Revenge of the Chili Queens (24 page)

“Agreed,” I said. “So what do you think? Is Montgomery underhanded, too? Underhanded enough to kill?”

I guess neither of them had thought of this before, because they both gasped, and while they were caught off guard, I closed in for the kill (bad pun, but it pretty much says it all).

“Or did you two do that?” I asked them.

Rosa fussed with her apron. “I told you. I tried to scare that Dom. I chased him with the knife. He deserved it.”

“He did.” Martha nodded. “But that doesn’t mean Rosa killed him.”

“But you might have,” I suggested to Martha.

“She didn’t,” Rosa assured me. “She didn’t, and I didn’t.”

I let a bit of silence settle between us. The better to let the ladies have some time to think about what they were telling me before I finally asked, “How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”

It was Martha’s turn to fuss. With her apron. With the rings she twisted around her finger. She stared at the ground. “The police know we’re telling the truth. If they believe us, you should, too.”

“I’d love to. But why should I? You admit that you were out to scare Dom. Rosa, you chased him with that knife toward the end of the evening. Right before he came over to my tent looking for Nick. And after that, how do I know what you two did? You might have waited until the fund-raiser was over. You might have wanted to make sure there was no one around. Dom wasn’t feeling good thanks to that spiked chili Tiffany gave him. He was weak. He was helpless. Then you two—”

“No.” Rosa shook her head.

“Absolutely not.” Martha mirrored the gesture.

“You weren’t here? You weren’t hanging around?” I asked them.

Martha hung her head.

Rosa turned ashen.

“Nobody is supposed to know,” Rosa mumbled.

“Know what?”

“We don’t want word to get out,” Martha said.

“About what?”

The two ladies exchanged looks. Both of them nodded.

“We could have had a disaster here tonight,” Martha said. “If you hadn’t tried our chili . . .”

“And thought to mix our two chilies together . . .” Rosa added.

“It could have been embarrassing. And bad for business.” She patted Rosa’s arm. “Both our businesses. The least we owe you in return is the truth.”

I pulled up a chair and sat down. “So . . .” I looked first at Martha, then at Rosa. “Somebody tell me what happened.”

Martha sighed. “We were leaving the plaza on Monday night and—”

“And I was minding my own business,” Rosa said.

Martha snorted. “You started it.”

“Did not,” Rosa insisted.

I waved them into silence before they could get into it again. “So you were already leaving the plaza on Monday night when . . . ?”

“She started it,” Rosa said.

“Did not.” Martha stuck out her bottom lip.

And I just about screamed. “What happened?”

The women exchanged looks and Martha gave Rosa a nod.

“We were on our way to our cars,” Rosa said, “and one thing led to another and—”

“And we had it out with each other,” Martha finished the sentence.

This did not seem unusual to me. From what I’d seen of the women earlier on Monday night and again here this evening, having it out with each other was second nature. Unless—

“It got physical?”

They both nodded. “And we . . .” Martha’s cheeks shot through with color. “We got arrested.”

“Both of you?” The question squeaked out of me. While Martha nodded in response to it, Rosa dug under the serving table for her purse.

“Here.” She shoved a photograph at me. It was a police mug shot that showed Rosa with her hair mussed and her lipstick smeared.

“I’ve got one, too,” Martha said. “The police officer, the one who took us in, he eats at both our restaurants. He said we should keep those pictures around and look at them once in a while. You know, just to remind ourselves that if we don’t change our ways, we could end up in serious trouble.”

“And you didn’t want anyone to know!” It made perfect sense, so I didn’t need them to confirm or deny.

“Bad for business,” Rosa said, anyway. “And those nice police officers, they did us a favor. They lost the paperwork. They said, you know, that they didn’t want to see us go through the public humiliation of, you know, a trial and the publicity and how it might hurt our restaurants.”

“Which explains why you two were so chummy the next day.” I nodded. “You did learn your lesson.”

“We’re trying,” Rosa said. “Now if this one . . .” She tipped her head toward Martha. “If she’d learn to tell me which slow cookers are really my slow cookers—”

“And if this one . . .” Martha motioned toward Rosa. “If she’d keep her peppers out of my chili . . .”

