Raiders of the Lost Corset (3 page)

“Sarcasm from Broadway Lamont. Who would have thought?”

He grunted. “Sarcasm’s cheap; take all you want. This broach thing valuable? Something someone would kill for? Or maybe this scene started in a robbery, ended in something else?”

“I never saw her without it. That’s all. Maybe it wasn’t so cheap after all. Maybe someone took it. Or maybe she just wasn’t wearing it today, didn’t go with her outfit.”

“So this is one of your so-called ‘fashion clues,’ huh?”

She shrugged and the detective rolled his eyes. Lacey felt a chill in the air. She crossed her arms and leaned back against the sofa where Magda still lay. “Hey hey hey! Crime scene!” Broadway yelled and she jumped up involuntarily. “Keep off the furniture.”

She moved and silently urged her nerves to calm down. “I didn’t say it was a fashion clue. I just noticed it was missing.”

“Yeah, yeah. Killer takes a souvenir. Something pretty to pawn, maybe. I’ll need a description of this whatchamacallit from you, Smithsonian.” He took out his notebook again.

“Maybe she left it in her room,” Lacey continued, “in a jewelry box or something.” He looked perplexed. She pointed up. “Magda lives upstairs. She keeps her key ring on a peg near her sewing machine.” Lacey walked quickly to the sewing machine and pointed but did not touch. The keys were hanging there. Lamont looked a little happier.

“Now that’s more like a real clue. Let’s go, Smithsonian,” Lamont said. He snapped on latex gloves and grabbed the keys with his big right hand. “Probable cause for a search. You better show me the way.”

Chapter 3

Lacey ushered Detective Lamont past a hanging rack of brightly colored velvet and satin costumes to the back of Magda’s workshop and through a door propped open by a small bust of Shakespeare. She led him up a dim narrow staircase illuminated by a bare forty-watt bulb. At the top of the stairs two front doors with chipped white paint were angled across from each other. On the right, Magda’s door led to the rear of the building, her apartment facing the small backyard and alley. From the other door the tan-talizing aroma of baking bread hovered in the air.

The workshop and apartments were located in an older house in the Eastern Market section of D.C., east of Capitol Hill, in an area where gentrification had turned the neighboring houses into stratospherically priced homes for the well-to-do and into chic storefronts. It was only a matter of time before this one too would receive a stylish makeover that would displace the remaining residents, one of whom had just been displaced by death.

Lamont opened the door. Magda’s apartment wore an air of proud but shabby gentility. The paint was old and chipped above the doorjamb and there were cracks running down the walls. An ancient Aubusson carpet covered the floor with flowers in faded shades of ivory, blue, and rose, worn and threadbare in places.

Still, it had a certain
je ne sais quoi,
as Magda would say.

Lacey’s visits had been restricted to the minuscule living room where she and Stella often shared strong coffee with Magda after fittings. Lacey remembered mismatched china cups and plates that held croissants and jam perched on the marble-top coffee table.

Now it was full of sewing and pattern magazines and a travel magazine about France.

Lacey had never seen Magda’s bedroom, but Lamont beckoned her to it, flipping the light switch. It still held a lingering trace of Magda’s distinctive perfume and of the sachet in her chest of drawers and closet. A single bed, neatly made with a yellow daffodil-patterned spread, was flanked by small white wooden end tables. On the tables were twin lamps, dancing ballerinas holding up the white and yellow shades. Magda must have loved the bal-let, Lacey realized; there was a large painting of ballerinas above the bed. Next to a small window, a plain white dresser was topped by a white leather jewelry box. When Lamont opened the lid, a ballerina sprang up, dancing to a tinkling music box air from
Swan
Lake
in front of pink satin lining.

This is a little girl’s room,
Lacey thought. She wondered whether Magda had ever had a man in her life. Lacey had vaguely thought of her as a widow, but she realized she had never mentioned a husband, deceased or otherwise. Besides the daily demands of her costume business, she seemed to have only one ambition — to find the lost corset.

“Come here.” Detective Lamont motioned Lacey over. He gently poked through the jewelry box with a pen from his pocket.

“You see it in here, that broach thingy? Maybe the perp never made it up here.”

She gazed at the pieces. A couple of necklaces, faux pearls, earrings. “No. It’s not there.”

“What did the thing look like? Can you draw me a picture?”

