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

by Diane Vallere

  He turned right at Perkiomen Avenue and drove a couple of miles east, and then took a right at a small used car lot. Two blocks later, he pulled into the parking lot of an apartment complex.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “My old apartment. It’s mostly empty, but the lease isn’t up until the end of the month. I’ve been slowly moving myself out. ”

  He hadn’t been kidding about the “mostly empty” part. The only furniture was a dining room table and an inflatable air mattress on the floor. Partially packed boxes lined the walls. A fancy coffee maker sat in the kitchen. A pizza box from Brother’s sat on the counter.

  “I don’t have any chairs,” he said. He went to the oven and pulled out a pizza. Nestled into the cheese were small birthday candles. He looked at me, and then at the pizza. “Do you even know what day today is?”

  “It’s my birthday,” I said. I hadn’t thought twice about it since hanging from the shutter. I was officially one year older.

  Nick lit the candles with a lighter and then set the pizza on the middle of the dining room table. He climbed up and sat on one side. I sat on the other.

  “Happy Birthday, Samantha,” he said. “Make a wish.”

  I wish life would be normal for one day, I thought to myself, and blew out the candles. Then again, what was normal?

  We ate our pizza off paper towels, keeping pace slice for slice until it was gone. That was one of the things I’d missed about Nick after we’d stopped working together. That we could share a pizza or a couple of hot dogs from a New York City street vendor just as easily as we could dine in a five-star restaurant. That he’d order a side of potato chips as an appetizer and then fight me for the last one. We might not have dated for those nine years, but I knew from how well we’d gotten along that we were a lot alike.

  “Do you ever think about raising chickens?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. He gave me a funny look and was quiet for a moment. “But sometimes I think about giving up everything and becoming a carpenter.”

  “Really?”

  He shrugged. “There are days when that seems more simple.”

  “That’s how I feel about chickens.”

  “You do know that the people who raise chickens don’t raise them as pets, don’t you?”

  “I hadn’t really thought it through that far.”

  I climbed off the table and stretched my arms directly up over my head, and then and tipped my head from one side to the other. “I need to unwind. Decompress.”

  “You can relax here. It’s safe. Have a glass of wine and let your hair down.”

  My hair. I reached up and untied the scarf that I’d secured around my new hair. Then I unwound the hair and undid the braid. I shook my fingers through the long locks and then draped them over my shoulders like Lady Godiva. Nick’s root-beer barrel-colored eyes grew darker.

  “You look like a different person with that hair,” he said. His voice was husky.

  I reached up and ran my finger across his mustache. “I could say the same thing about you.”

  “It’s like we’re us, but we’re not us,” he said.

  “There’s a risk that maybe we’ll do something we wouldn’t normally do because we don’t feel like ourselves,” I said.

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  I slowly unbuttoned my tunic. The second button got caught in my hair. I unwound the strand of hair, grabbed the hem, and pulled it over my head. It took awhile to get my hair through the neck hole. When I finished, I tossed the tunic onto the floor. I was in my bra. Nick put his arms around my waist and pulled me close. My body pressed against his chest. I wrapped my arms around his neck and stood on my tiptoes. He started to kiss me and I pulled away.

  “Do you have any music?”

  “Music. Sure. There’s a docking station on the floor next to my sax.”

  “Your sax? You play the sax?” I asked, surprised.

  “I did for awhile, still do every now and then. Not as often as I’d like.”

  I handed him the docking station and he cued up a mix of Seventies soft jazz. He plugged everything in and then turned to me.

  “Now, where were we?” he asked. This time his hands were a little higher. I ran my fingers through his thick curly hair. The corner of one of his sideburns stuck to my thumb. I twisted my wrist to unstick it, and then smoothed it back into place.

  We kissed for awhile. I was aware of his hands on my skin, his fingers gently strumming against my spine, until—

  “Ow!” I said, “You pulled my hair.”

  “Sorry. It got caught in my watch.” I turned around and he untangled my hair. When he was finished, he pulled me back so I was leaning against him. He kissed the side of my neck. I saw our reflection in the glass of the painting that hung on the wall. His hands moved from my stomach to my—

  “Lights,” I said. I stepped away from him and looked around for a switch. There was a round dimmer on the wall by the front door. I spun it—nope, still too bright—and then pushed it in so the room was mostly dark. When I turned around, Nick was in his underwear.

  “You wear boxers?” I asked.

  “What did you think I wore?”

  I felt myself go red. When I’d pictured Nick without his clothes, his choice of underwear hadn’t been the thing I’d focused on. Bolstered by the darkness, I swept my long extensions back off of my shoulder. They got caught in the ficus tree. I turned toward the tree and bent my head down so I could free my hair. When I was done, I turned to Nick. He was back in his jeans. He held his plaid flannel shirt toward me.

  “I don’t want to do this with an alternate version of you,” he said. “I can wait if you can.”

  I looked back at our reflection in the glass of the painting on the wall. His eyes were still bloodshot from the pepper spray, and the upper portion of his cheeks were a little swollen, both of which made him look slightly strung out. Together, we looked like extras in a low-budget porn movie. “Deal,” I said. I slipped the flannel shirt on over my bra and quickly buttoned it up. “I do have to ask you a favor, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Will you give me a haircut before we go to sleep?”

