Wicked Fix (7 page)

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Authors: Sarah Graves

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General

BOOK: Wicked Fix
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"I reached for him." Victor held up his hands, to

show how he'd done it. They were surprisingly large,

capable-looking hands with long, muscular fingers.

 

"I put," Victor went on, "both of them on his

throat, and I located his carotid arteries. And I.pressed

them, so he'd know I could find them again if I needed

to."

I waited hopefully for Arnold to cut in and ask

what had happened next. But he didn't, confirming my

suspicion that he already had more on Victor than even

Victor's big mouth had given him.

Just then Sam burst in. "Mom, you won't believe

--"

 

He stopped. "Or maybe you will. You okay,

Dad?"

 

"I'm fine, Sam," Victor said. "I think Arnold has

something to say to me, though. Don't you?"

 

"Yeah." Arnold opened the small paper sack he

was carrying. Inside was a zip-lock plastic bag. "Recognize

this?"

Victor peered studiously at it. "Yes, I do. It's my

scalpel. From my collection of historical items. How do

you happen to have it?"

 

You had to hand it to the guy. He'd known Arnold

was coming, and he'd been home to clean up and

 

change clothes, so he must have known the scalpel was

missing; that collection was his most prized possession.

At that point, I'd have been falling apart.

 

"Found it at the murder of a guy named Reuben

Tate," Arnold said. "Who I understand you had a few

words with at the Mexican place last night."

 

"That's right. This," Victor went on, indicating the

blood-caked object in the plastic bag, "is the most valuable

of my items. Dr. Gushing, the pioneer neurosurgeon,

used it himself."

 

Suddenly it all seemed to come over him, all he had

been saying, and what Arnold was doing here. But even

then he didn't panic.

 

"It would be," he finished, "a pity to lose this instrument.

Do try to see that it's well taken care of,

won't you?" he asked Arnold respectfully.

 

That's the other thing about Victor: he is capable

of these small instances of grace, during which you just

can't figure out how he manages to be such a jerk the

rest of the time.

Arnold sighed heavily. "Dr. Tiptree, I'm placing

you under arrest. You have the right to remain silent

..."

 

And so on. When Arnold finished, Victor got up

and pushed his chair in carefully. "I'll be calling an

attorney, Jacobia. I'll put the house up if it comes to a

question of bail."

 

He didn't know that in Maine there is, for all practical

purposes, no bail on a murder charge. But I nodded;

it didn't seem like a useful thing to tell him, just at

the moment.

 

"I'll watch your place till you get home, Dad,"

Sam said, his face full of shock, and Victor smiled encouragingly

at him.

"Good boy. I'll be back soon, though. Don't worry

about me."

 

Then without further ado he went out ahead of

 

Arnold, who even after informing Victor of his rights

hadn't asked where he'd been the night before, once

he'd departed the Mexican restaurant.

 

So I believed that Arnold must already know.

 

And unfortunately, I was correct.

 

After which everything got worse.

 

A lot worse. "Dad didn't come home at

all last night," Sam said.

 

It was a couple of hours after Victor had

gone, and we were crouched in the back hall, applying

steel wool to the old cast-iron radiator that has lurked

there since the house got central heating, nearly a hundred

years ago. Sam had gone all over the scabrous,

red-enameled surface--what had someone been thinking?

--with a paint scraper; afterward we would vacuum

and wipe it thoroughly, preparatory to painting it.

 

"I got in, and he wasn't there," Sam went on. "So I

thought he might be out looking for me. You know

how he gets sometimes, like he can't think straight and

he goes off halfcocked."

 

Oh, did I ever. I rubbed a patch of red enamel from

one of the delicate fern patterns cast into the antique

radiator iron.

This, by the way, is not the method the old-house

manuals tell you to follow when you are repainting

antique radiators. Their method consists of:

1. Removing the radiators; I mean, actually, physically taking them out of the house.

2. Hiring a professional to sandblast themdown to the bare metal.

 

3. Spray painting the radiators, keeping in mind that silver or gold paint inhibits heat

radiation, and

4. Hooking the radiators back up to yourheating system, again with professional

assistance.

 

This advice has the marvelous advantage of requiring

other people to do most of the heavy work for you.

But it ignores several crucial real-world facts about old

radiators, such as their weight, fragility, and rusted

solid connections to your household plumbing. Following

the old-house manual's advice on the topic, in other

words, can be a quick route to radiator hell.

