Union Jacked
A Samantha Kidd Style & Error Mystery
Diane Vallere
UNION JACKED
Book 9 in the Samantha Kidd Style & Error Mystery Series
A Polyester Press Mystery
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, places, and events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, companies, institutions, organizations, or incidents is entirely coincidental.
First published April 2019
Copyright ©, 2019 Diane Vallere
All rights reserved.
Print ISBN: 9781939197597
eBook ISBN: 9781939197580
Printed in the United States of America
Created with Vellum
Contents
1. Simontha
2. Above Your Pay Grade
3. Shots Fired
4. Late
5. This Was Different
6. One of Them?
7. Carl’s Unicorn
8. Management
9. Double Agent
10. Love is Anarchy
11. The Great Police Ball in the Sky
12. Act of God
13. Human Resources
14. Rude Americans
15. We’re Not England
16. Too. Much
17. I Lost It
18. Set-up
19. Name Dropping
20. Drugs Are Whack
21. A Proper Welcome Home
22. Badge Bunny
23. An Affair to Remember
24. Cover Story
25. Cover Blown
26. Manifesting Reinforcements
27. Not Proud
28. Interrupting My Mojo
29. I Could Do This All Day
30. Sitting Duck
31. Retailers Are Greedy
32. One Week Later
Epilogue
Afterword
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Also By
For the US Picks
1
Simontha
This wasn’t my cup of tea. I mean, technically, it was my cup of tea. Technically, all eight of the cups on the table were my cups of tea. But I’m more of a coffee person, and if I had to sample any more of the eight corresponding pots of tea on the table, I was going to float away.
“Simontha, it is imperative that you decide quickly,” the woman from the British Embassy said. “It’s a matter of life and death.”
Victoria Pratt, the woman pressuring me to be swift and decisive, wasn’t really from the British Embassy. And choosing a flavor of tea wasn’t a life-and-death matter. But ever since Nick Taylor, my husband of less than a year, had left for an extended business trip to Asia to outsource a new designer sneaker collection, my active imagination had been given room to run wild. Pretending Victoria and I were on a mission of some importance helped me focus on the outcome (and ignore the way she said “Samantha”).
I sometimes think I would have made an excellent secret agent.
“The blue teapot,” I said. “Definitely the blue one.”
“English breakfast. Brilliant. Next, we choose scones.”
Victoria was the sales executive for Piccadilly Group, a British investment company that had bought Tradava, the department store where I worked. She wore a white shirt under a teal sweater under a tweed blazer over flat-front, camel-colored, narrow-legged pants tucked into riding boots. Her hair was strawberry blond and bobbed at chin length, and her skin was creamy with a touch of pink in the cheeks that looked one hundred percent natural. If I rubbed a magic lantern and conjured up a British sales executive, I couldn’t have imagined a better manifestation.
She took her tea very seriously.
I was less interested in the tea selection than I pretended to be. When Victoria heard I was planning a party for—let’s call him a colleague—in addition to the grand reopening party for Tradava, she approved my request to host my side party right here. That decision solved the problem of location but left me with the unique challenge of explaining a British-themed retirement party for a homicide detective.
Considering it was a surprise party, I had at least a week to figure something out.
While Victoria poured our next mug of tea, fireworks testing commenced. The bright sun made the display undetectable by sight, but the sound of cannons followed by pops made it impossible to ignore.
Piccadilly Group was the financial savior who had swept in and saved Tradava, the department store where I worked as the buyer of special assortments. (It’s a bogus title.) They consolidated our inventory, which we sold off in a clearance sale, and they remerchandised the store into novelty departments based on the whims of their buying team on the other side of the Atlantic. I was assigned to spend the week with their senior sales executive who’d been tasked to train me on the British way of thinking.
How hard could it be? Did they think I’ve never read Bridget Jones’s Diary?
The fireworks quieted down, and I flipped a white folder open and pulled out the top sheet of paper. “Victoria, I don’t think you’ve locked in entertainment yet, right? I found a band that could liven things up—”
“Simontha,” she said, putting her hand on my upper arm. “You’re precious. But remember, this grand reopening is about shopping. We want to offer our customers something they didn’t know they needed. If they want to listen to a band, they can go to a pub. Do you understand?” She asked this last question as if I were a small child learning new vocabulary words.
“But this isn’t just any band. It’s an all-female, punk rock cover band called The—”
“Simontha,” she interrupted.
“I understand.”
“Brilliant.”
While Victoria refreshed her tea (Darjeeling? Oolong?), an attractive man with a swarthy complexion, dark hair, and one-inch sideburns jogged toward us. He wore a hooded sweatshirt under a blazer with well-worn jeans and Converse sneakers. “Hi,” he said to me. “You work at the store, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
He tossed a folder onto the table next to mine and held out his hand. “Harvey Monahan. I’m the strike leader.”
