Vultures at Twilight

by Charles Atkins

  ‘He seemed respectable,’ I commented.

  ‘First of the bunch,’ she said, checking the clock. ‘Let’s put some water on before the next one gets here.’

  ‘You don’t just want to go with Tolliver?’ I asked.

  She sighed. ‘I’d love to,’ she replied, heading to Evie’s rooster-themed kitchen. ‘But if I don’t get three quotes, someone is going to raise a fuss. And don’t have a fit, but number two is Mildred Potts.’

  ‘You didn’t . . . Oh, Ada, after the auction?’

  ‘I know, but no one was returning my calls. I just pray she doesn’t bring that dog. I keep thinking about how it went after that thing. Although a part of me,’ she admitted, ‘is dying to know whose finger that was.’

  ‘Agreed,’ I said. ‘People don’t go around losing fingers in drawers. And where’s the rest of the person? It seemed fresh, like it had just happened, or maybe that was the dog’s saliva? It’s been giving me nightmares.’

  Twenty minutes, and a good deal of speculation later, Mildred arrived. The mid-fifties blonde-headed owner of Aunt Millie’s Attic blew into the condo, with her yapping Shih Tzu, Taffy, tucked under her arm.

  I pasted a smile on my face as I jammed my hands, with all ten fingers, deep into my pockets. I watched as Mildred, with her orange and white polka dot dress swirling around her thick ankles, perused Evie’s things. All the time making derogatory comments. ‘You just can’t get much for a lot of this stuff.’ She pointed out chips and cracks; she clucked her tongue and shook her head, as if to say that if she took the estate, she’d lose money. But we could both see her ill-concealed excitement over Evie’s collection of Chinese Export.

  ‘What do you think this is worth?’ Ada held up the whaling ship platter.

  ‘It’s pretty . . . if you like that sort of thing. I could probably get a couple hundred for it.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ada. ‘Let me show you something else.’ She led Mildred and the snuffling Taffy over to the Hassam painting.

  As Mildred’s skirt tangled in the potted plants, she and Taffy finally made it to the picture. They appeared to sniff its surface. Finally, she declared, ‘It’s sweet.’ Her voice had the practiced sound of someone used to delivering bad news in what they considered a gentle way. ‘But your friend probably bought it at one of those motel art sales. I hope she didn’t pay too much. I always hate to be the one to say things like that, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I couldn’t tell people the truth.’

  She was there for over an hour, and the only other time she betrayed any interest was in the kitchen.

  ‘Now that,’ she said, practically squealing with excitement when she came upon the step-back cupboard, ‘that is darling! I’d give you a thousand right now.’

  Ada looked at me with her best bridge face. ‘I had no idea it was worth that much,’ she commented. ‘It just looks like an old beat-up cabinet. I was thinking about giving it a good fresh coat of paint.’

  ‘No!’ shrieked Mildred, which elicited a round of yaps from Taffy.

  My heart skipped and raced uncomfortably as I had a too-real flashback of the dog with the bloody finger.

  ‘Whatever you do,’ Mildred continued, petting Taffy while examining the surface of the cupboard, ‘don’t paint it! You’ll destroy the value. People want the original buttermilk paint.’ She ran a hand lovingly over the wide-plank construction. She examined the joinery. ‘It’s lovely.’

  ‘Isn’t that interesting, Lil. Who would have known?’ Ada steered the dealer and her creepy white dog back to the front hall.

  Mildred sensed her quarry slipping away. ‘If you have any questions,’ she said, turning in the doorway, ‘don’t hesitate to call. You have some charming things here.’

  ‘Well, thank you,’ said Ada. ‘Why don’t you get back to me with a quote. Obviously, I’m getting a few. So, not wanting to be crass, it will all come down to a question of money.’

  ‘Oh.’ Mildred’s mouth twisted as if she’d just tasted something unpleasant. ‘If you don’t mind my asking, who else will be seeing the estate?’

  ‘You mean dealers?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mildred, nearly hissing between tangerine-painted lips.

  Ada turned to me, smiling, clearly enjoying her role as the wide-eyed innocent. ‘Do you think it’s OK, Lil?’

