by Amy Korman
We looked through the front window, where Gerda was indicating the heights of the Gucci store across the street.
“I climb up and get them tomorrow,” Gerda said. “Too dark right now.”
Just then, Adelia’s houseman, Ozzy, walked in. “I understand one of your friends lost her car keys, so I’m here to give you a ride home, Mrs. Earle,” he said politely, offering his arm to the tobacco heiress, who seemed ready to go.
“I come along, too, you can drop me!” Gerda said, jumping up and following Adelia and Ozzy.
I made a move to follow them and hitch a ride with Ozzy, but Joe grabbed my bag, effectively blocking my escape. “If I’m stuck going to the Chessica cottage, so are you,” he told me. He found a twenty-dollar bill in his back pocket, left it as a tip for the bartender, and sighed. “Let’s do this,” he said, heading out behind Bootsie and Sophie as Holly and I followed.
“I like Scooter’s wife,” Holly said, apropos of nothing. “I’m minus one set of keys, but I think I’d like to get to know Mrs. Scooter Simmons.”
CHANNING AND JESSICA’S rented cottage turned out to be a white stucco carriage house on a grand property down by the old Sandbar Club. We parked on a side alley near the pricey private golf course, since a police car, lit up like a Christmas tree, was in the driveway outside their place.
“Zack!” called out Sophie to her detective ex. “Yoo-hoo!”
“Hey, Sophie,” he said, waving to all of us. “Better if you all stay back. In fact, you shouldn’t be here. We’re going to do some fingerprinting, even though this doesn’t seem to be technically a crime. It’s more like a prank.”
“It’s not exactly funny,” said Jessica bitterly. She was seated on a little bench in front of her rented cottage, shivering in the late-night air. Jessica was composed, but her eyes were puffy, and she looked especially downcast.
“We closed Vicino early, because, well, business stinks right now,” Channing said, his arm around his girlfriend. “Jessica got here a couple minutes before I did, and there was a delivery on the front porch.”
“It was an Hermès shopping bag, the signature orange one with the brown ribbons at the top,” Jessica said. “I figured Channing had bought me a present to cheer me up and had it delivered here.”
But when Jessica had opened the bag and pulled out some tissue paper and a small square Hermès gift box, she said, a baby alligator had popped out.
“Like, a live one?” Sophie squeaked.
“Yes, a freakin’ scaly-looking, prehistoric, monster baby reptile!” Jessica said, her voice rising to a scream.
“Are you sure about that?” Joe asked skeptically.
“Absolutely!” Jessica said. “It ran away into the bushes, but not before Channing got here, and he took a picture of the little fucker.” Channing produced a pic of what indeed looked like a very tiny alligator.
“You can order them over the Internet for about a hundred bucks,” Safina explained. “Kinda horrible, but people get them as pets.”
“Then a bunch of lizards jumped out, too,” Channing told us. “Pretty gross.” He gave his shaky girlfriend a reassuring squeeze.
“You mean those little tiny lizards you see everywhere in Florida?” Bootsie asked. “What’s scary about them? They’re harmless.”
“It doesn’t seem that way when they jump out of an Hermès bag at you,” Jessica told her. “You try it sometime!”
Channing had shaken out the bag and decided after some debate to open the orange Hermès box. Inside had been a man’s silk pocket square in a vivid red and yellow pattern that included the striking image of a snake. In the box, too, had been the invitation to the Reptile Foundation party at Vicino, which had been ripped in half.
“The text message is what really upset her,” Channing added calmly. “Jessica and I got the same message from a private number about thirty minutes ago. It said, ‘Consider the reptiles a warning: Cancel the fund-raiser and get out of Florida.’ ”
Chapter 18
“WE’LL START AT Hermès, because my theory is that the little pocket square was bought recently—in the last day or two,” Bootsie told me on Wednesday morning, after she’d stared me awake at 7:45 a.m. “Then we’re going to find the pizza guy who delivered to Barclay yesterday and see what he knows.”
“Why are you so sure the Hermès square was bought so recently?” I asked.
