French Polished Murder (13 page)

You simply can’t ask an active toddler to stay sedate and quiet in a place of business. And in E’s case you couldn’t expect him to stay sedate and quiet anywhere. Not that E was hyperactive, exactly. I’d asked the pediatrician—mostly because All-Ex worried—and the pediatrician told me that a child could only be considered hyperactive if he wouldn’t settle down and work at any task for any length of time. This did not describe E who could sit down and be absorbed in something for hours. Of course, that something, in the past, had involved such interesting projects as melting his entire box of crayons on the radiator or removing all the screws from my bed frame. In fact, it was a good bet that if E was quiet and seemingly behaving, it was time to investigate. It might not be completely amiss to call the police and the fire department, either, just in case.

“I’m sorry, Dyce,” Ben said. “But you didn’t ask. And I did make a date with Nick.”

“Oh, did you?” I asked. “To talk about the animal poisonings?”

He glared at me. “There have been two more, since we found Pythagoras. Nick is very worried.”

“Yes, I imagine he would be,” I said. “You didn’t get in a big argument or anything?”

He stared. “No, why?”

“Well, he wouldn’t come in.”

Again the blush came in waves, and I wondered if he knew how obvious it was. “Uh . . . he had to go home. He had to be in early this morning.”

“I see,” I said.

He threw a pancake at me. I ducked, and the pancake hung, art-installation-like from the knob of the cupboard. “Benedict!” I said. “I can’t believe you are wasting good food.”

He did his best to glare, but grinned. “Don’t, Dyce.”

“Well, considering how much you teased me . . .”

“Yeah, yeah. But . . . don’t. It’s very early still. I don’t know anything yet. If . . . if it turns out to be right, you’ll be the first to know.”

I picked up the pancake and threw it in the trash. “The problem,” I told him, “is that I was going to go early and hang out with Cas a bit before going to lunch.”

“And it has to be today?”

I had a strong feeling it did, so I nodded.

“I don’t suppose your mother would look after E?” he asked. “I mean Fluffy is gone. Maybe E can take Pythagoras with him.”

“Pythagoras,” I said. “Chews paper. I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave him in a bookstore. And as for E . . . Remember the last time? They forgot he was there and he left, and it took hours to find him down the block.”

“Oh, yeah,” Ben said. “Your son made the mistake of not being a book.”

“Besides, Mom is going to a tea . . .” I stopped, as I remembered what she had said about All-ex’s wife. I grabbed the phone and dialed Mr. All-ex Mahr’s residence. One ring, two, and I started praying.

Who says faith counts for nothing. Right on cue, the phone was picked up, and the new Mrs. Mahr’s supercilious voice answered, “Hello, Mahr residence.”

The little bitch didn’t sound in the least tired. I got a strong feeling that she and All-ex had actually been back for at least a week and hadn’t told me, so they wouldn’t need to take care of E. Yeah. The mills of Dyce ground slowly but they ground exceedingly fine. “Michelle!” I said, probably giving the woman a near heart attack, since I’d never called her by her first name to her face, and what I called her behind her back tended to be less than complimentary. “I’m so glad you’re home. I have an emergency this morning, and I must have E stay with you. Would that be acceptable?”

“But—” she stammered. “Uh . . . we have something this afternoon at the country club, and I—”

Yes, indeed, she was a female dog of unknown provenance. The two of them thought nothing of leaving me alone with E—and incidentally taking up Ben’s time—for a whole two weeks, but they would not tell me they were home because they wanted to go to a tea at the country club. Yeah. I glared at the phone and my voice became so saccharinely sweet that if anyone were exposed to it without warning, they would die of diabetic shock. Smart people who had known me for more than an hour knew what that tone in my voice meant,. But the current Mrs. Mahr wasn’t smart. “Oh, don’t worry about that. If you pick him up in the next hour and just keep him till one o’clock, I’ll get him then.” I neglected to mention that I, too, was going to the country-club thing. Let her be surprised!

She hemmed and hawed. She covered the phone and I heard her talk behind it, probably consulting All-ex. After a while, she said, “Hello. Yes, I can pick him up. No need to pack a bag since he’ll be returning to you. No need for you to come get him, either. I’ll bring him back.”

I smiled beatifically. Indeed. I was quite willing to have E return to me. In fact, I was fairly sure that to take him away from Peegrass and the rats right now would require physical violence—particularly in view of the fact that his new obsession was great enough to make him forget the bike. However, the time for payback would come. And come soon enough. All-ex had a large yard after all. And the next time E went for an extended stay, the motorcycle could visit, too.

“Stop that,” Ben said, as soon as I hung up.

“Stop what?” I asked, looking at him. He was calmly finishing his pancakes.

“Stop smiling like that,” he said. “It scares me.”

I patted him on the head, on my way out of the room. “Relax, my child,” I said. “My plans are not for you.”

He mumbled something, and I went out of the room to get E up and ready to go. Bathing him was easy, though the bathroom space was much reduced, and Pythagoras kept walking back and forth along the edge of the tub meowing little inquiries concerning this strange torture of putting small humans in water.

By the time E had been dressed and had eaten his breakfast, he’d registered several times the fact that he didn’t want to go to Daddy. He was sulking in the kitchen, glaring at both of us in turn.

Ben was feeding the rats and looking guilty. “If he—” he said.

I shook my head. If Ben wasn’t going to break his date for me, he sure as hell wasn’t going to break it for my bratty child. “I’m sure he’ll live, Ben. It’s just a few hours. If you don’t mind staying with him a couple of hours later this afternoon, while I go to a tea at the country club.”

