Button Holed (6 page)

I turned around just in time to see him pull a newspaper out of his back pocket. He unfolded it, and I wasn’t surprised to see the photo of Kate from the previous day’s paper. He waved it back and forth in front of my nose.

“Once word gets out that you’re catering to the stars, you’re going to be one hot button dealer.”

It was my turn to smile. Now that I thought of it, it was the first time I’d bothered since I ran into Kaz. “I’m counting on it,” I told him.

“So you’ll have more customers than ever, and you’ll sell more buttons than ever, and the money will just keep rolling in.”

“I’m counting on that, too.”

“Which means all that royalty money is just gravy, and here’s this guy, this friend of mine, who can hardly afford to put groceries on the table, and it’s only a couple thousand lousy bucks, and—”

This time, I didn’t even bother to answer, I just groaned.

And I guess Kaz took pity on me, because he gave me a quick peck on the cheek and turned to walk away. Right before he disappeared around the corner, I heard his parting comment. “By the way.” He grinned and waved the newspaper. “Nice butt!”

THE FACT THAT I was breathing hard had nothing to do with my walk down North Wells. Or the fact that the clock was ticking and Kate was scheduled to arrive in just a couple hours.

It had everything to do with Kaz.

Attraction or repulsion?

I was so busy trying not to think about it so I didn’t have to decide that I wasn’t paying attention. That would explain why I jumped when I heard a man say, “Hey, you’re the button lady.”

I turned just in time to see him round the corner of the alley that led between my brownstone and the one next door and back to the common courtyard shared by the nearby buildings. He was middle-aged, average height, and as bald as a baby’s backside. He had a camera slung over one shoulder. Just the hint I needed—paparazzi.

He obviously recognized me.

I hoped it wasn’t because my butt looked familiar.

“So, she’s coming back, huh?” The man had a round face and heavy jowls. There was a single gold stud in his left earlobe. He couldn’t possibly have known I was busy rehashing the close encounter of the shake-my-resolve kind with my ex so he assumed I was either being coy or I was offended by his question. Covering his bases, he smiled an apology. “I can understand you don’t want to say anything. After all, you don’t know me from Adam.”

“I don’t know Adam, either.”

He laughed. “Hey, it’s like this . . .” He took a couple steps closer. Like it or not—and I didn’t like it one bit—I had an automatic and gut-wrenching flashback to the morning of the burglary; I took a couple steps back. He reached into his pocket and handed me a business card. “Mike Homolka,” he said, pointing to the name printed on it. “I’m a journalist.”

“You’re one of the paparazzi.”

“You say
tomato
; I say
tomahto
.” He shrugged. “What matters is that I make my living getting the story. Get my drift? And I know you’ve got a story to tell. I’ve done my homework, see, and I know you worked with Hugh Weaver on
Trolls
.” He chuckled. “Whoever thought that goofy movie would make Weaver some sort of Hollywood god! And you were the one who did the costumes for that movie, right? From rags to riches! And all because of some cult hit. That makes you grist for the ol’ gossip mill. Know what I mean?”

I didn’t, but then, Homolka didn’t give me time to tell him that. He was as fast-talking as he was loud. And he was plenty loud.

“But hey, I’m not going to hassle you about the whole
Trolls
thing. Not today. We’ll talk about that another time. You know, when things are slower and I’m hard up for a story.”

This was supposed to make me feel better?

I had no plans to sit outside and eat my turkey sandwich, but I didn’t like the idea of Homolka hanging around outside my shop. Maybe if I headed to the courtyard and sat out there for a while, he’d get bored. And leave.

No such luck.

He followed right along.

“So . . .” One of Homolka’s eyebrows slid up his forehead. “What’s it like working with Kate the Great? And what did she say about that wedding gown of hers? Did she look at white buttons? Ivory buttons? Or is she going to be less traditional and go with a color?”

