A Disguise to Die For (10 page)

Tears welled up in my eyes and I blinked them back so Tak wouldn't notice. The air around us hung heavy with the scent of fried rice and the weight of his words. The silence was punctured by the sound of something falling to the ground by the hostess table.

Tak dropped my hands and stood up. “Who's there?” he asked the darkness.

There was no reply. A shadow moved along the far wall of the restaurant, distorted by the low light that emanated from paper lanterns swaying in the entranceway. I reached out for Tak's hand.

“The lanterns,” I whispered and pointed at the entrance. “The front door must be open.”

“Wait here.” He moved through the empty interior and out the front door. Seconds later, the door slammed shut and I was alone.

AS SAFE AS
I'd tricked myself into thinking I was when we arrived, now I felt a hundred times more scared. It was after midnight. I was alone in a restaurant where I had no business being. I didn't know who had been inside with us or what they'd wanted. I was rooted to my chair as if I weighed a thousand pounds.

I crept toward the exit. Voices outside argued. Then silence. And then—
bam!
I ran outside and found Tak alone in the parking lot. His fists were balled up and he stood facing the Dumpster as if it were his opponent in a street brawl.

“Tak?” I asked. He was so focused on the trash bin that he didn't hear me. “Tak,” I said again. In the distance, red and blue lights flashed. A police car approached and turned into the Hoshiyama parking lot. Its arrival snapped Tak's concentration and he turned to look first at the police car and then at me.

“Wait here,” he said.

A door opened above me and I looked up. An older Japanese man stood on a small balcony above a narrow flight of stairs. He crossed his arms over his chest and watched Tak. I didn't know if he saw me or not.

A police officer got out of her car. It took me a couple of seconds to recognize Detective Nichols from Blitz Manners's party. She wore a dark blazer over a white shirt and black pants. She and Tak exchanged a few words. Their voices weren't audible, but judging from their body language, they were exchanging more than a polite greeting. They turned in my direction and Tak pointed to me. I glanced up at the man on the balcony. He was watching me too. Tak called out my name. He waved me forward, and I joined him and the detective by the police car.

“Margo, this is Detective Nichols,” he said.

“I know. We met at Blitz's party,” I said.

“Ms. Tamblyn,” she said, nodding my direction. “I received a call that there was a break-in at the restaurant.”

“We didn't break in,” I said. “Tak had a key.”

The detective studied my expression, and I got the feeling she was gauging more than my words. “In any event, it's late and you two should call it a night.”

“Sure,” I said.

The detective walked around the restaurant, presumably to make sure everything was okay. Tak stood next to me, silent and guarded. I looked over his head to the balcony, but the old man was gone.

“Tak, why did Detective Nichols say someone called about a break-in?”

He watched her taillights fade away into the distance. When he spoke, it wasn't to answer my question. “She's right. It's late. How about I take you home?”

“There's a mess inside. Let me help you clean up first.”

“I'll take care of it when I get back.” He put his hand on the small of my back and guided me to his car. We didn't talk on the way back to Disguise DeLimit. Tak's mind appeared to be far away.

“Tak, who was the man on the balcony?”

He stared ahead at the road. “My father.”

“Was he the one who called the police?”

Tak parked in front of the shop and nodded. “The problems I'm having with my father have nothing to do with you. I'm sorry about tonight. It was a bad idea to go. That's not what I had in mind when I invited you.”

I shrugged. “You delivered exactly what you promised. The best fried rice in Proper City.”

For the first time since we'd left, he smiled. “Good night, Margo,” he said. His car didn't pull away from the curb until after I was upstairs in my bedroom with Soot.

*   *   *

EVEN
though I hadn't gone to bed until close to two—after soaking my gasoline-saturated linens and treating my suede moccasins with baking soda to absorb the stain and the odor—I was up by seven. Inspired by the uniforms that Bobbie had dropped off the night before, I dressed in my own sleeveless white sailor's top and black flare-bottom pants. I pulled a cheap black, white, and yellow naval captain's hat over my flipped hair and blended up a pineapple and banana smoothie.

