Dressed to Confess

by Diane Vallere

  * * *

  TWENTY minutes later, the Minnie Winnie pulled up behind the trailer. Good thing there weren’t any other cars on the road, because it appeared as though my dad still had some trouble with the concept of parallel parking the vehicle. The engine idled while I crossed the lot and climbed inside.

  “Where’s Don?” I asked. “I already know you didn’t go on a trip scouting golf uniforms, so don’t lie to me.”

  “Don’t worry about Don. He’s someplace where nobody’s going to find him. Get in and buckle up. I’m taking you home,” my dad said.

  “That’s as good a place as any for us to talk about what’s going on.”

  “There will be no talking. This has gotten too dangerous. After what happened in October, I’m surprised you ever leave the store.”

  “I’m surprised anybody lets me.” I pulled the seat belt across the SECOND GUNMAN T-shirt and clicked it into place. The black knit cap was no longer simply a part of my costume, but served the secondary purpose of keeping me warm now that the sun had dropped. My dad pulled the Winnie away from the curb and drove to Disguise DeLimit. It was one of the rare occasions when neither of us talked.

  By the time he parked, I knew things couldn’t continue the way they had. Ever since I’d been back in Proper, it was like I’d become five years old in a town full of babysitters, and enough was enough.

  “You always said I could talk to you about anything. Well, this might not be what you had in mind, but I didn’t set out to be involved in Ronnie’s murder. But because of my involvement with the festival and the fact that I’m the one who found Ronnie, I am. And because I care about Don’s safety, I asked questions. And I found things out—things that could help him. And I know you lied to me when you said you two were going to Utah for golf clothes. You probably never left Proper City, let alone Nevada. I don’t know where Don’s hiding, but there’s going to be a warrant issued for his arrest by tomorrow morning, and the evidence is pretty strong.”

  He stared at me for a few seconds. His expression reminded me of how he’d looked the day he gifted me fifty thousand airline miles so I could leave Proper City and travel the world. He’d wanted me to know what was out there—what I was missing if I stayed—but I knew, I could tell, that he struggled with me leaving. Until that day, it had been him and me. We were the only family each other had. I saw that same expression tonight and, like so many years ago, it broke my heart.

  “Dad, I’m not asking to do anything crazy. I just want to talk. Maybe between the two of us we can figure out what’s going on.”

  “You might look like your mother, but you think like me. Maybe Don does need your help.” He cut the engine and turned off the lights. “Go inside the store, feed Soot, and get something to eat. Turn on lights, act like you’re going to bed. At five till ten, bring the trash out to the curb. I’ll open the back door to the Winnie and you get inside. If the door doesn’t open, then I changed my mind.”

  “Or you could get out of the Winnie and come upstairs like you have your whole life.”

  “Okay, fine, we’ll do it your way.” He unclicked his seat belt. “And I take it back. Sometimes you’re entirely too pragmatic.”

  * * *

  MINUTES later we were seated kitty-corner at the kitchen table. My dad had scored it on one of his local flea market trips. His focus was supposed to be costumes and other related merchandise, but he couldn’t resist unique—and often free—furniture donations. The chairs had come to us when a local restaurant had closed. The real score had been for Disguise DeLimit in the form of twenty-seven red and white checkered hostess dresses with matching aprons and hats.

  “First, what’s this about an arrest warrant?” he asked.

  “I was at the police station today.” He glared at me. “Let me back up. I dropped my cell phone in a sewer grate on Sunday. Actually, let me back up before that. The day Ronnie was murdered, I saw a blue domino mask on the sidewalk. I know I saw it. Except I didn’t think anything of it because I was going to see Ronnie. But then I found her dead inside the trailer, and when I told the detective about the mask, she said her officers looked around and didn’t find it.”

  “How sure are you that what you saw was a domino mask?”

  “It was a royal blue satin half mask. It’s not like it could have been a leaf.”

  “Okay, so you saw it. We can safely assume someone realized they left it behind and took it.”