At that moment, the doorbell rang, so I left Ben to take E to the front door and into the arms of his equally sulky stepmother.

E wailed as a parting shot, “I want Peegrass.” Gratifyingly, Michelle’s eyes went huge and round and she said, “Uh . . . honey, we use the bathroom at Daddy’s house,” while giving me a reproachful look.

Ben was settling the rats back in the aquarium, as I came back to the kitchen and started washing dishes. “You know,” I told him. “I think sooner or later that woman will die.”

“Your ex’s wife?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Uh . . . Dyce. Murder is still—”

“I didn’t say anything about murder,” I said. “I figure she’s completely brainless, and there’s only so long residual brain-stem activity can last.”

“Yes, but . . . Dyce!”

“Yes?”

“What are you going to do at the country club? I mean, it’s not . . . you’ve never had . . .”

I considered telling him the truth—I was going to see the Martins to try to get more information about the letter. On the other hand, I remembered all too well that the only thing worse than an upset Ben was a Ben in full protective mode. “Oh, nothing,” I said. “It’s a tea for the fans of historical mysteries Mother is giving and the current Mrs. Mahr has annoyed me, so I figure I’d discomfit her a little.”

Ben frowned. “You haven’t fought with Cas, right?”

“Right. Remember, I’m going to have lunch with him.”

But Ben didn’t look convinced.

Dating a policeman hadn’t put paid to all my roman
tic notions. Well, obviously not, since he brought me chocolates and flowers and took me out dancing. However, it had forever destroyed any mystique associated with police stations.

What the downtown police station in Goldport looked like was . . . a nineteenth-century bank. This was not exactly strange, since most of the commercial buildings downtown looked like banks. It was as if everyone back in the late eighteen hundreds had used the same architect, someone who had never been out of Goldport. All he knew about what commercial buildings were supposed to look like came from a picture of a bank in Denver that he’d seen in a newspaper.

So, except for two buildings that had gone up sometime in the late nineties, which were the usual very tall, blank glass-faced monstrosities, every other commercial building was a squat stone square.

Some of them, like the police station, were at least pretty, since they were made of mellow gold-bearing rock. On a clear afternoon, you could see the sun glint on the stone façades of Goldport’s commercial district. It made the town sparkle. When I was little, I used to imagine mining the walls for gold, but let’s just say that the one time I’d tried that with a chisel on the wall of the medical building it didn’t end well. It was just as well I’d never put my more elaborate plan—involving dynamite—in motion since later on, when I supposedly grew up, I was told that the gold remaining in the rocks was too little to justify the trouble of extracting it and that the rocks were in fact wastage from gold mining.

I parked my car at the back of the police station and came around the front, where a broad staircase led to double doors, flanked by white globe lights. The doorway said,
Police
over it, in carved letters and I’ll assure you that so far it looked very impressive, particularly with all the police cars parked up front.

But once through the double doors, it was completely different. There was a floor in what I was fairly sure was linoleum old enough to contain asbestos, colored an indifferent pink with darker reddish and white occlusions. It would have made me feel as if I were walking on pepperoni, except that it was rather dirty, so I would have to imagine it was gray, dingy pepperoni.

On this unattractive surface, two unattractive battered metal desks stood, and at each of the metal desks sat a woman. They had those little headsets on that people use who talk on the phone all day, and both of them seemed to carry on various simultaneous conversations composed of a lot of “Would you hold, please?”

It was all, “I don’t know, I will check, will you hold, please?” and then “Well, he was released yesterday, will you hold, please?” and then “The mother would have to be present as well, will you hold, please?” and then “As soon as bail is posted, will you hold, please?”

The women, one matronly and probably just a little short of my mother’s age, the other about my age, very thin and harassed-looking, used to stop me when I came in the door. But now I was a familiar face, so they merely waved me through as they continued their conversations.

There was one of those doors with hammered glass at the back of the entrance room. Well, actually there were a series of them, looking exactly like refugees from a film noir set. But only one door interested me, and I’d only ever been through the one door. I presumed the others led to various other operations the police carried on, operations that had nothing to do with Cas.

The door I went through was labeled
Serious Crimes Department
.

Once past it, I entered the mid-twentieth century—all polished-oak floors, a broad hallway lined with file cabinets on the right, and a row of more of the doors with glass and names and titles on it on the left.

I went past the one that said
Rafiel Trall
, and I swear I heard a snuffling, as if Rafiel had a very large dog at the office. But that was none of my business. Cas’s door was past his. They were the only senior investigators and the only ones meriting offices. Beyond that stretched a vast, cavernous room, lit by broad windows and cut up by the sort of ubiquitous cubes that seemed to be part of every business these days.

I noted Nick at a near cube—if for no other reason because he was taller than most of the other people—but he was staring at his computer screen, so I didn’t say anything. Instead, I knocked at the door to Cas’s office.

And the time machine leaped another fifty years—at least—forward. The inside of Cas’s office was furnished mostly with things he’d bought from me over the last six months. He had a nice Persian-looking rug on a polished floor, a wall of dark mahogany bookcases containing not just process folders but the occasional—nicely—disguised file box made to look like a decorative wooden container. His desk was equally broad and a light oak color. The clean lines had attracted him when he’d first seen it.

There were two large armchairs facing the desk, his office chair was the sort that’s incredibly expensive but supposedly good for your back as well as decorative, and on the lower bookcase against the wall—piled neatly with papers, which pertained to his current work, and hosting the printer on the highest left-hand shelf—was a reproduction of Rodin’s
The Kiss
, which I had bought in a horribly rusted condition and spent weeks polishing, painting with an undercoat, and finally gold-leafing. It had been my Christmas gift to him.