She headed for her car with the box in her arms. “I’ll be right back to get the other box,” she called over her shoulder.
She wanted to look for the envelope right away, but a quick glance showed her that someone, probably the person named Elsie, was watching from a window. She hurriedly got the second box and slammed the trunk lid shut on both boxes. She went only as far as the parking area of the closed restaurant before stopping again to open the trunk.
Travis Beauchamp apparently wore his clothes until he ran out before he did laundry. Cate gingerly held two plastic bags of dirty clothes at arm’s length and examined them from the outside only. His personal gear consisted of throwaway plastic razors, a spray can of shaving foam, a scruffy-looking toothbrush, a flattened tube of Aquafresh toothpaste, a bottle of mouthwash, and the previously snickered-at skin lotion and hair gel. The motel man had a talent for descriptive scents, however. Rotten roses it was. She fingered through the few items of clean clothing, and finally, right at the bottom of the box was the manila envelope.
Sealed.
She hefted it in her palm. Not heavy or thick. But maybe rich with incriminating secrets? Could she get it open without leaving traces of her snooping?
A moment later she realized she should have just ripped the envelope open instantly. Because now, quicker than a freeze-up on her computer, her conscience had kicked in. Killer though Travis might be, could she rightfully rummage around in his private papers? Regretfully, she dropped the envelope back in the box. As an ex-wife from whom Travis was trying to extort money, maybe Kim was entitled to open it.
What Cate wanted to do right now was rush up to Tigard and start asking questions, but it was time, not conscience, that held her back. Investigating Travis wasn’t a paying proposition for Belmont Investigations, and husband-following was. Which is what she and Uncle Joe were scheduled to do for the next two days. But right after that—no, she couldn’t go then, either, she realized in further frustration. She’d have to wait until after the wedding.
But she did have time, she decided after a glance at her watch, to stop by the Mystic Mirage and see what Kim thought about opening the envelope.
Kim’s red Mustang stood at the curb in front of the Mystic Mirage, and Cate parked behind it. The street wasn’t busy on this blustery Monday morning, and the other parking spaces in the block were empty. A sign reading “closed” slanted across the inside of the door. Kim must be inside working on the going-out-of-business sale.
Cate headed for the door, but it resisted her push. Locked. She rattled the handle, tapped, and then pounded on the door. No response.
Odd. Even if Kim was working in the back room, surely she could hear Cate’s hammering. Cate felt a shimmer of uneasiness.
She moved over to the window, cupped her hands between her face and the glass, and peered inside. Kim had been rearranging merchandise, and Cate could see where she’d put tags on items with a red line drawn through the original price and a new price below. The Oriental swords had been removed from the back wall.
Maybe she should go around to the alleyway and pound on that back door. The one through which the killer had escaped that other time.
She wouldn’t let her mind latch onto the thought that instantly rammed into her head. The thought that Travis had already gotten out on bail, and he’d been here again, and Kim—
Cate ran to the window on the other side of the door. It gave her a new angle of view. Celeste’s books were scattered on the floor, and a Ouija board lay broken among them. Now she also saw the Kimmy doll sprawled on the floor, back of her head smashed in but her face still sweetly smiling.
The big brass shield that had hung on the wall with the Oriental swords lay on the floor now.
Two jeans-clad legs stuck out from beneath it.
23
No, no, no, not Kim too! Shock and pain and a desperate blast of failure roared through Cate. She hadn’t known Kim long. They were far from being the BFFs Rolf had suggested. But Kim had seemed on track for making something of her life, and Cate had hoped she could do it.
Even though Cate had known Travis would probably get out all too soon, she’d expected him to be behind bars for a few days yet. But he had gotten out, and he’d done far more than make good on his threat to destroy Kim’s mother’s reputation. He’d taken deadly aim on Kim herself.
Cate mentally hammered herself harder than she’d pounded the door with her fists. She should have done something to prevent this. Made Kim more aware of the danger. Convinced the police Travis was a killer. Something.
