A Fatal Stain (6 page)

Fortunately, I always carry my tool kit.

I retraced to the back of the car and got my tool kit, then walked back to the enclosure. The gate was composed of two halves that closed in the center. If I could just remove one of them.…

With the screwdriver, I reached through the gate to where it was bolted on the side. Yeah, you wouldn’t think that being able to unscrew things really fast was a needed skill. Until times like this. Of course, I’d started unscrewing things long before refinishing furniture. By the time I was E’s age, I’d taken apart more furniture and pulled off more doors than you could shake a really big stick at. Sometimes my parents even noticed. Well, at least if what I took apart was a bookcase.

I leaned the half gate against the fence, then lifted it until I could tip it over the top of the fence. I’m convinced it was made of aluminum or something not cast iron, because I hadn’t grown super strength, and I was able to lift it, using the fence as a fulcrum, and tilt-drop it, slowly, to the other side, after shouting to E, “Stay clear.”

The gate had barely touched the ground when E was scrambling up it, like the monkey that Ben often accused him of being. At the top, he scrambled toward me, while saying, “Quickly, quickly,” as if he were in charge of this escape.

It wasn’t until we were in the car and driving away from the scene of the crime, leaving All-ex’s trash enclosure sadly open to any and all bar-hopping (or not) bears, that my son looked at me, with a slight frown. “I ’spose,” he said. “I could have opened the padlock.”

I stomped on the brake out of sheer surprise, causing the people behind me to honk madly. “What? You had a key?” Now, Michelle was criminally insane. What kind of woman would leave Torquemada Jr. alone in a backyard with the key to unlock the gate? How come he hadn’t escaped before, just to check out the neighborhood? Was it that there was nothing fun to do in these suburbs, or did E only torment me?

“No,” he said, indignantly, before I brought up my worse suspicions. “But I’ve been practicing opening locks with pins an’…an’ stuff.”

He looked at me with the most angelic of smiles. Of course, devils were nothing but fallen angels. “Uh…opening locks?”

“Sure,” he said, now importantly. “Cas says that people can open locks without keys, so I’ve been trying…”

I was afraid to ask, truly I was. There was nothing in my house that was locked or needed to be unlocked, except the shed, with all its poisons, and the front door. And the idea of E in my shed was terrifying. Also, I had trouble believing he’d ever got in there and not created the sort of headlines that screamed
The fire near the college has now burned for five days.
“You’ve never…” At the last minute I remembered that if I asked him if he’d ever got into my shed, it would just guarantee he did so. Which just meant I still had some functioning brain cells. The same brain cells that told me I was going to buy the most high-tech padlock on the market tonight, no matter what it cost. “Uh…what have you unlocked?”

“You won’t tell?”

“Of course not,” I said, not worrying about the logic of it. In the minds of children, I suppose all adults are in collusion.

In his eyes was a look of pure mischief.

“Where did you open locks?” I asked. “I won’t tell,” I added. “And I won’t be upset. I just want to know.”

He sighed. “It’s Daddy,” he said in a tone that said this explained everything.

I hung on, wondering what stodgy and conventional All-ex could have to do with this. Had he, unbeknownst to me, started a career as a safecracker? The mind boggled.

“You see,” E said, and licked his lips and looked again at me, sidewise, as though sure I’d find something objectionable in this, “Daddy keeps a lot of things locked.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yeah.” E nodded. “And Cas once talked about someone picking a lock and I asked him what it was. And he said they used wire hooks and they…they did what a key does.
Made locks open.” He frowned slightly. “So I tried…and you know? It doesn’t work in every lock, but…”

“But it works in some?” I asked, making a mental note to tell my fianc to be very, very careful about what he said around my troublemaker.

“Yeah. An’ I got into Dad’s office and his locked drawer and stuff?”

“What was inside the locked drawer?” I asked, out of irrepressible curiosity. E and I weren’t that different. If my father had kept a lot of things locked around the house, I’d probably have learned lock picking, too.

E looked disgusted. “Boring stuff. Maps and papers.” He thought for a moment. “Oh, yeah, and pictures of poor ladies.”

“Poor ladies?”

“They don’t have any clothes.”

I had to bite my lip to prevent myself from laughing out loud, mostly because I knew E very well, and I was sure all the ladies with no clothes now sported moustaches and probably antennae. “Ah,” I said. And then, “E, you know you’re not supposed to just open all locked doors, right? You could get in serious trouble for that. Police trouble.”

“Oh, I know that,” he said, glibly, in a tone that made me very sure that he didn’t believe me at all. “Besides, you can’t open every door! Even with the best hooks.”

“Where…where do you get your hooks?” I asked tentatively.

A snort. “Earrings!”

I refused to ask whether it was my earrings or Michelle’s. Instead, I drove my budding housebreaker to the place where I’d bought the suspiciously stained table.

The semi-permanent garage sale took place two
blocks from my house, in front of what must once have been a majestic Victorian house. It remained vast and squarish, with a funny turret on one end. But its paint was peeling, boards were standing out from its facing, and its roof sagged on one side. There was a collection of items on the front lawn by a sign that said
Garage Sale
.

The house being one of the few residential buildings left on Fairfax Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares of Goldport, it got a fair amount of drive-by traffic, and at any given time, there were one or two people browsing a collection of items ranging from headless dolls to CD storage racks. Most of the time, I wondered if the people running the sale “shopped” in the same Dumpsters I did.

I drove by it almost every day, of course, and my twin
wonders over it were how the people running it managed to turn a profit at all from what amounted to little more than trash and how they never ran out of items.

Normally, I wasn’t even vaguely tempted to stop, but the lines of the table had made me suspect real wood and caused me to park and saunter over.

