Some Like It Haute: A Humorous Fashion Mystery (Style & Error Book 4) (27 page)

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“He’s my great-uncle, and that’s my way of looking at it.”

“Suit yourself.”

A truck loaded down with ladders, orange cones, and men in yellow construction hats drove past us, obstructing my view of the storefront. A thin old man with a cane approached from the left. He stopped in front of the store, studied me for a few seconds, then nodded at Ken and continued past us.

“Who was that?”

“Mr. Pickers. He’s head of the Senior Patrol. They’re a group of retirees who keep an eye on things around San Ladrón.”

I watched the man continue down the street. It was just after four, between the lunch and the dinner crowds I expected would fill up the restaurants on the street, and, now that the head of the Senior Patrol had moved on to other pressing matters, it was just Ken and me.

“Can I have the keys?”

“You know she was murdered in the store, and you still want to go in? I have the paperwork right here. You don’t have to see a thing if you don’t want to.”

“Isn’t that my name on the will?”

He looked down at his clipboard again and tapped the form. “‘New owner: Polyester Monroe.’ Your uncle Marius either really loved you or really hated you.” He looked back at the dingy gray storefront. “Right now I can’t tell which.” Ken juggled his clipboard and pen with a set of keys until he found the one he wanted. “I wouldn’t expect much,” he added.

We crossed the road in the middle, blatantly jaywalking. I might have walked to the light and waited for the signal to change if I were alone, but figured there was safety in numbers if any traffic cops decided to make an example out of us. Ken fed the key into the gate, a collapsible metal fence that had been pulled shut over the front door of the store and left locked. The key turned but the gate refused to open. Rust at the intersecting joints left it as stiff as the tin woodsman and here we were, armed with keys, legal papers, and a flashlight, but no oil can.

“Is there a back door?”

“Let’s see.”

As we hiked down the block then around to the back, I noticed a shiny black Mercedes sedan with dark-tinted windows sitting alone in a parking lot at the corner. The sounds of talk radio blurred as we passed the car, the only indication that someone was inside the vehicle. The front license plate read MCM. Distracted from the path, I tripped over an uneven seam in the sidewalk and landed face down in the gravel.

I pushed myself back up and slapped the dirt from my black turtleneck and black velvet jeans. I wore black a lot these days. It hid most of the grime I picked up from sketching, repairing sewing machines, and using a glue gun, but it wasn’t so good for hiding evidence of my klutziness.

Ken didn’t notice I was missing from his side until he reached the back door and turned around to look at me.

“I’m okay,” I said, then jogged a few steps to catch up with him.

“Still as uncoordinated as you were in high school. Remember how you tripped over the hem of your prom dress during the ‘Electric Slide’?” He laughed.

“Just unlock the door, please.”

Ken and I had attended the same high school in the neighboring town of Glendora. Upon graduation, he had moved to San Ladrón and gone to work in his father’s real estate agency, while I moved to Los Angeles and attended FIDM. I started working at To The Nines when I graduated and hadn’t been back since.

He turned the key and pushed the door inside. A stench of stale air, mildew, and something I immediately associated with wet metal hit me. Ken, who had been in front of me, stepped back and let me pass through. “I’ll wait here,” he said, waving his hand in front of his face.

“Fine.” I pulled the collar of my turtleneck over my nose and mouth to filter out some of the smell, clicked on the flashlight, and entered.

Tiny dust particles floated through the beam of the flashlight. As I moved farther inside, my eyes adjusted enough to make out large square tables piled high with bolts of fabric. The walls were fitted with shelves about four and a half feet deep, housing stacks upon stacks of round rolls of fabric, too. I only knew the depth of the shelf because I knew a bolt of fabric was generally forty-eight to fifty-six inches long. At least, the fabrics I bought for To The Nines, the downtown Los Angeles dress company where I worked, were that length. The job wasn’t what I dreamed of when I graduated from the Fashion Institute, but it was solid work in the garment district, and as my boyfriend, Carson, liked to tell me, a steady paycheck is worth more than a treasure chest of dreams.

