Most Likely to Die (A Kate Jasper Mystery) (14 page)

- Fourteen -

Lillian went silent again, the phone still pressed to her ear.

Just what did “all right now” mean? All right, now that Sid was dead? No, not necessarily, I told myself. It could mean a lot of things. All right now that the back screen had been repaired, for instance. Or all right now that the kids’ colds were better. Or…It could mean anything.

An air-powered drill started up a few feet behind us, taking bolts off a tire. The sound reminded me of a dentist’s drill. A great big dentist’s drill. But there was no antiseptic smell here. Only grease and rubber and all kinds of smells that a dentist’s office wouldn’t have allowed. My queasy stomach wasn’t sure whether dentist office smells or auto shop smells were worse.

And it wasn’t just the smell. It was the vibrations that were getting to me. Not the psychic ones, but the mechanical ones from all the machinery pumping and lifting and drilling and grinding. And the frustration.

What the hell was Jack saying to Lillian now?

“Jack, remember I have much love for you,” Lillian told him after a few more minutes went by. She sighed and turned her head, noticing that I was a foot away from her for the first time.

She aimed a glare my way that could have drilled concrete. I took the hint, walking off a yard or so to watch a Volkswagen van go up on a hydraulic lift. That didn’t help my queasy stomach any. And now that Lillian was finally doing the talking, I was too far away to hear her except in little pieces.

I caught “…call Mom?” in a moment of relative silence. And later, “to sing,” and “the children.” And a final “goodbye,” as she hung up the phone.

I let her come to me, acting acutely casual. If I’d turned around to face her she’d have known I’d been listening to her farewell to Jack. I was pretty sure she knew anyway, but just in case…

“Kate,” she said softly from behind me.

I turned now, hoping for an explanation of what I’d overheard, but resisting the urge to ask. Eavesdroppers don’t have interrogation rights.

“Jack is home with the kids today,” she told me.

I nodded, wanting more, mentally willing her to tell me more.

“He’s having a difficult time now. ‘In the dumps,’ I guess you’d say…” Her words tapered off as if she’d just noticed who she was talking to.

Then she pulled her head back and glared again. For some reason, it just made me want to talk to her more.

“I’d sure like to see your sculpture,” I ad-libbed frantically.

“My sculpture?” She tilted her face, the glare receding slightly.

“That was your stuff at your house, wasn’t it?” I pressed on. “All that beautiful bronze curling stuff and the busts?”

She nodded, the glare almost completely gone now from her small pretty face.

“I work from the back room here,” she told me. Her tone was quiet, almost shy now. She lifted her hands gently, as if in denial. “It’s not like a gallery, only a workshop.” She paused. “A studio,” she corrected herself.

“I’d love to see it,” I insisted.

Lillian led me through a door in the back of the auto shop and it was like beaming onto another planet. I could still hear the racket of the auto shop behind us. But the visuals were magic.

The back room was clearly an addition with its white plasterboard walls and high, skylighted ceilings. It was lined with workbenches. And tools. And art. That’s where the magic came in.

There were yard-long strips of bronze curved into forms that suggested, but weren’t quite recognizable, shapes from nature. And I saw a few tiny pieces on another bench that looked like jewelry.

But what I loved were the busts. They were mostly of women. Real women with wrinkles and ringlets and Afros and jowls and scars. With beads hanging from their bronze ears and glass marbles for eyes. Those marbles brought them alive. Or maybe it was the detail work. The spirit of each woman was as clear as if she were telling her own story. I knew this one was a proud warrior, that one an intellect, and this one a performer, definitely a performer with a sly wink in her marble eye. Lillian was good.

Only a few of the busts were in bronze though. There were a few stone carvings of a more traditional type. But the majority of the busts were made of plaster. And the plaster ones were stacked everywhere, underneath workbenches, on top of workbenches, on chairs, and on the floor.

“Wow,” I whispered finally. “They’re incredible.”

Lillian’s lips curved into a little smile. Then she tilted her face away. Embarrassed?

“They’re so real,” I added. “Are they from real people?”

“I do busts of the socially prominent—you call these ‘socialites’ I think—on commission. But most of these are faces I’ve passed on the street, faces I couldn’t forget. They burn into my mind like…like music.”

I nodded. I wouldn’t forget them either. Not now.

“You’ve made them immortal,” I said. And I meant it.

A faint blush touched her skin. She turned her face even further away now. Was it the praise that embarrassed her, I wondered, or her exposed passion for her own work.

“I sculpt the busts first in plaster,” she told me brusquely, jerking her face in the direction of the biggest workbench. “Then I have them cast in bronze at the foundry.”

She pointed up at the free-form pieces. “The abstract pieces I weld myself. I have sold some to banks, hospitals, institutions—institutions don’t want anything representational. And I sell a little jewelry, here and there.” She paused and sighed. “But it’s the women I love doing. I am ‘into’ the women.”

I understood her completely. Though I worried that her love for American idioms might get her in trouble someday.

“I like the women best too,” I agreed. “They have personality, soul—”

“Yes,” she interrupted eagerly. “I see this woman on the street.” She pointed at the proud-faced one. “And I want to capture her soul. Why is she so confident? What does she have in her soul to make her so?”

I left some fifteen minutes later, so overwhelmed by the art and the conversation that I’d almost forgotten my purpose in bringing up the sculpture in the first place. It had been an excuse to ask more questions about Jack.

“What does Jack think of your work?” I asked as we passed through the magic door back into the din of the auto shop.

“He loves them. He sees in them what he feels in his music. The same ‘vibes,’ he says. I think that’s why he first fell in love with me. And I with him. The American expressions are so wonderful, ‘falling in love.’ I did feel like I was falling. Especially when I heard his music…” Suddenly something pinched her small pretty face, something unhappy. “He is a very talented man.”