Was he still lurking inside, just as he’d been after he thrust that sword into Celeste’s chest?
Cate backed away from the window and frantically dug in her purse for her cell phone. She punched in 911 and told the dispatcher what she could see. Body on the floor. Brass shield half covering it. Door locked. Same address where a murder had taken place not long ago.
The dispatcher told her to return to her car, lock the doors, and stay on the phone. Help was on the way.
Cate followed instructions and stayed on the phone until she heard sirens in the distance. She returned to the window then. She felt a desperate need to do something, even if it was only watch over Kim’s body sprawled on the floor.
She blinked when she saw the jeans-clad legs again. Was that a toe moving? It couldn’t be. But then the shield moved, like some big brass beetle scuttling sideways. It slid aside, and Kim slowly sat up. She put a hand to her head and then looked at her bloody fingers as if they belonged to someone else.
“Kim! Kim! Are you all right?” Cate pounded the glass.
Of course Kim wasn’t all right. Blood streaked her face and matted her hair. Cate could see where all the blood was coming from now. A gash slashed across her forehead and into her hair. Kim looked Cate’s way as if she heard something but couldn’t focus on what it was. She struggled to her knees.
“No, don’t get up!” Cate yelled. “Stay there! Help is coming!”
Kim disappeared on the far side of a display table as she struggled to stand, only her white-knuckled hand clutching the table visible. Then she was upright, wobbling as if standing were an unfamiliar experience for her. She squinted in Cate’s direction, then moved by grabbing one display table, then another. Cate kept yelling at her not to try to do anything, but Kim determinedly kept coming. She used only one hand. The other hung awkwardly at her side. It was bloody too, and there was a crooked place between shoulder and elbow that shouldn’t be there. She reached the door just as a police car squealed to the curb, an ambulance right behind it.
Kim swayed back and forth at the door, but she managed to turn the deadbolt with one hand. Cate stepped aside as a police officer rushed forward. Kim lost her tentative balance when her hand slipped from the knob. She collapsed to the floor as if her brain had lost communication with her legs.
Cate had no chance to say a word to her. The EMTs rushed in, and only moments later they had her on a stretcher headed to the ambulance. Cate ran alongside.
“Kim, who did this to you?” she demanded frantically.
Kim’s mouth opened, and her gaze briefly focused on Cate, but she couldn’t seem to shape her mouth to form words. Then the EMTs lifted her into the ambulance, and the doors closed behind her. Another police car and officers arrived in a wail of sirens. The officers jumped out.
“Her ex-husband tried to kill her!” Cate yelled to them. “I’ve got to go with her.”
“Hey, you can’t leave!” an officer yelled back as Cate headed toward her car. “We have questions—”
“Travis Beauchamp!” Cate grabbed one of her ever-ready Belmont Investigations cards and tossed it in their direction. “He just got out of jail. He tried to kill her!” she repeated.
She jumped in her car and followed the wail of the sirens. They took Kim to the same hospital where Uncle Joe had been taken when he broke his hip in a fall from a ladder some months ago, so Cate had some familiarity with it. She headed for the en
trance to the emergency room.
She doubted she’d get to see Kim anytime soon, but she was determined to wait until she could find out how bad Kim’s injuries were. An officer showed up a few minutes later. They wouldn’t let him in to see Kim either, but Cate gave him what information she had about both Kim and Travis. He didn’t tell her anything in return. As Kim had once said, the police don’t give you information; they just ask questions.
Okay, Travis Beauchamp, Cate thought to herself after the officer was gone. You just lost your right to privacy.
Back at the car, she slid into the front seat and picked up the manila envelope. A fingernail under the flap, some wiggles with her finger, and it was done. She pulled out the contents.
A title and registration for the motorcycle, Travis’s name only. An insurance endorsement. A folded sheet of notebook paper with some dates and abbreviations and other figures on it. A passport and a receipt from the motel where he’d been arrested, plus a receipt with earlier dates from another motel. Cate studied the dates, calculating back to Ed’s death. Yes, Travis had been in Eugene then.
