Dressed to Confess

by Diane Vallere

  Shortly after I’d moved to Las Vegas, I answered an ad for a roommate and ended up living above a Chinese food restaurant. It wasn’t on the main strip—or even the strip next to the main strip—but it was affordable, and Crystal—the resident advertising for a roommate—was nice. We were both struggling to make ends meet, and oftentimes dinner consisted of egg rolls from the restaurant below us.

  One particular day while recovering from a cold, I’d gone downstairs for a bowl of egg drop soup. The candy store next door to us had put a sign in the window: FREE KITTENS. A family of four walked out with a tawny kitten nestled against the chest of the boy. Whether under the influence of extreme cuteness or Benadryl, I’d never know, but instead of getting the egg drop soup, I went into the candy store and inquired about the cats. Ten minutes later, I walked out with a dark gray bundle of fur and an industrial-sized bag of cat food. Soot and I had been together ever since.

  My time in Las Vegas had started out rocky. I’d taken whatever jobs I could: receptionist for a real estate agent, vintage clothing store sales associate, and concession stand clerk for a theater. Eventually, I answered an ad for a magician’s assistant. Magic Maynard wasn’t the best magician, which was why his show was at a dive bar on a side street away from the main strip, but he paid me every week and let me design my own costumes. I spent the better part of those years in sequined bodysuits and fishnets under cutaway tuxedo jackets that I got when one of the chapels of love cleaned out their inventory.

  Crystal spent her days auditioning at the main casinos. She stood in for me when I first came back to Proper, but she never got the hang of the doves, so Maynard replaced her with someone else. Last time we talked, she’d been working on an act as a Taylor Swift impersonator. I guess when you’re determined to make it, you learn to create your own opportunities.

  My hand had gone slack. Soot bent his head into it and pressed slightly, and then swatted at it with his paw a few times to make sure I got the message to keep petting him. I caught his paw between my thumb and forefinger and rubbed it a few times until he pulled away, meowed again, and jumped off the bed. He skulked to the kitchen and sat below the window, staring up. The wall phone rang again as I was filling Soot’s bowl. I ignored it and refilled Soot’s water too. I checked the litter box, scooped out two suspicious clumps, washed my hands, and left.

  * * *

  HOSHIYAMA Kobe Steak House sat a couple of miles east of Disguise DeLimit on the left-hand side of Main Line Road. Unencumbered with boxes of bear costumes and the like, I was able to take my scooter. The helmet sat awkwardly on the top of my head, squishing my ponytail down. It was a short ride, and a few minutes later, I was parked in a space close to the front of the restaurant.

  I’d fallen in love with teppanyaki-style cooking long before I’d met Tak. Ebony and my dad had taken me to Vegas for my sixth-grade graduation and told me I got to choose the restaurant. Considering I was twelve, they’d probably expected to get off with a Happy Meal and a supersized order of fries, but once I’d spotted Mori’s Steakhouse, I’d been smitten. Add in the fried rice, onion volcano, and green tea ice cream, and I’d never been the same.

  Hoshiyama Kobe Steak House had moved into Proper City while I lived in Vegas, so I hadn’t experienced their menu until my recent return. Tak’s parents had been running the restaurant for several years, slowly converting the interior to a more authentic Japanese style. The exterior was a dark brown wooden building with a small plaque and menu posted, but inside, the hostesses wore kimonos and the chefs wore white mandarin-style cooking shirts and chef’s hats. Paper lanterns hung at varying levels from the ceiling, glowing with soft battery-operated tea-light candles, and displays of swords, knives, paintings, and objets d’art were placed in the front lobby, giving visitors something unique to see while waiting for their table.

  Tonight, the restaurant was mostly empty. Teppanyaki restaurants, most famously Benihana, were popular destinations for special occasions, but aside from celebrations, most people didn’t think of them when considering takeout or a typical Tuesday night meal. The festival would pull people away from the existing restaurants too, which was why so many of them chose to participate. Tak had promised to get us a private room, but it appeared as though that would be unnecessary. We could have our pick of the tables and still enjoy our privacy.