“Kidd,” I said. “Samantha Kidd.” I shook his hand.
“How come you’re not with us?”
“I was needed out here.”
Harvey shook his head. “Management is taking advantage of you. Tradava lays off three-quarters of the store staff and thinks everybody will show up for a paycheck. They’re working you harder than the law allows. And for what? You deserve a voice.”
“My job is interesting. Every day it’s something different.” Like six months ago when they sent me to Las Vegas to cover the lingerie market. The trip had ended in a spontaneous wedding ceremony and a honeymoon in Paris. I doubted that would have been in the job description if my job were more official.
“Are you sure everybody wants to be picketing?” I asked. “Some people are probably happy the store isn’t going out of business. Maybe they don’t want to rock the boat.”
Harvey scowled. “They don’t know how it works. I’ve coordinated strikes at retailers from here to New Jersey. Our actions will show Piccadilly Group they can’t walk all over us. I have a ninety-nine percent success rate in negotiating for better compensation packages.”
“Why not one hundred?”
He waved his hand dismissively. “We got hu
ng up on parking spaces in Cherry Hill.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and smiled at something on the screen. “Management is about to cave, and they won’t be able to ignore me after today.” He winked, and despite my newlywed status, I blushed.
Harvey turned to Victoria. He tapped the folder on the table. “These are for you,” he said.
Without stopping, her eyes darted from the biscuits to the shiny white folder and back to the biscuits. “Not necessary.” If I hadn’t been paying attention, I might not have noticed the faint blush that crept up her neck.
Victoria checked her watch—an expensive-looking timepiece with Roman numerals and a leather strap that wrapped around her wrist several times—and sighed. “Simontha, I need to pop into the store for a liaison with human resources. Can I trust you to carry on until I return?”
“Sure,” I said, though the carrying on part seemed vague since we’d already chosen our tea. “Why don’t I follow up on that band I mentioned?”
She gave me a tight-lipped smile. Harvey grabbed his folder from the table, and they walked toward the store. The two of them made an odd pair as they crossed the lot: his dark, Mediterranean good looks and mostly black attire, her peaches-and-cream complexion and English countryside ensemble. Yet I sensed Victoria wasn’t inexperienced when it came to negotiations and wondered if Harvey’s record was about to take a hit.
I waited until Victoria was out of sight before pulling a bag of pretzels out of my handbag and biting into a loop. My stomach had been queasy all morning, and I figured pretzels were a close cousin to saltines. I chased the pretzel with a swig from a small silver flask filled with coffee.
A dark-blue sedan pulled into the parking lot. The car stopped in front of me, and my favorite homicide detective got out. (What? Don’t you have a favorite homicide detective too?) I quickly capped my flask and hid it behind me.
“Detective Loncar,” I said. I considered asking what brought him there but was afraid to jinx any possible interest in him updating his wardrobe.
Detective Loncar and I had an interesting past. He was in his mid-sixties, wore ill-fitting suits, was going through a divorce, and investigated homicides around Ribbon. I’d say he’s the person I’d call if I ever got arrested, but the more likely situation is that he’d already be there.
This was bad. This was worse than bad. Not because it may have appeared to the detective that I was day-drinking in the open parking lot outside my employer, but because in addition to my job responsibilities, I had a secondary secret agenda.
“I’m organizing the grand reopening for Tradava,” I said tentatively. “There are a lot of decisions to be made. Decisions that require my unique knowledge of, um, stuff.”
Loncar crossed his arms. “Are your plans going to cause problems that could tax the police department resources unnecessarily?”
“This party is as much for you as it is for them,” I said without thinking.
Loncar’s expression changed from mildly tolerant to understanding. And in this case, understanding translated to a probably correct—let’s face it; he was a detective—suspicion of what I meant.
“You’re not—”
I winced. “I am.”
He shook his head. “I don’t believe this.”
“Just to be clear, what do you think I’m doing here?”
“Ms. Kidd,” he said. The people on the other side of the parking lot could probably sense his annoyance.
“Right. Technically, I am out here working for Tradava.” Oh, bloody hell. “But I’m planning your retirement party too.”
2
Above Your Pay Grade
In the three years that I’d been in Ribbon, Loncar and I had moved into comfortable territory. He was among the first three phone calls I made when I stumbled onto something suspicious, and I was—well, I wasn’t sure what I was to him. Hey! Maybe I was his informant! (Get PoPT! says it’s important to claim credit for our contributions to the world around us. I wonder if I should add “informant” to my LinkedIn profile?) But now, the detective was facing mandatory retirement from the force.
There were approximately thirteen hundred reasons why I shouldn’t have known that. Despite my proclamations to the contrary, Loncar and I weren’t friends. He was a cop, and I was a resident in his city. A resident who, some might say, made his job more difficult. Not me, though. To me, we’re practically partners.
