by Chassie West
I headed for the Bridal Bower to get that out of the way first, and during a stop at a traffic light a couple of blocks from the store, used the wait to dig the Bridal Bower receipt out of my purse. And didn’t find it. An annoyed blast of a horn from a cab alerted me that the light had changed, so I interrupted the search and continued it at the next stop. And still couldn’t find it.
Irritated, I turned onto a side street, eased into the vacant space beside a fire hydrant and, with emergency blinkers on, emptied the contents of the damned bag onto the passenger seat. I’m always amazed at the amount of pure junk I wind up carrying, but the receipt from Bridal Bower was definitely not among it.
What could I have done with it? I squinched my eyes tight, trying to think. Janeece had dragged me to the shop kicking and screaming back in October. No way was I getting married in white satin or organdy fluff. That’s not my style. Besides, to wear white anything would be a travesty, since Duck and I had known each other—and that’s in the biblical sense—for over a year. Last but not least, anything in the shop had to be six times more than I was prepared to shell out. It was in a high-rent district and I was already paying rent, at my insistence, to Janeece. But she’s six-feet-plus with Georgia mule in her veins and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“Dammit, it’s your wedding, Leigh. Whether it’s your first or fifth, you should at least get gussied up for it. Now, come on.”
I had eventually settled on an unfussy ecru suit with a mandarin collar and straight skirt, the only decorative elements a bit of embroidery around the sleeves and the bottom of the jacket. It didn’t help that I looked fantastic in it. Still, I could use it again on dressy occasions, the only thing that salved my conscience and wallet, along with the fact that it was on sale. And I’d insisted on paying for it myself, since Nunna, a retiree and recently married herself, really couldn’t afford it.
I’d left it for minor alterations, shortening the sleeves a bit and lengthening the hem in the back since my ample rear end tended to hike it up back there.
I’d squeezed the receipt into my wallet, but I remembered taking it out at Duck’s and sitting at his desk a couple of weeks before to tally up how much I’d spent on Christmas and the wedding to that point. I could swear I had put it back but honestly couldn’t remember doing it or seeing it since. Still, I might not need it. I had enough ID to prove who I was, and the credit card I’d used.
I parked in the lot behind the shop, hauled myself out of the car with every bit as much trouble as I’d anticipated, set the fancy alarms, and hurried inside, bells tinkling “Here Comes the Bride” announcing my entry. Flocked satin lined the walls and covered the lounge chairs, and bouquets of lilies of the valley and baby’s breath draped the doors, windows, and mirrors. A white baby grand, complete with candelabra, was parked in a corner. The only thing missing was Liberace.
The fitter, a tiny, ageless woman with the exotic features of the Orient and straight pins between her lips, stuck her head from between the curtains separating the fitting rooms and stock from the front. She gestured for me to wait, and a few seconds later a statuesque blond flirting with middle age swept into the room, a plastic smile in place. “Yes? I’m Monica. How may I help you?”
“I’m Leigh Warren. I left a suit for alterations,” I said. “I’m a couple of days late; I was supposed to pick it up on Monday but had to postpone coming in that day.”
She nodded. “I remember the call. Is there a problem with it?”
“With what?”
“The fit. If there is, we’ll do what we can, of course, but you really should have tried it on before taking it.”
A chill slithered down my back. “Don’t tell me. It’s gone? Someone picked it up?”
Something filtered into her eyes, a certain wariness. “Yes, on . . . Just a minute.” She strode away, disappeared into the corridor to the fitting rooms, and returned almost immediately, a pink fabric-covered file box in her hands. The Asian lady stuck her head out of the curtain, watching.
“Here we are,” Monica said, her relief palpable as she removed a card from the box. “Picked up early yesterday. ‘Customer declined final fitting.’ Is something wrong? I’m a little at a loss here.”
“Join the club,” I said, the chill replaced by white-hot lava. “I’m at a loss of three hundred twenty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents and the suit I’m supposed to wear at my wedding. A woman claiming to be me has been making my life hell, and she’s obviously done it again. She picked up the suit, not me. Just damn it!”
