French Polished Murder (11 page)

“Go,” I said, trying very hard not to laugh. “I promise to look after the rats properly.”

“I’ll supervise her,” Cas said.

Ben looked doubtfully at both of us. “E is in his room,” he said, as if he must make sure that we remembered all our obligations. “He was drawing the rats last I saw him. But he’s been quiet awhile, so you might want to check. And I put the motorcycle in your shed, Dyce, so that he wouldn’t, you know, take off without your noticing.”

I realized my childless friend was now lecturing me on the care and upkeep of my toddler. Okay, granted, Ben had often been the adult in our association, but all the same, I suspected that, having known E since before he was born, I had some idea what to do.

Looking at Cas, I read the same thoughts in his eyes, but he was doing his best not to say anything. Except for clearing his throat and saying, “Ben, we’ll take care, you may go.” He was exhibiting great forbearance.

I looked back at Nick, expecting him to be horrified, but he looked more amused, which was a good sign. Actually all of it was a good sign, considering what had pushed Ben’s last partner over the edge had been the fact that he’d perceived Ben as emotionless and uncaring.

“You know my cell number, if something happens that you need my help with,” Ben said.

“And we’re going to be at the Branding Iron,” Nick said. “If you can’t get him on his phone.”

“Right,” I said, as we actually managed to get them out the door. After they left, Cas turned to me and asked, “The Branding Iron? I’ve known Nick since we were kids. I wonder if there is something I missed? Will Ben be safe with him?”

I laughed. “Uh . . . How much does Nick talk about his private life with you?”

Something like a shadow passed behind Cas’s eyes. “Not much, since I offered to beat up his ex for him. The offer seemed to horrify him for some reason. Mostly we work on his car together and we watch sports. Why?”

“Ah . . . His car?” I said. I had an idea of some horribly beat up clunker that Nick was trying to rehabilitate.

“Uh . . . I should say his hobby car. Nick likes to buy old muscle cars and fix them. He has like three of them, but the current project is a 1955 Chevy Bel Air convertible. It was . . . uh . . . horrible when he got it. He keeps it over at my parents’ garage. He rented out his place when he went to Denver to study, so now he needs to wait till the lease expires to move back in. So he has all his equipment and stuff at my parents’, and that’s what we do in our free time.” He grinned. “When I’m not with you.” He grinned again. “I confess most of our emotional sharing refers to the damn wrench that can’t be found or what in hell he thinks he’s doing to the radiator. Why?”

“Very . . . guy,” I said. I was trying to figure out how this motor-head thing would play with Ben. I was never very clear on what were Ben’s “ew” or “hot” buttons. Though then again, even if we didn’t work on classic cars together, we, by agreement, said very little about our love lives to each other. An arrangement that had seen us through since middle school. “At any rate, the Branding Iron is not anything fringy. It’s just one of the local gay bars. . . . It’s like a restaurant with a dance floor. I mean, the purpose is less cruising and more nice meals in friendly surroundings. They have white tablecloths and all.” I noticed Cas was looking at me very weirdly, and said, “Ben had a birthday party. His friend Peter from the Philharmonic threw it for him. Surprise. Peter invited me. They don’t actually prevent women coming in, you know.”

Cas grinned. “No, I was just . . . if Ben and Nick frequent the same places, it’s a miracle they didn’t already know each other.”

I waggled my hand. “Not really. The Branding Iron has only been open a year. Nick was away at school, right? I’m going to guess he’s either never been there, or never at the same time that Ben was . . . Or they just never noticed each other. There are . . .” I coughed at having to explain this to Cas. “You know, Goldport is a population center for this area and there are ranches and . . . small towns, and . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now we can stop discussing the ins and outs of gay dating, right? They’re gone. We’re alone.” He cornered me against the wall and was kissing me very thoroughly, when I heard, “Ew. Peegrass chewed up a rat.”

I think we beat all possible speeds between the living room and E’s room. It turned out my son was absolutely accurate. In a weird way. Though the rat that had gotten—apparently—chewed up then spit out in a pulpy mess was one of E’s drawings.

“Pythagoras,” I said. “Honestly!”