  “Not necessarily. I found out later that Ronnie didn’t perform at the rehearsal at the festival. Gina stood in for her—in her costume and mask and wig.”

  “The Casserole?” my dad said, using the nickname he and Kirby used behind Gina’s back. “What does she have to do with anything?”

  “She’s Ronnie’s daughter and Ronnie was ill. She couldn’t perform. She asked Gina to do it for her but to keep it to herself. It wasn’t public knowledge. And another thing. Gina told the detective that Don was her father.”

  “That can’t be true. Don’s relationship with Ronnie ended when she took off for Vegas.”

  “Could they have reunited?”

  “It’s possible, but why keep it a secret? He would have told me, at least. You mentioned Chet Lemming the other day. It could be him too.”

  “But that would mean that he and Ronnie had an affair thirty-some years ago.”

  “That’s when she was in her prime.” We both thought about that for a couple of seconds. “Go back to the mask,” he said.

  “It could be that Gina dropped the mask, saw me coming to the trailer, hid until I went inside, and then picked up the mask and took off. Or it could be that the murderer didn’t realize that the mask fell out of the trailer when he or she left and it blew under the trailer into the sewer grate.”

  “Which is what you suspected so you tried to see and dropped your phone into the grate.”

  “Yes,” I said, surprised. “How’d you know?”

  He shrugged. “It’s what I would have done.”

  Maybe Finn was right. Maybe the acorn didn’t fall far from the tree. “Here’s the big problem for Don, though. My phone didn’t fall on a blue domino mask. It fell on a teddy bear.”

  “In the grate?”

  “Yep. And that grate was directly under Ronnie’s trailer. So it’s possible that she put it there.”

  “Ronnie Cass was not the type to wiggle under a trailer that was parked on the street,” he said.

  “She wouldn’t have to. According to Dig, all trailers and buses have access panels in the floor. Ronnie could have opened the access panel from the inside and unscrewed the sewer grate from inside the trailer.”

  “You met Ronnie. Does that sound like something she’d do?”

  “No, but if she had something inside the trailer that somebody wanted, and she needed a safe place to hide it, maybe she would.”

  “You said it was a teddy bear. What’s so special about that?”

  I leaned back against the chrome bars of the chair. “It wasn’t the bear, it’s what she hid inside the bear. It was an engagement ring that said, ‘To R, my favorite enigma. Love, D.’”

  My dad leaned forward. “How do you like that. She still had the ring.”

  “Yes, and probably nobody would have found it except that I went to the police station for my phone. And we got to talking about why a teddy bear would be in that grate, and one thing led to another, and now the detective thinks it’s the piece of evidence she needs to link Don to Ronnie’s murder, which is what she’s using to get the arrest warrant. She thinks Ronnie left it there as a clue.”

  “No way. If she kept that ring all this time, it meant something to her. She wouldn’t use it to incriminate him. More likely she hid it as a message—an apology.” He stood up and opened the fridge, pulled a small gray plastic bag of old coffee grounds out and set it on the counter. I sat, silent, as he rinsed the coffe
epot. He pulled out the used filter and set it on the counter while he fitted a new one in. Long ago the rest of the world had moved on to fancier coffeepots and premeasured pods, but not Dad. Once a week he divided the contents of the paper shredder into three plastic garbage bags and dumped soggy coffee grounds on top of each one. It was a tip he’d picked up from his conspiracy circles. Old habits die hard.

  He finished prepping the coffeepot and clicked the on button. Soot jumped onto the windowsill. A small nut fell from the roof and landed on the outside sill. Soot raised a paw and swatted at the glass. I stepped closer to the window and looked outside.

  “Dad, where’s Don?”

  “Don is someplace nobody would think to look.”

  I stood up and crossed the kitchen and raised the sash on the window. The round object that had landed on the sill was an acorn.

  “Dad,” I said. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

  He stuck a finger inside the collar of his shirt and tugged it away from his neck. “I already told you. The pictures of the meteor shower in Moxie didn’t turn out, so I set the telescope up on the roof.”

