Dolled Up to Die (32 page)

The tuxedos hadn’t fared too well either. One of Mitch’s sleeves dangled by threads from his shoulder. Lance’s dirt-stained knees showed through rips. Rolf glowered between them, Mitch twisting one arm behind him, Lance doing the same with the other arm.

Jo-Jo and groomsmen ran up. Behind them the fire truck started pumping water on the flames. Robyn and the bridesmaids tore around the end of the hedged enclosure like a flying wedge of celery-colored birds in high heels.

Cate thought Robyn would start wailing about her ruined rehearsal, asking what happened to Cate’s gown and wig, but she took one look at fiancé Lance, with dirt on his face and exposed knees, gave a little shriek, and ran to him. He didn’t let go of Rolf, but he put his other arm around Robyn.

Two policemen raced up. They stopped short at the sight of the odd tableau of a wedding party with various wardrobe malfunctions. Rolf spoke first.

“Get these idiots off me! They attacked me, and I was trying to get to the fire and help—”

“He wasn’t helping! He was chasing me! He tied me up in his attic. My wig is still up there! I had to jump out a window to get away. He killed Celeste and Mr. Kieferson, and he was going to kill me too! Because I saw his arm, and it has a tattoo
with an eye in it and that was the arm and tattoo I saw when Celeste was murdered!”

“She’s crazy!” Rolf yelled.

“Okay, everyone calm down now,” an officer said. “Let’s get away from the fire and we’ll get to the bottom of this.”

“He started the fire too!” Cate yelled.

“She’s lying! Let me loose!”

The officer moved over to where Mitch and Lance weren’t loosening their holds on Rolf. For a moment Cate thought he was going to order them to release Rolf, but he spotted something at Rolf’s feet.

A knife! Rolf had been chasing her with a knife!

The officer reached out and rubbed Rolf’s dirt-stained shirt between his fingers. He held his fingers to his nose.

“I was working on a motorcycle. I spilled gas on my shirt,” Rolf muttered. After a moment’s hesitation, he added belligerently, “I’m not answering any questions. I want a lawyer.”

“I think that can be arranged,” the officer said.

A man in a dark blue suit came around the hedged enclosure.

“Pastor Dietrichson,” Robyn said.

“Someone around front, your aunt I believe, said everyone was around back here.” The pastor looked questioningly at Robyn, and she nodded. “I’m sorry I’m late. I take it I missed the rehearsal?”

The minister’s gaze took in the bedraggled wedding party, officers, burning hole in the wall, fire trucks, and Rolf with the officer now snapping handcuffs around his wrists. Mitch came over and wrapped an arm around Cate’s shoulders. She realized she was shivering now, both from the chilly night and nerves. His warmth and strength felt good.

“Maybe this would be a good time to ask if you’d like to come work for Computer Solutions Dudes?” he whispered.

As good a time as any, Cate realized. At the moment, being
a PI in a bedraggled bridesmaid’s gown, with a fixation on window escapes, didn’t really seem like the right answer to that age-old question, What do I want to be when I grow up?

Hey, but there was something—

“Not today. I just captured a killer!”

“
You
captured a killer?” Mitch yanked his tuxedo sleeve free of its few remaining threads and handed it to her.

“Okay,
we
captured a killer. And Lance too.”

“Will there be a wedding?” the minister inquired politely.

Everyone looked at Robyn. Cate mentally tallied up the damages.

Her bridesmaid’s gown in tatters, her wig gone. There went the color scheme.

Two tuxedos ruined.

“The van that was supposed to deliver the buffet never showed up,” Jo-Jo offered. “Someone called and said the restaurant has just closed down.”

The master of ceremonies/deejay had laryngitis.

“I don’t think Lodge Hill will be usable,” Jo-Jo added. She glanced back at the burning area. The firemen had the blaze knocked down, but a smoking hole yawned in the wall.

“Perhaps the wedding should be postponed,” the minister suggested.

Cate expected tears of anguish and despair from Robyn, maybe even a genteel faint on this disastrous occasion. Yes, postponement was the only solution. Robyn’s perfect wedding was in ruins.

Instead Robyn wrapped an arm around her fiancé’s waist. “Lance could have been killed! This guy had a
knife
. But he’s here. I’m here. We love each other. There will be a wedding.”

Robyn looked around defiantly, as if she expected objections, but everyone, including Cate, simply looked at her in astonishment. Robyn had finally gotten her priorities right.

“That’s an excellent attitude,” Jo-Jo said. “I can make punch.”

