“Good idea,” Cate said. “Afterward, we can stop and get something to eat. You haven’t been eating, have you?”
Kim looked around vaguely, as if eating were an unfamiliar concept. “I guess not.”
“We can go in my car. I’ll drive.”
Cate thought Kim might want to change clothes or comb her hair, but she just pulled the plaid jacket tighter around her and headed for the door.
“Maybe you should put on some shoes.”
Kim looked down at her feet. She seemed more surprised than embarrassed to see the toe-hole socks. She disappeared again, and this time came back wearing dressy slides that, along with the pink sweatpants and plaid jacket, made a rather odd fashion statement. The fashion police were apparently not on her list of worries now, and Cate liked her rather more for that.
Outside, at the car, Kim stopped suddenly. “Do I need to, um, hire you or something to do this?”
That brought Cate up short too. She already had a client, Jo-Jo. She couldn’t take on another client whose interests might conflict with Jo-Jo’s. But this case might be connected with Eddie the Ex’s murder, which definitely involved Jo-Jo.
“That won’t be necessary.”
The apartment building where Celeste had lived wasn’t disreputable or ratty looking, but neither was it the upscale complex Cate had expected. It was simply a single oblong building, gray-green in color, each unit with a tiny balcony. The landscaping was minimal, and the asphalt parking lot had odd bulges and bumps. Apparently Celeste’s book was no longer bringing in big money, nor was the Mystic Mirage any producer of wealth. Had Celeste been looking for something better for her daughter when she targeted Ed Kieferson and his Ice Cube house? Maybe thinking some financial benefit would flow through to her?
Kim pointed to a corner unit on the second floor. “That’s Mom’s.”
Celeste’s apartment stood out from the others with colorful pots of flowers and a climbing vine that formed a graceful green frame around the balcony. A copper plaque of a sun with fat rays, like those in the window of the Mystic Mirage, hung in the center.
There was an elevator, but they took the stairs. No crime-scene tape barred the door at 17B. Kim stuck a key in the lock and opened the door.
Inside …
What Octavia had done to the brown-haired wig, someone had done to the apartment. Kim’s mouth dropped open as she stared at the chaos, but nothing came out. Cate stepped around her.
Ripped sofa cushions, overturned floor lamp. A dining room chair flung against a wall, TV screen broken, a vase smashed, wilted chrysanthemums on the carpet. Beyond, in the kitchen, broken dishes and contents of fallen drawers strewed the floor, and the microwave door hung askew. In Celeste’s office, papers scattered the desk and floor, and pieces of a broken computer monitor glittered in the carpet. The medicine cabinet in the bathroom had been swept bare, pills scattered everywhere. In the bedroom, the mattress had been pulled from the bed and overturned, clothes yanked from the closet, drawers dumped.
Kim turned slowly in the ravaged bedroom, like a limp doll caught in forces beyond her control.
Cate had heard that the police weren’t into tidying things up after they searched a place, but this surely went far beyond police untidiness; this was destruction.
“We need to call the police,” Cate said.
Kim didn’t say anything. Cate had the impression her mind had simply stalled, as her own had there at the scene of Celeste’s murder.
“I wonder how he got in?” Cate said. “The door was locked.”
Kim blinked as if Cate’s statement made no sense. “He, who?”
“Travis?” Cate suggested.
The name jerked Kim out of that lost space and lifted her into anger. “Travis,” she repeated. “He could get in. He knew about picking locks! Some friend showed him. Just for fun, they said.”
Had Travis been having “fun” here?
“But why would he do something like this?” Kim wilted back into mental bewilderment and made that slow rotation with her arms outstretched again. “Why would he break in here just to destroy everything?”
Cate made a surveying turn of her own. “I think he was looking for something.” With destruction as a bonus. Or fury at not finding what he was looking for?
“Looking for what?” Kim asked.
