Diane Vallere - Style and Error 01 - Designer Dirty Laundry

by Diane Vallere

  I’d angered Store Management. I wondered how regularly they checked in with Human Resources about things like this.

  “Do you remember anything?” he asked.

  “Nothing more than I remembered yesterday.”

  He shrugged out from under the messenger bag still hanging across his shoulder and set it on the floor next to the errant yellow Sharpie.

  “I think you know more than you think you know.”

  “I can’t see how.”

  Eddie sipped his coffee. I mirrored his action, waiting for his questions to start. He set his cup down and leaned back, folding his arms across the Devo logo on his shirt.

  “So are you going to tell me why you’re really here?” he asked.

  I froze, mouth filled with hot coffee, barely able to swallow. I coughed a few times after choking it down, and glared at him with wide, water-filled eyes. My twice-burnt tongue clumsily formed a retort.

  “Here, where?”

  “Here, Tradava, today, of all days.”

  “I told you. It’s my job. Patrick hired me. Just because he isn’t around doesn’t mean I’m not going to show up for work. Maybe hiring me was his last wish.”

  Eddie bent down to retrieve the yellow Sharpie. “What’s your background?” His voice came from somewhere by my feet.

  “Shoe Buyer at Bentley’s New York.”

  He sat back up and whistled. “Nice. You travel much? Go to runway shows?”

  “Some.”

  “I’m not buying it.” He tapped his palms on the rubber elbow rests of the desk chair.

  “I’m not so sure I’m trying to sell something.”

  “You’re telling me you left behind a buying career in New York to move to Ribbon? You traded flying to Paris and Milan for this? We’re not exactly the fashion capital of eastern Pennsylvania, and Tradava is not exactly in the same category as Bentley’s.” He gulped from the coffee cup. “Nope, I’m definitely not buying it.”

  “Wait a minute.” I leaned forward and grabbed my cell phone.

  “No, seriously, people don’t just up and leave jobs like that without good reason.”

  “Not that, this! You said there’s no reception in here.”

  “You’re a quick one, aren’t you?”

  “The elevators are right outside of the office. If Patrick was having a heart attack in here and tried to call 911 from a cell phone, the call wouldn’t go through.”

  “True.”

  “Yesterday the EMT held up a phone and said Patrick called emergency himself. She was lying!”

  Eddie slammed the palm of his hand down on the desk. “I knew it. I knew you knew more than you thought! What else do you remember?”

  “I don’t know.” I stood up from the chair and started pacing around the office. “After I realized Patrick was dead I sat in one of the sofas in the shoe department with Nick. The emergency tech put a brown wool blanket over the body.”

  “How much time passed?”

  “I don’t know.” I stole a glance at him.

  “Estimate.”

  “I really don’t know. I, um, passed out.”

  “No way.”

  “Way. And now I don’t know what happened.”

  “You remembered that cell phone bit. You better tell that to the cops.”

  Eddie finished his coffee; I pretended to let mine cool. I wasn’t eager to field more questions, especially now that I had information to share with the police.

  “How long have you known Nick Taylor?” he asked next.

  “Years. I bought his collection for Bentley’s. We were kinda friendly, until recently.”

  Eddie gave me a knowing look. “Kinda friendly? Is that code for ‘We were sleeping together’ or ‘we had a flirtatious business association’?”

  “That’s a little personal, don’t you think?” My face grew hot. Truth was, our business relationship precluded anything other than dinner and the occasional two cheek kiss. Romances between vendors and buyers were seriously frowned upon at Bentley’s so regardless of what I’d daydreamed about on that flight over Paris, I had accepted our relationship for what it was.

  “So you had a flirtatious business association. What was he doing here?”

  “He said he had a meeting.”

  “I wonder who with? The shoe buyers are all in New York for market week.”

  He was right and I should have known that. If I were still at Bentley’s, I’d probably be in the middle of a tight schedule of showroom appointments trying to cull together next spring’s assortments. That life felt more like a distant memory than something I knew.

