Crushed Velvet

by Diane Vallere

  “So after he passed out, you suffocated him with a croissant?”

  “And searched the van for the hash. When I didn’t find it, I knew he’d already double-crossed me.”

  “But there were no croissants in the back of the truck, only crumbs. What did you do with the rest of them?”

  “Tossed them in a public trash can. Everything went according to plan.”

  “What about the usher who slept on your sofa?” I asked.

  “What’s a little sedative between friends? He slept right through the whole thing. I woke the kid up myself when I got back. He took one look at my see-through negligee and went back to work with a heck of a story.” She laughed again. “Establishing my alibi was a lot like a burlesque routine. A little sizzle, a little mystery. People think they see more than they do. There’s a reason I sell out two shows a night. I’m good at what I do.” She lunged across the chair for me. I leaned backward and her hands swiped at air.

  “Don’t you want to know where the hash is?” I said between breaths.

  Confusion flashed across her face for a second. “Where? Where did he hide it?”

  “In my fabric.”

  “No, he didn’t. I looked.”

  “The fabric in the truck wasn’t mine. Phil knew as long as he had the hash, he had power over you.”

  “And you have it now?”

  “It’s with the police.”

  Her eyes went wild and crazy. I lunged for the kitchen cabinets and pulled out the bin of catnip. The lid fell off. I threw the bin at her and tiny leaf fragments flew through the air. Babs swiped at them like a cat clawing a scratching post. I dashed past her to the sink. She spun around. I aimed the spigot at her. A shower of water drenched the leaves.

  She grabbed me. I slipped on a patch of wet catnip. We both went down. She wrestled me on the slick, leaf-covered floor. We rolled until we were against the back door. She pinned me with her knees and pressed her wool-gloved hand against my mouth. I gagged.

  The back door opened and a large blue-and-white piece of French pottery came down on the back of Babs’s head. Her eyes fluttered for a second and then she collapsed against me.

  Genevieve stood on the back steps. “La nécessité nous délivre de l’embarras du choix.” She tossed the broken blue-and-white pottery against the concrete step. ‘Necessity saves us the embarrassment of having to make a choice.’”

  “What choice? Hitting the woman who killed your husband?”

  “Sacrificing a perfectly good piece of French pottery.”

  She helped me stand. “How did you know we were here?” I asked.

  “I didn’t. I was released tonight and I wanted to peek at the store. I saw the two of you through the window and called Sheriff Clark.”

  In the distance I heard sirens. “For a couple of minutes there I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure your troubles are over.”

  “Why?”

  She pointed to my clothes, covered in wet clumps of catnip. “When you get home, Pins and Needles are going to tear you apart.”

  Twenty-nine

  It was hard to believe how much happened after the showdown at Tea Totalers. Clark arrived and I gave him my statement. Babs returned to consciousness while we were talking. When she saw Genevieve, she reacted like she’d seen a ghost. Clark took Babs into custody, and a uniformed officer I’d never met escorted her outside and into the back of a police car.

  A medical examiner gave me a quick once-over despite my constant repetition of the phrase, “I’m okay. I just want to go to bed.” He finally agreed and, just past midnight, I was released.

  When I got home, I cut the sleeves off my sweatshirt and gave one to each of the cats. I put the rest of my outfit in a plastic bag and threw it in the Dumpster out back. I showered for an hour and slept for fourteen.

  When I woke, Pins and Needles were zonked out on the bed. Their bellies were in the air, paws over their heads, sleeping off the catnip buzz Cheech and Chong–style. I got up, showered again, and made an afternoon breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee. I called Charlie and told her what had happened, and then headed downstairs to work in the fabric store. It was Saturday afternoon. In less than a day, I’d be opening my doors to the public, and I had to use every second to make sure the place was ready.

  I flipped on all of the interior lights and turned around. Since I’d been staying here, I’d gotten familiar with the interior of the store, but what would customers see? A large, open warehouse space. Walls lined in white shelves bulging with brightly colored bolts of quilting cottons, soft charmeuse, silk, wool, and jersey. Large tables in the middle of the store held stacks of fabrics rolled on cardboard tubes. One table held an assortment of faux fur; one held denim and camouflage. Others held suede, vinyl, and burlap.

  I had lined the outside of the register stand with small two-shelf bookcases. The shelves facing the front of the store held how-to manuals and sewing supplies. Scissors, tape measures, pins, needles, bobbins, and thimbles filled the shelves on the side. Next to the register area were more fixtures, filled with zippers, thread, buttons, bias tape, and binding tape. The notions wall ran the length of the store and held more supplies for sewers at any skill level.

  Most of the store was ready. Except for the front by the door, where I’d hoped to house my new bolts of proprietary velvet, the inventory was stocked. After what had gone down with Babs, I knew not to count on getting back my velvet—or not-my-velvet—any time soon. I looked at the rest of my inventory, trying to decide what to move to the empty space. Everything had been carefully placed. Everything except the fabric discards too damaged to sell. They sat by the back door, where I’d carried them. I hadn’t been able to throw them away.

