Authors: Kylie Logan
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #General
Buttoned Up (19 page)
Victor passed a hand over his eyes. “All right. Since you know so much, I might as well tell you. Then you’ll see . . .” He twitched his shoulders. “Yes, I know the legend. I first heard talk of it in Haiti. There was a story about a special button that had been made there two hundred years ago, a button with special powers. Le bouton was taken to Jekyll Island when the houngan who owned it was transported there as a slave. And yes, I know what happened to Parmenter’s father and grandfather. They were given the button.”
“And died terrible deaths soon after,” I reminded him.
Victor nodded. “The button was the reason I was at that tacky little excuse for an art show in the first place,” he said. “I mean, really, the Chicago Community Church?”
I really had never wanted to wring the man’s neck. At least not until I saw the way his top lip curled when he talked about the church.
“I’ve been interested in Mr. Parmenter’s work for a while and thanks to Mr. Norquist’s . . . er . . . assistance, I’ve been able to obtain a couple pieces of it for my own private collection,” Victor went right on. “When I heard Parmenter was coming to town, I was mildly interested. When I heard he’d made vudon the theme of this show . . . well, I doubted it was possible that the Button of Doom would be there, but you can’t blame me for being curious. An artifact of such age and such power . . .” His shoulders shot back and his chin came up and Victor had to rein himself in. “Well,” he said, “I knew it wasn’t likely that the button would be there, but I thought it was worth taking a chance and showing up to see.”
“And did you see it?” I asked him.
Victor pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. “I didn’t need to see it. I saw Parmenter’s reaction when he walked up to that loa exhibit. I knew the button was there.”
“And you stole it,” I said.
Victor’s smile was slow and sinister. “There are some people who believe le Bouton de Malheur has great power. Power to vanquish enemies and eliminate all opposition. Any man who had that sort of power could easily use it against his rivals.”
“If you believe such things,” Gabriel said.
“Yes, of course.” Victor’s smile was quick. “But the only way to find out . . .” He splayed his fingers and held out his hands. “I made my fortune taking chances and I wasn’t about to pass up one like that. After Parmenter ran out of the church and the party broke up, I went into the men’s room and stayed there for a long, long while. I thought that by the time I came out, the coast would be clear and I could take a look around the exhibit and figure out which of those buttons Parmenter was looking at when he lost his nerve.”
“And did you see the button?” I asked him.
Victor ran his tongue over his lips. “I saw . . .” He squeezed his hands into fists. “When I got over to the exhibit, I saw Parmenter’s body on the floor. I understand that’s not where you eventually found it, Ms. Giancola. That tells me the murderer heard me coming. He was still there. Right nearby, and when he saw me, he hid. I didn’t know that at the time, of course, I only know that Parmenter laid there, all pale and waxy and with buttons glued to his eyes and his lips and . . . I panicked. Of course, I panicked. At least for the moment. I don’t know what I did, I suppose I might have . . .” He clutched both of his hands to his heart. “I suppose I made some sort of gesture and that’s when I lost my shirt stud, that’s how you found it under the ceremonial drums. All I know for sure is that I ran out of that church as fast as I could.”
“‘At least for the moment.’” I glommed onto the words that seemed so out of place in his story. “Does that mean you went back?”
Victor nodded. “The next morning. By then, I thought I could deal with seeing the body again. My plan was to get into the church, get the button, and be gone by the time anyone else was around, but you . . . You and the police were already there.”
“You were wearing Bob the maintenance man’s uniform!” I pointed in an aha! sort of way. “No wonder Bob thought there was a zombie around.”
“Did he?” There was no laughter in Victor’s voice. “I obviously didn’t get close to the exhibit that day, either, so I didn’t have a chance to look for le Bouton de Malheur, but as you can see, I’m not the one who killed Parmenter.”
“You didn’t give up, though, did you?” Another thought hit and just for good measure, I added another aha! gesture. “You didn’t know that the button was already gone. But you did know that you didn’t have the luxury of picking through that exhibit, button by button. You broke into the church and ripped the front off the loa box. Then when you realized the Button of Doom wasn’t there, you dropped the box at my shop because you knew I’d get it back where it belonged.”
“Yes.” Victor lifted his chin and moved toward the door. “I’m more than willing to pay a fine for trespassing and destroying Parmenter’s work. So go ahead and report me if you like. But while you’re at it, make sure you tell the cops that I didn’t kill the man. I couldn’t have. By the time I saw him after the show broke up, he was already dead.”
