Death on Heels (6 page)

“That flight must have tired you out. You didn’t drink enough water. You need to stay hydrated. You’re in the guest room, your old room. It’s not quite there yet, I’m afraid,” Rose said. “I’m still working on it.”

This could mean anything.
“I can’t wait, Mom.”
No big surprises, please
.

On her way to viewing her mother’s latest triumph, Lacey peeked into the room that had been Cherise’s. It looked pristine as a shrine, still in the perky pinks that Cherise always preferred. Memorabilia from her high school cheerleading career were still tacked to a bulletin board. Even though Cherise had moved away from home, the room remained the way she left it for those occasions when she stayed overnight, like holidays and when her big sister came home.

“Still the same, I see,” Lacey said.

“No, it’s not.” Cherise pointed out the new drapes, curtains, and rug. “It’s completely different. I helped Mom pick out the paint.”

“But it’s still pink.”

“There’s pink and then there’s
pink
. It’s a totally different
shade, more lavender pink, more sophisticated. Grown-up pink.”

Rose stood before the guest room door and gestured. “Ta da!”

The guest room had once been Lacey’s bedroom, a cozy retreat in shades of blue and violet. Rose had claimed the space as her own décor test site and redecorating laboratory the minute Lacey was off to college. Lacey’s surplus possessions were all stored in the basement.

“It’s—different.” Lacey tried not to gasp, but failed. Each wall was a different color. One was deep brown, one banana yellow, one electric blue, one zebra-striped. The dresser was painted in leopard spots, and the sofa was upholstered in a tiger stripe fabric. Her head started to pound.

“I haven’t quite decided which way to go,” her mother said. “You like it?”

“It’s really, um, wild.”

“I think it’s fun,” Cherise said. “Every wall tells a story.”

“A lot of plot.” Lacey eased herself down on the angular sofa bed. It looked soft, but it was as hard as granite.
Home sweet home
. She smiled. “You’ve been busy.”

Lacey reserved judgment on the butterfly chair with its eye-popping neon lime green canvas cover. Obviously, it was an
accent
piece.
The lime wedge in the crazy cocktail of this room. Ewww.
The preposterous iron and canvas beast glowed radioactively against the one brown wall. The wood floor was covered by a beige sisal rug. Lacey hated the way sisal felt under her bare feet, but she searched for a neutral statement.

“Sisal. Lots of, um, texture.”

“It’s a work in progress,” Rose said. “I haven’t decided on the accent color, but I am crazy about the zebra wall. That definitely stays.”

You don’t have to sleep in here
.

It was impossible for Lacey not to compare the Smithsonian house with Vic’s parents’ traditional Northern Virginia home with its understated elegance.
Mostly
understated. Vic’s mom, Nadine, was fond of pink and had used it liberally in her grand dining room. It somehow always made Lacey think of the court of Marie Antoinette, but tastefully, of course.
Who didn’t like a little wretched excess?
And the Donovans’ backyard was a lush landscape of winding stone paths through maples and oaks, dogwoods and holly trees.

Of course, plants and trees grew more easily in Virginia. Here in Colorado, the Smithsonians’ grass was flat and yellow, like every other Denver lawn in wintertime. The evergreen bushes needed to be trimmed, but the pines and junipers stood tall against the winter storms. Heaven forbid that a leafy tree should intrude on the alpine splendor of it all.

“It’s so good to have you home, Lacey. Now, take your time, relax, freshen up, but do hurry and get ready, dear. Your father is taking us all out to dinner,” Rose announced. “And we’ll hammer out this whole Cole Tucker business.”

That’s what I was afraid of.
Lacey set her bag down in her old, yet not at all familiar, bedroom and fled to the living room. “Where’s the newspaper?” She wanted to see how the local media were handling the story. Her mother pointed to
The Denver Post
on the blond coffee table.

“I bought an extra copy for you.” Tucker’s arrest was featured on the bottom of the front page, with a jump to the inside. W
ESTERN
S
LOPE
R
ANCHER
A
RRESTED IN
T
HREE
M
URDERS
. “For your scrapbook.”

Lacey perched delicately on one of the uncomfortable accent chairs. The story was long on background and short on relevant facts.
The
Post
had clearly been caught by surprise and was padding the story with local color. A sidebar on the murders even pointed out that Sagebrush wasn’t that far from Brown’s Park, once a notorious outlaw haven in the Old West, and that some claimed the area was still a hangout for “criminal elements.”
A century ago,
Lacey thought,
when Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were hanging out there.

