Hot Button Read online

  More praise for

  Button Holed

  “Kylie Logan’s Button Holed is absolutely terrific! I love it, and can’t wait for the next installment in the series.”

  —Diane Mott Davidson, New York Times bestselling author

  “This is the opening act of an engaging amateur-sleuth mystery series, and if this book is any indication, readers have a special and original new series to enjoy. The protagonist is independent and resolute… She enlists a quirky crew to assist her on her quest. Kylie Logan overcomes the subgenre flaw of why the heroine must investigate with an entertaining plot and a strong cast led by a woman who refuses to be Button Holed.”

  —The Mystery Gazette

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Kylie Logan

  BUTTON HOLED

  HOT BUTTON

  Hot Button

  KYLIE LOGAN

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME, NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  HOT BUTTON

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / June 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Connie Laux.

  Except from Panic Button by Kylie Logan copyright © 2012 by Connie Laux.

  Cover illustration by Jennifer Taylor.

  Cover design by Annette Fiore Defex.

  Interior text design by Kristin del Rosario.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or

  electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of

  copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58087-5

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For collectors everywhere who

  understand the temptation of buttons!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Readers often ask where story ideas come from. Honestly, it’s hard to say. Each book is different and so is every author. Sometimes, a story idea might spring from something I see on the news. Or a scrap of conversation I overhear in a restaurant. Other times, I’ll play with some obscure historical fact and see where my imagination might take it.

  The idea for Hot Button originated back when I was first thinking about writing a mystery series about buttons. I was messing around online, doing research and indulging my interest in vintage buttons, when I came across the story about Geronimo and his buttons.

  How could I resist!

  As for the button enthusiasts portrayed within these pages…

  When it comes to button collecting, I am the rawest of beginners. I am grateful for the advice and guidance given to me by all the collectors and dealers I’ve met. Their knowledge of not only buttons, but of their construction, their history, and their significance to fashion and society, is amazing. I am always impressed!

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Mother of Pearl Buttons

  Panic Button

  Chapter One

  WITHIN TEN MINUTES OF MEETING THAD WYANT FOR THE first time, there were two things I knew about him:

  1. He was high maintenance.

  2. He wasn’t going to let me forget it.

  On the five-minute walk from where I collected him at O’Hare over to the baggage carousel where we’d pick up the luggage he’d brought with him from Santa Fe, I added two more items to the list:

  3. It was going to be a very long week; and

  4. Thad liked scotch. A lot.

  “That showed that varmint a thing or two!” Finished telling the story he’d been recounting loud enough for everyone in the airport bar to hear, Thad slapped his thigh, threw back his head, and laughed. No small feat, considering he managed to do it all while downing a glass of Johnny Walker Blue. Blue. That’s the expensive stuff.

  “One more for the road.” He tapped the bar in front of my ice water. “And this young lady here, she’ll be paying for it,” he told the bartender. “Her and that cute little button club of hers.”

  “That cute little button club…” I didn’t give the words the same sickeningly sweet twist Thad had. But then, that would have been tough since my teeth were clenched. It was no wonder why. The International Society of Antique and Vintage Button Collectors was a group near and dear to my heart. It better be. I was chairing this year’s convention and—I glanced at the time on my cell phone—I still had a heck of a lot to do back at the hotel before this evening’s opening festivities.

  It was no easy thing to stifle my worries, but then, I reminded myself the delay was all for a good cause. The best of causes. Thad Wyant might be loud, pushy, and more worried about grabbing a drink than getting to the conference, but he was also reclusive—and legendary in the button business. The fact that I’d convinced him to come to Chicago at all was something of a coup. Now all I had to do was not murder him before we got over to
the convention.

  “Our membership is honored that you agreed to give our keynote address this year, Mr. Wyant.” Oh yeah, that was me, sounding as professional as it was possible for a woman to sound when she knew the Blue Line train to downtown was set to arrive in exactly four and one-half minutes, and there were a million little details that needed her attention, details that couldn’t be handled from O’Hare.

  “Who you talkin’ to, girl? My dear ol’ daddy? He’s the only Mr. Wyant I know.” Another of his laughs rattled the glasses on the bar. “I wouldn’a agreed to come to this here conference at all if it wasn’t for you sweet-talkin’ me with your letters. You won me over, darlin’, heart and soul.” To prove this, he pressed one hand to his heart. “That means you can call me Thad, just like all my friends do. We are friends, ain’t we?”

