A Killing in Antiques (16 page)

I engaged in a number of minor accidents, fender benders really. Some were my fault, but several took place when the car wasn’t even moving. I happened to be behind the wheel, though, so I was given credit for them. Hamp, at first sympathetic, began to be irritated by the situation.

Edgar took pity on me. He stopped replacing the old car’s parts with new ones, and began hammering out my various bumps and dents. That made it a little less expensive. He joked that I was one of his “preferred customers,” and assured me that I was lucky I didn’t drive a new plastic car. Edgar is a good person. I’m sympathetic that he feels a lesser man when he repairs a vase, but his attitude makes no sense to me.

“Just take a look at it,” I said, and pulled the cloisonné vase from its newspaper swaddling in the box, holding it up for him to see.

He looked away from the vase and contemplated the garage walls. He took a sidelong peek at the vase, tried to avoid another look, but couldn’t. He finally let his eyes rest on it.

“It’s that enamel stuff, huh?”

“Cloisonné.”

“Yeah, cloisonné,” he said, and he looked at me. “Why do you do this to me, Loose Lady?” He approached the vase but didn’t touch it. His eyes were drawn again to its lines. “Enamel over bronze, a little silver in there, too,” he mused. “Old bronze can be brittle, you know, and when that old brittle stuff busts, not even
I
can fix it.”

As he lifted the vase from my hand, he made a cooing sound. Calming the vase? Himself? With both hands, he turned it, caressing its surface with his palms. Warming it, weighing it, imprinting its design against his palms.

Then he nodded. He had made an agreement with himself. He held the vase by the neck with both hands and slid his thumbs down inside. I watched. He pressed his thumbs against the inside of the bronze. We stood, still as statues, me watching Edgar, he watching some distant place. Seconds passed quietly; then the vase made a hollow popping sound. We looked at it. Fixed. Edgar-the-auto-body-guy smiled.

He handed the vase back to me and he said, “There. Now don’t come back here again unless you need your car fixed. I don’t repair antiques, and someday I’m gonna break one-a them things. Then all hell will break loose, Loose Lady.”

“Edgar, it’s beautiful,” I said, and it was. “What do I owe you?”

“The same as always, Loose Lady: nothing for vases. But I’m warning you, if you break your car again, you had better bring it here to be fixed. Or I’m calling in my markers.” He was smiling again.

I wondered if he would accept my gift in the right frame of mind. Maybe it would antagonize him. If he didn’t like it I’d plead insanity.

“Edgar, I have something here for you. . . .”

I gave him the hammer.

“Here, Edgar, it’s a . . .”

“I know what it is. It’s a dolly.”

“. . . hammer of some sort.”

“It’s not a hammer, unless you see an anvil as a hammer. It’s a dolly. It’s beautiful, Lucy. This is handforged, you know.” He held it gently and looked at it.

“Yes, I know.” I didn’t know. But if he liked it, he might as well think that I was aware of something special about it.

“It’s beautiful,” he repeated. “Where did you get this?”

“At Brimfield, where I got the vase.”

“Brimfield? That’s where the guy up the street was murdered,” he said.

Not exactly up the street, but by neighborhood standards, Monty’s Contents was in the vicinity.

“Did you know him, Edgar?”

“Not really. I knew who he was. I seen him around, him and his helper. But I can’t say I knew him.”

“They come in here?”

“Uh-uh, not here. Last time I seen ’em was in the Viet restaurant across the avenue. I like their seventysevens.”

“Me too. They call them summer rolls where I live now.”

“Yut, well, just before the murder, I saw Monty giving the quiet guy a bad case of grief,” he said, nodding.

“Oh?”

“Yut, then when I heard about the murder, I goes, that was brewing the day I seen ’em.”

“What happened?”

“Well, the quiet guy just sat there, taking the dressingdown Monty was giving. But Monty wouldn’t quit; he just kept nagging. You couldn’t help but hear him. Everyone in the place heard him. He kept bitching about a table or something. He goes, you shoulda never done that. That’s the worst thing you coulda done, and on and on. Never do that again, he goes, unless I tell you it’s okay.”

