The Tailor Who Disappeared
Chapter 07 - The Tailor Who Disappeared
The label inside the replacement jacket bore the name Bellini & Cross, a prestigious tailor whose Manhattan studio had closed without explanation two days earlier. Nora and Lena drove there before dawn.
The front door was unlocked. Nora noticed that the lock had not been broken; someone with a key had entered calmly, erased the records, and left the destruction behind as a warning. A single unfinished white cuff remained pinned to a worktable, stained with blue tailor’s chalk like a fingerprint. Inside, mannequins stood in the darkness like silent witnesses. Drawers had been emptied, computers removed, and every order book destroyed—except for a strip of carbon paper caught beneath a cutting table.
Nora shaded the paper with tailor’s chalk until faint letters appeared: J. HART / WHITE DINNER SUIT / ALTERATION AUTHORIZED BY C.H. / SECOND COPY TO V.V.
“Conrad ordered two suits,” Lena said. “Vanessa received the duplicate.”
A sound came from the back room.
They found Matteo Bellini hiding behind stacked garment boxes, bruised, exhausted, and terrified. He admitted Conrad had forced him to build the hidden mechanism. Matteo believed it contained only a sedative meant to make Julian collapse after the vows. When he learned the substance was lethal, he tried to remove it. Conrad’s men caught him, destroyed the studio, and demanded he disappear.
“Who put Evelyn’s picture inside?” Nora asked.
Matteo looked at her carefully. “An old woman came to my shop three weeks ago. She knew your mother. She said the suit would reach Clara’s daughter because Conrad always hired local help for final adjustments. She gave me the photograph and told me where to stitch it.”
“Evelyn?”
“No. Her nurse. A woman named May.”
Matteo also revealed the second stage of the plot. At noon, Julian would sign a marital trust granting Vanessa temporary voting power if he became medically incapacitated. If he died after the ceremony, Vanessa would control his shares. She would then transfer them to Conrad in exchange for clearing her family’s enormous debts.
Julian was not marrying into love. He was walking into a corporate execution.
Lena arranged a safe place for Matteo and sent copies of his statement to a prosecutor she trusted. But they still needed Evelyn, and they still did not know who held the original suit.
As Nora left the studio, her phone buzzed with a photograph from an unknown number.
It showed Julian asleep in his bedroom.
May you like
On the chair beside him lay the dangerous white tuxedo.
The message beneath it read: ALTER ONE STITCH, AND HE DIES BEFORE THE WEDDING.
