“I have to go. We have customers.” She hung up.
There was no doubt in my mind that I’d said shaken Amy up. Was it simply that I’d tracked her down? Or was it the mention of the tear in the pants? Maybe she didn’t know the garment had been torn—which would be a problem only if she’d been doing something incriminating when the tear had happened.
I’d succeeded in accomplishing one thing: I’d made her nervous. If she had nothing to hide, she would have reacted entirely differently. I didn’t believe for a second that she’d thrown the costume out. Now, the first chance I got, I was going to go to Candy Girls to see if it was somewhere in their inventory, and if so, if I could match the torn fabric to that costume.
*
I spent the next hour undressing the mannequins in the front window and redressing them in the newly acquired sailor outfits. I envisioned a South Pacific theme. By store opening, not only did I have three mannequins dressed in crisp (and pleasantly smelling) uniforms—two men and a woman—but also a female mannequin in the middle dressed as Nellie Forbush. I measured the backdrop of the window and made a few quick sketches of a tropical scene with palm trees, blue water, and sailboats. Now all I needed were materials and a skilled set painter.
It was a slow day in the shop. The highlight was a woman who came in with a small brown wiener dog under her arm. She wanted a custom Robin Hood costume for him. He stood still on the counter while I took his measurements and then wrapped him from neck to tail in brown butcher paper and marked out where his leg holes would have to go. I recorded everything in a notebook and quoted her a price. She paid her deposit and we agreed she could come back to pick up the costume on Thursday. She tucked the wiener dog under her arm and left.
For the next few hours, I used a blank page in the notebook to work out the six degrees of separation from Blitz Manners. The problem wasn’t the lack of suspects, it was the high number of them. Anybody who’d attended the party would have had the opportunity to get into the kitchen and kill him—at least anybody who knew when the kitchen would be empty.
I flipped through the pages clipped to the clipboard until I found the list of custom costumes I’d made for the party. Grady’s credit card slip was stapled to the upper left-hand side of the page, and his phone number was written alongside of it. If only I could think up an excuse to ask him about who wore which costume.
Maybe I didn’t have an excuse to call Grady, but I had a perfect excuse to call Detective Nichols. Now that I knew that she and Tak were a couple, I couldn’t shake the look on her face when she discovered us at Hoshiyama’s the previous night. I didn’t need there to be any bad blood between us, not while she was investigating Blitz’s murder.
Ebony’s vandalized car was an isolated incident that Ebony had asked me not to report, and that meant not reporting the empty black hair spray cans and torn piece of fabric. That didn’t mean I couldn’t bring up Amy’s suspicious behavior.
I called the number on the card the detective had given me at the party. “Detective Nichols, this is Margo Tamblyn. You asked me to call you if I had information related to Blitz’s murder.”
“Does this have to do with Ebony Welles?” she asked.
“No. It has to do with Amy Bradshaw. She works at Candy Girls Party Store.”
“What about Ms. Bradshaw?”
“She was at the party on Saturday.”
“I already know that. I have a copy of the guest list. Is that all?”
I cleared my throat and spoke up. “She came into my store on Sunday morning and wanted to sell me her costume, but when I told her I needed her name, she changed her mind.”
“Sounds like you already knew her name.”
“I didn’t find out who she was until after she left. But don’t you think that’s suspicious? That she’s in a relationship with Blitz, but the day after he’s murdered she comes here to try to sell her costume? I mean, why wouldn’t she take it to her own store?”
“Ms. Tamblyn, it isn’t a crime to shop the market.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. Every impulse told me to hang up the phone before I annoyed the detective and made things worse, but I didn’t. The image of Ebony saying good-bye and driving off that morning appeared and I squeezed my eyes shut to pretend it hadn’t happened. But it had. And it was up to me to resolve things so she’d come back.
“Detective, it’s possible that Amy Bradshaw has a very good reason for trying to sell me her costume. I just don’t know what it was. When I told her I needed her name, she changed her mind about selling and took off. I could understand if she didn’t like the price I offered, but that wasn’t the case.”
“You said she wore this costume to the party on Saturday?”