“Whoa.”
“If Char did it,” Bree said, “we have to stall them.”
“Where are they staying?”
“At the Ramada by the interstate.”
I looked to my left. There was the giant red Ramada Inn sign.
“I’m right there. I’ll stall. You call Cal and tell him to hightail it over here.”
“Like the man would do my bidding.” I thought I detected a tiny note of hope in her voice, as if maybe she wanted me to tell her that Cal would jump through hoops of fire if she asked him to.
“I think he might be inclined to help you out, Bree. But if he balks, make up an excuse. Anything to get him to the Ramada before Sonny and Char hit the road.”
I’m sure she was violating company policy, but the woman at the front desk recognized me from the A-la-mode and handed over Sonny and Char’s room number with a smile.
I knocked on the door to room 307.
“Jesus, Sonny, did you forget your key a—”
The door swung open, and Char stopped midsentence when she saw me. She was dressed to travel in low-slung jeans and a baby-doll T-shirt, her paprikacolored hair in a ponytail high on her head. I hadn’t noticed before that she was so much younger than Sonny.
“Hey, Char.”
“Sonny isn’t here.”
“Oh. Shoot. Well, mind if I wait for him? It’s really important.”
She narrowed her eyes. I could almost see her weighing the pros and cons in her head, trying to decide which was better: getting rid of me or figuring out why I was there.
Finally, she stepped back and let the door swing open. “Suit yourself.”
They’d pulled the drapes in the room, so the only light came from a couple of brass lamps. I made my way to the upholstered chair by the window and sat. Char flipped closed the suitcase sitting on the kingsized bed and zipped it before stepping over to the vanity.
“You leaving?” I asked innocently.
“Just for a few days. Family emergency.”
“Oh. Sorry to hear that.”
Char reached up to wrap her ponytail into a loose bun. As she did so, her skimpy T-shirt rode up her torso, and I caught a glimpse of green on her abdomen. An arc of dark green . . . a flash of gold . . . a tattoo of a champagne bottle.
I gasped. “Spumanti?”
Charlize slid her eyes to the side to meet my gaze in the mirror. For a second, I thought she would protest, but then her lips curled in a feline smile. “At one time,” she conceded. “Shirley, Spumanti, Charlene, Shireen—” She punctuated each name by stabbing another pin in her hair. Her arms dropped to her sides. “Just names.”
“You look . . . different.”
She rolled her shoulders in a graceful shrug. “Better living through chemistry? A little silicone here, some collagen there, enzyme peels, bleach for my teeth, colored contacts.” She shrugged again, and flopped back to sit on the bed. “And Pilates. Lots of Pilates.”
“I can’t believe. . .”
“Lordy, Tally. Can’t finish a sentence, can you?” She laughed, a low and knowing sound. “Can’t believe what? That Sonny and I are still together?”
Bingo.
“I—uh, no, of course not.”
“Oh, it’s okay. I know what y’all thought of me. Just a sad little junkie looking for a father figure, right? Figured Sonny’d dump me for a new flavor-of-the-month the way he dumped Bree?” She narrowed her too-blue eyes. “I
was
a sad little junkie. But I was also a smart little junkie. You know my secret to holding on to Sonny?”
I shook my head.
“Sonny likes new things, right? So I became someone new every chance I got. Hell’s bells, Sonny has moved from one girl to the next . . . but every one of them has been me.”
A smart little junkie, indeed.
“I got good at reading his moods, paid attention to the girls he watched with that special look in his eyes. Got a boob job after I caught him panting after this double-E cup in Cincinnati. Went red when he said Reba McEntire was foxy. Made myself into his dream girl.”
A tiny crease marred the space between her eyes, and the corners of her plump, glossy lips tightened. “For some reason, I never noticed that his dream girl— the girl I see in the mirror every morning—looks just like Bree.”
“But Sonny left Bree,” I said. “He chose you.”
Charlize or Shirley or whatever her name was rolled her eyes and blew out an exasperated breath. “In case you didn’t notice, Sonny’s an idiot. He ran off because he got an itch in his drawers. And he didn’t choose me. I just happened to be the nearest warm body when that itch came over him.”
“The result’s the same,” I insisted.
