Dressed to Confess

by Diane Vallere

  I tried to find props for the window but was too distracted by Gina’s visit. When she first showed up, I’d been blinded by an overwhelming need to give her a break and be nice, but as time went on, I became more and more focused on her anger. One thing was clear: there’d been no love lost between mother and daughter.

  * * *

  THE rest of the day was quiet. I spent the afternoon working on the Sorry!-themed windows and finished with lettering for the window that read: YOU’LL BE SORRY!

  After I was done, I pulled every costume that related to board games out of the stockroom. Ebony needed more items for her giant Monopoly—I mean, Properopoly—setting. In a back corner under two boxes of plastic pistols, I dug out a top hat, a small plastic toy car, and an unused trash bin and spray-painted them silver. The upside-down trash bin was the best I could do on short notice for a thimble. I’d ask my dad, who was handier on the sewing machine than I was, to make a dog out of silver fabric. Ebony’s Properopoly would come together yet.

  A few minutes after seven, I locked up the store and tallied the few receipts from the day. The real money this time of year would come from the festival. My dad had never created costumes for the headlining act of the festival, but now that I was in charge, I’d seen it as a unique opportunity, something a store like Candy Girls would never be able to do. But because of the murder, the domino costumes had a morbid quality. Would people want to dress like the dancers now? When they’d been announced as the headlining act, their image had been linked to the robbery fifty years ago. Was their memory forever tainted by scandal?

  The festival would be going strong until ten, so I had plenty of time to grab something to eat there. Considering the number of restaurants with booths at the festival, I might as well kill two birds with one stone.

  I left my scooter behind the store and walked to the corner and waited for the Zip-Three. The Zip lines were a series of repurposed yellow school buses that covered the network of streets around Proper. They were driven by retired senior citizens who were looking for something to fill their time. There were four in total, and with the exception of the really out-of-the-way parts of town where hardly anybody wanted to go anyway, one of the four would take you to almost any Proper City destination.

  About two minutes after I arrived at the Zip stop, the sound of a labored engine blocked out everything else around me. I looked up and down the street—the Zip-Three ran the length of the Main Line, the one road that ran from end to end of the city—and saw what was making the horrible sound. A once-yellow school bus, now covered in a rudimentary mural of dice and domino game pieces, approached and then screeched to a stop in front of me. A cloud of blue-black smoke chugged out of the tailpipe as the doors opened.

  The driver, a full-figured black woman with an elaborate hairstyle that had been gelled into place around her face, waved me in. “Trust me. It’s better in here than it is out there.” I climbed on. “I swear Andy Caplan tried to jump this thing over the dip on Thumbelina Thircle and he cracked my oil pan. Been burning oil since I started her up this morning.”

  She was right, it was better inside the bus, but not by much. She picked up a can of Lysol and sent a stream of it through the air. “I’d sit in one of these front seats if I were you. The back ones are closer to the exhaust.”

  I sat in the front on the right side of the bus. “I’m no mechanic, but isn’t it a bad idea to drive around with a cracked oil pan?”

  “You think? Problem is this festival. I can’t take the day off because everybody wants to go to the park. And now that that publicist got these buses painted for the festival, he wants us to double up our shifts so people don’t have to wait longer than fifteen minutes to catch the next bus. Do you know how long it takes to drive Main Line Road end to end and make stops? Thirty-seven minutes is the best I ever clocked it and that’s with me skipping three stops. Darn near impossible, I tell you.”

  She hit the gas and the bus lurched forward. I fell back against the torn green seat. Despite what the driver had said, she arrived at the park in record time.

  “What happens to the Zips at night?” I asked.

  “We park them in the lot behind the high school. Second row behind the regular school buses. Why?”

  I scanned her dashboard—Big Gulp, bobby pins, value pack of Twix candy bars, and more—until I spotted a pen and a scrap of paper. “Call Dig Allen. He runs a towing company, but he’s really good with cars. His shop is just past the high school. He might be able to fix things for you overnight.” I scribbled the name of Dig’s company on paper and tucked it under the corner of the Twix package so it wouldn’t blow away.

