Framed

by Nancy Springer

  Framed

  By Nancy Springer

  Copyright 2012 by Nancy Springer

  Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, April 1999.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Also by Nancy Springer and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The Mystery World of Nancy Springer: #20

  The Mystery World of Nancy Springer: American Curls

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  Framed

  By Nancy Springer

  Expecting nothing but the creative pleasure of a reframe job, Veronica ripped the brown paper off the back, wadded it and lobbed it into the trash. Reaching for the pliers to pull the brads, she asked, “So you think this guy’s had a sex change or something, Lois?”

  “Who knows?” Putting on her coat to leave, the boss rolled her eyes. “His phone’s a wrong number, they returned the postcard I sent him, maybe he’s deep-sixed with Jimmy Hoffa. Who knows what goes on with customers? Look at the art they bring in. Look at the mats they put on it.”

  “I’ll say.” Puce and fuchsia on a lithograph; what was somebody smoking?

  “Another cowsy-wowsy print. Mat it up nice and some schmo will buy it.”

  “I’ll do my best.” Veronica pulled the last brad and lifted out the backing.

  “Well, I’m outa here. See ya, Ronnie.”

  “See ya,” Veronica echoed automatically, staring at the strange little parcel she had just uncovered. Or not strange, exactly, but quite out of place, taped to the back of the fuchsia mat. Why would somebody sandwich a key inside a frame job?

  A key in a clear plastic bag. Ronnie pulled it loose and looked at it more closely. Looked like some sort of locker key. And a business card. With one stubby, callused finger Ronnie coaxed the card out of the bag and read it: GROAT’S MINI STORAGE. And scrawled in Bic pen the number 129.

  “Huh!” she said.

  “What’s that?” Tim, the other framer on the evening shift, had just come in. She showed him her find. It was good for a lot of joking and speculation over the next four hours, during which she reframed the lithograph in a really classy cream black-core mat with V-groove.

  “Groat’s Mini Storage. Isn’t that where they had an Elvis sighting or something?”

  “I doubt it,” Ronnie said. “It’s down near where I live.”

  “Well, something happened there. I can’t remember. Clinton did it with some woman there? Princess Di’s ghost?”

  When it got near time to close, Ronnie said, “I’m just going to drop the key off.”

  “Sure.”

  That night? Why not; it wasn’t like there was anybody waiting for her at home. Since the divorce, the less time she spent at home, the better. It felt good to walk into Groat’s 24-Hour Convenience Store. Lights. People. She asked the man behind the counter, “You’re under the same management as the mini-storage out back, right?”

  “Right. You want to rent a unit?”

  “No. I found a key.” She laid it on the counter in front of him. Leaning on his plump forearms, he stared at it but did not touch it. He had eyes like a dead fish, expressionless.

  “Where’d you find it?” he asked.

  “Inside a framed picture, of all places.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  She explained briefly. She had no clue why he wanted to know, and for sure he wasn’t her type, but talking with him was better than going home.

  “One twenty-nine,” he said meditatively after a short silence. “That’s a claimer unit.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nobody’s been paying the rent. You got the key. Whatever’s in there, take it. It’s yours.” He shoved the key at her, still in its bag.

  “You serious?”

  “Yep. Yours.” He looked at her with those fish-flat eyes. “Go take a look.”

  She gawked a moment, then took the key and headed out to see for herself. Veronica Phillips could use a windfall as much as most people. More than some. Bluejean jobs like framing don’t pay much. But she’d reached a point in her life where, even if it meant working for minimum wage, she was not willing to walk the walk and talk the talk any longer. No more lipstick. No more pantyhose.

  And if somebody wanted to give her the contents of a mini-storage free, why not?

  It was lighted well enough down there that she did not feel frightened. One twenty-nine was only halfway down the hill anyway. She spotted the number about the same time as she heard the sirens approaching.

  The key fit the lock okay.

  Guinea pig siren noises, woot woot woot, and something with flashing lights pulled into the convenience store parking lot. Ronnie glanced up. Cop car.

  What the hell? Was somebody trying to rob the place? She’d stay until she was sure it was safe to go up there. With a click she pushed open the door of 129.

  Empty.

  She stood there a moment to be sure the shadows in the corners weren’t fooling her. But it was…empty. Ronnie clenched her teeth, mentally framing a thing or two to say to that fish-eyed man.

  “Police officer,” said a male voice behind her. “Turn around slowly and keep your hands where I can see them.”

  About that time Veronica remembered why Groat’s Mini Storage had been in the news months back. It was the place where they’d found the body.

  * * *

  “Tell it to me one more time,” said the police detective, looking bored.

  “Why? It’s way past my bedtime.” Ronnie tried to speak pleasantly even though her head ached with stress and fatigue. It had to be 3 a.m.

  It had been a woman’s body, she remembered. The cops wouldn’t tell her a thing, but it seemed to her that it had been a woman’s body jammed into a footlocker in the mini storage. Sawed in pieces.

