Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (13 page)

When we were little, this building stood in the heart of what was then the downtown shopping district. And it remained the downtown shopping district. Sort of. Gone were the mom-and-pop stores and the strange, sometimes dusty shops of our adolescence. In their place were a lot
of chain restaurants, a couple of chain bookstores, and a whole lot of trendy clothing stores, with names like
Virgin Forest
.

The building that had become Ben’s place had been one of those massive, stone structures, nine or ten floors tall. The bottom floor held a used record store, the floor above a funky and somewhat scary used office furniture store, and the levels above that the sort of small offices that evoked images of Dickens.

A few years ago, local developers had bought it, stripped it down to the bones, and then rebuilt it much taller as a steel-and-glass structure. I still resented the idea that it had taken the place of the familiar building of my childhood, but I couldn’t deny that it was far more pleasant. The bottom floor now held a combination bookstore and coffee shop. The entrance for the people who lived above it was through the back, straight out of the parking lot. Ben had let himself in with one of those key cards reminiscent of the badges used in office buildings.

I followed him into the elevator. He punched the button for the nineteenth floor, then leaned back against a faux marble elevator wall, in silence. I hate elevators, and having to go that far up in one to go home would have dissuaded me from living where Ben did. But Ben didn’t seem to mind. At least I presumed the hard-set face and narrowed eyes were not fear that the elevator would take him very fast between floors, then drop him. When he saw me staring at him, he looked away. The nineteenth floor was as far as the elevator went—one floor from the top but the lofts up here were two floors. Ben was fumbling in his pocket for his key, but he needn’t have bothered.

There were three doors leading out of the marble hallway onto which the elevator opened. One to the left, one to the right, and one right in front.

The left and right ones led to the bigger lofts on this floor, both big enough for large families—not that I
thought large families lived in this building. The one in front of us led to Ben’s loft. And it was open, because someone had axed the handle—and lock—clear off the door. I say
axed
because there were marks around it, of the sort someone leaves when swinging an ax wildly.

Ben made a sound. It wasn’t a sigh and it wasn’t a whimper, but it might have been something in between.

He pushed the door open the rest of the way and went in. I walked in behind him. My feet squelched on the entrance rug—a Persian or a good imitation in tones of red. I looked down. The rug was soaked. And the polished wood floor around it was covered in a fine, shimmering veil of water.

“What—” I said.

“The sprinkler system,” Ben said, as he walked very slowly into his place, as though he were afraid either of waking someone or that someone would jump out at him. “It’s a multistory building with more than three stories. Sprinklers are mandatory. I already told the building manager to call the disaster recovery people.”

“A fire?” I said.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he prowled into the big open room that constituted most of this downstairs floor. The leather sofas were soaked, the massive mahogany coffee table awash in water. The bookcase with all his babied books was soaked, too. But there was more to it than the sprinklers or an accidental fire. Someone had taken the oxblood vases, lovingly picked one by one, that used to occupy niches in the bookcase, and smashed them and then—it looked like—jumped up and down on the fragments till they were tiny pieces and dust. We walked on pieces of priceless antique porcelain as we rounded the bookcase and looked at the soaked guest bed, then back again to the kitchenette on the other side.

Ben didn’t make a sound, but his hands were on either side of his head, his fingers touching his temples, as if he
were afraid his head would explode. I half-expected the very thorough destruction out in the living room to continue in the kitchenette, but it didn’t. The glass-fronted cabinets were intact, the dishes and glasses in them untouched by the destruction, and the granite countertops shimmered, covered in water but otherwise undisturbed. The only thing out of place was on the cooktop, which was set into the counter between the kitchenette and living room. There, there was a pile of what looked like papers, wood, metal, and ash on the now turned-off, soaked, and cold gas burner. The exhaust fan over the stove was still going full tilt.

Ben looked at it with a blind-seeming, flat gaze and said something that sounded like, “He didn’t mean it.”

