Diane Vallere - Style & Error 02 - Buyer, Beware

by Diane Vallere

  “I have more to tell you too.”

  Loncar cut me off. “We appreciate your help, but we have a suspect in custody.”

  “Will you tell me who you arrested?”

  “No.”

  “So that’s it? No more flowers at work?”

  “No more work. You’re done at Heist.”

  “But Tony Simms hired me to do a job.”

  “Mr. Simms hired you to help figure out why his handbag buyer was murdered. That question’s been answered. Thank you for your help.” He held a hand out to formalize the end of our working relationship.

  “What about the poison?” I asked suddenly.

  “What?”

  “The poison? From the restaurant? I brought you samples from takeout? My cat?” My voice rose with each question.

  Detective Loncar retracted his hand. “The mushrooms they used in the truffle butter were poisonous. Somehow the supplier got a few of the bad kind mixed in with the regular delivery. They’re in the process of changing their supplier, and we can’t pinpoint whether the bad mushrooms came from the old delivery or the new one. Unfortunate accident. Couple of people got sick—nothing serious. They tossed their supply and started fresh. No truffle butter for the restaurant for awhile.”

  “But my cat and my friend—”

  “You shouldn’t be feeding your cat human food. Your friend is a different story. No one else reported passing out. Maybe she should eat more.”

  This time the detective let well more than a minute of silence pass before he offered his handshake and left with the two uniformed officers. I didn’t know what I expected from working with him, but it was more than this—and more than this and two bouquets of surveillance flowers too. I shook his hand, but the voice inside my head screamed, This isn’t over!

  I was scared the voice was right.

  Dante followed me into my kitchen. The light on my machine blinked.

  “Can you wait out front?” I asked. “I don’t want you to hear my messages.”

  I hit the playback button the second the screen door slammed.

  Beep: “Sam, it’s Eddie. Call me.”

  Beep: “Sam, where are you? It’s Eddie.”

  Beep: “Dude, you’re freaking me out.”

  Beep: “You didn’t have something to do with this, did you?”

  Beep: “Are you okay?”

  Beep: “I’m calling the cops.”

  It’s nice to be loved.

  I dialed Eddie’s cell number. He answered on the first ring. “I’m fine, and I didn’t do anything,” I said.

  “But you know about Kyle?”

  “I know about Belle. What happened to Kyle?”

  “The police arrested him half an hour ago.”

  24

  The news sucked the wind out of me. The phone clattered to the floor, and I reached for the edges of the counter to steady myself. “Dante?” I called out.

  He ran inside and guided me to a chair. “Put your head down,” he instructed, his hand hot on the back of my head.

  I bent forward and held my head in my hands, trying to shake the sound of voices in the distance. Then I realized the phone hadn’t disconnected when it landed on the floor and Eddie was still talking.

  Dante noticed it too. He scooped up the phone and said, “She’ll call you back.”

  “Dante, is Cat still going stir crazy?”

  He nodded.

  “You think she’d like to come over?”

  For three days I did little more than sleep. There were two lessons to be learned from my short time at Heist:

  a) Love doesn’t conquer all,

  b) I was borderline unemployable.

  Twice a day my friends checked up on me. At first I tried to make small talk, but it didn’t last. I dug into the pile of discarded clothes on the floor and pulled out a black polyester tunic with green and yellow trees embroidered on it. There was a hard spot on the right thigh where someone had accidentally melted it with a cigarette back when flammable polyester clothes were in style. You didn’t find cigarette holes in clothes anymore. Those were simpler times.

  It was like my life. I spent nine years working for Bentley’s New York. Eight years working my way up the retail ladder until I’d landed at the position of senior buyer for ladies designer shoes. I’d traded that experience to move back to Ribbon, the town where I grew up, in a bold move to try to figure out what I really wanted out of life.

