by Susan Kandel
“I do this kind of thing every day. It’s routine. I don’t take chances.”
“It is raining soon. The roof is bad.”
“I’ll be gone before it starts raining.”
She looked down at my delicate sling-backs. “Your little shoes.”
“This will save your employer a long wait. I know Mr. Honey will be grateful.”
“Mr. Honey is very kind to me. He has been so sad.” She grabbed her sweatshirt off the entryway table. “I am going to tell Mrs. Ramirez you are okay. She makes pies.”
Mrs. Ramirez wasn’t going to be a problem for me. Only Mitchell would have been a problem for me.
Miss Vasquez came back, smiling. “Okay. But do not bother Mrs. Ramirez. The door locks behind you when you go.”
“Thank you so much.”
“Raoul Ortiz.”
“He’ll change your life.”
After she left, I realized I’d forgotten to ask her how you got up to the attic.
In the kitchen Mrs. Ramirez was up to her elbows in flour.
“Hola, señora,” I said, tapping her gently on the back.
“Aiyeee!” she screamed, knocking over a bowl of egg whites.
“Oh! I’m so sorry.” I grabbed a roll of paper towels off the counter. “Can I help you clean up?”
She snatched the paper towels away from me and started wiping up the sticky mess.
“Qúe muchacha más estupida! ¡Fuera de mi cocina! ¿No puedes ver que tengo que trabajar?”
I got that she didn’t want to be friends. Still, it never hurt to be polite.
“¿Cómo estás?” That was about it for my Spanish.
“Cuál es tu problema?” She washed her hands and walked over to the refrigerator, pulling out a fresh carton of eggs. “Estoy haciendo un merengue y está en un punto muy delicado. ¿No debes estar en el ático?”
“Did you say ‘el ático’?”
“Sí.”
She cracked one egg, separating the white from the yolk. The white went into a plastic mixing bowl, the shell with the yolk into the sink.
“Señora.”
She was ignoring me.
“Señora. ¿Por favor, dónde está el ático?”
Mrs. Ramirez had moved on to the second egg. She said, without looking up, “Hay una escalera raquitica cerca de los dormitories de atrás. Se queda cerca del dormitorio azul.”
Azul means “blue.” The attic was somewhere near the blue bedroom.
“Muchas gracias.” She said some other things to me as I left, but I didn’t recognize a single word except “interrumpiendo,” which I think means if you don’t get out of my hair, I’m going to hit you over the head with the frying pan.
Busy, busy. Everybody was so busy. The defunct mop, its handle broken in two, was lying on the floor at the bottom of the staircase, next to a bucket of soapy water. At the top of the stairs, there was a wooden ladder leading up to the stained-glass window, a bottle of Windex posed artfully on the top rung. Miss Vasquez had her hands full taking care of this house. And she was sweet, worrying about how sad Mitchell was. But if I was right, he was really going to be sad.
I walked down the hall, my briefcase whacking me in the calf with every step. It was that damn Chicago Manual of Style. I’d stuck it in there so the briefcase wouldn’t look so empty, but the thing must’ve weighed ten pounds. On the bright side, it was the closest I’d gotten to exercise in months.
I jog, but only when I’m feeling fat or testy.
Now what I was feeling was edgy. And embarrassed. I’d taken advantage of Miss Vasquez. I wanted to run straight home to West Hollywood. But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t leave this house. Not without what I came for.
Just past the blue bedroom I came upon a low door with a finely cut glass knob. I hadn’t noticed it the other times I’d been in this house. It looked like something out of Alice in Wonderland. I turned the knob slowly, half expecting that when the door opened I’d go tumbling down a rabbit hole. But when the door opened there was no rabbit hole. Just a steep, curving staircase.
I ducked my head in and looked up, but it was hard to see anything despite the light flooding in from the hallway. I ran my hand against the wall, feeling for a switch. I couldn’t find one. I opened my briefcase and pulled out the flashlight I’d put in there, just in case, and flicked it on. With the briefcase tucked awkwardly under my arm, I started up the rickety stairs, my free hand clutching the wall to steady myself.
