The Case of the Flashing Fashion Queen - A Dix Dodd Mystery

  “Oh, go ahead, Dylan. Just do what you’ve got to do. Just get it over with.”

  “No, I’m fine. Really.” He nodded firmly, resolutely, but I could see the strain on his face.

  “Dylan, you’re about to explode. So just go ahead and—”

  He didn’t need anymore coaxing.

  He exploded, all right—with laughter.

  And not with a manly ha ha chuckle or even a curled-lip snort. He collapsed on the motel-room bed with peels of helpless mirth. Tears streamed from the corners of his eyes. He held onto his sides.

  Did I mention he was rolling on the bed?

  He’d seen the whole lovely scene unfold outside the Weatherby house as I’d made my hasty, and not so graceful exit.

  “Oh, you vulture!”

  That was the name that greeted me when I came barreling around to the front of the house. I stopped—or rather, skidded to a stop—in my high-heeled tracks.

  Shit, shit, shit!

  Ned was back. Back with grieving parents in tow. Right freaking in front of me! With mouth gaping open, he kept looking, first to me, then to the real estate agency sign I’d propped against the house. His parents had to have grabbed an earlier flight, one that hadn’t been available when Dylan had checked for me. Or maybe Ned had chartered a private plane.

  His shocked parents gave me—that is to say, the dark haired, pink-sunglasses-wearing, tight-skirted real estate agent me—a look of utter disdain. Cockroach-on-the-dinner-plate revulsion.

  “Who are you?” Ned demanded.

  Wordlessly, I held the real estate sign up in front of me. Partly as a shield, and partly to hide Jennifer’s journal, which I’d tucked into the (ever more tight now—circulation slowly becoming non-existent) waistband of my skirt.

  “Oh, you work for that Cartsell fellow, do you?”

  “Yes.” After my initial squeak of an answer, I lowered my voice to what I liked to think of as my slow, breathy, lets-have-phone-sex voice. Not because I was feeling particularly sexy. But because, apparently, Ned hadn’t yet made me. True, the night we’d met, the night he’d found Jennifer dead, he’d been somewhat distracted. But even so very cleverly disguised as I was (God, I hoped I was cleverly disguised!), I wasn’t taking any chances. “Yes, that’s right, Mr. Weatherby.” I could literally feel the words purring in the back of my throat as I spoke. “I work for Mr. Bert Cartsell. And he—”

  “Well, doesn’t that beat all! That son of a bitch just doesn’t give up, does he!” Ned’s face turned so red, it looked as if his head might explode. “That no-good, rotten, money-grubbing bastard!”

  ‘Breathe, breathe’ I silently coached. To both of us.

  “Mr. Weatherby.” I took my phone-sex voice a notch lower, added a deep-south accent. “I assure you that Mr. Cartsell—”

  “I told him to stay the hell away!”

  Oh shit! Of all the real estate agents in Marport City, this was the one from whom Craig had to steal the sign!

  Ned continued to rant, “I’ve no intention of selling this house. Not now, not ever, and not for any amount of money. The first day Jennifer’s obituary was in the paper, you goddamned people start nosing around, trying to make a buck off my wife’s murder. Well let me tell you, missy, I’ve had enough.” Ned opened his jacket. For the briefest of moments, I thought he was going to haul out a gun. Worse luck. He hauled out his cell phone. “I’m calling that Cartsell son of a bitch! No, wait, I’ll call Luanne! She’ll get his boss on the phone. She won’t let him get away with this. She’ll—”

  “M-Mr. Weatherby,” I stammered. “I really don’t think—”

  I could tell by the flick of his thumb, he’d pushed number one on the speed dial. And as he waited, and waited, he pointed a demanding finger at me. “And you stand right here.”

  Not in this lifetime.

  There was no way in hell I was going to maneuver down the walkway, past Ned and his parents (his mother’s walker looked dangerous, like a weapon now, in her grip), so I veered off across the rain-soaked lawn, making a mad dash for the street.

  Bad idea.

  My spiked heels sank to the hilt in the soggy lawn, causing my hips to move in ways hips weren’t meant to. After a few more heel-sinking, Frankenstein lurches, I stepped right out of them (my shoes not my hips). Barefoot now, I pulled Jennifer’s journal from the waistband of the skirt, clutched it to me with one hand, hiked the skirt up to my ass with the other hand, and with the red blazer fanning out behind me, I ran like hell to Mrs. Presley’s Hyundai. I peeled out of there so quickly you’d think I was trying to qualify for the Indie 500.

  Well, at least Dylan was getting a good laugh out of it now.

  “Asshat,” I mumbled, loud enough for him to hear me. I faked annoyance even as I bit down on my own grin.

  “Sorry,” he said, wiping at his eyes. “But all I can see is you trying to run across that lawn in that skin-tight skirt and those high heels. The look on your face when the shoes stuck in the lawn! Omigod, it was priceless. And when you hiked up your skirt and really ran...” He started laughing again, so hard the bed shook.

  “Look who’s talking.” I sat on the red sheets beside him, giving him a poke (okay, a damn good knuckle jab) in the ribs. “You were a sight yourself, Boy Wonder. Creeping along on your hands and knees, peeking through the neighbors’ bushes.”

