Buttoned Up (10 page)
Authors: Kylie Logan
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #General
Well, at least I tried.
The moment I put a hand on the railing, it slipped and I slid.
“What the—?” My feet tangled, and I would have gone down like a rock if I didn’t throw out one arm and grab onto the organ to steady myself. I was grateful now that I was alone, and no one had seen the not-so-graceful pirouette. I was also curious about why I’d slipped in the first place.
I looked at my hand, then back at the railing. Both had the slightest traces of a slippery substance on them. White. Like the greasy smear we’d seen in Reverend Truman’s office the day I found Forbis’s body.
My initial reaction was twofold. I mean, after I stood there for a couple minutes wondering what the heck was going on.
1. I fished a tissue out of my pocket and wiped my hand, then carefully folded the tissue so I could turn it over to the cops and tell them what happened and where I found the smudge.
2. I reached for my phone to call Nev.
Instinct is a funny thing. It was instinct that made me think of Nev first, that warm, comfortable feeling that fit me like a second skin and let me know that if I was confused, or in trouble, and especially if I found evidence in a murder, Nev was my go-to man.
But it was instinct, too, that made me stare at the phone for a moment, then tuck it back in my pocket.
Oh, I’d tell Nev what I’d discovered, all right. After all, when it came to murder investigations, I was as professional as I was when the subject was buttons. But I wasn’t in the mood to talk to Nev. Not yet. Not until the sting of our morning argument wasn’t quite so sharp.
“Josie! Is that you up there?”
My thoughts were interrupted by a shout from down in the church, and I turned to find Laverne on the altar, waving to catch my attention. “We’re locking up,” she called out, and just as I expected, the church had great acoustics. I didn’t have to strain to hear even one word. “I’d hate to see you stuck inside for the night.”
She wasn’t the only one.
I scrambled downstairs and found Laverne alone. No Richard. Which now that I thought about it, was probably a good thing. I’d already asked him the question I was about to ask her. Before I did, I thanked her for the opportunity to check out the buttons.
“No problem.” Laverne patted my hand. “The way it looks, Richard’s not going to be able to get this stuff out of here for at least a few more days. Some to-do with the shipping company and how they already had dates set and how changing them is going to cost more.” She fanned a hand in front of her face. “You’d think they were planning D-Day! The good news is that means you’re welcome to come back anytime between now and when the stuff gets moved out of here. In fact, you could stay a little longer this evening, but I have a social justice committee meeting over at the food bank and—”
It was my turn to tell her it was not a problem at all. “I might be back,” I told her, thinking of the tissue that was in my pocket along with Victor Cherneko’s onyx stud. And wondering about that missing button. “But until then . . .” I paused, pretending like this was something that had just occurred to me. “I’ve been thinking about the night of the murder. You know, the way you see detectives on TV think over their cases.”
Laverne barked out a laugh. “Then you’re way smarter than me,” she said. “I will admit, I tried. That first day it happened. I had this sort of Jessica Fletcher thing come over me, and I tried to look at what we know about Forbis and the murder and piece things together. It got me absolutely nowhere!”
“Well, I might be getting nowhere, too,” I said, and cringed when I realized it actually might be true. “But I figured I should give it a try. I feel responsible, you know what I mean? Just being here with Forbis that night, and being part of the ceremony and then finding his body the next day . . .” I didn’t have to fake the shudder that trembled over my shoulders when I pictured Forbis with those buttons on his eyes and mouth. “I guess I’ve just been trying to keep myself busy, to make a sort of puzzle out of it so I don’t think about how horrible it all was.”
Laverne bent her head. “Amen.”
“So I’ve been wondering . . .” Did I sound like a woman intent on solving a puzzle? Or like a busybody who had no business poking her nose where it didn’t belong? “I’ve been asking people who were here that night, you know, about their alibis for after the show.”
