Dressed to Confess

by Diane Vallere

  “You mean there was a time when he was willing to give up what he believed because of her?”

  “It was more like he was willing to back-burner things. But so much happened in 1968. The world changed. On a big scale, there were political assassinations. On a local scale, the hippie movement was gaining momentum. The separation between the teenagers and adults was a gap almost too broad to span. The bucolic town that you grew up in was different then. Kids were experimenting with drugs and challenging authority. They were exerting their voices in ways that the previous generation never thought possible. That’s one reason why Don was under suspicion of the bank robbery. A lot of people wanted a kid to be guilty so they could lock him up and send a message to the rest of the generation.”

  “So Don and Ronnie were suspected of being involved. Don stayed here and Ronnie went to Vegas. When did she meet Mayor Young?”

  “It was a couple of years later. She never quite made it the way everybody thought she would, but when she came back to Proper, it was on the arm of Wharton. He was an up-and-comer in local politics, and she was the pretty young thing from the city of sin. They gave each other what they both wanted: her, respectability, and him, sex appeal.”

  I pictured the mayor, skinny limbs and rotund belly, dressed in his thin dress shirts, seersucker pants, and goofy round rocker-bottom sneakers. Ronnie herself had aged from too much sun and booze. But back then, who knows? It was hard to think that any woman would go for him unless there was something else to be gained in the union.

  My dad interrupted my thoughts. “When Ronnie came back to Proper, Don tried to pretend that he was over her, but it all came back. At first, he defended her leaving town and making a name for herself. But the more famous she got, the less she wanted to talk to him. One day we overheard a reporter asking her about her past, and she glossed right over him, said there hadn’t been anybody worth mentioning until Wharton.”

  It sounded to me as if Ronnie Cass had an iron in every fire. In the six degrees of separation game, she was Kevin Bacon, connected to the mayor, Don Digby, Gina Cassavogli, Chet and Jayne Lemming, and probably half of the town. It stood to reason that she’d made an enemy somewhere along the way, someone who had murdered her. But had it been a recent action that triggered the violent act? Or something she’d done almost fifty years ago?

  I took a copy of Spicy Acorn and left my dad to his audience of fellow theorists. Don would have loved the scene, a group of like-minded individuals who believed he was being detained because of his desire to expose “the truth.” But there had been more than the whim of part-time conspiracy theorists behind my dad’s demeanor. He was worried about Don. The crowd out front could spin the situation however they wanted, but my dad knew there was something more than the desire to inconvenience Don at the root of the detective taking him away from the festival.

  I found an empty table at the back of the park and borrowed a pen from the snow cone cart next to me. On the back of the newspaper, in the space left blank for a mailing address, I made some notes.

  Ronnie Cass

  Engaged to Don Digby

  Short marriage to Wharton Young

  Child: Gina Cassavogli (Who is father?)

  Rift with divas

  Murdered

  Possibly involved with bank robbery 50 years ago

  Came out of retirement for this year’s festival. Why now? Why did other divas agree?

  I was so involved in my note-taking that I didn’t notice that I was no longer alone. A shadow fell across the page and I looked up.

  “Mind if I join you?” asked Tak Hoshiyama.

  “You’re back!” I said, a little too eagerly. “I mean, hey, nice to see you again.”

  He picked up the genie bottle that I’d set on the table, closed his eyes, and rubbed it. “I wish I could find a woman willing to speak her mind.” He opened his eyes and set the bottle down.

  “Hey,” I said, trying to act cool.

  “Hey.”

  Tak was the son of a Japanese father and a Hawaiian-born mother, resulting in Asian features, black hair, and naturally red lips. His strong brow made him appear as though he were deep in thought most of the time. I’d teased him that he spent too much time calculating the interior dimensions of wherever we were, but I guess that’s the side effect of being good with numbers.