“I told her!” The fitter burst through the curtains. “I told Catherine something wasn’t right. I may not recognize a face every time, but I remember busts and waists and hips, and the woman who came for the ecru was the wrong shape.”
Monica paled, but stood her ground. “I’m so sorry. We’ve never had anything happen like this before. But Catherine would have had no reason to doubt this other person. She had a receipt.”
Which she’d swiped from Duck’s desk in the living room. My suit was gone, and there was nothing I could do about it.
I turned, and my legs gave out. Rather than winding up on the floor, I plopped down on one of the brocade love seats. I had to think.
Monica and the fitter watched me anxiously. After a moment, I decided to fall back on the tried-and-true and dug out my notepad.
“Anna, isn’t it?” I asked, belatedly remembering the fitter’s name. “Describe her for me, please. You may be able to give me details the average person couldn’t.”
She fingered the scissors hanging from a cord of the belt of her trim black dress. “Taller than you are, short-waisted, probably a thirteen, and broader through the hips. Her skin was a different color, a bit lighter. But, Monica . . .” She turned, glancing back at the taller woman. “We can do better than describe her.”
It took the clerk a moment to catch her drift, her confusion contributing a frown and crow’s-feet that hadn’t been visible before.
“Oh! Of course! Do you have a few minutes, Ms. Warren?”
“However long you need.” I wasn’t sure what was what, but they clearly had something up their respective sleeves, and I was in no shape to go anywhere.
They retired to the inner sanctum again, Anna practically running to keep up with Monica. I used the time to pull myself together and jot down the fitter’s unorthodox description to compare with Mrs. Luby’s and Dolly’s at the travel agency, my next stop. I was debating where to go after Graystone’s when my cell phone burped. To my surprise, it was Eddie Grimes.
“You ratted on me,” he said, without preamble.
“I had to. Did Duck tell you what’s been happening? She’s stolen my wedding outfit, Eddie,” I blurted, unable to contain my anger any longer, “marched in the Bridal Bower and out with my damned suit. She had the receipt, and the only place she could have gotten it was from Duck’s apartment.”
“Jesus! This broad’s a real con artist. Listen, let me talk to the guys who told me about the Silver Shaker look-alike, see if there’s anything they know that might help. It may not have been the same woman at all, but it couldn’t hurt to ask. They’re supposed to be trained observers, right? Hold on a minute, can you?” The line went blank. Damn all hold buttons.
I’d been waiting for a decade before Monica and Anna swept through the curtains to the fitting rooms, their smiles reminding me of well-fed cats. Anna planted herself in front of me and handed me a business-sized envelope, the baby’s breath insignia of the shop embossed on its corner. “For you. Maybe it’ll help make up for . . . the mix-up.”
Inside the envelope were two underexposed photographs, one of a woman entering the store, the second of her at the circular counter in the center of the floor, the face in profile.
I looked up in search of a camera and wasn’t surprised at not having noticed it. Above the curtained door in the center of one of the flocked blossoms of the wallpaper, a tiny red light blinked. There were, in fact, several of them, one near ea
ch corner. They looked like jewels, part of the decor.
“Very clever,” I said.
“You’d be surprised,” Monica said, one brow arched, “how often someone tries to pull a switch on us by changing a price tag or walking out with a veil under their skirt. Will the photos help? We enlarged them as much as we could. You’re lucky you came in so soon or it would have been recorded over.”
I had wanted to wait until I was outside to take a good look at the woman I was coming to hate with a searing passion, but realized that would cheat these two out of what little reward they would get for their efforts. Crossing to the counter, I placed the photos side by side. And wondered what was wrong with people’s eyes. As far as I was concerned, she looked nothing like me at all.
“Thank you so much.” I extended a hand to them both. “This will help enormously.”
“Hey!” Eddie’s yell from the love seat reminded me that I’d been on hold. I sprinted for the phone.
