Junkyard Man

by Libby Howard

  “Is this the stuff that was stolen?” Daisy flipped a few pages.

  “No, it’s an inventory of what Henry remembers seeing, along with what Mr. Peter told him about the pieces. The hope is that Bert eventually finds all of these things in the house, and that any theft was confined to whatever was in the basement.”

  I doubted Bert would be able to recover any of that. Without any knowledge of what was in the basement before his uncle’s death, he wouldn’t be able to report anything stolen.

  “And pictures, too.” Daisy pointed to one. “I actually like these. They’re some kind of blue Delft plates.”

  Quite a few were pretty, although I didn’t feel any urges to go buy antique china and pottery from looking at the pictures. The report had to have been fifty pages long. Henry had been very thorough, and I was sure Bert could use it to cross reference what he was sorting through over there. Henry had even noted down the locations where he’d been shown each piece.

  “I saw these up front on the display shelf when I was there,” I told Daisy. “Henry said they’re knife rests.”

  She laughed. “I don’t even think the fancy country clubs use knife rests anymore.”

  “They should. Balancing my knife across the side of the plate is always a dicey proposition. And I never feel right propping it up on the edge of the plate or sitting it on the table once I’ve used it.”

  “We should bring them back into fashion,” Daisy announced. “From now on, at every meal I will include knife rests in my place settings.”

  “Pretty fancy for paper plate cookouts,” I teased. “And what about Chinese take-out?”

  “I’ve seen chopstick rests. Yep, I’ve made up my mind. If you see any knife rests at MegaMart, pick me up a set.”

  “I’ll ask Bert to keep an eye out. I’m sure he’ll be happy to sell you a set. Or I’ll check at Swanson’s. I’m heading there on my lunch hour to see if they’ll buy that pitcher on the dining room table.” I really wanted to get rid of it before Taco knocked it over and smashed it on the floor.

  I managed to get in to work an hour early, Judge Beck staggering down for coffee in his pajamas as I was leaving. J.T was out all morning meeting with bail bond clients, so I was actually able to make a dent in the Creditcorp files. My to-do stack was half the size it was when I left work yesterday by noon, so I didn’t feel bad at all about leaving J.T. a note and heading into Milford to unload an ugly pitcher and hopefully return to work several hundred dollars richer.

  It was about twenty minutes into Milford, then another ten to find parking during the lunch rush. I was glad I’d gotten in to work early today, because this lunch hour was most likely going to stretch into a lunch hour-and-a-half, if not two. Swanson’s Antiques was in a Phillimore Street row house that looked small from the front façade, but stretched back for the entire width of the block. The front section of the store was packed with furniture. Large paintings covered every wall. I walked through the first two rooms before I found the storekeeper standing behind a glass counter with a very modern cash register on top. Outside of the bell that announced my presence as I opened the door, I doubt this guy would have known I was here since he had no visibility to the front part of the shop. Although I guess he’d probably hear if someone was trying to shoplift a fainting couch or an oak armoire.

  The man behind the glass counter looked exactly as I suspected an antiques dealer would look. He was thin and pale, as though he spent all of his time in attics and the dark recesses of the shop. His wire-framed glasses were so old-fashioned that the word spectacles immediately came to mind. He looked nearly as old as some of the antiques he was selling, and the few wispy strands of white hair on his head had slid off his comb-over to dangle over his left ear. I could never let Judge Beck meet this man or he’d be shoving Henry toward law school faster than I could bake a scone.

  “Can I help you find something?” He smiled, and I blinked at how it transformed his face into ‘kindly grandfather” from “emaciated, ghostly-pale horror-movie villain antiques dealer’.

  “I’m wondering if you’d be interested in purchasing this.” I shifted my huge purse/briefcase to the side and put my box on the counter, pulling out the pitcher. The man made several appreciative oooh-ahh noises. They were much better than the noises Judge Beck made when he’d seen it, or what I’d involuntarily made when I’d unwrapped the gift after my wedding.

