Grand Theft Retro (Style & Error Mystery Series Book 5) (25 page)

“You manipulated everybody and everything to gain access to this house. You’re after the clothes.”

“A clothing collection assessed at over four million dollars. I’d say that’s worth more than a credit in a start-up magazine, wouldn’t you?” He laughed.

Behind him, Mr. Charles lay still in the freshly groomed lawn. I didn’t know how badly he’d been hurt or whether or not he’d be able to help take down Pritchard. His lack of movement told me I was on my own.

A dark sedan pulled into the driveway. Dust and gravel kicked up as it neared. Pritchard tucked the gun into his waistband under his suit jacket and adjusted his vest so the gun was completely concealed. If not for Navajo, I might have tried to make a break for the dead taxi and flee, but I wouldn’t leave Jennie Mae’s white Persian cat behind.

Pritchard turned away from me and watched the sedan. It pulled up behind the dead taxi and the driver’s side door opened up. Deep V, my contact from the dentist’s office climbed out. Without her highlighted wig and liberal makeup, she looked different, but still familiar. Today she wore a leopard printed jersey wrap dress, cinched tight around her waist. A black and white zebra printed bra showed above the low neckline, clearly not by accident. “You should have listened to me,” she called out.

“I tried to,” I said. She slammed her car door and walked closer, only stumbling slightly when the stiletto of one of her high heels sunk into the freshly mowed grass. I shook my head from side to side and gestured for her to turn around and leave.

She wasn’t getting the picture. In about three seconds, Pritchard was going to be able to take both of us hostage. I looked around for a weapon. The landscapers had cleaned up too well, the only evidence of their work in progress being a scattering of trees in plastic pots that were evenly spaced out by the perimeter of the building.

“Get out of here,” Deep V said.

“He has a gun,” I yelled. “He knocked out one person and could kill us both.”

She looked at him and then at me. And then as if in slow motion, she raised her arm and fired a gun that I hadn’t even seen her holding. Pritchard screamed and dropped to the ground.

“Are you crazy?” he yelled.

“Don’t be a baby,” she said. “It’s only a flesh wound. If you had taken care of her like we agreed, I wouldn’t be here.”

Pritchard curled into a ball and whimpered.

I took two steps toward her and then realized the gun was now aimed at me. I looked back and forth between them. How could I have missed the resemblance? It wasn’t her outfit that made her seem familiar, it was the similarity in bone structure that she shared with Pritchard. She’d emailed Nancie with information about Pritchard. I’d replied and she’d sent me off on a tangent that keeps me away from the very house where I should have been spending my time. Deep V had been the one to send me to Bethany House, and had fed me the information about Pritchard Senior. Only because of the notation on the desk calendar that I ever pieced together her contact with them.

“These men need a doctor,” I said.

“They’ll have to settle for a dental technician.” She came closer. I backed up. In a few steps, I’d be up against the wall and Deep V would have no trouble aiming at whatever part of me she wanted to hit.

“Gene Whitbee didn’t kill Pritchard, did he?”

“Who cares? Pritchard Smith was a bum, just like my dad. They both got what they deserved.”

My research had indicated that Gene had died of natural causes, but I got the feeling there was more to that story. “You couldn’t have been more than a teenager when Gene died.”

“My mom OD’d when I was sixteen. I took my brother,” she glanced at Pritchard, “
half
-brother, and we moved in with Gene. He didn’t think I was smart enough to use his equipment, but I watched and learned. It’s too bad he died right after my eighteenth birthday. Maybe we could have been partners.” She laughed.

“Who’s skull was in the attic? Pritchard’s?”

“Yeah. I can’t believe you found it.”

“How did it end up in Jennie Mae’s sample collection?” Did it matter? Probably not, but I had to keep her talking. The longer Pritchard bled from his flesh wound, the less he would be a threat. I didn’t know if I could take Deep V, but I wasn’t ready to give up just yet.

“Pritchard left all kinds of equipment in Gene’s possession. After the desert critters had at the body and left me with a mass of bones, I hid them in his boxes. I planned to dump them in a donation drop box where nobody would be able to trace them to me. But Gene was always such a pushover for a pretty face. When Jennie Mae came to Gene to see if he’d heard from Pritchard, he said she could take his belongings. I figured she’d find the skull and figure out what happened. I waited a long time for that shoe to drop.”

