And Then You Dye

by Monica Ferris

  The two parted with words of gratitude, shaking hands, exchanging names.

  Business fell off completely after that, and around one o’clock Godwin opened the little cooler he’d packed that morning with sandwiches, pop, and corn chips, and the two sat back to have lunch.

  Another dealer came by to talk about how poor business was and to see how Rafael and Godwin had been doing.

  “Nothing too much, Jim,” said Rafael. “I am too heavily invested in oddities and medievals for this show. But I did strike it lucky with two PCGS-rated coins.” He reached into a box under the table and brought out the coins. “Take a look.”

  Jim looked at the Trade Dollar and said, “It’s a good thing this has been graded by PCGS. There are so many Chinese fakes of this coin that I’ve sworn off buying them.”

  “Chinese fakes?” said Godwin.

  “But the Chinese fakes are castings, this is struck,” said Rafael.

  “You haven’t been keeping up. They’ve gotten damn clever and turned it into an industry,” the man said, his voice warming with indignation. “They bought old stamping machines from the US years ago for their own coinage, and some of them got diverted into making fakes. You’re right about their early attempts, they were just trash, cast instead of struck, but they’re getting better all the time.”

  He looked at the PCGS holder, turning it over in his hands, examining the lettering on it. “This is a good-looking dollar. Let me see the other one, would you?”

  Rafael produced it, and the man examined the coin. “Uh-oh,” he said.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “The Morgan dollar was first minted in 1878, and this coin is dated 1876.”

  Rafael snatched it out of the man’s hands. “I do not believe it! You are reading the date wrong.”

  “No, I’m not, the date is perfectly clear, and you better believe something’s screwy, because it’s true.”

  “But this is a PCGS-graded coin!”

  “I will bet you the best coin in my private collection that slab is fake, too. It’s an old one, hasn’t got their new holographic emblem on it. Jesus, I’ve been hearing they’re doing that, but I haven’t seen one till now.” He turned and shouted down the room, “Hey, Milo, come take a look at this!” He said to Rafael, “Is the guy you bought it from still here?”

  Rafael looked around, standing on tiptoes, looking hard. “Of course not. Damn.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Pedro Alvarez, he said, though if he’s selling fakes, that’s almost certainly not his real name.”

  “What’s going on?” asked a tall, cadaverously thin man with a slender graying mustache trickling off the end of his chin.

  “Our friend here was suckered into buying two fakes.”

  “Two!?” exclaimed Rafael.

  “If one’s a fake, what do you wanna bet the other one’s not a fake as well?”

  “God damn it!” Rafael stooped and brought out the other two coins he’d bought. “What about these?”

  Jim looked them over. “I’d say they’re authentic. Not high-grade enough to be fake. Did he nick you good on the price of the copies?”

  Rafael named the amount and the man said, “If they were real, I’d’ve said you made a heck of a deal.”

  “Yeah, I was feeling pretty good about what I paid for them. And so was Pedro—he seemed satisfied with the price—and no wonder! Pedro me vió la cara—Pedro made a fool out of me!”

  There was a policeman at the entrance to the show, and Rafael filed a report, though without faith he would ever encounter Pedro Alvarez again.

  * * *

  HE was still fuming about the loss hours later. “How was I to know?” he grumbled over a late supper that evening at home.

  “How did Jim know?” asked Godwin. “What’s he reading that you aren’t? Is there a publication that talks about frauds and fakes?”

  “Not one I’m aware of. I’m a member of the American Numismatic Association, and I usually read most of each issue of their magazine. I go to Northwest Coin Club’s monthly meetings but not faithfully. And I’ve only been to two of ANA’s annual meetings. Too lazy. That, I see now, was a big mistake.”

  “You’re a lone wolf in a lot of ways,” said Godwin, stacking the plates and carrying them into the kitchen. “That hasn’t been a problem up to now, I guess.”

  “I wonder,” said Rafael. “It makes me question a lot of my recent purchases. I’d been thinking I’d become an expert in this coin collecting business—and maybe I am in my own small sphere of medieval coins. But that’s a small sphere, and I see now I only have a shallow understanding of other arenas. I’m a long way from being educated enough to open my own shop, I guess.” He sounded so depressed that Godwin left the dishes in the sink to come and speak words of comfort to him. But his heart was singing and he was careful not to disagree.

  Fifteen

  BETSY had never spoken with someone as reluctant to sit down with her as Walter Moreham. Though he didn’t say a word about his reluctance, his body language was eloquent. He sat very stiffly in his chair, avoiding eye contact, his hands folded in his lap. He spoke in short, sometimes incomplete sentences, and the cup of coffee she brought him sat untasted on the table in front of him.

  They were sitting at the little table in the back half of the shop. It was Saturday. Walter had been at work all morning, had eaten a quick lunch—he had refused to join Betsy for lunch—and had come in with a face like a stone to sit down with her. What made this all a bit strange was that he had called her to offer to talk. All right, it was Phil who persuaded him to do it, but it wasn’t by threats of violence, was it? Nonetheless, clearly he was really spooked.

  So Betsy started gently, off topic. “What is it you do, Mr. Moreham?”

