Diane Vallere - Style & Error 03 - The Brim Reaper

by Diane Vallere

  “Who’s Eddie?”

  “Eddie Adams. Visual manager for Tradava. It was my idea for him to call you,” I said, like I was trying to score brownie points with one of my parents by tattling on my sister.

  He made a note in his notepad. “Is he around?”

  “He’s fertilizing the rosebushes.”

  The detective glanced at the back of the building to Eddie, who was bent at the waist. Both of his hands were on the building for support. Lights blazed in the background. The parking lot was a collection of black and white cars parked at angles, like a pile of saddle shoes cast off at a sock hop. Lights pulsated in the background like a disco, completely confusing my dance-era metaphor.

  “Were you with him when he found the body?”

  “Sort of. I mean, yes. I mean, I was by the back door, and when he didn’t catch up with me, I went to check on him.”

  “Because you were concerned.”

  “Yes.”

  “What was he doing that made you concerned?”

  “He was dropping off a set of keys. It took him longer than it should have.”

  “So you’re saying Mr. Adams could have been doing something other than dropping off a set of keys in the admissions office?”

  “I’m not saying that. Eddie was with me the whole time.”

  “Except when he was dropping off a set of keys.

  “Yes—no!”

  “Ms. Kidd, what am I going to find when I go into that office?”

  “A cold, dead man wrapped up in plastic packing wrap.” I didn’t mention the identity of the corpse. They would figure that out soon enough. I told the detective what Eddie and I were doing at the museum, and how we had come to find the body.

  Loncar took notes, the kind that probably only made sense to him when he reviewed them later, and flipped the notepad shut. “Ms. Kidd, stay out of this. Don’t make me lock you up to keep you from being a public nuisance.”

  “I’m not in this. I was just trying to help a friend.”

  “Okay, so consider me a friend too.” He smiled a half-smile that made his face resemble a jack-o-lantern. “You’ll be helping plenty if you let me do my job. You’re not planning to leave town, are you?”

  “Why?”

  “In case I have any follow-up questions to our interview.”

  The detective’s question gave me pause. We’d done the right thing by calling him, but this wasn’t my first time at this particular rodeo. Word about homicides got around fast and my boyfriend and dinner date wasn’t going to be pleased about my involvement.

  “Um, Detective? You’re going to keep this between us, right?”

  He chuckled. “Why, you have some other detective you want to make jealous?”

  “I just would prefer that my name not be used in connection with any of this, if you know what I’m saying.”

  He stared at me for a couple of seconds, made another note in his notepad, and walked away.

  I stood off to the side, waiting for Eddie to give his statement to the detective too. After a couple of minutes, they shook hands and Eddie crossed the yard to me.

  By the time we left the museum, it was clear that skateboard or no skateboard he was in no shape to drive.

  A few minutes and a wall of silence later, I pulled up in front of his apartment.

  “Dude, do you want to crash here tonight?” he asked.

  “No, Nick’s waiting for me to call. We were going to go to dinner, but I don’t think I can handle that.”

  “What are you going to tell him?”

  “I don’t know. He’s not a big fan of my extracurricular activities involving the law.” I stared out into the night. “Are you going to be okay by yourself?”

  “As okay as I can be, considering.”

  “I hear you.” I waited by the curb until he’d made it to the front door and let himself in.

  I backed out of the lot and drove home in a swirling cloud of thoughts. There was no escaping it. Dirk Engle was dead. And considering the hat left sitting next to him, it wasn’t a stretch to think the murder was connected to the exhibit.

  I couldn’t—just couldn’t—let myself be involved. No way. Just because Eddie and I found the body didn’t mean we had to get involved. The cops would figure out who had committed the heinous act. But still, I couldn’t help wondering why someone had murdered the curator of a hat exhibit.

  If the cops needed any information from me, they would know where to find me, but right now, I had to push the memory out of my mind. Because if I wasn’t going to be helping Eddie at the museum, then it was back to the job search for me. And while I didn’t want to think about it, I knew there was one person I could go to about a job. I’d been turning down his offer for a month now because, after seven years of working together when I was a buyer and he was a shoe designer, I was finally in a place where work couldn’t interfere with my interest in dating him. I knew his offer had more to do with helping me through a rough patch of employment cooties than an interest in hiring me to be his showroom manager. Eddie’s request that I help him at the museum had given me a temporary excuse to keep Nick in the boyfriend column, but after tonight, I didn’t expect to be back at the museum anytime soon.

  As much as I didn’t want to do it, tomorrow morning I was going to see Nick about a job.

  5

  I pulled into the parking lot five minutes early and touched up my lipstick in the car. I’d decided to wear a black pinstripe pantsuit that I’d worn only once and a pair of polka-dotted ankle-wrap sandals I’d recently rediscovered thanks to my closet purge. One of the ankle straps had broken on my way down the stairs, and with no time to head back to change, I secured it to my foot with a roll of black electrical tape from the hall closet.

  Nick’s showroom was a long narrow storefront in a strip mall a few miles from my house. It shared the parking lot with a video store, a hoagie store, and a grocery store. I yanked on the door’s silver handle. It was locked.