While Soot buried his nose in a bowl of organic fish parts, I sat at the dining room table staring at the hair spray cans and the torn piece of fabric that I'd found on Ebony's car. I'd wanted to talk to Tak about it, but our conversation had been interrupted before I had the chance.

I finished my smoothie and filled the glass and the blender
with water and left them sitting in the sink. The store wasn't due to open for a few hours, and with Kirby in school, I wouldn't be able to leave once we were open like I had yesterday. I stuffed my wallet into a hidden pocket inside the waistband of the sailor pants, grabbed my keys, and left.

*   *   *

SHINDIG
was located inside of the house where Ebony had lived since I'd met her. It was a small split-level building. Ebony had opened up the first floor by knocking out walls to make a showroom. The upstairs was modest—a bedroom, bathroom, and a small landing filled with Ivory's toys—but it was all she needed to make do.

Her massive Coupe de Ville was parked in a space in the corner of the lot behind the store. The flat tires had been repaired and all traces of the hair spray had been removed from the hood. Even the windows appeared to be in working order. Dig must have bumped his other business in order to handle Ebony's crisis. No big surprise there.

I locked my helmet to the scooter and pulled the captain's hat onto my head. After letting myself in through the back door, I started a pot of coffee. Ebony had never been a morning person, and she'd long ago given me a set of rules for entering her house before ten a.m. They included starting the coffee, not attempting to clean up any messes that she might have left out the night before, and staying downstairs. As usual, I adhered to the first and third rules and completely ignored the second by moving the dirty dishes in the sink to the dishwasher. I texted her to let her know I was there, and wandered into the showroom out front.

Shindig had been Ebony's party planning business since she'd graduated high school in the '70s. Photos of her early parties lined the walls behind the counter next to the first dollar
she'd ever made. In the front of the store were small round tables surrounded by three to four chairs, and on each table was a stack of photo albums that showcased what she'd done for clients in the past. She stocked very little in the way of merchandise, preferring to be hired to coordinate a party rather than to let people come to her for supplies to create their own backdrop. This was the fundamental difference between the way Shindig and Candy Girls approached party planning.

As I wandered the store, I heard the sound of footsteps over my head. Seconds later, Ebony called down the stairs. “I'll be down in a second. Did you start the coffee?”

“Rule number one,” I called back.

“Leave those dirty dishes in the sink,” she said.

“Too late.” I headed to the kitchen to fix her a cup, when I heard something dragging across the floor over my head. “What are you doing up there?”

The dragging traveled to the stairs. Ebony appeared at the top of them, dressed in a tank top, long patchwork vest that hung to her knees, and bell-bottoms over platform sandals. Her gold medallion necklace was tucked inside the tank top. She descended the stairs backward. Ivory scampered down the staircase to greet me—or to get out of the way of the giant brown suitcase Ebony bumped down the stairs—I couldn't tell which. The suitcase, a hard brown plastic with brass trim, slammed against each wooden step. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she leaned back against the wall and dabbed at her hairline with an orange bandanna.

“This sucker is heav
y.
”

“What's in there?”

“Everything I could fit. Help me get it to the car, wouldya?”

“Have your coffee first.”

“No time. In fact, pour that into a travel mug for me and I'll deal with the suitcase.”

She struggled to lift the suitcase and carry it out to her Caddy. I dumped her coffee into a travel mug that said
GROOVY!
and met her outside.

“Where are you going?”

She opened the trunk of the car and heaved the suitcase inside. “Ebony needs a vacation,” she said, referring to herself in the third person as she did on occasion. “Ivory too. No business happenin' here since the Blitz thing. Now's as good a time as any to get out of town.”

“Ebony, you can't just leave.”

“Baby girl,” she said. She put her hand alongside my face. “I tried to teach you that every situation was an opportunity to learn something about yourself, right? Maybe that's what I'm supposed to learn from this. That it's time for me to leave the past behind and move on.”

“No,” I said.

She picked up Ivory and set him inside the car, then turned to me. She gave me a trademark Ebony hug—the kind where she holds so tight the breath is squeezed out of you—and I squeezed back. As soon as we parted, she pulled a pair of sunglasses from her pocket and put them on, rendering her expression unreadable.

