French Polished Murder (29 page)

Mrs. All-ex confessed this without blushing, and I waved good-bye to them with a song in my heart, thinking of All-ex’s manicured backyard lawn and the plastic, ridged wheels of E’s electric motorcycle. Sometimes things happen to the best possible people.

Now that I was alone I had time, and I decided to do my thinking where my brain seemed to work best—in my work shed.

The piano stood there, peeled and patient, waiting
for me. I felt as if things were working themselves out at the back of my mind, but I was not sure what I could do to hurry the process. It felt—as it had felt before, when I was working through some problem that was so big and complex I couldn’t see my way out of it with simple logic—as though my subconscious were working furiously and not letting me out on it.

To while away the time, I set my printouts on French polishing on top of the piano. Long ago, I’d admired the mirrorlike finish on Ben’s mother’s piano and been told that it was French polish. Because I was then young enough to think that French polish must be done in France, I’d remembered the term forever, since I’d spent quite a bit of time considering how one might ship a whole piano to France, then back again.

Now reading the instructions, I learned that French polish was both the finish with the best acoustic qualities, and therefore the best to put on musical instruments, and that it was susceptible to a list of ills—alcohol, heat, cold—all manner of things could damage it. I found myself wondering if I could just give it a thin coat of that plastic substance they used to put on bar tops, sometimes with coins underneath. While epoxy was by no means—at least I thought—the best acoustic anything, it was practically indestructible. I’d once finished a living room table in epoxy, back when I still shared a home with All-ex. The result was a piece of furniture capable of surviving everything including but not limited to parking your car on it. Not that I’d ever tried that, of course, but it had survived two years of All-ex’s putting his feet on it while watching sports on television, without showing the slightest mark.

The instructions themselves were bewildering and at least two sites seemed to imply that you could set your house on fire in the process. Given my propensity to set my parents’ house on fire—I had done it at least half a dozen times as a child—I decided to shy away from those methods that said anything about heating or melting. At any rate, some of the other material led me to believe that the dangerous stuff was a form of shellac—the base material of French polish—that was only available in the United Kingdom.

It was all completely bewildering, so I set it aside. Instead, I started making a shopping list, consisting of shellac flakes and rotten stone and pure, virgin olive oil. The last one surprised me as an ingredient but the arguments in its favor made sense. And some of the problems mentioned could probably be avoided by its use.

The flakes were going to be the biggest problem to find. I looked at my watch and realized that the hardware store would still be open. I couldn’t lock my door, because I didn’t have a key to get back in, and now that I was aware someone had broken into the house in my absence, I didn’t feel right leaving Pythagoras and the rats behind, at the mercy of whoever might come in.

After all, I had promised E that I would look after the animals. So I did the only rational thing. I took the aquarium with the rats and put it in the backseat of the car and strapped it in. Then I shooed Pythagoras into his carrier, took that out to the car, and strapped it in beside the aquarium. I tried to ignore the fact that this reminded me of a
The Far Side
cartoon where trucks of rodents and flightless birds have an accident in front of a house where a cat is waiting. On the other hand, at least I’d managed the same in more compact space. On yet another hand, judging by how Pythagoras had cowered from the rats the one time the poor things had had the run of the house, perhaps I should be more worried about him than them.

With my strange passengers, I headed out to the hardware store. This hardware store was as old as the town or perhaps older. It was run by a man named Julius whom I had always assumed had served in the Revolutionary War. He looked exactly like the wounded soldier in the
Spirit of Seventy-six
poster, only I had to assume he’d found a way to grow back his leg. This didn’t seem unlikely, as he’d been as old as he looked now—probably mid-fifties—since I was a little girl and had come in with Grandma to pick up some wax polish for her antique furniture. But he had to be more like in his seventies or even eighties.

He also cut keys and carried a line of old drawer pulls that rivaled anything I could find online in the manner of reproductions. Apparently collecting them and finishing them was his hobby, though getting him to sell them was as hard as convincing Dad to part with a book.

However, with one thing and another, I spent a lot of time in his store. Sometimes I thought I was the only customer under seventy, the others being little old ladies who came in for everything from cleaners to lightbulbs, instead of going to the grocery store, or even to the bigger chain hardware store across town.

Part of this was the service. I greeted Julius—I’d sometimes wondered if he was the original and if his last initial was
C
—and asked him where the shellac flakes were. He didn’t even turn a hair at the idea that I wanted to buy something so quaint, but led me right to them. He also found the best rotten stone for me. “They say to use pumice sometimes,” he told me. “But rotten stone is ground finer.”

Then he had insisted on selling me several pads of cloth, and instructed me on how to use them. “You want several pads, because by the time you’re done applying all the polish, your arm will be right sore and these pads will be in tatters.”

He seemed to relish the idea of my arm being sore far too much for my taste, so I tried to divert him. “Funny weather we’ve been having, huh?” I said, falling back on the standby of every tribe of man since the beginning of time. It was particularly effective in Colorado. Most people—probably because of
South Park
—think Colorado is all ice and snow almost year around. At higher elevations, it might be so. In fact, I had often read about Colorado towns that were snowed completely under from the beginning of September to the end of May every year. The articles I read tended to talk about the absolute necessity of beer to keep the population of those towns what passed for sane during the months of isolation.

But Goldport, and for that matter Denver and Colorado Springs—though in varying amounts for each town—had a lot of snow fall, but also had an almost instant melt. It was rare for the snow to linger on the ground for more than a day or two. If it did so at all, it was in January.

