by Kylie Logan
“Number one, I’ve never been to that man’s apartment. Why would I have been? And number two, what DVD are you talking about?”
“The one I told you about. You know, the one with James Faragut in it. It shows actors auditioning for porn movies, and I’m pretty sure you were the one directing them.”
Eleanor’s laugh was as sharp as broken glass. “Do you know who I am?”
“I do. And hey, it’s not like I hold the whole porn thing against you or anything. My bet is that it all happened before you met that old husband of yours. And a girl has to eat, right? I’m sure you made more money making porn movies than you would have waiting tables.”
Her top lip curled. “You’re talking crazy. And besides, even if it was true, you could never prove it.”
“I can. Because, see, at one point in the video, we can hear your voice in the background.”
She sloughed this off like the nothing it was.
“And for another . . .” I gauged the distance between me and Eleanor, and the distance from there to the intersecting hallway that would take me toward the wings and back out front. “There’s that ring of yours. There’s no mistaking that. See, you held out your hand at one point in the video, and the ring flashed nice and bright and blue, just like it’s been flashing in the stage lights.”
She glanced down at the sapphire. “It isn’t in the video. That’s impossible!” She spoke too quickly and realized her mistake the moment the words were out of her mouth. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Maybe not. But if that’s true, then you won’t mind me giving the cops a copy of that DVD. We’ll let them decide if I’m right.”
“Or not.”
Eleanor closed in on me, her eyes flashing sparks much like her ring. Only these sparks were icy cold.
Before she could get any closer, I raced forward, rammed her out of the way, and ran.
I wasn’t at all surprised that she came after me, and I looked left and right, trying to make a split-second decision about which was the best way to go and the quickest way to find help.
From out front, the music swelled, and I imagined the curtain getting ready to rise on all those smiling beauty queens.
“Nobody’s ever going to find out.” Eleanor was right behind me, her growl punctuated by the upbeat rhythm of the music. “No one’s ever going to know what I did in my past. It’s none of their business.”
I spun to face her, back stepping the entire time. “But Dom found out, didn’t he? And since I know Dom was a lowlife who blackmailed Teddi, I’m guessing he blackmailed you, too, right? He wanted money or he’d let everyone know you directed porn movies. And once your society friends found that out—”
“They weren’t going to find out. Nobody was ever going to find out. That’s why I paid Dom. That’s why I paid him a whole lot of money.”
I thought back to our visit to Dom’s apartment. “Enough for him to buy a Porsche.”
“Enough for two Porches,” Eleanor snarled. “But that doesn’t mean I killed him.”
“Oh, come on!” I guess the stage decorations had been changed since the first part of the pageant, because, still backing up, I bumped into the giant can of Consolidated Chili that had been moved into the middle of the passageway, and was trapped there between the can of chili and Eleanor.
“You’re not going to ruin this cushy little life,” she growled. “I won’t let you.”
“Oh, but I am.” This sounded plenty brave, but with any luck, she couldn’t see that I was shaking. “I’m going to tell the world. Everyone’s going to know that Dom was blackmailing you and why. Everyone’s going to realize you had a great reason to want to shut him up. I bet he ran into you back in LA when he was a cop and you were shooting those porn movies. And then he shows up years later here in San Antonio and sees that you’re this queen of society. Dom was the kind of guy who didn’t bat an eye at stealing seventeen dollars from Ginger and Teddi’s tip jar. I can only imagine that when he saw what you’d become, his mouth started to water.”
Eleanor rumbled and came at me. My back plastered to the can of chili, my arms out at my sides, I slipped to the other side of the giant can and took off running.
There was only one place to go. I raced onto the stage just as James Faragut stepped up to the microphone and the curtain rose.
“I might have been producing porn videos, but I didn’t kill him, you little bitch!” Eleanor screamed and skidded to a stop just a foot or two away from me, and when she realized where she was and that there were seven beauty queens onstage and a couple hundred people in the audience staring at her with their mouths open, she offered them a grand and gracious smile.