“I know a deejay,” Cate offered. Thoughtfully, remembering Destiny Dustinhoff’s posthypnotic tendency toward impromptu Lady Gaga imitations, she added, “Just don’t ask her what time it is.”

 28 

It was a beautiful wedding.

Cate and the bridemaids spent most of the day on the phone, notifying guests of the new arrangements, and that evening Aunt Carly’s house overflowed with people and the flowers originally intended for Lodge Hill.

The minister showed up on time.

Bride Robyn dazzled in her wedding gown. The groom and best man wore spotless blue suits. All the groomsmen showed up, but there wasn’t room for all the bridesmaids and groomsmen in the ceremony, so the entire entourage was scrapped. Cate came in her natural flyaway red hair and a blue dress that Mitch especially liked, with Band-Aids on her various cuts and scratches. Other bridesmaids went creative with everything from sequins to a flowered muumuu.

The minister asked if anyone had any objections to this union, and no one did. He pronounced Lance and Robyn husband and wife, the groom kissed his new bride, and in his enthusiasm stepped on her floor-length veil. The veil ripped. The tiara crashed to the floor.

There was a moment of dead silence among the guests as Robyn stared down at the fallen ornament. Cate expected her to burst into tears. But then the new and improved Robyn
picked up both tiara and veil and waved them like trophies overhead, and everyone applauded.

The pizza parlor delivered five different kinds of pizza, plus platters of spicy Buffalo wings. Jo-Jo’s punch, with plenty of ginger ale, was a big hit.

Destiny Dustinhoff emceed the introductions at the reception, and deejayed the music with no lapses into Lady Gaga solos.

Robyn threw her bouquet. Cate wasn’t trying to catch it, but it smacked her in the head and fell into her hands. The bride and groom dashed out to their car to speed off to their honeymoon on the coast, everyone throwing birdseed.

The car wouldn’t start.

Mitch loaned them his SUV.

Later, Cate drove him home to his condo in her car.

“I had my doubts before, but I think they’re going to make it,” Mitch said in a satisfied way. He glanced over at Cate. “You okay?” They hadn’t really had a chance to talk before now.

“A little stiff and sore.” She’d fallen, been trussed up like a rodeo calf, jumped out a window, and been tackled by a killer. She had a right to be stiff and sore.

Mitch reached over and touched her cheek. “A few cuts and bruises too.”

“Just another day in the life of a private investigator,” Cate said.

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

Then she remembered something. The camera. It was still in the backseat of the car. At the condo, they took it inside, where Mitch quickly figured out that the problem wasn’t a highly technical one.

“It needs new batteries.”

He supplied the two AA batteries, and then they were
looking at a series of photos. Ed Kieferson’s Jaguar parked at Jo-Jo’s house. Ed digging his fingers into the flowerpot on the back steps for the key. Ed leaning inside the half-open door of the house. A motorcycle and rider, apparently just arrived, behind Ed’s car. Cate couldn’t tell who was under the helmet.

“I wonder how she was getting these photos?” Mitch said. “Couldn’t they see her?”

“She could have parked behind those big blackberry bushes around the deserted house across the road and come over on foot. That’s what I’d have done.”

Mitch nodded. “And used a zoom.”

The figure from the motorcycle was at the door in the next photo. He’d half turned, helmet off, as if looking around to be sure no one was watching him.

“Rolf,” Cate breathed.

Rolf was coming out the door in the next shot. Even in a still photo, he was obviously running. He was holding something close to his body.

A gun.

“So now Rolf takes off on his bike, but Kieferson’s car is still there,” Mitch mused. “But it was gone when you got there. What happened to it?”

Good question. “So do these photos prove anything?” Cate asked.

“I don’t know. But I think the police will be interested.”

They were.

During the next month, repairs at Lodge Hill were under way with insurance money. Jo-Jo and Kim had an agreement that Jo-Jo would manage the wedding business until Kim was ready to take over. Jo-Jo had decided not to move to Arizona. She’d found a free companion donkey for Maude,
and, now that she had a friend, Maude had abandoned her watchdog brays.

Kim wouldn’t be taking over Lodge Hill for some time, however, because she was starting classes in business management at the University of Oregon in the spring. Her arm was healing nicely. The Ice Cube had been foreclosed on, so Kim was now living in the one room Ed had completed at Lodge Hill in his grand plan of making it into an actual lodge. She had come to church with Cate and Mitch a couple of times.

