Death by Devil's Breath (25 page)

I crab-stepped to the side. “While you’re at it, ask that detective if there’s any way I can see the doll they found in Jarret’s room.”

Nick held up a finger to tell me to wait while he left a message. When he was done, he swiped a finger over the screen of his phone. “I don’t need to ask. I took a picture,” he told me. “When they invited me to see what they’d found. Here.” He angled the phone so I could see the screen. “What do you think?”

What I thought was that the doll looked mighty familiar.

Well, sort of.

She had the same skinny stuffed arms and legs I’d seen on both Tout Sweet, Reverend Love’s doll, and Honey Bunch, the doll for sale in George Jarret’s booth, and her pink satin dress looked to be an exact duplicate of the one I’d seen on Tout Sweet.

Except . . .

I squinted for a better look, and when that didn’t work, I grabbed Nick’s phone and enlarged the picture on the screen.

The pink satin dress and black felt scarf on the doll from Jarret’s room did look exactly like Tout Sweet’s, but unlike that doll’s brown hair, this doll had black hair, and hers wasn’t styled in a bob like Tout Sweet’s. The long felt strips of this doll’s hair were braided into pigtails that hung over her shoulders.

“What?” I didn’t realize my mouth had fallen open until Nick’s voice brought me back to reality. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

“Not a ghost. No. Of course not. It’s just that the doll looks similar to the one I saw in Reverend Love’s office and . . .” Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t say anything else. For one thing, my tongue was suddenly stuck to the roof of my mouth. And for another, well, if I told Nick I’d just had an idea about who killed Dickie Dunkin—and why—something told me he wouldn’t believe me anyway.

Not without a little more proof.

CHAPTER 17

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the years I’ve traveled with the Showdown, it’s that a lot of the people who walk through the turnstiles consider themselves experts.

There are chili experts, of course, who want nothing more than to tell you everything they know about what kind of meat to use, and why real chili can’t possibly contain beans, and how they garnish their bowls of spicy goodness with everything from sour cream to avocado, chives to cheese.

Then there are spiciness experts who most of the time don’t want to talk about peppers and how they can enhance the taste of a chili as much as they want to brag about how they can tolerate more Scoville Heat Units than just about anyone else on the planet.

There are also the bean experts (kidney or pinto? great northern or black?), tomato experts, and people who insist the only way to make a really good base for their chili is to add things like beer or beef broth or (I swear, this is true, I actually met a person in Nashville who claimed it was the only way to go) clam broth.

None of this may seem like the stuff detective work is made of, but trust me, the information was always there, swimming around in my head, part of my DNA, and because of that, I got to thinking. Thinking, I arrived back at the Showdown, told Nick I had something I needed to take care of, avoided the Palace and Sylvia, and hotfooted it right across the street.

See, if there are chili experts at chili cook-offs, it stands to reason that there are doll experts at doll conventions.

Doll experts.

Doll enthusiasts.

Doll fanciers.

And the obsessed.

Exactly what I was counting on.

It didn’t take me long to find exactly the expert enthusiastic fancier I was looking for. It helped that within two minutes of sitting down next to Minnie Cranston, I also knew she was obsessed.

“They’re all so lovely, aren’t they?” Minnie was resting her doll-weary self on a bench along the far wall of the showroom, and when she looked around at the vendor booths and the dolls displayed in them, her eyes twinkled. She was a woman of eighty or so (one of the reasons I’d chosen her), and as we spoke, she pulled a bagel out of her purse along with a can of V8 juice.

“Lunch,” Minnie said, giving me a smile and a wink. “If you’re smart like me, you can avoid spending money in the hotel restaurants and save a ton. That gives you more to spend on dolls. Oh, how I love the dolls!” She glanced around again and poked her chin toward the opposite side of the showroom. “There’s a Just Me over there that I’m dying to get my hands on. You know, one of those sweet German character dolls made by Armand Marseille. And over there”—she turned in her seat, the better to look in the other direction—“there’s a two-and-a-half-inch-tall French bisque doll for sale at that booth over there. I swear, if I had an extra one hundred and forty-five dollars, I’d snap that one right up. But I’ve already spent five thousand on dolls this weekend.”