Today’s offerings were less impressive, I noted as I parked and told E, “Stay here. Do not come out. I’ll be right back. I’m serious. Do not leave.”

He looked at me with a scrunched-up face. “We have to go back,” he said.

I let my hand fall on the way to opening the door. Had E turned into an adult? Was he going to tell me Michelle would worry?

“I forgot Ccelly.”

I took a deep breath. The rules of this game were impenetrable at best, and I never knew when E would take my lead or not, but as I let air out slowly, I decided to go for broke. “No, you didn’t,” I said, improvising wildly. “Ccelly broke out ahead of you. He’s the one who told me you weren’t sick and I should come and get you.”

E let out air, as though relieved. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. That’s where he went.”

I refused to believe my son had been missing an invisible llama. I rushed out of the car before he could give me any details.

There were several empty flowerpots near me. Further on were two CD racks. Yet further on were a lot of baby clothes, strewn on a plastic bag. There were also a lot of suitcases that looked like someone had paused at a zoo, on a tour of the world, and given them to a bunch of wild animals to toss around.

The man who presumably lived in the house and ran the garage sale got up from the steps where he’d been sitting and ambled toward me, a smile displaying his large yellow teeth. “I see you’re looking at them CD cases,” he said. “Very fine they are and—”

“No,” I said, afraid I’d be forced to buy CD cases if I let him go on. “No, really. I just wanted to know—” I looked up at a weathered face in which two blue eyes looked curiously unfocused, as if their owner were looking into a very distant place, not at someone standing in front of him. “I bought a table from you two days ago,” I said. “Big, kitchen or dining table.” I made the gestures with my hands that indicated how big the table was, or at least that it was as large as my arms could reach.

“Hey,” he said. “Once you buy it, it’s yours. We’re not no department store. No returns.” He laughed at his own joke.

“I don’t want to return it,” I said. “I was just wondering where it came from.”

He looked at me awhile. “We get things from many places,” he said. “People who don’t have time to have a garage sale sell us things cheap, see, and then we sell them.”

“And who did you get that table from?”

The blue eyes focused at me for a moment, taking me in. “Why would you want to know?”

“Well,” I said. And then I realized if I told him that there were bloodstains on the table, he’d probably clamp tighter than a clam with constipation. Not only because, doubtless, he didn’t want any trouble—who did?—but because I’d sound like a total lunatic, talking about stains on a table. And besides, I really couldn’t explain to him
that the finish on that table had just been wrong and nothing a reputable refinisher would do to a good piece of furniture. Heck, I would barely be able to explain that to Cas, much less to this addled stranger. On a strike of inspiration, I went with the first convoluted thought in my head. “You see, Castor Wolfe, senior investigator of the Serious Crimes Unit for the Goldport police—”

“Hey!” he interrupted me, which was a good thing, since I had no idea where I was going with this. I surmised saying that Cas slept with me half the nights would probably not impress this man…even if it still impressed me, frankly.

“Hey,” he said. “I don’t want no trouble with the police. If the stuff was hot, it wasn’t I who took it and—”

“Of course not,” I said. “But see, that’s why we must know where it came from.”

He ran his fingers up and through his salt-and-pepper hair, leaving distinct canals in the midst of it, which meant it was either drowned in product or—judging by the stale smell rolling off him—very dirty. “Yeah.” He squinted at me, as if by focusing he could determine how serious I was. “Yeah. The table, you say?”

“Yes, the large table, that—”

“Only big table I seen in months,” he said. “At the sale. And at the time I kinda wondered how come they didn’t want it. But it looked kinda rough, and I thought what the hell.”

Considering how often I thought
what the hell
, this was perfectly believable. Heck, I was thinking
what the hell
right now. As in
What the hell am I doing here asking this man stupid questions
?

“So I took it.”

“You stole it?” I said.

He glared at me. “No. I paid five dollars for it.”

“To whom?” I asked, mentally noting he’d made a fifteen dollar profit on that.

“He said his name was Jason Ashton,” he said. “That’s all I know. Never knew him from Adam, mind. I have nothing to do with it.”

“Where does he live?” I asked.

He shrugged, backing away from me as though, by putting distance between us, he was somehow separating himself from any trouble I brought. “I don’t know. Only reason I know his name is that I wrote him a check for the table and…and a bunch of other things, like those baby clothes.”

I resisted an impulse to go and check if there were bloodstains on the baby clothes. The idea of a vast network of baby sacrificers flitted through my mind and made me shudder. But surely if that were going on, someone would have noticed. After all, there was a limited supply of babies, and people tended to care for them. It wasn’t like you could buy babies in the department store, like how my mom used to tell me she acquired me. Though to be honest, she’d said she’d found me in the bargain bin up front, at ten for a dollar. It had taken me until I was four to know she was lying, though at least it explained why she hadn’t taken advantage of the bargain and bought a couple more.

“But I don’t know where he lives,” the man said. “Honest. Don’t know him from Adam.”

“Right,” I said. “Thank you.” It was entirely possible he was telling me the truth. About as possible as that he was lying, of course. But in either case, I wasn’t going to
get any more out of him. Not when he thought I was out to get him. Not unless I could bring Cas with me and get him to ask questions, and I hadn’t seen ads for the sale of any ski-lift tickets in hell. “Thank you.”

I beat a hasty retreat toward the car. Chances were Jason Ashton was in the phone directory. Alternately, I could probably get someone at the police station to find the address for me. Perhaps even Cas, if I came up with a convincing enough lie to tell him.

In the car, I locked the doors. E looked out the window, doing such a convincing impression of a cherub I almost checked his back for wings. But surely no divinity would be so cruel as to increase E’s ability to move
while
leaving him in possession of both hands.