Death Was in the Picture (11 page)

At first, aside from an open door on an empty office, I could
see nothing amiss. Then I spotted one of Dex’s shiny black broughams toe-up on the floor, peeking out from behind his desk. When I looked more carefully, I could see that there was still a foot inside the shoe. I dropped my packages next to my own desk as I passed, hurrying to Dex, splayed on the floor next to his.

He was perfectly still and there was an awful lot of blood. My hand on his wrist reassured me: he wasn’t dead. I could feel his pulse, but when I tried to rouse him, I got no response at all.

I grabbed the phone on Dex’s desk and dialed Mustard’s number from memory. I knew Mustard had gone golfing, so I didn’t have much hope I’d get him at his office. When he answered I almost felt like weeping in relief. I told him what was happening in as few words as possible.

“What should I do? Should I call the police? Or an ambulance? Maybe Dex needs medical attention? Oh, but if I called the police, they could decide—”

“Hold your horses,” Mustard interrupted my stream of possibilities. He sounded like he was already in motion. “No police. No nuthin’. I’ll be there in eight minutes. Seven if traffic is light. Then we can decide.” And he was gone. I stood looking at the phone, biting my lower lip, wondering if I’d done the right thing, but knowing that Mustard would probably get here faster than the police would have in any case.

I spent a bad eight minutes. Maybe it was five. Or ten. It certainly felt like much, much more. In that time, even though the wound on the top of Dex’s head that had bled so profusely had slowed, I used a clean rag to staunch the blood. By the time Mustard got there with a couple of his men, the bleeding had stopped altogether, but Dex still hadn’t woken and I was frantic. After a cursory glance at Dex, Mustard reassured me.

“I think it’ll be OK, Kitty. Head wound like that can produce more blood than seems likely. But Dex has got a head like an engine block. You’ll see, he’ll come ‘round in a bit.”

From speaking to me—reassuringly, gently—it was almost comical to see Mustard switch gears when he turned to his thugs. At the sound of his voice—grim and serious—I looked up from where I’d squatted on the floor next to Dex. I wanted to see if what I heard in Mustard’s voice was also in his face. The voice hadn’t told any lies: Mustard had about him the look of a man who would cause a death if given the chance. I had always suspected he wasn’t someone to mess with. The look on his face confirmed it.

He conferred with the two men quickly, before both of them left the office. I could tell it wouldn’t be long before Mustard followed them—he just had that look—but first he bent back to where I sat next to Dex on the floor to see what needed doing. His face held its usual cheerfully gentle look, the murderous intent banished, at least for the moment, while he looked at his friend.

“He hasn’t come ‘round yet?” Mustard said, stating the obvious.

I shook my head.

“OK,” he said rising. “Let’s try something.” He crossed to Dex’s desk and pulled a bottle of bourbon out of one of the top drawers. Then he took his handkerchief and doused it with a splash from the bottle, which he then dabbed gingerly across the cut on Dex’s temple.

What Mustard had done seemed like magic when Dex protested with a yelp of pain.

“Now we’re cookin’ with gas,” Mustard said sounding satisfied.

“Huh!” Dex said. “I don’ know what you’re cookin’, but I think you just dumped some of it on my head.” He sat up, pressing his fingers gingerly to the cut, then pulling them away quickly. It seemed likely that the cut wouldn’t be the worst of it: a bruise was already forming under the skin.

Now that he was awake and moving, we could see that the cut on his head wasn’t Dex’s only injury. He held his right arm
painfully at his side, moving it as awkwardly as a heron with a damaged wing might have done. His eye was going to settle into a shiner in a few days time and the way he moved his body—carefully and without full motion—made me suspect other injuries.

Mustard had seen it, as well. “Looks like you got yourself beat up pretty good.”

“You think?” Dex said sarcastically while he pulled himself to his feet.

“Looks like they took a little waltz across your suit while they was at it.”

Dex pushed his fingers experimentally into his side, his abdomen, his upper thigh. “Musta done. I don’t remember. Must have blacked that part out just after they put their dancin’ shoes on.”

“Huh,” Mustard said. “Probably a good thing.”

“It’s all right, I guess,” Dex said, still poking.

