10 Lethal Black Dress (29 page)

“We have to confirm it’s the same silk,” Vic said.

“You read my mind,” Lacey said.

“Darling, it’s the big print-edition. I can read it with my
eyes closed.” Lacey punched him in the arm.

Nadine pointed the pink Caddy up Georgetown Pike to the
little town of Great Falls and detoured to an ice cream shop. She parked the
Caddy and made an announcement.

“I suggest we huddle over some mint chocolate chip or
something.”

Lacey had a chocolate cherry cone, while Vic went for cake
batter. Nadine had peach, and Vic’s dad opted for the mint chocolate chip, with
sprinkles. They retreated to a table outside, beneath the shade of a maple tree.

“A fabric conservator could compare your fabric scraps with
the painting to determine whether it’s the same silk, the same weave, the same
dye,” Danny suggested.

“I know someone I can call,” Lacey said.

“So you will need to borrow my little picture, after all,”
Nadine said, beaming.

“If you don’t mind. As long as it wouldn’t damage the
painting,” Lacey said.

“They could take a little sample from the back, where it’s
tacked into the frame,” Danny suggested. “You’d never even see it. I never
cared for it anyway.”

“It’s a lovely picture,” Lacey opined. “Though I expect if I
make it notorious, it might be more valuable.”

“Danny, it’s a nice painting,” Nadine said. “And you know it.
But you take it, you two. Do whatever you need to do. You have a case to
solve.”

“You’re sure?”

“I don’t mind,” Danny said. “It’s just gathering dust.” He
winked at Lacey.

“Sean Daniel Donovan, that painting is dusted regularly and
you know it,” Nadine protested. “Don’t you cast aspersions on my housekeeping.”

“That’s right,” he acknowledged. “They come every two weeks
like clockwork.”

“More often around the holidays,” Nadine agreed.

Danny chuckled. The elder Donovans seemed to be forever
bantering with each other. For a moment, as Lacey gazed at them, forty years
fell away and they looked to her just like newlyweds. Lacey looked at Vic, who
just laughed.

“Pay no attention. They’ve been needling each other for as
long as I’ve known them.”

“No hurry bringing it back, either,” Danny said, goading his
wife.

“What have you got against that painting?” Nadine asked. “I
like that painting!”

“Not the painting. That woman. Something wasn’t right about
her.”

“Well, of course not. She was an artist.”

Danny snorted. “I think your mother took pity on her, buying
that thing.”

“She had problems?” Vic asked his father.

“You know the type, Vic. They walk through our doors often
enough.”

“Did she really walk through your door?” Lacey asked. “I
mean, as a client?”

“She’s been dead so long, I guess I can talk about it. She
was convinced her husband, her current husband anyway, was cheating on her.”

“You never told me that,” Nadine said.

“You never asked. And since she was a client, briefly, she
had client confidentiality. But she’s gone now, so it’s all right, and this is
just among family. Didn’t take me long to figure out he
was
cheating on
her. But she insisted he was trying to poison her too. He wasn’t, not that I
could ever establish. She had other delusions, such as physical complaints her
doctor couldn’t seem to confirm. He told her it was all in her head, and I
finally decided he was right, she was crazy. That’s a technical term,” he said
to Lacey.

“There’s an irony,” Lacey said. “If she was somehow being
poisoned, it was probably by arsenic, and it was probably her own doing,
because she was painting with Paris Green. She was almost certainly mixing
pigments herself, like her hero, Cezanne. And if she dyed the silk herself
too—”

“What did you say?” Vic looked up sharply.

“If she dyed the silk herself. She might have. Just
supposing.” Lacey put a spoonful of chocolate in her mouth and closed her eyes.
It was delicious. She gazed at Vic. “There’s a connection somehow. There must
have been more green silk.”

“What makes you think Hopewell dyed the silk herself?” Vic
asked.

“The shed where she mixed her paints,” Lacey said. “She was a
do-it-all-herself kind of woman. First of all, it’s likely she had a quantity
of Paris Green, maybe years old. You couldn’t buy it off the shelf when she was
painting. It wasn’t even legal anymore, except maybe in pesticides. She
certainly knew how to mix paint. There was paint splatter all over that shed.
And there was an old washtub in there too, with green stains on it. So if she
had a basic knowledge of chemistry—”

“You saw this on YouTube,” Vic said accusingly.

She grinned at him. “I did see it on YouTube. It didn’t look
that hard. If you have the ingredients. The big question is, if she dyed the
silk, did that silk wind up in Courtney Wallace’s dress? And if so, how?”

