The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery) (16 page)

It was growing increasingly clear that he would have to kill her too.

The thought repelled him. Running down Clark had been bad enough—awful—the dreadful, unforgettable sound of it, the sight of that disfigured face up against the windshield—blood, shattered teeth—the fright, the freezing horror when the body got caught on the mirror, or on something, and he couldn’t shake it off at first, so that it flopped and banged against the side window a few inches from his face. Horrible.

He was not a killer, he didn’t see himself as a killer, he had never before killed anyone or even thought about it; not seriously, not until the day before yesterday. And now, not twenty-four hours after killing Clark, he was sitting here priming himself for a second murder. Unbelievable. But he knew the kind of person Alix London was, and he couldn’t chance letting her live. There was so very much at stake: the rest of his life.

But it would have to be done differently. Clark’s murder had been unplanned and wildly dangerous (although, thank God, there had been no witnesses), a frustrated reaction to Clark’s arrogance and stupid, stupid intransigence. With Alix it would have to be safer, better thought out—and especially, accomplished somehow at a distance. He didn’t think he could stand another experience like the one he’d had with Clark.

Think.

For once Jake Cruz had the pleasure of sitting behind a desk that matched his size—it matched
him
too, wide and heavy, with thick bowling-pin legs; a sturdy and reliable piece of work, but starting to show signs of wear. Made of solid oak supposedly crafted from the timbers of a British warship captured on Lake Erie during the War of 1812, it had once belonged to L. Morgan Brethwaite. Now it sat in the museum director’s office, where Lillian Brethwaite had used it ever since assuming that job. Unfortunately, the massive chair that went with it had been too big for Mrs. B—her toes barely touched the floor—so it had been replaced with a smaller one, an austere, unpadded wooden banker’s chair, the arms of which had been digging into Jake’s hips for the past hour and a half.

He was just finishing up the last of his interviews with the curatorial staff. Madge Temple had proved the most cooperative, or at least the talkiest, of the bunch and he was having trouble getting her out of there. He tried one more time.

“Well, I think that wraps it up, Ms. Temple. Thanks very much for your help.” He indicated the card he’d given her on his previous attempt to shake himself loose. “You’ll call me if anything comes to mind?”

The expression on Madge’s face, a bit porky but still engagingly gaminlike, suggested that she found this amusing, but then she had seemed to find the entire interview amusing, to find
him
amusing. “Now why,” she said as if to an invisible personage off to her right, “do I have the impression he’s trying to get rid of me?”

Jake managed a chuckle. “Well, actually, I do need to get—”

“I’m going, I’m going. Back to the grindstone.” But at the door, she turned. “Oh, one question, though. Is it all right to tell my husband how this went—what we talked about—or am I sworn to secrecy?”

“Perfectly all right, no problem at all.”

As if, Cruz thought, it would have made any difference if he’d told her she had to keep it to herself. Either way, Drew Temple would have heard it all before the hour was out—he was probably hearing about it right now—and anybody else she could corral would hear it too, no doubt considerably embellished, by the end of the day.

He really didn’t have any objection. All four interviews had gone over the same ground and everybody’s information had corroborated everybody else’s. He was pretty certain that all had been reasonably honest and forthcoming in answering his questions, possibly because they knew that any issues they tried to evade—anything potentially disadvantageous to themselves—would be happily served up by one or more of the others. But then his purpose hadn’t been to probe very deeply; he was simply trying to get a grasp of the situation at the museum vis-à-vis Clark.

He eased himself out of the chair and stood at a window massaging the dent in his left hip. So what had he learned? He’d learned that if Clark Calder’s plans were implemented, every one of them had something to lose.

a) Drew and Madge Temple’s separate departments—Decorative Arts and Costumes and Furnishings—were to be combined into one Costumes and Decorative Arts department under Madge. Drew would be demoted to assistant curator and would henceforth report to his wife, an outcome at which the sour-faced, pointy-nosed Drew took extreme umbrage and thought unfair, inappropriate, unseemly, and deeply flawed. Madge, after due reflection, wasn’t exactly nuts about it either. It held little promise of improved domestic relations.

b) A similar problem confronted the stately Prentice Vandervere and the rosy-cheeked, palpably tipsy Alfie Wellington. Vandervere’s department, Paintings, was to be combined with Wellington’s Prints and Drawings into a single department, necessitating the elimination of one of the two curator positions. According to Clark, the decision as to which of the two men was to be put in charge, and which to be downgraded or possibly let go, had not yet been made. There was general agreement that Clark’s main intention here was to humiliate Prentice, with whom he’d been at odds from the beginning. The only one who let Clark off was Prentice himself. “I really am an old codger now,” he said, “and perhaps the job would be a bit too much for me.”

Jake thought otherwise. The old guy was sharper than
he
was, and miles ahead of Alfie Wellington, whose brains had been well suffused in
marinade au bourbon
and who had years ago lost whatever ambition he’d once had. Alfie himself feared—hated—either possible outcome. He didn’t want a more important job, and he didn’t want to lose his current position. He just wanted things to stay the comfortable way they were. (
Not so different from me, really
, Jake thought.)

