Crushed Velvet

by Diane Vallere

  I changed back into my sailor pants, top, and sneakers and found the kitties, who were far more interested in the sock they swatted back and forth in the living room than in my theories about Phil’s murder. I got down on my hands and knees and gave each of them a kiss between their ears, told them where I was going in case of emergency, and locked up behind me.

  Outside, I turned left, walked the length of the sidewalk past the gas station on the corner, and turned left again. Two blocks later I was at the sheriff’s mobile unit. Sheriff Clark sat at his desk eating a Snickers bar. When he saw me, he let the uneaten portion slide back into the wrapper and neatly tucked the plastic around the candy. He couldn’t have shown more care if he was a vampire looking to conceal evidence of his bite marks.

  “Ms. Monroe. What brings you to my doorstep?”

  “Do you still have my fabric?” I asked.

  “Like I told you, your fabric is currently part of my homicide investigation. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but I can’t let you have it.”

  “Would it be possible for me to examine it? Just a swatch?”

  “While I appreciate the gesture, I think our technicians can handle that.”

  I detected a note of sarcasm. I lowered myself into the chair across from him and folded my hands on the desk in front of me.

  “I spoke to the man who runs the fabric warehouse where I was to pick up my fabric. His name is Mack. He said my velvet is still in Los Angeles. He described it well enough for me to know it’s what I ordered, which means what Rick delivered here isn’t. So I’m trying to figure out how that’s possible, that my fabric is there when we all think my fabric is with you.”

  Clark picked up a pen and wrote something on the corner of his desk calendar. He moved the Snickers bar on top of his notes so I couldn’t read them.

  “Don’t you find any of this suspicious?” I asked.

  “When you hired Phil to make this pickup, did you arrange it through his company? Fill out an invoice? Pay by credit card or check?”

  “I hired him with a verbal agreement and paid him in cash. That’s what he wanted. Why?”

  “Seems to me this story about your fabric, if it’s true, has nothing to do with Mrs. Girard.”

  “Yes! Exactly.” I sat back and placed my forearms on the chair, my hands wrapped around the end of the armrests. “I’m glad you understand.”

  “What I understand is that you’ve brought me a story intended to throw suspicion away from Mrs. Girard. You have no proof that this story is anything other than that—a story.”

  “That’s why I want to see the fabric, Sheriff. If you let me see it, I can tell you if it’s really mine or not. If it’s not, I can try to figure out where it came from.”

  “Ms. Monroe, I can assure you we’re looking into every lead we have, and that includes your fabric.”

  “Does it include the fabric distributor where the fabric was picked up? Because I personally think it’s a little weird that somebody let twelve bolts of fabric show up here and it turns out they’re not the right ones. Those people are opportunistic. If they knew what happened, they wouldn’t admit to the error. They’d sell off my fabric to someone else and wash their hands of the mix-up.”

  “So you’re saying you conducted business with shady businessmen.”

  “There are people in the fabric industry who are less than honest, yes. I happen to know this because I worked for one of them. Until I get my store up and running, I have to rely on the contacts that I have.”

  Clark glared at me.

  “There were crates of food in the back of the van, which means someone picked up a delivery. Did you look through the food? Was any of it suspicious? Maybe the food suppliers were the ones who did this. Did you know there’s a food distributor named Topo di Sali who’s pressuring Genevieve to sell out? Maybe Phil met with him. Maybe negotiations got out of hand. Have you talked to him?”

  “Ms. Monroe, are you finished?”

  “And what about Rick Penwald, the driver? He should be your main person of interest. He drove the van that had Phil’s body in it. He must know something.”

  “I can assure you we have a list of suspects and we’re pursuing each of them.”

  “Does that list include Babs Green?”

  Clark leaned forward. “What does Babs Green have to do with this?”

  “She was having an affair with Phil Girard.”

  “Did Mrs. Girard know about it?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “I imagine a wife might get angry when she finds out her husband is having an affair.”

