A Custom Fit Crime (24 page)

“I love her like a cousin. Or a daughter. Or both,” I said with a laugh.

“Where are you off to?” Madelyn asked.

“I have an appointment with the
D Magazine
journalist.”

“To talk about Beaulieu?”

“She wants to do an interview,” I said.

“Right. And you’re going to dig a little while you’re there, are you not?”

My silence was answer enough for her.

With mysteries and magic, Madelyn was like a girl in a candy store. “What are you going to ask her? I’m free as a bird. I can join you! We’re a pretty good team, you and I.”

That we were. She knew exactly how my mind operated. I was going to do the interview, but more than anything, I wanted dirt on Beaulieu so I could put the pieces of the puzzle together. Madelyn had helped me before. She could definitely help me again. “Deal. Meet you at Seven Gables.”

A few minutes later, I parked in front of the refurbished old house, thinking through my next steps as I waited for Madelyn to show up. My thoughts were scattered just as all the contents of my house had been a little while ago. I decided I’d go through the suspects one by one to eliminate the innocent and ultimately implicate someone in the murder. First up was Midori. As much as I hated the idea that the friendly Japanese-American designer could have anything to do with killing Beaulieu and poisoning Orphie, she was definitely at the top of the list.

I ticked off what I knew about her, which took all of twenty seconds. She came from Japan and her aesthetic was heavily influenced by Japanese kimonos, flowers, clean lines, and simplicity. She’d been featured in
D Magazine
before, along with Beaulieu; had made a name for herself in the fashion design world, appearing from nowhere with designs that were fresh and exciting; used authentic fabrics from Japan, as well as designing her own; and had loyal models.

“Why would she kill Beaulieu, and try to kill Orphie?” I said aloud, my voice hollow in the cab of the truck.

Professional jealousy was at the top of the list. If she somehow knew that Beaulieu had tried to steal her designs, she had a pretty good motive. But I couldn’t think of a good reason why she’d have it in for Orphie. She was successful in her own right. Stealing Maximilian’s book to copy his designs didn’t make sense—if she even knew about it.

Next was Jeanette. She was a disgruntled employee, but was that enough of a motive? She’d told me that she’d overheard Beaulieu’s conversations. Maybe she also read his e-mails and knew about him blackmailing Orphie for the book. She could have decided to make her own name in a cutthroat industry by stealing the book for her own use. “Maybe Beaulieu got wind of her plan and she killed him before he could fire her,” I mused. It was possible, but I didn’t know how likely the scenario was.

I considered Lindy next. Journalists were a dying breed, and she’d mentioned wanting that Pulitzer. But was she crazy enough to kill in order to make a story bigger? And what about Orphie? If Beaulieu had told her about the book and if she was motivated by a bigger story, would she have tried to eliminate Orphie to get the book thinking there might be something valuable in it?

It all seemed so unlikely, and yet someone had killed him, and had poisoned Orphie. I kept thinking. Meemaw’s claim that whoever had searched 2112 Mockingbird Lane was a woman let me discount Quinton. My head spun as my thoughts moved to the four models. I couldn’t begin to fathom motives for any of them to target Orphie, which was the problem. And which brought my attention back to the other three at the top of my list.

A horn beeped from behind me, and two seconds later, Madelyn fairly skipped down the sidewalk to the driver’s-side window of Buttercup. I got out and we walked up the front path.

“Did you solve it all yet?” she asked, half joking, half hoping I hadn’t because I knew she couldn’t wait to dig in and help.

I laughed. “Not quite.” I filled her in on all my ideas.

“All very circumstantial—if that, love. None of it proves anything, and you’re right, there’s no obvious connection to Orphie from any of them.”

Exactly the conclusion I’d come to, so I had to keep digging until something turned up. I raised my hand to knock just as the front door opened. Lindy stood there, notepad in hand, her dark brown wavy hair a tad unruly and pulled back by a stretchy headband. “Right on time,” she said. “Let’s talk outside. Those sisters are batty.”

Batty was an exaggeration, but I was sure Raylene and Hattie were ramped up right now over what was—or wasn’t—happening with the wedding.

I introduced Lindy and Madelyn as we walked to the redwood picnic table the sisters had placed under a pecan tree in the front yard. Lindy slid in on one side of the table while Madelyn and I sat on the other side.

