Hang Down Your Head

by Janice Macdonald

  It was tough for me in one way, because I’m not much of a shopper, but I tend to be pretty good at spatial recall. I took a look at the beaded gown that was Exhibit A and then closed my eyes. I’d been riffling through the sales rack near the back of the store while Denise wandered along the side wall, checking out the power suits. Where were the evening dresses? I mentally walked my way through the store, heading to the Henry Moore. Suddenly I remembered the alcove of evening gowns, tucked into the corner near the manager’s fine wood desk. I put an A in the corner and moved on to the Chanel suits, much like the one Denise had tried on in the other store. They were on the side wall opposite the evening wear, about halfway down. I marked B, C, D, E and F there. I had no idea where I’d seen the next few really dressy mid-length dresses hanging, but they were exquisite. I figured that even if the campfire smell never came out of them, they’d be wonderful to wear somewhere.

  The wool suits in winter white and pale butter yellow, with their double-breasted buttons imitating sailors’ pea jackets, were at the front of the store, near the window. I had checked the cost of the jackets and nearly swooned at the time. I marked K, L, M, N, O, P at the door and pushed them to the left. Some hand-tatted lace nightgowns had survived, though they no longer had the pristine look of bridal whiteness they’d had in the store. I recalled seeing lingerie hanging close to the archway to the changing rooms, so I marked my R, S, T, U, and V there. I had absolutely no recollection of where the chinchilla jacket was, but I petted its sleeve for a bit before moving on to the last few items. There were three dresses that looked like sacks on their hangers. I recalled the Rita Rudner routine where the salesclerk tells her a garment looks “really good on.” “On what?” she replies. “On fire?” I snickered nervously, because that scenario was too close to reality. Actually, I had seen these dresses, since they were hanging rather close to the sales rack where my precious middy was housed. While they weren’t as heart-stoppingly expensive as the wool suits, I recalled that they were pricey. Their elevated price must have had something to do with the designer label. I figured that particular designer must really hate his ex-wife and was now taking it out on women in general. I marked their corresponding letters by that rack and pushed through the once-jazzy-looking raincoats, which I recalled being featured in the window but was uncertain where they were hanging in the store. That was about it. Not a lot left of what had seemed a thriving business.

  “Is this all that was salvageable?” I asked when I was finished.

  Iain nodded. “The rest was just cinders, aside from the big stone statue in the back. That looks like it could be scrubbed up and plunked down in a park, good as new.”

  “Holly didn’t like that statue; she would rather have had the crystal chandeliers that the west end store got,” I recalled.

  “I don’t suppose Barbara Finster was too fond of it near the end, either. That’s where we found the body, draped across the statue.”

  I shuddered at the thought. Steve reached for my clipboard.

  “So this is where you recall these items hanging?” he said, changing the subject.

  “As best as I can recall. As I said, Denise can probably zone in on the right inch of rack space. It’s weird, though.”

  “What’s weird?”

  “Well, it seems odd that these things would make it through and other stuff on the same rack would burn up. After all, the store was full, and each rack was full. For instance, there had to have been twenty-five evening dresses on that first rack, and only one was saved. Do you think it had something to do with the sort of fibres? Maybe there was some kind of flame retardant on this material?”

  “Nope, I think it had a lot to do with conservation of expensive or favourite items. These clothes were hanging in the back storage area on this rack. They weren’t out in the main area. We figure we can get the forensic team to check for residual material in the areas we pinpoint with the maps you folks make for us, and then we can see if there were corresponding items still in the store. Maybe we can write this off as some sort of exchange that was planned with another store, or clothes that had been tried on or returned and were going to be touched up before being put back on the sales floor.”

  “Well, you can cross off the idea that they’re try-ons. For one thing, that rack was situated right across from the Henry Moore, to your right as you walked into the change area. For another thing, you just wouldn’t get all five sizes of a wool suit being tried on by the same woman, right? A try-on rack would be a lot more diverse in one way and common in another. Same sizes across the board, and similar types of things, but not the same outfit in all the sizes it comes in. For one thing, Holly could probably peg a client’s size as she walked in the door. There might be occasional divergence, but not by much. For another, there was just so little business in those stores that I can’t imagine Holly letting the try-ons get that far behind in rebuttoning and rehanging. When Denise and I were in there, we were the only ones shopping, in both stores, and we spent quite a bit of time in each one.”

  “So what do you think this rack represents?” Iain asked, with a tone in his voice that let me know that he likely felt even more uncomfortable than I did in high-end women’s clothing stores.

  “Since I saw pretty much the same wares in the other store, and there was no offer to get something sent over from another Shoppe when we were trying things on, I think these women run their stores like jealous little fiefdoms. Most of these clothes were new stock, ready for the fall. Their summer stock was already on sale, weirdly enough, but I think that’s par for the course in retailing anymore. So I doubt this rack was going anywhere, either to another Shoppe or returning to the distributors. If I were of a suspicious mindset, I would check the stockbooks and see if these weren’t the highest priced items in the store. Maybe someone was making sure these clothes wouldn’t be ruined in the fire.”

  That sounded good, but there was something wrong with it.