As a little girl, I used to play in the store, and “playing” included climbing the fixtures and hiding between the bolts of fabric. And before I outgrew the fun of playing hide-and-seek in the store, I outgrew the fixtures. By sixth grade I was five feet tall; by graduation I was only a few inches shy of six.

The interior of the store appeared smaller than I remembered, and not just because my memories were from childhood. I noticed a dividing wall that hadn’t been there on my last visit over ten years ago. An unpainted wooden door was in the middle of the makeshift partition. I crossed the room and tried the doorknob. It was locked. I looked behind me for Ken with his janitor-like key ring, but he was still MIA.

“Ken? Can you come here with your keys?” I called out the back door. “I want to see what’s behind this door.” There was no answer.

Above the door was a small square window. I pulled a three-rung folding metal ladder under it, climbed up, and tried to look through, but the glass was too filthy. “You break it, you bought it,” I said under my breath. “Good thing I’m the owner.” I swung the flashlight against the glass. It shattered on impact and fell to the floor on the other side of the wall, creating tinkling harmonies in the process. I looked through the hole but made out nothing of interest, nothing that would have been the reason for closing off a third of the store. There must be something back there, I reasoned. Before I decided whether or not I was keeping the store, I wanted to know what it was.

I jumped down and found a pair of scissors under the dust-coated register. After cutting a long strip of faux zebra fur and throwing it over my shoulder, I sliced off two more strips and wrapped them around each fist. I climbed back on the footstool, punched the bigger pieces of remaining glass to the floor, and threw the larger piece of fur over the bottom of the sill. I fed my head, arms, and shoulders through the opening and fumbled with the flashlight with my fur-wrapped hands. It dropped to the floor and landed on the pile of glass. The light flickered a few times, and then went out.

I leveraged myself against the opposite side of the window with my zebra paws, but the opening of the window was doing direct battle with the size of my hips. My feet lost touch with the footstool as I wriggled, trying to fit through.

“Just what the heck do you think you’re doing up there?” said a muffled voice behind me.

There was little I could do in my Pooh Bear–like pose, other than kick my legs in an effort to reconnect with the footstool.

“Ken? Is that you? Can you help me?” I called. “I’m stuck.”

“Hold on.”

Positioned as I was, halfway through a broken window four feet above the ground, I didn’t really see that I had much choice and considered saying as much, but I bit my tongue. I only hoped Ken was a quick thinker, because the pressure of the windowsill against my midsection was creating an impending need for a bathroom.

The locked door swung open. I heard a click of a switch, and seconds later the secret room was flooded with light. I shut my eyes immediately, too late. I was temporarily blinded and still stuck in the window. Things were not improving.

As my vision cleared I realized the man who stepped into the room in front of me was a stranger. His light brown hair was cut short and parted on the side. He wore a white turtleneck and a navy-blue cotton peacoat over khaki trousers and white sneakers, and looked as if he’d just returned from an afternoon on his yacht. It was bad enough to be caught dangling through a window, even if it was my window, but worse because it seemed I was on the verge of making a very bad first impression.

“Do you think you can fit through the window if I pull you?”

“I don’t—maybe.”

“‘Maybe’ might not be good enough. You could get stuck more than you already are.”

“I can push her from behind,” said Ken’s muffled voice from, well, behind.

“Nobody’s pushing anything!” I said. “You, pull. I’m almost through.”

The stranger stepped in front of me and paused for a second before grabbing my zebra-wrapped hands. My center of gravity had shifted, more of me through the window than not, and I knew there was no going back. As the stranger pulled, my hips popped through the opening and I fell on top of him, knocking him to the floor next to the chalk outline of a body.

Suddenly, I knew why Uncle Marius had divided off this portion of the store.

I didn’t know if
Thank you
or
I’m sorry
was the more appropriate response to knocking someone into the scene of a ten-year-old homicide, so I said nothing. For the second time that day I stood up and dusted myself off, then unwrapped the fur from my right hand and offered it to the stranger to help him stand. He ignored the offer and stood up on his own.

“You’re on private property,” he said.