  “Rostrand. Probably made anywhere from eighteen seventy to eighteen ninety from the pattern and mark. Nice condition.” He eyed me and adjusted his glasses. “I can give you fifty for it.”

  I hated this pitcher. It was ugly and I wanted to get rid of it. But I also had a hot tub repairman to pay.

  “I was told five hundred.” It was a gross inflation of what Mr. Peter had informed me the pitcher was worth, but I figured I needed bargaining room.

  The shopkeeper recoiled dramatically, reverting to ‘emaciated, ghostly-pale horror-movie villain antiques dealer’. “Perhaps I could go as high as seventy. It’s an unusual item that would take me a while to sell. I’d need to actively solicit to find a buyer, and then there’s my mark-up. I could probably only sell it for one hundred if I were lucky.”

  Liar, liar, pants on fire. Well, I could play that game, too. “I’ve been looking on the antique auction sites, tracking actual items sold, and in the last three years, six of these have sold, fetching between two and five hundred U.S. dollars. The two hundred dollar one had some glaze crackle, where this one is pristine. Now, I do agree it might take you a while to find a buyer at five hundred, but there’s no reason you couldn’t quickly find one to buy this at four hundred. Your offer before shows you’re willing to make a thirty-dollar profit on it, but I’ll be generous and assume a fifty-dollar profit. Pay me three fifty, and it’s yours.”

  He narrowed his eyes behind those wire-rimmed spectacles. “One fifty.”

  “Three hundred.”

  “One seventy-five.”

  “Three hundred.”

  “That’s what you said before,” he complained.

  “Yes. Three hundred. That’s a hundred-dollar profit for you.”

  “Two twenty.”

  This was fun, and I was pretty sure if I hung out and continued to barter with the guy I could probably get my three hundred, but I had to get back to work. And I had a parking meter that was probably close to expiring at this point.

  I sighed. “Two fifty and you throw in that set of knife rests.” The ones that I was darned sure weren’t worth seventy-five dollars.

  He hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Deal.”

  Oh, thank heaven. Because if I had to go home with this pitcher, it was going right up in the attic. The shopkeeper pulled the knife rests out of the case and I admired them as he was writing up the bill of sale. They were three inches long, a hand-painted white glazed pottery that reminded me a lot of the pieces Mr. Peter had on display the first day I’d come over. Each of the five were different, each panel of the knife rest painted alternately with a blue stripe pattern and sprays of wildflowers in a lighter blue and orange.

  “I’ve got more Quimper over there in that case,” the man told me. “A coffee pot that matches these with bleuets and a Bretonne woman painted on the side. There’s also a lovely plate set with blue on a yellow décor riche border with a Brittany coat of arms at the top.”

  I wasn’t interested in purchasing more antiques, but it was clear that he’d be a few moments writing everything up, and I did want to see this coffee pot, so I wandered over to the display case. The coffee pot was pretty. I was tempted until I saw the price tag. I didn’t need a three-hundred-dollar coffee pot, not when Mr. Coffee worked just fine and I had a vacuum-seal carafe to keep my morning elixir steaming hot for hours. I admired a huge meat platter and some butter dishes, then cast my gaze on the next display case which held three fish-shaped serving dishes, bordered in blue and yellow. One featured a lady holding a flower, another a milkmaid, and the third, improbably, a portrait
of George Washington complete with his name and the dates of his birth and death.

  I recognized these three serving plates. And they were weird enough that I doubted there were two exact sets within fifteen miles of each other. I stared at them for a few seconds, hardly believing my eyes, then I pulled Henry’s papers out of my bag and started to go through them, marking down items that he’d seen in Mr. Peter’s house that were also for sale at Swanson’s. I didn’t know enough about antiques to say for certain if these were the same pieces that had been in Mr. Peter’s house last week, but I was positive about the fish-shaped dishes.

  “Um, when did you get these serving dishes in? The fish-shaped ones with the two ladies and George Washington?”

  He looked up. “Saturday.”

