Diane Vallere - Style & Error 03 - The Brim Reaper (11 page)

“Nothing. Sorry. Where were we?” I asked.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Why do you think something’s wrong?”

“I’ve never known you to turn down a hoagie. What gives?”

“I’m trying to eat better, that’s all. You know, salads and fruit and stuff.”

“Really,” he said, crossing his arms.

“Really.”

“You didn’t stop off for lunch somewhere, like maybe at a pizza place?”

“Are you having people spy on me?” I asked angrily.

“There’s a tomato sauce stain on your lapel.”

I looked down at my chest. A telltale stain had blossomed across the brown fabric. I looked around the desk for a napkin but saw none.

Nick held out a box of tissues. “It’s no big deal, Kidd. I just didn’t know.”

I wiped at the stain and then gave up and took off my jacket. “What’s my next job, Boss?”

“Set up a meeting with Milo Delaney to see the samples.”

“You know him?” I asked.

“I’ve seen him around the trade show circuit and at a couple of industry banquets. Do me a favor? Bring me the notes I left out front.”

I went to the desk by the front of the showroom, found pages of notes in Nick’s handwriting, and returned to the back office.

“Thanks. See you tomorrow,” he said, and hung up. He leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. He had taken off his suit jacket, and the cuffs of his shirt were folded up twice, exposing his tanned forearms. I looked away to the four-foot square painting I’d hung earlier, an abstract lime green canvas that popped against the otherwise white walls of his showroom.

“Who are you seeing tomorrow?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

“Milo.”

“I’m perfectly capable of handling this on my own.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“I figured since there was so much to get done around here, we’d divide and conquer. I’ll go to Milo, you do your stuff. Call London, visit Amanda.”

He ignored my mention of Amanda. “As it turns out, you got more done than I expected.” He leaned across the desk and put his hand on top of mine. A rush of heat went through my body. I pulled my hand out from under Nick’s.

“Don’t make me threaten you with a sexual harassment case,” I joked, and stood up. “I’m going to keep working on the line sheets.”

When he didn’t say anything I turned around and headed back to the front of the store to proof the line sheets I’d typed up. We didn’t talk until the end of the day.

Nick stood in my doorway. His expression looked strained. “I’ll meet you at Milo’s at nine tomorrow morning. Here’s the address.” He held out a piece of paper.

“Fine.”

“And do me a favor. If you want to avoid the sexual harassment situation, skip the sexy secretary look. It’s a little distracting.”

Logan met me by the front door. I dumped my handbag on the chair and scooped him up from under his belly. As I scratched his ears, I called out for Eddie. “Honey, I’m home!”

Eddie emerged from the kitchen.

“What do you want to eat? I can go hamburgers or hoagies.”

“Dinner’s done. Steamed chicken and brown rice.”

“Is that some kind of a joke?” I asked, looking past him to the table.

The table was already set, complete with already-filled wine glasses. Eddie handed me one. “You started working for Nick today, and I’m in the middle of avoiding the police. Figured we could both use some power food.”

I couldn’t speak for anybody else, but what I really could use was the leftover pizza.

“You still haven’t called Detective Loncar back?” I asked.

“I’ll do it tomorrow. I don’t know what I’m going to say to him, about taking the hat and not calling him back.” He buzzed around while I talked.

“The longer you wait, the worse that conversation is going to be.”

Within minutes we sat at the table with plates of beige food in front of us. Logan meowed, caught up in the excitement. He got a piece of my chicken, cut into small cat-bite sized pieces

“I went to Over Your Head today. The woman who runs it is Vera Sarlow. Short, brunette woman. Kind of compact. Emotional. A little shady. You know her?”

“Nope, not familiar. Sounds like you have her pegged as a suspect.”

“She knew about the Hedy London collection. She said something about wanting to be involved.”

“From what Thad told me, a lot of people wanted to be involved. Volunteers came out of the woodwork, but Dirk refused any outside help. He said he was risking his store’s performance and bottom line by being involved, and the only way he’d continue to do so was if the entire thing was kept under wraps.”

I nodded. “What about you? You said you won some kind of contest and doing this was the prize.”

He set down his fork. “That’s just it. I won the contest for designing windows. Dirk wasn’t exactly amenable to my talents. He wanted me to do grunt work. You know, move this mannequin here, move that pedestal there.”

