The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery) (10 page)

Warmed by their concern, Alix answered patiently, but when it seemed they were never going to run out of questions, she held up both hands. “Truce. Can we please get off this subject for a while? Through lunch at least?”

“Yeah, lunch,” Tiny said, brightening. “Boy, I’m ready.”

“Good, let’s go. You’re going to love this place, just wait.”

G
eoff had his nose in the air, nostrils twitching, like an English hunting dog zeroing in on the fox. Tiny looked much the same, practically straining at the leash.

“Ah, those aromas,” Geoff said. “Heavenly.”

“Wow, it smells great in here!” exclaimed Tiny, his eyes closed. “I could be in the Carnegie right now. Somebody, quick, bring me a corned beef on rye!”

“Well, since the two of you never stop griping about the New York delis you can’t find in Seattle,” Alix said, “I thought you’d enjoy this place.”

“This place” was Sherman’s Delicatessen & Bakery, which Madge had recommended as the best Jewish delicatessen in the city. It advertised itself as a “New York–style deli” and was obviously modeled on the old-time delicatessens that New Yorkers of a certain age remembered with such fondness.

The Brethwaite people seemed to like it too. There, a few tables away, sat the curatorial staff, minus Clark—Prentice, Madge, Alfie, and Drew. And Mrs. B’s secretary, Richard. Alix had waved to them coming in, but they’d had their heads together and hadn’t seen her.

“It sounds like a New York deli too,” Chris said, pointing out that the man standing at the central cash register was yelling to his old customers and ribbing them, and the staff was loud, jokey, and kibitzing with the patrons to the point of rudeness.

“I detect a subtle difference, though,” Geoff said. “Here, I have the sense that we’re witnessing a sort of genial playacting, not serious, with everybody merely
pretending
to be raucous and rude.”

“Whereas in New York you get the genuine article?” Chris offered slyly.

“Precisely.”

Alix had dropped out of the conversation. Like the others, she had her eyes on the menu, but she was thinking about that venomous blog again, and only now realizing that there’d been no mention of her father, despite the opportunities to sling more mud at him. Did she have it wrong, then? Was
she
the object of the blog and the reviews—and not Geoff? But who could possibly be so spitefully determined to stigmatize her, to shred her reputation, her livelihood . . . her life? And why? And what would have prompted the creation—
yesterday
—of a brand-new blog totally devoted to her wickedness and ineptitude?

She realized Geoff was speaking to her and tuned back in.

“. . . just that you seem a bit, ah . . .” he was saying with some delicacy.

“Just that something’s bugging you,” Chris said bluntly. “You’re a million miles away. What’s up? Still chewing over what happened last night, huh?”

“Actually, no, something else. I came across this new blog, this website, The “Art Whisperer”, which . . .”

Three smart phones were immediately whipped out of their hiding places and flicked on. Alix knew better than to compete with smart phones, so she just shut up and sipped water while they read, each of them muttering comments as they went along.

Geoff: “My word . . . Oh, my . . .”

Chris: “I don’t believe this . . . You gotta be kidding me . . . How could they? . . . Jeez . . .”

Tiny (in a rumbling, ominous mutter): “
Cavolo
. . .
Cazzo
. . .”

They were interrupted by their waitress, a short-haired, middle-aged dyed blonde in white shirt and trousers and a black apron. “Get the matzo ball soup,” was her greeting. “Stay away from the stuffed kishke, that’s my advice for today.” She tilted her head toward the man at the cash register. “Don’t tell Airhead I said so.” Her nameplate read
Donna
.

“Your secret is safe with us,” said Geoff. “I believe I’ll have a pastrami sandwich, please.”

“On rye?”

“Of course.”

“Good choice,” Donna said, writing. “Anything to drink?”

“You wouldn’t actually carry Dr. Brown’s celery soda, would you?”

“We got it. I’d stay away from that too, though.”

“Nevertheless,” said Geoff politely.

Donna shrugged. “It’s your stomach.”

Tiny ordered a pickled herring appetizer, a bowl of mushroom-barley soup, and the knockwurst and corned beef dinner plate. Chris, who was almost as hearty an eater as he was, got an entrée-sized Cobb salad and a Reuben sandwich, and Alix ordered the hot corned beef sandwich.

“This blog,” Geoff said as Donna left with their orders. “Don’t you have any idea of who’s behind it? Anybody with a reason to bear a grudge?”

Alix didn’t, and neither did the others. “But even if I did, what would I do about it, sue him?”

“Damn right!” Tiny said with some heat.

“Honestly, Tiny, I do not want to upend my life, and spend thousands of dollars, going through a suit.”

“Actually,” Chris said, “I think you do have grounds for a suit here. I’m no lawyer, but—”

“Neither am I,” said Geoff, “but I do happen to have some familiarity with the issue. Not
everything
they said about me at the trial was true, after all, and I looked into the possibility of a suit myself. From what I learned, Chris is right. This is libel, pure and simple: an effort to injure your professional reputation with defamatory, untrue accusations.”

“So did you wind up suing anybody?” Chris asked him.

“Ah, no. In the end, I didn’t feel I had a convincing case. I was a disgraced conservator and a convicted felon serving a long jail sentence for fraud. Exactly what ‘reputation’ was I protecting? Alix, however, is not in that situation.” He knocked twice on the tabletop.

But Alix had a friend who had filed a suit a few years ago under similar circumstances. The suit, rancorous and time consuming, had yet to be resolved, and the friend now bitterly regretted ever having gotten into it. “It’s eating up my life,” he’d said.

“Sorry, folks, but no thanks,” said Alix. “Anyway, since we have no idea who’s behind it, it’s pointless to even talk about it, so let’s just forget it.”

