French Polished Murder (17 page)

“It really would have been much better,” she would say, “if newspapers were printed on acid-free paper.”

“That new stud at the ranch. Man, you ought to see the colts he sires. I swear they come out running. I was wondering if I should start breeding him to—”

“Why, today we found a rare issue of the
Conspirator
, must have been the first that was printed, and—”

“Did it say anything about horses?”

“My dear?”

“Never mind.”

I pulled myself back from that little fantasy, as Mrs. Martin said. “I heard you were interested in the mystery of Grandmama’s disappearance.”

“My grandmama,” John interrupted. “Almeria Martin.”

“His father was her son,” his wife said. “Her older son, you know. He was about ten when she disappeared.”

“My father never fully recovered from it, I think,” he said. “But of course, Auntie Diane had it much worse.”

“She was only eight and very frail, you understand. A sickly little girl. She was her mother’s best friend, you know, and she—”

“—was never the same after her mother disappeared,” he finished.

I was fascinated by this distributive method of speaking. Ben’s ex had complained that we finished each other’s sentences, but never like this. This was like something they had learned, perhaps rehearsed. I kept expecting them to break into song along the lines of “auntie never recovered, poor little thing.”

So vivid was this impression that I must have stared at them for a minute before realizing they were no longer talking. Then I cleared my throat. “She . . . do you have any idea where she might have gone?”

This time, they started both at the same time. “You must understand, Grandpapa, he was a great man and he did a lot for Goldport—”

He stopped suddenly and made a vague gesture with his hand, then backed up and disappeared into the crowd. I wondered if I was supposed to follow him, but his wife put out a hand and touched my coat. “John just went in search of something to drink,” she said. “He so hates this many people and this confined a space. You know how men are.”

I made a vague comment that might mean that yes, indeedy, I was acquainted with a male or two. While I was doing so, John came back, bearing a delicate rose-figured cup of tea. The smell coming from it, though, was nowhere near tea and I almost said something, but even I am not that completely stupid.

“What you have to understand about my grandfather, Ms. Dare,” he said. “Is that he was a very odd man. A great man, but like all great men as capable of evil as of good, you know. His heart . . .” He spread his hands and swung some of the liquid around onto the carpet. I could already imagine some of the servers taking snap shots to warn newcomers about him.
He’s worse than the tablecloth chick,
they’d say.
It’s cow shit and whiskey as far as the eye can see, and it just won’t come off the carpets.

I gave him my blandest smile. “Uh-huh.”

“Well, great men are like that,” he said, and seemed disposed to sulk. With his buzz cut, pale eyes, and broad features, he could have been a rancher who’d never been to the city, rather than the scion of one of the richest families in Goldport. “They have their right points and their flaws. And you see, my grandmother, she was a very kind, well-disposed woman, and she took it to her heart to try to improve the social standing of Mr. Jacinth Jones. He was, you see, very raw, as my mother would say. Just arrived from the East, and probably not from any family that counted back there, if you know what I mean, and he was . . . well . . .
nouveau riche
. His saloon was doing so well that people around were jealous of him and complained. And then, you know . . . He didn’t have the graces so he could keep those criticisms at bay.

“So my grandmother undertook to help him. Nothing . . .” He sipped the whiskey. “Nothing underhanded, you know, or even remotely scandalous. Just, telling him what he should wear, what establishments to patronize. But in those days behavior standards were a lot more rigid, you know?” He swigged again, and must have emptied the cup. “So, you know, she was . . . well the local papers talked about it.” He started moving away again.

His wife put out a hand to stop me from following him, not that I’d made any attempt to, and said, “The thing is, you know, though the papers never named her, my husband’s grandfather figured out what it was all about and he was not a man to take such a thing kindly. He was then the mayor. I don’t know if you realize, but it was during his term and largely with contributions made by him or projects procured for him that most of the downtown was built. You must come to the Martin wing again, I’ll give you all the relevant documents, since you’ll want at least a brief introduction to his career, you know, for . . . for balance.”