  I scanned the interior, looking for him. A pretty brunette woman in a pink and orange floral kimono approached me. “Good evening,” she said with a slight bow. “Are you waiting for the rest of your party?”

  “Tak Hoshiyama. I’m meeting him. Is he here yet?”

  She looked confused. “Tak isn’t coming here tonight,” she said. Something about her expression had changed, but I couldn’t read the emotion that had replaced her initial politeness.

  “Are you sure? He said he was going to meet me in one of the private rooms. Maybe he’s there now?”

  “I think there’s been some kind of mix-up. Maybe you should call him?” Her eyes cut to the phone that sat on the hostess station, and then she looked down toward the carpet.

  “You’re not telling me something,” I said. “I don’t know who you think I am, but I’m—I’m Tak’s girlfriend.” It was the first time I’d spoken those words, and guilt shuddered through me. “I mean, we’re not—you know—but we do go out together, and I don’t know if he’s seeing anybody else, but I’m not, so—”

  The light behind the rice paper screens that separated the private room from the main dining room went on, casting a muted orange-pink glow onto that corner of the restaurant. The doors slid open, slowly.

  “He is here. I’ll just go surprise him,” I said.

  “No, you can’t—” she said. She put her hand on my arm and held me back. Startled, I looked at her, and then back at the open doors to the private room. Standing in the orange-pink glow next to Tak was Detective Nancy Nichols.

  Chapter 17

  OF ALL THE people I could have imagined being with Tak behind closed doors, this one was my least favorite. Not because she was conducting an investigation against my dad’s best friend. Not because she and I had been at odds twice before over crimes in Proper. But because she actually had been Tak’s girlfriend, for real, for a while, before he’d moved to Proper City himself.

  He’d never told me about their breakup, their relationship, or the terms of their coexisting in Proper City now. I liked to think that the fact that he spent time with me meant something, but seeing them together, across the restaurant, coming out of a room that I knew to be both private and intimate in setting, scrambled everything I’d been comfortable thinking and left me feeling poached.

  While I hadn’t spent much time listening to the not-so-subtle hints of the hostess, it seemed like there was no time like the present to change that. “Oh,” I said. “I’ll just be leaving.” I looked at the hostess stand. “Is this the takeout menu? Great, thank you. That’s just what I need.” I left the restaurant as quickly as I could, sure that they’d recognized me, feeling ridiculous. I had my helmet buckled on and the scooter engine started by the time Tak caught up with me. I probably could have gotten out of there too, if he hadn’t stood directly in my path.

  His mouth moved but with the helmet on, I couldn’t hear what he said over the engine. I pointed to my ears and shook my head. He came closer and cupped his hands around his mouth.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “You invited me.”

  “Didn’t you get my message?”

  “What message?” I asked, which seemed to work as well as “No, I didn’t,” in terms of answering his question.

  “I called you and asked if we could reschedule.”

  “My cell phone is still with the police and the store phone’s going crazy with reporters. I stopped answering after the first two and let the service pick it up.”

  “Turn off the scooter and take off the helmet. We
need to talk.”

  I thought back to my conversation with Soot about being a mature adult who could handle the situation with Tak. I owed it to Soot to act like that mature adult. Cats like him preferred to know that their owners were emotionally stable. I turned off the engine and unbuckled my helmet. The scarf that I’d tied around my ponytail stuck to the inside of the helmet, which made it difficult to extricate my head from the plastic casing.

  “Did you or did you not tell me to meet you here for a da—for dinner?”

  “I did.”

  “So I did not get that wrong? Because the hostess acted like maybe I’d gotten that wrong. And when I saw you and Detective Nichols coming out of the private room, it sure felt like the hostess was right, which meant I wasn’t, which meant that you hadn’t asked me here, which you say you did, so I’m confused.”

