Wicked Fix (7 page)
"I reached for him." Victor held up his hands, to
show how he'd done it. They were surprisingly large,
capable-looking hands with long, muscular fingers.
"I put," Victor went on, "both of them on his
throat, and I located his carotid arteries. And I.pressed
them, so he'd know I could find them again if I needed
to."
I waited hopefully for Arnold to cut in and ask
what had happened next. But he didn't, confirming my
suspicion that he already had more on Victor than even
Victor's big mouth had given him.
Just then Sam burst in. "Mom, you won't believe
--"
He stopped. "Or maybe you will. You okay,
Dad?"
"I'm fine, Sam," Victor said. "I think Arnold has
something to say to me, though. Don't you?"
"Yeah." Arnold opened the small paper sack he
was carrying. Inside was a zip-lock plastic bag. "Recognize
this?"
Victor peered studiously at it. "Yes, I do. It's my
scalpel. From my collection of historical items. How do
you happen to have it?"
You had to hand it to the guy. He'd known Arnold
was coming, and he'd been home to clean up and
change clothes, so he must have known the scalpel was
missing; that collection was his most prized possession.
At that point, I'd have been falling apart.
"Found it at the murder of a guy named Reuben
Tate," Arnold said. "Who I understand you had a few
words with at the Mexican place last night."
"That's right. This," Victor went on, indicating the
blood-caked object in the plastic bag, "is the most valuable
of my items. Dr. Gushing, the pioneer neurosurgeon,
used it himself."
Suddenly it all seemed to come over him, all he had
been saying, and what Arnold was doing here. But even
then he didn't panic.
"It would be," he finished, "a pity to lose this instrument.
Do try to see that it's well taken care of,
won't you?" he asked Arnold respectfully.
That's the other thing about Victor: he is capable
of these small instances of grace, during which you just
can't figure out how he manages to be such a jerk the
rest of the time.
Arnold sighed heavily. "Dr. Tiptree, I'm placing
you under arrest. You have the right to remain silent
..."
And so on. When Arnold finished, Victor got up
and pushed his chair in carefully. "I'll be calling an
attorney, Jacobia. I'll put the house up if it comes to a
question of bail."
He didn't know that in Maine there is, for all practical
purposes, no bail on a murder charge. But I nodded;
it didn't seem like a useful thing to tell him, just at
the moment.
"I'll watch your place till you get home, Dad,"
Sam said, his face full of shock, and Victor smiled encouragingly
at him.
"Good boy. I'll be back soon, though. Don't worry
about me."
Then without further ado he went out ahead of
Arnold, who even after informing Victor of his rights
hadn't asked where he'd been the night before, once
he'd departed the Mexican restaurant.
So I believed that Arnold must already know.
And unfortunately, I was correct.
After which everything got worse.
A lot worse. "Dad didn't come home at
all last night," Sam said.
It was a couple of hours after Victor had
gone, and we were crouched in the back hall, applying
steel wool to the old cast-iron radiator that has lurked
there since the house got central heating, nearly a hundred
years ago. Sam had gone all over the scabrous,
red-enameled surface--what had someone been thinking?
--with a paint scraper; afterward we would vacuum
and wipe it thoroughly, preparatory to painting it.
"I got in, and he wasn't there," Sam went on. "So I
thought he might be out looking for me. You know
how he gets sometimes, like he can't think straight and
he goes off halfcocked."
Oh, did I ever. I rubbed a patch of red enamel from
one of the delicate fern patterns cast into the antique
radiator iron.
This, by the way, is not the method the old-house
manuals tell you to follow when you are repainting
antique radiators. Their method consists of:
1. Removing the radiators; I mean, actually, physically taking them out of the house.
2. Hiring a professional to sandblast themdown to the bare metal.
3. Spray painting the radiators, keeping in mind that silver or gold paint inhibits heat
radiation, and
4. Hooking the radiators back up to yourheating system, again with professional
assistance.
This advice has the marvelous advantage of requiring
other people to do most of the heavy work for you.
But it ignores several crucial real-world facts about old
radiators, such as their weight, fragility, and rusted
solid connections to your household plumbing. Following
the old-house manual's advice on the topic, in other
words, can be a quick route to radiator hell.
