“I’m glad to hear that. You’ve received Eddie’s insurance money, then?” Enough to hire a killer as well as buy a car?
“No. I signed a contract to buy the car, thirty-six months of payments. I hate to be in debt, but I had to do it, for Maude. Without the alimony money coming in, I’ve also had to use my credit card for some things. I hope the insurance comes through soon. I need it.”
Okay, cancel the hired-killer possibility. Hired killers probably didn’t accept Visa or MasterCard.
“Actually, if it weren’t for Maude, I think I’d just pick up and head for Arizona,” Jo-Jo declared. “The lawyer I talked to said the police couldn’t keep me from doing that, unless they actually arrest and charge me with something.”
Which they might do. But Cate only said, “Let me know if you decide to do that, okay?”
Cate wanted to make another phone call. She didn’t have the number, but even unlisted numbers were supposed to be easily available on the internet. She started looking.
Maybe “easily available” was true for some surfers, but not Cate. People her age and younger were supposed to be the generation that came complete with a computer gene installed, but her installation had apparently been short a few cyberspace screws.
After twenty minutes, she decided there was an easier way and his name was Mitch, who had more than enough computer genes. She called his cell phone. He said he’d see what he could find out and call her back. Which he did, although he didn’t instantly rattle off the number. She wasn’t surprised that a mini-lecture came first.
“I suppose you’re going to do something with this number that I won’t approve of,” he said.
“Maybe I’ll use it to run a scam about how I’m in jail in Nigeria, and would Kim please wire money.”
He ignored the facetious suggestion. “I think you’re planning to call her and get yourself involved in what my grandmother would call ‘a heap of trouble.’”
“Yes, that’s my plan. The bigger the heap, the better.”
Big, put-upon sigh, but he gave her the number. “Let me know if you need backup again.”
“Will do.” But not if she could help it. At some point, she had to be able to stand alone as a PI.
“By the way, I have something to show you. I’ll come by later, okay?”
“Some new electronic gadget?” she asked.
“You’ll see.”
Cate dialed the number Mitch gave her. An answering machine picked up after four rings. It felt strange, hearing Eddie the Ex speaking while remembering him sprawled on the floor of Jo-Jo’s workroom, bullet hole in his forehead. Eerie. A voice from beyond the grave cheerfully telling her to leave a message and he’d get back to her.
In spite of how the unexpected voice rattled her, she managed to leave a reasonably coherent message for Kim. She didn’t have high hopes that Kim would respond, but when the phone rang ten minutes later, she jumped for it hopefully.
Not Kim. A male voice.
“Ms. Kinkaid, this is Roger Ledbetter, of Winkler, Ledbetter, and Agrossi, Attorneys-at-Law.”
Mr. Ledbetter was the lawyer handling the estate of the woman who had originally owned Octavia, and who was now overseeing construction of the house that was part of the cat’s inheritance. He always identified himself with careful formality. Cate had wondered if he did this to reinforce his voice of authority, or if he had some secret insecurity about people not remembering him.
“Yes, Mr. Ledbetter?”
“I’m calling because the contractor says the house will be ready for occupancy as soon as the final inspection by the building department is complete. So it’s time for you and Octavia to give the house a final walk-through to make certain everything is satisfactory.”
“You think Octavia should check it out?”
“Don’t you?” He sounded taken aback by her surprised reaction and uncharacteristically uncertain when he added, “I’ve never had a cat. I don’t know much about them. But I don’t want her to be unhappily surprised by any aspect of the house.”
Mr. Ledbetter may not know cats, but he took his job as executor of the estate seriously. He’d even had a private investigator check Cate out before granting her ownership of Octavia. She refrained from saying she doubted Octavia would sue if she didn’t like the color of the carpet.
“Okay, I can take Octavia over for a look in a day or two.”
Mr. Ledbetter’s brisk self-assurance returned. “I’ll be in court for the next few days, so I need to meet you there today. Will 3:00 be suitable?”