Cate felt a twinge of impatience. Kim was the one who knew the guy, the one who’d been married to him. If anyone would know what Travis may have been looking for, it should be her.
“Who was the friend in Tigard you called to ask about Travis, the one who said he was looking for you?” Cate asked.
“Melissa Bair. She owns a house now, but she lived in an apartment next to us, and we got to be pretty good friends.”
“I don’t suppose you can tell if anything’s missing here?” Cate asked.
A useless question given the state of the apartment.
“I don’t know what Travis, or anyone else, could steal here. Mom never kept much cash around. She dropped the Mystic Mirage’s receipts off at the bank almost every day. She had some diamond earrings and lots of bracelets, but they were mostly those colorful bangle kind.”
“A burglar wouldn’t necessarily know that was all she had here,” Cate pointed out. Celeste was the kind of woman who looked as if she owned expensive jewelry, even if she didn’t.
“The only piece of jewelry she really cared about was that big crystal on a silver chain. I don’t know that it was worth a lot, but she said it had ‘special properties.’ But it wouldn’t be here, because she always wore it. The …” Kim swallowed convulsively. “The police gave it back to me.”
A big crystal on a silver chain. Cate hadn’t remembered seeing it that night at the Mystic Mirage. Her mind, too frozen by the shock of the murder and being attacked herself, had simply turned off details. But this detail had apparently been buried in her subconscious, because now it leaped into her conscious mind like a photo in 3-D. Celeste’s slender throat. A delicate silver chain. A big crystal glittering there on Celeste’s blood-stained ivory tunic. Right above the sword in her chest.
“Do you know where she kept her jewelry?”
“In a jewelry box here in the bedroom, I think.”
Kim didn’t help look for the box. She simply dropped to the edge of the bed and watched Cate probe around in the chaos. Cate came up with an empty, smashed box covered in blue velvet, and Kim nodded to identify it as the jewelry box. Poking further in the jumble on the floor, Cate found a few bracelet bangles, nothing that looked valuable. The burglar had apparently gotten the diamond earrings.
Which meant—what? Just a run-of-the-mill burglar enjoying a destructive fling in the process, especially if the loot hadn’t lived up to his expectations?
Cate’s PI intuition told her no, and this time she felt confident in the instinct. This was someone with a grudge against Celeste, someone who grabbed the diamond earrings while he was looking for something else. Travis.
Cate called 911. The woman first said, because it wasn’t an emergency situation, that it might be a while before an officer could respond. When Cate pointed out that the vandalized apartment belonged to a recent murder victim, the woman said they’d get someone there as soon as possible.
Cate wandered back to the combination living/dining room while they waited. Sliding glass doors opened out onto the little balcony, and Cate could see now that neither the flowers nor climbing vine were real. Kim followed and plopped down on the sofa.
“When did you last talk to your mother?” Cate asked.
“I haven’t been in the store since Ed was killed. So … I don’t know. I guess that morning, probably. She called and wanted to know if I’d heard anything from the attorney about Ed’s insurance.”
“Had you?”
Kim shook her head. “She said she’d check on it with him for me. We found out after Ed was killed that his ex-wife gets the money from a big insurance policy, but we were hoping Ed had gotten another policy
to protect me. But now that I’m learning about all his money problems, I doubt if he did that. I don’t know how I’m going to manage without Mom.”
No mention of Kim having problems getting along without Ed, Cate noted.
“I can’t do it!” Kim hadn’t cried before, but tears tumbled down her cheeks now. She brushed at them with a cuff of the plaid jacket in a harsh gesture that somehow seemed more angry and frustrated than grief-stricken. “I can’t get along without Mom.”
Cate wanted to stomp over to the sofa and shake Kim for such a negative attitude, but again she reminded herself of all Kim had lost. She started shoving kitchen drawers back into cabinets and putting utensils in them.
“Maybe you shouldn’t do that,” Kim said. “Maybe the police need to see everything the way we found it.”