It might have been more convincing if her eyes didn’t spit fire, she wasn’t breathing hard, and her fingers weren’t curled and ready to go around my neck.
I wasn’t about to wait around and see if she’d succeed. I ran, bowling over Miss Chili’s Cookin’ and Miss Hotter than a Chili Pepper in the process. Before I made it to where James Faragut stood with his mouth hanging open, Nick had already jumped up onstage and subdued Eleanor.
Well, physically, anyway.
“She made me say that!” Eleanor screamed. “She made me say that stuff about the porn movies. You can’t believe it. None of you . . .” Her eyes wide and her hair mussed, she pleaded with the audience, most of whom had their phones out and were busy snapping pictures. “None of you can believe that. I would never . . . I would never . . .”
It was almost enough to make me feel sorry for her.
“You okay?” After he handed Eleanor off to fairgrounds security, Nick hurried over. “Good thing you’re fast.”
I wound my arm through Nick’s. “Let’s get out of here. I think I’ve had enough excitement for one day.”
“No! No, you can’t!” Tiffany stepped forward, waving toward the people in the audience who were thinking the way I was thinking and had already gotten to their feet to head to the doors. “You can’t leave. The pageant isn’t over! We have to crown a Miss Consolidated Chili!”
I glanced at the seven assembled beauty queens. Miss Chili’s Cookin’ and Miss Hotter than a Chili Pepper were back on their feet and looking none the worse for wear, and one by one, each girl raised her chin and smiled.
“I guess the pageant isn’t over yet,” I told Nick, and like everyone else in the auditorium, we returned to our seats.
“Well . . .” Sylvia spun in her seat so she could see me, and really, I couldn’t decide if that gleam in her baby blues was one of begrudging admiration or all-out envy. “Looks like you’ve solved another murder.”
At the risk of looking like a beauty queen, I pulled back my shoulders. “Looks like I have.”
Nick slipped an arm around me. “You should have told me you had an eye on Eleanor. There’s no way you should have gone after her alone.”
He was right, but hey, it turned out okay, didn’t it? When the house lights dimmed, I sat back and watched Miss Texas Spice twirl baton, Miss Chili’s Cookin’ sing (yikes!) opera, Miss Hotter than a Chili Pepper juggle, and on and on.
“Will it never end?” I groaned when Miss San Antonio Chili Queens finished her sign language rendition of the Declaration of Independence.
“Only one more,” Nick whispered back. “Miss Texas Triangle.”
Bindi Monroe.
I will admit that when she walked out onstage holding a guitar painted in a wild pattern of red, white, and blue stripes, I held my breath and prepared for the worst.
Until she opened her mouth and started to sing.
The girl had a good voice and a sense of style. I sat back and enjoyed her jazzy interpretation of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
For like twenty seconds.
“Nick,” I tugged at his sleeve just as Bindi started in on a second chorus. “Do you remember the
murder scene?”
His wrinkled nose conveyed his huh?
“The murder scene . . .” I grumbled, mad that I couldn’t explain, not with the music and the singing and the swirls of painted colors on Bindi’s guitar that I found so distracting and so revealing.
“Dom had a plain guitar,” I said.
Nick gave me another huh? look.
“Dom had a plain guitar,” I whispered. “When he came by the tent to check on me and Sylvia, he was holding a plain, ordinary guitar. It was probably some piece of junk he picked up at a pawn shop. But at the murder scene—”
The song ended and the audience applauded, and I knew I didn’t have much time.
Before Nick could ask where I was going and long before he could stop me, I popped out of my seat and went around to the far side of the auditorium to head backstage. Oh, sure, he made to follow me, but got waylaid by fairgrounds security who wanted to talk to him about Eleanor’s apprehension. Fine with me. I didn’t have to explain myself.
The dressing rooms were down a corridor to my right, and I made sure everyone was still busy onstage and raced that way.