“That’s a lot of ifs.” Vic knit his brow in concentration.
His green eyes looked darker. “If that’s the case, where has that silk been
hanging all these years?”

“Before we jump to any more incredible conclusions,” Danny
cut in, “you need to analyze the silk in the painting. See if it matches the
pieces you have. If it doesn’t, then all this speculation is leading us
nowhere. Except to the counter for more ice cream.”

Lacey rubbed her head.

“What’s wrong, Lacey?” Nadine said. “Another headache?”

“Nadine, the whole thing is a headache. I have to admit it
all strikes me as completely preposterous. This silk. That silk. The dress.
Courtney’s death. Your painting. Someone throwing rocks. How could they all be
connected? The whole thing is so improbable.”

“But that’s what I like best about it.” Nadine’s eyes
sparkled.

Vic leaned in close. “Lacey, where clothes are involved, and
where you’re involved, I’m learning to simply go with it. It may be the wrong
road, but we won’t know until we go down it. Like they say: We may be lost, but
we’re making good time.”

“And as long as we’re going down the road together,” Nadine
added, “we might as well go full speed ahead.”

“Your psychic friend could be right.” Danny put a hand on
Lacey’s shoulder. “You’d be surprised how sometimes things work out. Secrets
hidden for years rise to the surface. Maybe because the universe has a plan? Or
maybe because people feel the need to confess. Sometimes the most unlikely
pieces of a puzzle fall right into your lap. It’s too early to discount this
green silk thing as a red herring. And too early to tell the world how
brilliant we are.”

“Marie would say there is a higher purpose in all this,” Lacey
said, and Vic lifted one eyebrow.

“I’m not in the higher purpose business,” Danny said, putting
his other hand on Vic’s shoulder. “I’m in the billable hours, work hard, stick
to the facts, and do the right thing business. If positive things happen because
we keep plodding along, trying to find the truth and do what’s right, that’s
all to the good. In the meantime, you two, we’re here to help you.”

It was beginning to sound an awful lot like a family project.
Lacey wasn’t too sure how she felt about that yet. She’d traveled halfway
across the country to Washington, D.C., to build a career and escape her own
family. And now she found herself in the middle of another family. She looked
around at the happy Donovans, licking ice cream from their fingers and laughing
at each other.

My new family?

CHAPTER 36

It was dark when Lacey
and Vic returned
to her apartment. She missed being in her own place. He insisted on following
her home and staying with her after she picked up her car at his place. She
didn’t resist.

Vic’s field operative tailing Peter Johnson reported by phone
that “the target” had spent the entire afternoon in a Silver Spring sports bar,
where he got drunk and complained loudly about “some no-talent bitch” trying to
undermine him at his office. Vic’s man in the field actually drove Johnson home,
where the target collapsed in a beer-induced stupor and was still sleeping it
off. Vic’s guy was parked out in front of Johnson’s townhouse. Vic had told his
operative to keep close tabs on the target.
Couldn’t get much closer than
that.

“No-talent bitch, huh? At least we know he’s following the
right Peter Johnson,” she told Vic.

“Sounds like.” Vic kissed her hard before setting up his
laptop in her tiny office in the spare bedroom to review his field reports. She
told him she’d be fine left to her own devices, as long as he wasn’t far away
for long.

Lacey knew she should have gone to bed early to prepare for
Monday morning, but instead she poured herself a glass of Riesling and opened
Aunt Mimi’s trunk. It was one thing she had missed doing over the weekend.

The trunk was a constant comfort to her. It was almost as if
Mimi were there with her, whispering to her through the things she had saved in
the huge steamer trunk. Mimi saved these things for herself, but in so doing
she also saved them for her favorite great-niece. The trunk was Lacey’s most
prized possession, and she felt quite as rich as if she’d stumbled upon a
pirate’s treasure. Rather than gold doubloons, it held fabrics and patterns,
some half-finished, some merely put into the trunk in that dream state where
Mimi had a vision of the completed gown. But Mimi’s attention span often
wavered, and she went on to buy more fine cloth, a newer pattern, perhaps one
of the Hollywood styles or a Vogue, all to Lacey’s delight.

