Masking for Trouble

by Diane Vallere

  “I can get it myself, thanks,” I said. I jumped in and jabbed the Close-Door button. The velvet curtain that had kept the elevator door hidden now swung back into place. The last thing I saw was Agent Smith’s hand get caught up in the fabric as the doors closed.

  My heart was racing. Whoever the men in black were, they definitely weren’t breaking character. Were they part of Paul Haverford’s team? Through my interactions with most of our customers, I was able to pick out who was who, but these guys were good. Too good. They gave me the creeps.

  I pushed the button for the second floor. The elevator had received the same fake-spider-web treatment as the front desk. Considering my costume, I should have felt at home. I sensed that even though this was an old elevator, there was a camera watching me. I looked up at the cracked panes that covered the ceiling and spotted a glowing red light in the corner. Without thinking twice, I aimed one of my Silly String canisters at it and shot. The thin foamy spray sprung out and covered the light. Somehow, the juvenile act made me feel better.

  The elevator passed the second floor. I jabbed at the number 2, but it continued to ascend. When it reached the sixth floor, the doors opened. I stepped out and the doors closed behind me.

  I looked for signs to indicate which direction to go. There was nothing but a bunch of lumps: furniture that had been covered in white sheets long ago. The cobwebs on this floor had a different appearance, as though they hadn’t been applied for the party. Instead of fog, a layer of grit and gravel covered the floor. The leather soles of my black booties were quiet against the dirty residue, but if I wasn’t careful, I’d track it back downstairs when I left.

  The only light came from the open window, where tattered white curtains blew in and out with the breeze, and a small night-light that had been plugged into a wall socket on the opposite side of the room. I remembered the figure I’d seen walk past the windows when I was outside, and I shivered. I returned to the elevator and pushed the call button.

  The floor indicator lit. A series of numbers, one through twelve, showed the floors in a semi circle. A black arrow was pointed toward the six, which was where I was. Like many old elevators, this one must have been programmed to rest at the top or the bottom floors when not in use. The doors did not open. I jabbed the call button again and leaned toward the fixture, listening for indications that the contraption was moving.

  The air in the room felt colder than it had when I’d arrived, and even though I had leggings and a hoody on underneath the black jumpsuit of my costume under the spider cocoon and legs, I was downright cold. The sound of the wind whipping by the curtains raised my paranoia. Everything that made this the perfect setting for Halloween made it the worst place to be caught alone. I hopped from foot to foot until the doors opened, and then jumped inside and pressed the button for the first floor. And then, I noticed that I wasn’t alone.

  In the darkness, on the floor, was the body of a white-haired man in a business suit. Paul Haverford. A trail of blood trickled down from a gash on the top of his head.

  Chapter 4

  I LEANED DOWN and jostled his arm with my hand. The spider legs swatted against his legs and waist. His arm fell from his lap to the floor. I made a noise between a gasp and a scream. His head rolled to the side.

  I pressed my fingers against the clammy flesh on his neck. There was no pulse. I grasped his lapels and shook him. His jacket fell open, exposing a cranberry monogram on his shirt. PWH. His already seated body slumped down the interior wall of the elevator. I jabbed my finger at the first-floor button, but the elevator doors did not close. I tried Close-Door—second floor—anything to make the elevator move. Finally, I hit the Alarm button. The bell cut through the night air, drowning the sound of the pipe organ. I thought again about the party. I had to notify someone about the dead man without alarming the families and children in attendance.

  I grabbed the man’s ankles and pulled him onto the faded Oriental carpet. As soon as his head cleared the opening, the doors closed. The arrow above the elevator indicated its descent. My already dry throat closed up, resulting in a coughing fit. I stumbled to the window and pushed my head and shoulders through.

  “Help,” I yelled. “Somebody, help!” I hollered. A few people looked up and pointed at me, nudging others, as if I was part of the entertainment. “Call the police,” I cried. “There’s been an accident!”

  A couple of spectators clapped. One man cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Don’t jump!” Another pointed to the right of me, “Spider-Man will save you,” he called.

  I glanced to my right. A figure dressed in a Spider-Man leotard clung to the rusted-out fire escape by the sixth floor. I was too far away to make out anything but his costume, but with a frightening chill, I realized I might be looking at a murderer.

  I backed out of the window and slammed the casing shut. There had to be an emergency exit, but I didn’t know the layout of the hotel. Before I could act, several men dressed in black suits appeared from the corner of the room. A flickering Exit sign was partially hidden under a fake cobweb. Stairs. They’d come up the stairs.

  They moved quickly to Paul Haverford and felt his neck and wrist for a pulse like I had done. One of them pulled a radio from under his jacket. “We have a deceased male on the sixth floor. Apparent injury to the head.”

  The men stood up and looked at me. I held my hands up in front of me and stepped backward. “I didn’t do it,” I said. “I came up here for water. I tried to stop on the second floor but the elevator came up here.”

  “Ms. Tamblyn, please step away from the body,” one of the men said.

