French Polished Murder (10 page)

She gave a fine aristocratic shrug. “Oh, Mr. Martin said everything here is to be got rid of.” She inclined her head. “It will show better if it’s empty.”

Knowing I was insane, I tried to calculate how much I could afford to pay for it all, and how much would be too much. “Uh . . . how much for the lot?” I asked.

She looked disdainful. “Mr. Martin said five hundred would be fine.”

Right. For a token payment, five hundred was stiff. But not for the contents of this carriage house. I would guess there were at least twenty pieces here, large and small. I didn’t know what amount of fix-up they’d require, but I was fairly sure that when I was done, the smallest table would easily sell for a hundred. And I actually had about four times five hundred in the bank, for once. Of course, I’d been saving to replace the car. But then again, if I pulled this off, I would be able to get a better car.

Only there was no way in hell I would be able to put everything in my shed. And paying for storage might completely destroy any profit.

Giving the woman a polite smile, I said, “If you’ll excuse me,” then stepped away and toward the dust-caked window on the left, which didn’t exactly give me privacy but gave me that polite distance that allowed both of us to pretend that I was in private.

I dialed my parents’ number and was answered by my mother’s voice, “Remembered Murder!”

“Mom!” I said. And immediately repented it. Mom lives in the expectation that I’ll call them to tell them I’m about to do something that fits their ideas for me—go back to school, marry, or perhaps write a mystery. They had just about given up on the idea that I would marry Ben, though not because they accepted for a moment that Ben was gay—despite the fact that Ben was not particularly in the closet—but because I was dating a policeman. Mind you, they would much rather I was dating a mystery writer but a policeman was almost as good. It gave them access to the details of crime investigation. And Cas humored them—he read the books they recommended and discussed them afterward with great solemnity.

I realized that what I was hearing from the other side of the line was my mother’s expectation I’d called to announce that Cas and I were getting married. I plunged ahead, hastily, “I was wondering if I could borrow your garage for a month or so.”

“Borrow?” Mom asked. She was clearly thrown by the fact that the subject was not marriage.

“Well, you see, I’m about to buy a whole lot of furniture,” I said. “And it won’t fit in the shed, so I was hoping I could store it in your garage, until I had time to work on it.”

I could hear—in the silence—my mother considering her options. She could tell me that my line of work was unseemly for a lady. She could tell me I needed to get married and start acting like an adult. But she had told me all this before, and I hadn’t seemed to care. And there was the hope, of course, that if I was buying a lot of furniture, it meant that Cas and I were about to furnish a house together.

“All right,” she said. “You can put what you buy in the half of the garage where the business van goes. We can park on the street for a while.”

“Thank you, Mom. I’ll have someone pick it up and deliver it, and I’ll be there when it’s supposed to come in.”

Mom sounded less than convinced this was a good thing, but accepted my thanks gracefully, and I turned to look at the lady in the shadows. “Five hundred,” I said. “We have a deal.”

I pulled my checkbook from my purse, made out a check and handed it to her.

“I’ll have someone pick up everything,” I said. Probably Starving Students, since they looked like they’d work for twenty bucks and a can of beer.

“Of course,” she said, as though that were a given. This time she showed me out of the carriage house through the garden, not through the gleaming, antique-appointed house.

The garden was perfectly fine, mind you. There were benches and statuary and such. Things I hadn’t seen outside the most upscale catalogues. But it seemed to me like I was being given a firm snub being shown out this way. As though the dust from my feet might pollute their upscale interior. Or as though they were afraid I would steal the antique knickknacks on the tables and credenzas.

As we walked, she said, “When your employees come, if you would be so kind as to tell them to come to the side entrance, by the driveway. I really should not be admitting tradesmen through the main entrance.”

I was left in no doubt that I was being included in those less than worthy tradesmen.

I felt as if I had entered an Agatha Christie novel, and though I enjoyed Agatha Christie, I didn’t like the rigid class structure in her novels. However, the fact was that even though I now worked with my hands, my maternal grandmother had been one of the grandames of society—such as it was—in Goldport, and on the sheer strength of that, my peculiar ex-hippie mother, with her obsession with mysteries and her vague ways, was admitted to the ranks of ladies who did lunch.

Remembering this was what made me go a little mad. Of course, those who know me and love me would probably say I’ve always been a little mad.

All I know is that I straightened my back and looked up at this ladylike housekeeper person and fired the most impertinent question I could think of. “It took quite a long while for the family to recover from the scandal surrounding Almeria Martin’s disappearance, didn’t it?”

When I got in my car, she was still standing at the garden gate, looking quite pale, opening and closing her mouth like a fish out of water. I’d rarely scored a truer hit.

I got home to find Ben sitting on the sofa with E,
reading him the adventures of the lab rats. I was fairly sure that he was adding lines to the books, too, because I would bet no children’s book author would write, “And Ratty was very calm and happy because he took Prozac by the bucketful.” However, E seemed content and it had been a long time since I’d tried to put the brakes on Ben’s weirdness. Because if I tried, he was likely to retaliate.

Instead, I called Cas to find the number for Starving Students and, incidentally, to let him know that Ben had plans for the night and we couldn’t plan to unload E on him. I needed to let him know, since Cas had got in the very bad habit of assuming we had a babysitter, unless otherwise stated.

“Too bad,” he said, when I told him Ben would be unavailable. “I was planning to bring you to my place and cook. Best we can do till Alex returns from his extended vacation. We’re sure he’ll return, right, and hasn’t left for good? I mean . . .”

“Yeah, I’m sure he’ll return,” I said.

