The Queen Con (The Golden Arrow Mysteries Book 2) Read online

  ALSO BY MEGHAN SCOTT MOLIN

  THE GOLDEN ARROW MYSTERIES

  The Frame-Up

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Meghan Scott Molin

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542004190 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542004195 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542004183 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542004187 (paperback)

  Cover design by Danny Schlitz

  First edition

  To Sawyer, my little sequel in so many ways.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  “So, we’re still on for Game of Thrones Sunday night, or should I sell your tickets?” My best friend Lawrence’s voice carries over the stack of fabric I’m carrying into the downstairs closet-turned-costume-haven of his salon. It’s already so packed with garments I have no idea where these are going to fit. I’ve successfully skirted the rusty back door and bypassed the folding metal chair and 1980s-era metal desk that serves as L’s back of house. His office still hasn’t gotten the same upgrade as the rest of the shop this summer with all the new clients rolling in, but I know it’s on the list. In fact, I’d parked my beat-up brown Aspire right next to L’s “new” but shiny black 2008 Dodge Challenger. My poor Millennium Turd looks even sadder next to it. Matteo has been bugging me for a month about starting to save for a “safer vehicle,” but I just want something pretty like L’s.

  Which is never going to happen unless I figure out how to make more money. Dropping down to part time from my job as a comic book writer to do part-time costume design has been amazing, but a labor of love. L is my biggest—and, let’s be honest, only—consistent client. I’ve had a ton of inquiries after winning the Miss Her Galaxy contest last year at San Diego Comic-Con, but actually getting the jobs once I send a price quote has proven more difficult. My new plan is to continue to hone my skills and streamline my process through L’s looks and then take on other queens, rather than internet randos, as clients. I keep telling myself that if I put in the time, hustle, and love, the universe will bring it back. I just hope it’s in the form of Benjamins and/or a newer, running car.

  “Yes, we’re still on for Sunday; Matteo is going to try to come too . . . can you help me here?” A strap of glimmery silver hangs dangerously near my foot as I shuffle forward to the door across from the stairs. I use my feet to sweep blindly for the chair that sits in the closet and, upon finding it, drop the fabric onto it with a grateful sigh.

  “Girl, you look beat.” Lawrence reaches for the pile just as I set it down, and I shoot him a “too little, too late” look.

  I pluck the first costume off the stack, a gold-and-black, circus-inspired number that took at least twenty hours last week to finish. “Well, someone has a drag revue this weekend and needed four costumes updated. So. Pot. Kettle.” I know he’s been burning the midnight oil too, balancing his blossoming business and his true love of stage performance.

  The chime of a bell overhead makes the point for me, and I roll my eyes. “I thought you said you didn’t have an appointment right now, L.” I try not to sound too snippy. L’s success both on and off the stage is funding a lot of my side work. If I need to come back after work tonight, I will.

  “I don’t. Or at least I shouldn’t.” L frowns and looks over his shoulder, peeking through the doorway. “Hopefully it’s a walk-in. I’ll go look and see if someone is scheduled.”

  “I have a meeting with my Genius team in two hours. I can come back.”

  “Be right there!” he calls to the front before crossing to his desk and flipping open the large-scale paper calendar on it. The guy seriously needs to move into the digital age with his planning. “This new part-time assistant thing is more headache than it’s worth, I swear.”

  Even from behind I see his shoulders straighten. L has, for lack of a better term, come to full military attention. Whatever is on that paper has him either upset or excited, and by the way he jogs back to the doorway to the salon, I’d guess upset. He peers around the doorjamb, so I join him from the closet.

  Forcibly reminding myself of Prisoner of Azkaban Stan Shunpike, I stage whisper, “What’cha lookin’ at?”

  L stares so intently at the figure at the front counter he literally jumps when I speak.

  “Geez, L. What’s up?” I ask, a chill running down my spine. I turn back to the front of the store, fingers itching to grab my phone. Our case is too fresh in my head, and I start to worry about boogeymen. “Do I need to call Matteo?”

  L rolls his shoulders like he’s loosening up for a game. “No, don’t be silly. Do I look okay? Don’t answer that; I don’t have time to do anything if I don’t.”

  “What. A. Weirdo,” I say to myself as I track his progress across the dark studio and up to the front counter. After a moment, I see his usual posture return, so I shake my head, mystified, and make my way back to the closet by way of his office.

  I’m curious about his reaction, so I just happen to glance at the calendar for today. There’s nothing else for this afternoon except L’s fitting. But underneath that is a yellow sticky note in foreign writing—I assume his part-time assistant’s—that says,

  Someone named Stevie came in to make an appointment but wants to talk with you personally. He’ll stop by again to schedule.

