Die Smiling

by Linda Ladd

  Four

  It was nearly half past three when I left Buck and his team to finish processing the crime scene and remove the body for autopsy. I wanted to talk to Brianna, find out what she knew—better yet, who she suspected could have hated Hilde enough to do something this godawful to her. I didn’t want to push her too soon or too hard, or Bud, either, so I gave him an exploratory call as I pulled out of the Royal Bungalows, turned west onto the lake road, and headed back to Camdenton. It took him two rings to pick up.

  “Yeah? Claire?”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Better than I expected her to, that’s for damn sure. She’s calmed down a little, anyway.”

  “Enough for me to ask her some questions?”

  “Maybe. She’s still pretty much in denial, I think, but she says she wants to help us, if she can.”

  “How about now?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Better to get it over with so she can take something that’ll make her sleep.”

  Brianna Swensen lived in a house off Highway 54 in a little town with the unlikely and, yes, even unsavory name, of Roach, Missouri. It was about five miles southwest of Camdenton and I drove past the sheriff’s department on my way there without stopping. I’d already reported in by phone to my boss, Sheriff Charlie Ramsay, and he was less than pleased that another sensational murder had come down at the lake so soon after the last one. He didn’t blame me out loud but I wondered if that’s what he was thinking. Hell, it was what I was thinking.

  Brianna’s house set atop a ridge about two miles down a winding blacktop road. Her Vette was parked out front. Bud had been at the wheel when they’d left Hilde’s place, and he probably hadn’t wanted to take time to put it in the garage. I pulled up beside it in the graveled semicircle driveway and killed my engine.

  I sat there a couple of minutes, listening to the motor tick and watching leaves on the hedge along the house rustle in a gentle April breeze, not exactly eager to barge inside and torture Brianna some more, which pretty much was what I was going to do. It was imperative to interview her, however, and better me to question her than Bud. Let him hold her hand, put his arm around her, and be the good guy. Actually, he was the good guy. I climbed out, beeped my door locked, and walked up the L-shaped sidewalk to the front door, which was painted a cerulean blue. I knocked softly, ignoring the brass doorbell. Brianna’s nerves were probably jangled enough. Seconds later, Bud opened the door, looking a little worse for wear. Actually, a lot worse for wear.

  “Still okay to come in?”

  “Yeah, she took a Darvocet a while ago. She wants to talk to you.”

  I followed him down a short entry hall, painted beige and hung with a black-and-white photograph of an old barn framed in white and then out into a living area that faced the back of the house. The whole place smelled good, like oranges and lemons. I wondered how Bri got it to do that. My house sure never smelled this good. A kitchen was visible off to the left with a short bar and ceiling-hung cabinets separating it from the living room. A pair of multipaned white French doors revealed an exceptional view of the wooded hills around Camdenton, but not quite as breathtaking a panorama as the one from Hilde’s bungalow. I could just barely glimpse a little half-moon sliver of the lake on the distant horizon.

  Brianna sat on a red-and-blue plaid couch facing a white brick fireplace alive with gas logs. They were dancing around and warming the room. Her face was unnaturally flushed, her eyes swollen from several hours of crying. She still looked beautiful, believe it or not. She was sniffling into a wadded-up pink Kleenex, almost as if she couldn’t quite summon up the strength to wail any more.

  I put down my leather handbag and squatted in front of her. I put my hand over hers. “Brianna, I am so sorry about your sister.”

  She nodded, and more tears leaked down her cheeks. She dabbed at them with the same soggy tissue that she nervously squeezed in her hand. I glanced at Bud, and he motioned with his head for me to sit down in the matching plaid chair that directly faced her. I did so while he took a seat on the couch close beside her and held her hand.

  “Brianna, I really hate to put you through this right now, but we’ve got to ask you some questions, okay? I wish we didn’t, I wish it could wait, but it really can’t, not if you’re up to it at all.”

