“Scared? Angry?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. She dropped a ceramic wind chime and broke it. She went to use a ballpoint pen, and it wouldn’t work, and she threw it halfway across the store. I mean, that struck me as agitated.”
“Could the caller have been Mr. Kieferson, and he said something to upset her?”
“The call came on the Mystic Mirage line, and when Mr. Kieferson called Kim, it was always on her cell phone. But I suppose it could have been him. Kim was there, and she asked Celeste about the call later, and Celeste said it was just some annoying salesman.”
“But you didn’t believe that?”
“For all I know, it could have been someone from one of her past lives calling up for a chat.” Small, uneasy laugh. “Well, that was catty, wasn’t it? Forget I said that.”
“Can you remember anything Celeste said on the call?”
“I remember her telling whoever it was that he wasn’t welcome there. And if he started coming around, there could be unpleasant consequences.” She paused to reflect for a moment. “I’ve always assumed it was a man, but it could have been a woman.”
“How long ago was this call?”
“It was a couple days before Celeste fired me, which would make it about three weeks ago.”
Which would be before Ed Kieferson was killed. Which might or might not mean anything.
“Thank you. That’s very interesting. If you think of anything else, give me a call, okay?” She gave the woman the Belmont Investigations number.
Celeste’s caller may have been a persistent salesman, as she claimed. Her end of the conversation could fit with that. But former-employee Lola wasn’t convinced, and neither was Cate. Maybe Celeste was talking to a killer.
Maybe a killer she’d hired?
Cate immediately called Mitch to see what he could find out about the phone call to Celeste at the Mystic Mirage, but he laughed.
“Cate, you overestimate my skills.”
“I think you’re a computer genius.” Which wasn’t hogwash or sweet talk. He really could make a computer give up an astonishing number of secrets. Maybe sing and dance too.
“That’s very flattering, and it’s no doubt possible for the police to check phone records. For me it would take some powerful illegal hacking, which I do not do now. Although I have something else that may interest you.”
“About?”
“Rolf Wildrider.”
The first thing Mitch had found out was that Rolf Wildrider’s real name was Robert Johnson. He’d adopted the more colorful name during a successful motorcycle racing career. He’d also gotten into motorcycle stunt competitions, suffered a broken back, and quit that line of work. He’d then gone to college in California and studied viticulture, no hint on what prompted him to go into the study of grape growing. He didn’t graduate, which Mitch guessed might be because he ran out of money. He’d made big bucks in his motorcycle career, but he’d lived high and hard enough to run through money as fast as he made it. Mitch hadn’t found anything on past marriages or divorces, but Rolf’s name had been linked with a fairly well-known model during his racing career.
“So he settled down and became a quiet-living grape grower?”
“Not exactly,” Mitch said. “He worked for a vineyard down in the southern part of the state before coming here, but he got in the middle of some drug deal shoot-out down there. At first it looked as if he was involved in the shooting himself and might be charged with manslaughter, but some witnesses disappeared and that case against him fell apart.”
“Witnesses disappeared? Suggesting he had something to do with their disappearance?”
“I don’t know. But he was in trouble anyway, because they found out he had a little sideline of growing marijuana along with grapes on the vineyard. He wasn’t in jail long, but he’s still reporting to a probation officer.”
So, caring and generous man that Mr. K was, according to LeAnne, he’d been willing to give Rolf a second chance in spite of his wayward ways? Or maybe those wayward, drug-growing ways were what interested Eddie, and he had in mind adding a sideline to boost vineyard income? And could that have any connection with his murder?
Cate had another case to work on the following day, an investigation assigned to Belmont Investigations by an insurance company. The man they were investigating had applied for disability payments, saying he couldn’t work, but the company suspected he was secretly working for under-the-table cash. She had several possible workplaces to check out.
By the end of the day, after slogging around an auto repair shop located in an old barn, two small businesses that did yard-maintenance work, and a woodcutting outfit, Cate had found nothing to indicate the man was doing anything but what he said he did. Which was sitting around a coffee shop nursing a lone cup most of the day, because that was all he could afford.