  Is this what weirded L out? This note? I cast an eye up front as I cross back to the closet. L seems perfectly at ease now, selling the man a few bottles of hair product. I shrug, plopping back down against the nearest rack on the floor next to my stack of costumes and resting my head against the soft pouf of a pink taffeta skirt. Exhaustion floods my body instantaneously, and I’m not surprised that I’m already half-asleep in the few minutes it takes L to return.

  He hunkers down next to me, his dark-brown eyes on a level with mine. “Are you sure you want to keep doing this? I know everything’s been a little light speed–paced.”

  “And let you hire a hack? Or, worse yet, sew your own?”

  “I don’t sew. I bedazzle. And pin things. And I can hot-glue with the bes
t of them.”

  I stifle a yawn but straighten. “I’m just living the dream, L. Let’s get you fitted.”

  After a few minutes, I poke the Wookiee in the room. “So, was that Stevie?”

  Underneath my hands, L tenses. “What?”

  “I saw that note in your calendar. Who is Stevie? Your number-one fan?”

  I laugh, but L basically freezes in place.

  “Oh come on, L, loosen up; I’m only teasing . . . wait—are you blushing? Okay, now you really do have to tell me who he is.”

  “No one,” L says. “Just a friend from a long time ago. Lots of them coming out of the woodwork when you’ve been on late-night TV. Now can we get going?”

  It’s obvious he doesn’t want to talk about it, so I oblige him but make a mental note to ask Ryan about Stevie the next time I see him. I wouldn’t want someone taking advantage of L after his local célébrité.

  Halfway through my pulling the circus costume over L’s head, my phone chimes twice from my purse. I pause, wondering if it’s Matteo. I really should give him his own text tone so I can know from across the room. I’ve waffled on it because it seems like such a momentous step in a relationship to give your significant other their own ringtone. Was I ready to commit a favorite song or phrase to forever remind me of Matteo? I’d been pondering the classic Captain America show opener, the one about when Captain America throws his mighty shield, but wondered if that was too on-the-nose—

  “A little help here?” L’s voice is muffled by the beaded cummerbund.

  “Yeah. Sure. Sorry.” I yank down and uncover a disgruntled L. His hair, grown slightly into a short afro these days, is mussed, and I can see a red mark on his cheek where a sequin scratched him. “I—ah—guess I’ll add another zipper on the side.”

  “I hope you and Hot-Lanta get over the honeymoon phase soon. I swear, you two are—”

  My phone rings. L rolls his eyes and motions for me to answer it, so I leave him standing straightjacketed by the costume and grab the phone. Instead of Matteo, it’s my supervisor, Andy. It rolls to voice mail, which I don’t mind, since I prefer to read the message text instead of taking phone calls—so much simpler that way.

  “Huh,” I say after reading the message and trying to help L’s arm through the sleeve with only one hand.

  “‘Huh,’ as in these arms are way too damn tight?”

  “Well, it’s obvious you’ve been working out more since I took the measurements for these, L. How am I supposed to plan for how stacked you are getting?”

  “That sounds like a line, but I’m going to take the compliment. Please plan for this level of stacked-ness for this weekend.”

  “Deal.” I had made those armholes waaaaay too small. Not quite sure what I had been thinking.

  “So, it wasn’t your ladylove breaking your heart?”

  “No—Andy.”

  “Andy . . .”

  I smack L’s arm with my hand. “Andy my supervisor, Andy.”

  “And what did my good friend Andy want?”

  “Actually”—I yank the zipper, only now partly surprised that it won’t go all the way up; I am going to have to let out the seams across his shoulders—“he wanted to let me know”—I tug again and then give up and turn my attention to the frilled tail across the back—“that they’re hiring another artist to help out our team now that I’ve dropped to part time.”

  L grunts, though it may be because he’s partially strangled by the corset-tightness of the costume. I let down the zipper a little, and he shakes his shoulders. “Is this a good thing?”

  “I don’t know. I hope so. Kind of weird to add to the family, but I’m losing my mind trying to balance everything, so I think it’s necessary.”

  The next piece is a much closer fit, a drapey, silvery cocktail dress with accentuated hips and a cameo closure at the tie neck. It’s my favorite of the bunch, the one I’m most proud of. Ironically, it took less time to make than the circus one, but whatever.

  Halfway through the fitting, L’s phone chimes. And then again, and then again. He reaches for it and swipes through several messages, his eyebrows drawing down in a scowl.

  “Everything okay on the home front?” I ask around a mouthful of pins, sticking one carefully into a tuck.

  Without responding, he shuffles to the right and, despite my protest, reaches for the remote and flicks on the old wall-mount TV.

  I follow along as best I can. “You haven’t used that thing since our Firefly binge night . . . what? Five years ago?”

  No response from L. He just flips through channel after channel of fuzz and weird daytime free-access programming like a man possessed. What on earth?

