Diane Vallere - Style & Error 02 - Buyer, Beware

by Diane Vallere

“Good. The dedication is at eight. Meet me there at seven.”

  “But—”

  “Time’s up. See you at the college.” He disconnected, leaving me with more questions than I’d started with and fewer opportunities for escape.

  “What was that about?” Dante asked.

  “The college is dedicating a lecture hall to Tony Simms next week. He asked me to go to represent the store, or act as a liaison to the store, or something like that. I tried to cancel, but he wouldn’t listen.”

  “Tell me again what he said when he offered you a job.”

  “That he valued my unique skill set.”

  “So that’s it.” He leaned back against the sofa, knees apart and wrists resting on his lap. “You’re the one link between all these people. He asked you to keep an eye on everybody else, but he’s the one keeping an eye on you.”

  27

  Dante left with the others and I suddenly felt very much alone. If I was right, and the killer was still out there, I was going to have to figure out a way to prove that and figure out a way to keep myself in one piece too. That was a tall order for someone in my size seven shoes. I didn’t want to be a part of this anymore. It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t fulfilling, and it might get me dead.

  In short, I wanted out.

  I needed another person close to the situation, another ace. Nick wasn’t due to come home for another two weeks. Then I remembered the way Andi had looked at Kyle on her cell phone picture. There was no way she believed him to be guilty, and if I wasn’t mistaken, that look spoke volumes of her feelings, even if she’d chosen not to speak of those feelings out loud. I had a good sense that I knew where to find her too, but the clock was ticking.

  I parked in the lot outside the bar. Her shiny black Miata was parked by the front door. When I entered I scanned the interior. There she was, perched on a spinning barstool, dangling a maraschino cherry and cleavage in front of the twenty-something mixologist. Maybe I’d been wrong. She didn’t look like the kind of woman pining away over another woman’s man.

  “What’ll it be?” the bartender asked. Andi spun on her chair and recognition hit.

  “Girlfriend!” she shouted, and hopped—or should I say slipped, because she didn’t seem to have control of her faculties enough to hop—off the barstool. She threw her arms around me.

  I hugged her back, knowing I had to play into our BFF routine. “I’ll have what she’s having,” I said.

  “RockStar and pomegranate vodka martini?” the bartender said.

  “You go, girl!” she proclaimed, struggling to right herself on the stool.

  The bartender set a frothy pink drink in front of me and Andi clinked my glass. “You are so smart. Hey, Steve, this is Samantha, and she’s, like, the smartest buyer in all of Ribbon. No! In all of Pennsylvania. No, wait! In the whole tri-state area!”

  Not that I didn’t enjoy the compliments, but I was starting to wonder if I really had it in me to pull Andi out of this moment of escapism and drag her back to reality and her unspoken love for a man suspected of killing the last two women he’d been involved with.

  “Um, Andi, have you read the news today?”

  “Screw the news. Have a drinkie!” She picked up her glass, shook the ice cubes around, and drained what was left. I caught Steve’s expression. He was watching her with interest too. Only our interests were obviously of different natures.

  I nursed my drink while she started on another that had appeared before her without even ordering. Steve leaned in front of her. “That one’s on the house.”

  “Ohh, honey, you know the way to my …” She dragged her finger over her lower lip and let the tip draw a line down her neckline. This was going nowhere fast. There was no way I was going to have a real, meaningful conversation with her tonight.

  “Andi, when’s a good time to talk?”

  “Talk, shmalk. Let’s party!”

  “Seriously. I mean, I need to have a serious talk with you.”

  “Screw serious! I just wanna have fun tonight! No worries! You with me?” she asked Steve the bartender.

  He picked up an ice cube and tossed it down her cleavage.

  “Oooohh! You nasty boy. Now who’s going to help me fish that out of there?”