When the door swung closed behind him, Gabriel and I exchanged looks. “When he mentioned he was willing to cop to what he’d done, he forgot to mention stealing Forbis’s artwork,” I said.
Gabriel grinned. “It’s kind of nice to think of the cocky bastard getting his due. You’ll tell your policeman friend?”
“Yes.” I pulled out my phone to check the time. “Only it’s kind of late. Nev’s pretty much an early bird.” I pushed open the door to walk back into the gallery. “I’ll wait until tomorrow and—”
And what?
Honestly, at that moment, I couldn’t remember. But then, that was because I found myself face to face with Nev.
Nev and Evangeline.
I’m not sure who was more surprised to see who. Or is it whom? And did it matter anyway when Evangeline and I exchanged startled and oh-so-embarrassed looks?
Lucky for me, Gabriel was either unaware of the mortified vibes or he really didn’t give a flip. “Hey,” he pumped Nev’s hand, “we were just talking about you.”
“We were just . . .” Nev had a canapé in one hand and he popped it in his mouth. “That is, we heard about the opening and we thought we’d stop in and . . .”
“Talk to Victor Cherneko. Yes, I figured.” Did I? Or was I just trying to save a situation that was obviously headed down the tubes? Maybe I was simply trying to save my own suddenly flaming face. “He went thataway.” I pointed toward Victor’s retreating back. Last I saw them, Nev and Evangeline were headed after Victor.
I headed for the door.
“You’re going to tell him aren’t you?” Gabriel asked, scrambling to catch up with me. Can a short woman with short legs really move that fast?
“Tell him . . .”
“Everything Victor told us. When it comes to the police, Cherneko might not be in much of a talking mood.”
I glanced over my shoulder to where I saw Nev chatting it up with Victor. But only for a moment. I pushed through the door and took a long, deep breath of outside air.
“So you are going to tell him everything, aren’t you?” Gabriel asked again.
“There’s nothing more important than solving the case,” I said.
“Which means you’re more than willing to share.”
“I always have been before.”
I didn’t bother to add the words that finished the thought and swirled in my head to the funny beat of the hurt and disappointment that mixed it up on my insides.
Except this time.
After all he’d done for me, there was no way I could ask Stan to mind the Button Box for another day. The day after the opening at Forest, I got to the shop early and told myself in no uncertain terms that there was no suspect, no investigation, and no distraction that was going to make me leave.
I stuck to my guns and luxuriated in all the wonderful, mundane tasks that made the shop so special to me. By one, I pulled out the ham salad sandwich I’d brought with me for lunch and sat down in the back room with it and a nice tall glass of iced tea. I actually might have been able to enjoy both if there wasn’t something niggling at the back of my mind.
Gabriel’s phone.
I’d found it on my dining room table when he dropped me off at my apartment and left for parts unknown the night before.
“Who forgets their phone when phones are so important these days?” I asked myself, and not for the first time.
Just like I asked myself if I was brazen enough to poke through the phone and, hopefully, find some clue on it as to how I could contact Gabriel and get it back to him.
I gave the phone a one-fingered nudge that sent it spinning on my worktable, not sure if I admired myself for, at least so far, not snooping, or if the fact that what felt like a violation of privacy to me simply meant I was too much of a wimp.
Before I had a chance to figure it out, the bell above the front door jingled.
“I’ll be right with you,” I called out, and I hopped up to run a brush through my hair and smooth on a fresh coat of lip gloss.
I always greet customers with, “Welcome to the Button Box,” but this time when I walked out of the back room, the words never made it past my lips.
Nev stood near my desk.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” he said back. He didn’t smile. “I was in the neighborhood and I wondered if you could get time away for lunch.”
“I just ate.”
“Oh, OK.” Nev shifted from foot to foot. “You know, I’ve been thinking . . .”
“About the case. Of course.” I reminded myself that this was my shop—my turf—and I didn’t need to feel uneasy or embarrassed or unsure about anything. Which actually might have been encouraging if I didn’t feel uneasy, embarrassed, and unsure. Especially when I made the mistake of glancing up into Nev’s blue eyes.
“I can explain about last night,” he said.
“I’m sure you can. But I don’t need to hear it.”
