“Since it happened at Bentley’s Boutique yesterday morning. Sort of a coincidence, your being on the Bentley story.”
“I hate coincidences, Trujillo.”
“It already made the police column. Maybe you could use it in a ‘Crimes of Fashion’ column.” He produced a copy of that day’s
Eye Street Observer,
open to a two-paragraph brief, “Bandit Trio Robs Boutique.”
“Do you ever notice how you’re always trying to give me more work?”
He shrugged and favored her with a brilliant white smile in his smooth tan face. Although Tony was the police reporter, the robbery at Bentley’s wasn’t the kind of story he would usually cover. Not gory or gaudy enough. No death. And a lot of murders in the District never even hit the newspapers; there were just too many. But he knew that Lacey had ambitions beyond reporting the fickle frippery of fashion, and he was determined to prod that ambition, no matter how much extra work it created for her.
“There’s this Bentley’s employee, Miguel Flores. Took a beating. He might be willing to tell his story. Says he’s a fan of yours. Besides, these are well-dressed crooks hitting a big-money boutique, not the normal scum-on-scum crime that I cover.”
“Maybe a sidebar. Your Miguel have a phone number?”
“I knew something was wrong,” Miguel said. “Nobody wears Chanel at ten o’clock on a Monday morning.”
Miguel Flores was more than happy to tell Lacey about the three overdressed bandits who pulled an armed robbery at Bentley’s Chevy Chase boutique, where Miguel was the assistant manager. The robbery went off track, thanks in part to Miguel, and ended with the arrival of not one but two SWAT teams and the capture of two men, one white and one Hispanic. The third suspect, an attractive Chanel-wearing black woman; escaped with the booty. Her trail ended with a discarded wig and one high heel in a nearby parking garage.
Miguel was tall and thin and effortlessly stylish. He sported a flower in his lapel, a yellow rose. His glossy dark hair was worn in a slicked-back ponytail, and he was meticulously dressed, despite his rough handling the day before. Large purple bruises had already formed on his smooth face and neck where one or more of the assailants had kicked him repeatedly. Lacey could see he would be very nice looking when the swelling went down. He met her and Tony, who had come along for the ride, at a small café near the boutique. Miguel was sipping wine. Lacey couldn’t write a word if she drank anything, so she was doomed to a decaf coffee, black. Tony slurped some kind of latte. Miguel claimed to be a huge fan of Lacey’s column, and he positively purred at seeing Tony again, who was oblivious. “And do you know what else, Lacey? We have the same hairstylist! Stella!”
“Stella Lake? You’re kidding!”
“Is there any other? I’m at Stylettos all the time; I can’t believe we never run into each other.”
“Oh, dear. Then you already know too much.” Lacey could just imagine what Stella might have said about her. Stella knew—and told—far too much about her. About everything.
Miguel caught her look. “Don’t worry; she only told me all the good parts of your innermost secrets, like your big adventure this spring.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
“I feel like we’re old friends. And Stylettos is so much cooler now that Ratboy isn’t her boss anymore. So, like, what about the guy you were seeing? The ex-cop? I hear he was totally hot. I love men from the West.” Lacey felt her face color and she glanced at Tony.
“Pay no attention to me,” Tony said. “I’ll just think about baseball.”
“We’ll talk about men later, Miguel. Let’s get back to the robbery.”
Miguel took a sip of wine and his hands trembled. Adrenaline obviously still pumped through his veins at the mention of the robbery. “I had a bad feeling the moment I saw the three of them enter the store,” he said. “This overdressed woman and two big fat queens. But what are you going to do? Call the cops on every inappropriate customer? ‘Officer, these people are simply not our kind here at Bentley’s. Kindly remove them.’ Of course, later I wished I had, when I was tied up on the floor next to Kika.” He paused for effect.
“They started wandering around with that phony I‘m-just-browsing kind of air. I went in the back room for a second, and when I came back out the fat white guy immediately stuck a gun in my face, took my cell phone, and forced me upstairs to the office. Kika was on the floor. Oh, my God! At first I thought she was already dead, but then I saw her breathing. I was tied up too, with duct tape, ‘execution style.’ That’s what the cops said. Then the bitch slaps me for no reason, just no reason at all, and it just made me so mad I said to myself, ‘Over my dead body is this bunch of faggots going to rob my store.’”
