Marked Fur Murder

by Dixie Lyle

  “Like an opportunity to sell it as one-of-a-kind?”

  He looked thoughtful. “I hadn’t thought of that…”

  “Well, now you have. Move the canvases, please—there’s plenty of room outside and it’s not going to rain.”

  He nodded graciously. “Ah, of course. I heard you’d taken the day off, but clearly I was misinformed. You were merely busy expanding your realm of control to the weather—I knew it was only a matter of time.”

  I blinked. “I have to go.”

  I turned and charged back up the stairs, Whiskey at my heels.

  [We should have a word with Mr. Gorshkov. Obviously, he’s working Kaci much too hard.]

  “She’s a working dog, remember? Used to chasing sheep twelve hours a day. I don’t think a few brushstrokes are going to wear her out.”

  We got to Keene’s room. I pulled out my master key and took a deep breath. I didn’t like snooping on the guests, and I liked snooping on my friends even less, but this was serious. If Anna and Keene had been together, I needed to know.

  I unlocked the door and we stepped inside.

  Keene didn’t have a particular room he preferred over the others; in fact, it was his stated intention to eventually stay in all of them. When I asked him why, he told me, “Because I love this place and want to know all of it, inside and out. Besides, if every room is my favorite, then I’ll never be disappointed, will I?”

  He had, of course, made the room he was currently staying in his own. He never actually broke anything—well, nothing he didn’t profusely apologize and pay for—but he did tend to unpack rather explosively. Clothing shrapnel covered a great deal of the room, as well as a number of guitars, a violin on a stand, a large red cylinder attached to a gas mask with a hose, and a great deal of Lego. The top of one table was dominated by a sprawling, free-form sculpture made of the stuff; it managed to be both playful and vaguely pornographic at the same time.

  Whiskey was already over by the bed, which the maids clearly hadn’t gotten to yet—cleaning Keene’s room was always problematic, due to his habit of sleeping at odd hours and behaving oddly the rest of the time. We’d had to let one maid go after she walked in on him, a supermodel, a pair of hip waders, several gallons of vanilla custard, and an industrial paint mixer. Don’t ask.

  Whiskey sniffed at the sheets. He sniffed at the carpet. He sniffed at the bedside table. He sniffed at several items on the bedside table that I won’t describe. And finally, he stopped sniffing, sat down, and looked steadily at me.

  [I’m sorry, Foxtrot. Anna was here, with Keene. And they were … busy.]

  Dammit.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Keene slept with plenty of women, some of whom he brought with him, some of whom he met here. There was that Nobel Prize winner a while back—nobody saw that one coming except me. Anna was angry at her husband, Keene was sexy and funny and available … I found myself more disappointed in him than angry. A woman in Anna’s state—he should have known better.

  But that was all secondary. Anna was dead, and Keene had lied about sleeping with her. Was he trying to spare her husband the knowledge that her last act had been to cheat on him, or was he covering up something more sinister?

  I looked around the room. I’d seen this mess plenty of times before, and even though it was always different it was always the same. There was his favorite silk shirt. There were the leather pants—a blue pair and a red pair this time. Lots of T-shirts, some new, some not. Enough makeup on the vanity to make a model drool.

  But something was missing.

  I stood up and went over to the vanity. It was the most organized part of the entire room, with all the accessories laid out in a very systematic manner. Eyeliner, moisturizer, hair products …

  “No hair dryer,” I said. “Keene never travels without one. And it’s always right there, next to the gel.” But not this time.

  I searched the room. I found many interesting things, some of which required batteries, but no hair dryer. I was pretty sure I knew where it was, though: in a police evidence locker.

  “This is bad,” I said.

  [There might be an innocent explanation.]

  “Sure. Maybe he forgot it. Maybe he took it with him for some bizarre reason. Maybe Anna borrowed it after they had sex and liked it so much it wound up in the pool with her.”

  [None of those seems very likely.]

  No, they didn’t. A more likely explanation was that Anna hadn’t been alone in that pool. Keene did love a naked, late-night dip, and he preferred his dipping to be done with others. He was vain enough to have taken his hair dryer with him, too.

  The hair dryer hadn’t killed Anna, though. It must have been thrown in to make us think her death was an accident, by someone who didn’t know she was a Thunderbird. Possibly by the person who actually killed her.

  But why? Keene had no reason to kill Anna. An accident, maybe?

  I just didn’t have enough information. I needed to learn what actually killed Anna, which meant talking to somebody official. Fortunately, I knew somebody better than someone official—I knew who did their paperwork.

  We left Keene’s room. A quick call to the coroner’s office put me in touch with Harriet Tilford, who was the coroner’s version of me. Harriet couldn’t divulge details of an ongoing investigation, except for little insignificant things that might affect the person filling out all the insurance forms, a person she could really identify with and feel sorry for and you never heard this from me, right?

  Usually Harriet was extremely helpful, but in this case she didn’t have much to offer because the autopsy hadn’t been done yet. So I thanked her and asked her to give me a call when she could because we really should catch up. Which I meant, because Harriet is a lovely person and we really do have a lot in common—mostly that neither of us has any time for catching up with friends.

