Ride a Painted Pony (Superromance)

by McSparren, Carolyn

  “Thank you so much, Mrs. Oliphant. I have a problem I hope you can help me with.”

  “Ma’am?” A thickly accented southern voice came down the line.

  “My accountant is trying to do my end-of-the-year tax statement, and he’s ready to kill me. I cannot for the life of me find the receipt for my county taxes this year. I keep thinking I must have paid in August when I paid the city taxes, but without the receipt I just don’t know. Could you look them up for me?”

  Nick heard a sigh. “Yes, ma’am,” the voice said wearily. It was obviously not an unusual request. “Name?”

  “Fields. Clara Fields.” Taylor crossed her fingers and held her breath.

  After a moment the voice came back. “Yes ma‘am, you paid both of ’em. Which one?”

  Taylor’s eyes widened. She’d thought they might have one storage location, not two. “Uh—better give me both.” She hesitated a moment. “Maybe I didn’t get the receipt because the address is wrong or something. What addresses do you have for me?”

  The bored voice answered at once. “Forty-eight sixty-two Park Lane Terrace.”

  “Yes, that’s correct.” Taylor stuck the telephone between her ear and shoulder and scribbled on the front of the telephone book.

  “And thirty-three fifty-five Newcomb.”

  “What zip code?”

  A deep sigh. “Three-eight-one-four-six.”

  Taylor wrote. “Thank you so much, Mrs. Oliphant,” she trilled.

  “Y’all want me to send copies of those receipts?”

  “That would be wonderful. What address are you sending them to?”

  The voice suddenly sounded sharp. “We’ve been sending them to Mississippi. Is that correct?” Suspicion began to eddy down the line.

  “Wonderful. Thanks so much.” Taylor hung up the phone and shouted.

  Nick came out of the bedroom grinning. Taylor was dancing around the room like a madwoman.

  “At last! A decent piece of luck.”

  Nick leaned against the doorjamb. “I am impressed.”

  Taylor winked at him. “Well, you should be.” She sobered. “Now, all we have to do is figure out which one has the animals.”

  “No telling.”

  “So we start with the closest one.” Taylor picked up her satchel. “Come on, we can call Mel from the car and you can tell him what a brilliant investigator I turned out to be.”

  “WHA—?” MAX SAID SLEEPILY, as he opened the door.

  A stubble of white beard gleamed on his cheeks. His eyes looked sunken, the whites unhealthily yellow and webbed with red veins. He seemed to have shrunk.

  Veda gave him one stern glance and pushed past him. He followed her to the kitchen. She nodded approvingly at the full coffee pot, pulled down a couple of mugs from the shelf beside the sink and poured each of them a cup. Then she handed Max his, and sat down at the kitchen table.

  “Sit,” she ordered.

  He obeyed, warily.

  “Maximillian Jefferson Beaumont, you are not a jerk, you’re an idiot,” Veda said.

  He drew himself up. “Now wait just a damn minute, Veda—”

  She held up her hand. “You could have confided in any of us about your grandson. We’d have helped you even if we had to stand on Main Street with tin cups. You chose to steal. You slapped every one of us in the face, starting with Nick, whom you profess to love. If that’s your idea of love and honor, I pity the men you led into battle.”

  “Now, hold on. I protest—”

  “We, you and I, are going to fix things now, today.”

  Max stared at Veda as though he’d never seen her before.

  Veda waved her hand around her. “How many square feet do you have in this place?”

  Max stammered. “About five thousand.” Then he rallied. “Hell, Veda, I will not live anywhere but this house.”

  “You’ll be sharing a six-by-ten cell with three very large and possibly amorous men if you don’t listen up,” Veda continued. “I’m not asking you to sell this house. I’m asking to share it with you.”

  Max gaped at her. “But, but...”

  She waved a hand. “I’m not going to move in with you. Frankly, at the moment I’d rather sleep with an armadillo. The place is going to kill you before you’re old enough to collect social security. You only use the downstairs. You did have sense enough to set up a master suite down here so that when you can’t get up the stairs any longer you won’t have to go into a nursing home. That was about the most sensible thing you’ve done lately.”

