Dolled Up to Die (7 page)

Cate had heard a few imaginative stories even in her short time as an assistant PI.

“Try this on for size,” he said. “Jo-Jo is a woman scorned, and everyone knows how that can turn even a sweet woman into a flaming maniac. She’s out for vengeance. She lures Eddie to accompany her to the house in her car—”

“It’s an old white van,” Cate scoffed. “Eddie wouldn’t be caught dead in it.”

“Well, he wasn’t, was he?” Uncle Joe pointed out. “Now, once they’re inside the house, he gets suspicious and pulls his own gun. But she shoots him in the head, leaves the body lying, returns later, and, with you and the deputies present, is horrified to ‘discover’ the body.”

Cate considered his scenario. “There are some holes in that,” she said.

“True,” he agreed. “What did she use as bait to get him to accompany her to the house? Why was he in her workroom? Why did he shoot the dolls? How about he didn’t shoot the dolls? She did it herself, after he was dead, as part of that amateur suicide scene she tried to set up. And it was a really amateur mistake for her not to realize ballistics tests would show that two guns were involved.”

“It could have happened an entirely different way,” Cate suggested as she slowly formulated a different scenario.

“I’m listening.”

“Eddie came to kill Jo-Jo, but she shot him in self-defense. Then she got scared and ran.”

“Possible. But where’s the vehicle he came in?”

“Or the new wife Kim, who knows Eddie is a wife-cheater because he cheated
with
her, has now discovered he’s cheating
on
her. Maybe he’s even going to leave her for the other woman. She chooses Jo-Jo’s house as the place to kill him because she figures the ex-wife will be blamed for the murder. She drives him to Jo-Jo’s house on some pretext, kills him, and then drives away in the Jaguar and parks it at the restaurant.” She paused. “Although I guess that has a few holes in it too, doesn’t it?”

Uncle Joe nodded. “But it’s not bad. Not bad at all.”

“I just don’t think Jo-Jo did it. PI instinct?” Cate asked hopefully.

“Instinct and intuition, like curiosity, can be a great help to an investigator,” Uncle Joe agreed. “Sometimes it’s all you have to go on. It can also get you into trouble. Like the time I had this great intuition that a teenager I was looking for was hiding out in a barn in back of an abandoned farmhouse. What my intuition didn’t tell me was that there was a rotted-out old septic tank by the house.”

“Septic tank meaning . . . sewage?”

“If I didn’t know that before, I did after I crashed into it,” Uncle Joe agreed. “But the kid helped pull me out.”

So Joe’s intuition had, in a roundabout way, worked. Or maybe it was God working in his mysterious ways again. “So would it be okay if I go talk to Jo-Jo again, maybe do a little investigating into her ex-husband’s death?” Cate asked. “I’d really like to help her if I can.”

“You want to put Belmont Investigations back into the murder business.”

“Well . . . um . . . yeah.”

Joe scowled but then gave her a wry grin. “It’s what I’d have done back in my hotshot days.” He paused. “Thank you for checking with me first. But be observant. And careful.”

The warnings were not afterthoughts.

Cate was supposed to meet Mitch at 6:30 at the Hong Kong Restaurant for a Chinese dinner, but he called to say he was working late on a computer systems installation job for a business down in Cottage Grove and could they make it 8:00?

“Great! That’ll be fine,” Cate said.

“How come you’re so happy about it?” Mitch grumbled. “Here I thought you’d be sitting around counting the minutes until you could see me again.”

“Oh, I am! Counting seconds, even. A thousand and one, a thousand and two, a thousand and—”

“I believe that’s known, in technical terms, as hogwash,” he muttered.

“I’ll tell you about it when I see you.”

“You’re planning to do something I won’t approve of, aren’t you?”

“Bye now.”

 7 

The house lights were on in Donna’s house, and she answered Cate’s tap on the doorbell.

“Cate! I didn’t know you were coming—”

“I thought I’d stop by and see how Jo-Jo’s doing.”

Donna led Cate to the living room where Jo-Jo sat in the blue velvet chair. She still had a dazed, not-quite-present look. For a moment, Cate wasn’t even sure Jo-Jo would know who she was, but the woman blinked, as if coming back from somewhere, and reached for Cate’s hand.

With an unexpected spark of life she said, “I knew you wouldn’t let me down!”

“We read the piece in the newspaper about Eddie,” Donna said. She motioned Cate to a seat on the white sofa.

“And I finally got it through my head what’s going on. Eddie didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered right there in my house, and they think I did it.” Jo-Jo touched her chest, as if she couldn’t believe it. “
Me
. They think I shot Eddie.”

“What makes you say that?”

“What the newspaper says. The questions they asked me. Realizing that if I were them, I’d probably be suspicious of me too. Discarded wife, bitter about being dumped, getting
revenge.” She held up her hand and cocked one finger like a gun. “Bang.”

“They may think it, but they apparently don’t have strong evidence yet, or you’d be under arrest,” Cate said. “Have you talked to a lawyer?”

