Some Like It Haute: A Humorous Fashion Mystery (Style & Error Book 4) (9 page)

“Fill out this questionnaire and then let’s set up a schedule for you.”

I handed over a clipboard with a couple sheets of paper on it. Molly looked relieved. I pulled three tissues out of a box on the corner of my desk and handed them to her. “There’s something green on your cheek.”

“There’s always something green on my cheek.” She scrubbed her cheekbone until the green went away, leaving fresh, pink skin.

I didn’t know how other personal stylists worked, but when I hung out my shingle, I assumed I could figure it out as I went. I compiled binders of looks that represented the fashion identities I’d once learned from a Cosmo quiz: Casual, Fashion Forward, Bohemian, and Powerful. My own personal style ran along the lines of whimsy, but my goal wasn’t to have my clients dress like me. I sat Molly in a comfy purple velvet chair and handed her a stack of binders. Day One involved identifying the way she wanted to dress, the sizes she wore, and the budget she had in mind. I’d shop and put together what I felt was the basis for a new wardrobe to suit her needs. My take was 10% of her spend.

While she was busy with the binders, I snuck off to the back corner of the basement and made a call to Dante.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I’m at my house.”

“I thought we had an arrangement.”

“No, you had an arrangement. I had a need to change my clothes and see my cat. I’ll be done here soon.” I glanced at Molly. She had her nose buried in Bohemian. “Can you come over in about an hour?”

“Sure.”

Molly and I finished our first consultation and she wrote me a check to cover my initial consulting fee. I thanked her, we set up an appointment three days away, and I walked her out. Dante’s motorcycle pulled into the driveway next to her car as we were saying goodbye.

“Is he yours?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be ready for a man like that.”

That made two of us.

11

I waited until Molly drove away before I led Dante into the house.

“You rang?” he asked.

I held my finger up in a just-a-minute gesture. I was hungry. I opened up the cabinets looking for food and came up with a box of Snyder’s of Hanover Sourdough pretzels. I pulled a fat pretzel out and held the box toward Dante. He waved them off. I bit into the round loop of a full pretzel and leaned back against the counter.

“I talked to Amanda today. She’s been getting threats at her studio,” I said.

“What kind of threats?”

“Written. They look like old fashioned ransom notes with letters cut out of magazines, but whoever made them kept the original and sent her a copy. I’m guessing it’s because whoever did it didn’t want to leave fingerprints.”

“Nobody’s going to take the time to cut letters out of a magazine.”

“They did. I saw them. The most recent said ‘burn, baby, burn!’ I don’t think it’s much of a coincidence that her runway show went up in a blaze of glory.”

Dante leaned back against the chair. “Why are you still helping Amanda?”

“Because I said I would. I made a commitment.”

“The job is over.”

Breakup Rule #4: Don’t get into your last relationship problems with the potential new guy.

Logan was the only one who heard the gory post-breakup details. Maybe if Dante and Logan bonded enough, I could leave the explanation to my cat.

“The fire investigator is trying to determine whether the runway fire was an accident or arson. Even if it was intentional, nobody was hurt, so it’s not a homicide investigation.”

“Have you talked to any of the models?”

“No.”

“Not even Harper? Weren’t you two close?”

“Harper was a loner among the girls. We weren’t close, but she didn’t seem to have any other friends.  Besides, Harper is in Mexico. Why?”

“Samantha, I can understand your desire to figure this out, but there’s something else driving you here and you’re not telling me what it is.”

I looked down at my hands. “The attack was personal. Someone was in the parking lot waiting for me. Someone wanted to hurt me and I don’t know why.”

“You might never know why.”

 “How am I supposed to move on if I don’t know if it’ll happen again? How do I know somebody isn’t watching me every time I leave my house?”

“All the more reason to stay at my place.”

“I’m not going to hide,” I said. “But I can’t live my life constantly looking over my shoulder, either. I don’t know how anybody could expect me to.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“My plan?”

“I figure after your meeting with Amanda you came up with a plan. You asked me here because I’m a part of it.” He stared at me for a few seconds. Logan climbed from the table onto Dante’s leg, and then onto the ground. Dante never broke eye contact with me. “Unless I’m wrong, and I wouldn’t mind being wrong.”

