Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (27 page)

The symphony in Goldport is housed in a fine turn
-of-the-century building at the very edge of town. To understand why it’s at the edge of town, one needs to know how and when Goldport was built, or at least how it became a town worthy of the name.

There were legends of Native American camps in this region, and in fact our town hall was decorated with the usual nineteenth-century paintings of noble savage com muning with civilizing newcomer. Muskets and feathers and the occasional turkey.

It might all be true, but I suspected not. I suspected yeah, some native hunters might have camped here on the way across the mountains, but I very much doubted that any particular significance had been attached to the area, much less that it was considered sacred ground. And I would bet good money that the wild turkey had never roamed the Goldport area in multitudes. At least if one were to believe that the largest tree in the region when colonizers arrived was scrub oak.

At any rate, after the turkey-native-colonizer time,
Goldport had been a little struggling settlement of half-a-dozen cabins belonging to one family—the Goldport family. And then the gold rush had hit.

People had hastened to settle in Goldport. Newly made millionaires commissioned gingerbreaded mansions to rival anything in the East. The—mostly immigrant—workforce imported to put up the buildings and be servants and such had settled in smaller workingman Victorians.

At the height of the gold rush, there had been illusions that Goldport in its full glory would eclipse Denver. Because of this, and because it was expected that the city would continue growing toward the West, one of the gold rush nouveaux riches had built . . . well, I supposed an opera house, though to my knowledge, at least after the end of the nineteenth century, no opera had been performed there.

The failure of the gold mines that supported Goldport had put an abrupt end to the city’s expansion. The city had been prevented from turning into a ghost town only because the Tasty Treats pet food plant had moved in, giving employment to all the blue-collar workers. And then in the early twentieth century the University of Colorado at Goldport had opened up. Since then Goldport, with its skilled workforce, had become something of a tech center, a miniature—very miniature—Silicon Valley.

However, the development, when it had come, had gone to the north and east, extending in suburbs and neat subdivisions.

The symphony remained stranded on the edge of town, a huge building that looked like someone had taken a tour of Europe and brought back a blurred memory of what impressed him most. To begin with, the building was set in the middle of a wide lawn, which in the Colorado climate was brown ninety percent of the time and overgrown with weeds the rest of it.

Approach was made through a narrow path in the middle,
which was in turn flanked by several statues of tritons and water nymphs, which, judging by the bone-dry pools around them, were meant to be fountains of some sort. Of course there was no water. I imagined the statues looked a little startled, as if they were thinking,
Wait a minute there, where did the ocean go? It was here just a minute ago
.

Up from that was a huge staircase with towering columns supporting a portico that was entirely too small for the number and the size of the columns. Mind you, it all looked very impressive at night, with the front doors open and light spilling out. And during the holiday season when the entire thing—statues and all—was festooned in lights and the struggling nonlawn mercifully covered in snow, it could be downright romantic.

In the few months between Ben returning to Goldport and taking up with Les, I’d come to the symphony with him often. Ben had a season ticket and his local contacts were still shaky, or perhaps he thought I needed some time out or some fun, because that was right after my divorce. And at night, one could really get caught up in the atmosphere. During the day, it wasn’t nearly as impressive.

The fact that instead of climbing the stairs we took the little path to the side to go in through a side entrance made it even less impressive. Of course, the side also had statues of bare-breasted females, supporting vases above their heads that I suppose were meant to have profuse greenery growing out of them. The city had really made an effort there—at least for the level of effort that Goldport normally put into public beautification—and when the real plants had failed, they’d stuck in sprigs of what looked like artificial ivy. Which was a really good idea, except that no one dusted them and—Goldport being the dustiest city ever, because of all the drought—by now they looked as brown as the lawn, so that the poor nymphs seemed to be lamenting the state of vegetation in the area
and hefting their vases to show the level to which the horror had climbed. Of course, their male counterparts on the other side of the building just looked angry with the situation, like
Come on, guys, let’s dump these plants and go get a beer
.

