Dolled Up to Die (21 page)

“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 break-ins. 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.

Cate was momentarily inclined to walk off and leave Kim to her gullibility or whatever it was, but a frustrating concern for the vulnerable woman kept her from doing so. She couldn’t just leave Kim in the clutches of a killer. Finally she decided there was no way to be subtle about this.

“Kim, could I talk to you for a minute? Alone,” she emphasized. Cate thought for a moment that Travis was going to jump in and veto that. His hands balled into fists. She tossed out a diverting statement. “I really need your help with something.”

Kim looked up at Travis again. His glance at Cate narrowed, but he apparently decided protest would look suspicious, and stepped back. Or maybe he was already confident enough of his hold on Kim. Cate led Kim over to the far side of some straggly but head-high bushes.

“Kim, what is going on here?” she whispered frantically. “I can’t believe this. Yesterday you were convinced Travis may have killed both your mother and Ed, and trashed her apartment too. And today you’re taking his advice about cremating her?”

“I thought you needed help on something.”

“I do! I need help understanding what you’re doing!”

“I can see why you might have reservations about Travis.” Kim spoke with an I’m-trying-to-be-patient note in her voice, as if Cate were just too dense to understand. “I did too, when he called me last night from Tigard—”

“How do you know he was calling from Tigard? On a cell phone, he could have been standing here in this parking lot.”

“I thought of that,” Kim admitted. “But when he got here this morning, he had flowers for me. They were from a florist’s shop in Tigard. My favorites, anthurium, from Hawaii.”

If Travis had staged a couple of murders, he could certainly stage the production of flowers that looked as if they’d come from a florist’s shop in Tigard. And remembering Kim’s favorite flowers. A nice touch.

“Anyway, we talked and talked last night when he called, and we’ve been talking ever since he got here this morning.”

“So just like that, you’re jumping into a hot new romance with him?”

“Of course not!” Kim’s eyes flashed as if that suggestion both shocked and offended her. “I’m still in mourning for my husband. Travis is just trying to help out. He told me how sorry he is about everything. He’s changed, Cate, he really has.”

Okay, people could change. Cate could grant that. But she wasn’t yet ready to jump on Travis’s bandwagon. The ex-husband may be saying he’d changed, but the difference between saying it and actually doing it was like the difference between misdemeanor and murder.

“Did he tell you why he left you? Or where he’s been? Or why he came back?”

“He left because he just got tired of the responsibility of marriage and wanted out. It was as simple as that. Now he realizes how immature that was, and he’s ashamed of himself. He also says he was really stupid. That he was too dumb to realize what he had when he had it.”

“And now he wants to jump back into the role of husband?”

“No! I told you. We’re not into some instant romance. He’s been down in Guatemala. But the buddies he knew who’d gone down there were living like jungle rats while they grew pot. He found out he doesn’t want anything to do with that
kind of life. He says he got lost out in the jungle one time, lost for ten days out there alone, and it changed him. Straightened out his priorities. He came back to Oregon because he’s different now, and his life is going to be different too.”

For Kim’s sake, Cate hoped that Travis’s claim to change was real. But the hope was pockmarked with a dread that if Travis was the killer Cate thought he was, Kim might be risking her life in accepting his claim.

“How long has he been back?”

“He worked down in California for a while after he left Guatemala, so he’s only been in Tigard for a couple months.”

“Long enough ago for him to make that call to your mother.”

“That wasn’t him. I asked. He didn’t know anything about any phone call. Like I told you, I felt like it was him on the phone with Mom that time, but my feelings about most things are about as reliable as infomercials. It must have been some salesman on the phone that day, just like Mom said. Travis didn’t find out until just a couple days ago that I was here in Eugene.”

Kim asked. Travis denied. Kim believed.

Which meant she was also believing he couldn’t have been involved in either Ed or Celeste’s deaths, because he hadn’t known where Kim was until a couple of days ago.

Cate wanted to pound Kim the way Kim had pounded that purple pillow back at the house.
Wake up, girl. Smell the lies!
Frustrated, she asked, “What does he plan to do now?”

Cate was thinking in terms of the next few days, but Travis had already filled Kim with loftier plans.

“He’s realized he needs more education,” she said. “He’s thinking, if he can find a job here, he could start taking classes at the university.”

“Classes in what?”

“I don’t know.” Kim sounded impatient with these picky
details. “Maybe architecture or social work, something like that. Something worthwhile.”

“That’s a rather wide area, from architecture to social work,” Cate pointed out.

Kim waved a hand, as if this were irrelevant. “I just know he’s already been a big help in deciding what to do about Mom. He says maybe I should go back to school too.”

Kill Celeste and then kindly jump in to help decide what to do with the body. Way to go, Travis.

“Kim, don’t do this! You can make decisions on your own. You don’t have to have someone tell you what to do. Maybe you
should
go back to school. But decide it for yourself. You’re not dumb.” Naïve about men, maybe, but not dumb.

Look who’s talking, Cate had to remind herself. Before good-guy Mitch came along, her past had included a fair number of frogs who hadn’t a clue about turning into princes.

“I remember back to a decision I made on my own,” Kim said with a certain defiance.

“Marrying Travis.”

“A very dumb, very bad decision,” Kim said.

“So you think letting him help and advise you now is a good decision?”

Kim managed a smile. “I know. That sounds, um, a little muddleheaded, doesn’t it? But we were both so young back then, and we’ve matured now. He’s changed, and I need his help. Neither of us is thinking romance now.”

Kim turned, circled the bush, and headed back toward the Mustang and Travis. Kim might not think Travis had romance on his mind. Cate thought otherwise.

The even bigger worry was, what else was on Travis Beauchamp’s mind?

On the way home, Cate pulled over to the curb and did a quick search with her cell phone for a number for Melissa Bair in Tigard. She expected voice mail, answering machine, a delay of some kind, but instead a woman answered on the third ring. She sounded harried even in her one-word hello.

“Hi. Is this Melissa Bair?”

Cate had a feeling the woman would prefer to say “maybe” rather than “yes,” wary of what the call was about. Instead the woman detoured answering the question by saying, “And this is?”

“Cate Kinkaid. I’m a private investigator here in Eugene. I’m not investigating you or collecting a bill or trying to sell you something,” she added quickly. “I’d just like to talk to you. But if this is a busy time, I can call again later.”

“With three kids under five, it’s always a busy time,” Melissa said. Curiosity, however, apparently outweighed the busyness. Or maybe hearing from a private investigator was preferable to a call from a bill collector. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

“A situation has come up concerning Travis Beauchamp. I believe he was a former neighbor, and you knew his wife Kim too?”

“You said you’re a private investigator?”

“Well, uh, an assistant private investigator, actually,” Cate said. Sometimes she wished honesty about that minor detail wouldn’t kick in at inopportune moments.

“Travis has done something that needs investigating, no doubt. What do you need to know?”