  “After that, I’m confused too.” He held out his hand. “Come back into the restaurant and I’ll explain.”

  “Is there a back door? I’d rather not walk past the hostess again.”

  “I just saw a party of seven go inside. There’s light staffing tonight because it’s been so slow lately, so she’ll be busy serving the miso and the salads. Come on. You have a limited window to maintain obscurity.” He grinned.

  I took his hand and swung my leg over the scooter, hopped a couple of times until I had my balance, and locked the helmet to the seat. He kept holding my hand even though I was off the scooter. I didn’t mind.

  I half expected to find Detective Nichols waiting for us in the private room. When Tak slid the doors open and led me inside, I felt an unexpected release of tension, as if weights had been tied to my hands and feet and were suddenly removed. But then I realized I hadn’t seen her leave, which meant she knew of a back passageway, or she could be hiding behind the other set of rice paper walls or under the table—

  “Nancy left out the back when I came after you.”

  “So there is a back door.”

  Tak dropped my hand. “Margo, sit down. We need to talk.”

  “I don’t want to,” I said. Soot, I felt, would have been embarrassed by how quickly I abandoned my mature adult act.

  “Why not?”

  “Because if I sit down, you’re going to tell me how you and the detective are getting back together, and how you don’t want to see me anymore, and I can’t move away because I just moved back a year ago to take over the store, so we’ll see each other all the time, and I won’t be able to get fried rice anymore because it’ll remind me of you.” I remembered the takeout menu in my pocket, but bit my tongue. Not the time to mention that my subconscious had seen this coming.

  “I used to think I could read you pretty well,” Tak said. “It wasn’t just a body language or facial expression thing either. The first time I met you I felt like I’d met you before. But you’re so off base right now, I don’t even know what to say. Why do you think Nancy and I are getting back together? Why do you think I don’t want to see you anymore? Where did that come from?”

  I chewed the inside of my mouth and stared at the table. I knew where it had come from. A big fat overwhelming ingrained-in-my-DNA fear of abandonment that I’d been carrying with me since the day I was born. The day my mom had died.

  I knew the story of my mom and dad. Jerry and Celeste had met shortly after he’d bought Disguise DeLimit from the original owners. Together they’d taken over the daily running of the costume shop. They were the picture of newly married bliss, and then my mom had gotten pregnant. Nine months later, I arrived, but complications during her pregnancy had created a situation where only one of us would survive.

  That day, she passed the torch to me. For the past thirty-three years, it had been me and my dad. He managed Disguise DeLimit while raising me by himself—at least until Ebony happened into the shop, saw a five-year-old girl dressed like a fireman, and figured I could use a female influence in my life. The two of them did the best they could to make me turn out normal, but considering my school clothes came from the costume store and my surrogate mom sometimes kept a plastic pistol in her Afro, normal was a stretch.

  I’d spent time with more than one therapist trying to get over what they all termed “survivor guilt,” or the residual feelings that maybe I should have died so my biological mother could live. A few specialists added in the extra prediction that I’d have trouble connecting with people in my adult life, a side effect of the irrational sense of abandonment I’d developed. I almost wished I’d never heard the theory because it had turned out to be freakishly accurate, leaving me wondering if the suggestion had never been planted, would I be more suited to handling the ebbs and flows of adult relationships?

  This was the type of conversation I usually had with Soot, who had taken the place of a rotating cast of therapists when I moved back to Proper City. One woman, an unlicensed counselor named Willow, pinch-hit when Soot was busy chasing mice in the stockroom. But otherwise, I was on my own to sort this kind of stuff out. See how well that has worked out for me?

  “Okay, you don’t have to tell me what you’re thinking, but I do have to tell you something. You know I’ve been looking for a job. It’s rough out there. Maybe if I was fresh out of college, I could find something, but I’m not. I’m competing with people who are ten years younger than I am.”