The door to which Ben walked was small and set unobtrusively between two distressed nymphs. It, too, was distressed in the sense that the paint was all blistered and flaking. For once not a sign of neglect. Having grown up in Goldport, I knew that Mom and Dad had to paint their house every couple of years because the sun was so strong up here, and only made stronger by reflecting off snow.

On the other hand, once Ben opened the door—and yes, it was unlocked—the interior was exactly what I remembered from my symphony nights, only smaller. The front door led to a great domed entrance, much like the Orthodox churches the architect must have seen on his grand tour of Europe. The back door led to a corridor with a ceiling like the interior half of a cylinder, curving smoothly around.

Both were gilded, and both painted with the sort of frescoes that wouldn’t be found near an Orthodox church much less in it. I remembered spending time in the front entrance during intermission, staring up at a scene of debauched orgy that involved not only fauns, nymphs, and every Roman god, but also cute little cherubs and the occasional African animal, none of them in the combinations you’d expect. And meanwhile, all the well-dressed people swirling around me never looked up. It wasn’t so much like they didn’t know what was up there. They did. But they were ignoring it as hard as they could.

Entering through the side, I looked up and found that the orgy was going on there, too. “Ben, is that elephant . . . ?”

He didn’t even look up, but nodded and said, “Probably,” as he headed down the hall like a man on a mission. He turned to another hallway on the left and stopped. In
front of a door was a man wearing the most flashy uniform I’d seen in a long time. Oh, he was clearly supposed to be private security of some sort, but he wore silvery-blue pants with silver piping and a jacket whose cut and fit wouldn’t be out of place in the armies of Prussia. On the jacket was a huge, glittering badge. The man was almost as wide as he was tall, which meant he wouldn’t pass the fitness requirements for any security force, and he wasn’t wearing a gun, so I assumed that no one had decided to arrest the symphony performers. Which wouldn’t be deserved, because most of the time they were pretty good, Les notwithstanding. Now, if he were to arrest the architect who’d designed the building, that would be justified, but of course the coward had probably died long ago.

Ben stopped short and looked at the man.

“May I help you, sir?” the man asked.

“Yes.” Ben drew himself up and managed to look as if he were wearing a uniform at least as shiny and official as the guard’s. “I would like to go in. I must speak to a friend of mine.”

“And your friend’s name is . . .” the guard said, looking suspicious. Because people normally don’t look suspicious of Ben, and because frankly the chance of anyone lying to get in and see one of our local performers was about like the chance of someone trying to steal all your Monopoly money, I started to get an awful sense of how this was going to go.

If Ben also did, he didn’t show it, but then Ben at the best of times showed very little to any official person. “Les Howard, please?”

The guard stood straighter, which meant his height gained maybe two inches over his width. “You wouldn’t be Mr. Ben Colm?” he asked.

Yup. I’d guessed right.

“Yes, my name is Benedict Colm, but . . .”

“Mr. Howard said you were stalking him and that under no circumstances was I to allow you in.”

I must have snorted at the idea of Ben stalking anyone, because the security guard looked at me, and while I was trying to put on my most innocent expression, I missed Ben’s look. I don’t know if he was angry or appalled. All I know is that when he spoke again, he was perfectly calm, “I see. Would you please see if Mr. Peter Milano is in there and if I may speak with him?”

The guard looked dubious, as though Ben might be some sort of all-purpose stalker, out to harass every performer, but at length he went inside and closed the door carefully behind him. I heard talking, then footsteps approaching the door, then more talking, then what sounded like a muffled laugh. I assumed that Peter Milano—whoever the hell he was—had been called to the door and also that either he found Ben’s predicament funny or the guard did.

Then the door opened and I expected to see the guard come out. Instead . . .

Well, my first thought was that Ben could do worse than stalk Peter Milano. And if he wasn’t, I’d like an explanation of why not. Okay, Milano wasn’t as cute as Cas Wolfe, but that was a matter of personal preference. I prefer my men not to look like they’d left one of the frescoes on the ceiling and somehow exchanged a toga for a tux. Though he seemed to be at least forty—judging from the eyes and the touch of white at the temples—he looked both decorative enough to have been a Greek god in a past life, and also just the slightest bit decadent, as if he’d spent the last hundred years watching the world’s most unlikely orgy. It was all there—the slightly overlong curly hair, the Greco-Roman nose, the intense gaze, and the amused smile twisting his sensuous-looking lips.

