Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (33 page)

I set the tea table in the powder room, in such a way
that it didn’t block access to the toilet, should Ben wake up in the middle of the night. He was still asleep in the same position on the sofa.

I went back to my bedroom, closed the door, undressed, put on the long T-shirt I used for a nightshirt, and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

The day had been so long and I was so tired that I actually started brushing my teeth before something struck me as not being quite right. I looked up. There on the mirror, written in bright red lipstick, were the words
Come back
and an imprint of lips, as if someone had put on lipstick, then kissed the mirror.

I stared at it a long time. Michael. It had to be Michael Manson. It just had to. And what had been bothering me about Tiff knowing that the body had been dipped in lye suddenly made all the sense in the world. Of course, Michael had told her. She had intimated that Miss Charity Jewel wanted to . . . get cozy with her.

It all made perfect sense, and for a moment I contemplated getting up and going back to Manson’s place and . . .

Then I came to my senses. The clock on the shelf in the bathroom said it was three A.M., and I was dog tired.

Of course, Cas had given me his phone number. I could call him and ask him to drop in on Miss Jewel. But again, it was the middle of the night. How happy would he be to be called? I would call him first thing tomorrow.

I was about to go to bed on this resolution when a terrible fear took hold. What if Michael Manson was
still
in the house? Worse, what if he had done something to Ben? When I was a teen with a great appetite for blood and gore, I’d read pirate stories, and there was a scene that had stayed with me—a pirate attack where they’d killed a woman with a wire by cutting her head off, so that it looked like she was asleep. I was fairly sure this was impossible, but what if it wasn’t?

I walked back out to the living room and turned the light on.

Ben jumped, and his head stayed remarkably attached. He blinked, then looked at me. “Dyce?” he said. “What on Earth?” He rubbed his eyes. “How long have I been asleep? When did you come in?”

“A while back. I was just going to sleep, but I thought you might be dead. Pirates, you know, might have cut your head off with a fine wire.” I realized what I had said. “I mean, not pirates, but I read . . .”

A smile twitched at the corners of his lips. He shook his head. “Not so I know. Have you checked on E?”

“What?”

“E. Your ex dropped him off . . . right after you left to go to dinner. Well, actually the wife did. They brought him back a day early. Your ex was upset . . .”

I wasn’t ready for this. And I wasn’t ready to do anything before making sure E was all right. There had been someone in the house, I was sure of it, unless Ben had taken to writing on the mirror with lipstick, and that was too strange even for him.

“E’s in his crib?”

Ben nodded.” I read him Allingham and he fell asleep, and then I came out here. I didn’t realize I’d dropped off. I know he’s as likely as not to climb out and go running off.”

Oh, please, no. My heart beating somewhere near my throat, I made it all the way to E’s room. His crib was full of stuffed animals, and I didn’t see him.

I turned the light on, conscious of Ben behind me.

A little head rose from amid the stuffed animals. “Bah!” he said.

“Hi, monkey,” Ben said.

I waved E down. “Go back to sleep.”

Ben and I walked back to the living room. “Sorry I woke you,” I said.

“No, sorry I fell asleep while babysitting. I didn’t mean to. I guess work isn’t as riveting as usual. How did the date go?”

I shrugged. “It wasn’t a date.”

He grinned at me, the shameless grin of someone who didn’t believe a word I said. “So, no kiss?”

“Oh, there was a kiss.”

He grinned wider. “Date. Second. Or third? There was that kiss in the parking lot.”

“Benedict Colm, don’t make me throw things at you. Why did Alex bring—send E back?”

“Apparently E got hold of a baseball that your ex had gotten at a Rockies game and had signed by the team members or whatever, and he tried to flush it down the toilet. And when your ex yelled at him, because he had to call the plumber and pay him full price, E started saying,
Oh, holy you-know-what
, and wouldn’t stop. So the new wife brought him back.”

I leaned against the door frame. “Oh, good.” And bad. E had been in the house while a killer roamed around. And it was my stupid fault, too, for leaving the back door unlocked when I went out to the workshop. I had done it in case I needed to come in quickly to ask for Ben’s help. And instead, I left my baby and my friend at the mercy of some unknown fiend. I wasn’t about to admit it to Ben—what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him—or make him angry at me again.

“And bad,” Ben said. “I
have
to go to work tomorrow morning. I have a meeting with a client who is driving in from the mountains. I have to stay at the office for as long as it takes. I can come back afterward, but . . .”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I just won’t work on furniture tomorrow.”

“No. That’s not it. If someone . . .”

“Oh, that,” I said. “Don’t worry. I think there’s a good chance the killer will be identified by tomorrow morning.”

He gave me a dubious look. “I wish I had your confidence.” But he didn’t ask me why I thought that, which was good.

Before going to bed, I cleaned the mirror, to keep Ben from being startled when he tried to take a shower in the morning.

CHAPTER 24

In the Cool Morning Light

And in the morning I found that I wasn’t so sure that
the writing on the mirror had been Michael Manson’s doing. I woke up late—nine A.M.—and Ben had gone to work. He’d left his stuff—which I guess he must have reclaimed from my parents’—all around the house. Toiletries in the bathroom, his clothes carefully hung in the normally empty coat closet beside the living room sofa, a morning paper on the table.

His used teapot and teacup were washed and drying on the drying board when I carted E in, moments after waking him up, and gave him cereal and milk from the supplies that Ben had left in the pantry and refrigerator.

“Bah?” E said.

I was starting to suspect that
Bah
was his name for Ben. “He’s not here,” I said. “He had to go to work.”