“I’m moving forward with the article,” Lindy said as she flipped open her notebook.

I reined in my circling thoughts, focusing only on Lindy as a possible killer. “The magazine’s okay with it, even with Beaulieu dead?”

“There’s an editorial meeting coming up, but if I wait, all my time will be for nothing. I’ve spent too many hours researching—” She stopped, tapping her pencil against her notepad, her attention shifting to some point over my shoulder. “I was there and I can bring something to the story that no one else can. Some depth and a greater interest level from which to frame your and Midori’s stories. I have to say, though, that I’d feel a lot better about the chances the story will run if the murderer was caught. It feels like a dark cloud hanging over all of us right now, and the magazine won’t want to be in the middle of that. Bad PR.”

“Maybe you can write the story on spec and sell it somewhere else,” Madelyn said.

That’s just what Midori had suggested, and from the slight tic on one side of Lindy’s mouth, I suspected that was exactly her plan. But then she shook her head. “Not unless
D
officially kills the story—or I come up with a completely different angle.”

I realized how difficult making a living as a journalist had to be if you weren’t on staff somewhere. Spending your time researching and writing a story that might never get to print.

“Someone tried to poison my friend Orphie,” I said, hoping this one little sentence would open up the conversation. “The same way Beaulieu died.”

I watched her carefully, looking for any sign she’d been the one to administer the poison. The tip of her pencil hovered above her paper, the corner of her mouth twitching again. It almost looked like a smile, but then it was gone and I wondered if I’d seen anything at all. “Tried to poison?” she asked.

“She’s in the hospital.”

“Doing well,” Madelyn added. “Full recovery, the doctor said.”

Lindy shook her head, her lips drawn together in a tight line. “Why would someone try to kill her?” she mused, finally dropping the lead to the paper and making a few notes. “Beaulieu, I can almost understand,” she said, “but your friend? That doesn’t make any sense.”

She was far too blunt to be a native Southerner. “Why can you understand about Beaulieu?”

She scoffed. Not very impartial for a journalist, but at the moment, I liked that about her. Maybe she’d reveal something with one of her responses. “You met him. He was an ass.”

Madelyn looked from Lindy to me. “I never met him. What was he like?”

I stopped myself from answering, vaguely wondering how much Lindy actually knew and how likely it was she was fishing for her own information. She was a journalist, after all, and for all I knew, I could become an unnamed source.

“It’s reported that he stole from other designers,” Lindy said.

Madelyn gaped. “Really?”

Lindy nodded. “A lot of others think so, but I’m not so sure. Even if he did, he certainly wouldn’t be the first and he won’t be the last.”

I thought about Orphie and knew she was right.

“I’ve been following him for years, from his days in New York to his rise as a Dallas designer. There have been a few similarities to a few other people—certain design elements, for example—but out-and-out theft of ideas? I’d argue that he didn’t actually do that. I’ve done a lot of research on it, actually. Intellectual property infringement is a big topic.”

“But the sheriff found some of my designs on him when he died,” I said.

She stared at me and I bit my lip, too late. She hadn’t known that, and Hoss McClaine probably hadn’t wanted me to tell anyone, least of all a reporter. Lindy tapped her pencil frenetically. “But that can’t be right.”

“It is. And here’s one theory,” I said, leaning forward on the picnic table. “Blackmail.”

Lindy, with her dark eyes wide, and Madelyn with her grin growing bigger, both turned to me. “Really?” Madelyn said. “Who? How do you know?”

I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—breathe a word about Orphie coming here to make a blackmail payment to Beaulieu, and the conversations Jeanette overheard were hearsay, so I just shrugged. “Just a hunch.”

A dazed look came over Madelyn and she seemed to look right past me. “The plot thickens,” she said, her British accent making it sound very ominous.

Lindy wrote the word “blackmail” down on a fresh sheet in her notepad. “That makes perfect sense, actually. So whoever he was blackmailing could have killed him. The question is, who did he have dirt on?”

I answered carefully. “Seems like there are a few possibilities. The deputy’s looking into it all.”