“Mummy buys a lot of Hermès scarves. I texted her, and she said that most patterns are only around for a few months, or just weeks if they’re popular. I described the square to her, and she knew it immediately—it’s called Baiser du Serpent, and it came out this week.”
“She knows that much about Hermès?” I said, impressed. Kitty Delaney, like Bootsie, was mostly a Lilly Pulitzer and L.L.Bean type, but come to think of it, I had seen her wear Hermès scarves at the country club back home.
“Absolutely,” Bootsie told me. “Mummy’s wired in with Hermès on Facebook and Twitter, and gets their e-mails every week, plus the saleswomen call her all the time.
“Anyway, I’m taking you and Joe with me. Holly said she’s going to work out, plus I think she needs to work on her Howard issues, and Sophie’s spending quality time with Gerda today.”
“WE’RE WONDERING IF you can help us,” Joe said in his most charming tones to an elegant young saleswoman standing behind the glossy counter at Hermès.
Joe is good at ingratiating himself with women, so, before entering the sumptuous store, the three of us had deemed him the best person to cajole the Hermès staff into dispensing information. We’d sat in the car, sucking down mochas picked up at the little coffee place near the drugstore on Ocean Drive, until Hermès’ perfectly polished doors had been unlocked at 10:00 a.m.
“How may I assist you?” said the salesperson, who was about twenty-three but wore her blond hair in a topknot that evoked a cool, supermodelish vibe that called to mind Catherine Deneuve circa 1967. She had also mastered a bright red lipstick that somehow looked amazing on her. She faced us down with an impressive display of politeness mingled with an unspoken Are you going to buy something? as she assessed the three of us.
Joe looked good in a handsome pink Lacoste shirt and crisp seersucker trousers—not to mention an Hermès belt. Bootsie wasn’t bad herself today—she’d abandoned the caftans and was back in a more user-friendly Lilly Pulitzer shift dress and a pair of Jack Rogers sandals, which, she’d told me, was her go-to outfit for reporting in warm weather climates.
I realized I should have gone with one of Holly’s loaner outfits. My Target dress, which I’d thought looked fine back at the guesthouse, didn’t cut it in Hermès. I looked to my left, where a simply magnificent beige suede skirt hung gorgeously on a rack. I’d peered at the price tag and almost choked up some of my mocha: $4,700.
“Thanks so much,” Joe told the topknot girl. “We’re wondering if you remember anyone buying the Baiser du Serpent pocket square over the past few days. You know, the red silk with the winding snake motif that just came into stores this week.”
I had to stifle a laugh at this. Joe has near perfect memory for this kind of thing. Bootsie had downloaded the details about the snake scarf on the ride over, and, true to form, he’d remembered every single one.
The girl looked somewhat reluctant as she appeared to think this over.
“Forty-two centimeters square, retails for two-seventy-five?” prompted Joe in his sweetest tone, leaning over the counter winsomely. The blonde hesitated, clearly somewhat taken in by Joe, who’s pretty cute when he wants to be.
“I can’t give out that kind of information,” she said finally. “I would, but Corporate doesn’t allow us to discuss customers. I mean, some of these ladies will literally bribe us to find out when the next handbags will be in, and we can get in a lot of trouble.”
“Oh, come on!” wheedled
Joe. “It’s just a little man-scarf. Who’s gonna care?” He added a small wink.
“I can’t,” said the girl.
“Oh, really?” Bootsie said loudly, having lost patience and forgetting she was supposed to stay in the background while Joe talked. “Our best friend is Holly Jones. And you don’t want us to tell her to take her Hermès business over to Palm Beach or down to Bal Harbour. Because, and I’m not threatening, just telling—she will.”
“Please don’t do that!” said the saleswoman, abandoning her frosty stance. “I really need Holly’s commissions. She’s got two bags being hand-stitched as we speak. That commission covers my rent for three months. You have no idea how expensive it is to live in Magnolia Beach!”
She looked over nervously at the store’s other salesperson, a pretty woman in her forties who was over in the shoe department helping a mother and daughter team-dressed in what looked like head-to-toe Hermès. The mom and daughter were determined as they slipped their pedicured feet into pricey footwear. I’d seen the same look on Holly’s face too many times to count. These two were buyers, not browsers.