  “Thank you, I think.” Max attempted a smile.

  “My son is an architect,” Veda said. “My suggestion is that you turn this place into a duplex. Downstairs for you, upstairs for me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Max snapped. Veda merely looked at him, her head cocked to one side like a bird’s. “Besides, I don’t have twenty-thousand to reimburse the amusement park, so where would we get the twenty or thirty grand to finish the upstairs? And what happens when you can no longer climb the stairs?”

  “We put in an elevator or one of those stair-climbing things,” Veda said. She leaned forward. “I have the money, Max. My townhouse was bought for cash and I am a relatively rich woman. I also desperately need more room and I like the neighborhood, but most of these old places are too big and too expensive for me. Half of this place would be perfect. We put in a separate entrance and a verandah across the back.” She pointed. “The neighborhood is zoned for multiple-family dwellings. You could even redo the carriage house and rent it out.”

  Max shook his head. “This is all going too fast for me.”

  “I’m sure it is. But I’m fed to my back teeth with all this nonsense about money. Are you aware that Nick is on the hook to buy back Pete Marley’s hippocampus for thirty-five thousand dollars at the end of next week?”

  “What? That’s crazy!”

  “Of course it is, but his sense of morality and ethics demands it. Those are, I might add, concepts completely foreign to your makeup.”

  “Now wait just a minute, Veda. I never thought anyone would be hurt by what I did. I told Nick I’d do it again in the same circumstances.”

  “Proves my point. Nick wouldn’t, even if it meant he had to sell a kidney. So, do we proceed?”

  “With what?”

  “I intend to fax my son copies of the blueprints of this house as soon as I leave here. If it is feasible, we can go condo.”

  Max gulped. “It’s...uh...worth pursuing.”

  “Fine. As earnest money I’d put up twenty thousand dollars cash immediately.”

  Max exhaled deeply. “To pay for the stolen carousel horse.”

  “Precisely. Deal?”

  Max nodded slowly. “It’s something to think about.”

  Veda stuck out her hand. “Deal?” She realized that Max looked as though he’d just had a minor stroke. His eyes were unfocused and his mouth hung slack.

  After a moment he broke into a wan smile. “Deal.”

  “Good.” Veda took their cups to the pot and refilled them. She brought Max’s back and set it in front of him. He made no move to take it. Veda waved her hand over hers and blew into it a moment, then took a tentative sip.

  She set it down in front of her. “Next problem.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nick needs thirty-five thousand dollars by the end of next week. He may be able to get it eventually by suing Eberhardt’s estate, but not in that length of time. I, for one, do not intend to have Rounders go bankrupt. I propose to call Marcus this morning and tell him I want a hundred thousand dollars available to hand over to Nick before the end of next week, just in case he discovers more than one horse has been sold.”

  “You think he’ll do it?”

  “He’ll do it, all right. It’s chicken feed to Marcus. The problem is getting Nick to accept it.”

  “Never happen.”

  “We have to make it happen. And I think I know how. I’m going to make him feel
so guilty about the possibility of having to close Rounders over this, and abandon the carvers and everything we’ve all worked for, that he’ll positively beg to let Marcus Cato bail him out.”

  Max curled his lip, but said nothing.

  “I’ll bet you dinner that if it comes to a choice between accepting help from Marcus and shutting down Rounders, Nick will bite the bullet and accept.” She stuck out her hand. “Deal?”

  Max shrugged and smiled. “Yeah. Deal.” He took her hand.

  “Good. Now find me those plans.”

  Max bit his lip uncertainly. “Veda, I’m still not sure this is the way to go.”

  “The alternative is to sell the Rounders building to some developer.”

  Max ran a thumb across the stubble on his chin. “We’d all make a hefty profit. Rounders could always move someplace else.”

  Veda looked at him appraisingly. “You had offers?”