“Mee-ooo?” he asked, which probably translated as, “I’m sorry, kind stranger, isn’t the ritual chewing up and spitting up of paper a custom of your land? I promise to endeavor to practice more appropriate behavior in the future.”

I looked up to read frustration and amusement in Cas’s eyes. “That cat,” he said, “is seriously insane.” He disappeared into the bathroom and returned with a wad of toilet paper, which he used to pick up the paper pulp and dispose of it in the bathroom trash.

“Right,” I said. “I’m going to go cook something.”

“No way,” Cas said. “I’ve ordered pizza. It should arrive any minute.”

“Pizza!” E said.

“You didn’t have to,” I said.

Cas slipped his arm around me and kissed my forehead in an almost chaste way. “Babe,” he said, “I’ve seen you cook. The way you get all confused, we’d end up with baby rat soufflé, and then Ben would kill you, and then I’d have to arrest Ben, and then, likely as not, Nick would be mad at me. See pizza saves us all that.”

“Pizza!” E said, as he started to draw a round pizza with green pepperoni on black cheese.

So we’d had pizza and beer, except for E who had fruit juice, and then we’d fed the rats and helped them poop. And then we’d fed Pythagoras who was starting to eye the rats with a speculative look.

We installed E in a chair at the table, to pursue his newfound artistic enthusiasm, I washed dishes, and Cas dried them and put them away, in a sweetly domestic way.

He caught me looking at him and must have seen something in my eyes, because he smiled back at me. “You know, I’ve been thinking. There is a way to avoid all this you know . . . having to abstain from unseemly behavior while Alex is away.”

“There is?” I asked, since though I hated to admit it I was frankly missing the unseemly behavior and everything that went with it.

“Well, you know, I got this place. It’s not in the best area, but it’s better than this.” He’d bought a working-man’s Victorian a few blocks from me, in the other direction from Waterfall Avenue. “And it has two bedrooms, and a big garage. You could take over one side of it for the refinishing and, you know, there would be a yard for Peegrass and the rats.”

I had to blink away an image of Pythagoras chained next to the rats, each of them with their own little dog—or cat and rat—houses, each one with the name written on top in Ben’s exact handwriting. “His name is Pythagoras,” I said. I looked over at E who was completely absorbed in his drawing. “Cats and rats aren’t yard sort of animals. And besides, I thought we’d agreed we weren’t going to do that.”

“We did? Agreed we weren’t going to put the cat and the rats in the yard?” He was smiling teasingly, but it was entirely possible he was also confused. I seemed to have that effect on people.

“Well, we did agree we weren’t going to have you stay over so that we wouldn’t confuse him.” I gestured toward E. “I mean, it’s bad enough that he has three parents, I don’t want to subject him to a revolving door of step fathers or . . . something.”

“Revolving door?” Cas asked, sounding somewhat incredulous.

His surprise was justified since, of course, he had probably gathered there hadn’t been any dating between the breakup of my marriage and his not taking no for an answer about becoming a part of my life. “Okay,” I said. “Probably a bad analogy, but I just wanted to point out that we’ve only been dating six months, and what if you move on, and then he wonders where you went and . . . you know. This sort of extra-legal relationship is fine for adults, but when the adults have kids, one has to—”

“Silly,” Cas said, sounding affectionately amused. “I wasn’t asking for extra-legal anything. What I was trying to say—”

The phone rang. There followed an intense moment of hunting for the phone, and the answering machine had already picked up with my mom’s dry voice saying, “Candy, I know you’re there,” when I found the phone and said, “Mom!”

“Oh,” she said. “Are you screening calls? You didn’t break up with Cas, did you?” I made a face at Cas, who had heard that—Mom has a loud phone voice—and was grinning at me.

“No, Mother. Cas is right here. We were just washing the dishes and had to find the phone.”

“Oh.”

E chose this moment to be excited by his grandmother’s phone call. Normally his level of excitement for anything relating to my parents hits somewhere between watching paint dry and yawning, far lower than his interest in a small rock, since small rocks were collectors’ objects for E, who carried them in his pockets by the dozen. Possibly to provide ballast. In which case they failed. He continued to move at a speed just below that of light.

Not that I blamed him for being indifferent to two people who either read him murder mysteries or tried to convince him he wanted to change his name to Sherlock.

