Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (20 page)

And he turned again and walked off. Janet, looking at his back, said softly, “I wish he’d take his meds. It really worries me when he drives in that state. But,” she said, in a rallying tone, “I just paid him for a large oak entertainment center that sold, so he should be able to afford his meds again, for a little while.”

“Meds?” I said.

“Oh, a slew of them. He’s bipolar and I think schizophrenic. He told me once, in one of his better times, you know, but I don’t remember.”

“Ah,” Ben said from behind me, and wandered off to look at stuff again. Janet smiled at his back. “There is one of those vases you collect, Mr. Colm. It’s over there on that large dresser.”

Ben headed that way—Janet was not his main source for his pottery, but she was one of the cheaper sources. And now, I thought, he had a lot of them to replace.

Janet was walking toward the counter where the register was and where she kept the account books, as she said, “I thought you knew better than to talk to him about lye.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize he had such an objection to it.”

She hesitated, then shrugged. “Well,” she said. “You see . . . the lye really isn’t good for real antiques. I wish that Rocky would stop using it. Oh, we’ll still take their things on consignment.” She gestured toward one of the larger areas, crammed with a dining room set, a couple of bedroom sets, and some very showy armoires. “I mean, it’s money, and you know, their stuff looks good. But it seems almost a crime to use a caustic method of refinishing on the real good furniture. And it’s not like they need it. I mean, he has what? Two, three people working for him and all those machines? They could afford to do the work slower.”

“He needs to pay the people who work for him,” I said, and Janet nodded and shrugged as she got behind the counter and got out her little black book, where she kept the accounts for all of us. I’d once asked her why she didn’t use a computer, and she’d told me that she’d used it every day of her working life, back in the office. This was her retirement job—something to do for fun in her golden years—and she had neither the time nor the patience to fuss with technology.

She showed me the page, and I had to smile, because everything had sold for the asking price. Which meant I had almost two thousand dollars coming to me. “All to one client?” I said.

“Yes, young couple furnishing their first home. And your stuff is always reasonably priced. They left just an hour ago or so. Do you want check or cash?”

“Cash,” I said. I did have a bank account and most of it would probably be deposited, but right now was the weekend, and I didn’t feel like depositing the check and waiting for it to clear. Also, I had nowhere near that amount in my account and if I deposited a check they’d probably put a hold on it until they received the physical money from Shabby Chic’s account in Denver. Meanwhile, I needed to buy veneer and who knew, there might be something else in the thrift shops or construction recycling stores up here that might be useful or needed. Besides, I thought, with a pang of guilt, thinking of Ben’s bill for fixing up his place, I probably should buy Ben dinner to compensate for the gas I’d made him use to bring me here.

At any rate, with the records Janet kept—and the ones I kept, of necessity—there was no question of evading taxes or any such thing.

She counted out the notes and handed them to me, then handed me a receipt to sign and gave me the carbon copy
of it. I went out to the car, got the new pieces, and brought them in, and we priced them.

At which point Ben showed up carrying a vase and a marble bust. Oh, goody. The vase, which he set on the counter, was a red one and looked almost exactly like one of those he’d lost. The marble bust looked like a young man—or a somewhat butch young woman—with curls and head thrown back, laughing. It also looked very much like a classical statue.

“Ah, I’d forgotten we had that, otherwise I would have pointed it out to you,” Janet said.

Ben signed a check for just over five hundred dollars—Janet didn’t take cards—but he didn’t look at all upset about it. I took the opportunity, as Ben and Janet were telling each other what a nice piece it was, to say, “Inobart said something about Rocky’s wife . . .”

“Ah, Nell,” Janet said absently, as she wrote down Ben’s cell phone number on the check, under his address. “Rocky’s ex-wife. She divorced him about six months ago.”

“On her way to becoming a light being, we understand?” Ben said, managing to sound both amused and puzzled.

Janet rolled her eyes. “Inobart had a thing for her . . . you know, became convinced that she’d left Rocky because she agreed with him that Rocky is evil or something.”

“That’s not why she left him, I assume?”

Janet sighed. “Oh, no. The usual, complicated by the fact that they both worked in the same place. You know—she complained about how he didn’t give her enough power and treated her like a child, which he probably did, Rocky being Rocky.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“But Inobart had a crush on her, and you know, he’s
really inoffensive, but he’s like a child, and he makes up these things in his head. About how she was really in love with him, and that’s why she divorced Rocky. When Nell was up last week, she told me that she was going to have a restraining order filed against Inobart because she was sure he was looking in her windows at night.”

I thought of that straying eye looking one way and then another, all the while slyly prying through the window, and shuddered.

The creepiness stayed with me all the way through my visit to the construction store and to a couple of thrift shops.

All in all, the trip was good. In one of the thrift stores I bought another tall reading desk, this one probably of twenties vintage. It was, of course, covered in paint, but a look inside the drawer, and at the frame once I’d removed the drawer, gave me hopes that it was real mahogany. The other piece was a desk with inlaid leather, and the inlaid leather might have to be replaced, but then maybe not.

Both of them were a pain to fit in the backseat of Ben’s car, but fortunately my friend—possibly knowing he might get stuck driving with me and furniture—always carried a couple of blankets in his car, which he used to protect the upholstery from the dusty wood.

In the construction recycling store, I found a lot of veneer that had been pulled off someone’s paneling or wall or something. I truly didn’t care, except that I got the lot for less than twenty dollars.

And yet, through it all, and even if Ben hadn’t complained about the very dirty veneer in his car, I felt creepy and out of sorts. I kept thinking of Inobart looking in some woman’s window, in the dark. What if he was far more dangerous than we thought? How often did he go without his meds? Janet said he was inoffensive, but was he?