It wasn’t my imagination. Laverne’s eyebrows really did shoot up a bit. Maybe it was because she hadn’t expected me to be quite so much of a busybody. Or maybe there was another reason. I made sure I smiled when I said, “I talked to Richard, so I know what he said. You know, about his alibi.”
Laverne’s smile froze around the edges. “Richard told you I was with him, didn’t he?” She pulled in a long breath and let it out slowly. “Of course he did. Because that’s exactly what happened. Why on earth would he tell you anything else?”
“That’s exactly what he told me.” It was true, so it’s not like I had to feel the least bit guilty saying it. Which was only fair, since Laverne didn’t look the least bit guilty, either. Was it because Richard had told her what to say in case anybody asked? Or because Gabriel Marsh, he of the hot-as-sin smile and tempting . . . er . . . lo mein, wanted me to think Richard was with Victor when he really wasn’t?
I didn’t know. And I wasn’t going to find out standing there with a vacant smile. Instead, I told Laverne I hope she had a good meeting at the food bank, said I might be back soon one of these days to look at the buttons some more, and headed out the nearest door. I was in the hallway that led to Reverend Truman’s office when a man came around the corner and nearly slammed right into me.
“Oh!” The syllable of surprise escaped my lips just as I pulled myself to a stop so I didn’t crash into the man and the industrial-sized bucket on wheels he was dragging along with the help of the mop in it. He was tall and stocky, and wearing dark gray pants and a shirt with an oval on it and a name embroidered on it in red: “Bob.”
“Excellent.” I don’t think he was used to being greeted with that much enthusiasm by strangers. Bob’s eyes went wide and he took a step back and away from me. “I’m Josie,” I told him without bothering to explain who, exactly, Josie was or why it mattered. I poked a thumb over my shoulder. “I was just talking to Laverne. You know, about the murder. I was hoping I’d run into you, because I think maybe you can help me out.”
He shook his head. “Don’t know nothing. I already told the police that. I only work here. Didn’t have nothing to do with that weird art exhibit. Just watched them set it up, and made sure the floors were washed and swept and the bathrooms were all in good shape for everyone who was coming to the show. After that . . .” Another shake of his head that made his beefy jowls swing. “I don’t know nothing.”
“I believe you.” I offered him a warm smile, and even though it was designed to melt his wariness, his shoulders got rigid. “I was just wondering about the night you cleaned up the champagne and glass. You know, from when Forbis dropped his glass.”
“Did my job, and did it right.” His fingers closed over the mop handle in a proprietary gesture. “I told the cops that.”
“And the next morning?”
He wasn’t sure what I was getting at and, truth be told, I guess I wasn’t, either. I only know that what happened the next morning was a little odd, and odd always struck me as something I needed to get to the bottom of. “The next morning when we were all here. You know, the morning they found that poor man’s body.” The
they
was no mistake, believe me. I sensed that with a man like Bob, it was best to keep things as impersonal as possible. I feared if he knew I was so intimately involved in the finding of Forbis’s body, he’d tuck tail and run. “You stepped into the church, and Laverne and I, we were hoping to talk to you but when she called out to you, you walked away. Then the police looked for you and couldn’t find you anywhere in the building.”
“Talked to Ms. Laverne that afternoon.” Now he was nodding, again and again, like a bobblehead doll on a dashboard. “Talked to the police, too and told them just what I told her.”
“That’s terrific.” Remember what I said about instincts? Mine told me there wasn’t anything else I was likely to get from Bob. I stepped back and turned away.
“Only you’re wrong about that morning.”
His comment brought me up short, and just as quickly as I’d turned away, I whirled back to face him. “The morning the body was found? What am I wrong about?”
“You said I was here.” Now he shook his head again. I had to focus my gaze directly on the wall behind Bob’s left shoulder or I was going to get dizzy. “Didn’t come in that day until noon. Just like I was scheduled to.”
