A Fatal Stain (12 page)

It turned out Nick and Cas had come in one car, and so they just traded passengers—Ben took Nick, and Cas took a completely asleep E and myself. Ben and Nick didn’t look like they were at loggerheads as they got into the car.

“I’m sorry,” I told Cas. “It must be tough.”

“Yeah,” he said. He scratched at his nose. Now that we were in the relatively enclosed area of the car, it was obvious his clothes smelled of soot and smoke. “You know, the thing is…” I looked at him. “The thing is that those condos were up for sale with, well…”

“All-ex’s realty?” I asked. I didn’t need the nod from Cas. I already knew it.

I woke up listening to Cas in the bathroom. He is the
champion of the silent getting up, but no man born of woman has ever learned to brush his teeth silently. Which is a good thing, as otherwise I might well end up missing his exit most mornings.

As it was, I wasn’t exactly awake but in that state in which your still-asleep brain pilots your still-asleep body through motions designed to give the impression you’re awake but that, in fact, will give the impression of the living dead to anyone who has ever watched a zombie movie.

I found myself out of bed—shuffle, shuffle—feeling on the floor for my shoes—shuffle, shuffle—finding one tennis shoe and one of the house slippers my mom gave me, which for some reason had a half heel and pink pompons. I felt around with my foot, trying to find the mate
of either, but couldn’t. However, going without shoes in the house risked an encounter with the dreaded micro Lego blocks E left strewn all over the carpet. This was a well-known tactic of toddlers seeking to get rid of parental authority. I imagine it worked in the Neolithic, too, when an adult crippled by the stone Lego embedded in the foot would get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger in no time.

Considering the trouble I got into even without saber-toothed tigers, I couldn’t afford to go barefoot. So I slipped on my mismatched footwear and continued to the bedroom door—shuffle, limp, shuffle, limp—pulled it open and—

There was a mummy on my sofa. It was long and vaguely human shaped and white. I let out a scream before I realized the mummy wasn’t so much human shaped as, more specifically, Ben shaped.

The minute my scream sounded, the mummy—that is, Ben—sat up, looked at me, and screamed.

Look, I was too sleepy to stop the automatic reaction. It takes coffee and being somewhat awake to realize you’re not in a rerun of a mummy-versus-zombie movie. So I screamed again. I mean, zombies, sure, I’m a zombie every morning before coffee. But mummies are much scarier. Mummies are like zombies who have gone to school and learned all sorts of arcane stuff. Ben screamed, “Dyce, damn it.”

And I managed to scream, “What in heaven are you doing here?”

By that time our screams had brought the law down on us. Okay, in this case not so much down as out of the bathroom and across the bedroom, in his pajama bottoms and holding aloft the safety razor of doom.

It would probably have been more impressive if half of Cas’s face wasn’t covered in white foam and if the safety razor he was holding aloft weren’t one of the cheap disposable ones in virulent pink—which meant he’d forgotten to bring a razor and had therefore swiped one of my razors from its pack. However, in his defense, he was holding it like someone who meant business and had jumped into the fray to protect his ladylove. If any threat got near me, it would be well and properly shaved for good and all.

He didn’t even make an effort to take a swipe at Ben’s whiskers, though—which was a little disappointing. Instead, he stood there, staring from one to the other of us. After a while, he frowned at Ben. “What are you doing here?” he asked, which again proves that Cas can spot the essential wrongness about a situation.

Then he turned on me, in a completely unfair way. “And why are you screaming?”

I pushed my lower lip out, which I realized made me look like a petulant child, but I felt like a petulant child, so that was okay. “He was imitating a mummy.”

“No, I wasn’t,” he said. “I was asleep, and she came in and screamed.”

“You’re asleep in my living room.”

“On the sofa. It’s normal for people to sleep on the sofa.”

“It’s not normal for you to sleep on my sofa,” I said. “You have a place of your own.”

“Ah! But Nick has a key.”

