Dressed to Confess

by Diane Vallere

  But tonight, we were on opposite sides. His new job was funded by Mayor Young and was a by-product of the desired city incorporation. His base of operations would be inside the police department working alongside the town detective every single day. His background and grasp of mathematics and calculations led him to being an analytical person, systematic in his approach to everything. He was on the side of rules, regulations, and leaving things to the police.

  I already knew that sometimes life wasn’t like math. You could add two and two, but if there was an unknown variable at play, you wouldn’t get four. Was this what things were going to be like after Tak took this job? Spending time alongside his ex-girlfriend, would he become her confidant, someone to bounce theories off of?

  “You said Don was released? How come?”

  “Nancy brought him in for questioning, but she didn’t have enough for a warrant. He was there for twenty-four hours, which is the maximum she can detain him.”

  “She took him in yesterday.”

  “That’s right. She let him go this afternoon right about when I got there. We were twenty minutes into our interview and he started calling.”

  I looked at the time on the clock on the wall. Yesterday, Don had been taken away from the festival around four o’clock. It was closing in on eight now. If Don had made enough of a nuisance of himself in the four hours after he’d been let go, then Don had something worth talking about. And even if Nancy didn’t want to listen to him, I did.

  I balled up the napkin that sat in my lap and set it on the table next to my barely touched plate of food. “Will you judge me too harshly if I back out of tonight? I’ve had almost no sleep over the past two days, and the carbs in the fried rice just hit me. I think I need a very long nap.”

  Tak studied me for a few moments without saying anything. His deep brown eyes bounced back and forth over my own, and I knew there was a chance that he knew exactly what I was thinking. There was also a chance that, after he’d made all of these arrangements for us, he’d be insulted.

  I put my hand on his arm. “I really am tired,” I said. “I was up most of last night making costumes for teddy bears for the festival. I know it’s barely eight, and I’d really like to spend time with you, but I think I’m going downhill.”

  “Truth is, I’m a little jet-lagged myself. I think I synced with Michigan time right before I flew out today.”

  “So how about tomorrow night? We’ll have a proper celebration for your new job.”

  “Isn’t any celebration in Proper a proper celebration?”

  “I guess you’ll have to wait and see.”

  Tak found a couple of takeout containers and helped me pack up half of the food for later. He knew about my penchant for Fruity Pebbles and wanted to make sure if I did get hungry later, I’d have a more acceptable meal available. I think he considered the bowl-of-cereal-for-dinner thing an insult to restaurateurs everywhere.

  If he doubted my sincerity earlier, he had proof while he walked me to my scooter. I stifled two yawns and gave up the third time, turning my head the opposite direction and gulping down air. He stood patiently while I unlocked the seat to the Vespa, pulled my helmet out, and tucked the takeout containers inside.

  “Are you okay to drive?” he asked.

  “Sure. It’s two miles.”

  “I think we should put the scooter in the back of my truck and let me drive you.”

  “Not necessary.”

  “Then I’ll follow you.”

  “Tak, I’m not going anywhere but home. You can trust me.”

  “Who said anything about not trusting you? You’re stumbling around like you polished off a bottle of wine.”

  “Maybe you slipped something into my fried rice.”

  “Margo, come on, this is serious.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. I remembered a time, not too long ago, when I’d been in a dangerous situation and had wanted nothing more than for Tak to check on me. “You know what? You should follow me and make sure I get home safely.”

  He smiled. “You got it.”

  And that’s exactly what happened: I drove home on my scooter with Tak not far behind me. And after I parked out back and waved good-bye, I went upstairs, turned on the light to my bedroom, and changed into black sweats and a baseball hat. I turned the light off, made sure Tak’s SUV was nowhere in sight, grabbed the keys to Dig’s Le Sabre, and drove to Don’s house.

  * * *

  DON Digby lived in arguably the smallest house in Proper. About five hundred square feet in total, it was a small brick box that sat between the Department of Water and Power and the abandoned schoolhouse where a portion of Proper City’s residents had been educated. After he’d retired from being a nurse, he’d made it his mission to live small and reduce his carbon footprint.

  I parked the Le Sabre out front and approached the door. Before knocking, I slipped a piece of paper underneath. Frohike’s here. Open up. I tapped lightly on the door and it opened almost instantly.

  “Hurry up,” he said. “You don’t know who’s watching.”

  For the briefest of moments I worried that Don had lost it. I stepped inside and he closed and locked the door behind me. “The news has created a feeding frenzy. People keep driving past, shouting my name and asking where I hid the gold. I can’t turn on my TV or radio because all I see are reports that aren’t even true. It’s like the mayor sicced his PR person on me and I’m the flavor of the month.”

  “People are stalking you?”

  “When I got home today, there were holes in my yard. Actual holes. People were digging.”

  “Digging for what?”

  “For the gold that Ronnie took from the bank fifty years ago.”

  “But that’s just a story, right? Wrong place, wrong time. You and Ronnie didn’t rob the bank.”

