Dressed to Confess

by Diane Vallere

  “Everybody knows Dr. Lemming cheats on his wife. There’s a line of women just waiting for her to ask for a divorce so he’s available. I don’t think that would have upset him like this.”

  “But that’s all I said.”

  “Did he deny it?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. I thought about what he had said. My wife is a disturbed woman. He’d all but fingered Jayne as Ronnie Cass’s murderer, and then threatened my dad with a lawsuit if he printed anything that could potentially harm him. It could mean nothing.

  I didn’t think it meant nothing.

  * * *

  I drove to the high school. I’d been living and breathing the Sagebrush Festival for weeks, and shifting focus to Kirby’s dilemma was a welcome respite. I parked next to the tennis courts in a space marked VISITOR and entered the building the same way I had back when I was a student.

  A long hallway framed out with blue-gray metal lockers stretched in front of me. To my left was a trophy case that housed various plaques, awards, and ribbons, and photos that documented the achievements of students who had come and gone. A couple of old yearbooks were displayed in the background, navy blue covers with gold writing embossed on the front. I had one like it, as did my dad and Ebony. I used to love flipping through the pages, looking at photos of the people I’d only ever known as adults.

  Across the hall from the trophy case was the principal’s office. I entered. A younger version of Grady O’Toole was waiting in one of the otherwise vacant chairs. He wore a blue letter jacket with yellow sleeves. The name ANGUS was embroidered above a patch that featured a shrimp in a football helmet.

  “Hi,” I said to him.

  “’Sup.”

  “Do you know if the principal is here?”

  “If he is, he’s keeping me waiting out here for nothing.” He scowled. A young blonde entered the office and let herself behind the counter. Angus’s attitude changed dramatically. He sat up and dusted off the sleeves to his letter jacket. Considering how hot it had been lately, I got the feeling he wore the jacket out of vanity, not necessity. I guess we all wear costumes.

  I approached the blonde. “I’m here to see the principal. Margo Tamblyn.”

  “You’re the one who made that great lab rat costume for the chemistry teacher for Halloween,” she said. “That was the best costume ever.”

  “Thank you.”

  She reached down behind the counter. “Principal Stanley was expecting you. He said the gymnasium is a go as long as you can hold off on setup until Saturday morning.”

  I felt my neck prickle with the knowledge that whatever we said could be overheard by Angus. I tucked my chin and pretended to rub my cheek against my shoulder, giving him a sly over-the-shoulder look. He was busy texting and probably hadn’t heard a word.

  “Sure, that works for me. Can you tell him I said thanks? And please, it’s a surprise. Not a word to anybody.”

  She glanced at Angus and smiled. “You got it.”

  I left the office. The task had taken less time than I anticipated, so I paused by the trophy case and looked at the photos until I spotted the swim team. Kirby stood proudly in the middle of the rest of the men, hands behind his hips, feet shoulder-width apart. They were suited up in the navy and yellow tracksuits they’d raised money for by working for us last Halloween.

  My eyes traveled over additional awards in the case. Of a series of black-and-whites, one caught my eye. It was a candid shot that had been taken on the football field. While a few people stood in the background, the subject was a pretty brunette in a majorette costume. There was something familiar about her face, though I had to look at the caption to confirm what I thought. “Young and Ready to Take on the World,” it read. In parentheses after, someone had written Ronnie Cass.

  * * *

  WHEN I returned to Disguise DeLimit, the door to the stockroom was open and Soot was standing guard by the entrance. Booker T and the MGs played over the speaker system. I put my hands on the doorframe and leaned in.

  “Dad?” I called.

  The response was muffled. A few seconds later, Richard Nixon stood up from behind a stack of boxes. He held his arms out on either side and made peace signs with his fingers. I crossed my arms over my chest and shook my head at him.

  “Let me guess. You are not a crook.”

