Dressed to Confess

by Diane Vallere

  I waited for a reaction from Nancy. Her expression remained unreadable. If she ever decided to get into the local poker game, she’d be a worthy contender.

  “Margo, I know you like to think that I am a bumbling small-town cop who can’t do her job. I wake up every morning with that in my head. But here’s the thing: I’m here because I chose to be here, not because I was shuffled to your district by some vindictive boss. Crime in Proper City has been on the rise for the past decade. I saw it long before you moved back. I became a cop because my dad was a cop. I respect the job and I want to make a difference. I became a detective because I want to investigate. So while I appreciate the fact that you’ve been forthcoming with the evidence that you’ve found, I don’t want you to get the feeling that I rely solely on you for clues. Do you understand?”

  I bristled at her words and heat rushed to my face. “Let me finish. I thought maybe the mask had rolled under the trailer. There’s this sewer grate, see? And I thought—”

  “That the mask had dropped into the sewer grate. This is all very convenient. I suppose when I look in the grate I’ll see a blue mask that will incriminate someone other our current person of interest. Am I right?”

  “That’s what I thought too, but you’re wrong,” Bobbie said.

  I didn’t want to gloat, but I was really happy that she’d asked that question. “When you look in that grate you’ll see my cell phone.”

  “And a teddy bear,” Bobbie added.

  Nancy looked back and forth between Bobbie’s and my faces. “A teddy bear? How’d that get in there?”

  “We don’t know, but it seems that if a bear was inside of a grate that was under where Ronnie’s trailer had been parked, maybe it was evidence in your investigation and we should tell you,” I said. While technically it had been Bobbie’s idea, I felt I’d earned the right to point it out.

  Nancy unclipped a flashlight from her belt and clicked it on. She stooped down above the grate and aimed the beam into the hole. She moved the beam slightly, an inch here, an inch there, and then she straightened up quickly, her eyes wide.

  “What?” I asked. “Did you see the bear?”

  “No. I saw a snake.”

  Both Nancy and Bobbie turned to look at me. I held up my hands in surrender. “Don’t look at me. I didn’t put it there.”

  Nancy stood up and called somebody. She gave the address and instructed them to bring tools and a net. When she hung up, she turned to us. “I’m delegating,” she said. It wasn’t like we were judging her.

  Bobbie and I moved from our position near the grate to the wall of the building. A police car arrived quickly, and two uniformed male officers got out. Nancy pointed to the grate, pointed to me, and then held her hands in approximately the size of the bear. One officer inserted a bit into a cordless power drill and then unscrewed the corner screws one by one. When he finished, the other officer lifted the grate and set it on the sidewalk. The first officer looked at Nancy. She held out a plastic bag. “Put the bear and the phone in here,” she said.

  “That’s my phone!” I said.

  “Like you said, it’s evidence. I should be able to have it back to you tomorrow,” she said.

  The officer reached down and pulled out my phone first, and then the small bear. He was smudged with a dusting of dry dirt, as if he’d been dredged through chocolate powdered milk. The officer put both items into the bag and sealed it. He set it on the sidewalk next to the drill and reached back into the sewer. Bobbie, Nancy, and I all took a step backward, predicting what he’d pull out next.

  We were wrong. The snake may not have been hiding under the bear, but a round piece of felt was. It was one of the circles I’d glued onto the Domino Diva costumes.

  It appeared as though one of Ronnie’s fellow dancers had visited her the day she’d died.

  Chapter 11

  IF THE DETECTIVE recognized the felt circle, she didn’t say. This time, I was keeping my mouth shut and my theories to myself. After all that nonsense about not counting on me for clues, Detective Nichols was going to have to do her own detecting to figure out what I already knew.

