Diane Vallere - Style and Error 01 - Designer Dirty Laundry Read online

  Designer Dirty Laundry

  Solving Crime Through Style & Error

  Diane Vallere

  www.polyesterpress.com

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, places, and events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, companies, institutions, organizations, or incidents is entirely coincidental.

  No parts of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Copyright © 2012 Diane Vallere

  All rights reserved.

  Ebook ISBN: 098496531-1

  Print ISBN 13: 978-0-9849653-0-4

  Dedication

  For my mom, Mary Vallere,

  and my dad, Donald Vallere,

  for everything.

  Chapter 1

  When you wear fishnet stockings to the grocery store, people tend to stare. Women look at you like you’re affiliated with the sex trade. Men pretend they’re not staring, doing so all the while. It’s probably because they’re thinking the same thing.

  The last time I wore fishnets to the grocery store was weeks ago. It was then I met the man who changed the course of my life. Because of him I’d traded in the title senior buyer of ladies designer shoes at Bentley’s New York to become the trend specialist at Tradava, the family-owned retailer in Ribbon, Pennsylvania. I’d given up an apartment in Manhattan to buy the house where I grew up. And now, because of him, I sat in a police station explaining my actions to a homicide detective.

  I still couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it all started to go wrong.

  I changed clothes six times, then ultimately settled on the fashion uniform of black: satin motorcycle jacket cinched at the waist over a black lace camisole, pegged pencil skirt, fishnets, and stilettos. Elsa Klensch meets Catwoman. Patrick, the fashion director and my new boss, was bound to approve.

  I topped off my look with a finishing blast of Aqua Net, powered up with coffee and a donut from a newspaper kiosk by my house, and headed to work earlier than I remember ever going to work before.

  “I’m Samantha Kidd,” I announced to the Latina woman behind the Loss Prevention desk at the store. “Patrick’s new trend specialist. Do you know if he’s here yet?”

  “He’s here but he didn’t say anything about you.” She picked up the phone and did a double take when she saw my fishnets. I heard the ring through the receiver. When no one answered, she hung up.

  “Visitors gotta sign in.”

  “But I’m not a visitor, I’m staff. Today’s my first day.”

  “You got ID?”

  I reached into my handbag and pulled out a quilted leather wallet, then held it open so my driver’s license showed through the plastic window.

  “I meant a store ID.”

  “No. Not yet, anyway.”

  “That’s a New York license,” she said.

  “You’re right, I moved. But it’s me, see?” I held the wallet up to my face and smiled at her in the way only a half-crazy person who is brimming with caffeine and adrenaline over starting a new job might. She reached her hands up and gathered her long wavy brownish-orange hair on top of her head then wound it around several times until it resembled a doorknob. The whole time she kept eye contact with me but didn’t smile back.

  She handed me a clipboard and a red ballpoint pen. Samantha Kidd, I wrote with a flourish. trend office, 7:37. I snapped my wallet shut and put it in my handbag, then hopped out of the way of a flatbed filled with merchandise and headed into the store. Aside from security and shipping, the store was quiet and I was on my own.

  I wasn’t a morning person. It was Day One of a new job and a new life, full of potential. My early arrival had less to do with my natural ways and more to do with my need to make a good impression. I was determined to be the best damn trend specialist Patrick had ever hired.

  I wandered through the dirty gray hallway, through the shoe department on my way to the elevators, pausing by a round marble fixture that displayed a purple suede platform pump. My index finger traced over the black and white designer label that decorated the sock lining.

  “Of all the shoes, in all the stores, she had to walk up to mine,” said a husky voice behind me. I turned and faced the man whose name was stitched onto that label. The man I’d once fantasized about during a layover in Paris and almost kissed a couple of months ago after a particularly late dinner that involved a good deal of Sauvignon Blanc and an unexpected serving of lemon meringue pie. My judgment is severely impaired when there’s lemon meringue involved.

  Nick Taylor was a shoe designer. His showroom was charged with electricity, hot looks, and devastating style. His shoe collection wasn’t bad, either. He was one of the few people I thought I’d miss after leaving Bentley’s, that is, until I caught him flirting with the buyer from Bloomingdales and realized the only special thing we had was a gross margin agreement.

  “You’re a long way from New York. What are you doing here?” I asked in lieu of hello.

  “Same thing as you, probably.”

  “I doubt that. I’m here to start a new job.” I cocked my head to the side and crossed my arms, the plum-colored laptop bag that hung from my shoulder banging against my hip.

  “First day? Let’s get you into practice.” He stood directly in front of me and held out a hand. “I’m Nick Taylor. Shoe designer and all around good guy.”

  I pursed my lips and took in his dark curly hair and his brown eyes, the exact shade of the three root beer barrels I ate in the car after finishing the donut. I met his outstretched hand with my own.

  “Samantha Kidd. Former shoe buyer. Former angry New Yorker.” I pumped his hand twice to emphasize the word ‘former.’ “Current trend specialist for Tradava, on the cusp of a new life.”

