Dead Man Talking (26 page)

“By the time they find out, it will all be over,” I said, and I wondered just how prophetic I was being. All over? Was I talking about our fundraising event? Or my job at Garden View Cemetery?

I knew that Bianca would be there that night, and I reminded myself that I looked like I just stepped out of
the display window at
La Mode
, and that, oh, by the way, I’d never much liked working in a cemetery, anyway.

Which meant I didn’t have anything to lose.

Except the
Cemetery Survivor
contest, of course.

And there was no way I was going to let that happen.

“It’s going to be fine.” It was like the hundredth time I’d said this since I made up my mind about how we were going to keep people entertained now that our art show was ruined. “I asked them. You saw me go over and ask them,” I reminded her with a look over to where Absalom, Sammi, Reggie, Delmar, and Crazy Jake waited. “My team’s all for it, and it’s going to bring in a boatload of donations. How can anybody fault us for that? It’s what we’re here for, right? We’re supposed to be raising money to give to the Monroe Street Foundation. No way our trustees can complain when that’s exactly what we’re doing. And we’re doing it with class and style! And this is going to give the restoration project even more publicity, and Garden View, too. It’s perfect, Ella. We should have thought of it sooner. We’re going to create a sensation!”

“Yeah, a sensation.” Ella was paler than any ghost I’d ever met, and her voice was no more than a terrified whisper. When a tuxedoed waiter passed carrying a tray of glasses filled with wine, she grabbed one and downed it. Her cheeks flushed with a color that matched her outfit. Her shoulders shot back. “Let’s do it,” she said.

And before I could talk myself out of what I’d already talked myself into, I hurried to stand on the steps right outside the main doors into the memorial.

I figured there was no need for a lengthy introduction or an explanation of any kind. How do you explain that some whacko with a cheap tube of lipstick ruined days and days of work? And why would I want to give the nut job that kind of spotlight, anyway? Of course, that didn’t
stop my mind from racing or my gaze from wandering the crowd.

Who had engineered the destruction?

Maybe I needed to start being careful about what I wished for. As I scanned the crowd, my heart bumped to a stop. The used car dealer owner, Bad Dog Raphael, was in the front row, looking as suave as ever in a tux. He lifted his wineglass, and the smile he shot in my direction glistened like the evening light.

I was too nervous to do more than acknowledge him with a tip of my head. And pretty surprised when I realized the reporter Mike Kowalski was standing right behind him. He looked me over like a starving man in line at the local Ponderosa.

My stomach was already doing flip-flops, so I didn’t want to think about what he was obviously thinking about. I looked away—and saw Reno Bob Oates on the other side of the crowd. When his eyes met mine, they narrowed. Reno Bob bit through the finger sandwich he was holding.

Never one to back down from a plan I was convinced was a good one, I pasted a smile on my face and refused to look around further. The crowd quieted and all eyes turned to me.

I waved. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Team Two’s fundraiser. We’ve had a little change of plans. So gather around, grab a glass of wine, and I hope you brought your checkbooks. We’re about to begin . . .” I paused for a moment to add to the drama, “the first ever
Cemetery Survivor
bachelor auction!”

That one moment of total and complete shocked silence, and all those opened mouths made me wonder if I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life. I was about to stammer an apology and tell them all it was a joke when Reggie sauntered up the stairs to stand next to me.

And guess what? The ladies in the crowd went wild.

Three cheers for Reggie. He’d begged, borrowed, or stole (I didn’t want to think which) a black suit for the night, and between that and the tie with a pit bull painted on it (an exact match to the tattoo on his forehead), he looked like a Wall Street broker gone way bad. As I’d said to Ella, there were a lot of women who liked that sort of thing. They proved it, too. Absalom stepped front and center to take over the proceedings, gave the crowd a rundown of the ground rules we’d made up on the fly (like making it very clear how the winner was only paying for each team member as an escort for the rest of the evening), and the bidding started.

“One hundred dollars!” A woman at the back of the crowd called.

“One-fifty,” said another.

“Two hundred dollars!” The voice was familiar, and no wonder; Ella jumped up and down, waving her checkbook like there was no tomorrow.

