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

by Diane Vallere

  “Do I want to know where we’re going?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Do I want to know why your pants are torn? Not that I mind the view of your panties.”

  I pulled my hand away and tugged down on the bottom of my blazer. “Fine. I’ll let you surprise me.”

  Nick kept an apartment in Italy, where he lived six months out of the year. After moving his base of operations from New York to Ribbon a few years ago, he’d rented a furnished apartment where I’d heard he sometimes stayed. When his father had a heart attack last year, he’d put his business on hold, sublet the apartment, and moved back to New York to help care for his dad. Nick hadn’t led me to believe that he was going to drive me to New York tonight, but I still wasn’t sure where we were headed.

  We drove through downtown Ribbon, past street upon street of rundown Victorian row homes. He turned left at a church and after a few blocks turned right and right again. He eased his truck up to a private garage, fed a plastic card into an automated parking teller, and then pulled forward into a space by the elevator marked “Reserved.”

  “Surprise,” he said. We got out and I followed him to the elevator wells.

  “How long have you known you were moving to Ribbon?”

  “A couple of months.”

  “Why’d you kept it a secret?”

  “I had big plans to throw you a surprise party.”

  “Nice try.”

  “New York was inconvenient. There are—there are a lot of reasons why I wanted to find something bigger. Truth is, it took awhile to find an apartment I liked and when I found this one, I didn’t want to jinx it.”

  I stopped walking. “Am I one of the reasons?” I asked.

  He reached for my hand and ran his fingertips over mine. “You’re the main reason,” he said softly. He tipped his head down and kissed me gently.

  Whether it was instinct or the memory of kissing Nick in our on-again times, I didn’t know, but I grabbed the lapels of his jacket and pulled him close. This time when our lips met, there was no mistaking my intention or his response.

  “I want more, Kidd,” he said after the kiss. “My dad’s heart attack made me realize what’s important in life. I hope—I think—it just feels right.” His expression grew serious.

  The elevator stopped and we got out. I ran my finger around my lips to fix any smudged lipstick. Nick walked to apartment 2001, but before he could insert his keys into the lock, the door opened up.

  An older man who bore more than a passing resemblance to Nick stood resting on a cane in the hall in front of us. He looked at me, then at Nick, then back at me.

  “Is this her?” the old man asked.

  Nick rested his hand on the small of my back. “Samantha Kidd, I’d like you to meet my new roommate. Nick Taylor, Senior.”

  Nick hadn’t invited me over for hanky panky. He’d invited me over to formally meet his dad.

  Chapter 5

  WEDNESDAY NIGHT

  I’d first seen Nick’s dad a little over a decade ago. I didn’t know if Nick Senior knew I was the same girl who had walked into Nick’s showroom and slipped my sample-sized foot into one of the shoes on display. Truthfully? It didn’t matter. You gotta love the universe. Just when you think you know where your life is headed, you learn that your coworker has an alias and your possible love interest has moved in with his dad.

  Ah, life’s little curveballs.

  “Mr. Taylor, nice to meet you,” I said.

  “I know you,” he said. “When was it—ten years ago? You were a buyer from Bentley’s. Didn’t want me to see you trying on the samples in Junior’s showroom. I always wondered what happened to you. Did you know your pants are torn?”

  “I-um-”

  He looked at Nick. “Real conversationalist, this one.” He turned back to me. “Call me Nick.” He held out his hand.

  I shook his hand. “I can’t call you Nick. I call him Nick.”

  “You can call him Junior like I do.”

  Nick’s eyebrows went up. “She’s not going to call me Junior.”

  “Suit yourself. Anybody want a beer?” Nick Senior turned around and went to the kitchen.

  I started to follow him, but Nick put his hands on my waist and pulled me backward. “From that kiss in the elevator, I don’t think hanging out with my dad is what you had in mind.” Now that was an understatement. “And it’s not exactly what I have in mind either.” He turned me around and stared directly into my eyes. “This is my life now, Kidd, and I want you to be a part of it. Is that okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. Nick put his hands on my upper arms and studied my face. I hoped for another whammy of a kiss before his dad returned. Instead, he pulled me in for a hug.

