All Sales Fatal (18 page)

Lily-scented perfume assailed
me as I crossed into Nordstrom. A half dozen cosmetics counters lay in front of me, laden with face products worth as much as the annual budget of a midsized city. Dodging a woman who wanted to spritz me with the perfume, I caught up with a clerk and asked if she’d seen a dark-haired teen in a hurry. She pointed wordlessly toward the lingerie department. I knew an exit door was on the far side of the bras and pajamas, so I zipped along as quickly as I could. The Segway gave me a little extra height as I scanned the department, able to see over the revolving racks and displays. One middle-aged woman examined undergarments with enough support to hold up the Brooklyn Bridge. No teenager. Damn. She must have made it to the parking lot.

I cut diagonally through lingerie and out the row of glass doors leading to the parking lot. Looking both ways, I didn’t see anyone who resembled the girl I was following. Possibly she was already in her car, if she had one. Or… I spun the
Segway and returned to the dressing room between lingerie and women’s evening wear. It was the only one on the route the clerk had indicated the girl had taken. There was no attendant in sight, so I dismounted and walked through an open doorway. A chime sounded. The dressing room doors, unfortunately, went to the floor, so I couldn’t peer beneath them and figure out which ones were occupied.

“Eloísa?” I called softly. I began to walk the length of the dressing room, toward a three-way mirror at the end. Doors lined both sides of the narrow hall. Rustling sounds and the clink of hangers came from behind several of them. With a sigh, I turned the handle on the first door. Empty. Ditto for the second and third doors. The fourth room held a skinny woman who clutched a gray chiffon gown to her chest when she spotted me.

“Sorry,” I apologized.

“Well! Cameras in here to prevent shoplifting are bad enough, but this is ridiculous,” the woman said as I closed the door.

The next two doors yielded nothing but piles of discarded clothes on the floor and slung on the bench. A woman carrying an armload of bathing suits and resort wear emerged from the next door before I reached it, stepping past me with a muttered, “Excuse me.” I envied her the cruise I imagined she was shopping for. Hesitating at the final door, marked with a “Handicapped” placard, I heard nothing from within. My fingers closed over the handle, and I eased the door open an inch. It promptly slammed shut, clearly propelled by a well-placed kick or shoulder.

“Eloísa,” I said, “this is crazy. I just want to talk with you for a couple of minutes. About Celio. You’re not in trouble.”

“I’m not?” The door muffled the voice, but I heard tension and doubt.

“Absolutely not,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to Celio. If he was your friend, I’d think you’d want to know, too.”

“I don’t know anything,” the girl said.

“Would you please come out?”

The middle-aged woman emerged from the other dressing room, garbed in the gray gown, which did nothing for her light eyes and mousy hair. “Teenage daughter, huh?” she asked in the voice of experience.

Did I really look old enough at thirty-one to be the mother of a teenager? Involuntarily, I glanced at my reflection in the three-way mirror.

“Don’t you wish you could lock ’em in a closet—with a muzzle on—from the time they hit adolescence until they’re about twenty-three?” the woman asked, edging past me to stand in front of the mirror. “When my Suzanne was seventeen, she tried on fifty-four dresses before finding one she wanted to wear to the prom. Fifty-four! Why, I only tried on three to find my wedding gown.” She turned first one way, then the other, craning her neck to view her backside. “Does this dress make me look fat?”

“Not at all,” I replied truthfully. Drab, yes. Fat, no.

Satisfied, she returned to her dressing room, and I knocked on Eloísa’s door once more. “I’m not going away.”

Apparently, she believed me because ninety seconds later the door opened. The teenager slid out through the crack, all long denimed legs, dark brown hair, and wary eyes. But she wasn’t the girl I’d seen with Celio. She was Eloísa’s friend from FaceNook, the one who’d told her to run. “You’re not Eloísa.” Master of the obvious, that’s me.

“No.” The girl tossed her hair, clearly pleased at having put one over on me.

“I’m EJ Ferris.” I extended my hand. “What’s your name?”

Caught off guard, the girl stared at me. “I’m really not in trouble?” She had a soft Virginia accent that was disarming.

Her obviously guilty conscience made me wonder what the girls had been up to. Shoplifting? Playing hooky? Some of the local schools were on spring break, but not all. “I told you, you weren’t.”