  Max raised his eyebrows, drank his coffee and leaned back expansively. The chair wobbled precariously beneath him. “Couple. Real estate agent called me a week ago with a very nice offer.”

  Veda leaned forward eagerly. “Who was the client?”

  Max shook his head. “Some developer, I assume. That property was worth squat when we took it, but what with all the fancy houses going up on the bluff and all the loft apartments, it’s gotten valuable again.”

  “Max, I want the name of that agent.”

  Max looked around. “Probably got it somewhere. Is it important?”

  Veda nodded. “It could be. I need to use your phone while you hunt for that number and those plans.”

  She waited until Max left the room, then dialed Mel Borman and told him about her conversation. He seemed eager to talk to her in a way that Max never would be.

  “I’ll give you the agent’s name and number as soon as Max hunts it up. Mel, do you think it’s possible the murders and all the rest of what’s been happening could have something to do with a real estate deal?”

  “Anything’s possible. Veda, you doing anything for lunch today?”

  Veda felt herself blushing. “I’ve got errands, then I’m going to Rounders and carve on Harvey.”

  “I’ll pick you up at Rounders about twelve-thirty.”

  “I’ll be grungy.”

  Mel’s laugh rumbled down the phone line. “You’ll be beautiful.”

  Veda hung up the phone and took her pulse. Definitely racing. Nobody had called her beautiful since Bill died. Things were looking up.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  NICK OPENED ROUNDERS and left Taylor crowing to Mel on the phone about their progress. Mel, in turn, brought her up to date about the real estate offer for the Rounders warehouse.

  “I’m calling the agent, Taylor. Interesting if the offer comes from somebody we know.”

  “Why kill the Eberhardts unless the animals are the motive?”

  “No idea. Vollmer called me this morning trying to locate you.”

  “Stall him. I don’t have time to talk to him today.”

  Mel laughed. “Sooner or later he’s bound to discover you’re with Kendall. He’s going to hate that.”

  “Tough.” Taylor took a deep breath. “Mel, I don’t know why I feel we’re on the homestretch. We seem to have more possibilities, not fewer.”

  Mel laughed. “You’ve got a nose, Ms. Hunt. Right when you think everything’s screwed up like a ball of yarn the cat dragged in, that’s when you find the single strand, and all of a sudden it unrolls smooth as silk.”

  “You feel that way too?”

  “Nope. But then I’m not that close to it. You be careful.”

  “Eugene only stalks by night.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  Taylor hung up, grabbed her satchel and headed downstairs.

  Veda was there, along with a pair of heavyset, fortyish women who looked as though they could manhandle the engine out of an eighteen-wheeler. Nick introduced them as Corinne and Sally.

  Corinne smiled perfunctorily and went back to sanding a haunch. Sally wriggled her fingers and turned back to carving a giraffe’s head.

  “Veda’s in charge until I get back,” Nick said. All three women nodded without looking up from their work. “Okay, we’re outa here,” Nick said and took Taylor’s arm. “We better take the Rounders truck. We might have some animals to bring back.”

  “Even if we find them, Danny Vollmer will want them for evidence.”

  Nick checked. “I suppose he will. Damn!”

  THE HOUSE ON NEWCOMB was a vintage nineteen-seventies ranch-style house set well back from a winding street in a neighborhood on its way down. But the yards on either side were neatly trimmed; in one a few late yellow roses held on. It was obvious that no one had attended to the Eberhardt yard in several weeks.

  The neighborhood seemed deserted. Families at work. A perfect setting for the Eberhardts.

  Taylor rang the bell. After a full minute she dug her lock pick out of her satchel and went to work. She could feel Nick’s amusement at her obvious lack of coordination. Three minutes later the lock clicked, and Taylor wiped the film of sweat off her lip, stood and brushed off the knees of her jeans. “There,” she said with obvious pride. Nick applauded silently, then leaned down and kissed her.

  “Whoa,” she gasped. “This is office hours. You promised.”

  She handed Nick another pair of surgical gloves, crossed her fingers and held them under Nick’s nose, then opened the door.