The long, skinny dressing room featured a row of mirrors on the wall with a small vanity and a chair in front of each. Those familiar makeup cases were parked in front of the dressing tables: black, purple, leopard print, pink sparkles, gold sparkles, photo-collage covered.
Just what I was looking for. I bent closer for a better look at the photographs and homed in on the one that had jogged a memory when Bindi was onstage.
Teenagers in a garage band playing brightly painted instruments.
From out front, I heard James Faragut’s voice. “Now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for . . .”
I didn’t have a second to lose, so I popped open Bindi’s makeup case and stared at the single photograph pasted on the inside cover.
“What are you doing?”
When I heard Bindi’s voice, my head came up. For the second time that night, I’d been surprised doing what I had no business doing. The first time—with Eleanor—I’d been quick and I’d been smart and I’d been lucky.
I was about to find out if my luck would hold again.
“What are you doing back here already?” I asked Bindi. “Faragut is just announcing the winner.”
“Yeah, well he just announced the three semifinalists and I wasn’t one of them. I was supposed to stay there onstage and simper and smile, but when I saw that you’d left your seat . . .” She shrugged like it was no big deal when it was actually a pretty smooth piece of deductive reasoning. “I had a feeling you might be poking your nose where it didn’t belong.”
“Good thing, or I never would have found this.” I pointed toward that photo on the inside of the case. It showed a young man with shaggy hair as dark as Bindi’s. He was holding a brightly painted guitar, and the line of handwriting under the photo listed his name as well as a birth date and a death date, just a couple years before. “Tommy Monroe. Your brother, right?”
“My twin. So what?”
“He painted guitars.”
She set her own brightly painted guitar down in the corner. “It was his hobby. So what?”
“So I should have noticed right away, but by the time I saw Dom the night of the murder . . . well, the guitar was all smashed. There was no way I could have known that it wasn’t the same guitar he’d been carrying around earlier. That explains that trail of Consolidated Chili souvenirs near the body, too.”
She twitched a shoulder, and the beading on her sky blue gown twinkled. “Really, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t, either,” I admitted. “But I bet it won’t be hard to find out. Your brother is dead and I’m sure there’s a way the cops can find out the circumstances. He died young. That’s too bad. And his death had something to do with Dom Laurentius, didn’t it?” I took another gander at the photos on the outside of the makeup case. “I’ll bet that beach isn’t a Texas beach. I bet you lived in LA. That’s where Tommy ran into Dom. He must have, and whatever happened, I bet it wasn’t pretty. It’s the only thing that would explain why you killed Dom.”
“You think so?” That perfect smile firmly in place, Bindi closed in on me. She stopped at her dressing table, slid the drawer open, and pulled out what I thought was a pink cell phone.
That is, until I realized it was the stun gun she had used to knock me out before she dumped me in with the bull.
I looked into her eyes. Better than concentrating on her hands and letting her know I was scared to death she’d come at me with the stun gun. “Pink? How cliché!”
“But effective.”
“I should have known Eleanor would never get her hands dirty with rodeo animals.” I could have kicked myself for not thinking of it sooner. I glanced at the photos again, and the one that showed Bindi and her brother on horseback. “You’re not afraid of big animals.”
“Or of anything else,” she assured me. “Let’s get moving.” She flashed the stun gun toward the door. “I don’t want to do this here. We’ll find a nice dark corner somewhere where they won’t find your body for a few hours.”
It wasn’t hard to pretend this scared me, but I cranked up the drama a notch. I can cry at the drop of a hat. Ask Jack. He’d given in to me plenty of times thanks to the waterworks.
“All right. Okay.” I scooted toward the door, sniffling all the while, but careful to keep just out of Bindi’s reach. “But the least you can do is tell me why you killed Dom. It was because of Tommy, right?”