  I wonder if he’s looking for a replay of his interview with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show . . . he’s been on cloud nine, having checked off that bucket-list item last week. News traveled fast that an already-popular local drag queen was instrumental in locking up a double agent, and the media was eating it up. L is reveling in the attention, but L isn’t the only local celebrity to come out of our summer. The Golden Arrow, a secret vigilante citizen, helped us catch Agent Sosa—DEA agent turned drug lord—in a chase through San Diego Comic-Con and link her to the thirty-year-old, unsolved murder of my boss’s father through my favorite comic, The Hooded Falcon. The Golden Arrow planted clues, sprayed white rabbits on suspects, left notes in my personal notebook, and tied up drug dealers in an effort to point the LAPD to the link between the drug-ring crimes and a similar drug ring in my favorite vintage comic.

  Between the clues and my knowledge of the old comic, I was able to discover that Edward Casey Senior—my boss’s father—had actually been writing about a real drug ring, and a real villain, before he died. A villain who’d discovered that Casey Senior planned to out him in the comic book, and had murdered him, covered it up, and gone scot-free as a DEA agent for more than thirty years. Putting the murderer of my childhood idol behind bars should have been the highlight of my life. It brought my oddly normal boyfriend to me and clinched Lawrence, Ryan, and me as family and partners in crime solving, and as a bonus, I didn’t have to spend even a night in jail. And yet, as much as life had settled down to a wonderful new normal, the mystery identity of our masked helper rankled deep in my soul.

  Lawrence takes my silence as an unasked question about his sudden TV obsession.

  “Cleopatra is on the news,” he answers, not taking his eyes off the TV.

  My eyebrows lift in response. “Cleopatra your nemesis, Cleopatra?”

  “The one and only.” He grimaces. “She hasn’t taken my . . . er . . . newfound success well. It’s only gotten worse. She’d better not be throwing shade on the drag revue this weekend.”

  Cleopatra is Lawrence’s main competition on the drag stage in our little corner of the world. And while Lawrence has acclaim from his appearance on Drag Divas (the superpopular reality show and TV drag competition), and recently with the Golden Arrow stuff, Cleopatra has managed to mostly hold her own despite being a homegrown queen with little to no big-star airtime. And now her face fills the screen, completely done up.

  “That’s right, this weekend at the Pink Boa on Santa Monica, starts at nine p.m.” She pouts prettily at the reporter. Her makeup is over-the-top glam—big feather false eyelashes, heaps of glittery pink eyeshadow to match her Barbie-pink sequined gown, white feather boa, tall wig—the whole nine yards. Truth be told, she looks good for a queen in the middle of the day, but I’m not about to say anything to Lawrence. The reporter starts the wrap-up of what I assume has been a brief interest-piece interview about drag.

  L grunts at the screen. “Well, at least it was just promotion. No clue how she got on there, seeing as I’m the organizer. I didn’t even know the news was doing—”

  Cleopatra leans in over the front of the reporter, cutting her off midsentence, same as Lawrence. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you about the theme of the evening.” She raises her hands and wiggles her fingers in a bangle-and-overdon
e-nails jazz hand. “Capes and costumes, it’s superhero-themed, and it’s going to be magical.”

  “The fu—” Lawrence starts.

  I glance at him, being fully aware that the theme is currently set as the “Queen of the Night Circus.” Tension grows in the pit of my stomach.

  Cleopatra fairly drapes herself over the reporter now, who, in truth, handles it as well as one can on regional-access TV. “Yes, there will be superhero numbers. Mine will be the best, of course, so bring your tip money, darlings—and I’m throwing a themed after-party at the Zebra Lounge. Attendees are encouraged to come in costume, and—”

  I have to physically hold L back from charging the television at this point. He’s uttering curses and words like “self-promotion” and “sabotage” as well as several very creative ways that one queen might use pantyhose to kill another.

  We miss her next few words in a scuffle over the TV remote, which L attempts to throw through the television. We hit the volume control instead, and suddenly the reporter’s voice is so loud we both clap our hands over our ears, remote falling to the floor.

  “Did you say a ‘special guest’ as in who I think you mean?”

  “That’s right. A golden opportunity.” She coos a fake laugh and then levels her gaze at the camera. “Let’s just say I’ve developed an inside contact with one of our city’s most popular . . . icons . . . and he’ll be coming to one or all of my parties this fall. There’s no way to know other than to come find out for yourself.”

  The reporter looks at the camera as if this has suddenly become her payday. “Well, folks, you heard it here first. All about this weekend’s drag revue and then, even more interestingly, maybe our first public appearance of the Golden Arrow. Joy? Andrew? Back to you.”

  Even as the anchors back in the studio gape a little at the transition, L is dialing his phone. Within seconds he’s yelling something unintelligible as I stare at the TV.

  The Golden Arrow.

  “There’s no way,” I say, more to myself than to the room.

  “Of course there’s no way—this is all a damn media grab. That basic bitch,” L yells, disentangling himself from the rest of the costume and throwing it to the floor near the chair. “We’re gonna have to finish this later; I have a mess to clean up.”