The Man on the Washing Machine Read online

  “Did you remove the price?” the firefighter’s lover asked anxiously. I held up the price tag to assure him that I had, but he still didn’t believe me, so I unwrapped it to show him, wrapped it again, and put it in one of our striped shopping bags.

  “I hope your friend is okay,” he said. Which was nice of him. I’m in favor of people looking out for each other.

  “Thanks. I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

  A motorcycle roared to a stop outside as he was leaving and a familiar leather-clad figure came in, lifting off her helmet as she came through the door. Sabina shook her head and her fiery red curls sprang sideways like springs. She had a bruise under one eye, but otherwise she was as effortlessly gorgeous as usual.

  “Hey, Theo,” she said. She removed the huge leather gloves that came nearly to her elbows and flopped them over one shoulder. She began casually looking around the store, waiting while I rang up the sachet lady’s choice, picking up hand mirrors and pretending to inspect the display of massage oils.

  “Get a cappuccino and stay for a bit?” I said. “What happened to your face?”

  She shrugged. “I fell on a skateboard some kid left on my steps. I was in a hurry, trying to get my helmet on, stepped on the damn skateboard, fell face-first into the handrail, the helmet went flying and landed in some dog shit.” She scowled. “I don’t know who the board belongs to, but if I find him—does Davie have one?” I shook my head. “Helga says there’s one missing from one of those hideous collage things in the coffee shop, which is stupid because who would do that? Anyway, I’m off coffee. It’s keeping me up nights.” She made a comic grimace.

  “I’ve got a couple of Perriers in the office,” I said in the same tone I might offer one of Helga’s cupcakes or a dish of double chocolate fudge sauce. She giggled, put down a mirror, and squeezed past me to get to the office. The sachet lady closed the door as she left.

  “D’you want one?” Sabina said, her voice muffled, and then she came to the office door and leaned against the counter.

  “I’ll get tea later.”

  “Busy morning?” She was looking around the store.

  “Not too bad,” I said. “One of Nicole’s kimonos sold. Um, is everything okay?” I said tentatively as she rolled her eyes and took a big swallow from the bottle.

  “Nicole being Nicole.” They didn’t get along and there was usually some minor thing going on between them. “She’s been bitching about my music again.” Sabina lived in the apartment above Nicole’s ground-floor studio. Their last argument was about the smell of Nicole’s turpentine seeping through the air vents into Sabina’s apartment. Nicole’s complaints about Sabina’s music were probably payback. Although classic heavy metal can’t really be played softly and I was inclined (silently) to sympathize with Nicole on this one.

  She played with the label on her bottle and started to tear it into tiny pieces. “Kurt and I have been dating,” she said abruptly.

  “Wow,” I said, making an effort, “that’s big news.” The last I heard, she was still dating someone who occasionally sent a limo for her late at night, sending the local gossips into a swoon. She’d told me he was married.

  “Kurt wore me down. He said you wouldn’t like it and not to say anything. I thought he meant you had PTSD from your breakup or something and I didn’t want to trigger anything for you.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I think he mesmerized me; I knew you were way over him, but—”

  “It’s okay with me, honey. Truly,” I added for emphasis. Now I knew why so many of my friends thought I was still pining for Kurt. The jackass. Sabina is way too good for him. Not the kind of thing to say at this particular moment. But true, all the same. “I’m fine with it. Er … you know you’re too good for him, right?”

  She grinned. “You say that about everyone I date.”

  “Yeah, well in this case, it’s especially true. Sure you don’t want to keep seeing the married mystery man instead?”

  She snorted and then grinned. “Only you, Theo…” She squared her shoulders, tugged the zipper in her leather jacket, massaged on the gauntlets, and left, looking jauntier than when she arrived. At least one of us felt better.

  I sighed as I watched her bump into my grandfather on his way into the shop. He was wearing his weekday uniform—gray flannel trousers with a knife-edge crease and an elderly but immaculate navy blue cashmere jacket. The Aquascutum raincoat folded over his arm was more a matter of lifelong habit than any expectation of rain during our summer dry season. Although, fair enough, the summer fogs are often drippy enough to require not only a raincoat but an umbrella, too.

