Died with a Bow (6 page)

“You’re Rita Jewel?” the first stocky guy said after taking the steps two at a time.

I nodded. “I’m the one who called you. She’s in there. Vienna.”

He said, “Don’t go anywhere,” which wasn’t necessary because when I tried to stand, my legs were trembling so violently I collapsed back down on the steps. I swiveled my body around to watch as they went through the front door and into the foyer. That’s all I could see except for the camera flash going off. If you have to be photographed, it’s good to be wearing a designer dress. I knew Vienna would be glad she was wearing it, especially if her photo appeared in the newspaper, which it probably would. After all, she was a socialite’s daughter and her death was suspicious to say the least.

I finally got up and walked gingerly into the foyer.

“Hold it,” a cop whose name tag said “Rowley” announced with his arm stretched out in front of me. “Stand back.”

I craned my neck to look around him. “How is she?” I asked hopefully. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she wasn’t dead. She was just unconscious.

“Dead,” he said. “Who are you?”

“Rita Jewel, I work here.”

“On Sunday?”

“No, no, I just came to return a dress, and then I saw Vienna there on the floor, so I called you.” I was breathing hard and hoping he wouldn’t have any more questions. I wanted to get out of there. I turned to go.

“How’d you get in?” he asked.

“The door was unlocked, but I have a key. I work here,” I repeated.

“Where you going?” he asked.

“Home.”

“Nuh-uh,” Rowley said. “Sit down. We’ve got some questions for you. First one, who is the deceased? Can you ID her?”

“Her name is Vienna Fairchild. She works here too.”

“Okay. Wait outside.” He shoved one of Dolce’s folding chairs toward me, and I pushed it outside onto the small front porch and sat there, taking big gulps of fresh air. In the background I heard the cop talking to someone on his phone.

“Says she works here. Who?…Yeah, that’s her. How did you know? Okay. Okay.”

A few minutes later he came outside. “Don’t go anywhere. The detective on the case wants to talk to you.”

Uh-oh, by “detective” did he mean Jack? By “talk” did he mean on the phone? Maybe that was a good thing. Jack would say, “Rita is a smart girl. She can help us find out who did this. She’s an amazing detective herself for an amateur. I want to talk to her.” Of course he would say that.

I looked at the round-faced cop. Now what?

“Anyone else here?” he asked.

“My boss Dolce lives here.” I looked up at the ceiling as if he’d be able to see through it to her apartment upstairs. “She has an office at the back of the shop. But I don’t think she’s there. She might be upstairs where she lives.”

“I’ll check it out. You come with me. Chief says not to let you out of my sight. You lead the way. Don’t touch anything.”

“But I already touched…” I’d touched everything—the
hanger, Vienna, her clothes. What did he mean by not to let me out of his sight? Why was that? Surely Jack didn’t think…No, he couldn’t. I walked through the shop, eyes straight ahead. I didn’t want to see Vienna’s body again, but I didn’t need to worry, as it was now covered with a sheet. Rowley, the cop, came with me, and when we got to Dolce’s office, I used my key to unlock the door. We went in. Since the whole world seemed to be upside down, I almost expected the place to be trashed. But everything in the office was just as we’d left it on Saturday. I sat down and used her Rolodex to find some numbers for him, like Vienna’s next of kin.

“I should try calling my boss again,” I said. “She’ll want to know what’s happened.”

Instead, he took her number and called her. Like me, he got no answer, so he left a message that there’d been an accident in her shop and asked her to contact him as soon as possible. Then he gave his phone number and hung up.

“You say she lives upstairs?” he asked.

“Yes, but she’s not there or she would have come down.”

“Unless she didn’t hear us,” he said.

“You’d have to be deaf not to hear all this,” I said.
Or dead
. I started to shake again.

