Dolled Up to Die (29 page)

“He’ll probably be out on bail soon.”

“I hope he stays away from Kim. She has enough troubles without him hanging around.”

One point on which they were agreed, although all Cate said was, “It’s nice of you to help her out with the motorcycle.”

“That’s me, ever the nice, helpful guy.” He smiled. “Don’t forget how cooperative I am. Anytime. And I have this weakness for redheads.”

But I don’t have a weakness for guys with a God’s-gift-to-women complex.

Inside, Cate headed up the stairs to the dressing room, but she detoured when she spotted Jo-Jo and a woman in a Mr. K’s uniform setting out hors d’oeuvres in the main Chapel Room.

“It’s great of you to be here,” Cate said.

“I feel as if I’m fraternizing with the enemy,” Jo-Jo grumped. “Imagine. Me, helping Eddie’s new wife.”

“Widow,” Cate pointed out. “And you said you needed a job.”

“Ex-wives and current wives shouldn’t get along. It’s unnatural. Like a fox and chicken being friends.” Jo-Jo scowled as she arranged tiny crackers with caviar on a silver platter. “But she isn’t weird, like I thought she was.” Another pause and scowl. “Actually, I kind of like her.”

“Is everything going okay here?”

“The hors d’oeuvres are fine, and I made up a big bowl of punch, but someone from the restaurant called and said they had a problem with the van delivering the food for the buffet and it would be late. Then the minister called. I was just going to find Robyn and tell her he said he’d be late too.”

“I’ll tell her. You just take care of things here.”

“Okay. Oh, I wanted to tell you. I’ve started your redheaded doll. You are still my private investigator, aren’t you?”

“I’m kind of sidetracked with the wedding and all, but I’m definitely working on it.”

“Good.”

Jo-Jo’s cell phone rang, and Cate headed for the dressing room. Behind her, the photographer had arrived and was photographing the hors d’oeuvres.

The other bridesmaids, plus the maid of honor, Robyn, and Aunt Carly, were already in the dressing room. Cate noted that a small Band-Aid was all Robyn needed to cover the cut on her hand now. Robyn’s cell phone rang while Cate was hanging her celadon gown on a rack with the others just like it. Hanging there together, they had the strange look of oversized clumps of genetically altered celery, a salad experiment gone awry. But, Cate hurriedly reminded herself, her gown had looked great when she put it on.

Robyn pressed her phone to her chest. Her face had that this-can’t-be-happening-to-me look.

“That was the wife of the guy I hired as master of ceremonies and deejay for the reception. He was supposed to be here
for the rehearsal tonight too.” She looked down at the cell phone as if it were some alien machine receiving unwelcome signals from another galaxy. “He has laryngitis.”

“What about tomorrow night?” a bridesmaid asked.

“His wife said he’s been sick like this before. It usually lasts four or five days.” She took a deep breath. “But everything is going to be all right,” she said, as if it were a mantra she was repeating regularly. “Surely nothing else can go wrong.”

Cate hated to have to tell her that more
had
gone wrong, but she repeated what Jo-Jo had told her about both the minister and the buffet being late.

“Should we get dressed?” a bridesmaid asked.

“Not yet,” Robyn said in her tone that suggested the entire wedding was on the brink of extinction. “I need to talk to Lance.”

Robyn hurried off, and the bridesmaids milled around, although Cate gave them credit for not being the kind of friends who made catty remarks the minute one of their group left the room. They just talked about how stressful this was for Robyn.

Yes, it was stressful, Cate had to agree. But it would be less so if Robyn would just lighten up about details and be glad she was marrying a great guy.

Then she had a different thought about the voiceless deejay, the late minister, and problems with the buffet.

Perfect timing.

 25 

Cate slipped out the main entrance and circled the hedged enclosure. She’d wanted the chance to see if the saddlebags on Travis’s motorcycle held anything useful, perhaps even the gun, and here was that chance. Rehearsal delayed, so no one would miss her for a few minutes, and Rolf was gone somewhere in his pickup.

A yard light on a tall pole lit up the area around Rolf’s cottage, but the light didn’t spill into the carport. It was a dark cavern of shadows, and Cate hesitated. But Travis’s bike was in there somewhere, and she made herself plunge into the darkness.

Once in the carport, her eyes adjusted, and she could make out dim shapes of the bikes that looked as if some motorcycle-hungry monster had been chomping on them. The place smelled of oil and paint and other unidentifiable scents of repair work. She touched something that made her foot jerk back . . . alive? No, just a tangled electric cord. Then her other foot hit a metal something, and down she went. Face first in the dirt.

She lay there a minute, disoriented by the shadows and her spinning head and the taste of oily dirt in her mouth. She finally squirmed to a sitting position and wiped a hand
across her face. Her nose felt as if it had been squashed into a new shape. A little late, she remembered the bullet-sized flashlight on her key ring and groped it out of her pocket. Its tiny beam showed oily spots on the knees of her jeans and what looked like the remains of motorcycle warfare around her. Bike parts everywhere.

