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

  And that suggested to me he knew more than he’d let on.

  Chapter 5

  My alarm went off as I attempted to shut out the sunlight streaming through the bedroom window. I slapped a hand on the snooze button, vaguely considered reasons not to get up, and shivered as images from the previous day assaulted me. Worse than the reality of what had happened at the store was the realization that I had to go back. Today was Day Two.

  If Day One is the day friendly co-workers escort you to your destinations and you’re not expected to turn in any projects, Day Two is the day you try to prove your worth and accidentally walk into the broom closet. Day Two is never better than Day One, but compared to what I had to face today, the usual Day Two issues were just the tip of the iceberg. My Day Two would put me face to face with a whole store full of people who knew I was involved in the police investigation. And there was that troubling issue about verifying my employment.

  I’d fallen asleep with the window open. The heat had broken overnight, and the air was crisp. Logan curled up on my pillow while I dashed from the warm bed to the hot shower. An hour later, my curly brown hair was tamed into submission thanks to the blow dryer and a couple of pumps of serum, and my pale skin glowed under makeup. My reflection stared back at me from the bathroom mirror. I mugged to the left, then to the right, then stared directly at my reflection and stuck out my tongue.

  I pulled on a pair of soft gray and lilac glen plaid pants and belted a gray tweed cape over an ivory turtleneck. With dark purple patent leather pumps on my feet, I was ready. Fifteen minutes later I sat in the parking lot outside of the store. This time I knew there was no familiar face waiting to welcome me to the department. This time I knew I was on my own.

  The façades of old department stores are impressive. They tower several stories over street level, promising unique and exciting merchandise within their walls. The illusion is shattered once you’ve walked through a store’s employee entrance. You’ll never anticipate that promise of glamour again.

  This particular door had been painted gray at one time. Actually it looked like it had been painted gray many times over. I knew the routine; touch-up paint was slapped on every couple of years, never matching the original color. The kick plate at the bottom showed the dings and divots of flatbeds, handcarts, and maybe the toe print of a few disgruntled employees. Inside, one bulb flickered overhead, and the linoleum tile under my feet had yellowed with age. It was like a decorator’s picture of Dorian Gray; this dismal passageway for the staff counterbalanced the glamour showcased inside the store.

  I approached Loss Prevention and held up both hands. “I know, I know. Visitors sign in. I should get everything straightened out today.” I signed my name on the next available line on the sheet of paper clipped to the clipboard. “I’m going to Human Resources now.”

  “They’re not here yet. Nine o’clock,” said the short Latina woman. Today her hair was flat-ironed and fell in an orange-brown sheath over her shoulders.

  I looked at the clock on the wall. Again, I was too early. So far, being a morning person hadn’t paid off.

  I didn’t walk to the elevators. Instead I took the stairs up seven flights, exited near the Intimate Apparel department and walked through the doors that housed the trend offices. A hush fell over the small group of people who milled around the hallway. This time I bypassed Eddie’s desk and two doors later, entered a stark space that split off into two offices. One housed a large purple velvet sofa, and one was stripped clean. This was farther than I’d gotten yesterday, but still, I’d lay odds the empty one was mine.

  It was quiet in this part of the store, but I didn’t mind the solitude. A stack of pink While You Were Out messages accessorized my desk. We need to talk to you. Contact us at the precinct. A few phone numbers followed: office, pager, and cell. The next message read Brittany at Full Circle Mortgage. Urgent. Three more messages followed. All were dated with yesterday’s date. I crumbled them up into small pink balls and lobbed them at the trashcan. Two of the five made it.

  At the moment, I was glad the trend offices were in a separate part of the store. Outside the heavy glass doors that marked the entry to this wing, the buzz of gossip would soon turn to a roar, and I wasn’t up for it. Not yet. I was still a stranger in a strange land, and until I could figure out how to feel as though I belonged, I wanted to avoid the store full of curiosity-seekers.