I wasn’t about to ask him who didn’t mean what, particularly because it had just hit me—because of bits of glass and Plexiglas in the mess—that the pile on the burner was the remnants of framed photographs. The framed photographs that used to decorate the room were mostly of Ben and Les at various occasions. Okay. A woman would have been more merciful, I thought. She would have put
Ben
on the burner. And I was at a loss—if this was the work of Les Howard, how he could not mean it?

Did one just accidentally drop every vase on the floor and stomp it to pieces? And then it hit me. Ben thought Les hadn’t meant to set off the fire alarm. The dumb bunny had started the fan over the stove, even as he cooked the personal mementoes of their life together.

I bit my tongue. Hard. What in heck good did Ben think that did, exactly? Oh, sure, he’d broken thousands of dollars’ worth of porcelain, but he hadn’t meant to soak the apartment and destroy everything else, so goody. They could kiss and make up. But even I wasn’t about to tell Ben that right then. He looked like a man looking for a reason to blow up.

I’d never seen Ben blow up. Not really. I didn’t want
to. Which is why I jumped half out of my skin as he made a sound like he had blown up—or at least expelled a vast quantity of air from his lungs in a long hiss. I never knew what would come next, because someone knocked at the open door. “Mr. Colm?”

Like that, Ben looked perfectly normal. Still pale, but perfectly normal. You’d think that he looked at the ruins of his home every day. “Yes?” he said.

A man came in. He was middle-aged, short, and dark-haired, and apparently rejoiced in the name of Mr. Aretruse. Behind him was a taller, bulkier man, in a police uniform.

The policeman wanted to know if Ben wished to make a complaint of arson, but Ben just said he was sure it had been an accident. The man looked at me for sanity, but I was fresh out. In the end, he had to leave and be satisfied with the idea it was all a big accident. Or at least that Ben believed so and that it was unlikely he could get Ben committed.

Mr. Aretruse, the building manager, had come to tell Ben that the disaster recovery people had arrived, as well as the locksmith to put a new lock on the door. Not that I had any idea what anyone might steal from here now. Water, perhaps. This was Colorado, after all. Water was almost as precious as gold.

The conversation between them was a miracle of tenta tiveness and attempts not to offend, with Mr. Aretruse mumbling something about Ben’s roommate leaving a few minutes before the alarm went off and Ben, even as he disposed of burned pictures and picture frames, making polite noises about an accident. Yep, it had been an accident all right. If Les had thought about it, he’d have put the pictures in the oven. And possibly set the timer.

Men came in carrying very large fans. Ben fished his phone from his pocket, called a number, and said, “Les, it’s all right. Seriously. Call me, we can talk.”

So he wasn’t about to blow up. He was about to implode. I resisted a strong impulse to take both of his ears and tie them behind his head. Maybe I’d been as stupid when I was married, but I didn’t think so. I’d left All-ex after he slapped me the first time. This didn’t
feel
like a first temper tantrum. And it sure as hell didn’t feel like a slap, either. More like a roundhouse punch.

I gave my very tall, broad-shouldered friend a jaundiced look, then bit my tongue before I said that abused wives came in all sizes. But something must have shown in my eyes, because he said, “Yes, Dyce?”

“You can talk?” I said. “After this, you can talk to him?”

He pushed his lips together until they just about disappeared, and I thought he was going to invoke our “stay out of my business when it comes to love affairs” rule. But one of the men working with mops and squeegees, hanging up bedspreads, and upending the sofas came over. “We think we can save the leather sofas. There wasn’t that much water.” He shrugged. “And we have ways to dry things. It should take about three days, but we think we can save most things, and . . .” He went on to quote a price for the drying, for conditioning leather and reoiling wood, for removing the smell of smoke from walls and drapes.

The price almost made me swallow my tongue. It was a lot of pancakes. It could keep us in pancakes until E was in high school. But Ben just nodded and got his wallet out. “You take Mastercard?”

Apparently they did, and a happy arrangement was struck, after which the gentleman made it known that Ben really shouldn’t hang around the place while it dried. Which was just as well, because you’d think Ben would have gotten this from the fact that not only was everything either dripping or covered in water, but three turbine fans big enough to propel a medium-sized plane were parked in the living room, and two others in the loft-bedroom.

