A Disguise to Die For

by Diane Vallere

  “Nancy Nichols—do I know her?”

  “I don’t know why you would. She’s Proper City’s new police detective.”

  Oh crap. Crappety crappety crap. “You mean Detective Nichols? The one who looks like a professional volleyball player?”

  Bobbie studied me. “Mitty, you look like you just heard the stock market crashed. Are you okay?”

  “The detective and Tak Hoshiyama are a couple?”

  “That’s what I heard but I don’t keep up with these things. Why is it such a big deal to you?” she asked.

  I buried my face in my hands. “Detective Nichols caught Tak and me at Hoshiyama Steak House after hours last night,” I said. “Oh gosh, Bobbie, this is bad.”

  “How bad can it be? His parents own the place, so it’s not like you broke in, right? Besides, maybe they’re on a break. You’re consenting adults, and whatever she caught you doing is nobody’s business but your own.”

  “She caught us eating fried rice.”

  “Oh. Sounds innocent to me.”

  “That’s not the problem. It’s Detective Nichols and Tak. I bet that’s why he keeps showing up and talking to me about what happened. He’s helping her. Oh man, I am so stupid. Do you know what I did? I trusted him. I don’t know what she’s going to do but it can’t be good.”

  “Work with me, Mits. What’s going on?”

  I looked up at Bobbie. The desire to confide in Tak last night had gone unfulfilled and I desperately needed to talk to somebody. “Do you think you can spare an hour for breakfast?”

  * * *

  MINUTES later we were seated at a booth in the back of Eggcetera, a breakfast restaurant in the corner of the strip mall. I faced down a Belgian waffle covered in quickly melting whipped butter—the stress of Ebony’s situation required something stronger than a smoothie—while Bobbie layered lox and cream cheese onto her bagel.

  “You heard about Blitz Manners, right?” I asked.

  She nodded. “What a horrible situation. Murdered at his own party.”

  “I was there,” I said. At her surprised expression, I continued, “Not as a guest. Blitz hired Disguise DeLimit to provide costumes for the party and hired Shindig to coordinate everything.”

  “I thought he was going to have his party at Roman Gardens.”

  “A pipe burst in the kitchen a week before the party and flooded the place. The owner gave back the deposit and that’s when Blitz came to us.”

  “Twenty-four hours to plan a Blitz-sized party? That couldn’t have been easy.”

  “It wasn’t. We weren’t even going to take the job except—” I stopped midsentence. The twenty grand in cash that I’d found in Ebony’s parking lot was locked inside my scooter, now sitting in front of the offices of Money Changes Everything. Anxiety crept up my skin like an army of tiny spiders. I looked out the window to see if my scooter was still there. It was. I sipped water and remembered that nobody knew the money was in the scooter except for me.

  “Except that Blitz threw enough money at you to make it worth your while,” Bobbie finished.

  “How did you know?”

  “You don’t live in Proper City and not know about Blitz and his money. The day his inheritance came through was the first day of the rest of his life. And it wasn’t the fantasy people might think.” She took a big bite of her bagel and held her hand up over her mouth while she chewed.

  I studied Bobbie. “You sound like maybe you know more about Blitz than you’re saying.”

  She held up her index finger until she swallowed and followed with a gulp of her green tea. “This stays between us, okay?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Blitz’s dad died when he was thirteen, but he didn’t get his inheritance until he was eighteen. By then, he was already popular. Captain of the football team, homecoming king, you know the type. But when he got that money, his life changed overnight. Suddenly he had an entourage. His family was always rich, so it wasn’t like he didn’t know what money would do, but he still went a little crazy. When his mom remarried, he waited until their honeymoon and threw a massive party at the house. It lasted three days and somebody called the cops. It was the first of many parties like that. They were legendary.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked. Bobbie and I were six years older than Blitz’s crowd. Not an insurmountable age difference, but more likely an insurmountable difference in priorities. I couldn’t see Bobbie hanging with Blitz’s crowd, legendary parties or not.

  Bobbie looked down at her green tea, picked up the mug, and then set it down again without taking a sip. “Blitz had the same problems with substance abuse that I had. The difference was, he didn’t want to get better. That’s how he coped. After one party too many, he was arrested for disturbing the peace. His parents sent him to the rehab clinic.”

  “The same one where you went?”

  She nodded. “I was there when he checked in.”

  “You didn’t need to—”

  She held up her hand. “I haven’t taken anything stronger than aspirin since I left. Once a year I go back and visit. I can’t explain why I do it except that I feel like I owe it to them and to myself to check in and prove that I’m still okay, and to acknowledge the role they played in me getting my life on track.”

  “So you were there when Blitz checked in.”

  “And I was there when he bought his way out too. But he still had to serve two hundred hours of community service. I was planning a city fund-raiser and he fulfilled his community service by working with me.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Whatever I needed him to do. Twenty hours a week for ten weeks. When you spend that kind of time together, you start to know each other. And knowing what I knew, I wanted to help him. Blitz started those two hundred hours as a spoiled rich kid who was barely legal, but by the time his sentence was up, I’d gotten to know a whole different person. He was just like every other kid who is a big shot in high school and realizes that life isn’t what he thought it would be. He acted out for attention. He kept throwing the parties because people expected him to throw the parties but he knew his popularity had nothing to do with who he was. People weren’t coming to his house because they were his friends. He resented being popular for his money, and he never got over his dad’s death.”