  A knock on the doorframe interrupted my thoughts. A wood sprite in a mustard yellow velvet blazer that hung down to his knees met my startled stare. Matching yellow ear buds and iPod fed tunes directly into his head. His gravity-defying hairstyle suggested a heavy gel dependency.

  “Hi. I’m Michael.” He bounced back and forth between his feet, as though he could barely control his energy while standing still. A ketchup-colored scarf hung around his neck. He could have been anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five, and I envied him the ability to project that age range.

  “I’m Samantha,” I offered.

  “I’m a designer. Did Patrick tell you about me?”

  “Um, no. What can I do for you?”

  I didn’t know if it was possible this character didn’t know about Patrick’s untimely death, but I was beyond contributing to the gossip chain. Anybody asking for Patrick stood out on my radar.

  “I’m here for my portfolio.”

  I looked around the office. I hadn’t seen any portfolios and wasn’t sure where Patrick would have kept them if they really were there. “I’m sorry. I’m not familiar with Patrick’s filing system.”

  “I am. I’ll get it.” He bounced away toward Patrick’s office.

  “Wait!” I jumped up from the desk and followed him. “You can’t go in there!” I called to his back.

  “Here it is,” he said, holding a flat black vinyl folder zipped shut around three of the edges. He reached into his pocket and lip-balmed himself while I stood there. “Are you one of the judges?”

  “Judges of what?”

  “The competition!” I must have looked confused. “Never mind,” he said quickly, and bounded toward the heavy glass doors. I stepped into Patrick’s office to see if anything seemed out of order even though I didn’t know what to look for.

  It struck me as odd Patrick had never interviewed me at Tradava. Our first conversation had been in the parking lot and our subsequent interviews had taken place over the phone and at local restaurants. When I’d asked him if he wanted me to meet him at Tradava, he’d been evasive. “I like to keep things less formal,” he’d said. “There will be plenty of time at Tradava once I’ve made my decision.” And when I’d pressed him about that decision, he smiled. “I chose the wrong words. Once my decision is official, is what I should have said.”

  “So your decision has been made?” I’d asked.

  “Let me be candid, Ms. Kidd. I need someone like you at the store, someone who loves fashion for fashion’s sake. Designers must look to the past to envision the future, but many are in too much of a hurry to show their own point of view they fail to learn from those who have paved the way.”

  It was that night my plans to move to Ribbon felt real. He all but told me I had the job. The next day he called with an offer which I accepted. We discussed start dates and I gave my notice to Bentley’s. He must have notified Human Resources, gone through the proper channels, unless he was the kind of person who felt like the rules didn’t apply to him. I didn’t know if he was that kind of person or not. Aside from those few meetings, I didn’t know much about him at all. He’d maintained a public presence over the course of his career, but who was he?

  Idly, I opened and closed file cabinet drawers and thumbed through piles on his desk. I found a set of keys by his monitor and tossed them from one hand to the other three times before I buried them inside my handbag. On the corner of his desk sat a Rolodex. It was open to a card from a local fabric store, Pins & Needles. I flipped to the card in front and the card behind and left it where it was.

  It didn�
��t surprise me to find the spinning business card holder on Patrick’s desk. He was part of what we at Bentley’s liked to call the old guard, the generation who preferred their contacts to be at their fingertips versus at the click of a mouse. Names of designers now famous were scribbled on dog-eared cards along with people I’d never heard of. I wondered about each name I flipped past. Who were these people? What had they meant to Patrick’s career, to Tradava, to fashion?

  I left Patrick’s office and went back to mine. A cardboard carton stamped with a fancy bottled water logo lay in the corner, now filled with obsolete office supplies: a battery operated pencil sharpener, carbon papers, three-ring binders with the covers falling off. Faded empty walls surrounded the room, bright squares of paint showing off where pictures had hung. The shelves alongside the desk held fashion magazines and catalogs that were a couple of years old. I doubted I was going to get any valid information from them. Unless, of course, they had been there a couple of decades, since fashion tends to repeat itself.