In addition to the dressmaking materials, Mimi had packed
away old letters, photos, memorabilia, and magazines from the Thirties and
Forties, which provided Lacey with hours of pleasure. There were choice copies
of
Vogue
,
Mademoiselle
, and
Ladies’ Home Journal
, as well
as those amazing
LIFE
magazines from the war years, each issue a window
into another era. What might have seemed superficial at the time had a
poignancy now. During the War, Oldsmobile was making cannons instead of cars. The
Singer Sewing Machine factories were retooled to produce artillery. Still, the
ads promised that better days were ahead, and cars and sewing machines and
appliances would all come down the line once again soon, when the war was over.

Lacey picked out a vintage
Mademoiselle
, “The Magazine
for Smart Young Women,” from late 1940. She didn’t know what made her pick up
this particular issue. She’d never opened this one before, and some things were
simply tactile. This issue from before the war was printed on a much better
grade of paper. Wartime magazines had tissue-thin pages, practically newsprint,
which was now deteriorating, leaving small slivers of paper in their wake. But
this prewar issue showed life in 1940 was still full of promise. And it had
something even more interesting to show Lacey.

Flipping through the pages, she saw a familiar-looking black
dress. She stopped, riveted by an article on stylish debutantes around the
country. The universe, or an angel, or chance, supplied an answer to one of her
questions.

Where had the Madame X dress come from?

Perhaps right here. It might be the very dress Lacey was
looking at in
Mademoiselle.
The gown in the picture was worn by Miss
Elizabeth “Betty” Lionsgate, of Richmond, Virginia. Ingrid Allendale had told
Lacey she’d bought Courtney’s gown at an estate sale in that very city. Lacey
read on.

Betty’s dress was one of her own “creations,” she explained,
and she was inspired by John Singer Sargent’s
Portrait of Madame X
.
“Making it was a lark,” Betty told the magazine. “Of course, that painting was
quite a scandal, because of that one strap dangling off her shoulder, before
the artist repainted that little detail. But now this dress of mine is quite
modern, don’t you think? And I keep my straps up.” Lacey stared at the picture
for a long time.

Betty the debutante was photographed in color in much the
same dramatic pose as the portrait, standing against a copper wall and resting
her right hand upon a table, her left hand lifting up a swath of the skirt. Her
skin was very pale, but Betty was not dark-haired like Madame X in the
portrait. Thick auburn waves were pulled back from her face and fell down her
back. Her complexion was clear and dewy, her profile softer, and instead of
looking off into the distance like Madame X, Betty Lionsgate cast a mischievous
sidelong glance at the camera, with the hint of a grin. She could have been
posing for an ad for shampoo or Woodbury Facial Soap, instead of a fashion
article.

The accompanying article quoted her on the dress. “I worked
with Mother’s dressmaker. Oh, she’s a whiz with a needle. She used to work for
Broadway stars in New York City. I was my idea to line it in white silk and cut
out the fabric in the designs from a deck of cards—hearts, clubs, spades, and
diamonds—so the lining shows through.”

The brief bio note said that Betty Lionsgate was a “coed,” a
junior at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, studying
English, “with a minor in the opposite sex.” Betty apparently was quite a live
wire
.
She was roughly contemporaneous with Lacey’s Great-aunt Mimi,
another live wire.
Lacey Googled the name Elizabeth Lionsgate, not
expecting much. She found an obituary for an Elizabeth Lionsgate Howard of
Richmond, Virginia, with a thumbnail biography.

In the blink of an eye, the vivacious young Betty of
Mademoiselle
had graduated from William and Mary and joined the WAVES during the war. A
woman with an eye toward style would obviously, Lacey thought, pick the service
with the best-looking uniform. The WAVES’ Navy uniform was designed by the
famous American designer Main Rousseau Bocher, better known as Mainbocher. It
had enduring style. So, it seemed, did Betty.

Elizabeth Lionsgate later married a soldier named Howard, had
children, and died in Richmond at 88, preceded in death by her husband. The
obituary made a point of saying that although she’d had a long career in
education, Betty’s true joy was in “being a wife and mother.”

Lacey wondered if there was some kind of ancient newspaper
rule about that. Were obituaries required to pull the wife-and-mother card, if
possible, as if all other achievements ranked lower? She’d have to ask old
Chester Bardwick,
The
Eye
’s senior obit writer. Or maybe after
Betty lived through the war, she was happy to take refuge in her family. She
had, however, saved that dress of hers for decades. Part of her must have clung
to the sparkling young woman
Mademoiselle
had profiled. The dress
survived, practically unworn—until her family cleaned house after she died.

What would Betty Lionsgate Howard think of her black dress
now?