Diane Vallere - Style & Error 03 - The Brim Reaper

by Diane Vallere

  “I’m taking a personal day tomorrow,” I said. I didn’t ask if showroom managers who’d been on the job for less than a week were entitled to such things, but Nick didn’t refuse me. He let himself out. When the door clicked into place, I ran over to it, threw the deadbolt, and turned around and leaned against the door.

  “I am so screwed,” I said to Logan. He buzzed my ankles and agreed via meow.

  Nick was right; I needed sleep, but there would be plenty of time for sleep after this was over.

  My phone’s battery was at 3 percent. I plugged it into my computer and rooted around the kitchen looking for something to eat. I found an old package of frozen spinach in the freezer. I tore the cardboard away from the dark green block, put it in a bowl with some water and a chunk of butter, and nuked it.

  When the beeper went off, I carried the bowl to the table and burned my mouth on the first forkful. That’s what I get for trying to eat vegetables. I pushed the bowl to the side to cool, opened a bag of Splits extra dark pretzels, and bit into one.

  I tapped the keyboard as I crunched. Plugging in my phone had brought up a pop-up window in the middle of my screen asking what I should do with the files on the phone. I closed the window like I always did and then realized what I had on the phone.

  Photos of the exhibit from the day I helped Eddie.

  I cued up the photos and scrolled through them. The quality wasn’t fantastic, but it was passable, and passable was good enough to see one important thing. On the desk, next to the computer monitor, was a small pile of papers. I enlarged the image and read the words INTEREST IN HATS across the top.

  It didn’t matter that Thad had taken that very sheet of paper from me after I’d printed it out from Christian’s desk. It had been in the exhibit space the whole time.

  It also didn’t matter that Eddie had cleaned up after us, because I had eight bags of trash from the museum, and chances were that particular sheet of paper was inside one of those bags.

  I needed to get the garbage from Dante.

  25

  I Took off my tweed blazer and pinstriped pants and changed into a navy blue and red spandex yoga outfit I’d purchased a few years ago. At the time I thought I’d be more inclined to exercise if I had attractive workout wear. I tore off the tags, set them on my dresser, and rooted around for a pair of matching sneakers. I pulled my hair into a high ponytail and called Dante.

  “Hey,” I said when he answered.

  “Hey yourself.”

  “I, um, I need the stuff.”

  “The stuff?”

  “The bags of stuff I asked you to hold.”

  “Is your phone tapped?”

  “I don’t think so, why?”

  “Because I think you’re talking about the garbage you took from the museum, but you’re making it sound like you’re looking for kilos of drugs. So I would think, if your phone isn’t tapped, that you call it what it is.”

  “Is this part of my lesson plan?”

  “You think I want to be your mentor?”

  “I’m not sure what you want from me.”

  “That’s funny. I thought I was pretty clear when you dropped off the stuff.”

  “Speaking of the stuff.” I paused.

  “You need it.”

  “Yes. Do you remember where I live?”

  I adjusted my ponytail twice and slicked on a tinted lip gloss before Dante arrived. Logan stared at me from the arm of the chair by the door.

  “What?” I asked him. He yawned.

  Fourteen and a half minutes later there was a light knock on the door to the rhythm of “Shave and a Haircut.” I tapped back twice, peeked through the peephole, and opened the door. Dante and Cat stood on my porch. They were surrounded by bulging black plastic bags.

  “Don’t look at me that way,” Cat said. “Dante said he needed to borrow my car. As soon as I saw him shoving garbage into the trunk, I knew what he was doing.”

  “You could have said no,” Dante said.

  I looked back and forth between their faces. It wasn’t the first time I’d been struck by the sibling relationship between them. More often than not since I’d met her, Cat was cool, aloof, and a little reserved. Dante was hot, forward, and ready to go. Yet there was something similar about them when they were together. It was as if a deeply rooted rivalry still existed, as if they were both still trying to prove themselves to each other.

  I picked up a bag and set it on the floor next to me. Logan jumped down and buzzed around it, and then started chewing on the bottom corner. I picked it up by the knot and held it above his head. He meowed at it and skulked away.

  “So I guess this means I don’t get a discount?” I asked as a joke.

  “Sam, you’re a fashion industry professional. You shouldn’t be going through trash. If people found out—”

  “Remember when you mentioned the secondary market?”

  “Yes.”

  “To some people, that’s like trash. It’s old, used stuff.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “What if I told you that there’s something in this bag that someone was killed over?”

  “If you really think there’s incriminating evidence in that bag, you should take it to the police.”

  I’d been completely bluffing, but she had a good point, and I didn’t know how to counter it. I studied her face. Was she going to tell people about this? I couldn’t risk it, for more reasons than my once solid fashion reputation. Depending on what was in the trash, something might accidentally link Eddie to Dirk Engle’s murder. I had to know what was in there before anybody else did.

  “I’m waiting in the car,” Cat said. She turned around and left Dante and me facing each other.

  I carried two of the bags into the kitchen. Something slimy that I didn’t want to think about transferred to my hand and I wiped it on the navy yoga pants. Dante followed me and set the last three bags next to the table.