  I shrugged, not entirely certain what her game was, and eager to get Taffy, with her too-cute matching orange polka dot ribbon, out the door.

  ‘Let’s see.’ She counted on her fingers. ‘We just met with that lovely Mr Jacobs . . .’

  ‘Tolliver?’ Mildred asked. ‘Did he make an offer?’

  ‘No, but he said he would. And I must say that you and he had very different takes on things.’

  Mildred tensed, her lips tightened and she gripped Taffy like a furry football. ‘Well,’ she responded, ‘this is a highly subjective profession. Get any three dealers in a room and you’ll get three different stories.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ada, ‘I see that.’ And she showed Mildred and Taffy to the door.

  ‘Two hundred dollars for Evie’s charger!’ Ada fumed after the dealer had left. ‘I should report her to The Better Business Bureau.’

  ‘People swear by her,’ I commented, noting the flush in Ada’s cheeks, and how her eyes seemed bluer – like sapphires – when she was angry. ‘It does seem criminal. What if we didn’t know? Most people don’t, particularly in Pilgrim’s Progress. I hate to say it, but if I were a criminal, I’d definitely focus on older people.’

  ‘A lot of them do,’ Ada stated. ‘Since I moved here, I’m forever getting these awful phone calls from people telling me I’ve won something, but in order to collect I have to buy a water purifier, or something equally ridiculous. The worst part is, I know people who’ve bought those damn things, and half of them know they’re being taken for a ride.’

  ‘Me too. So why do they do it?’

  Before Ada could respond, the bell rang.

  ‘Contestant number three?’ I asked.

  ‘Enter and sign in please,’ she quipped. ‘I loved that show.’ And she opened the front door.

  Wafting in on the acrid stench of tobacco came Rudy Caputo, a potbellied man with a shock of white hair and a smoldering cigar glued to the corner of his unshaven mouth. He wore a well-loved black biker jacket and a pair of khaki paratrooper pants with pockets that tracked up and down his legs. I instantly recognized him as one of the major buyers at McElroy’s auction. On a good night, Mr Caputo could buy up a third to a half of the furniture, making the other dealers squirm as Chippendale highboys and Queen Anne tea tables were hoisted to his truck. Often McElroy would joke: ‘Well, guess that’s heading to the West Coast,’ or ‘California here I come.’

  ‘You Ada Strauss?’ he grunted as he came through the door.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ada. ‘And if you wouldn’t mind putting out your cigar, I’d appreciate it.’

  ‘No problem.’ He flicked off the smoldering tip with his bare finger and then crushed the ash into the doorstep with his booted foot.

  ‘Nice place,’ he commented, sticking the unlit stub back in his mouth. He moved from the foyer to the living room, with its vaulted ceiling, skylights and abundant windows. ‘Looks like some decent pieces, too.’ He dropped on one knee and examined the underside of a Queen Anne style wingback chair. ‘You know if this is all original?’ he asked.

  ‘No idea,’ Ada admitted. ‘My friend collected a lot of things, and some came down through her family. I’m not sure which are which.’

  ‘You getting multiple quotes?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  He mumbled something unintelligible. I thought I heard the words ‘waste of my time’, but I couldn’t be certain. He was all business, tipping back chairs, running a flashlight over joints in the furniture and pulling out a tape measure when he came to Evie’s spider-leg candle stand.

  ‘You know this is a repro,’ he stated, after measuring the top.

  ‘Yes,’ s
aid Ada, ‘but Evie knew that when she bought it.’

  ‘It’s good quality,’ he conceded, pulling a magnet from out of a pocket and affixing it to a number of small metal statues and lamps.

  ‘What’s that for?’ I asked.

  He looked up. ‘I’m trying to see what’s bronze and what isn’t. If the magnet sticks it’s got iron in it, and it’s definitely not bronze.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t stick?’ I asked.

  ‘Could be bronze, could be brass, could be copper, maybe pot metal. The magnet narrows it down.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Ada. ‘So how do you know for sure?’

  ‘Bronze is solid, real heavy. If I want to know for sure, I’ll scratch the base. If it’s zinc alloy you get a silver streak; bronze looks bronze.’

  ‘What about the mantel clock?’ Ada asked.