And it was neither unusual nor remarkable for the day to start at seventy degrees and be minus two by nightfall, or vice versa.

Julius perked up, as I knew he would. “Oh, yeah. Boy, the weather. Now it’s cold, then it’s hot, then it’s cold again. I was telling Miss Martin just yesterday as it played havoc with my leg.” He made a gesture, pointing at his leg that made me wonder if he was really the man in the
Spirit
painting. Nah. Impossible.

“John Martin’s wife buys her own hardware?” I said, somewhat surprised, to say the least.

“No, no, Miss Diane Martin. She comes in now and then. Fussy. All these old women are, of course, and she wants her furniture polished just so.”

I wondered if he’d taken leave of his senses. The invalid I’d seen, the woman who was getting ready to go into assisted living couldn’t possibly be walking around polishing her furniture.

“Course, last time she just came in for me to cut a key,” he said. “Said she had lost hers.” He shrugged. “Old women lose everything, too.”

I shook my head. He had to mean Mrs. Martin. I hardly call her an old woman—but Julius was definitely an old man and it made me a little sad to think he might finally be failing. But I had no intention of arguing with him, so I left the store carrying my purchases and drove home by way of the grocery store, where I bought the virgin olive oil.

When I got home, Cas’s car was in the driveway, a sight that always makes my day better. He came over, opened my car door and stood looking at the backseat with a smile. Pythagoras said, “Mew,” in the tone of a cat who wishes to complain of a great injustice done to him and I told Cas, “He’s lying, you know. I never did leave them in the car with the windows up. I opened them a crack, because even in winter, in the sun, cars can get very warm.”

He just shook his head as he picked up the aquarium and left me to collect the cat carrier. “Mrs. Dare and her mobile animal zoo.”

I made a face at him. “Well,” I said. “I do what I have to do. Besides, after dealing with you, Ben, and E, the zoo is the least of my worries.”

We settled the animals in the kitchen—Pythagoras in front of a plate of flaked tuna—and Cas said, “By the way, you left the door unlocked. Which I’d think you wouldn’t do, after someone came in and tampered with Ben’s beauty products. And yes, we’re already looking at the possibility that his ex is back in town. He was last heard from playing the French horn in the symphony in Belize, but this seems to smack of him.”

“Yeah. It would drive him nuts to come back to town and find Ben is dating again, wouldn’t it?” I said, as I made tea for both of us.

“Probably. So, right now he’s our number one suspect. But you really shouldn’t leave your door open, meanwhile.”

“Well, I don’t have a key,” I said. “That’s why I took the rats and Pythagoras. I mean, it’s not like there’s anything else to steal in the house.”

“No, but someone could mess with your tea, or the milk . . .”

“If it is Ben’s ex, he’d know he doesn’t make tea from bags.”

“All the same,” he said. “You shouldn’t leave the door unlocked. Do you want to have to chase Ben across town again?”

“Well, presumably,” I said. “If whoever did whatever they did to Ben’s moisturizer already has my key, my locking up or not wouldn’t make any difference.”

“If they have your key,” Cas said. “Which is a big
if
.”

“They got in somehow.”

“Doesn’t prove they had your key,” he said. “It’s entirely possible that they’d simply found the door unlocked. I mean, weren’t you the last one out when we went for ice cream? And carrying E, yet. You don’t have a key, so you couldn’t possibly have locked the door. My fault, of course, but I forgot.”

It was possible. “Well, I still haven’t found the key.”

This was the wrong thing to say to my law-and-order love. It started a search of all my pockets, while the tea cooled in the teapot, despite the very pretty chicken-shaped tea cozy that Ben had given me in what I liked to believe was a fit of humor.

Cas finished with my purse, and after spilling all the contents on the kitchen table, he reached down and triumphantly held the key aloft. “Ah-ha!” he said. “See, you do have your key.”

I frowned at him. “I’m sure I looked in the purse.”

“It was under the lining. You’re always losing things there. You need to either mend the hole or get a new purse. Remember when your phone was ringing and you were convinced it wasn’t in your purse, so your purse had to be echoing the ring of the phone at home?”

I gave him a glare. “I was very tired.”

He smiled a little. “We’ve both been working too hard. And I have bad news for you.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. Even though E isn’t in the house, I can’t spend the night. You see, the tests we’ve already done on the bones Ben found seem to show the presence of arsenic. There were two skeletons, one a woman’s and one of a man. The man’s bones were wearing the remnants of an overcoat, which had a label still visible. It was tailored for Mr. . . .”

“Jacinth Jones.”

“Bingo. It’s quite possible the old lady told you the truth, however questionable her motives might have been, you know.”

“Yeah,” I said. It was starting to seem like it.

“So, between that and the fact that someone broke in and tampered with Ben’s moisturizer, we have our hands full tonight. I doubt I’ll even get to sleep. But I’m taking a couple hours off to take you to dinner, because I convinced Rafiel I really needed it.” He smiled. “Besides, I’ve covered for him more than once or twice. The man must have the busiest love life west of the Pecos.” He rolled his eyes. “I don’t think I would want that. Not for me, the kind of romance you have to manage with a Rolodex and a file cabinet.”

So we went to dinner, and talked about E and the rats, and gossiped about Nick and Ben, hoping they would end up together, the way you do about family and best friends. “Nick went to the hospital to spend some time with Ben, while I came here. He’ll be on duty pretty much all night, too.”

It wasn’t till Cas was dropping me off at my house that he said, “Oh, by the way, the techs say that the dead woman was pregnant. Pretty far along.”