  “The man was president for seven years. He helped desegregate schools, put women in his cabinet, and created the Environmental Protection Agency, and his most quoted line is denial. Poor guy. Makes a good costume, though. Everybody recognizes Nixon.” He pulled the mask up and rested it on top of his head. “I’m in the lead on an eBay auction of president masks. I’m thinking we can do a whole political corner. Campaign buttons; red, white, and blue ties; and the masks. What do you think?”

  “Can you build a fake voting booth? People could rent it with the costumes.”

  “Sure. See if Varla can paint a backdrop. I’ll bring out the Fourth of July stuff: flags, streamers, balloons.”

  “And don’t forget the donkey and elephant costumes. No reason they can’t be repurposed.”

  “Don’ll have a fit. He still thinks Nixon had something to do with the Kennedy assassination. Payback for beating him in the 1960 election.” He pulled the Nixon mask back onto his face, gave me the peace sign fingers again, and continued digging through the boxes.

  Riffing about costumes and party themes had been one of my favorite activities to do with my dad. Growing up, I’d watched him get an idea and implement it. Once I’d gotten old enough, he’d ask for my ideas. My goal had always been to impress him, to think of something he hadn’t. I’d forgotten how good it felt to be part of the brainstorming.

  * * *

  FOR the next several hours, I’d have to concentrate on business, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t try to make sense of what I’d discovered. I pushed all thoughts of Ronnie and the bank robbery temporarily out of my mind and got the store ready to open. Expecting another quiet day, I grabbed squares of white, yellow, blue, green, red, and orange felt and carried them out front to the temporary sewing station. Since the festival was clinging to the game theme, I was branching out into Rubik’s Cubes.

  I laid the felt rectangles over each other in perpendicular patterns and trimmed off the excess so I was left with a pile of squares. One by one I pinned them along a straight edge and then sewed them together in three-by-three panels of mixed colors. In total, I made five panels, and then attached four of them along one edge so they created a square. I pinned the final panel to the four edges on the top and cut out a small X for my head to fit through. I was in front of the mirror checking the look when my dad—still in the Nixon mask—emerged from the stockroom.

  “Turn it inside out,” he said. His voice was muffled by the plastic.

  “Why?”

  “The seams are on the inside right now, so you don’t get the sharpness of each square. Turn the whole thing inside out, and the raw edges will create more of the grid that you want.”

  I shrugged out of the square and gently turned the inside to the out, and then set it on top of my head again. He was right. With the raw edges of the felt squares pointing out, the felt looked more like a Rubik’s Cube.

  “If you reinforce the seams a second time with heavy-duty thread, the whole thing will be even more rigid,” he suggested.

  “If I run the sewing machine needle through the felt again, it’ll weaken it and increase the chances of it falling apart while being worn. I’ll use fabric glue on all of the seams. That should seal the needle holes.”

  “That’s my girl. Always thinking. I’ll get the glue.” He went into the sewing station and returned with a clear plastic bottle of fabric glue. One end had a long aqua nozzle, like the kind a baker uses when decorating a cake with icing. I took the glue, but before I got to work reinforcing the seams, I set it down and looked up at him.<
br />
  “Dad, are you worried about Don?”

  “He needs to lay low for a bit, but this is all going to blow over.”

  I thought back to last night. “People are stalking his house and digging up his yard. Even if he never leaves, I don’t think he has much of a chance to lay low.”

  “Don can take care of himself. This situation will work itself out.”

  “But what if it doesn’t? You told me how he changed when Ronnie left. Now all of these stories are resurfacing and they’re putting Don in the middle of something he’s not a part of. He’s like an uncle to me. I want to help him.”

  “Margo, I don’t know that there’s much you can do.”

  “If you really believed that, you wouldn’t have started Spicy Acorn. You wouldn’t have thought it was important for people to know the truth.”

  Slowly, he pulled the Nixon mask off and set it on the corner of the table that held the sewing machine. He leaned against the table and nodded. “I can’t argue with that, now can I?”

  Everybody I’d tried to talk to about Ronnie’s murder had told me to leave it alone, but I had to talk to someone. I had to talk about what I’d found out so far.