  I wondered how Tango was doing with Fimsby. I tried paging her telepathically, but got no response; she must have been out of range. I made a mental note to myself to someday test what the practical limit of that range was, in and out of the graveyard, then pulled out my phone and e-mailed myself a reminder.

  “Whiskey, see if you can track down Tango for me and get an update. I’ll meet you out by the pool.”

  [Very well.] He trotted back the direction we’d just come from.

  I ducked down the back stairs. Those let out kind of close to the kitchen, and I really hoped I wouldn’t run into Ben. I wasn’t ready to talk to him yet. But I heard a tremendous racket start up when I was only halfway down, and guess where it was coming from? I had to check it out.

  I opened the kitchen door on a blizzard.

  I staggered back, blinded by a torrent of swirling, clattering white. It took my senses a moment to register that the temperature hadn’t dropped, and a second after that to realize that the whiteness whipping through the air was far too fine to be snow; it was much more like dust.

  I licked my lips. Flour. That was a culinary tempest I was looking at, not a seasonal one. Right about then a silver pot clanged loudly off the door frame and I knew why it was so noisy, too.

  “Hey!” I yelled into the storm. “CUT IT OUT!”

  The wind slowed. I heard the last of the cookware crash to the floor and stepped into a murky, swirling fog of finely ground whole wheat.

  I could see two figures, facing each other in the middle of the kitchen. One was Ben. The other was Teresa Firstcharger.

  The good news was, I hadn’t interrupted some sort of frenzied Thunderbird mating ritual. The bad news was that they looked like they were ready to kill each other.

  Ben was dusted in flour from head to toe, but Teresa looked like she’d just stepped out of a salon; somehow, she’d prevented any of the flour from actually touching her skin. The level of control that implied was terrifying. So was the look on her face. She was smiling. It was the kind of smile you’d wear if you’d learned how by studying pictures of
serial killers.

  Ben looked a lot angrier, but then it was his kitchen that had just been trashed. His hands were down at his sides, just like hers, but his fists were clenched. Firstcharger’s were open, palms up and fingers spread wide.

  “Your girlfriend’s here to rescue you,” she said. “What excellent timing.”

  “I don’t need rescuing,” Ben growled. He didn’t look at me.

  “What the hell is going on?” I demanded.

  “A challenge,” Teresa said.

  “To what, see who’s better at redecorating using pastry ingredients? Fine, you win. Now stop.”

  “Foxtrot, stay out of this,” Ben said. His eyes were still locked on Teresa’s.

  “What, so you two can start tossing thunderbolts around? Don’t make me call for Topsy, Teresa.”

  She laughed, a low, throaty sound. “You see what I mean? She likes her possessions on a short leash. Cats, dogs, elephants … Thunderbirds.”

  “This house is my responsibility,” I said. “I’m not going to let anything happen to it, and you can’t goad either of us into overreacting.”

  “Now she’s telling you what you can and can’t do.”

  “Back off, lady,” Ben said. “Nobody messes with my kitchen. Nobody.”

  “Then stop me.”

  This was getting out of hand. Whiskey! I yelled in my head. I need reinforcements in the kitchen, and fast!

  No answer. He must be out of range.

  But the tornado I was expecting didn’t happen. Ben’s brow furrowed and the winds died down to almost nothing. Teresa’s smile changed to something a little less aggressive and more admiring. “Not bad, fledgling, not bad. But you have a long way to go if you’re ever going to earn your wings. You need to learn your place.”

  “My place is here,” Ben snarled.

  “Here? As a domestic servant to a rich old white woman? You can do better—or at least I hope you can. We’ll see.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped.

  “It means that I’m formally challenging him to a duel. At the Aerie, dawn tomorrow. Under Thunderbird law, you must accept or forfeit your status.”

  “The only status I have is head chef. You going to confiscate my apron?”

  She shook her head slowly, her eyes still on his. “No. I’m going to confiscate your ability to influence the weather. People like us are too powerful to roam around without the proper training, and yours is nonexistent.”

  “She’s bluffing,” I said.

  “I don’t think she is,” Ben said. “But it doesn’t matter. I accept. Dawn tomorrow it is. Where do you want to meet?”

  Teresa looked away from him and at me, an amused and expectant look on her face. “At the graveyard, of course. If that’s all right with its custodian?”

  “Fine by me,” I said.

  “Not going to tell your pet to heel, Foxtrot?” Teresa said.

  “He’s my boyfriend, not my pet.” I paused. “And he’s going to kick your tail feathers tomorrow. At dawn.”

  She nodded in an oddly formal way, turned, and left the kitchen without saying another word.

  I looked at Ben. He looked at me.

  “Well,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Then neither of us said anything.

  “This is nuts,” Ben finally said.

  “That it is. Nutty as a squirrel café.”

  “I have to do this.”

  I took a deep breath. Before I could use it for anything, he said, “I do. She’s telling the truth about me forfeiting my abilities. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. And there’s no way I’m letting her do that, not without a fight.”

  “I was going to ask what I could do to help.”

  said a raspy feline voice in my head.

