Beauty to Die For and Other Mystery Shorts (10 page)

“Since when did you become a fashion critic?” Mac hissed at the dog. Now the bird hat was annoying him as much as it did Gnarly.

At twenty-nine thousand dollars, the bidder in the front seat dropped out.

While the auctioneer waited, it went once, it went twice, and Mac raised his paddle to flip the hat off the woman’s head onto the floor in the aisle in front of Gnarly, who pounced on the bird that had been torturing him.

“We have thirty thousand from number seven-oh-two!”

Ben and Archie followed the tip of the auctioneer’s fingertip to Mac.

She grabbed the paddle out of his hand and checked the number painted on it. “You’re number seven-oh-two.”

But Mac had other matters to contend to.

With the blue bird in his grasp, Gnarly ripped it from the hat and was trying to eat it.

With the bird lady screaming bloody murder, Mac grabbed Gnarly in a head lock and extracted the mangled Styrofoam and feathered creature from his jaws to hand them back to its owner. “I’m sorry about your hat. Maybe you can fix it with some glue.”

“Peasants!” She grabbed her hat and bird and stormed out.

“Do we have thirty-one thousand for Celeste Taylor’s wedding gown worn in
Sparkle
?” the auctioneer was asking.

“You just bid thirty thousand for that dress!” Ben laughed. “’You’ve been bidding on it and you didn’t even know it.”

“Going twice!”

Mac felt the blood drain from his face. He froze like a statue in his seat. “Don’t anybody move,” he whispered. “Don’t even breath.”

Holding his breath, he prayed that one of the other two bidders would cough up another thousand, hundred, ten dollars, dime to make it all go away so that he could have a good laugh about his blunder on the way home.

Judging by the expression of the bidder eyeing him from the front row, it wasn’t going to happen.

Mac’s only hope was the phone-in bidder. Desperate, he turned to the man on the phone. Frederick was handing a coffee mug to the operator. With a glance in Mac’s direction, he hung up the phone before taking a sip of his coffee.

“Going thrice!” The auctioneer announced in a loud voice while pointing across the room at Mac. “Sold to the man with the bird dog!”

“I saw that you didn’t really mean to bid,” Millicent Taylor, the woman in the pant suit who had been conferring with her lawyer told Mac as he wrote out the check for thirty thousand dollars to complete his purchase of the rhinestone gown.

“I’m a man, I can take it.” Mac handed her the check.

“I’m really sorry,” she said. “If there was anything—” She turned to the man who she had been conferring with while watching the bidding. “Maybe—” She turned back to Mac. “This is my mother’s attorney, Reginald Patterson.” She turned back to her lawyer. “Everyone saw that it was a mistake …”

“Millicent, if you take back items then you aren’t going to make enough money to get the estate out of the red.” He flashed his bright white teeth at Mac. “I’m sure, being a businessman, Mr. Faraday, you understand.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Mac didn’t want to admit that he felt sorrier for her selling her belongings. “Maybe my daughter will wear it when she meets some nice man, he passes a background check, and I allow him to get close enough to my daughter for them to get married.”

“Maybe,” Reginald interjected before Mac could turn away. “Privately, I could take that gown off your hands. Of course, you won’t make back all of your money. I knew Celeste for years and am sorry to say that it was business for us so much that I neglected to get anything to remember her by.”

“You want her dress?” Mac looked him up and down.

“Those gowns belong in a museum,” he said. “The Smithsonian. They’re a part of Americana.”

“If we didn’t need the money so bad to pay Mom’s debts, that’s where I would send them,” Millicent said with teary eyes.

“Give me a call.” Patterson handed Mac his business card. “We’ll work something out.”

As disgusted and embarrass as Mac was, his companions were laughing it up a few paces away. His tail high up in the air, wagging away, Gnarly seemed to be enjoying the joke as much as they were.

