The Lanvin Murders (Vintage Clothing Mysteries) (25 page)

“What are you talking about?” She leaned forward. “You know something about that key, don't you? And what is this about ‘papers’?”

“Look.” Ray's voice was low but forceful. He locked eyes with Joanna. She pulled back. “Just stay safe and keep out of the way. Do you hear me?”

This was not the gentle Ray who gardened and made cinnamon rolls. “If you know something, you need to tell me. Don’s been killed. I can't sleep in my own house, and I’m terrified even being alone in the store. For God's sake, Ray.”

“Stay out of it, and you'll be fine.” The words cut cold and sharp. “If you don't, no guarantees.”

She swallowed.

He took a last glance at the coat, then left.

Joanna regained her breath. The threat in Ray’s eyes stayed with her. She was at a dead end. But she had to admit she wasn't, as he demanded, “done with it.”

He’d mentioned the mysterious papers again, too. She knelt by the shelf under the tiki bar to find the price gun to tag some blouses and stopped mid-reach. The bank officer had said Franklin recently visited the safe deposit box. Could he have removed something? The box was plenty big and less than a third full.
 

The store was quiet but for the hum of the fan and Rosemary Clooney's honeyed voice on the stereo. A few tattooed women in cut-offs wandered into the bar next door. A bus lumbered by. Maybe the shoes the teenager got earlier and the clothes the timber executive’s wife bought would be her only sales of the afternoon. She found that people often didn't want to try on clothes when it was hot outside, and, frankly, if they weren't liberal with their antiperspirant, she didn't want them trying them on either. Body odor on 1940s rayon was almost impossible to get out.

Her thoughts returned to Franklin. Too bad she couldn’t talk to Ray about him. She’d like to know more about how he died. Time to call her friends at Central Library. After a short chat about her cats and a few helpful tips on flea prevention, the reference librarian confirmed the story she heard at the Remmick fundraiser: Franklin Pursell, owner of Pursell Plumbing, had fallen from an open wall in a condo complex under construction above 23rd Street. He had died on impact. Joanna pictured Marnie in her living room, smoking a cigarette, learning about the accident on television.

What the hell. She dragged in the sandwich board with “Tallulah’s Closet” painted on it in Deco script and locked up the store. She wanted to see, firsthand, where Franklin had died.

***

Joanna pulled the Corolla into a rare open parking space in the Uptown neighborhood in front of a spa with a pseudo-French name. Just up the hill loomed the half-finished condo complex.
 

She stepped out of the car and held her hand above her eyes to shield them from the sun. The complex took up two city blocks. It was a mass of steel and concrete with about half of its windows installed. Five stories of balconies jutted from the building's face, but the railings weren't yet attached. It would be all too easy to fall.
 

Partway up the block yielded a better view. A few hundred yards of gravel stretched in front of the condo's skeleton, and a scissor lift raised a man to a third story opening where he helped two workers inside the structure install a window.
 

“Can I help you?” came a voice behind her.
 

Startled, she turned to see a tall man wearing a hard hat. With the noise of the construction, she hadn't heard him approach. “Oh, I knew Franklin Pursell, the man who died here, and I was thinking about him today.” Maybe she'd never met Franklin, but it wasn't a complete lie. She was beginning to feel she did know him.

“I see. I thought you might be from the City. A building like this, we get a lot of inspections. Of course, you don't look much like an inspector.” He eyed her 1950s ivory cotton dress bordered with orange and blue flowers.
 

A few construction workers had stopped working and were staring at her and the man with the clipboard. Was the one on the right Paul? Her fingers went to her grandmother’s ring. The man in the crew turned. No, someone else. Her grip relaxed. The man caught her glance and smiled.
 

“I wonder—would it be too much trouble to see where he worked?” Joanna asked.

The man in the hardhat pointed at her red 1940s platform sandals. “Those shoes aren't exactly regulation. You're not one of those crime scene fiends are you? Get a thrill out of seeing where people died?”

