“They’re not going to bite, you know,” he said. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like he was more nervous than I was.
I looked inside again. I still wasn’t 100 percent sure we should be there, but I was at about 85 percent. Before I dropped the tea I was only at about 35 percent, so things were going the right direction. Curiosity trumped caution.
Nick looked somehow different than he had at the hoagie store, or at Tradava, or even out front. He looked proud. He turned away from me and looked at the walls, the floor, the ceiling. His hands were in his front pockets, jiggling his change. He faced me. “Your opinion means a lot to me.”
“My opinion about what?” I asked.
“My new showroom.”
He placed his hand on the small of my back and guided me inside. It dawned on me slowly that there were a lot of things about Nick I didn’t know, not the least of which was why he’d been spending so much time in Ribbon. When we stopped, the time seemed right to ask some questions.
“Your new showroom?”
“Yes. Well, satellite showroom. Satellite showroom slash store. Imagine it like this,” he said, and stepped forward. “A desk up front, white laminate.” He walked to the middle of the room. “Tables here and here.” He waved his hands to either side, “so buyers can work the collection. I picked up two dozen frames from an art supply store. After I paint them, they’ll go on the walls around display shelves so I can showcase my samples.”
“White?”
He nodded. “Yellow rod lighting by the ceiling, to give the place a glow. I can’t decide about the floor. White carpeting, which might be a nightmare, or exposed cement.”
“Hardwood. White wash it.”
“Tom Sawyer-style?”
“Why not?”
“It’s not a bad idea.”
I joined him in the middle of the room while he looked around. “Why Ribbon? Why now?”
“A lot of reasons, actually. It’s cheaper. It’s not that far of a drive from New York City, and I show at the market center when I’m there. My collection has always done well here, and now that I’ve scaled back my distribution, it seemed a natural to start small. Thanks to stores like Tradava, there’s name recognition, a built in audience. And my dad’s here, alone, since my mom passed away.”
“Did Patrick know about this?” I blurted out.
“Yes.” He looked back and forth between my eyes and his brows pulled together, as though he was calculating a really big tip. I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. Instead he covered a bare patch of carpet with sheets of white tissue paper, then set the lunch in the middle like a picnic. “He’s the one who suggested it. I’m not sure if it’s the right decision. Some people think I’m making a big mistake.” He pinched the Visa card and pulled it out of my hand, then tucked it back into his worn brown leather wallet. “Even when I use the keys I feel like I’m breaking and entering.”
I took a step in his direction and squeezed his hand. “I think you made the right decision. You’re a talented designer. There’s no way you won’t succeed.”
He looked down at me and squeezed back. “I had a feeling you’d like it.” My stomach rumbled again, removing all sentiment from the moment. “Enough about my business. Let’s get you fed. I don’t want to be the person who stands between you and that hoagie.”
We sat down on the floor and split my sandwich. He didn’t seem to be concerned his showroom was going to smell like potato chips and Capicola, so I didn’t point it out. Our lunchtime conversation covered the details of his new venture. Countless business dinners had taught me he favored a martini during the social hour, had eyes the color of milk chocolate fondue, and vacationed in Hawaii once a year, but they left me short on his creative aspirations. Other than casual business conversation and the occasional innuendo, I didn’t know much about him, a small fact I’d rarely considered until I realized I thought he was capable of kidnapping me.
“So this is it. A store with my name on the front,” he added.
“That you are incapable of breaking into.”
“Apparently I’m not cut out for a life of crime.”
“So you keep telling me.” I raised an eyebrow.
“Seriously, I felt bad about what I said last night, when I told you to stay away from Tradava. It might have sounded like I was lecturing you.”
“As a matter of fact, it did.”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
I bit into a potato chip with a snap. “Are you nervous?”
“Nervous? Sure. But excited too.”
“But what if …” My voice trailed off. I was knee-deep in my own sea of self-doubt and wanted to know I wasn’t alone.
He looked down at my hands, crumbling the chip. “If it’s important, you make it work, right? I know there’ll be a lot of challenges along the way, but you do what you have to do. If something gets in the way, I’ll deal with it and move on. That’s what you should do.”
His words hit me harder than I expected. My throat tightened and my face got hot. I stared down at the chip bag, letting my hair fall forward. Move on. I didn’t want to move on. I wanted to make this work. Why didn’t he understand that?
“Do you have a restroom?” I asked abruptly.
“Sure. Back of the store, to the right.”
I stood and smacked my hands against each other, showering the tissue paper with tiny potato chip flakes. I passed the piles of shoe boxes and a closet-sized reception nook and entered a small office that smelled like cookies. I scanned the desk and spotted a Vanilla-scented plug-in air freshener. A navy blue blazer hung from the back of a chair. There were no signs of a restroom around. I started to back track, when I spied a familiar plum laptop bag on the floor of the office next to the desk chair.
Nick had Patrick’s computer.
I bent sideways at the torso, in the kind of limbering-up waist exercises common on aerobics videos, checking that Nick was still out front. He was. I extracted the small laptop from the bag and looked around for a way to smuggle it out of the store.
