Shot Through Velvet (18 page)

A chill crawled up Lacey’s spine. “So
The Eye
really is in trouble?” Lacey wanted to ask if her own job was safe, but that would be the act of a coward. That wasn’t what this meeting was about.

“Every big city paper in this country is in trouble. There is still a chance to save the newspaper. It won’t be easy, but I will never go down without a fight.” Claudia paused for a beat and lifted her own cup of coffee, while Lacey looked on, acutely aware of her need for coffee. “Now, tell me what else you learned in Black Martin.”

“You read my story?”

“Yes, but a good reporter always learns more than she can fit in a story.” Claudia smiled.

What I learned? Mostly slanderous things about the late Rod Gibbs.

“There may have to be a follow-up,” Lacey said. “The official cause of death, leads, suspects, police statements—that sort of thing.”

“I will draft an official statement for your story, as one of the owners of the factory.”

“Thank you.” Lacey had to walk a thin line with her questions about Gibbs. “Some of the people said you were close to Rod Gibbs.”

“That’s what they always say, isn’t it?” For the first time, Claudia seemed amused. “It’s all right, Lacey. I’ve already played the Scarlet Woman in this town. Rod’s family and mine knew each other, but I never had a relationship with Rod. His family had money. Mine didn’t. My father worked on his father’s car. He was ten years younger than me. He was married. And he always seemed like such a boy to me. And not a good boy. A very bad boy, from what I hear. But rumors are always rampant in a little town like Black Martin.”

“Not one person spoke up for him, Claudia. Not his coworkers. Not his wife. Well, they were getting a divorce. Was he always so hated?”

Claudia stared out the window for a moment. “No. Believe it or not, at one time Rod could be very charming. He was the town’s golden boy. He showed a lot of promise. He was very attractive once, though certainly not in recent years.”

You should have seen him blue
, Lacey thought.

“When he was young, Rod had a lot of money and a lot of friends. He was the one who was supposed to be the big success in life. It certainly wasn’t me. Then—” She opened her empty hands and noticed her torn nail. “Something changed. He changed. He became angry and bitter. He thought people used him for his money. And though he had a lot of it from his father, he had no talent for making more. It made him desperate. He really was too young to think life had passed him by.”

“When did you become a partner?”

“About five years ago. When he came to us with the deal, he sounded like the old Rod. He was going to find a way to retool the factory, modernize production, cut costs, save jobs. I guess he was caught up in some fantasy, but it was contagious.”

Outside Claudia’s window, fluffy white snowflakes were falling. Lacey felt as if they were inside a snow globe, momentarily safe and protected. It was an illusion, and Claudia was waiting for Lacey to say something.

“Black Martin. It looks like it had an impressive past. Once.”

Claudia nodded. “We wanted to bring back its glory days, or at least the memory of them. Maybe with technology companies. The state was interested in creating tax incentives. There were big plans. Then the economy tanked.”

“What was the congressman’s role?”

“Same story. Tazewell Flanders comes across as a bit of a lightweight. He needs to change that image if he’s going to move up in politics. He wanted to help resurrect Black Martin, implement change, save some jobs. But now it looks like a huge blunder, and the entire company is tarnished by a murder.” She picked at her imperfect nail. “Are there any suspects?”

“Everyone who ever met him, apparently. There’s no one strong contender. But the state police are being pretty closemouthed. Did they contact you?”

“No. I suppose there was no reason.” Claudia looked up at Lacey, propping her perfect chin in her left hand. “Rod certainly turned into a bastard, but murder?”

“Someone hated him enough to go to all that trouble.” The swollen blue face flashed into Lacey’s mind. “I’m glad you didn’t have to see him when he was found.”

“I’m sorry you did. I asked Mac for everything connected to the story. He forwarded the pictures to me. Horrible. I keep thinking Rod shouldn’t have named his boat the
Blue Devil
. Tempting fate. It might have been a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“Did you ever see his boat?”

“I never had that dubious pleasure. I heard it was a Cobalt. Expensive toy. He didn’t seem like a guy who liked to fish. Thank you for keeping me in the loop on this story, Lacey.” It was an order more than a thank-you.

“Claudia, is there any chance this killer might be going after others—after you or Flanders?” Lacey asked.

