Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (34 page)

“Oh, not you, honey. Les is zonkers. He
must
have drama, and he has the temper of a prima donna. It goes with his largely imaginary artistic talent. Yeah, that’s exactly what he believes about you and Ben. He also thinks your son is Ben’s and that’s why Ben likes him and has a picture with him. He thinks that’s why your son is blond.”

“But . . . my ex-husband is blond!”

“Yeah, I told you he was zonkers. We’ve always suspected it. You know, Les is one of those musicians who thinks himself above mere mortal beings? He came from somewhere out east, acting like he was God’s gift to Colorado music. And he can’t take a joke. Of course his attitude incited the brass section. Which, you know, are
pranksters in every symphony I’ve ever been in. So they started pranking him, and instead of laughing and going along with it, he got oh-so-offended. He said they were jealous of his talent. And then the brass section got tired of his airs, and they put a whoopee cushion on his seat during a recording session . . . Well, instead of realizing he was being an ass, he punched the trombone player. Fortunately he’s a bantamweight, but then he went after the guy’s instrument, and . . . we had a hell of a time calming everyone down and keeping the cops out of it. I thought maybe Les would calm down then. But no, he got . . . strange. No, stranger. This thing about Ben and you is about the strangest. I told Ben he’s well off without Les, and that he should change his locks, but Ben, you know . . . tries to parent the world, and Les is really such a . . . helpless idiot, beneath all his aggression . . .”

I sighed. “Ben . . .” I tried to explain, “. . . doesn’t like it when things don’t turn out the way he planned.”

“I know that. I’ve known Ben for ten years.”

Oh.

“Tell him I said to change his locks. Then make sure he does it. He’s more likely to listen to you than to anyone else. Sooner or later, Les is going to have a full-blown breakdown, and he’s a violent son of a bitch who will hurt somebody. Ben doesn’t want it to be to him. Trust me.”

I trusted him. Decadent Roman gods knew insanity when they saw it. And a Roman god who worked under the sort of ceilings the symphony sported would be an expert in it. I thanked him and hung up. So . . . even though the evidence was circumstantial and the timing for that tire slashing must have been very tight indeed, it was highly probable that the nonmurder insanity was the result of Les having gotten a truly weird hair . . .

As for the murder . . . I went back into the bathroom and read the inscription on the bottom of the table.

Now that I knew what it was likely to say, it seemed
very clear. It said
Botched
and
Nell Gwen found in alley
. And then the description. So this was one of the pieces that Nick in Rocky’s workshop had put out in the alley . . . and Nell Gwen had found it. And guessed its worth . . . and . . .

I caught E in the process of eating a fly, made him spit it out and wiped his lips and hand with a baby wipe, then took him to the bedroom and put clothes on him.

“Bah?” he said hopefully, as I was tying his sneakers.

“No,” I said. “We’re going to see if Mommy is right about who the murderer is this time.”

“Oh, holy fuck!”

“Precisely.”

CHAPTER 25

Once More into the Lye Vat, My Friends

I’ve been called reckless at various times in my life.
Which isn’t exactly the truth. I didn’t just go charging into Rocky’s workshop, demanding to talk to Tiff. No. I did the prudent and rational thing. Before going into Rocky Mountain Refinishing, I called Officer Wolfe, and got his answering machine.

Clearing my throat, I told him the name of the killer—or who I suspected to be the killer—and I told him I was going to talk to someone to confirm it. Then I called Ben’s cell and told him the same.

Then I picked E up and went in to talk to Tiffany. I breezed past the receptionist, who recognized me as having been there before.

Tiffany was alone in the machine-filled room, which meant I was in luck. She was fine-sanding what looked like a coffee table and looked up when I approached. “Oh, hi,” she said. “Rocky isn’t here. He went to deliver some stuff.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Me?” she said, looking much like the third dancer on
the left in the chorus line, when told she must fill in for the main actress. “Oooh. What do you need?”

“I . . .” I hesitated. There are ways of telling things and ways of telling things, and you don’t outright come out and ask someone if she’s an accomplice in a murder. “I know how Nell Gwen died.”

She let her sandpaper drop and went pale. “Look, Rocky didn’t mean to,” she said. “Honest. It’s just he gets these tempers, and he pushed her, and she must have hit her head or something and died, so he threw her in the lye vat. Only, as I told Nick, the police would suspect Rocky first, because, you know, he’s the ex-husband. They were reconciling and all, but who would believe that? So I told Nick they’d analyze the lye vat when she disappeared, and there’s chemicals, you know . . .”

“Rocky?” I said. This wasn’t in the script at all. “Rocky did it?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “He told me that Rocky had done it, and then threw the body in the vat and left.”

He.
My twelfth-grade English teacher used to rant on about unclear antecedents. Clearly Tiff had never studied with her. “He?”

“Nick. When I came in, I found Nick all distraught, and Nell was in the vat. So I told him about how the police might find—traces—and Rocky . . . well, we’re both very fond of Rocky. So I helped Nick get the body out—it was
awful
—and he put it in the Dumpster. We never thought she would be identified, you know? It was an accidental death. You’re not going to feel the need to tell anyone, are you?”

“No! She can’t say anything!” a male voice said, and I turned. It was the pimply young man I’d seen fishing stuff from the vat with the assistance of a robot arm. Damn. He must have been somewhere. Somewhere like a break room, because he was carrying two cups of coffee.

Before I could recover from my surprise, he dropped
the cups of coffee. They shattered on the floor, spraying my ankles with hot coffee. This might have been because he was shaking like a willow tree. Despite that, he reached over and grabbed E.

