Diane Vallere - Style & Error 03 - The Brim Reaper (6 page)

“With you? I’m already involved with you.”

“With the homicide.”

“I’m kind of involved in that too. Like I said, I’m the one who called the police.”

Nick’s face grew serious.

“I told Detective Loncar what I saw. And then I drove Eddie to his apartment and went home.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. It’s not like I was hanging around the docks looking for action.”

“There are no docks in Ribbon.”

“You know what I mean. I wasn’t looking for this. I was helping a friend. It’s not my fault someone committed a murder while I was there.”

“I don’t like it when you put yourself in dangerous situations. You know that.”

“Then give me a job. I can’t be in two places at once. If I’m here with you during the day, and out with you at night, then I can’t exactly be in any dangerous situations, can I?”

“If you weren’t here right now, I would have hired some young college graduate and lost three months of my time teaching her how to run the office. Are you serious about this? Because I need someone who knows what goes on in a showroom, who can problem-solve and think fast, who can act on her own without having to ask my permission for every little thing. I need someone like you. I know it was your idea, but it would solve a problem for me too.”

“Then it’s decided?”

He held out his hand and I shook it. “You’re hired. You start on Monday.”

“So if we go out tonight, you won’t be my boss yet, right?”

“I sure hope not.” He leaned down and kissed me again. This time his hands went places that would have cost him a sexual harassment suit seventy-two hours later.

Later, I couldn’t help wondering what it was about me that voluntarily made my life more difficult.

I arrived home shortly after two. Eddie was waiting on the porch. I unlocked the front door and he followed me inside.

“I have a problem,” I said.

“Join the club.”

Logan, my slightly snobby black cat, met us in the living room and meowed loud enough to alert the neighbors across the street that it was time to be fed. I scooped him up and carried him into the kitchen, set him down, and fed him a few treats from a drawer that needed a new knob. Eddie scratched Logan’s ears until a soft purr emanated. He tipped his head and ran the length of his body against Eddie’s faded jeans and left us alone in search of something more interesting under the sofa.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“Sure. Do you have any fruit?”

I reached into the freezer and pulled out a carton of Neapolitan ice cream.

“I said fruit.”

“It’s Breyer’s. It has strawberries.” I pulled two bowls from the cabinet.

“Dude, I think I bit off more than I can chew on this one.”

“Talk to me.”

So he did. The director was pressuring him with unreasonable demands, wanting to promote the exhibit that, by Eddie’s estimation, might never open. Hats had gone missing. Curators had been killed. Odd items had arrived in the mail.

“It’s starting to sound like Lilac Inn over there,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“
Lilac Inn
. You know, Nancy Drew?”

He shook his head.

“Okay,
Terror Castle
.”

“What?”

“
The Three Investigators
?” Still nothing. “Hello, didn’t you read as a kid?”

He ignored my question. “Christian called me at six this morning. He has some kind of crazy motivation to open this exhibit. He wants to open the exhibit this Thursday. This Thursday! That’s less than a week. I can’t make that deadline. Not now.”

“You’d think he’d cancel the whole thing considering a man was murdered.”

“I asked him about that. He said it was too late to cancel. A bunch of rich collectors are scheduled to view the exhibit on Thursday afternoon. Christian only communicates the vaguest of details, and I don’t know which way to turn. It’s overwhelming.” He repeatedly tapped his fingers against his sternum.

“You told Detective Loncar all of this, right?” I asked.

“Sort of.”

“What does ‘sort of’ mean?”

“Wait here.” Eddie left the room and returned with his black nylon backpack. He set it on the dining room table, reached inside, and pulled out the forest green felt hat that had been in the admissions office next to Dirk Engle’s body. It was dusty on one side. He stared at it for seven seconds without moving. Then he set it on the center of the wooden table.

“This is the hat from the admissions office,” he said, confirming my worst thoughts. “It was in my backpack when we left.”

“How did it get in your backpack?”

“I put it there.”

“You stole evidence from the crime scene?”