Okay then, what did it all amount to? Yes, they all had reason to not like Calder very much, as Alix had said, and perhaps even to wish him dead. But kill him? What for? Mrs. Brethwaite had already approved the plans, so what good would it do any of them to get rid of Clark?

But like any seasoned cop, he well knew that logic went only so far in explaining motives for murder. Or human behavior in general.

T
he afternoon turned out to be just what Alix and Chris had hoped. It was a straight shot toward the Salton Sea on Highway 111, through flat, open desert, and the ride went quickly. They had the windows down, and the warm, dry breeze felt cleansing and revitalizing. They were almost to the sea, passing through the small town of Mecca, when Chris, leafing through a travel guide Alix had brought with her from Seattle, came up with another idea. “How about a hike instead? There’s this place, Painted Canyon, just a couple of miles up a dirt road.” She read aloud: “Spectacular wind-and-water-carved rock formations, narrow, shaded canyons hemmed in by walls streaked with rose, pink, red, purple, and green mineral deposits, with bighorn sheep on the—”

“I’m convinced. Where’s the road?”

“Turn left there,” Chris said, pointing.

They saw no bighorn sheep, but the rest was as advertised. They strolled for almost three hours on the sandy, flat bottom of a canyon—
cleft
would be a better word, just a few yards wide in some places, and towered over on either side by sheer, eighty-foot cliffs lit with faint pastel colors. The day had grown hot, but down at the canyon bottom, shaded by the walls, it was cool and comfortable, at least for the first hour, before the sun had reached its height, and Alix imagined she could still smell the river that had created this place so many eons ago. They saw only two small groups of hikers (serious ones with sturdy, worn boots and multiple liter bottles of water). Most of the time they had the place to themselves.

They stopped at one pretty place with sweeping views a long way up and down the winding canyon, where Alix said: “Do you realize there is nothing visible here that was made by humans or altered in any way by humans? This is no different from the way it would have looked a million years ago.”

“Which reminds me,” said Chris, master of the non sequitur, “I’m hungry. And thirsty.”

While Alix and Chris had been exploring Painted Canyon, things had been hopping along at the police department. Jake Cruz had come back from his interviews at the museum with an intriguing new idea forming in his mind. Not long after he arrived at the station he went looking for his partner on the Calder case, Pat Malloy. He found him in his cubicle, peering hard at his computer screen. His desk was alarmingly cluttered with file folders. In his left hand was one of them, in the other his computer mouse, and between his teeth, like a pirate dagger, was a ballpoint pen. The screen at which he was looking so intently showed four different windows. The existence of the big corkboard beside his desk could only be taken on faith, so completely swathed was it in push-pinned papers, sketches, and photos.

“You busy?” Jake asked.

“Now why would you ask that?” Malloy said around the pen, continuing to scowl at the screen. “I was just sitting around trying to come up with something to pass the time. Thinking about taking a nap, maybe.”

“Well, instead of that, how about coming with me to the video room? I want to show you something.”

Malloy removed the ballpoint from his mouth. “Mm, okay, I
guess
I could put the snooze off till after lunch, but tell me what we’re going to see.”

“Interview with the London woman.”

“I watched it while you were gone, Jake. I just finished ten minutes ago. I could practically recite it to you.”

“Humor me.”

“Okay, if it’s that important,” Malloy said, “but we can do it right here. I put it on a flash drive . . . somewhere.” He was rummaging with both hands in a drawer that was as cluttered as the desktop.

“Are you kidding me? I can barely fit into my own so-called office when I’m all by myself. I’m not about to squeeze into this place with you. I’ve already set it up in the video room. Come on, buddy, up and at ’em.”

The video room was two doors down from the interrogation room and was mostly used for watching live interviews. Once upon a time it had been the evidence room, but that had been moved downstairs to a larger space. The plaque on the door still said “Evidence Room,”
however
.
One of these days somebody would get around to changing it, but since it was used only by the detectives and they all knew what it was, nobody had bothered.

“Okay, now,” Jake said, settling himself. “I’ve got it right at the place I want you to look at. Or more specifically, to listen to.”

On the screen, Alix was speaking:

“
‘A deal is a deal,’ I remember Clark saying. And he wasn’t happy about it. But the other person must have been pushing him, because Clark, um, let’s see. . . . Oh, that’s right. The other guy—well, I don’t know if it was a guy or not—the other person asked for seven at first and Clark said that was out of the question, and then after listening for another minute he said all right, six was possible, and that seemed to settle it. He didn’t like it, though.”

“Six what? Hundred dollars, thousand dollars?” Jake’s voice from off-screen. “
Million
dollars?”

“Six dollars, for all I know. Or six paintings, or six tickets to a baseball game. I have no idea. You understand, we weren’t really listening, we were just . . . overhearing. And that’s about it. Oh, no, wait a minute. He called him by name! It was . . . it was . . . Seymour . . . Milton . . . something like that, something old-fashioned . . . Stanley . . . Morton . . . no,
Melvin
, that was it!”

