Button Holed (10 page)

He made a face. “I screw up a lot. Personally, I mean. Not professionally. Professionally, I’m a damn good cop.”

“And a lousy person?” I made sure I kept my words light. There was no use hitting him over the head with the message.

He winced as if I had, and scratched a finger behind his ear. “I’m not a lousy person. Not all the time, anyway. At least I don’t like to think so. You just keep catching me at bad times.”

“Apparently.” I hoped the small talk was over, and sat up a little straighter, a signal that I was ready to get to the meat of this meeting, whatever it was.

Nevin apparently didn’t share my desire to get it over and get it over quickly. He shuffled a stack of papers on his desk, tapped them into a neat pile, and set them back exactly where they’d come from. When he was done, he sat back and cleared his throat. “I thought we could try again,” he said.

“You mean like a date?” The words whooshed out of me a little too loudly, I guess, because a couple of the cops at their desks in the bullpen-like office looked over and grinned. I lowered my voice. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Not really.” One corner of his mouth pulled into a wry grin. “Unless you want me to be.”

The ball was in my court, and I guess I wasn’t willing to play, because even before I knew it, I found myself with my arms crossed over my chest. Defensive? Oh yeah. And when I realized it, my embarrassment morphed into full-blown mortification. It was déjà vu all over again, and I had an ugly flashback to that night at the pizza place. There was Nevin, trying to make conversation. And there I was, rambling like a lunatic. Only this time when I started rambling, it wasn’t about buttons. “I sure hope you didn’t ask me to come all the way down here just to talk about going out again,” I snapped.

“Of course not.”

“Because if you felt bad about what happened yesterday and the way you burst into the shop and how you didn’t even stop to say hello to Stan or to ask how I was doing or to think that the reason I didn’t tell you about Mike Homolka in the first place was that some of us aren’t used to finding dead bodies and some of us aren’t immune to the blood and the gore and some of us . . .” I stopped for air. But not for long. “Some of us were just a tad upset the night of the murder and not exactly thinking straight, and if you thought of any of that, then maybe rather than making me close the shop early today and schlep over to the El and come all the way down here, you could have just called and maybe apologized and explained why you acted like such a jerk in the first place and then you could have just asked me out on the phone.”

OK, so now I did sound like a full-blown lunatic, and I didn’t even regret it. I’d said what he needed to hear, and I guess he got the message; the tips of his ears got pink.

“Sorry!” he said. “Again.”

While I struggled to settle my heartbeat and the breaths that were coming too hard and too fast, Nevin reached for the evidence bag.

“Actually what I called about was this.” He lifted the bag, the better to show off the button inside. “Thank you for calling me when you found it.”

I forced myself to sound like the reasonable woman I usually am. “You’re welcome. I thought it might be important.”

“And thank you for having the sense not to touch it. Unfortunately—”

“No fingerprints?” Like I might actually see them if I looked closely enough, I peered through the plastic at the button. “That’s too bad.”

“It is.” He set the button on the desk. “It’s left us at a dead end.”

He didn’t have to elaborate. When he said
us
, he was talking about the police in general. But I knew what he really meant to say was
me
.
It’s left me at a dead end.

“Buttons are your business.” He jumped in with an argument so smooth, I knew he must have practiced it before I got there. I wondered if that’s why he’d come to our meeting late. Was he standing in the men’s room, reciting this speech in front of the mirror? I’d never know, and he’d never admit it, but the visual was enough to relieve some of the tension wound inside me. “From what I’ve been told,” he said, “you’re one of the country’s most-respected experts on buttons.”

“Yes.” Admitting it, I felt more like myself and less like the crazy woman who’d just taken him to task. “I am.”

Nevin’s smile lasted as long as it took for him to set the bag back where it came from. He folded his hands on the desk in front of him. “That’s why I asked you to come down here today. Josie, I need your help. To solve this murder.”

I WAS ON my way back from the El to my apartment when I ran into Stan, just coming out of the grocery store. Maybe it was a mistake to mention my meeting with Nevin and the not-so-small fact that he wanted me to help out with the investigation. Stan pounced right on it.