  I couldn’t take any more of this. I unfolded a Bud Light napkin and pulled a pen from my handbag. Andi, call me tomorrow to talk. It’s about Kyle. I think we can help.—Samantha. I jotted my cell phone number down after my name and folded it carefully. When she wasn’t looking I tucked it into her handbag. She was too preoccupied to notice.

  I opened my fake Vongole clutch and pulled out my keys. When I looked up, I spotted Mallory George sitting in a corner booth. She buried her head in a large menu, but I wasn’t fooled. She’d been watching me from the second I’d walked in.

  The sun was halfway visible above the horizon as I drove home. Was it possible that I was making too much of situation that was already resolved? No. Definitely not. Two people were dead, and something was still not right. And just when I thought I was out on my own, I was pulled back in for the dedication at I-FAD. Heist was like the retail mafia. And even the envelope of money I’d moved from the Halston biography to under my mattress did nothing to comfort me.

  The lights were on at Nora’s house. I parked in my driveway and crossed the lawn, pushing a couple of crabapples out of my path. “I’ve been expecting you,” she said, holding the door open.

  She wore a Mercersburg sweatshirt pulled over a turtleneck and jeans. Blucher moccasins, standard issue at most prep schools, adorned her feet, and a stained white cotton apron dangled loosely over her clothes. She was the best candidate I’d ever seen for a makeover, but if given the chance, I wouldn’t change a thing. Some people just know who they are.

  “I saw you through the window. I was hoping you were heading my way. Care to test out a new recipe?”

  “Sure.” I followed her to the kitchen. Her house was laid out much like my own if you held the floor plan up to a mirror. She used an ice cream scoop to measure out a perfectly round dollop of rice into a bowl and scooped something vaguely orange over it. “Thai curry. It might be a little spicy. Want some bean sprouts?”

  She handed me a fork and set a bowl of sprouts on the counter. I scooted up onto one of her bar stools and dug a forkful into my mouth. Exotic flavors of basil and coconut hit me a split second before the heat.

  “Water?” I choked out.

  “Milk will be better. Is it hot? I wasn’t sure. I may have added too much liquid pepper. You’re okay with mushrooms, right?” She filled a glass with milk from the refrigerator and handed it to me. I drained it and toyed my fork around in the rice for a while, not sure if I wanted any more.

  “Nora, with everything that’s been happening around town, do you think it’s good timing for the dedication? Don’t you think it should be postponed?”

  “Tony was on the fence, but I convinced him to go for it.”

  “He was going to cancel?”

  “He was concerned for his and everybody’s safety. I think it’s wise that he arranged extra security.”

  “Detective Loncar?”

  “The detective on the Hart case? No. Well, I didn’t ask for him specifically. The college is hiring extra security officers to work for the night, and we’ll have a large presence of campus police. Between that contest and the matters at Heist, there’s bound to be some kind of activism. I admire that the students want something to protest, because it’s good to stand up for things, but in the event their activities get out of hand, someone’s got to be there to keep things under control.”

  “You think the students are going to riot against Tony Simms?”

  She laughed. “I’ve gotten beyond the age when I can predict what the students are going to do. What I do know is that several of the students participated in the promotional activities of the Heist contest and were not happy when there was no winner announced. You know, Simms owned each of the landmarks mentioned in the rules, an
d in each case there was really no chance for anyone to actually win.”

  “My team won. We swapped the Puccetti statue for a fake.”

  A knowing smile crept onto Nora’s face. “Wait here,” she said. I sampled another scoop of curry after she scaled the stairs, and refilled my glass with water to wash it down. The water ignited the heat in my mouth, and I ran to her fridge for milk.

  When I turned back around she was coming down the stairs holding a locked metal strongbox. She set it on the counter and spun the dial on the padlock until it opened, and pulled out a bundle wrapped in white sheets. She unwound the fabric and exposed a wooden statue that bore striking resemblance to the one we’d swiped from the college only a week before. I swallowed a mouthful of milk in one gulp and pounded on my chest until the pain went away. She pulled the statue away from me to avoid me from tainting it with DNA evidence.