“Hey. Sorry. Are we done?” I asked.
“Yeah, for now. I wanted to check to see if any of those guys were working this shift and where. Got lucky; two of them are. They’re on their way in from court, so maybe I’ll have something to tell you before the day’s over.”
“Keep them there,” I said. “I’m on my way. I got lucky too, thanks to a couple of smart thinkers here at the Bridal Bower. She screwed up, Eddie, and now I have her face.”
13
I WAS TOO CLOSE TO GRAYSTONE’S NOT TO STOP so I zipped around several blocks and lucked out on a parking space across the street from the travel agency. Didn’t even have to feed the meter; there was more than enough time left on it. The face of my nemesis in my pocket, an open spot within a few yards of my destination, and a half hour on the parking meter? Hey, things were looking up! Buoyed by this turn of fortune and a decent break in traffic, I jaywalked across the avenue, feeling better than I had in days. Granted that wasn’t saying much, but you take what you can get.
I recognized the willowy blonde with the curly hair and no hips immediately. Dolly, sans jacket and absolutely stunning in a coral knit dress that fit her like a coat of paint, stood at the curb in front of Graystone’s in animated conversation with a tanned hunk of masculinity in a UPS uniform. He took the package she extended to him, his expression making it clear he could eat her alive without benefit of knife and fork. She shooed him across the avenue to his truck, double-parked on the other side, then saw me approaching.
Her first reaction was to turn the color of a sheet of twenty-weight bond, her second to lose control of the bottom third of her face. Her eyes, a robin’s egg–blue, widened.
“You’re Ms. Warren! I remember you now. Oh, I’m so sorry about my mistake. But I just realized why I assumed the other woman was you. It’s your walk!”
“My walk.”
“You have a very distinctive stride,” she said, her cheeks flushing with excitement. “I’m a runway model, part-time, of course, and one of the things they yell at us about is our walk, so I notice other people’s. Some sort of stroll or lope, some slam down on their heels or bounce up onto their toes with a lot of head-bobbing. Your stride is smooth and energetic and long, as if you have places to go and look forward to getting there. Your head doesn’t move at all and you’ve got dynamite posture. It makes you seem taller than you really are.”
I can’t say it was the first time I’d heard this or variations on the theme. It was one of the reasons I made such an effort to walk without a limp, even on days when my knee was raising hell. Duck claimed he loved to watch me, coming and going, and my Aunt Frances said she’d have recognized me as her sister’s child because I walked just like my mom.
“And this other woman?” I asked, guiding Dolly back inside the store. Just looking at her without a coat made me shiver.
“She had the same walk. I could see her from my desk, coming across the street like you did just now, and I knew I’d seen that arm-swinging stride before. Then when she said she had come to cancel the reservations for the Kennedys’ trip to Hawaii, I remembered you’d been in a while ago, put the two things together, and just assumed she was the same person. Does that make sense?”
Unfortunately, it did. “Is this the woman?” I showed her the photos.
“Yes! It’s funny. Now that I see these I realize you don’t look that much alike, feature for feature. You’re just similar in type, close to the same coloring, same shaped face and eyes, close to the same height and build, similar hairstyle. But the walk’s what fooled me. I’m really sorry.”
I told her to forget it since there was nothing to be gained by stringing her up by her bra. I asked about Margie, hoping there’d be good news in regard to reservations for our honeymoon. No such luck. Margie wouldn’t be in for another hour and, as far as Dolly knew, was still working on it.
Deciding I’d be wasting valuable time by waiting around, I left and this time crossed at the light. At the Corvette, I folded myself into it and headed for Southeast Washington.
I’d left a message for Duck about the pictures—to which he hadn’t responded—and blessed my luck again when I spotted him outside the Sixth District substation in conversation with a kid in a Boy Scout uniform. I spotted a space around the corner, eased into it and reached him just as the scout was leaving.
No “hello,” no “hi, cutie.” “Where’s the Corvette?” he asked, glancing up and down the block.
