Revenge of the Chili Queens (13 page)

“And hand out crappy souvenirs.” I strolled a little farther into the cavernous motor home to check out the stairs that led up to a second level, and while I was at it, I checked out the makeup cases that sat in a straight, soldierly line nearby. Black, purple, leopard print. All pretty standard, and each one was knee-high and had a telescoping handle and wheels, and all but one was marked not by the name of its owner but by her title.

Miss Chili’s Cookin’.

Miss Texas Spice.

Miss Hotter than a Chili Pepper.

I took a moment to look over the case next to that one. No title on it, but then, there wasn’t a lot of room. The entire case was covered with old photos—teenagers playing neon green and blue instruments in a garage band, a shot of a blue ocean and a sweep of beach, Bindi Monroe with a smile on her face and a tiara on her head.

I guess I knew who that case belonged to. I moved on to the next.

Miss Texas Chili Pepper.

I glanced over my shoulder from the shiny, purple case to the Miss it belonged to.

“You haul around an awful lot of makeup.”

She stood at the same time she clicked her tongue. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Not even about Dom and the bad batch of chili he got?”

Don’t think I didn’t notice that she hesitated just for an instant.

Don’t think she didn’t notice that I noticed.

Which was precisely why Tiffany acted like that momentary hitch in our conversation was no big deal.

“I told you. I didn’t know that man who got killed. And I certainly don’t know anything about bad chili. Consolidated is the largest chili manufacturer in the world. It comes in ten different varieties and—”

“Not really interested in the party line,” I told her. “Though it sounds like you’re all set for the pageant on Sunday. What I really wanted to talk about was you and Dom.”

“Dom, you mean the man I don’t know?”

“I mean the man who broke up with you in Figueroa.”

She was caught and she knew it, though I have to say, maybe all that beauty pageant training was good for something. Tiffany didn’t waste any time disavowing herself from the story.

“Well, it looks like you know all sorts of interesting things,” she said. “And Dom was sick on Monday evening? I’m not especially sorry to hear that. If it’s true. But I don’t see how that concerns me. Since you’ve apparently been spending your time gossiping about me, you already know, at the time of his unfortunate demise, Dominic and I were no longer seeing each other.”

“Because he broke up with you.”

“Is that what you heard?” There was a slide-out drawer built into the nearest kitchen cabinet, and Tiffany put her water bottle on the countertop, opened the drawer, then
tossed her bottle inside in a recycling container. “The fact is,” she told me, sliding the drawer closed, “I’m the one who told Dom I didn’t want to see him anymore. As you might imagine, it broke his heart.”

“Would that have been right before that parade in Figueroa? Because the way I heard it—”

“The way you heard it obviously isn’t the way it happened.” In a motor home the size of Delaware, there was plenty of room for Tiffany to get by, but she knocked into me when she sauntered toward the stairs. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to freshen up and get back outside. You can show yourself out.”

I assured her I would.

But I never said how fast.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs and waited until I heard Tiffany’s footsteps overhead, then made a move for her makeup case.

Don’t ask me what I thought I’d find. I mean, besides a wide variety of lipsticks in that cappuccino shade Ginger didn’t like.

But hey, I figured it was worth a try.

I flipped open the case and pulled out the accordion-style foldout trays and did a quick inventory of the contents.

Just like Ginger said, there was plenty of lipstick in the same funny brown shade Tiffany was wearing that day. There was also mascara and fake eyelashes and blemish concealer, and any number of products I never even knew existed. Seaweed soak and skin brightening mask made from tomatoes? I’d stick with soap and water, thanks.

While it was all mildly interesting in a who-has-time-for-this-nonsense sort of way, none of it proved that Tiffany had tried to off Dominic with poisoned chili.

When I heard a door close upstairs and Tiffany’s footsteps directly overhead, I moved quickly, sliding those expanding drawers together, and lifted out the top tray of the case so I could take a quick look into the bottom compartment.