  Moving to Ribbon had been about giving up the pressures of a job I knew I could do in order to retrace the steps of my life and figure out what it was I was meant to do. I hadn’t sought out the handbag buyer job at Heist; the job had found me. I’d been in a vulnerable enough position that I took it. And now, I was back where I had started: unhappy and unemployed.

  It wasn’t the crimes that left me unsettled either, though they didn’t help. It was the feeling of failing, repeatedly, that made me sick to my stomach. That’s what kept me from joining my friends downstairs, even if they took turns staying at my house.

  Cat brought me a tray of food on Friday. She tapped on the door. “Are you awake?” she asked softly. “I brought you grapes and cheese.”

  She carried the tray to the bed and sat it next to my leg. The weekend edition of The Style Section, the industry newspaper, was folded and tucked under a silver bud vase with a flower from the front yard. Logan stood up and walked over my knees to sniff the cheese. Cat held out her hand and set a kitty treat on the blanket. Logan lost interest in my cheese.

  “You couldn’t have known it was a crime of passion, Sam,” Cat said. “Nobody would have believed it.”

  “It doesn’t fit. Nobody ever mentioned Kyle being the jealous sort. I can’t see him killing his fiancé. All I ever heard was how well they got along.”

  “Sometimes it’s the ones you least expect.”

  “Sometimes …” I said.

  “Do you want to come downstairs and join us?”

  “Not yet.” I stared at the ceiling.

  “Do you want me to stay?”

  “No, I’d rather be alone.”

  Eddie delivered my tray on Saturday, bringing me his homemade macaroni and cheese. An origami monster sat on the corner by a glass of lemonade.

  “Dude, time to rise and shine.” He set the tray on the foot of the bed and pulled the cord on the curtains, flooding the room with unwelcome sunlight.

  “I don’t want to rise and shine.”

  “Then consider taking a shower.”

  I rubbed my eyes and blinked a few times to adjust to the brightness. Eddie fluffed a pillow from the chaise lounge that sat in the corner of my bedroom, and rearranged the frames lining the top of my dresser. He picked up the pearls I’d worn to work earlier that week and tucked them into my jewelry box, along with a couple errant earrings I’d left sitting out.

  “The police really arrested Kyle?” I asked.

  He turned to me. “Seems that way.”

  “But he was your friend.”

  “Sometimes you think you know people, but you don’t really know them at all.” He picked up yesterday’s pajamas and tossed them into the hamper. A pair of my panties were on the floor in front of it. He stood there looking at them before shutting the hamper, leaving them where they were.

  “Dude, you can’t stay in bed forever.”

  “I’m not ready to acknowledge what a colossal failure my life is.”

  He looked up. “Seems to me if you were really ‘just a buyer for Heist’ like you keep telling me, nothing’s really changed. You get up, you go to work, you do your job. Only you’re acting like you don’t have a job to go to. Why is that? Why would Kyle’s homicidal tendencies have anything to do with your job as buyer for Heist? As far as I know, you haven’t even called in sick for the past two days. And nobody’s been calling here looking for you either.”

  He stood in the doorway, one hand on the doorknob. Inside, I knew if I said I wanted to tell him everything that had been going on, he’d sit on th
e edge of the bed and listen. He’d forgive me for not confiding in him all along. He’d be what I needed. A friend.

  Only I couldn’t. Not yet. I didn’t believe Kyle was guilty. And if I was right, that meant this wasn’t over.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said.

  We looked at each other for a few more seconds before he let himself out of the room. I pulled the curtains shut, took a half-hour-long shower, and crawled back into bed. There was something I wasn’t seeing, and I needed to take notes, to reason it out.

  I opened the drawer to my nightstand and pulled out a wad of take-out menus I’d moved from the kitchen in an effort to cut down on my junk food delivery habit. I found a Sharpie on the floor by the closet and wrote the names of each player on top of the listings over my favorite comfort foods: Kyle Trent, Tony Simms, Belle DuChamp, Emily Hart. I rearranged the menus in different order, trying to see the connection between these four people but succeeded only in giving myself a craving for cheap Chinese food.