“Would now be a good time to tell you I got a D in eighth-grade art? I barely mastered circles and stick figures.”

“You’re hopeless, Smithsonian. Can you at least describe the damn thing?”

“Yeah, I can describe the damn thing. It’s a round pin with a fluted edge, about the size of a golf ball, silver with lots of colored stones, red, blue, and green.”

Lacey was no authority on the life and dreams of Magda

Rousseau. She’d probably met her no more than a dozen times crowded together in the last few months, often in the company of the inimitable Stella, the hairstylist they had in common. But every single time, Magda had worn the gaudy pin. She said it “went with everything.”

“Maybe it had sentimental value,” she said, thinking it might have been a gift from a man, a lover. But the room wasn’t talking.

There weren’t even any photographs of Magda, or of anyone else.

“We’ll let Forensics poke around up here. When they get

here. Let’s you and me go have a chat, Smithsonian.” He sighed loudly and followed her back to the living room and down the stairs to the costume shop. With his lumbering gait he reminded her of a big bear.
A big bear who also happens to be a big drama
queen,
she thought.

The paramedics had given up and were standing by amid the uniformed police. Magda lay on the sofa now, her eyes half open in that teasing way, the weird smile in place, as if she were rather amused by the proceedings occasioned by her death. Lacey hoped she was.

Behind Lacey, Lamont said, “Top button’s gone off the dress.”

She turned and looked at the dead woman again. Magda’s face looked chalky. “That’s where she would have worn the pin. Maybe to hide the missing button.” She pointed to a tiny rip, wondering if the same someone who spiked Magda’s wine took the gaudy piece of jewelry. But was that the same someone who spiked her ribs with a gaudy dagger? And why try to kill her twice? Was it possible there were two killers?

“What did she tell you?”

“Not to drink the wine.” Lacey indicated the bottle of Pinot Gri-gio sitting on the edge of Magda’s sewing machine.

“We’ll have it tested.” He signaled to another cop to collect it and several other glasses scattered around. “She didn’t tell you what kind of poison? Arsenic, rat poison, cyanide?”

“She just stared at me with that look.”

“Dead people can be damned uncommunicative,” he said. “But hell, that’s what autopsies are for.”

“Right. An autopsy. How are things going down at the

morgue?” Lacey had heard horror stories about the D.C. morgue.

“It’s a damn mess.” Lamont rubbed his chin.

“How long will it take?”

“Do I look like I got a crystal ball on me? So how’d you meet this Magda Rousseau?”

“A friend. I met Magda through a friend.”
It’s all Stella’s fault.

Lacey met Magda because Stella had a passion for exotic fashion, which included leather bustiers, sequined halters, and full-fledged boned and brocaded corsets. Because Lacey was the fashion reporter for
The Eye Street Observer,
Stella insisted Lacey should write a story about her friend Magda Rousseau. Stella had modeled Magda’s latest laced-and-boned creation and promoted the old woman’s craftsmanship and design sense as a subject for one of Lacey’s “Crimes of Fashion” columns.

“What did I tell you? The woman is a total genius with underwear,” Stella had said. “She’s French, did I tell you? And her fancy underwear is like outerwear for the inner goddess, you know? You could use that in a column, huh? Give me credit if you use it, okay, Lace?”

Lacey shuddered at the idea of slipping racy French lingerie into her style columns for the staid, buttoned-down Washingtonian woman, but Stella persevered in her lobbying on behalf of Magda’s talents. Lacey agreed that beautiful underwear deserved respect, as Magda said, and that the secrets under your clothes might be worth examining. Under duress, Lacey even conceded that corsets had a certain charm and a sexy retro panache. Indeed, many designers were incorporating them in their collections, no-tably in formal wear. But she had told Stella firmly that she should not, could not,
would
not write about kinky corset fetishes and call-girl couture in a family newspaper. Her editor, Mac, would have a heart attack.

“I will not write about kinky boys and girls in kinky underwear, do you understand, Stella?”

“Whatever,” Stella had replied with a dismissive lift of her shoulders. “Don’t knock it till you try it, babe.”

Lacey’s stylist had dragged her to the small shop where Magda worked, stitching custom underwear, corsets, and costumes, and where she bickered with Analiza Zarina, and Lacey and Magda had hit it off.