“I’ve been thinking, Lacey,” Rose said. “Cole must have a hidden life.”

“It’s impossible to have a hidden life in Sagebrush, Mom. Everybody is in your business all the time. Kind of like our family.”

“Did you know he was a homicidal psychopath?” Cherise asked.

“Cole Tucker better be innocent. That’s all I can say,” Rose said. “My God, he was here with us for that one Thanksgiving dinner. I served him turkey at our table. He seemed so nice. Why, I never would have—”

“You never would have served a murderer your Thanksgiving turkey,” Lacey said. “We know that, Mom.”

“How’s my girl?” Steven Smithsonian emerged from his workshop in the garage and gave Lacey a hug.

Steven was an even-tempered man who let his wife handle the family and the social calendar, which left him free to play golf. His golfing buddies had nicknamed him Even Steven. He and Rose were also fond of tennis. They played doubles with friends and were taking up birding. They had season tickets to the Colorado Rockies and Opera Colorado. He might have felt like the odd man out, outnumbered by the females in the house, but his daughters thought of Even Steven as the counterbalance to Rose’s flamboyance.

Steven Smithsonian had always looked like the quintessential dad to Lacey, with his black Clark Kent glasses and combed-back brown hair. His daughters used to pretend he was more interesting than he appeared. They finally decided that he must be a CIA agent, rather than the manufacturer’s senior sales rep he said he was. He sold plastic parts for some sort of machinery, but eyes glazed over whenever Steven went into detail.

“What’s all this nonsense about that old boyfriend of yours?” he asked.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out, Dad,” Lacey said. “But what’s going on with you?”

“Flying to Thailand on Monday.” That was a relief to Lacey. He would be in transit for at least twenty-four hours, unable to aid and abet Rose in any of her schemes.
“Your mother tells me you have another young man on the hook.”

“On the hook? Thanks, Mom.”

“Isn’t this new one from Sagebrush too? Something about that place, you know. There really should be a way to figure out whether these fellows of yours are going to turn out to be bad apples. Before you date them, I mean. Say, does he play golf? The new one, I mean. Not the killer.”

“Try the buffalo burger,” Rose suggested. “So much better for you than beef.”

Lacey felt like she’d been buffaloed by her family all afternoon. Eating a buffalo might be poetic justice, but she never ate burgers of any kind.

“Skip the hairy beast, sis. Let’s get the rattlesnake bites,” Cherise suggested. “Yum.”

The Smithsonian family was dining at the Best of the West Steakhouse in LoDo, the lower downtown area that had become Denver’s nightlife hub. Rose had picked the place, but Lacey’s dad liked it because it was close to Coors Field, home of his beloved Colorado Rockies baseball team. Like the rest of LoDo, it was hopping on Saturday night.

The steak house was decked out in high Western style, with copper, leather, and mounted trophies. The menu featured a dozen kinds of steak, including buffalo steaks, and novelties, like Rocky Mountain oysters and rattlesnake and gator bites. It was not cheap. Lacey was impressed. The Smithsonians’ dining-out experiences had always been economical and family-friendly, heavy on chicken and burgers. Times had changed, but one thing had not: No matter what was cooking on the grill, grilling Lacey was at the very top of the menu.

“He really seemed like such a nice guy, that Cole Tucker,” Steven said. “I let him carve the turkey. I hate to think of you going out with some murderer.”

“Yeah, you didn’t learn that at home,” Cherise chimed in.

“It’s a bad business,” Steven said.

Rose patted his hand. “It just shows you never can tell.”

“Imagine stabbing another human being,” he said. “With no more concern than carving up a turkey. How’s your buffalo steak, sweetie?”

“The victims weren’t stabbed, Dad,” Cherise said. “The paper said they were strangled. You’re thinking of that other murder Lacey was involved in—”

“Can’t we find something else to discuss over dinner?” Lacey asked.

“Don’t worry, Cherise,” Rose said. “We’ll get to the bottom of this Cole Tucker business. And if you need us, sweetheart, we will be there.”

Lacey opened her mouth to speak. Then shut it. The last thing Lacey wanted was the Smithsonians en masse, getting to the bottom of things. She managed to squeak out, “And how is the team this year?”