  More than anybody else, I knew that it’s better to be involved in life than to sit on the sidelines. Nick’s invitation to his new residence spoke volumes about how he felt. While I was unsure of a lot of things, I knew he wouldn’t have brought me here if he didn’t want me to be here. I was an adult. I could learn to act like one. Plus, I was curiously optimistic that Nick’s dad would retire to his bedroom for an early night and we’d have a chance to spend some time alone together.

  Behind me I heard a beer can open. I pulled away from Nick and turned around again. “There’s a documentary on about the Son of Sam. You two want to watch?” Nick Senior asked.

  “Sure,” I said again, feeling the optimism slide away.

  The documentary outlasted Nick Senior. Nick and I maintained our first-date-with-the-parents position, side by side, holding hands. When the credits rolled, he turned to me. “You probably have a full day tomorrow. How about I take you home?”

  “Sure.”

  We covered the four miles in a matter of minutes. Nick pulled into my driveway and threw the car into park. “Thanks for being a good sport, Kidd,” Nick said. “Sorry the Son of Sam monopolized our evening. You never got to tell me about this work project.”

  I had hit overload on the amount of information to process in one night. “It can wait,” I said.

  We sat like that for a few moments, just watching each other, saying nothing. I wondered what he was thinking. If he’d ask me about my own thoughts, I don’t think I could have articulated them. Finally, I reached over and put my hand on his. “Good night, Junior,” I said. I got out of the car and went inside. He didn’t drive away until the door was locked behind me.

  I woke the next morning with Logan chewing on my hair. Two swats and one attempt to bury my head under the pillowcase proved ineffective against his feline determination. I pushed back the covers and went downstairs to feed him. I found my hobo bag on the floor, half of the contents spilled across the blue and white linoleum tile. Both my hobo bag and the folded copies of Pritchard’s many ID cards had a regurgitated blob on top of them.

  “What is this?” I asked Logan. He looked up at me and meowed, as if asking me why I’d made photocopies of my coworker’s questionable ID cards in the first place. “Oh, come on. The man is clearly hiding something. Who fakes an ID from Utah?” I pulled several paper towels from the roll and wiped the gunk from them and from the handbag. Both now had a wet spots that didn’t smell particularly fresh.

  Recently I’d noticed that Logan had put on a little bit of weight. The vet had suggested that I switch him to diet cat food, which had not proven to be a popular lifestyle change. My own diet was far from an infomercial for weight loss and it never seemed fair to enjoy the particular savory delight of meatball sandwiches and cheese steaks alone, so, while Logan now dined on reduced calorie kitty vittles, he also enjoyed the occasional meatball or chicken finger. I suspected the diet cat food was a poor substitute and the hairball was a message.

  I went back upstairs, showered, brushed my teeth, and dressed in a black turtleneck, black flared pants, and a paisley caftan. I blow dried my hair upside down and tied a paisley scarf around my head Rhoda-style. Chunky heeled boots gave me a couple of additional inches of height. I dug a black fringed han
dbag out of the closet and carried it downstairs.

  When I got back to the kitchen, I put my wallet, lip glosses, and phone into a black fringed handbag and then opened a can of diet cat food for Logan. He looked at the bowl and then at me and meowed. “It’s diet cat food or nothing.” I opened the freezer and pulled out a box of frozen waffles. He meowed again. I looked back and forth between the waffles and his bowl. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll eat Bran Flakes. Are you happy?”

  Logan sniffed the bowl of food, gave me the saddest (most manipulative) look, and gagged a few times until another mess came up. After cleaning it, I left a message for Nancie that I’d be late getting to the office and took Logan directly to the vet.

  “What have we here?” Nancie asked when she entered my cubicle several hours later. Logan, doped within an inch of his kitty mind, was sacked out on the carpet. He opened one eye and made a noise that sounded like sandpaper on a piece of bark, and then laid his head back on his paw and fell asleep.