“No, believe me. If anything, the opposite is true.” If anything, she'd trade every Bakelite bangle in the store never to encounter a dead body again. “I saw Franklin's brother this morning, and, well, I thought it would, you know, bring closure to know where Franklin spent his last days.”

“All right. I guess it will be okay just this once.” He held out his hand. “Dan. Foreman. Come with me into the office and we'll get you a hardhat.”
 

She followed him into the side of the structure through an opening that looked like it would become the entrance to a multi-level parking garage. Inside was cool and dark. They mounted a stairway lit by lamps strung on orange extension cords and entered an office framed and sheet-rocked into a corner of the third floor.

Three men sat around a long folding table in the middle of the room. Two of them seemed to be arguing about wooden flooring with another man with a Russian accent. Beyond the table, a coffee pot put out an acrid odor. A large whiteboard scribbled with notes covered one wall, and a grid of dirty file holders spanned another. Dust powdered the floor.

“Hey boss,” one of the men at the table said to Dan, but his eyes were on Joanna.

“This is a friend of Franklin's. I'm going to show her his office.”

“Family?” He turned to Joanna.

“No, but a friend of the family.”

“She knows Ray.” The walkie talkie on Dan’s belt erupted in staticky voices, and he lifted it to his mouth as he wandered to a desk in the corner of the office.

“Ray?” a man at the table said, his fingers gripping a Styrofoam coffee cup. When Joanna nodded, he said, “That couldn't be easy.” He looked at his coworkers and raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah, those two could barely stand to be in the same room.”

This was interesting. Nothing she could remember that Ray did or said led her to think he had a problem with his brother. “I'm sure Ray feels awful about it now.” She gave what she hoped was a knowing look.

“Put this on and follow me.” Dan had returned and handed her a pink hardhat. “Visitor's hat. Smaller size for the ladies. I'll show you his office.” He led her into the parking garage again, then to a smaller office framed in nearby. He opened the door to reveal boxes of equipment leaning against a wall and a man in jeans, a tee shirt, and dirty work boots hunched over a well-used desk.

“Roberto, I'd like you to meet Joanna, a friend of Franklin's. She's interested in seeing his office. You taking a break?”

“Sure, I have a minute.” Roberto stood and shook Joanna's hand as the other man left. Roberto was short and muscular, and his curly hair was flattened around the edges where his hardhat normally sat. He leaned on the desk and folded his arms, studying her. “I don't remember seeing you before.”

“I haven't been here before.” She shifted on her feet.

Roberto stared at her a minute. “What do you want to see?”

Good question. What was she here for? What did she think she’d find? She sneezed from the building's dust. “Oh, I don't know—I—I guess I just wanted to get a feel for what his life was like here.”

“You don't know Franklin, do you?”

Damn it. She brushed a speck of plaster from her skirt before meeting his eyes. At this point she didn't have anything to lose by being honest. “You're right. I'd never met him. But I've heard so much about him over the past few weeks, and I know his brother, Ray.”
 

Roberto continued to stare without speaking.

She drew a breath. “And I knew someone who was very important to Franklin, at least at one time. She recently died. I guess it's for her sake I'm here.”

“The girl from Oysterville?”

She nodded.

Roberto relaxed. “Franklin used to talk about her sometimes.” A glimmer of a smile appeared on his lips then disappeared. “So she died, huh?”

“Yes, a heart attack.” He clearly knew Franklin well. She cocked her head and decided to throw out a line. “It’s a shame about Ray. I wish he and Franklin had got along better.”
 

He nodded. “Really is a shame. I knew Franklin a long time. We worked together for twenty years. All that time he talked about Ray like a brother would, but lately whenever I saw them together they were fighting.”

“That's too bad.” She tried to think of tactful way to get him to elaborate. “Family, too.”

Roberto grabbed his hardhat and walked toward the door. “Yes, definitely a shame. In fact, they had a fight the day Franklin died. Right here.” He pointed toward the desk. “I walked in on them. I don't know Ray that well—he helps out from time to time with some of the scheduling—but I can't imagine he feels very good about it now.”

“I wonder what they were fighting about.”

“Couldn’t tell.”
 