  Tango strolled into the kitchen through the back door, the one Ben had installed a cat flap on.

  In a minute, okay? I’m having a discussion with Ben and it’s kind of important.

 

  “About my status,” Ben said. “Seems some people don’t have a lot of respect for it.”

 

  I sighed. “Tango, this is a little more complicated than that.”

 

  “What?” Ben said.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I’ve never actually seen someone lob a grenade, but I’m guessing that the silence between when it lands and when it goes off was a lot like the silence in the kitchen after that little exchange. Seemed to last forever, but I knew there was going to be a big explosion and a huge mess to clean up any second.

  “What?” Ben said again.

  Tango looked up at Ben. She looked over at me. She looked back at Ben.

 

  “My family?” Ben said. “My family told ZZ to hire me?”

  Sometimes, trying to explain just makes things worse. “Yes,” I said.

  “And you knew about this?”

  “I just found out. ZZ asked me not to tell you.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Uh-huh. Just doing what our boss says, right?”

  “That’s not fair—”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I meant to say your boss. Apparently she’s not so much my employer as the head of the charity dedicated to looking after me.”

  “I was going to tell you.”

  “Sure you were. At a time and place of your choosing, right? Funny how everybody but me gets to make all the decisions.”

  That’s the kind of statement there’s no good response to—it’s 90 percent emotion and 10 percent logic. Pointing out that he couldn’t make a decision about something he didn’t know about would just get me another angry response, so I kept my mouth shut and gave Tango an irritated look instead. She did that cat thing of crouching down really low and then zooming away like a cruise missile hugging the ground.

  Ben untied his apron and yanked it off. “You know what? Teresa’s right. I don’t belong here. I’m obviously not the chef I thought I was, or even the man. I’m a freak of nature, half weatherman and half goddamn bird. Maybe it’s time I faced the truth.”

  He threw his apron on the floor at my feet. “Tell ZZ she can find another charity to contribute to. I quit.”

  And then he turned and stomped off through the back door.

  * * *

  Putting out fires is what I do; I do it so often I should have one of those sliding poles in my bedroom. No, wait, that makes me sound like a stripper.

  Anyway, Ben’s resignation didn’t throw me into the kind of panic it might other people. Okay, it meant I was now short one chef, possibly one boyfriend, and maybe even my job—but I could deal. I went out to the pool where I said I’d meet Whiskey, pulled out my cell phone, and started to make calls. It wouldn’t do Ben’s bruised ego any good, but I had guests to feed and a boss to answer to.

  Whiskey didn’t show up. Odd. Well, I couldn’t wait around for him; I had things to do.

  I called the cook who had subbed for Ben this morning and got him to come back. Then I went looking for ZZ and found her in her office, immersed in the Internet as usual. “Oh, hello, dear. Couldn’t stay away even for one day, could you? I just won a bet with Consuela.”

  I sat down in the chair opposite her desk and said, “Officially, I’m still not here. But there’s something you need to know: Ben found out.”

  She stopped what she was doing and looked over at me. “Oh, dear. You mean you—”

  “I didn’t tell him. He found out on his own.” That was about as close as I could come to the truth. “He was pretty upset—in fact, he tendered his resignation.”

 
Her face fell. “Do you think he means it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve lined up a temporary replacement for tonight, and once he’s cooled down a little we’ll talk. But I really think you need to be part of that conversation, too.”

  “Of course. I feel terrible about this, Foxtrot. I was only trying to help.”

  “I know, ZZ. Once he’s had time to think about it, Ben will, too.”

  I told her I had a lot to do—always true—and left. So far, today wasn’t going so great.

  But you know what they say: Things could always be worse. And for some people, they already were …

  I heard her crying behind the door as I walked down the hall. Heavy, choked sobs, full of misery. Being the caring-yet-nosy person I am, I stopped outside the door, then knocked gently. “Theodora? Are you all right?”

  The crying stopped. I hear her getting off the bed and walking over. The door opened to show me a very tearful Theodora Bonkle, her overly made-up face now a streaky ruin. “Foxtrot,” she sniffed. “I’m sorry, dear, I’m a bit of a mess. Do come in.”

  I stepped inside. From the small mountain of crumpled tissues on the bed, it seemed she’d been weeping for some time. I hoped she wasn’t having some sort of breakdown; I couldn’t help but think of poor Damon Inferno, sobbing under his bed.

  Theodora sat back down beside the white mound. Her shoes were off and her feet seemed huge—I did my best not to stare. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “My investigations have borne fruit,” she said. “Bitter fruit, I’m afraid.”

  Uh-oh. “What happened?”

  “Mr. Cooper and I were on, for lack of a better word, a stakeout. According to the pattern the marble placer has established for herself, it was likely she would make an appearance today. The graveyard, as you know, is quite sizable, so Mr. Cooper and I were patrolling it separately. I was the one who chanced to encounter her first, in the company of a woman who was no doubt her caregiver. I approached them cautiously but with a friendly demeanor, and the caregiver—a Mrs. Gonzales—was willing to talk to me. She told me a tale that quite broke my heart.