A Parfait Murder (9 page)

Ever since, he’d been rattling around the house in which he’d grown up, alone with the ghosts of his departed father and the brother who died too young.

The time had finally come to go through the boxes of his brother’s high school football paraphernalia, his dad’s hunting trophies, and his mom’s accumulation of tchotchkes. As a dutiful girlfriend, I got to help.

When I left the Hair Apparent, I had about a half hour before I was supposed to be at Finn’s. I pointed my craptastic van away from Dalliance proper and headed toward FM 410, Lantana Plaza, and the Lilting Bloom.

I was in luck. Cookie Milhone, the owner of Dalliance’s newest florist, was in the store that afternoon.

It’s a well-established fact that you’re either born a Texan or you’re not. The state is wedded with your flesh and bone at birth, as tough to extract as the petroleum in north Texas’s rich shale bed.

I had a few friends who skedaddled north the second they could, to places like Chicago and Boston and even Seattle. They still came back to Dalliance with big hair, Botox, and more twang than a truck full of banjos.

Cookie Milhone had left Dalliance after high school, gone off to some college in California where they offer classes on the philosophy of surfing and postfeminist psychoanalysis for St. Bernards. She returned to Texas five years later with the zeal of the born again, wearing plenty of rhinestones and dropping y’alls all over the place.

Cookie looked like a china doll. She stood all of five-foot-nothing, with buttercup hair set in a profusion of lacquered barrel curls, lips a glossy poppy red, and lily-white skin. It was her eyes, though, that made her look like a doll: Thick black lashes fringed her startling cornflower eyes, and she blinked seldom and slowly.

“Hey, shug,” she drawled, accent as thick and sweet as cane syrup. “Can I help you?”

“Hi, Cookie.”

She blinked once, eyes vacant.

“Tally,” I prompted. “Tally Jones.”

She blinked again, and a blinding smile spread across her face. “Oh, Tally!”
Buh-link
. “I haven’t seen you since—well, since the divorce.” She whispered that last, even though we were the only two souls in the store. And even though her name was in boldface type in paragraph 43 of my divorce decree, so it wasn’t exactly a secret between us.

Lord a’mighty.

“It’s been a while,” I conceded.

Buh-link
.

“A little birdie told me there’s a new man in your life,” she said, her lips pursing in a semblance of a smile.

Little birdie
. Right. More like a flock of grackles. Everyone in Dalliance had something to say about my renewed relationship with Finn Harper.

Cookie gave me a quick once-over. “Finn Harper’s quite a catch,” she said.

Buh-link
.

Suddenly, Cookie’s dead eyes made me think less of a baby doll and more of a shark, cruising the water for fresh meat. And I didn’t fancy chumming the waters with any more talk of my handsome, accomplished significant other.

“Nice store,” I said.

Cookie cocked her head and her flat blue eyes rolled like marbles in her head as she looked around the store, seeming to see it for the first time. “Thanks,” she said. “I was so bored, you know. And I always liked flowers.”

I felt a twinge of resentment that this woman could run a business as a hobby, pumping in all the cash she needed to keep the storefront tidy, the case filled with flowers, the most lovely vases on display. Meanwhile, my whole family worked our fingers to the bone to keep the vertical batch freezers churning one more day at the A-la-mode.

“Are you looking for something special?” Cookie said. “We just got in some exquisite dahlias. Vibrant orange centers with gold tracing along the edge of the petals.”

“Sounds beautiful,” I said. “But I wanted to send something to Kristen Ver Steeg’s law office. Express my condolences. I don’t know if she has family in the area.”

Cookie blinked twice, quickly. I had her attention now.

“Kristen didn’t have family here,” she said. “I think she was from down near Galveston, but I got the impression she didn’t have any family at all, really.” She sighed. “So sad.”

“It certainly is. She contributed so much to the community. Involved with the fair and all.”

She chuckled low in her throat. “I’m not sure she was making many friends that way.”

“Really?” I put on my best wide-eyed innocent face. “But she gave so much of her time, was taking her commitment to the job so seriously.”