I nodded and mumbled something about balance, although right then the only balance that concerned me was my ability to hold tea and a plate of sandwiches, and what did my mom expect me to eat it with, my toe or my ear?

Then Mr. Martin was back, with a freshly filled tea cup. He continued his story as though there had been no interruption. “Well, my grandmother was . . . er . . . with child, and he told her, he said if the child didn’t look like the two children that she’d already had with him, then he was going to kill both her and Mr. Jones, with his wood chopping ax.”

I almost dropped the sandwich plate, which might have solved my dilemma but would certainly get me on that most-wanted list that the waiters were keeping. “Excuse me?” I was thinking of that lovely mansion with all its antiques. It had been the home of a man who had threatened to kill his wife with an ax.

John Martin took a swing of his whiskey, which clearly conferred telepathic abilities, because he then turned to me and said, “Well, those were much . . . rawer times, you know, much rawer. People were still very close to survival and they . . . they had to eat or be eaten, metaphorically. And my grandfather was a big man, yes, sir, a great man, but choleric.” He took another drink. “My father always thought Grandma Almeria, his mother that is, was . . . innocent, you know? That the child she was carrying was his father’s, but . . . who can guarantee what their next child will look like, I ask you? So, we think, she . . . that is . . .” He took another swig. “We think to save her life, you know, and Mr. Jones’s—I mean, certainly you couldn’t expect her to just wait and allow herself to be killed, could you?—so, in self-defense, and in defense of this man she’d been trying to er . . . mentor . . . yes, mentor, she—we think—ran with him.”

“Ran?”

“Yeah, left, ran, eloped. Somewhere. We never knew where. To his dying day, my father—he died last year—wondered if he had a sibling out there, the baby his mother was carrying, you know, that he never got to see. It weighed on him to his dying day. He left me instructions that if this person or his descendants were to surface, I was to do something for them, you know, whatever they needed and I could help with.”

“Has anyone surfaced?”

He shook his head. “No, we think . . . she . . . they . . . er . . . must have left the country. Gone somewhere else.”

“Any indication of this? I mean, is there a reason you think it? Did she ever send a letter or a postcard or . . .”

He shrugged and finished his second teacup of whiskey. “I don’t think so, leastwise not that anyone ever said, certainly not my father. But my father had private investigators look for her high and low, you know, all over the country, and he never found a sign of her. Mr. Jones, it is said, was swarthy, though blue eyed, so my father always said that they might have gone to Mexico or South America and changed their names.”

“It is a very romantic story, isn’t it?” Mrs. Martin asked.

I agreed. It was very romantic, and I had no doubt at all that it was a story, as in something fictional designed to provoke a certain reaction. I was not sure what the reaction was supposed to be, but my first feeling was that this had been shared with me to keep me from asking any more questions.

“It’s very strange,” I said. “A lot of people are very protective of Mr. Jones’s past apparently. I had asked my friend, Castor Wolfe—he’s a police officer—if he could get me some information on it, and he said he could not. He said that his captain had asked him not to give information to anyone writing a book on Mr. Jones. Very odd, don’t you think?”

“Very,” the woman said, and blushed as badly as Ben tended to.

Her husband didn’t say anything, but left once more to return shortly with yet more whiskey. It soon became obvious that there I was, holding a plate of crustless sandwiches and a cup of now very cold tea, and they didn’t have anything else to tell me. which only reinforced my impression that I’d been told a well-rehearsed tale. Why, I didn’t know. But at least they didn’t seem to be Mafiosi, and had nary a violin case between the two of them. I apologized and explained I needed to get home to babysit rats so my best friend could go on a date.

 

 

As I made my way through the crowd, I did notice
that the current Mrs. Mahr was indeed attired in a dress that defied description, though I’ll do my best to try. Imagine a dress that starts as a tank top in blue satin that shades to white in horizontal stripes. Right at the crest of her breasts, which were more inconsequential than mine, she had . . . a hoop, sewn into the fabric, so that it stood stiff and proud, well away from her breasts. So far so good, right? I mean, no one has circular boobs, but it could give her a slightly more imposing figure. However . . .