When I sat down on one of the park benches the local merchants had donated to our little courtyard oasis and didn’t answer, he leaned in closer and lowered his voice, like he was sharing a secret. “Hey, honey, I’ve got people who are willing to pay for this information. You’re a businesswoman. You understand, right? You can’t blame me for trying.”

“I can’t.” I opened the bag with my sandwich in it, took one look inside, and changed my mind. Somehow, being with Homolka had robbed me of my appetite. “But you can’t blame someone who has a professional relationship with someone else for refusing to betray a confidence.”

“Is that what it is? A confidence? So, she wants you to keep it all hush-hush? Of course she does. That’s just like Kate. She knows the more she keeps those luscious lips of hers shut, the more people will talk about what she might be thinking. See, she’s a smart businesswoman, too.”

I reclosed the bag.

“Kate loves the spotlight,” he said. “And oh, how she loves letting us take her picture. But then when any of us tries to get her to talk so we can get our stories straight and make sure we’re publishing nothin’ but the truth, she clams up like one of them marble statues. Claims it’s all about her right to privacy. That’s why stuff gets published sometimes that isn’t quite . . . well . . . stuff that isn’t totally true. But you . . .” Homolka looked me up and down, and I felt a chill. “With your help, I won’t have to make anything up, and then my editor won’t end up printing a bunch of lies. So you see what I’m getting at here, right? Talk to me, and you’ll be doing Kate a favor in the long run. The truth will get out, and no one will have to speculate.”

I knew whatever I said, my words were going to be twisted around and turned into a quote I wouldn’t want to see in the papers any more than I wanted to see that photo of my butt again. I stood. But apparently, even a closemouthed button dealer wasn’t enough to put off a guy as pushy as Homolka. When I made my way back down the redbrick alley and onto North Wells, he was right behind me.

“You’re working late.” He tried one last ploy. He’d obviously been on this sort of fishing expedition a couple billion times before, and he knew that according to the law of averages, the normal person would eventually cave.

What he didn’t know was that I’m not normal.

Not when it comes to this sort of schmoozing, anyway.

There was Kaz, after all.

“Seems funny that you’d be working late the same week Kate was here to visit. I mean, if she already ordered buttons from you, that sale would be all wrapped up, right? And you wouldn’t need to still be hanging around. Unless she’s coming back, of course. This evening?”

I was back in front of the Button Box, and I tossed him a look that would have warned a smarter man to back off.

“I’ll pay you a thousand dollars if you’ll talk to me.”

I guess he wasn’t one of those smarter men. I froze and turned to stare at Homolka, but only because I was so knocked for a loop by his offer, I needed time to process it. Processing over, I whirled around the other way, anxious to get into the shop, praying he wouldn’t be bold enough to follow, and worried about what Kate would say (and do) if she got there and found Mike Homolka lying in wait for her. I couldn’t tell him to go away. That would only make him more suspicious. But I hated the thought of Kate getting ambushed.

Torn between appealing to Mike’s human side and wondering if
human
and
paparazzi
were oxymorons, I turned one last time when I had my hand on the shop door. He had walked away. He was watching me from in front of the blues club two doors down. The only thing I could do was go into the shop and hope that by the time Kate arrived, it wouldn’t look like my problem.

I pushed the door open and stopped dead in my tracks. The bag with my turkey sandwich in it slipped from my hand and hit the floor with a splat.

Too stunned to move a muscle, I stared at the chaos, which reminded me of the chaos of the burglary.

The chaos I’d finally cleaned up and had under control when I left the shop not an hour earlier.

Like the hiccup of a bad dream, there were buttons spilled all over the floor. But this dream contained another grisly component—in the center of all those buttons, there was Kate Franciscus, dressed in skinny leather pants and an emerald green jacket that would have looked spectacular with her coloring—if she wasn’t so ashen.

