Read Ride a Painted Pony (Superromance) Online
Authors: Carolyn McSparren
Ride a Painted Pony (Superromance) (20 page)
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His head jerked back. “Sorry.”
“Take a look at this.” He sighed and ran his eyes down one page after another. He looked up at her and shook his head. No carousel animals listed. Maybe there was another list somewhere devoted entirely to stolen goods.
“You can probably salvage most of the stuff from the store itself,” he said to Estelle. “Most of the furniture that was burned was in the storeroom at the back—stuff he hadn’t finished aging. Upholstery will have to be redone and some of the wooden stuff will have to be cleaned, but he had a great stock of toys and small things. Listen to this: Uncle Sam children’s bank, excellent quality. Waterford crystal bud vase. Gold and amethyst art deco pin. Twenty-four carat gold lady’s pencil. Twenty-two-inch, triple-strand cultured pearls. Even some sets of baseball cards and an ivory chess set.”
“What should I do?” Estelle asked.
“I know somebody in the business,” Taylor said, thinking of CeCe Washburn. “I’ll call her for you, get her down here. She’ll give you a decent price for everything that’s left.”
“Oh, would you?” Estelle put her hand over Taylor’s. “I can’t take much more of this.” The waiter put a plate of Cajun pasta with shrimp in front of Estelle, and she burst into tears.
“Ma’am,” he asked, “Is there something wrong?”
Estelle shook her head and waved him off.
ESTELLE UNLOCKED THE WRECK OF A STORE. The wind had finally blown away the stench of burned flesh, but in its place the reek of moldy upholstery and soggy wood leapt out at their senses. Nick opened the glass front door and held it for the two women.
“Please,” Estelle whispered. “I can’t.” She turned away. “I’ll wait in the car.”
Taylor nodded to Nick. Better that way.
The fire wall between the workshop and the store proper had kept the flames from leaping across, but the smoke line lay only two feet above the floor. The water that had run across the concrete floor had soaked the threadbare Orientals and turned them into mud pies. Taylor coughed.
Nick walked down the aisle to the left, moving slowly among the armoires, chests and tables, each one covered with an assortment of grimy accessories. Taylor stood and watched him. He kept his hands in his pockets, and shrank away from touching any of the wood.
At the far back corner—closest to the wall of the workshop—stood a long glass display case. Beside the case sat a doll carriage, melted and twisted by the reflected heat and covered with shards of glass from the broken display cases. Taylor walked back to it and looked at the contents. There was the art deco pin, a beautifully elaborate piece constructed of angular bits of amethyst. The pearls were there as well, but blackened and scarred. She was able to identify several other bits—a beaded evening bag, and a broad piece of woven hematite that would have fit into the décolletage of a lady’s bodice in nineteen hundred.
Nick came up behind her so quietly that she jumped when he spoke. “No carousel animals. Nothing but ashes behind the wall.” She moved to the door, but he put a hand on her arm and shook his head. “Don’t look. It’s like a terrorist bomb hit the place.”
Taylor shivered.
“Come on.”
Taylor followed him outside. He locked the padlock on the front door and walked over to lean on the window of Estelle’s car. Taylor heard him whispering to her without being able to catch the words.
Estelle nodded and drove off.
“We’re going to follow her to the house,” he said.
Ten minutes later Estelle opened the Eberhardts’ front door to them. She had been crying. “It’s so hateful,” Estelle said.
“I know.” Taylor sat her down in the front hall on a prayer bench that had survived the onslaught nearly intact. “Do you mind if I go upstairs?”
Estelle nodded and waved her hand at the staircase.
“I’m going to start clearing up the kitchen,” Nick said.
All the upstairs rooms had been attacked, but without the single-minded ferocity Taylor had seen downstairs.
Apparently the Eberhardts had slept in separate bedrooms. The third bedroom was obviously a guest room, the fourth a study-library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and walls that had been sponged to look like aged leather. The books were mostly leather-bound editions bought by the yard for their decorative value. All had been struck from the shelves.
The desktop computer lay on the floor behind the desk, screen smashed, case cracked, cables ripped, keyboard broken. Whatever the Eberhardts had kept on that computer was long past restoring. She dug through the desk drawers searching for backup diskettes and found only bootlegged software.
She set the computer back on the desk and began to replace the books one by one, checking the pages and spine of each as she progressed. She found no notes or inserts.
The pictures had been thrown from the walls and lay half out of broken frames. She picked them up, checked to see that nothing had been slipped between frame and picture, then set them in a neat pile on the desk. They were probably valuable prints. Most of the glass had remained intact on the thick Oriental carpet, or had broken into large pieces.
An hour later the books were back on the shelves and the room was relatively neat. Her back hurt from all the stooping and she had a couple of nasty paper cuts on her fingers.
She went downstairs to find Nick and Estelle.
They were both in the kitchen. Nick wielded a mop on the last of the molasses. Estelle sat at the kitchen table sorting bits of china and crystal.
She was laughing.
Taylor felt a stab of jealousy.
A moment later Estelle saw her and gave her such a welcoming, happy smile that Taylor felt horribly guilty. Nick had managed not only to clean up the horrific mess but to cheer up Estelle while he did it. Most of the men Taylor knew would have set Estelle to the scrubbing while he made certain she worked to his specifications. Nick did it himself.
“Oh, Taylor, I can’t thank you enough,” Estelle said, and turned shining eyes toward Nick.
“I’ve only managed the study,” Taylor admitted. “It’s after two. Shouldn’t you be getting back to the motel to get ready for the memorial service?”
Estelle’s hand flew to her mouth. “My Lord, yes!”
They followed her to her car. “You will call your dealer friend?”
Taylor nodded. “Absolutely.”