  “I didn’t, but Ronnie did. That’s the reason we broke up.”

  Chapter 19

  “RONNIE ROBBED THE bank?” I asked, shocked at the news.

  “Sit down, Margo. I’ll get some tea. It’s a long story, and you might as well hear it.”

  I lowered myself onto a brown tweed chair but then stood up almost immediately. The room was a study in brown, sort of “eccentric professor,” the type of setting that called for a costume with elbow patches and argyle. A map of the world that was marked with locations of UFO sightings hung from the ceiling, separating the living room from the corner with Don’s bed. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with bound reports and record albums. His love of blues and soul music was as great as his suspicion of the government. I ran my hand over the spines of a row of old cordovan leather books with faded gold letters, and then lifted the lid on the record player to see what was on the turntable. Sonny Boy Williamson.

  As I wandered around the tiny room, I couldn’t help but think about how different Don must be now from the eighteen-year-old who had been in a relationship with Ronnie. In 1968, Don had been Kirby’s age. The memory of Kirby’s angst over Varla was still fresh in my mind. Was that how Don had felt about Ronnie?

  He returned with two steaming mugs, one in each hand, and a folding aluminum TV tray tucked under his arm. He twisted at the waist and I took the TV stand and set it up. He set one mug down and then sat on a small footstool and drank from the other—the mug, not the footstool. I sat back in the tweed chair and cupped my mug, waiting for him to talk.

  “Your dad and I weren’t sure whether we should tell you any of this or not,” he said. “It’s water under the bridge. Ancient history.” He took another pull on his mug and then set it on the floor. “How did she look?” he asked quietly.

  My heart went out to him. For as long as I’d known Don, he’d been happy to be on his own. I’d never asked why he didn’t date, because that was too close to asking why my own father didn’t date. Both men could be filed in the c
ategory of eligible bachelor: single, financially solvent, unencumbered by ex-wives. I knew a lot of the women in Proper viewed my dad as a catch, but I’d never really thought much about Don.

  I’d spent the past few days trying to block the image of Ronnie’s body from my mind, but for Don I conjured the image back up. “She was in her costume,” I said. “Ready to perform.”

  He smiled and nodded. “Ronnie loved performing. She was like an athlete suiting up for a big game. She put on that wig and that mask and could do anything. And she did.”

  “You said she robbed the bank. How do you know for sure?”

  “Because I helped her.” At my startled expression, he laughed. “Not like you think. I didn’t know I was helping her at the time.”

  He grew quiet. I wanted him to tell me the story, but I knew it was something he’d kept to himself for a long time. The clock on the wall ticked like a metronome, counting out beats of silence. An occasional drip from the faucet behind him provided a counter rhythm. It struck me as funny that the house next to the DWP had a leaky faucet.

  “She knew I liked puzzles, so she’d try to come up with things to stump me. Sometimes riddles, sometimes impossible situations. Every once in a while she told me a story that she pulled from those two-minute mystery books, ones where she knew the answer because she flipped to the back page to read the solution. She used to ask me about conspiracies too. She said that’s why I liked them, because it was as if there was a big secret out there and I was constantly trying to figure it out. She said one day I’d figure her out too. I told her as long as I lived, she’d always be a mystery to me. My enigma,” he added, almost as if he was talking to himself.

  I was having a hard time justifying the snappy, arrogant, self-centered Ronnie with the woman Don described. Every person who’d talked about her had shared the opinion that she only looked out for herself, except for him. Something big had happened to her after she left Proper. Something that had forever changed the person she once was into the woman I’d found dead in a trailer.

  “How serious was your relationship?” I asked.

  “Ronnie and I had talked about marriage. I even bought a ring and had it inscribed. I kept waiting for the right time, but I was scared. We were just kids, but we didn’t feel like it. We thought if we didn’t capture what we felt it would vanish. Ronnie used to talk about us making a name for ourselves. She said Proper City was too small for us, and I said that no matter where we went, Proper would always be a part of us. I think that’s how she got the idea, because she started to say that Pete Proper was our guardian angel. Pete Proper would always look out for us.”

  “But, Don, it’s one thing to say the founder of the town is going to look out for you and another to rob a bank and get away with a brick of his gold.”

  “She had this game she’d play. It started out being ‘How much would we need to disappear?’ and then it turned into ‘How could we get it?’ and from there it became ‘There’s gold sitting right there in that bank. Let’s figure out how to steal it.’ It seemed innocent at the time, but it was also a way to rebel against authority. Bonnie and Clyde came out in 1967, and she wanted us to be like them. Talking about robbing banks and disappearing. And it was somehow okay because we never talked about robbing the citizens of Proper who kept their money there. It was always about Pete Proper’s gold. And like she said, he stole it in the first place.”

  “So you two came up with a plan?”

