Diane Vallere - Style & Error 03 - The Brim Reaper (22 page)

Loncar stood up straight. “What night was that?”

“The night after we found Dirk’s body. The night you have Eddie on film. The reason you’ve been after him.”

“You weren’t on that footage.”

“I know, and I can’t figure that out. I was next to him the whole time. So how did someone delete me from the video? And why?”

“Maybe they didn’t want you to be part of the investigation either.”

I ignored his attempt at humor and pointed to the boxes. “These were in the museum. We saw them through the glass doors. And someplace else too.” I tipped my head back and looked up. The sun was playing peek-a-boo with a couple of clouds, coloring the museum grounds in bright sunlight and then darkening it with shadow.

“Ms. Kidd, you were saying?” Loncar prompted.

I tipped my chin down and looked him in the face. “It’s Over Your Head.”

“Pardon me?”

“It’s not an insult. It’s a store. You must know it. Vera Sarlow’s store on Penn Avenue. Over Your Head. She’s Dirk Engle’s sister.”

“For someone who claims not to be trying to figure out who killed Dirk Engle, you seem to know a lot about his background.”

“With all due respect, my boss asked me to go to her store. It had nothing to do with Dirk Engle’s murder.”

“Who’s your boss?”

“Nick Taylor.”

“I thought he was your boyfriend?”

“Are you keeping tabs on me?”

Loncar removed the last box from his trunk and slammed it shut. “Are you planning to attend the gala tomorrow night?”

“Yes. Are you?”

“There will be a significant police presence here, but on behalf of the Ribbon Police Department, I’d like to ask you to stay home.”

“Detective, I’m not going to stay home.”

“Then try to stay out of trouble. It would make my job easier.” He held out his hand. I shook it. I wasn’t sure if we’d sealed some kind of deal, and if we had, I wasn’t how much control I had over my end of the bargain.

28

When I returned to the exhibit space, Eddie was on his hands and knees, smoothing a vintage poster into an oversized frame. Similar tubes were lined up along the back wall of the exhibit. I knelt on the floor, helping him secure the corners. He picked up the frame and set it on an easel, and then bumped the easel to the left with the instep of his sneaker. I moved the boxes of hats from the cart to the floor and told him about my conversation with the detective and my meeting with Dante earlier that morning.

Eddie bumped the easel forward a few inches and reassessed its placement. “Do you believe him?”

“I don’t know. He seemed sincere, but something’s still off.”

“So you suspect Rebecca.”

“Not sure. Has she been much of a help on this exhibit?”

“Rebecca? I don’t think she’s ever been up here.”

“That’s funny,” I said. On the desk, sitting on a pile of paper next to the monitor, was a pair of square black Lisa Loeb eyeglasses.

I tucked the glasses into the pocket of my sweatshirt. “Will you be okay for a little while if I go talk to her?”

“Fine, just don’t take too long. It’ll take two people to hang the posters.”

Rebecca was inside the gift shop. She stood on a two-step ladder that put her within reach of the Rodin sculptures on the top shelf. Her boot-cut pants and collared shirt almost made the smock that she wore over her clothes look like designer apparel. When she saw me, she climbed down the ladder and started to unpack a box of umbrellas made of fabric inspired by the Impressionist masters. I recognized the goldfish print as Matisse and the water lilies as Monet. She was about halfway done unpacking the box, and worry tugged at the sides of her mouth.

“Rebecca,” I called out, “why didn’t you tell me you were working on the exhibit?”

She knocked three of the umbrellas to the floor and quickly scooped them up. “Me? I’m not. I don’t even know what’s going on up there.”

When she looked up at me, I noticed the layer of makeup she had used to mask the redness around her eyes. For an instant I questioned my suspicions. She’d worked at the museum every day for years, with people she knew and trusted. She was probably the one who brought muffins on holidays and organized the Secret Santa at Christmas.

I put my hand in my pocket and closed my fingers around the frames. I couldn’t accept her innocence at face value. “I know you were upstairs. I found your glasses.” I pulled them out of the pocket and set them on the top of the glass display case between us. Rebecca started to cry.

“When Christian asked me to stay late, I thought he wanted—I didn’t think he wanted me to work. I thought he saw me differently. He asked if I thought the setup was exciting enough, if it had enough sex appeal. I thought he was dropping hints.”