“I picked it up off the floor to keep the blood from getting on it, remember? I must have carried it outside with me when I got sick. I don’t really remember. I found it in my backpack this morning.”

“You have two choices: call the detective or take the hat back.”

“To the admissions office? It’s a crime scene. I can’t just waltz in there.”

“You just said Christian moved up the deadline on the exhibit. How are you supposed to get anything done if you can’t get into the museum?

“I can get into the museum. I can’t get into the admissions office.”

“You also can’t walk around with a hat that was found next to a bloody corpse.” From the way Eddie looked at me, I suspected he thought I was being less than supportive, considering the tables had been turned when I’d first moved to Ribbon.

“What about the gift shop? Can you leave it there? That’s nowhere near the admissions office.”

“Sure, yes, the gift shop is probably available.”

“Too bad you left the keys on Thad’s desk.”

Eddie reached into the zippered pocket on the outside of his backpack and withdrew a set of keys. He set them on the table next to the hat.

“Well, that changes things, doesn’t it?” I leaned against the back of the sofa and looked at the ceiling. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll take it back to the museum while they’re closed. You can leave it somewhere nobody would look—where’s lost and found? After we leave, you’ll call Loncar and tell him to look for the hat. Tell him you forgot about it until today. You remember it was there but don’t remember where you left it. Let him go back to the crime scene and find it himself. The sooner we get the hat back to the museum, the sooner we can wash our hands of our involvement.”

The drive to the museum took less than fifteen minutes, and during fourteen-and-a-half of them I kept up a steady chatter so Eddie didn’t have a chance to think about what we were about to do. Before long we were parked outside the Planetarium, making our way toward the museum.

“While we’re here, look around and see if anything seems out of the ordinary. You can’t do it when everyone else is around. There are too many distractions,” I advised.

“What about you? Aren’t you a distraction right now?”

“No. I’m like an extension of you.”

“That’s comforting.”

We headed around to the back of the building.

“Look,” Eddie said.

“What?”

“Two suspicious-looking characters making their way through the grounds.”

I got excited. “Where?”

He pointed to our reflection in the glass doors.

“This is serious, Eddie. Do you notice anything?”

He cupped his hands around his eyes and crept closer to the doors. “There’s a stack of boxes inside, addressed to Hat Exhibit. There’s a whole bunch. The return address labels are torn off.”

“Let me see.” I pressed my face up to the glass. I counted nine boxes.
Do not crush
had been printed in a cursive font on the adhesive labels stuck to the side of the boxes.

“Are those the boxes that were delivered yesterday?”

“They don’t look the same. Look. There’s an open one.” He pointed to an empty carton. There was a small red number 2 on the corner. “I think there’s something in it. An invoice or packing slip.

“Eddie, when did Thad give you the keys to the museum?” I asked suddenly.

He stared at the keys. “Yesterday.”

“And he specifically asked you to leave them on his desk when you were done?”

“Yes. He said I should work late but to drop them off before I left.”

“So he basically arranged it so you’d have access, all by yourself, to the museum and the admissions office. And if you’d left the keys, he could say he knew you’d been there. Are you following me?”

“You don’t think Thad—”

“C’mon, forget returning the hat. We have to get out of here.”

Just then, gunshots sounded from the parking lot.

7

Eddie and I dropped to our hands and knees. Eddie’s head went closer to the ground than mine. I looked toward the car but saw nothing suspicious. I pushed myself up until I was kneeling on the grass, and I strained my eyes. If I hadn’t heard the crackling of gunfire, I wouldn’t have believed the sound had taken place.

When nothing happened after ten minutes of waiting, we ran to my car. I dropped Eddie off at his apartment and went home. It wasn’t until I parked the car safely in the garage that I realized the hat was still in the backseat. I retrieved it and set it on my glass coffee table in the living room.

The sunlight filtered through the front windows and struck the jet bead that pierced the grosgrain band around the hat. A pheasant feather stood up a full twelve inches. Logan jumped onto the table and swatted the feather. I scooped him up and set him on the floor, and then picked up the phone and called Detective Loncar.

