Masking for Trouble

by Diane Vallere

  “Costume shop? Is that why you’re dressed up?”

  I looked down at my gangster outfit. “I’m not dressed up. What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”

  “It’s—nothing. It’s unique.” Cooper walked around the side of the scooter and squeezed the front and back tires. “Cross your fingers for a slow leak. That’s easy to fix.” He pulled a pair of leather gloves from his pockets and handed them to me. “Wear these while I take care of this.”

  I pulled the gloves on and looked up the street. A set of headlights was headed our way. Cooper had the can of Fix-A-Flat attached to the valve stem already, and the scooter visibly lifted as the tire inflated. The headlights—attached to a gray RAV4—pulled over and parked behind Cooper’s truck. Tak hopped out.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “You said—” I stumbled around, looking for the right thing to say. “Flat tire,” I finished. “This is Cooper. He’s helping me out.”

  Tak looked past me. “Coop?”

  The man stood up. “Hoshi? What are you doing, following me?”

  Chapter 8

  “YOU TWO KNOW each other?” I asked. I looked back and forth between them. They were about the same age, same height, same build. Tak had the strong Asian features he’d inherited from his Japanese father. Cooper was more boy-next-door turned adult. The kind of guy you might not notice in high school who turns out to be a real heartbreaker in his twenties. I had a feeling neither one of them had trouble getting dates.

  As I thought the word date, I felt Tak’s eyes on me. Ever since we’d met, he’d had an uncanny knack for reading my mind. I flushed for a moment.

  “This is Tak Hoshiyama. He used to work in the Clark County Planning Office with me,” Coop said. “Tak, this is Margo.”

  A smile toyed at the corners of my mouth, but I didn’t say anything. Cooper finished with the tire and stood up. “All fixed, Margo.” He capped the can and handed it to me. “Keep this. If it is a slow leak, you might need it.”

  “Thank you.” I took the can. Cooper reached out for my other hand and held it for a moment too long. “Keep the gloves too. Your hands are going to get cold again as soon as you start driving.”

  “We can pack up your scooter in my truck and I’ll give you a ride home,” Tak said.

  Cooper looked at him. “Wait, you two know each other?”

  It was the same question I’d asked moments before. Tak and I looked at each other.

  “We’ve met,” we both answered at the same time. Not suspicious at all.

  Cooper laughed. “I see. Well, now we’ve met too,” he said to me, and smiled. He looked at Tak. “Hey, man, you want to grab a beer?”

  Tak shook his head. “No, I should be getting back to the restaurant.”

  “Okay. Nice meeting you, Margo. Keep an eye on that tire.” Cooper climbed into his truck and waved as he drove away.

  Tak pulled a pair of gloves out of the pocket of his coat. “You left these at the restaurant last week. I meant to give them to you this morning and I forgot.”

  “You should have given them to me when your friend was here. Now he doesn’t have any gloves.”

  “I thought it would blow our cover.”

  I traded Cooper’s gloves for my own. “Do you want to give these back to him?”

  “Not sure how I’d explain things.” He looked at me for a moment, and then stepped closer and kissed me. It was turning out to be a good day for affection. “Let me take a look at that tire,” he said.

  “The tire’s fine, Tak. I only let enough air out of it to make it look good in case anybody actually checked it. Which turned out to be a good idea.”

  “You could have told him help was coming.”

  “I did. He wanted to help me anyway.”

  “Sounds like Coop.”

  “What’s the story with him? Are you guys friends?”

  Tak stood up. “We work in the planning office together. Worked. He’s still there.”

  “Doing the same kind of work that you did? Zoning, approving petitions, that sort of thing?”

  “Mostly. There was some talk about restructuring our positions into utilities, residential, and business, but there was no way to control the workload that way. We just each took whatever came in when we had the time to manage it.”

  “Why did he say you were following him?”

  “That’s where I was when I texted you.”

  “The district attorney’s office?”

  “The planning division. I wanted to find out a little more about Paul Haverford’s plan to take over Proper City.”

  “You don’t really care about that, do you?”

  “No, but you do.” His expression softened. “Actually, I do care about it. For years I was on the other side of situations like this. Filling out the paperwork, checking the reports on the condition of the land and whether or not it was suitable for the proposed project, approving the building permits, all that kind of stuff. I never thought about the implications my job had on the community where the project was to take place. This time I’m on the other side. I’m a resident, and I can see firsthand what might happen. So I guess I didn’t do it just for you.”

  “Still, I appreciate the thought.”

  A pizza delivery van rumbled past us. Cheesus Crust was painted on the side. Kirby swore they made the best pizza in Proper, which probably wasn’t too difficult considering they might be the only one. Soon, Disguise DeLimit would smell like tomato sauce and cheese. I hoped Kirby had ordered enough that there would be some left over for me when I returned.

  “Can we sit in your truck for a little?” I asked.

  “No, I really do have to get to the restaurant. The rice supplier didn’t make his scheduled delivery today and I’ve got fifty pounds in the back in case of emergency.”

  “Rice Emergency—now there’s a crisis.”

