The Lanvin Murders (Vintage Clothing Mysteries) (24 page)

The next letter was in a manila envelope which must have also contained the copy of the birth certificate. The timing, six months later, was about right. The letter was more of a note, really, asking for help with medical bills. It also said that she'd given the baby, a boy, up for adoption and that she didn't know, and couldn't find out, who the baby's new family was.

From the fresh ink and crisp white paper of the last letter, Joanna knew without looking at the postmark that it was recent. She drew the letter to her nose. Cigarette smoke.
 

She read. “Dear Franklin. I don’t know where to send this letter, so I’m mailing it to your old office address. Maybe they'll forward it. I know it’s been a long time since we’ve been in touch, but I’m writing because I've met our son. He's a good kid. He's studying to be a lawyer.” Well, what she didn't know couldn't hurt her. “I'm giving him a little money to help him get by. He doesn't know that you’re his father. Also, I wanted to tell you that I have ovarian cancer and the doctors say it's terminal. They want to do all sorts of things to me to make me live longer, but I say, why bother? We've all got to go sometime, and I've had a decent run of it. I may live years, who knows? After all this time, Frankie, I think of you every day, and I wish you well. Love, Marnie.”

Joanna put the last letter back in the safe deposit box. Each of these letters, so flat in the hand were full of emotion—hope, love, and, eventually, loss. How strange what love makes you do. Marnie wanted to be with Franklin, and Franklin chose his wife instead. But he couldn't give Marnie up completely, and he kept these letters locked away, all told over fifty years. Marnie wanted stability and chose Don, then repaid his care with an on-again, off-again affair with Franklin.
 

Joanna stood up and stretched. She'd been reading for over an hour. The letters told a sad story, but as engrossing as they were, they didn't explain how the key to Franklin's safe deposit box ended up in Marnie's coat. Or why someone wanted it so badly.

On her way back to the store, Joanna stopped by her house to check on the cat. He was sleeping on the newly-straightened couch, and after a few sniffs Joanna recognized Fleurs de Rocailles on his fur. He must have been hiding in the vanity cabinet when the intruder broke in. The living room felt bare without the portraits above the couch. Instead of camouflaging the warning, broad smears of glaring plaster drew her memory back to it.
 

She dumped some kibble into Pepper’s bowl, kissed him on the head, and quickly left. The dog was at Apple's house, probably digging a hole in her goddess garden. He didn't seem worried to have lost Don—his appetite was good, and he had pulled at the leash on his morning walk. If only people were as resilient as dogs.

Before unlocking the door at Tallulah’s Closet, Joanna peered through the plate glass window. Mannequins hulked in the dark. But that was normal. She probably shouldn’t be alone here, either, but she found comfort in the thought that a yell would draw someone from Dot’s in seconds.

Inside the store, she dawdled as she flipped the light switches and clicked on the lamps on the shelves at the room's perimeter. The morning's revelations had left her feeling pensive. Sometime today Franklin's widow would find out her husband had a child with Marnie. Her heart sank as she imagined a police cruiser showing up unexpectedly at Franklin's house and the creak of the policeman's leather holster as he sat down to tell the widow about the safe deposit box. It wasn't that long ago Franklin died. And now this.
 

She picked up the phone. She'd call Ray and fill him in on the details. Maybe if he knew about Franklin and Marnie's affair, he could help break the news to Franklin's wife.
 

The call bounced to voicemail. “Hi, Ray. This is Joanna Hayworth. Do you have a few minutes? I want to talk to you about Marnie.” It was eleven o'clock in the morning. She figured Ray had been awake for hours. Maybe he was working in his garden, or turning a harvest of tomatoes into sauce for the winter. She hung up and reached for the price gun.

Her body jerked as the doorbell rang.

“Jumpy today, aren’t you?” It was Eve, with a garment bag slung over her shoulder.

She would have to show up now. “Look, if you’ve come to talk to me about your store, I’m not—”

“Relax.” Eve hung the garment bag on a rack near the tiki bar. “I’ve come with a peace offering.” She unzipped the bag. It was the Lanvin coat.