“Kidd?” he called out. Shit. I flipped my tweed cape up and shoved the flat computer into the back of my waistband. My pants, now fighting both stolen office equipment and an unhealthy amount of lunchmeat, dug into my waist. When I rounded the corner, Nick stood in the doorway, talking to a pretty brunette. I pressed myself against the wall and strained to overhear their conversation.
“Will I see you tonight?” she asked.
“Not tonight. Something came up. Tomorrow?”
“I don’t know if I can wait that long. You can’t change your plans?”
“I don’t think it would be a good idea. She doesn’t know about us yet and that’s a good thing.”
Behind me, the door to the restroom slammed shut thanks to an unexpected cross breeze. Nick and the young woman turned toward the noise and I ducked into the reception area. The laptop wedged in the back of my waistband shifted lower into my tights. I had to get out of there.
When I returned to the showroom, Nick was alone. “You okay?” he asked.
“You have a lot of nerve, Taylor,” I said. “First you warn me to quit my job, then you take my lunch, then you pretend we’re all friendly, but clearly, we’re not.”
He leaned against the wall and smiled. The crinkles in the corners of his eyes made him look infuriatingly good. “What did I do this time? Put the toilet paper on the roll the wrong way?”
I was in no mood for his playfulness. I stormed past him to the makeshift picnic and loosely wrapped the rest of the hoagie in wax paper then shoved it into my handbag. Whereas I would have liked to depart on a highly witty note, brevity and the computer in my pants won out. “See ya around, Taylor.”
I headed toward the door but Nick jogged past me and blocked my path. He wore confusion like a Halloween mask that distorted his features, and I vowed at that moment not to trust his facial expressions.
“Did I miss something?” he asked.
&n
bsp; “No more than I did,” I replied cryptically. I was this close to confronting him, but it seemed more important to get it home, to see what I was intended to see in the first place, before letting him know I was onto him.
He opened the door, allowing me room to pass. I concentrated on the tea stain on the sidewalk out front instead of making any more eye contact.
“So, when I see you at the Tradava Gala on Sunday, will we be past this, or not?” he called to me as I stormed past him.
“The what?” I asked.
“The Designer’s Debut Gala at the museum. You’re going, right?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I said as I unlocked my car.
Now, I just had to figure out what the hell he was talking about.
Chapter 9
Back at my house, the leftovers went in the fridge and the laptop went on the dining room table. The beauty of the hoagie is that, unlike a new job, it’s just as good on Day Two. The machine blinked with a second round of messages.
Beep! “Hello, Ms. Kidd, this is Maries Paulson. Please call me at your earliest convenience.”
Beep! “This is a courtesy call for Samantha Kidd. This is the video store. You returned an empty box to the store. Please bring the movie back to avoid accruing additional late fees.”
Beep! “Yo, it’s Eddie. Hit me back when you get a chance.” He left his number on my phone.
Beep! “Ms. Kidd, this is Brittany Fowler. If you don’t contact me to resolve the issues regarding your mortgage, I’ll have no choice—” I pressed delete mid-sentence.
I returned Maries’ call first, and almost immediately, a sultry, scotch-and-cigarettes voice came on the line.
“Ms. Paulson, this is Samantha Kidd,” I said. “I work in the trend office with Patrick. Worked,” I corrected myself, cringing. Good thing she couldn’t see my face.
“Ms. Kidd, how may I help you?”
“In light of Patrick’s—in light of what happened, I wanted to offer my help with the competition, and with the Gala,” I added as an afterthought.
“You mentioned in your message yesterday you worked with Patrick. Do you know where he is?”
“You don’t know?” I asked, shocked. But of course she didn’t know. According to everyone but me, there was nothing to know. But I knew. I knew what I saw. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore, but it was a fact, nonetheless.
“I know we are facing a string of very timely deadlines and I’ve been unable to reach Patrick for the past three days. Are you acting on his behalf? Did he share his thoughts on the competition with you?”
“Only briefly,” I said, looking at the computer on my kitchen table. Patrick had a file at Tradava and notes on the computer. Surely I’d be able fake my way through enough knowledge to pass as a professional. And if Maries treated me as though I worked in the trend office, then Tradava would have less reason to doubt my claims of employment. All in all it was a pretty sub-respectable bit of self-negotiating. I wasn’t exactly proud of myself. “I’ll be working from home for the next few days, but I’m available to help with whatever you might need,” I finished.
She took down my address and phone number and promised to be in touch.
I took off my cape and draped it over the back of the kitchen chair, then booted up the laptop and went directly to the file manager. Patrick had mentioned the competition when he handed over the computer. I thought back to that conversation.
“Tradava has indulged me with an annual design competition, and it’s my top priority. This will be the first time we’ve attempted something on this scale. We’ve invited residents within a sixty-mile radius of Ribbon’s epicenter to show us what they’re made of, or rather what their wardrobes are made of.”
“Do you want to brief me on the competition?”
“I don’t want to bore you with the mundane details of orchestrating this project. My hope is to discover a talent within our city, put Ribbon on the map.”