  The laughter subsided, but the smile remained. “Oh, you caught that, did you?”

  “Ha!” My turn to tease. “How could I not catch that! All six foot four of you, crawling along the length of the hedge like some kind of long-legged, studly bug or something.”

  As soon as the words passed my lips—the very freakin’ millisecond—I realized what I’d said. Studly. Should I try a quick recover and say ‘ugly bug’? Like, five times really fast. That would sound intelligent!

  Dylan said nothing. Didn’t so much as falter in his grin, or blink. But I could tell by the glint in his eyes that he’d caught my slip of the tongue.

  And I wanted to slip my tongue...

  Whoa, Dix.

  I busied myself re-belting the old brown housecoat Mrs. Presley had provided, cinching it even tighter, telling myself I needed the extra bit of warmth after the long, increasingly cool shower. It had taken so many shampoos to get the temporary dye out of my hair that I’d used up all Mrs. P’s hot water. But at last, I was blond again. And though I was fully clad in underwear (no, not the be-tasseled stuff that Dylan had brought over), jeans and t-shirt, the housecoat felt good around my shoulders. Protective. Defensive.

  Butt-ugly.

  “Had to make sure you got safely out of there, Dix.” His voice dropped a notch. Though his eyes still showed a bit of teasing, he’d stopped laughing altogether. “I’d crawl through worse than a few bushes to do that.”

  “Well, thanks. If you hadn’t been watching my ass—” Oh, just shut up, Dix! “—I’d still be stuck under that desk.”

  “Yeah, well.” He cleared his throat, then said, “If you need a hand checking up on the man, I’m the one to call.”

  “Let me guess—another business card?”

  He pulled himself up on the bed so both of us were leaning against the headboard. “It’s a good one, don’t you think? Straight-shooting from the hip. Gets right to the point. Clever and witty.”

  “Ummm, that would be a no.”

  “Geez, you’re hard to please, woman. We gotta come up with something.”

  “I know, I know. But it has to be the right thing. The exact thing.”

  And it felt kind of good just then, when I realized what I’d said. Dylan felt it too, I could tell by the impish grin on his face. We were talking positively about the business cards again. Talking about the future. Hope.

  Things were beginning to look up. Jennifer’s journal had been an amazing find. And though I was far from out of the fire, I had maybe moved a little to the periphery of it. Maybe.

  I heard a siren in the distance growing closer. Dylan’s eyes widened along with
mine. Only when the siren sound began to fade again did I realize I’d been holding my breath. I let it out again. Just a little reminder that I was far from burn-free yet. This was no time to get lazy. No time to let my guard down.

  It was time to get to work.

  I told Dylan about the second intruder to the Weatherby home — Luanne Laney. Turns out it wasn’t news, of course. He’d seen Ned’s psycho-secretary walk up to the front door and let herself into the Weatherby house with a key.

  That was why he’d called frantically on Ned and Jennifer’s home phone line after I failed to answer my cell. He’d ID’d her from all the surveillance pictures I’d taken over the course of the week I’d trailed Ned, even though she’d drawn her hat down over her eyes and pulled her coat collar up around her ears.

  “I’m telling you, she might have had a key, but she wasn’t supposed to be there,” Dylan said. “Even without the turned-up-collar routine, her posture would have said it all. Self-conscious and guilty.”

  “Odd for a woman known to scare the bejeezus out of just about everyone who knew her.”

  Luanne’s presence there put a new spin on things. Why had she been sneaking around? Why had she wanted Jennifer’s journal? And, perhaps most importantly, how the hell had she even known about it?

  “Do you think it was Luanne who came to the office dressed as Jennifer that day?”

  “No,” I answered, without having to put too much effort into the thought. “For one thing, even in heels Luanne isn’t tall enough. And yes, I realize the impostor was putting on a fake voice, but I think it was too throaty for Luanne Laney under the best of circumstances.”

  “Luanne could have hired someone. There’s a very good chance that whoever killed Jennifer and set us up did just that—hired an actress for that stint. And I’m betting that if that’s the case, that’s one scared actress right about now.”

  I nodded in agreement. “Scared and close-mouthed, no doubt.”

  Dylan scratched a hand along his unshaven jaw as he thought. “You said Jennifer hid the journal somewhere other than in the desk?”

  “Right, the bookshelf.”

  “So who was she hiding it from? Ned or Luanne?”

  “And what the hell is so very important in this journal that Luanne Laney would risk breaking in to retrieve it?”

  Dylan and I barely breathed into the silence now, as I opened Jennifer’s journal. The bed dipped between us as we leaned in closer together to look through the pages. Dylan was seeing this for the first time, of course, and studying it with all the intensity that I’d come to admire about him. I was giving the journal a second but substantially more thorough look—a more purposeful one now that I had the time to do so, and now that I’d had the chance to think things over.

  I looked at the time correlation of the journal entries again:

  J - return six dresses to Ryder’s.

  N - meeting with PR.

  J - buy three watches, choose one (return others within the week)

  N - church meeting after supper

  J - cancel first-class tickets to New York.

