Crushed Velvet

by Diane Vallere

  “Nobody likes looking like a fool, but Genevieve’s situation is a little more dire than that.”

  “Are you any closer to finding out who murdered the cheater?”

  “Right now I’d settle for finding out why someone murdered the cheater. Every single thing I find points to Genevieve.”

  “My money’s on this Rick dude.”

  “I told you, the sheriff is his alibi.”

  “For what? Clark gave him a ride to the city and took off. Nobody knows what happened next.”

  “Charlie, you’re involved with him. Do you really think he’d cover up for a potential murderer?”

  She twisted in her chair and hung one leg over the arm. “No. He wouldn’t. I’m looking for a reason to be even more mad at him than I already am, but that’s not one.”

  “I think it’s totally fine for you to be mad at him. In fact, I encourage it. He’s after Genevieve, and she didn’t do this.”

  “Okay, so what do we got?” she said, sounding like a female Kojak.

  “Rick says Phil called him early Monday morning and asked him to come to LA to pick up the van. If that’s true, then Phil was alive early Monday morning. Clark dropped Rick off and left. Rick found the keys in the ignition, money on the driver’s seat. He bought a cup of coffee and drove back, and that’s when I found Phil. Genevieve’s produce was in the van, and the fabric was on top of Phil.”

  “What doesn’t make sense is why he’d have the wrong fabric,” she said.

  “That could have been a mistake. Phil’s body was under that velvet. And there were a couple of crates of produce in there, too. And the jug of tea. All of that suggests that something happened after he picked everything up but before Rick got behind the wheel of the truck to make the delivery. So, let’s see. Phil packed the truck. Phil called Rick and asked him to make the delivery. And then what? Rick said Phil claimed he was on to something big in Los Angeles.”

  “You’re sure it wasn’t a woman?” Charlie asked.

  “Both Babs and Genevieve said something that makes it sound like it was, but Phil was no Prince Charming. I’m not even sure how he got two women, let alone three.” I chewed my lower lip and looked at the black-and-white cat clock on the wall of Charlie’s office. The eyes of the cat moved from side to side, marking off the passing seconds.

  “So whatever happened to Phil happened between him calling Rick and Rick showing up,” Charlie said.

  “It’s like someone heard him call Rick. If somebody was watching Phil they would have heard him make those arrangements. It would be perfect timing for a murderer. Murder him and put him in the van. You already know someone’s going to show up in forty-five minutes to courier the body to another town.”

  “I’d say it was genius, except it seems a little spontaneous. If Phil hadn’t made that phone call, then the opportunity never would have presented itself.”

  “You’re right,” I said, dejected. “The other thing that bothers me is Rick. Why did he care so much about getting my signature on the paperwork? He acted totally normal. If you knew you were delivering a dead man with your cargo, would you act totally normal?”

  “I like to think I don’t know the answer to that question, not being a murderer and all,” Charlie said.

  I ignored her sarcasm. “We’re still missing something. I just don’t know what.”

  I said good-bye to Charlie and went out front. Across the street, a long truck with a wooden flatbed was parked in front of Material Girl. Two ladders were propped against the front of the store and men in hard hats stood on each ladder.

  “Hey!” I called, jogging through the traffic like Frogger. A man stood by the truck, a hand keeping his yellow hard hat on his head, staring up at the men on ladders. He jumped when I put my hand on his arm, and his hard hat tipped to the side.

  “You never called me back. What are you doing?” I asked.

  “It’s your lucky day. We finished our last job early. I had the permits for your job in the truck, so here we are. Should be done in about forty-five minutes.”

  “By ‘done,’ what do you mean?”

  “All traces of the old sign down, new sign up and wired. Done.”

  “So I’ll actually have a sign by the time I open on Sunday?”

  “That’s what you wanted, right? Don’t you think you’re cutting it a little close?” he said with a wink.

  “Don’t even go there.”

