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Authors: Diane Vallere

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BOOK: Crushed Velvet
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“So you told him about it?”

“I just came from there. He won't tell me anything.” I kicked the toe of my boot against the ground.

“Do factories really produce double orders? Seems like a stretch.”

“Rarely. The only other thing I can think of is that someone knew Phil was going to pick up twelve bolts of velvet but didn't know that it was a specific twelve bolts. So they killed him and buried the body under twelve bolts. It's possible the murderer never thought anybody would pay attention to the velvet.”

“What do you think it means?”

“I don't know. Here's what I thought I knew: Phil went to Los Angeles on Sunday. Allegedly, he made arrangements for Rick Penwald—the other driver—to come to Los Angeles and make the delivery to San Ladrón. Only somehow the wrong fabric got loaded in the van—on top of Phil. I don't know when, how, or why.”

“Why ‘allegedly'?”

“Because that information came from Rick. He must know more than he's admitting. All he said was that Phil told him he wasn't leaving LA just yet. Maybe Rick made the whole thing up and killed Phil. A dead man can't contradict his story.”

“That would be pretty gutsy: killing a guy, putting him in the back of his van, and making his scheduled deliveries.”

“I know, but otherwise I can't figure it out. How did someone put Phil's body in the back of the van under my fabric without the driver knowing? The only answer I can come up with is that the driver knew. But what doesn't make sense is that Genevieve knows Rick. She said he and Phil were friends, that Rick borrowed Phil's van when Phil was on his taxi route. He just slapped a logo on the side and conducted business.”

“Maybe that makes a lot of sense. He could have done all kinds of shady things. If anybody got suspicious he could have covered Phil's logo, or uncovered Phil's logo.”

“Genevieve said if the tea shop ever took off, Phil was planning on leaving his delivery route to Rick. But Rick wasn't all that happy when I caught up with him and started asking questions. If he really was Phil's friend, wouldn't he want to help?”

Genevieve popped her plastic-wrapped head out the door of the shed. “Charlie? The timer went off,” she called. “I don't want my hair to fall out.”

“I'll be right there,” said Charlie. She turned back to me. “Call me tomorrow,” she said, and jogged back to the shed.

I ran across the street to Material Girl, unlocked the front door, and went to the bedroom. My clothes from yesterday were still on the fainting sofa. I went through the pockets until I found the pink page Rick had made me sign. I hadn't pressed hard enough and now my signature was little more than a smudge. Across the center of the page it said, “12 rolls velvet. Prepaid. Signature for delivery confirmation only.” The carefully printed words were the only clear thing that had been added to the preprinted form.

I unlocked my phone and dialed 411. When the operator prompted me for city and listing, I said, “Los Angeles, Special Delivery. They're a delivery service out of Los Angeles,” I added.

Keys tapped in the background. “You sure they're in Los Angeles?”

“I thought they were. Why? Do you have them listed somewhere else?”

“Nope. Hold on,” she said and switched me over to a ringing number. One ring, two, three, four . . . After seven rings, three piercing tones came on the line. “I'm sorry, the number you have dialed has been disconnected. Please check the number and try again.” The piercing tones repeated.

I called information again. “I just called for a number but I'm getting a not-in-service message. Can you double-check it for me? And this time don't connect me. I'll write the number down and call it later.”

She asked for the city and listing again and clicked on her keyboard. “I got nothing,” she said. “Hold on. That's interesting. Special Delivery, you said?”

“Yes. Twenty-four-hour delivery service. Did you find them?”

“No, and I don't think you're going to find them, either.”

“Why's that?”

“Because I'm staring at a listing for a temporary number designated to that business. No address, no website, no e-mail.” She chuckled. “I hope you haven't hired them yet, because it looks to me like Special Delivery was a fly-by-night operation.”

Nine

I thanked the
operator and hung up. My hand was shaking. I smoothed out the creases of the invoice and looked at the label that had been affixed to the upper left-hand corner of the form. Special Delivery, with an address, phone number, and website.

But Special Delivery didn't exist. Which meant not only was Rick not exactly telling the truth, but he'd gone out of his way to create invoices to back up his lie. Everything I knew about his story started to fall apart: the last-minute arrangement to make the delivery, the thousand dollars in an envelope on the front seat, the statement that he'd never looked into the back of the van. Even the sign on the side of the van had been temporary, and the fact that he'd been driving around this morning with that same sign on what appeared to be a brand-new truck told me he was trying to mislead someone. He could have known exactly what Phil was picking up in Los Angeles. I still didn't know what his
motive might have been, but now I had evidence that he was lying to me.

I went downstairs to the computer, plugged my phone into the USB jack, and cued up the pictures from the back of the van. I enlarged the images, trying to make out the information on the tags. The screen was pixilated and all I saw for my efforts was a sequence of beige squares. I moved the photo from my phone to the hard drive of the computer and opened it in Photoshop. After fiddling with the contrast, resolution, and increasing the sharpness, I was able to read the writing on the tags. One word, the same on each of them.
100% Polyester.
No wonder someone thought it was my fabric.

