Grand Theft Retro (Style & Error Mystery Series Book 5)

by Diane Vallere

  “Did you get that from the ‘how to be a potential girlfriend’ guidebook?”

  “I’ve been reading a lot of romantic comedies and I’ve noticed a trend. Do we have a deal?”

  “Deal.”

  I sat back and rubbed my palms against each other. Somewhere after the window slamming, I’d discovered the gutter that ran alongside of the house. Nothing like a little shinny down the drainpipe to make a girl feel spry. Once I was back on the ground, I pulled my blazer out of the handbag and put it on, hiding the scratches I’d incurred along the way. Unfortunately, my velvet pants were torn in three different places, one of which exposed the frilly lace trim on the side of my pink panties.

  “So, what now?” Eddie asked.

  I tucked the edges of my navy blue shawl deep into the hobo bag. “Take me back to the Retrofit office. There’s something going on with Pritchard and I’d like to see what I can find out.”

  “Translation: as long as he’s at that house, you have a window of time to snoop around his cubicle.”

  Clearly I hadn’t fully embraced the reasons why snooping was a bad idea just yet because I thought he had a good point.

  Eddie’s best efforts to get to work early had been dashed thanks to me and the hanging-from-a-building act, so I couldn’t complain about the fact that he drove directly to his job instead of dropping me off in front of mine.

  The parking lot was mostly empty, but instead of cutting across the vacant spaces, I stuck to the sidewalk. It was a Wednesday in May, and it seemed the residents of Ribbon had better things to do than go shopping. I entered Retrofit and went to my cubicle.

  Before Retrofit had become Retrofit, the offices where we ran the magazine had been a storefront for a local bakery. Every once in awhile I imagined the scent of various and sundry breads coming from the back of the offices where Nancie Townsend had set up the boardroom. During particularly long meetings, I would have paid good money for someone to show up and bake us a couple of loaves of sourdough.

  Once the bakery had moved out and Nancie had obtained the keys, she’d taken it upon herself to convert the property to a business. The permanent walls had been painted yellow, the linoleum tiled floors had been covered in throw rugs, the counter had been taken out and replaced with moveable walls that created the perception of individual offices. The intern who worked as our receptionist and general Johnny-on-the-spot sat at a small desk out front. There weren’t a lot of jobs out there that included shopping on eBay for copies of Vogue in mint condition, and while I knew our rotating door of interns were unpaid, I suspected the sheer novelty of the job kept local fashion students in line for the next vacant position.

  Keys jangled outside of the offices. Moments later, Nancie arrived in my doorway.

  “Sam, great, you’re here.” One by one she pushed the sleeves of her black and white blazer up over her forearms. “I got a concerned message from Pritchard. I was worried that you might have tried to go with him today.”

  “I haven’t seen Pritchard all morning,” I said truthfully. “Didn’t you say he had an appointment with a collector?”

  “Yes. Local clotheshorse. Pritchard wanted to see what she still had before acting on behalf of Retrofit, but he heard rumors that her collection was worth a look. He might persuade her to loan it to us for a special feature.”

  The garments that I’d seen were in pristine condition. The vibe was exactly what we needed. With the correct accessories, we could style the outfits two ways: as they were shown forty years ago, and how to wear them today. It would be unlike anything the fashion magazines did, because they focused exclusively on new collections. And I was capable of styling it myself.

  “I have an idea.” Forgetting about Prichard for the moment, I outlined the concept to Nancie. “What if we had a feature that broke down exact items from the Seventies—maybe even the complete head to toe look that a designer showed on the runway or how it was featured in Vogue—as close as we can get it.” I made a quick sketch of a female figure on the left half of a piece of paper and wrote “Literal Translation” under it. “On the right, we take one key item from the look and style it for now. Pair it with jeans, or leggings, or all white. Modernize the jewelry, hair, makeup. Make it today.” Under the right sketch, I wrote “Modern Translation.” I pushed the paper toward Nancie.

