The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery) (21 page)

Alix would never have expected to feel sorry for the Iron Lady, but she was sorry for her now. “Lillian,” she said gently, “what Ted said is true. This is something I know about. Most buyers don’t demand scientific testing. As with you, they fall in love with something; they want so much for it to be the real thing that they don’t want to take a chance that it might not be. It’s like wives or husbands hiring private detectives to spy on their spouses. They don’t do it at the beginning, when they’re in love and full of wonderful thoughts about the future. They only do it after the relationship has gone bad—when it’s too late.”

“Thank you for that, child.” Lillian smiled sweetly at her. Good heavens, the woman was becoming more human by the minute. “But I still feel like the chump of the century. Ted, will we be able to recover our money from Lord & Keen?”

“I hope so, Lillian, but I can’t promise. There’s going to be a long line of people wanting the same thing. I suggest you have that picture examined by a reputable forensic lab right now, get their report as soon as possible, and get yourself at the head of that line.”

“I can put you in touch with the best of them, if you want,” Alix said.

Lillian sadly nodded her acceptance of the offer and turned to look out the window on her left. “Ah, me,” she sighed.

Ted and Alix started talking at the same time as they exited the museum, en route to the parking area. “I have a question,” Alix said. “I have an idea,” Ted said, and then, after they both laughed: “What’s your question?”

“About Clark getting murdered. Are you assuming it had to have something to do with the Pollock too?”

“With the Pollock in particular? I’m not sure, but I’m betting it’s got something to do with his flimflam operations with Lord & Keen in general. There were a lot of transactions, and we don’t yet know how many of them he was involved with. But even if you take just the Pollock and Austin’s Whistler, you’re talking about a tremendous amount of money changing hands—well over twenty million between the two of them. I think Jake needs to look into that. He might be focusing too much on Clark’s relations with the museum people here.”

“So do I need to tell him about all that, or will you?”

“I will.”

“Thank you. So what’s your idea?”

“About what?”

“A minute ago you said you had an idea.”

“Oh, right,” Ted said. “I was just thinking, let’s go have some lunch.”

Alix smiled. “I don’t know. The last lunch we had together didn’t work out all that well.”

He gave her a polite, pro forma smile in return. Did he really not understand what she meant, or was he tactfully pretending not to? Either way, it seemed to bode well.

“Sure,” she said, “let’s. I know some nice places just a few minutes away.”

“No, I have a better idea. Do you have to get right back, or can you take a few hours off?”

Where was this leading? Was she kidding herself or was he trying to set them on a new footing, or rather back on their old footing? Or was she reading more into this than was there? Ted was the hardest damn man to read that she’d ever met. Well, she supposed, the thing to do was to go with the flow and see where things led. “No, I can take a few hours. In fact, I can take the whole afternoon,” she ventured a bit more boldly. “I’m not on an hourly schedule. I have a due date to get the work done, and I’ve allowed myself plenty of time.”

“Good. Because I was also thinking that you’ve had a stressful few days here, and it’d do you good to get away from things for a while. See some different scenery.”

Alix laughed. “That’s exactly what Chris said we should do yesterday.”

“And did you?”

“Yes, she thought it would relax me, put things into perspective.”

“And did it?”

“Yes, actually, it did. We went to this lovely desert canyon. We could certainly go back there, if that sounds good to you. It’s not that far.”

He was shaking his head. “No, I’m not nuts about the desert, to tell you the truth. I like green, I like to see
water
in my rivers, and I wouldn’t mind getting out of the heat. Aren’t there some oases around here?”

“Yes, but what would you think of taking the aerial tramway up to Mt. Jacinto instead? You’ll see more white than green, but it’s supposed to be beautiful, and it’s what I was hoping to do today anyway. It’ll certainly get us out of the heat, and there’s a restaurant at the top, so we can get something to eat there.”

“Perfect, let’s get going.”

“Did you bring any warmer clothes?”

“My bags are still in my car. I’ve got a couple of sweaters. I’ll put one on.”

“I’d put them both on, if I were you. And we can swing by the Villa Louisa so I can get a coat. I’ll drive. I know the way.” She smiled up at him. (Had he always been this tall?) “This’ll be fun—we can have ourselves a snowball fight, and then go in for a hot lunch. No, let’s change the order. I’m starving.”

“Either way, sounds exciting.” He smiled at her. “And enjoyable.”

G
ett
ing to the tramway took a straight four-mile shot up North Palm Canyon Drive to where the streets thinned out, and empty lots started to outnumber houses, and the desert began to intrude. Then a turn onto the two-lane Tramway Road for another four miles, the first half through unlovely, boulder-strewn desert, and then up along the floor of a valley that ascended through increasing scrub and even a few clumps of greenery, to the aerial tramway’s base station at 2,600 feet. The famous rotating tram itself would then lift them to almost nine thousand feet, where it was winter ten months of the year.

While Ted put in a call to his office to apprise his people of the latest developments, Alix’s mind had already soared to the top of the mountain. There was a cocktail lounge up there, she knew, adjacent to the restaurant, and it went without saying that such a place could be counted on to have a roaring log fire going. They would have a good lunch, have their snowball fight, and then come back inside, into the lounge, laughing and pink-cheeked from the cold. They would sit in a warm place, relaxed and pleasantly tired, staring quietly into the fire and listening to the crackle of the wood, slowly sipping Irish coffees, or maybe Ted would be having a cognac. And Alix would quietly say, “You know, Ted, about that lunch we had in DC—I said some things . . .”

But . . .

. . . they never got that far. They didn’t even make it to the tram. A ten-inch-long Coachella Valley fringe-toed lizard had plans of its own.

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 and 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?”