“So I’m thinking a stakeout,” he said, shifting the reusable grocery bag he refused to let me carry for him from his left hand to his right. “We can follow each of the suspects. You know, for a week or two. What do you think?”

“I think . . .” It was late in the afternoon, and my head was swimming. As I’ve already admitted, my wildest dreams usually center on Kaz. Or buttons. I never thought they’d include murder, or me helping to find a killer. “I really don’t think that’s the kind of help Nevin was talking about,” I said. “He wants me to do some research. And talk to my contacts in the button-collecting world. He wants to know more about the button and where it came from and how it got to my shop. He doesn’t need help with the actual police work.”

“Yeah. Right.” Stan kept walking, even though when we rounded the corner, we saw there was some commotion going on a little farther up the street. A crowd of thirty or so people was gathered on the sidewalk, and the commotion looked to be happening near our building. He narrowed his eyes and tipped his head, walking a little slower, sizing up the situation.

I slowed my pace, too. I’m not nearly as tall as Stan, and I had to crane my neck. Whatever was happening, it looked to be peaceful enough. “I’m going to investigate,” I said, telling him exactly what I’d told Nevin. “In books. I’m going to make phone calls. To button people. No stakeouts. And what do you mean, anyway?” Now that I had time to process it, what he said struck me as more than a little odd. “What are you talking about when you say
suspects
? We have suspects?”

“There are always suspects. You’ll learn that fast enough.”

“But I don’t want to learn that. I don’t need to learn it.” Nevin had given me close-up and detailed photographs of the button. He’d had an evidence technician join us who slid the button out of its protective bag and made all the measurements I asked for. I patted my purse where I had all the information safely stored away. “All I need to do is tell Nevin everything I find out about the button.”

We were closer to the crowd now and I stopped to try and get some sense of what was happening. “So . . .” I dangled the word like a fat worm on the end of a hook. “Our suspects are . . .”

Stan chuckled. “Think about it.”

“I have.” Not technically true since I was pretty sure this part of the investigation wasn’t any of my business and I hadn’t spent even a moment considering it. “Kate was alone in the shop and—”

“And that photographer was outside when you got there.”

I nodded. If I was thinking more like the careful investigator Nevin wanted me to be and less like a woman with her head in a cloud of buttons, I suppose I would have thought of that. “Mike Homolka. OK, yeah, I can see how he might be a suspect. Right time, right place. But it seems to me a guy who just killed somebody wouldn’t stick around.”

“Unless he wanted to get pictures of that someone he just killed.”

“But he could have done that before I got there.”

“Except that he might not have wanted to take the chance of anybody seeing him or of some sharp-eyed cop taking a look at the photos and seeing some little clue that indicated they’d been taken before you got back to the shop. On the other hand, if he arrived at the Button Box with you . . .”

It all made sense. Even if it didn’t prove anything.

“And then there’s Brina and Dr. Levine, of course,” Stan said. “They were right across the street.”

“Of course they were. But you can’t possibly think—”

“When you eliminate people right off the bat like that, that’s called jumping to conclusions, and it’s as dangerous as deciding who’s guilty before you have all the facts.”

It was a valid point, even though there was no way he could ever convince me Brina or Dr. Levine might have been involved.

We walked along quietly for a bit before Stan said, “Then there’s that husband of yours.”

“Ex-husband,” I reminded him. Right before I stopped cold, whirled to face him, and blurted out, “What?”

He shrugged. “You said it yourself; he told you he’d been to the shop.”

“And saw Brina while he was there. Which means Brina hadn’t gone across the street yet. Which means Kate hadn’t arrived.”

“Yeah, sure. That’s what he says.”

“And you think I shouldn’t believe him?” The second the words were out of my mouth, I realized how ridiculous they were. “Of course I can’t believe him. He’s Kaz.”

“Which doesn’t mean he’s lying about this. It just means we’ve got to be careful, that’s all. You know, we’ve got to look at the facts, and get a time line down, and consider alibis and motives.”

“Which pretty much eliminates Kaz.” I felt a little funny standing up for the guy who’d given me nothing but grief, but the order-loving side of me couldn’t let Stan get carried away. Facts were facts, just like he’d said, and this one was inescapable. “Kaz didn’t have any reason to kill Kate. He didn’t even know Kate.”