Geoff shook his head at her. “My dear, this is important—to you, I mean, to your reputation in this small and highly competitive field. I believe it’s worth every effort to try and find this person, and when you do—when we do—then you must take some kind of action to counteract it. If suing is the most appropriate route, then sue it should be. You know you can count on us for all the support we can give.”

“Absolutely,” Chris said.

“Nah, Alix is right, screw this
sue
stuff,” Tiny said. “Listen, we find out the name of this bum, this
cafone
, I give my Uncle Guido a call, he whacks the guy the same day. Problem solved.” Tiny had a pretty thick Bronx accent to begin with, but here he’d broadened it to his over-the-top version of Mobspeak.
We fin’ ou’ da name a dis bum, dis
cafone
. . .
“Bada bing, bada boom,” he finished, making the appropriate thumb-and-forefinger trigger pull.

“I like it,” Alix said, laughing. “Case closed. And here comes our lunch. Let’s eat.”

“
’Ey,
mangiamo
!” cried Tiny, urging Donna on with an expansive wave.

During the flight from Seattle, Chris had learned that Tiny was a huge Frank Sinatra fan, and to accommodate him she had called from the plane to book a tour of Twin Palms, Sinatra’s famous Palm Springs residence and a major tourist attraction, but had no success.

“Sorry, Tiny,” she said, turning off her phone, “no openings for the rest of the week.”

Tiny’s face fell. “Nuts. He’s my absolute favorite singer. Maybe I can come back another time. Thanks for trying, Chris.”

“They did say we might be able to get into Elvis’s house, though. Interested?”

He lit up. “That’d be
great
. He’s my absolute
second
favorite singer.”

And so she’d made reservations for the four of them on the two o’clock tour of the “Elvis Honeymoon Hideaway,” where Elvis and Priscilla Presley had spent the first nights of their marriage. As soon as lunch was over, Alix put the address into the GPS and drove off with them to the ritzy Las Palmas District. They got lost on the district’s winding streets near the end, and Tiny, who was also a dedicated movie buff (Alix was learning some surprising things about him today), was in heaven. At the airport he’d bought a guidebook to the old movie stars’ homes, and he ticked them excitedly off as they passed. “Wow, right there, that was Kirk Douglas’s house . . . That was Dinah Shore’s . . . Whoa, that was Edward G. Robinson’s . . . That one right here on the corner? That’s where Donald O’Connor lived . . .”

After all that, the Honeymoon Hideaway was a bit anticlimactic and more than a little strange. With a dozen or other visitors, they were greeted at the door by their guide, a fully costumed impersonator—not your everyday, ho-hum Elvis impersonator either, but a Priscilla impersonator (the only one in the world, she announced) who was indeed a near look-alike to Ms. Presley. Standing in the entrance foyer, “Priscilla” offered a spirited introduction to the story of Elvis’s time at the house, going so far as to provide different voices for the King, Priscilla herself, Frank Sinatra, and even Elvis’s father.

The tour proper then began. Straight walls must have been considered gauche by Palm Springs’s mid-century, because, like the Brethwaite, the house was built of intersecting circles, with no straight walls. They began in the kitchen, with its huge, hooded (circular) charcoal grill, and then were taken into the living room, where they were encouraged to sit on the original curved, built-in banquette for snapshots—“If you look right above you, you can see photos of Elvis and Priscilla sitting right where you are now, on these very same cushions”—and to strum a guitar purported to be one of Elvis’s own. Then through the sliding glass doors onto the back patio where they looked at the swimming pool, heard more stories, and went across the lawn to see the roof of Marilyn Monroe’s house just below, and to stand on the very spot on the lawn where Sinatra had parked to help the Presleys flee to Las Vegas for their wedding to escape the gimlet-eyed gossip columnist who lived next door.

Alix and Chris decided to sit out that part of the tour and instead they waited for the others in a couple of lawn chairs beside the pool.

“I’ve been thinking,” Alix said. “Maybe you all have a point about that blog. Maybe just ignoring it isn’t the right thing to do. But is it even possible to find out who’s doing it? Can you trace the what-do-you-call-it, the URL?”

“The URL doesn’t tell you anything. It’s the IP address you need—the address of the individual computer that it was created on—but even if you get it, it’s still a hassle identifying the guy himself. First, it’s next to impossible, and it takes months, if not years. You see, even if you get the IP address, it’s not necessarily the IP address of Mr. Creepo’s own computer. How do we know he’s not sending it from a library computer, or a computer rental place? And even if he’s been using his own computer, the ISP, the Internet service provider, isn’t going to give you his name without a court order, and in order to get a court order you’d have to prove that a crime had been committed, which in your case is the catch, because in order to do that you’d have to first—”

Alix lifted her hand. “Forget it, I’m sorry I asked. I’m already bored with the whole thing and we haven’t even started. Really, I just don’t think it’s worth it.”

When the rest of the tour group returned, Alix and Chris rejoined them to see the bedroom (“Feel free to sit on the bed where Lisa Marie was conceived”), the bathroom (“Climb into the Jacuzzi if you want to”), and the toilet area (“Have a seat on the ‘throne,’ if you want. You can even use it when we take a break”).

Tiny, who had happily sat on the banquette and strummed the guitar, was reluctant when it came to sitting on the bed or in the Jacuzzi, and incensed about the offer to use the toilet.

“That’s disrespectful,” he growled, and being the size that he was and looking the way that he did, no one took Priscilla up on the offer.

For the rest of the tour he remained out of sorts, and at the end, when Priscilla said, “If you enjoyed our tour, please go to our website, where you’ll find a link to TripAdvisor, and give us a good review,” he muttered, “And if we don’t like it?”