Sweetheart in High Heels (4 page)

“And she didn’t like hearing that you weren’t,” I said, imagining how that conversation played out.

Celia shook her head. “Like I said, I didn’t mean to upset her, but I didn’t want her to be disappointed either, you know?”

“So you weren’t worried about moving out?’ Dana asked.

Celia shrugged. “
If
a ring was in the box,
if
he popped the question, and
if
he wanted to move in here. That’s a lot of ifs.”

She had a good point. And, while a nice rental in L.A. was hard to come by, I had a tough time picturing the woman before me killing to stay in this one. But, just in case, I asked, “Where were you yesterday morning?”

Celia blinked at me. “Here. Why?”

“Alone?” Dana asked.

“Yeah. Alone. I’d had a late night and was sleeping in.”

Not exactly an airtight alibi, I noted.

“This guy that Peach was seeing,” I asked, “Know where we can find him?”

Celia nodded, then dug into her back pocket and came out with a cell. “Peach was staying there a couple nights a week, so she gave me the number for emergencies.” She rattled it off, and Dana punched it into her own cell.

We thanked Celia for her time, then as soon as we got back in the Jeep, Dana dialed the boyfriend on speaker phone.

Four rings in, he finally picked up.

“Hello?” came a gravelly voice.

“Vic? Hi, my name is Dana. I was a friend of Peach’s.”

The guy on the other end sniffed loudly. “Oh,” he said. Then did another sniff. “It’s terrible, huh?”

Dana nodded in the car. “Terrible. Look, I was wondering if maybe we could meet. I have a few questions I’d love to ask you about Peach.”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice low. “Sure. I guess so. For Peach.” I wasn’t sure, but I thought I heard his voice crack on that last statement. If it wasn’t actual grief consuming him, he was doing a hell of an acting job.

We agreed to meet up at a coffee place near his house, and twenty minutes later Dana and I had our second round of lattes for the day. We settled into a table near the back and a couple minutes later a tall, dark haired man walked in. His eyes were rimmed in red, and his shirt was miss-buttoned, leaving an extra hole on one side. Taking a wild guess, I hailed him over to our table.

“Vic?” I asked as he approached.

He nodded, then said, “Hi,” in a somber voice, shaking hands first with Dana then me.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said, feeling like a broken record.

He nodded again. “Yeah. Thanks,” he said. His voice came out as a cross between Ross from
Friends
and Eeyore from
Winnie the Pooh
. Then again, considering the circumstances, I hardly expected peppy.

“You were friends of hers?” he asked us.

“Dana was,” I said gesturing to her.

“I can’t believe she’s really gone,” he said.

“You’d known Peach a couple months?” I asked.

“Yeah. We met at club on Sunset. I was drawn to her immediately. She was just so sweet.”

That seemed to be the consensus. On the other hand, sweet people usually didn’t have the kind of enemies that stabbed them to death.

“You had a good relationship?”

“The best!”

“So good you were going to propose, right?” Dana asked.

Vic blinked at her, shock registering clearly on his face. “Propose? God, where did you hear that?”

“So, you weren’t going to ask her to marry you?” I clarified.

“No. God, no. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I totally dug Peach. But we’d only been dating a couple months. No way were we ready to get married.”

“Peach thought you were,” Dana said. “She thought you were going to pop the question soon.”

Vic shook his head. “Why on earth would she think that?’

I cleared my throat. “Uh… apparently she found a ring box in your sock drawer.”

Vic did some more blinking, then sat back in his chair. “It was an
earring
box. I bought her earrings for Valentine’s Day. Geeze, she really thought I was going to propose?”

Dana leaned in and whispered to me, “I knew no man could propose in two months!”

I ignored her, instead asking Vic, “The morning Peach died… where were you?”

“Home, I guess.”

“Alone?”

“Yeah. I telecommute. Why?”

I shrugged. “No reason. Just checking.”

We thanked the still shocked Vic for his time, told him again how very sorry we were for his loss, and left.

“So,” I said when we got back to the car, “we have a boyfriend who
isn’t
proposing, a roommate who
isn’t
being kicked out, and a business partner who
isn’t
losing money.”

”And a victim everyone described as super sweet,” Dana said.

I turned to her. “Did you think she was sweet?’

Dana bit her lip. Then nodded. “Yeah. She really was. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt her.”