“Of course it was because of Tommy. He was railroaded back in LA by none other than Dom Laurentius. He was sent to prison and he was killed there in a fight. So much talent! So much potential. And it all got wasted because of that lowlife Dom. He was more interested in closing a case than he was in finding out the truth, and poor Tommy was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Laurentius planted evidence. He made up a story. He arrested my brother and he pinned a burglary on him that landed him in jail, and when Tommy was killed . . .” Bindi pulled in a shaky breath. “When Tommy was killed, I swore I’d do whatever it took to make sure Dom paid for what he’d done. When I went to my first meeting at Tri-C and saw him there . . .” Her eyes flared. “It was like a gift from the gods, and there was no way I was going to waste the opportunity.
“You were right about the guitar,” she added. “I used one of Tommy’s to kill him. It was painted with a skull, and you know what, I thought that was pretty funny. Too bad I don’t have something nearly as appropriate for you.”
I was at the door, and it was now or never. I threw it open and took off just as I’d taken off a little while earlier when Eleanor was after me. But this time, I never made it as far as the stage. I got as far as that giant can of chili and ducked behind it.
“You can explain the whole thing to the cops,” I said, sticking my head from behind the can of chili to see what Bindi was up to. “They’ll understand. They’ll take your brother’s death into consideration. But if you kill me, too—”
“If I kill you, then nobody will ever know what happened.” She made a stab at me with the stun gun just as I dashed back behind the chili can. “I didn’t win the Miss Consolidated Chili pageant,” she growled. “I have nothing else to lose.”
My back flat against the chili can, I slipped around to the other side of it.
Bad timing.
I found myself toe to toe with Bindi.
“Hold still,” she said, and poked the stun gun at me. “This is only going to hurt for a second. Then—”
Then a dull thud interrupted whatever she was going to say.
I looked up, stunned, to find Jack standing not ten feet away.
And the can of chili he’d thrown and beaned Bindi with at my feet.
CHAPTER 20
What with the police and the handcuffs and Tiffany cryi
ng because everyone was paying more attention to Bindi than to her even though she’d just been crowned Miss Consolidated Chili, it was late when we got out of there.
Not too late, though, to celebrate.
Jack took me and Sylvia and Nick to dinner, and he invited Gert and Tumbleweed and Ruth Ann along, too, for a reunion that had been a long time coming.
It was a chichi restaurant, and Jack picked up the bill for really good wine and steaks the size of San Antonio. By the time the waiter brought over a tray of what he called Texas Brownies, we were all pretty relaxed and in a good mood.
“The Showdown will be leaving town tomorrow.” Jack took us all in with a glance. “I wish I had more time with y’all, but since I don’t . . . Nick, Tumbleweed, Ruth Ann, Gert, you’ll excuse me if I talk a little business with my daughters.”
I guess Sylvia had been expecting this, or at least hoping for it; she sat up like a shot. Me, I didn’t have a clue what was going on. I took a sip of coffee and held my breath.
“I’ve got a big ol’ company to run,” Jack told us. “And there’s a bit of what I’d call a divide between what I want to do with it and the current corporate culture. I could use a couple good assistants.”
“Yes!” Sylvia practically jumped out of her seat. “Work here in San Antonio? For Consolidated Chili? In a real office? Yes, yes, yes! Count me in.”
Jack gave her a smile. “I knew I could.” He turned in his seat to look my way. “What about you, Maxie? I’m thinking of puttin’ Sylvia on the business side of things, you know, prices and strategies, that sort of thing, but there’s a PR department that could use a little shakin’ up. With your experience and your head for promotions, I’d say it was a perfect fit.”
It would be perfect.
A steady job and a reliable paycheck.
Working with Jack day in and day out.
I wasn’t sure which of those things appealed to me most.
Which was why I grimaced when I told my dad, “That would mean leaving the Showdown, and the Showdown . . .” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “If it’s all the same to you, Jack, I think I’ll stay on at the Palace. The Showdown wouldn’t be the same without me, and I wouldn’t be the same without the Chili Chick.”