Buttoned Up (14 page)
Authors: Kylie Logan
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #General
I was in luck. At least that’s what Laverne said. Richard would be at the church the next morning, taking care of all the details.
Perfect timing, especially since Nev was able to join me.
It was early when we met in the parking lot of the Chicago Community Church. The sun was barely above the tall steeple and already the air rippled with heat. My headache was back, and I blamed it on the high humidity and told myself that, headache or no headache, I had to finish up and get over to the Button Box as soon as possible. Stan would open the shop, but this was the day of his monthly lunch at Clark Street Dog with other retired cops and that, I knew, was written in stone. So was what Stan would order: a Polish sausage sandwich with mustard and grilled onions along with cheese fries. I also knew he’d spend the evening complaining about heartburn.
What with the heat and the headache, I wanted to be cool and comfortable all day. But I was finally going to see Nev, too, and I wanted to look my best. I chose a khaki skirt and a pink short-sleeve blouse. Yeah, pink again. I wondered if Nev would notice.
He didn’t.
“I appreciate you calling me about this,” he said, swinging out of his unmarked car, his eyes on the church. “Like you told me on the phone yesterday, you’ve been busy. You found out why the art exhibit ended up here and not at that swanky gallery. And you found out Richard was with Cherneko after the show.”
“There’s a lot we still don’t know.” I didn’t need to remind him. The fact that things still didn’t make sense explained the little vee of worry between Nev’s eyebrows. “Obviously, something’s going on between Victor Cherneko and Richard Norquist. They wouldn’t have met at Remondo’s after the art show otherwise. And as far as Richard trying to cheat Forbis out of ten percent of the profits from any sales of his artwork—”
“Yeah, that’s all important. But what I meant is that you’ve been busy at the Field Museum.”
“Oh.” Not the most elegant comeback. But then, my brain froze at the same time as my feet did. Witty was too much to ask at a time like that. When I stopped cold, so did Nev.
“You talked to Evangeline,” I stammered.
“She told me you stopped by.”
“You’re the one who’s always told me that when you want information, you shouldn’t waste time with somebody who might know only some of it. You go right to the top. I hoped she could help me out. You know, when it came to vudon.”
“Really? Is that really why you went over there to talk to her?”
Why did I suddenly feel like I was in an interrogation room down at the police station and Nev was interviewing me from the other side of a gray metal table?
I shifted my purse from one shoulder to the other. “Why else would I go to the museum to talk to Evangeline?”
“She was uncomfortable.”
“Because I stopped to talk to her?” Call me insensitive, but I laughed. “You’re kidding, right? What, I’m intimidating? Because I asked about a subject she’s supposed to be an expert about?”
“She is an expert. And I’m just telling you what she told me. She thought you were being . . .”
“What?” I’d stepped closer to Nev and raised my chin even before I realized it, but by that time, it was too late to back down. “I was being what?”
How on earth he could wear a raincoat when the temperature was already licking eighty, I didn’t know, but I did see Nev’s shoulders rise and fall inside his coat. “All she said was that she was uncomfortable. She thought you were there to talk about . . . you know, about you and me. About our relationship”
“Well, she was wrong and besides, why would I talk to a complete stranger about my relationship with you? If I was going to talk about my relationship with you, I’d talk to you.”
He pushed a hand through his hair. Even if I didn’t know Nev was knee-deep in a case, I would be able to guess from his hair. It was a little past needing a cut and if he paid more attention, he could have made it look halfway presentable. But when Nev is busy, his hair is the last thing he thinks about. Even before he got out of the car, I saw that there was a curl flopped over his forehead and now it stuck up at a funny angle right above his left eyebrow. One of these days, he’d worry about personal grooming again. That is, when he wasn’t distracted by his case.
Unless he’d been distracted by something—or someone—else that morning?
The thought was unworthy of me, and I slapped it away. “How’s LaSalle?” I asked him.
“LaSalle’s fine. LaSalle’s always fine. You know him, he’s a tough street dog. Nothing ever bothers him.”
“Really.” I slipped past him and to the door of the church. “Then why did he have to go to the vet?”
