French Polished Murder (2 page)

At five foot five—which was to be my adult height—and weighing less than a hundred pounds, soaking wet and with lead in my pockets, I’d been constitutionally incapable of sleeping at night if I thought that someone, somewhere, was getting away with committing blatant injustice against his fellow man or woman, or snively, pimply middle school kid.

Ben had first come to
my
rescue when I’d taken on three bullies—each of whom were twice my weight—at once and had insisted on helping me despite my outraged howls that I had them surrounded.

We’d been best friends ever since and cooperated in an unusual way—I charged in and got way over my head, and he jumped after me to rescue me and incidentally finish off whatever dragon I’d been fighting. But now, I thought, staring at him, my eyes misting with tears, I would simply have to kill him.

“Why on earth are you crying?” Ben asked, as E came back in and whirled around him three more times, before speeding back out to the dining room, causing a hollow sound in his wake that I was afraid was the knocking down and breaking of the potted plant my boyfriend’s mother had given me for Christmas.

“Because I really am going to hate having to kill you. And then, you know, at your size and in the middle of winter, with the ground frozen solid, there is no way that I can dig a hole large enough to bury you in. And that means that either you’ll be found right away, and I’ll have to figure out a system of misdirection so they think someone else is the culprit, or I’ll have to figure out a way to dissolve your body, so I can flush it down the drain or something.” I thought a moment. “Given how dirty that bathtub was when I moved in, do you think there would be any noticeable difference if I used it as a container to dissolve you in muriatic acid?”

He sighed heavily. “Don’t you think that buying enough muriatic acid for that purpose would call attention in and of itself? Besides, from what I’ve read, it doesn’t dissolve the body completely. You’d end up with clogged drains, and they’d find pieces of me in the plumbing.” He had to shout the last part because E had come back for a whirl around the living room and, this time, was blaring the horn continuously, which created a sort of siren effect. “Besides, your neighbors upstairs would probably complain about the smell.”

“Why not?” I said, as the siren receded toward the kitchen, followed by a series of thuds that meant that E was trying to open the door to the bathroom by dint of knocking on it with the front wheel. “They have already complained about the noise. Which means I’ll get evicted before the month is out and I have no idea if the security deposit will cover impact marks on the bathroom door.” I brightened up, as the noise indicated that E had hopped directly from the motorcycle onto the toilet, which was, at least, an improvement over the last time, when he’d brightly informed me that the bike was plastic and washable. “Where did you say your ex lives now? I wonder if I might simply make it seem like he did you in. I mean, the police already know he set fire to the inside of your condo when you broke up.”

“Only that part of the police force that is currently dating you,” Ben said tartly, and then in the tone of one defeated, “Fine, fine, fine, fine. Do you want me to take the boy out for a spin on the sidewalk, to tire him out, so he can stop terrorizing you?”

“Would you?” I asked, as the horn/siren started up again. “That is ever so sweet of you.”

Ben rolled his eyes as he reached to the toppled coat tree and grabbed E’s little, black leather jacket, which was the other part of Ben’s Christmas gift. “Why is this coat tree brok—oh, never mind,” he said, as E rode the electric motorcycle straight into his leg and stopped with a thud. In Ben’s defense, he didn’t even flinch. Calves of steel. Clearly his daily workout was doing something.

He got the jacket on E in a single movement, reminiscent of a matador’s wrangling a bull in full charge, and then took advantage of E’s momentarily puzzled state to say, “Come on, E, we’re going for a ride outside.”

“Outside!” E said. He had just recently started talking in front of people who were not his mother—that is to say, most of the world—but he seemed to think the function of his vocal cords was to enable him to become part play-back machine and part question generator.

Ben handled this with more aplomb than I managed. He said, “That’s right, outside.” And with a bright and horrible smile, he reached over and flung the front door open, which allowed E to dart out of it on his electric motorcycle at top speed.

I heard the sound of the motorcycle going down the front cement steps, and then E’s battle cry. Ben darted out the front door. “Wait!” I heard him scream, shortly followed by, “Not on the street. Not on the street.”

I closed the front door and relished the relative quiet of a toddler-free apartment. I wasn’t in the least worried that Ben would let E play in traffic. I had long ago laid down the rules for their outings together without my supervision and that was that, if Ben broke E he would give birth to the replacement, and I would make sure that this happened, no matter what the physical impossibilities.

Able to hear myself think for the first time in more than a week, I thought I would go out back to my work shed and make room for the piano I was going to refinish for my boyfriend’s birthday.

Which is why I was alone when I found the letter.

I was picking up the plant in its miraculously unbroken
pot and setting it back atop the windowsill when the phone rang. Since the plant wasn’t long for this world from the moment it had entered my house, I sort of patted at the dirt, shoved the pot into a corner of the sill, and rushed off to track down the phone.

It’s not that I put the phone in weird places. It’s more like it gets tired of waiting for someone to call and starts roaming around the house, finding ever more inventive places to hide. This time I got it on the third ring because it was only behind the toaster. “You should have known I’d catch you!” I said. “You were only two feet from the base.”

“Dyce?” the voice on the other side said.

Fortunately I’d lived with my nickname long enough that I knew this wasn’t a plea from Gamblers Anonymous. “Were you talking to the phone again?”

The voice was Cas—Castor—Wolfe’s. He was my first boyfriend after two years of being divorced, and we’d been dating six months. Which didn’t give him the right to know that much about me.

“Never mind,” he said in the sort of tone that implied that other, normal women didn’t chase their phones all over the house. Which, frankly, either meant their phones were far better behaved than mine, or that they were phone-whipped. But Cas didn’t give me a chance to reply. Instead he said, “The guys will be there to deliver the piano any minute now. I told them to come through the backyard gate.”