She went back to the sheet of notebook paper and studied it again. There were day and month dates but not years, cryptic abbreviations, and two sets of other numbers. Slowly, because of what she already knew about Travis, an interpretation emerged.
Maybe the police would scoff and say this was no proof of anything, that it could be a record of when Travis made his rare trips to the laundry and how much he spent. A record of gambling wins and losses or a rating system on women he’d dated. But Cate knew what it was. This was Travis’s private record of dates and amounts of Rohypnol supplied to Celeste, and the money amounts, written without dollar signs, of what she’d paid him. The abbreviations were still meaningless. Maybe the supplier from whom he’d obtained the drug?
Travis had tried to extort more money out of Celeste, probably with the same threat of disclosure of the drug she was still giving her clients. But she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, pay him. And now she was dead.
Cate went back to the emergency room and settled down to wait endless hours. They weren’t endless, but it was more than three hours before they let her into one of the curtained-off cubicles. Kim’s eyes were closed, her upper body slightly raised on the bed. The blood had been cleaned off her face and the gash on her head bandaged. An IV line led to one hand. Her other arm wasn’t bandaged, but it seemed to have some protective or supportive enclosure around it.
“Kim?” Cate whispered.
Kim’s eyes opened. Her gaze wavered for only a moment before focusing on Cate.
“Kim, who did this to you?” Cate demanded. “Travis?”
“Nobody did it to me,” Kim said. She sounded hoarse but mentally aware. And a little annoyed. “Couldn’t you see what happened?”
“No. I followed the ambulance. I’ve been here ever since.”
“Sweet Cate.” Kim sounded grateful but mildly frustrated, as if Cate were a lovable but not-too-bright pet. “Thanks for getting me here.”
“Are you in pain?”
Kim moved her shoulders and winced. “I’m not ready to go dancing.”
“What have they done for you?”
“Put stitches in the gash. CAT-scanned my head. X-rayed everything else. Looked at my eyes. Tapped my knees for reflexes. Tested my blood for who knows what.” Kim’s voice gathered strength as she related what she apparently considered medical overkill. Then she looked down at the motionless arm. “And I managed to really mess up my arm. They’re going to do surgery and put a metal pin in it tomorrow.” Almost as an afterthought, she added, “And I have a concussion. They’re going to do an MRI too.”
“You seem to be talking okay, so that’s good.”
“Talking as well as your average blonde bimbo klutz, I suppose.”
“Kim, stop that!”
Kim sighed and then grimaced as if that movement hurt too. “I think your prayers got hung up in call waiting or voice mail. Or maybe God just cuts you off if he doesn’t want to listen.”
“God listens, but he works on his timetable, not ours. And I didn’t pray that he’d make all your problems disappear, just that you’d be able to manage and cope with them.”
“Well, thanks. I guess.”
“But what do you mean nobody did this to you? I saw you there on the floor, Kim. I thought you were dead under that brass shield! Did he hit you over the head with it? Throw it at you?”
“I wanted to get all those stupid swords down off the wall. I couldn’t find a ladder.”
Cate had noticed that the swords were gone from the wall, but she failed to see the connection here. “So … ?”
“So I piled up some stuff to climb on. A stool from behind the counter. Some of Mom’s books on top of it. I could reach the swords with that, but I still couldn’t get a grip on the shield. So I added a stack of Ouija boards and some magazines—”
“You were climbing on a pile of books and Ouija boards?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Kim muttered. “I remember reaching for the shield, and slipping and grabbing at it to keep from falling. And then, this big crab was rushing up at me—”
“Crab?”
“You know, one of the astrological signs Mom had painted on the floor. And then, I just can’t remember.”
Cate leaned against the bed as her brain slowly rearranged facts. No one had tried to kill Kim. She’d created a Leaning Tower of Ouija and fallen. The brass shield had crashed down and slashed her head. She’d smashed into the concrete floor and knocked herself out.
