Dior or Die (Joanna Hayworth Vintage Clothing Mysteries Book 2)

by Angela M. Sanders

  Joanna grasped the edge of the table. "Please, hear me out. Poppy's the best person for the auction. She knows the audience—who can bid high, who will compete with whom. She'll raise the most money by far."

  "But she's practically a felon. Who knows? Maybe she'll show up high or steal something," Lacey said. Her toy poodle started barking at a high pitch. "Hush, Wally. Mommy needs you to be quiet."

  Jeffrey's head whipped from speaker to speaker.

  "Calm down, Lacey," Clary said. "It's not like Poppy would pickpocket the guests. If anything, she'd be on her best behavior." He leaned back, crossing one leg over the other. "I like the idea."

  Joanna shot him a bewildered glance. Well, well. Clary was full of surprises. "You wouldn't regret it. I'm certain."

  "It's still a bad idea," Lacey said. "If anything goes wrong, not only will it screw up the evening, but no one will ever go to a NAP event again. Think about it. Half the people in that room had diamonds stolen from them or know somebody who did."

  "But we'd sell out the remaining tables like that." Clary snapped his fingers. "Everyone would want to come out to see her." The group was quiet for a moment. Ticket sales for the dinner had been lagging. "A quick press release, and I guarantee people will be talking about the auction for months." He tapped a finger on the desk. "Yes. I like it."

  Lacey shook her head and pulled her poodle closer. "If you really want to do it, fine. But I won't take any responsibility."

  "Jeffrey, you're the only one here actually with NAP. What do you think?" Clary asked.

  "Well," Jeffrey smiled uncertainly. "I can't really say—"

  "Fine then. We'll do it," Clary said.

  "Poindexter" indeed, Joanna thought. The man had some take-charge in him.

  "Problem solved. We already have a contract with Poppy, no?" Clary asked. Jeffrey nodded. "Then she's our auctioneer. It's settled."

  Jeffrey sat back, apparently resigned to relinquishing control of the meeting to the Baronet.

  "Great." Clary pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose and picked up the agenda. Not many people could make such stuffy glasses look more Cary Grant than Grandpa Walton, but he pulled it off. "Next up, dresses for the greeters. Joanna?"

  Joanna leapt at the chance to move on. "Yes, I found some gorgeous late 1950s cocktail gowns, including two Traina-Norells and a Galanos."

  Clary leaned forward at the conference table. He had rejected the coffee Jeffrey brought from NAP's break room. A paper demitasse of espresso from Spella Café, a small local roaster, sat at his elbow. "Let's see them. I talked to Eve, and if these don't work she said she's happy to lend us some of hers."

  "Oh, I think you'll love them," Joanna said quickly.

  "Did you bring pictures?" Lacey asked. As she talked, she dipped into the massive pale green handbag on the floor next to her and pulled out her buzzing phone. Instead of looking up for Joanna's reply, her fingers worked the phone's keyboard.

  Joanna's smile froze. Damn. She'd forgotten to touch base with the Mother Superior, let alone bring photos. In fact, she hadn't even seen the dresses firsthand. She'd been so busy following up on Poppy, she hadn't stopped by the convent yet. If the nuns didn't come through, she had no idea where she'd scare up five "Hollywood Glamour" gowns in two days. "Do you have a laptop handy?"

  Jeffrey pushed his laptop across the table.

  "You'd better do it." Joanna looked at the computer. "I'm not so great with those things. Look up Sisters Vintage."

  "Sisters Vintage? I thought your store was called something else. Louella's something or something like that," Lacey said.

  "Tallulah's Closet. But I'm, well, as a special favor, I'm borrowing these dresses."

  Jeffrey clicked past the Sisters Vintage opening screen and enlarged a photo of a black Galanos cocktail dress with a portrait collar.

  "It says it's on hold." Lacey put her phone on the table.

  Relief washed over Joanna. The Mother Superior had come through. "On hold for us."

  "Nice styling," Clary said under his breath. Joanna filed that away to tell Sister Mary Alberta. "Where is this store? Somewhere in town?"

  "It's internet-only," Joanna said. She didn't feel the need to go into the whole convent angle.