  I walked around the block and let myself in through the back door so as to avoid interrupting the hard-hatted men out front. I couldn’t blame the interrupted schedule, or the rain, or the murder for not opening on time. This was it. Even if it was all coming down to the wire, it would be ready. I’d open on schedule, and I’d cross all of my fingers and toes that customers would show up.

  The sound of the power saws cutting the remaining exposed bolts away from the façade of the store was uncomfortably loud. I put my earbuds in and cued up some Ike and Tina Turner. I grabbed one of the bolts of velvet still wrapped in plastic and dragged it across the floor to the wrap stand. I cut the plastic open and lifted the velvet out of the wrapper. When I turned around, the foreman was standing by my back door. His lips moved but I couldn’t hear him. I pulled the earbuds out and let them dangle around my neck.

  “We’re all done out front. You wanna come see?”

  “Give me a minute to move the rest of this fabric.” I went back to the stack and strained with the weight of another roll while moving it to the wrap stand.

  “Jeez, lady, take it easy. You’re going to throw out your back if you keep that up. You gotta lift with your knees, like this,” he said. He crossed the store, wrapped his arms around the navy velvet, and hoisted it up. He stumbled forward a few steps, and then tripped over the bottom of it. The bolt fell out of his arms and landed on the floor. “Heavier than I expected.”

  He kept talking, but I didn’t hear anything he said. I was too focused on the small, plastic-wrapped package that had fallen loose from inside the tube of velvet and rested on the exposed concrete floor.

  Twenty-eight

  I picked the small bundle off of the floor. It was in the form of a tube, as if it had molded to the interior of the cardboard where it had been stuffed. I set the package on the wrap stand and squatted down on the floor by the end of the fabric roll. There were more packages shoved inside.

  “This must be what we’re looking for,” I said.

  “What’s that? Hash?” the foreman asked.

  “I don’t know. Is this what hash looks like?”

  His expression morphed from curiosity to concern. “I don’t know what you’re involved in, lady, but I’m not sticking around to find out.” He backed away from me a few steps, his eyes trained on the drugs. A few steps back he spun around and went out the front door. “Yo, pack it up. Job’s over.” He glanced over his shoulder at me. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I grabbed my phone, ignored an incoming call from Carson, and hit Charlie’s name.

  “Remember how we thought Phil made a mistake when he picked up the wrong fabric?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I don’t think it was a mistake. Get over here as soon as possible. Like, five minutes ago.” I hung up.

  I squatted by the end of the bolt of fabric and looked inside what should have been the hollow core. The cardboard tube had an opening of about three inches in diameter. I pushed my hand inside and reached as far as I could, made contact with an obstruction, and jimmied it until it was loose enough to remove. It was just like the first, a carefully wrapped and secured clear plastic package of something I was willing to bet wasn’t legal.

  I gave Charlie credit for how quickly she showed up. I was in the process of wrangling more bolts of fabric to the wrap stand when she came through the front door. “Drugs. In the velvet. Help me,” I said between breaths.

&nbs
p; She followed me to the back of the store. We struggled with the additional rolls, bringing them to the register one by one like a pair of lumberjacks carrying fallen tree trunks. Conversation ceased until we were done.

  I scooted into the back room and grabbed two wooden yardsticks from a shelf. They were old, from the days when the fabric store had been thriving, and were printed with the original name: Land of a Thousand Fabrics. I didn’t remember the last time I needed a yardstick while working for Giovanni, but I remember seeing them by each sewer’s station, as if the ladies relied on their presence in case of a straight-edge emergency. I loved the nostalgic feeling of them and planned to use them as a promotional item when the store opened.

  When I got back out front, Charlie was sniffing one of the small tube-shaped packages. I peeked inside the center core of the vibrant red velvet. Seeing nothing but darkness, I reached my fingers in. I pulled out two more plastic packages from each end, and then used the yardsticks to poke at the center until I freed something and it fell out the other side. Charlie’s hands were bigger than mine, so she left the task of emptying the tubes to me while she lined up our findings on the edge of the wrap stand. When we were finished, we had a large stack of bundles.