“Oh, that.” Nev reached around me so he could open the door and he stepped back so I could walk inside first. “He’s fine now.”
I didn’t budge. “But Evangeline’s not. She’s uncomfortable because I went to the museum to talk to her.”
“I told you, Josie, I’m just reporting the facts.”
“And the fact that you’ve talked to her—”
His exasperated sigh interrupted me. “She called. What did you expect me to do, hang up on the woman?”
Honestly, men can be so clueless sometimes. Well, if he didn’t know the answer, I was duty bound to give it to him. I breezed through the door at the same time I said, “Hang up on her? Yeah, that’s exactly what you should have done!”
It was a good thing we found Richard standing near Forbis’s artwork. With questions to ask him, Nev and I didn’t need to worry about talking to each other.
Nev wasn’t in the mood for preliminary chitchat. Which was fine by me. Practically before Richard had a chance to look our way, Nev said, “We’ve talked to Laverne Seiffert, Mr. Norquist. We know your alibi for the night of the murder doesn’t hold up.”
Richard’s mouth dropped open, and though she was nowhere around, he glanced toward the hallway door anyway, the hallway that led to Laverne’s office. “Laverne wouldn’t—”
“She did.” I climbed the single step and walked closer to where Richard stood with a clipboard in his hands in front of the ceremonial drums. “Asking you to lie for her was a lousy thing to do. Laverne’s a good woman. It wasn’t fair for you to take advantage of her feelings for you and put her in that position.”
Richard’s mouth flapped open. “I didn’t. That is, I never—”
“Laverne believed you when you said all you did after the show was go back to your hotel,” I informed him. “She trusts you. So you can imagine that she was plenty surprised when I told her the truth. You know, about how you weren’t at the hotel at all. You were with Victor Cherneko.”
The clipboard slipped out of Richard’s hands and clattered to the floor. He didn’t stoop to retrieve it. “You know—”
“That you lied to us.” Nev walked up to my side. “I shouldn’t have to remind you, Mr. Norquist, but in case I do, lying to the police about a murder investigation is serious business. You could be charged with—”
“Charged?” Richard’s face went ashen. His hands flew around him like frenzied butterflies. “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. I didn’t do anything.”
Instead of mentioning the lie again, Nev simply stared at him.
Richard ran his tongue over his lips. “OK. All right. So my story wasn’t exactly on the up-and-up. I didn’t mean to deceive anyone.”
This time, both Nev and I gave him a look. Deceive? That’s exactly what Richard intended and he knew it.
“What I meant to say . . .” His shoulders sagged. “I knew that if you thought I was with Laverne, you’d realize I couldn’t have killed Forbis. I mean, Laverne is salt of the earth. You know that, right? With her to vouch for me, you’d have to know I couldn’t have had anything to do with Forbis’s murder. Me? Kill Forbis? That’s just . . .” There was a little too much forced humor in his laugh. “That’s just crazy!”
“But why not just tell us where you really were?” I asked Richard. “Wouldn’t that be far simpler? You and Victor Cherneko, you could have provided each other with alibis.”
“Unless they were doing something they didn’t want us to know about.” Leave it to Nev to think like a cop. His suspicion paid off. At least, I thought it did when Richard gulped so loud, the sound echoed in the church, as loud as—
I thought of the night of the opening and about that argument we heard before Forbis walked into the gallery. I’m not a gambler (I leave that up to my ex, Kaz, who is an expert at it even if he is usually not very successful), but I decided to take a chance.
“You were the one we heard arguing with Forbis before the show opening.”
As if asking for divine intervention, Richard squeezed his eyes shut. “Yes,” he said. “You’re right. That was me. I didn’t say anything to you about it because I knew if you found out I had a falling out with Forbis . . .” His eyes flew open and his gaze shot to Nev. “If you knew Forbis and I were fighting, I was afraid that would make me look guilty.”