  “Besides, Tradava dropped Nick’s shoe collection based on poor reviews. I heard the advertising team talking about it at a meeting last week.”

  “Would Patrick have written those reviews?” I asked, wondering again about Nick’s cryptic warning.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But back to my earlier question, how well do you really know him? Have you guys spent time together outside the office? Do you know what kind of person he is?”

  I wasn’t sure where he was going with this so I followed along. “Occasionally we went to dinner together, but it was always business-related.” Ish, I added to myself. “I don’t know his deep dark secrets or anything.”

  “You think Nick Taylor has deep dark secrets?”

  “Everybody has deep dark secrets. What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Okay, does he know your deep dark secrets?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t have any, I mean,” I paused, then gave up trying to defend my own secret-less life. “What’s your point?”

  “What was he really doing here yesterday morning when most people weren’t even at work yet? Was it a coincidence he was with you when you found Patrick’s body?” Eddie continued. “How much time transpired between you passing out and him calling the cops?”

  “You’re implying Nick had something to do with Patrick’s death.” I shuddered when I heard my words. “Why do you think that?”

  Eddie sank his head into his hands. Chunks of blond hair stuck out between his fingers.

  “I don’t know.” He leaned forward with interest. “You were at the scene of the crime. You were on hand for vital clues and important details no one else except Nick saw.”

  I remained silent. It’s only your second day on the job, I told myself. What I wanted was for the rest of the day to go off without any more unexpected hitches, straighten out the hiring situation, and discover some trends. Nobody had warned me crimes of fashion were to be a part of my job.

  Finally, I spoke. “I keep thinking I should remember something, but I don’t.”

  “Are you sure you don’t remember anything about that morning? Anything that seemed out of the ordinary?”

  “It was my first day of work. I found a dead body. Belonging to the person who hired me. Whose body is now missing. What part of that is ordinary?”

  “Good point.”

  I stood up and shook my left leg until the creases in my pant leg released. “I can’t think about this now. I have to go to HR and get the hiring straightened out.”

  “You better be prepared to talk about what you saw, especially if you want them to move past the fact that you’re the one who got the store shut down during business hours. It’s going to come up.” He tapped the desk in front of me. “Go through it with me, one more time.”

  I launched into my story for the millionth time: the elevator doors, the body, the EMTs, the cell phone, and the quick exit through the basement. And then I remembered something else.

  “The computer.”

  Chapter 7

  “What computer?” Eddie asked.

  “Patrick loaned me a computer, a small laptop, after he hired me. It’s in a plum nylon case.”

  “Patrick didn’t have a laptop. Patrick wouldn’t know what to do with a laptop. He took notes. Longhand, and had Michael transcribe them.”

  “Then whose computer did he loan me?”

  Eddie s
hrugged. “Why did he loan you a computer?”

  “He wanted me to get a briefing on his current projects. He arranged to hand it off to me in the parking lot.”

  “Why didn’t you just come up for it?”

  “I don’t know. He specifically said I didn’t need to come to the trend offices. This was two days before I was supposed to start.”

  We stared at each other, processing what this might mean. I wasn’t willing to accept the obvious answers. “How do you know Patrick didn’t have a laptop?”

  “He might have had a laptop, but it didn’t belong to Tradava. Everybody in corporate got new desktop computers six months ago. There’s that,” he jerked his thumb in the direction of the office, “and a BlackBerry. All the directors and veeps got them. Anyway, people like Patrick aren’t tech savvy. Did you look at it? What was on it?”

  My breakfast of cold Pop-Tarts that I ate in the car flipped over in my stomach. I’d read over his newsletters, checked out his calendar, but other than that, nothing had struck me. But what if there was something else on the hard drive I was supposed to discover? And where was it now?

  I pulled Detective Loncar’s card out of my wallet and dialed.

  “Loncar,” he answered.