Joanna’s hands leapt to the coat. She peeled back the garment bag and ran her fingers over its shoulders. Marnie’s coat, home at last. Had she been alone, she would have hugged it. It didn’t change the fact that Eve would do her damnedest to run Tallulah’s Closet out of business, but it was a decent start.

“Thank you. I—I should have known you’d never keep a coat you knew had been stolen from someone else. I’m sorry about what I said at the hearing.” She eased the coat completely from the bag and returned the bag to Eve.

“Well...” Eve shifted feet.

“Yes?” Joanna hung the coat behind the counter.

“When I got the coat, the lining was kind of messed up, so I had to have it fixed. Plus, I had to pay the homeless guy who sold it to me.”

She should have known. Eve wanted money. “Of course.” She reached for her checkbook. “How much?”

“About two hundred dollars should do it.”

“Two hundred dollars?” Joanna’s jaw dropped. “I paid less than a hundred when I got it.”

Eve shrugged. “It costs what it costs. That is, unless you don’t want it.”

Joanna capped her pen and pushed the check across the bar. “Here.”
 

Eve smiled, producing the dimples that had broken so many hearts. “I’ll be getting over to my new space, then. The interior designer’s coming to take some measurements.” She trotted to the front door, then turned. “Good luck selling that thing. None of my clients wanted it.”

With effort, Joanna resisted the urge to run after Eve and chuck a mannequin’s arm at her.
 

Eve gone, Joanna leaned on the tiki bar and examined the Lanvin once again. So much drama around the coat. Such a beautiful coat, too. She had trouble envisioning Marnie's tiny body inside it. She buried her fingers in a strip of silver fox, then opened the coat to inspect the mended slash near the bottom of its lining. She sighed. What a lot of pain that coat had caused. Well, the coat was hers now, and she wouldn’t let it go, no matter how much money it could bring the store.

She turned at the sound of the front door's bell to see one of the women from the Remmick fundraiser hesitating at the doorway. Joanna summoned her most welcoming smile.

“Come on in.” She hung the Lanvin coat aside. “It's nice to see you. I have a suit that would look terrific on you—it's almost exactly the color of your eyes.”

***

Later that afternoon, Joanna sorted through the day’s credit card receipts.
 
The timber executive's wife had left with two of the store's best cocktail dresses, and to her surprise, an Astrakhan vest. Next to the stack of receipts was a half-eaten tuna melt—no mayonnaise, provolone instead of cheddar—from the bar next door. At the rear of the store, a teenaged customer tried on 1980s pumps. She sat surrounded by shoes on the zebra-striped chair. The soundtrack to
Funny Girl
played in the background.

From the corner of her eye, Joanna caught sight of a dark, stocky man entering the door. She dropped the receipts, and one hand flew to the phone. She returned the receiver to its cradle and relaxed. It was only Ray.

“Hi there.” Joanna flattened her hands on the tiki bar to calm them. “You must have got my message.”

“Yeah, I saw you were calling from your store, and I thought I'd stop by. Nice place,” he said without looking around. He wore jeans and a tee shirt with the Rolling Stones’ trademark lips across its chest.
 

“Thanks. Just a minute and I'll catch you up.”
 

The teenaged girl carried two pairs of pumps to the tiki bar. “These will look perfect with the zipper-leg jeans I got last week.”
 

Joanna wrote up a receipt for a pair of white Nina pumps and a pair of sequined Stuart Weitzmans. She had seen enough episodes of
Dynasty
in her childhood not to want to wear 1980s clothes herself, but they were too popular not to stock at Tallulah’s Closet. Plus, they were a whole lot easier to find at thrift stores than 1940s house dresses. “Enjoy those.” The teenager left.

When she turned to Ray, he was staring at the Lanvin coat.
 

Joanna shot him a questioning look. “Do you want to see it closer?” She lifted it from behind the counter and handed it to him.

“Marnie sold you this coat, didn't she?” He touched its red leather waist gently and held it out in front of him as if to imagine someone inside it.
 

“Yes. She did.”
 

“This coat used to belong to my aunt. She was wearing it when she died.” He hung the coat on the edge of a rack of dresses and continued to gaze.

“Your aunt wore Lanvin?”
 

