The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery) by Aaron Elkins, Charlotte Elkins Read Free Book Online

bun with a nasty-looking dagger of a tortoiseshell comb stuck through it. When Alix had seen her before, she’d been wearing a mannish, well-tailored pantsuit. This time she was in a beat-up denim jacket and jeans worn over an old, much-laundered, open-throated white shirt. She looked as if she’d just arrived from breaking in a stubborn horse or two that had been too much for the hands down at the ranch. As a matter of fact, she did own a ranch a few miles south of town, so who knew, maybe she had.
    Twenty years earlier, in her mid-forties, she had married a manufacturer of plastic barrels for ballpoint pens, a man with the unlikely and uniquely unsuitable name of Lillienburger, but, to no one’s surprise, marriage didn’t suit her. Soon divorced, she had quickly and understandably discarded the “Lillian Lillienburger” name and gone back to “Brethwaite.” At the museum, she preferred to be addressed as Mrs. B (“not Miz, if you don’t mind”), and so it was.
    Her approach to running the museum fit the “Iron Lady” sobriquet too. She was the founding director, having been handed the reins directly by her father when it opened in 1996. The museum consisted almost entirely of his own collection, and she had indeed ruled it with an iron fist and a protective, frostily possessive attitude. She was demanding and domineering with the staff and no less dictatorial with museum visitors. There were strictly enforced, prominently displayed standards of dress and deportment for those members of the public who ventured onto the premises.
    These premises had been her childhood home, after all. She had grown up with most of the works of art that were on the walls now, so as far as she was concerned, visitors were little more than vulgar interlopers and rubberneckers to be tolerated only because her father had so willed it, and only so long as they behaved themselves. She was famous for having once called the police to demand that some poor guy be arrested and hauled off for “willfully despoiling private property.” He had been eating a donut and drinking a carton of milk—while leaning against his car, out in the parking area.
    As to the board of trustees, they were local businessmen and -women whom she herself, as its chair, had appointed, and at whose pleasure they served. A dozen years ago, two of them had stood up for themselves and voted against her on some now-forgotten issue. By the next day they had been dismissed, and since then no further insurgencies had arisen. People didn’t mess with Lillian Brethwaite.
    But according to what Alix had been hearing, things had changed four months ago, which was when Mrs. B had met Clark Calder at a meeting of the Association of Private Museums. She had been impressed (or charmed, or smitten, or conned, depending on whom you talked to) by the glib, patently ambitious Clark to the extent of creating a new position for him as senior curator. He had taken up the job within the week, and it quickly became clear to the others that he could do little wrong in Lillian’s eyes. Almost everything he proposed had either been implemented or was scheduled for implementation: relaxing the dress code to the extent that nothing short of showing up topless or with bare feet would deny you entrance; extracting a $15 “suggested donation” from visitors (admission had previously been free); creating Patron-level and Fellow-level museum memberships at $250 and $500 respectively, whereas there had previously existed only the $50 General level (shortly to become $75); and various other changes to remedy the museum’s dire financial situation.
    And of course it had been on Clark’s recommendation that IMS be brought in to do the two-month study of “client interface experience” that had resulted in the monumental shakeup now under way: the deaccession by auction of many “surplus” works of art (the first deacessioning in the museum’s history), the banishment to storage of many