  “This is the real Puccetti.” She had put on white gloves, the kind a magician wears while waving his hands as a distraction before the voila! moment. She kept one hand on the base of the man while the other gently patted him on the head.

  “I thought we stole the real Puccetti.”

  “You stole a knockoff of this one.”

  “And we replaced it with our own knockoff.”

  “And your knockoff was used to kill Emily Hart.”

  “You had this one the whole time?”

  “Yes.”

  She kept a finger on the head of the statue and spun him around to face her. “It’s been killing me not to tell you.”

  “But Tony Simms told me we’d won the contest. In fact, the team at Heist said one team succeeded in pulling off the stunt, and Simms said he would see to it that my team was paid the prize money. Why would he say that if we didn’t actually steal the original like the contest wanted?”

  Nora’s eyes flicked from my face to my bowl of curry, now virtually untouched. “Come into the living room with me. I can finally tell you the backstory.”

  28

  “Heist wanted a massive publicity event, one that would have a viral word-of-mouth feel that would energize shoppers. The idea was to be so different from what this town has seen that it would instantly feel cool,” Nora said.

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Once Simms heard the concept from the PR manager, he wanted to go full force with the idea. Originally it was a much smaller scale, like a scavenger hunt, but Simms knew he had the unique option of using his own holdings around Ribbon as the bait, and that would accomplish two things. He’d instantly connect Heist with landmarks from Ribbon, and he’d get the kind of publicity he wanted.”

  “Tony owns the statue?”

  “It’s been in his family for generations. His father donated it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art decades ago. It’s been at I-FAD for about five years now. There was a nice amount of publicity that went into the exhibit. So he decided to leverage that publicity by naming the statue as one of the objects on the list.”

  “I get it. He fooled the public by using a fake at the museum, so the real one was never at risk.”

  “That’s when I came in. The college appointed me keeper of the real statue. No one was ever going to know.”

  “Nora, that statue has to be worth millions. You kept it in your house?”

  “God no! It’s been in my safety deposit box. Just yesterday Tony asked me to make sure it was back in place for the dedication. I picked it up today and am delivering it to the school tomorrow morning.”

  “Who else knew the statue had been replaced with a fake?”

  “Simms, the PR manager of Heist, the dean of the college, and me. We didn’t tell campus police because we wanted them to take the protection of the statue seriously. When you stole it, they came to my house to deliver the news.”

  “We saw them that night. We were celebrating, at least we were until we heard the sirens. We thought they were coming for us.”

  “They weren’t happy when they heard they’d been duped.”

  I peered closely at the little wooden man on her counter. “So that’s the real McQueen.”

  “Don’t you mean McCoy?”

  “We called him—never mind.”

  “For what it’s worth, yours spooked a lot of people. You must have some very good contacts to have come up with a knockoff that good on such short notice.”

  I did. I thought back to Dante, showing up at my meeting with a folder of surveillance photos of the statue, and Eddie, who’d taken those photos and turned it into reality. I remembered our assignments: Cat as executive professor, Dante as security guard, me as undercover student. Undercover grad student.

  “You can’t repeat any of that, you know,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said, nodding. “I guess I can’t.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you at all, but it’s been killing me since you showed up at Heist with our fake.”

  My mind was abuzz. The killer, who had bashed Emily Hart’s head with Eddie’s copy of the Puccetti statue, would most likely be at the dedication. And while the press had reported about the murders, news of the statue as weapon had been kept quiet. The only people who knew were those in the inner circle: my friends, colleagues, and the killer. Whether or not the killer knew the statue would be at the dedication was one thing, but I’d bet he or she wouldn’t expect another knockoff.

  I was short on both time and ideas, but in the brief moments, when I ignored the fear of trying to trap a killer who had escaped the police, one fact remained consistent. The killer had used the fake statue to murder Emily Hart, and if I could trick him into thinking I had evidence to prove that, I could potentially catch him off guard and take him down. I excused myself from Nora’s house and all but ran home and called Eddie.