The call went into voice mail, and I left a message. “Hi, Detective, this is Samantha Kidd. I know you probably weren’t expecting to hear from me, but I have something at my house that relates to your case and I think you should see it. I mean, I think you should have it. I mean, it’s not a gift but it’s from the exhibit—or at least I think it is, but I really don’t know. But probably you should figure that out, not me. Isn’t that how this is supposed to work?” I paused for a moment, left my phone number so he wouldn’t have to dig through my police file to find it, and hung up.

I wrapped the hat in tissue paper, nestled it in a shopping bag, and then carried it to the garage and set it on a top shelf between Logan’s slate-blue cat carrier and a heavy duty flashlight my dad had bought when he took my sister and I camping when we were kids. I propped an old license plate that my mom had kept (she liked the old state slogan “You’ve Got a Friend in Pennsylvania”) in front of the bag and stepped back. I wasn’t sure what Eddie was going to say when I told him I’d called the detective, but I was fairly sure I’d done the right thing. The longer that hat stayed at my house, the more involved I’d be.

I changed into a satin caftan top that I’d gotten in Chinatown for seven dollars, and a pair of black leggings. Most people assumed people who worked in fashion wore only designer apparel, but I also enjoyed the “disposable” street fashions of New York as much as the designer togs we carried at Bentley’s. The top had a kaleidoscope pattern in shades of teal, yellow, black, and white. The problem with this piece was, Logan liked it as much as I did, and now the thin band of black satin that bordered the collar, sleeves, and hem showed the telltale signs of tiny cat teeth and claws from a particularly eventful day of burrowing into the laundry pile. The top was now part of my lounging-around-the-house wardrobe.

I went outside and picked up the mail—a pet store ad and new catalog from Tom Sturgis Pretzels—and found a rubber-banded copy of the
Ribbon Times
on the grass halfway between my neighbor’s and my house and carried it inside. I didn’t have a subscription, but I figured if my neighbor did, he’d complain and the accuracy factor of delivering said paper would stop being an issue. Technically, this was probably a case of possession being nine-tenths of the law. Not that I had any legal background to rely on, outside of what David E. Kelly’s TV shows  had taught me in the nineties.

My mind returned to the image of Dirk Engle wrapped in Bubble Wrap in the admissions office. The gallery had been filled with packing materials, and it would have been easy for someone to get a piece from our trash. I thought about the argument I’d overheard when I first arrived at the museum, and the way Dirk had stormed out. There had been tension between him and the person in the admissions office. Had that been Christian? Or Thad, the assistant museum director? I’d talked to them both, but the voice I’d overheard had been distorted by Dirk Engle’s cell phone.

That was another thing. What was Dirk doing back at the museum? He’d quit earlier that day. Had he returned to pick up some of his personal belongings? Or had someone lured him to the admissions office? Or maybe he’d been there to sabotage the exhibit he was no longer part of?

I turned my attention to the newspaper. Eventually I reached a two-page fold-out dedicated to fashion and art. A feature story on a pair of local sisters turning quilts into jackets was sandwiched between a
What’s Hot/What’s Not
list and a sidebar on Hawaiian shirts. The rest of the page was littered with shopping ads and coupons. It was hard to believe that local boutiques and retailers—Tradava included—actually believed these ads were going to generate business. The copy was boring, the ads were stale, and the placement was a waste of money. Who read the paper anymore? Why weren’t they modernizing their approach with e-mail blasts and postcard mailings?

Because this was Ribbon, Pennsylvania, not Manhattan, New York. We were 130 miles east of the Big Apple, which some days felt like getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

I scanned the rest of the page. One ad stood out from the rest. A fifties-style cursive script was laid out next to a photo of a stylish woman with one hand touching the brim of her hat, another hand resting on her hip. The model stared at the copy:

“Cloche” call? Not at all! OVER YOUR HEAD carries the finest assortments from around the world, including one-of-a-kind vintage selections in
mint
condition
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