  The next morning, Nick got back into disguise. It seems he’d bought more than one plaid flannel shirt, so I didn’t have to give up the one I was wearing. He reattached the sideburns but left the mustache on the sink. “Something to remember me by,” he said. He left a key on the counter next to a container of protein powder and left.

  Nick drank protein powder?

  Truth was, there was a lot more to distract myself with here at Nick’s partially vacated apartment than there’d been at the Motel 6, but that didn’t change the fact that I didn’t like being cooped up. An hour of getting acclimated with the place (aka snooping) was enough to trigger feelings of guilt and also let me see that I didn’t know Nick as well as I’d thought. Was this sax-playing, boxer-wearing, protein-powder-drinking man my boyfriend? And was he the same guy who had a thousand piece puzzle of the Sistine chapel in a closet next to the entire collection of Stephanie Plum mysteries? Signed?

  When did Nick have the time to get Janet Evanovich to sign twenty-some books? Did he read them? Were they personalized?

  The answer to the last question was yes. At least, the three that I pulled off the shelf were.

  But just like last night, I knew I didn’t want to get to know Nick because I’d gotten acclimated with his stuff. So I stopped snooping (after I found his high school yearbook and read a few of the entries inside) and checked my email.

  Whoa, Nellie.

  Four days away from the internet plus two forwarded email accounts and one forgotten birthday left me with a very full inbox. I deleted half of it immediately, and then scanned the names for anything of relevance. There were five from Eddie, varying from “Happy Birthday, Dude,” to “You OK?”

  The last one from Eddie was a picture of Logan curled up with a stuffed Godzilla toy. At least I kne
w they were both safe and out of harm’s way.

  I sent a cryptic thank you and sorted through various birthday offers for free sandwiches and discounted appetizers. Buried on the third page was a reply to the one I’d sent from Nancie’s inbox. I’d forgotten all about it.

  The email was brief. I have information about the man who claims to be Pritchard Smith. Meet me in parking lot behind the dentist station on Penn Avenue.

  The note was not signed. There was no meeting time listed, no date listed. It was a simple call to action.

  I wrote back. Just saw this. Can you still meet?

  The reply came right away. Yes.

  I wrote back again. On my way. I looked up the direction to the address listed. I found an online car service and booked a reservation. Ten minutes later, I was face to face with my source.

  Chapter 21

  MONDAY, NOON

  The woman in front of me was clearly in disguise. She wore a highlighted wig, a thin gold necklace, and a yellow sweater with a plunging V-neck. Her face was heavily made up, making it a different color than the skin on her cleavage. I placed her age somewhere in her forties, though she appeared to be in denial over the aging process. As lacking in taste as her outfit appeared, it was decidedly more flattering than Nick’s flannel shirt.

  “Took you long enough,” she said. She took a drag of a long brown cigarette and then exhaled smoke to the side of her face. The scent clung to the air. I waved my hand in front of my face to make it go away. “Oh, please. You have a lot worse things to worry about than a little second hand smoke,” she said.

  “What can you tell me about Pritchard Smith?”

  “His name isn’t Pritchard Smith.”

  “What is it?”

  She took another pull of her cigarette. “You’re going to have to find that out on your own. Here,” she said. She handed me a neon pink sealed letter-sized envelope. “Sorry it’s not more discreet. They were on sale at Staples. Don’t open it until after I’m gone.” She threw her cigarette onto the ground and walked away.

  As soon as she was out of view, I tore the envelope open. Inside were two pieces of paper. One was a copy of a driver’s license that said Pritchard Smith. My Pritchard Smith. The second was another Pritchard Smith, born in 1937. The DL number was the same.

  I’d given Detective Loncar the copies of the fake IDs that I’d found in Pritchard’s suitcase, but aside from that, I had nothing. Now I had something else that spoke to the fact that Pritchard wasn’t who he claimed to be.

  Having a personal driver was going to get very expensive very quickly. Add in the fact that I didn’t have my wallet and could only spend money on the internet with my memorized credit card number, and I had limited options. It did seem that getting a replacement license should be at the top of the priority list, and considering I now had questions about how someone could go about getting a picture ID with someone else’s info, a trip to the DMV seemed very two birds, one stone. I pulled out my phone and made another reservation with the car service company, and then waited on the curb in front of the dentist’s office. If my informant was watching me, I wanted her to see that I was leaving alone.

  The Department of Motor Vehicles is not known for their efficiency or their general help in the areas of replacement licenses, but that didn’t stop me from heading that direction next.

  I arrived at the DMV, filled out the appropriate paperwork and picked up a couple of brochures on identity theft. When I reached the window, a petite blonde behind the bulletproof glass started on my paperwork.

  “It’s your birthday!” she said when she reached the date. She stopped typing and looked up at me. “You look good for your age.”

  How do you respond to that? I smiled and secretly hoped her shoes pinched her feet. “What can you tell me about identity theft?” I asked.