“Take care of your old man, now, you hear?” she said. She climbed into the car and started the engine. I stood directly behind the rear bumper. If I didn't move, she couldn't leave. It was selfish, I knew, but as I stood there, watching her adjust her rearview mirror, I felt more alone than I had in years. If Ebony pulled out of that parking space, I felt as though I'd never see her again.

She rolled down the window and propped her elbow on the door. “Margo, fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly.” Ivory climbed over her lap and poked his head out the window. Ebony ran her hand over his head and moved him back to the passenger side.

I stepped out of her way. She threw the Caddy into gear. I reached a hand out to her. She touched my fingers and squeezed them, and then pulled out of the parking lot, leaving me alone in a cloud of gravel, dust, and isolation.

The car had disappeared down the long stretch of Main Line Road that led to the highway. When the dust cleared, I spotted a white envelope on the ground next to where her car had been parked. I picked it up and looked inside.

The envelope was filled with a thick stash of hundreds. It looked like roughly the same amount that Blitz Manners had given us to throw him a party. The same money I'd given back when I'd told him we couldn't take the job. But Ebony hadn't been paid at the start of the party. So how did she end up with this envelope of Blitz's cash?

And what was it doing in the parking lot outside of Shindig the day she decided to leave town?

I RAN TO
the corner where Ebony had driven and looked for her car, but I already knew she was long gone. I shoved the envelope of money into the small storage compartment under the seat of the scooter. Ebony was my rock. Ebony was the one who stood up to anybody who got into her path. The fact that she'd left told me more than any words could have said.

Ebony was scared. Of what, I didn't know. But I wasn't going to let her face this alone.

*   *   *

I
left Shindig and drove to Money Changes Everything. Bobbie's office was at the end of a modest strip mall that included a used paperback bookstore, a pet groomer, and three fast-food restaurants. I parked the scooter in front of the office and headed inside.

The interior was neat. A single desk, white metal base with
wood laminate top, faced the front door. Colorful sour balls wrapped in clear plastic were nestled in a glass bowl on the corner of the desk next to an old, white phone and a couple of frames. A computer monitor sat to the right. Behind the desk, shelves lined with teddy bears made from scraps of colorful fabric ran from floor to ceiling, covering every inch of the wall save for a small hallway that led to a restroom.

“Mitty!” I heard behind me.

I turned around and saw an older and happier version of the friend I remembered.

“Bobbie Kay!”

Bobbie Kay—birth name Barbara Kennedy—had been my first friend. We met when I was six and she was five. On the surface, Bobbie was straight out of the pages of an East Coast prep school. She dressed in white, pink, or blue polo shirts, pleated khaki pants that she bought in bulk from the Gap, and Tretorn Nylite sneakers, and her trademark bob was trimmed every six weeks like the hairdresser suggested.

Bobbie had joined the entrepreneur's club in high school and while her classmates worked up moneymaking schemes that involved day trading and the occasional gambling trip to maximize their investments, she'd devised a plan to make and sell teddy bears around town. She blew the doors off the next-highest-grossing project and surprised everybody in school when she donated her profits to charity. “Teddy bears should be used for good and not evil,” she'd said in a press release.

What most people didn't know about Bobbie was that the pressures of staying at the head of her class had led her to the unhealthy regimen of over-the-counter diet pills, a habit that escalated to dangerously addictive levels. She developed a dependency her senior year and spent the summer after graduation in a treatment program. Not willing to test her
newly healthy body with the unknown stresses of the Ivy League college she'd been planning to attend, she declined the scholarship that awaited her and instead accepted an internship with a local business. Now she ran her own nonprofit. Both her stress and her figure were maintained through early-morning yoga sessions. She was happy, healthy, and making a difference in the world, one teddy bear at a time.

Bobbie rushed across the office and threw her arms around me. I hugged her back. Even though the more recent years of our friendship had dissolved into birthday text messages, Facebook post “likes,” and the occasional e-mail, I felt as if I'd seen her yesterday. Some friendships are like that.