“It was about a table? What about it? Anything else?”

“Nah, he was rankin’ on the guy, but it was the same thing all over again. He really trampled the guy. I felt like punching his lights out myself.”

“Was there any actual punching, Edgar?”

“Nah, like I said, the quiet guy just sat there, browbeaten.”

“And that was the day before the murder?”

“I think it was two days before. Yeah, two days. The whole neighborhood is talking about the murder, and that ain’t gonna change quick. His place was just broken into.”

“Monty’s Contents was broken into?”

Edgar, who didn’t know that appellation, explained that he had, less than an hour ago, heard his police scanner say that Warehouse Used Furniture had been B&E’d. “The police are probably still over there right now,” he said.

Wow.

I left Edgar’s. My plan had been to then zip over to Coney Island, but, with the slightest of detours, I drove by Monty’s Contents for a bit of a gawk. I didn’t intend to go into the place, only to notice if the police were still there. Approaching the building, I saw Matt’s BMW parked by the side door. Other than that, the lot was empty. No police cars, nor was Billy’s truck there.

I pulled up next to Matt’s car and went into the place. It turned out that Silent Billy was there. He must have been chauffeured by his attorney, Matt. I would have loved to have seen the meticulous Matt driving the scruffy Silent Billy anywhere, but I missed it. Billy nodded hello, and Matt said, “You missed the excitement, Lucy.”

“T
he burglar didn’t get what he came for,” Matt said. Billy stood nearby, nodding silently.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Billy says nothing is missing,” Matt said. He seemed to be taking his role as mouthpiece literally. “The police were here for a few minutes; they didn’t look for fingerprints. They thought we might have scared the perp away when we arrived.”

I turned to Billy. “I’m glad you’re free,” I said.

“He’s not exactly free,” Matt said. “The police would like this to be temporary. They’re working overtime to put him back inside.”

Bad news. I wondered if the police knew about the rift at the restaurant, but didn’t bring it up. “How did the perp get in?” I asked.

“The outside door was easy,” Matt said. “It has a simple lock. It was jimmied. Monty recently got concerned about the lock and bought a new one, as well as an alarm system, but he hadn’t had time to install it.”

“The inner doors were forced, too. The office door and the antique room door took more effort,” he said.

Billy motioned for us to follow him through the huge dusty warehouse. Used furniture was lined up in long unbroken rows of tables with tables, sofas with sofas, lamps with lamps. No attempt at decor had been made. We passed the workshop and the antiques room; neither looked any different from usual. Next we passed the tiny room with a cot in it; then we were at Monty’s office.

What was left of the office door hung open. The door and the wooden frame were splintered. We looked into the tiny office. It was a sight to behold. Small and overcrowded, with papers and stuff everywhere. A large battered walnut desk and chair took up a lot of the space. A file cabinet and an old-fashioned Coke machine were squeezed tight to each other against the wall to the right of the desk.

Stacks of papers, miscellaneous objects, and boxes filled with oddments covered every space, including the floor. Billy tiptoed quickly around the stuff to the file cabinet. There, he picked up a shoe box that had been set on top of some magazines. He riffled through it and pulled out a lock and several components of an alarm system. He held the pieces out for me to examine.

Everything looked the way it should. I wondered if I was expected to tinker with the parts. I flicked the lock back and forth. It opened and closed just as it would if it were installed in a door. I wasn’t sure how to tinker with an alarm system, so I didn’t.

“Do you suppose it was the murderer, after the rest of Monty’s cash?” I asked.

“What do you mean ‘the rest’?” Matt asked.

“Well, whatever he took when he killed Monty probably didn’t satisfy him, so he came back here and—”

“The murderer didn’t take any money from Monty. He had a roll of bills in his pocket when they found his body, Lucy. It came to almost seven thousand dollars.”

How could that be? I was sure the motive had been robbery. “You mean he wasn’t robbed?” I said.

Matt cocked an eyebrow and stretched his mouth wide in a tight line. “Isn’t that what I just said?” He murmured impatiently.

Well, of course it was, but I was having a little trouble assimilating that information. I handed the lock and alarm assembly back to Billy. That made everything different. Very different. Monty had
not
been killed in a robbery that went bad.