I took a breath that felt like the first I’d pulled in half an hour.

“Who was it?” Mustard asked. I could sense his urgency returning. His friend was all right—would live, in any case. Time he was out with his muscle, chasing down whoever had done the damage. I knew the signs. “Did you recognize them?”

“Seems to me there were three or four of them altogether. But I only recognized one of them: Xander Dean.”

Mustard’s eyebrows rose, then ducked back into position so quickly I doubted having seen them lift in the first place.

“Little I saw of him,” Mustard said, “he didn’t seem the type.”

“Ha,” Dex said mirthlessly. “I think mebbe you had him pegged wrong.”

“I think mebbe you’re right,” Mustard agreed. “Where’d he go?”

“Wish I could tell you. But I think they were careful not to
say. Or maybe they
did
say, and I was too busy listening to the floorboards.”

“What was it about?” I asked.

“He wanted to know had I changed my mind about what I told him earlier,” Dex said. “I told him I hadn’t.”

“What had you told him?” Mustard asked.

“That we were parting company.”

It was clear to me that there was as much here that Dex was not saying as what he chose to share. It must have been clear to Mustard, as well, because he didn’t pursue the matter; didn’t press for greater detail. I resigned myself to the fact that Mustard and I would never know exactly what had happened here this afternoon. But the upshot? That much I knew: Xander Dean had been even more unhappy than we’d suspected that Dex had left his employ. He’d put some pressure on Dex to prevent it happening. That hadn’t worked. Could never work. Not with Dex who, in the end, truly didn’t care what was done to him. You got that with Dex before long. It was hard to frighten someone who figured that nothing worse could happen to them than what already had.

“When did it happen?” Mustard wanted to know.

“I’m not sure, to be honest. But they were waiting for me when I got back to the office and they worked on me for maybe half an hour.”

“He would have gotten back to the office close to two hours ago,” I supplied. “If he came back here right after he dropped me off at Blackstone’s.”

“I did,” Dex said nodding.

Mustard nodded crisply, all business. “All right then. So you were out for an hour, Theroux? That ain’t good. You wanna make sure you keep an eye on yourself: see you don’t go all loony or anything after bein’ out that long.”

“Yeah,” Dex said dryly. “I’ll do what I can about that, old hoss.”

Mustard seemed not to have heard the irony in Dex’s voice. Or maybe he just chose to ignore it. With Dex, that wasn’t always a bad idea.

“I’ll go poke my head out,” Mustard said, “see what I can see and if the boys have picked anything up. I have a hunch there won’t be anything. Not today. They had too big a lead. Still…” and with that he plunked on his hat and left the office without another word. The air about him swirled as though it knew it followed a man on his way to fix something.

“I need a drink,” Dex said, dusting himself and his bourbon off and righting the chair behind his desk before dropping himself into it.

The office was a mess. Dean’s toughs had seen fit to upend every single chair in the place, including mine. I wondered mildly what they had against chairs.

A couple of file drawers had been opened, their contents strewn on the floor around my desk, but I got the idea that no one had been looking for anything, that whoever had done it had just wanted to make sure their message was delivered loud and clear. Dex’s ashtray and the contents of the coffee pot had been dumped in the middle of the floor together. This was more irritant than anything. Since our floors were battered hardwood, one more mess wasn’t going to make that much difference, but it wasn’t going to be much fun to clean up, either. And though Dex’s blood would mop up easily enough, the trick would be tracking down all the places he’d left it. Judging from the blood spatters I found all over the office, they’d really bounced him around a bit.

I let Dex nurse his bruises, his battered ego and his bourbon while I put the place back together. The toppled chairs and tobacco soup messes were easy. The most difficult part would be organizing the files. I decided to just press everything neatly into an empty file drawer for today: I could sort things out properly over the next week or so, whenever I had time in the
office that needed filling up. It wasn’t like we hit those files on a daily basis anyway.

My tidying was interrupted only once when Steward Sterling popped by as promised with masks for the ball, an invitation and the address.

He whistled when he saw the place. “Wow,” he said pleasantly, “what a dump! Tell me it’s not always like this.”

“It’s not always like this,” I repeated as instructed. “Only when we’re anticipating going to a ball.”