On the other hand, stripping one slowly is a fine
way to let your emotional engines idle while you are
trying to figure out what to do next.
"So then what happened?" Ellie prompted Sam
gently.
She'd been going around with the vacuum cleaner,
trying to get the little chips of red enamel up off the
floor before Monday decided that they were edible.
Sam sighed, moving the steel-wool pad. "So I went
looking for him. By then it was way after midnight."
Coming in to find Bob Arnold in the process of
arresting his father, Sam had been carrying some things
he and Tommy had spent the previous afternoon fooling
around with. Now they lay on the kitchen table,
forgotten: a pocket-sized, U.S. Coast Guard-issue
Morse code instruction book bound in blue imitation
leather, and a flat, 1950s-era cardboard box, its
brightly illustrated cover proclaiming that it contained
a genuine Ouija.
"Because you know Dad," Sam continued. "He
wouldn't've tried going to Tommy's, if he wanted me,
or called there. It would have been, like, too obvious."
The Ouija board gave me an uneasy feeling. But I
figured that with all that was going on now, Sam might
forget about the dratted thing.
"Anyway, I got my bike, rode downtown, out to
South End, and back again on County Road. But no
Dad. So then I started getting worried about him. I
went back and sat around awhile waiting for him."
"Nothing on his answering machine, or anything
like that?"
He shook his head, working his way along the side
of the old radiator a final time with the pad of steel
wool.
"Nope. I thought of that. You know, that maybe
he went out for some other reason, somebody'd called
him. Then I went through the house to see whether I
could figure out what he'd been doing before he left."
"And?" I ran my hand over the now-smooth antique
heating fixture. Before there were furnaces, my
old house had been heated with stoves, and originally
with open fireplaces; the chimneys remain, and when
the wind blows hard they howl like a chorus of demented
banshees, one in each room.
"And it turned out that while I'd been out hunting
for him, he must have been back. Because when I first
came home--"
Sam glanced at me; there had been, since Victor's
arrival in town, a problem in the definition of just what
constituted Sam's home: my house, or Victor's? In the
end, Sam had decided on both, but he tried not to rub
my nose in it.
"When I first went in," he rephrased smoothly, "I
looked in his study. Everything in there was neat and
normal like always."
A few feet away, Ellie had been gazing out the
kitchen window while she listened, watching the purple
grackles moving en masse across the lawn, a glossy
regiment. Now she looked over alertly.
"And the second time?"
"He'd been there, in a hurry," Sam said. "Or I
thought he had. His desk drawer was open, and the
cabinet where he keeps the old instruments, the antique
things from his history collection. That was open, too,
and it didn't look so perfect to me, lined up all careful
the way he always keeps his stuff."
Victor had bone saws, trephines, gadgets that
looked like nutpicks, all of it once the absolute height
of high-tech medical equipment; he had collected such
things since he was a medical student, buying them at
auctions or from private estate sales.
"Like somebody," Sam finished, "had been in
there, looking for something. But I just assumed it must
have been Dad. Because who else?"
Deliberately, Ellie took a mixing bowl out of the
cabinet and got out the ingredients she needed for baking
cream scones. She thinks best, she always says,
when she is cooking.
"Were the doors locked? Of his house, I mean?"
She knew Sam had keys.
"Nah." Sam shook his head. "He does it like everybody
else around here does now, locks when he
goes to bed. Otherwise--"
He made a frittering gesture with his hands, indicating
the general daytime attitude to locking up in
Eastport. People walk in and leave things on hall tables
all the time: baked goods, jars of homemade marmalade,
borrowed Tupperware.
"It's mostly," Sam summed up, "wide open."
Which, with a valuable historical collection in the
place, I thought was pretty silly. Victor didn't even lend
Tupperware, because he didn't own any; too hard to
sterilize properly. But he had probably enjoyed the idea
of not locking and had gone overboard with it.
Ellie put on my green plaid apron with the moose
pattern trimmings and the moose heads chain-stitched
in green embroidery floss. In it, I always resembled the
animal depicted upon it, but she looked fetching.
"So you never did find out where your father was,
or what he was doing?" she asked.
Sam finished wiping the radiator, went into the
kitchen, and sat at the kitchen table. "Well, not what
he was doing," he said reluctantly. He began turning
the Morse book around and around on the table.