  Tak and I had dated occasionally since we first met about a year ago. It was after a client of the costume shop had been murdered at his birthday party—the client’s, not Tak’s, although Tak had been a guest. Tak had an uncomfortable knack for guessing what I was thinking before I said it. His dad, a proud Japanese man, hadn’t liked the fact that Tak, a Princeton graduate and former city planner for the Clark County District Attorney’s office, had prioritized spending time with me, a costume shop owner, over finding another prestigious job.

  Despite a comfortable connection, I couldn’t shake the fear of the inevitable: that he’d get a job somewhere else and leave me behind in Proper. Whether or not he sensed those thoughts, like he read the rest of my mind, was unspoken. I thought I’d done a good job of hiding my own insecurities, though Soot and I had had a couple of heart-to-hearts about the subject.

  Tak himself had realized that working in his parents’ restaurant and helping me reorganize the stockroom of Disguise DeLimit wasn’t what he wanted out of life. Jobs for analytical city planners with Ivy League degrees weren’t plentiful in Proper City, which meant the jobs Tak interviewed for weren’t local. A month ago, it was Pennsylvania. Last week, it was Texas. This week, it was Michigan. All of which might have been the moon in terms of starting a relationship, which explained the “occasional” in our dating status.

  It had been my own decision to move back to Proper City and take over the costume shop. I knew this was where I wanted to be, but I couldn’t say the same for him. We’d agreed to keep things laid-back between us so as not to complicate anything.

  Sometimes I hated being a grown-up.

  I didn’t know how long Tak had been back in town. He wore a gray T-shirt over black jeans, and red Converse sneakers. His black hair was cut into a more businesslike style than when I’d met him, neatly trimmed and held into place with a product that left it looking shiny and wet. It was parted on the side and dusted his forehead. He pushed his hand into it, moving it away from his face, but when he let go, it fell back into the same spot.

  “Sit. Talk. Tell me. How were your interviews?” I asked.

  “Okay.”

  “Just okay? What’d you do, spill coffee on the head of human resources?”

  “Nothing quite that bad. How are things around here?”

  I looked to my left and to my right to see if anybody was within earshot. “You really haven’t heard anything?”

  “My plane got in about an hour ago and I have an appointment at”—he looked at his watch—“four thirty. I haven’t even been home.”

  “You came straight here? Why?”

  “Why do you think?” He lowered himself onto the bench next to me. Under his direct stare, I felt my cheeks grow warm. I tried, unsuccessfully, to hide my smile.

  “I think you wanted to get some of your parents’ fried rice before your next appointment.”

  “You forget I can make my own fried rice whenever I want. Want to guess again?”

  “You got tired of only seeing people dressed up in businessman costumes and needed some variety.”

  “That’s a little closer to the truth.” He grinned.

  The easy familiarity that Tak and I maintained when we were together was not something I was used to. Sometimes I felt like I’d known him my whole life. But times like now—him being playful and me being distracted by Ronnie Cass’s murder—I felt like we were worlds apart. I looked down at the newspaper in front of me and shifted my arms to hide the notes I’d been taking.

  “What’s going on?�
�� Tak asked. He glanced at the paper in front of me. My handwriting was mostly covered by my forearms, but the words “bank robbery” and “murdered” were visible. He put his hand on the corner of the paper and tried to tug it out from under me. I pressed down harder to keep it where it was.

  “There was a murder two days ago. One of the Domino Divas, the headlining act.”

  “It happened at the festival?”

  “Close. In their trailer. It was parked on Rapunzel Road.” I smoothed my hand over my hair and twirled my ponytail around my finger. “I found her body. And when I was in her trailer, I got stabbed—not by a person, but by a needle—and it turned red—not the needle, but my hand—and now Detective Nichols is holding Don Digby because of something that happened almost half a century ago.”

  I had a tendency to get things mixed up and turned around, especially when things were already as jumbled up as they were right now. Tak had demonstrated an ability to untangle my thoughts, but this time even he seemed confused.