“Work? Oh, holy fuck?”

“Hardly,” I told him. “And you shouldn’t say those words.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Daddy angggggy.”

“Yes, I imagine. They’re very bad words.”

E gurgled laughter, and I decided it truly was better not to poke around and find out what the laughter meant. I wondered what exactly the marks of the Antichrist were supposed to be. I had looked him over from head to toe at birth, and I was fairly sure there was no triple six anywhere, but perhaps there was something else I was supposed to look for.

Instead, I made sure that all the doors were locked and went to shower, leaving the bathroom door open so I could hear any sounds from the house. In the bathroom I discovered that a lipstick tube in the trash had come from the little ziplock bag where I kept all my makeup. It was a singularly weird color. My mother-in-law had given it to me for Christmas the last year of my marriage, and I’d always wondered if she meant something by choosing that peculiar shade of red.

There were no sounds other than E eating the cereal and—as I approached the kitchen, after dressing—pouring the remaining milk onto the floor.

I cleaned up the milk while thinking. Come on. It had to be Michael Manson. Who else would leave the message in lipstick?

But the message saying
Come back
and, more important, the kiss seemed oddly out of kilter. I remembered what I’d done to Michael before running into the house . . .

Now, if I’d found a drawing of someone’s kneecap, that might have come from Michael. Though my kneecap had imprinted on something other than his mind’s eye, I was sure. But . . . a kiss?

A kiss was right up there with my knifed table and the hanged monkey. Stuff that didn’t seem at all related to the two bodies dipped in lye. So we’d have to go on the assumption
that there were two crazy people running amok in Goldport. One was a homicidal maniac and the other one was . . . just a maniac.

That assumption bothered me because it was a violation of Occam’s razor, which said the simplest solution that covered all facts was the truth. Only I couldn’t find a solution that covered all the facts . . . not even if I stitched it around, cozylike.

I made tea and sat down to drink it while E explored the windowsills for bugs. I got the newspaper from the living room. Today’s newspaper, which meant that Ben must have bought it before he left.

I looked in the crime blotter page, and there was still nothing about Nell, and of course nothing yet about Inobart . . .

I drank my tea. Then I fetched my notepad and one of my flat yellow pencils and sat down to list everything that had happened, starting with the corpse in the Dumpster and ending with my getting locked in the workshop.

There were two separate sets of events here. There had to be. I noted down the table, the inscription on the bottom of the table, calling Rocky’s, finding Inobart. All of those were part of one set. The locking of the workshop might be, or not. But because there had been the lipstick inscription at the same time, probably it belonged with the other set, which started with Ben arriving at my house with a dented car and a scratch on his face and proceeded through his car tires getting slashed, the monkey getting hanged, the multiple
Bitch
es being painted on and in my house, and most recently the inscription on the mirror. If I added in the situation at Ben’s apartment, it became clear that maybe, just maybe, a certain more-than-a-little-unstable musician might be involved: Les. Les, who thought that Ben was playing around on him, an idea that was perfectly insane, because Ben’s life was work and home.

Then it hit me. The other major part of Ben’s life
was—visiting me. And Ben had a picture of himself and E in his wallet.

I paused, contemplating the enormity of Les’s insanity. It was perfectly all right for my parents to think that Ben was really straight and in love with me, but surely Les knew better? What would be the purpose of the elaborate deception, if Ben were carrying on with me?

There was no logic to it, but then the stuff that had been done around my house was not the work of a rational mind. And frankly, when it came to sexual affairs, men were often less than rational. Perhaps Les had convinced himself that Ben was having doubts about his sexual orientation . . .

I could call Les. But I didn’t think I’d get an answer any more than Ben had. Or I could . . .

I pulled the phone book to me and looked down the
M
columns. There was one Milano. Peter Milano. Which was of course a lucky thing, because if he had a partner, the listing might very well have been under his partner’s name.

The phone rang twice and was answered by a distinctly cheery male voice. “Hi there.”

Well, and double to you, with a scoop of ice cream.
Aloud I said, “May I speak with Peter Milano?”

“Sure. Who do I tell him is calling?”

“Dyce Dare,” I said, and then, remembering that Peter had never been introduced to me, “on behalf of Ben Colm.”

“Oh,” the voice said. And after a pause. “All right.”

I had the feeling of someone unfolding out of a comfy chair, and the sense more than auditory clues that a cup of coffee was being set down. Then I heard “Peter!” followed by more indistinct sounds and a graver male voice responding.

Moments later, a half-awake-sounding man said, “Hello . . . ?”

“This is Dyce Dare,” I said. “I’m Benedict Colm’s—”

“Quasi little sister. Yeah. Heard of you. What’s wrong?”

I realized the poor man had probably been performing till late—if Les had come by here, he’d come after a performance—and that I had just wakened him relatively early.

“Well . . . I don’t know if it’s a question you can answer, but Ben is in a meeting and I don’t think he knows. I mean, he knows he’s in a meeting, but he doesn’t know about what I’m calling about because even if you told him, he wouldn’t believe it. And Les wouldn’t answer me even if I asked, so . . .”

“Yes?” the voice asked, with just a hint of mischief.

Oh. “Uh . . . when you said that Les Howard suspected that Ben was having an affair with someone . . . he didn’t by any chance think it was me?” The absurdity of it hit me, even as I said it. I felt a blush climb up. Now Peter Milano was going to think I believed myself so irresistible that even gay men lusted after me.

But my answer was a delighted cackle, followed by the word, “Zonkers.”

“I’m sorry, it’s just that . . .”