Shot Through Velvet (2 page)

Vic was dressed in his professional attire, a close-fitting black turtleneck that showed off his muscles, a black leather jacket, black boots, and gray slacks instead of his usual jeans. One pesky dark curl fell over his forehead. Lacey restrained the urge to push it back and gaze into his green eyes.

Vic Donovan, the man in her life, had tipped her off to the factory closing story. He invited her along to the little town of Black Martin, Virginia, to see the factory firsthand while he initiated the security contract for Dominion Velvet in its waning days.

After angry graffiti had been scrawled on a factory wall one night, the company had instituted some stopgap security measures, but its original plan was not much more sophisticated than locking the doors and turning out the lights. The workers were unhappy about losing their jobs. The local economy was devastated; there were no other jobs in town. Dominion Velvet was afraid an empty plant would just encourage more vandalism. The company had hired some local good old boy to watch the plant at night, but he wasn’t a real security guard. Donovan’s company was hired to install a serious security system to ensure there would be no more incidents on-site. When and if the building and the machinery were eventually sold, security would be the new owners’ problem.

For Lacey and Vic, this foray to Black Martin was supposed to be a quick road trip away from Washington, D.C. Lacey could work on her serious fashion story, Vic would meet his new client, and she and Vic could have a romantic dinner somewhere. But their plans for a little romance were spiraling down the drain, along with the blue dye dripping from the corpse.

Things had gone wrong from the start that morning. Vic and Lacey were supposed to meet with Vic’s contact, a company official named Rod Gibbs. But Gibbs hadn’t shown up, so general manager Tom Nicholson had filled in. He was giving them what he called the five-cent tour.

Rod Gibbs was also the company official Lacey had intended to interview. He had promised her on the phone that the shutdown would be temporary and he would give her details of “an exciting new plan” for the factory’s future.

At the moment, Vic was taking a deep breath, no doubt trying to control his emotions. “This is a disaster,” he whispered and shook his head.

“This is not my fault, Vic Donovan,” Lacey whispered back.

“I know that, Lacey.”

“That’s not what your tone says.”

“My tone? Are you telling me this is one of your infamous crimes of fashion?”

“Just what would you call it? He
is
tied to a spool of velvet. He
is
blue. Do the math.”

“It’s a workplace homicide,” he said. “Just so happens the workplace is a velvet factory. Besides, I didn’t mean this was your fault. I meant mine.”

Lacey raised an eyebrow in response. “Your fault? How do you figure that?”

“I should have started this job yesterday. Then this wouldn’t have happened.”

“The company set the timetable, not you. The client is always right. Right?”

“Yeah. That was my first mistake. The client is usually wrong.”

A handful of other witnesses were sharing this spectacle. Vic and Lacey’s tour had picked up a few hangers-on, employees who trailed along in a kind of melancholy parade, not knowing what to do to fill their time on their last day on the job. They collected their personal mementos and cleaned out their lockers, but they had nowhere else to go. It didn’t feel like a brand-new day waiting around the corner for the factory, as Rod Gibbs had promised. It felt like a heartbroken good-bye.
A deep blue good-bye.

This is what happens when people lose their jobs.
The irony didn’t escape Lacey. She was writing about job loss at a time when newspapers were closing all over the country and her own newspaper was in trouble. She could lose her own position just when the job horizon for reporters was rapidly dimming. Lacey had expected her journalism career to move from paper to paper, onward and upward, with better positions at every step along the way. But what if
The Eye Street Observer
was the end of the road for her? Newspapers were threatened daily by the Internet and twenty-four-hour broadcast news. Lacey shook her head to clear her thoughts. This wasn’t about her. This story was about Black Martin, Virginia.

The group had turned a corner, from the velvet-shearing operations on the main floor to the white-tiled room that was called the dye house. Six large gray steel vats sat in a row, partly sunken in the floor. Five of them were empty. Each vat was seven feet deep to accommodate the heavy steel spools of fabric six-and-a-half feet wide. Nicholson, their tour guide, had been surprised to see there was a problem with the sixth. The spool of velvet seemed to be stuck half in and half out of the vat. When the spool was slowly lifted by the heavy machinery, the blue corpse came up with it.