  “How do you know my name?” I asked, backing away again. I felt cornered and didn’t know which way to run. Fear pumped adrenaline through my arms and legs. One of the men reached into his jacket, and I screamed and threw my hands up over my face. The man pulled out a wallet and flipped it open.

  Finally, a person who could carry off a costume. As it turns out, the man was really a woman. Detective Nancy Nichols of the Proper City Police Department.

  I looked back and forth from her badge to her face to her badge to her face. Her normally long blond hair had been cut short and slicked back. Dark sunglasses hid enough of her face to hide her identity. She tipped her head back and pulled what appeared to be a watch from her throat. “Voice lowering device,” she said. “Part of the costume.” I started to talk but she cut me off with her hand, palm face-out. “Wait over there, Ms. Tamblyn. I’ll need your statement.”

  I stepped away from the body and sat on the corner of one of the sheet-covered sofas. A puff of dust rose when I sat and now filtered through the air like tiny particles of history. So much of what I’d seen at the hotel looked to have been rigged for the party tonight, but not this. Not a murder.

  Detective Nichols had been appointed to the Proper City Police Department about the same time I’d moved back to Proper. She had the build of a pro volleyball player and the just-the-facts manner of a census taker. If I hadn’t been firsthand witness to a more human side of her, I might not have liked her very much. It had been the day I learned that my dad had a second heart attack while on a costume scouting trip, and despite the fact that I’d been interfering with her investigation, she’d dropped everything to make sure I was okay. After that, it had been hard to dismiss her simply because she’d also been mistakenly interested in Ebony’s role in a homicide. Still, it didn’t mean we were destined to be friends either.

  She gave instruction to the two men who’d arrived with her and then joined me by the sofa. When she didn’t sit, I stood.

  “Ms. Tamblyn, what happened here?”

  “Water,” I choked out. I cleared my throat a couple of times. “Do you happen to have any water?” I asked. She shook her head. One of the men in black handed me a plastic bottle and I took a long gulp. “I don’t know what happened here. I came up here to get some water. One of th
e men in black—wait, are they all with you?” She nodded once. “Good costumes,” I said, temporarily distracted. She didn’t react. “Sorry. I heard there was water on the second floor. The elevator didn’t stop there even though I pushed the button. It came up here. I was waiting for the elevator to come back, and when it opened, he was in there.”

  She waited a few seconds. “Do you know who he is?”

  “Paul Haverford. He’s the developer who owns the hotel. He came to Disguise DeLimit earlier today.”

  “What was the nature of his business at your store?”

  “He was there to deliver some papers to us. Some legal documents.”

  She made a note on her phone with a plastic stylus. “You said you were waiting for the elevator to come back. What makes you think it wasn’t waiting here?”

  “You know how these old buildings are. When they’re not in service, the elevators float from the bottom floor to the top. I got off and the doors closed. It had to go somewhere. When the elevator came back to the sixth floor, he was inside.”

  She made a few more notes but didn’t reply. I looked at the elevator display. The arrow hadn’t moved from the sixth floor. But where had the body come from? He hadn’t been inside when I rode up.

  I shivered. Detective Nichols glanced up at me. Her eyes dropped from my face to my body. I wrapped my arms around my torso for warmth. The spider legs moved in like fashion, bouncing like an oversized black rib cage around me.

  “Is there anything else you’d like to add to your statement?” she asked.

  “You should look for Spider-Man,” I said. She didn’t move. “I yelled for help out the window and people thought it was a stunt, like I was acting. Somebody pointed to the fire escape and said Spider-Man would save me. He was on the fire escape.”

  “We’ll check it out,” she said. She slid the wand back into the case of her phone, closed the case over it, and slipped the whole thing into an inside pocket of her black suit jacket. “You’re not planning on leaving town, are you?”

  “No. Why?”

  She stared at me long enough to make me uncomfortable. “Follow-up,” she finally said.

  “I’ll be at the shop if you need to talk to me. But if I think of anything”—I made a gun shape out of my index finger and thumb, and pointed it at her—“I’ll call you.”

  She turned to one of the men in black behind her. “Scott, escort Ms. Tamblyn to her vehicle,” she said. The officer nodded. “Stairs,” she called behind him.

  The officer led me into a dark hallway.

  “Are you the one who gave me water?” I asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. I knew you were thirsty. You asked about water before you got onto the elevator.”

  “You didn’t want me to get on the elevator. Why?”

  “These elevators were programmed to stay on the first floor. Mr. Haverford asked us to keep people from going to the other levels.”

  “But you said you were going to—”

  “Get it for you. I was thirsty too.”

  We walked past the sheet-covered furniture, past a wall of windows, to a nondescript door in a corner. An Exit sign had been mounted above it, but the light was burned out. The officer opened the door and we went inside. The air was stale and cold. I forced myself to swallow a few times though my throat was just about shot at this point. We descended the stairs and reentered the hotel on the first floor behind the check-in desk. The skeleton hotel employee sat with his hands positioned on his keyboard, a layer of spider web stretched over top. He grinned freakishly—as if he knew something about the night that nobody else did—all part of the elements that made the past hour so surreal.

