The Lanvin Murders (Vintage Clothing Mysteries) Read Free Page A

course, there was her grandmother. Naturally, they didn't have an open casket. Couldn't.  
    Joanna couldn’t force herself to reach across Marnie’s body for the phone under the tiki bar. She ran next door to Dot’s Cafe and banged on the door. Maybe someone was setting up for lunch. The prep cook greeted her with a smile, but Joanna shoved past him and ran towards the phone. She returned to Tallulah’s Closet a few minutes later and sank on the bench, gaze firmly averted from Marnie’s body.  
    A rapping on the door jolted her to her feet. A uniformed policeman and policewoman stood outside the door. “Back there.” Joanna gestured toward the tiki bar. They pushed past her.
    An unmarked Crown Victoria pulled up behind the cruiser. A tall man wearing a bolo tie and cowboy boots got out. He dropped his cell phone in his pocket and slammed the car door behind him.  
    In the store, he extended a hand. “Detective Foster Crisp.” He approached the tiki bar and stopped short of the Lanvin coat, a pile of fur and wool now pushed to the side. “What’s that?”
    “A coat. It was covering her.” Joanna reached to pick it up, but the detective stepped in front of her.  
    “Please, don’t touch it. We’ll need to check it for evidence.” The police behind the tiki bar parted as the detective knelt beside the body. After a few minutes, he rose. He placed a hand in the small of Joanna’s back and directed her back to the red velvet bench.  
    “You know the victim?” he asked.  
    “Yes, Marnie. Marnie Evans.” Joanna didn’t want to leave her, but at the same time she was glad to be distracted. “How did she die?”
    “Crowley?” Crisp asked one of the policemen.
    “Can’t say until the autopsy. Nothing obvious.”
    “Sit,” the detective said and patted the bench. A chunk of turquoise anchored his bolo tie. Its silver-tipped ends dangled as he leaned forward. “This is your store, is it?”
    She nodded, still casting anxious glances behind the tiki bar.  
    “Tell me what happened. Start from the beginning.”
    Joanna recounted the last quarter hour, from noticing the Lanvin coat missing to trembling over the phone at Dot’s.  
    “Did—” Detective Crisp looked at his notebook “—Ms. Evans have a key to the store?”
    “No. I don’t know how she got in. The door was locked when I got here.”
    “Only a handle lock. Easy enough to pick. I’m surprised you don’t have better security, actually. But there’s no reason she would be at the store?”
    “Closed? No.” She bit her lip. “That coat, the one that covered her. She sold it to me the day before yesterday. That same day she called to say she wanted it back. I told her she could come by yesterday morning to get it, but she never did.” She wouldn’t have come back to get it by herself, would she?  
    The detective made a few notes. “Tell me about Ms. Evans.”  
    While a policeman stepped away from Marnie and punched numbers in his cell phone, Detective Crisp kept his attention on Joanna. From where Joanna sat she could only see one of Marnie’s slipper-clad feet.
    “I've known her not quite a year. She sells—sold me—some of her old clothes.”  
    “Tell me about it,” the detective said.
    The day Marnie first appeared the fall before, the store had been quiet. Joanna had looked up from a skirt she was mending to find Marnie standing at the door with a cardboard box at her feet.  
    “Do you buy old clothes?” she'd asked.
    “Yes, I do.” Although Marnie's appearance—baggy pants, waterproof jacket—didn't suggest a glamour puss, Joanna had enough experience to know the box could contain anything from 1930s silk nighties to an old wedding gown to a stack of batik hippie skirts.  
    “Got a few things I don't need anymore.” Marnie had pulled a dress from the box and held it up by its shoulders. It was Nile green and covered with an intricate pattern of bugle beads that gleamed in the dim morning light. From its