  “I know Dig. He taught my youngest how to change his spark plugs.” She looked up at me. “I’ll tell him to bill the festival. That’ll show that publicist.” She pulled the lever to release the door and I hopped down the stairs and waved good-bye.

  The drop-off spot for the Zip-Three was on Main Line Road by Rapunzel. The festival was across the street from me. Ronnie’s trailer was still parked alongside of the curb. Yellow crime scene tape had been affixed to the seal around the door, sliced through, and then covered up again. It must have been after I’d asked Detective Nichols to look for the teddy bear. Which meant she knew the answer to my question and I didn’t.

  I hated when that happened.

  Even though I was in the conspicuous black and yellow striped bumblebee costume and yellow tights, I was more covered up than yesterday, so I dropped down on my hands and knees and looked under the trailer for the blue domino mask. There was nothing to the left of me, but to the right was a small grate for water runoff.

  It was an inside joke among Proper City residents: if you wanted to hide your valuables, put them in a sewer grate. Our desert town saw about two inches of rainfall a year if we were lucky. The city planners who designed and built our town had come from cities around the country and didn’t understand the idiosyncrasies of the desert climate. They would have done better to put up rattlesnake crossings and BEWARE OF TUMBLEWEED signs, but nobody had known to tell them otherwise.

  The grate, as I expected, was dry. I scooted to the right, twisted my head, and closed one eye so I could try to peer inside it. If the blue domino mask had blown under the trailer, it might have fallen inside the grate.

  I turned on the flashlight app on my phone and tried to use it to get a better view. The phone slipped from my hand and fell into the sewer. And landed not on a blue domino mask, but in the lap of a small brown teddy bear that sat just below the grate.

  Now how did he get there?

  Chapter 8

  WHO WOULD PUT a teddy bear in a sewer grate? And how? It wasn’t like it could have fallen in there. I fed my fingers through the slats under the trailer and yanked. The grate rattled but didn’t come free. Three of the four corners were secured by screws. I said a quick prayer to St. Jude, the patron saint for hopeless cases, and tried to fit my fingers through the slats. Apparently St. Jude was otherwise occupied because my case remained hopeless.

  It was one thing to have dropped my phone down a sewer grate. It was quite another for someone to have unscrewed the grate, put a bear in there, and then screwed the grate back on.

  I remembered the scavenger hunt that Mayor Young had asked Ebony to plan on short notice. Had she done this? It was an odd spot to use to hide something considering the location of Ronnie’s trailer. There was an easy way to get an answer. I adjusted the hem of my bumblebee outfit and headed back to the festival.

  I found Ebony talking to Dig Allen, of the towing company that I’d suggested to the driver of the Zip-Three. Ebony often bragged about how she could still fit in the clothes she wore in high school, and she proved it most days of the week. Today she’d paired hip-huggers with a white T-shirt that had a pair of dice printed on the front. The decal had cracked thanks to too many washings over the years, but Ebony didn’t seem to mind. Her trademark gold
medallion hung around her neck, matching shiny gold hoop earrings.

  Dig held a torch for Ebony even though she was ten years older than he was. Dig’s wardrobe consisted of vintage bowling shirts with the sleeves torn off to show his biceps tattoos: an anchor on one side and Tweety Bird on the other. His usual appearance was like Mr. Clean with toffee-colored skin. Today, he wore a black wig that looked suspiciously like the one we rented with Moe from The Three Stooges. He was dressed in a baggy peach-colored jumpsuit. A large hole had been cut out of the front exposing a second layer with cartoon drawings of a rib cage and internal organs. Similar holes were on his arms, left thigh and shin, and right knee and ankle. A red clown nose rested on his face. Not a lot of men would seem confident while dressed like the body in Operation, but Dig seemed okay with it.

