Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (28 page)

“Yeah,” Ben said, without looking at me.

“Old flame?”

“What? Not . . . no.”

Okay. If Ben was going to be outraged at the idea, then he definitely needed mental help. I mean, he had eyes, and just comparing Les with . . . An idea occurred to me. “He has someone?”

“Who?”

“Milano?”

“Why do you care?” Ben said looking at me, and frowning as if he suspected I was going to start chasing the man. I was about to tell him that yes, of course, he was much preferable to the UPS guy.

“Just curious.”

Normally this would have brought a snippy reply from Ben or perhaps a question about what exactly my curiosity entailed, but now he shrugged and continued walking. Until we were almost at the back door, and then he stopped. “Wait here,” he said. “I forgot to tell Peter something to tell Les.”

“Uh. He said Les wasn’t disposed to listen—”

I was talking to Ben’s back as he wheeled around, saying, “Yeah, but this might make all the difference!”

I stood in the middle of the hallway, imagining what would make all the difference in
that
relationship at this point. I thought the only thing would be
Honey, I won over fifty million in the lottery
, but I was probably doing Les an injustice.

I heard the rumble of Ben’s voice from the side hallway and the tones of the security guard answering him. It
went on for a while. I looked at the ceiling. Yes, the elephant was doing exactly what I thought he was. And with a cherub, no less. Though I had no idea what the faun a little to the side was up to. I suspected I didn’t want to know. The nymph to the right of them didn’t want to know, either. She was fainting. Although that might be caused by what the creature with the bottom half of an emu—

While my eyes, and most of my mind, were absorbed in this sort of artistic contemplation, the rest of my mind seemed to have been thinking furiously. I say
seemed
because I was not conscious of any of this until—with sudden force—the idea presented itself to my mind that I was very close to Michael Manson’s—aka Charity Jewel’s—workshop. And that Ben was otherwise occupied.

I looked down at my feet. I was wearing sneakers. If I ran, and took alleyways, Ben would never see me go. And he probably wouldn’t have any idea where I had gone. And I could ask Mike about Rocky’s ex-wife and poor Inobart and all. Mike might not know much about it, but Charity Jewel was, after all, a gossip, and they happened to share a head.

Walking carefully, mindful of the conversation still coming from the side hallway, I opened the door, closed it very slowly, and slipped onto the walkway amid the parched lawn.

Right. I’d assume I had five minutes and get the heck out of here.

CHAPTER 19

Devil with a Blue Dress On

I ran down one alley, up another, and across yet an
other, up to the squat old brick warehouse where Michael Manson had his workshop. He had taken over what had probably been an abandoned building.

The front of it had the sort of slide-down metal doors such buildings usually have, but all the times I’d been there, it had been wide open—even when the snow was blowing outside.

Now on this mild spring day, not only was it open, but my first feeling was that the workshop was full of people, from the sound of wood being scraped, nailed, and sawn, and the smell of wood and various varnishes.

Manson’s work had one distinguishing characteristic—though he might refinish the occasional piece, what he mostly did was build reproductions by period techniques so that, except for the age of the wood, his work was indistinguishable from the real thing. Rumor had it—though I’d never asked—that he held a doctorate in history and had used his knowledge to develop his methods of working with wood.

He had once told me in a casual meeting that he’d lived for a time in a school bus in the mountains of West Virginia. He admitted to being functionally unsuited for business life as such—for going to an office or even working full time in a workshop. But this business he could manage, partly because it was creative and partly because it was very well paid. He personally built two to four pieces a year, and that was enough to get him money to live on. The rest of his business came from selling pieces built by his interns, who, for the greater part, came from history courses at the nearby university.

Now, as my vision and senses resolved, I realized that there were five people in the workshop, all young, two men and three women. The women wore their hair pulled back in scarves, as I did when I was working around heavy solvents or with wood that might snag it. They wore very bright coveralls, which gave them the look of children in a playhouse.

The nearest young man, wearing a red coverall, was applying a coat of something that looked homemade (from the fact that it was in a glass jar and had a deep amber color like none I’d ever seen from commercial products) on a boxlike piece that might have been a bedside table.

He had a light turned on across from him and was looking across the piece, probably to check for dry spots. Without looking away from his work, he said, “May I help you?”

“I would like to see—” I started.

“Dyce!”

I looked up. Miss Charity Jewel was standing a few feet away. To understand the glory that was Miss Charity Jewel, you first had to understand that Charlie Michael Manson was an ex-Marine who towered to six foot five in his stocking feet and who had one of those naturally craggy faces that looked carved out of granite with a blunt
chisel. He wasn’t so much ugly as incredibly masculine, from his heavy brow, to his aquiline nose, to the square chin that sported a permanent five o’clock shadow. He had long, wavy black hair, which he wore tied back.

Miss Charity Jewel, however, wore
her
hair loose down her back, which would have been fine if Michael had ever heard of hair care products or clipping one’s split ends. I’m sure that he used curlers for his female persona, but his hair remained scraggly and ratty, rather like the tresses of a hippie leftover.

As for Miss Jewel’s makeup, let’s just say that if Michael was wearing the style of makeup he’d seen on his mom or his ex-wife, neither of them were good women.

She had blue-green eye shadow caked on her eyelids. Her use of foundation and blush and mascara made tele vangelists’ wives look discreetly made up and almost clean-faced. And none of the powder and paint managed to disguise the distinctly masculine features or completely erase the five o’clock shadow. Despite all this, Michael was so convinced that he passed as female that no one was willing to disabuse him.

