Buttercream Bump Off (23 page)

Mel spent the entire ten-minute ride home psyching herself up. Tonight was going to be the night. She and Joe were going to leap forward to the next level in their relationship, and then everyone could stop talking about her sex life and get back to their own.

She opened the front door, and a snore greeted her. To his credit, Joe looked as if he’d tried his best to stay awake. He had the remote in his hand, the TV was still on, he was even upright—all except his head, which had flopped onto the back of the couch. Thus, the snoring.

Mel sighed. So, they would not be moving to a new level tonight. She wondered if she should take this personally, but then decided no. If she had the biggest baking event of her life happening, she would expect Joe to be patient and let her do what she needed to do. Surely, she could do the same for him.

She locked the door and headed to the bathroom, where she got ready for bed. When she returned, she prepped the bed around Joe, and then tossed the covers over the two of them. He pulled her close and buried his nose in her hair.

She could feel his warm breath against her skin, and it lulled her to sleep.

“The pigeon has landed.”

“What?” Mel asked into her phone.

“The pigeon has landed,” Angie repeated.

“She means they’re here,” Tate said. He and Angie were sitting at a restaurant table while Mel lurked in the kitchen. They had her on speakerphone.

Mel had arranged for Marty to take Elle to Les Terrines, a French restaurant in the heart of Phoenix. The executive chef was a cooking-school friend of Mel’s and was letting her linger in the kitchen. She didn’t want Elle to catch sight of her and suspect anything.

The restaurant was packed, but Tate and Angie had snagged a table on one side of a short wall, and Mel had arranged for the hostess to seat Marty and Elle on the other side. Mel hoped their plan worked. If Marty could get Elle talking about Baxter, maybe she would say something that would incriminate her in his murder. No one had as good of a motive . . . well, except maybe Roach, which she suspected was why Angie was here.

Mel glanced through the glass window of the kitchen door and saw Angie and Tate across the restaurant. Their faces were warmly lit by the small glass votive candle between them.

Tate was hanging on Angie’s every word. It struck Mel for the first time that they were a perfect couple. Angie’s zest for life kept Tate from being a complete dork, and his rock-solid dependability gave her stability. They had always enjoyed the same things and shared the same irreverent sense of humor.

For months now, Mel had watched Angie staring at Tate with her heart in her eyes. Now the tables had turned, and it was Tate looking at Angie as if he had a million things to say and no idea how to go about it. It had to be killing him that, with the arrival of Roach, he may have lost his chance.

The hostess strode into view with Marty and Elle following. Marty looked dapper in Tate’s altered dark blue Prada. Elle, meanwhile, glittered in a sequined halter dress that accentuated all of her assets. Marty was the perfect gentleman and held her chair for her. As he took his seat, Elle looked at him as if she were trying to count the bills in his wallet before he sat down.

Tate and Angie both stilled as if trying to listen to the conversation on the other side of the wall from them. Tate, not very subtly, dropped his napkin. When he bent to retrieve it, he passed his cell phone under the table next to the leg of Marty’s chair. Mel watched as Marty bent over and scooped it up, slipping it into his breast pocket as if he were just adjusting the fold of his handkerchief. Very smooth.

“So, Martin,” Elle began. “Tell me, how did you make your fortune?”

“A little of this and a little of that,” he said. “I like diversity.”

Mel felt herself get tense. Marty couldn’t be too vague or she’d figure out he was conning her.

Elle looked at him with shrewd eyes. Marty must have realized it, too, because he added, “Mostly, I dabbled in real estate, properties in the Hamptons and Palm Beach.”

“The East Coast?” Elle’s eyes lit up.

Mel got the feeling she was furnishing a beach house in her mind.

“Have you been there?” he asked.

“Not as much as I’d like,” she said with a coquettish smile. Mel felt like gagging. Did that really work on a guy? She was going to have to ask Joe later.

“I’d love to show it to you,” Marty said. He was channeling some serious suave here. “There is no other place for shopping like Manhattan, unless of course you’re on the continent, in Paris or Milan.”

Elle looked as if she might swoon.

Mel glanced at Angie and Tate’s table to see if they were getting all of this. Judging by the sour look on Angie’s face, they were.

Tate leaned over the table and said something to Angie, and her expression darkened into a tight-lipped, biting-back-her-anger glower, of which Mel was happy to note she had never been on the receiving end. But why was she furious with Tate?

Oh, no. Was Tate using their stakeout time to push his personal agenda of getting Angie to break up with Roach? Ack. This was terrible.

Mel glanced around the kitchen. She needed someone to run interference. Immediately! The kitchen staff was humming. She considered sending Monique, her cooking-school pal, out to their table, but she was having troubles of her own, as she was chewing out her sous-chef for plating a dish too early.

Mel would have gone out there herself, but she couldn’t risk being spotted. She wondered if she could peg Tate with a dinner roll from ten yards.

