Button Holed (8 page)

He pursed his lips. “Because . . .”

“Because Brina’s not responsible, and I should have realized that. I mean, I do realize it; it’s just that it was only for a few minutes and I figured it wouldn’t hurt. I was hungry, and Kate was early, and Brina . . .”

“The girl with the weird hair and the tattoos.”

I nodded.

“According to the first officer on the scene, Ms. Martingale was here, in Dr. Levine’s office.”

I nodded. “Like I said, not very responsible. And easily distracted. And not very—”

“Bright?”

I was grateful for the assist, and I smiled my thanks. It was the first I’d even tried for a smile since I found Kate, and my face was stiff. That would explain why the expression didn’t last long. “Kate showed up way early, and Brina, she said she was keeping an eye on the place but apparently, she wasn’t. She says she didn’t see Kate, or anyone else, come in.”

At least he didn’t point out that trusting Brina was my first mistake.

Instead, he blindsided me. “Unless she’s lying about what she saw.”

I sat up so fast, the Cubs sweatshirt slithered off my shoulders. “You don’t think—”

“Can’t say. Not yet. So, Ms. Franciscus, she was dead when you got here?”

I tugged the sweatshirt back in place, toying with the sleeves, tugging them closer around me. “I’ve never seen a dead body before, not outside a funeral home,” I said. “But there was all that blood, and . . .”

“Did you touch her? Anything in the store?”

I shook my head. “I went outside and called the cops.”

“And that’s it.”

I nodded. “Dr. Levine and Brina ran out to the street and I told them what happened and we waited for the police to arrive. You know the rest.”

Nevin flipped his notebook shut. “Then that’s it. You can go.”

“Home?” I thought about the chaos in the Button Box. “I’d rather wait until everyone is gone. I guess I’m feeling a little possessive when it comes to the shop. There’s a lot that needs to be cleaned up, and a whole lot of recataloging and re-sorting and cleaning. My poor buttons!”

Too late, I realized I’d used the
B
word.

I didn’t wait to see Nevin’s eyes glaze over. Once in a lifetime is enough for that.

Instead, I got up and hurried to the door. I was already there when I heard him say, “You know, Josie . . .”

I spun around to find him tapping his notebook against the table.

“Not that it matters or anything . . .” His shrug emphasized his point. “I just want you to know that last time I saw you . . . that phone call I got from the office . . .” He tugged his left earlobe. “I mean, I know that looked pretty fishy and all, but . . .”

What else could I do but deny I’d had my suspicions? “I never thought—”

“Yeah. Sure. I just thought—”

“No, really.” I managed a fleeting smile. “I hope you didn’t think—”

“I wondered. I mean, it really was pretty awkward and—”

“No problem.” I turned back to the door.

“Josie.”

I looked at him over my shoulder.

“It was legit,” Nevin said. “And important.”

“I figured.” It was another lie, but I was rewarded for it by the look of relief that swept over his face and the one-sided smile that made him look cuter than ever.

“I should have called to explain,” he said. “I meant to. It’s just . . .”

“Yeah, I understand.” That was stretching the truth a tad, too. But then, he didn’t have to know that.

I still wasn’t sure I believed him, I mean, about the phone call and all, but I did have to give him points for at least trying his hand at damage control. I guess that’s why when I went back across the street, where cops still swarmed like bees around a hive and a team from the coroner’s office was just putting Kate’s body onto a stretcher, I might have been smiling, just a little bit.

Chapter Five

“SO WHAT DO YOU THINK? DID YOU SEE THEM CHECKING things out over here?”

I knew Stan was standing near the front display window, but I barely looked up when he asked the question. Then again, I was a little busy scooping buttons off the floor, all the while avoiding the spot where, just a few short hours earlier, Kate Franciscus had bled all over my newly sanded and varnished floor. It was the day after the murder, and finally, the cops, the technicians—and Kate—were gone.

Now if only the rest of the world would leave me alone!

As if on cue, the phone rang. Since I’d seen neither hide nor hair of Brina that morning, I cupped the fistful of buttons close to my heart and answered the phone myself. I didn’t wait for the caller to say anything; the words just spilled right out of my mouth. Then again, I’d already gotten six phone calls that morning; I knew what was coming.

“The Button Box,” I answered pleasantly enough; then, practically before the tabloid reporter on the other end of the line had a chance to introduce himself, I said, “No, I’m not interested in selling my story. I don’t have anything to say.”

“Of course you do!” He sounded young and eager. I almost felt guilty about hanging up on him.

Almost.

I looked around, grumbling, and even I wasn’t sure if it was because I was overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the job ahead of me or if it was a comment on the ghoulish obsession of the public in general. Already, news of Kate’s murder had gone viral on the web. It was all over TV, too, and in the newspapers. Kate Franciscus, the hottest thing in Hollywood, was twice as much a star dead than she had ever been when she was alive.

The thoughts pounded through my head, just like my sneakers slapped the floor when I made a trip to the back room to deposit the buttons on the work table. When I came out into the shop, Stan was still stationed near the window. In the morning light, his face looked pale. His eyes, though . . . His eyes were sharp, the fire in them as blinding as the morning sun.