  Jeffrey clicked to another dress, this one a vivid red satin. The model's tattoo snaked above the off-the-shoulder sleeves. "It looks like they're in some kind of church. Is that a crucifix?" He pointed at the screen.

  Joanna stepped in. "The greeters will need to bring their own shoes, but I can provide jewelry. Apple and I will help with hair and getting them dressed."

  The vintage dresses would stand out even among the guests' expensive evening clothes. The long, full skirts, the careful cut of an armhole and boning in a bodice were details even the fanciest boutiques in town couldn't provide these days. She'd have to remember to load her purse with business cards—if the committee okayed her selection. She glanced from face to face.

  "I guess these will work." Clary picked up the agenda again. "Next up, food. Jeffrey, did you make sure we'll have enough gluten-free entrees?"

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Home at last. Joanna set her purse on the chaise longue and checked the blinking answering machine. Three messages. Paul kept warning her that one day she'd wear out her last answering machine tape and have to switch to voice mail, but until then she clung to her Clinton-era machines.

  She pressed "play" and went to the kitchen. Pepper head-butted her calf as she lifted the container of kibble from the top of the refrigerator and poured some in his dish.

  "Hey Jo." Paul. "Where have you been? I stopped by the store, but Apple said you'd asked her to work today. You've been kind of caught up in this whole Poppy thing, and I want to make sure you're all right."

  That's sweet. She'd see him later tonight, anyway. She didn’t plan to stay the night at her place alone until the auction was over and the threatening caller was in police custody.

  The machine beeped again. "Babette, it's Ted Tyler," Apple said, using their code spy names from when they were children. Joanna laughed. They hadn't played Ted and Babs since fifth grade. "I'm stopping by after the shop closes to hear more about the covert operation. Over and out." She'd have to tell Apple about the threatening call when she stopped by, damn it. She'd put it off too long as it was.

  The machine beeped again to deliver its third message. "Hi, it's Helena." Joanna stared at the answering machine as if she'd hear more clearly that way. "I'm sorry about yesterday. I know I let you down. It's just that I was so worried about Gil. He—he—anyway, he's fine now. He’d had a panic attack, that’s all. I guess I overreacted." She laughed weakly. "No cause for alarm. I'll see you at the NAP auction."

  Joanna pressed "rewind." She put her hands on her hips and looked at the portrait of Aunt Vanderburgh. "Strange, huh? What do you think, Auntie V? Something going on between Helena and her husband?"

  The portrait stared in its usual disapproval. Something strange is always going on, it seemed to say.

  ***

  "Just a quick one, then. I'm due at Paul's for dinner." Joanna pulled a jar of honey from the cupboard and set it next to the lemon and bottle of gin on the kitchen table. "What are the proportions?"

  Apple perched on the kitchen's stepping stool, which with its seat flipped down made a chair. In her hands was Ted Saucer's Bottoms Up cocktail manual from the early 1950s. "Naughty illustrations." She held up the book to show a pin-up girl naked but for black stockings, seen through an upturned champagne saucer.

  "Booze and dames." Joanna rolled a lemon on a cutting board to loosen up its juice. "I put the reference librarians to work tracking it down once I heard the Bee’s Knees was Vivienne’s favorite cocktail."

  "I hope you tell those librarians how much you appreciate them. For Goddess’s sake, Jo. Everyone else knows how to use a search engine."

  "Don’t worry. Last week I dropped off a Spode teapot for the break room. Bee’s Knees please."

>   "Let’s see. Juice of one-quarter lemon, one teaspoon honey, half a glass of gin. Dissolve honey in lemon juice, add gin and ice. Shake well and serve in cocktail glass. Says it's courtesy of the Hotel Ritz in Paris."

  Joanna cut the lemon and squeezed half into a cocktail shaker. "Helena, Vivienne's daughter-in-law, said Vivienne first had them in Paris before World War Two. She had one every night, including the night she died." She opened the jar of honey and dipped a spoon into it, letting the amber ribbon twist into the cocktail shaker with the lemon juice. "Here. You mix this up while I get ice."

