A Head in Cambodia. Nancy Tingley
his complexion was sallow.
He leaned closer. “I plan to come up to your museum at the beginning of the week, once I’ve packed up. Hopefully I won’t have much to pack by then. I live in Bangkok.”
“Good luck,” I said, turning to look at the sculptures in his stall, moving out of the aisle and in amidst the Buddhas, away from Grey and his hover. “Has business been good tonight?”
“Various people have helped me out.” He nodded toward P.P.’s bag.
“See you, Grey,” called a youngish man bustling by with his well-dressed wife, the diamond on her ring finger weighing down her hand. An attractive, youngish couple with a look that said tech start-up. At least that’s what it said in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’d have killed for her crimson boots.
“Good to see you, Barker, Courtney,” Grey said, raising his hand.
She slowed and waved. “We’ll be back over the weekend.”
“Talk with you again about that piece,” her husband said, taking her elbow and hurrying her along.
“Who?” P.P. frowned as he watched them weave away amidst the crowd. He was always concerned about the collecting competition.
“Local people. Bought a few things.”
“You, too, it seems,” I said. I’d ask him later what he’d purchased, though when I looked around the stall, I didn’t see anything that seemed particularly to P.P.’s taste. Moving farther into the space and away from the two men, I looked at the small bronzes in a wall case. Two rather coarse Cambodian sculptures sat on the top shelf, while folkish northern Thai or Lao bronzes populated the lower shelves. Two Burmese weights in the form of karaweik birds had been squeezed in with the rest. The men’s continued conversation hummed wordlessly in my ears until I heard “decapitated.”
“Terrible, really terrible. He seemed a very nice man,” Grey said.
Unable to contain my curiosity, I moved back to Grey and P.P. “Who are you discussing?”
“Tom Sharpen, a local collector,” said Grey. “Down in Atherton. I flew here to the States to discuss a piece with him. A terrible loss. He had a good eye.”
Clearly for him the loss wasn’t the person, but the sale, the promise of more sales. “What was the piece?” It was a rude question to ask, but I hadn’t thought before speaking.
P.P. cut me off before I could say anything more. “See you, Grey. Want to finish the fair tonight. Moving, Jenna.” He took my elbow and led me away.
“Why did you drag me off?” I said. “He was about to answer.”
“Atherton. Where I bought the head. Murder. Be careful about fakes.”
That flummoxed me. “What do you mean, be careful about fakes?”
“Don’t know. Need to go to garage sale house.”
“Garage 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