Diane Vallere - Style & Error 03 - The Brim Reaper (12 page)

Peeking around the side of the cart, I watched Christian open a desk drawer and lean down. A lock of hair fell over his forehead like when Clark Kent becomes Superman, but I was beginning to suspect that he was not one of the good guys.

He sat up and changed out of a pair of dusty brown construction boots and into wingtips. The boots were tossed along the back wall. A clump of dirt tinted dark red fell from the waffle-stomper tread on impact with the concrete floor. He stared at his computer screen. From my vantage point I couldn’t tell if the screensaver had returned or if the list was in front of him.

He moved the mouse and turned toward the printer, stopping for just a fraction of a moment. He turned back to his desk and rifled through the papers under The Thinker, pressed a button on the phone, and wedged the phone between his ear and his shoulder.

“Have you been to the office recently?” He paused. “Okay, no, nothing. Thank you.”

He replaced the receiver and dialed a second number, this time punching in a series of numbers.

“Everything is going according to plan. I assure you, you’ll be quite pleased.” Pause. “We knew there would be challenges along the way, but I’m dealing with them in a discreet manner, as always. No, I haven’t seen her at the museum for a few days, but I’ll keep an eye out. If she gets too close, I’ll tell the police what I know.”

Pause.

“Now, now. I don’t want you to worry. Soon it will all be over, and the hiding and the lies can stop. I assure you it will be worth it. I’m happy to do this for you. Of course. Until tomorrow then.”

It wasn’t until he hung up that I realized I was a sitting duck. Who had Christian been talking to? And who was he talking about?
If she gets too close, I’ll tell the police what I know.
Who was she—Hedy? Vera?

Me?

 If I hadn’t hidden to begin with, I could have stepped out from behind the racks and told Christian I’d been waiting for him, but not now. I could hardly pop up from behind a row of books and pretend my presence was normal.

Christian showed no sign of leaving. He thumbed through the very stacks of paper I’d rummaged through seconds before, while I squatted on the concrete floor behind two rows of research material.

I looked around the room, desperate for an escape plan. My eyes passed over his boots, a Louis Vuitton briefcase that sat next to his own tattered leather one, and a stack of dog-eared exhibit catalogs. The room was painfully silent. I needed a distraction and a way out. I was not going to become one of the challenges along the way that he would have to deal with. If he was the killer and thought wrapping someone in Bubble Wrap was discreet, what else he was capable of?

Light from a streetlamp outside the museum shined through a small window above the shelving unit on the other side of the small-ish office. I crawled toward the door. I quietly tore a strip of paper from the sheet of collectors that I’d printed and balled it up. Right before I came out from behind the shelving I bowled it across the shiny concrete floor. It skidded to the wall behind his desk like a mouse. Christian looked up, startled. He went to investigate.

That was my chance.

I slipped through the double doors and into the hallway, making a beeline for the exit. Two-thirds of the way to the door, Thad stepped out of the shadows.

“Thad. Hi. Where was I supposed to meet you?”

He glared at me with his unnaturally bright green eyes.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been able to help more with the exhibit,” I started.

“What’s that?” he interrupted, staring at the list of collectors in my hand.

“Nothing, really. Something I picked up for Eddie.” I needed to get out of there.

He snatched the paper out of my hand. He unfolded it, glanced at it, and then glared at me with an expression of anger. “Where did you get this?”

“Isn’t that Eddie’s to-do list? Did I grab the wrong thing?” I stood on my tiptoes and pretended to look at the paper. My voice sounded exactly as I hadn’t wanted.

“This is not Eddie’s to-do list.” He folded the paper and ran his thumb and index finger over the crease.

I threw my hands in the air. “Then I don’t know where I’m supposed to find it. Maybe the admissions office? But I can’t get in there. You have your own set of keys, don’t you? I mean, you can get in there when the rest of the museum is locked up, right?”

“Samantha, if you really want to help Eddie, give him a message. Tell him to stay out of this before he gets in too deep.”