I guess it was a police technique, one I told myself I’d have to remember and use to my advantage some time. Nev let him stew for a couple minutes before he said, “What’s making you look guilty is all this lying. Maybe we should take a ride down to the station and—”
“No! No!” Richard backed up a step. Yeah, like that would save him from Nev if Nev decided to haul him to the hoosegow. “If you’ll just let me stay here and wait for the insurance adjuster, I’ll tell you everything.”
It was Nev’s turn to back up. He did, and gestured toward the pews, and Richard plodded down the step ahead of us and sat down in the first row. Nev and I joined him, me to Richard’s left and Nev on his right.
“Let’s start with before the show,” Nev said. “What were you and Mr. Parmenter arguing about?”
As if it was immaterial, Richard waved a hand. “It was a business disagreement. That’s all. Nothing important.”
I scooted forward in my seat. “A business disagreement that had something to do with you telling Forbis that the Mango Tango Gallery was taking sixty percent of every sale when they were really only taking fifty?”
Richard’s eyes went wide. That is, before he pressed a hand to his forehead. “No! Forbis didn’t know anything about that. He couldn’t have. He’d never—” Realizing he’d almost said too much, Richard’s head shot up.
“He’d never found out before. Is that what you were going to say?” Nev asked him. “Because my guess is this wasn’t the first time you cheated Forbis out of his share of the profits. You’d done it before. In other cities. With other galleries. Bart McComb, he’s the first one who figured out what was going on, and he’s an honest businessman. He wasn’t about to get mixed up in a scheme like that.”
Richard considered his options and realized they were pretty much slim and none. He squeezed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “Y . . . yes. You’re right. I’ve done it before. In other cities. With other galleries.” He snapped his gaze to Nev. “It’s not exactly like I’ve taken millions. The sales were all small, and Forbis didn’t need the money, anyway. He’s got tons of family money that goes way back, all the way back to when his family ran the hops plantation on the island where he lived. Believe me, Detective, we’re talking nickle and dime. That’s all it amounted to. Nickels and dimes.”
Nev sat back. “I don’t need to believe you. We’ll subpoena your financial records, Mr. Norquist. We’ll find out exactly how much you stole from Forbis Parmenter.”
“Stealing isn’t murder,” Richard grumbled.
“But if you’re lying, and Forbis really did find out what you were doing . . .” I threw out the theory just to watch Richard squirm, and I wasn’t disappointed. “If he found out and he threatened to turn you in, that could be what you were fighting about before the show. It’s also a really good motive for murder.”
Richard jumped to his feet and yelled, “No!” and the word bounced back at us from the church’s high ceiling. His breaths came hard and fast, and for a moment all Richard could do was try and control himself. When he finally did, he dropped back down into the pew. “It was the church. We were fighting about the church. I’d promised Forbis this glamorous art venue and when he got here and saw this place . . .” Richard looked all around. “Well, it didn’t exactly fit with Forbis’s delusions of artistic grandeur.”
“And he let you know it.”
In response to Nev’s comment, Richard nodded. “He fired me. Right then and there.”
“But you—” It went without saying, but I couldn’t help myself. “You were here in the church for the opening ceremony. You had the cement so Forbis could place the button and—”
“Yes,” Richard said. “I couldn’t exactly walk out, not when I had a role in the evening’s festivities. Whatever you think of me . . .” He slid a glance from Nev to me and gave us an opportunity to say that he wasn’t as bad a person as all this made him sound. We didn’t. “Well, whatever you think,” Richard grumbled, “you should know that I took my job seriously. And I had to save face with Laverne. I said I’d help out that night and I intended to help out, no matter what Forbis said.”
I thought back to that scene I’d witnessed between Forbis and Richard at the opening. “Forbis wasn’t happy about it.”
“No, he wasn’t. But I knew he couldn’t say much in front of other people. Besides, I was sure the opening would go well, and I hoped once we made a few sales, Forbis would be in a better mood and he’d see that this wasn’t such a bad venue after all, and then maybe he’d change his mind and give me my job back.”
“And if you got the sales you were hoping for, you’d get to skim another ten percent,” Nev put in.
Richard had the decency to at least look embarrassed. “I told Laverne the church would get twenty percent of the profits. I told Forbis they were taking a fifty-fifty cut.”