  “There’s information in the kiosk by the doors.” I held up the brochure. “You already got that? Is that why you’re here? Did somebody steal your ID?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “You should call the credit card companies and turn off all of your cards. And change all of your online passwords. How’d it happen? You don’t shred your mail, do you? You need to shred your mail.”

  “It wasn’t from the mail,” I said. “My ID was stolen. But that mail thing—does that happen often?”

  “It’s one way these people work. Sometimes they steal credit card applications, establish credit in your name. I’ve heard of people stealing social media profiles, too. Did that happen to you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You need to go home and Google yourself to find out.”

  “What would somebody do with my social media profile?”

  She shrugged and typed something into her computer. “Who knows? Sometimes people just want to mess with you.”

  “If somebody did that, opened credit cards in my name and took over my social media profile, could they come in here and get identification in my name?”

  “You ask a lot of questions,” she said. “Are you sure this is you?” she asked.

  I could have cited the article that a local reporter had written for the Ribbon Times that mentioned me in conjunction with homicide investigations around town, but I didn’t. There was only one photo, and it had been a bad hair day.

  “Did you hear about the shooting at the Motel 6 the other day?” I asked. When she nodded, I continued. “I’m the person who was shot at. I dropped my bag and ran and lost my ID, my phone, and my lip gloss.”

  “Bummer,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was talking about the shooting, the loss of my ID and phone, or the lip gloss.

  “Big time. And right before my birthday, too,” I said, hoping to distract her. “I guess I never thought about identity theft until recently, and now I can’t stop wondering how hard it would be?”

  She leaned forward. “Don’t quote me on this, but it’s not all that hard to fake an ID,” she said. “I mean, to make a real fake, yes, it’s hard. But if all you want is something that can let you buy beer before you’re twenty-one, that’s easy. Not that you have to worry about that anymore,” she said.

  Mental note: stop telling people that I just had a birthday.

  “Okay, but say you want something better than a fake ID to buy beer. Say you want something that is legit. How hard would that be?”

  She dropped her voice. “You’re talking about a bigger operation. We hear about them in our employee newsletter every now and then. You can probably research it on the internet.” She clicked a couple more keys on her keyboard and the rolled the mouse around and clicked four times. A piece of paper chugged out of an ancient, asylum-beige printer. She snatched up the paper, stamped it with a red stamp, and initialed next to the fresh ink.

  “Your new ID will arrive in about a week. In the meantime, keep this with you.” She slid the paper through the narrow opening under the window.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Can I ask one more thing?”

  “You can ask, but I probably can’t answer. Besides, the guy behind you looks pretty annoyed that you’re taking so long.”

  I left the office with paperwork validating my identity (don’t think I didn’t triple check that it said Samantha Kidd and not anything else) and the humiliating realization that the photo on my replacement license was going to show me in a flannel shirt. Although one problem had been solved, I was still dealing with the very real crisis of how to get about town on my own.

  I called Mo. “It’s Samantha Kidd.”

  “Miss Samantha!” he said. “My sister Keisha is very happy. She has been hired. She wants to say thank you to you for your head. She thought you might come back for dinner. Last night she made special goose eggs stew.”

  “Mo, I think it’s best that I don’t spend too much time at your house, at least until this mess that I’m in is resolved.”

  “You are messy?” he asked.

  “No, I’m not messy, but my life is.”


  “Do you need me to recommend a cleaning service? I know a woman whose husband cleans houses—”

  I started to explain, but gave up. “Thank you, Mo. If I need a cleaning service, you’ll be the first person I call.”

  “Do you need a ride?”

  “Actually, I wanted to see if I could borrow another dead taxi.”

  “Sure. Do you want the one that I loaned you before?”

  “Do you have it?”

  “Yes. Your friend brought it back to the graveyard. He asked a lot of questions.”

  I pictured Detective Loncar interrogating Mo about the retired taxis. I had a feeling Mo would hold up very well under interrogation. “Here’s the thing, Mo. I can’t get to the taxi graveyard because I don’t have a car.”

  “This is easy problem to solve. I come to you and take you there as a thank you for giving your head to my sister. No charge.”

  Ten minutes later, Mo dropped me off at the taxi graveyard with a fresh set of keys. I thanked him profusely, assured him that I loved the extensions that his sister had given me but that the responsibility of having that much fabulous hair had been beyond the scope of my everyday beauty routine, and then left. I drove to my house to get a change of clothes.

  Loncar had repaired the broken window from the garage door with a piece of wood. I said a silent thank you to him, and then broke a pane from the door next to it and let myself inside. Out of habit, I locked the door behind me.

  Evidence in the living room indicated that Loncar had been sleeping on my sofa. I clicked the TV on to see what channel he watched. ESPN. I clicked it off and went into the kitchen, where I found the trash can overflowing with empty bottles of Rolling Rock next to a brown bag from Burger King. Come on, detective, I thought. You can surely do better than that.

  I went to my home office on the second floor and made copies of the copies of the information my source had given me. I wrote EVIDENCE! On one page, and was about to leave when I spotted my Retrofit press card on my desk.