CHAPTER 13

Night Drive

“You’re very quiet,” Ben said when we were almost
to Goldport. We’d stopped to eat at this little place that served—of all things—squid steaks in the heart of the Rockies. Ben knew the owner and insisted we go there, and I hadn’t complained because Ben also insisted on paying.

His bad mood seemed to have lifted since he’d bought the bust and the vase—both now safely nestled in cloth in the trunk with my unfinished table. He’d even poked around the construction recycling place and expressed regret that his home didn’t lend itself to the application of an entire tin ceiling that must once have covered a room the size of Shabby Chic.

On the way back, he tried to start several conversations, most of which went nowhere, partly because I still felt as if I could see Inobart looking in my windows in the night, and partly because I tend to fall asleep in cars if I’m not driving—all the more so if it’s dark out.

I kept hearing Ben asking something, and I’d try to answer, but my eyes would close and my head would nod.

Close to Goldport, as I saw the lights of the city in the distance, I started to perk up, and I actually answered Ben, “It’s Inobart. I was wondering how dangerous he is without his meds. You know, how out of touch with reality he might be.”

Ben gave me a curious look out of the corner of his eye, even as he watched the dark road ahead. “Dyce, he dresses like and seems to think he is some sort of elf lord; what do you expect?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think he dresses like or thinks he is a pagan priest.”

Ben rolled his shoulders in an elaborate shrug. “The point is, sane pagan priests don’t wear robes. Of course he’s out of touch with reality. But you’ve known him how long? And he hasn’t hurt anyone, right?”

“Right,” I said. That we knew of. Of course, lye eats through everything, doesn’t it? I mean, leave something in it long enough and it would all be gone to hell, wouldn’t it? I didn’t know what it actually would do—I’d never tried to submerge any pieces, and I certainly couldn’t submerge them in the sort of volume a commercial lye vat would have. But I’d heard stories of entire Spanish Colonial tables turned into a little bit of sludge at the bottom of the caustic liquid.

And then it occurred to me—if a person submerged someone in lye, either after killing her, or because she was dead—why not leave her in the lye till she, too, was just a bit of sludge at the bottom of the vat? It would seem the logical thing to do. That it hadn’t been done would mean the person who’d done it wasn’t logical. Which meant . . .

Inobart would be my main suspect. “What if we just haven’t found out?”

Ben seemed to think that was funny. He gave a little chuckle, deep in his throat. “Oh, come on,” he said. And then, stealing a glance at me, “You are creeped out. I should
have known, because you haven’t teased me about the bust.”

“Teased you?” I said confused. “It’s a very nice bust, though I’d think classical antique—”

“Not the original,” he said as we hit the main lighted strip into town. “The original is in a museum in Europe. The Prado in Madrid, I think. Mind you, this is a nice reproduction and probably Italian and bought by someone who traveled to Italy, where they sell all this stuff.”

“Ah,” I said.

He took this for encouragement. “Antinous. The lover of Emperor Hadrian.”

“Ah,” I said.

“All right,” he said, after a silence. “You
are
creeped. No jokes about buying statues of ancient gay guys? Nothing about building a historical gallery and am I going to find a bust of Marlowe next?”

“It’s a nice bust,” I said, absently.

He sighed. “You should tell Officer Wolfe about Inobart,” he said.

“I did.”

“What—that he might have a restraining order against him for spying on naked ladies? How? Are you telepathically linked to Wolfe now?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Just about Inobart in general.”

“Well, you probably should tell Wolfe about what we found out in Denver,” he said. “And look at it this way, it gives you a chance to call the big-not-so-bad Wolfe, right?”

“Right,” I said, and heard clear as day in my mind my mother telling me not to call strange men.

We passed the George at Fairfax, and then we turned down Quicksilver and drove the two blocks to my house.

And I realized I didn’t need an excuse to call Officer Wolfe. In fact, I would have to call him anyway, no matter how reluctant I was to do it.

Someone had taken a bloodred spray can and written the word
Bitch
in five-foot-tall letters next to my door—which stood wide open.

Ben pulled up and cursed. He took his phone out of his pocket and dialed, before I could. To my surprise, what he dialed didn’t seem to be the police department. Or if it was, it was a direct number and Officer Wolfe worked Sunday evenings, because Ben said, into the phone, “Wolfe? Colm.” A pause. “We’re at Dyce’s place. Outside. In my car. Yeah. Someone has broken in.” Pause. “Because the door is wide open.” Pause. “Yes, I’m sure I locked it.” Pause. “Okay.” And he hung up.

“What?” he asked me, and I realized I had been looking at him openmouthed.

“He gave you his number.”

“What?” he said, then made a very weird sound that might have been a laugh. “Not like that,” he said. “He wanted me to . . .” He paused. “Uh. He thought because you’d found the body, you know, and then someone slashed my tires in your driveway, that you might be in danger. He gave me his number in case something else happened.”

“Ah,” I said. I felt suddenly very numb. “And that’s why you’re staying here, isn’t it?”

He looked at me. “Well, I couldn’t exactly sleep at my place,” he said. “Between the fans and the—”

“No, but here, instead of at a hotel. You’d much rather stay at a hotel, wouldn’t you?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it, then shrugged. “Considering how much I’m paying for the disaster recovery service,” he said, “I think I can use the savings, don’t you?”

“You bought the vase and the statue,” I said. “Without blinking.”

“Well, yes,” he said. “And I’m not going to tell you I’m going to be stone-cold broke after I pay for the disaster
recovery, but you know . . . it’s going to take time to get back to where I was before, and staying with you helps.”