I was speechless. Stealing from a church was one thing, stealing from a woman who was supposed to be a friend . . .
I swallowed down my revulsion and stuck with the facts. “Well, if Forbis fired you . . .” I slid out of the pew and strolled over to where Richard had dropped that clipboard. The papers on it were invoices from a shipping company. “You’re probably not the one who should be in charge of sending Forbis’s work back to . . .” I flipped through the papers. “This is all going back to your home in New York!” I yelled, wheeling around, my fists on my hips. “You were going to steal it all!”
“You’ve got it wrong.” Richard didn’t bother wasting this argument on me. He stood and looked at Nev. “There’s no one at Forbis’s home on Jekyll Island to receive the shipment. So there’s no use sending the artwork back there. I thought if I sent it to my place—”
His explanation was cut short when Nev stood up, too. “Now that we know that your employer fired you, where the artwork goes and how it gets there isn’t up to you anymore.” He gestured to me and I gave him the clipboard. “I think this is all going to have to be worked out by attorneys now.”
“Sure. Of course.” Richard hung his head. “I’ll just go back to my hotel and—”
“You’re kidding, right?” Nev clamped a hand on his arm. “You’ve just admitted to stealing from Forbis Parmenter. And don’t tell me I can’t take you in because you didn’t commit any of the acts here in Chicago. We’ll let the prosecutors figure things out and worry about the details later.”
Nev didn’t say good-bye. But then, he was pretty busy hauling Richard to the door. If he wasn’t so preoccupied, I would have pointed out that he might already have enough to officially charge Richard in Cook County. That is, if that package Richard delivered to Victor Cherneko was what I thought it was.
And listening to how Richard had been ripping off Forbis for years . . . well, I was pretty sure I was right.
• • •
I got to the Button Box in plenty of time for Stan to make his lunch date. That was a good thing because by noon, when I knew he was already over at Clark Street Dog, dark clouds had gathered in the skies above Chicago and the air crackled with the kind of electricity that proceeds a whopping thunderstorm. At least I didn’t have to worry about him traveling in the rain.
I wouldn’t have much foot traffic that afternoon, that was for sure. Anyone who was smart would be inside, and to tell the truth, that was fine by me. Without customers to distract me, I had the opportunity to take care of a few Internet orders, a slew of e-mail, and some research I’d promised to do a couple weeks earlier for a group of Revolutionary War reenactors who were looking for authentic British regimental buttons for their uniforms. Once they found out what the buttons cost, I had a feeling they’d opt for reproductions.
By the time I was done, it was nearly four o’clock and I heard rumbles of thunder in the distance. It was the first time I remembered that it was my week to mind the small courtyard behind my brownstone and the one next door, the tiny green space my fellow merchants and I used when we needed a little fresh air and sunshine. There was nothing I could do about the coming storm, but I wanted to make sure the pots of flowers we kept out there around a little park bench were pushed into a corner so they couldn’t blow around.
Did I think about Angela Morningside when I went out to the courtyard? Absolutely. Poor Angela was a customer who was killed behind the Button Box and I was the one who found her body. As always when I was back there, I bowed my head and said a little prayer. Done with that, I grabbed the pots of begonias and petunias to tuck them away.
It was the first time I noticed that there was something leaning against the back of the brownstone.
Buttons, hundreds of them, though since the sky was getting blacker by the moment, they didn’t glow nearly as much as they had under the spotlights in the Chicago Community Church gallery.
Just as the first giant raindrops plopped to the ground, I grabbed the panel that had been ripped off the loa box and raced inside.
• • •
It was nearly six and time for the Button Box to close, but I wasn’t in a hurry. Most Friday nights, Nev and I tried to get together for a drink and dinner or, if he was working on a case, at least for a cup of coffee. But when I saw him earlier that morning, he hadn’t said a word about dinner. It’s not like I was bitter or anything, but I will admit to wallowing in just a bit of self-pity. It was raining cats and dogs and thunder crashed and rattled the shop’s front display window. It was Friday night and I had no one to spend it with and no place to go.