

“You see,” Prentice said, “I feel much the same sense of moral outrage when I see a museum like the Brethwaite demean itself by selling off—‘deacessioning,’ if you prefer the gentler euphemism—its most glorious possessions so that it can buy the works of momentarily fashionable artists in their place. It’s pathetic, really. Artistic merit—beauty—doesn’t enter into the decision at all.”

“I don’t understand,” Alix said. “I thought that the paintings that were being auctioned off were for general museum upkeep, not to buy anything new for the collection.”

“That’s so, but the reason they are being auctioned off, or banished to the basement, is that they don’t bring in ‘eyeballs.’ They’re not popular, you see, or entertaining. They don’t ‘grab’ the average person, don’t interest the youth. But when did it become the purpose of the museum of art to entertain the ‘average’ person, whoever that might be? When did it—”

“Prentice, dear, you’re getting a little exercised,” Margery said. “Try the bacon-wrapped shrimp. She cooked them with rosemary this time and it’s made all the difference in the world. They’re wonderful.”

This was in reference to the varied plates of hot hors d’oeuvres that Lena had brought out on a rolling cart a few minutes earlier. Chris and Margery had eaten a few and made appreciative noises as they did, but Alix and Prentice had been too engaged in conversation to try them.

In response to Margery, Prentice dialed down his fervor a little, but kept on talking. “In any case, the auction isn’t really what I was referring too, it’s just the latest indication of the museum’s direction, one more straw. It’s the Pollock that I was thinking of.”

“The Pollock?” Alix’s interest spiked. She remembered him expressing “concern” about the painting when they’d been standing in front of it talking to Jerry and Clark the other morning. “Do you think there’s something wrong with it too?”

“Wrong with it?” Prentice repeated, frowning. “You mean other than its being a Pollock?”

Alix smiled. She was thinking that the fact that she didn’t care for abstract art and contemporary art in general—more than once she’d been called a snob about it—was hardly surprising, given that her most influential mentors had been Prentice and Geoff.

“I wouldn’t know if there was anything ‘wrong’ with it or not,” Prentice went on. “No, I was referring to the deacessioning that we went through in order to purchase it.”

“I didn’t know you did.”

“Oh, yes. It cost the museum
sixteen million
dollars
, can you imagine?” He winced at the thought. “The most expensive object we ever purchased. We had to sell—”

“Deaccession,” Margery said with a twinkle in her eye. “Let us not be commonplace, Prentice.”

That made Alix think of something she’d heard Geoff say: “Have you ever noticed that the art museum is the only business in which one ‘buys’ things, but never ‘sells’ them? It merely ‘deaccessions’ them. So much more civilized.”

“—
sell,
” Prentice continued
, “
nine of our finest paintings, arguably our very finest, to afford it. Nine paintings that had come from Morgan Brethwaite’s personal collection.” His face grew longer as he remembered. “There was a wonderful, luminous Bierstadt of a clearing storm in the Rockies; a Degas horse race, not his best, but charming all the same; a magnificent storm at sea by Turner, no more than twelve by fourteen inches, but filled with stupendous power; a Vuillard; a somewhat slapdash but affecting Gainsborough family group; a Constable; a—”

“Dear, I would say you’ve made your point,” Margery said sweetly.

“Wow,” said Alix. “Mrs. B must have wanted the Pollock an awful lot to give those up.”

“Well, you know Clark by now.” He shook his head. “He can be immensely persuasive when he wants to be, at least”—and the corners of his mouth turned down—“to those susceptible to his famous charms.”

As far as she remembered, it was the first time she’d heard him speak disparagingly, let alone sarcastically, of anyone (with the sole exception of the Abstract Expressionists and their anarchic, anything-goes descendants). Obviously, Clark had gotten to him in a way that few others ever had.

“But you do have to admit, my dear,” Margery said to Prentice, “that his judgment has proven sound in the end. Since the installation of the Pollock, attendance has increased something like thirty percent, has it not?”

“I do have to admit that attendance numbers have increased, yes, but I don’t admit that Clark’s judgment was sound. We sacrificed quality for quantity. We surrendered enrichment and refinement for entertainment and celebrity. Are we to think of ourselves as being in competition with sports events and rock concerts, then? If so, to what end?”

At this point Chris got into it. “But isn’t an increase in museum attendance a good thing, Prentice? Don’t you want more people to come in and see the museum, the rest of the art? And to see the Pollock, for that matter, and make their own judgments about it?”