“Does anybody call you Mitty anymore?” she asked.

“Anymore? Nobody ever called me Mitty except for you, and if you stop now, I'll never speak to you again.”

Ever since I'd known her, Bobbie had made a point to ignore her given name. Maybe Barbara was too feminine for a six-year-old tomboy who wanted to explore old barns and adopt stray kittens. Or maybe her parents, activists in their own right, nicknamed her Bobbie as a tribute to the presidential hopeful who was assassinated in 1968.

But sometime around her twelfth birthday she'd decided it was time for another identity, and Bobbie Kay was born. She hung a portrait of Mary Kay in her locker as a symbol of what could be accomplished by a woman with a vision and a tube of lipstick.

She'd decided that I needed a nickname too, and cleverly pulled the
M
and the
T
of my names to get Mitty. She claimed it worked because the way I dressed showed that I was partially living in a fantasy world. Come to think of it, her five-cent diagnosis wasn't all that different from my sometimes therapist. Today Bobbie was in a pink polo, pleated khakis, and
white Tretorns. Her straight brown hair was in her signature bob, parted in the middle, and both sides were tucked behind her ears. Even though she shirked makeup and still dressed like she had decades ago, she now wore a layer of maturity that she'd earned by confronting her personal demons and winning.

“I see you got my donation,” she said, standing back and checking out my outfit.

“I'll have you know this came from my own closet, thank you very much,” I said. “But yes, the sailor suits are fantastic. We steamed the fishy smell out of them last night and I'm going to put them in the windows later today.”

“So Jerry's doing better? I heard about his heart attack.”

“You'd barely know he had a heart attack. He's in the desert with Don Digby, chasing alien costumes.”

“I bet he wouldn't have considered going if it weren't for you coming here.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“There's no ‘maybe' about it. When the local ice cream shop closed, they donated their backup uniforms to me. I stopped by to see if Jerry was interested in them and he kept me there for an hour showing me photos of a collection of costumes from some German-themed restaurant in Wisconsin. He couldn't get over the lederhosen. I could tell he wanted to go, just to meet the guy and find out the backstory on the costumes, but he couldn't.”

“He kept you there for an hour?”

“Yeah, he'll talk to anybody who wants to talk about costumes.”

“Since when do you want to talk about costumes?”

“Don't let the outer package fool you. I appreciate a costume as much as the next girl.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, unconvinced. “What happened to the
ice cream parlor costumes? There's nothing like that in our inventory.”

“I don't know. He took the lot and made a nice donation to the cause. They're probably in storage.”

I hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about how my dad had been stuck behind the counter of the store all these years. Sure, he had Kirby to keep him company, and he always enjoyed finding new and different ways to satisfy the clients who came into Disguise DeLimit, but he hadn't taken an actual vacation since I was a kid. Moreover, he never told me that he'd wanted to. But after only a few days back in Proper, more than one person had mentioned how much he talked about getting away and exploring the country. Maybe this road trip with Don was the best medicine after all.

“If your dad's in the desert, who helped you steam out the costumes?”

Heat climbed up my face. Bobbie clapped her hands and half sat on the corner of her desk. “There's a guy. It's a guy, right? You went totally red. It must be a guy.”

There was something about hanging out with Bobbie that turned us into giggling girls in no time, and even though we'd been in her office for only mere minutes, we'd already time-traveled back to our childhood selves. I leaned against the wall and told her about Tak showing up at the store while I was dressed in alien pj's and slippers.

“Tak Hoshiyama?” She whistled. “That one's a mystery. I thought he was dating Nancy Nichols. Did they break up?”

“Nancy Nichols—do I know her?”

“I don't know why you would. She's Proper City's new police detective.”

Oh crap. Crappety crappety crap.
“You mean Detective Nichols? The one who looks like a professional volleyball player?”

Bobbie studied me. “Mitty, you look like you just heard the stock market crashed. Are you okay?”

“The detective and Tak Hoshiyama are a couple?”

“That's what I heard but I don't keep up with these things. Why is it such a big deal to you?” she asked.