What she had at the end of the day was a pair of shoes covered with enough oil to excite a drilling company, courtesy of the puddle she’d stepped into at the auto-repair shop. Plus a dent in her car bumper from backing into a stump at the woodcutting site. Where she’d also gotten stuck in the mud and had to pay the unfriendly woodcutters, who hadn’t liked her nosy questions, to pull her out with their four-wheel-drive pickup.
She was not in an upbeat frame of mind when Robyn called that evening to tell her the bridesmaid dress had arrived.
“I was thinking you could come over tonight and try it on,” Robyn said.
Cate’s first inclination was to make up some wild excuse. Sorry, I have to wash a murderer out of my hair. I have a killer headache. But she squelched that route as unacceptable. Especially with such bad puns. Actually, she decided gloomily, trying on a bridesmaid dress was probably the perfect end to the kind of day she’d had.
“Sure, I’ll come over right now.”
Cate had never been to the house Robyn shared with her great-aunt Carly, but a Googled map took her right to the beautifully maintained Victorian. Gingerbread decorated the porch, ivy climbed the fireplace chimney, and a ceramic daisy encircled the doorbell. Robyn gave her a big hug at the door and introduced her to Great-aunt Carly.
Carly Simmons was of indeterminate age, white haired but enviably slim and smooth skinned. She was watching a documentary on TV about the poisonous qualities of some jungle plants. Taking notes. Hmm. Cate, operating on that be-suspicious-of-everyone premise, made a mental note of her own in case any plant-based poison cases turned up in the future.
Robyn led Cate upstairs to a bedroom with a steeply slanted roof and orchid-flowered bedspread and curtains. The dress lay spread on the bed, artfully arranged so it seemed to have an alluring figure of its own.
Celadon. Cate hadn’t given much thought to what that color actually was, but now she saw that it was a pale celery. A silvery-grayish, not-too-healthy-looking celery.
She skimmed out of her jeans and sweater, and Robyn helped her step into the dress. She didn’t even have to hold her breath or suck in her stomach for Robyn to zip the dress up the back.
Robyn stepped back to look at her. She clapped happily. “Oh, that’s awesome. It’s a perfect fit! Come look.”
She led Cate to a full-length mirror in an alcove at the end of the room.
“I’ll go get Aunt Carly,” Robyn said. “She has to see this.”
Cate studied herself in the mirror. If you wanted to be critical, you might say she looked rather like a stalk of ailing celery, with her red hair a radish on top. But if you didn’t want to be so critical … the effect wasn’t bad. Not bad at all! The dress nipped her waist, the neckline flattered her throat and shoulders, and the color set off her red hair rather nicely.
Of course, the idea Robyn had earlier proposed, that Cate would have lots of use for the dress after the wedding, was high fantasy. She saw no Emmy award banquets or presidential inaugurations in her immediate future. But the gown would upgrade her closet nicely.
Great-aunt Carly made Cate twirl twice, so she could get a 3-D view
. She offered enthusiastic oohs and aahs. Then she asked, “What about shoes?”
Cate looked down at her bare toes. Good question.
“Shauna’s sandals had to be extra-wide and I knew they wouldn’t fit Cate, so I told her to keep them.” Missing shoes were no problem for the efficient Robyn, however. “What size do you wear, Cate? I’ll order them tomorrow, and they’ll be here in plenty of time.”
Cate told her size seven, and Robyn made a note of that on a to-do list for the wedding. A list that filled most of two pages and would have made Cate cross out everything and put “elope” on the top line.
Cate thought of something as Robyn started unzipping the dress. “Mrs. Simmons—”
“Oh, do call me Carly,” the woman said. “Everyone does.”
“Okay. Thanks. I was wondering, I think Robyn told me you knew Ed Kieferson, the owner of Lodge Hill who was killed recently? Murdered, actually.”
“Yes. So shocking.” Carly touched a veined but elegant hand to her collarbone. “I mean, I know murders happen all the time, even here in Eugene, but I’ve never personally known anyone who was murdered. Did you know him?”
