Diane Vallere - Style & Error 03 - The Brim Reaper (17 page)

I lifted the bag. It was light. I slammed the passenger door and ran around to the other side. The sirens grew closer. I had a very bad feeling.

I started the engine and drove the car out of the lot. The lights were still off. I waited, wondering what would happen next. Within minutes, strobe lights punctuated the parking lot between the museum and the planetarium. A couple of uniformed officers went to the gardening shed with a man in a khaki trench coat. Flashes of light popped out of the widows, like someone was taking pictures.

Lights went on in first one and then two of the houses near where I’d parked. I knew what that meant. Curious people notice curious things and at the moment, sitting alone in Eddie’s VW bug after midnight on a Monday night, I was the definition of curious. As much as I wanted to stay and see what had happened in the gardening shed, I couldn’t risk it. I threw the car into reverse and backed away from the museum, turned on a side street, turned on the lights, and headed home. An ambulance passed me in the opposite direction. That wasn’t good. That meant someone was hurt—or worse.

It wasn’t until I was inside the safety of my garage that I stopped to think about the trash I’d taken from the museum. I lined the bags up against the back wall, the one with Eddie’s notes on the left. The last bag I took from the car was the one that had been left for me. Inside, wrapped in a large sheet of Bubble Wrap, was a turquoise pillbox confection of felted wool, satin, and rhinestones.

While I’d been wondering what someone was doing inside the shed on the museum property, someone had broken into Eddie’s car and returned Cat’s missing hat.

20

I left the hat in the bag and the bag in the garage. Eddie was asleep on the sofa, and I would have left him in that condition too if I didn’t need to tell him what  had happened.

“Wake up,” I said, shaking his shoulder.

He rolled into the back of the sofa and grunted something.

“Eddie, come on.”

He flung a hand at me. I stepped backward and he missed contact.

I went into the kitchen and opened a can of tuna, took a pinch, and set it by Eddie’s collar. Logan jumped on him and licked it off. Eddie woke up.

“Good cat,” I said. I lifted Logan away from Eddie and gave him a bowl with the rest of the tuna inside.

“Wake up. We have to talk.”

“What time is it?” Eddie asked.

“It’s something’s-not-right-o’clock. I’m serious. Do you want some coffee?”

Eddie blinked a couple of times and reached into a pocket low on the outside of his cargo pants. He pulled out a bottle of 6-Hour Energy and downed it. He opened his eyes really wide and relaxed. “What’s up?

“I went to the museum like we agreed. Thad wasn’t there. I had a chance to talk to Rebecca, and she tipped me off that the garbage gets taken out every Monday night.”

“Yeah? So?”

“So I got to thinking that maybe if the garbage has been sitting around the museum for a week, maybe there’s something we should know about.”

“So what, you want to go get the garbage?”

“I already did. It’s in the garage.”

“Dude.”

“That’s not all.” I stood up and paced back and forth. The laces on my left sneaker had come undone, and Logan swatted at the plastic aglet on the end. “Something happened at the museum. I don’t know what. I saw a light in the gardening shed and saw someone run out. I tried to look inside but it was too dark. When I got back to the car, there was another trash bag.”

“How do you know it was another one?” he asked. I could tell he was slowly fighting the clouds of sleep, but he seemed more alert than he’d been five minutes before.

“The doors to the car were open, and there was a bag on the passenger seat.” I sank into one of the black and white chairs that faced the sofa. “It was Cat’s hat wrapped in Bubble Wrap.”

“The one that someone jumped her for?”

I nodded.

“But that doesn’t make any sense. That hat has nothing to do with my exhibit. It has nothing to do with the museum. Why would someone put it in my car?”

“I don’t know. The way I see it, either someone wanted to get rid of it and they saw me put bags in your car so they added it to that pile. Or someone knows Cat told me she was robbed. Or …” I hesitated. “The person who stole her hat has something to do with the exhibit.” It wasn’t a stretch to see that the third option was probably the right one.

“You said you saw someone by the shed?”