“Ah, motive!” Stan nodded. “Now you’re thinking like a cop. It’s all important, the who and the what and the where. But the why . . . The why is always the heart of the matter. Figure that out, and the rest just falls into place.”

For all I knew, he was right. Then again, we didn’t exactly have a chance to talk about it. We were close to our apartment building, and from someone in the knot of people, I heard, “There she is!” The crowd surged toward me.

“Stan?” I gripped his sleeve. “Who are they? And what do they want?”

I found out as soon as the first camera flash went off. The next second, a woman in a gray suit shoved a microphone in my face. “You were the first one on the scene,” she said. “So you must have heard Kate’s dying words. Tell us, Josie. The people of America deserve to know what she said. Did she name her killer? Did she talk about Roland? About their doomed love?”

“I . . . I . . .” I blinked, looking around at the crowd of reporters and photographers like a stunned rabbit and wondering how, since I had an unlisted phone number, they’d found out where I lived in the first place. “I have nothing to say.”

“But you must have seen the murderer.” This time, it was a tape recorder that got shoved at me. There was a middle-aged man in a plaid sport coat on the other end of it. “Is that why you’re trying to keep out of the investigation, Josie? Have the cops told you to keep your mouth shut? They have, haven’t they? They want to make sure the killer doesn’t know that you got a good look at him.”

“But I . . . I didn’t . . . I . . .”

A young guy with long hair and bad skin pushed his way to the front of the crowd. “Maybe you don’t want to say anything because you’re not much of a liar. Maybe you were the first one on the scene because you had something to do with the murder yourself. Why did you hate Kate so much, Josie? Was it her money? Her beauty? Her power? What made you kill her?”

“OK, that’s enough.” Stan gripped my forearm and pushed through the crowd and went straight for the door of the apartment. “Josie’s got nothing to say to any of you clowns.” He unlocked the door and pushed me into the lobby ahead of him.

“Thanks!” I pressed my back to the wall and closed my eyes, hoping to calm myself. “That was awful!”

“Fools!” Stan was glaring out the window, and I saw a few flashes go off. No doubt, one of these days soon, some tabloid would feature his picture on the front page. He would not be happy about that.

“I can’t believe they’d care that much about me,” I groaned. “I don’t know anything. I can’t tell them anything.”

He scraped a hand along his chin. “I guess they’re just doing their jobs,” he admitted a second before his eyes narrowed. “But if they ever get pushy like that with you again, I’m going to show them a thing or two.”

I knew he would. Which is why I smiled.

I’d just shifted away from the wall and was headed toward the elevator when the doors opened and Brina stepped into our postage-stamp-sized lobby—Brina and Mike Homolka.

“So, yeah, this is the elevator she rides every day,” Brina was saying. “And you saw her door and talked to her neighbors and—” She caught sight of me, and her face went as pale as the silvery streak she’d added to her hair since last I saw her. “Oh, hi, Josie.”

Homolka flashed a picture.

“You?” I guess I wasn’t all that surprised, but I was plenty outraged. “You’re the one who told these jackals where to find me?”

“Oh, come on, Josie.” When Brina squinched up her nose, that stud in it sparkled in the overhead lights. “It’s business. You understand about business. You’re the one who’s always saying—”

“They paid you?” I could barely swallow around my outrage. “Well, of course they did. That’s why you sold me out.” I swung toward Homolka. “You looking for an exclusive?” I asked him.

His eyes shone with excitement. “You bet! What have you got to say?”

“You can tell the world loud and clear. Brina here? She just got fired.”

IT TOOK A couple hours, a long shower, and a glass of wine to get me settled down. Once I was feeling more like myself and less like a zebra carcass left on the Serengeti for the hyenas to feast on, I pulled out every button reference book I owned (there were a lot of them), settled myself on the couch, and got to work.

“Wooden buttons,” I mumbled to myself, flipping through the pages of the first book. I found the chapter I was looking for, skimmed it, found nothing that was even vaguely helpful, and went on to the second book.