  He pulled me in, converting our handshake to an embrace. I lost my balance and fell against him. “I thought I might never see you again,” he whispered in my ear. As we parted I checked my reflection in the highly polished doors of the elevators for smudged lipstick and errant crumbs. “So, Tradava?” He held his palms up and looked to his left and right at the store. “From the big city to the small town. I knew you’d land on your feet, but I didn’t expect you to land here.”

  “You make it sound like I vanished into the night,” I replied, blowing at a strand of hair that had gotten stuck in my lipstick. My cell phone buzzed from the depths of my handbag and I pretended not to hear it.

  “You did vanish in the night. Out of my life, out of my dreams …” He reached out an index finger and freed the lock of hair, a trace of red lipstick remaining on his fingertip. “And now I find you haven’t even missed me. That hurts.”

  “So you took it upon yourself to stalk me. Good to know.”

  “C’mon, everybody needs at least one stalker in their life. It’s good for the ego,” he said.

  Nick Taylor had captured the eye of more than one female at Bentley’s and rumors of his love life often permeated the otherwise work-heavy market weeks. More than once I’d wondered what would have happened if I’d given in to my post-pie impulse to kiss him after that innocent business dinner last May.

  “So, what are you doing at the store so early?” I asked, wondering at the luck of running into him on my first day.

  “I have some outstanding business with the buyer,” he said vaguely. “The only time he had available was this morning.”

  “Did security make you sign in?” I asked, nodding toward the back hal
lway.

  “Sure. They make everybody sign in before the store is open.”

  The bell sounded. The doors attempted to open, then jerked shut. Nick stabbed the button with his index finger and the doors repeated their spastic motion. I had the other option to take the stairs but with a breakfast of highly concentrated sugar, fat, and root beer barrels coursing through my veins that wasn’t going to happen.

  The doors jerked open again and I jammed the laptop between them. They beat an irregular rhythm against the plum nylon case but left a resulting opening large enough for my fingers. By now I had exerted more energy than I would have on the stairs, but I was determined to get on the damn thing.

  I quickly changed my mind.

  In the elevator was a well dressed man. His jet-black hair was held perfectly in place with pomade and his mustache was neatly trimmed. He wore a taupe suit with a violet windowpane pattern, a brown and purple paisley ascot knotted around his neck, and a crisp white shirt that no doubt had been laundered and starched by a team of professionals. Even though his body lay crumpled on the floor, the shirt was barely wrinkled.

  Patrick.

  I yanked the laptop out from between the doors. When I stood back up, the room spun. I put a hand out to steady myself and lost my grip on the computer bag. It fell from my shoulder and landed on its side. A sound escaped my lips, my knees buckled, and I followed the laptop to the floor.

  Chapter 2

  I blinked several times and tried to focus. I was sitting on a sofa in the shoe department, leaning against Nick. My fishnets were torn over my left kneecap, so I crossed my legs to hide the tear. I scanned a pile of catalogs and magazines and strained to read the covers. After spelling out V-O-G-U-E I figured the worst had passed.

  Nick pulled his cell phone away from his ear. “Are you back?”

  “From where?” I asked, confused by more than his question. “What happened?”

  “You passed out when you saw Patrick’s body.”

  “Is he—he’s dead?”

  He nodded. “I couldn’t find a pulse.”

  “Did you call 911?”

  He nodded again. “Take a couple more minutes to relax. You went down like a ton of bricks.”

  Considering I was on a sofa about twenty feet from the elevator doors, the analogy was more humiliating by the evidence he’d probably carried me to my present location. Mental note: lay off the donuts.

  “I’m fine now,” I said, feeling anything but fine.

  The second elevator bell rung and I turned back around. The doors slid open and a thin woman in a navy uniform stepped out carrying a collapsible gurney in her hand. She stopped in front of the elevator with Patrick’s body and inserted a key in the control panel. Her hat was low on her forehead and I couldn’t see her face. The reflective letters EMT on the back of her nylon jacket were more jarring than white shoes after Labor Day. I wondered how long it had taken her to get there, which made me wonder how long I’d been lying on the floor like a ton of bricks.

  “It’s my first day. If I’m going to be late, I should call someone.” I rooted around in my handbag for my phone.

  The EMT adjusted the bill on her navy blue hat. She coughed twice. “Today’s your first day?” she asked in a scratchy voice. “What department?”

  “His,” I said, pointing toward the elevator. Reality hit like, well, that clichéd ton of bricks Nick had introduced into our conversation. I turned to Nick. The room spun again and I leaned down, dropping my head between my knees, trying to head-off a second black-out.

  “You really go in and out fast, don’t you?” Nick asked. His hand, warm through the fabric of my satin motorcycle jacket, gently stroked my shoulders. Truth was I’d never fainted before in my life. I slowly sat up.

  The woman looked at us for a couple of seconds, then knelt on the floor. She grabbed Patrick’s ankles and pulled them out so the fashion director was laying in a straight line. It looked like too big a job for one person and I stood up, not sure if one of us should offer to help. The EMT log-rolled Patrick until his body was on the gurney. She snapped one end of the gurney up, then came around the other side and raised it until it was level. She moved it into the elevator before jabbing a gloved finger at the control panel.

