Read Ride a Painted Pony (Superromance) Online
Authors: Carolyn McSparren
Ride a Painted Pony (Superromance) (3 page)
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Then she fixed herself a tuna sandwich.
Elmo protested. Filled cat dish or no, any available tuna was supposed to go down his gullet, not hers. She ignored him, cleaned up the kitchen and padded barefoot across the brick floor into the bathroom under her sleeping loft. In the large closet attached to the bathroom, she peeled off her clothes and dropped them into the hamper in a pouf of dust. Elmo sneezed daintily and regarded her with malevolent blue eyes.
She stood under a hot shower, scrubbing her body, her short nails and hair until she felt dust-free. She toweled her hair and ran a comb through it, then moisturized her face. She pulled on cotton underpants and a sports bra, a bulky black fisherman’s sweater, tight black jeans and, finally, black running shoes.
Eight-and-a-half minutes total.
No more hours spent on long streaked hair, body waves, acrylic fingernails, weekly manicures and pedicures, Swedish massages, bikini waxes and body wraps when she was swollen from P.M.S., or when Paul wanted her to make an especially good impression on one of his prize clients.
No more high heels, panty hose, tiered jewelry case. No more endless hours spent creating herself.
She’d been just like one of Kendall’s horses—her honest wood covered by layers of garish paint.
She reached for her satchel as the telephone rang. She was tempted to let the answering machine pick it up, then relented. “Hello,” she said.
“Taysie, darling, it’s mother.”
Taylor sighed. “Hi, Mom.”
“Darling, I haven’t heard from you in days. I drove by to check on you but you’ve changed the entry code on your gate again. You really should give me a key and the code. What if something happens to you out there all alone?”
“Mel has both the code and a key to the cabin, Mother.”
“He’s not family. He’s only your boss, and only so long as you refuse to give up this detective business.”
Taylor heard the edge of exasperation in her mother’s voice. “It pays well and I enjoy it.”
“You could do so much better. CeCe Washburn tells me she’s opening a branch of her antique store in Germantown. I know she’d love to have you help out.”
“At minimum wage plus commission, no doubt.”
“Darling, if money’s the problem you know—”
“Money is not the problem.”
“Oh, Taysie, your brother and I only want you to be happy and settled again. And to see you occasionally. Tell you what, meet me for lunch at the club tomorrow. I promise I won’t mention Mel Borman or your job.”
“Sorry, Mother, I’m working tomorrow.”
“You have to eat, dear.”
Guilt flooded her. Her mother did want her to be happy. Their definitions of happiness had simply ceased to coincide. “All right, Mother.”
“Wonderful!”
Taylor heard the elation.
“Latish? One o’clock? I have a hair appointment in the morning. Oh, and Taysie, could you—you know—fix yourself up a little, dear? I mean, it is the club, after all.”
Taylor dropped her head into the hand not holding the telephone. “I’m sorry. I told you I’m working. If you want me to dress up, I’ll have to decline.”
She heard the quick intake of breath, then the resignation. “No, please come. Do the best you can. You never know who’ll be there. Mr. Right might walk in the door.”
“Mother, if he’s Mr. Right, he’s going to like me in jeans and a sweatshirt.”
“Of course he would...if he got to know you.”
The implication was obvious. No man at her mother’s country club would bother to get to know a woman who wore jeans and a sweatshirt to lunch. Probably true.
Taylor braced for the inevitable lecture.
“You are much too lovely a woman, dear, to spend the rest of your life without a husband. And life is so much easier if the whole economic burden isn’t on your shoulders. But sometimes the image you project is a little... well, tough. Men like a woman to be a little soft, darling. Smile more, relax a little. You have such a lovely smile. Grief has to come to an end sometime—”
Taylor cut her off before she could set off down that stretch. “Sorry, Mother, I have to go.”
“Where?” her mother asked quickly. “You have a date?”
Taylor flashed on Kendall’s dark eyes and crinkly smile. For a moment she wondered what it would be like to date a Big Tin God. The warmth that flooded her was annoying. She cut her mother off more sharply than she intended. That was Kendall’s fault. “No, Mother, not a date. A business meeting.”
“At this hour? Taysie, you know I hate having you drive those back roads at night.”