I looked down the hallway, back toward the door that led into the church. Clearly, I remembered Bob opening that door as Laverne and I stood talking in the church. Just like I told him, she’d called out to him and waved him over. And all he’d done is turn and walk away. “You walked in,” I said. “And then you walked out again.”
“Wasn’t me.” Bob’s hands closed around the mop handle. “I swear, it wasn’t.” His gaze darted to the door that led into the church and his eyes went wide, his pupils huge. “You seen that crazy stuff in there, that stuff they’re calling art. Maybe that’s what this is all about. You know, the murder and all. Maybe what you saw was one of them things. What do they call them?” He ran his tongue over his lips. “Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe it was a zombie.”
I was a theater major in college, and my specialty was costume design. My all-encompassing passion, of course, was the buttons on those costumes, and ultimately, that’s what doomed my theater career. I was too focused on detail, producers and directors told me. I was too worried about authenticity. I was too careful and too compulsive. At least when it came to the buttons the audience would see only from their seats.
At the time, this broke my heart, but I am nothing if not an optimist and fate proved me right. I worked on costumes for exactly one low-budget, silly movie, and
For Whom The Trolls Troll
became a cult hit that guaranteed me a big, fat royalty check every month. It was that check that made it possible for me to quit my nine-to-five and open the Button Box.
The other plus of my schooling was that all those years of costume design taught me a thing or two about drawing. I am no Michelangelo, but my work is better than passable. At the same time I hit the speed dial on my phone, I looked at my kitchen table and the better-than-passable drawing of the button I’d sat down and sketched the moment I got home from the Chicago Community Church.
“Nev.” I usually didn’t sound so jumpy when my main squeeze answered his phone. I told myself to get a grip and put the memory of our argument out of my head. It was a stupid fight, anyway, and what I had to tell him was more important than either of our bruised egos.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” I said, then added so he didn’t think
interrupting
meant what it could have meant only it wasn’t what I meant to begin with, “Are you still at the station?”
“Just got home.” He sounded tired “What’s up?”
I told him. About the missing button on the Congo Savanne art piece. About Victor Cherneko’s onyx and silver stud and how I found it under the ceremonial drums. About the smudge of white, greasy stuff up in the choir loft.
“And there’s Richard’s alibi, too,” I added even though I knew it was likely that bringing up that particular subject would also bring up the subject of Gabriel Marsh and that bringing up Gabriel might put us in the same loop of unspoken, unreasonable, and uncomfortable accusations we’d danced around earlier in the day. “I asked Laverne where she was after the show—”
“And she confirmed Richard Norquist’s alibi, right?”
Nev didn’t have to sound so pleased with himself. And he sure didn’t have to explain why. If Laverne and Richard were telling the truth, it meant Gabriel was lying. Which meant Nev was right about not trusting him. Which meant I was wrong about everything, including eating lo mein with the man.
“Just because she said she was with Richard doesn’t mean Laverne is on the up-and-up,” I reminded Nev. I shouldn’t have had to. Cops are notoriously skeptical. About everything. “In fact, I’m pretty sure she was lying.”
“Because . . .”
“Because she looked uncomfortable when she told me how she went out for coffee after the show with Richard,” I explained. “You know, like she didn’t really want to say it, and maybe he’d asked her to corroborate his story. Of course she was uncomfortable! Laverne is clearly not the kind of woman who likes to lie.”
“Impressions aren’t evidence,” he reminded me.
“But gut instinct has to play some role in investigating.” I could have pointed out that he obviously believed this or he wouldn’t have written off Gabriel as a no-good lowlife as quickly as he had.
“Anyway, I thought it was important for you to know all that,” I said, because clearly, going around and around about Laverne wasn’t going to get us anywhere. “It’s important stuff, don’t you think?”
“The missing button and the onyx stud and the smudge of greasy stuff? You bet it is. Thank you for thinking of calling to tell me about it.”
Don’t think I missed the fact that he left Laverne’s and Richard’s alibis off of the list. Or that the way he thanked me bordered on a little too professional. It was the kind of throwaway line that begged to be answered with a, “That’s OK. Glad to help. Good-bye.”