  The house remained silent for the rest of the night. I stared at the ceiling. Eddie was right. I couldn’t stay in bed forever. I pushed the covers back and opened the bedroom door. The serving tray sat on the floor. An Atomic Fireball rested in the middle of a small, white saucer, next to a note. It’s just you and me, Kidd.

  I belted on my silk kimono and went downstairs.

  “Hello?” I called.

  “The kids went to get something to eat,” Dante said. He folded a newspaper on his lap.

  “I got tired of staring at the sheets.”

  He held out the newspaper. “Want to read the details?”

  “Sure,” I said, taking the bundle. I felt him watching as I unrolled it and scanned the front-page headlines of the Ribbon Eagle and Ribbon Times respectively: Respected Businessman Endangers Life in Hostage Situation, and Fatal Showdown at Tradava Ends Murder Investigation.

  I went with the Times article first. It detailed Belle DuChamp’s visit to Tradava and her suspected love triangle with Kyle Trent and Emily Hart. “Ironically, the designer handbag collection that brought these three people together will most likely go bankrupt. Tradava has already distanced themselves from Vongole and, according to a statement from Simms, Heist will remain closed indefinitely to restructure their business model.”

  I flipped open the Ribbon Eagle and scanned the newsprint, a basic afternoon rehash of the information that had appeared in the Times. “Sources close to DuChamp and Trent confirm their business-relationship but maintain the couple kept their private dalliances private. According to local entrepreneur Tony Simms, ‘Belle DuChamp was a smart woman, too smart to risk her career for a one-night stand.’ Other sources report when Trent proclaimed his love for DuChamp, she denied reciprocating those feelings, and threatened to turn him in. People were concerned for her safety. ‘I confronted him and told him to back down, to leave her alone, but he was too upset. He pulled a gun and shot Belle. I was able to detain him until the police arrived.’ ”

  It was hard to fit these pieces of the puzzle into the thought patterns I’d been playing with for the past few days. First Emily met Kyle. Then he killed her. He professed love for Belle and she denied him. When he tried to kill her too, Tony Simms saved the day.

  I still didn’t like it.

  “Dante? When did you say Cat and Eddie would be back?”

  “About five.”

  “Do you think you could give me about an hour alone?”

  He studied my face. “I want to take a long shower and make a couple of phone calls to tell everyone I’m okay.”

  “If that’s what you need.” He left with not much more than a good-bye, his motorcycle kicking up gravel as he peeled out of the driveway.

  True to my word, I made those calls. To my parents in California. To my sister in Virginia. To Nick. I left a voice mail.

  And then I called Tony.

  I needed to know what was to become of my future at Heist, though with a three-day tenure, my imagination had already served me walking papers.

  I caught Tony in his office and asked him to come to my house. He agreed to come in about twenty minutes. It wasn’t a random amount of time, it was the minimum I required to look at least part human. Eighteen-and-a-half minutes later, dressed in the black pantsuit Heist had delivered earlier in the week, I descended the stairs as a silver BMW pulled into my driveway. I didn’t need to see the vanity plates to know it was Tony.

  My cell phone buzzed with a new text message from Dante: 10 more min. Here’s hoping Tony Simms could talk fast.

  I held the door open for him before he had a chance to ring the bell.

  “I heard about what happened. I’m sorry,” I said.

  “We’re all sorry. Thank you.”

  I was about to invite him to sit in my living room but changed my mind and had him follow me to the dining room. We sat in opposite chairs across the table from each other. A small wooden napkin holder my sister had made in seventh grade sat between us, holding a stack of plain white paper napkins. Tony turned down my offer of iced tea, so I sipped my own while he spoke.