I felt my face grow warm. “I told Amanda to fire Clive and bring you on as her photographer. I need somebody on the inside. Clive was at Warehouse Five today—”

“You went to Warehouse Five? That’s a crime scene.”

“I know. Detective Loncar was there with an arson investigator.”

“I can’t imagine either one of them was happy with you walking around.”

“Happy? No, but after Clive elbowed me in the ribs, Loncar took my side.”

“He what?” Dante gripped the table and his knuckles turned white. His sleeves rode up and the flame tattoos around his wrists throbbed with his pulse.

I waved my hand. “It’s good that he did. I don’t think the detective believed me until he saw I was in pain.”

Dante looked like he wanted to put his fist through something. Maybe a wall, maybe Clive’s face.

“He’s out of the picture. You’re in his place. Can you do that?”

“You said Clive was hired to document the show from inception to completion? Sure, I can step in.”

“You’ll need to get pictures of whatever you can if we’re going to crack this thing.”

He leaned back. “I’ll get pictures of samples, sketches, and Amanda’s showroom. If she’ll give me a list of everybody she employed, I’ll get interviews on film. Clive probably turned something over to her already. That’s standard procedure.”

I didn’t know what to say. I’d gotten so used to everybody telling me I shouldn’t be involved that I wasn’t prepared for Dante to take me seriously. “Is that okay?” Dante asked.

“Sure.”

“Great. I’ll tell her I need to see whatever he’s done so I can stay true to the style of the initial photography and keep the change of photographers seamless.” He sat back in the chair and put his hands behind his head. “That should give us a good start if we’re going to ‘crack this thing’.” He smiled.

“Take pictures of everything you can. The fire happened after the attack. So did I see something backstage and the fire was set to cover it up, or was someone planning to set the fire and they wanted me gone before it happened?”

“You need to be careful. If you’re right and somebody targeted you, they’re not going to like knowing you’re poking around their business.”

“I know.”

We started at each other for a few seconds, until I broke eye contact and focused on my pretzel. I snapped off the other loop and bit into it. Pretzel dust covered the front of my shirt. I dusted it off, chewed, and swallowed the lump of dough. I felt better already.

“So what do we do now?” Dante asked.

“You need to go to Amanda’s studio, introduce yourself, and get the lay of the land. She doesn’t know that I confided in you. Right now, she thinks you’re a fashion photographer who can replace Clive.”

“So I’m your man on the inside.”

“That’s what I’m counting on. Be on the lookout for Tiny, Amanda’s business manager, and anybody else who comes along. There was a guy there today named Oscar LeVay. He owns the agency where Tiny hired the models, and he expects Amanda to pay him seventy-five grand for the show even thought it didn’t take place. He may have taken the letters from Amanda’s desk.”

Dante’s eyebrows went up.

“I was hiding behind a screen when Oscar arrived. When he left, the letters were gone.”

“If she went to the police about the letters, they would have kept them.”

“Maybe that’s why the ones I saw were copies.”

“Did you see this Oscar guy take them?”

“No. I don’t even know if he saw them. But if he saw them, and he was responsible for sending them in the first place, he might take them to hide the evidence.”

“Did you tell Amanda that?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Because Nick was there.
“The timing wasn’t right,” I said out loud.

“Anything else you can tell me?”

“Clive wasn’t happy when I dropped your name.”

“You leave Clive to me.”

I walked Dante to the front door. “Thank you for helping me,” I said.

“Samantha, just because I’m helping you doesn’t mean I don’t have ulterior motives.”

“Meaning?”

He put his fingers on my chin, tipped my head back, and kissed me. On the few occasions when I thought about what it would be like to kiss Dante, I imagined heat-of-the-moment, back-up-against-a-wall type stuff. Like kissing Brando in
The Wild One.

It was just like I’d imagined.

The world dropped away and the room spun, leaving me dizzy. It was enough to make me forget the name of that shoe designer who’d been on my mind a lot lately. When Dante pulled away, he looked me straight in the eyes. I blinked twice and then looked away. He pulled on his motorcycle helmet, flipped the visor down, and left.