“She never unpacked the boxes” I said. “She kept everything in storage. Those boxes were a reminder that when her career took off, her husband left her. She’s been haunted by that her whole life.”

“Which would have been fine if you hadn’t come along. I thought Pritchard had taken care of you with a few threats, but when we found out you took the skull, I had to intervene. We thought we’d have all the time in the world to empty out her closets, but you changed that. It never occurred to you that I didn’t respond until after you took the skull to the police, did it?”

It hadn’t. I’d been so busy trying to figure out what Pritchard was doing that I hadn’t give much thought to anything else. “Everything you told me was a lie.”

 “I’m sure
something
I said was true,” she said. She chuckled.

She moved closer to me as she talked. The gun never wavered. “They were small town crooks. Nobody would miss them. My mom used to tell me about Jennie Mae, the successful model who had everything. Jennie Mae’s husband was my dad, but somehow we were still dirt poor. It wasn’t fair.”

“Why come here? Why now?”

“Because of your stupid magazine. I lost track of Jennie Mae Tome but I never forgot about her. When I heard that
Retrofit
magazine was looking for private collectors of Seventies memorabilia, I knew it was the perfect opportunity, a way in. I set my brother up with the right ID to get inside. We could have made millions selling off her wardrobe.”

“But why use Pritchard’s name? Jennie Mae recognized it right away.”

“That was the plan at first. We were going to drive her out of her mind. We could have used that to our advantage if we had the kind of time we expected. And then you came along. We had to back burner Jennie Mae and deal with you first.”

“I was just doing my job,” I said.

“Ironic, isn’t it? How far we’ll go to do our jobs. Becoming a dental technician was supposed to be a way to turn over a new leaf. And now, a bunch of teeth in a skull are going to bite me from beyond the grave.”

In the distance, I heard sirens.
Please let them be headed this way, I thought. Let them be responding to my 911 call.
A car turned into the driveway of the Tome house. I didn’t dare look away from Deep V to see who it was. If it was the police, the sirens would grow closer. If it was a random car using the end of the driveway to make a U-turn as people so often did, the driver would never see us. We were easily a hundred yards away from the road.

But the car, a glorious, freshly washed, bright yellow taxi, drove all the way to the house. Deep V turned and looked, giving me just enough time to grab one of the potted trees by the trunk. I swung it as hard as I could toward the back of her legs. She dropped to the grass. The gun fell. The tree came out of the pot, showering Deep V with dirt. I kicked the gun through the grass toward the driveway and used the trunk of the tree to pin her to the ground.

“Miss Samantha?” Mo called out of his window, “I think this time maybe you need more than a taxi so I call the police.” Four cop cars, blaring sirens and flashing lights, pulled into the driveway, parking him in. Judging from his smile, I don’t think he minded.

Chapter 31

WEDNESDAY

It wasn’t until the next day that I learned the full story of what had happened over the past week. Deep V, aka Natasha Whitbee, was Pritchard’s older sister. She’d been seven when Gene Whitbee had shot Pritchard Smith. She’d watched her father bury his business partner in the desert. Gene turned to alcohol to numb the memories of what he’d done. When their mom died of a drug overdose in the early eighties, she and Pritchard had been left to raise themselves. She dug up the skull and hid it in a box in the basement. Security, in case her father’s murderous streak ever threatened their own safety.

She watched and learned the ID operation and, after her father’s death, reinvented herself. It wasn’t until a Google Alert on Jennie Mae Tome popped up and let her know that the long-hidden archive of seventies fashion would become public thanks to Retrofit and Bethany House that she contacted her brother with a plan to steal the samples. She established her brother’s background and he wheedled his way into Retrofit.

While Pritchard had been tasked with logistics of the theft, Deep V had been crafty in her pursuit of the skull. She’d taken a job as a dental technician with a local dentist, hoping to gain early knowledge if the police requested dental records to find a match. She sent me on a wild goose chase through a series of misinformation delivered in the parking lot outside of her place of work. She’d manipulated me by tapping into my inquisitive side, something she learned after researching me just like I’d researched everybody else. Perhaps another reason why snooping was a bad idea, though I’d given up counting arguments against my own nature.