  “Samantha, we’re going to close down the store indefinitely. Regroup and restructure. If we intend to have a future in Ribbon, we need to let the bad publicity pass. The other Heist stores shouldn’t be hurt by the press; in fact, it might help them. But that means we no longer need your services. In light of the recent deaths connected to Vongole, we are dropping their line. We’re also moving the buying offices for all of Heist from each individual store to a central office in Philadelphia. Thank you for taking on such an important role at the store.”

  “It was nothing,” I said.

  “We’re still planning on hosting the dedication at I-FAD, and I’d like you to be there. Can you do that?”

  “You just said I don’t work for the store anymore.”

  “I need you to be there as an ambassador of Heist. A liaison between the store and the college.”

  “What about Nora?”

  “She’ll be there too, but I need someone with your skill set to back me up. Someone who knows the score.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to have more tenured people from Heist there instead of me?”

  “I’ll have plenty of tenured people there. You represent the kind of new Heist blood we want. If you wanted to move to Philadelphia, I’d find a place for you in the center city store. But since you don’t, consider this your last job assignment. Representing the store. You can do that, can’t you?”

  “S-sure. Yes. I can do that.” I felt backed into a corner.

  He slid an envelope across the table to me. “And consider this payment for your time at Heist.”

  I didn’t want to look in the envelope because, after all I’d done, I didn’t know if I could allow myself to accept it. I didn’t want to know what I was turning down. I pushed the envelope back.

  “You’ve more than earned it,” he said. “I’ve written a letter of recommendation for you should you choose to pursue employment elsewhere in Ribbon. I understand you’ve had difficulty holding on to a job around town, and you’re not to be faulted for what happened. You were no more involved in the Vongole situation than I was.”

  A letter of recommendation from Tony would go a long way in offsetting my career cooties, even if I didn’t completely trust the man. He stood and held out a hand.

  “Samantha Kidd, I enjoyed having you on the payroll.”

  I stood too. “Tony Simms,” I mimicked, “I enjoyed being there.” We shook hands, me finally matching his two-pump handshake.

  “If there’s anything else I can do for you, don’t hesitate to call.” He held out his business card. I thanked him for the offer and watched him walk away.

  See, now that should make me feel good. Right? A noted businessman recognized my worth to the tune of—I glanced in the envelope he’d left behind—wow. That was a lot of cash.

  I pulled the stack of bills from the envelope and counted out ten thousand dollars i
n hundreds. There had to be some kind of mistake. I’d worked at the store for three days, and no way had I earned that kind of dough. Even if I had put myself at risk by working with a couple of greedy, homicidal sex-fiends, if the papers were to be believed.

  I ran to the door with the cash in my hand to see if I could catch Tony and ask if this was a mistake. Instead, Dante stood on my doorstep. I put my hand behind my back.

  “Give me a minute,” I said, and shut the door in his face.

  I put the money inside the front cover of the Halston biography on the coffee table, but the cover wouldn’t close. I moved it to the back of the book, ignoring the fact that it was no longer flat.

  “Come on in,” I said, as though slamming the door in his face was routine.

  “Got your mail. Couple of days’ worth.” He held a business-sized envelope between his fingers but pulled it away when I reached for it. “Something addressed to your cat?”

  I would have done better to mail the recaps to the cops. If nothing else, it would have been evidence that I was working with them, but who was to know that this whole thing would go down before I could offer up my discoveries?

  Still, I dialed Detective Loncar’s number.

  “Hi Detective, Samantha Kidd here.”

  “Ms. Kidd, like I told you, we’re all done here. No need for you to keep checking in with us.”

  “I know. I just, I have that information you needed. The spreadsheets I told you about? Remember, Kyle Trent gave them to me before he … you know … and I thought it might be important.”

  “You can bring them by if you want, but we already got a witness and a pretty solid case against him.”

  “Did he confess?”

  “Do you have anything else to tell me?”

  “You’d look good in blue,” I said.

  The detective hung up on me without saying good-bye. I stared at the two recaps, wondering if Kyle had been playing me when he gave me this info. Maybe he’d been the one trailing the breadcrumbs I’d been following.