When I woke up, Daniel was nibbling on my ear.
“What ever happened to that dinner you promised me?” I asked sleepily.
“Why, are you hungry?”
“Starved,” I said, sitting up. “What time is it, anyway?”
He picked his watch up from the nightstand and handed it over to me.
“Seven,” I said, sinking back into the pillows. “I’ve got to get going.”
“What’s your hurry?” he asked, pointing toward the Trojan carton, which was surrounded by little foil wrappers. “We’ve barely made a dent in the supply.”
“You may be on vacation,” I said, planting a kiss on his forehead, “but I’ve got work to do. Including getting over to that house on the Southside to pick up your new living-room furniture.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, yawning again. “Furniture.”
“Dibs on first shower,” I said. I took the quilt and wrapped it around myself and padded toward the bathroom.
“I think we should share,” he called after me. “The drought, you know.”
“It rained most of yesterday and all night last night,” I pointed out. “Anyway, I’m serious. I really do need to get back to Savannah.”
By the time I got out of the shower, Daniel had fallen back to sleep. I dressed in the clothes I’d brought to wear crabbing, and was silently grateful that I had something clean to change into, just in case anybody who’d seen me leaving my carriage house yesterday should happen to glance out the window and see me coming back today—in the same clothes.
Downstairs, I made coffee and piddled around in the kitchen, slicing the french bread and toasting it under the broiler with some slices of Havarti cheese Daniel had packed. When my breakfast was ready, I took it out to the dock and watched the early morning sun sparkling on the May River. A blue heron stalked quietly by in the mud, and I tossed it the last bits of my toast.
At eight, I took a cup of coffee and more of the cheese toast upstairs for Daniel. He was still sleeping. I set the dishes down on the nightstand and leaned over to kiss him, but as soon as I got close, an arm snaked around my waist and pulled me down onto the bed.
“None of that.” I laughed, trying to push myself away from him. “I’ve showered and I’ve dressed, and now I’m ready for business.”
“Mmm,” he said, running his hands up under my T-shirt. “I’m ready for business too.”
“I can tell,” I said, patting the covers. “But that’s not the kind of business I had in mind. Come on, Daniel, I really need to go to town.”
He grinned.
“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “Is everything a double entendre with you?”
“The morning after? Yes. Do you have a problem with that?”
“Not as long as you get up and get dressed and take me home. Are you going to do that, or do I hijack the truck and drive myself back to Savannah?”
“I’ll take you,” he grumbled. “But this is not what I had in mind.”
“Give me a raincheck,” I said, tugging him upright.
Tal’s BMW was parked in his slot behind the townhouse.
Daniel pointed at it. “Guess he’s not feeling up to work this morning.”
“Asshole,” I said. “I hope he has the king hell hangover of all times, after what he put me through last night.”
“What you put yourself through,” Daniel said. “I’ll call you later.”
He put the truck in reverse and started to back out into the lane.
“Hey,” I yelled, pounding on the hood of his truck to get his attention.
He stuck his head out the window. “What?”
“I’m going to go pick up your furniture this afternoon. Want to give me a check to pay for it?”
He fumbled around in the glove box until he found his checkbook. “You shack up with me for one night and already you’re making me write bad checks?”
“It better not be bad,” I told him. “I’ve got a reputation to protect.”
“It’s good,” Daniel said. “Like me.” He tore the check out of the book and handed it over.
“And what should I do with the stuff after I pick it up?” I asked. “There’s no room to store it here.”
He sighed. “What time were you going over there?”
“The guy wants it gone by five o’clock.”
“All right,” he said. “Guess I’ll just spend the rest of the day in town, then go back over to Bluffton tonight. Give me the address of the house and I’ll meet you out there. Four o’clock OK?”
“Fine,” I said. I gave him the address, and without checking to see whether or not Tal was watching out the window, I leaned in the window and gave Daniel a long wet kiss good-bye.
Inside, I propped my Beaulieu oyster plates up against the living-room mantel and stood back to see how they looked.
“Great,” I muttered. “They look great. But two oyster plates aren’t enough to fill the space. I need something else. Preferably another piece of majolica.”
I took one of the plates over to my desk and got out my magnifying glass. The Minton mark was quite clear under the glass, which made me feel much better about Daniel’s paying full price.
For the first time I looked closely at the price tag on the back of the plate. It was the dealer’s handwritten tag. Like most dealers, she’d put the store price on the tag, but there was also a series of letters and numbers which I knew was her own code, probably for the amount she’d originally paid for the plate, plus any other pertinent information she would want to remember, such as the date the piece was purchased and, possibly, the source.
Every dealer has his own code, a way of keeping inventory. Most of them allow the dealer to tell, at a glance, a fairly complete history of a piece.
I took the other plate down and checked the back, but it didn’t have a price tag, since—duh! The dealer had priced the plates as a set.