Claudia shielded her eyes with her hand as if the light bothered her. “There is always the odd threat,” she said. “When you are in the public eye, anything could happen. A violent death creates ripples in every corner of the lake.”

Something about the way Claudia answered made Lacey pause. “Have you been threatened?”

“I’m not sure. Perhaps a warning.” Claudia hesitated. She pulled an envelope from the top drawer of her desk. A length of blue velvet ribbon, about twelve inches, tumbled out onto her pristine white blotter. “This came in the mail this morning.”

The ribbon was Midnight Blue, the color of the ruined velvet, the color of many parts of Rod Gibbs. Lacey didn’t touch it. “Was there a note?”

“No, but the postmark is from Black Martin.”

“Are you going to the police?”

“And say what? I received a ribbon in the mail?” Claudia inhaled deeply. “I think it’s just a prank. Don’t you?”

Lacey stared at the velvet ribbon. “I don’t know. I’d like to tell Vic Donovan about it.”

“He’s your boyfriend, isn’t he?”

“You know Vic?”

Claudia laughed. “He was at
The Eye
’s Christmas party, wasn’t he? It’s hard to miss a man like him.”

Lacey nodded. “Vic is handling some security work for Dominion Velvet. I’d like to tell him about the ribbon, even if you don’t tell the police. Vic used to be a cop out West.” He was also beginning to trust Lacey’s hunches, but she left that part out.

“Very well. He might be the right person to know. Not the police, not now. Just so we don’t overlook a possible link to Rod’s death. I can trust Vic’s discretion? And yours?”

“Yes, of course.” The ribbon wasn’t part of the story.
Not yet.

Claudia put the ribbon back in the envelope and handed it to Lacey.

“Is that all?” Lacey stood up, envelope in hand.

“For now. Thank you. By the way, Lacey, there will be a staff meeting this afternoon, in the large meeting room. For the editorial staff.”

“The entire editorial staff?” That was unusual.

“Yes.” Claudia averted her eyes and picked up the phone. Lacey opened the door. She glanced one more time at the sumptuous décor and the incongruous dream catcher in the window. It was still snowing.

Chapter 16

Lacey felt ill.

A meeting of the entire editorial staff of
The Eye
couldn’t be good news. Rumors had been swirling around the newsroom for weeks that the paper might be moving, perhaps even somewhere outside Washington, D.C. If so, it would devastate the paper’s reputation and the staff’s morale. This meeting had to concern those rumors. What else could justify an all-editorial meeting?

The Eye
might not have been a great newspaper, but it was audacious and it had a sense of purpose and life. It believed in the nobility of its First Amendment mission. Nobody at the paper wanted
The Eye
to slink across the river to Virginia and die. Or even worse, to Maryland. It had forged its identity on Eye Street.
What could the paper possibly become, away from Eye Street in the District?
she wondered.
The Off-Off-Eye Street Observer?
It made her queasy to think about it.

The moment Lacey returned to her desk, Kelly Kavanaugh rushed across the newsroom to Lacey’s cubicle, clutching a copy of
The Eye
in her hands. The one saving grace to having Kavanaugh plastered to Lacey’s beat was that Kelly still occupied a desk in the police beat division near Trujillo. Lacey didn’t have to babysit her every second.

As usual, Kelly looked like a truant schoolgirl, with her lustrous Buster Brown haircut, a thousand freckles, and nails bitten to the quick. She wore her everyday uniform of a plain polo shirt, baggy gray pants, and sturdy black shoes. She hated shopping, she had told Lacey. There was no way she could be transformed into a fashion writer. Lacey sighed at the sight of Kelly, and she still hadn’t had her coffee.

“I don’t believe it! You grabbed another great crime story without me,” Kelly said, shaking the newspaper at Lacey. “While I’m suffering on this awful beat.”

“Good morning, Kelly.” After her meeting with Claudia, Lacey was really in no mood to deal with the cub scribe. Kelly plopped down in the Death Chair, which was still in Lacey’s cubicle. But somehow, magically, Lacey’s desk chair had been returned. “Mac tells me you don’t like this beat. It’s too ‘girly’ for you. Just remember, you asked for the girly beat. Girly.”