  “This past Saturday?” I didn’t want to rule out that Bert had brought a few items in to sell, just to clear a few things out of the house and get some cash. But Saturday was the night when Mr. Peter had been murdered. I doubted that he’d sold them, and I’m was sure Bert wouldn’t have been authorized to remove items from his uncle’s house prior to his death. If it was Bert who’d removed them, that is.

  “Yes. I just put them in the cabinet today.”

  “Where did you buy them?” I tried to make my tone casual. The guy drove a hard bargain, but he didn’t strike me as someone who knowingly bought stolen goods. Either way, I didn’t want to seem like I was accusing him of anything, especially since he hadn’t paid me for the pitcher yet.

  “An estate sale. Some guy’s grandmother left him her collection. He’s been bringing it in a few pieces at a time as he goes through it. It’s mostly majolica and faience, some Quimper but a few Porquier and Malicona He also had a nice Wedgwood tea service, and some Flight and Barr Worcester porcelain. The real shocker was a Louis XV Silver Tureen by Jean-Baptiste-Francois Chéret. So many pieces during that era were melted down for coin. And this was in perfect condition. I normally don’t deal in high-end pieces like that, but I knew a guy in New Orleans, and sure enough, he was interested.”

  I felt sick to my stomach. “How much did you sell it for?”

  “Fifty thousand. I thought the guy was going to faint when I told him.”

  “Do you…do you know his name?” I asked, my mind whirling with the thought that the murderer had been right in this store, hocking Mr. Peter’s beloved treasures.

  The shopkeeper shot me a narrowed glance. “I get identification from all my sellers, in case there’s any issue with authentication. I don’t give that information out, though.”

  Of course not. He would hardly want to have someone cut him out as the middle man of these lucrative deals.

  “I’m surprised that there was some grandma in the Milford area that had a fifty-thousand-dollar soup tureen sitting around her house. Did she die recently?”

  He shrugged, bowing his head back down to the paperwork. “I think so. He’s only been coming around for a few months. He’s a young man, too. I wouldn’t have expected someone in their middle twenties to have inherited a collection of china and dinnerware, but he said that he was the only grandchild. He doesn’t seem like the type who would want to keep fish-shaped hand-painted dishes or soup tureens.”

  Something moved over in the corner of the room, just at the edge of my eyesight. I watched as the ghostly shadow approached, leaning indistinct hands against the display case. This time when I turned to face him, the ghost didn’t disappear.

  “Guess in a way his grandmother paid for his college. Or at the very least, a really nice car,” the shopkeeper added.

  I blinked at his words, and suddenly the ghost wasn’t what had my attention. In my mind, I pictured a brand new Mustang with all the options and a young owner who I’d not expected to be able to afford such an expensive car. Mid-twenties. Of course, that didn’t mean anything. There were lots of men in the area that fit that age range and had nice cars. But Sean and Henry had been spending a lot of time listening to Mr. Peter talk about his collection. What if some of it had filtered through the cookies and lodged in Sean’s brain long enough for him to go home and tell his sister’s boyfriend about the old man across the street from his friend who had a bunch of dishes he claimed were worth a lot of money.

  Or it could have been Will Lars, although he didn’t appear to be mid-twenties. Maybe this shopkeeper was a poor judge of age and everyone under the age of forty looked mid-twenties to him.

  “Did he have a man-bun?” I asked. “Tall, thin guy? I’m just wondering because my neighbor had a death in the family and said she had a bunch of antiques he said he needed to sell now.”

  “No, this guy had a big swoop of hair on the top of his head. Although please send your neighbor my way.” He fished out a card and handed it to me. “I’d be happy to give him an appraisal or look at any of the antiques he’s inherited.”

  I took the card, my mind whirring. Big swoop of hair. Like Flock-of-Seagulls hair. What had Sean said the boyfriend’s name was? Dustin or Dillon Buckle or something? Either way, this wasn’t something I could handle myself. I signed the paperwork, collected my money and my knife rests, then headed back to work. The soup tureen and other items might be a coincidence, but I was certain those fish-shaped platters were stolen. And for anything to be done about that, I’d need to talk to both Bert and the police.