Good point. Cate moved just enough debris so she could sit on the other end of the sofa. Then she jumped up, realizing they hadn’t even done what they’d come here for.
“Where’s the calendar you said your mother kept her appointments and notes on?”
“In her office.”
Surprisingly, the calendar still hung on the wall. The current month had a picture of a quaint-looking seaside village dozing under a Mediterranean sun. Cate flicked the pages. Various of the squares for the days of both past and future months indeed listed appointments and notes. None of them stood out as suspicious. Bridge club. Hair appointment. A book club reading. A couple of women’s names and phone numbers that Kim thought had been appointments for past-lives regressions. Cate jotted the names and numbers in her notebook. The square for the day Celeste had met her death was empty.
“We’d made the appointment only the day before, so she probably just didn’t bother to write it on here,” Cate said.
Only now did something click in Kim’s head. “I thought your appointment with Mom was one you didn’t get to keep because she’d been killed. But you did keep the appointment, didn’t you? You’re the person who found Mom’s body! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m a private investigator. My work is confidential.” To ward off further questions, she added, “It isn’t something I can talk about.”
Kim stared at Cate for a moment, as if she was thinking about challenging that answer, but finally she changed the subject abruptly.
“I think I’ll make some tea. You probably think I don’t even know how to make tea, don’t you? That married to Ed, all I was supposed to do was sit around and look good. But I cooked and kept house and everything, back when I was married to Travis.”
“About Travis,” Cate said. “Do you really think he could have killed your mother and done all this because he blamed her for your marriage breaking up?”
“Travis could carry a grudge for a long time.” Kim straightened an overturned chair in the dining area. “But I’ve been thinking while we’ve been sitting here. Mom was in Tigard not long before Travis disappeared. She was staying in a motel, not with us, because I was afraid if she was at our place Travis might start throwing frying pans or something at her. I thought that was when she might have paid him to get out of my life. But I’m wondering now if she did it some other way.”
“Such as?”
“Maybe she knew something incriminating about him. Something bad enough to get him in real trouble. And she told him he’d better just walk away or she’d use it against him.”
“Blackmail?”
Kim’s delicate brows drew together in a frown, as if she objected to the bluntness of that word. But she finally said, “I guess that’s what it would be called, wouldn’t it? But she must have had proof, or he’d have ignored her.”
Right. Some kind of proof that he’d been searching for here in the apartment. Tearing the place apart in fury. Or frustration? Had he killed Celeste and then come here to the apartment to find that proof, so it wouldn’t turn up later to trap him? Or had he come here to search and then gone to the Mystic Mirage and killed her? Had he looked for that proof, whatever it was, there in Celeste’s office?
No, he hadn’t had time. Because Cate had interrupted. And if Mitch hadn’t been there backing her up, she’d have been dead right along with Celeste.
Once more Kim turned slowly to survey the destruction. “I wonder if he found it?”
Good question.
An officer finally called Cate’s cell phone. He said no one would be able to come until the following day. They made an appointment to meet him at the apartment at 3:00 the following afternoon.
On the way back to the Ice Cube, Cate tried to get Kim to stop for something to eat, but Kim said she wasn’t hungry.
“I’ve been putting on weight anyway.” She prodded a slim thigh with a finger. “Mom said I’d better start taking it off.”
Mom, the guiding force behind everything Kim did.
“Don’t forget to put your shoes on in the morning,” Cate muttered.
They arranged to meet outside the apartment building just before 3:00 the next afternoon. Just an hour before that, Cate thought of something and called Kim.
“I was wondering, do you still have any photos of Travis around?”
“I might.” Kim sounded cautious, as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to admit to a secret stash of ex-husband photos.
“Could you bring them along? I think the officer might find them useful.”
Cate also wanted to see photos of Travis Beauchamp for herself.
Unexpectedly, Kim laughed. “I can do better than that,” she said almost gaily. “See you at 3:00.”