“Did they look upstairs?” he asked, and I knew he was talking about the cops who’d been on the scene the night before. “’Cause I’ll tell you what, Josie . . .” He leaned over to peer up to the second floor of the brownstone. “A good cat burglar with the right tools and a little luck—”

“Would not be able to rappel down from upstairs and not have anyone see him, not on a busy street. Besides, Emilie—she owns the travel agency upstairs—was in her office at the time. I think she would have noticed.” I shouldn’t have had to point this out, but then, it had been a stressful twelve hours for all of us so I cut Stan some slack. What with him insisting on staying at the shop until I left the night before, and me insisting on staying until the cops were done looking over the scene, we hadn’t gotten home until well after midnight. If Stan was thinking more like himself and less like a bored retiree who watched too many movies and who’d gotten too little sleep, I wouldn’t have had to state the obvious. “And even if that was possible, there’s no way to open the front display window, not without breaking it. Which means the killer didn’t need to rappel anywhere. All he had to do was walk in the front door.” I made a vague sort of gesture toward the fine film of fingerprinting dust that coated the window like sand in the desert, and when I was done, I picked up a pile of buttons at my feet. “Nothing was touched. The cops didn’t find any fingerprints at all, none except Brina’s and mine, of course.”

“Dang.” Stan scraped a hand through what was left of his hair. “The whole thing about the murderer coming in through the window, that sure would have cracked open this case. And that would have shown them, huh? Civilian!” He had a steel-trap mind, and not being acknowledged as on a par with the cops at the scene was one insult he was never going to forget. “I was on the job when most of those guys were still in elementary school. They got a lot of nerve.” He pushed away from the window, his eagle-eye gaze sweeping the room. “How about secret passages? Is there an old dumbwaiter that’s been walled over? Or a secret room?”

“No. And no.” He knew all this, of course. Stan had insisted on checking out the area before I signed the lease. He wanted to be sure the neighborhood was safe, he’d said, and that Emilie, upstairs, was trustworthy, and that the brownstone was as secure as it could possibly be. Apparently, secure hadn’t been secure enough, but I wasn’t going to point that out. I knew that Stan being Stan, he was just trying to cover all his bases. “You heard what the cops said. Whoever killed Kate must have followed her here.” A shiver snaked up my spine. “I just wish . . .”

“Baloney!” He waved away my concerns. “You wish you woulda been here so that maybe you coulda been a victim, too? Stop beating yourself up over something you can’t change, Josie. Yeah, sure—” Like the street-corner traffic cop he’d started his career as, he stuck out a hand to stop what he knew I was going to say. “Sure, if you were here, the killer might not have tried anything. But I know how these guys think. This one? He wanted Kate the Great dead plenty bad. The force of that stab wound proves that much. If he didn’t kill her last night, he just would have done it some other time, some other place.”

The phone rang again, and just in case it was an actual customer and not a reporter or a photographer or a macabre fan looking for details about Kate’s death I was never, ever going to provide, I piled the buttons I was holding on the desk. “Some other place is sounding pretty good right about now,” I said. I answered the phone with an efficient “The Button Box,” and I was all set to launch into my I-have-nothing-to-say-and-I’m-sticking-to-it story when I was cut short by a familiar voice.

“Talk about taking this whole famous thing to a new level!”

It was enough to get me grumbling all over again. “What do you want, Kaz?”

“Hey, a guy can’t call and check on his favorite button collector?” The tone of his voice told me he was smiling. “You’re all over the news, Jo. What kind of husband would I be if I didn’t call to see what was up?”

“An ex-husband?”

He chuckled. “You always said you were going to be the most famous button dealer in America. I guess you’re on your way, huh?”

I shifted the phone to my other ear. “What do you want, Kaz?”

“You’re having a bad day.”

Understatement.

I didn’t point it out. He didn’t press.

In fact, Kaz breezed right on. “I had to call. You know, after I saw your picture on the front page of the paper this morning.”

It was the first I remembered that Mike Homolka had met me outside the evening before. I’d been so busy being shocked—not to mention grossed out and scared silly—when I found Kate’s body, I’d forgotten all about the machine-gun fire of camera flashes. Come to think of it, I didn’t recall Homolka being there when the cops arrived. But then, I guess the photographs he took before anyone else even knew Kate was dead were worth a premium. He would have wanted to get them into the hands of the highest bidder, ASAP.

I could only imagine how I looked in that one instant.

Then I realized that me looking like a fool . . . Well, that might not be the worst of it.

“He didn’t . . .” I gulped. “The picture in the paper didn’t show Kate’s body, did it? That would be . . .” No word I thought of was sufficient to express my outrage.

Kaz supplied one. “Obscene? You bet it would be, and you can bet the guy who took the picture will get it printed somewhere else, and no doubt make a fortune on it, too. But today’s paper . . .” I heard a noise, as if he was flipping through the pages of the newspaper. “The editors showed a little restraint. It pretty much just shows her shoes and a little bit of her legs.”

“And a lot of me.”

“You were upset.”

I tipped back my head and closed my eyes. “Do I look that bad?”

“You look . . .” He paused, and I knew that for once, Kaz was trying to spare my feelings. I might have marked the day on the calendar as momentous if there weren’t bigger, more important things to overshadow even this unusual occurrence. “Upset,” Kaz said. “And who can blame you? Except I was sitting here reading about the whole thing this morning and watching the news, and I’m thinking now that it’s all over . . .”

A familiar prickle of suspicion tickled along my shoulders. “Now that it’s all over
what
?”

He gave in in the space of a heartbeat. “Heck, Jo, you’re going to be more famous than ever after this! I’ll bet the reporters are calling. Am I right? You’re going to end up making a lot of money off this, what with the movie rights and a book deal and—”

What’s the definition of insanity? Doing things the same way and expecting a different outcome?

I guess it was official, and I was truly insane, because the only thing I could think to say was no.

“No?” I pictured Kaz with that same gee-whiz look on his face that I’d been tempted to smack off more than a time or two. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about how this seems to be exactly the right moment for you to ask for money. My answer is the same today as it was yesterday. Yesterday, as you no doubt remember, it was no.”

“But I have this friend who’s in trouble, see, and—”

“No, you don’t.”

“And yesterday, that was before—”

“Yes, it was. Good-bye, Kaz.”

“But, Jo, I—”