  “Hey there, Kidd-o,” Nick called out from behind me.

  I jumped so high I would have flown out of my shoes if one hadn’t been secured with electrical tape.

  He wrapped his arms around me from behind and kissed my right cheek.

  I shrugged out of his embrace, adjusted my jacket, and looked him in the eye. “We need to have a serious talk.”

  He looked confused but unlocked the door to his showroom and held it open for me. I crossed the blond-wood floor with a confident stride. Halfway to the chair by the desk, my ankle turned, the electrical tape stretched, and I fell.

  Nick put his hands under my arms and pulled me off the floor. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” I tried my best to ignore my less-than-graceful spill.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  “Then why is your shoe taped to the side of your foot?”

  We both looked down. My sandal jutted out at a ninety-degree angle from my instep.

  “Can you give me a second?” I said.

  Nick wheeled a chair from behind the desk and faced me. He picked up my foot and moved the shoe back into place. His hands lingered on my ankle for a second.

  “I didn’t think we’ve been together long enough to have a serious talk. Does it have anything to do with why you stood me up for dinner last night?”

  “No. I mean, sort of. I mean, this isn’t about you and me.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “A job. I need you to give me a job.” I almost couldn’t believe I was asking for a pity paycheck from my boyfriend with the hopes that it might come with a decent amount of job security. “I moved here for the job at Tradava.”

  “Refresh my memory. Why did you lose that job?”

  “Mix-up.”

  “What kind of mix-up?”

  “Suspicion of murdering my boss.”

  “Maybe I should take some time to think about this.” The laugh lines by the corner of his eyes crinkled.

  “I
wasn’t guilty, and you know it.”

  We stared at each other longer than I expected. I’d come here expecting him to say fine, you’re hired, start work on Monday. I knew working for him would give me an escape route from the homicide at the museum. But then Nick would be my boss. And that would create some potential problems considering my thoughts about Nick didn’t involve performance reviews. Unless you consider a different kind of performance, and that wasn’t the type of thing I hoped he’d review me on—

  “Kidd? What do you want to do with your life?”

  “I want to get a steady job. I don’t care what it is.”

  “That’s not a to-do. That’s a side effect. You were a buyer. You were a good buyer. Why’d you give it up?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. But I knew. I’d gotten good enough at my job that I’d gotten restless.

  Retail buying involves a constant shifting of focus and priorities. Planning a business for today, tomorrow, three months, next year. You often buy sandals in winter and boots during a heat wave. You learn to take risks, at first calculated, until the calculations become second nature.

  If you sell out of one hundred pair of rain boots in the first week of February, how many could you sell by the end of April? What if a fashion director names them a seasonal trend? And then, advertising comes onboard and makes rain boots part of their print campaign: rain boots poolside in summer and as a gift item for the holidays. Can a pair of $100 rubber boots become hot enough to help you layer a million dollars of top-line sales to your year end?

  Second nature.

  By the time I’d pushed the boundaries of rain boots, mid-heel dancing shoes, and gladiator sandals, I’d become something of a tastemaker. Cowboy boots may have been my downfall.

  In truth, I never had a light bulb moment that caused me to leave. My parents dangled that carrot in front of me: “We’re selling the house and moving to California.” The weekend I spent in Ribbon helping them load the contents of the house I’d known my whole life into a moving van left me feeling like I’d lost touch with my grounding center.

  I had a chance run-in with a wise man who might have become my next mentor if he hadn’t gotten killed before my first day on the job. He gave me the encouragement I needed in the form of a job offer in the trend office of Tradava. Despite my experience with planning, projecting, and taking calculated risks, that didn’t work out like I’d planned.

  “You need a showroom manager, right?” I asked.

  “Right.”

  “And I need an income stream.”

  “The pay’s not that good,” he said with a chuckle.

  “This isn’t funny.”

  “We should talk about this.”

  An unexpected windfall in the form of a cash payout from my short-lived tenure at Heist, a competitor of Tradava that had barely been open a fortnight, had paid four months of bills, my car insurance, and bought me a spectacular outfit that made me feel like Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Did I mention the windfall paid for my Netflix addiction as well?

  I looked away and fought to clear my head. Something—maybe the all-too-recent memory of Dirk Engle’s Bubble-Wrapped body at the museum—told me I was doing the right thing.

  “Hire me. I know you need help here. I can do the work. Put me on your payroll, at least until I find something else.”

  “You really want me to do this?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll hire you on one condition: it’s temporary, and the second something better turns up, you’ll either quit or I’ll fire you. It’ll be a big help working with someone who doesn’t have a learning curve.”

  “Great. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Nick said, and leaned down to kiss me.

  I leaned out of range of his lips. “I think we should be professional while we’re working. So it feels official.”

  He traced a line down my nose and onto my lips. His eyes focused on them. My heartbeat picked up, just like it did every time Nick touched me.