  “If that’s the case, though,” I continued, “whoever saved these is the person who set the fire. But my theory that they were salvaging the good bits would only work if it was an insurance scam where these clothes were taken away from the store before the fire, then claimed as part of the burned-up inventory. The only person who would benefit from that would be the owner of the insurance policy, who I am figuring was Barbara Finster, right?”

  “Right,” Steve grimaced. “You’re thinking along the exact same lines as we have been. Someone moved this merchandise, readying it to be removed from the arson site. Maybe Barbara Finster herself was doing this, when she was snuck up on and killed. Then whoever killed her could have just continued to finish what she had started, hoping to cover their work.”

  “Unless she was overcome by the fumes of her own fire and got caught in it,” offered Iain. “We’re waiting to hear back from the medical examiner about cause of death, and from the arson boys about patterns of accelerant.”

  “But surely she’d have hauled the rack of clothes outside to a truck or a van first, before doing anything,” I pondered.

  “What we’d like you to find out, Randy, is if there are any folk songs that correspond to this crime scene in any way. We have some holdback information that I’m afraid we can’t let you in on, but could you research women dying in fires they’ve set themselves, dying in clothing stores, dying in factories? I’m wondering if we can tie this to the tableau effect of David Finster’s murder in any way.”

  “I can try. I’m not sure there are all that many folk songs about rich women in boutique clothing stores, but I’ll look. Is that all you want from me, then? Because if so, I’d like to go home.”

  “No problem, and thanks for this. That store’s an enormous pile of ash; this helps us narrow down where to expend our forensic efforts. None of those tests come cheap, so any narrowing down we can do helps the budget enormously.” Steve stood up from the desk where he had filed my map. “Iain, I’m going to drive Randy home. Call Denise Woolf and see if she ca
n come in to give us a map, too. Randy, give Iain Denise’s phone number. I’ll go sign out and get you home.”

  It wasn’t till I was outside in the parking lot that I realized I’d been inhaling the smell of fire-sale clothes so much that the smell had all but disappeared for me. Now, out in the fresh air, I caught a whiff of it in my hair. A shampoo would be first on the list of things to do as soon as I got home, along with washing the clothes I was wearing. I didn’t know how firefighters did it. It was a relatively benign smell, until you coupled it in your mind with the charred images of destruction, and then it took on such a powerfully dangerous sensibility.

  Steve caught up to me and I leaned into him briefly as he unlocked the passenger side door for me. He, too, had the smell of fire and death on him. I nibbled his ear.

  “Want to join me in a shower at my place?” I murmured.

  “Best offer I’ve had all day,” he hugged me briefly, ”but I’m going to have to take a raincheck. The day isn’t ending for me yet.”

  We drove back to my place in silence, partly because of the rush hour traffic, which seemed to start earlier and get worse every week, and partly because there seemed to be something hanging between us—something neither of us had the energy or the will to tackle. When we got to my back door, I leaned over to kiss him briefly on the nose, and jumped out of the car before I had to listen to him hem and haw about whether he wanted to make time to be with a murder suspect on his time off.

  27

  ~

  Over the following week, Steve and Iain interviewed a dozen or more women who had recently shopped in the now-torched Barbara Shoppe—including Denise, who was able to give them a nearly complete inventory and layout. I’m not sure how she manages to keep all that information in her head along with having most of Shakespeare memorized and ready to spit out at unruly students.

  Meanwhile, I managed to get quite a bit done on my master tape for the Folkways Stage. Woody had hired a sound engineer, and the two of us arranged to go down to the Festival office to meet with the executive director and the site manager. The permanent office for the Festival was in a very central location—at the bottom of Bellamy Hill, which led to the downtown core of the city. Even so, it was sort of hellish to get to, with all the one-way streets and busy six-lane freeways we had to cross and dodge to get there. Woody rented a car this time round, and was happy to drive as long as I navigated. Of course, as long as he stuck to bus routes, I was fine. It was his desire to quickly find locations and subsequently to achieve parking spots that was driving me crazy. I stared death and the angry driver of a massive SUV in the eye as we darted across two lanes of traffic to make the turn into the area of townhouses where the Festival offices were located.

  I was still shaking as Woody calmly got out of the car and waited for me to join him. Instead of commenting on our near escape, he pointed his key ring at the car and smiled at me as the doors locked electronically. I smiled back. What the heck? We were alive.

  The executive director was waiting for us, which was a nice thing. Of course, he was a Folk Festival director; he had to be perceived to be nice, right? It took about twenty minutes of jolly banter about Edmonton, Washington, folk musicians, recording labels and beer before Woody and the director, Aric Skurdal, got down to business. Woody wanted access badges for his sound engineer, announcements from the main stage to let people know that the performances on the Folkways Stage would be recorded for folkwaysAlive!, and some assurances that noise bleed from the afternoon mainstage concerts could somehow be minimized.

  “There’s nothing going on at the other stages when the mainstage matinees are scheduled,” Skurdal smiled. “There’s no need to worry about that point at all.”

