The ruse didn’t really hurt anyone . . . unless you counted the flag corps girls who cropped their own hair in solidarity.
But as the Carberrys’ attorney, Kristen knew Dani had cut her hair, that she wasn’t sick. And that put Kristen in a tricky situation. First, she wasn’t sure whether faking cancer constituted child abuse that she, as an officer of the court, was obligated to report. And, second, she didn’t know how to square her role as pageant director—which she did, indeed, take very seriously, despite the fact that she wasn’t really a veteran of the pageant circuit—with her ethical obligation of privilege to her clients.
“The ethics board informed Kristen that you weren’t breaking any law,” Finn said, “so she had no basis for breaking privilege. They recommended that, if she felt conflicted about her role as pageant director, she should step down. That’s what she planned to do.”
“That’s why she recused herself from the dispute between you and Tucker over his ice cream, because she had every intention of stepping down from her position as judge entirely. She was turning over both jobs to Jackie Conway so she wouldn’t be torn up about keeping your secret.”
“I didn’t know,” Eloise said.
Finn shook his head. “No, no, you didn’t. You thought Kristen was going to break privilege and tell everyone about your lie. What I can’t figure out is how you thought you could keep Dani’s condition a secret. Eventually, it would come out in the litigation . . . that was part of your case, that Tucker had pulled Dani into this crowd of kids who were having a bad influence on her.”
“I . . . I didn’t think.”
“No,” I said. “No, you didn’t.”
“So, let me get this straight,” Cal said. “Dani Carberry doesn’t have cancer.”
“Nope. Just a stupid haircut.”
“And you think maybe Eloise was so torqued up about this pageant thing that she actually killed Kristen?” Cal didn’t look convinced.
The four of us—Bree, Finn, Cal, and I—were gathered around a table at the A-la-mode. Beth lurked behind the counter, pretending not to eavesdrop.
“I don’t know for sure,” I said, “but I know Bree didn’t do it, and Eloise had at least as much motive as Bree. Plus, like I’ve been saying, Eloise was a gymnast. She could have hoisted herself up onto that balcony. You yourself said the shooter could have been up there.”
“
Could
have, Tally. Maybe.” He shook his head. “I’m just not seein’ it.”
“Just talk to her, Cal. Bree deserves to have you investigate every possible alternative.”
Cal’s eyes slid to my cousin and then away again. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, I’ll talk to Eloise.”
Dang, I was starting to think that Cal had a crush on Bree. And by the way she was blushing, red as her hair, it might be mutual.
“I’m not promising anything here, but I’ll talk to her,” he repeated as he got to his feet.
“Oh, I almost forgot.” He patted his pockets, pulled out a cell phone, and held it up. “Alice’s phone. We found it in the center console of Kristen’s car.”
“Don’t you need that for evidence or something? I mean, it backs up Bree’s story,” Finn said.
“We duped the SIM card, we verified that Kristen’s prints were on it, took pictures of it in the console. We’ve got what we need. And it helps Bree, but it doesn’t get her off the hook. We still don’t know whether Kristen or Alice used the phone to call Bree that night. And even if Kristen arranged the meeting. . . .”
Cal was right, of course. The phone verified part of Bree’s story, but it didn’t clear up what had happened inside the haunted rodeo. Still, it was good news.
Bree took the phone from Cal, and, sure enough, his fingers lingered just a touch too long before he let go.
“So?” Finn asked as the door swung shut behind Cal. “Do you think he’ll get anywhere?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure. But I think he’s motivated to try.”
“Huh.” Bree was monkeying with Alice’s phone. “Here’s that picture of Sonny Alice was talking about. He was pretty handsome, wasn’t he?”
She handed me the phone. The picture was grainy, having been scanned from an old Polaroid, but it showed Sonny, hair combed in a black pompadour, holding Alice. A nimbus of wispy strawberry hair stuck out from her tiny head, and her head was tipped back as she laughed, tiny teeth bared in glee. Sonny watched Alice, the smile on his own face more reserved but still radiant.
He might have bailed on them, but he obviously loved his child.
