Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (4 page)

I nodded. E waved at him as he turned to say, “Bye, little one. See you later.” Even if E didn’t trust him enough to talk, the wave was a big honor. E didn’t wave at anyone but Ben.

I was conscious of Ben’s messages on my cell phone in the purse on the floor of the passenger seat, but I had to get away from the smell before I listened to any messages. I drove carefully out of the parking lot, through the crowd of policemen, who got out of the way. Some looked toward Officer Wolfe, who waved as if to say that I was free to go.

Over the bump and onto the tree-lined downtown street, and then down that and around the corner onto Fairfax Avenue. My house was eight blocks down it and then a sharp right on Quicksilver.

Fairfax was a busy street, the east-west artery of the town. I pulled into the parking lot of a drugstore and got my phone out of my purse. It was not normal for Ben to call me on Saturday morning, certainly not two times in what seemed to be half an hour or less.

Les Howard, Ben’s live-in lover, was a French horn player at the symphony downtown, and Friday night was usually concert night, which meant that they stayed up late, of necessity. The earliest I heard from Ben these days on Saturday was midafternoon, when he usually did call, keeping up a habit from our high school days of each finding out how the week had gone with the other. Even while I’d been married to All-ex, we’d kept it up. It was one of All-ex’s big all-time complaints, as if he really were in any danger from Ben. And I kept it up now, too, even though, frankly, I could be fonder of his boyfriend—
partner
seemed all too final, and Ben hadn’t done anything
bad enough to deserve that. I could be fonder of Les Howard, for instance, if it had been his body I’d found back there.

But this thought brought with it an all-too-clear image of the body, and I shook my head. No. I didn’t wish that on anyone. And besides, I had nothing really against Les, except the way he looked at me and the suspicion that he wasn’t making Ben very happy.

Ben and I had been friends since we were twelve, when he’d rescued me after I’d gotten in over my head in a fight with playground bullies. It would take more than our truly despicable taste in men to break that.

As I thought that, I was dialing my messages, and I got Ben’s voice, crisp, clipped, over the phone. “Dyce? Why aren’t you answering at either phone? Where are you? Call me.”

It didn’t sound particularly urgent, but something about it disquieted me. I erased the message and listened to the next. And became far more worried. Ben’s voice had lost the patented, almost inhuman calm he seemed to think was necessary when leaving a phone message. “Dyce! Oh, for the love of—” I didn’t know for whose love it was, because the next word was slurred. And then, in growing annoyance, “Dyce, answer the damn phone now. Where are you? Would you please answer and tell Les that I—Les, would you
please
?”

The connection ended. I opened my mouth, closed it, and looked at the dashboard, at Officer Cas Wolfe’s card. But what was I going to tell him? That I thought Ben had had some sort of domestic scene, what . . . an hour and a half ago? Yes, that would be helpful.

And the thing was that the idea of a domestic disturbance between Ben and Les would strike people as either funny or Ben’s fault. Les was all of five-five, maybe five-six, elegantly slim, with the sort of build that seemed made for the tuxes he wore to work, while Ben was six-three
and built like an assault tank, and he kept slim only through strenuous and continuous exercise. Any policeman seeing Ben and Les fight would immediately arrest Ben for assault.

And besides, Ben didn’t fight with people as such. Even when we met—I’d been involved in trying to punish two bullies at once and had momentarily forgotten that they were eighth graders and a year older than I and probably singly outweighed me by double—he’d walked up and punched the bullies out, and asked me if I was all right. Then he’d dusted his clothes—which didn’t need it—and introduced himself, and walked away with me, leaving the bullies in the dust. All without looking even mildly upset, much less angry.

No, I had no idea what was going on with Les, but the idea that they were fighting was absurd.

I dialed Ben’s house, just in case, but the phone rang and rang, and no one answered. I closed my phone and was about to put it back in my purse, when it rang.

I opened it. Ben’s cell phone number. “Ben!” I said.

“Dyce.” He sounded like himself again, and wasn’t yelling. “Where are you?” Correction, he sounded terribly tired. He probably had woken up too early.

“Shorty Drugs.”

“Where?” Which was justified because Shorty was the local chain and it was all over town.

“On Fairfax.”

“Are you coming home?”

“I was about to.”

“Good. I’ll wait.”

I was going to tell him to let himself in—he and my parents were the only people with keys—something he never did without permission. But he’d already hung up.

CHAPTER 3

Two Ciphers

As I pulled into my driveway—beside the once
-opulent blue Edwardian mansion of which I rented the bottom floor—alongside Ben’s BMW, E said, “Uh-oh,” from the backseat.

I didn’t know—exactly—what called for that sound. E shouldn’t know anything was wrong. From where he sat, he couldn’t see what I could. That the trunk lid of Ben’s car was dented, and that his back windshield had a crack straight across.

Ben sat in the driver’s seat. He’d rolled down the window, and he was scribbling on a pad in a leather portfolio that looked like something from work. And Ben’s appearance was as wrong as the dent on his normally impeccable car, as wrong as his being here at this time of the morning on a Saturday, of all days.

It’s hard to explain how Ben relates to clothes. It’s not that he’s exacting about them—he is—and it’s not that he cares how he looks—he does—it’s something well beyond that. Ben is attached to clothes as if they were his armor of righteousness, without which he would dissolve.
If he were a superhero, he would be Captain Suit and Tie, and if he had a trademark, it would be to leave behind an impeccably tied tie or at least a drawing of one.

Now, though I suspected it had taken him his college years to get over this, he wasn’t so fanatic about it that he wore a suit and tie on weekends. But even then he did usually look as though he’d put himself together to exact measure from some picture in a magazine captioned
The man who has it all relaxes
.