Cookie clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Maybe a little too seriously,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Eloise has been chair of the pageant committee for years, of course. The only reason she’s not this year is because Dani’s competing. Conflict of interest, you know.”

I nodded. That made sense.

“Eloise was trying to figure out who should take her place this year, and then she went to a Pampered Chef party at Kristen’s house. Saw all of Kristen’s pageant crowns. She even had a big one for Miss American Pride 2001. Eloise figured Kristen would give the event some added legitimacy, and that way, when Dani won, it would be an even bigger deal. But Kristen was just supposed to be a placeholder, you know. I told Eloise it was a mistake. Kristen would take the job way too seriously. She was a lawyer, you know,” Cookie said, as though that explained everything.

When I just stared blankly at her, she huffed impatiently. “She was a bit of a stickler for the rules. Had a real stick up her you-know-what. And that didn’t sit well with everyone, if you get my drift.”

I didn’t get her drift at all. First, as a fellow rulestickler, I didn’t appreciate the mental picture Cookie was painting. Second, in my experience, lawyers were more interested in getting
around
rules than in actually following them.

“Following the rules is usually a good thing, right?” I said, a little defensively.

“Well, the Lantana Round-Up has rules, but not all rules are created equal, you know? Some matter more than others. Kristen was getting hung up on some of the little details that were on the books but never meant to be enforced. She was all trees, no forest.”

“Could you give me a for-example?”

Cookie leaned up on her tiptoes to peek over my shoulder, make sure we were alone.

“It wasn’t official or anything, but she was calling a meeting of the pageant judges just yesterday. Right before she died. You didn’t hear this from me, but she said was going to move to disqualify Dani Carberry from the competition because of a rules infraction.”

I gasped, trying to sound suitably shocked. “Dani Carberry? Isn’t she on the honor roll? What kind of rule could she have broken?”

Cookie shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s a huge long list of rules for the pageant. Age and residence requirements, morals clauses, academic standards. But Kristen was pretty fixated on the artifice rules.”

“The what?”

“The artifice rules,” Cookie repeated slowly, as if I were a little dense. “You know, what sorts of artificial beauty enhancers you can and cannot use. Kristen made sure we all had a copy of the lists.”

“There are lists?”

I didn’t mean to repeat everything Cookie said, but I was trying to wrap my brain around what she was saying.

“Sure. Lists of things you can use, and things that are strictly off-limits. Spray tans are okay. Mascara, yes, false eyelashes, no. Highlights, yes, perms, relaxers, and all-over color, no.” She leaned forward. “Weird thing was Kristen was an alum of the glitz pageant circuit. Anything goes in the glitz pageants—fake hair, false eyelashes, airbrushing away freckles, flippers, you name it.”

“Flippers?”

“Partial dentures to hide missing baby teeth.”

“Oh.” Of course. Why didn’t I think of that? “But why is that weird?”

“Well, the good Lord only knows what kind of smoke and mirrors Kristen used to win her crowns. Some of the rodeo pageant girls are, uh, a little plain . . . to put it delicately. Why would she want to deny them the chance to look their best?”

I didn’t know Dani Carberry well at all, but I’d seen her a time or two. She wasn’t even a tiny bit plain. “Dani’s a gorgeous girl. What kind of artifice could she possibly want that wouldn’t be allowed in the rules?”

Cookie’s eyes narrowed and she pursed her lips. “Only one thing I can think of.”

“The wig?”

She crooked an eyebrow in response.

“But Kristen never said that was the problem, right? I mean, she never told you that Dani’s wig would disqualify her?”

Cookie shook her head, her starched curls dancing around her delicate chin. “No. In fact, the rules don’t specifically say wigs are illegal. But hair weaves are definitely not allowed, and wigs aren’t on the list of acceptable enhancements. And, honestly, Dani’s such a wonderful girl. What else could it have been?”

“Maybe Dani got into trouble recently? Something she managed to keep quiet.”

Cookie tipped her head back and gave me a smug look. “I surely don’t think so. I’ll have you know that Eloise Carberry and I are very close. We’re both on the board of the League of Methodist Ladies. As soon as Kristen called the meeting, I contacted Eloise. She was as shocked as I was at the allegation Dani had done something improper.”

