Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (15 page)

The rat fink had discussed my eating habits with a strange man. “I eat anything,” I said, and then, in belated
recollection of my fears, “except bank notes and contracts.”

His eyes widened for a moment, an effect I tended to have on people, but then he nodded, as though I’d made the most reasonable of comments. “Oh, good. You wouldn’t want to eat those. Too dry by half.”

He got out, opened the door for me, and led me into the restaurant. It
had
been a bank. Once we went in the door, I recognized the subdued parlor with its rosewood paneling, the polished marble floor, and the greenish glass globes on the wall casting an . . . expensive light over the proceedings.

In front of the entrance that had led once to the sanctum sanctorum of bank counters and desks where people stood ready to discuss your investments, there stood a lectern that seemed made of the same rosewood as the paneling. Behind the lectern, a slim blond woman in a little black dress to end all black dresses raised eyes to us, as though seriously doubting that two such uncouth beings could have access to her establishment.

She would have been perfectly justified in this, had Officer Wolfe not changed out of his T-shirt and jeans. But because he was wearing a dark suit, which somehow—and I failed to understand how—made him look both dangerous and refined, the blonde was out of luck. Officer Wolfe knew it, too. You could tell by the way he looked at her and said, “Wolfe. I have reservations.”

She checked a list, condescended to smile, and motioned for her identical twin to come and lead us into the vast resonating hall of the . . . now restaurant.

It shouldn’t have worked. I mean, the whole point of a bank is to be too large and have architecture that is too crushing and imposing, so that one feels appropriately small in the midst of monetary transactions. And the point of a restaurant is to create a sense of intimacy.

To convert a bank to a restaurant, they should have
needed to lower the ceiling by ten feet and partitioned the floor with booths everywhere.

Instead, some intuitive genius had kept the lights low—really low—on the wall, the sort of lights they show in movies when an airplane loses power. And then, at each of the small tables covered in white tablecloths, they’d put subdued white globes that looked just a bit too strong to be one candle, but were not too much more. The light barely extended beyond the tablecloth.

The result was to make each table a little island of light amid a sea of encroaching darkness. In this darkness floated blond waitresses and waiters in black. I started to wonder if perhaps, just perhaps, the restaurant cloned one waitress and one waiter. I mean, surely they couldn’t just hire blonds with the same body build. It had to be against some law.

Such was my confusion, as I followed the blonde through a dark pathway among the islands of light, that it took me a moment to realize I was hearing some sort of old-fashioned music. Looking in the direction of it, toward where the bank vaults had been, I saw that there was a . . . big band ensemble and a dancing area in what had once held the holy of holies.

This whole thing was starting to sound very much like Ben’s hand had been in it. He was the one who knew where every band played in Goldport, and also one of the few people who knew I could dance, because we’d taken a class together in our last year of high school. Granted, he’d taken it because he’d had a crush on the guy who taught it, but I’d taken it because I enjoyed dancing.

This impression was increased as I sat down and I saw Officer Wolfe’s gaze on me, with that hint of confusion a man wears when he’s not sure his efforts will meet with success.

“Officer Wolfe, do you normally talk to suspects in expensive restaurants?” I asked, in a conversational tone.

For just a moment he was confused. “Susp—” Then he stopped and smiled again, the long, lazy smile he had given me as he opened his car door. “Well, no,” he said. “I much prefer to take them to bars and get them drunk. But your friend Ben said that when you get drunk you just cry and don’t say anything material, so I realized my best bet was to feed you.”

My friend Ben had told him entirely too much and was capable of a multitude of sins, but he hadn’t told Officer Hotstuff
that
. Among other reasons, because it wasn’t true. When I got drunk, I got very quiet. “Actually,” I said. “Ben says that when I get drunk I get hyperrational.”

The smile became more comfortable. He unfolded his napkin onto his lap. “Oh, I’m glad I didn’t get you drunk, then, because the last thing I need is to question someone who is rational.”

“You prefer your witnesses irrational, then?”

“Are you a witness, Ms. Dare? Did you actually see anything?”

“Ah, I see how they train you in the police academy.”

“Indeed.”