He was still wearing nice clothes—a pale cream shirt with two buttons unbuttoned at the chest. But the shirt was misbuttoned on the uppermost button, one up from where it should be.

As he got out of the car, I became even more alarmed. His khaki pants looked . . . rumpled. And up on the left side of his forehead was a very thin, jagged . . . scratch, I decided; I wouldn’t call it a cut. From it a drop of blood had run in an irregular pattern down Ben’s square, closely shaven face. And I was sure he hadn’t noticed. Or he’d never have come out looking like that.

I couldn’t even look. Something was wrong. Very wrong. I thought of the corpse in the Dumpster. Everything was wrong. I’d taken a wrong turn. Reality was askew.

“What’s wrong?” I said, as I got out of my car and opened the back door to unbuckle E. He was squirming and screaming, “Bah!” which was the closest he’d ever come to talking near another human being that wasn’t me. I had no idea what about Ben prompted the exclamation, and probably neither did Ben, who looked unusually dazed.

E escaped my grasp and ran gleefully out of the car to hug Ben’s legs. “Bah.”

“Uh,” Ben said, somewhere between amused and puzzled. “Same to you, buddy.” He looked back up at me, and I became suddenly conscious that I was still wearing my
denim coveralls, probably stained all over with stuff from the Dumpster. “Ugh. What have you been doing?”

“Dumpster diving,” I said, but unzipped and removed my coveralls and folded them, clean side out, which was what I normally did when I was trying to keep the car clean—what I should have done before I drove here. I put them under my arm to take inside. “For furniture. End of term at the college.” I wasn’t going to tell him anything else. At least not yet. I didn’t have words to tell him anything else. Yet.

Ben visibly hesitated. “Look, your parents—”

“Stuff it. No.”

I didn’t really want to discuss for the umpteenth time why it was profoundly unadvisable for me to live with my parents, and because E was firmly attached to Ben’s legs saying, “Bah,” up at him in wild adoration, I was free to go to the back of the car and pick up the little table.

Being just a tea table, it could—barely—be lifted with one hand and left me the other free to offer to E. “Come on, E. Let’s go in.”

But Ben reached down and grabbed E around the waist, lifting him up and sort of sitting him on his right arm. “Come on, monkey,” he said.

I’d never fully understood Ben and E’s relationship. They were the two people in the world closest to me—the ones who mattered most. I’d known one of them for seventeen years and the other since before he was born.

It should have been easy to figure out how they related. But their relationship was more complex than some third-world diplomatic negotiations and had all the protocol of a Mandarin ceremony. Somewhere between the fact that Ben lived in dread of what E’s spit-covered hands would do to his clothes, and the fact that E acted around Ben like cats act around people who hate them, they had a very strange friendship of sorts. The thing was that Ben didn’t
hate E. Not even close to it. I was sure of it. You could tell it in times like this, when he carried E even though he could have avoided it. Or the times when he actually babysat, twisting his life all out of shape to look after E so I could deal with divorce hearings and such. Not to mention the utter panic Ben had gone into the night that E had the ear infection and his fever wouldn’t stop going up. He’d all but physically threatened the ER doctors. But most of the time Ben avoided E and called him
monkey
and accused me of having kidnapped him out of the local zoo. And E thrived on this, as he didn’t on fawning and petting and cajoling.

I opened my front door and we went into the apartment that had been home to me for the last year and a half. Howsoever dumpy, it was still . . . well, dumpy. It was the sort of apartment that was rented to students, though the landlord had given me a break on the rent because I’d been willing to sign a two-year lease and because—presumably—he guessed my cleaning skills were better than the average bear’s. Or college student’s. But I repeat myself.

It wasn’t so much an apartment as the bottom half of an Edwardian house, relatively sprawling as these places went. I was lady of a domain that comprised a living room carpeted in spilled-ketchup red and wallpapered in prim little yellow roses. This spacious room I’d furnished with an old blue couch and a table that I could never sell for any decent price, mostly because I hadn’t yet determined whether the table was wood or cardboard, but I was fairly sure it was glued together with spit. Its legs tried to sprawl wide at the slightest touch.

Through the door at the back on the far right was the bedroom. Or rather the bedrooms, which sort of flowed into each other, with a narrow door in between. The bedroom I used had my childhood bed—single, rickety, white-painted—and
a makeshift shelf of bricks and boards, which held the books I actually read; no
literature
because it brought out my PTSD from college. It was carpeted in neon-glaring blue and the walls had a wallpaper that looked like a snapshot of spiders involved in an orgy spanning all of spiderdom. All of this over a red background. Through the narrow door was E’s bedroom, which someone filled with foresight had refused to carpet and covered instead in poo-brown vinyl. What it was covered in, though, most of the time, was stuffed animals. For reasons unknown to me—though I was sure there were reasons, perhaps involving secret memos and a strategy for driving me insane—everyone I knew, even the most casual of acquaintances, gave E stuffed animals. He had every creature that had ever stumbled into old Noah’s ark. Only not two by two. Oh, no. As Noahs went, E was clearly broad-minded, and his beasties marched by three, by four, by multitudinous crowd.

E was a normal little boy. Except for the occasional cuteness mode—which I always suspected was more for my benefit than his—he used his stuffed animals as projectiles, which he lobbed with unerring aim at the head of the unsuspecting. Usually me. From this sea of variously colored fake fur emerged E’s crib—which he still used, as I was still looking for a little bed at a good price. In the corner sat a bunch of plastic drawers and cubes, which contained his clothes and toys-that-weren’t-fuzzy. The only one he’d shown any interest in so far was the toy piano Ben had given him for Christmas, which I had regretfully put in a safe place, while putting Ben on my
What was he thinking?
list. My only regret was that Ben was unlikely to ever have kids. Otherwise, the kids would already, pre-existence, be on my
Give a drum set to
list.