She tried to see a silver lining as she struggled to her feet. If the carport floor had been concrete instead of dirt, she and Kim might have had matching concussions.

She balanced herself with a hand on the skeleton of a motorcycle and flicked the beam around the carport. Travis’s bike stood near a counter along the back wall. She headed for it, picking her way through the booby trap of bike parts. Maybe future generations would drill for oil here. Rolf seemed to have spilled enough of it.

The first thing she discovered was that she couldn’t open the saddlebags. She leaned over to focus the flashlight’s tiny beam on the small lock. TV and mystery-novel PIs always seemed to know how to open or circumvent locks, but Cate had no such expertise. It wasn’t a formidable-looking lock, but poking at it with a fingernail resulted only in a broken fingernail. But another flick of her flashlight beam revealed tools scattered on the counter behind the bike. She grabbed a screwdriver.

She was trying to ease the screwdriver into the lock when she heard a car engine, and then the carport blazed with light. She looked up into a blinding glare of headlights. She squinted and held up a hand to dim the glare, and through a space between her fingers saw Rolf’s pickup stopped just outside the carport. A car, the red Camaro she’d seen at the motel, pulled in beside it. Cate’s first frantic thought was
hide
! The next thought was
where
? She didn’t look enough like a bike part to just blend in.

She flicked the flashlight off, but a moment later Rolf hit a switch by the door, and overhead fluorescent lights flooded the entire carport.

Her next thought was defensive. Why should she hide? She might not be handling this in the most orthodox manner, but there was nothing actually wrong in her doing this. Hopefully. Although the screwdriver in her hand felt as incriminating as a burglar’s leg climbing through an open window.

Cate expected immediate confrontation, but what Rolf said mildly was, “If you’re trying to hotwire the bike, I don’t think that’s the way to do it. But if you want to learn, I can show you how.”

Cate straightened from her bent position. “Well, uh, thanks. But I guess not. This is Travis’s bike, isn’t it?”

The blonde woman was out of the Camaro now, standing at the edge of the carport with a DVD case in one hand and a frown on her face. She wore tight jeans, high-heeled boots, and a black turtleneck decorated with sparkly stuff. “What’s going on? Who’s she?”

“Cate is a private investigator,” Rolf said. He sounded amused. “Apparently she’s doing some investigating.”

Cate held up the screwdriver and studied it as if baffled. “Which end of this is it you’re supposed to use?”

Rolf laughed. “Kim wants to know what’s in the saddlebags of her ex-husband’s bike?” he asked. Before Cate could mumble an ambiguous reply, he added, “I put the keys in the house. I’ll go get them.”

Maybe she should have enlisted Rolf’s help to begin with. He seemed cooperative enough.

“I thought we were going to watch
Spiderman
,” the woman complained.

“This won’t take long,” Rolf said. “You can go on inside and get the DVD set up.”

Rolf headed for the door to the house, but the woman looked undecided about following him. Finally she planted her boot-clad feet in the dirt floor of the carport, crossed her arms, and studied Cate suspiciously.

“I’m Melody Ketchison,” she said. “You two seem to know each other.”

“Hi, Melody. I’m a bridesmaid at a wedding tomorrow night, and the rehearsal dinner is tonight.” Cate motioned toward the bright lights of Lodge Hill filtering through the trees as if that explained everything. “There seem to be problems with both the minister and the buffet.”

Cate had found that a barrage of irrelevant information was a useful PI technique, and it seemed to work now.

“I’ve heard it’s really nice but awfully expensive to have a wedding there,” Melody said.

“I think it’s the man you’re marrying that matters more than where the ceremony is held or what it costs,” Cate said.

“Yeah, that’s true.” Melody glanced toward the door again as if evaluating Rolf’s qualifications in that area. Personally, on a list of Would I Want to Marry This Guy?, Cate’s list would have the No Way box checked by Rolf’s name. But she didn’t say that. The woman turned her suspicions back on Cate. “How do you happen to know Rolf?”

Rolf came out of the house dangling a key ring from a forefinger like a trophy, so Cate didn’t have to answer the question. He fitted one of the keys into the lock on the saddlebag. With his left hand, Cate noted.

“You haven’t looked in here already?” Cate said.

“I wasn’t curious enough before.” Rolf smiled as if they were in some conspiracy together. “But if you and Kim are interested, so am I. I’m thinking you both figure Travis was up to his ears in murder, don’t you?”

“The guy who owns this bike is a
murderer
?” Melody took
a step backward, as if the motorcycle might reach out and grab her.

Rolf turned the key and lifted the lid on the saddlebag. In doing so, the sleeve on his left arm pushed up.

Cate reeled and had to catch the back fender of the bike for balance. Because at that moment, all that had been hiding in her subconscious since that night at the Mystic Mirage popped into Technicolor memory.

A left arm bursting through a beaded curtain. An arm with a multicolored tattoo of swirled lines, and in the center of the lines a malevolent dark eye.