When my mouth dropped open, Minnie poked me in the ribs with her elbow and wagged the bagel. “Hey, kid, why do you think I swipe my lunch from the free hotel breakfast buffet? Money is money, and I need every cent I have for more dolls.”

“Dolls.” I hoped my thin smile didn’t betray the fact that just thinking about dolls gave me the creeps and being this close to so many of them made that feeling escalate way past the creepiness stage and all the way to the point where I felt as if I were about to crawl out of my skin. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. See, I’m pretty new to collecting.”

Chewing, Minnie slapped a hand against my knee. “You’ll get the hang of it, kid,” she promised me.

“But there’s so much I have to learn. There’s a doll over at George Jarret’s booth.” I didn’t have to look that way to know there was no one manning the booth. As far as I knew, Jarret was still in police custody. The spotlights over his booth weren’t turned on; his tables were covered with cloths. “She’s called Honey Bunch and she’s so cute. But he’s asking seven-fifty, and I don’t know, I think that’s pretty pricey.”

“Not if Honey Bunch is the only one of Noreen Pennybaker’s dolls still around,” Minnie informed me. “You know the story, don’t you? That’s part of the reason that doll is so valuable. Noreen, see, made a bunch of those dolls, back in the seventies.”

A bunch
.

I liked the sound of that, mostly because
a bunch
of the dolls is what I swore I saw right before I got tossed into that steamer trunk.

“Noreen’s dolls were perfect little darlings,” Minnie went on. “But the whole thing . . .” She shook her head. “Well, more’s the pity. That whole situation was just awful, wasn’t it?”

“That’s what people are saying.” They weren’t, at least not to me, but Minnie didn’t have to know that. “But nobody’s giving me any details. The dolls are so adorable, so what’s the story?”

Minnie scooted closer. She was as small and as thin as a chile de árbol and I couldn’t help but wonder if she packed as much of a punch. “Went crazy, you know,” Minnie said, leaning in close to share the confidence. “Noreen, that is. She went crazy making all those dolls of hers.”

I had to ask because, let’s face it, it’s one of those catchall sorts of things that people say when they really mean something else. “Like went crazy and made a whole lot of them? Or like went crazy really crazy, crazy in the head?”

Minnie nodded. “Like went crazy really crazy in the head. See, Noreen was a stay-at-home mom. She had two little boys.”

“Lawrence and Dickie.”

“Those might have been their names.” Another nod. “Only it hardly matters, does it?”

It did. Desperately. But I didn’t want to interrupt the story so I didn’t bother to mention it.

“So Noreen, she answered one of those ads. You know, at the backs of magazines. Well . . .” She gave me a look. “Maybe you don’t know. You kids, you don’t read like we used to back in the day. You’re always on those phones of yours. Or messing with your pads or pods or whatever you call them. But back then, we women had plenty of magazines to keep us busy. Not just
Good Housekeeping
or
Life
or things like that, but romance magazines and magazines full of true confessions. And every one of them had ads at the back. You know, for women who wanted to work and still stay home with the kids.”

My own mom had always worked outside the home, as the Chili Chick, of course, but later, when I was a kid, she did ten-hour-a-day shifts behind the bar at a local tavern.

“Noreen had talent,” Minnie went on. “If you’ve seen Honey Bunch, you know that. So naturally, her interests went toward the craft ads.”

“Crafts as in . . .?”

“As in assembling crafts at home.” Minnie already had enough wrinkles to cover an elephant, but when she frowned, a few dozen more furrowed into her cheeks and forehead. “Bet they don’t do anything like that anymore, either. But it was a big business then. You paid some small amount of money, maybe two or three dollars, and the company, they sent you the materials to put together a craft that they’d turn around and sell. You know, like a flower arrangement or a balsawood airplane.”