By now her face was a pinkish red, darker around her eyes. She’d smeared her eyebrow pencil by her right eye, leaving a stripe that faded off into her hairline. It made her look Romulan. I looked around for a tissue but didn’t see any.

“Rebecca, if you think Christian is expecting a certain kind of behavior from you, well, that’s sexual discrimination. You can talk to someone about that.”

She looked up. There was a sadness to her smile. “It’s not like that. I—I’m the one who expected something. I took off my glasses and my cardigan and unclipped my hair. I told him I thought the exhibit was sexy, that I thought he was sexy. He looked at me—just looked at me!—and told me to get dressed. I’ve never been so embarrassed.” This time when she put her face into her hands, her shoulders shook with sobs. “I’ve never done anything like that before!” she squeaked between breaths.

“Rebecca, Christian is a bastard for leading you on.”

“I never expected anything like this. I thought I wanted to be part of his team. I thought he would notice me. Now I don’t want to work here anymore.”

I nodded and searched for something to say to change the subject. Bits of the conversation that I’d overheard between Christian and her popped into my head like a collection of sound bites. I gambled on small talk.

“I don’t think he’d ask for your help if he wasn’t interested in what you have to say. I heard Dirk Engle was Christian’s connection to the collectors. Is that your job now that Dirk’s gone?”

A fresh wave of tears filled her eyes. “How do you know Christian asked me for help?”

Uh-oh. “Eddie must have mentioned it,” I said. I studied her face and hoped she wouldn’t ask why Eddie and I were talking about her.

“It was so stupid of me. I volunteered to do whatever he wanted. I wanted to make sure he knew I don’t want to run the gift shop forever. But now, this—” She waved her hands by her eyes and blinked a few times. “He didn’t even say good morning when he got here today.”

“He’s here already?”

“Sure, he gets here really early. It’s my favorite time of the day because we’re the only two here. But lately every time we start to have a meaningful conversation, that woman calls and he has to leave.”

“What woman?”

“Hedy London.” Rebecca waved her hand in front of me. “I shouldn’t talk about her. He doesn’t even know he’s being manipulated.”

I searched her face for signs of something other than sadness but discovered nothing.

Being inside the museum shop, surrounded by merchandise, my retail instincts kicked in. I flipped through a rack of aprons printed with scenes from pop-art paintings and sorted them on autopilot. Lichtenstein in the front, Rauschenberg in the middle, Warhol in the back.

“What kind of things do you and Christian talk about?” I asked as I moved on to a circular fixture of T-shirts with pictures of dinosaurs. I started by the XS brontosaurus and worked my way around to the XL saber-tooth tiger, tucking the price tags in and making sure they were all facing the same direction.

“Mostly his ideas about how the store is run,” Rebecca said as she reached in for a fresh handful of umbrellas. This time I spotted the décolleté of the barkeep on Manet’s
Folies-Bergere.

“I thought museum gift shops were leased by an independent museum store association?”

“Most are, but we’re an independent shop that’s attached to the museum. We have some flexibility. Christian terminated the contracts with the last suppliers, and what they wouldn’t take back he put on clearance.”

“Like my moccasins?” I looked around the store but didn’t see them. “Did they sell out?”

“No, they’re in the back. Christian hates them. He wants me to find a buyer who wants the whole lot. You’re lucky you bought a pair when you did.” She peered over the counter at my feet. “You have small feet. I wanted to buy a pair but I could only fit into the men’s size.”

“So the profits from the museum shop now feed the bottom line of the museum?”

Rebecca nodded and moved from Gauguin to Matisse. “I’m not sure how he convinced the board to approve the money, but he ordered a lot of merchandise—all inspired by the museum catalog of holding—and plans to keep the profits to fund future exhibits and add to the acquisition funds.”

I stopped sizing dinosaur T-shirts for a second. “He thinks there’s money in that?”

“He’s counting on it. He said if we focus on the collector market, we’ll make a fortune. This hat exhibit is the test. The hats from Hedy London’s collection are going to be on display. We’re going to sell duplicates.”

“Tradava is supposed to be producing a collection based on the Hedy London samples,” I said. “That’s why they’re funding the exhibit. Why would they agree to let you sell the copies?”