  The house smelled unused and dank. Nick clicked the light switch and a dim bulb lit in the hall.

  “It’s empty!” Taylor wailed. “Nobody’s been here for months!”

  “Maybe it was rental property they hadn’t had time to get ready to rent after the last tenants left.”

  Taylor nodded. “You’re probably right.” She looked out in the backyard. “There’s a storage shed out behind the carport,” she said.

  “I’ll check it. You look in the storage room in the carport.”

  “Meet you back at the car.”

  A few minutes later she climbed into the passenger side of the Rounders truck. “Major waste of time,” she said.

  “Now you sound depressed,” Nick told her. He reached over and ran his hand down her cheek. She covered his hand with hers.

  “Sorry. I was so positive we’d find the animals.”

  “We will. At the other house.”

  The other house lay down a back road thirty miles away on the edge of the old section of Ellendale. After three tries, they finally located the mailbox canting crazily on the edge of a steep roadside ditch.

  Nick turned into the narrow gravel driveway that wound back through a thick stand of old oak and locust trees thickly grown with poison ivy and lovevine. The trees flamed with autumn colors among the pines and scrub spruces. There was no lawn to be mowed, only several acres of thick forest and underbrush.

  “This can’t be right.” Even Taylor’s whisper sounded loud in the oppressive silence under the trees.

  The truck inched around a final curve. The house was a prewar bungalow built of dark red brick the color of dried blood. Gravel created a turnaround in front that would handle relatively large vehicles. Behind the house they could glimpse a metal building that looked like the twin of the shop in Oxford.

  Taylor felt the flow of adrenaline and drew a deep breath. She was almost afraid of what they’d find.

  Nick turned off the ignition and then turned to her. “Ready?” he said, and smiled.

  She nodded and climbed out of the truck.

  “Let’s try the house first,” she said and walked up onto the concrete front porch. She tried to peer into the front windows, but there were heavy drapes across them. She raised her electric pick in salute and went to work on the front door.

  After only a minute the lock clicked. Taylor closed her eyes and put the pick back in her satchel.

  Nick wrapped his arms around her, and she leaned against him gratefully. “Whatever we find inside, r
emember, you found these houses.” He held her chin in his hand and raised her face to kiss her gently. “That’s my girt,” he whispered.

  Taylor wanted to stay in his arms forever. She didn’t want to open the door to another empty house.

  But this one wasn’t empty.

  It was like walking into a Chinese palace hidden behind the walls of a tenement. They wandered from room to room, flicking on the lights in Venetian chandeliers as they went. Oriental rugs lay two and three deep against stained pine floors. Only the living room and one bedroom were furnished, but they were opulent. The drapes were maroon damask heavy with gold bullion fringe.

  The bedroom was furnished with a circular king-size bed covered by a real fur throw.

  “Oh, my,” Taylor said.

  “I’ll bet this is where Clara planned to spend the night.”

  “Some hideaway. I wonder whether Clara and Helmut used it together or separately with other lovers.”

  “We’ll probably never know,” Nick said. He picked up a heavy gilt picture frame. “I never saw Helmut, but this is sure Clara.” He held it out.

  “Has to be Helmut. He just looks like a Helmut, doesn’t he? White hair, white beard, that square Germanic face.” She set the picture down again and leaned against Nick. “I’ve been thinking of them as thieves, pure and simple. But they were people, Nick. They must have loved each other. They didn’t deserve to die the way they did.”

  He slid his arm around her waist and kissed the top of her head. “No, they didn’t.”

  “No carousel animals. I was so sure.” Then she brightened. “Attic? Basement?”

  Nick shook his head. “From the pitch of the roof I’d say there might be enough attic space to store the Christmas lights.”

  “Damn!” Taylor said.

  “The animals are in the workshop,” Nick said with complete composure. “You know they are, I know they are. Come on. We’ve held off long enough.”

  They walked around the side of the house towards the workshop. Doors wide and high enough to accommodate a big truck opened onto the gravel turnaround. Beside them stood a single steel entry door. It was padlocked.