  After the officers and the detective left, Bobbie and I returned to the festival until closing time. She reminded me that I was expected to make a hundred bear costumes by festival opening tomorrow. I waited at the Zip-Three stop for a few minutes until a yellow school bus rumbled toward me. The doors opened, and the driver, a crotchety-looking old man covered with wrinkles and thin gray hair, looked at me. “If you want a ride, you’d better get on now. I’m the last run of the night.”

  I climbed on and took a seat halfway back. The bus was already mostly full. The woman next to me wore a tight red satin dress, red fishnets, and red platform shoes. Her hair was jet-black and parted on the side. It was curled under and the back was held into place with a soft net.

  “Nice costume,” she said to me. “What are you performing in?”

  I glanced down at my black and yellow striped bumblebee romper. “This? I work in a costume shop, so I wear a lot of costumes because it’s free publicity.”

  “Candy Girls?” she asked. “I haven’t seen you there.”

  “No. Disguise DeLimit. Candy Girls is more of a party store, but Disguise DeLimit specializes in costumes only. We’ve been around a lot longer than they have.”

  “‘We’?” She laughed. “The owners must love you. You sound like you own the place.”

  “It’s a family-run shop. My dad and me. He ran it for most of my life, but I’m back in Proper City now, so I run the shop and he scouts costumes around the country.”

  The man in the seat in front of us turned around. His face looked far younger than I’d originally placed him thanks to the gray hair that hung down from under a pith helmet. He wore a safari-style jacket over a white shirt and a yellow ascot. Several medals were pinned above his left pocket. “You don’t just order your costumes from a catalog?”

  “No, we’re not that kind of costume shop.”

  The woman tapped the shoulder of the man across the aisle. He wore a purple tweed blazer with elbow patches over a purple argyle sweater. “Did you hear about her store?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he answered. He leaned forward and looked at me. “You ever take custom jobs?”

  “All the time. That’s one of our specialties.” As I talked, I noticed that more and more of the people on the bus were tuning in to our conversation. Not only that, I noticed that their outfits were not everyday outfits, and the direction of the conversation started to make sense. “Are you all actors?”

  “We’re the Traveling Thespians,” the woman in the red satin dress said.

  “Not anymore,” the man in tweed interjected. “Now we’re the Proper City Players.”

  “I live in Proper City and I don’t know you.”

  “We used to travel up and down Route 15 looking for places to perform. Somebody from the Sagebrush Festival approached us with the opportunity to be the replacement act if we were willing to change our name.”

  I studied their outfits. “You’re performing Clue: The Musical,” I correctly deduced. The mayor’s office hadn’t missed a beat. “Professor Plum, Colonel Mustard, and Miss Scarlet,” I said, pointing one at a time to the three who had engaged me in conversation.

  “Yes!” Miss Scarlet smoothed a few wrinkles out of her red satin dress. “I guess the costumes aren’t too bad if you could recognize what they were from.”

  “Actually, I’m sort of going to be working on costumes based on yours.” I explained how I was about to head back to the shop to start working on costumes for teddy bears that were based on their production.

  “Clue bears? How charming,” said Colonel Mustard.

  Miss Scarlet smiled. “How are you supposed to make costumes based on ours when you never saw them?”

  “To be honest, I was going to make them
up based on the original board game. But why are you in costume now? I heard that you were taking the place of the last act, but when do you start?

  “It’s not that far from what you’re doing. We need all the publicity that we can get, so we agreed to wear our costumes until the festival is over. People see us dressed like this and they ask questions.”

  “Here’s a question: Will you follow me to the store so I can take pictures myself?”

  * * *

  IT was after eleven when the cast of Clue: The Musical left Disguise DeLimit. When I couldn’t find the battery to the digital camera, I asked them to use their cell phones to take pictures of each other and then I let them browse the store while I downloaded everything onto the store’s computer. There was much excitement over our rack of gangster suits and flapper dresses, more understandable when they told me their next production was going to be Guys and Dolls.