  Maybe I didn’t have to.

  I moved the old inventory to the front of the store. I scanned in and printed up pictures from when Aunt Millie and Uncle Marius had owned the store, and wrote short blurbs explaining where the fabrics had come from. I created a history of the store from when they first opened their doors to the day I was reopening them as mine. When I finished, the front left corner of the store was a fabric museum, where patrons could come in and see what my family had built all those many years before. I ended the display with a large round trash can filled with bolts of the old, damaged fabric and signed it Original Inventory. One Yard Free! I doubted I’d get any takers, but it was better than throwing it out.

  • • •

  Sunday morning I dressed in a black turtleneck, black boot-cut pants, and my black riding boots. I pulled a pink apron printed with brightly colored spools of thread over the turtleneck and tied it in back, and then draped a matching pink tape measure around my neck like I’d seen my aunt do a thousand times when she was alive. There was a pounding on the back door. I unlocked it and found my parents in the parking lot.

  “Surprise!” my mom said. “We couldn’t let you open the store without us.” She threw her arms around me. She stepped back and looked at my neglected haircut, then back at me, and hugged me again.

  My dad handed me an arrangement of flowers. “Congratulations, Poly. Aunt Millie and Uncle Marius would be proud of you.” He kissed me on the cheek and followed my mom inside.

  She scanned the interior, her gaze falling on the display. “What’s this?” she asked. She walked past the bins of fabric and studied the photos. Within seconds, she turned to my dad. “John, come here. You have to see what Poly made.” There were tears in her eyes.

  I couldn’t wait any longer. I unlocked the front door and pulled the gate back. Out front I hung a sign: Free Fabric! Inquire Inside.

  And then I flipped the Closed sign to Open.

  Genevieve, Maria, and Big Joe walked toward me with Carlos and Antonio behind them. Big Joe pushed a two-tiered cart. The top held six carafes of coffee. The bottom was stacked with pink
bakery boxes. The two young boys looked like they weren’t happy about the prospect of spending their morning in a fabric store.

  “Maria, Genevieve—”

  “Poly, you need to learn to either say thank you or keep your mouth shut. You got that?” Maria said.

  “Thank you.”

  “That’s better.”

  Carlos’s face was squinched up. “Where’s our free fabric?” he asked.

  “Carlos! We did not do this because we expected anything,” his mother chastised.

  “Maria, he’s right. The sign out front says free fabric. Come with me,” I said to him.

  I led him to the section of the store where I’d set up the history display. I stooped down so I could look him straight in the face. “These pictures are from when my aunt and uncle owned the store a long time ago. They made a place that was really important to the city, just like your parents have made the donut shop. People came from all over the state to see the fabric in this store. Even moviemakers. They would buy special silk here because it came from Thailand, and cashmere that came from Scotland.”

  “Moviemakers came here to buy fabric?”

  “Some of them did, yes. And some very glamorous women came here, too.” I pointed to a picture of my great-aunt in a boucle suit with a pencil skirt. The picture was taken in the fifties, and I figured my aunt had been in her late twenties at the time. “See her?”

  “Is she famous?” he asked.

  “She’s my aunt.”

  Carlos was mesmerized by the photos. His eyes scanned the rest of the display, until he spotted the bin of fabric at the end.

  “That’s the free fabric. You can pick any one and I’ll cut you a yard of it to take home with you.”

  “For free?”

  “For free.”

  He concentrated on something for a few seconds. “Can I look at the rest of the pictures before I decide which one I want?”

  “Of course you can.”

  Genevieve was waiting for me at the register. “Thank you for everything, Poly. Babs was charged with Phil’s murder, and Sheriff Clark contacted the Drug Enforcement Agency about the hash you found. Babs has been flying under the radar out here for years now. I can’t believe she thought she was going to use my shop as her front.”

  I put my arm around her. “What about you? How are you doing?”

  She looked up at me with a wan smile. “I still can’t believe that I’m alone, that he’s not coming back. There are so many things about Phil that made me mad, all of these secrets that I didn’t know, but still, there’s this hole in my life.”

  “Gen, it’s going to take some time for that hole to go away.”

  “I know.” There were tears in her eyes. “I know I’m better off without him, but it’s hard to think that all of our plans were a lie. When we opened the tea shop, it was supposed to be our future.”

  “Tea Totalers is your future. Yours. From the moment I met you, I could see that you were born to run a French café. And now you can, and you can do whatever you want with it. In fact, I had this idea the other day . . .” I briefly outlined the Midnight in Paris concept for her and watched her expression change from sadness to enthusiasm. Genevieve’s life was changed forever, but she had more to look forward to now than ever before.

  “Poly, I owe you so much more than the next eight hours of my time.”

  “I’m sure we can work something out,” I said with a smile. “But first, I have a question. What was the deal with the Italian food distributor?”

  “Mr. di Sali? I told you he wants me to sell my recipes. Thanks to Vaughn, I don’t have to consider that anymore.”