  “Detective, it’s Samantha Kidd. You said I should call you if I remembered anything else, and I did.”

  “Ms. Kidd. Where are you?”

  “I’m at Tradava.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “I work here.” Why was everyone having such a hard time with that fact? “Detective, Patrick loaned me a laptop I had the morning he died, but I don’t know where it went.” I waited for his response. There was nothing, for several seconds. Enough nothing for me to ask, “Hello? Are you still there?”

  “Ms. Kidd. First you said there was a body, which we haven’t seen. Then you said there was an Emergency Technician, who we haven’t identified, and now you say there was a computer that went missing. Plus, you claim to have employment nobody can verify.”

  “I’m not making this stuff up, Detective. I’m trying to be helpful.”

  “Hold on, ma’am,” he said. Instinct told me now was not the time to tell him I was too young for him to call me that. “Ms. Kidd, why don’t you come down to the Human Resources department on the fourth floor? Maybe we can clear up a couple of things.”

  “You’re in the store?” I asked. After confirming that fact, I hung up and faced Eddie. “I’m going to HR. I’ll be back in a sec.”

  I took the stairs down to the fourth floor and exited the stairwell by Human Resources. Detective Loncar stood talking with a woman with a gray pixie haircut. A chunky blue necklace hung around the neck of her Nehru-collar shirt. Perfect timing, two birds, one stone, and all that.

  I stepped around the side of the escalators. Their words were quiet but so was the store.

  “She’s on her way down. She said she works here.”

  “I don’t know what she wants or why she keeps returning, but we have no record of her interviewing here, let alone working for us. These awful things she keeps saying about Patrick, about him being dead, well, I don’t know why a person would make such gossip up, but it’s disturbing. Her presence yesterday morning seems as suspicious to us as it does to you.”

  I leaned back against the wall, suddenly lightheaded and dizzy. The ground shifted under me in an unexpected bout of vertigo. I peeked back around the corner. The detective checked his watch, then scratched his head behind his ear. “I’ll take her to my office and we’ll see if we can’t figure out what she’s up to. Let’s wait inside, I don’t want to scare her away.”

  Too late for that, detective. I was three feet from the down escalator, as soon as they stepped into the office, I sidestepped to the escalator, picked up the stairs on the third floor, and bypassed the security entrance for the customer doors that faced the lot where my car was parked.

  I broke all kinds of speeding laws driving home. I sat in the driveway with the windows down, breathing deeply the scent of withering lilac buds that barely clung to branches on the bushes alongside the house, willing my thoughts and my racing heart to calm down, already. I pulled my cell phone out and called Nick. The one person who knew there had been a body.

  My call went into voicemail and I left a message. “It’s Samantha. It’s—” I pulled the phone away from my ear to check the time but couldn’t see it because a second call was coming through. Brittany Fowler needed to get a life. I put the phone back to my ear. “It’s important. Call me when you get a chance. I need to talk to you.”

  I went into the house and pressed the play button on the answering machine.

  Beep! “Hey Kid, it’s your mom. Just wanted to check in on you and see how you were doing. Things are good on the west coast. We’re going to the beach now so don’t try to call us back. Love you!”

  Beep! “Hello, Ms. Kidd, this is Maries Paulson. Please call me at your earliest convenience. I’d like to meet with you to discuss Tradava’s role in the upcoming designer competition.”

  Beep! “This is a courtesy call is for Samantha Kidd. This is the video store. You have an overdue rental. Please bring the movie back to avoid accruing late fees.”

  Beep! “Ms. Kidd, this is Brittany Fowler from Full Circle Mortgage. Can you call me back today please? I really have to talk to you about this application.”

  A lot of people wanted to check in on me. People I didn’t necessarily want to talk to. The best way to avoid any additional calls was to avoid the phone. I grabbed the movie, left my cell phone on the counter on purpose, and locked the door behind me.