The man from the front row made a “psst” noise in Mac’s ear. “Hey, buddy.” He grasped his elbow. “How much do you want for it?”

Still reeling after paying thirty thousand dollars for a woman’s gown, Mac had to wrap his mind around being offered money to resale it.

Wait a minute, Mac. I bought it for thirty thousand, even if by accident. That means I need to sell it for more in order to make a profit. Ask for more than thirty thousand.

Meanwhile, the man in the suit thrust a business card in Mac’s hand. “I might be able to get my client to go up to forty thou.”

The card read Eli Harris. The address was New York, New York. Seeing that his title was Investment Counselor, Mac took an instant dislike to him.

This dude came all the way from New York to buy a dress?

“Would you take forty for it?” He already had his cell phone up against his ear.

Before Mac could say yes or no, the investment counselor was talking away, explaining that he was talking to the wealthy fan of Celeste Taylor who would give anything for the Sparkle Wedding Gown and stepped away.

Gee, that’s a ten thousand dollar profit in less than thirty minutes. That was easy.

Mac was calculating how many thousand it was per ten minutes when Catherine grabbed him from behind by the upper arm and hissed in his ear. “I don’t believe it! I really don’t believe it!”

“Believe what?” Mac glanced over his shoulder at where Archie and Ben were studying the jewels sown and glued onto the bodice of the gown. They were looking in disbelief at Catherine whose face was pale. “What?”

“Those aren’t rhinestones. They’re diamonds. Every single stinking one of those is real.”

“Are you sure?” Mac asked.

“The appraiser told us that they were fake,” Archie said.

“I’ve worked with gemstones for over ten years before I got married. I know jewels,” Catherine’s voice rose in volume while pointing at the gown. “That gown is covered in real diamonds. It’s got to be worth at least a half a million dollars—if not a million.”

“Stop the auction!” Millicent Taylor suddenly screamed. She threw out both of her arms while yelling at the top of her voice. “Don’t sell anything else!” She turned to the lawyer at the desk. His mouth was hanging open. “Give everyone back their money until we get another appraiser to examine everything. I knew there was something funny going on. Mom insisted that I was going to be really pleasantly surprised with the estate that she was leaving me—this is not what I expected it to be. That woman tried to rob me!”

She looked beyond Mac and pointed her finger. “Someone grab her!”

The doors clanged as Brenda Collins ran from the auction room.

Mac and Gnarly gave chase through the crowd. In the hallway, Mac heard Gnarly barking while running up the stairs to the second floor of the mansion. At the top of the stairs, Mac heard a door slam. Gnarly was jumping on what appeared to be a bedroom door at the end of the hall.

Before he could reach the dog, Mac heard a woman’s scream, followed by a chorus of screams from the guests outside as the body of the appraiser tumbled over the verandah railing to land in the courtyard below.

He threw open the door. Gnarly raced out and jumped up to place his paws on top of the bannister. Below, they saw the body of Brenda Collins sprawled out in a flower bed.

Archie and Ben knelt next to her body before looking up at Mac. One of the security guards was standing behind them while calling emergency on his radio.

“What happened?” Ben called up to him.

“It wasn’t me,” Mac said before recalling that Gnarly was scratching at the bedroom door. Behind him, he saw that the verandah door leading into the bedroom was open. The glass was broken in the window frames. Jewelry boxes and cases were scattered around the room. Doors hung open and empty drawers were pulled out.

Gnarly sniffed the front of a jewel case and lowered his snout to the floor before trotting out into the hallway.

Sounding the alarm, Mac ran out onto the verandah and yelled over the side down to Ben and Archie. “It’s a robbery! There’s a bunch of empty jewelry cases up here and each one is empty.”

“Mom’s jewels!” Millicent screamed from where she was in the crowd around the fallen body. “The Blue Starburst! I’ll bet she lied about that, too.”’

Ben and Archie waded through the crowd to get to the parking lot.