There was no railing.
The staircase veered once to the right, once to the left, and from there it was straight up. I had a flash of a bad dream I’d once had, where I’d climbed a long flight of stairs to a diving board only to plunge into an empty pool.
I try to shake off my bad dreams, but they don’t always want to go.
When I reached the top, I shone the flashlight around. The silvery beam illuminated a large, mostly empty space. Overhead were rafters draped with gauzy cobwebs. Below, wooden boards with sizable gaps between them, which seemed to be all that remained of the floor. I stuck out a foot and tested the nearest one. It felt sturdy, which was a good thing considering there was nothing on either side of me or beneath me (at least for ten feet, estimating conservatively) except dead air. If I walked straight across without losing my balance, I’d live—for starters. I’d also be able to see what was concealed beneath the sprawling canvas tarp opposite. It was long and low and lumpy.
Under the tarp.
It was the only place it could be.
Looking straight ahead, my briefcase slung around my neck, I put one foot in front of the other. That was the plan. I was almost there, everything was fine, until the heel of my left shoe got stuck on an exposed nail. I pulled and pulled but it wouldn’t budge. I suppose I could have taken it off and kept going, but my general disinclination to abandon a Maud Frizon shoe, not to mention a longstanding phobia about splinters, prevented me from doing the sensible thing. Instead, I bent over to extricate myself, forgetting about the briefcase around my neck. As I yanked my heel free, it tumbled forward, and I lost my balance and went hurling into oblivion.
“Omigod!” I cried, throwing my arms out in front of me. Somebody must’ve been listening because I managed not to crash through the rotted-out floor into whatever room on the second floor I was currently suspended over, but to latch onto the floorboard with both hands.
Dangling there was extremely unpleasant.
My life flashed before my eyes. It was not a pretty sight. There was a particularly humiliating scene in gym class. The occasion was fitness testing. We had to do pull-ups and I couldn’t manage even one. The physically challenged among us were given the option of performing the ignominious “flexed arm hang,” which turned out to be merely an alternate form of torment. I could still hear the underarm ligaments of dear friends tearing all around me.
I snapped back to reality. I was not at Asbury Park High. I was in Edgar Edwards’s attic. A flexed arm hang wasn’t going to cut it right now. I needed to pull myself up. One pull-up, that was all. I was extremely motivated to succeed.
Unfortunately, however, my fingers were numb. And the sweat was spilling off my brow. I couldn’t see. But there was no choice. I steeled myself. My legs flailed. I grunted like a wild boar. And I did it. I hauled all one hundred forty-four pounds of me back up onto the board, landing stomach-first.
I rested for a moment in that unlovely position, grabbed my briefcase and flashlight, then dragged myself the rest of the way across.
Once I was on safer ground, I struggled up to standing and adjusted my clothes, which weren’t too much of a mess, considering. I still couldn’t go home to West Hollywood. I checked my watch. It was already ten o’clock. Mitchell wasn’t going to be gone forever. I had to hurry.
I looked around desperately.
No boxes, no crates, no piles, no parcels, no suitcases, no nothing, just that tarp. I stepped closer. It was cream-colored canvas, speckled with blackish mildew. I didn’t relish the thought of touchin
g it. But way over on the left side, it had been folded over neatly, like a dinner napkin. I ran my fingers over the creases. Dust-free. Exactly what I’d been hoping.
It meant someone else besides me had been here recently.
I lifted back the tarp, crazy with anticipation.
Hatboxes. Half a dozen hatboxes were under there, decorated with pictures of eagles and flowers and scenes from American history. A minuteman signaling the alarm. The standoff at the Alamo, I think. A simple country lass milking a Holstein.
Not to worry. What was in the hatboxes, that was the real question.
I lifted the delicate cardboard lids off, one by one.
Velvet bonnets. Plain velvet bonnets, velvet bonnets with feathered ornaments, velvet bonnets with striped sashes. Very nice, but I wasn’t here for millinery.