Somewhat satisfied, she grasped my outstretched hand in a weak, brief handshake. “I’m Gilda.” She pulled her hand back and thrust it into her jeans pocket.

“Pretty name.”

“What do you want with Eloísa?” she asked, curiosity replacing suspicion in her eyes.

I saw no reason not to be honest with her. “I saw her with Celio Arriaga here at Fernglen the day he was killed. I want to talk to her, see if she remembers anything from that day that might help the police figure out who shot him.”

“She doesn’t.” Gilda spoke positively.

“How do you know?”

“Because Enrique says so.”

“Who’s Enrique?”

“The leader of the Niños Malos. What he says goes.” A certain stiffness to her face made me think she wasn’t totally in sync with Enrique.

“And you’re part of the gang, so you have to do what he says?”

Gilda shook her head vehemently, swishing her hair against her shoulders. “Not me. I stay away from that gang shit. But Eloísa was tight with Celio, and, well…”

“Enrique won’t find out if Eloísa talks to me,” I promised, passing her a business card with my phone number on it. “If she cared about Celio—”

“Cared about him? She loved that poser.” Gilda rolled her eyes.

“You didn’t like him?”

“I didn’t
not
like him, but getting mixed up with the Niños is a bad idea. Eloísa didn’t see it, though. Celio was her kryptonite.”

“He was her boyfriend?”

She gave me the look all teenagers have perfected, the one that laments the stupidity of everyone over eighteen. “Nah. Her cousin.”

“What’s her last name?”

The talkative shopper popped out of her dressing room, the gray chiffon draped over her arm. “That looks great on you,” she told Gilda in an affirming way. “You should buy it.” She left.

The woman’s appearance, or maybe my question, disrupted the tenuous rapport between Gilda and me. “These are my jeans, and I’ve had this sweater for four years,” Gilda said, looking down at her attire. “I’ve gotta go.”

Sensing that pushing her at this point would only make her less likely to pass my words along to Eloísa, I walked with her to the dressing room entrance. “Thanks for talking to me,” I said. “Please tell Eloísa what I said.”

She ducked her head in a funny little bob that could have been acknowledgment, agreement, or teen for “leave me the hell alone.” She strode toward the exit without looking back.

I knew I
should call Detective Helland with what I’d learned—both from Paula and Aggie, and from Gilda. I was reluctant to sic the police on Eloísa, though, in case they were ham-handed about finding her and exposed her to Enrique’s punishment. I compromised by calling from the office and telling Helland that Captain Woskowicz had a safe-deposit box that might hold something of interest. “And I don’t know if you knew,” I added, “but he was still legally married to his third wife, Aggie.”

“Huh,” Helland said without inflection. “She gave a different address.”

I smiled into the phone, pleased to have one-upped him. “I guess they’ve been separated for a while. If she inherits his estate, that would give her a good motive for killing him.”

“Assuming his estate’s worth anything,” Helland said discouragingly.

“Did you get anything useful from the gun? The one from the office?” I slipped the question in, hoping he might feel motivated to share with me since I’d given him a useful bit of information.

Apparently not. Ignoring the question completely, he said, “If that’s all?”

Before he could hang up, I caved and told him about Eloísa, unable to square it with my conscience to keep possibly important information about a murder from the police. “You can’t just barge in and interrogate her, though,” I said. “She’s afraid of some low-life named Enrique, the big kahuna—”

“Mero mero.”

“—of the Niños Malos. I don’t know her last name, but she’s Celio’s cousin.”

There was a pause from Helland’s end of the line. I expected him to let loose with some comment about me presuming to tell the police how to do their job. Finally, he said, “The bullet the coroner pulled out of Celio matched the gun we found in Woskowicz’s office. That information is not for public consumption.” He hung up.

I had hardly put the phone down when Pooja stepped into the office, a sheaf of papers in her hand. She thrust them at me, and I raised questioning brows.

“The application for the director of security job,” she said, smiling slightly. “The board voted to move ahead quickly, and the first round of interviews is
Saturday—they’re anxious to fill the position. I thought I’d give you a head start.”

“Thanks,” I said, eyeing the application with distaste. “I think.” She started for the door, but I stopped her. “Officer Dallabetta wanted to apply, too. Do you have another copy of the application?”