  “My cat is having trouble adjusting to his new diet food. I took him to the vet this morning. Apparently the higher fiber content has upset his stomach. He’s drowsy because he just got a shot to relax him.”

  She ran her hand over his head. “Is the poor baby sick? Did the ittle bitty baby swallow something icky?”

  Logan opened one eye again. Logan was neither ittle or bitty. He was a far cry from a baby too. He might have been sick, but the look he gave Nancie conveyed pretty much everything I was thinking. And then he stood up and gagged a few times, just to make sure she got the point.

  She stood upright and stepped back. “New shoes. Suede. Can’t take a chance.” She backed away toward the opening to my cubicle, but stopped. “How’s the research going?”

  “Research?”

  “For the magazine. I heard from Pritchard this morning. He said he struck the mother lode of Seventies fashion at that private collector’s house.”

  “What’s the collector’s name?”

  “Jennie Mae Tome.”

  “How did Pritchard find her?”

  “He’s resourceful. And good for us! That boy is going to ensure that this whole project is a success. Make sure you carry your weight on this one, Sam. I know you know we’re a team, but there’s no point in working at odds.”

  I wish Logan had thrown up on Nancie’s new suede shoes. What had Pritchard really done so far? Not much, as far as I’d seen. And the fact that Pritchard wasn’t really Pritchard didn’t help matters. Whatever he was doing on the payroll at Retrofit was a mystery.

  “Nancie, how well do you know Pritchard?”

  “Trust me, he’s qualified. I already told you, you two are my dynamic duo. A perfect complement to each other’s skills. Don’t get lost in the boys vs. girls thing, Sam. Fashion doesn’t discriminate between the sexes. It discriminates between those who have taste and those who do not. Hey, that’s good. I should write that down.” She laughed and then left.

  I wasn’t in the mood to spend my afternoon in front of my computer digging up background material on designers from the Seventies, but as long as Nancie stayed at her desk, I didn’t have much of a choice. What started as a Word doc of cut and pasted info resulted in several hours on Wikipedia and a series of secret boards on Pinterest. I called the public library and set up an appointment to dig through their archives of vintage magazines and filled my Netflix queue with Love Story, The Getaway, Annie Hall, and The Eyes of Laura Mars. No way would I let Nancie think I was phoning it in while Pritchard Smith was in the field. Until this project was done, I was going to live, breathe, eat, and sleep the Seventies.

  It was going to be Dy-no-mite.

  Nancie took her customary break at quarter after twelve. She stopped by my cubicle. “How’s it going? Are you going to stop for lunch?”

  “I’m on a roll. I’m going to work through.”

  “Perfection! Pritchard emailed some info. First thing tomorrow, I want a sit down to see where we’re at.”

  “Sounds good.”

  I waited three whole seconds after the door shut behind Nancie to see what Pritchard had thought important enough to send her.

  You work with the skills that you have (or have learned). At any other job, the punishment for hijacking my boss’s email and forwarding it into my own would be somewhere between clerical duty and termination. But Nancie had established a shared info policy. Plus, she had only three employees and I was one of them. I could talk my way out of this if I had to. I could blame it on the tech guy who set up her office equipment.

  Nancie was right; Pritchard had been busy. What he lacked in actual get-it-done work ethic, he seemed to make up for in schmoozing. His email said: spending the afternoon with Jennie Mae Tome. She’s granted us an exclusive before she finds an auction house to sell her collection. Twelve runway looks coming via email attachment. More later.

  How exactly was I supposed to compete with that?

  I scanned the other unread emails in her inbox. One popped out at me. The subject read: Need to talk to you about Pritchard Smith. I clicked the email, but the body of it was blank.

  I clicked reply and wrote: Nancie asked me to follow up on this. When can we meet? I added my name, email, and phone number. I waited ten minutes but there was no reply.