“Right,” I said.

“Are you sure you can refinish it?” he asked. “It’s in pretty bad shape.”

“No problem,” I said, which translated roughly to “I sure as heck hope so.”

But by the time I made it out the back and into the yard, to unlock the door to the shed that was one of the reasons I lived where I did, I wasn’t sure at all.

The truck was already there, maneuvering over the ten feet of dead grass and remains of snow in the backyard. It was a beat-up truck, painted an indifferent brown that mingled well with the patches of dirt. On the side of it, it said
Starving Students Moving
in the kind of writing that suggested a drunken midnight and a can of spray paint. Only, it was more like several cans of spray paint, since the
S
was in pink, but in the middle of the
V
it changed to black, then turned yellow on the
D
, and finished in glorious orange after the
O
. In fact, whoever had used the orange was so enthusiastic that it dotted off to the front of the truck and only quit in front of the wheel well, though I suspected the ground had been spray-painted as well.

The guys who jumped out each door of the truck as soon as it stopped didn’t look like they were starving. They also didn’t look like college students, unless the category was expanded to include those students who had gone on a trip into space in the eighties, had failed to come down to Earth, and hadn’t yet realized that twenty years had gone by.

The bellies protruding out of their too-short T-shirts and above their too-tight pants definitely had taken twenty years and a lot of beer to develop.

“Yo,” the nearest one said. “Is this where we drop the piano?”

In these circumstances, I’m always possessed by the ghost of my grandmother, the last woman in my family who put any stock in the term
ladylike.
I straightened myself up, which meant I reached these guys’ chests, but never mind. Morally, I was standing on a mountain. “If you please,” I said. “It should go in the workshop.”

I think I was a little surprised they didn’t look at me like I was a total nut. Instead, they climbed onto the back of the truck and started untying the piano, which was covered in a confusion of ropes that looked like a cat’s cradle.

While they were doing that, I went into the workshop, leaving the door open. Mind you, it was a workshop. It was also where I earned the living that kept E and me in roof, food, and clothes.

Having tried three majors on for size, I’d left college to get married. That course of study had proven as much a success and now All-ex—couldn’t be any more ex unless I killed him, something I considered two times a week and three times on Sunday—Mahr and I were divorced. I’d turned to the furniture-refinishing talents I’d picked up while trying to furnish the house on a shoestring, to keep up my side of E’s upkeep and my own. So, the food often defaulted to pancakes, my clothes sometimes came from flea markets, and the apartment was in the sort of neighborhood that made Ben worry about my safety. But I was managing. I was on my own.

And it all happened in this little shed, with its chemical-and tool-filled shelves; its worktable made of four sturdy kitchen cabinets topped by a big, heavy board; and its pegs on the wall, that held my protective suit—resistant to most chemicals—my goggles, and my ear protectors.

When the guys came in carrying the piano, I was trying to drag the worktable to one side, which was easier said than done. First, because I had some pieces awaiting refinishing by the wall. Second, because cabinets and plywood top and all, the worktable outweighed me by quite a bit, even without the cans of stain and varnish I had stashed under it.

I’d managed to push it maybe five inches—okay, two—when one of the Starving Students said, “Whoa, there. Let us do that.”

They pushed the table as far as it would go without moving the tea cart and the leather-topped desk by the wall. The blonder of the two—though it might just have been white hair shining from within his mullet that gave that impression—said, “What do you keep under there, little lady?”

He could have chosen a less appropriate thing to call me, since little I am, but
lady
is open for debate. Before I realized it, my mouth said the first thing that crossed my mind, “The body of the last guy who asked that question.”

I don’t know if they thought I was crazy or if they believed me. This sort of stuff tends to sound much more plausible when you’re in a girl’s workshop, surrounded by cutting and power tools.

Whether they thought I spoke the truth or that I was the rudest woman on Earth, they went ahead and brought the piano in and left it where the worktable had been. When I turned around to give them the twenty bucks I had in my pocket for that purpose, they were already hurrying to their truck, slamming both doors behind them.

“Your husband already paid us,” the less blond one said, out the window, as they tore out of the backyard, in a shower of half-melted ice and clods of earth and dead grass.

Since All-ex wouldn’t be caught dead near such a ragtag outfit and, in fact, would probably pay ten times as much to have white-glove movers do whatever needed to be done, I assumed they meant Cas.

Which was just as well, I thought, as I came back to the workshop and took a look at the piano, because All-ex would also not be caught dead near a piece of furniture in this condition. And for once, perhaps he would be right.

To begin with, the piano was painted—in patchy, irregular bits—the sort of pink that suggested someone had melted a lot of cartoon horses or perhaps a lot of little girls. And it was covered in dirt. Opening the keyboard cover revealed ivories as yellowed as an old man’s teeth.

But the inside of the keyboard cover was not painted, and it had the name stenciled on what I was almost sure was rosewood. It said
Steinway
in golden letters. And that had been the problem.

You see, Cas Wolfe is a manly man of the sort that—Ben tells me—one imagines sitting at home growing his chest hair. He works one of those dangerous professions that every little boy dreams of doing and every little girl dreams of marrying—in his case, investigator in the Serious Crimes Unit of the Goldport Police. He drives a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and he calls it a
vehicle
, too. He climbs tall mountains. He runs for miles every morning. He likes going to the range with his dad and his brother on the weekend, and the least manly thing he will admit to is fencing at the Goldport University Club on Saturday mornings. And that doesn’t really count, because while some guys might sneer at fencing, every girl knows that the Three Musketeers were no sissies. Besides there’s just something inherently right about a big muscular guy with a big, gleaming sword.