Screaming. Giggling. Whoops of delight. Chatter. A little pushing. Some grabbing. One quick tug-of-war. And—oh my God—this purse party was fabulous.
In the big conference room at Marcie’s office building we’d filled the long table with our faux handbags and wallets for the lunch-hour party. These women had gone wild. They loved the bags! And Marcie and I were raking in the bucks.
It was over pretty quickly—the women still had to eat—and I was feeling like a real entrepreneur.
“We’re doing this again,” Marcie said, as we packed up the few bags that didn’t sell.
“You bet,” I said. “My friend Grace at the store, she wants to have a party. She knows about fifteen people who will come.”
“Cool,” Marcie said.
We hauled everything down to Marcie’s mom’s Pilot and she drove me to my apartment. I kept a few of the bags to show to Grace, then rushed inside to change; I was covering Bella’s shift in Housewares this afternoon while she was at the hair show.
I felt sort of covert, coming in today at 2:00 p.m., instead of my usual evening shift. Technically, no one—except Bella and me—knew I was supposed to be working now. My name wasn’t on the schedule. She’d mentioned to her department supervisor that she’d gotten someone to cover her shift, but the woman who ran housewares had been smelling fabric dye in the linens for a long time now, and I thought maybe she’d lost some crucial brain cells.
So, after I punched in, I saw no reason not to abuse the situation. I headed for the customer service booth.
“Are you ready to book a purse party?” I asked Grace, as she waited on a customer.
I expected her usual bright smile, but got a frown instead.
“Oh yeah, the purse party.” Grace took a breath. “You should know, Haley, that your idea was taken. I heard in the break room that there’s a party already set for tomorrow.”
Craig. That rat-weasel. I knew he’d stolen my idea. And now he was stealing my customers—right here in Holt’s.
I wanted to have it out with Craig, but not on the sales floor. The stockroom. I’d wait until he went into the stockroom. But I didn’t want to take a chance that I’d miss him.
I could hang out in the security office. Yeah, I could do that. Nobody really knew I was here today. I could watch the monitors and see when he went in—
Wait a minute.
“Haley, are you okay?” Grace asked. “I don’t blame you for being pissed.”
I was plenty mad, all right, but something else had taken over my thoughts.
When I’d looked at the stock room surveillance tape at my apartment, desperate to pin this murder on Craig, I’d figured he couldn’t have done it because the video showed Richard going into the stockroom after Craig was already in there. Craig hadn’t followed him in.
But maybe I had it backward. Maybe Richard had followed Craig. Richard might have been in the security office spying on that whore-bitch Glenna Webb, seen Craig go in, and followed. That made sense if it had been Richard and Craig whom Evelyn had overheard arguing earlier that evening.
“I’ll still buy a purse from you, Haley,” Grace said. “And I know some other people who will too.”
What had they been arguing about? And why had they taken it into the stockroom? Was it something personal?
Probably not, since Craig’s wife had cancer and wouldn’t have been available for what was, apparently, Richard’s favorite sport: screwing married women. So that left business, something to do with Holt’s, and Richard’s second-favorite sport: clawing his way up the corporate ladder.
“I’d like to buy a couple of purses,” Grace said, forcing a smile. “And my mom might want to give some as Christmas gifts. Haley?”
So if it wasn’t something personal the two of them had argued over, it had to have been something to do with the store. Was Richard trying to dig up dirt on Craig to make himself look valuable to the company? Craig didn’t seem a likely candidate. The man worked constantly. If he wasn’t on the sales floor he was in the stockroom. I’d seen him back there a number of times moving the luggage around, getting it ready for the returns truck to pick it up and—
What the…?
For days now, I’d scrolled through merchandise on the inventory computer looking for info to either restock an item, or give a customer a refund. But never—not once—had I noticed a piece of luggage marked for return.
“Haley?” Grace called.