  “I hope you see there’s more to this murder investigation than a case of ‘angry wife offs husband.’”

  “And I hope you were paying attention when I said I wasn’t going to discuss the case with you.”

  I felt a sneeze coming on, and I pinched the bridge of my nose to stop it. “As long as I’m here, why don’t you let me take a close-up picture of the velvet so I can use it in my promotional materials?”

  “Why would you want a close-up of velvet that wasn’t your velvet?”

  Drat. He was going to shut me out of his investigation. “Good night, Sheriff.” I headed to the door, and then turned back around. “One more thing. When you finish up with the velvet that isn’t my velvet, feel free to give me a call. Maybe I’ll be willing to take it off your hands, since I have a fabric store and you don’t.”

  Sheriff Clark had his elbows on his desk calendar and his fingers steepled in front of him. Before he had a chance to say anything else, I added, “Maybe this investigation is none of my business, but fabric is. So before you say anything, that’s what I’m minding.” I turned around and stormed out.

  The streets were almost empty. I walked quickly to Charlie’s Automotive and tapped a rhythm of beats on the glass door, followed up with a phone call and a text. The text was answered first. We’re around back.

  Charlie’s Automotive was exactly what you’d expect an auto shop to be: an austere, exposed brick and concrete area with three pits for getting under cars, and two walls of tools to do whatever it was that needed to be done. Calendars of half-naked firemen shared wall space with images of Rosie the Riveter and Eddie Van Halen.

  What most of San Ladrón didn’t know was that Charlie kept a small oasis behind her auto shop. It was the size of a gardening shed, about eight feet by ten feet, whitewashed on the interior and outfitted with wooden benches that lined the walls. Decorative wicker baskets filled with plush Egyptian cotton towels, shower gels, and moisturizers sat below the benches, and framed pages from a 1970s mechanic’s calendar featuring pastel drawings of women posing behind blankets, towels, and nightgowns hung on the walls. What Charlie exposed to the world in the form of don’t-mess-with-me toughness was countered by what she kept in the back, her place to get away from it all when she needed to.

  The only reason I knew about her private quarters in the back was because she’d offered me use of them when I first showed up in San Ladrón. My unpopularity at the time had inspired the destruction of her property. Until tonight, I didn’t know what she’d done about it. I rounded the corner and saw the door of her shed propped open with one of her combat boots.

  “In here,” she called.

  Inside the shed, Genevieve sat in a chair with her hair wrapped in a turban of plastic. She faced the wall. Charlie stood by a small sink, running her hands under water. A pair of clear plastic gloves sat on the edge of the sink. A small boom box sat on the floor, playing The Stray Cats.

  I pointed at the boom box, at Genevieve, and at Charlie. “Do I want to know what’s going on?” I asked.

  “Charlie convinced me I need a new look,” Genevieve said. “She’s giving me a cut and color for the low price of organizing her invoices. Plus she let me pick the makeover music.”

  Charlie rolled her eyes. �
�Until ten minutes ago I didn’t know rockabilly was French.”

  “What?” Genevieve asked, turning her head toward Charlie.

  “Nothing.” Charlie picked up a white plastic kitchen timer from the bench next to the sink and twisted the dial as far as it would go. “You can relax now. We rinse in fifteen.”

  “What?” Genevieve asked again. A ratty, faded towel was draped over her from neck to thigh. She reached a hand out from under the towel to the plastic that covered her ear and Charlie swatted her hand back down.

  “Sit. Relax. Wait. Got it?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Genevieve said with a salute.

  Charlie turned to me. “Is this a social call?” she asked, her voice low.

  “Not exactly. How’s she doing?” I asked, pointing at Gen. Her head was tipped back against the top of the chair and her eyes were closed.

  “Better. She stopped crying around noon. I gave her a couple projects in the office and told her to lay low. I expected her to be a real pain in the butt, but she didn’t bother me once.”

