Tulle Death Do Us Part (8 page)

He spoke of Robin in the past tense, I noted, and Bambi didn’t deny it.

Snake, with his peekaboo accent, shouldn’t be too hard to track down, if he was still alive.

“The scavenger hunt was your idea,” he reminded Bambi. “And when did you grow a conscience?”

“Screw you. I started with a tame inventory of pretty baubles. That added list of unsavory conquests was your idea. I told you those things could harm people.”

Snake waved a defiant piece of petticoat at her.

She grabbed it and gasped. “Where did the blood come from?”

“I cut myself on a broken window getting in.” He showed the cut across his wrist.

“I cut myself, too,” said Grody, further mixing my emotions. Would Robin’s body show signs of trauma?

It took two of them to climb across broken glass before one had the sense to open a door? They lie.

“What if Robin doesn’t make it back to shore?” Bambi cried, working herself into a good case of hysteria. “What do we do then?”

“The body will do what a body does,” Snake said without a care, as if offering us mint juleps from a porch swing by a peach tree, miles away from Mystic, and years away from the present, which is where I was heading.

After work, I prepared to visit Werner at the police station without the fabric the brass box had been wrapped in. It seemed that Chakra had absconded with the original covering, and I hadn’t yet found her hiding place. What a cheeky kitty. She really had a thing for tulle. With a place full of sixties and seventies gowns, she was in turn accosting and “making love to” anything tulle in the shop. That was some estimable quantity, yet none got left un-fooled-around-with. She wasn’t harsh. She didn’t tear anything. She rolled, she wallowed, she purred, as if they were all made of catnip. And if a tattered piece fell off from too much cat-love, she ran with it, and it got secreted away for her later rolling pleasure. They’d be lucky to get a print off the original box-covering when Chakra was done.

To turn Werner up sweet and distract him from the
missing fabric cover, I changed into a fifties Mainbocher three-piece linen blend suit in a cheery citron. I particularly loved the jacket’s wide-cut double-notched collar and pearlescent cream Lucite buttons. Mainbocher is probably best known for designing the wedding gown and trousseau for Wallis Simpson’s 1937 wedding to Edward VIII, the Duke of Windsor.

I confess that I dressed well to sweeten the detective’s mood, in a business suit sort of way. But I countered my sobriety of choice with a pair of Giselle, Lady Double You “Giselle” spikes in buckskin tan suede, with bronze hand-applied metallic leather crests from ankle to heel tips. Nothing shows off a leg better than giving it wings.

I reapplied my makeup while I enjoyed the beat of a big band piece called “Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me).”

Too late for you, Jaconetti, I thought. You made your choice.

Why, when I was on my way to see Werner, did I feel giddy? Why did the universe wag that jazzy finger my way? Like I should embroider a scarlet letter on my blouse for moving on with my life? Sheesh. I’d recovered from the shock of losing Nick, made peace with his decisions, especially when he had Paisley with him. Now I was free to make some choices of my own.

I topped the outfit with the tiniest forties ochre satin twist toque labeled: Balenciaga, 10 Avenue, George V Paris.

Not until after I’d donned my supple kid gloves did I place the recovered country club treasure box into an appropriately
sized Vuitton travel bag that matched my personal shoulder bag. and wished I had Chakra’s petticoat scrap.

At the police station, Officer Billings saluted and grinned when he saw me. “Gad, ma’am, I sure hope the detective stops yelling now that you’re around again.”

“I’m not moving in,” I said. “And you can drop the ‘again.’”

“Sorry to hear that, ma’am. He’s not here, anyway. He took the late shift last night so a couple guys could go to a bachelor party. He’s working from home today.”

“Will you do me a favor? Call Detective Werner and ask him if I can drop by?”

The desk clerk made the call and set the phone on speaker.

I winced, preparing for Werner’s shout, but even when we were frenemies, I’d liked him, though I’d kept expecting the grizzly to show his claws.

“Not her again,” Werner grumbled.

I raised my arms because he’d repeated the “again,” but I could tell that the Wiener didn’t mean it. Have I mentioned that I dubbed him that in third grade?

Picture it: The Cafeteria. Lull in the conversation. When he poked the tiger—that would be me—I called him “Little Wiener,” instead of Lytton Werner, so the whole school heard it together. And it stuck…to this day.

Surprising how many times the words “Wiener” and “again” had popped up since I walked in the door to the station.

“Good,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll be right over, er, unless you’re otherwise occupied.”

“Madeira, when I say I’m working at home, I’m working.”

Funny, I thought I remembered an occasion when he/we weren’t quite. “Working,” that was.

When I pulled into the drive, Werner opened his front door, not the kitchen door I used to breeze through without knocking. Putting up a wall. Testing formality as its fabric. Self-protection, however weak.

Never mind. I could knock down all his defenses with a pair of well-placed innocently lowered lashes. I needed the Wiener on my side today.

Standing there waiting for me, he made a show of rolling down his sleeves and slipping into his suit jacket to prove this was business.

Point taken, but I so wanted to keep him as a friend, frenemy, ally…as a pair of arms I could step into? Hmm.

He left the door open for me and disappeared, and when I got inside, I found him in his home office, behind a desk bigger than the one he used at the station.

All business.

In the doorway, I raised my shoulders and lowered them again. Did I look innocent enough? What could I say, except: “I brought a peace pipe.”