  He courteously stepped aside and held the door open for Sabina. His manner would have been exactly the same if she had been a linen-clad debutante, although he seldom leaves me in any doubt how he feels about things. In this case, as Sabina extinguished her red curls under the green helmet, hopped aboard the Kawasaki, and roared off down the street, the waves of disapproval nearly knocked me down.

  “An interesting mode of travel for a young woman,” he said.

  “She’s really very nice,” I said, answering the thought.

  “Indeed, Theophania?” he said neutrally. “You mentioned that you have a badger-hair shaving brush. May I see it?”

  I showed him the brush that I’d special-ordered for him. We don’t have many customers interested in $150 shaving brushes.

  Several new customers came in, asked me questions about bath oil and natural sponges, paid for their purchases, and left. I served them automatically and watched my grandfather inspecting the shaving brush minutely in the light from the front window, his long face showing only polite interest. He moved to the city a year ago at the age of seventy because, he says, he needed a change. He never accepts my invitations to visit me in my flat. (“I don’t wish to intrude, Theophania.” “It’s no intrusion, Grandfather.” Maybe he knows I’m lying.) I visit him at his Telegraph Hill house once every two weeks and we sit mostly in silence while his housekeeper serves us a tea worthy of the Ritz. Sometimes he plays Mozart on the Bechstein grand he purchased when he arrived here. He has a long nose, gun-metal gray hair and eyebrows, and an erect bearing left over from his military career. Whenever I see him I itch to have a camera in my hands. I suspect he was a spy of some sort. I don’t know where my blond hair came from—both my parents were brunettes—but my blue eyes stare at me from my grandfather’s face. I sometimes wonder what he’d say if I suggested he could make a comfortable living as a fashion model. Probably that he was already quite comfortable, thank you, Theophania. Which is true.

  He cleared his throat, and I snapped, mentally speaking, to attention. “I read a small item in the newspaper about a man falling to his death.” The reproach was a silken whisper in his otherwise neutral tone.

  “I didn’t want you to worry,” I said.

  “That was kind of you, Theophania.” He looked around the shop. “I hope business is good?” He’d never said anything else about Aromas. I was sure he wondered what I could possibly be doing behind a counter in a shop. He hadn’t approved of my career as a member of the paparazzi tribe, but at least it was a larger life than the one I was living now. He was generally in favor of living on a wide stage. He’d accepted my use of a phony name with hardly a raised eyebrow. It probably reminded him of his days at Checkpoint Charlie.

  “Very good, Grandfather. Thank you.” Nothing is lamer than my schoolgirl manners when I’m with him. We used to be able to talk when I was younger, but now I can’t find the words to break through, and I worry that he doesn’t want me to. Grandfather used to breed racehorses, so he’s a believer in bloodlines, and my mother—his daughter—was murdered by my father. I assumed he maintained the connection with me from a sense of duty; being near me had to be hard to tolerate.

  He paid cash for the shaving brush, refusing, as always, to consider a gift or even a discount. He allowed me to kiss his cheek in farewell and I watched him leave with a tightness in my chest.

>   I was exhausted and it was barely lunchtime.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Oh, hell,” I said aloud, and rested my head in my hands.

  “Hey, English. Good day so far, huh?” I looked up and saw Nat, half in and half out of the front door, grinning at me.

  I waved him inside with a smile and a slight lifting of the heart. He was beautiful. If the one-worlders get it right, one day we’ll all have Nat’s almond-shaped eyes and skin the color of milky cocoa. If we’re also as thoughtful and funny, the world will be a much better place. This morning he was wearing one of his apparently endless collection of cashmere sweaters and looked, as always, perfect. He was my closest friend, and lying to him was getting harder and harder.

  “Hi, gorgeous,” I said. “No better or worse than usual, I guess. Did Derek get back from Hong Kong?”

  “Last night. He picked up some new herbal medicine to make his hair grow. The man is obsessed.” This was an old story, but I snickered anyway. “Don’t dare say a word when you see him; he’ll cripple me if he knows I told you.”

  “You can trust me.”