  “Kidd, I kind of like having you as my girlfriend. I’m not sure I’m willing to trade that in. It would be a lot easier to find a showroom assistant than to find someone I want to fall for.” His warm fingers cupped the side of my neck inside the collar of the white shirt I wore under the pinstriped suit, and he pulled me close. This time when he kissed me, I didn’t pull away.

  There was something about kissing Nick that made me feel like a teenager, not a thirty-something. I got butterflies in my stomach and my knees went weak. We’d been taking our time over the past few months—silly since it had taken us ten years to get to our first date—but I didn’t want to blow what we had by keeping secrets from him.

  “Nick, last night—” I started to say. He pulled away from me and studied me with his root-beer-barrel colored eyes. “There was a homicide at the museum. I’m the one who made the 911 call.”

  6

  Details of the homicide had been in the morning paper and on the local news. I knew because I’d gotten up early to see what the police knew. I wasn’t going to tell Nick any of that.

  “I was helping Eddie at the museum. He’s working on an exhibit of Hedy London vintage costumes. When it was time to leave he went to the admissions office to drop off the keys. He found a body.”

  Nick stepped back and dropped his hands from my body. “Kidd, if I put you on my payroll, will that keep you from getting involved?”

  “With you? I’m already involved with you.”

  “With the homicide.”

  “I’m kind of involved in that too. Like I said, I’m the one who called the police.”

  Nick’s face grew serious.

  “I told Detective Loncar what I saw. And then I drove Eddie to his apartment and went home.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. It’s not like I was hanging around the docks looking for action.”

  “There are no docks in Ribbon.”

  “You know what I mean. I wasn’t looking for this. I was helping a friend. It’s not my fault someone committed a murder while I was there.”

  “I don’t like it when you put yourself in dangerous situations. You know that.”

  “Then give me a job. I can’t be in two places at once. If I’m here with you during the day, and out with you at night, then I can’t exactly be in any dangerous situations, can I?”

  “If you weren’t here right now, I would have hired some young college graduate and lost three months of my time teaching her how to run the office. Are you serious about this? Because I need someone who knows what goes on in a showroom, who can problem-solve and think fast, who can act on her own without having to ask my permission for every little thing. I need someone like you. I know it was your idea, but it would solve a problem for me too.”

  “Then it’s decided?”

  He held out his hand and I shook it. “You’re hired. You start on Monday.”

  “So if we go out tonight, you won’t be my boss yet, right?”

  “I sure hope not.” He leaned down and kissed me again. This time his hands went places that would have cost him a sexual harassment suit seventy-two hours later.

  Later, I couldn’t help wondering what it was about me that voluntarily made my life more difficult.

  I arrived home shortly after two. Eddie was waiting on the porch. I unlocked the front door and he followed me inside.

  “I have a problem,” I said.

  “Join the club.”

  Logan, my slightly snobby black cat, met us in the living room and meowed loud enough to alert the neighbors across the street that it was time to be fed. I scooped him up and carried him into the kitchen, set him down, and fed him a few treats from a drawer that needed a new knob. Eddie scratched Logan’s ears until a soft purr emanated. He tipped his head and ran the length of his body against Eddie’s faded jeans and left us alone in search of something more interesting under the sofa.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked.

  “S
ure. Do you have any fruit?”

  I reached into the freezer and pulled out a carton of Neapolitan ice cream.

  “I said fruit.”

  “It’s Breyer’s. It has strawberries.” I pulled two bowls from the cabinet.

  “Dude, I think I bit off more than I can chew on this one.”

  “Talk to me.”

  So he did. The director was pressuring him with unreasonable demands, wanting to promote the exhibit that, by Eddie’s estimation, might never open. Hats had gone missing. Curators had been killed. Odd items had arrived in the mail.

  “It’s starting to sound like Lilac Inn over there,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Lilac Inn. You know, Nancy Drew?”

  He shook his head.

  “Okay, Terror Castle.”

  “What?”

  “The Three Investigators?” Still nothing. “Hello, didn’t you read as a kid?”

  He ignored my question. “Christian called me at six this morning. He has some kind of crazy motivation to open this exhibit. He wants to open the exhibit this Thursday. This Thursday! That’s less than a week. I can’t make that deadline. Not now.”

  “You’d think he’d cancel the whole thing considering a man was murdered.”

  “I asked him about that. He said it was too late to cancel. A bunch of rich collectors are scheduled to view the exhibit on Thursday afternoon. Christian only communicates the vaguest of details, and I don’t know which way to turn. It’s overwhelming.” He repeatedly tapped his fingers against his sternum.

  “You told Detective Loncar all of this, right?” I asked.

  “Sort of.”

  “What does ‘sort of’ mean?”

  “Wait here.” Eddie left the room and returned with his black nylon backpack. He set it on the dining room table, reached inside, and pulled out the forest green felt hat that had been in the admissions office next to Dirk Engle’s body. It was dusty on one side. He stared at it for seven seconds without moving. Then he set it on the center of the wooden table.

  “This is the hat from the admissions office,” he said, confirming my worst thoughts. “It was in my backpack when we left.”

  “How did it get in your backpack?”