Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (6 page)

But he just pointed at the table and said, “A
B
, a
B
,” before trying to get back under it.

“C,” Ben said, with every appearance of being helpful.

I ignored him. However, this was new behavior for E, who frankly had never made so many speechlike sounds near anyone else, not even Ben.

“What is it, baby?” I said.

“No, no, no,” he said, earnestly. “A
B
, a
B
. An’
N
.”

“You know,” Ben said. “I know you’ve been saying for weeks that he could talk, but this is not—”

“Shush,” I told him, as I reached over, removed the little table from atop E, and set it upside down on the carpet. There, on the underside of the table, big as life, was a long scribble, which started with something that looked like a
B
and contained at least an
N
.

“You know, you could have a circus act here,” Ben said. “If you teach him to stomp his foot twice for yes and once for no. What was that thing with Clever Hans, the horse that could . . .”

He stopped, probably realizing that I was frowning at the bottom of the table and looking totally unamused. I was looking totally unamused because I remembered where I’d gotten the damn table. And if it had some message underneath . . .

“What is it?” Ben asked.

“The table was in the Dumpster. Where I found the body.”

For a moment, he didn’t move. He exhaled air in a long, long breath. He said something that sounded suspiciously like, “Oh, holy fuck,” under his breath, and then aloud he said, “Dyce, are you joking? About finding a body?”

I shook my head, and he put his cup down slowly next to mine. “Dyce!” he said, his voice half reproach and half tight with something that sounded terribly like worry.

Of course I had to look up at him, nothing for it. The expression on his face was all worry, the kind of worry one would expect if he’d just seen E sample a poisonous spider. “I found a body in a Dumpster. I told you,” I said.

He cleared his throat. “What . . . what did you do to it, Dyce?”

It crossed my mind to tell him that I had saved the
choice cuts for a stew, but the joke caught in my throat in a knot of nausea. “Nothing!” I said.

Ben sat down. He didn’t do it, but looked like he would very much like to clutch his head in his hands. He visibly bit his tongue. “Dyce, you have to call the police.”

“I did,” I answered, and it occurred to me, even as I said it, that my voice came out peevish, like E’s when I asked him if he’d washed his hands.

E at this point decided to add to the discussion by walking up to Ben, patting his knee, and saying feelingly, “Phew.”

Ben smiled at him. “Just about. With Mommy, you never know. But one
is
rather
phew relieved
she did the right thing.”

“I think he meant the smell,” I said.

He looked up at me with the kind of look he got when we were seniors in high school and he had come in early one morning to find me treed like an idiot cat atop the giant cowboy statue in front of the school. It wasn’t my fault.

You see, my French teacher kept spare panties in her desk. At the time neither Ben nor I could have guessed why, though looking back, she had held long conferences with the principal and . . . who knows? These panties, which I’d found quite by accident when she kept me after school to write the verbs and then left the room to see the principal, were the size of your average washtub, pink and made of the sort of improbable synthetic fabric that, with the roaches and the rats, will be the only thing surviving after nuclear attack.

Now, if you know that the mascot of the high school was a cowboy—with his hat in his hand—and that I loathed the French teacher, you’ll understand it was more than human flesh and blood could endure
not
to climb the statue and put Madame Virginie’s underpants on the cowboy’s
head. But the look on Ben’s face that morning, before he had to help me climb down from that stone shoulder twelve feet in the air, I’d never forget.

His expression now was exactly like that, half wonder and half shock. “Dyce . . . the table was in with the body?”

I shook my head. “Not exactly. I mean same Dumpster, but there were some bags in between and all. I mean, it wasn’t touching it or anything. I’m sure it wasn’t related.”

“How can you be sure it wasn’t related?”

“Because it . . . it was far away from the corpse. The corpse was . . .” I swallowed hard, having become unaccountably nauseous. “It was melted and I . . .”

“I’m sorry.”

I shook my head. “Well, it wasn’t me,” I said. “Or anyone I know.”

“But the table . . . should you have kept the table? I thought the police would take everything in the general vicinity.”

“They would,” I said.

“Except . . .” he said, looking suspicious.

“I didn’t tell them. I mean, it was just in the Dumpster. It wasn’t touching.”

He just looked at me. He opened his mouth, closed it, then said, “What
am
I going to do with you?”

“Nothing, I’m not your type. Horrible deformity. Important missing part.
^”

It didn’t even get me a smile. In fact, he frowned. “Seriously. You have to call the police now. Tell them you forgot about the table. They’ll believe you. Shock and all.” And the crazy man was fishing in his pants pocket for his cell phone and extending it to me on the palm of his hand. “Call them. Now.”

I ask you. He had known me for seventeen years, and he thought that would work. I’d been feeling low and
down and about ready to do the girly thing and burst into tears. Until he took that tone. At which point I crossed my arms on my chest and looked up and up and up to glare at him and said, “No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

Poor man, so young and with such sad hearing loss. “Benedict Colm, you know perfectly well what I mean. No. I am not calling the police and telling them I have a table from that Dumpster. They would take it away.”

“Of course they would,” he said. “It’s evidence,” he said. He frowned. “That’s why you must give it back.”

Sometimes I think with men in general there’s a sort of skip in the brain—a flat spot. They don’t seem to understand that
should
is not the same as
must
. Of course I
should
give it back. Theoretically. Very theoretically. I knew that. I knew it was possible Officer Hotstuff would think it was evidence of a sort or another. But come hell or high water, it was far more likely that the table was completely unrelated to the corpse and had just been thrown away. And if that was the case, then by giving it to the police, I’d be doing myself out of . . .