  She picked it up and looked back and forth between the two sketches. With the hand not holding the paper, she flicked the page, leaving a dent in the middle. “Perfection!” she said. “This is exactly what we need to give our magazine its own identity. I’m going to call Pritchard and tell him. Depending on what this collector has, he can pull looks and shoot them so we can at least have placeholders before we put them on a figure.”

  “But don’t you think that’s a two person job? To help identify what we should and shouldn’t use?”

  “Sam, Pritchard is a Godsend. I can’t expect you to run all over town on a project of this magnitude. Let him do the legwork while you get started on editorial.” She left my cubicle muttering, “Dream team.”

  I bit back the response that sprung to my lips. I knew my idea was a good one. I knew it would set Retrofit apart from the other print publications out there and could possibly even be what made our first issue a collector’s item. But the person who put the outfits together would get stylist credit on the pages of the magazine. The person who wrote the editorial would have one listing in the front on a page nobody looks at because the font is painfully small.

  The four months I’d been working with Nancie had been enough to show her what I brought to the table. I didn’t know what Pritchard was up to, but I wasn’t going to let him take sole credit for finding our source and styling the clothes. That would turn my dream job into a nightmare. No way was I going to play second fiddle to a middle aged guy with a comb over.

  But I couldn’t help wonder, who had he been talking to? What was he hoping to find in the attic, and what would he have done if he’d found me there? His words had sounded threatening but could have been just a figure of speech. I’d worked with competitive colleagues before, and I could do it again. If Pritchard was going to throw down the gauntlet of who-is-a-better-employee, I would accept the challenge.

  I spent the next few hours making a list of major trends of the Seventies so we’d know what to find for our literal translation. Caftan, boho, patchwork, Indian beading, long vests, prairie skirt. It was a start. I was eager to get going on the idea-to-execution stage. I was anxious, too. The longer Pritchard spent away from the office, the more I wondered how well he’d take to running with my idea. If she ruins this, I’ll take her out of the equation. I still wasn’t sure what he’d meant, but I couldn’t afford to lose this job.

  Nancie returned to my cubicle in the late afternoon. “Pritchard called. He’s been looking at that collection all day.” She pulled a pair of square black sunglasses out of her handbag and perched them on top of her head. “Make sure he knows he can rely on you for this too. I don’t want him to feel like he has to do everything.”

  I felt the heat climb my neck. “I’ll make sure it’s a 50-50 partnership,” I said.

  “Perfection.” She hiked her quilted Chanel handbag up onto her shoulder. “I’m heading out for a teeth cleaning. Don’t work too hard. Wait—you’re working for me. Work as hard as you want!” She laughed at her passive management style and left.

  I sorted unwanted emails into the trash folder and listened for Nancie’s keys in the lock. When I was sure she was gone, I grabbed a notepad and went to Pritchard’s cubicle. I didn’t know how much time I had so if I was going to snoop, I had to be quick.

  Long ago I’d heard that a messy desk was the sign of an organized mind, and, seeing how I was probably the only person who could follow my own logic of notebooks and paper stacks, I liked to think it was true. But if my desk indicated that I had an organized mind, Pritchard’s indicated the opposite. His desk was neat. Clean. Empty. It was as if he’d spent the last hour of last ni
ght removing all signs that he worked there.

  Weird.

  His desk, like mine, was a white laminated table. A black metal inbox tray sat on the corner. A matching pencil holder sat next to it. It was filled with several dozen retractable black ballpoint gel pens. I pulled one out of his cup holder, clicked to reveal the point, and clicked it to retract.

  A row of small, white, build-them-yourself bookcases ran along the far wall. They were mostly empty. Pritchard was new to the team and it appeared that he hadn’t brought much in the way of decoration, personal effects, or distractions. Which was good, because as far as snooping around his office went, there wasn’t a lot of time.

  I opened the file manager on his computer and scanned his files. They were as clean as his desk. Each folder was neatly labeled in all caps. Subfolders were capitalized, and sub-sub folders were in lowercase. His master folders were labeled by decade. I clicked on the Seventies. Inside were two nestled folders: designers and private collections. I clicked on the designer folder and found a subdirectory of every major fashion player who’d contributed to the look of the decade. Halston, Biba, Bonnie Cashin, and more.