  “Dad, I found something out this morning, and I think I know what it means, but I need to talk it out. Can you pretend for the next hour or so that I’m not your daughter?”

  “No.”

  I braced myself for another lecture, another Stay out of it, Margo.

  “You’re my daughter, and asking me to pretend you’re not is asking me to give up my one link to your mother,” he said. I looked away. He reached his hand out and rested it on top of mine. “But Don’s my best friend,” he continued. “If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t know how I would have gotten through Celeste’s death. If you know something that might help him, tell me and we’ll see what we can do with the information.” He lowered himself onto a small ottoman and waited.

  I started talking before I could lose my nerve. “I went to see Chet Lemming this morning. At the West Proper Hospital. I pretended to be a patient in need of a physical to get in to see him, and then I asked him about his relationship with Ronnie Cass.”

  “Did he deny it?”

  “No. He implicated Jayne. And then it was like a lightbulb went off over his head and he asked if I was your daughter.”

  “Then what?”

  “When I said I was, he said you’d better watch what you print in your newspaper, otherwise you’ll be looking at a lawsuit.”

  He sat back in his chair. “Interesting.”

  “Which part?”

  “We started Spicy Acorn a few days ago. No advertising, just word of mouth. If Chet knows about us, we must be doing something right.” His eyes got the familiar gleam that usually meant trouble.

  “Dad, I don’t think his reaction was a rousing endorsement of your agenda. He threatened to shut you down.”

  “Chet’s not a dumb guy. He knows that we have the First Amendment on our side and can say whatever we want in Spicy Acorn. You say he implicated his wife in Ronnie’s murder?”

  “He said she was ‘disturbed.’ That’s the word he used. And then he said something about how he encouraged her to get back involved with the Domino Divas. I got the feeling he wanted me to think she was guilty. And then all of a sudden, he made that threat and stormed out.”

  “He left the exam room? Were you done with your physical?”

  “No. I waited about a minute and he didn’t come back. The receptionist said he got called on an emergency, but a woman from the waiting room said it was a lie, that Chet told the receptionist to get rid of me.”

  “What took you to the clinic in the first place? Are you feeling okay?” He leaned forward and put the back of his hand across my forehead.

  I leaned back. “I’m fine, Dad. I was following up on a rumor I heard this morning. Jayne Lemming—his wife—said Ronnie took something from her, and Bobbie told me Chet and Ronnie had had an affair. I thought that gave Jayne a pretty big motive for killing Ronnie. That’s the reason I went to the clinic.”

  “And he handed you that motive on a silver platter.” My dad tapped his index fingers on the tabletop and stared up into the shelf with the mannequin heads and the colorful wigs. I knew he wasn’t seeing the costumes; he was searching for answers.

  “Dad, when I was in Ronnie’s trailer, I saw a lot of pill bottles. And the woman in the reception area said one of the reasons she liked Chet was because he refilled her prescriptions without question. What if Chet’s doing something illegal, like writing out prescriptions that people don’t need? Can’t he lose his medical license over that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Spicy Acorn should investigate it.”

  I didn’t know either. But if Chet’s livelihood—the very thing that afforded him the luxury car and the mansion in Christopher Robin Crossing—was at risk, what would he do to protect them? Had Ronnie benefited from his underhanded dealings? Had she gotten greedy, demanding more and threatening to talk if he didn’t comply? And if so, did the resulting confrontation end in him bashing her head inside of her trailer, minutes before she was scheduled to perform?

  Chapter 23

  MY DAD LEFT the stockroom and made a phone call. A few minutes later he returned. “I made arrangements to scope out some golf uniforms in Utah. It’s a two-person job. Don and I will take the Winnie. I’m going to go upstairs and pack, and then we’ll probably spend the night there and head home tomorrow. Call me if you need me.”

  I nodded. We both knew what he was doing. Golf uniforms weren’t in particularly hot demand, and we already had a vast collection from shopping the thrift stores over the years. Dad was making sure Don stayed out of trouble by getting him out of town.