The look he gave Ben managed to combine both pity and amusement. He shook his head, even as the security guard came out and resumed his place at the door. Without
speaking, Milano gestured with his head to indicate, I suppose, that they should move a little away from the guard. Because neither of them was paying any attention to me, I slid along with them.

“Ben, Ben, Ben . . . what is it now?” Milano asked. “What have you done to the unstable one, my darling?” The voice had just the faintest bit of a British accent, which made the
my darling
feel perfectly natural. He was also, I realized, more than likely one of what Ben generally called
my people
. Meaning his, not mine. At least I couldn’t imagine any straight male looking at Ben and calling him
darling
, particularly not with that intonation that implied he was a young and sweet thing.

“It’s Les,” Ben said, as if he hadn’t understood who the
unstable one
might be. Or more likely pretending not to understand. “There’s been a terrible misunderstanding and I must talk to him.”

Milano’s eyebrows rose. “A misunderstanding?”

“Yeah . . . he did something stupid with . . . with the stove fan.” Yeah, that’s what Les had done something stupid with. “And he’s probably afraid I’m mad at him over it. Would you tell him I’m not?”

Pity won out over amusement in Milano’s eyes. He sighed. “Ben, he’s not afraid of anything. He’s furious at you. He says you’re playing around on him. He did this whole drama for everyone in the symphony, complete with much in the way of tears.”

“Playing around?” Ben said. “Would this be at poker or bridge?”

Milano shrugged. He leaned against the wall in a pose that was both boneless and gracefully calculated. “Look, I’m not going to give you my opinion of this relationship, right? And I’m not going to say anything about Les, because, you know, we have a deal and all.” Just how many people did Ben have a deal with? “But my advice to you would be to let the unstable one have room to cool off and
think about things. You know what he’s like when he gets in these moods.”

Ben opened his mouth as if to protest, then snapped it shut. “Yeah. Artistic temperament.”

Milano looked up and the amusement was back, playing across the dark eyes. “Right,” he said. “That’s what it is.” He shrugged. “Let’s just say that we did
Peter and the Wolf
for the kiddies and Les did the most unstable, shaky, watery wolf to ever run the prairie, right? Not a good time to talk to him. Not unless you relish the idea of being screamed at in front of the entire Goldport Symphony.”

Ben wouldn’t relish the idea of being screamed at in front of a group of his closest and dearest friends. In fact, his reaction to being screamed at was normally to wheel about and leave. Which, unless I was much mistaken, had caused this whole problem with Les to begin with. Les looked like the type who would like to set up a good screaming match now and then.

“Uh . . . but I have to talk to him,” Ben said. “He’s blowing all this out of proportion. And I have no idea where he came up with the idea that I was . . . that there is anyone else.”

Milano muttered something out of which the words
chrome
and
pipe
emerged, but I wasn’t about to even imagine what it might mean.

“That’s not . . .” Ben said, as he turned a shade of red slightly lighter than his hair.

Milano raised an eyebrow. “Fine, but look, it really won’t do you any good to talk to him now. How about you wait a couple of days, let him cool down, and then maybe he’ll listen when he’s talked to? Maybe.”

Ben sighed. He rubbed his forehead. “Yeah. Okay,” he said. And we turned to go. I noted he hadn’t so much as introduced me to his friend, which I would have been upset about, only of course, Ben was thinking about Les. As for me, I was thinking of the whole conversation.

It was clear that Peter Milano was Ben’s friend, even if Ben had never mentioned him to me. Not that it was a big deal. Ben didn’t exactly give me a detailed account of his entire life. But all the same, it felt a little strange. So, as we were halfway down the hallway, I said, “Peter Milano is one of your people, right?”