Which left us back at square one. This was proving to be a much harder Valentine’s anniversary present than I’d thought.

Chapter Four

Dana had to meet Ricky for a “thing in the Hills”, so I dropped her off at her place. She gave me a hug goodbye along with a reminder that tomorrow was the Viewer’s Choice Awards, and we had 9 AM appointments at Fernando’s for our hair. I promised I’d meet her there, then headed home myself. On the off chance that Ramirez might come home for food and a nap again tonight, I decided to have a nice home-cooked meal ready for him. Taking stock of the ingredients I had on hand, then searching through AllRecipes.com’s database, I came up with pot roast. I chopped, spiced, boiled, and simmered all afternoon, and by the time I heard Ramirez’s key in the lock, I had to admit, it smelled pretty good in there.

“Hey,” he said, throwing his keys on the kitchen counter. “What smells so good?”

“I made pot roast,” I said, beaming with domestic goddess pride.

He raised an eyebrow. “
You
made it?”

I swatted him with a dishtowel. “Watch it, buster.”

He grinned. “All right, I give in. Hand me a plate. But, I have to make it quick. I gotta get back down town in an hour.”

“That’s it? All you get is an hour?” I asked, doing my best to hide my disappointment as I dished him up a serving.

“ME’s report came in on Peach. We need to get back to the CSU lab.”

“Why?’ I asked, my ear perking up. “What was in the report?”

“Lots.”

“Very funny. Care to elaborate?”

“Well, guess how she died,” he said, leaning back on his heels, a small smirk of I-know-something-you-don’t-know playing on his lips.

“Um, stabbing? Or bleeding out or whatever you guys call that,” I guessed, stating the obvious.

He shook his head. “Nope. Turns out the stabbings were post mortem.”

I frowned. “Wait – post? That means she was already dead?”

“Yep.”

“Why would someone stab her if she was already dead?”

Ramirez shrugged. “That’s a great question. Could be they didn’t know she was dead. Or maybe they were trying to make the murder look like something it wasn’t. Could be they were even trying to get rid of evidence by confusing the crime scene. Hard to tell at this point.”

I pondered this. Dana and I had been going on the theory that the murder was personal based on the stabbing. But if Peach had been killed another way, maybe someone was trying to make it look like it was more personal than it really was. Which begged the question…

“So, how did she really die?” I asked.

“Asphyxiation.”

“She was strangled?”

“Or suffocated. We didn’t find any obvious ligature marks on her neck, but the ME did say she had the telltale petechial hemorrhaging around the eyes that indicated lack of oxygen.”

“So, someone suffocates Peach, then stabs her multiple times?” I shook my head. “Kinda seems like overkill.”

“You’re telling me. Double the wounds, double the missing weapons, double the paperwork. Which,” he said, “is why I only have an hour to eat and get back out there.” He stabbed at a piece of beef and brought the fork to his mouth. He chewed, paused, did a kind of grimace, then slowly swallowed.

“What do you think of the roast?” I asked hesitantly.

He looked down, finding a piece of lint on his shirt inordinately interesting. “It’s good.”

“You can’t look me in the eye and say that, can you?”

“Do I have to?”

“No.” I sighed. “Go grab a burger.”

Ramirez grinned. “And that’s why I love you.” He leaned in and gave me a quick peck on the cheek. Then he grabbed his keys and called, “Don’t wait up,” over his shoulder before shutting the front door behind him,

Leaving me alone for the evening.

Again.

* * *

While I would have liked to follow up with a couple of our suspects, the following day was, as Dana had reminded me, the Viewer’s Choice Awards, which meant a morning of visiting the hair stylist, the make-up artist, and the nail artist, and then finally squeezing ourselves into Spanx and skin tight dresses in order for our limos to be outside the Kodak Theater in Hollywood to walk the red carpet before the show started taping live for the east coast viewers at 2pm.

By the time our limo was in fact in line on Hollywood Boulevard, inching toward the red carpet behind all the other limos, I had to agree with Dana that being a movie star was actually hard work. I was sausaged into a black, sequined Versace dress on loan from one of my fav boutiques on Melrose. While I was in absolute love with the dress, it was at least a size too small, but, thanks to my supportive undergarments, I was able to just barley get into it. God forbid someone should hand me an hors d'oeuvre during the after party, because I might pop a seam. On my feet were, of course, a pair of my own designs from my Spring collection – four inch black stilettos with a Swarovski crystal design down a satin T-strap from the ankle to the toes. Which, thanks to the fabulous skills of Fernando’s salon, were painted in a deep, blood red that perfectly matched my lipstick. My hair was done up in a forties-inspired look with soft waves and the ends tucked under. At one point I passed a mirror and could have sworn Veronica Lake was staring back at me.