The thought twisted my insides and rather than give in to the pain, I blurted out, “I haven’t eaten yet. I was thinking maybe you could come over and we’d pick up something. I drew a picture of that missing button and we could go through some of my references books and—”
“Wish I could.” It would have sounded more like Nev meant it if right after he said it, he didn’t hold the phone to his chest for a moment to say something to somebody. His voice was muffled, but I thought I heard the word
dinner
. “LaSalle’s been kind of punky,” he said, his voice—and his message—loud and clear now that he was talking into the phone again. “The vet’s got late clinic hours tonight and she said if I stopped in, she could check him out.”
I knew how devoted he was to the mixed breed dog that used to be a stray in the Button Box neighborhood until he and Nev found each other. I understood.
Of course I understood.
I only wished I could believe him.
I didn’t bite my tongue quickly enough to prevent myself from saying, “Is that why you were just talking about going to dinner with someone?”
“Huh?” He was quiet for as long as it took him to figure out what I was talking about. Which wasn’t long. I heard a rattle that sounded like small rocks against a hard surface. “LaSalle’s dinner,” he said, shaking the dog’s metal food bowl again. “I told him to come get dinner before we leave to go see Dr. Sylvia.”
“I figured.”
I didn’t.
“I know.”
He didn’t.
Another shake of the dog’s bowl and Nev sighed. “He doesn’t even want to eat,” he said, “so you know something’s wrong.” I heard a muffled
clunk
as he set down the bowl. “I’ll give you a call at the shop tomorrow, and we can talk about that button. You think the fact that it wasn’t on that box with the creepy statue in it means anything?”
“I think . . .” I had my fingers pressed to my temples even before I realized my headache was back. “I think I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” I said, and ended the call.
Truth be told, Laverne and Richard weren’t the only ones fudging the truth (if, indeed, they were fudging the truth at all). On my way home, I’d grabbed a small pizza from the Italian place on the corner, so my dinner invitation to Nev wasn’t as much an act of hungry desperation as it was a stab at compromise. So much for trying to be an adult. I dragged the pizza box closer and looked over my drawing of the mysterious button while I finished off a couple slices of pepperoni, mushroom, and banana pepper.
My memory, it should be noted, is pretty darned good, especially when it comes to buttons, so there was no question, at least in my mind, that I got the details right. Though I’d drawn it much larger, the real ceramic button was about three-quarters of an inch across. That is, what we in the button biz consider a medium-sized button. The button was the off-yellow of a #2 pencil and to help bring it to life, I headed into my bedroom and dug under my bed for the set of colored pencils that I hadn’t used in years. I found one just about the right ochre color and pushing the pizza box aside, colored in my drawing, then used my regular lead pencil to again go over the squiggly lines I’d used to represent the wonky letters that I’d seen incised on the button. Did they actually spell out a word? And was it in English? Or was what I remembered as letters actually some kind of primitive picture of some sort?
If only I’d had a chance to check out the button more closely before Forbis was killed and the button went missing!
If only I knew if the two incidents were related, and if the medium-sized ochre-colored button was what he referred to when he screamed, “Le bouton.”
If only.
I’d already grabbed another piece of pizza before I came to my senses and realized I was full. Before I could give in to the temptation, I wrapped the leftover slices and put them in the fridge. My drawing of the button in hand, I headed into the living room, but not until I stopped and grabbed every button reference book I had in the apartment.
A few hours later, my eyes ached and my neck muscles screamed in pain from being bent over so many pages of so many books.
“And without luck, too.” I grumbled and closed the last of the books. But remember what I said about me being an optimist. I had many more reference books at the Button Box, and a network of button expert friends around the world. Believe me, I intended to use them all.
That is, once this darned headache went away.