  It’s a delicate line a conference chair walks.

  An older-than-middle-aged man in ratty jeans, a worn flannel shirt, dusty cowboy boots, and a seen-better-days Stetson. Scotch on his breath. A leering smile and a slow, deliberate look that took in everything from my black skirt and jacket to my tasteful white tank, and yeah, it did kind of make my skin crawl.

  Of course, all that was balanced by other attributes: keynote speaker at the most prestigious button event of the year. Expert extraordinaire on Western-themed buttons. Owner of the one-and-only-known-to-exist, coveted, and wonderfully historic Geronimo button.

  Automatically, I glanced at the carry-on Thad had tossed on the floor beside his bar stool. Was the Geronimo button in there? Well, of course it was. I answered my own question because there really couldn’t be any other answer. No collector in his right mind would dare put the button into checked baggage. Not the Geronimo button.

  “So what d’you think?”

  Thad’s question snapped me back to reality, and once there, I heard that clock tick-tick-ticking away inside my head again.

  “You think we’ll get a chance to get some of that Italian beef? I’ve been reading about it online, Josie. They say Chicago is downright famous for them sandwiches.”

  Who uses words like downright? And varmint, for that matter?

  Who couldn’t point out that Thad talked like a bit player in an old TV Western? Not without offending the man hundreds of button collectors from all over the world had traveled to Chicago to finally meet.

  “I’ll make sure you get an Italian beef sandwich,” I told him, deliberately leaving out the part about how there wouldn’t be any money left in the conference budget for Italian beef—or anything else—if he didn’t stop drinking the top-shelf stuff at the speed of light. “In fact…” I grabbed my purse. Subtle hint. “It’s a forty-five-minute train ride back into town, but if we hurry, we’ll still have plenty of time this afternoon. We can stop at one of the Italian beef places on our way over to the hotel. If there’s time, that is.”

  OK, so that last bit was not quite as subtle. It might as well have been attached to a helium balloon and dangling up near the ceiling. That’s how far over Thad’s head it went.

  He crooked one bushy gray eyebrow at me. “Shucks, little lady, I must have heard you wrong. I could have sworn you said train. Well, that for sure can’t be true.” Like a man who’d just been given a death sentence he didn’t deserve, Thad shook his head sadly. “A man like me—”

  I knew what he was going to say, and I didn’t give him the chance. “You’re used to being driven. Of course you are. It’s just that my friend, Stan, he was supposed to come pick you up this afternoon, and he couldn’t make it. Just as he was about to leave to come over here, he got a call that his granddaughter was having her baby. And obviously, a great-grandchild has to take precedence over doing me a favor.”

  With thumb and forefinger, Thad snapped his cowboy hat further back on his head. “It surely does,” he said. “But I gotta say, I don’t see as how that has anything to do with me. And it sure, by gum, has nothing to do with a train. But then, I guess my ears is playin’ tricks on me. On account of the plane ride and all. There’s no way you said train. ’Cause if you did, that would mean you’d expect me to git on down there to baggage claim and pick up my own luggage and haul it down to this big, fancy conference on a train. And there’s no way in hell a conference expects that of the guest of honor. Not a conference that’s dragged a man all the way clear across the country from his home, where he’s nice and comfortable and happy spending all these years just writin’ about buttons and studyin’ buttons and never comin’ out to meet people because buttons… Well, shucks, buttons is enough. That man, he don’t need people to make his life complete. And so he’s doin’ you and all these other button folks a big ol’ favor. And expectin’ him to be treated like just an average sort of Joe…” With one thick-fingered hand, he waved away the very idea as preposterous. “It just don’t make sense, does it?”

  It did.

  At least it had back at the hotel when I was going through the registration list one last time and I got that call from Stan. By that time, the other conference committee members were too busy to drop what they were doing and get out to O’Hare. And it would have taken me too long to go home, get my car, and get over to the airport. I would have been way late picking up Thad, and that, to me, was the height of rudeness.

  Besides, it wasn’t exactly like I was asking him to rough it. Thousands of people took the El every day. It was efficient and economical. The train made sense.