I frowned at the table. Delicate legs; a drawer that was subtly, not perfectly rectangular; a top that looked like a piecrust edge, but really could be any other kind of carving under a thick slathering of various kinds of paint . . . well . . .

If it was anything even nineteenth century or earlier, it would probably sell at the consignment store in Denver for maybe even as much as five thousand. Which meant I could pay the rent and afford real food for me and E for more than a few weeks, all of which I had no clue how to do otherwise.

Alternately . . . alternately, it could be a piece of trash.

I bit the tip of my tongue, trying to clear my head.

“Dyce. Dyce! You must call.”

“Shush. Look . . .” I frowned at the table, then looked at Ben. “Do you have to go back and . . . make up or whatever you do?”

He let a breath escape again, with the effect of a balloon losing air. “Whatever I do?” he asked confused.

“After arguments. Make up. Shake hands or . . .” I realized where I was going by implication, shook my head, and shut up.

Ben of course knew what I was thinking, but he had no more wish to traipse there than I. There were things one simply didn’t need to know about one’s friends. Hell, things one would pay not to know. Real money.

He pressed his lips together. “We’ve never had an argument before. Don’t go there, Dyce. I’m not ready to go back. It wouldn’t be a good thing for either Les or me if I did.”

“Oh, good,” I said.

“Good?”

“Yes, good, because that means you can stay with E while I go out back and look at this thing.”

“But—”

“I’ll look at that inscription,” I said. “And see if it’s anything that could even be vaguely related to the murder. I mean, if it says
Mr. Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth
, you’ll admit it has nothing to do with the body in the Dumpster, right?”

“
Mr. Lincoln
doesn’t start with a
B
.”

I made a dismissive gesture, meant to convey to him that he was being nitpicky. “
Booth
does.”

He sighed. “It could be this murdered guy is also Mr. Lincoln. Or Mr. Booth.”

“Oh, it could,” I said, “except the corpse was a woman. And don’t ask how I knew, it’s the hairstyle. So, will you watch E for an hour? Please? If this is just a modern trash piece, I promise to call the police.” I looked up and saw mutiny in his brown eyes. “Ben, please. It could be a month
or more of living expenses riding on this, and there’s a good chance it’s nothing to do with the body.”

He looked like he was grinding his teeth, but when he spoke his voice was perfectly calm. “You know how you were voted most likely to change the world?”

“Yeah?” I said, puzzled, wondering why in heck our high school senior yearbook was being brought up.

“They were correct. Hurricanes often change everything in their path. Go. I’ll keep an eye on the monkey.”

I looked at E, who seemed to be asleep on the carpet, and felt a little better about leaving Ben with the brat. “Okay,” I said, but hesitated before I grabbed the table, because now that Ben wasn’t yelling at me, I no longer felt like I should resist him with all my might.

“Go,” he said. “Before I change my mind.”

I grabbed the table and I went. All the way to the back.

CHAPTER 5

The Chamber of Horrors

The shed in the back was the real reason I’d settled
for this student apartment, instead of the hundred different ones downtown, some of which were cheaper, many of which had bathrooms that would have disgusted Ben slightly less.

Not that Ben was particularly fond of the shed in the back. When he was forced to come out here—usually to call me—he was very careful not to touch anything, and he called the place my “chamber of horrors.” As far as that went, he was absolutely right. He shouldn’t touch anything in here, and someone like Ben, unusually attached to his clothes, could only view this area with absolute and utter horror.

To me—but I have a more romantic imagination—it looked like an old-time alchemist’s shop. Oh, I had some of the modern stuff, including some of the nontoxic—or not too toxic—paint remover, of the kind that you can’t touch with metal. You buy it at refinishing stores and it costs an arm and a leg. Other things I had were pretty
expensive, too, and had been bought while I was still married and the furniture refinishing had been an interesting hobby. Like the heat gun of the sort that puts out eight hundred concentrated degrees and can be used to peel several layers of paint at once.

I also owned some good scrapers, including one that I was told is called a five-point painter’s tool but that I called “the vicious tool” because with its flat front, kind of like a sharpened spatula, and the curlicues and bits on the side that could be used to enter the narrowest crevice and scrape the tightest carving, it had always struck me as the tool I wanted at hand if anyone ever broke in while I was refinishing. Then there was the incredibly expensive but near-miraculously useful set of fine-sanders that Ben had bought me for my birthday last month. Which had been doubly appreciated because I knew how Ben felt about what I did for a living—part discomfort that I was working at a manual profession and part disappointment that I didn’t try for something better.

But on the shelves against the far wall, I kept what I mostly used. Alcohol spirits and turpentine, and various waxes and oils that could be bought dirt cheap, as opposed to the really expensive prepackaged stuff. Oh, if I’d had money, I’d have bought the more expensive, name-brand stuff. There were some things I did allow myself, simply because they saved so much time. But when you’re living on a narrow margin, anything that saves money helps.

The other feature of the workshop that made it just about perfect was the two narrow windows. They were too far up for anyone to look in on me and see what I was doing, or even to allow much dust in—the screen notwithstanding—to land on any of the furniture I was refinishing. On the other hand, they allowed for lovely cross-ventilation, which one must have while working
with solvents. In my first attempts at refinishing, back at All-ex’s home, I’d worked in a completely closed garage. Which meant I’d once run into the house screaming when the desk I’d been working on had started dancing and singing show tunes. It had taken my ex’s best efforts and several hours of deep breaths before I was willing to admit that perhaps I’d been high as a kite.