The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery) by Aaron Elkins, Charlotte Elkins Page B

to find Alix.
    “Of course, come in, Mrs. B.”
    The director was dressed cowhand-style again: faded denims, threadbare at the elbows and knees; old white shirt with a ragged collar edge; and scuffed lizard-skin cowboy boots. In her hand she was brandishing a typewritten sheet of paper. “You need to see this,” she said and plopped it down on the desk.
    Alix reluctantly took it. What now? You need to see this was not generally a precursor to anything good.
    Mrs. B stood, rigid and straight-backed, her bony, sun-browned hands on the back of a chair, her thin lips pursed. Definitely not good , Alix thought. And it wasn’t. It was, in fact, a printout of The “Art Whisperer”, the very blog page to which her computer was open.
    “It was in my e-mail in-box this morning,” Mrs. B said. “I don’t know who sent it, and I don’t want to know.”
    “I was just reading this myself,” Alix said, turning the computer so the older woman could see. “And I have no idea what this is about. I hope you know that everything I’ve read so far is . . . is . . .” She flicked the sheet with the back of her fingers. “ ‘A well-documented association with the infamous Albanian mafia’? Well, sure, if by association he means being used as a shield and choked practically to death by an Albanian thug trying to get away from the Albanian police. And, and calling me a person of interest when I was actually—”
    “Alix, I don’t want to hear your explanations.”
    Alix felt the back of her neck grow warm. “But surely you can’t believe—”
    “You misunderstand.” There was a slight easing up, a barely perceptible warming of tone. “I detest cowardly, anonymous mischief-making like this. Even if I didn’t know you, I would never believe a single word of it. Believe me, my opinion of you is the same as it was before I saw this, and that is very high, indeed. I’m bringing this to your attention only because I think you should know that someone is actively trying to do you harm.”
    “Thank you for that, Mrs. B,” Alix said humbly.
    “What do you intend to do about it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “If it were I,” said Mrs. B, leaning over the back of the chair and speaking confidentially, “I would find out who the bastard is and tell my lawyers to get on his case and stay on his back the way shit sticks to a blanket, pardon my French.”
    Alix couldn’t help laughing. “I’ll certainly keep that in mind. Thank you again.”
    What in the world did the staff have against Mrs. B, she wondered afterward. As far as Alix was concerned, the Iron Lady was a sweetie.
    She returned to the blog.
Now, a charitable person might point out that she has never been arrested or convicted, that all of this is strictly coincidental, an unlucky tendency to turn up in the wrong place at the wrong time. But where there’s smoke there’s fire, says the old maxim, and Alix London’s professional life has been one smoke signal after another. Who else do you know who . . .
    She shut the site down and sat there, her heart pumping angrily away. This was far worse than the reviews; not just opinions and value judgments, but outright lies and contorted half-truths. And not about the book, but about her . There wasn’t a single sentence in that blog, not one, that was true. Not one of those “facts” was even close to being factual. Surely, nobody could believe—
    She jumped at the sound of the telephone buzzer, took a deep breath, and let it out through her mouth. It seemed to settle her, and she picked up the phone.
    “Ms. London? It’s Jock downstairs. I got these people here for you.”
    “People? Plural?”
    “Well, there’s this lady, Christine, uh—”
    “LeMay. Yes, but she’s the only one I was expecting.”
    “Well, there’s two guys with her. One of ’em’s your father. I know because that was the first thing that came out of his mouth. He couldn’t wait to tell me.” He switched to a wildly off-base