More grumbling, and a quick trip to wash up, get ready for bed, and pop a couple of aspirin. But even once I was tucked in under the blankets, sleep refused to come. Tired as I was, the day’s events whirled through my head. I must have been thinking about that crazy thing Bob the maintenance man said to me. How he wasn’t at the church until late on the day I found Forbis’s body, so I must have seen his zombie double.
That would explain why when I finally drifted off to sleep, I swore I heard drumbeats in the distance.
• • •
Since Nev didn’t take the Laverne/Richard alibi-that-maybe-wasn’t-an-alibi thing seriously, I knew it was up to me to check it out. This may sound easy, but let’s face it, I have a shop to run and customers who depend on me to be there when they arrive at the Button Box.
I worked diligently at the shop all Tuesday morning, checking in and cataloguing the buttons that were delivered from a collector’s estate in Cleveland, helping ladies from a church group who were looking for inexpensive buttons for craft projects they could sell as fund-raisers, and looking over the photographs I’d taken the day before of Forbis’s artwork. By lunchtime, I was ready to roll.
“I close at six on Tuesdays,” I told Stan.
Just as he promised when I talked to him early that morning, he’d shown up to babysit the shop for me, and now he sipped a cup of coffee and checked out the front page of the day’s paper. “I know that, Josie.”
“But I’ll be back before then,” I assured him. “Except if I’m not, you can put the ‘Closed’ sign in the window and—”
“I know that, too.” He was seated behind my desk, and he looked up from his newspaper to me. “I’ve watched the shop for you plenty of times.”
“You have. I’m grateful.”
“And I’m wondering why you’re as jumpy as a june bug. You’re usually cool, calm, and collected, Josie. Even when you’re investigating. What’s up, kiddo?”
I was about to head to the door and I forced myself to take a deep breath and slow down. “I guess I’m just trying to prove something,” I admitted to Stan.
“To Nev.” I hadn’t mentioned the recent tensions between me and Nev to Stan, but I wasn’t surprised that he’d picked up on what was going on. Stan is a retired cop, after all. He’s great at reading people, especially when that
people
is me. “It’s the way you’re acting,” he said, in response to a question I didn’t have a chance to ask. “I know something’s wrong. You want to talk about it?”
“No,” I said, then dropped into the guest chair in front of my desk. “He’s being unreasonable,” I said.
“About the investigation?”
“About everything.” My shoulders rose and fell along with the sigh that shuddered through me. “He’s not listening to me about this alibi for one thing.”
“Because of that good-looking British guy who showed up at your door the other night.”
“I hardly know the man. Nev knows there’s nothing between me and Gabriel Marsh. Not like there is between Nev and Evangeline.”
I hadn’t meant that last bit to slip past my lips, but once it did, I had no choice but to fill Stan in on the details.
He listened—Stan always listens—and when I was done, he scratched a finger along the side of his nose. “Your suspicions about Nev and this Evangeline sound about as flimsy as Nev’s when it comes to you and Marsh.”
I dropped my head into my hands. “I know. I just can’t help myself. It’s like . . .” I looked up at Stan. “You don’t believe in voodoo and zombies and things, do you, Stan? When you were a cop, did you ever see anything that made you think any of it might be true?”
He waved a hand and just in case I didn’t get the message, he made it clear when he said, “Hogwash! Why would you think—”
“I don’t. It’s just that I know I’m not acting like myself, and I know zombies and all that stuff aren’t possible, but it’s sort of what it feels like. Like somebody else is in control of me. I don’t like it.”
“Then don’t let it get to you. Remember what you told me, Josie, the day you and Kaz split? You told me that from that day on, no one else was in charge of you. That still holds true, you know. Maybe now more than ever. You proved you could get along without Kaz. You proved that you could open your own business and make it a success. You even proved you can conduct a murder investigation, and you’ve done it a whole lot better than some of the cops I worked with over the years. What you’ve got to prove now is that you can set aside these crazy ideas you’re having about Nev and get down to business.”