“Fascinating,” Lindy said, jotting something else down in her book. “Something still doesn’t make sense, but you’re perceptive. Beaulieu always was the type to get as much as he could for the least amount of work.”

That was a bold statement. “You seem to have known him pretty well,” I said. “Do you have any other ideas? Anything else he might have been involved in?”

She tapped the eraser end against the picnic table again. “Not that I can think of, but if it’s true and he really was stealing other people’s designs, that’s enough.”

She stared beyond my shoulder again, lost in thought.

“What is it, Lindy?” I asked, not sure at all what I felt about her and how much to trust what she said.

“I’ve studied Beaulieu for a lot of years,” she said, bringing her attention back to Madelyn and me. “There are similarities between his work and other designers, but isn’t fashion sort of like a story plot? They’ve all been written before, just the characters change. A color-blocked dress is a color-blocked dress. If Midori does it first, then Beaulieu comes in and makes his own version, is that really creative theft, or is the idea of color blocking open for interpretation by any designer?”

It was a rhetorical question that didn’t really need an answer, which was good because I didn’t have one. Lindy’s point was a good one. Diane von Furstenberg invented the wrap dress, but that didn’t mean that no other designer could ever design one for fear of being derivative. No, the whole concept was now open for creative license. Taking an idea and making it your own was what designing was all about.

Which meant killing Beaulieu over stealing designs didn’t make a whole lot of sense. It didn’t make me feel less angry that he’d tried to steal some of mine, but I wouldn’t murder over it. “But,” I said, an idea taking shape in my head, “if someone had found out what he was doing with other people’s designs, that person could have been blackmailing him.”

“But why would he be the one dead, then?” Madelyn asked. “If he was being blackmailed, whoever was doing the blackmailing would be the one targeted.”

“Things go wrong, though. If he were being blackmailed and tried to put an end to it, things could have turned ugly and the blackmailer could have decided to cut her losses. Or maybe Beaulieu discovered the blackmailer’s identity,” I suggested. “That would be a pretty good motive.”

Lindy continued to scribble notes as we talked. Finally she looked up. “The same question still remains. Who was being blackmailed or doing the blackmail against Beaulieu?”

“What about Midori?” I asked, thinking aloud.

Lindy’s gaze snapped from me to Madelyn and back. She clutched her pencil, looking as though she was forcing herself not to write. “What if Beaulieu had taken some of her designs? And what if she found out, turned the tables on him, demanding money for her silence?”

Madelyn piped up, continuing the hypothetical story. “He could have refused to pay up, she could have gone postal, and bam! Killed him.”

My stomach seized. I had no idea how ethical Lindy was as a journalist. Lord almighty, I hoped I hadn’t just thrown Midori under the bus. If she turned out to be innocent, she could still be tried in the courtroom of public opinion. Bad PR was tough to overcome.

It was a plausible scenario, though, so I went with it. “How could she have done it?” I mused. “All the food and drinks from that morning have been tested. Everything was washed, so there’s no way to know how he took it in.” A vague memory tickled the back of my mind. He’d had the lemonade. I didn’t know if he’d eaten any of the chèvre and crackers Nana had set out. But there was something else. He’d come into the shop after Lindy and Quinton, and after Midori. He’d looked around as if he were stuck in a junkyard instead of a designer’s shop. He’d done something right as he’d come in, but what?

I racked my brain trying to remember, and then it hit me. He’d tossed something in the trash! “The garbage can.”

“What?” The sharpness of Lindy’s voice snapped the image from my mind. “What did you say?”

“The trash. Right after he came into my shop, he threw something away. A coffee cup.” My skin pricked with goose bumps. “If the poison was delivered through the coffee, it happened before he got here. That would prove Orphie and I are innocent, and if we could figure out who was with him at the bourgeois coffee shop he mentioned, that would narrow it down.”

I jumped up and raced back to my truck, both Lindy and Madelyn hot on my heels. Surely it couldn’t still be there. Gavin, Hoss, and their team would have taken it as evidence. Or would they have? We’d all thought it had been a natural death at first, so there’d been no need to search the entire shop.

Madelyn voiced the very thought from behind me.

“Maybe they missed it. It’s possible.” I didn’t think either the sheriff or the deputy was prone to shoddy police work, but I had to check out the possible lead.