  I needed something familiar. I drove to the strip mall with the video store and left the car running while I dropped the DVD case into the wall slot. Instead of pulling out of the lot, I sat in an empty space and inhaled the scent of lunch meat coming from the hoagie store three doors down.

  They didn’t have strip malls like this in New York. Where at special times of the year like now the air was perfumed with the scent of Capicola, Provolone cheese, and lilacs. I turned off the engine and followed the scent to the counter of the sandwich shop where I ordered a hoagie big enough for two: twelve inches of hard roll seasoned with oil and oregano, and filled with four different kinds of lunchmeat, Provolone cheese, lettuce, and onion. I snagged a large bag of potato chips and a carton of iced tea and stepped to the register to pay. My appetite may have been slightly larger than my stomach, but I needed that sandwich. It might clog my arteries, but it would clear my brain. And at the moment, clarity was what I needed. No distractions like missing bodies or untimely police visits or angry mortgage companies—

  “I see you got your appetite back,” said Nick from behind me.

  I turned around and searched my crowded mind for a comeback but didn’t want a repeat Bacon incident so I kept my mouth shut.

  He looked as good in a crisp white shirt and jeans as he did in a suit. Before he could make another comment on the size of my lunch, the cashier reclaimed my attention with the total. The twenty in my wallet would barely cover it. I hoped against hope the flush warming my face was not apparent.

  “Looks like if I want to spend some quality time with you I’ll have to kidnap you from the hoagie store.”

  “Wouldn’t want you to commit a felony,” I said, perhaps too quickly.

  “Fine, then I’ll kidnap your lunch.” He snatched the bag from the cashier who thought he was being playful. “Play along, and nobody gets hurt,” he said in a low whisper. He placed a firm grip on my elbow and steered me out of the sandwich shop before I could respond.

  Chapter 8

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.

  “You’re coming with me.” He held up the bag. “Insurance.”

  We left the store, Nick holding my lunch hostage. He turned to the right. We walked down the sidewalk together in silence, approaching the video store. For a brief moment I wondered if he was going to turn me in for harboring stolen movies, but when
we passed it, and his fingers continued to bite into my upper arm, I wondered something worse.

  We passed three additional storefronts before he paused in front of a vacant one. “In here. This place looks deserted.” He handed me the bag of food and pulled a credit card from his wallet. “I’ll pop the locks open so we can get inside. Nobody will even know we’re here.”

  Panic set in. He was right. Not only did nobody know we were there, but nobody knew I was with him. I tried to remain calm on the outside, but inside I freaked out. What did I really know about Nick aside from what I’d picked up when we worked together? I mean, how many shoe designers actually know how to pop open a locked door with a credit card, and how many have the guts to do it during business hours?

  His choice of words hammered an ominous refrain inside my brain. No one will know we’re here. I’ll kidnap you. You’re coming with me. Insurance.

  He was having trouble with the lock. Daydreams while flying over Paris notwithstanding, I knew if I was going to get away it would have to be now. My weapons for defense were limited: a carton of Icy Tea and a hoagie.

  I pulled the carton of tea from the bag and took a step back on the sidewalk. My foot hit the edge of the curb and I lost my balance. I fell backward, dropping the food. Nick turned and grabbed me, his bear-claw hand easily circling my small wrist. He held tight while my feet sought stable footing. The carton exploded on the sidewalk and instantly the air was scented with lemon. I planted one foot underneath me, then the other. His grip relaxed. He bent over and picked up the bag of food. A puddle of brown liquid seeped onto the sidewalk and headed for the toe of his brown oxfords. He sidestepped the stream and handed the Visa card to me.

  “Kidd, relax. If it bothers you that much I’ll use the key.” He fumbled around with the change in his pocket, pulled out a key, and unlocked the door.

  I was confused. He held the door open, but I didn’t move. I looked around the inside of the vacant store, but all I could see were stacks of white boxes along the back wall. Shoe boxes.