  He reached his hand out and put it on the side of my face, and then brushed his thumb across my lips, which temporarily made me forget the murder, the bank robbery, and the six degrees of separation between Ronnie Cass and everybody else.

  “There’s someplace I have to be, but I want to keep talking to you about this. So, dinner? Tonight?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Your parents’ restaurant?”

  He nodded. “I’ll stake a claim on one of the private rooms.” He dropped his hand from my face but his dark brown eyes held mine. “I missed you.” He kissed my forehead, then stood up and left.

  I watched him make his way out of the park to his gray RAV4. I’d missed him too, but I couldn’t let myself think too much about that. It was inevitable that he’d get a job offer somewhere else and that would be it. It would be easier for me if I never let myself get attached. Still, I should enjoy it while it lasted. Right?

  I looked down at the notes I’d scribbled on the back of the newspaper. I was almost out of room and I’d hardly scratched the surface of what I knew. Or what I thought I knew.

  Did I really know anything?

  I sat back and tapped the pen against my front tooth. In the distance, Ebony stood with her hands on her hips giving Mayor Young an earful. I waved my hands to get her attention. She said one last thing to him and then came my way.

  “That mayor wouldn’t know his head from a hole in the ground.”

  “What’s he done now?”

  “He’s all hopped up about this Clue thing. I told him maybe we should just move on, focus on the rest of the festival and not the headlining act. But he’s all Clue this, Clue that. He wants to know how to run a festival, he should get a clue.”

  “But I’m completely off the hook, right? You’re not lobbying to resurrect the Double Ds with me as a stand-in, are you?”

  “You’re officially in the clear. Don’t get me started on the divas. Do you know what I found out today? We have to pay them every time we use their name. I don’t mean on merchandise sold either. If that publicist gets up in front of an audience and mentions “Dominos” or “Divas” or “Domino Divas”—per their contract—it’s a hundred dollars. Flat fee.” She looked over both shoulders to make sure nobody was within earshot. “That’s four hundred dollars right there if anybody heard me.”

  “What happens now?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care. I’m not saying I’m happy about what happened, but at least the festival gets to keep the proceeds from the merchandising instead of being a fund-raiser for a bunch of high-kickin’ baby boomers.”

  I could have pointed out that Ebony herself was a baby boomer, but it seemed this wasn’t the appropriate time. “Whose idea was it to get the Double Ds out of retirement?” I asked.

  Ebony looked at me as if I were a child asking questions about why the sky was blue. “What difference does it make now?”

  I shrugged. “It seems to me that if they’d performed, they’d be cleaning up in terms of merchandising. So even though there was bad blood between them, financially it made sense for them to get over their differences.”

  Ebony’s expression changed. “Not necessarily. I saw the contract. Ronnie incorporated the act six months prior to the festival. She was the sole proprietor. All of the money they made from coming out of retirement went to one pocket: hers.”

  Chapter 16

  “BUT CONSIDERING NONE of the other divas seemed to like her, why would the rest of them agree to something like that?” I asked.

  Ebony shrugged. “You’d have to ask them. Hard to say what motivates people to do anything. Maybe they got tired of being treated like little old ladies. Sixty-eight isn’t old. If you got it, you got it.”

  “Do you ‘got it’?”

  “You know I got it.”

  “Did they have it?”

  She considered the question. “They were passable.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said. In my mind, new questions surfaced. Had the remaining five members of the group known that Ronnie incorporated them as a single entity or had she kept that detail to herself? What had she offered them to get them to agree? Did someone say yes to Ronnie’s proposal because they’d been holding on to a grudge and knew they’d have the opportunity to kill her?

  Ebony shrugged. “Don’t underestimate the power of ego and fame,” she said. “Ronnie may have benefited financially, but maybe the rest of them wanted to come back so they could be in the spotlight again.” She tipped her head to the side and smoothed out a couple of flyaway strands of hair that weren’t cooperating with her Charlie’s Angels blowout.