A neighboring grape grower was dealing with the bank to take over purchase of the vineyard.

The chef at Mr. K’s had returned, and a group of employees were getting together to buy out and reopen the restaurant as Chef Dior’s. Kim included much of the contents of the house in a wildly successful closing-down sale at the Mystic Mirage. Cate bought several items for her new house.

Cate hadn’t intended to ask Mitch for help when she chose furniture for the house, but she spotted a great leather sofa in a furniture store window near where they had lunch one day. Once inside, he pointed out a beautiful dining room table, and before long almost the entire house was furnished.

Was it a little scary that they had such similar tastes?

Cate wrote up her final report for the files. Belmont Investigations. Cate Kinkaid, assistant private investigator, Case File 36-M. (She’d tacked on the M to indicate it was a murder case.) The report included both solid facts and some of what Uncle Joe called “informed deductions.”

Cate had been called in to identify the wig and an empty briefcase the police found in a search of Rolf’s cottage. The officer handling the search turned out to be the same one she’d met when Celeste’s apartment was trashed. On a you-didn’t-
hear-this-from-me basis, he suggested Rolf had been searching for the camera there, that Celeste must have threatened him in some way with what she had on it. Cate also learned that the search of his cottage had turned up the handgun from which the bullet that had killed Ed Kieferson had been fired. Fingerprints had been wiped off the handle of the sword that killed Celeste, but Rolf had missed an incriminating print on the blade. Why had Celeste been considering hiring a private investigator? Cate could only speculate that it had to do with Rolf or Travis.

Things were looking good on the case against Rolf, the officer said. Or bad, from Rolf’s viewpoint.

A news report said a police search of the old, unused buildings at the vineyard revealed that they weren’t so unused after all. They held a small but sophisticated marijuana-growing operation. Rolf had a couple of illegal immigrants working there, and they, in exchange for indemnity, had much to say about the pot-growing operations. An unexpected find for police was a rather large stash of Rohypnol also in the building.

Beyond this point, Cate had to use those informed deductions to answer various questions about the case in her report.

Why had Ed Kieferson gone to Jo-Jo’s house that fateful day? It could have been to win Jo-Jo back, but Cate’s own conclusion was that he’d gone to demand a reduction in his alimony payments, and shooting the dolls was a warning to Jo-Jo of what he could do to her if she didn’t cooperate. Would he have carried through on the threat? An unanswerable question.

Why had Rolf followed Ed that day? From what Kim had said about Ed’s fierce antagonism toward Rohypnol, it seemed likely that he’d found out Rolf was supplying Celeste and maybe selling the stuff elsewhere too. Rolf knew Ed was going to turn him in and he’d soon be back in jail. Rolf wasn’t going
to let that happen. He’d followed Ed with the deliberate intent to kill him that day. Which he’d done.

But Celeste had followed too. It seemed unlikely the three vehicles had been in parade formation going out to Jo-Jo’s place, and somehow Celeste had arrived before Rolf, which was how she’d gotten the incriminating photos. Cate figured Celeste really did suspect Ed had something extracurricular going with some woman. She’d followed him to get proof of that infidelity and unexpectedly got a different kind of proof. So why hadn’t she turned the photos over to the police? Maybe she didn’t want to lose her Rohypnol supplier? Maybe she figured she could use the incriminating photos for leverage to get her supply free? Maybe she was just glad Ed was dead so she didn’t have to do it.

Ed’s Jaguar. How did it get back to town? Rolf must have moved it back to the restaurant parking lot. Why? Maybe so it would throw suspicion on Jo-Jo by making it look as if Ed had gone to the house with her in the van. Rolf was a tough, resourceful guy. He’d have found a way to get back out there and retrieve his motorcycle.

Who had called Celeste that day at the Mystic Mirage, and who had Cate bumped into that time she fled the store in embarrassment? Travis Beauchamp? Who had now done a plea bargain on the burglary charge and received a short sentence.

Cate would add a copy of the newspaper account of Rolf’s trial to the file later.

Case closed.

Now here they were at the big event on a cooperative day in November. The yard had been nicely landscaped, the hillside sloping down to the street terraced and planted with grass and
shrubs. In the spring it would bloom with azaleas and lilacs, and Cate herself had added a section of iris bulbs Rebecca had donated from her yard. Cate hadn’t gardened since she was a girl back home, but she was looking forward to planting tomatoes and lettuce and onions out back next spring. Mitch had said, “Don’t forget carrots,” and she’d told him to bring his own carrot seed and give it a try.