  “But you’re smart and you have experience.”

  “That’s all true, but there’s an explanation for why I haven’t been excited about any of the jobs that I’ve interviewed for. There’s a reason why I want to stick around Proper City even though my employment options are limited.”

  He was quiet for a moment. I didn’t say anything.

  “I got a job offer today. It’s not exactly what I was looking for, but it’s a lot closer to what I do than helping around the restaurant.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. My words felt empty of emotion and I hoped Tak didn’t notice. “When will you be moving?”

  “I won’t be.” I looked up at his face. I’d expected to see a smile, but I didn’t. He was serious, the kind of serious that said that what sounded like good news was possibly bad news parading around in a sheep’s costume.

  “The Clark County District Attorney called. With the incorporation of Proper City looking more and more like a reality, the mayor’s office has approved a bill to fund city expansion at the district level. A portion of the money is being used to create a position that works closely with the police department to advise on the expansion. That’s what I worked on before I left my job. Turns out they’re willing to set me up in a satellite office to focus on future growth in Proper.”

  “So you’re going to stay here? In Proper?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good news, right? All you have to do is set up a temp office and you’re good to go.”

  “I have a temp office.” He paused. “At the police station.”

  Neither one of us said the obvious second half of the sentence. That he’d be staying in Proper City, working alongside Detective Nancy Nichols, every day of the week.

  Chapter 18

  AFTER THE BOMBSHELL, I wasn’t sure how I felt. It seemed inappropriate to suggest that I had to leave the restaurant so I could go home and talk things over with my cat, so I stayed. I even managed to ask a few questions about how this all had come about. It quickly became obvious that he’d been nervous about telling me, and that somehow allayed my fears. Not to mention the fact that when somebody who’s been looking for a job for months finally gets one, you’re a pretty crappy person if you make it all about you.

  Eventually, conversation turned from Tak’s new employment opportunity to what had been going on around Proper. Sometime between him coming to see me at the festival earlier today and now, he’d been briefed on the details of the murder of Ronnie Cass.

  “Who told you?” I asked. “Earlier today, you didn’t seem to know any of this
.”

  “Nancy told me. I don’t think she would have normally talked to me about it, but Don kept interrupting her. He’s not doing himself any favors.”

  “Maybe he was interrupting her because she arrested the wrong person. Did she ever think of that?”

  “Don was let go earlier today. She didn’t have enough to hold him.”

  “They why did you say he kept interrupting her? What did he do?”

  “He keeps calling the police station, asking to speak to her. Demanding is more like it. He said he had information that could help lead to the capture of Ronnie’s murderer.”

  “He’s cooperating. He’s trying to help.”

  “He’s borderline making sure the case is thrown for good. Every time he makes the claim that he has information that could help in the investigation, the police have to take him seriously.”

  “I should hope so,” I said.

  “The law is like that for a reason, but Don’s information isn’t helping, it’s diverting attention from the real investigation. He keeps talking about bank robberies from fifty years ago and illegitimate children and pointing the finger at Chet and Jayne Lemming. His behavior isn’t entirely unexpected considering his love of conspiracies, but it’s not a good strategy if he wants to cooperate.”

  I sat up straighter. “Maybe he does know something. Don’s very in tune with what’s going on around him. That’s the benefit of being a bit on the paranoid side. He might have seen or overheard something. He might really know what happened.”

  “Or he might be throwing a bunch of red herrings at the police so they get lost in a blizzard of dead ends.”

  Like the evidence found at the bank robbery fifty years ago, I thought.

  By the time our food arrived—prepared on one of the cooking surfaces out front and delivered to our room so as to maintain the “private” part—I’d lost my appetite. Tak hadn’t been gung ho on how I’d gotten involved in recent crimes in Proper, but he’d understood why I had. First, Ebony’s freedom had been at risk. Then, I’d almost lost the store. He hadn’t judged me during either of those times. He hadn’t tried to talk me out of being involved either.