  “Because I’m asking you nicely,” said the detective not very nicely. Llewellyn, his name tag said. He was her type, damn it, lean and dark, but he was too young; he wouldn’t be interested in her. Anyway, she didn’t like his attitude. “Start at the top.”

  “No.” Ronnie found that she had had enough. “You want to stay here all night, fine, we’ll stay here all night, but I’m calling a lawyer.”

  It was the smell that had given it away. The fish-eyed man probably wouldn’t have bothered with the contents of #129 for a few more months if it hadn’t been for the stench. Just like the frame shop hadn’t bothered with the deadbeat order until months past the six-week deadline.

  “You’ll have to wait till morning for that,” said Detective Llewellyn. With a name like that it was no wonder he had to act tough. “I can put you in a cell if you like.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Ronnie cried, her voice breaking, “if you won’t let me go, tell me what it is I’m supposed to have done. Just tell me what you think I did!”

  He wouldn’t, of course. What was driving Veronica toward the edge was the way none of them would tell her anything. But he did leave her alone for a while. When he ca
me back, he carried papers. “Okay,” he said, still bored, “just read over this transcript of your statement, sign it, and you can go. For now.”

  The transcript was accurate enough. While she read it, Detective Llewellyn diddled with papers on his desk, his hands irritated, jumpy. But as she signed, she saw his hands freeze like rabbits. She looked up; he was staring at her hand holding the pen, definitely not bored any longer.

  “How’d you get that callus on your little finger?” he asked.

  “Huh?” She put down the pen and looked at the rough patch on the outside of her little finger, right at the first joint. “Pulling the wire taut.”

  “Wire? What wire?”

  “Picture framing.”

  “And you get a lot of little cuts doing that?”

  “Oh, yeah.” She had bandages on two fingers right now and half-healed glass cuts on her knuckles.

  “And you keep your fingernails short.”

  “Yeah. Have to.” She’d never liked those acrylic claws anyway. “Why?”

  “Nothing. No reason. Just curious.” Llewellyn stood up, dismissing her. “I’ll be calling on you again. Don’t leave the area or you really will need a lawyer.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Ma’am, that’s a promise.”

  Damn him. Ronnie hated it when anyone called her ma’am, it made her feel so old. And what was all that rigamarole about her callus and her cuts and her fingernails?

  It came to her intuitively when she was in bed, finally, trying to go to sleep but too wired to relax, thinking about what she should have done…what she should’ve said…oh, damn it all, what should she do now? Her mind was going like a hamster in a wheel, and dreams were trying to break in; the result was almost like hallucination. That woman’s body. Still unidentified. In pieces. Head, dead. Decomposed. Hands. With a callus just in that place. Little cuts. Short nails.

  She sat straight up in bed. Of course, her mind tried to tell her, the cop could have been thinking about something else entirely. Some other case. Some show he saw on TV. But instinctively she knew better. She felt sure to her core.

  “A framer,” she whispered. “The dead woman was a framer.”

  It was no use even trying to sleep after that.

  * * *

  The next day when Ronnie walked into the shop Lois dropped all her paperwork and hugged her.

  “Ron,” she wailed, “for God’s sake, why didn’t you just put the damn key in the lost and found?”

  “The cop was here?”

  “Yes. That dead woman in the mini-storage—”

  “I know.”

  “She was a framer.”

  “Yeah. So now I know how it feels to be framed,” Ronnie said. She’d never thought much about that expression, but now she understood to her bones what it meant: to be put in a false context that looked true, a picture complete with spotlight. “Everything’s pointing at me, and I don’t know why.”

  “That detective is cute!” called a blonde framer named Tiffany.

  “Too much attitude,” Ronnie told her.

  “I like ’em with ’tude!”

  “Did he beat you with a rubber hose?” Tim asked helpfully.

  “Ooooh!” Tiffany cooed. “Did he? Please say he did!”

  “Stop it, guys,” Lois ordered, still hugging Ronnie. “We’ve got to find out who originally framed that litho.”

  It should have been simple. The order was still in the computer. The paperwork was still in the bin. But nobody had signed off on it, and nobody had entered it in the log.

  “Ronnie, do you remember, did anybody sign the back?”

  “Crud. I didn’t notice.” And the brown paper had gone with the trash. Ronnie was feeling increasingly annoyed. No, face it: increasingly scared. “Lois. Did whatshisname, the detective—did he seem to think that I, you know, that I’m mixed up in—you know, the dead woman?”

  “Honey, like he’d tell me?”

  “Well, dammit, isn’t he going to look for the deadbeat? What’s his name, Tedder?”

  “Horace Tedder. Yeah, I guess. He was asking about him.”

  With angst that echoed Ronnie’s Tim said, “You’d think I’d remember a guy who ordered puce and fuchsia mats.” According to the initials on the order, he had taken it.

  Ronnie knew how hard it was to remember yesterday’s orders, let alone one taken six months ago. Nevertheless, she bleated, “You don’t remember a thing?”

  “No. I don’t even remember the litho.”

  “Who else was working then? Lois, do you still have the old work schedules?” It felt like time to grasp at straws.