“Mother, it’s seven o’clock. I drive a pickup truck with four-wheel drive and a telephone. And I carry a gun.”
“Oh, Taysie!”
“Bye.”
Taylor hung up the telephone and wiped the thin film of sweat off her upper lip. How could she ever tell Irene Marshall, her exquisite widowed mother, that what she perceived as grief over Paul Hunt’s death was Taylor’s revolt against his lifestyle and Irene’s? That Taylor had never grieved for Paul, only for the manner of his dying? That his death had released her into a world in which people were not judged by bank balances, degrees, professions or their latest plastic surgeries?
How could she ever tell her mother that life with Paul had been hell, and that for all his looks and charm he had been an unfaithful, wife-beating louse?
CHAPTER TWO
L
IGHTS BLAZED FROM THE CHIC LOFTS in the redone warehouses on the way to Rounders, but once Taylor turned left into the alleyway leading to the square on which Kendall’s building sat, she felt as though she were plunging into the mouth of a cave.
IGHTS BLAZED FROM THE CHIC LOFTS in the redone warehouses on the way to Rounders, but once Taylor turned left into the alleyway leading to the square on which Kendall’s building sat, she felt as though she were plunging into the mouth of a cave.
Suddenly headlights ahead blinded her. She threw up one hand and stomped on the brakes.
Horn trumpeting like an angry elephant, a car shot by and barely missed her left front fender. “Damn fool!” she snarled. In her rearview mirror she saw the car spin around the corner onto Front Street. Her heart pounded in her throat as she inched forward.
By the time the parking area in front of Rounders opened before her, her adrenaline rush had subsided, but not her fury. Her tires crunched and bumped across a disused railway spur, and she pulled to a stop in the glow cast by the light over the door.
She turned off the key, but sat in her car with the windows up and locked while her heart rate returned to normal. The buildings on either side loomed black and faceless like punch-drunk boxers who refused to go down for the count. Apparently, no one lived in this particular square but Kendall.
NICK READ THE SAME PARAGRAPH for the fourth time, realized he still didn’t have the foggiest notion what it said, and dropped the carousel magazine onto the table beside him.
What had possessed him to hire detectives?
He leaned back and let the intricate rationality of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” wash over him. Max had introduced him to Bach and Mozart. Max Beaumont—partner, expert carver, the closest thing in Nick’s life to a father figure. Could such a man betray him? Steal from him?
Surely not Max.
Josh Chessman then? Cheerful, fumble-footed Josh with his myopic eyes and his childlike delight in discovering that he too, could handle a power saw? Josh, his other partner, who had braved unshirted hell from his wife—at least until she realized that such an interesting hobby would look good on his resume—to invest in Rounders?
Not Josh.
So if Nick ruled out both of his partners, the culprit had to be one of the regular carvers.
Veda? Veda loved them all as much as he did. Maybe loved Max considerably more.
And why would Marcus Cato have to steal? He didn’t gamble or do drugs. If he needed money, all he had to do was cut out another brain tumor. Nick didn’t know much about surgeons, but he supposed even a neuro could remove an appendix or a gall bladder to make emergency payments on his Mercedes.
There were rumors Charlene had threatened to kick Marcus out if he started another affair. If she caught him messing around again, she might carry through with her threat. Cato might be accumulating a safe nest egg that Charlene’s lawyers wouldn’t be able to get their hands on.
Then there was Rico Cabrizzo. He said the animals reminded him of the year he spent as a carny shill before his uncle dragged him home and got him into law school. He made big bucks, but he spent them just as fast and liked “living large,” as he called it. Nick liked him, but he had to admit Rico seemed the best bet for the thief.
Unless Nick had calculated wrongly, the thief had to be among those few people. The other twenty or so carvers were novices and most likely unaware of how much money Nick’s animals were worth. Unfortunately, the most likely suspects were the people closest to Nick.
So why the hell had he hired Borman?
Not for the first time, he wondered if he should write Taylor Hunt a check for the day’s work and send her packing. He’d hired Borman himself, not this woman who didn’t understand the first thing about Rounders. Talk about attitude.
Still, if Borman trusted her, she must be competent.
She was sure better looking than Borman. And she had those long, muscular legs...