“The stuff you wanted
me
to do.”

“That’s different, dude.”

“Whatever. So was Dirk planning to shuttle his staff in from Philly?”

“Philly’s thirty miles from here, so that’s a big nugatory. It was the museum staff and me, and if he could have booted me out, he would have. The Tradava tie-in kept me there. What did this woman do to get you so twisted?”

“We were talking about Milo Delaney. She carries his hat collection. A driver showed up with a large delivery. The boxes were all marked like the boxes at the museum, and one of the corners had Bubble Wrap peeking out from them. It seemed suspicious.”

“If we’re going to suspect every person with access to Bubble Wrap, we might have to put Mailboxes Etc. under surveillance,” he said.

I ignored him. “She threw a tablecloth over the boxes when she saw me staring at them. After I left I went across the street and chatted up the pizza man—”

“Are you using my situation as a license to eat poorly?”

I ignored him. “The owner said there’s been a lot of activity there in the past week. He also said she threw out a significant amount of Bubble Wrap, so much that the trash truck was filled. The driver had to activate the compactor and pop it to make room for the trash in the rest of the neighborhood.”

“Funny.”

“Not really. Somebody called the police because she thought it was gunfire. Do you think that could be what we heard last night at the museum? When we thought we heard gunfire?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do we know how Dirk Engle was killed?”

“Dude’s head was wrapped in plastic. What more do you need to know?”

“There was blood. Remember, that’s why you picked up the hat.”

Eddie went pale under his tan. “Don’t remind me.”

“I’m just thinking out loud here, but if somebody shot him, maybe nobody heard it because there was another explanation for the sound. Like Bubble Wrap popping.”

“I didn’t hear anything that night. Did you?”

“No, but we were upstairs. Maybe the acoustics aren’t so good up there?”

“It’s a museum with marble floors and stairs. The only fabric in the whole building are the T-shirts they sell in the gift area. If there was any kind sound, we would have heard it.”

“What about the light fixture? What if that was a distraction? We wouldn’t have heard anything else when that fell.”

Eddie’s eyes moved to the left and the right as he thought about it. “That was a couple of hours before we found the body.”

“But we don’t know how long the body was there. And the air conditioning was on too. Like someone wanted to keep his body cold and confuse the time of death.”

“So you think someone killed him that afternoon?”

“What about Thad? He came to the museum to see what had happened. What if he committed the murder, knowing he’d arranged for the light fixture to fall so he could join us and look like he wasn’t anywhere near the admissions office?”

Eddie pushed what was left of his brown rice around on his plate. “Just yesterday Thad told me Dirk wanted out of his contract. Dirk said urgent personal business came up and he couldn’t fulfill his commitment.”

“If that’s true, then why was he fighting with Christian? Why did he storm out and say the exhibit was cursed? Why did Christian tell him he was fired?”

“Here’s another one. Why would Thad lie to me?” Eddie asked.

I could think of one very good reason.

13

Before I had a chance to answer, the sofa rang. I mean, the phone under the delicately placed white afghan that hid the bald spot on the gray flannel sofa Eddie bought me at a visual sale at Tradava rang. I answered.

“This is Thad Thomas. May I speak with Eddie Adams, please?”

“He’s not available,” I said, using my best kill-them-with-kindness voice. “Can I give him a message?”

“I’m sure he
is
available, he’s waiting for my call. I’m certain he would like to talk to me about museum matters. I’ll hold while you find him and tell him that I’m waiting to speak to him.”

What a charming guy.

I carried the phone back to the kitchen and held it out to Eddie. “It’s my new friend, Thad, from the museum. He wants to talk to you.” I pressed my hand over the bottom of the phone. “Don’t trust him. Remember what you just asked me.”

Eddie took the phone. “Hey. Yeah. Where? Okay. Later.”

“Whoa,” I said when he hung up. “What’s Thad doing with my number? And what’s he doing calling you here at my house? Why isn’t he calling your cell phone? And how does he even know you’re here?”

“I told him I dropped my cell in water and it’s sitting in rice.”

“Did you?”

“No, but I needed an excuse for why I’m not answering my cell.”

What did he want?”

“If I still had the keys to the museum.”

“And you said …?” I swear it was like pulling teeth.

“I said yes. I couldn’t say no, could I?”