“You do.” He stuffed his hands into the pockets of a beige sport coat that he wore with a shirt and tie that were nearly the same color, along with brown pants. Maybe it was the steamy temperatures outside, but he reminded me of a vanilla ice-cream cone. “I was at the gallery last night to talk to Victor Cherneko. He’s got Haitian connections, you know, and I just figured—”
“You figured it was only natural to have someone along who’s got the inside track on the culture and the customs. Like I said, Nev, you don’t owe me an explanation.”
“But I do owe you an update.” It wasn’t my imagination. As soon as Nev pulled out the little leather notebook he carried around, he was back in his cop-element and feeling far more comfortable than he did when he was trying to tiptoe through the Evangeline minefield.
Fine by me. I knew once we were talking about the case, I’d feel more comfortable, too.
He planted his feet and read from the notebook. “Listen to this. Cherneko admitted that he was inside the Chicago Community Church the night of the murder after everyone else cleared out. But he swears he’s not the one who killed Parmenter.”
I think Nev expected a bigger reaction than the simple nod I gave him. “He told me that, too, but I bet he forgot to mention to you how he and Richard Norquist have been skimming artwork from Forbis’s collection. Richard steals them, Victor buys them.”
“That did slip his mind!” Nev made a note of it. “I can see you were at the opening last night for the same reason I was. As usual, you’re better at making people talk.”
It would have been nice to get lost in the gleam of admiration in his eyes. Just like the old days. Except this wasn’t the old days. “I’m not better at it,” I told him, “just less threatening. People are more willing to open up to me because they don’t think it’s going to hurt them in any way. They’re not intimidated by me like they are by you. It’s the whole cop thing, you know.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.” Nev tapped his pen against his notebook. “That’s why I was wondering if we could get together and . . . you know . . . do what we’ve done with the other cases we’ve worked on together. We’ve gathered our suspects and then you’ve taken over, explaining how you worked through the investigation and what you discovered about the case. I think having a button dealer call them out about their behavior and their motives catches them off guard, no offense intended. We’ve always caught our murderers that way before.”
Really, there was no offense taken, because I knew exactly what Nev meant. Besides, I liked the thought of working hand in hand with him again. Or at least I would have if I could get that image out of my mind—the one of a wide-eyed Evangeline, so surprised at seeing me at Forest.
I played it cool. And not because I was trying to be coy. I needed to keep calm for my own sake, not for Nev’s. I was still stinging from seeing him with Evangeline, and I didn’t want to fool myself into thinking I could forget that, simply because I fell in with his plan. At this point, I couldn’t afford to forget that we were talking about two separate things: our investigation, that was one thing. But my relationship with Nev . . . well, that was something else altogether.
I told myself to keep focused on the investigation and strolled over to the old library card catalogue files that held my glass buttons. “Who did you have in mind?” I asked him.
“Cherneko, of course. And now that I know about what he and Norquist were up to, I need him in on this for more reasons than I thought. Parmenter left him high and dry about some big project in that new building of his, you know. I figured a man like Cherneko holds a grudge as big as his ego. I thought that gave Cherneko motive. But if Parmenter found out that he was buying stolen artwork from Norquist and threatened to have him arrested. . . well, that gives Cherneko motive number two. Oh yeah, Cherneko’s on my suspect list. Then there’s Norquist, of course.”
“Forbis fired him.”
“And he was stealing.”
“And he’d been skimming the profits of the shows for a long time. If Forbis found out about that—”
“Another motive for him.” Nev made a note of it. “And then, of course, there’s Laverne Seiffert.”
“What?” I am not the type who usually confronts authority, but really, this was ridiculous and I told Nev so. “Laverne’s a sweet woman.”
“She had the opportunity. She was the last one to leave the building and we know she doesn’t have an alibi. And she knows where all the extra keys were kept. It would have been easy for her to pop into the minister’s office and take those extra keys, stash them somewhere to make it look like someone had stolen them, and then use her own keys to get back into the church. I’ve had my eyes on Laverne since day one.”
“But we’ve got to consider motive.” I crossed the shop to stand nearer to Nev. “You’ve always told me that, Nev. You’ve always said that why a killer does what he does is as important as what he does in the first place.” Even I cringed at this convoluted logic, but sharp guy that he is, Nev followed right along. “Laverne doesn’t have a motive. She barely knew Forbis.”
“But she did know Richard.”