  “Why don’t I believe you? You haven’t said anythin’,” he added in a different tone. “Don’t you think it looks pretty on the lavender sweater?”

  He waved the pendant under my nose. Interlocking double rings of gold were hung with fine gold rods set with tiny semiprecious stones. It sparkled and made a light, clear, metallic tinkle like a tiny wind chime dangling from his fingers. It was a gift from Nat’s lover, Derek Linton. I had seen the pendant every day for two weeks.

  “Do I have to compliment it every time I see you?” I grumbled.

  “What are friends for?” He leaned over the counter and leafed idly through Lichlyter’s notebook.

  Derek is a Tiffany-trained jeweler and Nat could sell sand to the Saudis. Their Jewelry Studio, a couple of expensively decorated rooms with discreet and gleaming showcases, was on the second floor of a building on ritzy Union Square. Most of Derek’s work is commissioned, but they also present the work of a few avant-garde young designers. I lifted the pendant from his fingers and rested it in my own. “How does it make that pretty sound, anyway?”

  “The gold tubes are hollow,” Derek said from the doorway. He came over and squeezed Nat’s shoulder. “Knew I’d find you here,” he said good-naturedly to Nat. “Anyone want another coffee? Tea, Theo?”

  I shook my head and Nat waved his half-full mug. “I’m fine,” he said.

  One of the kids in the neighborhood insists on calling them Beauty and the Beast, which is pretty astute. When he’s not smiling, Derek looks like a giant version of the frog footman in Alice, and he makes Nat, who tops six feet, look delicate. He’s a fairly high-maintenance kind of guy in some ways; touchy about certain subjects and, once he gets an idea in his head, stubborn as a mule. But he’s generous and talented and Nat loves him, which is enough for me.

  He was hollow-eyed from lack of sleep this morning. His jaws stretched in a cavernous yawn. “Sleeping on planes doesn’t do it for me anymore.”

  “How was Hong Kong?” I asked him.

  “Full of pretty sailors in white shorts.”

  Nat, who had wandered away to run his fingers through some potpourri, looked mock-indignant. “In Texas, them’s fightin’ words,” he growled.

  “I’ve heard about those Texas boys and their cattle,” Derek said. Nat chuckled.

  “Any good buys?” I asked Derek.

  Derek smiled like a gourmet about to devour a particularly juicy morsel. “A couple of pieces of carved imperial jade—dark, dark green. Beautiful. I’m going to mount them as earrings. There was some ivory—”

  “—but he was pure-minded and turned it down,” Nat interjected from over by the kimonos.

  Derek sighed. “You can’t bring it into the country anyway. Besides, my ladies would kill me. They all belong to the World Wildlife Fund.”

  “I guess politically correct is good for business,” I said. “Which is the second time today I’ve had this conversation.” I grabbed a handful of the Gibney Brothers soaps—the rose scent because Nicole was right; the stuff sells—and busied myself with price labels.

  “How’s Helga doing?” Derek said, leaning back on his elbows at the counter, following Nat with his eyes. “She looked better today, I thought.”

  “She’s still on autopilot,” Nat said. “I took her another casserole yesterday. She said you went over at zero dark thirty on Tuesday to make croissants for hours, Theo.”

  “She’s exaggerating. I was only a pair of hands. Her day starts practically in the middle of the night and she usually does the whole thing by herself. Swear to God, a couple of hours lifting those heavy baking trays and I was ready to go back to bed. She lent me her heatproof gloves and I still managed to burn myself.” I twisted my arm to expose the angry red welt on my inner arm and frowned down at it.

  Nat made a sympathetic face. “Poor baby,” he crooned. I snorted.

  “I guess they were close, her and her father, but even if not, it must be hard to lose a parent,” Derek said.

  As usual, when I received a casual reminder of my own history, I felt it to my bones and didn’t have much to say.

  He picked up a hand mirror and ran a hand over the silken smoothness of the wooden back. “This is nice work. New supplier?”

  “Uh-huh. Turn it over. The mirror is beveled.”

  “Better not. I might crack it,” he said with a wry grimace. “By the way, I want some natural sponges for my display cases—I’ve done some coral pieces—have any unusual ones?”