And there was no way Dani could have done anything wrong without her mother knowing about it.

Ha.

I
shoved a tissue-wrapped bouquet of miniature sunflowers in Finn’s face. “Why didn’t you tell me Dani Carberry has cancer?”

“What?” He took the flowers and stood aside to let me into his foyer. He led me back to the kitchen, where he’d been setting out sandwich fixings for our supper, and put the flowers in a cobalt glass pitcher. A basket of potato chips and two sweating glasses of iced tea were already laid out on the dining table.

“You heard me, Finn,” I said, leaning against the counter to watch him cook. “I found out today that Mike’s daughter has cancer. You work with the guy. Surely the topic came up at some point.”

Finn paused in the act of peeling the foil from a container of leftover barbecue. Everyone and his uncle were doing dress rehearsals for the fair’s big BBQ cook-off, so the whole town was on an all-barbecue diet for the week. At Erma’s Fry by Night, they even had a brisket quiche on the specials board.

“He mentioned she had a little cancer, but it was no big deal.”

I smacked my forehead with my palm. “No big deal? Cancer, Finn. Cancer’s always a big deal.”

He sighed. “It didn’t sound like a big deal. Mike mentioned last spring, before you and I started dating, that Dani had a little skin cancer removed from her shoulder. Dani was mad because her prom dress was backless and Mike wouldn’t let her wait until after the dance to have the procedure, so she had a Band-Aid showing in her prom pictures. And Mike was mad because he found out Eloise had been letting Dani go to a tanning salon. And Eloise was mad because, between you and me, I think Eloise is always mad.”

“That’s it? He just mentioned it once? Didn’t you ask how she was doing?”

He popped the container of pulled pork in the microwave and started it reheating. “Never thought of it again. We live in Texas, Tally. No stinkin’ ozone layer is going to protect us from the sun’s harmful rays. My mom had moles whacked off every year, no big deal. Besides, Mike brought it up in the context of ‘our house is pretty tense these days.’ He didn’t seem particularly worried, so I didn’t think it was anything serious.”

“Well, apparently it is.”

Finn pulled two kaiser rolls from a bakery bag, plopped them on a couple of plates, and handed one to me. He squinted his eyes and tilted his head, skeptical. “I saw Dani at the fairgrounds the other night. She looked fine.”

“She’s in chemo. She’s lost all her hair.”

“Naw . . . she has hair down to her shoulder blades.” He reached around to tap his own back to demonstrate how long her hair was.

“It’s a wig,” I insisted.

“Really? Huh. Well, I’m telling you, Mike hasn’t said a word.” The microwave beeped and he clicked open the door to give the barbecue a stir. “But. . .”

“But what?”

He shrugged. “The other night when I was at the Parlay Inn asking around about Sonny and his friend, I was talking with Mike. I don’t even remember how it came up, but he started going on about Dani being all grown up, entering this pageant, looking at college, starting to spread her wings, and he. . . well, he teared up.”

“You didn’t mention that before.”

His eyebrows shot up. “I didn’t mention that I found a penny on the way into the bar, either. Or that I bought a new three-pack of boxers.”

“Don’t be a smart aleck. Mike getting all choked up over his daughter is a whole different thing.”

“I didn’t think it was particularly relevant. At the time, I figured he was just maudlin from too many gin and tonics, thinking about where the time went, how his gap-toothed little girl in pigtails could be a grown woman. In retrospect, he might have been upset because she’s sick. But I still don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

I felt a pang of contrition. After all, Finn was doing a lot of legwork for me and Bree, and I did sound as if I was accusing him of incompetence. “Sorry. I don’t know if I would have thought anything of it before today, either.”

The microwave dinged again, and I held out my plate so Finn could pile barbecue on my bun. We made our way over to the dinette table and set our plates on his mama’s burgundy quilted place mats.

“Today, though, Karla Faye told me that Kristen was disqualifying Dani from the pageant.”

Finn pointed at my head with his fork. “Your hair looks nice, by the way. Cutting a little shorter brings out your curls.”

A wave of pleasure washed through me. I patted my hair self-consciously. “Thanks. She did a nice job.”