I ignored her, went to the inventory computer, and scrolled through everything. Not a single piece of luggage had been taken out of the inventory. Not one. But I’d seen Craig readying it to load onto the returns truck. Why would he do that? Unless—
Oh my God. Craig was stealing luggage.
Stealing luggage?
Why would anybody steal luggage? It’s big, bulky, hard to move around. It’s hardly a high-demand item. It’s Holt’s house brand, not designer. I can’t imagine there’s some luggage black market out there. Even if you took it to a swap meet, or sold it on eBay, you wouldn’t get enough money for it to risk your job. And certainly, if you were going to steal from a department store, there were bigger, more profitable items you could take.
Still, I needed to tell someone. I didn’t want to talk to Jeanette, so I decided to see if Ty was here today.
“Haley, just don’t be too mad,” Grace said.
I realized that she’d been talking to me and I’d been so wrapped up in my own thoughts I hadn’t been listening. But whatever she’d said must have been important. She looked worried.
“Look, I know you two have had your differences,” Grace said, trying to sound calm. “But just because Rita is having a purse party doesn’t mean you can’t have one too.”
I froze.
Rita? Did she say Rita was having a purse party?
“Yeah,” Grace said, “she’s a bitch for taking your idea, but—”
“Rita stole my idea?” I asked, feeling my blood pressure shoot up. “Rita?”
“Well, yeah,” Grace said, and drew back a little.
Oh! That bitch! I hate her.
But I don’t have time to deal with her now.
I stormed down the hallway looking for Ty. When I didn’t find him in any of the offices, I went into the security office. He stood in front of the video monitors, looking as if he’d been expecting me—which I guess he had, since he’d been watching the screens.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Note, he picked up on my spirit right away and had the courage to ask. I like that in a man.
I could have blathered on for a half hour about Rita and my purse party business, but instead I told him about Craig.
“I’ve seen him getting luggage ready for the returns truck,” I said. “But none of it’s been marked for return in the inventory computer.”
“Maybe it’s an oversight,” Ty suggested. “Maybe Craig just hasn’t entered it into the computer yet.”
I shook my head. “The merchandise is supposed to be scanned as it’s loaded into the truck, taking it out of the inventory.”
Ty pressed his lips together, thinking for a few minutes. Then he said, “Do you think Craig is stealing luggage?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
He thought for another minute. “Why would anybody steal luggage?”
“Beats the hell out of me,” I said. Then it hit me. “Unless—”
But I didn’t get to finish my thought. Behind Ty, on the video monitor, I saw Julie, the credit greeter, blast through the stockroom doors near the intimates department. Her arms were up and, even without audio, I knew she was screaming.
Ty turned, saw it too, and we bolted out of the security office. We intercepted her near the children’s clothing department.
She screamed incoherently. I was ready to bitch-slap her—just to get her attention, of course—when Ty grasped her arm.
“What happened?” he demanded, in that commanding voice men have.
Julie panted for
a few seconds, then said, “Evelyn! It’s Evelyn! I saw her in the stockroom! She’s—she’s dead!”
I shoved past Julie and raced into the stockroom. For some reason, I thought Evelyn would be upstairs, like Richard had been, but I found her at the foot of the staircase. She lay on her side, one leg bent the wrong way, blood coursing down her face from a cut on her forehead.
My stomach heaved. My eyes welled.
Not Evelyn. No, not Evelyn.
Then she moaned. Oh, thank God. She wasn’t dead.
Ty rushed past me and knelt beside her, feeling her pulse. I dropped to my knees and took Evelyn’s hand.
“Looks like she took a hard fall,” Ty said, glancing up at the tall, steep staircase. “Julie’s calling 9-1-1.”
“Hang in there, Evelyn,” I said, talking kind of loud, for some reason. “Help will be here in a few minutes.”
Evelyn roused a little, looking lost and bewildered. She mumbled something.
“You fell down the stairs. But it’s okay,” I told her. It was stupid, but people with absolutely no real knowledge of a situation always say it, so I said it. “You’re going to be fine.”
