French Polished Murder (27 page)

“Ben say someone killed. E afraid.”

Pythagoras chose this moment to corroborate E’s fear by making a ridiculous little meow.

“Don’t be, honey. It all happened a long time ago.” But I wondered if that long-past death could be reaching toward us. I didn’t understand how long-dead people could affect Ben’s behavior, but clearly they were. Maybe I had to start believing in ghosts . . .

As soon as I turned on the street where the Jones
house stood, I knew we had made the right call. Ben was standing by the twin trees. I couldn’t see what he was doing—for all I knew some sort of ghost dance around them.

“Stay in the car, Bunny,” I told E.

“Why Ben . . .” He struggled for the word, then gave up. “Funny?”

So many answers to that. But I didn’t think that telling him it was probably genetics, given neither of his parents were exactly average, would have satisfied E. I thought carefully and spoke slowly as I parked. “We think he ate something that gave him a bad reaction. Allergies, you know, like when Mommy sneezes and cries near feathers?” He nodded. “Well, sometimes it makes people crazy.”

I dialed the phone, as I got out of the car, and I told Cas, “Bingo.”

“Right, be there in a few seconds.”

I saw Cas’s small white SUV turn onto the street, as I hung up. He parked it at a jaunty—and illegal—angle by the curb.

“I’m afraid to go nearer,” I told him as I stood at the edge of the lawn, on the sidewalk. “Whatever Ben’s problem is seems to include acute paranoia. Earlier he was afraid of my mother and there’s a lot of talk of an unspecified
Them
. I’m afraid he’ll take off.”

Cas nodded. From where we stood, we could see what Ben was doing. Even Cas realized, without my needing to tell him, that something very serious was wrong. Because Ben had a shovel—large, with a shiny red handle—and was digging madly into the half-frozen ground around the trees.

Where Ben got the shovel was a complete puzzle. That he was using it was alarming to say the least. His ancestors might have been Vikings or Irish peasants. He had the shoulders and the build of those people. But he did not have the disposition. Oh, he worked hard. Mad hard, from what I understood, but his work consisted of planning investments for people, and the fact that he prospered even in these times meant he was good at it. His muscles came from exercise in a climate-controlled gym, not from anything that might be considered manual labor. Plus, he was digging into the brown clay soil while wearing his best pants, a dress shirt, and an impeccable tie.

The only explanation was insanity.

I stared in horror as Ben threw another shovelful of dirt over his shoulder and continued digging.

He was muttering to himself while he did so, something about finding them, how he must find them. I had no doubt that he was talking about dead people—Jacinth and Almeria no doubt.

Nick was acting like Fluffy the First when Mother put down her dinner, but I was in the way. She used to do this odd two-step, where she walked toward the dish, then remembered I was there, and stepped back, managing to forget while doing it that I was in the way. Then she would step forward again.

Nick would take two steps forward toward Ben, put his hand to his forehead, and do the two-step back, then start forward again, then back again.

Cas, on the other hand, was talking on the phone. “Code fifty-nine. No, I don’t think violent, but at serious risk for attempting to escape.”

Nick gave him a look, squared his shoulders, and walked over to Ben’s car. He opened the door, reached in, and came out with the keys, which Ben had left in the ignition. He walked back toward us. “That will stop him trying to drive away,” he said. “You have your keys, right?”

“Yeah, the kid and the cat are in the car, but I have keys.”

“The cat?” Cas said, hanging up.

“They were holding each other when I took off,” I said. “What the hell do you think he’s doing? And why?”

“Digging for bodies,” Cas said.

“Yeah, but why?”

“You said he had some weird reactions to meds in the past,” Cas said. “Ask Nick what happened to his father once when he took cough syrup with codeine in it.”

Nick spoke without taking his eyes off Ben. “It was like giving him speed. He walked around and around, babbling in Greek, though neither Mom nor I spoke it. But he was no way as bad as this. If this is the reaction to some medicine, Ben sure needs to be careful. Hell, he’ll need a statement from a doctor before taking aspirin. I’ll make sure of that.”

I passed on the “I’ll make sure of that” because in context with the worried eyes and the look like Nick didn’t know whether to rush forward and forcibly restrain Ben or bawl his eyes out, it was more an expression of concern than of ownership.

At that moment an ambulance and a fire truck turned into the street, sirens blaring. I heard Cas shout above the din, “I told them to not use the sirens!” But it didn’t have any effect on Ben. He didn’t even turn to look.

Two paramedics got out of the ambulance at a trot and advanced toward Ben.

“I told EMS it might be a reaction to medication,” Cas said. “So they won’t tranquilize him.”

Which probably explained why they’d sent two of the burliest paramedics I’d ever seen.

Even though, as they flanked Ben and managed to take the shovel away, they couldn’t move him. He was shouting something I couldn’t make out, both because his voice sounded oddly hoarse and because he was looking away from me.

I think Nick and I started forward at the same time. We did say, “It’s all right, Ben,” at the same time, but so much for the claims of his oldest friend—it was Nick that Ben turned toward, dragging the paramedic hanging from his right arm about a quarter turn.

“Nick,” he said. “Nick!” He was red-faced, sweating, and wild-eyed, and I couldn’t tell if he was calling to Nick out of affection or anger. But then he said, “Nick, tell them I’m not crazy.”