“Yes, and that’s the part that doesn’t make sense. The person in the shed ran away from me, away from the car. How would he have gotten back to the car without my noticing? That makes me think there were at least two people there. And that makes me think at least one of them saw me.”

“That’s a problem?”

“Depending on why the cops and the EMTs were there.”

“You didn’t say anything about the cops.”

“Eddie, listen to me. I have all of those trash bags in my garage. If somebody saw me take them, and they don’t know I’m me, they might think I’m you.”

“Yeah, because we’re like twins,” he said sarcastically.

“I was driving your car. I was working on the exhibit. And I kind of led Rebecca to think you were with me. What if Thad was the person who left the hat on the seat of your car? Or worse, what if Thad was the person I saw by the shed? What if he’s the one who called the cops and told them to investigate, thinking you’d be the natural suspect? How well do you know Thad? What if—”

“We don’t even know what happened.”

“We have to find out. But first, we have to find a way to hide those trash bags.”

The next morning I maintained the menswear routine with a black and white tweed blazer over a white cotton shirt and black pinstriped pants. I threaded a red silk scarf through the collar and tied it like a necktie, and then buckled my feet into black and white spectator d’orsays on a three-inch heel. It had always been my conviction that pattern goes with pattern as long as the scale of the prints varied. I might be late, and I might be tired, but darn it if I wasn’t going to look put together. I drove to the Ribbon Designer Outlets and found Cat straightening her shoe racks.

I carried the garbage bag with her hat into her store and set it on a display of jewelry. I pulled out the hat. “Does this look familiar?”

Her face broke into a smile, and she rolled up on to her tiptoes and clapped twice. I wasn’t used to seeing Cat so animated. “It’s my Hedy London hat! Where did you find it?”

“I didn’t find it, it found me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I was at the museum last night, and somebody left it in Eddie’s car.”

“Did you leave the car unlocked?”

“No.”

“So how—”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I have to say, I’m impressed. You should start a business. ‘Missing Fashion’ or ‘Stolen Style,’ something like that. Dante told me I was a fool for wearing it in public. He’ll be impressed.” She turned the hat over in her hands.

“Is there someplace we can go to talk?”

She looked at me funny. “My office. Follow me.”

Cat’s office was a closet-sized room that sat off to the side of the stockroom. She took the seat behind the desk, and I took the small folding chair in front of it. Nice power play for interviews.

“Have you been following the news about the exhibit?” I asked.

“A little. I know there’s supposed to be a big show this Thursday, and I know the hats are missing.”

“Do you know about the murder?”

“I heard about it, but to be honest, I don’t know details.”

“Dirk Engle, the owner of What’s On Your Mind, was murdered at the museum a few nights ago. We—Eddie and I—know it has to do with the Hedy London hats, but we don’t know how. When you were robbed two nights ago, it seemed like there was a connection. Thad Thomas, the assistant director of the museum, called Eddie to make sure he was going to be there. Same thing last night. Both times I went in his place. I drove Eddie’s car. Someone left your hat on the passenger side seat. Someone has put two and two together.”

“Well, I’m thrilled that they did. Thank you. Let me know if I can ever return the favor.”

“Um, Cat? There’s one thing you can do for me.”

“What? Oh, I know. You want a discount? Sure. How’s 30 percent—”

“No. I mean, sure, but no, that’s not what I was going to ask.”

“You want more? I guess I could go to forty, but you can’t tell anybody I did this.”

“Cat, slow down. I don’t want a discount.” Who was I kidding? Of course I wanted a discount. “I, um, need you to hold on to something for me for a couple of days.”

Her eyebrows pulled together, but she didn’t say anything.

“I don’t want to get into details here, but I have some trash in my car and I need it to not be in my car for about twenty-four hours.”

Her arms crossed over her beige leather jacket.

“It’s normal trash. Nothing weird. I was helping Eddie at the museum last night, and I threw out some stuff and think maybe I threw out something he needs. So I took the trash and now it’s in my car, but I don’t think that’s a very good place for it.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re asking me to hold on to trash that you took from the museum last night, because why? You want to go through it?”

“You’re making it sound worse than it is. I gathered up Eddie’s notes and sketches and threw them away, and now I think maybe there was something in there that shouldn’t have been thrown out.”