Spend the afternoon on a house tour with a deaf cat and a lawyer? Not an opportunity to which everyone had privilege. “Okay. We’ll be there.”
She called and left a message on Mitch’s voice mail about meeting Mr. Ledbetter at the house, and that she’d see him and whatever he had to show her later.
Octavia objected to being loaded into the pet carrier, objected to the ride, objected to Mr. Ledbetter peering into the cage when Cate carried it into the house. Objections expressed in yowls and snarls that would do justice to a lion protesting a toenail manicure.
Inside the house, Cate, wary of Octavia’s reaction, didn’t immediately turn her loose. She did a quick house inspection herself.
The house truly was a cat wonderland, but it was also a great house for Cate. She was going to love living here! A spacious master bedroom. A second bedroom as a guest room. And the third bedroom she could set up as an office for Belmont Investigations business. Refrigerator with ice maker. Sleek granite countertops. Double sinks in the master bath. Hmm. She’d never mentioned that to Mr. Ledbetter, and now all he said was a tactful, “I thought they might be useful at some time.”
Finally, when Octavia’s yowls had fallen to a lower decibel level, she unhooked the latch on the pet carrier.
To Cate’s surprise, Octavia stopped yowling and stepped out of the carrier with queenly poise. She sniffed around for a while and then climbed the carpeted pole that connected to the overhead walkway. She prowled the walkway through the openings cut through the walls, jumped to the window seat, and gleefully attacked a rope in her screened-in playroom. She also eyed the steel-brushed refrigerator expectantly. Octavia liked her cat food from a can, not running around on teensy-tiny mouse feet.
Hands tucked behind him, Mr. Ledbetter followed the cat’s progress through the house. This was the first time he’d actually met Octavia person-to-cat. “Do you think she’d like a TV in her sunroom?”
“Octavia isn’t really into TV.” There was an aquarium show that sometimes interested her, but Cate figured the cat could watch that on one of the other TVs. Mr. Ledbetter had already told her she could buy as many as she needed, along with whatever other furniture she wanted. All furnished by the estate.
Finally, after Octavia curled up on the window seat, he asked, “Do you think she likes the house?”
“I’d say she definitely gives it a cat thumbs-up.”
Surprisingly, now out of the cage, Octavia also seemed to approve of Mr. Ledbetter. She jumped down from the window seat and wound around his legs, rubbed her head on his shoe, and left a few souvenir white hairs on his dark suit. Hands still behind him, he leaned over to take a better look as she batted at his shoestrings.
“She really is deaf?”
“As a stump.” Cate eyed Octavia. “But if she were a person, I think she’d have made an excellent private investigator.” Maybe even a lawyer.
“Perhaps I’ll suggest to Mrs. Ledbetter that we should have a cat,” the lawyer said in a thoughtful tone.
After he left, Cate reloaded cat into carrier, and carrier into backseat of car. “You’re a cat kiss up,” she stated. Octavia, who always knew when she was being talked to even if she couldn’t hear, made a comfortable mrrow of agreement. “But I have to admit you’re an excellent ambassador for cat ownership.”
Cate was just slipping into the front seat of the car when a roar stopped her.
Not a kitty roar.
A motorcycle with headlight blazing growled to a stop behind her car. Panic attack. Rolf had figured out she’d seen him behind the curtain at the Mystic Mirage. He’d tracked her here and now—
Hey, wait, the handlebars on this machine weren’t ape hanger high like those on Rolf’s bike. Nor was this Rolf taking off a rainbow-streaked helmet and shaking out a headful of dark hair.
She got out of the car. “Mitch!”
He stepped back from the bike with gold specks glinting in the depths of deep purple. “What do you think?” He looked at the big machine with pride of ownership.
“I know you said you were thinking about getting one, but I guess I didn’t think you’d actually do it.”
“I was at the dealer’s when you called.”
“I wouldn’t have expected you to pick purple.” Mitch had never struck her as a purple kind of guy. To find purple depths in him was rather disconcerting.