  We headed our separate ways. As much as I liked spending time with Tak—and there was no doubt that I did—I couldn’t deny that this was a poor excuse for a relationship. I saw the way other women looked at him, and the insecure part of me, the part that kept track of my personal life in a journal on my nightstand and talked through big, life-changing issues with my cat, wondered if maybe there was another reason he didn’t want to tell everybody we were a couple. I shook off those nagging thoughts and arrived home to sixteen empty pizza boxes.

  Looked like it would be a dinner of Fruity Pebbles for me.

  * * *

  Wednesday

  The next morning, I woke filled with curiosity. I wanted to see the Alexandria Hotel in broad daylight. The air was crisp and dry, but according to the weather report, we were headed for a high in the eighties. Proper City was a desert town, just east of the California border and surrounded by mountains. We didn’t have to contend with the sleet, snow, or rain of the states east of us. What we had to worry about were earthquakes. They were infrequent enough that, when a tremor was felt, most of us needed a few seconds to realize what was going on at first. The more likely scenarios were the ones when I came home and found the paintings all hanging at odd angles.

  There was no point in drawing unnecessary attention to myself, so I dressed in a khaki forest ranger uniform and tucked a matching baseball hat in my back pocket. Thick CAT boots finished the look.

  I blended up a banana, vanilla yogurt, almond milk, and a handful of peanuts and chugged most of the resulting smoothie. Soot meowed and I slid my finger through the mixture and held it out for him to lick. He cleaned it and meowed again. I found an empty bowl and poured an inch of smoothie into it and set it on the floor. The cat food went ignored while he buried his head. When he looked up, traces of smoothie remained on his nose. His pink tongue shot out and swiped at his nose, leaving him clean. I reached down to scratch his fur and then grabbed my keys and left.

 
When the planners of Proper sketched out the community of their dreams in the ’50s, they created a series of small clusters of houses and businesses connected by one long main road. As more families moved here, offshoots from the main road were created, paved, and named. Sometime in the ’80s, the city council had voted for public transportation, and the Zip lines were started. They were repurposed yellow school buses driven by retirees around town, and if you understood the routes each of them drove, you could get from any spot in Proper to any other spot in Proper in just under an hour.

  I took the Zip-Two for three miles, and then changed to the Zip-Three. It let me off two blocks from the Alexandria Hotel. I walked the rest of the way. Despite the weather report, it wasn’t warm yet, and I welcomed the exercise to get my blood pumping.

  The Alexandria looked less scary in the daylight. I’d read a little of its history when the Halloween party was first announced. Built in the Rococo style that had been popular in the early 1900s, it housed twelve floors and a ballroom with a magnificent chandelier. Although Pete Proper, our city’s founder, had renounced alcohol when he struck gold, there was an oak bar and restaurant inside, serving the social and political elite. After Pete’s death, like much of Proper, the hotel’s clientele shifted. Scofflaws and vagabonds, seeking refuge from the laws in California, migrated our way and took up residency. Bootleggers used the hotel as a base of operations, and gambling soon followed. It wasn’t until the city planners took over Proper City that the hotel was cleaned up and retrofitted with an elevator. That was in the late ’40s.

  Today I could see the disrepair more clearly than during the party. The Alexandria was a mere shadow of its once glamorous self. Once-white fire escapes were now covered with rust. Paint peeled away from window casings. The stone façade was dingy with water stains and the general shade of brown that comes with decades of dust imbedding into the brick. Patches of brown grass grew here and there, but mostly the grounds surrounding the hotel were dry brown dirt.

  A hybrid hatchback with NSS on the side was parked in the lot. A woman was on her hands and knees by the foundation of the building. Her hair was gray from the roots to about halfway down the length, where it turned to blond. It was parted in the center and tucked behind her ears, though long enough that it still dangled down on either side of her head. Small round glasses sat at the end of her nose. Her outfit, camouflage trousers and an olive green T-shirt, could have come from the ROTC section of the costume shop.

  She held what looked like a remote control with a small screen in one hand and a large tape measure reel attached to a black handle with the other. Equipment was scattered by her feet. “Hold this,” she said. I looked around for another person. She turned her head to me. “You. Come here and hold this.”

  I approached her and took the end of a large measuring tape. “Don’t move.” She turned and walked away with the handle of the tape measure reel in her hand. The yellow metal ruler spooled out of the device and bowed in the center. She rounded the corner of the building and, as I guessed from the tension on the measuring tape, kept walking.

  The equipment on the ground gave few clues as to what she was doing. An empty blue plastic case like the one my power drill came in sat open. Gray foam filled the interior, with spaces cut out where equipment would nestle. The lid of the case was filled with wavy gray foam shaped like an egg crate. Whatever had been inside must have been fragile. Another similar case, this one black, sat on top of an amplifier. I was leaning closer to raise the lid of the case and peek inside, when the woman returned.

  I stood up quickly, expecting her to accuse me of snooping (because I was) or to ask why I was there (because I was thinking the same thing about her). She did neither. She pulled a small notebook out of her pocket, checked the measurement on the tape, and made some notes on it—the notebook, not the tape measure.