“His former wife had contacted me about another matter, and I happened to be with her at the house when his body was discovered there.”
“Cate is a private investigator,” Robyn said.
“Assistant private investigator,” Cate corrected conscientiously.
Carly adjusted her glasses and inspected Cate rather differently than she had when she was admiring the dress. “Are you carrying a gun?”
Since Cate was now standing there in nothing but her underthings, she had to wonder where Carly thought she might be carrying it. She grabbed her jeans and slipped into them. She didn’t feel like explaining about assistant private investigators and guns, so all she said was, “No, no gun. But I am interested in what you know about Mr. Kieferson.”
Carly perched on the edge of the bed. “I knew him only in the way one businessperson knows another, not really a personal connection. I did do a big job for him when they had the grand opening for Mr. K’s restaurant. He wanted yellow roses everywhere. That was before Robyn came,” she added, nodding to her grandniece, who was now carefully folding the dress and placing it in a box for Cate to take home. “We still have a standing order for a single rose at each table at the restaurant twice a week, but I don’t know if that will continue now that he’s gone.”
“You didn’t have much actual contact with him, then?” Cate asked. She wiggled into her sweater.
“Actually I’m better acquainted with his wife’s mother, Celeste, than I was with him.”
Even better!
“Well, I did know Celeste,” Carly corrected. “We had kind of a falling-out a while back.”
“This was a personal falling-out, not a business matter?” Cate asked as she sat down to put her shoes on.
“Yes, although it may have been why they didn’t order flowers for the funeral from us. I met Celeste through a bridge club we both belong to, and then we started going to brunch together occasionally, just the two of us,” Carly said. “I enjoyed her. She had lots of inside stories about celebrities she’d met, kind of catty stuff, but fun. She had stories about their past lives too. She kept wanting to do a past lives regression on me. I thought it was all kind of far out, but finally, a couple months ago, I said okay.”
“She came here?”
“Yes. She told me to get comfortable in the recliner downstairs. She’d hypnotize me, and then we’d go back in time together.”
“And?”
“She couldn’t hypnotize me. I just sat there, all bright-eyed and wide awake. So then she said she’d give me something to help me relax. I said no way, I wasn’t taking anything. That really annoyed her, and she told me I wasn’t cooperating at all. By then I was annoyed with her too, and I told her I was pretty sure neither I nor anyone else had any past lives anyway. That it was all a bunch of hokey drivel.”
“I take it she didn’t care for that opinion?” Cate said.
“She stomped out, and after that she wouldn’t even speak to me at bridge club.”
Interesting, but Cate couldn’t see that it aided her investigation. Although refusing to speak to Carly did show a certain vindictiveness in Celeste.
“Did Celeste ever talk about Mr. Kieferson or her daughter’s marriage to him?”
Unexpectedly, Carly laughed. “Did she ever. She said the man was a clod. Totally unsophisticated. Uncouth. That he had enough nose hair to make a doormat and terrible dandruff. But those flaws weren’t so noticeable, I suppose, when he was waving his money around.”
“She said this at the bridge club?”
“Oh no, this was when we were having brunch together, just the two of us. After a couple of mimosas, Celeste could get quite talkative. We laughed a lot. Although one time …” Carly’s elegantly arched eyebrows drew together.
“Something happened?”
“She hadn’t had a mimosa that day, but she was talking about Ed, and she wasn’t laughing. I don’t know what he’d done, but she said, ‘If that jerk does anything to hurt my baby, I’ll kill him. I will kill that man.’”
Carly looked up at Cate. She covered her parted lips with her fingertips, as if she’d had second thoughts about sharing that bit of information.
“I think you should tell the police about that,” Cate said.
Carly hesitated, as if she were considering a conversation with the police. Then she shook her head and laughed. “Oh, I don’t think she meant anything by it. I mean, how many times do people say something like, ‘My husband will kill me when he sees that dent I put in the fender.’ Or ‘I’m gonna kill that kid if he talks back to me one more time.’ I’ve done it. Haven’t you?”
“I suppose.”