“Never mind the Vette,” I said. “I left a message for you. Look what I’ve got.”
I waved the photos under his nose and he grabbed them.
“This is the woman? Terrific, babe! Where’d you get them?”
“She walked into the Bridal Bower yesterday with the receipt for my suit. They caught her on their hidden cameras and made these copies for me.” I swallowed around the lump in my throat, determined not to cry.
He must have sensed how close to the edge I was and folded me in his arms. He still smelled good, fresh, soapy, and woodsy, as if he’d just stepped out of the shower.
“I’m sorry, Leigh. She’s really hitting you where it hurts, isn’t she?”
“Duck, she got the receipt from your apartment. I’d left it on the desk in the living room.”
He stiffened, leaned back, and looked down at me, Mount Vesuvius rising in his eyes. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.” I reminded him of the day I’d been going over expenses, knowing he’d remember since we were both nude at the time. “She must have lifted it the same day she took the box.”
“And the keys to the Chevy. I guess I really should have removed that miniature license tag on the key ring. I’m sorry, babe. It led her right to it. I’m just glad I didn’t have an extra set of keys to the place on that pegboard.”
Letting me go, he focused on the two blow-ups. “How the hell could anybody mistake her for you?” he demanded. “She’s not even pretty!”
I could have kissed him but there were too many guys in uniform coming and going. “That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me. Thank you. The receptionist at Graystone said she walks like me and that’s what fooled her. The fitter at the Bridal Bower realized it wasn’t the same person she’d altered the suit for but since the woman had the damned receipt, there was nothing they could do but give it to her.”
“Well, in a way this makes me feel better,” he said, still scrutinizing the shots. “I don’t know her. There is something familiar about her but I sure as hell never dated her. Look, babe, I’m running late. Get Eddie to make copies of these, enough for Tank and Tina too. And you might want to show these to Ms. Poole, see if she remembers seeing her at all.”
I hadn’t thought that far but agreed it was a good idea. “I’m on my way to see Eddie. He’s rounded up a couple of the guys who were in the Silver Shaker, so they can take a look at these, since I’ve got them.”
“Yeah, I’ve already chewed him out for believing it was you.” He leaned down and kissed me, obviously less concerned than I was about hi
s image as the consummate professional. “Good luck. Keep me posted. I’ll see you later. Gotta go.”
I watched as he hopped into the car and pulled into traffic. It occurred to me that running into him had been a stroke of luck for him too. He could scratch finding the two old girlfriends off his list.
I found Eddie squinting at a monitor over the rim of the biggest thermal mug I’d ever seen.
“Want some coffee?” he asked, after we’d dispensed with the amenities. On the surface, he was his usual model of sartorial splendor—blinding white shirt, not a wrinkle in sight, navy and blue striped tie, navy slacks with a crease so sharp you could slit your wrists on them. His jacket, which matched the blue in his tie, hugged the back of another chair.
In spirit, however, he seemed to be dragging, Samsonite luggage under his eyes.
“No, thanks.” Squad room coffee could be used to strip paint. “You okay? Nunna would say you look kind of peaked.”
“No sleep. The kids are sick. We were up all night with them. So, let’s see the pictures.”
I passed them over and waited while he switched glasses and stared at the photos with narrowed eyes. Behind us, a scuffle broke out, a hefty woman objecting, as far as I could determine, to her arrest on charges of prostitution, maintaining that she’d been giving the man she was with a freebie. He was, she allowed, a gentleman.
Eddie seemed oblivious. “These were taken in the shop?” he asked.
I went through my tale of woe again and added the saga of the canceled reservations and the woman’s involvement in Claudia’s death.
“Yeah, Duck told me. This is way more serious than I thought.” Deep ridges lined Eddie’s forehead. “And you have no idea why she’s pulling these stunts?”
“None. I thought for a while she might be one of Duck’s old flames out for revenge, but I ran into him outside. He doesn’t know her.”