I stopped across the desk from him, almost at attention. If the words “peace pipe” made him think about us while we played the Indian lovers Running Bear and Little White Dove—an intimate rock and roll encounter during a previous sleuthing expedition of mine—well, so be it. It was a good memory that I did not want to lose.

He tilted his head, and I guessed that was the most positive response I could expect, given the circumstances. We hadn’t talked much, if at all, since Nick and I got back together.
And I’d missed this special old friend, but I couldn’t tell him that.

Not that I’d actually dumped him. We were never an item. We’d just had some…special events…together. Memorable ones. When Nick and I became godparents to my sister Sherry’s twins, my family sort of pushed us together. It suited for a while, until Nick practically lobbied his way into feeding his adventure bug…again.

“Again,” I said.
I’m ba-ack
, I did not say.

Since I couldn’t seem to give our memories, including one thermonuclear kiss, the slip stitch, I kept them shoved deep at the back of my mind and rarely took them out to examine.

“We both know the past is the past,” I said, and he nodded. “But the future holds promise. And our taste buds don’t change.” I pulled a Dos Equis from a recyclable shopping bag and set one bottle in front of him, one in front of me. This, too, came from yet another previous sleuthing experience we shared. One of our earliest ones.

His eyes brightened, but his fists clenched. Fighting with himself. “I’m not supposed to drink on the job,” he said, sotto voce.

“It’s after six, and I’d think working from home should have some perks. Besides, did I hear a no?”

I cupped the back of my ear. “No?” I saluted. “I’m looking for a negative, Detective, sir!”

He gave me a half smirk, and with a satisfied nod I shut his blinds.

He raised both brows.

“So people don’t see you drinking on the job.”

He flipped on the desk lamp, and I hung the jacket of my
dress in the room’s closet, since he made his “office” in a main floor bedroom.

When I turned back to him, he’d already tipped back his bottle, his throat working convulsively.

“That’s a mighty thirst,” I teased. Mighty fine throat work, too. Oh, oh.

“Sweet,” he said, eyeing me.

“The beer?” I asked. Or me? Okay, Cutler, stop flirting. He’s more than a rebound guy, he’s a friend. Don’t use Werner to punish Nick. But the truth was, I meant every word. Myself. I was being nothing but myself.

“The hat,” he said, rising and indicating the chair across from him.

I nodded. “I thought you’d make fun of the one with the feather.”

“I would have.” He didn’t sit until after I did, and even then he watched me with speculation for a bit too long to be comfortable.

I sat and clutched my gloved fingers before me on the desk—a nervous, guilty giveaway—and to make matters worse, I leaned forward as if this were just between us. I guess I was doubly skittish. Hiding evidence—sort of, maybe—and seeing my not-quite-ex again, one-on-one, empty house and all that. Was he my ex? Yeah. Imagine that.

This would have been more professionally played at the station. I sighed and jumped in with both aerodynamic feet. “What if I might have evidence of a crime?” I asked.

Werner sat back, picked up his beer, and waited.

“If I gave you the evidence, would you let me help you solve the crime?”

“If? Ever hear the phrase ‘obstruction of justice’?”

I copied his posture to the letter. “If there was a crime,” I said, leaning back in my chair a bit, “the statute of limitations has long run out on the scenario I have in mind.”

“Some investigations warrant being reopened,” he said.

“What if an incident was neither recognized as a crime nor investigated in the first place?” I wasn’t talking about the seemingly obvious robbery of the country club. I had other pleats to fold, like throwing him off the scent with the scavenger hunt, and then looking for a talented team swimmer from Vassar named Robin.
Oh! I should ask Eve if she can find Deborah’s swim team listed anywhere. Maybe they won a meet, a championship, something to get them listed in a newspaper. I needed Robin’s last name
.

“What do you have up your sleeve?” He rubbed the stubble on his chin, a whole day’s worth of five o’clock shadow. He hadn’t bothered to shave this morning.

I liked his big-bad-bear look. Dicey news for my currently muddled and crush-like mindset. “Does it look like I could hide anything in these tight sleeves?” I asked.

“Speaking of tells.” He took a quick, imperceptible inventory from my winged heels to my tease of a toque. His gaze slid once up. Once down. Then he folded his arms. “You think you know how to distract me.”

“This suit is from the fifties, though the pencil skirt is too tight for rock and roll. I’ll admit,” I said, “I’m aware that you like to see a girl in a skirt more than slacks. You once demonstrated your reasons quite well. I chose the outfit in hopes of sliding us past our, well, past”—best not make it “torrid past”—“and putting us at ease during a business discussion.” I tilted my head. “And maybe I
wanted to dredge up a memory or two, the playful ones. So sue me.”

He made a sound fit for a grumpy grizzly. “And maybe you want to get back at Nick for putting his Mystick Falls house up for sale.”

I actually felt the color drain from my face as I gripped the side of Werner’s desk. “His house is for sale?”

Sir Galahad to the rescue. He handed me his bottle of Dos Equis, because mine wasn’t open yet. I took a thirsty swig and let him hold a wet towel to the back of my neck. “I could kick myself for letting that one out of the bag,” he said.

“How long’s it been for sale?” I asked, eyes closed. “He just told me this morning that he’d left the country.”

“I thought you were building the third-floor apartments because you knew—”

“Weeks? I’ve been prepping construction for weeks—Nick’s known for weeks?”