“Actually,
you’re
on private property, if we’re going to get into specifics, but considering you just rescued me from a tight spot I’m willing to look the other way,” I said. I didn’t know if he’d seen the outline of the body or not, but at the moment I wanted out of that room.

He took a step closer and looked down at me. I wasn’t used to men looking down at me, since I was five foot nine, but he did. “Do you want to tell me what you’re doing on my father’s property?”

I stepped backward. “Who’s your father?” I asked.

“Vic McMichael.”

“Who?”

At that moment Ken burst through the door. His blazer flapped open, the crest on his breast pocket partially hidden under the lapel. “You should have called to tell me you were coming here,” he said to the stranger.

“Which one of you is going to tell me what is going on?” I demanded.

The stranger looked between Ken and me. “Who are you again?” he asked.

“Poly Monroe,” I answered and held out my hand for the second time. This time he shook it.

“Vaughn McMichael.” The intensity that I’d seen in his features moments ago melted into an expression that was just shy of a smile. His eyes, a mixture of green flecked with gold, held my own for a second longer than felt comfortable, but I fought the urge to look away. His handshake was firm enough to mean business, but the softness of his hand cocooned my own. I returned the pressure of the handshake equally. I didn’t know why, but I sensed that Vaughn McMichael wasn’t sure what to make of my presence. As we shook hands, a roll of pink-and-white gingham fell from the table behind him and landed on the floor. It rolled halfway across the room and came to a stop by Ken’s foot.

Vaughn dropped my hand and looked at Ken. “Sorry if I jumped the gun. Take your time. I’ll be in touch.” He turned around and left through the wooden door that had kept us from being inside the hidden room.

I followed him out of the store, keeping a few steps behind and watching to see where he headed. He approached the black sedan that had been idling in the adjacent parking lot, tapped twice on the back window, and the door opened up. Before he got inside he turned around and looked directly at me. I went back into the store as the car pulled away.

“What was that all about?” I asked Ken.

“That, my friend, was the son of the man who owns half of San Ladrón.”

“How did he get in? And why was he here? And why did he say that I was on private property, and that his father owned the store?”

Ken ignored my questions. “Come with me.” We walked to the front of the store and Ken unlocked the door from the inside. Again the metal fence kept us prisoners inside the store. In the distance, I heard the rapid-fire rhythm of a jackhammer against asphalt.

Ken cursed. He led me out the back door, around the block, and back in front of Land of a Thousand Fabrics. “See that?” he pointed to the vacant building on the left of the store. “Mr. McMichael owns that.”

“So?”

“See that?” He pointed to the building on the right of the store. “Mr. McMichael owns that, too.”

“Okay, I get it.”

“See that?” Ken continued, ignoring me. “And that? And that?” he said, pointing to various buildings around the fabric store. “He owns them all. In fact, there’s only one building on this street he doesn’t own. Care to guess which one?”

“Okay, so he’s interested in buying the fabric store. Why did his son act like he already owns it?”

Ken pulled a folder out from the bottom of the clipboard and balanced it on the back of a metro bench next to us. He flipped through a few sheets of paper until he reached a piece of thick stationery with a monogram on the top.
MCM
, it said, just like the license plate.

“When Mr. McMichael heard you’d inherited the store, he made an offer. A generous offer. I know you’re only here through the weekend, so I took the liberty of drawing up the paperwork.”

Ken was either the most efficient real estate agent I’d ever met, or I was being rushed into making a decision. Not one to be bullied, I crossed my arms and dug in for answers.

“What does Mr. McMichael plan to do with the store? Is he connected to the fashion industry? Does he even like fabric? Can he tell the difference between wool challis and gabardine? Did he know Uncle Marius and Aunt Millie? Or my parents? Does he know my parents? Has he talked to them about this?”

Ken signed. “Are you going to stop for a breath? Poly, this is business. He’s not asking for your hand in marriage. Mr. McMichael is a developer, and this property is worth a lot to him. He can’t do anything with the rest of the block unless he has this one location.”

“How does he know I own it?”

“It’s public knowledge. Besides, this isn’t the first offer Mr. McMichael has made on the property.”