  I thought back to the day Blitz had been at Disguise DeLimit. My first impression had been spoiled rich kid who gets whatever he wants, but he’d changed when I gave back his money. When Grady came back, he’d said that Blitz felt bad for the way he’d treated me, and I hadn’t believed it. Now I was left wondering if that was the case, if Blitz had gotten so used to people wanting nothing more from him than an envelope filled with cash that he didn’t know how to handle my rejection.

  “What happened after his sentence was over?” I asked. “Did he ever come back to help you?”

  “He helped the only way he knew how,” she said. “He donated money.”

  Nothing I’d learned about Blitz Manners had prepared me to discover he had an altruistic side. If it hadn’t been Bobbie talking, I don’t know that I would have believed the information.

  “Do you have proof of this? Donation receipts or thank-you letters?”

  “No. He didn’t want any kind of credit other than knowing he was doing something good. But every couple of months he showed up with an envelope of twenty thousand dollars in cash.”

  Chapter 13

  INVOLUNTARILY, I GLANCED out the window at my scooter again. It stood out by being kitschy in its mod appearance, an anachronism among the rest of the everyday vehicles parked around the area. It was the first time I wished I drove a dirty old car like everybody else.

  “Margo, your scooter is safe. There’s a special place in hell for the kind of person who would steal a scooter from outside a nonprofit that sells teddy bears for charity. Everybody knows
that.”

  “Sorry, I got distracted,” I said. “What did you do with the rest of the donations that Blitz made?”

  “I put them in the bank. Why?”

  “Did you tell anybody about them? After what happened?”

  “Who was I going to tell? Blitz wanted to remain anonymous. He knew what he did, and I knew what he did. And no matter how hard I tried to talk him into it, he wouldn’t even take a tax deduction on the money. You’re not going to tell anybody about this, are you?”

  “No. It’s hard to think that I met this person and he’s so much different than I thought,” I said. “I shouldn’t be asking you so many things. I got carried away.”

  She reached across the table and patted my hand. “I can understand that,” she said. “It breaks my heart that none of those kids who showed up at his party ever took the time to know the real Blitz Manners.”

  * * *

  I didn’t check the seat of the scooter for the money until I was back at Disguise DeLimit. I didn’t want to draw attention to it. I wasn’t used to driving around with $20,000 in cash, especially the cash of a recent murder victim.

  Bobbie had said that Blitz was due to give her his donation on the exact same day he’d shown up at the store and given us the incentive of an envelope of cash. It was curious that he’d had that much money on him in the first place. Was that why? Because he was on his way to Money Changes Everything? And if that was the case, what had happened to make him decide to give us the money instead?

  I thought back to later that same night, when he and his tipsy friends had stopped back at the store. Even Grady had made a comment about my actions. “You were right, Blitz, she’s not like the rest of them. All the girls we know would have kept the money.” Had the envelope of twenty grand been some kind of a test?

  Upstairs in the kitchen, I wrote Blitz’s deposit, returned by me Wednesday night on a blank sheet of white paper and set the envelope with the $20,000 on top of it. Now I had three things to investigate: the money, the empty hair spray can that had been in the backseat of the car, and the torn piece of fabric. Two had come from Ebony’s vandalized car. The third had come from her parking lot. Which meant all three were connected to her.

  One thing might have been easy to dismiss. Two, even. But three things—plus the fact that for the first time since I’d known Ebony, she’d decided to leave town—were too many to ignore. I didn’t know what she was afraid of. But Ebony had been there for me when I’d been scared—of going to junior high school, of taking my driver’s test, and of moving to Las Vegas—and now that she needed me I wasn’t going to let her down.

  I knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Ebony wouldn’t hurt a fly unless that fly was threatening someone or something she loved. Which meant somebody else had murdered Blitz. Somebody at the birthday party. But who? The guest list of a party was supposed to be made up of people who were your friends. So which of Blitz’s friends would have viewed the party as an opportunity to get back at him instead of a chance to celebrate with him? Who would have had a motive to murder the very person who had been included on his special day?

  My mind swam with images of costumed detectives at the party, each one running into the next. I’d made forty costumes as requested, but some of the costumes at the party had come from Candy Girls or even somewhere else. The police knew who was in attendance; they spoke to each person at the party before anybody was allowed to leave. That included guests, entertainment, Ebony’s serving staff, the kitchen crew, and the valet parking attendants. It was highly possible that this was the biggest locked-room mystery ever, and it was most probable that too many detectives had spoiled the stew.

  I carried the swatch of fabric downstairs and checked it against the roll that my dad had used on the Sherlock costumes. The pattern was similar, but not a perfect match. That told me something, but not much. I thought again about the tear in the costume that Amy Bradshaw had wanted to sell. Why had she changed her mind? What was she trying to hide?