I felt a bit bad for the young girl who’d gotten stuck with us. She was getting browbeaten by Bootsie, while the other salesperson was about to rack up a huge sale.
“Snake-print pocket square,” prompted Bootsie. “Who bought it?”
“A guy came in Sunday,” said the topknot, leaning on her elbows now, ready to spill all she knew. “I remember him really well, because even though our customers are always well dressed”—I noticed she averted her eyes from me as she spoke—“they’re usually not all that dressed up for shopping during the day. This guy was wearing a navy sport coat and a tie, sunglasses, and a Panama hat.”
“So what did he look like?” Bootsie hammered the question at her.
“Well, he was pretty tall and thin, but he looked like he was in good shape,” mused the blonde. “I couldn’t see his hair under the hat, and his face was really pretty much blocked by the sunglasses and the brim of his hat. He had kind of regular features. And he was tan!” she added hopefully, searching Bootsie’s face, clearly terrified that she’d lose the windfall from Holly if she didn’t come up with more details.
“Wedding ring?” asked Bootsie.
“I don’t think so,” frowned the salesperson.
“How old?” asked Joe.
The girl considered this. I guessed it was hard for her to calculate ages of those who weren’t glossy and fabulous twenty-somethings like herself. She looked like she was of a mind-set that placed everyone between thirty and sixty into the same category: on the lumpy downward spiral of life.
“I’m going to say, like, forty?” she guessed. “Maybe a little younger?”
“So he was tan, forty-ish, well-dressed, and had on sunglasses?” Bootsie prompted.
“That’s it!” the girl nodded enthusiastically.
“That only describes about half of the male population of South Florida,” Bootsie told the girl, which didn’t seem to endear her to the saleswoman.
“Carly”—I had no idea how Joe had gleaned this girl’s name, but he’s quite skilled at surreptitiously gathering that kind of information—“isn’t there a security tape from Sunday? We could come back later, after store hours, and look at it really quickly?”
“The security cameras are on the blink,” Carly whispered, looking around nervously. The older saleswoman appeared to be finishing up with the mother and daughter, who’d now each tried on about seventy-five pairs of shoes and had amassed a hefty pile they were preparing to purchase.
“Please don’t tell anyone I told you the cameras are down!” Carly added desperately. “No one’s supposed to know. We can’t get anyone out to fix them til Friday, and Corporate would freak!”
I noticed that her colleague, though still smiling pleasantly at the moneybags mother, who was slipping on one more pair of suede flats, was giving us a curious glance that contained the same Aren’t you going to buy anything? query we’d gotten earlier from Carly.
Joe, defeated, shrugged at the girl, but Bootsie wasn’t quite finished.
“Here’s the single most important thing I’m going to ask you,” Bootsie informed her. “Did the guy have an accent?”
“That’s so weird that you’re asking that!” said Carly. “The guy who bought the snake item didn’t speak. Not a single word. He just pointed at the pocket square, nodded when I asked him if he’d like to have it gift-wrapped, and handed me the cash for it.”
“You’re just telling us this now?!” Bootsie said, in a very un-Hermès shout, as the other saleswoman began carrying stacks of orange shoeboxes toward the checkout counter.
“Well, sometimes people just shop, pay, and don’t talk,” said the girl defensively. “This isn’t the kind of store where there’s always a lot of chitchat. I mean, when you’re paying a thousand bucks for a pair of shoes, that’s no time to, like, get into last night’s episode of The Bachelor.”
“GIANNI BOUGHT THE silk square,” Bootsie said as we piled back into the car. “Why else would the guy be completely silent? He was hiding his accent!”
“Gianni in a sport coat and straw hat?” I mused. “I’m not sure I see him buttoning himself into a navy blazer—even if it was in the pursuit of screwing over Jessica. I mean, it’s true that Gianni’s pretty tan, and he’s in good shape and about the same age as the guy Carly described. But he’s got all those tattoos, which Carly definitely would have noticed.”
