A Dress to Die For

by Christine Demaio-Rice

  “I’m thinking of making a picture frame out of mascara sticks to shut them up.” Cangemi leaned back in his chair, crossing his hands over his chest. “So what are you doing here? My sparkling personality draw you back?”

  “My mom had a heart attack. And I was thinking it had to do with the stress over the dress. Her boyfriend, who used to be a cop, told me I’m a lousy detective.”

  “I’ve been telling you the same thing.”

  “And so I thought, what the hell am I doing? Why do I do this over and over? And so then I thought I’d just stop and go back to work tomorrow. Just let you take care of it. But I wanted to show you some things I found, and I want to tell you that my father is somehow involved, and if you find him, I’d like you to put me in a room with him so I can tell him off. Possibly slap him a few times.”

  He smiled. “Can’t agree to that. Officially.”

  “Unofficially, he left us flat when we were kids, then magically appeared two days ago in the form of these notes. So you do what you want.” She handed him hers and Mom’s notes. “Ruby’s is in her apartment, but it wasn’t anything interesting.”

  He opened them, reading Mom’s first, then Laura’s. “Lala?”

  “Yes. It’s cute. Whatever.”

  He read the note and folded it back into the envelope. “You want to explain what this has to do with anything?”

  “What do you know already?”

  “You came here to try to get me to tell you what I know? Come on, Laura. I get sneakier manipulations from my girlfriend’s six-year-old daughter.”

  She wasn’t trying to manipulate him. She was trying to avoid boring him, but if he wanted her to run through the whole thing, then fine, she’d run through the whole thing, leaving nothing for herself to figure out later. “You know my mother worked on that dress, right? Right, you were there. Well, she knew the princess and her entourage. There was my father, too, who was apparently a receptionist at Scaasi while he was between engineering jobs. And Soso Oseigh. And Samuel Inweigh.”

  “The singer?”

  “Jesus, really? Am I the only out-of-touch freak who never heard of the guy?” When Cangemi shrugged, she continued. “I have to go through my mom’s pictures, which you are also welcome to do, because there were more people. Barney and Henrietta or something. And they hung out for a month while there were fittings and everything else for the saffron gown. I’d ask Mom, but guess what? I’m not bugging her with this right now. So at the end of this fabulous New York trip, my father decides he’s in love with the princess and takes off to Brunico with her, saying that it’s Samuel Inweigh he’s in love with, but we have it from Soso that the princess was in love with an American, and Dad was the only American in the group, and Soso all but confirmed it when my mother’s face fell into her wine. Which begs the question of why Jobeth Fialla says it was her brother who loved the princess, when in fact, my dad had no sisters.”

  “Wait, wait.” Cangemi held up his hand. “You spoke to Soso Oseigh?”

  A short guy pushing a mail cart stopped beside Cangemi’s desk. Shorty put a Vogue, a Bazaar, and a Mademoiselle in a plastic-wrapped special issue bag onto Cangemi’s desk, and he didn’t stop there.

  “Yeah. I thought he had a crush on Mom, but then I overheard him on the phone saying he was looking for Dad but got Mom instead, so I think—”

  “You spoke to Soso Oseigh?”

  “I think he owns this little café on Gansevoort. Or he’s the manager? After I had drinks with him, I snuck around the back door, and he was at the desk.”

  “Soso Oseigh hasn’t been seen since the Fortnight Coup. They assumed he was executed.”

  “Apparently, that’s false.”

  Cangemi looked over at Shorty, who seemed to be done, but the pile of magazines was a foot and a half high. Shorty shrugged, and the pile slipped over, splashing glossy pages all over the precinct floor. Cangemi opened a drawer, took out a Christmas tree embroidery kit, and tossed it on the desk. “Give that to your mother, would you? Tell her I hope she feels better.” He snapped his keys out of the drawer. “Let’s go.”

  Laura picked up the kit and followed him to the elevator.

  They went down to a floor represented by the bottommost button on the panel: B3.

  “So you went to the Iroquois?” Cangemi asked.

  “It was me or Mom.”

  “Met Jobeth then?”