Mac ran down the stairs. In the foyer, he dashed around Frederick the butler who was about to close the door after Gnarly had run out.

“You really shouldn’t be letting that dog run loose like that,” Mac heard the butler chastise him on his way outside.

They could hear the screaming and cursing before they found them in the parking lot. A man in a security guard’s uniform was in a tug-of-war with Gnarly who had caught one end of his duffle bag in mid-air.

“Give me that, you dumb dog!” In the struggle, the imposter guard’s cap fell off to expose the silver at his temples. He was the phone operator taking the phone-in bid for the diamond gown.

Gnarly shook his head like a predator snapping the neck of its prey to tear open the end of the bag. Diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires spilled out of the opening to scatter across the driveway and sparkle in the sun.

“Mom’s jewels!” Millicent dropped down onto her knees to gather them up. “You thief!”

The guard dropped the bag and turned to run, only to collide with Mac who grabbed him, whirled him around, and pinned his arm behind his back. “You’re not going anywhere. You have a lot of explaining to do. Starting with murdering your partner.”

“That wasn’t me who killed her. He did it. He’s covering his tracks. That’s why I was getting out. I needed the jewels to pay my way out of the country before he caught up with me.”

“Who?” Ben asked.

A shot rang out.

The security guard fell back against Mac. A growing spot of blood grew on his chest and drained down the front of his shirt before he slumped down to the ground to die at Mac’s feet.

“We can’t detain these people,” Reginald Patterson told Mac and Ben after they had given instructions to the security guards, who had thought they were going to spend their day guarding an old woman’s belongings. “Neither of you have jurisdiction here,” the lawyer said.

“We have two murder victims,” Mac said.

“Which is why everyone wants to leave,” Patterson said.

“If I was a killer, I’d be wanting to get out of here ASAP, too,” Mac said. “That’s why I have instructed your security officers to not let anyone leave.” He glanced across the porch to the two men chowing down on donuts and sighed.

“You know, you’re going to look like a real boob if it turns out your friend is mistaken about the glass on that gown,” the lawyer smirked.

“If she’s mistaken, why did the appraiser run?” Ben asked.

“Who hired that appraiser?” Mac folded his arms and looked the lawyer in the eye.

“I did,” he said. “I’ve used her before. She was very good at what she did and we never had any problem with her in the past.”

“Didn’t you find it fishy when she said all the jewelry and artwork was fake?” Ben asked.

“Celeste was having some financial difficulties the last few years of her life,” Patterson said with a shrug of his shoulders. “Everyone has. She had made some bad investments.”

“Enough to sell off all of her jewelry and artwork?” Ben was asking when Mac’s attention turned to something else.

His mind was working on the swindle. The phony operator was obviously talking to the man behind the swindle—the one covering his tracks. Across the living room, he saw Eli Harris, the investment counselor who had also bid on the gown.

Mac was on his way across the room to talk to him when Archie intercepted him. She had her computer tablet under her arm. “I did a background check on our phony auction worker-slash-security guard. According to his driver’s license, his name is Clark Dunning. His address is the same as Brenda Collins. They were obviously living together either romantically or as roommates.”

“Since they were both murdered, they couldn’t have set this up,” Mac said. “They were working with or for someone.”

“I also found a fifty-thousand dollar deposit in Brenda Collin’s bank account.” Archie showed him the tablet.

“Good work,” Mac said. “Now here’s something else I want you to check into. Reginald Patterson’s finances. Look specifically for an off-shore account.”

“You think he did this?”

“He’s a lawyer, isn’t he?” Mac said with a smile. “Call it my own prejudice. The first person I look to for a suspect is always the family lawyer.”

“What would you do if I told your lawyer that?”

“You don’t have to. I tell him that all the time.” Mac hurried past her to catch up with the fellow bidder, Eli Harris. “What have you heard from your client?”

Eli Harris chuckled. “I really am an investment counselor.”