  “But why did he tell me to remind you that it was a two-way street?”

  Her face colored. “He knew that I outsourced my croissants. He said if I would go into business with him, he could find me a different supplier and cut the cost in half. Poly, I was looking at everything I could to cut back on expenses, but that tea shop was my dream. I couldn’t sacrifice the quality of the food to save a couple of dollars.”

  “Did you tell him that?

  “I called him from Charlie’s. He said if I ever reconsidered selling or buying, to give him a call.”

  I had to laugh. The world was filled with Italian Scallions and Giovannis: people trying to make money from other people’s businesses. “It’s a good thing you never took him up on his offer. The fact that you and Adelaide use the same croissant supplier really helped you.”

  “What really helped me was being friends with you.”

  “What about Kim? Is she going to continue to work for you?”

  She shook her head. “Her parents felt that it was too much for her to handle, the job and school and her weekend community service. She’s going to work full-time with her uncle Sam in the insurance agency. Who knows? Maybe she’ll show a real flair for it.”

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  Genevieve draped a neon green measuring tape around her neck. “Enough about me. Tell me how I start to repay you.”

  I transferred the apron to Genevieve. “You can ring a register, right?” I asked while she turned around.

  “Right.”

  I knotted the strings in the back. “Then that’s your job.”

  There were four customers by eleven. By noon, at least a dozen. I lost track around a quarter after one and didn’t look at the clock again until four thirty. My mom’s hair stood up on one side and my dad was asleep in the corner thanks to donut overdose. We had given away several yards of fabric to people who wanted it because it represented a part of the city’s history. Customer after customer told me how wonderful it was to see the inside of the store that had been boarded up for the past ten years, and a few members of the city’s Senior Patrol shared their own stories: buying the fabric for their prom and wedding dresses here, making dresses for their children and now their children’s children. I didn’t want to jinx things, but if day one was any indication, it seemed as though Material Girl was going to succeed.

  I sank into a chair to rest my feet for a few minutes. “Mom, thank you for cutting your vacation short to help me. I couldn’t have done this without you.”

  She cupped her hand alongside my face. “Yes, you could have, but you didn’t have to. This store is about family.” She looked up at the front door. “Speaking of families, here comes one now.”

  I twisted my head and saw Adelaide and Vaughn enter. Adelaide smiled at me and said something to Vaughn. He looked at me, said something to her, and turned toward the historical display. Adelaide approached me.

  “You’ve had a very busy forty-eight hours,” she said. “I can’t imagine what it took to open the store today.”

  “That’s the one thing that I wasn’t going to leave to chance.” I looked over my shoulder and saw Genevieve and Charlie reestablishing the foundation of their friendship. “Adelaide, have you given any thought to my suggestion for your annual party?”

  “It’s just about the only thing I have been thinking about.”

  “Genevieve Girard is by the register, and I bet she’d love it if you approached her about it.”

  “I will in a second.” Adelaide looked around the interior of the shop, her eyes resting on the historical display I’d set up. She pointed to it. “You found a way to bring the past into the present,” she said.

  “Inspired by what you’ve done at the Waverly House.”

  “Do you mind if I go take a look?”

  “Please do,” I said.

  I watched customers mill around the interior of the shop. Genevieve stood by the register talking to Charlie. They appeared to be on friendly terms again. I wondered how long it would take Charlie to be on friendly terms with Sheriff Clark again. If ever.

  “Can you handle the cutting station?” I asked my mom. “I’ll only be a second.”
/>   “I’ll be fine. Go, take your time.”

  I met Vaughn halfway through the store by a bin of gabardine. He wore an ivory turtleneck, khaki pants, and his Stan Smiths. His hair was ruffled in the way that only the wind could do.

  “I heard about what happened at Tea Totalers after I left,” he said.

  “Things got pretty crazy.”

  I expected him to apologize for storming out or for not coming back. He didn’t. I liked him a little bit more because of that.

  “Vaughn, would you like to go to dinner tonight? To help me celebrate the opening of the fabric store?”

  He tipped his head to the side and studied me. I matched his eye contact and waited for his answer. I already knew I’d offended him a few times recently. He could say no just as easily as he could say yes.

  A lopsided smile played at the corners of his mouth and the light caught in his green-and-gold-flecked eyes. He gave in to the smile, revealing straight white teeth. “That depends,” he said.

  “On what? The restaurant? I hadn’t given it much thought—”

  “No. It depends on who’s picking up the bill.”

  Before I had a chance to think up a witty retort, Genevieve popped her head into our conversation. “That’s easy,” she said. “Come to Tea Totalers and I’ll provide a private picnic for two. My treat.”

  I looked at Vaughn and raised my eyebrows at him. “Does that work for you?”

  “This time, but you owe me.”

  “Okay, then. I’ll see you tonight.” I turned to leave. He caught me by the arm and spun me back around.

  “I’m not leaving yet,” he said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the value of a dollar and, well . . .” He paused.

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, before I leave, I want my free yard of fabric.”