  I picked up the broom from where it was wedged between the refrigerator and the wall and banged the end of it against the ceiling. A few seconds later, the ladder alongside the house creaked and then Don appeared. He descended the rest of the rungs and let himself into the store. By the time he joined us in the kitchen, my dad had a hot cup of coffee waiting for him.

  He was a little worse for wear than the day I’d paid him a visit at his house. His black long-sleeved T-shirt had picked up pieces of dried leaves and his charcoal gray pants looked like they’d been lived in. He adjusted his wire-framed glasses, though they seemed to be permanently twisted.

  “What do you remember from the day you found Ronnie?” he asked as if he’d been part of the conversation all along.

  “The door wasn’t locked or even closed properly. I knocked a couple of times, and then I went inside. She was sitting in a chair, all dressed up for her performance. Costume, wig, the whole nine yards. I didn’t even know which one she was—until I touched her and she fell over.” I shuddered at the memory.

  “What else do you remember?”

  “Her wig fell off and there was blood on the side of her head.”

  “So whoever killed her put her wig on her head to hide the wound.”

  The ringing phone interrupted our conversation. I’d gotten better at ignoring it, but with Don and my dad in the chairs in front of me, I thought it best to face the music.

  “Margo, this is Detective Nichols. Do you happen to know the whereabouts of Don Digby? I’m standing here with a warrant for his arrest.”

  Chapter 31

  DETECTIVE NICHOLS ARRIVED seventeen minutes later. After hanging up, Don, my dad, and I spent the next seven and a half minutes trying to find a better suspect. When it became obvious that there was no easy answer, we changed course. The new number one order of business was to find a new place to hide Don, and on short notice, only one location sprung to mind.

  I pulled Don down the stairs into the costume shop and handed him a long brown wig and a blue flowered overcoat. “Put these on and go to Landis House,” I instructed him. “They’ll help you. They have a no-questions-asked policy.” I handed him the keys to Dig’s Le Sabre and practically pushed him out the door.

  I was waiting on the opposite side of the back door when the detective arrived. She rang the bell and I opened the door quickly. She was startled. “I was waiting for you,” I said by way of explanation. “Come on in.”

  She followed me through the back door and down the hallway that led to the stairs. I started up and then stopped and turned back around. She stood by the bottom step, staring into the store.

  “Must have been fun, growing up here,” she said. I was taken aback by the wistful tone of her voice. She cleared her throat and I led her up the stairs.

  “Hi, Jerry,” she said. She glanced around the kitchen. “What’s this about evidence?”

  “Have a seat.” He gestured toward one of the vacant chairs at the table, and then picked up the pot of coffee and poured her a cup. He set it by the vacant seat. She picked it up and breathed in the scent, and then set the mug back down on the table in front of her without taking a sip. He topped off his own mug and held the pot up and looked at me. I shook my head no. Detective Nichols took one seat and he took another.

  “I’ll let you two talk,” I said. I kissed the top of my dad’s head. “See you later.” I ran downstairs and pulled a black down-filled puffy vest from our Deadliest Catch costume over the SECOND GUNMAN T-shirt. I grabbed a backpack, put my wallet into the zippered pocket, and lingered for a few seconds by the bottom of the stairs to hear how things would play out.

  “As you know, Don Digby and I have started a newspaper, the Spicy Acorn,” my dad said. “We’ve been conducting research for an upcoming article about hospital negligence and uncovered some questionable activities that are taking place in Proper City.”

  “This relates to the open investigation of Ms. Cass?” she asked.

  “It may. I’ll let you be the judge. My source tells me—”

  “Your ‘source’?” she interjected. I leaned closer to the bottom of the staircase so I could hear this part more clearly.

  “I’m a reporter, Detective. I feel an obligation to you to disclose what I found out, but my information channel is protected by the Constitution of the United States.” I imagined him smiling his charming smile, the one that got him extra breadsticks at Catch-22. “I thought it best to tell you what I could and let you follow up in the form of an official investigation.”

