Rubout by Elaine Viets

talk to Queen Elizabeth, but I was still surprised she agreed to talk to riffraff like me. She briskly told me I could have ten minutes ateleven o’clock tomorrow morning. That was the only time she had available. Ever. She also gave me directions to her house on the St. Louis Country Club grounds. I wrote them down, turned off of Upper Barnes Road like she said, and got lost anyway. I expected that. It’s easy to get lost on the winding roads around there. I passed the country club, the polo field, and parts of the golf course several times, and even I had to admit they looked fabulous, as they say in Ladue. Nice, too, as we say on the South Side. It was another golden late-fall day. I enjoyed watching the sunlight through the Ladue leaves. I enjoyed it even more because I knew those leaves drove Ladue nuttier than a nest of squirrels. With all those trees, the city spent ungodly amounts on leaf pickup and collection.
    Her house was typical for the area: a six-bedroom white frame colonial revival with black shutters and a lot of lawn. It didn’t look that rich. But I knew I was in a different world from the moment the door opened. Cordelia, the housekeeper, answered the door. She was a grandmotherly woman with mocha skin, gray hair, and a comfortable figure.
    “I better take your coat and put it under lock and key,” Cordelia complained. “Coats are disappearing around here right and left. Right and left. The burglars track in mud, too. Come right in this house and take an old lady’s coat.”
    There was Elizabeth, in another one of her formidable suits. But she wasn’t acting like a queen. She was trying to placate her “treasure,” Cordelia. “I am sorry your coat was misplaced,” she said to Cordelia. “I said I would buy you a new one.”
    Cordelia was not afraid to talk back to Elizabeth. I guess she’d been with her too many years to be awed by her. She snapped back, “It wasn’t ‘misplaced.’ That coat was stolen. I thought I was working in a good neighborhood here, but I guess you can’t count on nothing no more.”
    I stood there in the sunlit, slate-floored hall, while the two women bickered. I could have been a hat rack for the attention they paid me. It was funny. They were both about the same age and size, but Elizabeth had been surgically nipped and tucked. It didn’t make her look younger than Cordelia, just unnaturally smooth, like a statue.
    “It could not have been a burglar, Cordelia,” Elizabeth was saying. “Nothing else was missing from this house, and I am sure they would steal more than your five-year-old winter coat.”
    “Huh! There were some good years left in that coat,” Cordelia said, but she and Elizabeth finally remembered I was there. I hoped the five minutes they spent arguing didn’t count against my ten. Cordelia took me into a sitting room that had to be Elizabeth’s famous green room. It was painted pale green to highlight a pair of really ugly Meissen vases on the mantel. Endora had told me about those. She said I should also look for a Philadelphia highboy that may or may not be of exceptional quality and two late eighteenth-century tilt-top tables. I found them all. They were supposed to be from her husband’s family. Endora didn’t mention the two 1960s Waterford lamps with raw silk shades turning slightly yellow on the tables. She also told me that the rug on the floor was from Elizabeth’s family and it was “seriouslygood.” She didn’t say anything about the serious hole in the rug. It was mostly covered with a three-legged table. Jinny told me to compliment the rug and see how long it would take Elizabeth to tell me it was a prized overall pattern. So I did.
    “Nice Kirman,” I said.
    “Yes, it is,” said Elizabeth. “It is not one of those with a center medallion but with a prized overall pattern.”
    Less than two seconds. And the way she said it, I was sure her family climbed Mount Everest to buy that rug. The rest of the furniture was