  I closed out of his computer, stood up, ready to leave. I was halfway out the door when I stopped and turned around again, this time spotting a briefcase hidden on the bottom shelf of his bookcase. Once I had it open, it took only another couple of seconds to realize that Pritchard Smith was not who he seemed.

  Chapter 4

  WEDNESDAY, NOON

  You would have thought someone who had an assortment of fake identification would make more of an effort to hide it. But the briefcase opened up and right on the top of a stack of file folders and envelopes were four ID cards with Pritchard’s photo. The names on the cards varied: Pritchard Smith, Smith Pritchard, Pritchard Whitbee, and Gene Smith. Each card was from a different state. There was one from New York, one from Delaware, one from Florida, and one from Utah.

  The birth year fit Pritchard’s appearance. The city and states told me nothing. You could apply for identification anywhere with proof of residence. All that would take was a credit check and an approved rental application, and I suspected in some cities that a hundred dollar bill passed under the table might stand in for both.

  The phone rang. We used a universal number in the Retrofit offices, so the only way to know who the call was for was to answer and ask. I picked up Pritchard’s phone. “Retrofit Magazine,” I said.

  “Hey, Kidd.”

  It didn’t take more than two words for me to identify the speaker: Nick Taylor. Shoe designer, former business affiliate, on again/off again relationship with my finger poised on the switch, ready to flip it on.

  Nick’s voice was low and rich and deep, and when he wanted to, he could infuse those two words—“Hey, Kidd”—with a variety of emotions. Tonight, he’d selected sexy and casual from his arsenal. My knees grew weak and my heart rate picked up. If my head and my heart ever got together and had a serious discussion about how we felt about him, I’d be a little nervous at the outcome.

  “Hey, Nick,” I said.

  “Working late?”

  “I hadn’t planned to, but something came up. Why?”

  “I know this is last minute, but I thought maybe you’d like to come over.”

  Over the course of the nine years that I was a buyer for Bentley’s, Nick and I had maintained a business relationship that approached but never quite crossed the line of flirtation. I assumed that he had his share of attention from the other female buyers in the market. There aren’t many straight men in fashion, and even if there were, Nick would have been ahead of the curve. Curly brown hair and root-beer-barrel colored eyes that crinkled in the corners when he smiled. He even had dimples. He was a grown-up man with boyish charm, stylish in a metrosexual way that was on the right side of masculine. If the members of Duran Duran ever needed an American stand in, he’d be perfect.

  After I left Bentley’s, we ran into each other again. With no workplace politics in our way, we’d even started to date. But the usual relationship challenges cropped up: ex-girlfriends, hot bikers, and life-threatening murder investigations, and we never quite got the car into drive. During the six months when we’d acknowledged that we were in a relationship, there’d been an almost feverish need to establish a physical connection, but something had kept us from advancing past Go and collecting two hundred dollars.

  Only recently, after life came at both of us with its own agenda, did we step back, recalibrate, and start over. Nick’s dad had had a heart attack. I’d been hospitalized after a psycho attacked me in a parking lot. All of a sudden, living on the edge lost some of its luster.

  Neither one of us voiced a conscious decision to back up, slow down, and start over, but that’s pretty much what we did. Nick oversaw his dad’s recovery, temporarily living in New York. I put my energy into proving myself at Retrofit. In our spare time, we spent hours on the phone, talking about everything from past fashions to current events. We even managed a few long distance dinner dates, preparing the same meal and watching the same movie, connected only by our cell phones. I hadn’t been alone with Nick in four months. And here he was, inviting me over.

  “It’s a little late for me to drive to New York,” I said.

  “I’m not in New York. I’m in Ribbon.”

  “You’re here?” A zing of adrenaline coursed through me while I tried to remember if I’d shaved my legs that morning. The long distance had lulled me into a safe zone and I wasn’t sure if I was ready.