“It’ll be online in a minute,” Pooja said, “along with the job announcement. As soon as I get back to my office, I’m posting it to the Jobs section of the Fernglen website.”

Leaving Joel out front to man the phones and keep an eye on the cameras, I went back to the office and got started on the forms. Why in the world did they need my mother’s maiden name, I wondered, filling in “Atherton.” The phone rang at my elbow, the little
brrr
that let me know Joel had transferred a call to me. “Officer Ferris,” I said absently, trying to remember my address from six years ago to include on the application.

“If you want to talk to Eloísa, be at Phat Cat at ten o’clock tonight,” a voice whispered.

“But she’s underage.” I said the first thing that came to mind. Phat Cat was a twenty-one-and-over nightclub about halfway between here and Quantico.

A laugh ghosted over the line. “Phat Cat. Ten o’clock. One chance.”

“Wow,” Kyra said
when I told her about the phone call. “Cryptic phone calls. Very Nancy Drew. Do you think it might be
a trap
?” She said the last words with mock breathlessness, leaning forward across the table in the food court. Her hair threatened to fall in the barbecue sauce she was using for her chicken strips. “Of course I’ll come.”

I pointed to her hair, and she flicked it over her shoulder. Taking a bite of my Szechuan green beans, I said, “Thanks.”
It surprised me a little to realize I felt more trepidation about hanging out in a nightclub by myself, looking desperate and out of place, than I did about confronting a possibly armed, undoubtedly dangerous gangbanger or two. I had no proof it was Eloísa who had called, although I thought the voice was female.

“What’ll I wear?” Kyra asked, tapping a green-painted fingernail against her teeth. “More importantly”—she surveyed me critically—“what’ll you wear?”

“Jeans.”

“You can’t go nightclubbing in jeans!”

“We’re not going nightclubbing,” I said repressively. “We’re interviewing a witness.”

“In a nightclub; ergo, we’re going nightclubbing.”

I rolled my eyes.

“When’s the last time you went dancing?” she asked, piling the lunch debris on her tray.

“Senior prom?”

She shook a finger at me. “I’ll bet it was before you went to Afghanistan, right?”

“Well, duh. Dancing wasn’t high on our list of activities. It fell somewhere below ‘Protect the base,’ ‘Accomplish the mission,’ and ‘Stay alive.’”

“Yeah, yeah.” She brushed away my sarcasm. “What I mean is you haven’t been dancing since you got back. You used to love to dance.”

“That was long, long ago, in a place far, far away,” I said, trying to put a humorous spin on a conversation that was going somewhere I didn’t want it to go. “Don’t mention my knee or I’ll have to spill this on you.” I indicated my strawberry smoothie.

Kyra raised her brows. “I’ll mention what I want to mention, girlfriend. But, fine, have it your way. You’re letting a nameless body part keep you from doing things you would
like to do if you weren’t so worried about how you’d look doing them now that the nameless body part doesn’t work as well as it once did.” Crossing her arms over her chest, she gave me a “top that” look.

Caught between irritation and amusement, I wondered why I’d never noticed how square and stubborn Kyra’s chin was. “You might—might!—have a teeny, weeny, minor point. Which doesn’t change the fact that I’m wearing jeans. To the nightclub. At which I’m not dancing.”

“Who’s going nightclubbing?”

Kyra and I looked up to see Jay Callahan standing over the table, eyebrow quirked, warm smile making him look very appealing in a boy-next-door kind of way. That is, if the boy next door carried a gun and led a double life of some sort.

An evil glint came into Kyra’s eyes. “We are,” she said. “Tonight. And you’re invited.”

“Great,” Jay said without hesitation.

“Wait—” I started.

“You’ll have to dance with me, though,” Kyra continued, “since EJ doesn’t dance anymore.”

“I don’t think that’ll be a hardship,” Jay said, smiling down at her. His mischievous gaze shifted to me. “Although maybe we can change her mind.”

My abs clenched against the warm feeling his look stirred up. I rose, holding my tray in front of me like a shield. “Don’t you have some garage-lurking to do?” I asked.

He pretended to consult an invisible calendar. “Nope, no garage-lurking on the schedule. I’m all yours for the night.”

I frowned to stave off the images that leaped to mind. “Fine. Come if you want. But I’m still wearing jeans.”

Fifteen