  “I work at an ad agency.”

  “Do you write the ads?”

  “I illustrate them.”

  “You’re a photographer?”

  “A graphic artist.”

  “Really? Have I seen any of your ads?”

  “Probably.”

  “Do you do newspaper or magazine ads?”

  “Both. Label designs, too.”

  “Label?”

  He shrugged. “Cereal boxes, hot dog wrappers, things like that.”

  “Interesting. Did you always want to be a commercial artist?”

  “No.”

  Betsy waited, but he said nothing more. She sighed and got down to business. “Had you ever met Hailey Brent?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “She was Randi’s friend, not mine.” Betsy tried her waiting game, and this time he continued. “I have a friend or two Randi hasn’t met.”

  “Were you aware that Hailey was encouraging Randi to leave you?”

  “No.” But there had been a slight hesitation before the reply.

  “You suspected it.”

  Walter looked at Betsy with sad eyes, then took a big drink of his coffee. His mouth firmed and he looked down into his lap. He sighed. Betsy waited. He sighed again, the way a person sighs when making a decision.

  “My job is very stressful,” he began, speaking slowly and still not looking at her, “with lots of short deadlines and demanding clients with screwy agendas. It’s been like that for me since I started working as a commercial artist. What I wanted when I married was a quiet home, with a wife who was on my side. I had that for almost six years.”

  “That sounds really sweet.”

  “It was bliss.” He smiled, remembering. “I’d come home from a hellish day and my dinner would be waiting, the house would be clean, and Randi would be cheerful. I wouldn’t complain about my work and she would tell funny stories about her part-time job at the auto parts store.”

&nb
sp; He fell silent, and though Betsy tried her waiting game again, he appeared oblivious.

  “So then what happened?” she asked, as sympathetically as she could.

  He looked up at her, his eyes unhappy. “It started with little things, but pretty soon all I heard was how I wasn’t helping enough around the house, and why was I against having a child, and why didn’t I talk about my job. Everything I did irritated her. My home stopped being my safe house.” His head dropped again and he said so softly it was hard to hear him, “I didn’t understand what was happening. I was sick and scared.”

  Betsy’s heart filled with compassion and she let it show in her voice. “That must have been a dreadful time for you.” She paused, then asked, “Did you try couple’s counseling?”

  “Not then. I thought maybe it was my fault. I thought we could work it out. She was seeing a doctor. I thought he’d prescribe something. An antidepressant, maybe. But he didn’t.”

  This was wonderful; he was really opening up to her. She was careful to keep her tone sympathetic, although it wasn’t hard; she was really feeling for the poor fellow. “Who was Randi talking to about your troubles, did you know?”

  “No. I didn’t know she was talking to anyone at all. I know I wasn’t. I was just hoping it was some idea she got from a book or television, that she’d get over it. I wasn’t paying that close attention. I should have been, but I wasn’t. I was tangled up in a big project at work; the client was crazy, demanding lots of changes, short deadlines. A new product was being introduced, we couldn’t get anything right, we thought we might lose the client altogether, it was just nuts. And Randi got more and more unreasonable. She started saying maybe I should move out. It was a nightmare. I just about quit sleeping altogether. Then I come home from work and Randi is almost hysterical, her very dearest friend Hailey Brent is dead, shot dead. I was like, Hailey who? But I could see it was a shock to her—hell, even to me. I mean, murdered. That just doesn’t happen to people we know. She wants to talk about it, she can’t stop talking about it—and then I begin to understand. Hailey thinks—thought—all men are pigs, that we exist to exploit women. It was Hailey’s idea that Randi should divorce me.

  “Now, I love Randi more than any other woman in the world. She’s sweet, intelligent, hardworking, kind, and beautiful. I’m the luckiest man alive to have her for a wife. But she always thinks everyone else’s opinion is better than her own. Once I listened to her talk about Hailey, it occurred to me that this divorce business wasn’t entirely her own idea.

  “So I stopped agreeing with her that I was a sexist pig. Stopped sympathizing with her. I reminded her that I worked very hard, lots of extra hours, and didn’t have time to do half the housework, too. I asked her if she wanted me to get an easier job, for less pay, so that I could do more housework. Maybe she could make up for the loss in pay by putting the money her aunt left her into our joint accounts.”

  “Now, Walter, that wasn’t very nice,” said Betsy. But she kept her tone sympathetic.

  “I know. And I didn’t really mean it; it was more like shock therapy. But it started her thinking, and in a week she agreed we needed couples counseling, and it took only three sessions of that to make her decide maybe she didn’t want a divorce after all.”

  He sighed and took another drink of coffee. “When I found out Hailey Brent was to blame for our troubles, I hated her. I was glad she was dead. But you know something? Now, I think our marriage has come out of this stronger than before, so what the heck, maybe she did us a favor.”

  “Only by getting murdered,” said Betsy.

  “Well . . . yeah, I guess that’s so.”

  “Did you murder her, Walter?”

  “No! I told you, I didn’t know her. I barely knew she existed until after she was dead, and it was only then I found out she was the one trying to get Randi to leave me.”