  Yet there I was, with my tongue tied, unable to explain and afraid that whatever I said, I was about to offend the man I’d worked with for more than a year in order to make his appearance at the convention possible.

  “You see, it’s like this, Mr. Wyant—”

  “Wyant? Thad Wyant? Well, isn’t this lucky!”

  The voice came from behind me, and I spun around on the bar stool and found myself face-to-face with a face I hadn’t seen in six weeks.

  Eyes the color of a shot of double espresso and hair to match. Shoulders that wouldn’t quit.

  That afternoon, they were encased in a black suit jacket that set off a blindingly white shirt, black pants, a killer silk tie in swirls of red and gray, and—

  A chauffeur’s cap and a hand-lettered sign that read “Giancola and Wyant” in fat Sharpie letters?

  Bewildered, I sat back, the better to take stock of Mitchell Kazlowski. My ex acted like being there where he had no business was the most natural thing in the world. Which in Kaz’s world, it usually is.

  “You must be Ms. Giancola.” His smile was wide and, yes, as seductive as a nibble of Godiva truffle. But then, Kaz knew that. In fact, I’d bet he was counting on it. He put two fingers to his hat. “I’m from the limo service, ma’am,” he said. “Here to pick up you and Mr. Wyant.”

  “Well, that’s more like it.” At the same time Thad clapped Kaz on the back, he slipped off his bar stool. “I’ll just head to the outhouse…” He tipped his head toward the back of the bar and the sign that indicated the restrooms were that way. “I’ll be back in a jiffy. I knew it. I just knew it.” When he looked my way, his grin revealed uneven teeth. “One look at you, little lady, and I knew you’d know how to treat your guest of honor right.”

  Lucky for Kaz, he waited until Thad walked away before he had the nerve to chuckle and say, “Little lady.”

  I swung his way. “What are you doing here?”

  Kaz rolled back on his heels. “Looks like I’m saving your pretty little butt.”

  I ignored the “pretty little” comment. But only because I had more important things to worry about. “How did you—”

  “Saw Stan.” I guess he was taking his role as chauffeur seriously, because Kaz reached down and retrieved Thad’s carry-on. I was tempted to tell him about the precious button inside and how—considering that Kaz doesn’t care about buttons and I am one of the country’s most respected experts on the subject—he really should let me handle the bag. Kaz didn’t give me the chance.

  “I was actually heading over to see you, a
nd your apartment door was open, and I poked my head in and saw—”

  “Chaos, right?” I am organized and tidy. I couldn’t stand the thought. “Since I’ll be at the conference for the next seven days, I’m having the kitchen remodeled. And as long as they’ve got the place torn apart, I figured I’d have the rooms painted, too.” I squeezed my eyes shut and shuddered. “How bad is it?”

  “It actually looks like they’re making good progress. You did want the living room painted purple and orange, right?” When my eyes flew open, Kaz laughed. “Just kidding,” he said.

  It was another one of his not-so-funny jokes—I hoped—and I ignored it and got back to the matter at hand. “And Stan…”

  “Oh yeah, Stan. When I realized you weren’t around, I left, and I met Stan at the elevator, and he told me about the new baby and how he was supposed to be here and how you were going to pick up Wyant and take him back to the hotel on the train. Jo, Jo, Jo.” Kaz shook his head like Thad just had, only there was a spark in Kaz’s eyes when he did it. “You’ve got to stop being so practical. This Wyant guy is some kind of button rock star, right? Then that’s how you have to treat him. It’s what he’s expecting and what he deserves.”

  “I guess you’re right.” In the three years we’d been married, I don’t think I’d ever spoken those words to Kaz. Right wasn’t something Kaz usually was. With Kaz, it was more like in over his head. In trouble. Owing somebody money and showing up to see me because—

  I narrowed my eyes and gave him the once-over. “What do you want?” I asked.

  Kaz is delicious, and he knows it. That would explain why he thought he could get away with flashing a smokin’-hot smile and resting one hand on my arm in a very un-chauffeur-like way. “Just trying to help,” he crooned.

  “Yeah, like you were just trying to help when I was investigating that murder a while ago, and you practically scared me to death, hiding out in my car and hitching a ride to West Virginia with me.”