  Lois grumbled, “It’s a good thing I save everything.” She rooted in the back of a file drawer and eventually pulled the schedule for the day the Tedder order was taken. “You.” Oh, goody. Detective Llewellyn was going to eat that up when he got around to asking, which he would. “Tim. Tiffany. And Melinda.” Melinda was the only one Ronnie didn’t know very well. Melinda hadn’t lasted very long.

  “Do you ever hear from Melinda?”

  “No. But why would I?” Some people were like that, and Melinda was one of them. One day she just hadn’t showed up for work, and nobody was surprised. Ronnie remembered Melinda saying that she had held jobs as a road construction flagger, a masseuse, a telemarketer, a nail tech, a cookie factory line feeder, a horse groomer, and an exotic dancer. Not the stay-with-it sort.

  “Did she pick up her last paycheck?”

  “No. It’s still sitting—” Lois broke off and stared at Ronnie. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “The check doesn’t amount to much. She probably just blew it off.” Lois turned to the Rolodex, pulled a number, and jabbed the phone. After a moment, with a taut look on her face, she set it down. “Number’s disconnected,” she said.

  Silence.

  “I wish I had money to call a lawyer,” Ronnie said.

  Lois gave her a thoughtful look. “Honey, let’s you and me take the day off and go bar hopping.”

  * * *

  They made a disreputable pair in T-shirts and jeans mottled with frame stains; put walnut and mahogany and cherry all together and it looks like dog doo, that’s all. About the same color as Lois’s old Saab. “You don’t need to worry about a lawyer yet,” Lois said, sounding not quite sure, as she chugged the Saab out of the parking lot. “If they really thought you did anything, they wouldn’t have let you go.”

  Ronnie knew better. They just needed evidence to hold her, that was all. They wanted to wrap this thing up. “How much does a lawyer cost?”

  Too much. They talked about money, about how people got by, Tim and his child support payments, Tiffany and her kids and their asthma medication. Bar hopping meant looking for Melinda; they checked her apartment first. None of the mailboxes were tagged with her name. Lois pushed buzzers at random until she found a tenant at home. Melinda had skipped, he said.

  “If you find her,” he shouted over the intercom, “tell her come get her stuff. It’s still in the basement.”

  They found the basement stairs, went down and looked at Melinda’s worldly goods through the bars of the storage cage. At good washable-silk dresses thrown in there still on their hangers. At Melinda’s jewelry box teetering on top of the pile.

  “I’ve got a really sick feeling about this,” Ronnie said as they got back into the Saab.

  Lois nodded. “I know.”

  “Should we go to the cops?”

  “Nuh-uh. Let them figure it out. I’m not going to look at a dead person. In pieces.”

  They checked a couple of the bars where Melinda hung out, just in case. Nobody had seen her. She had so many boyfriends, no particular one of them was looking for her.

  “Dead end,” Ronnie said, then shuddered as she realized what she had said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s try looking for whatshisname, the Tedder guy.”

  They drove to the address, and it wasn’t th
ere.

  A nice old neighborhood, and the house number just wasn’t there. They drove up and down the block twice, looking, and finally pulled over and asked a woman collecting her mail at the curb where Horace Tedder lived.

  “Who?”

  “That name, Horace, he sounds like an old guy,” Ronnie suggested. No go. They drove away, silent. “Maybe Tim typoed the address?” Ronnie ventured.

  Lois snorted. She had a very expressive snort.

  “What now?”

  “Dead end.”

  “No, not quite.” Mentally Ronnie grasped for the last straw. “The artist.”

  “Huh?”

  “The artist. Do they keep records of who buys things?”

  “I dunno.”

  “He might have. It’s a signed limited edition.”

  Lois sat bolt upright behind the steering wheel. “That dinky litho is a signed limited edition?”

  “Yeah. The numbers, the rag paper, the whole routine. Which is another weird thing, why did someone slap plain paper mats on it?”

  Lois subsided back against her wooden-bead seat pad. “Tim took the order.”

  “But Tim would never have done that. And if the guy was too cheap to spring for acid-free mats, Tim would remember.”

  Lois took a long breath and let it out with eyes elevated heavenward.

  Ronnie said, “Somebody hides a key inside a job for a guy with no address who puts puce and fuchsia paper mats on a signed limited edition—”

  “Hey! Maybe the artist found out about the mats and killed the framer. Just joking,” Lois said hastily. “Just joking.”

  * * *

  Few artists had actual studios, in Ronnie’s experience, but this one did. Rather, the tasteful wooden sign said STUDIO GOROG, but really the place was a sales gallery. In a remodeled schoolhouse, bell and all. How very quaint. How very locked up and closed. SHOWINGS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY, said a placard on the door.

  “Jeez. Well, excuuuse us.” Shading her eyes, Ronnie peered in through a schoolhouse window. “Jeez,” she said again, louder, for displayed at the window was a litho identical to the one she had framed, with a hand-calligraphy price tag: one thousand dollars.

  “A thousand bucks!”

  “Huh?” Lois came over, looked, and said, “Holy catalpas, I was going to put it out for thirty-nine ninety-five with frame.”