The same dark eye she was seeing right now.

Rolf looked up. “You okay?”

Their eyes met, and she desperately willed hers not to give away any hint of recognition. Or to find any recognition in his.

“I-I’m just a little shaky, I guess. I fell over some piece of a motorcycle and hit my face in the dirt just before you got here.” She ran her fingers across her squashed nose. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you to put things away?”

“My mother never put
her
things away. Beer bottles and cigarette butts all over the house.” Rolf reached over and brushed a finger over Cate’s cheek. There was an odd intimacy to the touch that made her shudder. Oil and dirt smudged the finger when he took it away. He wiped the finger on his jeans. She wiped her face with both hands.

“I suppose you’re going to sue me now,” Rolf said. “Stress, pain and suffering, brain damage, warts, flat feet, et cetera.”

Cate tried to match his teasing tone. “Probably more money in that than in being a PI.”

“Sorry to have to tell you, but my entire fortune is tied up in bike parts. But maybe we could work out some other deal.” Cate heard the suggestion of some risqué double meaning in his banter, but she was relieved. Because it meant Rolf was
still being Rolf, confident any woman within range was smitten by his masculine charms. He hadn’t caught her shocked moment of recognition, and he still hadn’t recognized her.

It didn’t escape Melody’s attention that something was going on, however. She wrapped a possessive hand around Rolf’s arm. “C’mon, let’s go watch this DVD. She can look in the saddlebags by herself.”

“No, I’m interested too.” Rolf impatiently shook off her hand. “Maybe Travis keeps his gun in here. The one he shot Kieferson with.”

What Cate wanted to do was get out of there. Run, run, run. Before Rolf somehow did recognize her, and his playful teasing turned deadly.

But she forced herself to watch Rolf pull the contents out of one saddlebag and dump them on the motorcycle seat. No gun. Just more dirty clothes. Plus a couple of Styrofoam cups, a Sonic hamburger wrapper, and an empty Dr Pepper can. One thing to be said for Travis. Not a litterbug. Travis dutifully packed his trash away in his saddlebags.

The other saddlebag held a scrunched-up leather jacket with a carton of garbage bags on top. Cate almost smiled. She knew what those were for.

She also knew something else now. Travis was a lousy husband, a blackmailer, and probably a burglar. But he wasn’t a killer.

Cate’s almost-smile turned to a shiver.

The killer was right here beside her.

She studied him furtively as he dug to the bottom of the saddlebag. He dragged out a bottle of cologne, opened and sniffed it.

“Try this. Does Travis really think women go for a smell like this?”

Rolf thrust the open bottle under Cate’s nose. Rotten roses.

Cate’s nose automatically wrinkled. “Maybe he figured dabbing on cologne was easier than washing his clothes.”

She managed the snarky comeback even as the thought that filled her mind was that Rolf might have better taste in cologne than Travis did, but Rolf was the
killer
. She’d abandoned her first suspicions about Rolf in favor of Travis as murderer, but she’d been right the first time. Nerves prickled her body and trickled icy sweat down her ribs. She had to go to the police and tell them she’d remembered the tattoo on the arm that night at the Mystic Mirage. And that she knew who the arm belonged to.

Would they believe her? Or scoff at this miraculous return of memory? She had no explanation to offer for why Rolf had killed Celeste. Or what he was searching for when he trashed her apartment, which he must also have done. Or if he’d killed Ed too.

Cate swallowed. The thoughts in her head suddenly seemed so loud that Rolf surely must hear them. She covered them with a white noise of chatter.

“Well, I’d better be getting back to the rehearsal dinner. Mr. K’s restaurant is doing the buffet. They do all Lodge Hill’s food, you know. But I think they’re having problems there since Mr. Kieferson died. You two enjoy that DVD.
Spiderman,
you said it was, didn’t you? I’ve heard it’s good.”

“Hey, you could stay and watch it with us,” Rolf said. “We’ll pop some popcorn to go with the wine.”

“She could watch it
with
us?” the woman echoed with appalled indignation.

“Sounds like fun, but I am a bridesmaid. I guess it takes practice, that’s what this rehearsal dinner is all about. So we won’t make a mistake and all go down like a line of falling dominos during the ceremony.”

Cate backed away as she chattered. She wondered about
leaving Melody here alone with Rolf. But Melody was a girlfriend, no threat to him, so surely safe enough.

“Thanks for finding the keys,” Cate called back from outside the carport. “I’ll tell Kim that it was just more of Travis’s dirty clothes in the saddlebags. Maybe they’ll teach him how to do laundry in jail! See you later,” she added with a perky wave as she headed for the driveway.

Behind her, she heard Melody ask suspiciously, “What does she mean by that?”

Good. Rolf would have his hands full placating her. As soon as Cate got back to the lodge, she’d call the police. No, she’d go right to the station after the rehearsal. That way she could do a sketch of the tattoo for them. Once it had been only a shadow out of reach in her mind, but now it felt scorched on her brain.