Her lips moved. I thought she was trying to tell me something, so I leaned down.
“…locker,” she whispered.
I guess she wanted me to get her purse from her locker to take to the hospital with her, so I said, “Okay. I’ll get your purse. No problem.”
She grimaced and shook her head. “Yours…”
“My purse?” I asked, trying to figure out what she meant. Then I realized. “You want me to come with you?”
Evelyn managed to shake her head, and I could see it caused her more pain, but she looked determined to speak. I leaned down until my ear was at her mouth.
“Your…locker,” she mumbled. “Pushed…”
I sat up. My blood ran cold. I looked down at Evelyn and saw that her wild-eyed look wasn’t from pain, but fear.
“She said she was pushed,” I told Ty.
He lurched to his feet and started searching the area. I stayed at Evelyn’s side, watching, listening hard. A number of employees rushed in. Somebody ripped open a Candies comforter set and spread it over Evelyn. Someone else grabbed a couple of Egyptian cotton towels and eased them under her head. The loading dock door rolled up and I heard sirens approach.
The guys from the ambulance took over, but I didn’t want to let go of Evelyn’s hand. They were very gentle with her, attached some tubes, got her leg braced, and put her on a stretcher.
“I’ll come to the hospital with you,” I told her, as they started to wheel her away.
Evelyn shook her head frantically. “Your locker…”
I didn’t know if she was delusional, or confused from the fall, but I stayed behind when the ambulance pulled away. Ty came up next to me and put his arm around my shoulder. It felt nice. I leaned against him. That felt nicer.
We walked into the store. Along the way, the employees asked about Evelyn. Everyone seemed concerned, as if they genuinely cared. Shannon was already taking up a collection for flowers.
Ty’s cell phone rang—it was probably that Sarah Covington—and he went into the office and closed the door. I guess he was done comforting me; I wondered if his old girlfriend Claudia Gray had felt this way too.
I debated, for a minute, about what to do, then headed for the break room. That girl who’d lost thirty pounds was in there eating—finally!—a bag of chips. I guess news of Evelyn’s fall had gotten to her. She deserved them, no doubt about it, but after my own failed improved-diet-and-exercise plan, I couldn’t let her do it. An intervention was in order.
“Don’t do this to yourself.” I grabbed the chips off the table. She didn’t fight me. I ate them myself as I went to my locker, just to remove her temptation, of course.
I couldn’t imagine why Evelyn wanted me to come here, but I needed to check it out. I opened my locker. Inside, atop my purse, were several folded sheets of paper that had been slipped through the slot in the door.
“Oh my God…,” I mumbled. It was the employee work schedules for the day of Richard’s murder that had gone missing. Evelyn must have taken them. But why? Why would she want to cover for a murderer?
The other paper was an official Holt’s form. An inventory request. I’d never seen it before and I didn’t know exactly what it meant. But I knew who did.
I left the break room and went into the office. Ty was on the phone. I couldn’t tell if he was talking to Sarah or not. I paced around, huffing irritably until he hung up. “What’s this?” I asked, shoving the form at him.
He read it over. “Where did you get this?”
“What is it?” I asked again. I was in no mood.
“We do inventory once a year, unless there’s a problem, or a suspected problem,” Ty said. He tapped the paper. “This is a special request for an inventory of this year’s Christmas merchandise, the designer handbags, to take place in mid-December.”
“And it was requested by Richard,” I said. “On the day he was murdered.”
Ty looked at the form again, but I knew he wasn’t really seeing it. He was thinking—the same thing as me.
“Richard thought Craig might steal the designer bags. He was probably suspicious of all the game systems that were supposedly shoplifted last year,” I said. “Richard was overheard arguing with someone the night of his murder. I’ll bet it was Craig.”
“Richard was arguing with someone? How do you know that?” he asked, surprised.
“On the surveillance tape, Richard went into the stockroom after Craig.”
“When did you see the surveillance tape?”