“Great aunt, actually. Her husband was a soldier in World War II in Europe. He brought it home for her.” He tore his glance away from the coat. “It wasn't new when he got it. I think he bartered with a French family somewhere outside Paris. My aunt wore it everywhere, all the time, no matter how hot it was outside.
 
Bowling, church, whatever. It became a little bit of a town joke.”
 

“Do you want the coat? Sounds like it’s important to your family. I’d be happy to give it to you.” What the hell, the coat seemed destined to travel the city. She vowed she’d never give the coat up again, but it was different with Ray.

“No, no. It brings back memories, but it's not my aunt. She's not with the coat anymore.”

“You must have really loved her.”

“Yes, I did. We all did. She was a community fixture—was even chair of the tribal council when she died.”

“I'm sorry.”
 

“One night Auntie came home, fell down, and hit her head on a bookcase. There was blood everywhere. Franklin found her. She was getting up there in years, and she must have lost her balance. It was a bad omen.”

They both stared at the coat. Joanna broke the silence. “Funny you say ‘bad omen.’ It’s had a tough history even since I’ve had it. I found Marnie’s body under the coat, for one thing. And it was stolen a couple of days later. I just got it back this morning.”
 

“Marnie’s body. You said you found her here, but under the coat?” He shook his head. “Too awful. And yet—I have to wonder if the coat was cursed by Auntie’s death. Since my brother died…”

Joanna waited, but he didn’t finish his thought.
 

He started again. “Not long after Auntie died we had to give up the tribe's application for recognition. Franklin took the coat.”

“And gave it to Marnie.”
 

He nodded. “He and Marnie were very close, you know. I'm surprised they never married. For a while Franklin had the idea that he was too good to go with a dancer. His business was doing all right, and I guess he thought he was hot stuff. So he married Leona. But I know he never forgot Marnie.”

Joanna remembered the gorgeous beaded chiffon dress Marnie had bequeathed to her. “I used to wonder if Marnie would have married anyone. Maybe she didn't want to lose her independence, or she was just too removed from people. But now I think she never got over Franklin.” She pushed aside the plate with the sandwich and leaned her forearms on the tiki bar. “This brings me to why I wanted to talk to you. Remember Troy, Marnie's son, the one who came to her memorial service?”

“The kid who was going to law school? Sure, of course I remember him.”

“Well, Franklin was his father.” It made sense now. The family resemblance was clear in Ray's face and coloring.
 

He stood up straighter. “Can’t be. They broke up years before.”

“I’ve seen the birth certificate. The coat—your aunt's coat—just after Marnie brought it in, a key to a safe deposit box fell from its lining. Naturally I thought it was Marnie's. When my store and house were broken into—”

“Your house was broken into?”
 

“Just yesterday.” She shivered at the memory. “Anyway, to make a long story short, I figured someone wanted the key. The police agreed to open the safe deposit box, and we found out that the key—and the box—didn't belong to Marnie at all. The box was Franklin's. Your sister-in-law should be hearing about it soon.”

“And the birth certificate was in the box.”

“A copy of it was, along with some letters from Marnie to Franklin. I wanted to tell you to see if—well—if you’d let his wife know before the police do.”

Ray strode to the front of the store and looked out the window. He returned to Joanna. “I suppose that was all that was in the box. No other papers?”

There it was again. The mention of “papers.” “No, that was it. The birth certificate and the letters. Oh, and a pair of cuff links, plus a few ticket stubs and photos. Things like that. The police said they'd notify Franklin's next of kin.”

“Yes.” He seemed to be thinking.
 

“There’s something else.” He needed to know about Don. She looked at her tuna melt, cold now, and lost her appetite. “I went to see Don yesterday at his house. No one answered the door, so I walked around back and heard shots. I found him lying on the kitchen floor. He’d been killed.” She felt for the stool behind her and sat down.
 

“What?” He backed into a rack of dresses and grabbed them to steady himself.

“It should be in the papers soon.”

“Joanna, you need to stay out of this. Are you done with this now?”

“Stay out of what? Besides, I don't know what else I could do if I wanted to. I just have to hope that the police get to the bottom of it.” Don's body, one arm stretched out on the kitchen floor. The wig, dangling from a knife. The police had better be busy.

“Something is going on that doesn't concern you.”