I hit the NEXT button on the phone and revealed a picture Alice must have taken from the Dutch Oven parking lot, while she was sitting on the Bonnie’s hood waiting for Sonny. Even though she’d shot the picture through a plate-glass window, it was clearer than the old picture. In the new one, Sonny had his back to the camera. The two women sitting with him, though, were facing the window, one on either side of him.
Kristen, in fact, was staring right out the window, looking directly into the camera. Alice must have snapped the picture at the exact moment Kristen noticed her outside.
I flipped back and forth between the two photos for a second. Had Kristen ever tipped her head back and laughed the way Alice did in that picture? Had her daddy held her and studied her face with the loving awe I saw in Sonny’s eyes? Who missed Kristen?
“Bree? Can you watch the store this afternoon?”
“Sure, honey. Why?”
“I’m gonna take a drive.”
chapter 24
U
nder normal circumstances, I wouldn’t be caught dead walking into a dark, windowless establishment called the Pony Up Gentlemen’s Club. But looking at that picture of Alice with Sonny, and thinking of all the years Finn had missed with her, made me want to find Kristen’s family. As I’d said to Maddie, someone out there would mourn her, and she deserved that connection with her kin.
Walking into a strip club seemed a small price to pay for the possibility of finding someone who knew where Kristen had come from. It wasn’t much of a lead, but her Miss Am-Cam bio had a link to the Pony Up Gentlemen’s Club. I could only hope that Kristen had worked there long enough to make an impression on someone who happened to still be around.
The inside of the Pony Up had the same utilitarian anonymity as the outside: dinged lino tiles on the floor, featureless round wooden tables, a Formica-topped bar, everything in shades of brown and tan. To my surprise, the club had customers, even though it wasn’t yet suppertime. A young couple—him in jeans and a ball cap, her in a short skirt and a tank top—shot pool at the table near the front door.
Deeper in the room, a couple of men sat at the barheight runway where the dancers did their thing. As I made my way toward the bar, I studied one of the guys. He wore a denim vest over a plaid shirt, his pants the most colorless color I’ve ever seen. He cradled a coffee mug between his gnarled hands, and he seemed far more interested in its contents than in the skinny young woman grinding her privates not two feet from his face.
The tableau struck me as excruciatingly sad.
I turned to the bartender, and found her studying me through a haze of cigarette smoke. A mountain of platinum hair dwarfed her deeply lined face. A red-sequined tank top showed a generous amount of age-spotted décolletage.
“Hey,” I said, taking a seat on one of the padded stools.
“You lost?” she asked, red lips peeling back in a smile. Her teeth were tiny and spaced far apart, as if maybe she’d never lost her milk teeth. The juxtaposition of the old harlot’s face and the child’s teeth gave me the shivers.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Could I get a soda? Diet.”
“Sure, hon.” She dipped a clear plastic cup in the ice bin and filled it with the soda gun. She tossed a cocktail napkin on the bar and set my drink on top.
She didn’t ask for money, but I laid a five on the bar.
“I’m actually looking for some information,” I said.
She took a deep drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke in a tight stream, straight toward the ceiling. “Are you a private eye? You don’t look like a cop.”
“None of the above. This woman I know, she died. I’m trying to find her family to let them know, but she was pretty quiet about her early years. She used to work here, though.”
“How long ago? I been here, dancing and tending bar, for about twenty years, but if it’s longer than that, you’d have to ask the owner. He doesn’t come in until nine or ten.”
“She was a dancer here in the mid-1990s.” I pulled Alice’s phone out, found the picture of Kristen, Sonny, and Char. “This woman here,” I said, pointing to Kristen. “Sorry the picture’s so small.”
The bartender leaned over to look at the screen, squinting at it. “Well, I’ll be. That’s Kiki. She looks real good.” She laughed. “Kiki said she was going to go to law school.”
“She did. She was a lawyer.”
“Son of a . . . but you said she’s dead?”
I nodded.
“Well, that’s too bad. Poor kid. Did she die easy?”
I didn’t figure there was much point in lying to her. “No. Afraid not.”
She clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Poor kid. I’m not sure I can be much help. I remember Kiki talking about being in foster care. Her daddy ran out on her and her mama when she was little, Mama couldn’t make ends meet. But that’s about it. Sad story. Hear it every day around here.”