“He must have seen him on the monitor, followed him in, confronted him,” I said, imagining the scene in my mind. “Craig’s wife has cancer. He’s desperate for money.”
“Craig’s wife has cancer?” Ty asked.
“That’s probably why Evelyn didn’t tell anybody what she knew,” I realized.
“What’s Evelyn got to do with this?”
Everything, I realized. On the night of Richard’s murder, when I’d come out of the stockroom and told her I’d found Richard’s body in there, the first thing she’d asked was where Craig was. I thought she was just worried because he was her supervisor, but as I’d suspected before, there was more to it than that.
“When I phoned the police and everybody to tell them about Richard, I caught Evelyn going through his desk,” I said. “She must have been looking for the inventory request form. She probably thought it might incriminate Craig, and she felt sorry for him because of his wife. But she must have changed her mind about him, because she warned me to stay away from him, after he tried to get me fired.”
“Craig tried to get you fired?” Ty asked.
I huffed. “Don’t you know anything that goes on in your own store?”
I guess Ty didn’t want to answer that because he said, “If you think Craig intended to steal the designer handbags, where’s the proof?”
“In Craig’s garage.”
Now Ty was looking a little annoyed.
“You’ve been in Craig’s garage?” he asked.
“He’s got knockoff purses from the Fashion District in there. Dozens of them,” I said. “Craig smuggled the real bags out of the store inside the luggage, with the help of the returns truck driver, of course. They probably have a store connection somewhere who bought them.”
“And to balance the inventory, Craig substituted the fake bags,” Ty added.
“He had to. He couldn’t get away with that shoplifting excuse, like last year with the game systems,” I said.
“Handbags would be easier. No serial numbers, and proving the purses were fakes wouldn’t be easy.”
“Only I nearly screwed that up,” I realized, “when I rattled off my extensive knowledge of handbags, hoping I could work in that department. No wonder he’d told me to get my purses right away, he knew I’d recognize the fakes. And no wonder he’d tried to get
rid of me by getting me fired.”
It all made sense, perfect sense. Ty and I just stood there for a moment, digesting it. Then Ty said, “Where’s Craig?”
Good question. I hadn’t seen him in the stockroom, or out on the sales floor.
“I’m going to call the police,” Ty said. “You stay here.”
He picked up the phone and I headed out the door.
Craig must have known Evelyn suspected him of something. They worked closely together. She knew everything that went on in that department. Maybe he’d been waiting for just the right time to try and get rid of her. So why had he picked today?
Coincidence? Maybe. Or perhaps it was because he assumed that, as usual, I wasn’t working. He had no way of knowing I was covering Bella’s shift in Housewares—where I might actually have gone at some point this afternoon—so, for all he knew, I wouldn’t be in the store until later in the day. Maybe he’d planned it that way. Maybe he’d taken a chance that I wouldn’t have an alibi, and the police, already suspecting me in Richard’s murder, might think I’d gone after Evelyn too.
It was a guess, speculation, on my part. But the one thing I was sure of was that Craig had intended to kill Evelyn when he’d pushed her down those steps.
I circled the store, but didn’t see Craig. His Chevy Blazer was in the parking lot, when I peeked out the door, so he was here somewhere. The stockroom.
I went inside. It was quiet, just as it had been the night of Richard’s murder. I guess none of the other employees wanted to come back here, after Evelyn’s fall. Not that I blamed them.
Slowly, I made my way between the towering shelves of merchandise, looked in the janitor’s closet, behind the pile of merchandise awaiting the returns truck. Nothing. At the foot of the stairs, I stopped. Evelyn’s blood had left a dark spot on the concrete. I stepped around it and went up the steps.
I couldn’t imagine that Craig would still be in the stockroom. If he had good sense, he’d have left. But I suppose that someone who steals from his employer, murders one person, and pushes another down the stairs can’t be accused of having good sense.
At the top, I paused. Richard had been murdered up here. Evelyn had been pushed from here.
Handbags and Homicide Page 24