Where the hell had that come from? He felt himself harden. Too long since any woman had shared his bed, much less even the smallest portion of his life. And this one...tall, muscular, brainy. Not the usual downy dumpling he preferred. But she stirred him all the same. He liked the way her hair swung around her face. He liked the way she looked him straight in the eye, even when she was disagreeing with him.
Bad timing. He had a problem to solve and didn’t need to complicate his life further by lusting after any woman. Certainly not the detective he’d hired to save his ass.
Not just his ass. His whole way of life. He couldn’t go around suspecting all his closest friends. He had to know who had betrayed his trust so he could exonerate everybody else.
Suddenly he grinned as he visualized Rico Cabrizzo’s first encounter with Taylor. Little Rico invariably hit on tall women five minutes after he met them, but Taylor seemed quite capable of decking Rico if he annoyed her. Nick laughed out loud at the picture.
A horn honked. He went to the window and saw Taylor’s truck outside the front door. His stomach churned at the prospect of telling her about his friends. He buzzed the door open and watched her climb out. She glanced around her as though the dark square frightened her.
TAYLOR WAITED UNTIL SHE SAW NICK silhouetted in the upper window and heard the front door buzz. Then she slid out, locked her truck and hefted her satchel.
Something skittered away into the darkness. A rat? Sounded as big as a railcar. She shuddered.
She stepped into the dimly lit hall. The door eased shut behind her. “Up here.” Kendall’s voice came to her from the staircase.
She climbed the stairs past the closed door to the workshop. Light spilled down from the third floor where Kendall stood in the doorway of his apartment.
Suddenly her heart began to beat faster. What did she know about Kendall anyway? She strolled past him with studied casualness and plunked her satchel on the floor inside the door. Her gun, a nine-millimeter Glock, thunked against the wood.
The loft was brightly lit by track lighting fixed to overhead trusses. The brick walls had been painted white. The room held a few pieces of simple furniture beautifully crafted of pale wood. Gleaming. No dust here, but a faint aroma of furniture polish.
A white Euro-style galley kitchen opened to the right. To the left, eight-foot partition walls carved out what must be bedroom and bath. At the back of the room, a solid wooden grid covered what looked like a freight elevator. Floor to ceiling bookcases holding mostly art books and a few paperbacks fitted into the short wall beside the door.
As Kendall shut off the stereo, Taylor decided he no doubt needed this oat-colored oasis at the end of ten-hour days spent with rioting colors and blaring music.
“Right on time,” he said.
“I try. This is nice.” She waved a hand at the room.
“Thanks. Want a drink?”
“No, thank you.” Taylor inched her tape recorder from the pocket of her jeans. “Let’s get to it, shall we?”
Kendall shrugged, pointed to a burled walnut table in the dining alcove. Taylor set the tape recorder upright in the center of the table beside a mahogany bowl piled with polished wooden fruit, pulled out one of the comb-back Windsor chairs and sat down. Kendall sat opposite.
“Beautiful table,” she said, and switched on the recorder.
“Thanks again. I built it. I built all this.” Kendall waved a hand at the apartment. “My grandfather was a cabinetmaker. Specialized in restoration and fancy stuff. Taught me to love beautiful wood.”
“Did he teach you to carve carousel horses?”
Kendall flushed and looked down at his hands. Taylor frowned. It had been a casual remark, an ice breaker.
“Something like that.”
“So, how’d you find out your animals had been stolen?”
“What? Oh.” He seemed to pull himself back from a great distance. “I don’t just carve new carousel horses, I also restore old ones. Pete Marley called me from Seattle and said he’d just bought a hippocampus from Helmut Eberhardt’s antique shop in Oxford while Marley and his wife were down at Ole Miss for some sort of training seminar. Marley wanted me to come out to Seattle, all expenses paid, to restore the thing. It sounded like a hell of a vacation, so I gave him a cousin’s price and went. I didn’t recognize the hippocampus right off. I don’t guess I’d looked at the thing closely since I carved it twenty years ago.”
“But surely it wouldn’t have needed restoration after only twenty years.”
“That’s just it. It shouldn’t have, but it did. The paint was flaking and peeling. In places the glue had separated. There were spongy areas under the belly that felt rotten. It was supposed to have been in somebody’s attic for forty years. I could believe it.”