“Which doesn’t mean—”
“You heard her yourself, Josie, she’s nuts about Richard. If she knew Forbis fired him—”
“She’s not going to be so nuts about him once she finds out what a lowlife Richard really is.” I made a face. Poor Laverne. A woman concerned with social justice wasn’t going to tolerate a man with sticky fingers, no matter how many bittersweet memories she had of their days together in college. “She didn’t do it,” I told Nev.
“Maybe.” I saw him write down Laverne’s name anyway, and every scratch of his pen only served to remind me how unreasonable he was being. “Either way, we can invite Laverne to our little suspect powwow. She knows more about Richard than any of us do. Even if she’s not our murderer, she might be able to help us on that front.”
“I agree there. But I don’t agree that she looks guilty,” I added just so he knew he hadn’t changed my mind.
“So . . . great.” Nev flipped the notebook closed. “What about tomorrow evening? That will give me a chance to get in touch with everybody. I’ll invite them here, tell them you’re having a sort of private memorial for Parmenter. Wine and cheese, that sort of thing. I can say you want to do it here at the shop because of what buttons meant to Parmenter. Does that make sense?”
“Only if you invite Evangeline, too.”
I waited for the firestorm I expected would result from this suggestion and when it didn’t come, I bent at the waist and looked up into Nev’s face “Evangeline? You do remember her, right?”
He’s a tall, rangy guy. He shook himself like a Labrador coming out of a lake. “I thought you said you understood. I thought you said I didn’t owe you an explanation. Evangeline was with me last night because I thought she could provide some insights into Cherneko’s interests into Haitian religions, but other than that, come on, Josie. You know she’s really not involved in the investigation. I can ask her to come if you think there would be some benefit, but I hate to put her out like that. I’m guessing she’d be pretty bored.”
“Are you trying to make this as hard as it can possibly be?” I groaned and tipped my head back, thinking about the best way to ease into an explanation. “Oh heck!” I slapped a hand against my thigh. “I’m done playing games, Nev, so here’s what I think. If you’re going to drag Laverne here because she looks like a suspect to you, then I think Evangeline has to be here, too. As a suspect.”
He looked as stunned as if I’d started talking Martian. That is, until his mouth thinned. “You’re talking crazy.”
“I’m talking sense. Forbis’s show was about vudon, and nobody knows more about vudon than Evangeline.”
“Which doesn’t mean she had anything to do with his murder.”
“Which doesn’t mean we can’t poke around in that big brain of hers just a little.”
“No.” It was as simple as that. At least to Nev. He spun around and headed for the door. “I’m not going to insult Evangeline by making her come over here and—”
“And what? Show respect for Forbis at a private memorial service?” I followed on his heels. “That is what you’re going to tell everyone else, right? Why shouldn’t she hear the same story?”
“Because I don’t tell Evangeline stories. And I don’t let her get mixed up in murder investigations.”
“No, you leave that for me.”
Admit it, it was a great parting shot.
Too bad Nev had already banged out the front door and never heard it.
• • •
After Nev left and I spent an appropriate amount of time fuming, I decided to rearrange the biggest of the glass display cases at the front of the store. I emptied it and carefully stowed away the mother of pearl buttons that had been in there, then cleaned the glass until it sparkled. I filled the case with wooden buttons, decided they looked too dull and heavy to match the summer sunshine, and emptied the display case again.
Buttons, buttons, buttons.
Buttons, I knew, would keep my mind off the little tiff Nev and I had, and I went through drawer after drawer of buttons, looking for exactly the right ones to feature in the display.
I decided on lacy glass, those wonderful old buttons with painted backs and fancy molded surfaces that sometimes mimic the texture of fabric.
I arranged the lacy glass buttons one way, then another. I scooped them out of the display case and tried again, grumbling to myself all the while. It was Nev’s fault. Nev and Evangeline. Though what exactly was their fault—the fact that I couldn’t think straight, or the fact that I couldn’t make the display look the way I wanted it to—I didn’t know.
I did know I wasn’t happy with the lacy glass button display.
Grumbling some more, I stepped back and wondered what I could do that would look different, interesting, and I thought about that installation I’d seen at Forest the night before, the tea service stuck on the ceiling.
“Buttons stuck to the sides and top of the display case!” I swooned and really, that should have told me something right there. As much as I love my buttons, I am usually not obsessive (well, at least not too obsessive) about displaying them. I’m pretty sure I was knee-deep in what psychologists call transference, and perfectly willing to transfer my frustrations about my relationship with Nev to my button-display capabilities. I got on the computer and did a little research to see how an artist could possibly stick a tea service to the ceiling.