The corner of a blue and white box caught my eye, and a distant memory flashed in my brain.

I’d been visiting my grandmother—my mom’s mom—and I was bored and looking to get into trouble. I dug through the medicine cabinet in her bathroom and—

With something very much like hope blossoming in my heart, I grabbed the blue and white box and realized it was empty. Fine by me; that made it easy for me to wave it in front of Tiffany’s face the moment she was down the steps.

“Laxatives!” I stopped just short of adding a triumphant
aha
. That would have been corny, and besides, the way Tiffany’s mouth dropped open told me I didn’t need that little bit of drama, anyway. “And don’t tell me you’re trying to keep your weight down, Tiffany. The box is empty. And the night he died, Dom spent the night running to the bathroom. You tried to poison him with laxatives!”

“Poison?” It would be nice to imagine that Tiffany spit out this single word in a wicked-witch, I’m-the-evil-bad-guy sort of way. Truth be told, she laughed so hard, I thought she was going to keel right over. “Oh, honey, if I wanted to poison Dom, I wouldn’t have bothered with laxatives. Don’t you read mystery novels? There’s cyanide and strychnine and rat poison and—”

Just rolling off the names made her twinkle like . . . er . . . a beauty queen, and I stopped her because it was weirding me out.

“You weren’t trying to poison him?”

She puffed out a breath of frustration. Or maybe she was just annoyed. “Of course I wasn’t trying to poison him!” Tiffany threw her right hand in the air. “What kind of person do you think I am?”

“But I saw you give him a bowl of chili, and Dom was sick, and—”

“And don’t you get it? Haven’t you ever had your heart ripped in two?” Tiffany knew she’d opened mouth and inserted foot; her face went ashen. But by then, it was too late, and she knew that, too. She pulled in breath after breath, and when that didn’t work to calm her nerves or settle her emotions, she brushed a tear off her cheek.

“You’re right, okay? Is that what you wanted me to admit? You’re right. Dom dumped me. There. Now you can gloat about it. Or laugh. Or whatever it is you want to do. Now you know that just because I’m beautiful and graceful and talented . . . well, that doesn’t mean that my life is perfect. Dom dumped me and he broke my heart and sure, I was plenty mad. I was so mad . . .” Reliving the memory, her eyes narrowed and her shoulders hunched.

“I knew I had to get even,” Tiffany said from between perfectly even, blindingly white clenched teeth. “I knew I had to pay him back for the way he hurt me. And I knew he’d be here at the Chili Queens festival. So yes, I bought the laxatives.” She tore the empty package out of my hands. “And I took some with me to the Tri-C tent. And I put some
in a bowl of chili. And you know what I did?” Her smile was as sleek as the one she’d no doubt offered Dom that night. “I told that low-down, no-good Dom that we needed to let bygones be bygones. That I was willing to get on with my life and forget him, and I wanted him to know that so he didn’t have to feel guilty about the way he treated me.”

“Did he? Feel guilty?”

Tiffany snorted in a very un-beauty-queen-like way. “Dom never felt guilty about a thing in his life. Surely not about the way he treated women. But the point wasn’t to make him feel better about himself, was it?”

Even though an answer wasn’t necessary, I answered anyway. “The point was to get him to eat the chili laced with the laxatives.”

“Exactly!” Tiffany grinned. “And that’s exactly what he did. Gobbled that big ol’ bowl of chili right down. And now you’re telling me he really was sick the rest of the night?” She hooted with delight. “There is justice in this world. You remember that. There is justice, and scumbags like Dom, they’re made to pay the price.”

“So a person who can lace chili with laxatives, that person must be coldhearted.”

Tiffany’s face went hard. “So I put laxatives in Dom’s chili. So what? It doesn’t prove anything. He was a creep and he deserved what he got. I did it. I admit it. But that doesn’t mean I killed him.”

CHAPTER 9

The twinkling eyes.

The sunny smile.

The honest-to-gosh goodness.