I jumped after him, holding onto E.

Nick—I assumed that’s who he was—backed toward the steps to the lye vat. He was still shaking, and he looked close to tears. “She’s not going to say anything, or . . . or we throw her kid in the lye vat.”

My heart jumped. I was holding onto E’s chubby little arm. Nick was holding him around the middle. I wasn’t sure if I was more scared that Nick would do what he was threatening or that he’d let E go and E would run into one of the saws or worse. “Yes,” I said. “I mean, no. I won’t say anything. I promise. Honest.”

Tiffany was looking from one to the other of us. “Don’t be silly, Nick,” she said. “Of course, she wouldn’t say anything. She knows it was an accident. There’s no reason to destroy Rocky’s life over an accident.”

I was fairly sure that Tiffany had a brain somewhere. Possibly in a bottle of formaldehyde in her dresser drawer. “Does Rocky usually come in Saturday mornings?” I asked.

“Well . . . no, it’s a big selling day and he had that thing with All Saints . . .” She paused. I could hear a dime drop behind her eyes. “I never saw . . . uh.” She stared at Nick with wide-open eyes. “If Nell came in to talk to you about . . .”

“It’s all lies,” Nick said. His eyes were wild. “I never killed her. Why would I kill her?”

“Because she knew you had put a valuable piece out in the alley,” I said. Then I went with a wild hunch. “A colonial tea table worth at least five thousand dollars. You were putting pieces like that out back regularly, for your accomplices to pick up, weren’t you? You were getting kickbacks, weren’t you? No one would be stupid enough
to discard a piece like that table.” I remembered that some of the pieces in the alley behind Rocky’s were always set apart from the others. I’d always been hesitant about them, because it wasn’t clear if they were discards. “Who were your accomplices? The trash men? Did they give the pieces to a refinisher in Denver? Or resell them as they were? How much did you make? How upset were you when Nell tweaked to it?”

“No.
No!
It’s just she argued and argued and argued. She said it was theft, and she said . . . she said I’d go to jail. And I . . .” Nick said. He shook his head. “I pushed her. People don’t die from falling over! They don’t die even if they hit their heads. I’ve fallen dozens of times. It’s a lie. I didn’t kill her!” Now he was crying.

He took a deep breath. “I have to stop you from telling more lies. Either you go right up that ladder and jump into the lye, or I throw your kid in.”

The chances of his doing that were slim. On the other hand, the chances of his dropping E, considering the state he was in, were very high.

I looked up the steps to the lye vat. Sometimes you just have to throw the gasoline at the grill and hope none of the flames hit you.

“All right,” I said, “but you hold on to my son.” I let go of E’s arm, and Nick held him in his arms. I started up the steps slowly.

“No,” Tiff said. “I know you did it, Nick. I don’t think she’s making up lies. I will—”

“You’ll just have to jump in the lye vat after her,” Nick said, his voice breaking. “If you’re going to tell lies, you’ll have to jump in the lye, too. Because otherwise I’ll have to kill the kid, and you don’t want his death on your conscience.”

Tiff looked anguished.

“Come on, up the steps with you, too,” he said. E whined. Nick was holding him too tightly, I could tell.

I should have been terrified, but mostly I was annoyed, not at his causing Nell’s death but at his bungling the cover-up and now his obvious meltdown, which had led him to the bizarre idea that killing Tiffany and me and whoever else would solve his problems.

Whoever else . . . “Why did you kill Inobart?” I asked.

“Nell had told him she was going to confront me. He guessed I’d killed Nell—which I didn’t, but he said I did. He was going to tell Rocky about everything. Besides,” he said, “I put him in your shed because you’d called that morning and you needed to get the message to stop asking questions. I don’t want to have to kill anyone else.”

I stepped up and up and up, calculating my height. Steps are wonderful things. When a man stands right next to them, it’s perfectly possible to stand at the same height as his head and . . . kick.

Nick made an odd sound and fell. Tiffany screamed. E, who had been kicking with increasing frenzy, pulled away from the falling Nick and ran off, straight toward a saw.

“No, E,” I yelled.

“Oh, holy—”

“Enoch Dare Mahr, stop right this minute,” a voice called out.

E stopped. I couldn’t really believe it was Ben, even if the voice was his. But E turned around, inches from the saw, and said, “Bah!” with every look of delight.

Ben came forward to hold his hand. “Right. Now get away from the dangerous stuff. And Dyce, come down those steps. You too, miss . . .”

“Tiff,” she said, starting down ahead of me.

“You were in a meeting!”

“Yeah, but it ended happily and quickly and I was on the way to your house when I got your message. I didn’t grab it in time, but then . . .” He shrugged.

“Woof!” E called out. And in fact, Officer Wolfe was
coming through the workshop, avoiding various automated refinishers.

He waved at E, which, considering he looked very worried, was a feat in itself. “Dyce? What has been going on here?”

“Well,” Tiff said, as we both reached Terra Firma, and I started toward Officer Cas Wolfe Hotstuff. “I thought that Rocky had killed his wife, only it turned out that Nick did it and then blamed Rocky, so that I would help him hide the crime, so that no one would find out that he was putting valuable pieces out in the alley and he wouldn’t lose his job.”

“Dyce?”

“What she said,” I said, as I reached the safe haven of Cas Wolfe’s arms, and he put them around me. It felt very warm, very safe. “Other than all those unclear antecedents.”

“And Nick is—” Cas said.

“Oh my God, no!” Ben yelled. We all turned, in time to see Nick, with a loud cry, dive into the lye vat.

CHAPTER 26

Who’s Afraid