Speaking of snooping, thanks to me, Nick’s dad was going to be okay. Pritchard and Deep V had treated him much the same as they’d treated Nancie in the basement of Bethany House, so while being tied up and held against his will wasn’t the ideal way to spend a couple of days, it hadn’t been torture. Pritchard hadn’t known about Nick’s new apartment and had returned Nick Senior to the wrong location. Had I not happened along when I did, who knows how long he would have been tied up in the closet.

Tahoma Hunt had not been involved in any criminal activity. His past felony convictions had been accumulated during a time when he’d made it his mission to recover relics of his American Indian heritage. The very past that had seemed so suspicious to me had been the qualifications that made him an attractive candidate to Bethany House: someone who recognized the historical and cultural symbolism in all garments and was willing to put himself on the line to connect buyers to merchandise. In fact, the only thing Bethany House had done wrong was to leave their receptionist in charge of the office keys. Detective Loncar’s team found cartridges of nitrous oxide, readily available at most dentist’s offices, in her desk drawer, along with a small oxygen tank and instructions on how to care for Nancie. Turns out Deep V had bought her help with the promise of free dental hygiene. Somebody needed to seriously consider the ramifications of the health care crisis.

What I hadn’t known was that when Navajo had gone missing, Jennie Mae had gone to the police. Her accusation of catnapping might not have motivated them to act, but my 911 call plus the hysterical report of a taxi driver did. Mo, after hearing from his brother the fate of dead taxi #3, told Det. Loncar how often he’d been driving me to Jennie Mae Tome’s house. The coincidence had been far too great.

Loncar and his team arrived shortly after Mo had pulled into the parking lot, arresting Pritchard and Deep V and transporting Mr. Charles to the hospital for immediate emergency care. Navajo was reunited with Jennie Mae. The clothes in the attic floor were recovered. Loncar had left the keys to my house with an officer who in turn left them with the night nurse. I drove home and slept in my own bed for the first time in a week. I had completely forgotten about the turquoise silk blouse hidden in the scarf that was tied around my waist until I undressed for the night.

The next day, I woke up early and on edge. I was one year older but back to square one in my quest for steady employment.

I showered and dressed in a pair of amber culottes and an ochre chiffon blouse with full sleeves. I hung a gold pendant around my neck and slipped on a pair of striped espadrilles with ribbons that laced around my ankles. I blow dried my hair without benefit of a brush, letting the curls pop up on their own, and then knotted the yellow paisley scarf over the top and tied it on the side. My project might have ended, but I’d become charmed by the style of the Seventies.

I had a long list of people to call and things to do, but one item rose to the top of the list. I called Eddie and arranged to pick up Logan at Tradava. Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in his office, one hand on a cup of coffee, the other stroking my chubby black cat.

“Dude,” Eddie said.

“I know.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

I was quiet for a moment. So much had happened in my small little world. The Seventies project, the trashing of
Retrofit
, being shot at, being trapped in the basement of Bethany House, crawling through the air conditioning vents, and being held at gunpoint. I’d learned a lot about the people around me, but I’d also learned something significant about myself. Pritchard Smith had been right: I did not follow direction well. How many times would I have been safe if I’d stayed put like Loncar, Nancie, even Nick had asked? But the isolation—the sense of being trapped, or of missing out on something—had been stifling.

The thing that had gotten me through it all were friends: Eddie, who’d taken care of Logan no questions asked. Nick, who’d been dealing with the nuances of moving in with his dad but had taken time out to take care of me. And possibly the most surprising of all, Detective Loncar, who was dealing with his own drama: the estrangement of his wife, daughter, and her new baby.

“I’ll probably want to talk about it at some point, but right now, I’d rather hear about you. What’s up with the junk food?”

He sighed. “Tradava got the idea to put out a monthly catalog. As part of my visual director responsibilities, they have me sitting in on the buyer presentations and styling the pages. In addition to dressing the store. And until they find someone to run that division, it’s all on me.”