  “Wait—the cops are coming. I think.”

  “Nothing anybody can do about it now,” she said through a second stifled cough, then pulled a tissue out of a pocket and blew her nose like a foghorn. “Heart attack. Textbook.” She tipped her chin toward her neck and cleared her throat. “I’m taking him out through the sub-basement. Less disruptive that way.”

  “911 routed the call to you that quickly?” Nick asked.

  “Nah, he must have called from his office, I guess.” She held up a cell phone then put it in her pocket and coughed again. “They happen fast.” She tossed a brown sheet over Patrick’s body, covering the cuff of his taupe and violet windowpane pants and his purple cashmere socks. Until he was covered, I hadn’t been able to look away, and I knew, long after he was wheeled off, his image would stay with me.

  I turned back to Nick. “I should tell security.”

  “They know. They let me in,” said the EMT. She kept one hand over the elevator door to keep it open.

  “The executive office, then.” I dialed zero on the phone that sat in the middle of the shoe department. Several rings indicated the operators had no reason to show up hours early, like I had. My legs shook while I hung up the phone.

  I plunged back into the cushions of the sofa, my hand still in my handbag, closing around a half-eaten candy bar. “There has to be someone around here. I’ll go to the exec offices and let them know.”

  “You’ll have to take the stairs. I’ll have the elevators tied up for a while,” said the EMT. She turned the key on the control panel and the doors closed.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” Nick asked.

  “I didn’t plan on this,” I blurted.

  Nick sank into the sofa next to me, our knees touching. “Kidd, there’s nothing you can do now. Do you want me to walk you to your office?” He held out a hand. I rose to my feet without his help and looked around the shoe department, trying to get my bearings. He followed me into the stairwell. I grabbed the dull metal banister and started up the staircase. Halfway up the third flight, his footsteps stopped.

  “You said you’re working in the trend office, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said between breaths. I turned to face him, but he was looking down the stairs, his face clouded.

  “They’re on the seventh floor.”

  “I know. I already told you, I can get there myself,” I said, between short, shallow breaths. My thighs were starting to burn, and I needed a gulp of air. Mental note: reintroduce exercise into my life.

  “I’m going back to the shoe department to wait for the cops, let them know what we saw.” He jogged down three steps, stopped, turned back in my direction and jogged up five to where I stood. “Only five more flights, then you can let your heart rate go back to normal,” he whispered in my ear, without a trace of breathlessness, I noticed.

  “Four and a half,” I said, and glared at him, largely because it was the only response I could handle without proving he was right about my heart rate.

  “Good to see you again, Kidd, even under these circumstances,” he said, then jogged easily back down the three flights we’d already covered.

  I scaled the rest of the stairs and only barely avoided hyperventilation before entering the trend offices. Fluorescent tube lighting illuminated the space, casting distorted shadows on the piles of notebooks, slides, and posters. Two desks in the office were covered with an assortment of action figures, fabric, colored markers, drawings, and a few other items I didn’t recognize. Posters of Marilyn Monroe dabbing on perfume, Warhol’s tribute to Jackie O, and a concert poster of Madonna lined the walls. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected of Patrick’s office, but eighties pop culture wasn’t it. My interviews with him had taken pl
ace on the phone and outside of Tradava, and I was beginning to think he was not what he’d seemed, when an inventive string of curse words popped off behind me.

  “Hello?”

  “Who are you?” asked a green-eyed blond guy whose skin flushed red against a glowing tan.

  I answered with a question. “Did you say something?”

  The stranger scratched the side of his head and left a chunk of hair sticking straight out above a glowing blue light attached to his ear. “Who are you?” he asked again.

  I sat down at the desk with the Wonder Woman action figure. “I’m Samantha Kidd. The new trend specialist.” I waited, wondering if he was going to say anything. “Today’s my first day. And you are …?”

  He leaned against the doorframe and smiled casually, as though he knew something I didn’t. Given how calm he was I would bet that wasn’t true. My first impression was skateboard dude, but he had an air of maturity lacking in the guys I watched on ESPN extreme sports. His scruffy hair seemed more chlorinated than salon-dyed, and his eighties concert T-shirt looked like it came from one of those expensive vintage-reproduction stores. Either that or the laundry pile, I couldn’t tell which.

  He remained silent, with a lopsided smile on his face, while I tried to find a spot for my handbag. I finally leaned it against my ankles and folded my hands on top of the desk. I was on edge already and his presence unnerved me even more. Truth was I didn’t know where I should be or what I should be doing or who I should be talking to.

  “Don’t you need to be getting to your department?” I asked.

  “I can’t get to my desk right now,” he said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “You’re sitting at it.”

  “Isn’t this the trend office?” I hopped out of the chair as if it were wired with a shock device. The chair knocked over my bag and four tubes of near-identical pink lip-gloss rolled out by my left foot. I bent down to collect them and felt my skirt split over my right hip.