“Right,” I said. “And I bet you have a key to his place. Why didn’t you go and sleep on his sofa?”

Ben glared, knowing he’d been trapped by my
infallible logic, and rolled his eyes. “Women. Can’t live with them, and I don’t understand why anyone would try.”

Since this pretty much accorded with my view of females, I couldn’t say anything, and Cas took advantage of the silence to sigh, audibly, and in the tone of one much put-upon. “If you two are done screaming down the house, I’m going to finish shaving. Some of us have jobs to be at.”

“Some of us don’t work on Sunday,” Ben said, like that made him special.

“Aren’t you the lucky one?” I said, shooting him a venomous look, as I eased by to go to the kitchen and make Cas his breakfast. Of course, no way could Ben let me go about my morning business without coming out, still trailing his blanket.

There were several things wrong with that blanket. First, he’d brought it from home, because I do my laundry at a public Laundromat, which means I can’t afford to keep anything large and white around. Things have to wait for wash long past the time at which a white blanket near a cat and a toddler would end up gray, long before I could afford to take it to the Laundromat. Second, he had wrapped himself in a modified version of his “full mummy” sleeping posture, so that he looked like a human burrito with feet. I glared at his feet, and hoped he’d step on a Lego but, of course, he never did. Lego toys have magnets that attract them to parental foot soles.

Another annoying thing about Ben and his insecurity blanket was the way he managed to hold it around him and perfectly closed while he—mutter, mutter—washed out my coffeepot, which I had washed the night before,
thank you so much, and set about perfectly measuring and grinding the beans to make the perfect coffee. Some people need a dose of reality with their perfection. But I was extraordinarily good and didn’t say it. Instead, I decided since he was making the coffee—like he had to impress Cas!—I would make breakfast.

There’s only one thing I do well in the kitchen, but that I do very, very well. I had a stack of tender yet crispy pancakes in the middle of the table as Cas came in. “Oh, wow,” he said. “Coffee and pancakes? It is my lucky day.”

Neither Ben nor I dignified that with an answer. Ben, because I guess he really wasn’t trying to impress Cas, and myself because I was never sure if Cas was serious when he praised me for pancakes.

I’d just got him the maple syrup when E came in, carrying Pythagoras as he usually did—as though the cat were a doll—grasped in a hug under his front paws.

“E, you have to support his legs; you’re hurting him,” I said, automatically.

“He’s not complaining,” E said, perfunctorily tighten ing the grasp with one arm, and putting the other arm under Pythagoras’s back paws. “He likes it.”

To be honest, the cat’s amiable and confused expression betrayed neither like nor dislike, just this total confusion best transcribed as, “Kind lady, give me three of the green ones. I am a marshmallow poteen.” Sometimes I worried the poor animal hadn’t been
completely
insane when we’d adopted him.

I put pancakes, syrup, and a small glass of milk in front of E. Ben was standing by the coffeemaker and drinking a cup of coffee with an expression that would
only be justifiable if the coffee had killed all his relatives and attacked his livelihood.

Ben in this mood—as I’d learned fairly early on—is a good analogue to a statue in the middle of a traffic circle. The best you can do is maneuver around him and pretend he doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, he was standing in front of the drawer with the silverware needed to eat pancakes. But that was okay.

I gave E a small spatula to eat his pancakes with, handed Cas a cheese cutter, and grabbed a wooden spoon for myself. It says how well they knew Ben that, after a flitting look at him in front of the drawer, neither of them made a comment.

Turns out a small melon baller makes a not-unhandy coffee spoon. In similar circumstances before, I had discovered it could be used to eat cereal with, though it was a pain to put one’s finger on the little hole in the bottom of the scoop.

I was halfway through my second pancake and third cup of coffee, and feeling a lot less like a zombie, when the human burrito stirred. He stepped away from the counter, glared at us as if we’d said anything, and lurched out of the room. I heard him go into my bedroom and then slam the door to the shower.

Cas looked at me, “Does he often do this?”