“So give him the bag and be done with it.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s slightly more than just the one bag.”

She opened up a small fridge by her feet and pulled out a plastic bottle of water. She drained half of it and then set it down on her desk with a thud. By the time she looked at me, I’d tapped out half the alphabet in Morse code with the ball of my foot.

Finally she looked at me and shook her head. “Normal people don’t ask friends to hang on to their trash.”

“Normal people don’t pay $3,000 for a hat.”

We stared at each other for a couple of seconds. I didn’t know if I’d overstepped my bounds with that last statement, but if she was going to hit me below the belt, then I was going to hit her over the head. Seemed fair.

“Samantha, I really appreciate that you found my hat. I owe you a big thank you.” She leaned back against the register, looked at the wall over my head, and then back at my face. “Fifty percent, but that’s it.”

“I don’t want the discount, Cat.”

I sat on the other side of her desk, not sure if we were at an impasse. She picked up a sleek pen and wiggled it back and forth in her fingers.

“What do you remember about the afternoon when you were mugged?” I asked, changing the subject before she made me an offer too good to refuse.

“It’s kind of a blur, you know? I was walking out to my car. Someone came up from behind and grabbed me with one arm and took my hat. I didn’t get a good look at him. He shoved me down toward the back of my car, and when I turned around, he was running away from me.”

“How do you know it was a guy? Did he say anything? Do you remember any other details?”

“I think he said, ‘You can’t have this yet.’ His voice was low and I can’t place it, but it was familiar. I just keep going over what he said. ‘You can’t have this yet’? That’s not what you say when you’re mugging someone. You say, ‘Give me your wallet.’ What he said makes it sound like I was the one who took the hat from him.”

“You said the voice was familiar?”

She nodded, and her red hair bounced off her shoulders.

“Do you know anybody from the museum? Christian Jhanes, Thad Thomas? Dr. Daum?”

“I don’t know any of those names.”

“What about Milo Delaney?”

She leaned forward and looked at the notebook on her desk for a few seconds. She pulled a leather agenda out of the top right drawer of her desk and flipped through pages from earlier in the year. She stopped on March and tapped one perfectly manicured fingertip on the second Friday.

“Yes. I mean, I think so, but maybe yes. I met him at the accessories market last year. We were next to each other in the airport security line and he got into a fight with the woman at the counter because she said his bag was too heavy.”

“He does seem to have a short fuse,” I said, thinking back to how he’d treated me when I was at his showroom with Nick.

“But he’s a hat designer. What would he want with my vintage hat?

“You said you bought it on the secondary market, right? Can you introduce me to your contact?”

“I may have made it sound like I was more connected than I was. My boss was the one with the contact. He invited me to tag along because he thought he’d look less suspicious if he was with a woman. His contact—he didn’t exactly put an ad in the paper. I wouldn’t know where to begin to find him.”

“I don’t understand. Aren’t these people in the business of selling something?”

“Collectors are different from people like us. You can’t just walk into a store and buy a valuable piece of history. I mean, you can at some places, but to get the real thing, to know it’s been authenticated, but to not pay a fortune, well, you can’t go standard retail. You’d be amazed what’s out there. Vintage Hermes, Stephen Sprouse, Pierre Cardin. You name it, somebody’s got one to sell. It’s all hush-hush, and it’ll cost you, but you can get it.”

“You’re saying that the sellers are protective of who gets their stuff?”

“Exactly. The people selling stuff love it as much as the people who want to buy it, and the sellers want to make sure it’s going to someone who will truly appreciate what they bought. Remember Audrey Hepburn’s dress from
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
? Christie’s predicted it would go for something like a hundred thousand. It sold for close to a million. And that Jean Louis dress that Marilyn Monroe wore to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to President Kennedy? That went for
more
than a million. I know the economy’s tough for the rest of the world, but collectors … well, they’re still willing to shell out money when something rare becomes available. They’re willing to accept that they might never be able to tell anyone that they have what they have. And most serious buyers know when they see the real thing. They’re willing to not ask questions about something’s provenance.”