Sleeping there would have been kind of like sleeping in a World War Two hangar. So Ben went up the stairs to his bedroom, which was—in addition to wet and squelchy—thrown about as though someone had packed in a great hurry and not bothered making the bed. He held his breath and threw open his closet doors.

And then came my confirmation that Les Howard was, indeed, as blond as he looked. Because sure, he’d hurt Ben by breaking the vases and burning the pictures, but how could someone who had lived with Ben this long and who was this mad at him not have realized what the real go-for-the-jugular move would be?

The closet was miraculously untouched. It was possible, of course, that Les had forgotten it, because it was obvious that he didn’t keep his clothes there—every space was still taken up with Ben’s clothes. Immaculate hanging shirts and suits; a collection of ties on a special motorized turning rack; his lovingly folded cashmere sweaters on shelves up the center. “It’s all dry,” I said.

Ben made a face as he reached to the uppermost shelf for a couple of suitcases. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s probably a violation of fire codes not to have sprinklers in the closet, but I don’t care just now.”

He set the suitcases on folding luggage racks the likes of which I hadn’t seen since Grandma’s house. Only hers had been mahogany and Ben’s were chrome. He packed quickly and efficiently, and I refused to say anything about the fact that he was packing up most of his clothes for a three-day absence. Unless he intended to change five, maybe ten times a day, it was gross overkill. Knowing Ben, this was probably the equivalent of packing a security blanket. Particularly because it looked like he’d be leaving a key with the disaster recovery people. So he was probably protecting his favorite stuff.

I had no idea what other valuables Ben had in the house. I suspected most of the other stuff was decent, serviceable,
perhaps nice household accoutrements, but nothing like the broken porcelain. I did, however, know—as no doubt he did—that no employee of a bonded, insured company was going to make off with a stereo system or a sofa. But they might take one of Ben’s ties, and I suspected that right then such a thing would finish breaking Ben’s heart.

Of course, when he disappeared into the bathroom and came back after a while with two—count them—two travel cases, one of them the size of a gym bag, with what he no doubt considered absolutely essential toiletries, my tongue got bitten so hard it was going to make it hard to eat pancakes for a while. Yeah, okay, I was aware that Ben used the sort of shampoo you had to order over the Net and more creams for this and that than an aged dowager. And I wasn’t going to argue over it, either. After all, I had no room to argue. It’s not like he didn’t try to make me see the error of my ways, or hadn’t on several occasions given me a full line of facial products. I treated cosmetics as I treated just about everything else that wasn’t immediate, important, or interesting to me. I set it on a shelf and hoped it would somehow improve my skin by its mere proximity. A fleeting thought that Officer Hotstuff might like me better if I thought of essentials as something beyond my toothbrush and comb crossed my mind. Men. Who knew what they might like better or not? And what did I care what Officer Hotstuff thought?

Ben had zipped his suitcases and looked at me. I took this as,
Are we going, then?
Oh, sure, we were going. I might as well lead the way, and so I did, treading carefully around the small army of recovery people, past a gentleman who was on his knees collecting fragments of porcelain and another who stood nearby separating books into what appeared to be a “salvageable” pile and a “nonsal vageable” one. Then past the fans, which gave me the impression of being on a movie set designed to make it
look like I was walking in a windstorm, and past the locksmith kneeling by the door to fix it, and out into the elevator again.

I considered raising the subject of Les, but decided that Ben had suffered enough. Let him get some sleep, and then tomorrow morning I’d sit him down and do my abused-wife intervention. Of course, as with lion taming and Dumpster climbing I knew there was a way to do this, and of course, as with the other work, I knew I had no clue how. I was also perfectly aware that at the first word out of my mouth that sounded like
Les
, Ben would clamp his mouth shut tighter than an oyster protecting a pearl. Too bad. I still intended to sit him down and read him the riot act. And if at the end of it he was granite and fit only for someone to decorate with pink panties on his head, that was entirely his problem. One thing was shutting up when I had doubts about Les’s ability to make him happy. Another thing, and totally different for me, was to keep my mouth shut now that Les had proven himself stupid and dangerous.