“Gianni’s tattoos don’t extend as far as his wrists,” Bootsie told me, firing up the Range Rover and heading toward Royal Palm Way in the center of town. “Carly wouldn’t have seen them, since he was wearing a tie and blazer.” She paused. “I didn’t find an Hermès receipt in his desk yesterday, but he probably tossed it at his restaurant or in a trash can on the street as soon as he bought the pocket square.”
“I guess,” I said doubtfully.
I could imagine Gianni dreaming up the reptile theme and the overly dramatic Hermès “gift” for Channing and Jessica. But the idea of Gianni being able to keep his mouth shut during an entire five-minute shopping errand struck me as nearly impossible. The man couldn’t stop insulting people for any period longer than sixty seconds.
“Do you think it could have been Scooter?” I wondered aloud. “He’s a navy blazer kind of guy.”
“Scooter isn’t six feet tall, and he’s not in good shape,” Bootsie said. “He’s the right age, but I don’t think he’s the one. Plus, he doesn’t seem like the type to make an effort with the whole Hermès bag and the Reptile Party invitation and the crazy live lizard. Scooter’s a dealmaker on a bigger scale, not a guy who leaves little notes around.”
“And they probably know Scooter at Hermès,” I agreed. “He’s pretty much a fixture in this town.”
“Maybe Gianni sent one of the Colketts in to buy the snake thingy, and then did the lizard delivery himself?” Joe said. “Gianni loves to screw those guys over. The Colketts wouldn’t have known what Gianni was up to, and they’d be the ones looking guilty if one of them had gotten caught on security cameras—if the cameras had been working, that is.”
I agreed that I could easily picture Gianni doing this. Both the Colketts are very nice guys and would definitely agree to do the chef a favor.
Bootsie, meanwhile, had parked in front of Gianni Mare. “I’ll ask the Colketts about that the next time I see them. You know, it’s always possible that Gianni’s somehow hired them as hit men, and they’re the ones trashing Vicino!”
“The Colketts wouldn’t do that,” I told her.
“They might, if Gianni paid them enough! They said themselves business is slow.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Joe told her. “They might be scared of Gianni, but they’re not exactly going to turn into Paulie and Silvio from The Sopranos anyti
me soon.”
“You never know! Meanwhile, wait here,” Bootsie said. “I need to snap a quick pic with my phone. Joe, you make some calls. We need to know what’s up with Channing and Jessica, and get an update on Barclay’s head injury. Maybe Adelia tracked down Susie and Bingo Simmons, too.”
“It’s hot out here,” said Joe grumpily. “At least leave the motor running and the air on.”
“I’m risking my life here!” Bootsie yelled, while Joe cranked up the air to full arctic. “Fine—sit in the car and run the air conditioner if you really need to!”
“How is taking a fucking picture risking your life?” Joe screamed back at her.
“Because I need the picture of Gianni to go back and show Carly at Hermès! Maybe she’ll recognize him. And I’m taking a big scary risk because the guy’s probably in a homicidal rage and unleashing deadly baby gators on people!”
She hopped out of the Range Rover and crouched behind a hibiscus bush to snap a few pics. Gianni was visible inside the large open windows of Gianni Mare, where he was yelling, red-faced, at a hapless teenager who was mopping the expensively tiled floor.
“By the way, we just missed Olivia,” Joe retorted when Bootsie got back in the SUV a moment later. “She was in the passenger seat of that beat-up pickup truck that pulled out while you were screaming at me. The truck hung a left toward the mainland.”
I looked up from texting John Hall that I was about to kill myself if I spent one more hour with Bootsie and Joe. I hadn’t noticed Olivia in the truck.
“We should have followed her! Now you tell me?” Bootsie said, her face bright red. “She was probably going to run some evil errand for Gianni. You ruined the whole investigation.”
“Shut up, Bootsie!” Joe screamed. “I’m a decorator, not freaking Hercule Poirot! Olivia’s a girlfriend-slash-assistant who Gianni orders around, not some criminal mastermind. She’s probably headed to the airport again to pick up a bunch of heirloom tomatoes or something.”