“Melvin. Mean anything to you?”

“Nothing. Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about, but is there anything else you remember? Even if it doesn’t seem like anything?”

“Yes, I think—”

Jake fast-forwarded through his phone call’s interruption until Alix continued.

“The person he was talking to on the phone—just before he hung up,” he said, ‘All right, Melvin, see you there.’ As if they were going to get together, or at least to be in the same place. I don’t think he said when, so I guess he could have been talking about some meeting or conference a year from now.”

“Or last night.”

Jake stopped the video. Alix’s face remained on the screen, caught with her mouth half-open and her eyes half-closed. “Now I’m going to repeat something she said and try to make it pretty much the way she said it. Tell me if I get it right.”

Malloy looked hard at him. “Jake, this is slightly weird.”

“Just listen: ‘All right, Melvyn’s. See you there.’ Did I get it?”

“On the nose. You’re very smart. Can I please go take my nap now?”

“Pat, I didn’t say the same thing, I said: ‘All right, Melvyn’s. See you there.’
M-e-l-v-y-n-s.”

“You’ve got to be joking,” Malloy said with a jerk of his head. “How the hell do
you
know how she spelled it? How would
she
know how Calder spelled it? They sound exactly the same.”

“That’s my point, don’t you see? How do we know—how would
she
know—whether he was talking
to
a person named Melvin, or
about
a place called Melvyn’s?”

“Like the restaurant, you mean?”

“Like the restaurant.”

Melvyn’s was the restaurant at the Ingleside Inn, a famous holdover from the Golden Age, when it had hosted just about every famous personality from Clark Gable to Salvador Dali to Norman Vincent Peale, and was still bringing in the tourist crowds with recent well-publicized sightings of the likes of Tori Spelling, Diahann Carroll, and Kirsten Dunst. It was also a pretty decent place to eat, and its Casablanca Lounge was a good place to have a quiet, secluded drink, as long as you got there on the early side.

“Possible,” Malloy allowed. “So you think what they were talking about was getting together at Melvyn’s.”

“That’s right.
Melvyn’s. See you there
. Period, not a comma. Sounds exactly like
Melvin, see you there
, because the ‘s’ carries over.”

Malloy was nodding along. “Possible,” he said again. “And that gets us where?”

“Wait, let me finish. Melvyn’s is on West Ramon Road, near South Cahuilla. Calder was killed on Patencio, just north of Santa Rosa, which—”

“—would be two or three blocks northwest of there.”

“—and three or four south of San Jacinto, which is where he was leasing,” Jake said. “And if you look at a map you’ll see it’s on the most likely route he would have taken if he was walking home from Melvyn’s.”

“And the ME says he had to have been struck from behind by a car heading north, which means he could very well have been heading home from there. I hate to say it, Jake, but I think you’ve got something here.”

“Ah, the light dawns,” said a grinning Jake, “but let’s take it a little further. That business with ‘seven’ being impossible and ‘six’ being okay? What if it didn’t refer to six hundred or six thousand or six million anything? What if—”

“—it referred to six o’clock? Maybe even six o’clock last night?”

“Right. Calder was killed a little before seven—we’ve got those two guys who heard the hit and came running out. That would fit perfectly with a brief meeting—say half an hour—at Melvyn’s, wouldn’t it?”

“It would, Detective Cruz. Very nice.”

“Thank you, Detective Malloy. Would you say the next step would be to see if we could get a lead on just who it was he was meeting with?”

“Sure would. We’ve got a good picture of Calder. I could take it over to the Ingleside and see if anybody remembers him and is able to give us a description of who he was with. In fact, if you want, I’ll take it over right now.”

“Pat, at this time of the day, you’re not going to find whoever staffs Melvyn’s at six p.m. Better save it till later in the afternoon. But there’s something else you can do now.”

“Hallelujah,” said Malloy dryly. “I was praying you’d come up with something to kill all this time I’ve got hanging over me.”

“Those two guys who ran out? We know from them that there was another car near the corner where he was hit, and it backed up and got out of there in a hurry, which tells us that this was a guy who saw what happened and wanted nothing to do with it, so he’s somebody we’d dearly love to talk to. From the information the two of them provided, the lab has come up with the probable make and model: a Mazda MX-5 Miata, 2010 or 2011. Red.”

Malloy nodded again. “That might conceivably help. Not your common everyday car.”

“What’s more, they’re pretty sure they’ve been seeing it around the neighborhood, so it’s a good bet whoever owns it lives nearby.”

“Interesting thought. Which way was it headed again? Before it backed away, I mean.”

“It was on Santa Rosa, about to cross Patencio going west. So I’d suggest that the place to start looking for it would be to start hitting doorbells on the very next block of Santa Rosa, and circle out from there for a few more blocks. Find a photo of a red Miata and show it around, see if anybody knows who owns one.”

“Okay.” Malloy stood up. “Just might get us somewhere.” He reached for the remote and closed down the image of Alix’s face, frozen into its heavy-lidded, open-mouthed expression; it shrank to a little white squib and disappeared.