  ‘It’s nice, but it’s iron, not bronze. Pity.’

  ‘If it were bronze, what would it be worth?’ I asked, having some sense of the correct value.

  ‘About four grand,’ he said, coming close to the figure I had in mind. He then beat me to my next question. ‘It’s still worth something. A lot of people like these Victorian figural clocks. In a West Coast shop, you could probably get fifteen hundred.’

  ‘What about in Connecticut?’ I asked.

  ‘A lot less, maybe half. Everything’s cheaper here, that and the economy is in the toilet.’

  ‘More stuff around,’ Ada commented.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said, spotting the Hassam painting. ‘But even out here, stuff is drying up. Everyone thinks they’re a dealer and selling on eBay.’ He pointed at the picture. ‘You know what that is?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Ada, ‘but you tell me.’

  We watched as he sucked in his gut and squeezed through the plants. He looked back at Ada and smiled. ‘You can’t be too careful,’ he commented dryly.

  ‘No,’ she agreed, ‘you can’t.’

  ‘Mind if I take it off the wall?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  He eased the painting off its hooks and maneuvered it overhead to the sofa. From his back pocket he pulled out his flashlight and ran the beam over the surface of the painting, both front and back.

  ‘You got a honey here.’ He wedged the light back into his pocket. ‘This is a real good piece of American Impressionism. The painter used to live around here.’

  ‘Childe Hassam,’ Ada offered, sounding like she might know what she was talking about.

  ‘Exactly. It’s not my usual thing,’ he said. ‘It should go to New York, to one of the big houses, or else sell it directly to a dealer. If I were you, I’d take some pictures of it, bring them to the city and get a few quotes. If you want me to do it, I’d take a fifteen percent cut of whatever it brought.’

  ‘That seems kind of high,’ I said, quickly calculating his proposed cut of three hundred thousand dollars.

  ‘Like I said –’ and he chomped down on the cigar butt for emphasis – ‘ask around. Bet the auction houses will take at least that.’

  He took no notes, but seemed to be tallying values in his head.

  ‘Do you have a shop?’ I asked.

  ‘Used to, too much overhead. Now I’m strictly a jobber.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Ada asked.

  ‘I wholesale to other dealers. Not around here so much, but up and down the coast, the Midwest, California. I have dealers all over.’

  ‘Interesting,’ I said, trying to reconcile his biker get up and rank cigar with the obvious care he took in handling Evie’s porcelain. ‘Do you like your work?’

  He looked up from the eighteenth-century polychrome soup tureen he’d been examining. ‘Been doing it for thirty years.’

  ‘But do you like it?’ I persisted.

  ‘I suppose, but it gets to wear you down. ‘Specially now where I’m not sure how much longer I want to lug around furniture . . . Rheumatoid.’ He held up his hands, displaying a double row of swollen knuckles.

  ‘How terrible,’ Ada said. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘No thanks, I should probably get going.’

  After a final look around, where he counted and weighted the pieces of Evie’s sterling flatware and looked through her jewelry, Mr Caputo said goodbye and headed to his truck.

  ‘That’s three,’ said Ada, closing the door behind her. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I liked Tolliver best, although that Mr Caputo seemed to know what he was talking about. And that Potts woman is nothing more than a crook.’

  ‘Agreed,’ she said, sitting down at the dining room table. ‘Let’s see what they come back with.’ She stared into the living room, deep in thought.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, sensing something wrong.

  ‘Well,’ she started slowly, ‘I didn’t think I was going to tell you this, but you are my best friend.’

  I braced for the worst.

  ‘I have another appointment this afternoon.’

  ‘What is it? Is something wrong?’

  She looked up and smiled. ‘No, I mean nothing aside from the usual. It’s my mother, I’m getting a lot of grief from my brothers and sisters.’

  ‘Because?’ I asked, thinking of Rose Rimmelman, who I’d met following her cardiac catheterization and subsequent angioplasty last year when she’d recuperated at Ada’s for six weeks. Small and feisty, Rose was fiercely independent, and her ability to care for herself had become an issue.