It was as much of a truce as I could ever expect.

I left the two of them to sort it out.

CHAPTER 17

What with being shocked with a stun gun and having my head stuffed in a pillowcase, nearly being trampled by a bull, and almost going up in flames thanks to Rosa’s incendiary chili, it was a long, long Friday, and by the time it was over, all I wanted to do was drag back to the RV, put up my feet, and have a little well-earned R&R.

Lucky for me, Sylvia went to bed as soon as we got back from the fund-raiser. That left me alone, and that meant I could indulge in one harmless pleasure that I knew she’d object to and another that I was pretty sure she’d put up a fuss about.

Her loss.

Because I’ll say this much, that DVD that we found in Dom’s apartment, the one I just happened to . . . er . . .
forget to leave behind when we raced out of there, that DVD was just the kind of eye candy a girl deserves at the end of a long, trying, and nearly deadly day.

Male models. A dozen or so different ones in the first thirty minutes of the DVD that I had a chance to watch. All of them gorgeous. All of them strutting their stuff in front of the camera and showing off abs and pecs and glutes—and other things.

Oh yeah, Sylvia would have gotten all prudish about it. And then probably watched it sometime when I wasn’t around. She also would have lectured me about fats and carbs and blah, blah, blah, if she knew my dinner consisted of Twinkies and a beer.

Hey, Twinkies have plenty of redeeming nutritional value, not the least of which is sugar and empty calories, beer is perfectly appropriate at the end of a stressful day, and the naked guys . . .

I had just finished sighing as I checked out the six-pack on the dark-haired hunk currently on the TV screen when there was a tap on the door. I paused the video, scooped up the Twinkie wrappers I’d dropped around the chair where I was sitting, and went to answer.

“Nick!” When I stepped back to let him climb the three steps up into the RV, I dropped the Twinkie wrappers behind the coffeemaker on the built-into-the-wall counter in what passed for our kitchen. I might not care what Sylvia thought of my food choices, but I was too tired to explain my eating habits to Nick. “What’s up?”

“I thought I’d stop by and see how you were doing.” Nick is a tall guy with wide shoulders, and believe me, our RV
is nowhere near as large or as elegant as the one Consolidated Chili was using to accommodate the beauty queens. With him standing next to the table and the two benches that flanked it, the RV seemed smaller than ever, like there wasn’t room for both of us, and not nearly enough air.

That, at least, might explain why I felt a little light-headed.

“I’m fine,” I assured him. “I was just—”

He glanced at the TV screen and groaned. “You stole the DVD from Dom’s apartment?”

The beer gave me courage. The sugar gave me enough energy to sound convincing when I protested. “What are you talking about? It’s not the same DVD. It’s—”

“The same DVD.” Nick went over to the TV and tapped the screen. “Same background, see?” He poked a finger behind that hunky model toward a fairly ordinary (so how did he recognize it in the first place?) background of a bed covered with a white quilt and the powder blue chair beside it. “Same walls. Same—”

“Not the same guy. We didn’t see this one when we watched the DVD at Dom’s. See?” I pointed, too. Only not at the background, the white coverlet, or the blue chair. “Believe me, I would recognize this guy if I saw him before. In fact—”

The words froze on my lips. The blood stopped pumping through my veins. I stood paralyzed, staring at the screen.

“Maxie?” Nick waved a hand in front of my face. “Don’t move. I’ll call EMS. This is some kind of delayed shock. You’re just reacting to what happened to you this afternoon. You’ll be fine.”

“I’m fine now.” I batted his hand away and grabbed the remote, stopped the DVD, and started it again from the beginning. “In fact, I’m finer than fine, and in a moment, you’re going to see why.”

He stepped back and watched just like I did.

The first guy who came on screen was dark-haired and gorgeous. Oh yeah, I remembered him, all right: strong shoulders, narrow waist, an arrow of fine, dark hair that dusted his chest and went all the way down to—

“Why are we watching this?” Nick asked.

I shushed him and waited for the same funny flash we’d seen on the video back at Dom’s. Just as I remembered, the picture flashed off, then came on again, and when it did, there was a slim, light-haired guy on the screen.