No, not Sylvia! I’m talking about Tiffany.

About that darned perfect little personality of hers, and about how she could wring her perfectly manicured little hands all she wanted and bat those perfectly fake eyelashes until the cows came home and I still wouldn’t believe a word she said.

After all, I’d been done wrong by a guy once, too, and I knew that a little laxative in chili might be fun in a perverse sort of way, but no way did it qualify as revenge.

See, I was convinced that behind the twinkle and the
sparkle and the smile and the style, Tiffany was out for revenge.

But then, I never did trust a blonde.

Blame that on Sylvia.

Yeah, yeah, I know . . . I’d been grabbed, spun around, and told to mind my own business by a guy. But I didn’t let even that pertinent fact change my mind. I convinced myself that Tiffany had a minion with strong arms, a flat chest, and a deep voice and went right on believing in the soundness of my theory. In fact, I spent the next day at the Showdown dancing in the Chick costume and hatching up scheme after scheme about how I’d trap Tiffany into making a confession. How hard could it be? The girl was a beauty queen, right?

It helped that on that Thursday afternoon, all the women who were working their beauty queen tushies off over at Alamo Plaza would be packing all their beauty and all their talent and their sparkle and their shine into the Showdown for a rehearsal for Sunday’s big Miss Consolidated Chili pageant. I could expose (figuratively speaking, of course) Tiffany onstage in front of everyone! I could make her admit that she’d smashed Dom’s guitar and taken the strings and yanked them so tight around his neck that she cut into his windpipe and cut off his air supply!

I could prove once and for all and to everyone—including myself—that Nick was innocent. Then maybe he’d finally realize there was more to me than just some woman who donned stilettos and a chili costume and danced like a fool, all in the name of selling spices and dried peppers.

The thought snuck up and sucker punched me, and I froze, mid–shuffle step with my left leg raised and bent,
and ignored the Showdown patrons who stared at me, wondering what had gotten into the Chili Chick and why she was suddenly as still as a statue.

I wondered what had gotten into the Chili Chick, too, and reminded myself in no uncertain terms to get a grip.

Me? Worried about what Nick or any man thought of me?

If that mesh wasn’t over my face, the patrons who surrounded me would have heard me grumble.

“This has nothing to do with Nick,” I reminded myself. But, of course, it did. Especially if I couldn’t prove that Tiffany was our killer.

I danced and planned and plotted until I couldn’t move another step or think another thought, and then the Chick dragged through the back door of the Palace for a little shade and a nice, cold bottle of water.

“Work the counter for a while if you need to cool off,” Sylvia suggested, and though I refused to come right out and say that was a good idea, I took her up on it. I peeled out of the Chick costume, moved behind the front counter, and spent the next few hours blissfully talking about chili and not thinking about murder.

At least until it was time for the pageant rehearsal.

That’s when I told Sylvia I was ducking out for a late lunch and hightailed it toward the building where the rehearsal had already begun.

“Ladies, you’ve got to remember, you’re the best of the best!” I stepped inside just as things were getting started, and I guess I wasn’t all that surprised to see Eleanor Alvarez at the center of it all. Eleanor and her Women’s League were
one of the sponsors of the pageant, because I guess it’s only natural that something as crass and commercial as canned chili needs the sort of validation that comes from the Women’s League. In fact, the League’s special charity—a shelter for abused women—would benefit from the concessions and the take at the gate on the day of the pageant.

The closer I got to the stage, the more I could feel the nervous energy that buzzed around the seven contestants. And there was Miss Texas Chili Pepper in the heart of it all. In skinny jeans and a loose top the color of cherries—and sans crown—Tiffany looked younger than she had back at the Tri-C tent. Younger and more vulnerable.

But don’t think that made me change my mind about her murderous heart.

My gaze trained on her, my concentration complete, I watched Tiffany take her place between a petite dark-haired woman and a dazzling redhead as the women were herded into a neat, soldierly row.