  “She’s a little crazy. A hoarder, I think.” She remembered Jimmy saying that she didn’t pay attention, so she thought about all the junk in Jobeth’s apartment. “She had boxes of shoes from the seventies. I could tell from the colors. And I saw dry cleaning bags from Matin’s. They’ve been out of business since 2001. She’s only been there six months supposedly, so I don’t even know what to say about what it’ll look like in a year.”

  The elevator stopped.

  “It’s not her place,” Cangemi said. “It’s owned by the Brunican government. And they have no idea she’s there. She just had the keys and moved in. Most of that stuff was probably there already.”

  They exited the elevator into a dim hallway with beige cinderblock walls and buzzing, blinking fluorescents.

  Laura asked, “Maybe her supposed brother sent them?”

  “Could be you have an aunt you didn’t know you had.” He unlocked a door, and they entered a small room containing a desk and some chairs. He switched keys and opened another door that led to a huge room with rows of shelves and boxes. It looked like the bottom floor of a library. Cangemi tapped boxes as he walked through the side room until he eventually slid one out of a pile.

  “Mom would have told me, and by the way, I have to get back in two hours, or I’m going to miss her coming out of surgery.”

  “This’ll take as long as it takes,” he said, leading her back to the small room with the desk and chairs. “And it’ll even be fun. I promise.”

  “I didn’t come for fun. I came to dump this on you.”

  “Sorry. I have three open homicides right now. One was a minor. I won’t get into the details. But this dress? Couldn’t give a shit if you handed it to me. I’ll deny saying that if anyone asks.” He opened the box. “And let’s face it, Lala, you don’t know how to quit something once you start it. Dumping it on me is all talk.”

  The box had hanging folders in it. Each folder had a white tab, and each tab had a name.

  “That’s Mom’s name.”

  Cangemi put his hand on top of the folders. “The Brunican entourage. I found this the other night. It’s all here.”

  “You kept records on them?”

  “Monarchies used to get security details. And because there was a political crime directly after, a lot o’ notes got kept in case there were questions. There were none.” He leaned back in his chair. “Here’s what we know, in a nutshell. The high prince had observed his three months of mourning for his father. Once that was done, it was a party. By the way, he never misses a party or a chance to kill an innocent creature with a crossbow, but he doesn’t drink, smoke, or do a drug. Nothing. No extracurricular women, either, which has been a problem out in Brunico because Philomena died without making a baby. This is bad. Means there’s no heir. No boy. You know he got married again soon after, right?”

  “It really looks like he killed the princess, not for nothing,” she said.

  “Dunno. Didn’t happen in my jurisdiction. One point here. You assume the coup was a coup because that’s what you’ve been told. Things are usually pettier. I’m not pretending we know the whole story, because we don’t. But we have to get out of our own assumptions.” He gestured at the open box. “Nothing in here leaves the room. You’ll be searched on the way out.”

  She looked at her watch. “I can’t look at all this in an hour!”

  Cangemi shrugged. “Get to work, Detective.”

  He left her there alone with a box that had to weigh seven hundred pounds in information, her mother in the hospital, and her sister probably getting off a plane from Ho
ng Kong right at that moment. Suddenly, that room was hot as the inside of a dog’s mouth.

  The tabs read:

  Jocelyn Carnegie

  Joseph Carnegie

  Soso Oseigh

  Princess Philomena Forseigh

  Samuel Inweigh

  Barnabas Chard

  Henrietta Oseigh

  Laura touched her mother’s file, tapping the tab, then slid it out. Slim pickings in there, only a birth certificate, a picture, and a really creepy form where some cop in the nineties had handwritten Mom’s birthday; height, five-six; weight, 112 lb—Holy crap! Mom was skinny—place of birth, Manhattan; maiden name, Smyrski. Laura forced herself to stop looking so she wouldn’t waste time on stuff she already knew.

  Dad’s file.

  In her whole life, she couldn’t have imagined anything better than a folder containing information about her father’s life in the month before he’d left them. And it was fatter than Mom’s, which made sense, considering he had gone off to Brunico like a lapdog.

