“I hope for your sake she does.”
“For what it’s worth, she told everyone in the bar that I was the smartest buyer in the entire tri-state area. Too bad I didn’t have a tape recorder with me.”
“You are smart, Sam. We all know it. That’s why we listen to you.”
“Since when do you listen to me?”
“The gala? Swiping the statue? Your genius plan to pull that off?” I stared at him, stunned by his frank compliment. “Seriously, dude, you’re way too hard on yourself. Just because you can’t keep a job around here doesn’t mean people aren’t in awe of what you’ve accomplished. Even yesterday I overheard a couple of the Tradava executives talking about,” he made air quotations with his fingers, “ ‘that trend specialist we used to have. The one with the great personal style’. And you know as well as I do that fashion people can be a little judgmental.”
“People from Tradava said that? What else did they say?”
“Let’s just leave it at that, shall we?”
“What else did they say, Eddie?”
He averted his eyes, cleared his throat, and mumbled something under his breath.
“They said too bad corpses followed you wherever you went.”
“They didn’t.”
“Those weren’t the words they used, but they kinda did.”
“What about Belle DuChamp? She was killed at Tradava, and I was nowhere near there. I was out having drinks with Andi.”
“Yeah, no one really understands that one.”
“What do you mean, no one?”
“Just saying, you’ve made yourself quite a reputation around these parts.”
“Sometimes I wonder why I hang around you.”
“Because I don’t buy into the gossip? Because I like you for who you are? Because I’m willing to stare death in the face and hang out with you, knowing that just being in the same room with you might increase my chances of impending doom?”
I smacked him. Not across the face or anything dramatic like that, but still, I whapped his upper arm hard enough that a welt would appear in five … four … three … two … there it was.
He rubbed his bicep with the other hand and smiled. “The same goes for Cat, you know. When this whole thing started she was in it for the shopping spree. Now that she’s seen what you’re capable of, she’s impressed. She put her life at risk by associating with you. Probably Nick too. Did you tell him about all of this?”
“Nick would rather not talk about Heist anymore.” I thought about that last conversation we’d had.
“It’s probably not going to get any easier,” Eddie said.
“What?”
“The long distance thing.”
“Nick’s coming back in a couple of weeks.”
“Dude, he’s a shoe designer. He’s going to spend half the year in Italy. I know you know that. I just don’t know if you know that.” Eddie tipped his head and scratched the short blond hair that had grown in on the side of his Mohawk. “There is one person you could talk to.”
“You mean Dante?” I leaned back into the red vinyl booth and stared up at the ceiling, trying to figure out what to say. “He’s different from Nick, that’s for sure. It’s almost like he’s encouraging me.”
Eddie leaned forward and propped his elbows on the table. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
“Shoot.”
“You moved here to start over, to leave your old life behind, right?”
“Yes, but that didn’t exactly work out—”
Eddie cut me off with a raised hand. “Nick’s somebody from that life. That former life.”
“You’re from my former life.”
“That’s different. We know each other from high school. That’s like the you you were before you became the you you are.”
“Sure, that’s clear.”
“What I mean is, we got to know each other when we were still figuring out who we were. You took a side street after that—the one that landed you in New York. That’s where you met Nick. He doesn’t know the person I knew at Ribbon High School, the person who risked her own reputation to save me from a cheating scandal that would have impacted my future.”
I pushed the fruit around on my plate for a couple of seconds when I remembered that. Eddie as the new kid in high school. The football player who copied off his test. The accusation that Eddie had been the one to cheat. And me, in the principal’s office the next day, admitting in confidence that I’d seen the whole thing. Eddie’s scholarship to art school was safe after that, and until I read what he wrote in my yearbook, I didn’t know he knew what I’d done for him.
“I think Nick sees that part of me too.”
“Sure, but he met the professional out to prove something to the world. Who you are today, the Samantha who moved back to Ribbon to start over, came second to him, not first. Dante’s like a breath of fresh air—”
“—that smells like cinnamon—” I interjected.
“You know what I mean. You’re here in Ribbon, and in your first six months you did something nobody believed you could do. Maybe you should run with that.”
“But Nick—I can’t explain how I feel about Nick. Since the first time I met him, there was something there. A spark. And for all that time I worked at Bentley’s, we never acted on it. Now we can.” I speared a slice of pineapple from Eddie’s plate and took a bite.
“What I don’t get is Nick’s behavior.” He popped the last piece of crust into his mouth and washed it down with coffee. “He knew you were involved. He wouldn’t tell you to leave things to the cops unless he knew the cops were involved in something. So why back way now? And why not want to talk about it? I think you’re just trying to bait me again. Unless Dante’s right about Nick not knowing you at all.”
He got a second slap for that.
“Samantha? This is Andi Holloway. “I just found your note in my handbag. I’m concerned. Call me.”
I ran to the answering machine. “Hello, I’m here,” I said, breathlessly into the phone. “You got my note?”
“Yes. I’m not sure what it means.”
