The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery) Read Online Free PDF Page B

museum made cell-phone reception iffy, so Alix went out to one of the four twelve-foot-wide stone discs that served as entrance steps, where she knew reception was good. There wasn’t a right angle or a straight line in the place; everything was curved, and the four interlocking discs at the entrance mimicked the four giant discs that made up the building itself. Alix sat down on one to make her call. She dialed a number in Seattle.
    “Alix? Hi, what’s up?”
    The woman on the other end was her friend Christine LeMay. When they’d first met a little over a year earlier, Chris had recently resigned from her job as an IT systems/communications analyst at Sytex, an “international health care information technology advisory consultancy.” Considering that those alarming muddles of multisyllabic words were beyond the comprehension of a non-techie like Alix, and that Chris knew next to nothing about art, which was Alix’s specialty, they made an unlikely pair. More than that, Chris was big and raw-boned, a talkative, outspoken six-footer-plus with a startling honk for a laugh, given to flamboyant shawls and serapes and multiple rows of jangling bracelets. She was at her sparkling, noisy, funny best in crowds. Alix was the opposite. At five-nine, she was low-key and reserved, and she dressed conservatively (“classically” was the way she preferred to think about it). She kept her thoughts largely to herself, and she liked the quiet life. Well, to a point.
    Chris had made a great deal of money when Sytex had gone public and her options had matured; she was bent on using some of it to develop a respectable art collection, and a curator friend at the Seattle Art Museum had suggested that Alix London was just the person to help her build it. Whatever the reason, they had hit it off from Day One, and Alix had wound up doing a lot more than help her with her art collection. It had been a subtle intervention or two on Alix’s part that had gotten Chris to mend her threadbare relationship with Craig Templeton, the man who had once been the love of her life and who was now her husband. Chris had been enormously grateful and was to this day determined to repay the favor. Nothing she’d come up with had come close to panning out (they had different tastes in men), but Alix appreciated her intentions and they were now close friends. They worked well together, too, on Chris’s budding art collection—Alix a patient teacher, Chris an eager student—and Chris was now well on the way to developing a fine collection of American Moderns (that most permeable and vague art classification), including Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Hart Benton, George Bellows, and Grant Wood.
    But no Marsden Hartleys.
    She was excited the moment she heard. “Of course I’m interested. Are they really any good?”
    “They’re not what you’d call ‘finished,’ but they’re nicely done. There’s a liveliness to them, and they’re . . . interesting; historically, I mean. You can see Cézanne’s influence all over them.”
    “Fifty to seventy thousand, huh? For both of them? Does that seem in the ballpark to you? Sounds kind of cheap to me. Oh, my God, listen, to me, seventy thousand dollars is cheap . I’ve become a terrible person.” And there was the honk. “Who woulda thunk it?”
    “Well, we all have our crosses to bear, you know, and yours is being nouveau riche. My heart aches for you. Anyway, the reason it sounds so cheap to you is that you’re used to paying for oil paintings. These are pencil, and they don’t bring nearly as much; people aren’t that interested. And don’t forget, art market prices don’t have much to do with quality. They—”
    “I know. You’ve been telling me about once an hour for the last year: Art market prices depend on art market prices. Whatever they went for at the last auction is your best predictor for how they’ll be priced at the next one. Except higher.”
    “Very good. I didn’t realize