He smiled and acknowledged what Lacey and Tony were thinking. “Yes, of course, I too am gay. As if that were a big secret. Just ask Stella. But they were, like,
extra
gay. And, like, extra vicious. And I couldn’t let them get away with robbing my store, or killing Kika. Or killing me. I object to people killing me, gay or not.”
Lacey wrote it down, .knowing that all the good quotes would be excised from her copy if Felicity got her hands on it. “So how much do you think they—or rather she—got away with?”
“Furs, leather jackets, and jewelry. Over a million.”
“No way!”
“Way! The jewelry accounts for most of it.” Designer stores got robbed all the time, Miguel told Lacey. Both Versace and Gucci, located nearby, had recently suffered heavy losses.
Lacey wanted to avoid the typical intrusive journalist questions like, ‘How did it feel?’ The questions that really mean: ‘Would you please cry for the cameras?’ Instead she said, “What else can you tell me?”
“After they tied us up, they left the office and went back downstairs for more pillaging and looting. I was so totally pissed. I kept working my hands up and down till they were loose. Maybe it helped that my hands were sweating. But I was still all covered with tape. I crawled to the desk and managed to pull the phone off the desk and dial nine-one-one, and I was great; it was just like a movie. I said, ‘Robbery in progress at Bentley’s Boutique on Wisconsin!’ I gave them my name, so I wouldn’t be, like, a nameless victim in an unmarked grave if I was killed. I heard footsteps coming back upstairs, and the cops kept saying, ‘Stay on the line, sir, stay on the line.’ I dragged the phone under the desk and the door opened. Then it shut. I thought I was in the clear, but then it opened again, like they noticed something was wrong.”
“That would be you, under the desk with a phone?” Lacey asked.
“Right. I hung up the phone and she screamed at me, ‘The cops, you bastard, did you call the cops?’ I said, no, no, it was a wrong number. The woman looked at me. That’s when the kicking started.”
“You said they were well dressed. What did they look like?”
“The men were big and flash. Lots of leather, jewelry, and bling-bling. Wearing your basic black, but expensive basic black, not your Gap starving artiste collection. Armani suits.”
“Not Bentley?” Lacey asked.
Miguel shook his head. “Go figure.” The woman was simply overdone, he said, from her nails to her black patent stilettos, the baby blue Chanel suit trimmed in black, and the blue-and-lime-green Hermes scarf she wore around her neck. But what he remembered more was her beautiful, vicious face as she repeatedly kicked him in the head. Then her scarf slipped down, revealing a flaw in her perfection, an unsightly scar on her neck. That Miguel saw this enraged her all the more.
“She screamed at the two guys, ‘Shoot him, shoot him.’ And she just kept kicking me in the head. The sirens started. The three of them pounded down the stairs. The Montgomery County SWAT team arrived, then another one, and they were all over the place in no time. And they got the two fat boys, but the bitch was long gone.” Miguel stopped for breath and another sip of wine. “Thank God we’re just over the Maryland line out of the District, or I’d be this year’s D.C. homicide number three hundred something.”
Lacey didn’t know what to make of Miguel’s story. Perhaps
simply that stolen clothes make the man—or the woman?
According to Tony, the two captured accomplices lawyered up and were emphatically not talking. They wouldn’t discuss the woman. They wouldn’t say a word. They knew the drill. Tony said the two flunkies were pros, but the woman in charge sounded like an out-of-control amateur.
Maybe the crime of fashion makes the criminal.
Chapter 3
There was a postcard from Vic when she got home. It was brief and unsatisfying:
Hey, Lacey, the aspen are changing here and
turning the mountains to gold. It would be even
prettier
if you were here.
Vic.
No word as to when he might be coming back. If ever.
How very male.
No “Dear Lacey.” No “Love, Vic.” She turned the card over. It featured the mythical jackalope, the half jackrabbit, half antelope critter that was the semiofficial symbol of the Western Slope. Was it supposed to be funny? Was it just the first postcard he came across? Or did it carry a hidden meaning, that their relationship was as nonexistent as the elusive jackalope?