14

I left Thad in the doorway to the museum while I power-walked to my car. I wasn’t sure what his message meant, but there was no mistaking that it was a borderline threat. Thad knew more than he was letting on, and when I’d asked him about the admissions office, I sensed he was hiding something. I was going to find out what.

Another thing nagged at me—Christian’s two phone calls. He’d only dialed a number for the second one. That led me to believe the first had been an internal call. So who had he called the second time?

Eddie was asleep in my bed when I got home. I didn’t have the heart to wake him. I carried pajamas to the bathroom, washed my face and changed, and set up a makeshift bed on the sofa.

It wasn’t the sunlight or the smell of coffee that woke me up Monday morning. It was the sound of my name being repeated over and over. Actually, it was my name coupled with, “Don’t you have to meet Nick in half an hour?” that finally did the trick.

I opened one eye to a scary version of Eddie standing over me. Scary because he was in my terrycloth bathrobe. Second day back on the job, with Nick as my boss and show up late? Not a chance. Especially when we had a field trip scheduled.

Today I went with the opposite of sexy secretary: menswear. When I returned to the kitchen it was in a brown blazer and matching pants, light blue shirt, brown and navy paisley silk vest, and brown leather ghillies. I added an oblong scarf knotted as a necktie and topped it all with a mountainous pile of pearls. I secured my hair in a ponytail and ran down the stairs.

“How do I look?”

“How did you do that in ten minutes?” Eddie asked with awe.

“It’s a gift.”

I grabbed my keys, hid half of my face behind a pair of Jackie O glasses, and left. Rush hour was thinning out, so it was in record time that I turned from the main road on to one of the many side streets that led to Milo Delaney’s address. Slowly I drove past a series of row homes, checking the numbers on the front of each house until I found the one that corresponded to the address of the hat showroom.

Two kids bounced a ball on the street, and a couple of old men sat on a porch, watching them. They turned their attention to me when I got out of the car. I wasn’t sure, but they might have been laughing at my outfit. Head held high, I walked to the sidewalk and rested against a wrought-iron banister. Where was Nick? And why was Milo’s showroom in the middle of one of Ribbon’s inner-city streets?

A thin man in a close-fitting T-shirt and faded ratty jeans approached. He held a cup of coffee in one hand and a leash attached to a very big dog in the other. I took a step backward to give him plenty of clearance. He nodded at me and approached the front door of the row home we were intending to visit. He punched a code into the keypad outside the door and it buzzed. The door closed behind him. I looked around for Nick. Finally I saw him walking away from his white pickup truck parked farther down the street.

“You should have gone up without me. I didn’t realize I was going to have to park so far away.”

“I’m not sure this is the right address. I saw someone go inside, and he didn’t look like a hat designer.”

Just then the door opened, and the man with the large dog poked his head outside. “Nick Taylor?” he asked.

“Yes.”

The man jogged halfway down the stairs and extended a hand. “I’m Milo. C’mon up.” He turned away from us and scaled an intimidating flight of stairs immediately inside the front door.

Nick scaled the stairs and caught the closing door before it snapped into place. He gestured for me to follow. I climbed as quickly as I could, finding it unexpectedly difficult as I was only partially awake and wearing shoes not designed for stair-scaling.

By the time we reached the room, only one of us looked professional, but I was beyond caring. The big dog lay on a rug of braided rope next to an antique wooden desk.

“Welcome to my temporary showroom,” Milo said. “Sorry about the informality. I’m scrambling a little since my business manager left me.”

“Can I use your restroom?” I asked, the need to freshen up trumping the need to introduce myself.

“Sure, in there.” Milo gestured with his coffee cup.

The black lab lifted his head off the pillow and watched me cross the showroom floor. I passed shelves of architecture tomes and design manifestos along the back wall. A skylight from above flooded the showroom—which was more like a studio apartment in my humble estimation—with light.

A round mirror over the sink did little more than confirm my suspicions about my appearance. I dusted some powder on my nose and dabbed on a coat of lipstick, shrugged out of my blazer, and rejoined the two designers.

“This is Samantha,” Nick said. “It was her idea for us to come.”

“I thought we could see the Hedy London samples,” I added.