  After they left, I went upstairs to the kitchen. I brewed a pot of coffee and ate a bowl of Fruity Pebbles. Soot sat on the windowsill staring at the glass as if it was sweeps week and he was watching his favorite program. “I don’t suppose tonight’s the night you want to start helping me make costumes,” I said.

  “You need help with costumes?” he answered. I jumped, and the cereal bowl, mostly empty except for a little blue milk that I had yet to finish, tipped over and fell on the floor. Soot jumped down from the sill, sniffed the spill, and immediately lapped it up. My dad stood up from outside the window. “Hold on, I’ll be right inside.”

  I put my hand on my chest to calm my racing heart. His footsteps descended down the rungs of a ladder, and then seconds later, the back door opened and shut downstairs. He made his way up the stairs and joined me in the kitchen.

  “What were you doing outside on the ladder?” I asked.

  “Trying to get an establishing shot.”

  “Of what? The festival? Does this have to do with your newspaper? You’re not— Don’s not planning on doing a conspiracy story on Ronnie’s murder, is he?

  He gave me a funny look. “No. The footage from Moxie didn’t turn out as well as we expected. If I can get the telescope set up on the roof, I might be able to set a timer and capture part of the meteor shower.”

  Mention of the trip to Moxie set my suspicion meter on alert, but I refrained from calling my dad’s bluff. If Dig was right and the reason my dad and Don had vacated the premises was so I could entertain gentlemen callers, I’d rather avoid the ensuing conversation.

  My dad rubbed at his eyes. “What time is it?”

  “It’s after eleven.” I poured a cup of coffee. “Stay as long as you want. I’m going downstairs to work.” I purposely remained vague. What would he say when he heard I was making costumes for bears—costumes that we not only wouldn’t get paid for, but that were based on ones made by Candy Girls? The realization hit me. We’d be getting nothing from me doing this extra work. No word of mouth. No potential business. No income.

  “I’m awake now. What are you working on? I can help.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think it’s worth your time. Go to bed. I’ll try to be quiet.”

  I carried my coffee downstairs and reviewed the photos on the computer. The last time I’d made a series of costumes for bears—when you run a costume shop, you don’t get picky about clients—I’d learned that it was easiest to simplify and then mass produce. But costumes based on the characters in Clue? I didn’t see a way to simplify. Footsteps sounded on the stairs and my dad joined me in the sewing room. He surveyed the photos scattered across the workstation and then picked up a small teddy bear.

  “This has to do with the festival?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “You know that the Domino Divas were supposed to headline the festival, right?” He nodded. “After what happened, Mayor Young won’t call off the festival. I ran into this group of actors on the Zip line tonight. They call themselves the Traveling Thespians—or at least they used to. They said they’ve been performing across Nevada, but somebody from the festival got in touch with them with the opportunity to become the replacement act for the divas.”

  My dad shook his head. “You have to give Mayor Young credit,” he said. “What he lacks in community-building vision, he makes up for with opportunistic thinking.”

  “I figured it was either him or his publicist.”

  “Joel V. You’re right, this does have publicity stunt written all over it. What does it have to do with costumes?”

  “Joel wants to scrub the festival of the divas’ presence, so that means no more dominos. Apparently Mayor Young hired these guys to perform Clue: The Musical.”

  “And now you’re making costumes.” He spread out the pictures that I’d printed out. “Why didn’t you just rent them costumes from our inventory? We have a full set of Clue costumes. I think they’ve been in storage since Edith and Eddie Green renewed their vows last year.”

  “I didn’t make these costumes,” I said. “They came from Candy Girls.”

  He sat back and studied me. “You’re collaborating with Candy Girls?”

  “Of course not!” I said. “Candy Girls already had the account. What’s weird is that the cast acted like they’d never heard of us. I thought we had strong ties to the local community theater groups.”

  “We rent to the community players all the time. This must be something new. What did you say they were called?”