“Right now, I’d rather have you,” Jo-Jo said.

A nice vote of confidence. Jo-Jo might have less confidence if she’d seen Cate’s undignified exit from the Mystic Mirage.

“I can’t pay all your fee right away, but I will pay you eventually,” Jo-Jo said. “You can check my credit rating.”

Cate doubted Jo-Jo knew how expensive private investigation could be, but all she said was, “We’ll work out something. Actually, I did some preliminary investigation earlier today. I drove by the house in town—”

“Eddie’s Ice Cube?” Jo-Jo’s voice was stronger now, her eyes focused and alert. Her tone turned scornful. “A million-six. Can you imagine paying that for a house? I told Eddie he was out of his mind, but he just had to have the place.”

“I also went over to the Mystic Mirage,” Cate said.

Jo-Jo blinked, as if that information dismayed her. For a moment Cate felt like a traitor, fraternizing with the enemy, but finally Donna said, “That was a very good idea, checking it out. Was Kim there?”

“No. An older woman was behind the counter. I’m assuming it was her mother.”

“The famed Dr. Celeste Chandler.” The disdain Donna put into “Doctor” made it more of a slur than an honor.

“I’ve never been in the Mystic Mirage. Although I’ve been curious,” Jo-Jo admitted.

Donna prudently remained silent on that point.

“I saw something that surprised me,” Cate said. “It was a doll that looked like one of yours.”

Jo-Jo straightened in the chair. Her eyes flashed sparks. “Celeste put Kimmy in there?”

“She’s one of yours?”

“Of course she’s one of mine. She’s how Kim met Eddie. The nerve of Celeste! Putting Kimmy in that creepy place.”

“I think I need to know more about this.”

Jo-Jo said that Kim’s mother had admired the doll Jo-Jo had made for their mutual friend Krystal Lorister. “This was back when I was living in the Ice Cube, of course, with a workroom I’d set up in the garage. Celeste contacted me. She said she wanted to commission me to make a doll for her that looked like her daughter as a little girl, and I did.”

“It was a gift for the daughter?”

“No. She said she was writing a children’s book, about a doll that turns into a real little girl with mystical powers. She wanted the doll to put on the cover, I think.”

“So why did she put the doll in the store?” Cate asked. “She and Kim surely aren’t into giving you free promotion and advertising.”

“I never heard anything about her publishing a children’s book.” Donna gave an unladylike snort. “Maybe she wanted to upgrade the creepy atmosphere of the Mystic Mirage.”

“So what did the doll have to do with Kim and your husband getting together?” Cate asked Jo-Jo.

“Celeste came to pick up Kimmy when I had her done, and Kim came with her. Eddie happened to be home at the time. He had about as much interest in my dolls as he had in flying figs, but all of a sudden he’s following them to my workshop and blathering on and on about how creative and artistic the dolls are. Then he invites both of them to the restaurant for a complimentary dinner. I should have been suspicious right then, but it just never occurred to me that he’d . . .” Jo-Jo paused to swallow, and then in a self-righteous tone added,
“Of course, once she put a spell on him, he really couldn’t help himself.”

Donna leaned forward. “Did you say anything to the police about a spell?” She sounded anxious, and Cate could understand why. Talk about spells with the authorities might make Jo-Jo look a little strange herself. Like someone who’d blast away at evil spirits, Eddie included.

“No. I didn’t think to mention it.” Jo-Jo’s eyes brightened. She glanced at the phone. “Maybe I should do that.”

“No, don’t,” Cate said quickly. “Did either of the deputies, when you were questioned at the house or here, ask if you owned a gun?”

Jo-Jo nodded. “Among a zillion other things they asked.”

“What did you say?”

“I said no, of course. I don’t own a gun.”

“You didn’t tell them you used to own a gun?”

“They didn’t ask that.”

A certain innocent logic in that response. Or, an argumentative voice inside Cate’s head suggested, perhaps the clever dodge of someone not so innocent?

“You said you got rid of the gun you had. What did you do with it? Just in case the question ever comes up.”

Jo-Jo’s brow wrinkled. “Well, let’s see . . . Why? Does it matter?”

“If the authorities find out you once owned a gun, they may be interested in knowing where it is now. You’re sure you don’t have it? Because if the authorities search your house and property and find it . . .” Cate left the consequences hanging.

“They aren’t going to find a gun in my house,” Jo-Jo said. “I was going to sell it. But then I thought, what if it got into the hands of a criminal and he used it to do something terrible? So I took it to that bicycle bridge over the river, the bridge near the mall, and threw it into the deepest part of
the current.” She looked at Cate with a mixture of anxiety and defiance. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that?”

Cate wasn’t certain what you were supposed to do with a gun you wanted to get rid of, but she was fairly certain tossing it in the river wasn’t the preferred method of disposal. She also wasn’t convinced that was what Jo-Jo had done with the gun. She waved away the question for now. “In this situation there may be a bigger problem.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If the law enforcement people can’t find the gun that fired the bullet that killed Eddie, and if they find out you did own a gun, they may suspect you shot him with it. And then threw it in the river.”