  “Hand me the level,” she said next. I recognized it among the odd assortment of items and held it out. She approached the building and held it up by a horizontal mortar joint. “This is worse than I thought. Come here and tell me if I’m reading this right.”

  “I think you may have confused me with someone else. I’m not familiar with this type of equipment and I’m not sure what it is you’re looking for.”

  She looked at me over the top of her glasses. “You’ve read a level before, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then. Come here and tell me what you see.”

  I went to her side and she handed me the yellow plastic level. I lined it up with a horizontal mortar joint. I didn’t need to bother looking at the small bubble inside the level to see that it was on an angle. “The building isn’t straight,” I said. “But that can’t be too much of a surprise, can it? Buildings settle.”

  “I’ve been monitoring this building for the past forty years. Any settling would have happened a long time ago when the building was inhabited. There’s been no change for decades. And now the east corner is two inches lower than the west corner. Do you know what that means?”

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “Seismic activity!” she proclaimed. “Pete Proper left us a real keg of dynamite when he died.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are active fault lines under this entire end of Proper City. If Havetown is built, the construction might trigger an earthquake. If we’re not careful, Proper City will implode.”

  I glanced at the equipment on the ground. “Why here? Why now?”

  She stood straight and pushed her glasses farther up the bridge of her nose. She focused on me as if fully noticing me for the first time. “Those are the questions the Clark County Conservancy should have been asking. You’re not with them, are you?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m just a concerned citizen.”

  She glanced at my forest ranger uniform. “That’s too bad. The conservancy could use a smart woman like you.”

  “Are you working for them?”

  She threw her head back and laughed out loud, as if I’d said something much funnier than I had. “Am I with a nonprofit? Heck no. Those people want to save buildings. I want to save lives.” She tucked her remote control thingy (technical term) under her arm and held out her hand. “Francine Wheeler. Seismologist.”

  “Margo Tamblyn,” I said, returning the handshake and leaving off “costumer” as my credentials. “If you don’t mind my asking, what is all this?” With a sweeping gesture, I indicated the various items she had scattered in the brown grass.

  “My equipment.” She looked at the remote control, whacked it against her palm twice, flipped it over, and clicked a small black switch back and forth.

  “What’s that?”

  “Field balancer. It senses vibrations and indicates subterranean activity.” She checked the small screen, pressed a few buttons, and then tossed it onto the gray foam interior of the blue plastic case. “Batteries must be dead.”

  Before I could get back to those very good questions I’d been asking, she dropped down to her knees, put a stethoscope on, and pressed it to the ground. She moved the end a few times, and then pushed herself to a squatting position. “Things have quieted down since last night.”

  “You ran tests here last night?”

  “I had to. All those people here for a party in a building that isn’t structurally sound. It’s one thing for it to become a historical landmark. People respect a historical landmark. But no, Haverford wanted to get a bunch of people out here so he could take pictures to use in his sales brochures for Havetown.”

  The way she spoke about Paul Haverford made me uncomfortable. Whether or not she knew she was speaking ill of the dead, I didn’t know, and thought it best to find out. “Paul Haverford was murdered two nights ago.”

  “A bit of irony, don’t you think? The devil killed in his own lair.” She shook her head. “It’s almost poetic.”

  Chapter 9


  I WAS STUNNED by Francine’s response. She didn’t seem to notice. She picked up the blue plastic case, fit the vibration analyzer and accompanying cord into their respective cutout spaces in the gray foam, and then clicked the case shut. “Watch my equipment, will you?”

  I nodded. She walked to the other side of the building. As soon as she disappeared, I slipped her business card out of the plastic window on the black plastic case and pushed it deep into the pocket of my khaki trousers. Francine came back seconds later with a cart. She stacked it with the amp, the two plastic cases, and a tote bag filled with miscellaneous tools and cords.

  “Have you finished all of your tests?” I asked.

  “For now. I’ve been given a temporary reprieve, but not for long. There’s much work to be done.” She grabbed the cart and pulled it toward the car in the parking lot. I waited until she drove away before looking at her card. Francine Wheeler, Lead Seismologist, Nevada Bureau of Mines and Seismic Activity. Her title was followed by an address, website, e-mail, and phone number. I moved the card to a different pocket that had a flap and a button to keep it secure, and then walked to the front of the building to get a closer look inside.

  The party two nights ago had ended before it had gotten started, and it appeared that everything had been left as is. Large aluminum containers sat on either side of the front door, filled with pools of water. The dry ice, I remembered. Someone must have had the task of dropping a piece into the water every fifteen minutes or so to keep the illusion of fog going. I looked inside the bin to the right of the door. Pieces of candy corn floated on top. A scattering of cigarette butts had sunk to the bottom. The water in the bin on the left side of the door was completely clear.

  In the light of day, everything that made the Alexandria Hotel the perfect spot for a Halloween party now made it look like a sad, old, forgotten building. If the Clark County Conservancy was successful in their petition to turn it into a historical landmark, would someone come along and return it back to its former glory? Or would it simply be awarded a plaque that mentioned what the building had meant to Proper back in the day?