“It isn’t exactly purple,” Mitch objected. “I think they call it Night Wine.”
“It’s purple.”
The motorcycle had a big windshield, a big trunk, and big saddlebags. The seat was on two levels, so a passenger sat at a slightly higher level behind the driver. Chrome gleamed everywhere.
Beautiful, in a Darth Vader, death-rocket kind of way.
“What’s next?” Cate asked. “A wardrobe of black leather? A tattoo?”
“In the bikers’ world, those are tatts.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“No tatts. And that’s a very—” Mitch broke off and scowled at her. “What’s a word that means something like ageist or racist, except it’s about stereotyping guys with motorcycles?”
“Bike-ist?”
“Okay. Bike-ist. You’re being bike-ist. Very judgmental, to say nothing of snarky, about someone with a motorcycle. Owning and riding a bike is not a character flaw.”
No?
“I don’t think I’m expert enough to offer you a ride yet. This is a way bigger bike than the one I had back in college.”
Cate squelched a snarky comment about how devastated she was not to get a ride this very minute.
“I have to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles now and get a motorcycle endorsement on my driver’s license.”
The snark rose again. “Are you sure they’ll let you do that without tatts and black leather? Maybe a biker babe on the back?”
“Bike-ist.”
Okay, maybe she was, she had to admit. Her personal experience with bikers—the one who’d tried to kill her, plus probable killer Rolf Wildrider, and memory of that biker gang that had taken up residence when she was a kid in Gold Hill—had not left warm, fuzzy impressions. And weren’t there statistics about how many more deaths there were per motorcycle miles than car miles?
“Maybe I’m worried about you, charging around on this … Purple Rocket.”
“I worry about you, charging around getting into PI trouble.”
Was that a stalemate? The jingle of the cell phone in Cate’s pocket interrupted, and, still eying the motorcycle, she answered it without checking the caller ID.
“Hi. This is Kim Kieferson. I’m returning a call someone made a little earlier? An investigator who had an appointment with my mother?”
Kim sounded more little-girl-lost than sophisticated trophy wife. Cate wasn’t about to go softhearted, however. This was the woman who had stolen Jo-Jo’s husband.
“Yes, I called.” Cate explained the appointment with Celeste without revealing any specifics about when or even if it took place. “Dr. Chandler indicated she was thinking about having someone investigated, and I’d like to talk to you about who it might be. It may have a connection with her death.”
“Are you with the police?”
“No, I’m a private investigator. No police connection.” Cate thought that information might end the conversation right there, but Kim surprised her.
“I don’t want to talk to the police anymore. They make me feel … awful. Like I’m guilty of something. Like I’m not being truthful.”
Cate heard an unspoken cry behind the words. A cry that said that even if Kim didn’t want to talk to the police, she wanted to talk to someone. Cate was reminded of what Rolf had said about Kim having no family, and what LeAnne had said about her being so dependent on her mother.
“I can come over any time that’s convenient for you,” Cate said. “Right now, in fact. I just have to take my cat home first.”
Cate glanced up at Mitch and put her hand over the phone. “I won’t need backup for this.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay. But call if you need me.” Mitch slapped the rainbow helmet over his head and fastened the chinstrap. “I know you didn’t mean it as a compliment, but I like your Purple Rocket name.” He gave the bike a good-boy pat.
Good, dependable Mitch. He might not approve of her PI activities, but he’d be there, backing her up if she needed him. She supposed the least she could do was try not to be so bike-ist.
“At least the motorcycle doesn’t have ape hangers,” she said.
“Ape hangers?” he repeated, obviously with no idea what she was talking about.
She felt a little smug knowing something about motorcycles that he didn’t. “Look it up.” She blew him a kiss. “Love the helmet.”
“There’s a matching one for you in the trunk.”
16
Cate dropped Octavia off at the house and drove out to Riverwalk Loop. There was a number pad at the wrought-iron gate to the Ice Cube, but, as Kim had instructed, she spoke into the black box, and Kim opened the gate from the house. Cate parked behind the flashy Mustang convertible and consoled herself by thinking that her old Honda probably got much better gas mileage.