  “What do you think they are?” she asked.

  “I think they’re somebody’s motive.”

  “Do you think he knew they were in there? Do you think he double-crossed somebody?”

  “Phil Girard wasn’t smart enough to double-cross somebody. The man wasn’t even smart enough to hide a garter belt from his wife,” I said. I picked up a round package. It weighed about the same as the rubber-coated barbells I used when I worked out. “About five pounds each. And there were five packages in each roll of velvet—twelve rolls of velvet, so that’s sixty packages. Times five pounds each, that’s three hundred pounds of something. Add that to the weight of a roll of velvet and no wonder we’re so out of breath.”

  “I think this kind of stuff is sold by the gram. Or the kilo. What should we do with it?”

  “You know exactly what we have to do with it. We have to call Sheriff Clark.”

  Charlie followed me up the stairs to the apartment and flopped on the sofa while I made the call. I didn’t waste time on details. I told the sheriff that I had discovered something that related to Phil Girard’s murder and to come to the fabric store immediately.

  After I hung up, I turned to Charlie. “We probably shouldn’t mention Genevieve when Clark comes over. I’ll give him the drugs and tell him how I found them. If he doesn’t believe me, he can ask the foreman. He can’t deny that Phil was involved in something that had nothing to do with Genevieve or the tea shop. At least this takes the heat off of her.”

  Sheriff Clark arrived quickly. I raced down the stairs in my argyle socks. Charlie followed slowly behind me.

  “I better not find out this is a ploy to divert my investigation from Mrs. Girard,” Sheriff Clark said.

  “No ploy,” I answered. “Come see for yourself.” I led the sheriff to the wrap stand, where the sixty bricks were stacked. His eyes widened.

  “Where did this come from?” he asked. He used the end of a pencil to poke at the plastic packages on the table. Charlie’s arms were crossed over her chest.

  “Inside the velvet.” I pointed to the rolls propped along the side of the store. “This is the fabric Phil Girard was supposed to pick up, not the stuff at your station.”

  He picked up a plastic bundle and sniffed it like Charlie had done.

  “From what I’ve figured, someone packed these drugs into my velvet and expected Phil to bring them to San Ladrón. He brought the wrong fabric—I don’t know why—and he was killed because of it. Charlie thinks—”

  Clark held up his hand to silence me. He pulled on a pair of white rubber gloves and stacked the plastic-wrapped packages into a brown paper shopping bag from the local market.

  “Where’d this plastic come from?” he asked, pointing the eraser end of his pencil at the sliced-open plastic bag carcasses that littered the floor. They looked like oversized locust shells in a horror movie.

  “The velvet was wrapped in plastic. I was about to throw it out.”

  “Don’t.”

  Sheriff Clark went outside and said something in the radio that was attached to his dashboard. Minutes later, a dusty beige sedan and a white van pulled into the alley. The sedan parked next to my Volkswagen, and the van stopped in the middle of the lot.

  I didn’t recognize either of the men who arrived. Clark gave them instructions. They walked past Charlie and me and went inside the store. Charlie kept her arms crossed. I looked back and forth between the sheriff and her, expecting to see something that spoke of this secret relationship between them. Aside from the tension, there was nothing.

  I watched as the plastic, the packages of drugs, and my new rolls of velvet were carried out of the store. After several trips, Clark and one of the men closed up the doors on the back of the van. The third man hopped inside, backed the van up, then pulled forward in a large arc and drove out of the lot to the alley.

  “You can’t possibly think Genevieve had something to do with this, can you?” I asked Clark. “She grows her own tea leaves and orders cases of Dijon mustard over the Internet. She probably wanted fresh vegetables and spices that are unique to French cooking. I’m pretty sure the one thing that wasn’t on her shopping list was whatever that was. What was it?”