  “She didn’t go to New York?” Dylan asked.

  “She did.” I flipped forward a few pages, and pointed to an entry.

  J - see Mrs. E at Tiffany’s on Fifth re: refund policy

  “That’s Tiffany’s in New York,” I pointed out helpfully. “She went. She just didn’t go first class.”

  Dylan huffed a laugh. “So she downgraded her ticket, and flew economy to New York? Why?”

  I smiled. “Think about it. What’s the only logical reason someone would chose economy.”

  Dylan was still for a moment, then nodded slowly. “Money. Jennifer downgraded the ticket and pocketed the difference.”

  “That’s my guess.” I leaned closer to Dylan and started flipping through the pages—back and forth as I compared. “And look at the way purchases and refunds are aligned here. Every time Jennifer contemplates she should ‘return’ something, it corresponds with the times her husband is in church, at first.”

  “Feeling guilty for excesses?”

  “Orrrrrr,” I said. “Every time he goes to church, she got concerned. So she’d write a note to return a costly item. That’s the way Jennifer kept her entries—always what she ‘planned to do’. This wasn’t so much of a diary as an events calendar. And the more her husband went to church, the more Jennifer bought and returned.”

  “I don’t know...”

  “Think about it, Dylan. She puts items on her virtually limitless credit card. Returns them for cash. Husband, pays the credit card bills every month and is none the wiser as Jennifer tucks the money away. What would an outfit from Ryder’s run? At least fifteen hundred or two thousand, I’m thinking. That would certainly add up after awhile—build a little nest egg. Little backup cash just in case.”

  Just in case of what? That was the question pounding through my mind.

  “Nice theory,” Dylan offered. “Except stores would simply credit the amount of the refund back to the credit card, wouldn’t they? I’ve never known a retailer to do otherwise. I don’t think they can do anything else.”

  “Sure, to you and me and the rest of us plebs. But this is Jennifer Weatherby we’re talking about here. You gotta figure the proprietors of those shops would bend over backwards to keep her business, especially in this fairly small backwater. Hell, they’d probably turn a blind eye while she stole the stuff, then send the bill to Ned.”

  Dylan grunted agreement.

  “I’ve got it!” I said, my eyes widening. “I betcha my best RF tracker that Ned Weatherby’s arrangement with Ryder’s doesn’t involve credit cards at all. I’m betting he has a free standing line of credit. You know, rack up the purchases, settle up once a month.”

  “Oh, hell, yeah. That’s gotta be it. They could give her a cash refund, no problem, because they’d still get paid by Ned.”

  “Oh, and hey, maybe they even levied a little surcharge,” I suggested. “Say five or ten percent, to make it worth their while. Then everybody’s happy.”

  “Okay, that works for the local dress shops,” Dylan said, “but what about the airlines?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe not the airlines, but certainly any travel agent that was interested in keeping the substantial Weatherby account could figure out a way to accommodate.”

  He looked further through the journal. “But the consistent correlation of notes to self and Ned’s church times ends. And in the last few weeks, Jennifer was buying and returning up a storm whether she writes of Ned going to church or not. In fact...” He jumped up and rummaged through the pics on the bed. “In fact, the last time he went to church, when you snuck into choir practice, Jennifer didn’t even make an entry that day.”

  And we both knew why.

  “Church attendance was no longer noteworthy,” he said. “It was expected. Part of Ned’s everyday life now. She might as well have written in he brushed his teeth and wore a tie. Going to church was that common.”

  “Right,” I said. “But Jennifer wasn’t a big Ravenspire fan.” I flipped around the pages. “Other than the first two Sundays Ned attended, Jennifer never returned to Ravenspire’s church.”

  “We need to look into this guy some more,” he said.

  “Oh yeah. Do we ever.”

  Proud as oh-so-smart peacocks, we sat grinning at each other. This felt good. This felt like good old-fashioned private detective work. This felt like a bit of control here.

  As we’d poured over the journal, we’d drawn closer together on the bed. Getting more casual, getting more at ease as we sat there. Together. Almost touching. Dylan looked at me closely, his eyes soft but unreadable.

  “We... we still don’t know who killed Jennifer Weatherby,” I said.

  “But, we’re getting warmer, aren’t we, Dix?” His voice was slow and deep.

  I nodded. “Damn right we’re getting warmer.”

  I tossed the journal on the bed beside us, and it fell open
. A chill raced up my spine as I glanced over and saw where the book had opened, as if willed to this page by some other force. Some other spirit.

  J cancelled caterer, in Jennifer’s handwriting.

  And beneath it, contrasting sharply and angrily, the bold, black-inked NO WAY IN HELL.

  Dylan and I both stared at it. And we both knew. The answer was here. Had to be here.

  “Jennifer didn’t write that last part,” he said. “That’s not her blue; that’s not her hand writing. Someone else could just as easily have found out what she was up to.”

  “Someone else did.”

  “But who?”

  “We’ll figure it out.”

  Dylan nodded. He reached out and touched my hand. And I didn’t pull away.

  Yep. Damn right we were getting warmer.