  He shook his head. “It was just talk. She never wrote any of it down, and eventually we moved on to something else. Then the Domino Divas were booked to dance at a concert that would take place right out front and all of her free time went into that. Practicing around the clock, designing costumes, promoting the show. She contacted agents and scouts from Las Vegas and California. It was supposed to be her break and she wanted every single person to be there to see it.”

  I was starting to get an idea of why. “That was the day of the robbery, wasn’t it?” I asked. “She had a plan. She got everybody to show up at the dance concert so nobody was around to catch her.”

  “The news broke later that day. The alarm had been cut. The display case had been drilled and the gold was gone. The interior of the whole savings and loan was a mess. Trash everywhere. And it was wet. Like the roof leaked after a bad rainstorm.”

  “But it doesn’t rain in Proper.”

  “No, it sure doesn’t. That was just part of the enigma.” He grew silent again.

  “That’s the second time you mentioned an enigma.” Curiosity had taken over for me, a desire to know everything that had happened, the inside scoop, and why Don was so sure Ronnie was behind it.

  “Have you ever heard me or your dad talk about the ‘23 enigma’?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s the belief that most incidents and events are connected back to the number twenty-three. William S. Burroughs wrote about it. Smart man.”

  “Don?” I prompted, unsure how we’d segued to a novelist from the Beat generation.

  “The bank was robbed on February third at 5:23. Two three. Two plus three is five. Twenty-three. And twenty-three dollars was left behind on the bank counter under the velvet box that held Ronnie’s engagement ring.”

  “That doesn’t sound much like coincidence anymore.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “I know it’s no consolation, but at least she didn’t take the ring.”

  He looked up at me, his eyes filled with a sadness that spoke fathoms about the pain he still felt. “But she did. The ring box was empty.”

  Chapter 20

  THERE WAS NO easy way to ask the next question. “Don, I heard somebody say that you had a safe-deposit box at the bank and that you emptied it the day of the robbery. Is that true?”

  He leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. “There are no records that show that I emptied my box that day. Besides, there was only one thing in my safe-deposit box—the engagement ring. I kept the key on my key fob and Ronnie knew it. She could have made a copy at any time and replaced it without me even knowing. The story has gotten a little twisted over the years. Thing is, my box was the only one that was empty after the robbery.”

  “So people assumed you were involved because in addition to everything else, your box was singled out.”

  “Yep. Talk about a conspiracy to implicate me.” He laughed, but it was hollow. I could see why Don believed that what people saw wasn’t always the truth. He’d lived it himself. And like any good conspiracy, it was back in the media gaining steam, making him the center of attention over something that had happened too long ago to be news.

  “What happened after the robbery?”

  “There was an investigation, but it led nowhere. Too much evidence. As soon as I was cleared, I enlisted in the army. I couldn’t stay here. Life was different then and I needed a chance to make my own fresh start.”

  “But you came back.”

  “I served my time, but I’m not an army guy. Too many things I didn’t trust. Too many people who had secondary agendas. Proper City is home, so I came home.”

  “Detective Nichols thinks you’re doing the same thing again. Calling her with tips to investigate Ronnie’s murder to distract her from what happened. She thinks you’re more involved than you admit. She doesn’t have enough for a conviction yet, but you need to tread carefully.”

  “Ronnie was supposed to be my future. Apparently I was a poor judge of character back then. But this isn’t a game now. This is my life. For fifty years I’ve accepted that a lot of people think I was part of that robbery. I had patients who demanded a different nurse because their life savings was in that bank. I still get e-mails from people who ask me where the gold is. Once a month I have to edit the Wikipedia page about that robbery to keep my name out of it. Now somebody killed Ronnie and it’s all coming back. I had to unplug my phone becaus
e the reporters won’t leave me alone. Strangers are digging in my yard. I don’t know what she got into in the past fifty years, but it didn’t have anything to do with me. She made it clear that I wasn’t a part of her life when she came back, so I moved on.” He stood up. “I’m not going to let them vilify me again. This is as much my town as anybody else’s.”

  I stood up too. “Thank you for telling me the truth,” I said.

  He smiled. “I told you my version of what happened. The truth is still out there.”

  * * *

  THE next morning, I rose bright and early. I’d fallen asleep while trying to sort out everything Don had told me. There were details in his story that I hadn’t heard before, but there was still a lot of information for me to discover. What I knew was that Don hadn’t held back. He hadn’t been evasive. If he was involved—in either the bank robbery or the murder—he wouldn’t have opened up like he had. He reminded me of a pressure cooker, with everything building up on the inside, needing a release from the history that haunted him. Me showing up on his doorstep gave him that release, except it didn’t change anything. If Detective Nichols suspected that he did it, then no amount of pressure release would make a difference.

  There was one detail that nagged at me from Don’s story, though. The reason Ronnie had been suspected of the robbery in the first place: the blue domino mask that had been found at the scene of the crime. The Domino Divas had been at the top of their game when the robbery took place, and they’d been scheduled to perform that very day. It was almost too obvious . . . unless another diva was involved. And the one who appeared to have a grudge against Ronnie was Jayne.