“Did Franklin mention anything recently about some papers? Or maybe you found some strange papers in the office?” The place was a mess, although as far as she could tell, most of it was assorted bits of tubing.

He turned by the door and raised an eyebrow. “Papers? No. Why?” He held the door open for her.
 

“Just something Ray mentioned once. Where are we going?”

Roberto turned around to look at her. “You want to see where he died, don't you?”

She followed him to the edge of the parking garage where the outside wall hadn't yet been constructed. A waist-high wooden barrier ran along the opening. A few men with cigarettes loitered by its edge.

“Get back to work,” Roberto told them. “You're not supposed to be smoking here, anyway.” The men wandered back into the garage.

Joanna peered over the gaping edge of the garage. Fifty feet or so straight below was a dumpster filled with wood scraps, broken sheetrock, and sharp-edged, cut steel girders. Beyond the dumpster was a row of port-a-potties, then a chain link fence with a wide gate.

“He fell down there.” Roberto pointed to the dumpster.

“Off the edge. Awful.”

“We didn't have the barrier up then. Put that up after he fell. Eventually the whole thing'll be walled up. It's open now to load in materials.”

They both looked over the edge for a moment, silent. Joanna pulled back. “It's hard for me to believe that he would have just fallen like that.”

“Exactly,” Roberto said, as if he had been waiting for her observation. “He was used to working in big, open structures. I don't get it.”

“What a horrible way to go.”

“He died when he hit some scrap metal. Probably a girder. He must have come back, late, to finish something up. One of the day laborers found him the next morning.”

“Sounds like you're not so sure it was an accident.”

“I don't figure he would la-di-da walk over to the edge of the garage and fall in. None of us went close to the edge except to throw garbage off, and even then we were careful.”

“So you think someone pushed him?” She watched him.

“I didn't say that. I just don't think he fell.”

What is he getting at? “Well, if he didn't fall by himself, then he must have been helped by someone. Or—” She looked up. “Was he a drinker?”

“Nope. Well, maybe a beer here and there, but I've never seen him drunk. The company will tell you he'd been drinking when he died, though.” Roberto gestured toward the main office then leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Because that's what the insurance company wanted to hear. They found a couple of old beer cans in our office, a little alcohol in his blood, and they weren't too interested in looking into it further.”

“Is there a particular reason you don't think his death was an accident?”

He walked back toward the plumber's office without replying. She followed him, and when they were inside he shut the door. He sat in the beat-up chair and leaned back. “Something was up with Franklin. I'm not sure what, but something was.”

“Do you mean between him and Ray?” She lifted the hard hat from her head and pulled free a curl caught in its frame.

“Maybe. He'd been really distracted over the week before he died—I had to redo the gas stack for building one. Then, a few hours after his fight with Ray, he was yelling at someone on the phone. Not like Franklin. 'You can't get away with this,’ he kept saying.”

“Is that all he said?”

“It sounded like he made a plan to meet someone later that day.”

“Ray again?”

“Don’t know. No idea. And it’s not like we can ask him.”

His voice slowed. Joanna understood. This makeshift office and scores of offices like it had been his and Franklin’s safe world for years, just as Tallulah’s Closet was to her. It was the place they could leave their personal drama behind and escape through work. Until one of them couldn’t. “I’m really sorry about Franklin. You two must have been close.”

Roberto nodded. “He was a good man. He came a long way from his roots, you know, in building up the company. Sometimes, after we'd been working a long stretch and the both of us were up late, he'd talk about home and how he thought about moving back to the peninsula and living in a little house on the beach. Fishing for a living. He still had a boat at Sauvie Island. He'd talk about your friend, too, and about the other people where he lived. He was even writing a history of his tribe, spent years on it.”
 

She remembered the bundle of papers at Ray's house.
 

“And yet,” Roberto continued, “At the end of the day he'd drive home in his brand new truck to his nice little house and his family, and that was that.”

“I'm surprised he didn't retire. Especially if money wasn't a problem.”

“He liked working. He was good, too—twice as fast as some of the younger men on the crew. You can't work your demons away, though.”