“I guess I should have waited until I could get a ladder,” Kim added.
“You think?” Cate said. A fall. Yet she was reluctant to release Travis from responsibility. “What about Travis?”
“What about him? I called the jail. They’re transferring him up to Tigard today.”
“I found some papers among his things at the motel. They look like a record of the Rohypnol he sold to your mom.”
Unexpectedly, Kim gave a gurgly laugh. “Yeah, that sounds like Travis. It was something that always seemed strange about him. He was such a slob about most things, but he kept records on everything from what kind of mileage we got on the car to how many kilograms of electricity we used every month.”
“I think that’s kilowatts of electricity.”
“Whatever. I threw out boxes of the stuff when I came down here to live with Mom.”
Okay, so Travis hadn’t tried to kill Kim today, and he kept great records, even of his illicit activities. Which didn’t mean he hadn’t killed Celeste. Yet at the moment Cate’s own accusation of Travis to the police at the Mystic Mirage struck her as wildly melodramatic. As a PI, she needed to establish credibility with the police, not make herself look like a hysterical crackpot shouting impossible accusations. Once they found out Travis was still in jail, that she was wrong about his getting out, which meant he couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with Kim’s injuries, they’d be skeptical of anything else she had to say. Especially an odd list of dates and figures she claimed was a record of Rohypnol sales.
“But now I’ve got a big problem,” Kim said.
Kim had a lot of problems, but Cate didn’t point that out.
“I was supposed to meet with LeAnne at Lodge Hill tonight. And be at weddings Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. But I don’t know when I’ll even get out of here. There was something about possible bleeding or swelling around the brain. As if my brain wasn’t a big enough mess already.”
“There’s my friend Robyn’s rehearsal dinner on Thursday too,” Cate added reluctantly. “And her wedding on Friday.”
“Yeah, well, my being there isn’t going to happen.” Kim gave a frustrated flop of feet, then winced at the pain that followed.
“Maybe LeAnne will stay on for a few days, since it’s an emergency?”
“She made it plain when she first said she was leaving that she didn’t care how inconvenient it was for me, she wasn�
��t doing anything to jeopardize her new job. My stupid fall isn’t going to change her mind. She liked Ed’s ex-wife, but she’s never had any use for me.”
True. LeAnne had said as much to Cate.
“What I need to do is hire someone to take over at Lodge Hill temporarily. Because even when I do get out of here, I have the restaurant and house and Mystic Mirage to take care of.”
“There is someone,” Cate said slowly. “Things have no doubt changed since she was at Lodge Hill, but she knows the general way things operate there. It probably wouldn’t take her long to catch up on details with LeAnne.”
“Who else would know anything about Lodge Hill?”
“Jo-Jo.”
“Jo-Jo?” Kim repeated the name blankly, then recognition kicked in. She repeated the name as if it hurt her teeth. “Jo-Jo, as in Ed’s ex-wife?”
“She used to run Lodge Hill. Before Ed had his midlife change of direction.” Or whatever it was.
“How could I possibly work with her? I mean, it would feel creepy,” Kim said. “She’d never come to work at Lodge Hill anyway. She must hate me.”
“She needs a job, even a temporary or part-time one. She isn’t getting any insurance money. Ed squirmed out of paying the premiums, and the policy lapsed. She also doesn’t get alimony from him anymore.”
Not that he’d left Kim in a much better position, with big debts and foreclosures looming. Good ol’ Ed. He’d managed to leave not just one but two wives in financial straits. Although Kim did have all those, as she put it, hockable items, which Jo-Jo didn’t have.
“Jo-Jo isn’t my responsibility!”
“At the moment, you probably need her more than she needs you,” Cate pointed out.
The fingers on Kim’s one working hand pleated and repleated a fold of the hospital sheet for several long moments.
“I was wrong, wasn’t I? I’ve been thinking about it ever since you first came to talk to me. I never should have gotten involved with Ed when he was married. Wrong, wrong, wrong.”
Dolled Up to Die Page 23