The current blonde handed us menus. Mine didn’t have any prices. I wasn’t so stupid as to ask for a nondefective menu, but I did wish to know whether I’d be bankrupting the man with what I picked.

“I highly recommend,” he said, “the sage seared beef tenderloin and the watercress salad.” And he sparkled his gray-blue eyes at me above the menu, as if to dare me to ask if he had brought many people here. “And save room for the white chocolate jalapeño mousse. It’s worth it.”

Right. Saving room was all I had done for the last several months, so I doubted I could pass up such a thing as chocolate mousse, even if it came with such an unexpected accompaniment as jalapeño. I considered explaining to him that if he thought some hot pepper was going to keep me away from chocolate, he was sorely mistaken.
I’d eaten bittersweet chocolate, I’d eaten chocolate with coffee beans in it, and I’d even eaten Mom’s unsweetened baking chocolate, though I confess I had attempted to melt it with sugar and butter once. However, that hadn’t ended well—even if most of the upper cabinets were salvageable once refinished—and after that I’d just eaten it straight.

I ordered his recommendations, put my own napkin on my lap, and looked up. “You wanted to ask me about refinishing outfits in Goldport?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Are there many?”

One of the waiters came and served a red wine I wasn’t even conscious of his having ordered. Perhaps he came here so often that they knew what wine he wanted. I looked across the table at his classical profile, and the thought that he came here every week, each time with a different woman, made me bite my lip. Right. He probably did. And what business was it of mine?

I tasted the wine, and it was lovely, smooth, and almost sweet. The bottle said something of Toscana, but the days were so long gone since I’d drunk wine regularly that even if I could read the whole label, I would have no idea what it was
supposed
to be.

The waiter set a basket of rolls in front of us, and Officer Wolfe took one and tore it apart before setting the halves on his plate and starting to slather them in butter. The bread crackled as it broke, and his fingers were large and square-tipped, with very clean fingernails. I imagined those fingers cupping my chin, felt a wave of heat up my face, and grabbed a roll very fast. “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t have time to look in the phone book. I can tell you the companies I’ve had some interaction with.”

He raised his eyebrows at me, “And they are?” he asked, before taking a bite of his bread. His teeth were large and square, too, and very, very white.
What big teeth
. . . I had to bite my own bread to keep myself from
imagining kissing him, those teeth grazing my tongue. What in heaven’s name was wrong with me? I wasn’t old enough to become—what was the current slang—a cougar, was I? Maybe it started like this. Another ten years and I’d be dragging the UPS man inside to have my wicked way with him. Well, at least if UPS got rid of the current guy who delivered at my house. He had a squint and the worst case of acne scars I’d ever seen.

“Well, they’re both far bigger than I. One, I don’t know for certain if he uses lye vats. That’s Oak Friends down on Madison. They’re a little . . .” I tried to think of a delicate way to say that the owner of Oak Friends was loonier than a moon-phase clock. He dressed like a refugee from a Tolkien book, for one. “Poetic,” I said.

“Poetic?”

“Well, the owner . . .” There were no two ways about it. “He’s very creative about . . . okay, fine. He dresses like an elf. He says that the furniture must be freed from the oppressive layers of finish.”

Officer Hotstuff was giving me a jaundiced look. “You’re making this up, right?”

I looked back at him. “Do I look that imaginative? No. I’m not making it up. He calls himself Inobart Oakfriend. He will only oil furniture, never varnish it or paint it. And now that I think of it, he would never ever use a lye vat.”

The policeman looked at me with a look of frozen horror. “Right . . . and he is . . . as yet . . . staying out of a mental ward, I assume.”

“Most of the time, at least, because he puts furniture up for consignment in the same stores I use in Denver.”

He asked me for their addresses, and I assured him I’d make sure he got them. “There’s also Rocky Mountain Refinishing. I’m pretty sure they do have a vat. They’re very big. I’m not sure how many they employ. They do the really expensive antiques. You know, when someone dies their estate goes up on the block, and they buy the
whole lot—good pieces, bad pieces, everything. Sometimes they throw bad pieces out.” I stopped talking for a moment as the server paused to top off our wine. “Or at least,” I said, as the server moved away, “pieces that are too much work.”