I aimed the flashlight way in back, behind the hat-boxes. Something shiny glinted in the light. It was a large leather trunk with tarnished gold fittings. I pushed the hatboxes away and dropped to my knees in front of it.
It was one of those old trunks, the kind people used to take on their travels, when they’d go someplace far away and stay awhile.
It was padlocked.
Now what was I supposed to do?
There was no choice but to remove the offending shoe and use it to whack the padlock open. It was leopard-skin, which really killed me.
I started banging and kept on banging even when it was obvious that banging wasn’t going to do it. Then I dumped the contents of my briefcase onto the floor. The clipboard wasn’t going to work any better than the shoe had, but maybe I’d have better luck with a ball-point pen. It was a gift from Bank of America. New account. I unscrewed the back of it and pulled out the thin cylinder of ink. Just the thing to pick a lock. I inserted it slowly into the hole at the bottom of the padlock and started jiggling. I jiggled as if my life depended on it. I jiggled to make the Holsteins come home.
Lo and behold, the padlock sprang open.
It must’ve been really cheap.
The trunk opened with a creak.
It was full of junk. A pair of old-fashioned roller skates, some sheet music, a corn-husk doll, keys, change, a guidebook to California gold country, some kind of uniform, bells, a harmonica, some pastels and a sketchbook, a rotary-dial phone—and then I saw the bundle of red velvet way in the back.
The soft fabric was wrapped around something, as tight as swaddling.
I lifted it out and started unwrapping, and right away I saw the alabaster flesh. I kept unwrapping, and there it was, in its gold frame.
Russell Tandy’s painting of the naked Grace Horton. Blue Nancy Drew.
But that wasn’t what I was looking for.
I shook the painting.
I turned it upside down.
Then I flipped it around to the back. The reverse side of the canvas was covered by a thin wooden panel. I felt around, looking for an opening.
There was one at the top.
I stuck my fingernail into the small depression in the wood and carefully pried the panel off.
Inside was another canvas, folded flat.
You peel off the top layer of skin, Bridget had said the other day, and you just might find a stranger underneath.
I unfolded the canvas and laid it on the floor.
I saw a nude woman with lustrous blond hair and sapphire-blue eyes.
Grace Horton.
With bloodred gashes up and down her legs, and a colony of ants feasting on her milky stomach.
I checked the signature at the bottom.
It read “Salvador Dalí.”
I suppose, if you were the type, it just might be worth killing for.
All of a sudden, the attic was flooded with light.
“You don’t want to strain your eyes, Ms. Caruso, do you?” a familiar voice called out.
35
I froze in place.
“You missed the switch.”
I didn’t answer.
“Stupid mistake.”
Yet another.
“You being so smart. I wasn’t buying it, but you’ve proven me wrong, finding that painting—or should I say, paintings.”
“How’d you know I’d be here?”
He twisted his mouth into an approximation of a smile. “You think you have an exclusive on those Nancy Drew obsessives? I just wished I’d taken care of things last night, after reading the answers they posted. Then we would’ve been spared this unpleasantness.”
“You should go,” I said in a thin voice I didn’t recognize.
“I’m not going anywhere, Cece. You don’t mind if I call you Cece, do you?”
“Not as long as I can call you Asher.”
Absolutely. I fucked your best friend. That makes us practically related.”
Bastard. “If you’re not leaving, I am. I am going to walk down those stairs and out of this house and you aren’t going to stop me.”
“Close.” He seemed somehow unhurried, like he didn’t want to spoil the fun by rushing things. “You’re going to walk across the attic, right over to where I’m standing. Then you’re going to walk down those stairs and out of this house and I’m going to be with you every step of the way.”
He pointed a gun at me. It looked big. Bigger than the .22 he’d used the previous times.
“We have business to take care of, you and me. We need to find someplace more private.”
“Why’d you have to kill Edgar? That’s what I don’t understand.”
“I know you liked Edgar. He was a real sentimentalist, wasn’t he? He fell in love with that painting. The moment I saw it, I knew he would. He didn’t want to part with it.”