“I wanted to talk to you last night, but you had a couple of distractions.” I trailed off, not sure the best approach was to tell her that I’d watched her get sloshed, or ask how it felt to wake up next to a different bartender seven nights a week. Actually, I kinda did want to know about that last one.
“Oh, those boys, we just like to have fun. It was nothing. So, what did you want to talk about?”
“Kyle Trent.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone. “Andi? Are you still there?”
“What do you know about Kyle?”
“I don’t think he killed Belle DuChamp.”
Her end went silent for a few moments, long enough that I wondered if she had disconnected.
“Hello, Andi? Are you still there?”
“Who do you think killed her?” she asked.
I took a deep breath, and then exhaled. “Tony Simms.”
“Give me your address. I want to hear your plan to get that bastard.” This time there was no mistaking the click on the other end of the phone.
29
By the time Andi arrived, I’d fleshed out my thoughts on the take-out menus. I held them in my hand like a fan, ready to make my case for her. My denim jacket hung from the back of a dining room chair. Three sequins had fallen from my tank top and landed on the table next to a dusting of pretzel salt.
“Are you ordering food? I already ate,” she said, glancing at the menus.
“These are my notes. Follow me.”
Andi pulled a chair away from the table and sat. I’d been sitting for too long and instead paced back and forth on the other side of the table.
“You told me Simulated Trucking delivers Vongole handbags to Heist. Right?”
“Right.”
“That’s the key.” I looked down at what I’d written on the menu from B&S Sandwich Shop. “Tony Simms owns S
imulated Trucking.”
“Tony Simms owns a lot of things,” she said.
“Why is everyone so willing to accept that? It’s a conflict of interest. Tony owns Simulated, and Tony owns Heist. Simulated delivers the handbags to Heist.”
“I never thought much about it.”
“There’s more.” I flipped the menu over. “Heist has a growth strategy in place for Vongole, but didn’t Tradava cancel orders because they felt the bags weren’t up to the appropriate quality standards?”
Andi sat up straighter. “How do you know that?”
“Kyle told me. He thought it was suspicious.”
“He was right to be suspicious.” She sat back in her chair and picked a small pretzel out of the bowl I’d set in the middle of the table, and tapped the pretzel on the placemat. “Last season, Kyle brought it to my attention. I contacted the factory in Italy. They said the leathers came from a new source, and they weren’t using them anymore.”
“Did they offer to take the bags back from Tradava?”
“Better. They offered to pay all markdowns if Tradava liquidated them.”
I thought about the pile of Vongole handbags on the Tradava selling floor. The pile-it-high, let-it-fly merchandising certainly didn’t improve the appearance of the bags, but if Vongole was paying markdowns, Tradava probably encouraged the bargain-basement mentality.
Andi leaned forward. “What else do you have?”
I tossed the sandwich menu onto the table and flipped open the Chinese menu. “Emily was trying to exit the Vongole business. She must have known something was up.”
“But that doesn’t make sense. Belle bought out my inventory.”
“I know, right? I thought that was weird too. That’s when I realized Belle had some additional interest in the Vongole business.” I held the menus in my right hand and flapped them against the fingertips on my left. “But before we get to how Belle ties in, let’s follow this.” I squinted to read my writing over the fried rice options. “Kyle and Emily were engaged. No doubt, their loyalties were to each other and not to their respective stores.”
“Which would have pissed of their respective stores,” Andi interjected.
“I think that’s when Belle started the rumor about Kyle, to get between them—”
“—So Emily would stop listening to him—”
“—and get back onboard the Vongole gravy train.”
Andi’s eyes had lit up with our exchange. We were finishing each other’s sentences. She wasn’t pointing out any flaws with my logic. She saw exactly what I saw.
“Tony ultimately pockets the profits from Heist,” I added.
She crushed the pretzel in her fist. “Between Tradava’s cancellations and Heist dropping the line, Vongole wouldn’t be able to recover. We have a lot tied up in those two accounts.”
“How would it affect your showroom?” I asked.
“I’d be fine, if that’s what you’re wondering. Vongole is my biggest account, but I rep other lines. I could easily pick up another handbag line and use my contacts to fill the void. I never did because I’d have a conflict of interest between two different vendors.” She brushed her palms together, sprinkling pretzel crumbs like pixie dust over her placemat.
“How did you put all of this together?” she asked.
“It all started with the statue.”
Her brows pulled together, and three small wrinkles appeared between them. “What statue?”
“Heist had a contest.” I told Andi about the ad in the paper, the Puccetti statue, and how it had tied us to the murder of Emily Hart. “If Eddie hadn’t knocked off the statue, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you right now. That’s the key.”
“How so?”
“Tony Simms owns the statue. He’s the only one who would have had access to the knockoff we left the night we stole it. That statue was what he used to kill Emily. He probably knew the statue was a fake and our fingerprints would be all over it.”
The three wrinkles between her eyebrows marked her thought processes, and her eyes stared into mine in a manner at odds with the vacant party girl from the night before. She was thinking about what I had said. She was gauging if she should confide in me. My plan needed her, and she needed a push.