I frowned, hesitating between loyalty and truthfulness. “Only to me,” I said.

“Do you think he fought with Nick?” Cas asked, doubtfully.

This was such a stupid question that, frankly, it made me question all those lines in books and movies about
the police and their inquiries. I mean, even I, with my untrained mind, could spot that there had been some big row and now Ben was avoiding Nick, which, if I knew anything about Nick—whom I admittedly had known a much shorter time than I’d known Ben—probably meant Nick was avoiding Ben. It was a wonder they hadn’t both met here while avoiding each other.

“I mean, what in heck do they have to argue about?” Cas asked. “They laugh at the same stupid jokes, they like the same movies, they—”

“Ben said something about not knowing where to live and Nick’s house lease coming to an end,” I said, quickly, to forestall whatever else my beloved felt like telling me about his cousin’s relationship with my best friend. There are places the mind shouldn’t go, and mine tends to go there by default, anyway.

“Oh, but Nick…”

“Ben seems to think Nick is being a little…how do I put this? Greek.”

Cas stared at me, his eyes slowly widening. “But I thought the whole thing was—”

“Cas! No. I mean, you know, Nick is behaving presumably as Nick’s dad would. No. Stop. Not that. I mean,
House, castle, why isn’t my dinner made?
kind of Greek.”

Cas closed his mouth slowly. “Oh.” He frowned slightly, and looked vaguely toward where the sounds of the shower running echoed. “Yeah, I could see that would be a problem. But…” He frowned again. Finally he shook his head slowly. “At any rate,” he said, as though dismissing some elaborate argument, “I have to go to work. We should have the forensic report on the body from the arson case.” He sighed. “I hate to say this, but
I rather hope it was the arsonist, and he miscalculated. At least that problem would be done and over with.”

He kissed me, perhaps not as thoroughly as he would have if E weren’t watching us interestedly as if he intended to pick up tips for future dating.

As soon as he’d left, I told E to stop feeding pancakes to Pythagoras, and gave Pythagoras some of the stinkiest tuna known to man, which only caused him to stare at me in confusion, then hop back on E’s lap for pancake. “Fine,” I said, darkly. “But don’t come complaining to me when you get an upset tummy.”

The look in his eyes was
No complaints. I’ll just throw up on your pillow.
Which was, of course, par for the course. Lacking access to my own shower, which Ben had claimed, I did the dishes by hand until I heard the shower go off. Eventually, Ben showed up in the kitchen, perfectly dressed and groomed, wearing grayish chinos and a gray-greenish shirt. It being Sunday, he didn’t have a tie on, but you could tell he felt uncomfortable without it. I noted the clothes were different from the ones the day before, but I presumed that if Ben had gone through the trouble of bringing his blanket with him, he would—almost certainly—also have brought a small suitcase with a change of clothes and possibly his ubiquitous beauty products. Only he’d learned through painful experience not to leave his beauty products lying about where person or persons unknown could get hold of them.

As he came into the kitchen, he looked sheepish, as he tended to look when he knew he’d been exasperating. “Hey, look…” he said.

I’d long ago learned to strike while the iron was hot and impose on Ben while Ben was embarrassed or
feeling guilty. “Hey,” I said, quickly. “You know, I’m not going to have much time to work, with E here until…well, for a week at least, if it works out, so I was wondering, if you don’t have anything to do today, if you’d consider babysitting him a bit so that I can get some work done out back, because I’m almost out of stock at the consignment shop, and I have to finish stuff to take in.”

Ben opened his mouth, then closed it, then ran his hand back over his hair. “Nick and I were going to…” He pushed his lips together. “But he’s working all day, because of the arson case, you know?”

I started to see there might be outlines to the problems that Ben and Nick were having that had nothing whatsoever to do with ethnic culture. “Uh…You know, it’s part of being a policeman. They work all sorts of hours. It’s something I’m starting to get used to, but it’s hard as hell. It’s one of those jobs where the job has to come first, because it’s bigger than the person or career advancement or all of that.”