The Rockies saved the day, and her dinner. Sports talk led to an after-dinner stroll past Denver’s Union Station and the Rockies’ baseball stadium. Her dad was sorry that the season didn’t start until April or they could have taken in a game. He was explaining something complicated about the team or the sport, but Lacey never could keep anything about baseball straight. Or football. Or basketball, hockey, soccer, lacrosse. It was all the same to her, whether it involved kicking a ball, hitting a ball with sticks, dribbling a ball, or running with a ball into a knot of gigantic padded men. He might as well have been speaking in Greek about the Peloponnesian War.

The only sporting event that Lacey was ever sorry she’d missed was the infamous state championship football game at Geronimo High School, the game when Cherise “Lethal Feet” Smithsonian had knocked out the quarterback with one high kick. But Lacey had been delighted to discover there was a video of the devastating blow, which had recently made its way to YouTube.
Cherise refused to discuss it, but it always brought a grin to Lacey’s face.

Finally, Rose and Steven went home, and Lacey and Cherise headed for Larimer Square, one of the anchors of LoDo nightlife. Larimer Street had been redeveloped decades before, from the city’s most notorious skid row into a chic shopping and dining area. It was filled with couples on dates, groups of friends, and at least two major bachelorette parties. One of the brides-to-be wore a rhinestone tiara and a Miss America sash. Her bridesmaids, ten or more of them, donned neon-colored wigs in lime, pink, orange, blue, and purple.

“Purple wigs? Hey, maybe Stella will have a rocking bachelorette party like that,” Cherise said.

“Bite your tongue, Cherise. Stella would like nothing better than to stick me with a purple ponytail. And the rest of the pony outfit along with it.”

They were drawn by the lights and milling crowd to Crybaby Ranch, a Western wear store that specialized in upscale cowgirl gear, jewelry, and boots.

“Something’s happening at Crybaby,” Lacey said. “The National Western Stock Show is over, right?”

“Oh, it’s a boot show. I read about it,” Cherise said. “Designer cowboy boots. They’re open late tonight.”

“A designer cowboy boot show? I had no idea.”

“Wow, I know something about fashion that you don’t!”

“I imagine you’re also an expert in ski wear, bike wear, rock-climbing helmets, and running shoes. All of which I know nothing about.”

“That sounded vaguely like an insult, sis.”

“East is East and West is West, Cherise. We each have our own expertise. Trujillo is the expert on boots in my newsroom.”

Cherise grinned. “You mean Tony Trujillo, that cute police reporter?”

“Tony the Terrible. An attractive nuisance. I like Tony, Cherise, but be warned, he’s more in love with his boots than his ladies.”

Trujillo was the closest thing
The Eye Street Observer
had to a
GQ
kind of guy. He was a Westerner himself, from New Mexico, and he had a wardrobe of fancy cowboy boots in such leathers as ostrich, cowhide, alligator, python, and armadillo. Roadkill du jour, Lacey liked to call it.

Cherise pulled Lacey through the mob milling around on the sidewalk and opened the door at Crybaby Ranch. “Let’s go to the boot show. Terrible Tony will be so jealous. And I really want a fabulous pair of boots.”

They squeezed by the doorman into the throng inside the store, past colorful coffee table books and belt buckles and silver and turquoise jewelry. The place was filled with women in snug-fitting jean skirts and two-thousand-dollar boots. In D.C., Lacey thought, they would be the kind of gals who attended the Texas State Society’s Boots and Black Tie inaugural balls, where cowboy boots and ball gowns were the dress code. Cherise disappeared into the mob and Lacey navigated past the finger foods and wine, finally arriving at the boot displays. She said a silent thank-you to her little sister. This was a Fashion Bite on the hoof.
Have I been asleep at the style beat?

The boots on the shelf ranged from six hundred to six thousand dollars per pair. But tonight’s event was for those daring frontier fashionistas who wanted to custom order their next pair of boots, with their personal choice of style, color, and material. This boot event was tame, Lacey was informed, compared to the one in January during the National Western Stock Show, when Crybaby Ranch became a boot-happy madhouse, with hundreds of serious boot shoppers clamoring for custom boots.

The good news is that some people have thousands of dollars to spend on one-of-a-kind boots, even in this economy
, Lacey thought.
The bad news is it’s not me.