“Do you think anybody will pay attention? Ribbon is not New York, you know,” I said, repeating the same thing to him he had said to me in the parking lot in front of Tradava the morning we met.
“I believe the hundred thousand dollar prize will make people pay attention.” He handed off the small laptop and I was on my way.
A series of folders lined the left side of the screen. The first folder contained old files of Patrick’s trend newsletter. I’d read them a few nights ago but perused them again in case I had missed something, though I was still not sure what I was looking for. I discovered little more than Patrick’s droll take on the demise of couture, and his bon mots of commentary about such pressing issues as the hemline to high heel ratio advisable for the modern woman.
The second folder was titled RUNWAY, and, as expected, contained slides and background information for different runway shows. I sifted through additional files for travel expenses and budgets for the office, along with a few spreadsheets that projected how much inventory Tradava owned in different trends, and how much volume they anticipated from these of-the-moment categories.
As I clicked around the excel file, I couldn’t help think about what it would have been like to work for him. We’d talked for close to an hour about fashion week and going to “market”, the frenzied window of time when designers launched their collections each season and opened the doors to their showrooms for buyers to place orders. He had lit up when we talked about the fast pace of the New York fashion industry. Patrick had been a fixture on the New York runway circuit until sometime in the eighties when he left the Big Apple and took the position as Fashion director at Tradava. Though he didn’t share his own reasons for changing his life, he was the first person who appeared to accept my decision to change mine, no questions asked. I selfishly wished I would have had the chance to work with him, to carve my own niche out of the trend office at Tradava as part of his team.
The doorbell distracted me from my research. I closed the laptop and pulled a couple of newspapers over it. An elegant woman draped in black stood on my front porch. I recognized her immediately and opened the door.
“Ms. Kidd?” she asked. I nodded. “Maries Paulson.” She swept past me, a cloud of cashmere and Chanel No. 5. Oversized black sunglasses obscured most of her face. She did not take them off. Her head was covered with a turban that looked so chic I wondered if it were time for the style to made a comeback.
“I hope you don’t mind the unexpected visit. I’m more troubled by Patrick’s absence than I led you to believe. I can’t believe he’d leave me, our competition, with so many details left—”
“Ms. Paulson, Patrick didn’t abandon you, at least, not by choice.”
I explained what happened on Day One at Tradava. Out loud, it sounded crazy, but Maries didn’t act like I was insane. She pulled a white monogrammed hankie out of her quilted Dior handbag and dabbed at her eyes under the large black sunglasses.
“May we sit?” she asked. I gestured to the kitchen and she led the way.
“I’m sorry. Patrick was a dear friend of mine. He was an amazing man. I’m sure you knew that.”
“I actually didn’t know him well. You—you believe me, don’t you? Why do you believe me? Nobody else does.”
“Ms. Kidd, Patrick anticipated something like this would happen. He received a couple of threats and alerted the police.”
“What kind of threats?”
“Threats to cancel the design competition, that something would happen if he didn’t.”
“What kind of something?”
“He never said.” She pulled the glasses off and for a moment she focused on me as if for the first time. The eyebrows were drawn on and the lipstick was as red as a tomato-shaped pincushion. Her bright blue eyes appeared muddled through the tears that pooled in her lower lids. I’d place her in her seventies, but I was guessing she’d deny it vehemently.
“The police paid him little mind.” She adjusted her cashmere wrap. “If the police kept that information from
you, it only means they are worried about how they will look in the eyes of the public when the news becomes common knowledge.”
Admittedly I’ve had very little experience with death and consolation. I remained silent while she composed herself, still wondering what had brought her to my door. I offered her a glass of iced tea, which she accepted.
“He saw himself in you, you know,” she said.
“He talked to you about me?”
“You impressed him, and that’s not easy to do.”
I looked at the pile of newspapers on the kitchen table. Thankfully, the laptop was out of sight. I didn’t want Maries to know so soon after her friend’s death I was trying to break into his files, especially after learning I’d impressed him.
“I wonder if you would consider looking into his murder?”
“I think the police should do that,” I said automatically.
“Simply put, the police don’t understand the intricacies of the fashion world like we do.”
“What makes you so sure he was murdered? As far as I know, the police haven’t found his body. Maybe they’re right. Maybe he orchestrated the whole thing because he needed to get out of town.”
She reached inside her handbag and pulled out an interoffice envelope. “What happened to Patrick is only the beginning.” She pulled a stack of applications out of the envelope and set them on my table. “Patrick and I were judges of a design competition. This, you know. These are the applications and profiles of the contestants. I have reason to believe the killer may be one of those people.”
“Then you have an obligation to turn this over to the police,” I said, pushing the pile back toward her.
“Ms. Kidd, you’re being myopic.” She pulled her glasses down a second time and touched the inside corner of each eye with a tissue. “I suppose, if I want you to see the big picture, I should share with you a bit about Patrick’s past, about what brought him to Tradava.”
Diane Vallere - Style and Error 01 - Designer Dirty Laundry Page 6