Billy put the lock and alarm back in the shoe box. He turned to us from inside the office. “Cokes?” he asked. On hearing his scratchy voice, I noticed that my own mouth was dry, and I accepted immediately. Matt said nothing.

Billy sidestepped along the narrow space to the old Coke machine. It was more compact than a new one, a little shorter than Billy and half again as wide. Its sturdy metal shell had rounded edges and Airstream corners. It could have used a little attention from Edgar-the-auto-body-guy, but I held my tongue. It was made to dispense Coke. Not Diet Coke, not Classic Coke, not flavored Coke, and certainly not any other kind of soda. It was a
Coke
machine.

Billy took a dime from an ashtray atop a stack of papers nearby and turned back to the machine.

“Dimes?” Matt, who had appeared not to be watching, said. He was suddenly interested. “That machine takes dimes?” And, without waiting for a response, he said he’d like a Coke, too.

The Cokes dropped into the well and Billy took them out of the machine. His drawn face cracked into a grin, and he nodded and handed one to each of us.

The Cokes were in fluted glass bottles with tapered waistlines. Mine was icy cold; it didn’t have the crimped metal cap that needed to be opened with an old-fashioned church key. It had a screw top cap. I knew that Billy’s Cokes had been produced by some standard bottler only a few short days before, but the one I was drinking tasted so special it took me back to a different time.

“I heard they were a nickel in the good old days,” I said.

“Couldn’t find a mechanism for nickels,” Billy said.

Matt tipped his bottle, drank deeply, and then turned to me. “Billy and I are going to have a long talk.” That was my cue to get lost. Just when it would have been interesting to be invisible.

“One question before I leave, Matt. What was the situation when you defended Monty all those years ago?”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “There’s not much there. Monty was just a kid at the time, maybe eighteen, old enough to be called an adult. He was one of my earliest clients when I was fresh out of law school.

“He had a pickup truck and a rented garage where he kept a continuous garage sale going. All he handled was junk back then. Strictly junk. I think he even came by his garage sale stuff by way of hauling people’s junk.”

“He called himself a junk dealer to the end,” I said, recalling Monty’s frequent declarations. “But how’d he get into trouble? Surely he didn’t mistake a stolen treasure for a pile of junk?”

“No, he didn’t. It was a silver teapot that did it. He never told me how he came by that piece. I’m sure he was covering for a pal. I was too green at the time to realize how common that ploy is among the equally green.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s a tired old story, Lucy, and I’m sure you’ve heard variants of it over time. Some sly fox with a lot to lose convinces a pigeon with a clean slate that
he
should take the blame.”

“Oh, sure,” I replied. “Protectors of the underdog or something. But I’d have guessed that Monty might be a fairly wily fellow himself by the time he was that age.”

“He was street-smart, all right.” Matt frowned and hesitated, then went on. “But there’s a certain type of slick-trick sophistication among the street smart that Monty lacked. At any rate, he was a young fellow who covered for a friend. He felt, I’m sure, some sort of misplaced loyalty. He may have felt he owed the friend, or the friend may have put pressure on him. Something caused him to cover for someone else.

“It was the first time he’d ever been in trouble, and the whole thing might have been dismissed, except that this particular teapot was so special. It happened to be part of a larger heist of truly fine stolen objects. The teapot was the first item to surface, and Monty was caught with it red-handed.

“Over time it became clear to the cops that Monty’d been a dupe who may have had no real involvement, no knowledge of the crime, and no further stolen merchandise. But they did feel that he knew
something
. What they wanted was for him to hand over whoever connected him with that teapot. He never did.

“Had he given them the friend, he might have got off clean. As it was, because he’d had no priors, he was sentenced to a few months, reduced to a year’s probation. But, because he was just a little too old to be tried as a kid, his record was never expunged,” Matt said.

“How about the rest of the stuff?” I asked. “Did it ever surface? That could leave a trail to the real culprits.”

“It showed up long after,” Matt said. “When it did, there was no hint of where it came from, and no visible connection to Monty. That was a long time ago, and Monty had put it behind him.”