Read Grand Theft Retro (Style & Error Mystery Series Book 5) for Free Online Page B

feed him. I found my hobo bag on the floor, half of the contents spilled across the blue and white linoleum tile. Both my hobo bag and the folded copies of Pritchard’s many ID cards had a regurgitated blob on top of them.
    “What is this?” I asked Logan. He looked up at me and meowed, as if asking me why I’d made photocopies of my coworker’s questionable ID cards in the first place. “Oh, come on. The man is clearly hiding something. Who fakes an ID from Utah?” I pulled several paper towels from the roll and wiped the gunk from them and from the handbag. Both now had a wet spots that didn’t smell particularly fresh.
    Recently I’d noticed that Logan had put on a little bit of weight. The vet had suggested that I switch him to diet cat food, which had not proven to be a popular lifestyle change. My own diet was far from an infomercial for weight loss and it never seemed fair to enjoy the particular savory delight of meatball sandwiches and cheese steaks alone, so, while Logan now dined on reduced calorie kitty vittles, he also enjoyed the occasional meatball or chicken finger. I suspected the diet cat food was a poor substitute and the hairball was a message.
    I went back upstairs, showered, brushed my teeth, and dressed in a black turtleneck, black flared pants, and a paisley caftan. I blow dried my hair upside down and tied a paisley scarf around my head Rhoda-style. Chunky heeled boots gave me a couple of additional inches of height. I dug a black fringed handbag out of the closet and carried it downstairs.
    When I got back to the kitchen, I put my wallet, lip glosses, and phone into a black fringed handbag and then opened a can of diet cat food for Logan. He looked at the bowl and then at me and meowed. “It’s diet cat food or nothing.” I opened the freezer and pulled out a box of frozen waffles. He meowed again. I looked back and forth between the waffles and his bowl. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll eat Bran Flakes. Are you happy?”
    Logan sniffed the bowl of food, gave me the saddest (most manipulative) look, and gagged a few times until another mess came up. After cleaning it, I left a message for Nancie that I’d be late getting to the office and took Logan directly to the vet.
    “What have we here?” Nancie asked when she entered my cubicle several hours later. Logan, doped within an inch of his kitty mind, was sacked out on the carpet. He opened one eye and made a noise that sounded like sandpaper on a piece of bark, and then laid his head back on his paw and fell asleep.
    “My cat is having trouble adjusting to his new diet food. I took him to the vet this morning. Apparently the higher fiber content has upset his stomach. He’s drowsy because he just got a shot to relax him.”
    She ran her hand over his head. “Is the poor baby sick? Did the ittle bitty baby swallow something icky?”
    Logan opened one eye again. Logan was neither ittle or bitty. He was a far cry from a baby too. He might have been sick, but the look he gave Nancie conveyed pretty much everything I was thinking. And then he stood up and gagged a few times, just to make sure she got the point.
    She stood upright and stepped back. “New shoes. Suede. Can’t take a chance.” She backed away toward the opening to my cubicle, but stopped. “How’s the research going?”
    “Research?”
    “For the magazine. I heard from Pritchard this morning. He said he struck the mother lode of Seventies fashion at that private collector’s house.”
    “What’s the collector’s name?”
    “Jennie Mae Tome.”
    “How did Pritchard find her?”
    “He’s resourceful. And good for us! That boy is going to ensure that this whole project is a success. Make sure you carry your weight on this one, Sam. I know you know we’re a team, but there’s no point in working at odds.”
    I wish Logan had thrown up on Nancie’s new suede shoes. What had Pritchard really done so far? Not much, as far as I’d seen. And the fact that Pritchard