Both Rowley and I jumped up at the same time. Was he thinking what I was thinking? That my boss had also been murdered? Anxiously I followed the lawman up the stairs to Dolce’s apartment above the shop. Her door was locked, but the cop pulled an enormous key ring from his pocket and after a few tries, he unlocked the door. I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until we’d made a tour of Dolce’s place and found no evidence of foul play. In fact, it looked like no one lived there. That’s how perfect it was, every cushion, every pillow, every towel in place.

Strangely, in the year I’d worked there, I’d never been upstairs before, so I took it all in and despite my ragged nerves, I couldn’t help admiring her exquisite taste. No surprise there. We walked through the living room with its dramatic deep magenta walls and feminine floral print wing chairs on two sides of a faux fireplace.

For her bedroom Dolce had chosen a restful pale gray color for the walls—November Skies from Benjamin Moore if I wasn’t mistaken. The bed was West Elm, which I recognized from their catalog, and the ultrasmooth linens that were guaranteed to soften with laundering and use were from Williams-Sonoma Home. I knew because they were just what I’d always wanted. Maybe if I didn’t always blow my salary on clothes, I could upgrade my home furnishings. Back to the bed. It was covered with an Italian wool and cashmere blanket that begged to be touched. If I’d been alone, but I wasn’t. It was clear no one had slept in it last night. That’s what the cop said, and I had to agree.

“Know where your boss is?” he asked after we’d both peered into Dolce’s walk-in closet where her entire wardrobe was organized by season and color. I don’t know if he was impressed, but I was.

I tore my gaze from the lavishly patterned window shade in her bedroom and shook my head. “I haven’t seen her since last night. We went to a charity auction thing at the Palace Hotel. I left early.”

He asked me what time and where I’d gone afterward and how I got home. I didn’t like the way he took notes. Who did he think I was, Vienna’s killer? It was such a ridiculous idea I almost laughed out loud, but I was afraid I’d get hysterical and wouldn’t be able to stop.

I was relieved when we moved on to the kitchen. Rowley
was wearing rubber gloves, and again he cautioned me not to touch anything. As if Dolce and her apartment had anything to do with Vienna. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t.

Dolce’s kitchen was the biggest surprise. I’d never heard her mention cooking for herself or for anyone else. She ate out or ordered in as often as I did, and yet she had a gourmet kitchen that had obviously been remodeled, since this house was built before the 1906 earthquake. It was small but ultramodern, with high-gloss off-white cabinets and stainless steel appliances, and just like the rest of the place, it looked untouched by human hands. Had Dolce cleaned up the place for some reason, or was it always like this? I reached up to open a cabinet, curious to see what kind of dinnerware she had, but the policeman reached out and smartly tapped my arm.

“I said, don’t touch anything,” he warned.

“But why? You don’t imagine…”

“I don’t get paid to imagine anything. I get paid to keep from contaminating the evidence.”

“Evidence of what? Dolce had nothing to do with…” I stopped. We both knew that there was a dead girl downstairs—or maybe, hopefully, she’d been removed by now. And my boss was missing. And I’d found the body.

“And I get paid to bring the suspects down to the station,” he continued. “Let’s go.”

Bring the suspects down to the station? Did he mean me? I couldn’t believe I was on my way to the police station with my swimming bag on my lap in the backseat of the police car. The last place I would have imagined myself when I woke up this morning. When we went downstairs, I saw that Vienna’s body was gone, and so were most of the cops.

Dolce had not returned, and I was weak and strung out like I’d just run a marathon and come in last. Sweat was beading on my forehead and there were goose bumps on my arms. I wanted to go home, but for some reason I was being taken to the police station. Why me? I wasn’t a suspect, so it must be because I happened to find the body. Of course it was. I was not going to just any police station; I was on my way to the main station where Jack Wall was now working.

“This is a big misunderstanding,” I told Rowley from the backseat of his car.

“Yeah?” he said without turning to look at me.