My fabric wasn't 100 percent polyester, but someone who didn't know who I was might have heard the word
polyester
and mistaken it for the fabric and not the person who ordered it.

Fabric warehouses were some of the most overwhelming buildings I'd ever experienced. Rolls of material were stocked on deep shelves that went from floor to ceiling—and warehouse ceilings were sometimes twenty to thirty feet high. The owners knew their stock like the backs of their hands, but it would take even an experienced fabric connoisseur several hours to map out the rhyme or reason that an owner might use. According to Mack, my fabric had been left untouched, but that didn't mean Phil hadn't made the pickup he was hired to make. Velvet would be stocked with other velvet, and if twelve rolls were together, tagged
100% Polyester
, it was plausible that Phil would have made an erroneous assumption.

But if all of that was true, then I was saying that Phil Girard was murdered because he picked up the wrong twelve rolls of velvet. And I couldn't imagine circumstances where someone would commit murder over twelve rolls of fabric. Not even me.

So, who else would have found my fabric to be worth
killing over? It wasn't like I was under suspicion for Phil's murder. I wasn't anywhere near Los Angeles between Sunday night and Monday morning. I had a construction crew and a broken sidewalk as my alibi.

But so did Genevieve. She was right beside me when the van pulled up. I wondered why she hadn't been ruled out as a suspect because of that.

I zoomed out on the photo and took in the composition. The heavy rolls of fabric were on the right. Phil's body was on the left. Crates of dry goods sat by his head. Crumbs scattered about with plastic zip ties. And the empty jug of Genevieve's tea on its side.

But what was that under the tea jug?

Again I zoomed the photo, this time by the jug. The carpet under the jug was a darker color than the rest of the interior floor. The darkness spread in an irregular pattern around the lid of the container. It was a stain.

The tea had spilled onto the interior of the van. Which meant there was a chance Phil didn't drink it! Even if I couldn't find out who had murdered Phil Girard, I could prove that Genevieve hadn't poisoned him if I could prove it had spilled before he had a chance to drink it.

Genevieve kept shelves of those jugs at Tea Totalers. I had no idea how much tea one contained, but I watched enough true crime television to know that I could find out by re-creating the scene. What I needed was a carpet and a jug and a distance of six feet or so, to mimic the distance I'd stood when I took the photo.

Tomorrow morning, before going to Tea Totalers, I would swing by Get Hammered, the local hardware store, and buy a cheap carpet. I'd stage the spill. And once I had my proof, I'd take it to Sheriff Clark. I could have the whole thing wrapped up by lunchtime.

Which left me with one problem: How could I conduct
the experiment here and still manage to get my fabric from Mack by noon?

Even if I had the time to drive to Los Angeles tomorrow, twelve bolts of velvet wouldn't fit in the back of my VW Bug. I was going to have to call in a favor. And since this was a fabric-related favor, I knew exactly who I was going to call. If only I could predict what my former boss was going to ask in return.

I didn't bother calling the showroom. Giovanni closed up at six, if not earlier. He worked his staff far harder than other design studios, but the one thing that made the job bearable was that he was borderline religious about quitting time. Six months into my job with him, he'd put me on salary. I thought it demonstrated my value. I soon learned it meant he expected me to keep working from home when the showroom closed.

For all the hard work I'd put in at To The Nines, it was Giovanni who owed me something, not the other way around, but a certain devil-occupied condominium at the earth's core would freeze over before he'd acknowledge it. I braced myself for the inevitable hard time I was about to receive and called Giovanni's home number.

“Hi, Giovanni. It's Poly Monroe. I need a favor.”

“It's about time you came to your senses. I'll take you back, but you're not getting more money.”

So nice to know I was missed. “That's not why I'm calling. I'm in a bind and I was hoping you could help me out.”

“That's rich. You leave me in the lurch during the holidays and you want a favor from me?”

“Giovanni, I left in early November. And I not only finished the sketches and the design direction for the workroom, but I left you concepts and sketches for Valentine's Day and prom. I did six months' worth of work for you in my last two weeks. I would hardly call that ‘the lurch.'”

“We had to scrap your plans. Too much detail work. Too much fabric needed. I bought four hundred yards of pink
netting. We're going with a princess theme, but the girls are having a hard time with the bodices.”

I bit my lower lip and cringed, imagining the high schools of Los Angeles filled with wannabe princesses in poufy gowns of pink netting. Add in fairy wings from the dollar store and it would look like a clone army of Glinda the Good Witch. I wondered if Giovanni had been knocked in the head before his taste level had finished developing.

“By
girls
, you mean the women in the workroom, right?” He grunted. “Why aren't they using boning?”