There wasn’t time to address Eddie’s ignorance of the acceptable times to lie. I reached for my wine and took a sip.

“He wants to meet tonight. Go over a few details and figure out a schedule for me to keep working. Is that cool with you?”

I choked and set the glass back down. After I got the coughing under control, I said, “Five minutes ago. Here. We had a conversation. Were you not listening? Because I don’t think it’s a very good idea for you to meet up with Thad. Especially now that he knows you never dropped off the keys. Don’t you think it’s a little weird that he wants to get you back to the scene of the crime? Alone? At night?”

“He’s trying to help with the exhibit.”

“Are you sure? Thad has been nothing but nasty since the first time I met him. I think he’s hiding something.”

“Or he’s the assistant director of the museum and he’s under a lot of pressure.”

I knew how Eddie felt, wanting to believe in the honesty of one person connected to his world so it felt a little less scary, but I also knew Thad wasn’t above suspicion. Eddie was still trusting, still expecting the people around him to do what they said they would do. I knew deep down he had questions that would eventually bubble to the surface.

I remembered back in high school, when I stood up for Eddie when he was involved in a cheating scandal. We hadn’t been close friends at the time, him having transferred in halfway through senior year. But I’d seen the whole thing from my seat in the back of the classroom. I’d watched a member of the football team copy Eddie’s test and then accuse Eddie of cheating to protect his scholarship.

I didn’t know what was going down at the museum, but I couldn’t let Eddie take the blame for something he didn’t do.

“I have an idea,” I said. I outlined my plan for the evening, a basic test of Thad’s loyalty to find out if he could be trusted. “Call him back,” I finished, “and set it up.”

I handed the phone to Eddie, who stared at it like it was a newborn alien baby that had been dropped off on his doorstep. After several seconds of concentration, he hit redial. I heard the ringing phone through the handset.

“A little privacy, please?” he said.

I carried Logan into the kitchen and fed him another piece of chicken from my plate. He bit down on the chicken breast and jumped onto the floor, then ran to the corner by the sink and set it down. He sniffed it, and then carried it to the living room.

As he disappeared around the corner, Eddie reappeared. “I don’t know why, but I did what you said.”

“Did he take the bait?”

He nodded. “He’s at the museum. I told him you wanted to come over and get the keys. He said he’d wait for you.”

“I’m on my way.”

I left Eddie at the house while I drove to the museum. The sun hovered above the horizon. I parked in a space at the back of the lot and entered through the back door.

Thad had asked Eddie to meet him in the upstairs gallery space, so I figured now was the perfect time to duck in the opposite direction, down the stairs to the catacombs—the offices for the museum director and staff—and see what I could find on Christian’s desk.

The heavy wooden doors were shut but not locked; someone had turned the bolt on one door so it rested against its partner. I eased my way in and let my eyes adjust to the minimal light so as not to draw attention to myself.

The last time I’d been in this office had been when Dr. Daum was the director of the museum. The desk now belonged to Christian, and it was decidedly neater and better organized than it had been under Dr. Daum’s tenure. The wood had recently been oiled and held the faint scent of lemon. A miniature copy of Rodin’s
The Thinker,
like the ones in the gift shop Rebecca had been straightening yesterday, served as a paperweight, holding down a pile of notes and memos.

As I leaned closer to see what kind of things Christian kept on his desk, my hand slipped on a leather-bound journal and a few papers from inside fell to the floor. A vacation request and a responsibility sheet on an upcoming luncheon. I scanned the memo for a date and glanced at the computer monitor. A Word document titled “Interest in Hats” was open.

It was a list of names, followed by a city and state: Edith Willoughby, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Charlotte Mann, Princeton, New Jersey; Mildred Manners, Dover, Delaware; Paul Haines, Albany, New York.
I scanned the screen. There were twenty names on the list. I didn’t know who these people were, but I grabbed the mouse, pointed and clicked, and moved to the printer while it chugged out a hard copy. I picked the paper off the tray. One of the heavy wooden doors started to swing toward me and I shoved the paper into my back pocket. I collapsed behind an audio-visual cart that held a TV and a DVD/VCR combo. A couple of remote controls and plastic videotape containers sat on top of the unit. Stifling a breath, I lay frozen on the floor while clunky, shuffling footsteps plodded toward the room. Christian entered.