In the ensuing confusion and gasps of disbelief, Lacey felt Vic’s hand on her shoulder. His face was stern and his jaw was set. She’d seen that look before. She whispered, “I do not have a murder mojo.”

Donovan snorted. “I didn’t say that. Today.”

“You’re the one who gave me the tip the factory was closing.”

“I should have my head examined.”

“It’s a good story, Vic. Factory closing, workers out of jobs, American industries killed by cheap foreign imports.”

He nodded toward the body. “But it’s a better story now, right? With Blue Boy hanging there?”

“It’s a more complicated story now.” Lacey was beginning to regret not bringing a photographer, but she didn’t mention that to Vic. He had his own problems. She would have to make do with her small digital camera. She took a few quick photos, but she put it away after being glared at by Vic.

Lacey whispered as they moved a few yards away. “Vic, you know that old song, ‘Blue Velvet’? It keeps running through my brain.
And I still can see blue velvet—
”

“
—through my screams
. Thanks, darling. Now it’s running through
my
brain.”

Tom Nicholson stood next to the spool, shaking his head and staring.

“Do you know who it is?” Vic asked.

“Well—” Nicholson began. “It’s a little hard to say.”

A latecomer to the party joined the tour. Kira Evans, the bookkeeper, screamed and clapped her hand over her mouth. She looked ashen. A nearby worker reached out to prop her up.

Another woman gasped, “Oh my God. Is he dead?”

“Is he dead?!” A workman named Dirk Sykes answered. “Inez, honey, he is dead blue.”

Sykes looked fierce, even in his bright turquoise Hawaiian shirt, which revealed a scorpion tattoo crawling up his right forearm. He wore his black hair pulled back in a ponytail, but with a finely clipped Julius Caesar fringe around the nape of his neck. He was definitely dancing to the beat of a different fashion drummer. Lacey had just learned his now-defunct job was shearing the fabric. The velvet was woven with the soft nap connecting two heavier sheets of backing material. Sykes had been the one who sheared the woven material in half, producing two sheets of velvet with the nap exposed. Scars on Sykes’s hands and face testified to the sharpness of the huge blades he used.

“Why, Mr. Blue looks like one of them troll dolls, only not as cute,” Inez Garcia said, after catching her breath.

A pretty Hispanic woman about thirty-five, Inez barely topped five feet, but she fearlessly stepped right up to get a better look at the dead man. She held on to her long, black braid to protect it from the dye.

Like most of the other workers, Inez was dressed as if for summer: shorts and a thin cotton top. The shearing machines, the washers, dyers, and dryers pumped out heat and made the factory almost tropical inside, in sharp contrast to the bleak Virginia winter outside. It must have been almost ninety degrees in the dye house.

“That looks like a goat-sucking
chupacabra
to me,” Sykes said.

“That’s no
chupacabra
. It’s a coyote with mange,” Inez responded. “Blue mange.”

“I always wondered what’d happen if you fell in the dye vat,” observed Hank Richards, the maintenance chief. “Now we know. I guess he’s been in there a while.”

Richards appeared to be in his late forties, tall and fit with a soldier’s bearing but an aging surfer dude’s shaggy blond hair, mustache, and goatee. He wore a navy short-sleeve polo shirt with dark blue slacks, which were neat and tidy. He had sad brown eyes that watched everything, and he had reached out to Kira Evans when she screamed.

Everyone fell silent for a moment. They seemed to know who the dead man was, but no one was quite ready to say so. Perhaps because he was so changed from life? The velvet factory workers had never seen anything like the blue body before, and they were unlikely to again. Not just because murder was rare in that rural part of Virginia, but also because their jobs in the factory were lost and gone forever.

Lacey Smithsonian had never witnessed anything like the blue man either. She’d seen a few dead bodies—bloody ones, cold ones, and ones with terminally bad haircuts—but none like this. She held her breath, her heart beating wildly. It was a last day of work no one here would ever forget. The ruined velvet was more than the last batch of the day: It was the last batch. The final spool of Dominion Velvet ever to be dyed at this factory. And now Lacey had missed her chance to see how the dyeing process actually worked from start to finish. This was the finish.