All for a good cause, I reminded myself, and stepped to the side of the building so that I could grab a glass of wine in peace.

So much for that plan; I wasn’t exactly surprised to find Jefferson Lamar there waiting for me.

“You call this conducting an investigation?” I wasn’t imaging it, his nose really was in the air when he looked toward the front of the building where Reggie was having the time of his life. Reggie strutted and posed. He paraded and pouted. And when he stripped off his suit jacket and tossed it over one shoulder, the bidding shot from three hundred to four-fifty in a heartbeat. “This is tomfoolery!”

“Yeah, whatever. It’s not like I had a lot of time to come up with a Plan B. Besides, nobody seems to mind.” I listened as the bidding hit seven hundred dollars.

“Going once!” Absalom called. “Going twice. Gone!”

Was I surprised when I saw Ella dash out of the crowd and grab Reggie’s hand?

“I can’t spend all my time on your case,” I said, turning back to Lamar. “I’ve got a real job to do, and real people who are going to ask questions if I don’t do it.”

“I know. I know.” It must have been the night for pacing. He marched along the perimeter of the veranda and back again. “You’ve had time, though. You haven’t even gone to see Dale Morgan yet.”

“I worked on the art show twenty-four, seven.” I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at him. “I can’t do two things at once.”

“You have to concentrate. What about the file you have? The evidence? The newspaper articles?”

This was one place I could use a little one-upmanship, and I didn’t hesitate. “As a matter of fact, I talked to Mike Kowalski. You must remember him. He interviewed you like a million times.”

Lamar remembered, all right. I could tell because his brow furrowed. “Scandalous lies. Yellow journalism.”

“The guy’s like a hero or something,” I said. “He’s got a great reputation, and he wins all kinds of awards. Not the kind of person who would make stuff up. Only . . .”

Lamar leaned nearer. “Only . . . ?”

“Only something about him gives me the creeps. I mean, something more than just that he’s a creepy old guy, and that’s creepy enough. But he’s . . .” I shrugged. “I dunno. For a guy who’s supposed to be the second coming of Geraldo, he’s a big zero.” I thought about the way Kowalski’s stomach sagged over the waistband of his khakis. “And I do mean big.”

“And Kowalski, he says—”

“Nothing new, so nothing you’re going to want to hear.” Lamar didn’t take the hint. He stood there waiting for me to say more, and I figured since he apparently wasn’t careful about what he wished for, either, he was about to get what he deserved.

“Kowalski says exactly what he said back then: the desk clerk swears you and Vera were at the Lake View plenty of times.”

Lamar’s cheeks got dusky. “I remember that from the newspaper. It’s preposterous, of course. I told the police that. Why would the man lie?”

“Exactly what I want to know. Only, the thing is . . .” A roar went up from the crowd and new commotion started when Sammi’s auction was concluded. I don’t think I was imagining it when I saw Virgil race up the steps to claim her. After the fights that had been so prominently featured on
Cemetery Survivor
, nobody else had the nerve to do much bidding. He got her for a song: three hundred bucks. “The desk clerk never talked to the cops. He never testified. He seems to have conveniently disappeared.”

“And that means . . . ?”

“The hell if I know!” Crazy Jake’s auction was next, and I could see he was having the time of his life taking pictures of the crowd, even if he did go for only seventy-five dollars and the woman who won him looked enough like him for me to figure out it must have been his mother and she knew nobody else was going to bid.

Delmar did a little better and brought in another eight hundred.

I did some quick calculations and hoped my math was right. We were still behind Team One’s five thousand one hundred and twenty dollar total. I hoped Absalom had fans.

Rather than obsess, I concentrated on the case. “I’d
like to know which of them was lying,” I said, and big points for Lamar, he was a quick study.

“You think Kowalski made up the quotes from the kid? But why?” He must have seen Kowalski earlier, just like I had, because he scanned the crowd. I looked that way, too, and saw that if they weren’t eagerly participating in the auction, at least most of our guests looked like they were having fun. I didn’t see Reno Bob, but Kowalski was over at the food table, loading a plate. Was it a coincidence that Bad Dog was standing right behind him in line?