He was looking at me in an attentive way—the sort of way one expects can see beyond the front to what’s inside the person. I let out air with an explosive sound, “Yes, all right, I go by the back of their workshop on trash days. Thursdays.”

He grinned at me. “You’re forgiven. Anything good back there?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes. There was this golden oak bookcase with a fleur de lis carved edge. It had . . . sixteen coats of paint, two of them metallic. You couldn’t see the carving at all, so I think they thought it was just a plain bookcase. Or perhaps they thought it was too much work. I don’t know.”

“But I’d think with a lye vat it would be no work at all, would it?” he said. “I mean, it would eat through everything, wouldn’t it?”

I looked up at him and thought of the corpse, turned gelatinous by the lye. I had to gulp, and I knew that if I looked at the plate and the bread I would be sick.

“No,” he said softly, as though figuring out what was on my mind. “Not like that. Don’t think about that. But, I mean, it would take all the layers and layers of paint, wouldn’t it? I’m amazed that not every refinisher uses one, at least for the pieces that are covered in a lot of paint.”

I continued to look up at him. “A lot of people disapprove of lye,” I said. “I don’t use it for the good stuff, for instance.”

The waiters floated in out of the darkness and set salad in front of us. Salad was good. There was nothing about salad to make me think of flesh or lye. I collected a forkful
of greens. It might be called a watercress salad, but it contained far more than watercress—sweet, bitter flavors mingled in an explosion enhanced, not occluded by the vinaigrette dressing. I realized that it had been years since I’d eaten food like this—stuff that was designed to taste good, not merely to stop one from being hungry. Cy’s had become the pinnacle of my culinary enjoyment these days, because there was nothing bad there to detract from what I liked. But this . . . this was like music to the ear, like a good book. Things you enjoyed because they were enjoyable, not just necessary.

And I realized I had eaten almost the entire salad, like a starving orphan on a deserted island. I glanced up. Officer Wolfe looked very amused.

“Why not use a lye vat for good pieces?” he said. “And I thought you didn’t use one at all. That you could only have a bucket of lye or so.”

I nodded, then shook my head, then shrugged. “Well, you see . . . well, yes, sometimes there are small pieces, but the only one small enough to use a lye bucket in terms of immersing it would be a jewelry box. And the jewelry box . . . there would be a very narrow space between the time when the paint would be softened enough to pull off, and the point at which the wood would dissolve. So you see . . .”

He nodded. “So you don’t immerse anything, but you do use lye.”

“Sometimes,” I said. “On sturdy, not very good pieces. I think the last time I used it was this Oriental chest that had clearly been painted to begin with, and then painted again and again. It was probably not more than five years old. But the inside showed it was solid pine, and I thought it could be made to look antique. Not that I would sell it as antique, understand, but . . . people pay for what things look like.”

“Yes,” he said. “They always do.” He sounded tired. I
wondered if he paid for anything, but again bit my lip. Right. This man would not need to pay for sex. And if he did, it was none of my business, and besides, why was I thinking of this stuff? “But why do you talk about lye as if it should be something disapproved of? And say you wouldn’t use it for the good pieces?”

“Lye has to be neutralized,” I said. I took a sip of my wine and finished the salad at a more sedate pace. “You have to rinse the piece as soon as the paint is softened; otherwise it starts pulping the wood.” I took a deep breath, again not wanting to think of pulping. I would definitely
not
think of pulping. “I apply it with a brush, then wait, then rinse. And after you’re done rinsing, you have to apply vinegar; otherwise the residual lye will keep working. It sounds easy, but it’s a mess, unless, you know . . . you have a big workshop and lots of people working on the piece at once and can time things exactly.”

“Ah,” he said. “So your objection is the danger of ruining the piece?”

“Not just that,” I said. “Even when it all works fine, lye is very caustic and it burns the piece. If you’re working with maple or oak, it can darken the wood quite a lot.” I finished my salad, and the plate was collected by hands moving out of the pervading darkness. “Of course, sometimes you want that, like when you’re working with a relatively new piece but want it to look older, but if you use it on cherry or mahogany, it can completely obscure the figure.”