  Our Retrofit computers were on the same network so we could access each other’s work without difficulty. Nancie wasn’t nearly as organized as Pritchard, and it took me almost an hour to find the files related to our project. When I did find Retrofit Mag 70s (filed under “Projects,” in a folder called “Retrofit Dream Projects,” sandwiched between “Rags to Riches,” and “Romeo Must Die,”) (???), I realized why Nancie had been singing Prichard’s praises.

  The photos that he’d sent were simple but effective. Each picture contained an outfit, completely accessorized. To the left of each hanging outfit was a sheet of paper with a handwritten number. All in all, there were photos of outfits 1-37.

  The mother lode, indeed.

  I scrolled through the pictures, recognizing items that I’d seen while doing my own research. He’d labeled each photo with the number, which was perfectly fine in terms of organization, but would require a lot of extra work to backtrack and determine the designer, the season, the year. A lot of work that would have to be done on the premises.

  Again I thought about the phone conversation I’d overheard. Pritchard had seemed intent on finding something in the attic and not letting me know about it. Whoever had been on the other end of the phone call was in on it. This project had a chance to put us on the map and reestablish my place in the fashion community, but only if he didn’t shut me out.

  Pritchard clearly had no intention of asking me to the field to help him with Jennie Mae’s sample collection. Whatever he was up to, he planned to milk his side of the project for all it was worth, spending hours upon hours with his private collector friend, emailing bits and pieces of info that would keep me buried in busy work.

  Not. Gonna. Happen.

  What Pritchard hadn’t taken into consideration was that I wasn’t the type to sit back and let someone else get all the glory. Especially since:

  A) I was just as qualified as he was, and

  B) this was my first steady employment since I’d left Bentley’s New York, and I had every intention of ensuring that “steady” meant more than four months.

  I’d had my share of distractions in the form of criminal investigations. A niggling voice in my head had started to tune into the fact that my involvement in such situations wasn’t coincidental—that I sought excitement the same way I used to seek out opportunities for risk taking in business. But two years of pinching pennies had changed my priorities, and I vowed to focus on my job. This project was the kind I could sink my teeth into, and I intended to do just that.

  I grabbed my handbag, put out fresh water and a disposable litter box for Logan, and slid a portable white baby gate into place by the open door to my cubicle. “I’ll be back in two hours,” I told hi
m. I texted Nancie that I changed my mind on lunch after all and told her that Logan was best left alone while he slept off the narcotics the vet had given him. I locked the office doors and left.

  It didn’t take me long to arrive at the house where Pritchard was working. This time I followed the long, gravel driveway to the set of spaces at the right of the building. I parked my Honda del Sol and walked to the front door. I rang the bell by the screen door, even though the interior door was open. When no one answered, I leaned forward and pressed my ear against the screen, straining to hear conversation from inside.

  Maybe that’s why I jumped so high when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  Chapter 6

  THURSDAY MORNING

  “May I help you?” asked a mostly bald gentleman. He was formally dressed in a black suit with a white shirt and a gray vest. His face was lined with wrinkles that had been etched into his skin over time and his nose turned up ever so slightly. He easily stood four inches taller than me, and I was wearing platform shoes.

  “I don’t know. I work for Retrofit Magazine, and I’m here to look at the collection of clothes.”

  The man raised his thick gray eyebrows but said nothing. He reached past me and opened the door. He stepped back and gestured with his other hand for me to go first. I did.

  The room hadn’t changed much since I’d been there yesterday. Heavy curtains hung by the large picture windows that faced the front, blocking the light. The man in the suit pushed the front door shut behind me and the room went dark. It took a second for my eyes to adjust. I suspected that was the desired effect.

  “Ahem.”

  I blinked a few times and scanned the room again. I spotted a woman seated on the divan. Beside her, round bolster pillows had been pushed aside, covering the tufting on the cushion. She was dressed in her own loose paisley caftan, not dissimilar to my own. Both her legs and her arms were crossed, legs at the knee, arms at the wrist. She held a pair of glasses in one hand. She looked more curious than threatened by my presence in what appeared to be her house.