I slapped my forehead. “I should have seen it before,” I wailed. “I would have seen it if I was watching closely and didn’t get up to get another Twinkie the first time he was on.”

“You’re seeing it now.”

“Not that
it
.” I rolled my eyes because it was a pretty lame joke, and I pointed away from the
it
Nick was talking about and at the guy’s face. “That
it
. This is the guy I saw Eleanor Alvarez talking to this afternoon.”

“No way.”

“Way.”

Nick cocked his head. “A classy lady like Eleanor and him?”

“Well, he had clothes on down by the River Walk, so he looked pretty classy, too. His hair was shorter, too.”

“And he was here? In San Antonio?”

“Obviously.” I chewed on my lower lip and studied the
guy’s face. “Definitely him. And you know what this means, don’t you, Nick?”

“That Eleanor likes good-looking guys.”

He was trying to get my goat, and I was so not in the mood. Sugar careening through my bloodstream, I whirled away from the TV screen. “That there’s some connection between Eleanor and Dom.”

“Really?” Nick scratched a finger behind his ear. “I’m pretty sure the DVD doesn’t prove that.”

“Don’t you see? Dom had a video and this guy was on it. And Eleanor was talking to this guy.”

“All right.” He sat down on the green vinyl bench, and I slid into the one opposite. Lucky me, I was facing the TV screen. “But that doesn’t mean Eleanor and Dom knew each other.”

“But it could.”

“It could also mean that this guy was visiting San Antonio and he was lost and he stopped Eleanor to ask for directions. It could mean that once upon a time this guy was involved in some sort of weird something that to me looks like a porn audition and that now, he’s an upright citizen and he’s involved in one of the charities that Eleanor works for. It could mean—”

“I get your point.” Which didn’t mean I had to like it. “You have to admit, it’s a mighty big coincidence.”

“It is. But you’re jumping to conclusions again.”

“Me?” As long as I was being accused of jumping, I jumped up and got myself another beer and I got one for Nick, too, and opened them both with the Consolidated Chili can opener Sylvia had left on the counter. Yes, it offended
me no end, but desperate times, desperate measures and all that. “When have I ever jumped to conclusions?”

Nick took a sip of beer. And then another one. He set the bottle down on the table. He picked it up again. “When you heard I put Dom in the hospital, you assumed I was the one who killed him.”

“I did. But that was only natural, right? I mean, really, when you hear that Guy Number One steals Guy Number Two’s wife, and that Guy Number Two is so mad about it, he beats Guy Number One senseless . . . that’s not jumping to conclusions. That’s being logical. You know, like Sherlock Holmes or one of those detectives on TV.”

“It might have been perfectly logical. And you might have been thinking like Sherlock Holmes or some other detective. Except I have a feeling those fictional detectives, they usually get their facts straight.”

I can be excused for nearly choking on my beer. I slammed the bottle on the table. “Those aren’t the facts? You didn’t beat up Dom?”

“I did.”

“And Dom and Nichole weren’t sneaking around behind your back?”

“They were.”

“Then jeepers creepers, tell me what facts I got wrong!”

“Maxie?” A bleary-eyed Sylvia dragged out of the bedroom holding her pink robe closed with one hand. “What’s all the noise about? What’s going on out here?” She blinked the sleep out of her eyes, realized Nick was there, and said, “Oh, it’s you. Good night,” and disappeared back into her bedroom.

I waited until her door closed before I eyed Nick across the table. “So?”

He made to stand up. “We really don’t need to talk about this.”

“We do.” I put a hand on his arm to keep him from bolting. “For one thing, I just gave you a beer and you owe me for that. For another . . .” I don’t do pitiful well, but I gave it my best shot. I hung my head and looked at him through the fringe of my dark bangs. “I did almost die today. That means someone doesn’t want me to solve this case. And that someone . . . that awful, horrible, terrible someone might try again. You know, to shut me up.” Since this was true and mighty disturbing, I didn’t stop to think about it. “You wouldn’t want me to die without knowing the whole story, would you? That would be—”