  Woody shook his head. “I’ve heard tell that encores can push through more than fifteen minutes longer than they’re allotted. If that happens, we’ll end up with over twenty minutes of relatively unusable recording time, what with sound bleed and crowd movement noises. What I’m asking, I guess, is some way of guaranteeing that the matinees start on time and end on time. Maybe we could talk to the people you’ve booked for those slots and explain what it is we’re trying to do across the bushes from them? Or maybe you could mention it to them?”

  Skurdal wasn’t looking quite so folksy anymore. “I’ll see what we can do. Maybe we can fit some baffles in between the tree belt there to help mitigate. You have to understand, though, that the whole concept of the Festival is that you go with the flow. If the crowd calls for ten minutes of encores, you can’t just turn off the speakers.”

  Woody nodded. “I hear you.”

  I laugh inwardly whenever I hear the phrase “I hear you,” because from what I’ve seen it always means, “I see you talking but you can’t come in.” Woody wasn’t going to give on this point, I could just tell. Thing is, what could you do about a festival that had so many acts booked it required two major matinees to satisfy the main stage time for them all? I thought the names we had listed appearing at the folkwaysAlive! Stage were incredible, but compared to some of the names listed for the mainstage and evening lineups, we were relatively small potatoes. Luckily, we were small potatoes with the full clout of both the University of Alberta and the Smithsonian Institute behind us.

  Woody and Aric Skurdal hammered out particulars. I let my mind wander a bit, surveying the posters lining the walls from previous festival years. Skurdal was about the fourth director, but the festival seemed to be pretty similar to its original concept—only much, much bigger than it had been in the early years. It used to start on a Friday evening, then run all day and evening Saturday and Sunday, with lots of people buying tickets for just the evening concerts.

  Now it began on a Thursday night, continued Friday night and through the full weekend. Instead of being a festival in which all the performers got mainstage billing and shuffled about in various workshops during the daytime hours, many of the day slots were now given over to solo concerts to accommodate all the people booked to play. I had yet to meet one person who came away from the hill having seen everyone they wanted to see, and the magic of the weird combinations of musicians that were created in the workshops had almost completely disappeared.

  That potential for weird magic was one of the wonderful things about the folkwaysAlive! stage. Woody and Dr. Fuller had maintained the workshop layout. Several of our musicians were featured more than one time on the stage, and some of the combinations were either totally outlandish or amazingly inspired. We had four one-hour concerts booked through the entire weekend. The rest were workshop combinations of those four major names, in and around other groups and musicians booked from the Festival in general.

  We had dispensation to record it all, and the glorious thing was that everyone had agreed to work for scale. I guess the Asch guarantee that you would never go out of print went a long way to getting to people to sign onto an anthology album.

  If things worked out and Nathan Lamothe, the sound engineer Woody booked to handle the recordings for the folkwaysAlive! stage, was all he was cracked up to be, we would end up with five albums for the Smithsonian folkwaysAlive! label. Dr. Fuller had told me on the q.t. that she’d still be happy if we ended up with just two albums from this year’s venture. I figured that modest goal was a good thing, because the way things were going, who knew what we’d end up with?

  I came back to Reality Central just as Woody and Aric were shaking hands, which I figured had to be the signal that the meeting was over. Aric looked pleased with himself, Woody a little less so, but his diplomatic veneer seemed to be covering up any problems he might be nursing.

  As we got out to the parking lot, I asked him how he felt it had gone.

  “Great! It was a piece of cake organizing all that. Skurdal isn’t a bad guy to work with. Remind me to tell Nathan he has free rein all the way to the fences at the top of the hill, in case he wants to cover the background noises and crowd ambience. The idea behind any great live album is to mike the entire hall, you know. So
that’s what we were trying to get dispensation to do.”

  “What about the bleed from mainstage? Won’t that affect things?”

  Woody shrugged. “Marginally. We’ll just have to schedule for sacrifice acts right after the mainstage material and toward the end of each day’s session. That’s the one sad bit. Things tend to get really rolling along toward the end, but if the sound checks start up on the other side of the treeline, our music may not make it to the anthology album.” He grinned. “We’ll have seventeen hours of music to choose from, though, so I don’t think we need to worry overmuch.”

  “So why did you look like Aric had won some sort of pissing war on our way out of there?”

  “Did I?” he asked. I nodded, putting on my sunglasses. It was a good thing I did. He smiled, and I swear his teeth sparkled just like the villain’s pearly whites in a melodrama.

  Woody began to hum softly. It wasn’t until I closed the car door that I realized he was humming “The Battle of New Orleans.” So Aric Skurdal qualified as “the bloody British” in Woody’s mind? I wondered who else might fit that billing. The Finsters? Paul Calihoo? Me? I tried to think back to see if Woody had been finessing me at any time in the past few weeks, but it was too hard to tell or sort things out with all that had been occurring lately. I asked if he’d mind dropping me at the corner of 109th Street and 87th Avenue so that I could grab a bite to eat at home before heading back in to the Centre for the afternoon, and he whipped into the High Level Diner parking area so I could access the back door of my apartment building. He waved his arm out his open window as he drove off down the alley. For someone from Washington, DC, who had only been here a couple of weeks, he certainly had a firm grasp of the area.