“Gamma!” E said, pulling at my shirt with one hand and reaching for the phone with the other. “Gamma, we have rats! And Peegrass.”

“Candy, did the child just say you had rats? Do you need me to give you the name of a good exterminator? When we had mice in the store—”

“No, Mom. Pet rats. Seven of them.” And then, with utter mendaciousness, I added, “They’re Ben’s. We’re helping him raise them.” If Ben was going to write names on their little rumps, he could damn well own them as far as my mom was concerned.

“Oh,” Mom said. She paused then sighed. “That man,” she said, decisively, “must get married.”

I mumbled something, and Cas grinned and mouthed at me, “legal in some states,” which I chose to ignore. Instead I said, “You did not call to ask about Ben’s love life.” At least I hoped she hadn’t, although knowing Ben it was entirely possible he had chosen to take Nick by the store, and that my mother, being my mother, had decided to call me to discuss the matter.

But it turned out I was lucky. “No,” my mother said. “I was going to ask you if all that furniture you bought was from the Martin estate.”

“Why?” I asked. “It was, but why do you ask?”

“Ah. Thought so. John called me. John Martin. He said you’d given his housekeeper a check and he didn’t know there was anyone else but my daughter in town by that name.”

I refused to ask whether it was my first or my last name he recognized. At a bet the first, but I wondered if Mom actually admitted to her friends that she had named her daughter Candyce. “You . . . know John Martin?”

Mom sounded surprised. “What? He and your father went to school together. And he’s just married the sweetest woman. She works as a curator in the Martin area of the public library. You might have met her.”

“Does she look . . . colorless?” I asked.

“Oh, that.” Mom could be heard—I swear—to smile condescendingly on the other end of the phone. “Well, Asia was always a very pale girl. You know, pale and blonde, despite her name. So . . . you know, they fade early.”

I understood the smile, since my mother was a blonde who hadn’t faded early. I’d found that the older my mother got, the more she was gratified by evidence that her friends were aging worse than she was.

“Mommy! Peegrass.”

“Oh, your grandson would also like to tell you we have a cat named Pythagoras,” I said, forestalling my mother concluding something completely different.

“What an odd name for a cat,” my mother said.

“Ben named him.”

“Oh . . .” Mom sounded dubious. The truly sad part of my relationship with my parents was that, though I was an only child, I was not their favorite child. No, that honor was reserved for Ben who was not—not even slightly—gay and who was absolutely and completely the best son anyone could want. “Well, Ben was always so erudite. I must ask him which story he got the name from.”

I refused to be baited. It was like Mom to think that if someone had named a cat an unusual name, it must be in honor of some fictional detective, and it would take too long to correct her. “I hope you’re not upset I bought the Martins’ furniture?”

“Oh? No, of course not. I explained about your little business.” The way Mom said it, it made it sound like Daring Finds was a hobby that I played between sunbathing at the Cote D’Azur and attending concerts in Vienna. “Of course, they have to get rid of almost the entire contents of the house, now that old Diane is going into the hospice or the old age home, or whatever it is. At ninety-seven, an old age home is functionally a hospice, I suppose.”

“She could live to be a hundred and twenty,” I said.

“Really unlikely,” my mother said. “Frankly, I know it has surprised the entire family that she has lived as long as she has. She was a very frail little girl, I understand. Quite her mother’s darling. So sad.”

“Her mother . . .” I said, noting that Cas had detached E from my legs and was carrying him to the living room from where, in short order, I heard the reading of the adventures of the lab rats, done in voices.

If Cas meant something more than just moving in together, was I ready for it? Was it something I could consider after knowing him for only six months? He was kind, considerate, and quite indecently good-looking. And he hadn’t run as he’d got to know E. Hell, he seemed to like E.

I shook my head and returned to the conversation at hand, “Her mother was Almeria Martin?”

“Yes.” Mom sounded surprised. “How did you hear of her?”

I was about to tell my mother about the old letter, but thought better of it. “I’ve been considering writing a book about local stories. I’d heard some mention of her, but it wouldn’t be a mystery,” I said emphatically, as I heard Mom draw breath in preparation to gush. “Not even a true crime. Just a collection of events that occurred in Goldport.”