As Dominion Velvet General Manager Tom Nicholson had put it earlier, “The world keeps on getting smaller. You see, Ms. Smithsonian, making velvet isn’t just a manufacturing operation. It’s more of an art, and very labor-intensive. It’s expensive to produce.”

When Lacey asked about the new plan for the factory that Rod Gibbs had mentioned, Nicholson said that was a fantasy. In better days, the factory had close to a hundred looms and more than a hundred workers. Now it was just a ghost of its former glory. The half-dyed spool of velvet was a reminder that dyeing the last batch of “greige goods,” the cream-colored, undyed fabric, was the final task on this ultimate day of full operations.

Dominion Velvet had picked this bitter cold Monday in February to let their factory workers go, supposedly to avoid the deeper depression that comes with shutting down at the end of the week, according to Nicholson.

“I don’t understand it either,” he had told her and Vic in the office. “Some psychobabble mumbo jumbo. My people aren’t any happier to be let go on the first day of the week than the last, far as I can tell.”

Once the fabric of kings and queens, of luxury and wealth, velvet was subject to the whims of fashion and the hard economics of trade. Like Dorothy Parker’s ode to a satin dress, velvet too had the ability to soothe and comfort and “ease a heart.” Nothing was as deeply textured or as warm or as comforting as velvet.

Lacey was rather sorry that she hadn’t worn something velvet today.
In memoriam.
Her wardrobe held some favorite velvet pieces in black, green, and burgundy, which intensified her blue-green eyes, and rich jewel-toned velvet always contrasted nicely with the highlights in her light brown hair, which she wore today in a French twist. With the economy so dreary and depressed people all around her in Washington wearing nothing but shades of gray, Lacey thought it was time to dress up in the downturn. But today she had decided to go with a simple vintage purple wool jacket and black slacks, as if wearing velvet would be giving it too much favor, as if she were taking its side against other fabrics.

Nicholson cleared his throat to break the spell. He stepped a bit closer to the corpse, taking care not to touch anything. Nicholson had a young man’s face and an old man’s worried air. Casually dressed in a tan shirt and khaki slacks, his shoulders seemed to take on weight, dragging him down. With exasperation, he turned and gestured to Donovan. “About this security contract. We’re going to need some changes.”

Vic nodded in response. “Goes without saying.”

“I’m afraid this tour is over, Ms. Smithsonian,” Nicholson said. “I have to call the police.”

Lacey nodded, but she knew it didn’t mean the story was over. Her story here was just beginning.

“Who is the blue man?” she asked.

“That man is the Blue Devil,” Inez murmured, still clutching her hair and pulling tight on her braid.

“Who is the Blue Devil?” Lacey asked. “And where is Rod Gibbs?”

“I believe you’re looking at Rodney Gibbs right now,” Nicholson said. “He’s had better days.”

Chapter 2

Lacey and Vic shared a look. This day had just gotten worse.

To Lacey’s unasked question, Nicholson added, “Rod Gibbs, the man you were supposed to meet. He was part owner of the company, a partner. Liked to come around, keep an eye on things. Called himself the night manager.” Nicholson wiped the sweat off his forehead. “When I agreed to show you around, I sure as hell didn’t plan on this. I’m real sorry.”

“Not your fault,” Lacey said. “Ms. Garcia called him the Blue Devil?”

“Yeah.” Nicholson took a moment before answering. “It was Gibbs’s nickname. He thought it was funny. Had a strange sense of humor. Anyway, he keeps a boat out on Lake Anna. Calls it the
Blue Devil
.” Nicholson walked around the corpse and gestured mournfully at the ruined spool of velvet. He seemed lost in thought.

“Rodney Gibbs.” Lacey wrote the name down. “You’re sure this is him?”

“He’s not looking his best right now,” said Dirk Sykes. “I imagine he’s got one ferocious case of blue balls.”

The little crowd laughed uncomfortably. Vic’s lips were twitching, but he kept his professional cool. Lacey continued writing notes.

“It’s kind of hard to tell what he looked like.” Lacey took another look at the body, craning her neck for a better angle. She was sure his eyes didn’t bulge like that in life, or his tongue hang out that way. But he was so transformed by the dye, he might have been an alien.