  “You don’t agree with her,” I said. “You don’t think I should turn the trash over to the police.”

  “I think there are better ways to get dirty.”

  “I think you should go.”

  “You sure? I could stay, help you get your mind off things.”

  “I can handle this job myself.”

  Logan had returned and was sniffing the toe of Dante’s black boot. Dante scooped him up and held him face to nose. Logan’s head jutted out as he sniffed Dante’s face. Dante set him on the dining room table, and Logan stuck his nose in Dante’s sleeve.

  “I guess I’ll get going.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Anytime.” He let himself out.

  I locked all three of the locks on the back of the door and headed into the kitchen. Five bags of garbage sat in front of me. If there was an answer to be found in there, I was going to find it.

  I washed my hands, grabbed a bottle of Pellegrino and the bag of pretzels I’d opened earlier, set them on the dining room chair, and eased myself onto the floor with my back against the floor-to-ceiling curtains that covered the sliding glass doors to the backyard. I ate two pretzels, guzzled Pellegrino directly from the bottle, and then opened the first bag.

  It was slow going at first. I picked through wet newspaper and coffee cups, some smashed brown paper bags with empty yogurt cartons inside, an unnatural amount of Diet Coke cans, and a stack of schedules that had been printed on a printer with a low toner. I’d lost a fair portion of my sleeping time, and the only thing I’d gained was a lovely smudge of something that smelled like bananas down the front of my formerly new yoga attire.

  It was in the fourth bag that I found the yearbook.

  More curious than the hunter green textured leatherette cover and the lack of signatures inside of it was the fact that someone at the museum would have taken the time to throw away a yearbook in the first place. My own yearbooks had been in the back of a closet in my tiny apartment in New York for years, at least until I started looking up friend requests
from Facebook. When I moved, I’d pared down significantly, but my yearbooks made the cut of what I’d kept. And why not? Aside from the point-and-laugh, can-you-believe-I-wore-that? significance of most of the photos, yearbooks served little purpose. I knew most were preordered so the school wouldn’t over-order. I knew there were a few copies bought for the library. And I knew if someone wanted to make a case for who my network of friends were at that time, they could easily use my yearbook as evidence.

  Evidence.

  I leaned back against the curtain and opened the front cover. I-FAD, 1992. I flipped the pages and looked at the pictures, unfamiliar except for the overall style-stamp of the early nineties. Flannel shirts opened over white undershirts, denim jackets with torn off sleeves, baggy faded jeans worn with tight wide-necked bodysuits and wide belts that cinched in waists. Chokers. Peasant blouses. Square-toed chunky shoes. Grunge. I flipped the pages, not sure what I was looking for, but confident that I’d know it when I saw it.

  And there it was, on page seventy-nine.

  A young blonde with soft ringlets and Lisa Loeb glasses, walking next to a man in a black leather jacket with flames on it.

  Rebecca and Dante. Holding hands.

  26

  I flipped to the index of the yearbook and looked up Lestes. The only person listed was J. D. Lestes. The page number corresponded to the picture, and it was the only picture of him listed. But what about Rebecca? I didn’t know her last name. I started going through every name in the index, looking for Rebecca as the first. My vision blurred before I’d finished the Cs.

  I flipped back to the picture to make sure I hadn’t imagined it. There was no mistaking the image. It was a younger Dante and a younger Rebecca, but neither had changed all that much in the past fifteen years.

  I didn’t trust my instinct to call Dante and demand to know why he hadn’t told me. I considered calling Cat, but what good would that do? If I pressured her with questions about her brother, no doubt she’d defend him over me and my crazy implications. But still they were there. Something was up.

  By two in the morning I’d worn something of a path in the nap of the carpet in the living room. I’d finished off the pretzels and ice cream, showered once, tried to sleep twice, and watched four episodes of The Fugitive back to back and had started establishing parallels between the Richard Kimball character and Eddie. I wondered if I’d ever see my friend again.

  It’s possible that my paranoia was running at slightly high levels.

  By the time Eddie returned, I’d hooked up the VCR my parents had left behind in the basement and was halfway through the second of four Hedy London movies I’d rented from the video store. It was 4:26. I grabbed Logan, kissed him on top of the head, and told him to save himself. Halfway up the stairs his tail grew fat and he hissed.

  Eddie came in, shut the door, and locked all three locks. He was gray. The color had drained from his face, the spunk had eked out of his manner, the spring had long-since left his step.

  He dropped the keys onto the chair by the front door, took off the windbreaker, and placed it on top of the keys. He walked past me into the kitchen. I followed a few steps behind. He rooted around the vegetable bins of my refrigerator and pulled out a carrot. He bit into it without washing it.

  “I think you need something stronger than a carrot.”

  “What do you have?”

  “Chips, pretzels, popcorn … spinach! I nuked some spinach.” I expected him to be impressed. He wasn’t. He snapped into the carrot again and then tossed it on the counter.

  “After I visited with Thad, I got in the car and realized I didn’t know where I wanted to go. I started driving.”

  “You’ve been gone for hours.”

  “I’ve been driving for hours.”

  “You didn’t stop?”

  “I had to stop to fill up the tank.”

  “Where?”