Lacey was hoping there might be a brief scene, a snit, even a tantrum, and Kavanaugh would paddle back to her little corner of
The Eye
. Perhaps she would even beg Mac to give her back her old job of bugging police reporter Trujillo. Then again, with Kavanaugh being so new, she might be the first one to go in a RIF.

“But the stories you want me to write are totally lame,” Kelly complained.

“The stories you’ve written
are
lame.” Lacey picked up the previous day’s issue and opened it to a story the young reporter had written. “Just what is this?” She read the headline aloud.

 

CLOTHES. WEAR THEM. OR WHATEVER.

By Kelly Kavanaugh

 

Kavanaugh pouted. “Mac thought it was okay.”

“Mac was on deadline. And Mac doesn’t understand fashion,” Lacey pointed out. “Or fashion writing. Mac is a fashion philistine. He thinks the fashion beat is just filler to wrap around the Macy’s ads. All he saw is that you turned in column inches that filled space. You could have written it in Romulan and he wouldn’t have noticed. But I noticed. This
thing
you wrote is not exactly the school spirit we like to see here. And it’s not that hard, Kavanaugh. It’s only fashion.”

Lacey knew exactly how Kelly felt.
Only different.
Lacey suffered deeply conflicted feelings about the fashion beat. She hated it. She loved it. She wanted off of it. She wanted to write more in-depth pieces, features, hard news, analysis, social commentary. But there was a crucial difference between her and the cub reporter. Lacey loved clothes and personal style, and she couldn’t help writing about the way fashion affected people and how people used fashion, how their clothing revealed clues about them: Their attitudes. Their backgrounds. Their economic status. Their characters. Their ambitions, hopes, and dreams. Who they were or wanted to be. Lacey couldn’t get around it:
You are what you wear.

“Where are the real crime of fashion stories you handle? Real crime? Like this cool dead blue dude down in Black Barton.”

“Black Martin.”

“Whatever.”

There might be a crime here soon if she doesn’t stop bugging me.
Lacey sat down. Somebody had changed the settings on her ergonomic chair. It was too low. She stood up.

“Listen, Kelly. I don’t write the ‘exciting’ stories all the time. They happen when they happen. In between, we have the meat and potatoes of the fashion beat. Dresses, shoes, what’s in and what’s out, who’s wearing what, where, when, and why, and how can we ooh and ahh over it or else have a little fun with it. That’s what we do. It’s not brain surgery. Would you care to try a Fashion Bite?”

Fashion Bites were Lacey’s bite-sized bits of fashion folderol and snarky advice that she dished out in between her Crimes of Fashion columns. The name was her own inside joke. She kept telling Mac that
Fashion Bites
was not just a noun and an adjective, it was a complete sentence with a subject and a verb.
What does fashion do? Fashion
BITES.
And who is it biting? Usually
ME.

Trujillo, trolling the area for crumbs from Felicity’s tantalizing desserts, stopped to eavesdrop. What reporters live for: sugar and gossip.

“Those are especially stupid,” Kavanaugh huffed. “I didn’t go to journalism school to write that lame crap. Um, no offense.”

Offense taken anyway
. Lacey smiled grimly. “In that case, Ms. Kavanaugh, your next assignment is a Fashion Bite: Top Trends for Spring. You know, something like, ‘The pinks of last year are now jejune, and navy and white are poised to make a spirited return this Easter season.’ That kind of thing.” The kind of thing Lacey could write in her sleep, and often did.

“ ‘Jejune’?” Kavanaugh’s eyes went very wide.

“Mac will want to see it today. By four.”

“By
four
?” Kavanaugh looked stricken. “You hate me!”

“No, I don’t.
Hate
is such a strong word.”
A growing dislike is more like it.
“Whatever.”

“How do you expect me to come up with stuff like that?”

“Think. Go to the mall or a store or out on the street. Find out what the teenagers are wearing. What the adults are wearing. Compare and contrast. Or go to the Hill. The interns occasionally wear something mildly radical, like ribbons for belts. Go shopping. Pay attention to the details. Try to decode them into fashion statements, with subjects and verbs.”

“Will anybody
die
?” Kavanaugh was pretty rebellious for a freckle-faced kid.

“Only if you miss your deadline.”

“It’s not fair!” Kavanaugh crumpled up the newspaper. “You get a dead blue guy, and I have to go to stores and look at
clothes
.”