“I mean, I think Celeste is a pretentious quack with all that past-lives stuff,” Carly said. “I’m not sure her ‘doctor’ degree is even authentic. But I think ‘kill’ was just a figure of speech. I wouldn’t want to make unfair accusations. She said some bad things about Kim’s ex too.”
“Such as?”
“Like there were only two important food groups in his diet, chips and beer. Like he’d rather cheat someone out of a dollar than earn ten honestly. That he was lazy and mean, and Kim never should have married him even if she was pregnant.”
“Pregnant?” Cate repeated, surprised. She hadn’t heard anything about Eddie the Ex’s new wife already having a child.
“She lost the baby when she was a few months along.”
“Did Celeste ever mention the ex’s name? Or where he is now?”
“Travis something. I don’t think I ever heard his last name. I asked her what became of him, and she said he was out of the picture. She sounded kind of, oh, self-satisfied about it, and I’ve always wondered if she had something to do with getting rid of him.”
“He’s dead?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that.” Carly touched both cheeks in alarm, as if Cate had suggested Celeste had killed him. “I just meant, maybe she encouraged Kim to leave him. Although he could be dead, I suppose. I think he had kind of a wild lifestyle.”
So maybe Celeste had experience getting rid of undesirable husbands. And maybe she’d gotten away with murder not just once, but twice?
11
Cate slipped into her jacket and picked up the big box. She couldn’t make herself white lie about looking forward to the wedding, but she did manage to say, “I’m sure it’s going to be a beautiful wedding.”
Robyn reached over and picked up a strand of Cate’s red hair. She held it out from Cate’s head like some slimy specimen she’d found lurking on a plant at the flower shop. “Your, um, hair,” she said.
Cate tilted her head out from under Robyn’s hand. “I’ll get it cut before the wedding. And use some really strong hairspray to keep it from flying around.”
“A cut would be nice,” Robyn said. “But it’s the color I’m thinking about.”
“The color? What about the color?”
“Well, it’s … red.”
Yes, it was. Cate’s hair was red. It had always been red. Barn-paint red. Tomato red. Flaming carrot red.
“The thing is,” Robyn said, “my maid of honor and the bridesmaids are dark haired. I thought that would be a nice backdrop to, you know, spotlight my blonde coloring.”
Robyn fingered a strand of her own hair that reached below her shoulders in a lush fall of silky radiance. One golden-haired princess of a bride. A herd of dark-haired bridesmaids.
Except one of those bridesmaids wasn’t dark haired. Cate was the off-breed red-haired mutt in a lineup of purebred brunettes.
Cate knew she should feel relieved. Here was the perfect opportunity to agree with Robyn; red hair would totally destroy the ceremony. Both she and The Hair must be removed from the scene, or some warp in the universe would destroy the world as they knew it. But at the same time an unexpected indignation erupted.
“You knew my hair was red when you asked me to be a bridesmaid.”
“Yes, of course! I just—” Robyn broke off, apparently unable to think of a tactful rescue. “I love your hair. But I’m thinking that maybe, just temporarily, you could have it colored for the ceremony? I’ll pay for it, of course.”
“You want me to dye my hair?”
“Everybody colors their hair,” Robyn said, emphasizing the more euphemistic word. “I mean, even mine isn’t quite this blonde naturally. Didn’t you ever want to try a different color?”
Okay, Cate had thought a few times about a change. She’d even tried it once, but the resulting pool-slime green was not a flattering change. (“I’ve never seen that happen before,” the hair colorist had said, looking a little green herself.) Now Cate was out of her comfort zone just being a bridesmaid. To be a bridesmaid with hair dyed to meet Robyn’s color scheme was too much.
Carly, apparently sensing rebellion, stepped up. “How about a wig?”
Cate and Robyn repeated the words together. “A wig?”
Robyn jumped on it instantly. “Aunt Carly, that’s an awesome idea! I should have thought of that to begin with. Don’t you just love it, Cate? You can be a stunning brunette for just that evening, and then you can turn right back into a … unique redhead. I’ll pay for a wig, of course.”
Dolled Up to Die Page 10