“Why’d you sell it to him in the first place?”
“I sold him a Russell Tandy. I wouldn’t have thrown in a Salvador Dalí for free.”
“When did you realize what you’d done?”
He paused for a minute, then thought better of it. Why not tell me? He was going to kill me, after all. “Mitchell made that discovery when he was having the Tandy reframed.”
I knew Mitchell was in on this. “So the two of you conspired to kill Edgar and get the painting back.”
“It would’ve been so much easier if Mitchell hadn’t been an idiot and left the Dalí where he’d found it. He thought it was the safest place.”
“But Edgar was suspicious. Something wasn’t right. So he hid the painting of Grace before the two of you could arrange a sale.”
“You don’t know Mitchell very well, do you?”
“No, I don’t.” If I kept him talking, maybe Mrs. Ramirez would come up here and save me. “I’m a terrible judge of character.”
“Mitchell,” he said, shaking his head, “is a jealous and resentful man. He thought he deserved something, working so hard for Edgar all these years. Hazard pay, he called it. Edgar didn’t even know the Dalí existed, so no one was really getting hurt.”
“Interesting logic.”
“The ends justify the means.”
Spoken like a true seducer. “But you can’t sell a painting by Salvador Dalí without attracting attention, can you?”
“Someone like Mitchell can’t.”
“But someone like you can.”
“Someone like me can.”
“That’s why Mitchell had to tell you what he’d discovered. He needed your help. And you took the ball and ran with it.”
“So to speak,” he said, laughing.
“It was you and Mitchell who broke into my house. You thought Edgar had given me the painting for safekeeping. And then you followed us to Palm Springs. You broke into my car. You slashed my tires.”
“Mitchell didn’t want to pursue things after that. I don’t have to tell you what a coward he is.”
“Does he know what you’ve done?”
“Mitchell thinks he knows everything.”
He was going to kill Mitchell when he was finished with me.
“I’m waiting, Cece.”
He cleared his t
hroat. He shifted his weight. He was getting nervous, I could feel it.
I kept my voice steady. “You can wait until hell freezes over, but I’m not moving.”
“I don’t want to hurt you. All I want is the Dalí. You can keep that fucking Tandy monstrosity for all I care.”
“I’m going to scream.”
“I need that painting.”
“Mrs. Ramirez is in the kitchen.”
“The pies are done. Mrs. Ramirez is gone.”
“Liar.”
“Try me.”
“Help!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Help! Somebody please help me!”
“Get moving, Cece.”
“What about Miss Vasquez? She’ll be back any minute.”
“I drained her gas tank.”
If I could just stall him long enough for Mitchell to get home. Good god. It had come to this: I needed Mitchell. We needed each other.
Then I saw my cell phone, which had fallen out of my briefcase when I’d dumped everything out. I could get Gambino on auto-dial. But he was going to kill me. Stand in line, buddy. Maybe I could call 911.
“Don’t even think about it,” Asher said.
“What?”
“I’ll shoot you if you so much as touch that phone.”
“Like you shot Jake.”
“Jake shot himself.”
“Of course. I forgot. Jake shot himself because he felt so awful about killing Edgar.”
“And nobody’s going to mourn him when he dies.”
“He’s not going to die.”
“What a sorry fucking life he led. Waiting around for somebody to take notice. Always showing up at the wrong time.”
“Like in Palm Springs?”
“Time is up, Cece,” he said, his voice cold. He stepped onto the same board I had used to get across.
I tucked the Dalí back into its hiding place and lifted up the painting by its frame. “Stay away from me!” I shouted, waving it in the air. “Stay away from me or I’ll destroy them both!”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“Yes, I would,” I said, bending down to pick up my mangled sling-back. “I’m going to slice through both paintings with the heel of my shoe. I’m going to shred them just like you shredded that copy Edgar made, the one you found in Palm Springs. You were furious, being duped like that, weren’t you? Well, I’m furious, too.”