“So Eberhardt—or whoever did the faking—was expert?”
“Had to be Eberhardt. I won’t go into all the techniques crooked antique dealers use to make things seem old, but Eberhardt obviously knew them all and used most of them on the hippocampus.”
“So what tipped you that it was yours?”
“Once I got suspicious I went to the shop in Seattle at three in the morning so I could check it out. The last thing I wanted was to tell Marley he’d been had if I wasn’t certain. Next morning I went to see him and rechecked the provenance.” He raised his eyebrows in question.
She nodded. “I know about provenance. The history of the thing, who’s owned it, where it came from—the documentation that assures it’s authentic.”
“Yeah. In the thirties, a hurricane knocked down a great old carousel on a beach in New Jersey. Nobody valued carousels much then—it was the middle of the Depression—so they bulldozed it and the Ferris wheel beside it, covered the whole shebang with beach sand and left it.”
Taylor shivered. “I may not care much about carousels, but that seems like a terrible tragedy for the children, if for no other reason.”
“It was. There was a guy named Joe Kolzcek who had helped run it. One night, a couple of weeks after it was bulldozed, he and some friends got drunk, dug out some of the animals and carted them off. Kolzcek was living in a furnished room. His wife Nell was staying in Mississippi with her folks, expecting their first child. He probably figured that at least she’d get enough to eat down there. Anyway, Kolzcek wrote her all about the animals he’d rescued.”
“Seems pretty cut and dried. Marley had the letters from Kolzcek to his wife?”
“Photocopies. That should have tipped him off, but he’s new at this. Anyway, after Nell’s baby was born, Kolzcek moved back to Mississippi and farmed with Nell’s father. Apparently Kolzcek brought three animals back with him. He died on Iwo Jima. Eberhardt supposedly found the carousel animals in Nell Kolzcek’s attic when he bought her estate last year after she died.”
“Sounds like perfect provenance to me. The hippocampus is documented every step of the way.”
“Right. Except for two things. First, Joe Kolzcek never called any of the animals by name. His letter just mentions ‘three animals.’”
“He might not know a hippocampus from an American eagle. I certainly don’t.”
“Sorry. The front half is a horse, the back half is a fish.”
“Thanks,” she said, then added, “Weird.”
“Anyway, there was no hippocampus on the carousel. Only horses.”
Taylor let out a long breath. “Oh, boy.”
“How much do you know about faking antiques?”
“Not a lot.”
Kendall looked at her, a wry smile on his face. “I know a lot. You can fake provenance as easily as you can fake the piece itself if you’re willing to take the time. But Eberhardt was smarter than that. The provenance is probably genuine. It simply doesn’t go with the animal he sold.”
“What makes you think Eberhardt sold the others?”
“Why stop at one? There may be ten happy collectors gloating over their prizes all over this country, all certain they’ve got the bargain of the century.”
“Forgive me for saying this, but if they’re happy, why do you want to burst their bubbles? Why not just let sleeping dogs lie?”
“For one thing, I can’t afford to simply write off a hundred-fifty thousand dollars of inventory. But, more important, even if we head Marley off, sooner or later someone knowledgeable may figure out he’s got a Nick Kendall original and not a Muller or an Illions. I can’t take that chance. My reputation is all I have.”
“Wouldn’t Eberhardt be afraid you’d see one of the stolen animals somewhere and recognize it?”
Kendall shook his head. “Assuming all the animals were sold in the same condition, probably not. Once someone else restored them, even I might not recognize them. Besides, Eberhardt was smart. He didn’t sell to the trade, didn’t advertise in the carousel magazines, or put any of the animals into a carousel auction. He apparently set out only one animal in his shop at a time, and made certain that it went to someone who knew nothing about carousels. Marley took his wife shopping for antiques in Oxford one afternoon when they didn’t have classes at the university. He fell in love with the hippocampus but obviously didn’t know anything about carousel animals. Eberhardt found out he was from Seattle. There are plenty of carousel restorers in California. The chances that he’d get
me
to come all the way from Tennessee to restore it were slim to none.”
me
to come all the way from Tennessee to restore it were slim to none.”
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