After a rocky start, they had decided to take their relationship slowly. Or as Vic put it, “I don’t want to spook you. We both know how skittish you are.”
She didn’t agree, exactly. But with her past history of bolting from boyfriends who wanted to get serious, she wasn’t really in a position to argue. Then in July, Vic had to return to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Partly to take care of business, but mostly it was about Montana—not the state; Montana, his ex-wife. Montana McCandless Donovan, now Montana McCandless Donovan Schmidt.
“She wants to buy my house,” Vic said. “She always loved that house.”
“I thought she married someone else and they’re living somewhere in Wyoming.”
“Idaho. And they’re getting a divorce.”
“So that would make her an ex-ex-wife. An available ex-ex-wife.”
“Calm down, Lacey; it’s just an easy way to unload the house. I thought you’d be happy.”
For a smart man, he can be such an idiot,
Lacey thought. She had seen Montana a couple of times back in Sagebrush when Lacey worked on the local daily newspaper. Vic’s soon-to-be ex would occasionally blow into town to whine and complain about something. Montana was aggressively blond and blue-eyed, the girl-next-door-on-skis type. She was all about sheepskin jackets and tight blue jeans and tighter little tops. From what Vic told her, his marriage to Montana broke up partly because he was a cop, and not just a cop but chief of police, first in godforsaken Sagebrush, Colorado, then in the booming metropolis of Steamboat Springs. She couldn’t take Vic’s hours, his dedication to his job, or the way women throw themselves at cops. But Vic was no longer a cop; now he was a private investigator with his father’s security business. He said his future was in Virginia; Colorado (and Montana) were in the past.
“How long will you be gone?” Lacey had asked.
“The house needs some work. Roofing, plumbing, shoring up the foundation.”
“What kind of ramshackle shed were you living in?”
“The kind with a view of Rabbit Ears Peak and pronghorns grazing out back. It’s a little rustic,” he said, “but it’s huge and it’s got a great fireplace and a deck and a big wood-burning stove. Heats up the whole place on cold winter nights.”
“With snow up to your ass.” She shivered. She remembered it all too well.
“You never cared for the winters, did you? Are you sure you’re really from Colorado, or an alien from some hot planet in a galaxy far away?”
“I was totally broke, my car died, my toilet froze, it was forty below, and in that moment I realized I could be that poor anywhere, but I sure as hell didn’t have to freeze to death.”
“Alien, then. Yeah, Sagebrush was a hard town, Lacey. Steamboat’s a lot more civilized.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“I don’t know. A month.”
“A month!”
“Who knows, maybe less.” He kissed her good-bye and said he would call, he would write. It had been two months and a couple of postcards.
Lacey’s intuition was on Code Red. She was sure Montana wanted Vic back. The house was just a pretext, and he was too big a dope to see it. A dope with dark curly hair, grass-colored eyes crinkled from the Western sun, and a smile that could wreak havoc on a weak-willed woman like Lacey. He was swimming in an alligator swamp and Lacey was afraid she would lose him. All the better not to have taken the relationship further, to intimacy. This, of course, was the dumbest thing she could do, according to Stella, friend, hairstylist, amateur guidance counselor, and world-class purveyor of gossip.
“You blew it, Lacey,” Stella had said. “You should have slept with him right off the bat. Like I do. Guys dig that. You ever hear about catching more flies with honey as opposed to, like, you know, vinegar? And at least you would have had some beautiful memories.” Stella had lots of beautiful memories. She was that kind of gal. Lacey put the postcard aside and forced Vic, Montana, and Stella from her thoughts.
Overall it had been an exhausting yet exhilarating day. Lacey had lucked into lunch and a personal interview with the legendary Hugh Bentley and a scoop on the First Lady’s opening the fashion museum.
Not just luck
, she reminded herself.
It’s the suit. Aunt Mimi’s Bentley suit.
The inside story on the Bentley’s robbery would also lead to a column, and Miguel was a delight. And there would be another Bentley story from the museum opening. Suddenly there seemed to be Bentleys everywhere she turned.