  In the time that I’d been upstairs, the Alexandria Hotel had emptied. An ambulance sat by the sidewalk, the rear doors open. Clusters of people only now half dressed in costume stood around the perimeter. Uniformed officers who looked like partygoers themselves circulated among the crowd, taking statements. The sun had dropped, but the streetlights hadn’t come on yet. We were a week away from daylight savings, and the timer on the city-run lights had already been reprogrammed to accommodate the additional hour of sunlight. It happened this time every year.

  My scooter sat alone in the corner. I wrapped my arms around my torso, no longer worried about how silly I looked. The officers nodded at me, as if they knew the role I’d played in the discovery of the body. I checked in with them and they said I could leave. I gave them a tight-lipped smile, pulled my keys out of my pocket, and drove home.

  * * *

  Tuesday

  The next morning, I dressed like a gangster. Pinstriped double-breasted suit, white shirt, fat necktie with tie clip. Black-and-white spats. I parted my hair on the side and slicked it back with a thick styling cream, and then secured it into a ponytail at the base of my head, which I tucked into the collar of my shirt—the ponytail, not my head. I slipped a vintage class ring onto my pinky and finished the look with a fedora.

  It wasn’t abnormal for me to dress in elements of costume on a regular basis. Growing up, my dad hadn’t had time to go to the mall and pick out a wardrobe for me like other parents did. My school clothes had largely come from the inventory of the shop. Once I’d gotten old enough to shop for myself, I’d found that my identity was wrapped up in those costumes, and dressing like everybody else made me feel invisible. I’d learned to work the sewing machine in order to produce costumes for the store and had amassed a collection of patterns from yard sales in the neighborhood. My daily ensembles were like characters that I took on and off. They gave me a sort of power, like if I was dressed up as a character, then nothing that happened to me was real. Probably not the healthiest mind set, but it worked for me.

  I’d once had an art teacher who said that we were what we wore. He said he could take a picture of every student on the first day of class and compare it to a picture of us on the last day of class and there wouldn’t be much variation. Not only had I blown that theory out of the water, but apparently, my ever-changing looks were a cause for concern. The teacher pulled me aside one day and asked if I wanted to talk about my search for an identity. I dropped my portrait class and signed up for pottery instead.

  Whether my teacher had been right or not wasn’t the issue today. We were in that special week before Halloween, and that meant we brought out the big guns. In a town like Proper City, where costume parties were the norm, everybody had a party to go to, and some people, more than one. We had two types of customers: those who splurged on an expensive costume and wore it everywhere for a week, and those who wanted something different for every one of their social engagements. Dressing in costume this week was simply a business decision.

  I tossed a cup of soy milk, a banana, some blueberries, and a couple of leaves of kale into the blender, whipped up a breakfast smoothie, and transferred it into a metal flask. We sold the same one at the store, and it was the perfect prop to add to the gangster costume. Soot reminded me to fill his bowls with fresh food and water before I went downstairs. I gave him an unwanted hug first, cleaned out his litter box, and left him with his head buried in vittles.

  The store was a mess. We weren’t scheduled to open for a couple of hours, so I had the time to straighten it, but there was something more pressing on my mind. The legal documents that Paul Haverford had delivered.

  I’d only managed to fall asleep last night after a long shower and a lot of tossing and turning. Paul Haverford’s dead body hadn’t been the first that I’d ever encountered, but that didn’t make the situation any less disturbing. Coupled with the atmosphere of the Alexandria Hotel, the eerie sounds of the pipe organ, the emotionless men in black who now appeared to have been police—and not all men—and the tendrils of fog from the dry ice, my memories had morphed into nightmares. By the time I’d gotten home, I’d triple locked every door in the house, turned on a night-light, and moved Soot’s food and litter box into
my room so I wouldn’t wake up alone. He probably would have been fine keeping me company if it wasn’t for the multiple bathroom breaks I took, thanks to the gallon of water I drank before bed.

  I’d torn up and discarded Paul Haverford’s most recent legal notice in his office, but I still had a stack of unopened envelopes in mine. I opened one and pulled out the paperwork. The letterhead said PWH, and the rest was the same legal jargon I’d seen on the documents I tore up last night.

  I slumped into my swivel chair and read over the text, this time with my full concentration. After twenty minutes and only two paragraphs, I knew I was going to need help understanding the legalese. I didn’t know any lawyers, but I knew someone who did. Tak Hoshiyama, former employee of the district attorney’s office. Since I was in the privacy of the office in an unattended store, I called instead of e-mailing. He picked up on the third ring.

  “It’s Margo,” I said. Before he could speak, I rushed ahead. “I need help deciphering some legal documents. Do you think you could come over?”

  “I might. Where are you?”

  “The store.” I paused. “I’m alone.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Fifteen minutes later, there was a knock on the front door. I came out of the office and unlocked it, and Tak came inside.

  “You’re still alone?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He closed the small space between us, put his hands on either side of my face, and kissed me.

  Chapter 5

  AFTER THE KISS, Tak leaned back and slid his hands down from my face to around my waist.

  “You kissed me in the middle of the store,” I said.

  “I didn’t want to waste an opportunity.” He grinned. “Where is everybody?”