Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (29 page)

“Kills the spirit of the tree?” he asked indulgently. “Oh, come on, only Inobart believes that stuff. And if I were you I’d be careful about listening to him too attentively, because he will then think you have a crush on him. He’s plagued Nell something awful and has managed to convince himself that it’s
Rocky
who is plaguing her.”

“And he isn’t?”

Mike gave a little laugh that tried to be Miss Jewel, but fell ever so slightly short of the mark, so that instead of sounding high-pitched and ladylike, it sounded like the cackle of the mad villain in the scene where he laughs about taking control of the world. “Dear! There was never any doubt that Nell and Rocky belong together. I mean, if you see them . . .”

Of course the problem was that I couldn’t remember seeing them together, but I wasn’t about to admit to that. Instead I said, “So, they’re reconciling.”

“Oh, yes, foregone conclusion.”

“But I’d heard that the problem was that Rocky . . . didn’t give her enough responsibility at the workshop?”

“Well . . . ,” Mike said. “I suppose that his employees will have to learn to take orders from a woman. Yeah, I know that young men can be very temperamental, but my interns do fairly well taking orders from me.”

I looked right up at his heavily made-up chin, through which the five o’clock shadow still showed. “Some young men are more tolerant than others.”

He nodded enthusiastically and sipped his coffee. “So, what do you say?” he asked. “You can intern for six months, learn to do this . . .”

“I can’t,” I said, before thinking of a reason. The fact was that anticipating more tête-à-têtes with Mike in his
Miss Jewel persona was more than heart and mind could stand. But as he looked back at me, I realized I needed a reason, and it couldn’t be,
It’s not that you’re a transvestite. I mean, I could live with that. It’s that you are such an unconvincing transvestite and you hit on me while in unconvincing drag. That’s what makes it impossible. I’d either burst out laughing or hit you with a manual planer or a period crowbar or something.
I couldn’t say that and I didn’t know what to say, but fortunately my subconscious must have been working very fast and for once to a purpose. “I have E,” I said. “My son.”

Mike looked startled. “Oh, I thought . . .”

“You thought?”

“I thought your ex-husband had gotten full custody?”

I almost spit out the last mouthful of coffee. Instead I swallowed hastily and said, “Why would you think that?”

He looked genuinely confused. “Don’t know. Heard it somewhere. Something about some incidents at your house, and your ex having asked for and gotten full custody. And I mean, you’re here without the kid . . .”

“Yeah. No. It’s his three days with his father, this week.” My mind was spinning fast. What did he mean, he’d “heard”? I didn’t think that Mike ran in the same circles as All-ex, but then . . .

But then All-ex’s Michelle worked at the university. And the interns were mostly university students. That could be where the rumor had come from, couldn’t it?

Where and how would it have originated? Could it be that All-ex was actually behind the murders, as part of a plan to persuade the court to give him full custody of E?

I don’t remember what I said or what I told Mike, but I found myself walking outside the workshop.

I was half-aware that by now Ben was very likely to have realized I was missing. I headed down the alley and toward the street, hoping he would find me. I wanted to go home, which was at the other end of Goldport. I took out
my cell and hit Ben’s number. Nothing. The battery was dead.

Out of the alley, roaring, came a nineteen fifties red Thunderbird convertible. I jumped and knit myself with the wall. The Thunderbird screeched to a halt about twenty feet from me and backed up slowly.

I found myself looking into Miss Charity Jewel’s face, with his new and fresh coat of powder and a new layer of mascara. “Hi, Dyce. Wanna ride?”

“Uh . . .”

“I’ll take you home. Get on in.”

Various things flashed through my mind, including that this man, who thought he was a woman, who thought she was a man—no wonder Ben burst into “Lola” every time I mentioned Michael Manson—might be a murderer. The next time anyone saw me, I might be a gelatinous mess on my workshop floor. On the other hand . . .

On the other hand, if Miss Charity Jewel had done it, she would have left something behind—mascara or a lipstick, or . . . something. No lipstick scrawled on the Dumpster’s side, so it was not Miss Charity Jewel, I guessed.

“Uh . . .” I said, thinking only that he might give me more detail on exactly where he’d heard rumors about All-ex and E. “Sure.”

He reached over and opened the door for me, and I slid in onto the creamy white seat.

“Isn’t she lovely?” he asked. “I got someone to restore her for me!”

“She’s beautiful,” I said, as he started the car up again and drove down the alley with an abandon that belied the pristine condition of the cherry-red fenders.

“Yeah, I
love
her,” he said, falling completely out of his Miss Jewel voice. “Hey, you’re still living on Quicksilver, aren’t you?”

“Yeah . . .” I had no idea he knew where I lived, and for some reason it made me a little uncomfortable.

“Do you mind if I swing by Sixteenth Street on the way?” he said. “I have to drop by Rocky’s, because he wanted to consult me about this dresser he got.”

“Uh,” I said. Well, if he was going to kill me and dismember me or immerse me in a lye vat, he wasn’t going to bother explaining, was he?

On the other hand . . . now I knew for certain that Rocky’s had a lye vat. I looked sideways at Michael Manson. I was sure if push came to shove I could push harder than him. He was wearing stilettos. How hard could it be to tip him over? All the same, it was with a cold feeling in my stomach that I said, “Yeah, that’s all right.”

CHAPTER 20

Lye, Lady, Lye

I soon realized that—just as with his speech and his
mode of walking—the car was being driven, alternately, by Miss Jewel and Michael Manson. Or at least, as the voice deepened and became more masculine, he would drive more carefully and actively avoid hitting the walls on either side. On the other hand, when the voice went up and it was Miss Jewel behind the wheel, the car careened down the roads with a will and traffic signals were viewed as helpful suggestions, but by no means hard-and-fast rules.