  “Ms. Monroe, Ms. . . .” His voice trailed off as he looked at Charlie. I imagined that he hadn’t put much thought into calling her by her surname during their time together.

  “Charlie. The name is Charlie. Don’t even think about using my last name.” She stormed away from us. I heard her motorcycle boots clomp across the floor, and then I heard the front door open and shut.

  “She’ll come around,” I said. “She needs time.” Clark looked surprised. “Give me some credit, Sheriff. She’s mad at you. You lied to her. She wants nothing more than for you to be wrong about Genevieve.”

  “My job is to follow the evidence.”

  “Okay, so how does this evidence factor into your case?”

  “Maybe they were in it together. Husband-and-wife team. Maybe he couriers the drugs to San Ladrón and she moves them from her tea shop. She’s got all kinds of leaves around there already. Nobody’s going to question what’s in her kitchen unless she gives them a reason to.”

  “But don’t you see? You want to follow the evidence, but there’s almost too much of it. Every single piece of evidence you found points to Genevieve and absolutely none of it indicates drug trafficking. Doesn’t that set off any bells? That maybe someone did an almost-too-perfect job of pointing you in the wrong direction?”

  “Ms. Monroe, thank you for your cooperation in this matter,” he said as if he were reading from a manual. He turned around and left.

  I picked up a spool of thread and threw it at the door behind him. I didn’t know what Clark would do next, but I expected this new evidence would force him to reassess whatever it was he thought he knew about this case. Genevieve might have been his best suspect mere hours ago, but this new information, coupled with what he’d learned about the life insurance policy from Kim’s confession and the croissant information that Adelaide had been planning to give him, would be enough to muddy those very clear evidentiary waters.

  That meant Genevieve might very well be free by the end of the day. Free to reopen Tea Totalers. And I’d left it in a partial state of renovation. That was not what I’d wanted to do.

  I decoupaged rectangles of fabric to each of the tray bases Vaughn had cut, using the white school glue from the dollar store. I poured an ample amount of glue on top of the fabric so the glue would seep through the weave, and then I used the side of a Popsicle stick to smooth out the bubbles. I left the wood panels to dry in the front window, where the sun beat down on them, and placed
a sign on an easel that said, “Items from the fabric makeover at Tea Totalers. Come back on Sunday and find fabrics to inspire a project of your own!”

  I found the cloth rooster images and wrapped the first around a damaged canvas that I’d gotten for a few dollars at Flowers in the Attic, stretched the fabric until it was taut, and staple-gunned the edges to the back. I repeated the process for the two additional rooster images in smaller sizes. When I was done, I loaded the canvases and the last of what I’d made for Tea Totalers into my car and drove to the tea shop. I was eager to see if it all came together.

  Kim had finished the sanding and repainting of the outside tables and chairs, but I wasn’t strong enough to carry iron tables to the front yard. As it was, it took several trips to bring the completed projects inside from my car. I dumped my handbag by the desk and carried everything else to the middle of the café, jumping right into it. I swept the front of the cafe and placed the interior tables and chairs that had been stacked in the kitchen to where Genevieve had kept them. After propping the rooster fabric art on the shelves behind the counter, I added baskets filled with silverware wrapped up in napkins made from scraps of the fabrics I’d used throughout the rest of the interior.

  I found a bottle of lavender-scented laundry water among her cleaning products and misted the curtains. The light, fresh scent would fade to a mere hint within a short amount of time and would mingle nicely with the other scents Genevieve produced while baking and brewing her proprietary blend of tea. When I had finished all that I could do, I dug my phone out of my handbag and called Vaughn.

  “It’s Poly,” I said. “I’m at Tea Totalers. Are you in the area? Do you think you can swing by? You had a part in this, and I think you should see it before the rest of the world does.”

  “I’m hoping to finalize something tonight. One more phone call should do it. You’ll stick around?”