“No, it’s not. Sonny would have come back to Dalliance with his tail between his legs within a week of leaving, ’cept he was sure Bree would geld him with a kitchen knife.
“I guess I was an okay substitute. But Bree’s got one thing I can’t get from a cosmetic counter or a plastic surgeon.”
“What?”
“Alice.”
“Oh.”
“I could maybe compete with Sonny’s ex, but I can’t hold a candle to his little girl. He loves that child.”
“He’s got a funny way of showing it. He denied her the minute he got to town.”
Char snagged a short black leather jacket from the head of the bed and shrugged into it. “You’re so naive, Tally. That lawsuit wasn’t Sonny’s idea. It was mine.”
“But he went along with it. He must not have cared that much about Alice.”
“It didn’t really have anything to do with Alice. Look, the con . . .” She tilted her head in an inquiring angle. “You know it’s all a con, right?”
I nodded.
“Good. It’s exhausting, you know? Anyway, the con required Sonny to flash around a lot of cash. But that meant Bree would probably go after Sonny for child support, and that would mean Bree, the county, and God knows who else poking around in Sonny’s financial records. It wouldn’t take long for them to figure out there was no fortune. We’ve been living from scam to scam for fifteen years. At the moment, we don’t have nothing but a lease on that fancy car and the clothes on our backs. We’ll be lucky to get out of town before the hotel realizes our credit cards are no good and call the law on us.
“We had to stall. I came up with the idea of claiming Sonny wasn’t the daddy. We figured there’d be a week or two before we got to court, then another couple of weeks for the DNA results. . . by then, we’d be long gone.”
“Sounds like a good plan.”
“It was,” she huffed. “But then Sonny got drunk and spilled the beans to Kristen, and she started whining about how she was an officer of the court and couldn’t—what did she say?” She screwed up her face in concentration. “Oh, right, she couldn’t perpetrate a fraud. It would be an abuse of process. Blah, blah, blah. All a bunch of lawyer talk for ‘I’m gonna sell you guys down the river.’”
“So Kristen really did ask to meet Bree that morning?”
“Yeah. Can you believe that? I watch enough TV to know that she wasn’t supposed to do that. We had privilege.”
I had a sneaking suspicion Char was right. Kristen might have had an ethical obligation to withdraw from the case, to not help Sonny and Char, but she probably wasn’t supposed to have a private tête-à-tête with Bree, either.
“She was full of shit, too. Kristen didn’t have any problem with fraud. Her whole life was a fraud. She walked around this town all high-and-mighty in her fancy shoes with her law degree, but she got started just like me. Working a pole to buy meth. Heck, she was worse than me. Even I didn’t do porn.”
I filed away that little tidbit for future reference: on the sleaziness scale, apparently “stripping” and “snorting crank” were above “porn.”
“She knew we were scamming the minute we got to town. Like I said, she and I went way back. She knew I wasn’t born to the name Charlize Guidry, and I sure as heck wasn’t in the oil business. She didn’t seem to have any problem with taking a cut of our money until that night.”
“That night? What night?”
“The night before she died. We met Kristen at the Dutch Oven, late, to talk about the incorporation papers for the fracking scam. We’d copied some boilerplate language from a form contract we found on the Internet, but we wanted to make sure we had the heading right for the Texas courts. We didn’t want to involve Kristen too much in that side of our plan, but we wanted to make sure our i’s were dotted and our t’s were crossed.
“Sonny’d already had a six-pack, maybe more, and then he ordered shots with his pancakes. Pretty soon he was all weepy and gabbing away. At first, Kristen just sat there and listened.” Char laughed. “We’d both spent plenty of hours listening to drunk guys babble. It’s an art. Her eyes were all unfocused, staring out the front window of the restaurant, and every now and then she’d nod. Just like you’d do if you were listening to a john talk about how much he really loves his wife but she just doesn’t get him anymore.”
She sobered again. “Then, all of a sudden, she said she wanted to get her smokes from the car. She was gone for maybe five minutes, then came back and didn’t even have her cigs.”
That must have been when she saw Alice sitting on the hood of the Bonnie outside and gone out to talk to her.