I took a shower, put on clean undies, and checked my reflection in the foggy mirror. My injuries, though invisible, felt like a corset around my waist, and the elastic on my panties dug into my chicken finger, ice cream, and waffle weight gain. I moved my gaze from my torso to my face. The person staring back at me looked like a stranger. Where was the happy go lucky buyer who turned projects in on time and hit her end of quarter target inventory levels? Where was the overachiever who met sell-through expectations and gross margin goals? Where was the woman who could travel three cities on the contents of one carry-on suitcase and stay under the company per diem of sixty dollars a day?

She was gone, a distant memory. In her place was an unemployed job seeker with a muffin top.

Since moving to Ribbon, I’d been suspected of murder, used as a plant in a counterfeiting ring, and trapped in a museum. I’d started a relationship I had long daydreamed about and was pretty much responsible for sabotaging it before it got off the ground. My friends had gone ignored since the attack. Life as I knew it was out of control. I hadn’t even called my parents in California to tell them that I’d been hospitalized. I didn’t want to give anybody any reason to criticize my life. I was becoming isolated. And somewhere along the way, that had become okay.

As the fog cleared from the mirror, I focused on my reflection. I looked older than I had when I worked at Bentley’s and it had only been a little over a year. My brown hair hung past my shoulders, limp, unkempt. I’d gone from maintenance trims every six weeks to pulling it into a ponytail and ignoring it. My eyes looked tired. My brows needed shaping. My skin looked dull. And don’t get me started on my pedicure.

I ran a thick comb through my hair and secured it into two low ponytails on either side of my head. Without stopping to over-think things, I picked up a pair of scissors and sliced through the hair on the left side of my head.
Whack!
Right below chin level. The hair bobbed up around my face. The right side of my hair was long, serious, and staid in comparison.

I held my hand up to cover the left hand side of the mirror. The person who stared back at me with long straight hair was a stranger. She had seen things I never expected to see and had lived through things I never expected to have lived through. She looked light years older than I’d been when I moved back into this house.

I moved my hand to cover the right hand side of the mirror. The woman I saw looked fresh. Perky. Ready for anything. Unfettered by straightening irons and blow driers and the fight against killers and naturally curly hair.

I took the scissors to the ponytail on the right and snipped through the wet hair. The natural curls sprung up, making the hair instantly wavy. I squirted a handful of mousse into my palm and rubbed it onto my strands. I followed with a tinted moisturizer, mascara, and dark red lipstick, and blow-dried my hair upside down. When I flipped back up, I looked at the stranger in front of me. She looked like someone who didn’t care so much that she’d been in the hospital two nights ago. She looked like she might have a plan. I didn’t have a plan, so I liked the girl in the mirror even more.

I dressed in pajamas and went to the kitchen for a glass of wine. So what if it was only three thirty? That was practically happy hour. I downed the first glass and poured a refill. After the second, I had a really good idea. I would call Nick. Just to say hi.

I ignored the voice that said two glasses of wine plus one call to an ex-boyfriend was not only a not good idea, it was plain old bad math. When his message came on, I pulled myself together. “Hi Nick, it’s Samantha.” I stopped. What was I thinking? I ended the call and stared at the phone.

That went well. Not.

Seconds later my cell buzzed with a text:
Sorry didn’t answer. At Brothers Pizza. Come join if you’re not busy.

I tried to text back something that communicated that I missed him and was looking forward to seeing him but not let on that I’d kissed Dante. I ended up going with:
See you soon.

I stood up and stumbled. Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea to drink wine on a stomach filled only with pretzels. And maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea to drive to Brothers Pizza. How far away was it? I rolled my eyes up while I tried to calculate if I could walk, lost balance, and landed on the sofa. No, maybe it wasn’t a good idea to walk, either.

I called Eddie. “Yo,” I said when he answered. “Do you want to go to Brothers?”

“Can’t. I’m pulling an all-nighter at Tradava. Pizza does sound good, though.”

I’m meeting Nick and I could use some backup.”