  “Did she talk about Phil?”

  “Nah. Every time she came close to bringing him up, the sniffles started. I put a moratorium on four-letter words that start with P. That seemed to help.”

  “Good, I think. There’s definitely more going on than I originally thought. Can we talk outside?”

  “Frenchy—yo!” Charlie called across the room. Genevieve rolled her head to the side and opened one eye. “Stay put. We’ll be right back.”

  Genevieve nodded and closed her eye.

  I followed Charlie through the door to the yard outside. The sun had dropped, but streetlights illuminated the stretch of Bonita that ran between the auto shop and the fabric store.

  “I don’t want to leave her alone for long,” she said. “Is that cool with you?”

  “Sure.” If I was going by the timer Charlie had set for Genevieve’s hair, I figured we had about ten minutes, max, before we had to head back. I cut to the chase and told Charlie about my phone call with Mack, the fabric distributor and how he claimed to still have my velvet order.

  “I thought your velvet was in the back of the van on top of Frenchy’s husband?”

  “That’s what I thought, too. That’s what we all thought. But this guy described the fabric he has in Los Angeles, and it’s mine, right down to the content.”

  “So what does Clark have?”

  I shrugged. “For all I know the factory produced a double order. Clark won’t let me see it, so I’m in the dark.”

  “So you told him about it?”

  “I just came from there. He won’t tell me anything.” I kicked the toe of my boot against the ground.

  “Do factories really produce double orders? Seems like a stretch.”

  “Rarely. The only other thing I can think of is that someone knew Phil was going to pick up twelve bolts of velvet but didn’t know that it was a specific twelve bolts. So they killed him and buried the body under twelve bolts. It’s possible the murderer never thought anybody would pay attention to the velvet.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “I don’t know. Here’s what I thought I knew: Phil went to Los Angeles on Sunday. Allegedly, he made arrangements for Rick Penwald—the other driver—to come to Los Angeles and make the delivery to San Ladrón. Only somehow the wrong fabric got loaded in the van—on top of Phil. I don’t know when, how, or why.”

  “Why ‘allegedly’?”

  “Because that information came from Rick. He must know more than he’s admitting. All he said was that Phil told him he wasn’t leaving LA just yet. Maybe Rick made the whole thing up and killed Phil. A dead man can’t contradict his story.”

  “That would be pretty gutsy: killing a guy, putting him in the back of his van, and making his scheduled deliveries.”

  “I know, but otherwise I can’t figure it out. How did someone put Phil’s body in the back of the van under my fabric without the driver knowing? The only answer I can come up with is that the driver knew. But what doesn’t make sense is that Genevieve knows Rick. She said he and Phil were friends, that Rick borrowed Phil’s van when Phil was on his taxi route. He just slapped a logo on the side and conducted business.”

  “Maybe that makes a lot of sense. He could have done all kinds of shady things. If anybody got suspicious he could have covered Phil’s logo, or uncovered Phil’s logo.”

  “Genevieve said if the tea shop ever took off, Phil was planning on leaving his delivery route to Rick. But Rick wasn’t all that happy when I caught up with him and started asking questions. If he really was Phil’s friend, wouldn’t he want to help?”

  Genevieve popped her plastic-wrapped head out the door of the shed. “Charlie? The timer went off,” she called. “I don’t want my hair to fall out.”

  “I’ll be right there,” said Charlie. She turned back to me. “Call me tomorrow,” she said, and jogged back to the shed.

  I ran across the street to Material Girl, unlocked the front door, and went to the bedroom. My clothes from yesterday were still on the fainting sofa. I went through the pockets until I found the pink page Rick had made me sign. I hadn’t pressed hard enough and now my signature was little more than a smudge. Across the center of the page it said, “12 rolls velvet. Prepaid. Signature for delivery confirmation only.” The carefully printed words were the only clear thing that had been added to the preprinted form.