I buried my face in my hands. “Detective Nichols caught Tak and me at Hoshiyama Steak House after hours last night,” I said. “Oh gosh, Bobbie, this is bad.”

“How bad can it be? His parents own the place, so it's not like you broke in, right? Besides, maybe they're on a break. You're consenting adults, and whatever she caught you doing is nobody's business but your own.”

“She caught us eating fried rice.”

“Oh. Sounds innocent to me.”

“That's not the problem. It's Detective Nichols and Tak. I bet that's why he keeps showing up and talking to me about what happened. He's helping her. Oh man, I am so stupid. Do you know what I did? I trusted him. I don't know what she's going to do but it can't be good.”

“Work with me, Mits. What's going on?”

I looked up at Bobbie. The desire to confide in Tak last night had gone unfulfilled and I desperately needed to talk to somebody. “Do you think you can spare an hour for breakfast?”

*   *   *

MINUTES
later we were seated at a booth in the back of Eggcetera, a breakfast restaurant in the corner of the strip mall. I faced down a Belgian waffle covered in quickly melting whipped butter—the stress of Ebony's situation required something stronger than a smoothie—while Bobbie layered lox and cream cheese onto her bagel.

“You heard about Blitz Manners, right?” I asked.

She nodded. “What a horrible situation. Murdered at his own party.”

“I was there,” I said. At her surprised expression, I continued, “Not as a guest. Blitz hired Disguise DeLimit to provide costumes for the party and hired Shindig to coordinate everything.”

“I thought he was going to have his party at Roman Gardens.”

“A pipe burst in the kitchen a week before the party and flooded the place. The owner gave back the deposit and that's when Blitz came to us.”

“Twenty-four hours to plan a Blitz-sized party? That couldn't have been easy.”

“It wasn't. We weren't even going to take the job except—” I stopped midsentence. The twenty grand in cash that I'd found in Ebony's parking lot was locked inside my scooter, now sitting in front of the offices of Money Changes Everything. Anxiety crept up my skin like an army of tiny spiders. I looked out the window to see if my scooter was still there. It was. I sipped water and remembered that nobody knew the money was in the scooter except for me.

“Except that Blitz threw enough money at you to make it worth your while,” Bobbie finished.

“How did you know?”

“You don't live in Proper City and not know about Blitz and his money. The day his inheritance came through was the first day of the rest of his life. And it wasn't the fantasy people might think.” She took a big bite of her bagel and held her hand up over her mouth while she chewed.

I studied Bobbie. “You sound like maybe you know more about Blitz than you're saying.”

She held up her index finger until she swallowed and
followed with a gulp of her green tea. “This stays between us, okay?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Blitz's dad died when he was thirteen, but he didn't get his inheritance until he was eighteen. By then, he was already popular. Captain of the football team, homecoming king, you know the type. But when he got that money, his life changed overnight. Suddenly he had an entourage. His family was always rich, so it wasn't like he didn't know what money would do, but he still went a little crazy. When his mom remarried, he waited until their honeymoon and threw a massive party at the house. It lasted three days and somebody called the cops. It was the first of many parties like that. They were legendary.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked. Bobbie and I were six years older than Blitz's crowd. Not an insurmountable age difference, but more likely an insurmountable difference in priorities. I couldn't see Bobbie hanging with Blitz's crowd, legendary parties or not.

Bobbie looked down at her green tea, picked up the mug, and then set it down again without taking a sip. “Blitz had the same problems with substance abuse that I had. The difference was, he didn't want to get better. That's how he coped. After one party too many, he was arrested for disturbing the peace. His parents sent him to the rehab clinic.”

“The same one where you went?”

She nodded. “I was there when he checked in.”

“You didn't need to—”

She held up her hand. “I haven't taken anything stronger than aspirin since I left. Once a year I go back and visit. I can't explain why I do it except that I feel like I owe it to them and to myself to check in and prove that I'm still okay, and to acknowledge the role they played in me getting my life on track.”

“So you were there when Blitz checked in.”

“And I was there when he bought his way out too. But he still had to serve two hundred hours of community service. I was planning a city fund-raiser and he fulfilled his community service by working with me.”