“Andi, I saw how you looked at Kyle in that picture on your phone. I think he means a lot to you, more than just a buyer/designer relationship. And I know how that feels. The guy I’m—Nick Taylor—he was one of my vendors when I was a buyer at Bentley’s. We had to be professional because of our jobs. But that didn’t last forever, and now there’s no conflict of interest, and even though he’s in Italy and I’m here, we’re trying. Just like you and Kyle could try if he was clear of this mess and had a chance to move on. You can help him get that chance, if you want, but he’s never going to move on if he’s suspected of something he didn’t do.”
She sat back against the wooden chair, absorbing my words. I was a little surprised I’d volunteered as much personal information as I did, and part of me wanted to take it all back, but it was true. And if it helped convince her to help clear an innocent man and trap a guilty one, it was worth it.
“Here’s what I think has been going on with the handbags.” I sank into the chair opposite her. “The showroom has the real samples, produced in Italy by quality factories. After the orders are written, a different factory produces the bags with imitation skins and cheap hardware. Somebody in that equation is pocketing the difference.”
“You think Kyle knew. Tony figured out how to keep him from telling anybody his secret.”
I nodded. “I think Belle knew too. That’s why he killed her.”
She lobbed questions at me, questions I answered deftly, having recently spent a week reasoning out these very same conundrums from a cocoon of down comforting and stuffed animals. The questions I didn’t anticipate were answered slowly as I reasoned them out inside my head against the facts I knew. By the time the sun went down and the air grew chilly, we were on the same page. Unfortunately, that page indicated one very scary thing. I was about to meet the killer at the dedication at I-FAD, and with the exception of a handbag rep with a happy-hour habit, nobody believed me.
“The thing is, Tony Simms didn’t get to be Tony Simms by accident. He’s a smart guy. We have to be slick about this. We have to make him think we know everything. We have to get him so worried that he’s about to be caught that he trips up. We probably aren’t going to have any backup from the cops either, considering they have Kyle in custody.”
“Let’s hear your plan,” she said.
I studied her face and took a deep, steadying breath. “He murdered Emily with the statue, right? So we make him think the cops have the wrong statue, meaning that we pulled another switch and the one we have has his fingerprints and her, um, blood.”
“That’s going to take some doing.”
“True, but it can be done.”
“How are you planning to confront him without getting killed yourself?”
“Good question. I guess I’ll have to rely a little on luck.”
I made my apologies—some prior commitment I pretended I’d missed—then triple-locked the front door and found my cell phone in the bottom of my handbag. I stared at the keypad for a solid twenty seconds before I called the only person I trusted.
30
“I need your help,” I said when Dante answered.
There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. I stood very still, not sure if I was on the verge of a bad decision. Finally, he spoke.
“What time does your man call you?”
I blushed even though he couldn’t see me. “Nine. Ish”
“Ish?”
“Nine. Exactly at nine.”
“I’ll be there at nine twenty.”
“See you then.” I exhaled a long breath I didn’t know I had been holding.
If I were a different kind of person, I should have been able to walk away from it all myself, but I’d gotten in
volved too far, and the only way I knew to make sure I came out of it alive was to get the person that I believed to be a killer behind bars. I had learned that, somewhere in me, under the fashionable exterior and the business savvy that had launched my career, that there was also a need to see justice done.
I couldn’t explain it. I half-wished I could. Truth be told, since Kyle Trent had been arrested, I couldn’t sleep at night, I couldn’t eat during the day, and I’d lost my desire to accessorize.
I couldn’t live like this.
When the phone hadn’t rung by nine thirteen, I called Nick.
“Hey,” I said. “It’s me.”
“What’s going on?” he asked. His voice was cool.
I knew he didn’t want to talk about the homicide. But with the meeting at I-FAD in my immediate future, there wasn’t much else I could think about. The best way to maintain a truthful conversation with Nick is to tell him everything. That, I knew, to be right. Only I wasn’t ready to hear what he had to say, even though he’d been remarkably supportive up till now. I was on the verge of doing something really, really dumb—or genius, depending on how you looked at it—and I didn’t want his reaction to sway me from my plan. I adopted what I knew to be a successful manner of communicating the truth, without sacrificing my privacy. I finished all of my sentences in my head.
“Just hanging out.” I glanced at the wall clock and climbed on a dining room chair to mark the time Dante was going to arrive with a yellow Post-It note.
“Are you glad that whole mess is over?”
“I’m not exactly sure it’s over,” I said without thinking, distracted by the Post-It that had only partially stuck to my clock and now dangled by a corner.
“Kidd, why do you do this? Why can’t you just let it go?”
“You sound like you’re judging me.”
“I just want to understand how your brain works.”
“My brain works like it’s always worked. I like to solve puzzles. I like to figure things out. I like resolution.”
Diane Vallere - Style & Error 02 - Buyer, Beware Page 18