  * * *

  WHILE my dad kept Detective Nichols occupied with stories about city-wide conspiracies, I snuck out the back door and rolled my scooter into the alleyway. I needed to go to Bobbie’s booth at the festival and find the other bear from Ronnie’s trailer. I didn’t know why that bear was important, but when I connected the dots between Ronnie and Chet, the bear had been there all along. If teddy bears could talk, I had a feeling that one would make an even better informant than I had.

  I drove to the PCP and parked my scooter next to a picnic table. The park was deserted. Where was the festival security? I set my helmet on the table next to the scooter and put my keys into the pocket of the puffy vest. We were less than a week into the festival, and it was normal for the staff to thin down to a skeleton crew after they knew how many people it would take to patrol, but with the recent murder, I’d expected the mayor to keep security staff on around the clock. Instead, the festival grounds felt like the backdrop for a fake ghost-town party minus the dry ice and fog machine. The tents, colorful and welcoming by day, shuddered with the nighttime breeze, creating flapping sounds as the heavy canvas snapped back and forth with the shifting wind.

  I walked past Candy Land, through the temporary maze of festival booths. Ebony had used colorful snap-together foam tiles to create a path, painting instructions like “Advance two” and “Lose your turn” on alternating steps. It was the game within the game-themed park, the most minimal way to participate without patronizing any particular booth. My footsteps were quiet and cushioned, and I watched my sneakers move from red to blue to yellow to black, red to blue to yellow to black. I paid little attention to my surroundings, until I heard muffled sounds coming from a booth by the main stage.

  I dropped to a crouch, and then advanced slowly on the path. When I reached the corner, I put my hands on the aluminum pole that anchored the last booth and peered around the side. A light was on inside Bobbie’s booth and a large figure dressed in the teddy bear costume was moving around.

  I held on to the pole for support. The whole reason I was here was to get to Bobbie’s booth. Was that what someone else was doing too?

  I was too far into the park to turn back now. If I left, there was a good chance the person in her
booth would see me. I looked around again for security, and then it struck me: whoever was in the booth knew the park would be empty. I peeked from around the pole and watched the bear’s paws reach up and undo the ties on the back of the bear costume. He bent forward and let the fur suit fall forward, exposing a floral shirt and striped pants. I didn’t need to identify the face to know who was wearing it.

  Joel V., the festival publicist.

  The way we’d designed the costume was to put additional brown fur at the base of the head, like a dickie. When the rest of the costume was on, there would be no gap between the head and the body. Inside the head, there were mesh inserts by the bear’s eyes to allow the wearer to see. The design had been specifically customized to put the eye holes near the costume eyes so the mannerisms and gestures of the bear would be that much more believable.

  I stepped inside the tent and scanned the items I’d brought from Disguise DeLimit to sell at the festival. Colored hairspray, domino masks, short black wigs, and costumes. Under the cover of the booth, I pulled off the knit hat and tucked my own hair under one of the jet-black wigs, and then pulled on a blue domino mask. I grabbed a can of colored hairspray, popped the cap off, and stepped out from behind the bookcase.

  Joel froze. He looked behind him, the bear head still on. The quick turn of his head had made the bear head shift, and it no longer appeared that his eyes were lined up with the vision holes. He reached up to the head. I raced up to him. The second the head was off his shoulders, I let loose with the hairspray.

  He cried out in pain and threw his hands up in front of the spray. In the minimal light of Bobbie’s booth, I could see that the color I’d grabbed was green. Joel’s face, hair, and hands turned a chalky alien shade. He swatted at the air trying to hit me, but with his vision temporarily clouded, he couldn’t see well enough to connect.

  “Stop it, would you? You’re going to ruin my shirt!”

  He was worried about his shirt?

  I stopped spraying and stepped backward. I kept the can in front of me. He wiped the green away from his eyes, leaving finger-width streaks on his cheeks and temples. When he opened his eyes, he looked startled. “What is it with you divas? If you ask me, you’re all crazy. Didn’t anybody tell you that you’re not expected to perform anymore?”