  “Delaware.”

  “You drove my car to Delaware?”

  “I filled up the tank and realized how far gone I was. Not with Delaware”—he added before I could say it—“but with this exhibit. I can’t get out now. Someone’s trying to make it look like I’m involved in something I’m not involved in. I don’t know anything, except that someone’s watching me. That feels a little creepy. If I knew who it was, if I knew how someone had taken me off the video surveillance, if I knew what was going on at the museum, I could deal with it. Only I don’t. I need answers.”

  “I’ve got one for you. Check this.” I reached for the yearbook and opened it to the page marked with the empty pretzel bag. “Notice anything interesting?”

  He scanned the black and white photos. “Aside from the fact that women were never supposed to wear construction worker boots, no. Wait!” He looked closer at the incriminating photo of Dante and Rebecca. “Well, goodness, gracious, great balls of fire.”

  “Exactly. Notice anyone else?”

  Eddie looked at the photo again. “No way.”

  “Yes way. It’s Rebecca.”

  “You don’t think—”

  “That maybe she’s involved? I didn’t before I found this, but I sure do now. She was at the museum the day Dirk was murdered. She has access to all kinds of things. She’s the one who told us that a woman dropped off the hats. Maybe she took the hats. Maybe she sealed the boxes back up and had empties delivered?”

  “But why? She’s like a mouse.”

  “It’s always the ones you don’t suspect.”

  “At the rate you’re suspecting people, this must be a phantom crime, because there’s nobody you don’t suspect.”

  “I just think it’s smart not to trust people who might be murderers. Seems like a good idea.”

  “Have you told anybody about this?”

  “Not yet.” I tapped the page a few times.

  “Where’d you find this, anyway?”

  I looked over my shoulder at the bags of trash lining the wall. “It was in the museum trash. Ironic, right? That I trusted Dante to hold the trash for me when Cat said she wouldn’t, and it turns out there was something in there that linked him to this whole thing?”

  “Talk about coincidence,” Eddie said.

  “I don’t believe in coincidence.”

  “Okay, then give me a reason. One reason why Rebecca would murder Dirk Engle. Do you have any connection between the two of them?”

  “There’s a connection. I just have to find it.”

  I thought back to what Dante had been saying all along. You’re asking the wrong questions, Samantha. I couldn’t wait to find him and try out a whole new set.

  The next morning I showed great restraint by waiting until nine thirty to drive to Dante’s apartment. Eddie and I had both fallen asleep in front of the TV somewhere during The Reaper Wore Red, one of the movies I’d rented from the video store. I’d woken at five thirty. I woke Eddie and told him to take the sofa and I went upstairs, peeled off my soiled yoga clothes, and fell asleep in my underwear.

  Three hours of sleep and a full breakfast at Arners later, I dropped Eddie off at the museum and doubled back to Duryea Drive. I parked my twenty-year-old black Honda del Sol on the street.

  Dante stood on his balcony holding a white mug. I didn’t climb the stairs but addressed him from below. Romeo and Juliet-style, role reversal.

  “You wanted me to find that yearbook,” I said.

  He raised his brows and closed his eyes at the same time, like he was acknowledging the truth of my statement.

  “Why?”

  He held up an index finger and shook it back and forth. “Try again.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you knew Rebecca?”

  “Strike two.”

  I bit my tongue. He was toying with me, but there was something here I wasn’t getting. My mind whirred with thoughts. I stared at the crack in the concrete on the landing halfway up the stairs to Dante’s apartment and forced my thoughts to quiet down.

  “What can you tell me about the exhibit that I don�
��t already know?”

  “Brava.”

  “That’s not an answer,” I pressed.

  “You want to come up?”

  “I want answers.”

  “Then come up. Answers go well with coffee.” He turned his back to me. I jogged up the thirty-nine steps and walked the narrow balcony to his front door. I stood in the door frame and watched him pour a second cup.

  “One of these days I’m going to give up coffee,” I said.

  “But not today. You need it. It goes nicely with the Arner’s breakfast plate.”

  “Why are you watching me?”

  “Watching? No. Waiting? Yes.”

  “For what?”

  “For this.” He motioned back and forth between us. “For you to come to me with the right questions.”

  “You put the yearbook in the trash.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You knew if I went through the trash I’d find it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You wanted me to discover your connection to Rebecca.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why go to the trouble? Why not just tell me?”

  He held out his mug for a second, but instead of drinking he set it on a table next to silver cups filled with yellow, orange, and red Sharpies. He sank down onto his futon and kicked his heels out in front of him. When he looked up at me, his expression held more than the usual flirtation. I leaned back against the doorframe, my hands behind me. I raised my eyebrows in an indication that it was his turn to talk.

  “You want to know why I led you to that info? Because I needed to know how far you were willing to go for answers.”

  “It was fairly obvious. I didn’t go that far.”

  “Samantha,” he said and leaned forward, “in the past twenty-four hours you went through at least four bags of garbage. And the bag with the yearbook had coffee grinds and two-week-old bananas.”

  “That was on purpose?”

  “I had to test your resolve.”

  “You should have tested my Tide with Stain Release Technology. That’s the real test.”