  Apple set the book on the counter and took the shaker and a wooden spoon Joanna handed her. When Apple was finished, Joanna filled the shaker with ice then used one of the cocktail glasses to measure gin. She wrapped the shaker in a cotton dishcloth and shook. The dishtowel stuck to the shaker's icy wall as she unwrapped it. She poured frothy pale yellow liquid into each glass and handed one to Apple.

  "Cheers."

  "Not bad. Kind of like grown-up lemonade," Apple said. Considering she stuck to tea and rarely even drank wine, the Bee's Knees was a hit.

  They took their drinks to the living room. It wasn't dark enough to merit turning on a lamp, but Joanna lit a verveine candle on the fireplace mantel and settled on the couch. She pulled up her feet and covered them with a mohair throw. Pepper jumped up and began kneading his paws on the edge of the blanket. Apple took the deco club chair closest to the fireplace.

  "Is that Paul's shirt?" Apple pointed at a pile of plaid wool Pepper had turned into a nest.

  "Uh huh. I'll bring it to him tonight." Paul hadn't brought up her sudden insistence on seeing him after the threatening phone call at the store, but he'd seemed occupied as he watched her unpack a few things. He'd handed her a hanger for her Chinese silk dressing gown and pushed aside his scratchy wool robe to make room for it. She hadn’t said a word about the sting operation.

  "Hmm." Apple squinted her eyes slightly, like she did when she was getting her "intuitions." "So, fill me in, starting with the visit to the auction house."

  "It was kind of a bust, really, but it all worked out in the end." She told Apple about Ben catching her in Poppy's office before she'd got to the inventories, and about the visit to Detective Sedillo. "The worse part was getting caught." She shuddered at the memory of Ben clicking on the overhead light as she was reaching for the filing cabinet and his anger when she showed him the jewelry setting. "Helena was supposed to keep him busy, but she got a phone call saying her husband was in the hospital."

  Apple's glass, drained, sat on the coffee table on a stack of old New Yorkers. Joanna still nursed hers. These Bee's Knees could be deadly for an inexperienced drinker.

  "Is Gil all right?"

  Joanna's hand stopped mid-pet. Pepper looked up. "Helena left me a message this afternoon. Might have been a panic attack. Why? You sound like you know him."

  "He's a painter. I see him at life drawing." Apple and some other artists gathered at one of the neighborhood studios to paint from a model a few times a month. They all chipped in to pay the model's fees.

  "Seems like he could afford his own model, if he wanted."

  "I think he likes to hang out with us bohemian types." She gave a short laugh. "The first time he came he had a really expensive easel. The next time he showed up with something beat up, paint all over it. He must have bought it off craigslist." Apple gestured to her empty glass. "I'm tempted to ask for another of these, but I'm not sure I'd be able to stand up after I drank it."

  "Practice, dear Apple. It's all in the pacing." A half inch of Bee's Knees remained in Joanna's glass. "Helena adores him, but I get the sense she worries about him, too."

  Apple leaned forward. "There is one thing. You know the big painting Gil did, Pacific Five? It won the gold medal in the biennial this year?"

  "Sure." The painting Helena had mentioned at her house. "That's the one that's in the NAP auction."

  "Something's not right about it. It isn't like his other work. Pacific Five is this big post-modernist piece, but I've only seen him working on impressionistic nudes." Apple lay back.

  "So?" That hardly qualified as meaty gossip. "You've seen him at life drawing. Of course it's going to be nudes. Maybe he does other stuff at home."

  Apple shook her head. "No, it's not a natural progression. Besides, Gil's work is all right, but not great. Barely good enough to get into the biennial, let alone take home a prize."

  "What are you telling me? Someone else painted Pacific Five?"

  "I don't want to go that far, but—"

  "Stop it." Joanna picked up Apple's glass and waved it. "You want another one of these?"

  "Hmm." She tilted her cocktail glass and watched the little bit left swirl up one side and down. "Yes, please." Apple followed her to the kitchen and took her place on the stepping stool. "Hand me the shaker. I'll stir again."

  "Gil comes from a wealthy family. I'm sure the trustees at the art museum made sure his painting got a second look." She rinsed out Apple's glass and cut a new lemon twist. "Better let me carry that in for you."