  I stared at the various ID cards in front of me while my head and heart (and a few other body parts) waged a debate over what I should do. My head won control of my voice, though my heart might have tried harder if not for the torn pants. “I’m sort of busy. Nancie has me on a new project and I just discovered some interesting information.” My heart, apparently, wasn’t happy with that move, and pounded more aggressively in my chest.

  “Breaking news in the world of retro fashion? Let me guess: Diane von Furstenberg copied the idea for the wrap dress from her next door neighbor.”

  “Nothing that shocking.” I chuckled. “There’s this new guy working here, Pritchard Smith.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it? Retrofit must be successful if your boss is expanding the team.”

  “I guess so. Nancie loves him, says he has all kinds of contacts to help us, but there’s something off about him.”

  “Kidd, you’re not going to turn this into—you’re not going to—hold on.” There was a muffled sound, as if Nick had put his hand over the receiver for a moment. He came back moments later. “This project that Nancie has you working on—is it urgent? Because there’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

  First an invitation to go to his place. Now a pending conversation. Two very curious things. If I were a cat, it would only have taken one.

  My heart sucker punched my rational side and spoke up. “I’d love to,” I said. “But I’m stranded at Retrofit. Eddie gave me a ride.”

  “I can pick you up.”

  “I can be done here in about five minutes,” I said.

  “I’ll meet you by the curb.”

  I hung up the phone and glanced back down at the ID cards in front of me. Maybe this was a sign. Maybe I should talk it over with Nick. It might distract him from the fact that my velvet pants were torn in three places.

  Thoughts of the torn pants led me back to the memory of hanging off the side of the building earlier, which led me to Pritchard’s threats and the discovery of his secret identity which led me to:

  Reason #3 why spying on your coworker was a bad idea: When you stick your nose into other people’s business, you sometimes discover things you’d rather not know.

  I took the ID cards to the scanner and made a copy for myself. I returned the cards to the briefcase and put the briefcase back in the corner of the bookshelf where I’d found it. I lowered myself into a squat behind Pritchard’s computer and jiggled the mouse to his computer
until the monitor woke up. It was logged into his Retrofit email. Retrofit had been my employer long before it had been Pritchard’s, and darned if I was going to let him get important information before I did. It took only a few clicks to forward his email to mine. I wasn’t going to let him sneak on in here and undermine my four months of tenure.

  I didn’t know who Pritchard Smith was, but I intended to find out. Assuming I survived an evening with Nick.

  Nick’s white pick-up truck was idling next to the curb by the time I left the office. It had been months since I’d seen him in person. Even through the tinted glass of his windows, I could make out his gleaming white smile. I locked the doors to Retrofit, tucked the key into my handbag, and double checked that the copies of Pritchard’s fake IDs weren’t sticking out the top. I wasn’t taking any chances by leaving evidence of my snooping behind.

  I climbed into the cab of the truck and set my handbag on the floor by my feet. Pulled the car door shut. Buckled up the seat belt. All of a sudden I was nervous. Like I was fifteen and going on my first date.

  “Kidd,” Nick said in a low, husky voice.

  “Taylor,” I said back, though mine sorta squeeked.

  He smiled. “Long time no see.”

  “I was just thinking about that.”

  He put the truck into gear and drove through the mostly empty lot until he reached the exit. His showroom wasn’t far from Retrofit, but instead of slowing down and turning right at the light by the Dairy Queen, he breezed through the intersection.

  “You just passed your store,” I said.

  “We’re not going to my store.” He reached over and threaded his fingers through mine. Two blocks later, he picked my hand up and pressed it to his lips in a gentle kiss. I might not have known what to expect from him, but the subtle gesture conveyed a shift between us. My decision to say yes to his invitation had been partially predicated on the fact that maybe we were just going to talk like we had been doing long distance. But the kiss indicated otherwise. My heartbeat picked up and I squirmed in the seat. Nick hadn’t mentioned my torn pants. He hadn’t cursed when we hit four consecutive yellow lights. He kept his eyes on the road, but the rest of the drive he didn’t let go.