  “I thought coral was endangered. What about the World Wildlife Fund ladies?”

  “These are old carved pieces out of Mainland China, nothing new. One of them is a red coral chrysanthemum—probably a century old. I’ve mounted it as a brooch in a diamond and gold setting. Fabulous.”

  “Don’t you love the way he admires his own work?” Nat said slyly.

  I picked out three large sea sponges from the display. “Take them,” I said, tossing them into one of our bags. “Bring ’em back when you’re done. Those irregular ones don’t sell as well as the simpler shapes.” Which is weird, right? I mean why pay the extra for something natural that looks artificial?

  Derek thanked me with a grin that transformed his ugly face. “I wanted to pick some up in Hong Kong, but a two-day trip wasn’t enough time to check out the wholesalers and get other shopping done.”

  “I thought maybe you took the chance to pick up some herb medicines,” I said innocently. Nat gave me big eyes and a head-shaking grimace from behind Derek’s back.

  “Who told you about that?” Derek said with a scowl.

  I hesitated, mostly because he looked so incensed. “Um, well, everyone takes herb medicines nowadays, and I thought—”

  “I told her,” Nat sighed. “You know I tell Theo everythin’. Just because your hair’s a little thin—and whose isn’t?” he added hastily as Derek’s heavy eyebrows drew even closer together. He deliberately caressed Derek’s new crew cut. “Stylish,” he drawled. “And every little hair standin’ right up on end.”

  Derek finally smiled slowly and shook his head. “You bastard,” he said, pretending to shake Nat’s hand off his shoulder, but holding it there with his own. “I said to keep it private. Have you told anyone else?” We both solemnly shook our heads.

  “No, come on, you two. I’m embarrassed enough as it is.” And he looked it; his cheeks were even a little pink. Funny.

  “Fine.” Nat raised his hand in a mock pledge. “I promise I won’t tell anyone else except Theo that you are obsessed with findin’ a cure for your thinnin’ hair. Not that it’s thinnin’!”

  “And no mention of Chinese medicines! Theo?” Derek growled.

  “I promise, too, mardy arse. What about Rogaine?”

  Derek said: “What in hell is a mardy arse?”

  At the same time Nat said: “He has an allergy to one of the ingredients so—”

 
Derek rolled his eyes. “Does no one know the meaning of the word ‘private’? Has there been anything new about the poor guy who took a nosedive off number twenty-three?” he added firmly to me. “What was his name; did we know him at all?”

  Deciding he really was embarrassed, I went with the change of direction. “It was Tim Callahan; you knew him, right?”

  “Huh. We went to school together. He was pretty much always a stoner. He and Nicole were married for about five minutes back in the day. Does she know?”

  I was taken aback. “I had no idea. She said something about him, but never mentioned they were married! Honestly, she sounded pissed off at him. I thought her husband was a lawyer or CPA or something.”

  “Husband number two. That didn’t last long either,” Nat said waspishly. I looked at him in surprise. He wasn’t often catty. He rolled his eyes at me.

  “Maybe she didn’t tell you about Tim because it’s not a happy memory.” Derek looked at my expression and grinned. “Don’t get weirded out, Theo. This is a small town in some ways. Half my eighth-grade class works in the Financial District and the other half belongs to my gym. I bump into guys I went to school with all the time. It’s like kids who went to SI for high school—”

  “—that’s St. Ignatius,” Nat said helpfully.

  “—they practically all go to USF for college and stay local. Seems like even the ones who go to the East Coast for school come back. Anyway, Nicole and I are going for a drink this evening. I’ll take her pulse. My guess, she won’t be too cut up about it.”

  Nat frowned, started to say something, and closed his mouth.

  “Okay then,” I said into the slightly awkward silence, feeling as if I should send Nicole flowers or bake her a pie or something. “By the way, the police have said we can have access to the attic again. People are supposed to be getting their stuff out.”

  Derek frowned. “They closed it off? Did they treat it like a crime scene? I thought it was an accident.”

  “So did everyone. You two coming to the meeting tonight?” I said after a pause during which I served three customers and managed to get a few more price labels stuck on some bottles of Gibney Brothers talc, and they held hands and sipped their coffees.