The hot red Mustang stood in the parking lot when Cate arrived. Kim slid out of the passenger’s side. A male figure got out of the driver’s side.
Cate momentarily thought it was Rolf. Big, dark-haired, muscular guy. Then she took a second look. Not Rolf. Kim was right. There were definitely similarities, but, up close, you wouldn’t mistake the two men for each other.
But here? Now? Cate glanced at Kim in disbelief. Hey, girl, what are you thinking?
Kim made blithe introductions. Cate Kinkaid—Travis Beauchamp.
Cate’s skin prickled. She saw a malicious eye behind a beaded curtain, a tattooed arm reaching for her. An arm that was close enough to reach out and grab her again.
Cate wanted to get Kim alone and hammer her with questions. What is he doing here with you? Why are you smiling at him?
But that wasn’t going to happen because a city police car was already pulling into a space on the opposite side of the parking lot. Reluctantly Cate followed Kim and her ex-husband across the asphalt to meet the officer.
18
Kim gave the officer background information as they went up to the apartment. Cate had expected to have to do the talking, but Kim seemed more in charge today, as if Travis’s presence had given her confidence. She had identified him to the officer as a “family friend from out of town.” Cate had thought the officer might object to Travis accompanying them to the apartment, but he hadn’t said anything. Travis had little to say, but he seemed congenial and polite.
If Kim hadn’t already told her about the fist through the wall, the frying pan through the window, his possessiveness, and the possible drug dealing, Cate might have thought Travis really was a helpful family friend. His sleeves were turned back on this pleasant fall day, revealing a couple of red hearts and black skulls within a tangle of varicolored vines.
Was that the arm she’d seen that night at the Mystic Mirage? Maybe it was. And maybe it wasn’t. Cate just wasn’t certain. No matter how hard she concentrated, all she could pick up from that terrifying encounter was a vague vision of swirly lines. Although she was positive Travis’s arm wasn’t one she’d want to see every day over breakfast.
The officer had a portable kit for picking up latent fingerprints. Cate had to explain that hers would be in the apartment because she’d earlier touched a number of items, a fact that earned her a grunt of disapproval from the officer. She kept a hawk eye on Travis as the officer dusted a grayish powder over various
surfaces, wondering if he’d be nervous about his own fingerprints showing up, but he seemed unconcerned. Which might only mean that he’d been wearing gloves when he ransacked the apartment and smugly knew the officer wasn’t going to find anything that incriminated him.
The officer spent a good hour and a half in the apartment talking to them. He didn’t specifically say so, but Cate got the impression he doubted Celeste Chandler’s murder and the ransacking of the apartment were connected. He suggested the possibility that the burglar was some lowlife who kept track of reported deaths and used them as his personal reference guide for breakins. The officer said he intended to talk to other tenants in the building. He also said the police investigation of the Mystic Mirage had been completed, and Kim could go back on the premises now.
After they headed back to their cars, Cate suggested she and Kim go over to the Mystic Mirage and check things out there. It was a lame attempt to get Kim alone to ask her questions, and Travis easily defeated it.
“I could go along and help. But we should go to the funeral home, don’t you think?” He touched Kim’s elbow lightly. “Get that taken care of?” He sounded concerned about her welfare, solicitous of the strain on her.
“Travis has been helping me decide what would be best for Mom,” Kim said. She looked up at him. “Yes, let’s do that now. I’ll feel better with that worry off my mind. We’ve decided on cremation,” she added to Cate. “No services. We’ll sprinkle the ashes out at the vineyard in a private ceremony of our own.”
Cate got it now. Got it with a big dose of dismay and apprehension. Kim had been lost without either Celeste or Ed to tell her what to do, and Travis had instantly slithered into that influential job. Right now, he’d managed not only to keep Cate from getting Kim alone, he’d also smoothly cut Cate out completely.
Dolled Up to Die Page 17