  But Walter’s alibi was that he was locked in a conference room at a far end of his company’s headquarters in downtown Minneapolis. A big DO NOT DISTURB sign was taped to the door, and he was not answering his phone. He was frantically redesigning three illustrations for an ad campaign.

  “So you were blocked in, right? Couldn’t leave?”

  “I wasn’t a prisoner; there weren’t guards at the door.” Walter wasn’t looking at her again.

  “There was a back way out, wasn’t there?”

  After a pause: “Yes. The corridor went both ways: One way led back to the offices; the other went to a stairwell to the street.”

  “So you could have gone out for an hour or two without anyone being the wiser?”

  “No! I couldn’t have done that and gotten the redesign done!”

  “Did you get the redesign finished?”

  “Yes. Barely, but yes. And it was good; they bought it. And that’s my alibi. I couldn’t possibly have left that room for any reason but to visit the men’s room and still got that project done on time.”

  Betsy sighed. She had only Walter’s word for that.

  “I assume Mike Malloy asked you if you own a gun,” she asked.

  “Yes, he did. I don’t. I had a twenty-two rifle when I was twelve, did some tin can plinking with it, but I gave it to a cousin when I turned seventeen and haven’t even held a gun since then. I was never very good with one anyway. My eyes don’t work well together at a distance.”

  “No military service?”

  “No. Couldn’t’ve gone if I wanted to with my bad eye.”

  Betsy thanked Walter for talking to her and let him go back to work. Then she wrote up some notes on their conversation. His alibi was shaky. And what about his claim not to know until after Hailey Brent’s death that she had been the source of his marital problems? That might be false. Didn’t Randi ever quote Hailey to him? Or wasn’t he listening?

  On the other hand, he did come to her, and he didn’t seem evasive once he started talking.

  Still, she couldn’t cross him off her meager list of suspects.

  Sixteen

  ON Tuesday, Betsy left the shop in Godwin’s capable hands. The day started out gloomy, and by the time Betsy and Connor finished their breakfast it was raining. It was not a heavy downpour that might finish and clear off, but the kind of steady rain that could settle in for the day.

  The temperature was in the high seventies, so Betsy dressed lightly in denim shorts, a chambray shirt, and sandals.

  The rain had chased away a lot of customers from Green Gaia Gardens, Betsy noticed, as she hustled from her car to the garden center’s office. That was good; maybe she could talk to Marge without taking her away from business.

  But Marge wasn’t there, either. Betsy looked around and didn’t see even an employee inside. She went back out and found a tall young woman picking up a spilled four-pack of Indian paintbrush, expertly tucking the roots into a clay pot and replacing the soil.

  “May I help you?”

  “I hoped to talk to Marge,” Betsy said.

  “Her mother fell and they think she broke her hip. They’re at the hospital,” she said, using the rain to sluice the dirt off her hands then pushing her wet blond hair back behind her ears. She wore a short, waterproof yellow jacket and tennis shoes oozing water.

  “Oh gosh, that’s awful! I hope she’ll be all right,” said Betsy.

  “Yes, so do we all. Her mother is a lovely woman. I’m Katy, store manager; is there some way I can help you?”

  “Well, I’m not sure.” Betsy definitely did not want to ask the woman if she knew Marge was having an affair with McMurphy. “Did you know Hailey Brent?”

  Katy frowned at her. “I’m sorry, we’ve pretty much decided not to gossip about poor Ms. Brent. May I show you some flowers or vegetable plants?” Betsy started to say no—the rain was soaking into the shoulders of her shirt—when Katy said, “Wait a minute, you’r
e Betsy Devonshire, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Ohhhh.” There was a world of comprehension in that drawn-out syllable. Betsy could see Katy was shifting gears by the rearrangement of her eyebrows.

  “Are you really going to help Marge?”

  “I hope so. I’m trying to find out just what happened to Hailey. What she was like, who her friends—and enemies—were.”

  “Well, I’ve worked here for six years, but I wasn’t either a friend or an enemy. I knew her on sight, but she wasn’t over here a whole lot. She bought her plants through the Internet or by mail, mostly. Sometimes she’d come over just for a look, to see a plant she’d been reading about in person—photographs in catalogs aren’t reliable. Just once in a while she’d buy something. What she’d do—” Katy looked around for eavesdroppers and leaned forward to continue in a murmur. “She’d steal.”

  “She’d steal plants?”

  “No. This is going to sound weird, but she’d steal blooms off of flowers.”

  “Oh yes, Marge told me about that. She stole flowers to use in her dye-making. I bought some of her yarns to sell in my shop. Beautiful colors.”

  “I remember one time she cut a lot of blooms off our new variety of marigold. Marge was really upset about that, but one good thing about marigolds, they come back fast. I think maybe Ms. Brent didn’t know they were a spendy variety of marigolds, just that they were an unusual color.”

  “I think I remember hearing something about them. They’re pure red, right?”

  Katy smiled proudly. “Green Gaia developed them—well, Marge did, really. I don’t know how she does it. I didn’t even notice one of the marigolds we were growing was a spontaneous new variety until I saw a whole row of them, but she’s always got an eye out for something different. She propagated it, and now she’s patenting it. The variety will be a real moneymaker, we hope.”