But, as glamorous as I felt, it was nothing compared to the way Dana and Ricky looked together. A more golden couple, I could not imagine. While I was taking shallow breaths to stay in my dress, Dana’s fit her with an easy elegance that had me feeling just the teeniest bit jealous. (Only the teeniest because I knew first hand how many hours in the gym that easy elegance required.) She wore a nude colored, full length dress in a simple bias cut, with a slit up the right leg ending just high enough to be sexy, but not so high as to attract attention on street corners. Her hair was loose, in big, perfect curls, and, while the dress was elegantly simple, she’d tricked it out with a borrowed set of vintage diamonds – a necklace, cuff bracelet, and long, dangling earrings. The whole effect was grace and beauty that perfectly complemented Ricky’s Prada tux.

If Dana didn’t end up on the best-dressed list tomorrow morning, I was personally writing Joan Rivers a letter of complaint.

In fact the only thing marring Dana’s graceful get-up was the fact she was twisting her hands into knots on her lap.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” she said, glancing nervously out the window.

“Relax,” Ricky said, putting a hand over hers.

“It’s the red carpet. I’ve never done the red carpet.”

“It’s just the Viewer’s Choice. It’s not like it’s the Oscars or anything.”

“Fifteen million people in sixty-five countries watch this live.”

Ricky turned to her with a raised eyebrow. “Really?”

She nodded.

“It’s true. They do,” I said, being one of those who just last year had been glued to the screen myself. I had to admit, I was feeling just the slightest scooch of the nerves myself as I watched the red carpet draw closer.

“Huh. I didn’t know that,” Ricky said, though he leaned back in his seat like it was no biggie. Of course, he didn’t have to walk it in four-inch heels, either.

“What if I trip?” Dana asked, voicing my very thoughts. “What if my heel gets caught, or I step on Angelina Jolie’s train, or my bracelet gets caught on Ryan Seacrest’s mic wire? I don’t think I can do this.”

“Too late,” Ricky said, giving her a wink. “We’re next.”

He was right. I looked out the tinted limo windows to see the car in front of us pull to a stop and two guys in tuxes and headsets open the back door. I gasped out loud when I saw Johnny Depp emerge.

“Ohmigod. Did you see who that was?” I asked, gawking like a super fan. “Johnny Depp!”

“I think I’m gonna faint,” Dana said. “I think I’m gonna pass out on the red carpet. Ohmigod, what if I pass out on the red carpet?!”

“Deep breaths. You’re gonna do fine, babe,” Ricky reassured her.

“I need a paper bag,” Dana said, putting her head between her knees.

“Let’s go. You can do this. It’s show time, babe,” Ricky said, grabbing her hand as the guys with headsets opened the back doors for us.

Of course, as soon as we were out of the limo, I was ushered around the back side of the red carpet, where publicist, agents, personal assistants, writers, producers, and anyone else not on the A list stood. In this crowd the Spanx were a little looser and the jewelry a little smaller. But I didn’t care. I was at a red carpet event, and I was loving it.

I watched as Dana glided down the walkway, her arm through Ricky’s, a huge smile pasted on her face. She really was a good actress. You’d never know she was seconds from passing out a moment earlier.

Ricky leaned in as they posed for photos near a potted palm tree, whispering in her ear as flashbulbs assaulted them. I could see any lingering tension drain from her face as she leaned into his touch. For all her complaining about celebrity, I could tell that there was nowhere else in the world Dana would want to be more than right there.

Ditto for me.

I soaked it all up, enjoying my red carpet experience to the fullest. I saw Sandra Bullock in a beautiful ivory gown, Helen Mirren in a gorgeous emerald dress, and Julia Roberts sparkling in a short sequined outfit with a long chiffon skirt. Very daring, and sure to hit the Best Dressed radar later. I was in fashion heaven, not to mention just the teeniest bit star struck as I gawked in awe at all the star power surrounding me.