  She opened it, pushing the box out of the way. On top was same basic information page as Mom’s, with stuff she knew handwritten onto it, and a picture. Under that was a mug shot stapled over a few pages recording an indecent exposure arrest in an alleyway behind Tower Records. Indecent exposure sounded as if he had been giving someone the business in the dark and gotten caught. The next page showed another arrest in the Rambles, a big Central Park pickup spot. She sighed. Poor Dad. Then, when she saw more pictures, her sympathy turned back onto itself, and she was mad again. One displayed Dad and the princess walking onto the Jetway of a TWA plane. The cop had circled what was barely visible, their fingers hooked together, smashed between them like a secret. And another, in a club, showed him chatting with Samuel Inweigh, who had somehow taken the fall for the affair.

  Was Inweigh even homosexual? Could she just check? Yes. She slid out his file, pushing her father’s to the side for a minute. She rifled through Inweigh’s history—married and divorced. A report typed into a form described the method of his death the week following the Fortnight Coup. He had committed suicide. Pills. There was nothing about Dad, not a peep, not a picture, not a hint or implication.

  Whatever Dad had told Mom about Samuel was a lie that she had chosen to believe, even though there had been nothing to imply it was true. Mom was so naïve, because when Laura went to the princess’s folder, which was thick with interviews and family histories, she found more pictures of the princess and Dad looking super chummy. She hated him, a lot, and wondered if she was going to break Mom’s heart by telling what she’d seen. She flipped to the back and found a report on the fire where the princess had died. Straight reporting. No pictures. The house had burned to the ground six months previous. Nothing was left, not a bead, buckle, or sock. Except the dress, which, when packed, would be as big as a coffee table, had somehow escaped like a fugitive into Barnabas Chard’s hands, then into his sister Jobeth’s the month before the fire, as if someone had known the princess’s house was going to be destroyed and wanted to save the dress for some sick reason.

  Laura read the princess’s family history. She was getting used to understanding the reports, so she only scanned for anything unusual.

  The princess was from a small Argentine town. She met her future husband, Prince Salvadore, while he was on vacation in Buenos Aires. They went back to Brunico together. The high prince died soon after, and Salvadore had his three-day inauguration/hunting expedition. High times.

  She popped open Soso Oseigh’s file. She checked her watch. Where had the past forty minutes gone? She knew no more about Dad than she had an hour ago. Going right to the back of the file, she found a transcript from immigration. Fifteen years ago, Soso had returned to the United States as a refugee. The interview was long, and she had to skim or she’d be late.

  …life is in danger. I’m one of the last of the entourage that lives, and if I stay there, I know I am next…

  …no suicide. Samuel wanted to get back to the States to record more. He was ready on a boat on the second day of the feast. Everyone knows what happened. He was jailed and killed, I tell you. He was inconvenient, and all the rest of us are, too…

  …they were happily married. Barney couldn’t have shot her. I loved my sister, but I know that man. Not on his life would he kill her…

  Five minutes. She went to the back of Henrietta’s file. She had been shot by her husband in a heated rage two years after their return from New York. The child was spared, but Barnabas had turned the gun on himself. Criminy.

  She flipped through Barney’s file. He had been born in Park Forest, Illinois. The other American. When she flipped to his family history, she found two sisters: Ruth and Doris. No Jobeth. She rubbed her eyes and cursed everything holy and unholy.

  Her phone buzzed. “Rubes?”

  “How’s Mom?”

  Reality. Laura folded the files together and put them back in the box. “I don’t know. She should still be in surgery. I’m at the police station.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I’ll tell you later. But I found out stuff about Dad.”

  “Oh, who cares already?”

  Dad’s file was still in her hands. “Yeah, I guess. I’m going down right now. I’ll meet you. Jimmy’s there.”

  “You better be there, Laura. I am not messing with you.”

  Laura promised she was on her way but glanced at Dad’s file one last time. His family history had been completed more generations than the rest, and her eye caught something she’d been denying for as long as she could remember.

