Death by Design — Charles Ray

Franklin ‘Pierre' Honeywell is one of Washington, DC's best-known fashion designers. A man with an acerbic personality, he comes to Al Pennyback, claiming that someone is threatening his life. At the urging of his partner, Heather Bunche, Al takes the case, even though he develops a dislike for his new client. He finds a number of people with good reason to dislike Honeywell, from the models who work for him, and who he abuses horribly, to his former partner and lover Calvin Rigg, who is now one of his main competitors. After checking a long list of suspects, Al comes to the conclusion that Honeywell is indeed being threatened, but, despite having initially thinking Rigg might be the author of the threats, is convinced that he's innocent. Worse, none of the other suspects seem valid either. When Honeywell's assistant, Tina Wittmer, finds him in his studio with a pair of scissors protruding from his chest, Al finds himself caught up in a murder investigation. The police find evidence at the scene implicating Rigg, and arrest him. Rigg's attorney hires Al to prove his client's innocence. Al has to deal with Heather's fascination with the fashion scene as he goes back over his original investigation to see what he might have missed. Along with Heather, his girl friend, Sandra Winter, is also a fan of fashion, dragging him to a fashion show where he's bored and distracted. In a dream, Al's late wife tells him to look ‘close to home' for an answer to the mystery. He is stymied until he learns that the victim left his business to Tina, a talented but inexperienced designer. When he learns that Tina is, like the victim, a cocaine addict with paranoid tendencies, he begins to think that his original view that she was just an innocent bystander was wrong, but he can't tie her to the scene at the time of death, or to the evidence found near Honeywell's body. Convinced of Tina's guilt, Al uses logic, old-fashioned snooping, and a modicum of dumb luck to find the missing pieces of a puzzle, nearly becoming a victim himself when Tina's accomplice, Larry Roach, a male model nearly skewers him with another pair of scissors. In solving the case, Al discovers the true meaning of ‘close to home.' It wasn't just the fact that the killer was the person closest to the victim, but inside himself. He'd made the mistake of overlooking Tina because she seemed such an innocent. He missed the clear signs of her drug addiction, ambition, and paranoia, treating her as one of the ‘invisible' support people who are always around but never noticed.