“ ‘A friend,’ huh? You were working on a fashion story?” Broadway Lamont broke into her thoughts. “What’s the angle? This old broad’s no dish. Not like that fashion model that got herself gunned down in front of you in Dupont Circle a few weeks ago.”

“Magda’s not a fashion plate, she’s an old-fashioned corsetiere.

She makes corsets, fancy undergarments of all kinds, by hand, the way they used to make them. The corset renaissance is the fashion story. Or rather,
was
the story.”

“You’re writing about ladies’ fancy undies? I thought
The Eye
Street Observer
was a family newspaper. Corsets are more like
City Paper
turf, aren’t they?”

“
The Eye
believes in the right to wear the underwear of your choice, Detective. Besides, you told me you don’t read my newspaper.”

“That’s right.” He nodded his large head. “It’s third in line behind the other papers I don’t read.
The Washington Post
being the number-one paper I don’t read. Don’t mean I don’t know all about it. So what’s the story?”

“Magda and I discussed corsets and cleavage, uplift and control, things like that. And besides all that, Magda was an interesting character, a real dynamo. And a storyteller.”

In fact, Magda was even more persistent than Stella. “How can you write the story of the corset without your own corset? How will you know the
je ne sais quoi,
the feel, the experience?” She badgered Lacey until she gave in and ordered a custom-made corset of her own. Magda promised she would craft a corset for Lacey for only a little over the materials’ cost. She promised she would not reveal Lacey’s measurements to anyone, then loudly announced in front of several clients that Lacey’s waist was nothing to be ashamed of. The ordeal had been excruciating, and Lacey knew that Broadway Lamont did not need every little piece of information her flirtation with fancy underwear might have uncovered.
He’ll need a subpoena to get my waist size out of me.
Little by little, when Stella wasn’t around, Magda had spun out her theory about the lost corset. She swore Lacey to secrecy. Lacey wondered at first whether this was just a ploy to whet her appetite for the story.

“Wake up, Smithsonian,” Lamont demanded. “You been drinking that wine too?”

A puzzled female voice broke in behind them from the back door of the shop. “What’s going on? Where is —” Then a strangled scream. “Magda!”

Lamont turned toward the voice. Lacey spun around to see a slim, attractive woman being restrained by a police officer. Lacey recognized her as Natalija Krumina, one of Magda’s neighbors, whom she had met in passing once or twice. Aside from the fact that she was also Latvian and she pronounced her name “Natalie,”

Lacey knew little about her.

“Oh, no! My poor Magda! My God, what has happened? Was it her heart?” the woman asked Broadway Lamont. “She told me she had a weak heart. Is she —?”

“And just who might you be, ma’am?” Lamont asked politely.

Lamont was never that polite with her. But then Smithsonian bore the stain of being a newspaper reporter, a member of the Fourth Estate, a class merely tolerated if not downright despised by police and politicians alike in the Nation’s Capital.

“Natalija Krumina. I live upstairs,” she said with a tremor in her voice. She spoke with a slightly musical accent. “I was going to invite Magda over for some fresh herb and olive bread I just baked. She loves it.” She approached Magda’s still body and her eyes filled up with tears.

Natalija was probably Lacey’s age, her early thirties, with chestnut brown hair that fell below her shoulders in one dark, silky wave. Her features were even and pleasing. She had large almond eyes in a distinctive shade of golden brown, now wet and glistening.

Oh, yeah. Lamont is no doubt a big sucker for tears,
Lacey thought, running her fingers through her own hair, wondering what she looked like after the shock of finding Magda dying. Finding a dead body, no doubt, would be hard on the complexion, as well as the blood pressure.

The big detective asked Natalija a few questions, whether she remembered seeing anyone visiting Magda earlier, whether she had heard anything. Natalija swore she knew nothing, heard nothing, and had seen nothing.

“What about her favorite pin?” Lamont asked. “Seems to be missing.”

Natalija went blank for a minute, gazing at the puddle of fake jewels on the carpet. The detective gestured to Lacey, who dutifully described it. Natalija grimaced. “That old thing? I don’t know. Maybe she lost it.” She looked over at Magda again and shook her head. “She’s really dead, isn’t she?”

Detective Lamont looked grim and Natalija burst into fresh tears. “Miss Krumina, do you happen to remember a theatre expression Magda Rousseau used to say? A good luck thing?”