  Next I checked out the file cabinet. A monstrous gray fixture with four deep drawers, it stood by the inside wall of the office, stacked high with piles of paper on top. The first drawer was filled with files, old army green hanging folders so stuffed with paper the metal rods were barely able to support them on their beams. The plastic labels had cracked with age and the paper that had started out white was now the yellow usually reserved for legal pads. Handwritten titles on the labels read Spring, Summer, Prefall, Winter, Runway. The name in the upper right corner read Aries, and I wondered if my predecessor had identified herself by her astrological sign.

  The next drawer was in much the same state of disorganization, though the folder titles were years past. The reports were the same format; this time LESTES was written in standard block letters. The third drawer contained more folders like the second. There was no name on the corner of the page, but the author had not minced words when critiquing a collection. Expecting no surprises, I opened the fourth drawer, but it had been gutted of all overflow and left empty.

  Looking for a distraction from the one gruesome thought that seemed to keep coming at me, I scanned an issue of the Style Section, the fashion industry’s weekly rag, that had been left on my desk. I opened it to a page marked with a lilac Post-it. First Ever Design Competition. Winner receives $100,000 grant to fund start-up collection, guaranteed order from Tradava, six pages featuring collection in Tradava catalog, and unparalleled recommendations in the fashion industry. Patrick’s name appeared at the bottom as one of the judges, along with Maries Paulson, noted icon in the industry. The Post-it said: This competition is our number one priority. Let’s make it fabulous! I wondered who the note was for.

  A few pages later a Where Are They Now? article quoted Patrick, whose name was circled in red marker, speaking about designers who defined previous decades and renewed interest in their labels. I flipped back to the ad for the contest. The young designer who had stopped in earlier had mentioned it. So had the redhead from yesterday. It seemed as good a project as any to sink my teeth into. I flipped through the Rolodex and found a number for Maries Paulson. Four rings later my call went into voicemail.

  “This is Samantha Kidd, trend specialist at Tradava. I was hired by Patrick, and I want to offer to help with what remains to be done for the competition. You can reach me at—” I stopped. I didn’t know the Tradava number off the top of my head. As I was rattling off my home and cell phone numbers, Eddie rounded the corner of my office. He set two cups of coffee on my desk and slammed his finger down on the phone, disconnecting the call.

  Chapter 6

  “Why’d you do that?” I asked.

  “You are a wanted woman.”

  “I am not!”

  “Yes, you are. People are looking for you. The cops, some mortgage company, and the head of Human Resources.”

  “They think I’m easy?”

  “What?”

  “You said I was a wanton woman.”

  “Wanted, not wanton.” He set two cups of coffee on the desk. “Who were you calling? What are you doing here?” he demanded in a low voice.

  “I’m trying to do my job.” I tapped the paper with my index finger. “Patrick was one of the judges of this competition. I thought I should volunteer, you know, on behalf of Tradava. The show must go on, and all of that. Why did you disconnect the call?”

  “You don’t work here.” He glanced at the open Rolodex, then to the phone, then back to me. “You’re calling people from Patrick’s file and giving them your home number? What the—that’s like stealing company resources.”

  “I do work here, and I would have left Tradava’s number only I don’t know it. I have it written down, somewhere, but it wasn’t in front of me, and I thought I should give my own number instead of nothing. Now I have to call back and explain why I hung up half-way through my message.” I opened and shut a couple of drawers, for no reason other than I felt like a fool and wanted to look busy. “Are you going to stand there all day?”

  “The standard response to someone bringing you coffee is ‘Good morning’ or ‘Thank you’, but yours works too. Less expected.” He sank into the chair in front of me and pushed one of the cups in my direction.

  “Why did you bring me coffee if you thought I wouldn’t show up today?”

  “I was hoping you’d show even if I didn’t think you would.”

  I pulled one of the Styrofoam cups toward me. “I haven’t decided yet if it’s a good morning.”