“I hate to ask you, but could you, maybe come back?” When Taylor hesitated she shook her head. “Not tomorrow. I know you’re busy. But I can’t go home until next week anyway. Maybe in a couple of days?” she asked shyly.
Taylor smiled and nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”
TAYLOR PULLED INTO THE CIRCULAR DRIVEWAY beside a silver four-door Mercedes and climbed out. Marcus Cato’s house looked as if someone had adapted the plans for the Parthenon into a single-family dwelling. Taylor climbed the wide marble stairs to the double front door and rang the prosaic twentieth-century doorbell. From deep within the recesses of the house she heard a muted bong. Almost at once the door opened.
The man who stood in the doorway had built the house to his scale. He stood four inches taller than Nick and outweighed him by perhaps a hundred pounds. His thick gray hair stood straight up above a broad glowing face the color of coffee with double-thick cream. His face was pocked with deep acne scars.
Taylor smiled and stuck out her hand. “Dr. Cato? I’m Taylor Hunt. Nick called you about me.”
Even in jeans and a cotton sweater, Marcus Cato smelled of money. And sex. His impact was as physical as a blow.
He grinned hugely and stuck out a hand like a Smithfield ham. Taylor shook it and felt the soft, feminine skin of a man whose hands are his livelihood. His fingers felt long and fine, as though the hands of a concert pianist had been grafted onto the body of a linebacker.
“Come in,” he boomed.
Across a broad deep-green marble foyer, a large atrium opened up under a colonnade that ran around all four sides. A fountain chuckled in the center under skylights that let in light but didn’t trouble the conditioned air. It was like stepping back two thousand years into Pompeii or Rome.
“Wow!” Taylor exclaimed.
“Looks like an ordinary house from the outside, doesn’t it?” said Cato.
“It looks like an ordinary house the way a railroad cottage resembles Blenheim Palace,” Taylor said.
He slid a large hand under Taylor’s arm and propelled her through the atrium and around the fountain. “Come on. You want to see the carousel stuff? It’s in the den. That’s where we really live.” He opened French doors and stood aside for Taylor to enter an opulent room with maroon leather couches and a fireplace big enough to roast an ox.
Catty-corner to the fireplace stood an oversize armored carousel horse. Taylor was beginning to recognize the things. “Oh, nice,” she said appreciatively. “A Muller?”
“Mine.” Cato went over to it. “Sit. Drink.” He reached out a hand and popped open the belly of the horse. The inside had been fitted out as a bar.
“Not for me, thanks.”
Cato looked hurt, then brightened. “Soft drink, then?” Taylor suspected it would be easy to overlook the formidable intelligence in those eyes and the obvious skill in those hands, to get caught up in the sheer exuberant size of the man. She laughed. “Sure. Diet.”
He dumped ice cubes into a heavy cut-crystal glass, reached deep into the neck cavity of the horse, pulled out a soda and handed both glass and drink to her. He poured himself an inch of straight Chivas. On the way to the couch across from her he casually brushed her shoulder. She caught her breath. A very sexy animal indeed, and he knew lt.
“As Nick told you, I’m interviewing everyone who was at Rounders the day Nick called about the theft,” Taylor said.
“Not guilty.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I didn’t do it.” Cato stretched his arms across the back of the sofa, balancing his glass on his open palm like a juggler. “Whoever stole those animals did it for money. I don’t need money.”
“There could be other reasons.”
Cato shook his head. “Nope. Money.”
“Are you really as rich as you look? My daddy always told me that doctors are lousy businessmen.”
He laughed. “Your daddy was talking about his generation of doctors. My generation all have hotshot business managers.”
“I’ve heard rumors that you had been having some marital trouble lately.”
The balanced glass trembled a moment. Cato curled it into his palm and brought it to his lips. Taylor flushed. It had been a rude question, but maybe rudeness was the only way to get through Cato’s impeccable veneer.
When he removed the glass from his lips, he grinned. He was back in control.
“Charlene and I have been married thirty-two years. We have no intention of divorcing each other. Neither of us could live this well on half of what I make and Charlene hasn’t worked since I got my degree.”
“No gambling, no drugs, no women?”
A smile played across Cato’s wide mouth and the lids on his eyes drooped. “Oh, yeah, honey, I got the occasional woman. You interested?”
Taylor gulped. “Not at the moment, thank you.”
Cato threw back his magnificent head. His laughter boomed across the room. “Child, you sound positively prim.”
Taylor knew her face was flaming. “Women can be expensive extracurricular toys.”
“The women I play with are ladies. They can mostly afford to play better than I can.” He sipped his scotch. “Charlene and I have an arrangement. I don’t mess with her charge accounts, she chooses not to see my ladies.”
“I see.”
“Now listen here, child. I didn’t steal those animals and I sure as hell didn’t kill that woman.”
“You could have. You’d know right where to stab. It was either an expert job or a darn lucky one.”
“Nope. I don’t consort with the enemy.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t let anybody tell you there is such a thing as a benign brain tumor. Anything that’s in your pretty little head that God didn’t put there to start with is going to kill you if I don’t get it out. Death is the enemy. Makes me madder’n hell every time I lose to the bastard. I sure as hell wouldn’t go killing some little bitsy woman over a couple of carousel animals.”
“So where were you Monday night?”
“Elbow-deep in somebody’s brain from four in the afternoon until two in the morning.”
“Did you win?”
He grinned. “Damn straight I won. Death is going to have to wait a few years for that one unless the guy gets hit by a truck.” He rubbed his big hands over the glass as though warming them. “I like winning.”
Taylor laughed. “I bet.” Then she sobered. “How did you know Clara Eberhardt was little?”
Cato set the drink on the glass coffee table with studied casualness. “Newspapers?”
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