  “Oh,” she whispered, seeing a famous name up at the top of the family tree. “I’m related.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Laura ran to the train station, down the stairs, across the hall, then down more stairs. Finding no train, she paced the platform as if trying to put miles on her Pradas, but she was getting nowhere because all she could think about was why Brunico was so backward.

  Ruby was walking in when Laura got to the front entrance of the hospital. They had a huge hug, wrapping their arms around each other like boa constrictors.

  “Where were you?” Ruby asked when they got to the elevators.

  “With Detective Cangemi.”

  “You should just date him and get it over with, now that you’re such a sex fiend.”

  “Shut up.” She hadn’t realized how many biting comments having a boyfriend would open her up to. She thought she already took a lot of crap from her sister, but apparently, Ruby had been holding back out of respect for Laura’s inexperience.

  “I’m nervous,” Ruby said. “It’s not a big deal, the surgery. Right?”

  “Triple bypass? Boring. They fill in the crossword while they do it.” Laura spun the subject while the floors dinged by. “When we were kids, we had that sitter Marisa, who had a boyfriend south of the tunnel. She took us around with them and smoked cigarettes on her stoop. Right?”

  “Yeah. There were kids everywhere.”

  “Do you remember one who sometimes wore an oxygen mask? Skinny? A little older, but younger than Marisa? He couldn’t run because he’d look like he was suffocating. None of us would touch him because we thought we could catch whatever he had?”

  “Yeah,” Ruby answered, tapping her foot. Her mind must have been deeply on Mom, because nothing about the question seemed to prick up her ears at all. “He was at the bodega all the time.”

  “Do you remember what happened to him?”

  Ruby shrugged. “Probably dead already.” Then she said, almost as an afterthought, “Poor kid.”

  When the elevator doors opened, Ruby grabbed Laura’s hand, and they walked to the waiting room, where Jimmy sat. He got up when he saw them.

  “It’s weird, but,” Laura whispered, “yeah, he’s been with her longer than I thought.”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “Never mind.”

  Jimmy made it to them and hugged Ruby. “The doctor just went back in. It’s
another hour.”

  “What? Why? What happened?”

  He shrugged. “No idea. Where the hell were you?”

  “Sit down, and I’ll tell you.”

  They sat in three chairs around a low coffee table and pulled them closer so they could speak quietly. Laura told them about the non-coup, the box of files, the Brunican entourage, and Soso Oseigh’s defection, if one could call it that, after the murder of his sister, Henrietta.

  “And Dad?” Ruby asked. “Alive?”

  “Apparently. We got those notes, and Mom wouldn’t make something up about the handwriting.”

  Jimmy leaned forward. “It’s been twenty years. She could be getting it wrong. People are the worst witnesses.”

  “He’s here,” Laura said. “In the city. And he’s watching the news for me.”

  “Aren’t you special?” Ruby groused.

  Jimmy smirked. “Go ahead.”

  “You pointed out that twenty years is a nice, round number. What if he was in prison for his part in the coup, or whatever it was that happened? The petty, silly thing that got all of them in trouble and shut down the island for two weeks? And what if he came back here and left us the notes, and now he somehow found out the dress was going up at the Met—”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Jimmy said, holding up his hands. “You’re making connections, and you got nothing in your hands. We talked about this.”

  Laura leaned back in her chair, bending her neck right, then left. At first, it was to calm her annoyance at him, then it was to listen because he was right. “The notes appeared the day the dress switch appeared in the news. We know he’s watching us because he said so.”

  “Watching you,” Ruby said.

  Laura caught a hint of the jealousy she’d felt about Ruby and Mom, that one child was slightly preferred in a parent’s heart. “We also know he’s watching because the notes had no contact information.”

  “Meaning?” Jimmy prompted.

  “Meaning he knows he can find us when he needs us. He doesn’t want to be found. But he wants us to know he’s there.” There was something else about the notes, something she’d smelled when she opened the letter but had been too emotionally distraught to parse. Cangemi hadn’t taken them, so she pulled them out of her bag and opened hers. The paper had been ripped from a perforated pad. She held it out to Jimmy. “Smell this.”