  I unlocked my phone and dialed 411. When the operator prompted me for city and listing, I said, “Los Angeles, Special Delivery. They’re a delivery service out of Los Angeles,” I added.

  Keys tapped in the background. “You sure they’re in Los Angeles?”

  “I thought they were. Why? Do you have them listed somewhere else?”

  “Nope. Hold on,” she said and switched me over to a ringing number. One ring, two, three, four . . . After seven rings, three piercing tones came on the line. “I’m sorry, the number you have dialed has been disconnected. Please check the number and try again.” The piercing tones repeated.

  I called information again. “I just called for a number but I’m getting a not-in-service message. Can you double-check it for me? And this time don’t connect me. I’ll write the number down and call it later.”

  She asked for the city and listing again and clicked on her keyboard. “I got nothing,” she said. “Hold on. That’s interesting. Special Delivery, you said?”

  “Yes. Twenty-four-hour delivery service. Did you find them?”

  “No, and I don’t think you’re going to find them, either.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I’m staring at a listing for a temporary number designated to that business. No address, no website, no e-mail.” She chuckled. “I hope you haven’t hired them yet, because it looks to me like Special Delivery was a fly-by-night operation.”

  Nine

  I thanked the operator and hung up. My hand was shaking. I smoothed out the creases of the invoice and looked at the label that had been affixed to the upper left-hand corner of the form. Special Delivery, with an address, phone number, and website.

  But Special Delivery didn’t exist. Which meant not only was Rick not exactly telling the truth, but he’d gone out of his way to create invoices to back up his lie. Everything I knew about his story started to fall apart: the last-minute arrangement to make the delivery, the thousand dollars in an envelope on the front seat, the statement that he’d never looked into the back of the van. Even the sign on the side of the van had been temporary, and the fact that he’d been driving around this morning with that same sign on what appeared to be a brand-new truck told me he was trying to mislead someone. He could have known exactly what Phil was picking up in Los Angeles. I still didn’t know what his motive might have been, but now I had evidence that he was lying to me.

  I went downstairs t
o the computer, plugged my phone into the USB jack, and cued up the pictures from the back of the van. I enlarged the images, trying to make out the information on the tags. The screen was pixilated and all I saw for my efforts was a sequence of beige squares. I moved the photo from my phone to the hard drive of the computer and opened it in Photoshop. After fiddling with the contrast, resolution, and increasing the sharpness, I was able to read the writing on the tags. One word, the same on each of them. 100% Polyester. No wonder someone thought it was my fabric.

  My fabric wasn’t 100 percent polyester, but someone who didn’t know who I was might have heard the word polyester and mistaken it for the fabric and not the person who ordered it.

  Fabric warehouses were some of the most overwhelming buildings I’d ever experienced. Rolls of material were stocked on deep shelves that went from floor to ceiling—and warehouse ceilings were sometimes twenty to thirty feet high. The owners knew their stock like the backs of their hands, but it would take even an experienced fabric connoisseur several hours to map out the rhyme or reason that an owner might use. According to Mack, my fabric had been left untouched, but that didn’t mean Phil hadn’t made the pickup he was hired to make. Velvet would be stocked with other velvet, and if twelve rolls were together, tagged 100% Polyester, it was plausible that Phil would have made an erroneous assumption.

  But if all of that was true, then I was saying that Phil Girard was murdered because he picked up the wrong twelve rolls of velvet. And I couldn’t imagine circumstances where someone would commit murder over twelve rolls of fabric. Not even me.

  So, who else would have found my fabric to be worth killing over? It wasn’t like I was under suspicion for Phil’s murder. I wasn’t anywhere near Los Angeles between Sunday night and Monday morning. I had a construction crew and a broken sidewalk as my alibi.

  But so did Genevieve. She was right beside me when the van pulled up. I wondered why she hadn’t been ruled out as a suspect because of that.