“Change of subject, please.”

Mel heard Angie’s voice on her cell phone. She couldn’t hear Marty and Elle over Tate and Angie.

“No, you need to listen to me,” Tate said. His voice was firm. He was trying to use his corporate muckety-muck voice on Angie. Mel could have told him that was a bad plan if he had bothered to ask her before he decided this was a good time to make Angie mad.

“No, I don’t,” Angie argued.

Mel peered through the small glass window in the swinging kitchen door. She stared at her friends, who were completely oblivious to the holes she was trying to burn into their skulls with the intensity of her gaze.

She tried to find their waiter. Someone needed to interrupt what was going to escalate into ugly any minute.

“You’re being fatheaded about this whole thing, Ange,” Tate said. “And you know it.”

“Fatheaded?” Angie looked at him as if she might do him an injury with her butter knife.

“You can’t seriously think that you’re in love with a rock-and-roll drummer whose stage name is Roach!”

“I can’t?” Angie asked. “Watch me!”

Mel pushed halfway out the door. The hostess! She could send the hostess over. Mel crept out the kitchen door. She snatched a burgundy leather wine list and held it up to cover her face.

“Well, it looks like we got front row seats for the show,” Marty joked. Elle laughed.

Marty spun around and gave Mel a desperate look. She nodded vigorously over the menu at him.

“Angie, you can do so much better than him,” Tate said.

“Why would I want to?” Angie asked. Her voice was deceptively quiet, and if Tate had a brain in his head, he would have picked up on the danger and run.

Mel knew she was never going to make it across the restaurant to the hostess before Angie erupted.

She grabbed a passing busboy and hissed, “I’ll give you a hundred bucks to dump ice water in his lap.”

He glanced where she was pointing and then looked at her like she was nuts and said, “I can’t get involved in marital disputes. You should probably take this up with your husband at home.”

“He’s not my husband,” Mel protested but the busboy shook his head and scurried away.

“Have you lived in Scottsdale long?” Marty asked Elle.

“I—” Elle began, but whatever she’d been about to say was cut off as Angie popped out of her seat and yelled, “Stop it! Just stop it! You had your chance. I waited for you and waited for you, and did you ever notice me? No! Well, now somebody has noticed me, and I’m not going to walk away from him just because you think he isn’t good enough for me.”

Forks stopped in midair, glasses paused at lips, all eyes turned towards Tate and Angie. Mel lowered the wine list so she could see.

Angie was a vision. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes sparked with fire. She was wearing a clingy Versace drape-front jersey dress in peacock blue. Her hair was twisted up into a knot, and she was wearing heels that added several inches to her height and made her legs look three miles long. She was stunning.

Tate’s mouth sagged open. He blinked. He rose to his feet. He looked as if Angie had just punched him in the gut. Mel would have felt sorry for him if it wasn’t his own stupid fault that he was in this mess.

“You waited for me?” he asked.

“Duh!” Angie snapped. “I’ve been in love with you since we were twelve years old.”

“Sir . . . uh, Ma’am,” the hostess interrupted, but everyone in the restaurant hushed her.

“You never said anything,” Tate said.

“How could I when you’ve always been in love with someone else?”

Tate looked perplexed. “Who?”

“My best friend,” Angie snapped.

“What?” Tate shook his head, rejecting her words.

“Oh, come on, she’s your best friend, too, and she’s standing right there!” Angie pointed at Mel.

Tate’s head whipped in Mel’s direction. His eyes bugged. Mel felt her eyes bug in return. A buzz began to fill the restaurant. Angie let out a sob and ran from the room.

“Angie!” Tate yelled after her. He glanced at Mel, and she gestured with her hand for him to go after her. He ran.

Mel glanced back at Marty. Elle was gazing at her with a shrewd glare.

She looked at Marty and said, “Wasn’t that Tate Harper? The man who introduced us at the Biltmore? Odd that he’s having dinner with Roach’s girlfriend right next to us and her ‘best friend’ just happens to be lurking nearby. The same ‘best friend’ whose mother was dating my Baxter.”

“Uh . . .” Marty stalled. He looked desperately at Mel and then said, “Help.”

Mel approached their table, trying to weave together a basket of lies that would convince Elle that all of this was just a crazy coincidence. She wasn’t that good of a basket weaver, however.

Elle rose to her feet and picked up her glass of champagne, which she tossed into Marty’s face.

She sauntered past Mel and said, “Nice try, Melanie Cooper, but I’m on to you. Your mother is a suspect, but I’m not. I have an alibi. What does she have? Oh, yeah, nothing.”

Mel could feel the entire restaurant watching her. She sidled over to Marty, who was dabbing champagne off of his dome with his napkin. With more dignity than she had in her little finger, he carefully rose, adjusted his lapels, and offered her his arm.

On their way out, Mel and Marty walked right into Detective Martinez. He was not happy to see them.