“There’s a story, I’d imagine,” he said.

“Yeah. I just don’t know that I feel like telling it right now,” I said taking the small package he’d brought. “You could try your luck with Dex, though,” I said, indicating his closed door.

“Naw, that’s OK,” he said. “Maybe you two will feel like filling in the details next time I see you.” And with a smile and a bit of a bow, he was gone.

Once I’d tidied things up to the point where it no longer looked as though a tornado had hit the place, I poked my head in at Dex, Steward’s package under my arm.

Dex was sitting upright in his chair with his face turned toward the window. There were about three fingers of bourbon in the glass on the desk, but he wasn’t touching it. His ashtray was sitting just as I’d left it after cleaning: no butts marred the jade-green surface. It always scares me when Dex abandons his vices. Sometimes it can be the calm before the storm, sometimes it can be the storm itself but, whatever it is, it’s usually not good.

“Want some company?” I said now.

“Sure,” he replied, pointing one long index finger at my usual seat.

“Thanks,” I said, taking it.

“Drink?” he said once I was seated, using the same index finger to indicate the bottle.

I shook my head. He knows I don’t care for spirits, but he’s also dead polite.

“What do you figure?” I said after a while. I was trying not to notice the angry color the flesh around his eye was turning.

“I’ve got a bump on the noggin, but I figure I’ll live. And they didn’t dump my bourbon, so that’s good news.”

“But what do you figure it was about?”

“You know as well as I do, Kitty. And you called it right, too, didn’t you?”

“I guess,” I said, not sure that I had.

“I honestly figured I’d quit Xander Dean and that would be the end of it. It seems he has other ideas.” He paused for a moment, deep in thought. “You were right about something else, too,” he said, finally.

“What’s that?”

“Well, you figured maybe Dean didn’t hire me to follow as much as he hired me to see what he wanted me to see.”

“I said that?”

Dex nodded. “More or less, yeah, you did.”

“OK,” I said, unconvinced. “Let’s say I did. What makes you figure I was right?”

“It’s in how mad he was at me wanting to part company,” he said, as though thinking it through for the first time. “You know: you hire someone to do a job and they don’t do it. What do you do?”

“I don’t know. Hire someone else, I guess.”

“Exactly right. That’s what you do. Easy as pie in this day and age too, ain’t it? You open a door and holler, someone’ll come running to do the work that needs doin’.”

“Pretty much I guess.”

“So why break a sweat if I don’t want to do it? Unless the job, such as it was, is already done. And the thing you’re paying for is what was
already
seen, if you follow.”

Unfortunately, I did. “He was hoping for corroboration,” I said softly. “That’s what you’re saying.”

“Right. Corroboration. Trust you to find a ten-dollar word,” he said, not without affection.

Dex saying it like that—out loud and in plain language—made me think of something else. “If that’s true, Dex, if you were hired not to follow but to … to witness, then maybe you weren’t the only one.”

Dex looked at me for a while, as though if he looked closely enough he might see a more complete answer. He took a sip of his bourbon. Lit a butt.

“And if I wasn’t the only one,” he said finally, “it’ll make our job that much easier.”

“How so?”

“All we have to do is find the others.”

It might have sounded easy to him. To me it did not. To me it sounded like needle in a haystack time.

“Not first, though,” I said.

“Huh?”

I looked at Dex’s bruised noggin, at the careful way he was holding his arm. “Well, I don’t know if you’re still feelin’ up to it, but before anything else, Dex, we’re supposed to go to a party.”

BEFORE I LEFT the office for the night, I called Mustard and arranged for the use of a car. Dex would stop by and pick it up after he left the office, at which point he’d come and collect me and we’d go to the Masquers’ Ball together.

Dex arrived right on time. I opened the door myself. When he saw me, Dex’s eyes went wide. It was gratifying and a little scary, too. “Why, you’re all grown up, Miss Pangborn.” We stood at the door like strangers. Me on the inside, backlit by the house. Dex on the stoop bringing with him the scent of evening and the sound of cicadas and the city at night.

“I’ve decided to take your remark as a compliment, Mr. Theroux. I take it you approve of the purchase you had Mr. Wyndham make?” I spun around theatrically, with more élan than I felt.