  ‘Because she’s over ninety; she’s living alone and her visiting nurse says she’s not safe in her own apartment and Mom adamantly refuses to move, or have a live-in aide. The nurse is threatening to bring in adult protective services if I don’t do something. So I’m meeting with the administrator at Nillewaug Village. I can’t keep running back and forth like this, and if my siblings had their way I’d have her move in with me, or vice versa; which, given a choice between living with my mother and having a sharp stick poked in the eye, I’d go for the second.’

  ‘Do you think she’d go for it?’

  ‘When pigs fly, but I have to try something. I was planning to take a cab, but I thought . . .’

  ‘Of course I’ll go with you,’ I said. ‘You know Bradley was their medical director when they opened that place.’

  ‘You’d mentioned. But he didn’t stay long.’

  ‘No, and I could never get him to tell me why, other than he didn’t agree with their business practices.’

  ‘Great, so you’re telling me that I’m about to try and put my mother into some kind of snake pit?’

  ‘Ada,’ I said, looking at the concern on her face, and feeling such affection, wishing she didn’t have to go through this. ‘We’ll check it out. Like you said, you’ve got to do something. We just need to keep our eyes open.’

  ‘I know. I hate to say it, but I’ve even thought of moving back to the city. Someone’s got to look after her. And apparently as the youngest daughter . . . I just don’t know what to do.’

  Something caught in my throat at the thought of losing her, of not seeing her every day, and, if I were being honest, which I was trying to desperately not to be, I knew that the feelings I had for Ada had somehow passed the ‘best friends’ point. And how was that possible? I was a married woman for thirty-seven years, raised two children and had successfully stomped down any feelings I might have had for other women. But right now, looking at Ada and realizing she might move away, was more than I could bear. ‘We’ll figure this out,’ I said, as much for her as for me. ‘Let me grab my coat, aside from Bradley’s issue – whatever it was – everyone raves about Nillewaug. I’m sure it’s lovely.’

  FOUR

  Tolliver Jacobs’ hands shook as he hung up. Philip had been missing since Friday, and now he knew why. Why he wasn’t answering his cell. Why he hadn’t called. Dead.

  As he got up to shut his office door; his knees threatened to buckle. ‘Oh God.’ The information wormed into his brain. ‘Oh God.’ He sank to his chair. How would he be able to
face the others, to face the day, to face anything? He thought of their employees, most of them had been hired by Philip, what would they say? What would they think?

  Tolliver and Philip had lived with the gossip, the conversations cut short, the rolling eyes. He knew what they must be thinking, that he and Philip had a fight. But not this. He held his head in his hands. ‘Oh God.’ He pictured Philip with his perfect teeth and blue-green eyes.

  ‘I think we may have found your partner,’ the woman detective had said. Hope had surged only to be cut off by her next statement. ‘We need you to identify the body.’

  ‘Oh God. Oh God.’ Tolliver tried to focus. What was he supposed to do? Maybe it wasn’t Philip. But inside, he knew. Nothing short of death could account for the past five days. Not a word. After seventeen years, he and Philip had never been apart for more than a week. Since graduate school, the two men had been inseparable.

  Tolliver tried to map a course of action. He took a deep breath, and stood. Yes, just move. Then, he was through the door with what he hoped was a normal expression on his face as he passed the desks of his buyers.

  ‘I have to take care of some errands,’ he told Gretchen, his secretary. ‘If you need me, I’ll have my cell.’

  ‘Is everything OK?’ she asked, her dark eyes searching out his.

  ‘No, but . . .’ He met her gaze, and then looked around at half a dozen faces, all turned toward him, wondering. ‘Never mind.’

  He pushed open the ancient iron-studded door, and stepped out into the cool October air and the crackling of fallen leaves. He walked across the beautifully landscaped grounds of Grenville Antiques, each specimen tree, each weathered marble sculpture, a tribute to Philip’s eye and unfailing taste. Keep moving, he thought as he turned the key in his 5 series BMW. The powerful engine purred. But as he rode past their red warehouse, where Philip had painted a herd of whimsical Holsteins, his resolve faltered. He skidded to a stop, their last argument, more heated than any they’d ever had, played over and over. Philip storming out, his final words: ‘I need space, Tolliver. Don’t push me on this!’