Dolled Up to Die (18 page)

“Thanks for the invitation, but I’m, oh, you know, involved.”

He overdid a crestfallen look. “Oh. Well, okay then. I should have guessed. But if you’re ever uninvolved, or just want a little fun on the side . . .” Meaningful smile. “I’m a sucker for redheads.”

She took one hand out of her pocket to give him a little fingertip wave of good-bye, then scurried to the car and slid inside.

It wasn’t until she’d started the engine that she realized he’d picked up something from the ground where she’d been standing.

A Belmont Investigations business card. She’d accidentally pulled one out of her pocket when she waved at him.

He looked up from reading the card, and their eyes met. He wasn’t giving her any God’s-gift-to-women grin now. Instead his hard gaze asked,
Just what was she investigating?

Outside the gate Cate kept telling herself there was no reason Rolf would connect a private investigator’s card with a brown-haired woman at the Mystic Mirage. Unfortunately, there was also no reason for her to go to the police with new information about Rolf. She still didn’t know if he had a tattooed arm. Now what? Bad-investigation days were even worse than bad-hair days.

Although she wasn’t too sure of that when she got home and decided she should do something with the snarled wig. She tried combing it. Brushing it. Shaking it. No use. It still looked like something a cat had attacked with all claws unleashed. Which it was, of course. Octavia watched with an interest that suggested she’d like a second chance at the wig.

Cate finally jammed the brown tangle into another plastic bag and headed for the salon where Robyn had purchased it. There, she told the woman she’d like to have the wig repaired and styled. The woman held up the snarled mess and gave Cate an accusing look that put her in some category of felonious wig abusers.

Cate apologized for the condition of the wig and added, “My cat accidentally got hold of it.”

The woman gave her a look that put that statement on a level with “my dog ate my homework.”

“It doesn’t have to look as good as it did before, just wearable.”

“It’s beyond repair. And we don’t have another wig of this model in stock. We can order another one, but it will probably take from ten days to two weeks to get it.”

The wedding was in less than two weeks, so that was cutting it close. Especially when the woman sounded as if she’d really like to blackball Cate from wig ownership for the foreseeable future.

“Okay.” Cate paid for the new wig in advance. “Just call me the minute the new one comes in.”

 15 

Back home, Cate called Robyn from the office phone to ask about the injured hand.

“It’s okay, I guess. They stitched it up. It’s covered with a bandage the size of a watermelon now.”

That was rather hard to picture, but Cate murmured sympathies. “I hope it isn’t hurting.”

“They gave me some pain pills. But I’m not sure it will heal by the wedding. Oh, Cate, I can’t march down the aisle with my hand like this. I’ll look like a-a walking mummy! I won’t even have a finger to put the ring on.”

“Maybe the bandage will be off by then. Or at least the bandage will be smaller.”

“My ring finger is all swollen. I had to take my engagement ring off and put it on a chain around my neck.”

“Surely the swelling will go down by the time of the wedding,” Cate soothed.

“By then my whole hand could be infected. You can get this scary red line, you know, going right up your arm toward your heart. And who knows if there will even be a wedding, since no one seems to know what’s going to happen with Lodge Hill,” Robyn added with an ominous the-world-is-doomed gloom.

Cate decided there was no point adding to Robyn’s doom-and-gloom by mentioning the cat-and-wig disaster. She also realized that at the moment Robyn didn’t want sunshiny predictions; she wanted to wallow in her gloom. So Cate spent the next several minutes making sympathetic sounds while Robyn rambled through various dire possibilities. Robyn didn’t quite get to hand amputation, but close to it.

Finally, apparently realizing herself that none of the grim possibilities were apt to materialize, Robyn gave a self-conscious laugh. “Listen to me. Pretty soon I’ll be obsessing about the building collapsing. The dinner being hijacked. Another murder right there at the wedding.”

Collapse of the building or hijacking of the dinner bounced off Cate as unlikely, but a murder at the wedding? That hit her like a sneak snowball attack. With a rock inside. With two murders already, maybe a third was all too possible. Wasn’t there some old cliché, the kind of saying Mitch might come up with, about trouble coming in threes?

Robyn didn’t seem to notice Cate’s sudden silence. “Thanks for listening, Cate. You’re a real friend. I feel much better now. My hand probably won’t have any more than a Band-Aid on it by the time of the wedding. And surely Lodge Hill won’t close down.”

“Good thinking.”

Cate’s hand stayed on the phone when she set it down, her mind stalled on a third-murder possibility. No, not possible. The killer was running out of victims, for one thing.

A chilling truth clobbered her with another sneak attack. Killers never run out of victims.

The phone in the office rang under Cate’s hand. That’s what phones did, ring, but she jumped anyway. She picked it up, and, without preliminaries, Jo-Jo’s agitated voice pounced on her.

“You heard about Kim’s mother, didn’t you? That she’s dead? Murdered.”

“It’s been in the news.”

“Cate, would you believe, the police have been here to question
me
about her death?”

“They think you had something to do with it?”

Jo-Jo couldn’t have been the killer herself. It was definitely a male arm that had shot out of the curtain and grabbed Cate’s throat. But even gray-haired little old ladies had been known to
hire
killers. And Jo-Jo had all that money coming from Eddie the Ex’s insurance.

“They didn’t come right out and say that, but that must be what they’re thinking. Though I can’t imagine why they’d think I had anything to do with it.”