  The store hours listed on the Candy Girls website were nine to seven. I called the store and asked to speak to Amy. A few minutes later, she took the call.

  “Amy, this is Margo Tamblyn from Disguise DeLimit. I wanted to talk to you about the Charlie’s Angels costume you brought in on Sunday.” I charged ahead before she could hang up. “I’ve had a chance to look at our inventory, and I’d be interested in acquiring all three costumes if you can convince the other two women to sell.”

  “How did you know I worked here?” she asked.

  “I asked around,” I said. “After I saw your costume, I wanted to find out who made them. I thought if they came from Candy Girls, you would have returned them there, so you must have made them yourself.”

  “It’s too late for you to buy that costume. I threw it out.”

  “That’s a shame. I’m sure the tear in the pants could be fixed.”

  “What tear?”

  “In the back of the leg. I saw it when you brought it in to Disguise DeLimit. You knew the pants were torn, right? You must have gotten them caught on something at the party.”

  Amy was silent on the other end of the phone. “Amy? Are you still there?”

  “I have to go. We have customers.” She hung up.

  There was no doubt in my mind that I’d said shaken Amy up. Was it simply that I’d tracked her down? Or was it the mention of the tear in the pants? Maybe she didn’t know the garment had been torn—which would be a problem only if she’d been doing something incriminating when the tear had happened.

  I’d succeeded in accomplishing one thing: I’d made her nervous. If she had nothing to hide, she would have reacted entirely differently. I didn’t believe for a second that she’d thrown the costume out. Now, the first chance I got, I was going to go to Candy Girls to see if it was somewhere in their inventory, and if so, if I could match the torn fabric to that costume.

  * * *

  I spent the next hour undressing the mannequins in the front window and redressing them in the newly acquired sailor outfits. I envisioned a South Pacific theme. By store opening, not only did I have three mannequins dressed in crisp (and pleasantly smelling) uniforms—two men and a woman—but also a female mannequin in the middle dressed as Nellie Forbush. I measured the backdrop of the window and made a few quick sketches of a tropical scene with palm trees, blue water, and sailboats. Now all I needed were materials and a skilled set painter.

  It was a slow day in the shop. The highlight was a woman who came in with a small brown wiener dog under her arm. She wanted a custom Robin Hood costume for him. He stood still on the counter while I took his measurements and then wrapped him from neck to tail in brown butcher paper and marked out where his leg holes would have to go. I recorded everything in a notebook and quoted her a price. She paid her deposit and we agreed she could come back to pick up the costume on Thursday. She tucked the wiener dog under her arm and left.

  For the next few hours, I used a blank page in the notebook to work out the six degrees of separation from Blitz Manners. The problem wasn’t the lack of suspects, it was the high number of them. Anybody who’d attended the party would have had the opportunity to get into the kitchen and kill him—at least anybody who knew when the kitchen would be empty.

  I flipped through the pages clipped to the clipboard until I found the list of custom costumes I’d made for the party. Grady’s credit card slip was stapled to the upper left-hand side of the page, and his phone number was written alongside of it. If only I could think up an excuse to ask him about who wore which costume.

  Maybe I didn’t have an excuse to call Grady, but I had a perfect excuse to call Detective Nichols. Now that I knew that she and Tak were a couple, I couldn’t shake the look on her face when she discovered us at Hoshiyama’s the previous night. I didn’t need there to be any bad blood between us, not while she was investigating Blitz’s murder.

/>   Ebony’s vandalized car was an isolated incident that Ebony had asked me not to report, and that meant not reporting the empty black hair spray cans and torn piece of fabric. That didn’t mean I couldn’t bring up Amy’s suspicious behavior.

  I called the number on the card the detective had given me at the party. “Detective Nichols, this is Margo Tamblyn. You asked me to call you if I had information related to Blitz’s murder.”

  “Does this have to do with Ebony Welles?” she asked.

  “No. It has to do with Amy Bradshaw. She works at Candy Girls Party Store.”

  “What about Ms. Bradshaw?”

  “She was at the party on Saturday.”

  “I already know that. I have a copy of the guest list. Is that all?”

  I cleared my throat and spoke up. “She came into my store on Sunday morning and wanted to sell me her costume, but when I told her I needed her name, she changed her mind.”

  “Sounds like you already knew her name.”

  “I didn’t find out who she was until after she left. But don’t you think that’s suspicious? That she’s in a relationship with Blitz, but the day after he’s murdered she comes here to try to sell her costume? I mean, why wouldn’t she take it to her own store?”

  “Ms. Tamblyn, it isn’t a crime to shop the market.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I said. Every impulse told me to hang up the phone before I annoyed the detective and made things worse, but I didn’t. The image of Ebony saying good-bye and driving off that morning appeared and I squeezed my eyes shut to pretend it hadn’t happened. But it had. And it was up to me to resolve things so she’d come back.

  “Detective, it’s possible that Amy Bradshaw has a very good reason for trying to sell me her costume. I just don’t know what it was. When I told her I needed her name, she changed her mind about selling and took off. I could understand if she didn’t like the price I offered, but that wasn’t the case.”

  “You said she wore this costume to the party on Saturday?”