  “Have any cops showed up to talk to you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Sounds like a good morning to me.”

  His black and white checkered Vans complemented his Devo T-shirt. Now that I had more time to take in his total look, I realized this creative surf dude didn’t end up in retail fashion by accident. He had an eye for details. I’d bet his long board matched his wetsuit.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” he asked. He sat back in his chair and watched me watch him. He crossed one checkered shoe over the knee of his other leg and pulled his ankle up until it rested mid-thigh.

  I studied his face, his body language, his demeanor, all the while repeating his name inside my head. Eddie Adams …Eddie Adams …Eddie Adams …

  “We graduated high school together.” He raised his coffee cup toward me as though in toast. “I was only there for the end of senior year. I didn’t get to know many people. Check your yearbook.”

  “The math test?” I asked, as a memory clicked into place. He nodded.

  Eddie had been the new kid at school, starting halfway through senior year. There was a test in Calculus, and he scored the highest score. So had the captain of the football team, sitting to his left. Rumors that Eddie cheated started almost instantly. And, being the new kid, there was no one to come to his defense.

  That was the year I sat in the back of the class. I’d been stumped on the seventh test question. So, instead of concentrating on my own exam, I’d been staring out at the classroom, watching everyone else scribble numbers and math symbols on the pages in front of them. And I saw him copy the answers from another student’s test.

  Not Eddie. The football player.

  He’d just gotten a full scholarship to college. Getting caught cheating would have cost him his future. He did it anyway, and got away with it, and Eddie got suspended. I went to the principal’s office three days later, told him what I saw, and demanded something be done. The school readministered tests to both boys. Again, Eddie scored well. He came back and finished out the year, and went on to art school. I’d asked the principal to keep me out of it, and I remember not knowing if Eddie had ever suspected I was the one who came forward with the truth, at least until months later when I read what he’d written in my yearbook. He was the last person to sign it, because I didn’t want anyone else to know what I’d done.

  The football player failed. And though I never told a soul what I’d done, I’d gained a lot of satisfaction in doing the right
thing. You work hard, you get what you deserve. That lesson followed me my whole life.

  “You stood up for me,” Eddie said. An assorted bunch of miniature Sharpies dangled from a turquoise D-clamp he’d hooked to a belt loop on the side of his jeans. He jiggled the foot on his knee and the Sharpies clacked against each other like a colorful set of plastic janitor’s keys. The yellow one popped off and landed on the floor.

  “Have you been in Ribbon since high school?” I asked.

  “I landed this job out of college. I’ve been here ever since.”

  A part of me wanted to push aside thoughts of Patrick’s murder, the cops, the mortgage company, and Human Resources to get lost in our reunion, but before I could word the questions in my mind, Eddie tapped my cell phone with the bottom of his coffee cup.

  “Weren’t you listening yesterday? No reception.” He glanced toward the ceiling. “These offices were never meant to be anything more than temporary. You won’t get a signal. And store policy says you can’t have one on the selling floor. Looks bad to customers.”

  I chucked my phone back into my handbag and peeled the top off my coffee, a puff of steam hitting my face. With full knowledge it was too hot to drink, I took a sip. Burnt my tongue. Patience is not my strong suit. Finally, I spoke. “Are you sure you want to be seen talking to me?”

  “It’s better than talking to Patrick’s assistant, if you know what I mean.”

  “Who is Patrick’s assistant?”

  He gestured toward the balls of pink messages that accessorized the floor surrounding the trash can. “The guy who took the messages yesterday.”

  I wasn’t following.

  “Michael Dubrecht? The swishy guy who was here this morning?”

  “He was here yesterday? I never even saw him.” I sighed. “See, that’s probably the kind of thing the cops would want to know.”

  “They do. They came around yesterday, talked to everyone who was here. Anybody here before eight thirty was questioned. They closed the store so nobody could get in after that, and store management was pissed when they heard nothing actually happened. Significant loss of business.”