That silver swan-head buttonhook I’d arranged so neatly on my door-side table only a couple days earlier was sticking out of her chest, and blood curlicued down her side and puddled on the hardwood floor.

My breath gurgled on the bile that rose in my throat, and I jumped back onto the sidewalk. But I didn’t get the door closed fast enough.

That was why Mike Homolka was able to get a couple dozen photos of Kate’s body and a couple dozen more of me, staring in horror and screaming like a banshee.

Chapter Four

“GOOD THING MANKOWSKI DOWN AT THE END OF THE street remembered me. Otherwise, I never would have been able to get near this place.”

I heard Stan’s voice just a nanosecond before a Starbucks cup appeared right under my nose. The unmistakable aroma of Caffè Misto streamed out of the little hole on the to-go lid, tickling my senses and coaxing me back to reality.

“Drink.” The cup was in my hand before I could respond, and Stan was looking at me over it. “I put plenty of sugar in it. You know, to help with the shock.”

Shock.

Now that he put a name to it, what I was feeling made sense: the numbness that coiled in my stomach and made my arms and legs feel as if they were made of lead, my clammy skin, the way my breaths were so fast and so shallow that I wheezed like I had a five-pack-a-day habit.

“Go on; take a sip.” Somehow, Stan understood that expecting me to accomplish something even that simple was akin to asking me to leap tall buildings in a single bound. He reached over, popped the lid off the coffee cup, and put a hand under mine to lift it to my mouth. “It will make you feel better, kiddo. I promise.”

I wasn’t sure anything ever could, but I knew Stan; he wasn’t going to let me off the hook. A sip, and I felt some of the tightness in my chest uncurl. Another, and I somehow managed to draw in a long, slow breath.

“There you go.” He patted me on the shoulder. “Keep it up and you’ll be feeling like yourself in no time.”

“Can you promise that, too?” My voice was gravel. We were outside the shop on the park bench near the street, but the door was open, and I looked past Stan to the commotion that was once my tidy button emporium. The last hour or so was pretty much a blur. I sort of remembered jumping back out on the sidewalk, scrambling for my cell phone, and—for the second time in less than a week—dialing 911. I had a vague recollection of Brina and Dr. Levine, the optometrist who occupied the brownstone directly across from me, racing across the street at the sound of my screaming, of the cops arriving, of the questions and the confusion. I had a foggy sort of flashback that included all of us being told to wait outside and stay out of the way.

The memory of Kate’s body on the floor of the Button Box, her blood pooling around her—that was as clear as day, and something I would never forget.

I shivered.

Stan draped a Cubs sweatshirt over my shoulders and gruffly explained away the kindness. “I had it in the car. I figured I might as well bring it with me.”

“But how . . .” Even my favorite coffee wasn’t strong enough to completely order my brain. I took another gulp and shook my head to clear it. “What are you doing here?” I asked Stan. “How did you know?”

“I was watching TV at home, and all the first report said was something about the body of a woman in a shop on North Wells. I knew you were supposed to be here tonight, and I thought about everything that happened on Monday morning, and well, you know . . .” Stan cleared his throat.

“Hey, I’m fine.” I grabbed for his hand. “Just a little shaken, that’s all.”

He kept his poker face firmly in place. “Now, hell . . . As soon as Kate the Great’s name was mentioned, the media went into an uproar! It’s all over the news.” Stan turned and craned his neck, the better to see what was going on in the shop. “I wonder if those bozos in there know what they’re doing. I’d hate to see them mess up an investigation this important.”

The cops in the shop looked efficient enough to me. But then, before the night of the burglary, the only thing I knew about crimes and investigations was what I’d seen on TV. Now, I watched a couple uniformed officers cordon off the sidewalk outside my shop with yellow tape, while a couple more peered down at Kate’s body, taking notes and making phone calls. A technician bustled by and went inside, kicked aside a couple dozen buttons to make room, and flopped a hard-sided briefcase onto the floor. He popped it open and dug through it.