“After that,” Char continued, “it was like she’d blown a gasket. She chews out Sonny about how she wasn’t gonna have any part in his scam. Worked herself into a tizzy and then finally excused herself to use the ladies’. I followed her, real quiet. I heard her in the stall, talking to Bree.”
Using Alice’s phone
, I thought,
which had Bree’s landline number programmed into the contact list.
“I knew she was going to tell.”
“Why would she call Bree? Why not call the cops?”
“Like I said, she didn’t really care about our con. At least, not enough to risk her license by going public with privileged information.” Char shook her head. “No, she blew up about the fracking scam, but I know Kristen—it was the paternity suit that bothered her. And, besides, it was safer to spill the beans to Bree than to go to the authorities. Less chance of her getting in trouble with the bar.”
Again, I guessed Char had hit the nail on the head. Given Kristen’s own experience with a deadbeat dad, I bet Kristen identified with both Bree and Alice. And, from what Jason and Maddie had said, Kristen had a hard time reconciling the ethical obligations of her profession with her own sense of morality.
“Why did you have to kill her?” I asked. “Why not just pack up and leave, hit the road and try your con in some other town?”
Char cocked her head, puzzled. “Oh no. I didn’t plan to kill Kristen. I planned to kill Bree.”
chapter 26
I
t felt as if all the blood drained from my body, leaving behind nothing but aching cold.
“Bree?”
“Yeah. Stupid contacts. They’re expensive. I had to choose between colored lenses and ones that correct my astigmatism. Duh, I went with the blue contacts. Color’s called Marine Magic. But I can’t see for crap in the dark. First bullet, I think I took out a power line, and I only had time to get off one more shot before I heard people coming.”
I couldn’t believe how close Bree had come to dying. Saved by this crazy woman’s own vanity.
Char got up again, returned to the dressing table, and bent down to study herself in the mirror. She brushed her finger along her jawline, testing the elasticity of that delicate skin. “At first I thought, ‘Oh well. I need Bree gone. Prison’s as good as dead, right?’ But then Sonny started talking about how Alice was gonna need her daddy. Talk about jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Sonny getting all paternal was the last thing I wanted.”
She sighed. “The way I saw it, after I screwed up trying to kill Bree and she got in trouble with the law, there were two ways this could play out. Either we stuck around and Sonny decided it’s time to be a father . . . in which case he would definitely kill the con and probably dump me. Or else I convinced him it’s time to bail. So I told him the FBI was on to us.”
Wow. Really smart junkie.
There was a knock at the door. Cal. Finally.
But when Char peeped through the peephole—a prudent step she hadn’t taken when I knocked—she laughed. “Well, it’s turning into a regular hen party.”
She swung open the door, and there—of course—was Bree. How could my cousin miss an opportunity to stumble into trouble?
“Come on in, shug,” Char gushed.
“Hey, Char. Tally.” Bree managed to keep a smile on her face, but as she looked from Char’s big smile to my look of misery, I saw the realization in her eyes. . . the realization that this was not a good scene.
Char shut the door behind Bree and threw the safety latch. She stood there, between me and Bree and freedom.
“What’s up?” Bree asked.
Char looked over her to catch my gaze. “I take it she’s not quite up to speed.”
I shook my head.
Char sighed. “Too bad. Well, the short version is that you two picked the wrong time to stop by. Another hour, and Sonny and I would have been gone. But now I’ve gotta think on my feet.”
She reached into the pocket of her leather jacket and drew out a gun. Just a tiny thing, not much bigger than a deck of playing cards. But I knew that, when it came to firearms, size didn’t matter nearly as much as aim and determination.
To her credit, Bree kept her cool. She took a step back, her legs hit the edge of the bed, and she sat down hard. But she didn’t scream or cry or anything. Me, I was too scared to make a sound.
“I think I can make this work,” Char mused. “Bree comes over with Tally and has a hissy fit about me and Sonny. Woman scorned stuff. Pulls out a gun. Tally’s here to stop her, but a struggle ensues . . . Bree shoots Tally by accident, I shoot Bree in self-defense.”
Bree shook her head. “Sorry, darlin’. I don’t think that’s going to fly.”
“Why not?”
Before Char finished her question, the pounding commenced.