The dealer’s code was a mystery to me, but if anybody could decode it, I thought, Lester Dobie could.
Lester stared down at the oyster plate through a jeweler’s loupe.
“That’s an authentic Minton mark,” he said. “Where’d it come from?”
“My friend bought it from a shop over in Bluffton. Annie’s Attic.”
He pursed his lips. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“The dealer code is what I’m interested in,” I said. “Does it look familiar?”
He took a pencil and jotted the code down on a piece of scrap paper.
“Part of it’s just straight old pricing code, substituting letters for numbers,” he said, reading off the scrap of paper. “AEO—that’s a hundred and fifty most likely.”
“She got them for a steal if that’s all she paid. What about the rest?”
“Seven-three-oh-oh-oh,” he read off. “Could be the date of purchase. July thirtieth, 2000.”
“And the ZK?”
He shrugged. “The initials of the seller?”
“ZK,” I repeated. “Sound familiar?”
“Zack?” he said.
I dug in my tote bag until I found my business-card directory. I flipped over to the K page and glanced down at a dozen business cards belonging to antique dealers, interior designers, salvage yard operators, and other pickers. I had plenty of Ks in my directory, but no ZKs.
Lester pulled the big Rolodex from atop a stack of antique reference books on his desk and thumbed through the inch-thick section of Ks.
“No ZKs here,” he reported.
I moved papers around on the desktop until I found the Savannah yellow pages. I turned to the section for antique shops.
“Kaplan Fine Antiques. Keyes Kollectibles. King’s Ransom Antiques. Kramer & Culkin,” I said, moving my fingertip down the alphabetical listings. “Nothing matches here. Think maybe the code is reversed, and the seller is really KZ?”
He shrugged. I flipped to the Z page of my directory. Only one card, for a Ruth Zofchak, a Pennsylvania dealer who specialized in Bohemian glass.
Lester had two Zs in his Rolodex, but not KZs, and there were no Z listings in the yellow pages either.
“Could be anybody,” I said. “I buy and sell antiques from Orlando all the way to Wilmington, North Carolina.”
“Or it could just be she bought the plates from somebody who happened to have two majolica plates that just looked like the ones you saw out at Beaulieu,” Lester said.
“No.” I shook my head emphatically. “It couldn’t just be a coincidence. That woman at Annie’s Attic absolutely clammed up when I started asking questions about where she bought the plates. And the owner at La Juntique, she had the same reaction when I asked where that card table came from. No, Lester. I think they both bought stuff from the same person, who swore them to secrecy, because the stuff came out of Beaulieu, and they don’t want anybody finding out about it.”
Lester scratched his chin. “How are you gonna prove any of this? And even if you could prove the stuff came out of Beaulieu—so what?”
“It came out of Beaulieu after the memorial service for Anna Ruby Mullinax, but before I found Caroline’s body,” I said. “Don’t you see the connection? Whoever is selling this stuff off probably knows who killed Caroline. Probably killed her himself.”
Lester rolled his eyes. “Stick to picking, Weezie,” he said. “ ’Cause as a detective, you’re pitiful. You’ve been in this business long enough, you know how things work. People cut corners. They make shady deals. It’s the nature of the business. Just ’cause somebody sells an antique under the table, that don’t make ’em a murderer. Hell, if that was so, we’d all be locked up in the jailhouse.”
“I know I’m right, Lester,” I said. “Can’t you think of anybody to call? Somebody else who knows everybody along the coast? Somebody who might know a ZK?”
“Maybe,” he said. “She sure enough likes to gossip, and that’s a natural fact. Let me give it a try.”
He put his hand over his Rolodex, shielding the card so I couldn’t see the name; obviously this source was his own version of Deep Throat.
He dialed the number and waited. “Shug? Hey. It’s Lester. You been keeping sweet?” He listened, then chuckled. “Got a little puzzle for you. I’m trying to track down somebody who might be doin’ a little picking, over there in the Bluffton vicinity. All we know is the initials. Either ZK, or maybe KZ. Can you think of somebody like that?”
He shook his head. “The person’s selling off stuff could have come out of Beaulieu. You know? The old plantation house out there at Isle of Hope?”
He waited. Then wrote something quickly on his pad of paper.
“It’s a start. Thanks, shug. Tell your daddy hey for me.”
He hung up the phone and pushed the pad of paper toward me.
“Zoe Kallenberg,” I said, reading it. “You know her?”
“Never heard that name before,” he said, picking up the white pages of the phone book. He leafed over to the K listings. “Lives at two-oh-four and a half Liberty. That’d be pretty close to the intersection there at Abercorn. An apartment probably. Most likely a basement apartment.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. I opened the yellow pages back up to the antique dealer listings. L. Hargreaves was the first listing on the page. Lewis Hargreaves’ shop. At 206 Abercorn.