“Or a doll?”

“You got that right.” Minnie finished one half of her bagel and brushed crumbs from her hands. “Trick is, what a lot of people didn’t know was that some of these work-from-home craft companies were phony balonies. See, they’d get you to spend three dollars on supplies, you’d assemble the craft, and send it back to them. The idea was that then they’d pay you a percentage of what they sold it for. But what usually happened was that they’d say what you’d sent them wasn’t good enough. That you didn’t paint something carefully enough. Or that your stitching wasn’t any good. Or that you left off parts.”

“Even though that wasn’t true.”

“Some of the time, I bet it was. But most of the time, no. Most of the time, what they were doing was simply getting your three dollars for a bunch of materials that probably weren’t worth a quarter all told. That was their business, see, preying on people who wanted to try to earn a couple extra bucks, taking their money, then telling them that their work wasn’t up to snuff.”

“Is that what they did to Noreen Pennybaker?”

“Never knew the woman myself, but yeah, that’s what I hear. Most people, they’re burned like that, and they maybe get mad. Or embarrassed. Heck, I’d be both if I found out I was played for a sucker like that.”

“And Noreen?”

Minnie twirled one finger around her ear. “Like I said, crazy. And must have been to start. I think the craft thing pushed her over the edge. You see, she paid her money and got the materials to make dolls.”

I sat up. “Like Honey Bunch!”

“Like Honey Bunch.” Minnie’s smile was bittersweet. “You can take one look at Honey Bunch and know that Noreen’s work was top-notch. Her dolls were perfect, every single one of them. But when she finished that first one and sent it back to the company that commissioned it—”

“They told her it wasn’t good enough and kept her three dollars.”

“Most folks would have gotten the message right off the bat. Not Noreen! Instead of realizing that those craft company folks were out to get her money, she decided to try again. She sent them more money for more supplies and she made more dolls. And every time, they told her the dolls weren’t good enough and they sent them right back to her. They didn’t care about the dolls, see, they only cared about the three dollars.”

“But Noreen kept making dolls.” This was hard to imagine, even though Minnie’s nod told me it was true.

“Not only that,” the old woman went on, “but she went another whole step. She named each of the dolls she made, and embroidered her name and the doll’s name inside its slip. And when even that wasn’t enough to impress those crooks at the craft company, Noreen started writing little stories to go with each of her dolls. She even drew the pictures in every little storybook. The more dolls she made and the more stories she wrote and the more the company took more and more of her money for supplies, then told her that her work wasn’t good enough . . . well, from what I’ve heard, that was when Noreen really went off the deep end. Those dolls were like children to her. It’s sad, isn’t it? Imagine how her little sons must have suffered, what with their mother not caring about anyone or anything except those dolls. I’ve heard tell she had a house full of them and knew every single one of their names and stories. She ended up losing every penny she ever had, too, because she just kept buying more and more supplies so she could keep making the dolls.”

I wrapped my arms around myself. “That’s awful.”

“It is, especially when eventually Noreen realized she had nothing left except those dolls. I hear tell that’s when she went to bed one day and just never got out again. Died of a broken heart, surrounded by her dolls.”

The very thought made me sick, but I told myself I could wallow in my sympathy for Noreen another time. For now, I had more important things to worry about.

“Let me guess,” I said to Minnie. “That craft company that took all of Noreen’s money, it was run by a woman named Louise, right?”

“Louise?” Minnie’s lips thinned. “Well, I’m not as young as I used to be and I can’t say I remember everything like I did back in the day. But Louise? No. That’s not the name I heard.”

*   *   *

By the time I’d wrapped up my work at the Palace the next day and got to the auditorium, it was already chock-full of nervous couples waiting for their big moment.