“Good. Oh, wait, you said Ben will be busy . . . not with Nick?”

“Yeah,” I said, lowering my voice, and walking from the kitchen to the powder room. After I’d shut the door, I continued. “With Nick, why?”

Cas made a sound that was probably a cackle, but might also have been a cackle crossed with a “yes!”

“Castor Wolfe! Have you been playing matchmaker?”

“Uh? Of course I have. Nick’s ex left him when Nick lost his job, and if I get Ben to date him, he’ll leave you alone more often. More Dyce time for me.”

“You are a bad man,” I told him.

“Because I want time with you?” he said. I could hear him smile over the phone. “And why would that be bad? I call it eminently sensible.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I told him. “Prove you mean it by helping me babysit rats tonight.”

“Sure, and you’ll tell me all about your great buy, of course.”

Which I did, but it wasn’t as easy as that. First we had to face the fact that Ben was doing as good an imitation of crazy as I’d seen in a long time. He drove to his place. He returned with five outfits. He proceeded to model them for me.

Which, considering that I was a woman known for forgetting what color blouse she was wearing, should give you an idea of how completely far from sanity he had gone. I also had been known to not notice when Cas was wearing a suit instead of his ubiquitous jeans and polos, and therefore miss the fact that he intended to take me to an upscale restaurant. Needless to say, in those situations, I went right ahead and made the most inappropriate clothing choice possible for myself.

If you add to this the fact that Ben was either going through a beige phase or had decided that Nick would like beige, you’ll understand how I sat, in horrified silence, as my friend modeled first beige pants with a beige shirt, then another pair of beige pants with a different beige shirt. Then yet a third beige pants with beige shirt combo.

“Ben,” I said. “You’re putting me on. Those last three outfits were exactly the same.”

“No,” he said. “Can’t you tell they’re completely different tones of beige?”

“No, Ben, I can’t. Looks the same to me.”

“But the cut on the pants is completely different!”

I bit my tongue before telling my best childhood friend that I refused to look below his waist and tell him which pair of pants was most flattering. Instead, I looked up at his eyes and spoke to the sheer confusion there. “Listen to me, Benedict Colm. The man has seen you feeding rats. I think you could show up for the date naked, and he wouldn’t care.”

This got me a smirk, and I revised hastily, “Okay, okay, he’d care if you were naked. But you probably could show up in tie-dye and he wouldn’t notice.”

Blood left Ben’s face. “Tie-dye!” he said. “Why would I wear tie-dye?”

“You wouldn’t,” I said quickly, trying to remember how to give first aid, in case Ben should require it. “It was just an example.”

Ben vanished into the bedroom grumbling, “If I showed up in tie-dye, I would hope that he’d notice and be appropriately horrified.”

Then he started the dance of the seven neckties. Seven ties, all in tones of muted green. He wanted to know which one looked best with beige. While I could see the differences in the ties—one was slightly warmer than the other, one had a little pin-dot effect, etc.—I could no more tell how each coordinated with beige tones that were only different from each other in Ben’s fevered imagination.

Refusing to point out that, if anything, this mad confusion over clothes was giving away the fact he wasn’t going out with Nick to be polite, I picked a tie at random, shoved him into the bathroom where he had hung all his outfits, and closed the door, telling him not to come out till he was dressed.

As luck would have it this happened just as Cas came in the door, using the key I’d given him some months ago, because when All-ex had E, Cas often had to work late into the night and his having a key was better than his ringing my doorbell and getting me awake enough to figure locks in the middle of the night.

“Does Ben often wander around naked?” he asked. “Or is he threatening to go out naked? Is Nick taking him to a nudist restaurant or something?”

I shook my head, though I knew Cas was joking. “He wants me to decide which tone of beige he should be wearing.”

Cas had time to roll his eyes, before Ben emerged, looking perfectly attired, in beige shirt, beige pants, and a nicely coordinating tie. And then—to further prove he had gone completely off the deep end—he asked Cas’s opinion of his outfit. Even as Cas stood there in faded jeans and a white polo.

The love of my life had just managed to say, “Uh . . . it’s very . . . uh . . . beige,” when the doorbell rang.

Nick was wearing not just jeans, but jeans that had tears I couldn’t help thinking were strategic at various points in the leg and possibly other places I didn’t look. The jeans themselves looked worn, but not in the way any person would have worn them. More like they’d been pre-worn for the customer’s convenience. At any rate, the fabric had thinned enough to mold like a second skin, even though I was doing my level best not to stare. With the jeans, Nick wore a plain white T-shirt that stretched across a well-developed chest. And I would have thought he was seriously underdressed, except the effect that came across was that he’d probably spent more time on his attire than Ben. Though I’d bet he hadn’t bothered a childhood friend to ask if his white T-shirt was nicer than his other white T-shirt.

Ben stared for a moment, said, “Hi,” then wheeled around, and grabbed my shoulder en passant. I was very much afraid he was going to say the date was off, since Nick had shown up in a T-shirt, and that I’d have to explain to him that a T-shirt was not the same as tie-dye. However, before I could get the words out, Ben said, “Come on. I need to show you the rat system!”

“Excuse me?” I said. Cas and Nick followed behind, all the way to the kitchen, where Ben had set the aquarium back on the counter. The rats were starting to stir, and there was a notebook pinned to my fridge with a magnet, seriously disturbing the panorama of E’s art.

“See, there’re their names,” Ben said. “Make sure you match the names to the initials, and mark them with an
X
so I know how many feedings you’ve done on each of them. Don’t forget to rub their tummies. And—”