Nick stopped. I thought he was going to do the two-step again, only he didn’t. “You’re not insane, Ben,” he said. “But you’re not well, you must know that. We need to take you to the hospital. You’re having a reaction to something.”

Ben shook his head. “Head hurts. Eyes blurred. But I’m not crazy. Look.”

He pointed. Nick and I both looked in the hole that Ben had managed to dig—a surprisingly deep hole. Hell, a miraculously deep hole, considering that it had been dug by just one man in the frozen ground of a Colorado winter. At the bottom of it there was something yellowish, paler than the soil. No, several somethings.

Nick jumped backward. “It’s a hand.”

“Yeah,” Ben said. “I’m not crazy. It’s a hand. They’re there. They were buried there.”

Cas was on the phone again. “Human remains,” he said. “We have reason to believe they maybe have been victims of foul play.”

Ben took a deep breath. It was as if he’d been animated by his obsession and now had run out of purpose. He still looked crazy, but he looked docile-crazy. As the paramedics started dragging him toward the ambulance, he looked back over his shoulder. “Nick,” he said, “don’t let them arrest me.”

Nick looked at Cas. I didn’t know what passed in that look, but Nick ran after the paramedics. “I’m coming with him,” he said. “I want to write down anything he might say that . . . that might give us a clue.”

As they got in the ambulance and left with the fire engine, which according to Colorado law had to follow any ambulance sent out, I turned to Cas. “Did you have to say that you had reason to suspect foul play?”

He nodded. “Oh, yes. From here on out, things will have to be done a particular way, you know, the excavation and examination of the remains, if there’s the slightest chance there might be a murder charge involved.”

“A murder . . . charge?” I said. “But if Ben found Jacinth and Almeria and they were murdered, it was almost a hundred years ago.”

He shrugged. “There is no statute of limitations on murder. I know that there’s little chance the murderer is alive, but still . . .”

I shook my head. “If what Miss Martin told me today is true, he isn’t,” I said. I told him what she had said, even as a police car drove up and started disgorging more people than any clown car had ever managed. I should have made a remark about policemen violating the law on maximum occupancy for cars, but I didn’t. Instead, I told Cas the whole story.

Cas frowned at me. “It could certainly be the truth. But you don’t seem to believe it?”

“No,” I said. “There’s something about it that’s bothering me, though I can’t put my finger on it. She might be telling the truth, of course. It might be that what’s putting me off on it is this idea that she is trying to get her revenge on her father and her brother now that they can’t defend themselves.”

“Well . . . would you blame her?” Cas asked.

“No, but . . . it’s possible that’s all it is. I find it—distasteful.”

“On the other hand,” Cas said, “it would explain why someone put the word out to my captain to stop you. I don’t care how little of a social butterfly John Martin is, no man alive wants his father branded as a murderer.”

“Yeah. It would explain that, but—”

“But?”

“Something about it still bothers me, I just can’t tell you what it is.”

A tall man that I’d only seen in passing at the station before approached us. He wore a khaki-colored shirt and khaki pants and looked almost terminally relaxed, even though he was carrying more shoulder bags than I’d ever seen a human being carry. I knew who he was—Rafiel Trall, the other senior investigator in the Serious Crimes Unit of Goldport Police Department. He was hot in yet a completely different way from Cas and Nick, and worried though I was about Ben’s state and whatever was bothering me about Diane Martin’s story, I couldn’t afford sparing a thought to the awesome taste of the woman—probably a woman though it could be a gay man—who did the hiring for Goldport Police Department. Clearly, whoever it was had a requirement that went, “Must be this hot to wear the badge
.
”

“What are the chances if it was foul play that the murderer is still alive?” Rafiel asked. “Or that this will ever get to court?”

Cas looked over at me. I don’t know what he read in my expression, but whatever it was made him turn to Officer Hotstuff Number Three and say, “Treat this as though the bastard is still out on Main Street handing out poisonous candy, Rafiel.”

Rafiel smiled. “Right you are. So, isn’t it your case, too?” He gave me a curious look and then, clearly recognizing me as Cas’s girlfriend, a purposely naughty wink.

Cas took a deep breath. “Right,” he said. “Right. Let’s do this.” He squeezed my upper arm and then let go, the objection to public displays of affection in full force before what must be at least half of his department.

“I’ll go,” I said. “I can’t leave E and Pythagoras in the car much longer.” A look in their direction showed me both little faces pressed against the glass window. “And besides,” I said, “I have no idea what Ben did in the house before I got home.”

In the car on the way home, I questioned E. I asked
him what Ben had done before I’d gotten home.

E shook his head. He had added a full hug to Pythagoras’s restraints, and I was now wondering if the belt against the cat’s chest was restricting oxygen to his brain. Because any cat worthy of the name would, right about now, be clawing at my son and doing his best to take his eyes out. Instead, Pythagoras remained still, with that ridiculously apologetic expression on his furry face, emitting a meow now and then that probably meant, “I’m sorry, could we hurry this up, I have a meeting of the bedwetters club later
.
”

“I was ’sleep,” he said. He had stopped crying but still looked scared. I guess it was very strange for a little boy to find himself in this position. “I was ’sleep an’ I woke up an’ Ben was talking to you onna phone. He was feedin’ Ratso, He put him down an’ feed Ratfink.”