“Boning costs too much. I told them to figure out an alternative.”

Boning is a thin strip of plastic encased in a sleeve of fabric. It is sewn inside a bodice to create a cage-like shape. These days, it's most commonly used in wedding dresses and the occasional Renaissance Faire costume, but judging from the stash I found when I took inventory of the store, it was fairly popular at one time. A lightbulb went off over my head and I knew my way in with Giovanni.

“You know I own a fabric store now?”

He grunted again.

“I've been going through the inventory, and I found a pretty sizeable supply of boning. It's yours if you'll help me out with my favor.”

“What do you want?”

“It's minor, really. I ordered twelve bolts of velvet and they were delivered to Mack's Fabrics two blocks south of Santee Alley. There was a mix-up and Mack wants me to pick up the fabric tomorrow by noon. I can't get there.”

“Why'd you use Mack? We never use him.”

I didn't want to tell Giovanni that was one of the reasons. “I'm in a pinch here. Seriously. I prepaid for the fabric, and I can't afford to write it off.”

“Pick up twelve bolts of velvet by tomorrow noon in exchange for—how much boning do you have?”

I'd counted sixty-three rolls. At twelve yards per roll, that was over seven hundred fifty yards of boning, way more than he'd ever need to produce pink net princess gowns.

“Twenty rolls,” I said quickly. “Give or take a few,” I added.

“Twenty rolls and you deliver complete patterns and instructions on how the girls should use it to minimize cost.”

“You'll pick up my fabric? By noon tomorrow?”

“Yeah, fine, I'll get your fabric. What is it, anyway?”

“Thirty-dollar-a-yard velvet. Poly-silk blend. It's a custom weave and it has my name on it.”

“You always went for those pie-in-the-sky fabrics. You got a buyer?”

“I
am
the buyer,” I said.

“The world has changed, Poly. You're going to have to learn to function the way I do. Cut corners, quick turnaround.”

“That's not my style,” I said. “Can I count on you?”

He grunted a third time.

We said good-bye and hung up. As risky as it had been to ask Giovanni for help, I knew he'd come through for me. Ever since he learned I was reopening the store he knew I represented a channel for him to get supplies. Today's negotiation would serve to whet his appetite. He'd show up with my fabric, of that I was certain.

If only I was as certain of my efforts on Genevieve's behalf.

•   •   •

The next morning,
I woke at six and took a quick shower. The scent of lemon verbena from the soap invigorated me, and I lingered a little too long under the hot spray. When I finally turned the water off, steam covered the mirror and left a film of moisture on the sink. I cracked the door and let the steam escape while I towel-dried my short auburn hair and finished the rest of my bathroom routine.

My black sweater and sailor pants were draped over the
foot of the sleigh bed, covering the dark cherrywood. Pins was curled up under the neckline of the sweater, his head tipped against his paw. I left the clothes where they were so as not to wake him and rummaged around in the large armoire for something to wear today.

I dressed in narrow black jeans, a black T-shirt, and a black zip-front hoodie. The arm of the sweatshirt had
Polyester
written down it in cheap rhinestones I'd found in the trash of a craft store next to To The Nines. When Giovanni learned I could embellish by hand he cleaned out the trash and demanded I teach the workroom my technique so we could hide flaws in the cheap fabrics he bought. That had been a particularly blingy season.

I pulled on my favorite riding boots, fed the cats, ate a bowl of raisin bran cereal, and left. It was just going on seven and I wanted to stop off at Charlie's before I headed to Tea Totalers.

I crossed the street and jogged between cars that were stuck at the light. The bays to her shop were already open, and sounds of Van Halen trickled out of the office. Vaughn's car was up on the lift, same as yesterday.

I went to the office and knocked on the door frame. Charlie spun her chair around and checked me out.

“She's a whiz kid, you know that?”

“Who?

“Frenchy. I told her to figure out a way to make herself useful. She set up some kind of accounting tool for me and inputted all of the receipts and invoices I've been meaning to get to. She filed the closed invoices from my desk. She flipped the calendar to April.”

“It is April,” I said.

“March was hot. I liked him. I wasn't ready to turn the page.”

I glanced at the calendar hanging on the wall. “Do you have a problem with April?”

“The only problem I have with him is that he's going to make me forget about March.”

“So yesterday was okay, right? You two didn't kill each other, nobody found out she was here, and some work got done.”

“Sure, yesterday was fine, all the way up to last night. Her hair turned out better than I expected. Once she gets over that putz of a husband, she's going to be a real heartbreaker.”

“So what's the problem?”

“I'm not so sure how today's going to go.”

“Seems to me she likes the work. Give her a couple of projects and she'll stay busy.”

“That's just it. I can't give her any projects because I can't find her.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Everything was fine when I did her hair. She said she was tired and turned in. I went out. When I got up this morning, she was gone.”

BOOK: Crushed Velvet
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