However, she could not let a good thing go. So farther down, just above her waist, there was another hoop just slightly bigger, and so on all the way to her mid-thighs where the dress stopped on a ball-end fringe much like the ones that had been used in lampshades in the seventies.

Since there was a sort of inverted-bucket thing in the same color as the dress and with the same fringe perched on her bleached blond hair, I considered, momentarily, the possibility that she was, in fact, trying to imitate a lampshade, but it seemed so unlikely. Besides, if that were her intention, surely she could at the very least have put a little flashlight inside the hat or something, so we knew what she meant.

The second hypothesis was that she was trying to look like a wedding cake, an impression reinforced by the fact that she was wearing popular—if artificial looking—frosting colors.

What was worse, I thought, as I realized that, yes, I was going to go talk to them, was that this . . . confection . . . had probably cost her as much as my entire wardrobe combined. Had to. There was no way a normal seamstress, no matter how much fabric glue she might have inhaled, would come up with such a design. Heck, even the so-called designer lines available in our stores were not so crazy or ugly. To achieve such a level of awful—just as to achieve the casually elegant—it took massive amounts of money. That dress had probably been purchased right off a runway show, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the show had taken place in Paris or Milan or some other capital of fashion.

“I’m sorry, Michelle,” I said, as I approached with a terribly bright and happy smile on my face. “I didn’t recognize you at first. I must compliment you on your installation.”

The effect was immediate and beyond my wildest dreams. Both of them turned and exclaimed at the same time, “Candyce!” If they had pointed fingers, turned pale or clutched hands to chest, it would have given a good impression of the worst Shakespearean acting possible.

As it was they came close. “What are you doing here?” All-ex asked. “I thought you were supposed to be watching Enoch?”

Michelle looked at me and said, in a slow, puzzled voice, “Installation?”

I smiled brightly first at All-ex. In fact, I smiled so brightly that you could have lit entire towns with the wattage. “Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “Ben is babysitting him for a few hours.”

“Ben! Do you mean Benedict Colm?” The problem All-ex has with Ben is, I think, that he can’t decide why he disapproves of him. On the one hand, he badly wants to disapprove because Ben is gay, but is slightly held back by the political correctness and common politeness of the circles he aspires to run in. On the other hand, he is convinced that Ben, as well as any other male who comes within three yards of me, must be having an affair with me.

This leaves him in a horribly painful position, where he isn’t sure why he disapproves of Ben, but is fairly sure he does. “You cannot leave him alone with Benedict!”

“Well, it’s a good thing, then, that I am going to go home right away.” Then I turned to his wife, and my smile expanded. “Of course, I get that it’s an installation,” I told her. “I mean, no woman would actually wear as a dress something that gives her the shape of a wedding cake. I would guess you are performing interstitial art by reminding everyone present at the historical mysteries society tea that marriage and the bonds of matrimony were so very important in both birth and death in times previous to our own. My hat—metaphorically—is off to you.” I gestured toward her with the cup and cake plate in such a way that, being normal and possessed of normal reflexes, she couldn’t help but reach out her hands for them. At which point, I deposited them in her hands and walked away free as a bird.

I was feeling so bouncy that it wasn’t till I was in the car that I had time to think about the story of Almeria and Jacinth. What part was true, and what part fable? The part of her just—to quote her grandson—er . . . mentoring Jacinth was almost certainly a lie. A woman running away with a man who is at best a friend, just to save both their lives, doesn’t sign a letter the way she had.

I mean, there were many things I could imagine telling Ben, but none of them would be that I was his always. This left . . . the bulk of the story untouched.

On the way home I took a detour and went by the address where Jacinth Jones had lived. No wonder I hadn’t recognized it. Instead of the spartan, lean saltbox shape, there was now a weird, jutting construction. It was obvious that the property was owned by a rental company—and not just because it had a for rent sign on the front lawn, but also because it had had two enclosed porches added on the bottom floor and one on the top floor. This was the sort of thing companies that rented to students did, in order to increase their number of units.