  * * *

  FOR the next few hours, I felt like there was a toxic cloud over my head, interfering with my ability to function normally. Of the few customers who came in, two fell in love with the Sorry! game piece costumes in the windows. I promised to have the costumes removed and ready for pickup the next day. A couple came in looking for something special to wear to the prom. They walked out with our rentals of Queen Amidala and Darth Vader. The prom sure wasn’t what it was when I’d gone to high school.

  At four thirty, the chimes over the door sounded and Bull Smith, the neighborhood mailman, entered. He was dressed in his usual uniform: light blue shirt, navy blue shorts, navy blue socks, black sneakers. A dusty brown messenger bag was slung across his narrow chest. Bull had been our mailman my entire life except for the two weeks each year that he went on vacation. Over the years his hair had turned white and his skin had tanned. He reminded me a bit of Boris Karloff, except without the lisp and the creepy monster gait.

  “Hi, Margo,” he said. “Is Jerry around?”

  “He’s well on his way to Utah by now.”

  “Figures. You never know what’s in those boxes he ships to himself. Every time one shows up at the post office, we take bets. I won fifty dollars the day he got the UPS deliveryman costumes.”

  “How did you know what was in the box?”

  “Same supplier that we use for the postal service, and the word ‘brown’ was stamped on the outside of the box. Ours say ‘blue.’ I took a shot and I was right.”

  I laughed. “Good deduction.”

  “When you spend your days delivering packages, you start to notice things like that.” He reached into the messenger bag and pulled out a slew of bills and preapproved credit card applications. “You tell Jerry I said he’s losing his touch. It’s time for him to send us something interesting.”

  I took the mail and thanked him. “I’ll give him the message. Thanks, Bull.”

  “Hold on there, I got one more thing for you.” He pulled a thick padded mailer out of his messenger bag. “Official business from the mayor’s office,” he joked. “Maybe they want some horses’ patootie
costumes. You know, dress like themselves instead of parading around like you and me.” He scanned my scrubs. “Okay, maybe not you.”

  “The mayor’s office?” I said. I looked at the return address. The seal of the mayor’s office stared back at me, alongside the address for city hall. I flipped the package over and pulled the tab on the side. Inside was another bundle, this one wrapped in brown paper and tied with a piece of twine. A piece of paper was tucked under the twine. This should help you find answers. For your eyes only, it read.

  It had to be from Tak, who, because of his new job, had access to files in the mayor’s office. I pushed the bundle back into the original packaging before Bull had a chance to see the note. “Nothing important,” I said.

  “Seems important enough to wrap up twice,” Bull observed.

  I smiled. “It’s from a friend. I think he wrapped it up twice so nobody would see that he was letting them pay for his postage.” I held my finger up to my mouth. “We’ll keep his secret, won’t we?”

  “As long as people keep sending things, I’ve got a job. You tell your friend his secret is safe with me.”

  I didn’t point out that such an acknowledgment would expose the secret. I set the package on the table, pulled a couple of squares of felt over it, and walked Bull back to the door. As soon as his little white mail truck was down the street, I locked the door and flipped the Open sign to Closed.

  * * *

  SOOT sat on the kitchen table sniffing the empty packaging while I read an important-looking document on official Proper City stationary. The date on the paperwork was 1952. The letter detailed the findings of the most recent census that had been conducted, and then outlined the proposed template for what was to become Proper City as I knew it.

  All my life I’d known that Proper City had been a census-designed town. As it had been explained to me, after the city had been overrun with criminals, scofflaws, and a corrupt mayor, a new team had been elected on the platform that it was time for a new type of community. Stricter laws cleaned the streets of crime. The recession drove out bootleggers, who sought potentially bigger opportunities in Las Vegas. Once the criminal element had been contained, a task force of city planners had been put into place to pretend they were building a city from the ground up. From that point on, it really was like a version of Monopoly.