But word trickled through the community: from a couple of cops to the local crime reporter for the Ribbon Times to a hair stylist at the salon next to my store to the cashier working the candy counter where I occasionally treated myself to a couple of dark chocolate peanut clusters before driving home to me. And when the police captain reached out to ask me to coordinate the party, the most convoluted version of whisper down the alley came to an end.
Captain Valderama hadn’t asked Loncar’s ex-wife.
Or his daughter.
Or his partner.
Not even a discount party planner.
He asked me.
I recognized the possibility that a joke was being made at Loncar’s expense and instead of being in on it, I was part of it. Which was why I was determined to take the party seriously.
I had no intention of filling Detective Loncar in on the plans for his party. I also had no plans to run with the obvious cop theme. (I’d recently found myself participating in a cop-themed fashion show at a lingerie fair and blushed at the idea of recreating it for the local police force.)
But to plan a party, I needed a theme.
To use Tradava’s resources, I needed a British theme.
I started thinking about everything I’d learned about the detective from my research. Who was he? Not the cop. Not the father. Not the husband. But him? The man under the ill-fitting suit?
I don’t mean like that.
Within minutes of hanging up from Captain Valderama, I’d discovered the history of the Loncar surname in Ribbon, Pennsylvania. (Twenty percent of the world’s Loncars occupied Pennsylvania in 1920, and I’d briefly flirted with a flapper theme.)
A call to Loncar’s daughter provided slightly more information: his ancestors had come here from the UK in 1841 with the first Loncars, and his great-great-grandfather, who’d been a baby on that trip, had grown up and fought for the union in the battle of Gettysburg. (I’d briefly flirted with a Civil War theme.)
But it wasn’t the war, or the era, or the lack of inspiration from the events in Loncar’s family history that provided the theme. It was something far more personal, something unbelievably informative about the man Detective Loncar had once been.
It was a Spice Girls ticket stub from 1996.
I called Loncar’s daughter and asked if it was hers. “No,” she’d said with a laugh. “That’s a joke in our family. My dad has a thing for Ginger Spice. It’s where I got my name. Mom took him to a concert for his forty-fifth birthday. She said she never saw him as happy as he was that night.” (Now that she’d sent him divorce papers, I briefly considered reaching out to Geri Halliwell to coordinate an introduction, but sadly for Loncar, she appeared to be happily married.)
I found my British theme.
Would Detective Loncar appreciate my efforts? I didn’t know. But since it was technically a surprise party, I wasn’t supposed to have to deal with that until the day of the surprise.
Figures Loncar was a spoilsport.
Loncar turned away from Tradava and scanned the teapots, mugs, and biscuits. He reached for the folder that contained my notes on the party, and I slid it out of his reach. I gave him my most charming smile. “Above your pay grade.”
“Hear me out,” I said. “I know you. I know you don’t want this party. That makes me the best person to plan it. I won’t embarrass you. I won’t let anybody turn it into a joke. I even convinced Tradava to let me use their party set-up, and Eddie is going to help with execution, so anybody who isn’t invited will think it’s part of the grand reopening.”
Loncar was temporarily
distracted. He looked at the department store for a moment. “Will it help the store?”
I should have been surprised by the question, but I wasn’t.
“Hard to say,” I said. I stared at the façade of the store too. “Business has been tough, but Tradava doesn’t want to publicize that. It’s like they went through a bad breakup and nobody wants to date them, but they keep on putting on lipstick anyway.”
Loncar furrowed his brow at my analogy.
“You think the British invasion is the answer?”
“Piccadilly’s money could ensure the store continues, but it won’t be the Tradava people know and love. The days of shopping for fishing gear and prom dresses under the same roof are numbered.” I didn’t add that to me, that signified an upgrade. “We’ll lose what makes the store unique to Ribbon.”
Loncar turned back. He appeared to notice the flask I’d tried to conceal. “Coffee,” I said. I unscrewed the cap and held the flask toward him as evidence.
He waved it off. “What can you tell me about the strike?”
“Not much. Last week The Piccadilly Group downgraded the support divisions to hourly, and the local retailer’s union brought in a captain to organize a walkout. He said they needed to strike while the iron was hot or they’d never get respect from the new owners.”
Loncar kept his eyes on me but didn’t speak.
“Strike while the iron is hot,” I repeated. “That’s funny in the context of Tradava being a clothing store. You know, irons?” I pantomimed ironing something. “Get it? They’re hot when you plug them in to iron things? Although, I don’t think that’s what the union captain meant, unless he’s funny too, and I don’t know if he’s funny. Union captains aren’t supposed to be funny, are they? But he did say ‘strike.’ Do you think he intended the pun?”
Union Jacked Page 1