  “The Proper City Players,” I said. I toggled from the screen showing the pictures of the costumes to a new Internet window and typed Proper City Players into the search bar. I was redirected to a slick site that announced the upcoming performance of Clue as the headliner of the Sagebrush Festival. I was less surprised by the costumes in the photos than the identity of Mrs. Peacock, the newly appointed star of the show.

  It was Jayne Lemming.

  Chapter 12

  “JAYNE LEMMING IS the star of Clue? She’s one of the divas,” I said. “I didn’t know she was in the Proper City Players too.”

  “You know how acting types are. They don’t like to turn down roles,” my dad said.

  “Yes, but Jayne was the choreographer for the divas. Now that Ronnie is dead, the divas can’t perform and Jayne is going to be the new star of the show. New star. It says so right on their website. Doesn’t that seem suspicious?”

  “Margo, don’t jump to conclusions. You’re talking community theater here. Waiting for Guffman, not Black Swan. Jayne probably knew the festival needed a new leading act. She may have been the one to approach the Proper City Players.”

  “But don’t you see?” I said. “Ronnie’s murder should have shaken everybody up. It should have been cause to cancel the festival, or postpone it, or something. But it didn’t. The mayor is obsessed with the festival being a success despite the murder. He demanded that the festival continue. He has a publicist spinning it so people forget about the tragedy and still come out and spend their money. And then there’s Jayne. Her friend—even if they fought, you’d think they were friends—was murdered. She could be involved. I found a felt circle by Ronnie’s trailer. It could have come from her costume. I wish there was a way for me to check.”

  “Margo, let the police do their job.”

  “Come on, Dad, you’re a reporter now. You want to uncover the truth, right? Jayne should be in mourning and instead, she’s in the spotlight. Ronnie is dead and the divas are going to fade into oblivion after this, but Jayne is still going to get her fifteen minutes of fame.”

  “Some people are like that,” he said. “You can ask all the questions you want, but you’re never going to change human nature.” My dad toggled back to the photos of the Clue costumes. “I still don’t understand why Candy Girls is making the costumes. Why wouldn’t Jayne have them work with us? Her husband was very happy with the Mardi Gras costumes we’ve done for him for the past five years.”

  It was unclear
to me whether he was truly concerned by the costume situation or if he was trying to distract me. “I think Jayne is hiding something. I don’t know what or why, but something about the way she barely even acknowledges Ronnie’s death is suspicious. Her lack of sadness is like a big red flag waving in front of my face.”

  I thought back over my conversation with Gina Cassavogli. Unlike Jayne, she’d seemed upset about what had happened, but not for the reasons I would have expected. She’d asked me to look into the death of her mother, but not because she felt any kind of bond with her. Why had Gina come to me at all? Considering both she and Jayne had said the same thing about Ronnie being out for herself, what kind of relationship did the mother and daughter have? And here they were, two people who should have been close to Ronnie but had moved on awfully quickly.

  I yawned. My dad picked up the coffee mug and moved it away from me. “You don’t need caffeine. You need power foods. Go upstairs and eat a handful of almonds and a cup of Greek yogurt, and then come back down here. If we’re going to produce a hundred costumes by tomorrow morning, it’s going to be a long night.”

  “You’re still going to help me? Even if Candy Girls is going to get the publicity for the costumes?”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “Candy Girls is going to get the credit for those crappy costumes, yes. But Disguise DeLimit is going to get the credit for the teddy bears. I’ll see to that. Now, go eat some real food and then let’s get started.”

  * * *

  BEFORE moving back to Proper City, I’d lived in Las Vegas and worked as a magician’s assistant. Not one of the good magicians either. Think rickety wooden stage, threadbare velvet curtains, and lots of sequins. The bar had a two-drink minimum, and the doves often tried to escape during the act. I’d learned a few things during those years: among the more important ones, the facts that misdirection is a handy skill and good Chinese food comes cheap at four o’clock in the morning. But the number one lesson I’d learned was that if you don’t look at the clock, your body doesn’t know it’s time to sleep.