The double front doors of the house were glass, but a shade was pulled over them, and Cate couldn’t see Kim until she opened the door. She had a Marilyn Monroe aura about her, beautiful and voluptuous, but also vulnerable and a little fragile in a pink sweat suit and old brown socks that looked as if they might have been Ed’s. Her toe stuck out of a hole in the left sock. But it was a nicely manicured toe.
“Were you at the vet with your cat?” Kim clutched the door as if she needed it for support. “You said you had to take it home.”
“I was showing her the new house where we’ll be living before long.”
“That’s nice,” Kim said, as if showing a house to a cat was something everyone did. Her gaze roamed the high ceiling of the room, as if she were wondering how a cat might view it.
Cate’s gaze followed. The ceiling was solid, not glass. No looking up at the undersides of feet overhead. Good thinking. The statistics on the house at the tax assessor’s office had said there was an indoor pool and a temperature-controlled wine room. She’d kind of like to have a tour.
Kim lifted her arms. “I’ve always loved this house. But now, with Ed gone, it’s … different.” Her arms wrapped around her midsection. “I’m always cold.” Could eyes shiver? Her blue eyes seemed to.
Kim led the way into a living room so large that it was divided into several sections by furniture arrangements, each with its own color-coordinated scheme. Three TVs, one enormous, two only semi-enormous. Light streamed through the upper third of the glass window-walls, but shades that rolled up from the bottom gave the room a peculiar underwater feeling. Yet, if the shades were down, sitting here where every passerby on the street could see inside would be very fishbowl-ish.
When she was rich, Cate decided, she wouldn’t have a glass house. Although she might go for a Mustang convertible.
Kim motioned Cate to a white leather sofa in the purple-and-white geographical region. She sat down herself, then jumped up as if instructions on being a good hostess had just kicked in. “Would you like something to drink? There’s Pepsi or 7UP or wine. Pinot noir and chardonnay, I think. That’s the kind of grapes the vineyard grows. Or Snapple or V8 juice? But no coffee. I never could figure out that stupid cof
fee machine!” She slammed a purple pillow into the sofa, as if pillow or coffeemaker were to blame for all her troubles. “Ed always made our coffee. I haven’t had any since he’s been … gone.”
Instructions for operating a coffee machine didn’t come with the Trophy Wife Instruction Kit?
Cate gave herself a mental kick. Kim was trying to be nice. She looked as if she’d been crying, although that hadn’t turned her face all red and blotchy, the way it did Cate’s. Only a hint of blue shadows around her eyes darkened her peachy skin.
“Nothing for me, thanks,” Cate said. Although she had some doubts about Celeste Chandler’s character, the woman was Kim’s mother, and Cate offered her sympathies. “I’m so sorry about your mother. I know what a difficult time this must be for you. I think losing a mother is one of the worst events of our lives. Especially when she was still so young.”
Kim blinked and nodded. Her voice was scratchy when she said, “Thank you.”
Trying to look professional, Cate got out her notebook and placed it on her lap. She couldn’t think quite how to get started, but, unexpectedly, Kim made the first move.
“You said you had an appointment with my mother?”
“Yes, that’s right. Had your mother mentioned it to you?”
Kim shook her head. “She hadn’t said anything, but I’ve been thinking ever since you called, and I may know what the appointment was about.”
“Oh?”
“I think she was considering having my ex-husband investigated.”
Cate had been expecting Kim to say her mother wanted Rolf Wildrider investigated in relation to Ed’s death, and now she felt as if some new and ominous figure had peered out of the shadows.
“Why would she do that?”
“It’s kind of a long story?” Kim made a question of the statement, as if she were doubtful about taking up Cate’s time.
“I have plenty of time,” Cate assured her.
“Okay. Well, Travis, that was my husband, just walked out on me. Not a word where he was going, and I never heard from him again after he left.”
“Did anyone else have contact with him?”
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