  “What could she possibly have offered you to get you to dress up like that?” I asked.

  “Ebony said she needed help with the kids,” he said. “I’m good with kids so I figured what the heck.”

  “Where’d you get the costume?”

  “Jerry made it. He dropped it off at the tow yard before he and Don headed out to Moxie.”

  “You knew they were going to watch the meteor shower?”

  “Meteor shower. That’s what they told you?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I’m pretty sure your dad was trying to give you some privacy in the event you wanted to have company at the house.”

  “No, I’m pretty sure he and Don were trying to get photographic evidence of extraterrestrials. Did he say anything about the store? About the way I was running it?”

  “No. He did have a hard time finding the clown shoes. Said something about how they were always on the shelf next to the gorilla feet and why would you move them?”

  “Because I put all of the feet together,” I said. “Sometimes when people don’t know what costume they want, they look at the shoes. And when they see the feet, they make a decision. It’s good business.”

  Dig held his hands up and the plastic sleeves of his jumpsuit dropped to his elbows. “Hey, don’t put me in the middle of it. Maybe he was put off by the fact that you didn’t approve the change first.”

  Ebony put her hands on her hips. “Listen, yo. This woman here doesn’t have to report to anybody. She’s a full-grown independent costume shop manager. She holds the keys to the kingdom. Ain’t nobody going to tell her how to do her job. Isn’t that right, Margo?”

  “Darn straight,” I said.

  Ebony and Dig looked at me as if I’d actually said a curse word. “Come on, you know I’ve never been able to curse around you,” I said to Ebony. “Not since I was seven and asked you about the words somebody spray-painted on the side of the school and you washed my mouth out with soap.”

  Ebony crossed her arms and tipped her head to the side. The layers of her hair moved ever so slightly, as if she were the star of a shampoo commercial in the seventies. “If I recall, you were so traumatized by the experience that I ended up taking you out for a root beer float a half hour later.”

  “Something had to get the taste of Ivory soap out of my mouth.”

  “Girl, you think I use Ivory soap? My skin looks like this because I use one hundred percent pure cocoa butter. Have my whole life.”

  Dig looked at Ebony’s bare arms appreciatively. “That cocoa butter is working for you,” he said.

  Ebony crossed her arms and lowered her head so she was staring down Dig in his Operation patient costume. “Little man, are you going to make Ebony regret asking you for help?”

  “Dig is always available for Ebony.” Something inside of his suit made a buzzing noise. He patted his chest and hips, and then reached inside the costume and pulled out a cell phone. “Dig’s Towing,” he answered. He turned his back to us and stepped a few feet away.

  Ebony looked at me and shook her head. “Do you see what I have to put up with around here?”

  “You love the attention and you know it.” She smiled at me. “Remember that scavenger hunt idea? Did you start working on it yet?”

  “Nope. I decided to take a stand. Too many people are trying to take control of this festival.” She tapped herself on the chest. “Ebony is in charge. About time all these men around here recognize it.”

  “Who else is getting in your way besides Joel V. and the mayor?”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Tak Hoshiyama, that’s who. He zoned out this whole time and then took off for parts unknown and left me handling the complaints. You didn’t chase him away, did you?”

  “He had interviews,” I said.

  “He should be looking for work around here,” she said. “How are you two supposed to have a relationship if he takes a job in Minnesota?”

  “Michigan,” I corrected. “That’s where his interview is today. And it’s not that simple.”

  “It’s not that difficult either.” Ebony’s cell phone rang and she took the call. She held up a finger and turned around. “You tell those rich kids to stay off that playground.” She hung up and turned back. “I gotta go. Kids think they can get away with more at the end of the day. Those slides weren’t built to accommodate high school boys.”

  I scanned the grounds. Parents and children strolled around, but not as many as I’d seen in previous years. “Attendance is a little light this year, isn’t it?”