“Does he still play?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” she said, then shook her head as if she had said enough.

I let it go.

I grabbed her hand impulsively, her calloused sculptor’s hand.

“Thank you for letting me see your work,” I told her. “And let me know when you have gallery exhibitions. I’m not rich enough to buy, but I have friends.” And I have Wayne, I thought. Maybe he could set her up a show in the gallery of one of his restaurants. But I didn’t want to promise anything until I talked to him.

She nodded, blushing again faintly.

I left her then and sat in my car, my curiosity wrestling with my conscience. Jack Kanick was at home, not more than a few blocks away. And I wanted to talk to him. Badly. But a bond had been forged between Lillian and myself through her work. Would she feel I’d betrayed that bond if I visited Jack? I could always tell her first that I was going to. No. I shook my head. That would never work. She would just ask me not to. She was clearly protecting Jack from outsiders. In the end, that realization was the deciding factor that allowed my curiosity to win. Why was she protecting Jack from outsiders? I had to know.

I walked up the flagstone path to the Kanicks’ house alone this time, taking the steps slowly enough to admire the beautifully landscaped yard and breathe in the scent of sweet alyssum before I knocked on the door.

A small girl, maybe eight years old, with a serious Eurasian face opened the front door and peered out into the light. What was her name? Lark, that was it.

“Are you a solicitor?” she enquired gravely.

I snorted involuntarily. It was better than laughing hysterically. Because technically I was. I was here to solicit information from Jack. But I didn’t tell the girl that.

“No,” I lied instead. “I’m Kate Jasper, an old friend of your father’s.” I also decided not to remind her we’d met at Sid’s party. That had to be too traumatic a subject to bring up to a child. It had certainly been too traumatic to bring up to most of the adults involved. Including myself.

The girl was still staring at me.

“Is your father in?” I prompted.

“Daddy!” the girl shouted loud enough to back me up a step. I wondered how many of her formative years had been spent down at the auto shop. Learning to speak over the sound of hydraulic lifts and pumps and drills.

It seemed to take forever for Jack to get to the front door. I could hear his shambling steps before I spotted him. Finally, I saw his head looming over Lark’s, one hand up shielding his eyes from the sun.

When Jack showed me into the house I saw why he was shielding his eyes. The Kanicks’ living room was darker than the day before, the curtains closed and the lights shut off. I could hear Roberta Flack singing “Killing Me Softly With His Song” somewhere in the background. I squinted up into Jack’s face. It looked much the same in the gloom, hidden beneath its beard and black-rimmed glasses. This close to him I caught a whiff of acrid sweat. Not the smell of the need to bathe, but the smell of distress. But what kind of distress?

“Do you want me to stay, Daddy?” Lark asked from behind us.

“No,” he murmured gently. “That’s okay, honey. You can go fool around with your brother. Or draw. You have plenty of paper?”

Lark nodded quickly, then walked off, turning and looking once more over her shoulder as Jack motioned me to sit on the same navy-and-white-striped couch I’d sat on the day before. She was still worried about him. You could see it in her eyes. But she left the room as requested while Jack slowly lowered his tall, skinny body onto the couch across from mine.

I tried to think of what to say. At least he hadn’t questioned my presence here. Nor had he welcomed me. I wasn’t even sure if he recognized me. He’d shown me in without a word. And now he was staring just above my head, as if there was someone else perched there. I resisted the urge to look up to see if there was.

“So, how are you doing, Jack?” I tried.

“Okay,” he replied, his voice a low mumble, his shoulders slumped.

He brought his eyes down, and they seemed to register me for a moment.

“Kate,” he said, his volume normal. “Kate Koffenburger.”

I flinched in spite of the relief of his recognition. God, I hated that name. But I didn’t correct him. I wasn’t here to remind him of my name change.

“Listen, Jack,” I said, remembering what I
was
here for. “I wanted to talk to you about Sid.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again.

“Sid,” he repeated dully.

“You were one of Sid’s best friends,” I told him cheerily. I wasn’t sure if this was true. But I was pretty sure at this point he was one of Sid’s
only
friends. “What was Sid really like?”

“Oh.” His eyelids lowered for another moment. And another. I was just about to prompt him again when the lids finally rolled back up.

“Sid was really cool,” he told me, his eyes rambling around the room as his voice rambled around the octaves. “Like always planning stuff. Tricks and goofy stuff. A real wild man sometimes. The court jester of Gravendale High.” Jack hummed a little and his shoulders straightened ever so slightly. The Beach Boys? Something from the past, the deep past. “Dug music too, though he didn’t talk about it much. Music…”

“You were buddies?” I asked when I realized he had rambled off into silence again.

“Yeah, buddies,” he repeated. “Sid was a good buddy. Always goofin’ on people. Making them laugh.”

“And making them angry?”

Jack’s eyes landed on me again, clear for a moment behind the thick glasses. He shrugged, then looked away.

It was time to come back to the present.

“So Sid looked you up when he returned to the area a couple of years ago?” I prodded.

“Yeah,” Jack agreed. He started humming something that sounded an awful lot like “Mack the Knife.” But maybe it was my imagination.

“And was he the same old Sid?” I pressed.

“Same old Sid,” Jack repeated. “Older, but still funny. And scamming. Always scamming.”

“Did you know there’s a rumor going around that you owed Sid money?” I asked.

Jack’s brows went up for a moment above his glasses. A smile touched his lips. “That’d be a turnaround,” he said. And then the smile was gone.

“Well, the police have heard the rumor,” I warned him. “You might want to tell them it isn’t true.”

Jack shrugged, then his shoulders slumped even further. I had a feeling I’d lost him.