Closing my eyes as we crossed an intersection without even slowing down for the red light, I wondered if Miss Jewel drove like that because it was Mike’s perception of how women drove, or if perhaps Miss Jewel was the inner and freer version of Mike who simply couldn’t be bogged down with
could
s and
should
s.

I know quite well it was fruitless to think about it, but it was ever so much more relaxing than worrying about what was happening out there. I kept telling myself that the car was not dented or scraped or anything, and therefore
Mike and/or Miss Jewel couldn’t be that bad a driver. On the other hand, as much money as he made from his workshop, perhaps he was, in fact, just getting the dents pulled and the paint fixed whenever needed.

Not a comforting thought, and frankly I couldn’t hear a word he was saying as he careened this way and that, his voice and driving mode changing pitch. I closed my eyes and thought about praying.

At long last, we stopped. After I made sure we hadn’t stopped because Miss Jewel had gotten lost and Mike was trying to figure out directions, I opened one eye. Yep. We were stationary and in front of a big-as-life sign that read
Rocky Mountain Refinishing
. I opened the other eye.

I’d been by Rocky’s lots of times. As a rule, in fact, I came by once a week on the day I knew they did their culling. But I drove in the back, through the alley, where the Dumpster was and where they left the various pieces of furniture they were discarding.

From the back, Rocky’s was a forbidding brick building, with a ratty lawn and a cement walkway. The door was tiny and there were industrial-looking windows covered in grime very high up on the façade.

From the front, which I supposed I had driven past countless times without slowing down to notice, Rocky Mountain Refinishing looked like an office, with broad glass doors and a pleasant woman—just discernible through the glass—sitting at a desk.

As I followed Miss Jewel, who stepped through the glass doors with the unerring confidence of someone who comes up a full head taller than anyone around herself, I thought the place looked like the receiving area of a classy dry cleaner’s, from the checkered white-and-black tile floor, to the desk and the woman with a computer and a stack of claim tickets, to the potted plastic plant sitting beside the desk.

She looked up with a practiced smile and started what
must have been a practiced spiel, “Welcome to Rocky Mountain Refinishing,” she said. “How may I . . . oh.”

That it took her that long to recognize Miss Jewel or realize we weren’t there on normal business was witness to either her lack of brain or her boredom. It seemed, though, that she knew Miss Jewel because she said, “Rocky is out back,” and then looked at me, as if I were her last hope that this was a business transaction, which I had to counter by saying, “I’m with him . . . er . . . her . . . er . . .”

The receptionist nodded, looking appropriately sympathetic, and gestured us to a door behind the plastic plant. Miss Jewel didn’t notice, as she was already headed that way, clopping along in a way that should have been impossible for someone in those high heels. I thought that the world had lost a great stilts dancer when Mike had decided to be a TV instead.

He was still present enough in Miss Jewel, though, and held old-fashioned-enough principles that he held the door till I was through it, admitting me to . . . a place like none I’d seen before.

I’d been wondering if Rocky’s actual refinishing work took place elsewhere altogether or if perhaps there was a workshop at another location and this was just the offices. Because from what I could see of the lay of the land, the only possible windows providing ventilation to a refinishing room at the back of the building would have to be on the side. I had no idea if there were windows on the side, because I’d never walked the narrow space between Rocky’s and the two buildings on either side.

Now my question was answered. Yes, there were windows, large windows, fairly high up—probably to avoid break-ins and people trying to huff the chemicals. They were open, and there were fans above, circulating the air. But more than that, there was something I’d never seen before. It was as if the ventilating hood above my stove
had a family and this were its parent, at least ten times larger, making a sound like a controlled hurricane, as it sucked air up.

I stared at it, mouth dropping open, as I stepped out of the way so Miss Jewel could come fully in and close the door. I vaguely heard her say, “Rocky, you bastard,” and then I looked down and around me. The workshop looked exactly like hell, I thought, if hell were run like a hospital. Wherever I looked there was some noisy or smelly process going on.

There was indeed a lye vat, in a corner, or at least I assumed that was what the large cement-exterior tank was—I had no clue what the interior was. A pimply young man was fishing in it with what looked like a gigantic version of salad tongs. As I watched, he brought up a door. He must be stronger than he looked, I thought, as he then dipped the door in another tank, which I assumed was vinegar to neutralize the lye. I realized that the tongs weren’t exactly being held by him, but by a sort of robot arm, which he was guiding. Nifty.

There were other machines at work close by. One of them seemed to be slathering a large wood piece in some fluid, then moving along to scrape paint off the surface, then repeating. I wondered if there was some sort of control on it, or if someone just kept an eye out. Because it seemed to me all too possible that the scraping could be overdone. I thought of how much Rocky did and put out for sale every week and thought, well, some shoddiness might be understandable. Besides, who was I to criticize someone who did a hundred times better than I did?

Somewhere farther along, something that looked like a fully mechanized version of the crevice sander that Ben had given me was sanding the indentations on the piecrust top of a table.

There seemed to be only three people in the place. Rocky was in a full argument with Mike, from the sound
of it. (It was Mike, not Miss Jewel, judging by the bellowing tones.) Puzzled, because I was sure that Mike had said Rocky had asked him to come by, I wandered around, bewildered by the noise. Maybe Rocky had asked
Miss Jewel
to drop by, not Mike. I didn’t think Mike was a split personality as such. He couldn’t be. If he were, Miss Jewel would be far more convincing.

I rounded the corner of a place where what looked like gingerbreading from a Victorian’s façade was being painted by a spray robotic arm, and almost ran full on into a small many-drawered cabinet being given personal attention by a woman who appeared to be around my age.