  “Hard to get into the spirit of the thing when all anybody can talk about is the murder. If I wasn’t under contract, I’d cut my losses and let this thing go down in flames.”

  “Were the Domino Divas that big of a deal that people really were going to come here from all over to see them reunite?”

  “You’re too young to know what they meant to Proper City, but yes, they were a big deal. They gained national attention with their routines. Better than any sports team we had. You know who could tell you about them?”

  “Who?”

  “Your dad’s friend, Don.”

  I felt a chill shudder through me as I remembered Don’s handwriting on the back of the discarded issue of Spicy Acorn. “What does Don have to do with Ronnie?”

  “They were pretty hot and heavy before she left town.”

  “Don Digby? The same guy who thinks Elvis is alive and well and running a secret branch of the DEA?”

  “One and the same.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Girl, you know Ebony doesn’t go in much for town gossip,” she said. “You’d better ask him if you want to know the skinny.”

  Dig rejoined Ebony and me. He pulled the black Moe wig from his bald head and spun it on his index finger like a Harlem Globetrotter spinning a basketball. “I gotta split. Tow job just came in and it’s going to be a late night.”

  “That reminds me. The mayor doubled up the Zips and the Three is in bad shape. I told the driver to come see you.”

  He pointed to his phone. “That might be the job. Somebody from the mayor’s office said there was a broken down vehicle on the Main Line. I gotta get my truck and take care of it. See ya, ladies.” Dig reattached the red ball to the end of his nose. It lit up like Rudolph’s. Ebony shooed him away. He smiled, touched his forehead and held his hand out in a tip-of-the-invisible-hat gesture, and left.

  “So,” I said to Ebony, “you needed help and you called Dig? He’s going to get a hero complex.”

  “I needed a clown.”

  “He’s not a clown. He’s the patient from Operation. Why’d you need a clown? I don’t know any clown-themed board games.”

  “It’s a festival. I don’t care what the mayor says, every festival needs a clown. And Dig is five foot ten and bald. He was the right man for the job.”

  “Dig is bald by choice, not by genetics.”

  Ebony pointed her finger at me. “You might be a full-blown woman in charge of that costume shop, but you’re always going to
be a baby girl to me. Don’t you forget it.”

  “Okay, fine. Now, you were about to tell me about Don and Ronnie.”

  “No, I wasn’t. Don’t try to trick me, it won’t work. If you want to know about Don and Ronnie, you have to ask him.” She pointed to a small red and white striped tent on the edge of the festival grounds. “They got back this morning and asked for a better location. Don’t tell Tak. That’s their tent. Go crazy, but remember. There’s a reason you haven’t heard about this. It was a long time ago, and when two people break up, one of them usually holds a grudge.”

  I turned away and headed toward the Spicy Acorn tent. Even though the festival attendance was light, a crowd of people milled about outside the striped tent. As I grew closer, I realized that people were waiting to get inside. One man stood out, and not only because of his bright, copper-colored hair. Grady O’Toole would have stood out anywhere at the festival, dressed as he was in a suit and tie.

  Grady was the single most charming guy I’d ever met even if he was six years younger than me. His father owned a couple of casinos in Las Vegas, which put his family securely on top of the Proper City food chain. He lived in Christopher Robin Crossing, a development of mansions designed for the wealthy contingency of Proper City. A. A. Milne would have rolled over in his grave if he knew.

  Grady hadn’t seen me, so I approached quietly and tapped him on his left shoulder and then ducked over to his right side. He turned to look one way, and then the other. I laughed, having pulled off one of the more popular gags I remembered from the sixth grade.

  “Margo! I thought I might run into you today.”

  “Is this your first visit to the festival?”

  He nodded. “Yes. I came to talk to your dad.”

  “Why?” I asked. Grady had been known to throw around his considerable wealth to host costume parties for his crowd, but if that’s what he wanted, he needed to talk to me. “I’m in charge of Disguise DeLimit now,” I added.