“I don’t know.” She looked as confused as I felt.

I looked at the pile of boxes building up behind her counter. “You told me the trash got picked up on Tuesday mornings. What do you do with it during the week? I don’t think I’ve seen it sitting around back, but you can’t keep it here.”

“We recycle what we can, but everything else gets carried downstairs to the basement outside of Christian’s office.”

I thought about the boxes with the little red numbers on the corners. “So if there were empty boxes here, someone might have reused them?”

“Sure. Dr. Daum started an initiative for us to go green before he retired. Christian hasn’t stopped it, so we’re still trying to keep it up.”

“Rebecca, why are you so certain Christian is going to stay in Ribbon after this exhibit?”

She chewed the inside of her mouth, which caused her lips to purse and wiggle off to one side. “This exhibit is just the beginning. I guess it’s normal that he would obsess over his first show. He’s trying to make sure it’s not a disaster. If Eddie hadn’t left such a mess, everything would be different.”

“Eddie didn’t leave a mess. He’s working on the installation right now.”

“Does Christian know? Because if Eddie’s finishing the exhibit, then maybe everything will be okay after all.”

I returned upstairs. Eddie stood on the top of a ladder tying a piece of dental floss to the end of a sleek silver battery. I picked up a beanie and spun it around my finger like a Harlem Globetrotter.

“Rebecca just told me the gift shop is planning on selling duplicates of the Hedy London hats. But isn’t that Tradava’s role?” I asked.

“That’s what I heard.”

“And now that I think of it, Vera Sarlow said something funny back when I first met her. She asked if Tradava had negotiated an exclusive. Was she talking about the copies too?”

“You’re back to Vera?”

“I don’t know. The other day we were talking about the exhibit, I think, or at least I was. She was pretty broken up and I’m starting to think she might have been rambling. She said she hadn’t found her brother’s client list.” I used the inside of my foot to shift the base of a mannequin stand until it was lined up with the first three Eddie had already placed.

“That’s kind of a strange thing to be concerned with when she’s dealing with the death of her brother, don’t you think? Go two inches to the left,” Eddie instructed.

I shifted the mannequin to his specifications. “Maybe those collectors Christian’s trying so hard to woo are really the clients she wants to get hold of.”

“Is she planning a funeral or a memorial?”

“She didn’t mention it. The only thing she wanted to talk about was Dirk Engle’s client list.”

“Did you find it in the trash? Hold this flashlight.”

I steadied the dangling silver light while Eddie measured out a length of dental floss and tied it on. “Once I found the yearbook I forgot about the list. I know I cleaned up that night, and I know I carried a bag of trash downstairs and left it where Rebecca told me to leave it. So where did it go?”

“Good question. Start unwrapping the hats.”

Eddie scribbled measurements in a notepad while I untaped the ends of the Bubble Wrap that protected each hat. Occasionally Eddie picked up a hat and set it on a mannequin or a pedestal. He’d step back and survey the result, then either swap it out with a different hat or move on to the next mannequin. We continued for hours, stopping only for shots of espresso and bathroom breaks. It took hours, but finally Eddie and I had the exhibit looking like an exhibit.

Mannequins were grouped in conversational stances by different eras of fashion, from the twenties to the seventies. I’d been surprised by the breadth of the hat collection Hedy London had provided, but Eddie explained she’d not only loaned items from the movies she starred in but had also become a collector in her own right, obtaining costumes from studio sales and friend of friend bequeaths.

In Eddie’s exhibit, mannequins were positioned around the perimeter of the room, interspersed with pedestals and columns that showcased hats, shoes, gloves, and other period-specific accessories. Cat’s turquoise pillbox hat, the only one that wasn’t on loan from Hedy London’s collection, was worn by a mannequin dressed in a snug turquoise velvet dress with a deep V-neck and broad shoulders. The femme fatale was surrounded with others dressed in vintage trench coats, with colorful fedoras on their heads. Eddie had hooked up a smoke machine and positioned it behind that corner, piping in a soft layer of atmosphere.

Small flashlights had been loaded with D-cell batteries, secured to dental floss, and hung from the ceiling. As long as the exhibit remained free from breezes and seven-foot-tall people who could reach up and grab them, gravity would keep the lights aimed at the hats below.