The designer stared at me. “I thought you wanted to see
my
collection.”

That’s when I noticed the lit shelving opposite the room. Hat stands similar in design to the green fixtures in the window of Vera Sarlow’s store, but in their natural wood color, held exquisite bits of feather and fluff that would have made a woman drool back in the fifties.

I approached a forest green fedora like the hat Eddie and I had found next to Dirk Engle’s body. “This is,” I paused, searching for the right word.

“Fantastic, right?”

“Actually, ‘familiar’ is the word I was looking for. I saw this hat two nights ago.”

Milo glared at me. “Nobody has seen this collection.” He abruptly stopped speaking. He adjusted the hat that I’d touched as if I’d left it displayed at the wrong angle. The phone rang in the background, but he made no move to answer it.

“Is that one of the Hedy London hats?”

“No. It’s an original.”

Nick stepped behind Milo and put his hand up to his throat, signaling me to cut off my line of questions. I backpedaled and went for complimentary. “I do like the nostalgic element to your designs. They remind me of the way people dressed in old movies.”

“I’m not a copier, I’m a designer. I design.” Milo said bitterly while the phone continued to ring. “My ideas are organic.”

Clearly this was not going well. I changed subjects. “Do you handle your own marketing and publicity?”

“I have a team of experts hidden in the back room.
You
hear the phone ringing off the hook. What do you think?”

“I didn’t mean …” I tried to figure out what I’d said to trigger his animosity. “You’re a successful designer, consistently getting awards for your contributions to the industry. I’m sorry,” I said, interrupting myself. “Do you need to answer that phone?”

Milo slammed his coffee down on the table and crossed the room to the phone. He glanced at the display, picked up the receiver, and turned his back to us. I strained to hear what he said, but he hung up before I had a chance. He lifted the receiver again, hit a combination of four numbers, and set the receiver back on the base.

“What were you saying?” he asked me.

“I’ve read about you in more than one fashion periodical. It struck me as odd that you didn’t have help. At least a business manager. I’m impressed that you can handle all the aspects of your business by yourself. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“If you want to talk hats and see my samples, you’ll need to book another appointment. As far as my business manager goes, if I were you, I’d forget that question was ever asked.” He stood up and left the room.

I looked at Nick. “Did I say something wrong?”

“Misplaced anger. Considering the circumstances, I can’t say I’m all that surprised.”

“What circumstances?”

“You don’t know?” He looked surprised for a moment and then quickly recovered. “Nothing, really. He’s had a turn of bad luck, that’s all. Let’s go.”

I wanted to press Nick about what he’d meant, but he was being evasive for a reason. I followed him out the door and down the stairs, relying heavily on the banister for support. He was waiting for me out front.

“See you back at the showroom?” Nick asked.

“No. I’m going back to the showroom. You’re going to get us something to eat.”

“It’s nine forty-five.”

“I feel guilty for not eating your sandwich yesterday.”

Nick looked at me like I was crazy. I smoothed my necktie and looked up at him from under heavily mascaraed eyelashes.

“You’ll be impressed by how much I’ll have done by the time you get there. I promise.”

He shook his head. “Bagels and cream cheese? Will that work for you?”

Considering the brown rice and chicken option Eddie had offered me yesterday, I thought it was darn near perfect. “Works for me.”

I waited until Nick got into his car and started the engine before I hopped in mine and peeled out. Nick knew something I didn’t, but not for long. I ran a couple of yellow lights and possibly one red. After unlocking the showroom and dumping my handbag on the floor, I ran to his desk and booted his PC. When the search engine came up, I typed “Milo Delaney business manager.”

No wonder Nick didn’t tell me what he knew. Milo’s former business manager was the dead man, Dirk Engle.

15

By the time Nick walked into the showroom, I’d scanned in all of his inspiration photos and images and had mocked up four separate boards for his approval.

He set a cup of coffee and a brown paper bag in front of me. “Kidd, we need to talk.”

I could tell by the look on Nick’s face that something had changed. Gone was any trace of the attraction I’d seen on Saturday night and it hadn’t been replaced by appreciation for my efficiency.