“I’m actually a friend of Detective Wall. We’ve worked together on another case, which I’m guessing is the reason he wants to see me.” I paused, waiting for him to confirm my idea. The cop said nothing. Probably part of their code of silence or something. “He does want to see me, right?”

He said something that sounded like “Yep” or “Huh.” I tried to chill out by doing a relaxation exercise. First I sat back in the seat and kept my back straight. I put one hand on my stomach and the other on my chest, and breathed in through my nose and exhaled through my mouth—or did I have it backward? I’d once seen this on a cable TV program way before I’d ever dreamed I’d be involved in a murder investigation.
If
I was. I assumed I was, or why was I being taken to the station? If Jack Wall wanted to see me for any other purpose, he could call me.

I did my breathing exercises until we turned onto Van Ness. We took Van Ness all the way to Broadway, passing one of Vienna’s father’s dealerships, the showroom filled with expensive imports. Did he give Vienna one of them? If so, why didn’t she drive it to work? More important, did he know about Vienna’s death?

I leaned forward. “Uh, excuse me,” I said to Rowley. “Have her parents been notified yet?” I replayed my conversation with Bobbi in my mind. What would she say when she heard her spendthrift stepdaughter was dead? What about her father, Lex, who, according to Dolce, supposedly doted on her? Or her mother, Noreen? What a horrible job to inform the relatives of a victim. Was that Jack’s job? Or
was there a grief counselor who went to the houses in person like the military did?

He shrugged. “Guess so,” he said. Obviously not his job to contact the family. What was his job? To walk me through Dolce’s apartment and then escort me to the station? If I’d been at home, I would have continued with my exercises until I’d calmed down. It was hard to calm down in the backseat of a patrol car. At home I would have loosened my clothes, taken off my shoes and gotten comfortable to further improve my technique. But there’s only so much you can do while on your way to see the detective you have a history with.

The best thing I could say about Central Station was that it was indeed centrally located. When we got inside the big, cold, featureless building, I had a few minutes to study the map of the district on the wall. It covered the financial area, Chinatown, North Beach, Fisherman’s Wharf and three major hills, Nob, Telegraph and Russian Hill. The worst thing I could say about the place was that it had no character the way the neighborhood stations did, or at least the one Jack used to work at did. This one was all function. And the function was to intimidate and frighten suspects, I supposed, or even scare innocent citizens like myself into taking a vow of good behavior. As if I needed to. I felt guilty of something just standing there looking at the pictures of the officers who worked there.

The formal photo of Jack didn’t do him justice. Maybe it was the uniform, which I’d never seen him in, and the hat that made him look so stern. Or maybe I’d just forgotten that he always looked stern no matter what he was wearing.

A moment later a policewoman came to get me to have my fingerprints taken. I pictured messy ink, but she said
they had live-scan prints these days and I didn’t need to worry. I wasn’t worried about the ink, I was worried that my prints would be found all over Vienna’s body. But maybe so would the murderer’s. I could only hope they could sort them out.

After my session with the live-scan machine, Jack came out to get me. I was glad to see he was just as good-looking as ever, dressed as usual in top-of-the-line business casual. No uniform for him. In a pair of gray lightweight-wool flat-front trousers, a black cotton-blend sport coat over a dark striped shirt, he looked gorgeous and sophisticated but not really stern. Was this what he normally wore to work on a Sunday, or was he going somewhere afterward and if so, where?

“Good to see you,” he said pleasantly as he shook my hand. “Appreciate your coming down.” The last time I saw him, some months ago, he’d invited me to dinner as a kind of thank-you for helping him solve the murder of one of our customers. But there’d been no dinner, and I hadn’t heard from him again. Until now. Should I remind him that he owed me? By the expression on his face, I decided, no, I shouldn’t. Not now.

“Did I have a choice?” I asked.

“Not really.”

He opened an office door bearing his name and waved his hand toward a chair. I sat down.

“Look, about my fingerprints. I know it’s just a formality, I mean I could never kill anyone.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”