 

On the other hand, stripping one slowly is a fine

way to let your emotional engines idle while you are

trying to figure out what to do next.

 

"So then what happened?" Ellie prompted Sam

gently.

 

She'd been going around with the vacuum cleaner,

trying to get the little chips of red enamel up off the

floor before Monday decided that they were edible.

 

Sam sighed, moving the steel-wool pad. "So I went

looking for him. By then it was way after midnight."

 

Coming in to find Bob Arnold in the process of

arresting his father, Sam had been carrying some things

he and Tommy had spent the previous afternoon fooling

around with. Now they lay on the kitchen table,

forgotten: a pocket-sized, U.S. Coast Guard-issue

Morse code instruction book bound in blue imitation

leather, and a flat, 1950s-era cardboard box, its

brightly illustrated cover proclaiming that it contained

a genuine Ouija.

"Because you know Dad," Sam continued. "He

wouldn't've tried going to Tommy's, if he wanted me,

or called there. It would have been, like, too obvious."

 

The Ouija board gave me an uneasy feeling. But I

 

figured that with all that was going on now, Sam might

forget about the dratted thing.

 

"Anyway, I got my bike, rode downtown, out to

South End, and back again on County Road. But no

Dad. So then I started getting worried about him. I

went back and sat around awhile waiting for him."

 

"Nothing on his answering machine, or anything

like that?"

 

He shook his head, working his way along the side

of the old radiator a final time with the pad of steel

wool.

 

"Nope. I thought of that. You know, that maybe

he went out for some other reason, somebody'd called

him. Then I went through the house to see whether I

could figure out what he'd been doing before he left."

 

"And?" I ran my hand over the now-smooth antique

heating fixture. Before there were furnaces, my

old house had been heated with stoves, and originally

with open fireplaces; the chimneys remain, and when

the wind blows hard they howl like a chorus of demented

banshees, one in each room.

"And it turned out that while I'd been out hunting

for him, he must have been back. Because when I first

came home--"

 

Sam glanced at me; there had been, since Victor's

arrival in town, a problem in the definition of just what

constituted Sam's home: my house, or Victor's? In the

end, Sam had decided on both, but he tried not to rub

my nose in it.

 

"When I first went in," he rephrased smoothly, "I

looked in his study. Everything in there was neat and

normal like always."

 

A few feet away, Ellie had been gazing out the

kitchen window while she listened, watching the purple

grackles moving en masse across the lawn, a glossy

regiment. Now she looked over alertly.

 

"And the second time?"

 

"He'd been there, in a hurry," Sam said. "Or I

 

thought he had. His desk drawer was open, and the

cabinet where he keeps the old instruments, the antique

things from his history collection. That was open, too,

and it didn't look so perfect to me, lined up all careful

the way he always keeps his stuff."

 

Victor had bone saws, trephines, gadgets that

looked like nutpicks, all of it once the absolute height

of high-tech medical equipment; he had collected such

things since he was a medical student, buying them at

auctions or from private estate sales.

 

"Like somebody," Sam finished, "had been in

there, looking for something. But I just assumed it must

have been Dad. Because who else?"

 

Deliberately, Ellie took a mixing bowl out of the

cabinet and got out the ingredients she needed for baking

cream scones. She thinks best, she always says,

when she is cooking.

"Were the doors locked? Of his house, I mean?"

She knew Sam had keys.

 

"Nah." Sam shook his head. "He does it like everybody

else around here does now, locks when he

goes to bed. Otherwise--"

He made a frittering gesture with his hands, indicating

the general daytime attitude to locking up in

Eastport. People walk in and leave things on hall tables

all the time: baked goods, jars of homemade marmalade,

borrowed Tupperware.

 

"It's mostly," Sam summed up, "wide open."

 

Which, with a valuable historical collection in the

place, I thought was pretty silly. Victor didn't even lend

Tupperware, because he didn't own any; too hard to

sterilize properly. But he had probably enjoyed the idea

of not locking and had gone overboard with it.

 

Ellie put on my green plaid apron with the moose

pattern trimmings and the moose heads chain-stitched

in green embroidery floss. In it, I always resembled the

animal depicted upon it, but she looked fetching.

 

"So you never did find out where your father was,

or what he was doing?" she asked.

 

Sam finished wiping the radiator, went into the

kitchen, and sat at the kitchen table. "Well, not what

he was doing," he said reluctantly. He began turning

the Morse book around and around on the table.

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