“She never said where she was from?”
She shook her head. “No. Someplace east, I think. Got that impression, anyway.
“She was a real good dancer. Better than any of these girls.”
She gestured toward the stage, and my eyes followed the movement. The dancer had given up on the old man and his coffee, and now she was working the pole. Her dance steps led her away from the actual pole, and then she pivoted, took a gazellelike leap toward the pole, grabbed it with both hands, and—in a move I couldn’t entirely follow—swung up so her feet were above her head. My jaw dropped as she curled her upper body up, essentially climbing the pole with arms and legs.
“Better than that?” I asked.
The bartender laughed, a sound like a rusty hinge. “Way better than that. But not as good as Shirley.”
I turned back to the old woman. “Who?”
“Shirley. This girl.” She tapped Alice’s phone, which I still held in my hand.
I was so intent on Alice’s phone that I almost didn’t hear my own ringing from the depths of my purse. I set Alice’s phone on the bar, fished out my own, and saw that the call was from Bree. I raised a finger in apology to the bartender and flipped my phone open to take the call.
“Eloise has an alibi,” Bree announced without preamble. “She was at a freakin’ League of Methodist Ladies meeting, so she’s got a dozen of Dalliance’s most upstanding citizens ready to swear she was in a house of God when Kristen was killed.”
Well, that bit the big one.
Bree started to say something else, but the bartender staring hard at Alice’s phone distracted me.
“Bree, can you hold on a second?” I said into the phone. I covered the mouthpiece with my hand. “What’s wrong?” I asked the bartender.
“What? Oh, nothing. I just can’t believe how good she looks. Almost didn’t recognize her, but I’m pretty sure that’s her. Shirley could have worked the clubs in Dallas, maybe even gone to Vegas, but she got herself a little drug habit. Did her in right quick.”
“Shirley?” I repeated, totally lost.
“Yeah, Shirley.” The bartender tapped Alice’s phone again. “Surprised she couldn’t tell you about Kiki’s people. They were real close back when they both danced here.”
I looked at the phone on the bar, the picture of Kristen, Sonny, and Char. “This woman?” I asked, pointing to Char. “Her name is Shirley?”
By then, the bartender was looking at me like I had a screw loose. “Yeah.”
“And she was a stripper here?”
“Yeah. Until Joe fired her for the drugs. I would have thought she’d be dead by now. Most of the users don’t make it long. But she looks real good, too.”
I stared at the picture. Char had been a stripper. Of course. Sonny had said that Char hired Kristen, that she knew her from the old days. Somehow, the two dancers must have kept in touch over the years.
I let my gaze drift back to the stage, where the dancer was now swinging around the pole in a dizzying spiral.
A pole. Really nothing more than a pipe anchored between floor and ceiling.
A lot like the pipe that braced the saloon facade in the haunted rodeo attraction. Heck, from where I was sitting, it looked as if the pole was about the same size as that pipe.
I looked back at the picture on the tiny screen of Alice’s phone. And I wondered if Char—Shirley—could still work a pole the way she used to.
I let my hand fall away from the mouthpiece of my own phone. “Bree? You still there?”
“Where else would I be?” she snapped. “I can’t believe the thing with Eloise didn’t pan out. Now we’re back to square one.”
“Maybe not. I think I may know who did it. Though I’m still not one hundred percent sure why.”
“Spill it.”
“I think it might have been Sonny’s friend Char.”
“Crap! Really? Why?”
“I’ll explain it all when I get back to the A-la-mode.”
chapter 25
I
had just pulled off the interstate when my phone rang again. I was at a light, so I answered.
“They’re leaving,” Bree said. She sounded panicked.
“Who?”
“Sonny and Char. Finn just stopped by to say that he’d seen Sonny at the Parlay Inn. Sonny said he and Char were hitting the road tonight. Finn thought maybe I should break the news to Sonny about Alice before he left.”
“Why are they leaving so suddenly?”
“Sonny gave Finn some story about a family emergency, but Finn heard a rumor that one of their potential investors did a little poking around and might have called the feds.”