How about Jo-Jo taking vengeance on Celeste for killing Eddie? Cate had thought Jo-Jo was the sole suspect in Eddie’s killing, but maybe the police had an eye on Celeste too. So the possibility of Jo-Jo hiring a tattooed killer to kill the person who’d killed her ex-husband also loomed for them.

“Pretty soon they’ll be digging up cold cases from ten years ago and blaming me for those too,” Jo-Jo fretted.

“I’m sure they’re just checking out anyone who’s ever had any connection with Celeste,” Cate soothed. “And you do have a roundabout connection.”

“Well, yes. And there wasn’t any love lost between us, that’s for sure. But what happened to her . . . that’s really awful. No one deserves that, not even Celeste. But the police shouldn’t be wasting time on me.”

Cate repeated her earlier statement about confidence in the competence of the local police.

“If they’re so competent, how come they haven’t caught Eddie’s killer yet?” Jo-Jo retorted. Then in a quick change of subject she added, “Oh, I don’t think I told you. I bought
a car! A nice 2011 Chevy Malibu. Now I can run out to the house every day to visit and feed Maude.”

“I’m glad to hear that. You’ve received Eddie’s insurance money, then?” Enough to hire a killer as well as buy a car?

“No. I signed a contract to buy the car, thirty-six months of payments. I hate to be in debt, but I had to do it, for Maude. Without the alimony money coming in, I’ve also had to use my credit card for some things. I hope the insurance comes through soon. I need it.”

Okay, cancel the hired-killer possibility. Hired killers probably didn’t accept Visa or MasterCard.

“Actually, if it weren’t for Maude, I think I’d just pick up and head for Arizona,” Jo-Jo declared. “The lawyer I talked to said the police couldn’t keep me from doing that, unless they actually arrest and charge me with something.”

Which they might do. But Cate only said, “Let me know if you decide to do that, okay?”

Cate wanted to make another phone call. She didn’t have the number, but even unlisted numbers were supposed to be easily available on the internet. She started looking.

Maybe “easily available” was true for some surfers, but not Cate. People her age and younger were supposed to be the generation that came complete with a computer gene installed, but her installation had apparently been short a few cyberspace screws.

After twenty minutes, she decided there was an easier way and his name was Mitch, who had more than enough computer genes. She called his cell phone. He said he’d see what he could find out and call her back. Which he did, although he didn’t instantly rattle off the number. She wasn’t surprised that a mini-lecture came first.

“I suppose you’re going to do something with this number that I won’t approve of,” he said.

“Maybe I’ll use it to run a scam about how I’m in jail in Nigeria, and would Kim please wire money.”

He ignored the facetious suggestion. “I think you’re planning to call her and get yourself involved in what my grandmother would call ‘a heap of trouble.’”

“Yes, that’s my plan. The bigger the heap, the better.”

Big, put-upon sigh, but he gave her the number. “Let me know if you need backup again.”

“Will do.” But not if she could help it. At some point, she had to be able to stand alone as a PI.

“By the way, I have something to show you. I’ll come by later, okay?”

“Some new electronic gadget?” she asked.

“You’ll see.”

Cate dialed the number Mitch gave her. An answering machine picked up after four rings. It felt strange, hearing Eddie the Ex speaking while remembering him sprawled on the floor of Jo-Jo’s workroom, bullet hole in his forehead. Eerie. A voice from beyond the grave cheerfully telling her to leave a message and he’d get back to her.

In spite of how the unexpected voice rattled her, she managed to leave a reasonably coherent message for Kim. She didn’t have high hopes that Kim would respond, but when the phone rang ten minutes later, she jumped for it hopefully.

Not Kim. A male voice.

“Ms. Kinkaid, this is Roger Ledbetter, of Winkler, Ledbetter, and Agrossi, Attorneys-at-Law.”

Mr. Ledbetter was the lawyer handling the estate of the woman who had originally owned Octavia, and who was now
overseeing construction of the house that was part of the cat’s inheritance. He always identified himself with careful formality. Cate had wondered if he did this to reinforce his voice of authority, or if he had some secret insecurity about people not remembering him.

“Yes, Mr. Ledbetter?”

“I’m calling because the contractor says the house will be ready for occupancy as soon as the final inspection by the building department is complete. So it’s time for you and Octavia to give the house a final walk-through to make certain everything is satisfactory.”

“You think Octavia should check it out?”

“Don’t you?” He sounded taken aback by her surprised reaction and uncharacteristically uncertain when he added, “I’ve never had a cat. I don’t know much about them. But I don’t want her to be unhappily surprised by any aspect of the house.”

Mr. Ledbetter may not know cats, but he took his job as executor of the estate seriously. He’d even had a private investigator check Cate out before granting her ownership of Octavia. She refrained from saying she doubted Octavia would sue if she didn’t like the color of the carpet.

“Okay, I can take Octavia over for a look in a day or two.”

Mr. Ledbetter’s brisk self-assurance returned. “I’ll be in court for the next few days, so I need to meet you there today. Will 3:00 be suitable?”

Spend the afternoon on a house tour with a deaf cat and a lawyer? Not an opportunity to which everyone had privilege. “Okay. We’ll be there.”

She called and left a message on Mitch’s voice mail about meeting Mr. Ledbetter at the house, and that she’d see him and whatever he had to show her later.