  “If that was the case, you’d think they’d be more excited about it. From what I saw, there wasn’t a lot of love lost between them. Especially Jayne and Ronnie. Maybe— What?”

  “No.” Ebony leaned in and pointed a shiny blue fingernail close to my face. “I don’t want to find out that you’re poking your nose into this murder. I know you’re worried about Don. We all are. But that fancy-pants detective can’t hold him for no reason. Don wouldn’t harm a fly even if he suspected it was carrying a mutated form of Agent Orange.”

  As much as I agreed with Ebony in theory, I couldn’t pretend that all would be fine if we just waited out Detective Nichols’s investigation. There had to be something stronger than the fact that Don and Ronnie went to the prom together fifty years ago. Innuendo that led the investigation to Don’s door. Detective Nichols would have to either turn up hard evidence to hold him or let him go.

  The items in the grate were suspicious too. After seeing the trapdoor in the trailer at Dig’s tow yard, I felt certain that Ronnie could have put the teddy bear there. But why? The process of unscrewing the grate and hiding the bear was laborious. If someone was in front of her, threatening her life, she wouldn’t have had the time or the privacy to complete that task.

  But the killer could have too. Whoever had hit Ronnie in the head and ended her life would have had all the time in the world. No spectators. No questions. He or she could have committed the murder and then gotten into the sewer grate through the trapdoor inside the trailer. Why? Was there something hidden in that bear that they’d been planning to retrieve?

  There was a good chance that Don’s history with Ronnie would quickly become the talk of the town if it wasn’t already. That meant whoever killed her now had a scapegoat. An unwanted thought of lone gunmen theories and patsies popped into my head.

  There are two sides to every relationship, but in this case, only one could talk. One person who could tell me about what had really happened when Don and Ronnie broke up. One person who could shed light on things.

  I had to find a way to talk to Don.

  I left the festival while it was in full swing. Families were milling about, patronizing the various booths. Even though the mayor had arranged for there to be state-of-the-art video-game consoles with
the intent of attracting the high school crowd, a surprising number had congregated around arcade games that played digital versions of dominos. Ebony’s talent with a theme was making it hard to escape the tragedy that had occurred.

  It was five thirty. I went back to Disguise DeLimit. The phone was ringing.

  “Disguise DeLimit,” I answered.

  “Hi, who is this?”

  “Margo Tamblyn. Are you in the market for a costume?”

  “You’re Jerry’s daughter, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me anything about Don Digby’s relationship to Ronnie Cass?”

  My stomach twisted. “Who am I talking to?”

  “Or the gold. Can you tell me about the gold? One quote, that’s all I need.”

  “Have a nice day,” I said, and hung up the phone. It started to ring almost immediately. My business sense overrode my paranoia and I answered, experiencing almost a replica of the first conversation, this time with a woman. By the third time the phone rang, I let the answering service pick it up.

  I went upstairs to get ready to meet Tak. Even though it was May, the dry desert air would turn chilly when the sun went down, so I changed out of the genie costume and into a uniform from an out-of-business ice cream shop over leggings, and then slipped on ballerina flats. Not much could be done about hair that had been in a ponytail all day, so I tied a scarf around the base of it. Soot, who had been watching me patiently, let out a howl that could probably be heard at the Sagebrush Festival.

  “What?” I asked. He gave me the stink eye. I sat down on the bed next to him, took a deep breath, and let it out. “Okay, I know. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to keep seeing Tak when it can’t go anywhere. But I’m a big girl. I won’t get hurt if I already know that.”

  This time his meow was less audible but more judgmental—at least it seemed that way to me. I ran my hand over the dark gray fur on his head, and then scratched the patch between his ears with my index finger. “It’s not like I met a lot of smart, attractive men when I lived in Vegas. You know that. You were there too.”