  “Can you make another fake Puccetti statue?”

  “Consider it done.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Seriously, consider it done.”

  “I know it’s no big thing, but I need to know the timetable.”

  “I made an extra when I made the first one.”

  “I know you—what?”

  “I needed a prototype, and I thought it might be a cool little item to remember our adventure. Meet me at Arners tomorrow morning. Seven thirty.”

  “O-kay …” Rarely did my plans go so smoothly.

  The next morning I dressed in a sequined tank top, a pair of navy chiffon harem pants, and a cropped white denim jacket with frayed edges. I buckled on blue T-strap sandals on a two inch heel, grabbed a yellow handbag, and headed for the local family owned diner. Eddie was already in a booth when I arrived, even though I was seven minutes early.

  “You’re up to something, dude,” Eddie said while munching on a piece of dry wheat toast.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “There’s no way you’d agree to a seven thirty meeting if you didn’t really need this. And by the way, MC Hammer called. He wants his pants back.”

  “One more crack about my clothes and I’m taking scissors to your Frankie T-shirts when you’re not looking.” I poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the table and waved at the waitress, pantomiming my order of bacon and scrambled eggs. “Speaking of weird accessories, what’s with the bowling bag?”

  “I couldn’t exactly walk in here with a wooden statue that looks a lot like a piece of art that was recently used in a homicide, could I?”

  “Yeah, but a bowling bag? At seven thirty in the morning?”

  “I’ve seen the handbags at Tradava. Bowling bag, doctor’s bag, knitting bag. That’s what they all are. Someone else’s bag. Pretend it’s Chanel and call it a day.”

  “Chanel never made a bowling bag. Vuitton did. Chloe, too. But not Chanel.”

  “Whatev. Why do I need to think about being covert? According to you, you just wanted a keepsake.”

  I’d slept on Nora’s information, and on my theories, and kept returning to the statue. It was the perfect setup.

  I shrugged. “It
was nice, knowing we pulled it off.”

  “I had my doubts, but your plan worked. Is that what you did at Bentley’s before you moved here?”

  “I told you what I did. I was a buyer. There’s a lot more to it than picking out pretty shoes. There’s plans, projections, strategies for three months, six months, one year, three years. Then there’s the constant what-to-do-when-things-don’t-sell pressure. You don’t get to make one strategy and call it a day. Sometimes trends don’t hit and you’re stuck with merchandise. That’s when you have to figure out a new way to drive your business and liquidate your inventory.”

  “Trends. That’s what you were supposed to be doing at Tradava. Trend specialist.”

  “Yes.”

  I could almost feel the heat from the light bulb over Eddie’s head. He had seen my natural planning and problem-solving abilities firsthand. “What’s next for you?” he asked.

  I felt the conversation shift. I knew he was taking about my work history and lack of job leads, so regardless of my suspicions that I wasn’t ready for what was next because I was still dealing with what was now, I answered the question on the table.

  “I don’t know. Temporarily I’m at a standstill.”

  I thought again about the money Tony had given me. It made me uncomfortable. In the past twenty-four hours I’d moved it from the Halston book to my mattress to the never-used salad crisper. If I deposited it in the bank, I could pay my bills for a few months and figure out my next step. Only, depositing it indicated I was keeping it, and as much as Tony Simms claimed I’d earned it, I still wasn’t sure what he was paying me for. A few days on the job or my silence?

  “I’ll do the thing at the college for Heist, and then I’m officially unemployed again,” I finally said. “Maybe I’ll call Andi, see if she has any contacts.” I checked my watch. “Better give her a couple of hours to sleep off that hangover, though.”

  Eddie looked suspicious. “You really think a party girl is going to have a job lead for you?”

  “It seemed pretty clear to me she was looking for an escape last night. So maybe she knows how I feel.”