Miss Jewel was grinning at me, her painted lips curled in definitive welcome, showing overlarge and nicotine-stained teeth. She extended both callused hands to me. There was a large silver ring on her thumb. “Darling,” she said, making me think of Peter Milano greeting Ben, only in this case there was a good deal more camp in the mix.

“Hi,” I said.

“How nice of you to pay me a visit,” Miss Jewel said.

“Oh, yes, I was in the neighborhood.”

Her unfeminine features sharpened. “Have you heard about Inobart?”

I wondered if I’d be violating police confidence by telling her that Inobart had been found dead in my workshop, then decided that I was doing enough to show Ben and
Cas Wolfe that they couldn’t control me. I didn’t need to potentially drive them both nuts by babbling about possibly secret police stuff. “Uh . . . I saw him in Denver yesterday,” I said.

“How is he looking?”

I bit my tongue on
gelatinous
, but I shouldn’t have bothered. Miss Jewel went on, rapidly, “You see, the last time I saw him, he was so sadly low on his meds. Oh, my dear, he was practically raving out of his mind. He was talking about how he was having an affair with Nell. You know Nell, of course? Nell Gwen?”

I wanted to give him a prize for mentioning two people recently turned to Jell-O within five minutes of my coming in. Of course, that in itself might be suspicious. “I’m not sure. I think I met her, once or twice.”

“Well . . . she had a big fight with Rocky, you know, about six months ago. Over his workshop, you know. Oh, would you like to see the new wardrobe I’m making? An order from one of the house-staging firms for the Parade of Homes.”

I nodded. Miss Jewel led the way, wearing stilettos and fishnet stockings, I noted. Her heels were at least five inches high and probably six. It was a miracle that she could actually walk in those. I’d tried once, in Mom’s high heels and . . . it had not ended well. After they removed the cast from my leg, I’d vowed never to go near anything that tall again, unless it was for a circus act and someone was paying me big money.

We walked across the workshop, with Manson unerringly avoiding stepping on fallen pieces of wood or tools left on the floor. He put a hand out to restrain me as I was about to accidentally kick a jar full of yellowish fluid. “Joan, dear,” he called in an unconvincing falsetto, “are you actually leaving this lacquer around to dry, or is that just a fun side effect?”

As the girl in pink coveralls and a blue head scarf came
running, red-faced, to retrieve the jar, he said, “Always, always, always cap your jars, children.” He walked away with the most unconvincing hip swing I’d ever seen. I suppose I should say
she
, because Michael was very much convinced that no one could tell that he wasn’t female when he was in drag. But the truth was that he was just so strongly male—and fairly clueless male—even in female attire, that it became impossible to maintain any kind of belief in Charity Jewel for long.

He led me around several planks stacked against a workbench to look at a huge, carved cupboard, the kind that I believe the Germans call a
Schrank
. It looked like a massive wardrobe, but had carvings and fretting all over the top and on the doors, too. “What do you think?” he asked, then, seemingly in the same breath, “Would you like some coffee?”

“I wouldn’t want to give trouble,” I said.

“Oh, no trouble,” he said, and called across the workshop, “Jason!” A green-coveralled figure popped up like a jack-in-the-box. “Get me a coffee and one for my friend Dyce.” He’d completely forgotten his Charity Jewel voice, and the bellowing was very much Mike. “How do you take your coffee, Dyce?”

“Two sugars,” I said. “And about three tablespoons of cream.”

The green overalls scurried across the workshop to a door at the back, and I thought it must be good to have lackeys. Which, of course, I did not tell Mike. Instead, I said, “You have a lot of interns.”

“Well . . .” he said, as if this were a difficult thing to explain and he had to warm up to it and think about it for a while. “I have more orders than I can fulfill, and I figure I can get the interns to help me build more and then, you know, after that, they can set up their own businesses.”

“You’re not afraid they’ll saturate the area with accurate antique reproductions?”

He gave me one of those
You’re cute when you’re dense
looks that males sometimes give females. It was very annoying when given to any female by any male, but it was absolutely infuriating when given to me by a man wearing a blue minidress, fishnet stockings, and stiletto heels. I repressed an urge to glare at him and was saved by the bell, or rather by the coffee fetcher arriving, out of breath, carrying two foam cups. He handed them to us, and when I’d taken a sip of the coffee, I recovered my composure.

“Nah,” Mike said, finally answering my question. “You see, it’s like this—each of these pieces, this one, for instance, sells for around sixty thousand dollars. So you see, the thing is, there never was a market in Goldport for it. The clients come from all over the country and sometimes even from Europe. There are few of them, but not that few, and I couldn’t keep up with their demand if I worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, which I have no intention of doing. So . . . my interns are welcome to set up shops themselves . . .”

I looked at the cupboard again. I could not doubt it took a lot of work to do with the hand tools I’d seen strewn about the place. But still . . . sixty thousand dollars was a lot of pancakes. “How . . . how long does it take you to do it . . . ?”

“About two, three months,” he said. And gave me a look. Now, despite his sartorial ways, I’d been assured—more than once—that Mike was strictly hetero. In fact, Ben had reassured me of this when he met him. However, there is nothing—nothing—in the world quite as creepy as being given the
Come on, baby, I’d be good for you
by a tall, decidedly masculine man wearing women’s clothes.

I said the first thing that crossed my mind, entirely off topic. “What do you think of lye vats?”

He gave me a sly look out of his heavily mascaraed eyes. “Uh . . . they’re . . . vats. And they’re full of lye.” He
seemed to realize what had made me uncomfortable, and I think it amused him.

“Oh,” I said. “Some people think it’s unethical to use lye on furniture. That it . . . burns the fibers and . . .”