  Chapter 17

  “The new video’s up,” my boss announced as he blew into the office and plopped a bag on my desk. I’d held off calling the police, wanting to check with Bert or with Judge Beck, with somebody who could tell me that I wasn’t imagining the whole thing, and that the likelihood of three identical fish-shaped plates being in the same area was about the same statistical likelihood as me winning the Powerball.

  “Well, aren’t you going to look in the bag?” J.T. nudged it toward me. I had an urge not to look in the bag, immediately suspecting there were copperheads in there, or that something equally alarming would jump out at me.

  It held a wig. And a scrap of fabric that I realized was a dress—a very tiny dress.

  “Please tell me you don’t expect me to wear these in your next video,” I told him. There were limits as to what I should be expected to do under the ‘other duties as assigned’ portion of my job description. Wearing a wig and a mini-dress at the age of sixty for my boss’s internet video wasn’t one of them.

  “No, it’s for Daisy. She did such a great job playing the suspicious wife that I’m going to have her portray the mother-of-druggie.”

  I couldn’t wait to see Daisy’s face when he told her this. Actually, I couldn’t wait to see J.T.’s face when my friend verbally set him on fire.

  “Did you get rid of the ugly pitcher?” J.T. asked.

  “Yep. And I’ve got cash and a sweet set of knife rests. A word to the wise—Daisy is going to insist everyone use knife rests at her house from now on, so if you go over for dinner sometime, read up on your etiquette books.”

  J.T. shot me an oddly hopeful look. “She’s inviting me over for dinner?”

  I’d meant it in a general, making-a-joke sort of way, but my boss must have taken me seriously. As far as I knew, Daisy had no intention of inviting him anywhere. Was J.T. interested in my friend? They’d known each other since forever, having grown up in the same town, gone to the same school, etc. Was this some long-buried crush from childhood, or did yesterday’s filming stir up some sparks between the two? Although I was pretty sure this was one-sided. Maybe.

  I could play matchmaker if Daisy was interested. It would be a bit odd having my best friend dating my boss, but I’d deal. I envisioned the two of them together and just couldn’t see it.

  “I found something else at Swanson’s this afternoon.” I told J.T. about the fish-shaped platters, the soup tureen, and the other plates and pieces that matched Henry’s inventory.

  My boss scratched his head. “Bert would have to file the police report since he’s in charge of the estate. I don’t know how he’d claim that they were stolen, though. For
all he knows, they’re somewhere in that house. It would be pretty embarrassing to accuse some other guy of theft only to find those platters two months later in a box in the attic.”

  “I’m sure it’s the same plates. I mean, come on, J.T., you can’t tell me there are two identical fish-shaped serving platters with George Washington painted on them in the county.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “I guess you’re right. You and Bert file the report. Maybe have Judge Beck’s kid confirm that the stuff is missing from where Peter kept it. The police will get the name of the guy who sold it to Swanson’s and check him out. At the very least, there should be some proof of his inheritance-from-his-grandmother story.”

  Chapter 18

  “Fifty thousand dollars.” Bert still had a stunned look on his face. “Why Uncle Harry had something worth that much in a box in the basement is beyond me. Seriously. Who does that?”

  I shrugged. “Someone who keeps tens of thousands of dollars of china and pottery in boxes all over his house?”

  “We don’t know for sure the soup tureen was stolen,” Officer Fischer commented. “Neither you nor Judge Beck’s son ever saw it. All you had was the word of your deceased uncle that there was a valuable soup tureen in the basement. There’s no saying it was this one that sold for fifty grand. There’s no saying there even was a soup tureen in the basement. For all we know, your uncle sold it, or threw it away, or got confused and thought he purchased something that he didn’t buy.”

  He had a point. “Well, I saw the plates, and I can verify that they’re the same.”

  “But what if they’re still here…somewhere.” The officer gestured at all the boxes in the living room. Bert had been working all day and there was barely enough room to stand at the moment. Which was an improvement. But at this pace, it would take Bert years to go through all of his uncle’s stuff.