I watched them chat and wished I had super powers for super hearing. “You could just like, pop up over there, couldn’t you?” I asked Lamar. “I’d love to know what they’re talking about.”

“Too crowded. Not enough space.” He shook his head. “If I get close enough to hear them, someone will get frozen solid.”

I might have been willing to take the chance if Bianca wasn’t in line, too. And if I didn’t hear a voice calling my name from out in front.

“What about Pepper?” It was Absalom. Apparently, the bidding for him was over, and I hadn’t been listening to hear how much he’d gone for. When he didn’t get enough of a reaction from the crowd, he boomed the question again. “What about Pepper? Let’s get her out here!”

The crowd cheered and my stomach went cold. “Oh, no!” The last person who cared was Jefferson Lamar, but he was the only one I could complain to. “I told them I wasn’t going to participate. I told them, no auction for me.”

“It’s for a good cause,” he said, and I guess he didn’t want to hear what I was going to say about that, because he winked out.

I thought about climbing the wall that surrounded the veranda, scaling down the side of the monument, and getting out of there, and I might have done it, too, if Absalom hadn’t come around to the side of the building and latched onto my hand. When he took me out front, the cheers intensified.

“She’s a mighty fine woman,” Absalom said, holding me at arm’s length so the crowd could get a good look. “What do I hear for the captain of our team, Pepper Martin?”

“Fifty dollars!” The voice was small and tentative, and one I didn’t recognize, a man’s. It came from the back of the crowd, but though I was standing on higher ground, I couldn’t see him. Of course, that wasn’t going to stop me from sending a scathing look in that direction. Fifty bucks? For me? Please!

Not to worry, the auction got more lively from there. “One hundred!” someone called.

“Two hundred,” another countered.

“Six hundred.” It was the first I realized that Bad Dog had returned to the front of the crowd. He grinned when he called out his bid.

I reminded myself the whole thing was in good fun.

“Seven hundred.” This from Mike Kowalski.

I shot a panicked look at Absalom, but he was having too much fun to notice. He looked over the crowd. “Only seven hundred dollars for this gorgeous lady? How about eight?”

“One thousand dollars,” Bad Dog yelled.

Yeah, it was only for the rest of the evening. Yeah, it was so the cemetery restoration could be completed. No, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to spend my evening with ex-con Bad Dog Raphael. He was better looking than Kowalski, that was for sure. But he was one of my suspects, remember. Traditionally, guys who arrange
hits on girls wearing jelly bracelets do not make good dates.

I had my hands at my sides, and I was sending Absalom little signals to keep the bidding going when a voice called out from the back of the crowd. “Three thousand!” it said.

Oh yeah, Quinn knew how to make a dramatic entrance, all right. He looked like a god in a navy suit, a white shirt, and a plum silk tie with swirls of navy in it, and he strode through that crowd like he owned the place. When he sauntered up the steps, he had a check all written out and in his hands. He handed it to Absalom.

It would take more than grand romantic gestures to make me cave, but I couldn’t control a smile, and I guess that told Absalom all he needed to know. “Going once, going twice, gone!” He sped through the technicalities, grabbed my hand, and put it in Quinn’s, who promptly shot me a grin as hot as the deepest fires of hell.

“You’re mine for the night,” he said.

I smiled politely. “I’m surprised to see you. It’s been a while.”

“Too long.” He led me down the steps. Now that the auction was over, our guests were scattering to chat and stand in line for food. I guess Quinn figured being the big spender got him special privileges. He went right to the front of the line, got a glass of wine, and handed it to me. “Would you believe it if I told you I missed you?”

I wanted to. But then, I saw the curt nod Quinn gave Ella when she walked by. I clutched my wine in both hands. “Ella called you. How else would you know about the fundraiser?”

“Are you kidding? I haven’t missed an episode of
Cemetery Survivor
.” There was a twinkle in his eyes that would have been sexy if it wasn’t so darned annoying. “I’m a huge fan. I loved the episode where you and
Sammi were arguing about lord knows what. I’m not sure you two did, either. And I especially liked it that day you went down in the mud. If I’d known you were into mud wrestling, I would have—”