“But I didn’t do that. I threw the gun in the river months ago. And I didn’t kill Eddie.”

“What time did you leave the house the day Eddie was killed?”

“I don’t know, 2:00 or 2:30, I guess. Maybe 3:00. I didn’t get home until a few minutes before I called you. And I didn’t see or talk to anyone I knew. The deputies kept asking that. In about fourteen different ways.”

Cate tried to conceal her frustration. As an alibi, this was about as solid as a mist of lavender-scented room spray. “So where did you go? What did you do? Did you buy anything? Use a credit card? Eat anywhere?”

“Well, let’s see. I have a Visa card, but I can’t remember the last time I used it. I’ve never believed in buying things on credit.”

Admirable, but not particularly helpful at this point.

“I went to Walmart and looked at some rubber boots, because it gets sloppy out in Maude’s pen in the winter. But I decided maybe I could pick up a cheaper pair at Goodwill sometime. Then I went to the mall and looked at some fabrics
for an outfit for the doll I’m working on. His name’s Jerome, and he’ll be a gift from this woman to her granddaughter. Kind of the brother she doesn’t have. But I haven’t decided how to dress him yet. It’s a real problem. I hate those crotch-at-the-knees pants that boys wear now.”

No receipts to prove Jo-Jo had even left the house. And Jo-Jo was worrying about dressing her doll. Cate tried to jerk her back to the real problem. “If you didn’t buy anything, why did you go to town to begin with?”

“Sometimes I just like to get away from the house. It gets lonely, you know? I did get a hamburger at Biff’s Beefy Burgers just before I came home. That’s what they changed the name of the drive-ins to after we sold them. But they’re going really skimpy on the tomato now. We never did that.”

“Did you get a receipt?”

“I don’t know. If I did, I threw it in the trash with the other stuff.”

“Did you know the person who waited on you?”

“No. They change help all the time.”

No young person at the burger place was likely to remember one inconspicuous, older-woman customer. So far, there was no proof at all that Jo-Jo had even left the house that afternoon. But wasn’t that, in a backwards kind of way, proof that she had? Because if she was trying to be deceptive, wouldn’t she have made a deliberate effort to collect receipts and specific conversations to verify she hadn’t been home when Eddie was killed?

Donna suddenly straightened in her chair. “Jo-Jo, sweetie, I think you’re remembering wrong. Wasn’t it last week you went shopping for boots and fabric? And this week you came to the library and spent the whole afternoon looking at those Arizona magazines?”

Jo-Jo’s brow wrinkled. “I don’t think so. I—”

“But I’m sure you did.”

Jo-Jo started to shake her head, but then a crafty half-smile slid across her face. “You know, you’re right. How could I have forgotten?” She turned to face Cate. “I was with Donna in the library all that afternoon. I’m thinking about moving to Arizona, you know.”

“But you didn’t ‘remember’ that when you talked to the deputies?”

“I can still tell them.” Jo-Jo jumped up with surprising agility. “In fact, I can go to the phone right now and Donna can confirm—”

Cate gave her a light push back into the chair. She turned to Donna.

“Donna, I know you’re a wonderful friend, a very loyal friend, and you want to help Jo-Jo. But making up an alibi for her is not the way to do it. We’ll just have to work with the facts, whatever they are.”

The two women looked at each other. Neither said anything, but a kind of resigned sigh passed between them.

“So who do you think might have killed Eddie?” Cate asked. She let her gaze flicker between the two women. “How do you think Eddie got out there to the house since there was no vehicle?”

“Kim,” Jo-Jo said.

“Kim’s mother,” Donna said. “Kim has the boobs and beauty, and she’s not a totally dumb blonde, but Celeste’s the brains of the pair. And definitely the CEO. Kim does what her mother says.”

“Why would Eddie have come to your house?” Cate asked Jo-Jo.

Jo-Jo wound her fingers together. “I think he realized he’d made a mistake and wanted to talk about our getting back together again.”

A possibility that didn’t jibe with Jo-Jo’s original declaration that Eddie the Ex had come to the house to kill her. “But neither Kim or her mother would have driven him out there to do that, would they?”

Jo-Jo and Donna looked at each other, obviously without an answer to what seemed to Cate an elementary question. Finally Jo-Jo said reluctantly, “Eddie’s lawyer has been talking to my lawyer about getting my alimony reduced. I suppose he could have come out to talk about that.”

“So Celeste convinced him to let her take him out there in her car,” Donna said. “She saw it as a great chance to kill him at Jo-Jo’s place, where it would look as if Jo-Jo had done it.”

“So why would Celeste want to kill him?” Cate asked.

She expected Jo-Jo to continue with what Cate suspected was a wild fantasy that Eddie was coming back to her, but instead Jo-Jo said, “Greed. As Eddie’s wife, Kim inherits the restaurant, the Lodge Hill wedding business, the vineyard, the house, everything. Celeste wanted to get rid of Eddie before he divorced Kim and she wound up with nothing.”