  Apple plopped herself into the deco chair again, narrowly missing Pepper, who'd found the warm spot left by her rump. "One of the guys who goes to life drawing, Tranh, has a weird bond with Gil. I sense it." She took a long sip of her new cocktail. "Something is a little off."

  "You're not making a lot of sense. What do you mean?"

  "Nothing." Apple waved her hand dismissively. "Forget I said anything about it. God, these are good."

  "You're tipsy." She folded her arms. "How were things at the store today?"

  "Slow. I wish I could say they were better."

  She couldn't put it off any longer. She had to tell Apple about the caller. It wasn't fair to leave her in the store alone, not knowing someone could be watching her. "Last night—" She tossed back the rest of her cocktail. "Last night I was at the shop trying to figure out the bills and got a threatening phone call."

  "What?"

  "Someone told me I should leave other people's business alone. Then he told me to look in the dressing room, and I found one of the store’s nighties mangled."

  "Yesterday? But I emptied the dressing rooms when I closed up."

  "I know. I can’t figure it out. They—" She put her glass on the side table. "They twisted the nightgown and tied it with a ribbon to the hook so it looked like a hanged person."

  Apple stared, mouth agape. "But how did they get in?"

  "I don’t know. The door, the window—everything looked normal."

  Apple leaned back, surprise still showing on her face. "I don’t like this."

  "I filed a police report. Just be careful. Maybe it was some kind of joke."

  Apple tilted her head. "It’s no joke. I knew something was wrong. I'm glad Paul is looking after you."

  "He doesn't know. I don’t want to get him worked up."

  "For crying out loud. Why don’t you tell him? By this time with Gavin, I think we were married. Maybe not legally, but spiritually for sure."

  She had heard the story many times, about how Apple had started dreaming of him two weeks before they met, then how they were both in the same aisle of a bookstore, locked eyes, and that was that. Meet cute, pagan style. Joanna had given them an Eastlake nightstand as a wedding present. Poppy had helped her find it. Poppy. She was not fencing diamonds, and the sooner she was proven innocent the better. Just a few more days, she repeated to herself. It had nearly become a mantra.

  A moment of silence passed.

  "Jo, are you listening? Your energy is all over the place tonight. What’s going on?"

  She wrenched her attention back to Apple. "I was thinking about Poppy. I promised Paul I’d leave things with her alone, but—"

  "But you haven’t." Another moment passed. Apple yawned.

  "A few nights ago Paul even mentioned something about moving in together."

  "What's wrong with that? You're happy, right?"

  "Yes." She was. It
still surprised her how he listened to her. Sometimes she'd be chopping vegetables and telling a story about an estate sale she'd been to, and she'd look up to find him smiling.

  "And there's nothing wrong in other—uh—departments?"

  "No, not at all." She looked down at her empty glass.

  "Then what's the deal?"

  "Like I said, I promised him I wouldn’t get involved with Poppy’s case."

  "What did he think you’d do?" She paused. "Could this have to do with his sister’s death?"

  "I don’t know. This feels different. You know that way he has with always joking about things?"

  Apple nodded.

  "He’s serious about this. I don’t know what it is. He seems more edgy about it. And I promised him," she repeated. "But I can’t do it." Joanna’s gaze shifted between Apple and Aunt Vanderburgh, both disapproving, but Apple markedly more relaxed. Almost sleepy.

  "So talk to him about it," Apple said. "Say you have to look into Poppy’s situation, that you owe it to her. Don’t lie to him." She paused but when Joanna didn't respond, Apple yawned again and lay her head back. "Never mind. You better watch out, or you're going to mess this up for good."

  God, Apple was pushy. But she had a point. She glanced at Apple's empty glass, the lemon zest already beginning to tighten and die. Hiding her involvement with Poppy probably wasn’t the smartest way to move forward with Paul. But if she told him, he’d be furious. After all, she’d promised him to stay out of it. She could end up blowing the whole relationship apart. Yet there was no way she’d give up on Poppy now. It wasn’t fair that he’d expect it of her. Just two more days until the auction, then it would be over. In the meantime, she hated hiding it from Paul, but what was the alternative?

  "Oh Apple," she said quietly. "What should I do?"

  Slow, even breathing came from the club chair. Apple was asleep.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN