sale?” I stopped short. “You bought that gorgeous head at a garage sale? That’s an important bit of information you didn’t bother to tell me. Obviously whoever sold it didn’t think it was real. I’ve had Tyler working on the thing all week. Really, P.P., you are too much.”
He shrugged.
“Who held the garage sale?”
“Daughter? I guess.”
“Well, that could be useful. What was her name?”
“No.”
I gathered this meant that he didn’t know. Or he could be saying know, not no. Sometimes translating P.P. was a pain. “But decapitated. That’s horrible. His poor family.”
“Poor head.”
“Yes, his poor head. Did Grey think the decapitation had to do with his collecting?”
P.P. shrugged, and I thought about the dangers of collecting. They didn’t usually involve murder, more often money poorly spent, fakery, forgery, excess. “You’re right, P.P. We need to go meet the woman who held the yard sale.”
“Maybe not related.”
“You told me the previous owner died a suspicious death. Decapitation is pretty suspicious.” There couldn’t have been two murders of collectors of Khmer art in the Bay Area within the past few months I didn’t think.
P.P. looked at me apprehensively. He knew I loved to read mysteries.
“I’m not suggesting we go to find her because of the murder. I’m thinking about our research on the head and its provenance. Do you think Grey was the dealer who sold it to him?”
“Yes.” But, as usual, he didn’t offer more.
I changed the subject. “What did you buy?”
P.P. shrugged and pulled his bag a bit closer to his body.
He wasn’t going to tell me a thing about his purchases. Probably still smarting over my concerns regarding the stone head. “C’mon, P.P. Show and tell.”
He distracted me with the strands of enormous turquoise beads screening the stall that we were passing. “Real?” he asked.
It was a question I couldn’t ignore. I pulled a strand toward me and bit one of the beads. If only I had some matches to test them further. When I turned around, P.P. was gone.
4
“I found him, you know. His body. His head.” Peggy, Tom Sharpen’s daughter, ushered us into the room, but hung back in the doorway. Lanky, thin, and tense, she wore an expensive sequined top that had no place at ten in the morning and didn’t go with her purple jeans. It was as if she’d decided as she dressed that she needed to look good for us, but then couldn’t pull herself together enough to coordinate a wardrobe. “It made no sense. He made no sense.”
P.P. and I looked around at the freshly painted walls, the newly finished floor, a little confused as to why we were in the room where Tom Sharpen had been murdered.
Following our eyes, she said, “We had to redo the entire room. The floors. Even though the stains were gone, I still saw them. Like a giant Rorschach, that’s what kept going through my mind, so even though we’d cleaned the floor, over and over, I insisted we had to redo it. My brother didn’t want to bother, but my father’s blood had seeped deeply into that wood, it needed to be cleansed. And the walls. The blood everywhere. Even the ceiling.” She looked up. “I still see it and I keep thinking that anyone who might want to live in the house will be able to see it, too.”
I knew what she said was true about the blood splatter from a decapitation. I’d gone online and read about decapitation, arteries severed, blood exploding out of the body, up, out. What I’d pictured was blood squirting up from the neck of the Baphuon-style head, not from a living person. Conceivably because it was more alive to me because I’d held it. Funny the mind’s tricks.
“He made no sense,” she repeated in her trance-like voice. “There he was, over by the desk, but here he was at my feet, his eyes filmy.” She took a slight step back as she looked down. Was she afraid that she was stepping on the spot where his head had lain?
P.P. and I stared at the spot.
“I wanted to talk with him. I think I did talk with him. I said, What happened, what happened? The police told me I said it over and over when they arrived. How could it happen? I asked. Then, What happened? How?“She looked away from the spot. “‘Happen’ sounds like ‘happy,’ doesn’t it? I think I wanted ‘happen’ to turn into ‘happy,’ for the moment to become another time. But it didn’t. It never will.”
Her distress was unsettling and her description so vivid that I imagined the head, the body, the blood. I moved toward her, to comfort her, but she steeled herself. No stranger could comfort her, since no friend had been able to. I felt her unsteadiness, her off-kilter stance, and saw her restless eyes, her self-hugging arms. I said, “It must have been awful. I can’t even imagine.”
Coming out of her reverie, she looked at me more closely and relaxed a little. “What it is. What it means. It’s impossible to explain it to someone who hasn’t experienced it.”
“I’m sure. The suddenness, the violence, the helplessness. I think all I would want would be revenge.”
“Exactly. Someone to find the killer. For them to pay.”
We looked at each other.
“Very difficult,” P.P. mumbled.
She nodded, then seemed to fall back into her trance. “I just really couldn’t understand why he was here and he was there. I asked him, What are you doing? He didn’t know what he was doing. I knew that. But it was a question he used to ask me often. A critical question. Like, Why did you spray blood all over the room? Why did you leave your head where someone would trip over it?” She laughed a brittle laugh.
P.P. and I looked at each other. “The furniture,” he said, trying to get her thinking of something other than her father’s head on the floor.
“Yes,” she said, the tangible pulling her back to us again. “They’re coming to pick it up today. Or tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow. We sold most of the furniture at the yard sale, but nothing from this room. We dragged a few pieces outside, but they didn’t sell. So we’re giving what’s left to Goodwill. No one will know.” She saw our confusion. “No one will know that we had to clean the blood off these. That they were in the room with him.”
“And his papers about his collection? They’re here, in his study?” I asked.
“They were. My brother went through all his papers.” She pointed at the old oak file cabinet. “It’s empty. At least he told me it was. Why are you interested in those? Did you buy something at auction?” It seemed to suddenly have dawned on her that we were there for a reason and that the reason might not be to see the scene of his death.
“Here,” said P.P.
She looked at him, uncomprehending.
“P.P.
