I hung on for at least another minute before I heard the inner door open. The front door was unlocked, and a shrunken, balding man with wild hair and wilder eyebrows shuffled back a few steps. He was wearing a plaid bathrobe, slippers, and had a lit pipe clenched between his teeth.
What the fuck?Thiswas the owner? I suddenly didn’t feel the need to keep my guard up. No way was Mr. Robert involved in this mess. Which meant thiswasn’tabout extortion, but thecontentof the films….
“I was on the john,” he explained. “Come in, come in.”
“Er—thanks. Sorry it took a while to get here.”
“Take your shoes off,” he warned, pointing at my feet.
“What—oh—okay.” I reached down and tugged the loafers off, setting them to the side in the short hall between the doors.
Mr. Robert chewed on the end of his pipe, shook his head, and shuffled through the door. “Kid’s got the same shoes I do….”
I pretended not to hear that and followed him to the parlor floor of the house. “Wow.” I paused in the threshold between the staircase and the living area. The room was chock-full of antiques—Victrolas, cabinets of silver and china, grandfather clocks, musical instruments, and a penny-farthing bicycle pushed up against one wall behind a pair of parlor chairs with what I suspected was the original fabric and cushioning. Every square inch of the walls was covered with paintings, mirrors, pistols, and swords, as well as odds and ends that Mr. Robert had obviously run out of room to store in a more traditional means.
He turned to look up at me, puffing on his pipe in such a determined manner that he was doing a decent job of emulating a chimney. “Like it, eh?”
“It’s a very impressive collection you have.”
“So why didn’t you call me when you got the damn Kinetoscope?”
“The shipping company you hired didn’t provide your name or address on the contact sheet, just their own office.”
“Piss,” Mr. Robert muttered. He turned and began the shuffling journey to the next room.
“What can you tell me about the Kinetoscope?” I called, following after him. I stepped into a kitchen just as full of awesome gizmos and gadgets as the previous room. Everywhere I looked, vintage and antique baking tools, mixing bowls, and advertisements on the walls. “Jesus,” I muttered.
Mr. Robert opened the fridge and removed a container. He slowly made his way across the room to the counter. “I got a lot of shit,” he said, as if in agreement.
I went to a shelf that had an old flour sifter, rotary egg beater, hand-crank coffee grinder, and even an array of Christmas cookie cutters. It reminded me of the collection of kitchen tools I’d kept for Calvin after an estate sale in late January. He’d seemed so genuinely into them, and I thought at the time that maybe they would encourage his potential cooking habit.
But I’d lost those in the explosion too.
“My boyfriend would really like these,” I said.
“He cooks?” Mr. Robert asked.
I looked away from the items and watched my crotchety host pour himself a small glass of some dark-looking liquid. “When he has free time.”
“Any good?” he asked before downing the drink and making a disgusted face. “Prune juice,” he told me.
“Uh… yeah. He made lasagna the other night.”
“Marry him.”
“Pardon?”
Mr. Robert put the glass in the sink and returned the jug to the fridge. “Gay marriage is federal law now, ain’t it?” He put his pipe back in his mouth.
“Yes….”
“Then if he cooks, marry him. Or you’ll end up like me, eating runny eggs every day of the week that ends iny.”
“I’ll… thanks.” I was, in absolutely no way whatsoever, discussing my romantic hopes and dreams with Jim Bob. “So, about the Kinetoscope?”
Mr. Robert walked past me, back to the living room, while waving his hand. “I sent it to you for safekeeping.”
Crap.