  Brianna nodded, looked at Bud, and welled up again when he squeezed her shoulders. I waited a second or two, then started out as gently as I knew how. This was not going to be easy. I wondered if Bud had told her the grisly details yet. I had a feeling he hadn’t. I wasn’t going to, either.

  “Do you have any idea why somebody might’ve done this to Hilde?”

  Brianna sobbed aloud, jerked a fresh Kleenex from the box in front of her, and shook her head. She had pinned her long blond hair up into a bun like the one Hilde wore at the time of her death. Some strands had fallen around her face, too, just like Hilde’s had, and she kept pushing them behind her ears. She licked her lips, and I made the mistake of thinking of Hilde’s lips. I swallowed hard, tried not to show my revulsion at that image.

  “No, oh, God, no, Hilde’s really nice, you know, kind to people, just a good person, really. Even the other girls, the ones she competed against, didn’t seem too awfully jealous that she won so much.” She stopped talking, swallowed hard, dabbed some more tears, but all that mascara and eyeliner was not running in rampant manner down her cheeks. Actually, wasn’t even smudged. Waterproof, I guess.

  “And that’s highly unusual around this kind of circuit, too,” she continued, all muffled and weepy. “It’s really cutthroat and intense, you know, every girl for herself. But Hilde made friends, and they all seemed to like her, respect her for her hard work, you know, and everything. And she did work hard, really hard. She’s getting older now…”

  Brianna remembered that Hilde wasn’t getting older now and wouldn’t ever get older again, and began to weep in earnest. While she recovered, I took my little notepad out of my handbag and wrote down the pertinent details of her remarks, but I was pretty sure that Bri was looking at all this and her sister through a pair of very rose-tinted glasses. I couldn’t imagine the other contestants being quite so jolly about usually losing to Hilde Swensen. It didn’t fit the stereotypical, bitchy beauty contestant profile entrenched in my mind, but maybe I was wrong about the beauties and bitches of the world. On the other hand, I’d never been within three hundred yards of a beauty pageant, made sure of it, in fact, so what did I know? That, however, and unfortunately, was about to change.

  “Did she have any enemies that you know of? People who were jealous of her? Anybody who threatened her or accosted her verbally? I understand that sometimes happens to beautiful women. Other women don’t give them a chance, you know, just decide to hate them at first sight?” Yeah, me, for instance, I plead guilty, ’fraid so.

  Brianna nodded as if she knew exactly what I was talking about, as if it happened to her every day, and it probably did. My first impression when I’d seen her was that she was a haughty mannequin type with missing posters nailed up on bulletin boards concerning the frontal lobes of her brain. It turned out I was wrong about her, too, and me, a trained detective, at that. I guess it’s true what they say about not judging a book, and all that rot.

  Brianna said, “No, not that I’m aware of. She got some guys now and then who wanted to go out with her, date her and stuff like that, but she usually didn’t go in for men who liked her just because she was cute and won a bunch of titles. You know, men who dated her so they’d have a trophy on their arm when they went into restaurants or clubs. If she got any hint that’s what they were after, she’d drop them.”

  “Does she have a boyfriend right now that you know about? Somebody steady?”

  “Well, kind of, I guess. Back in Florida. From when she lived at South Beach. His name is Carlos Vasquez. He owns this fancy gym down there, and he’s a personal trainer, too. It’s well known, a spa, where lots of celebrities go, you know, people like Gianni Versac
e. He was a regular there before that guy shot him.”

  I dug out the photo I’d found at Hilde’s condo. “Is this him?”

  Brianna took it. She nodded. “Yes, that’s Carlos. I looks like it might’ve been taken a couple of months ago. He’s sort of a camera buff.”

  “What’s the name of Carlos’s spa?”

  “The Ocean Club.”

  “Did she live with this man?”

  “She moved into his beach house for a while, but he ended up getting too possessive, so she moved out last Christmas. Actually, it was New Year’s Eve. I remember because that’s the day I met Bud.”

  Brianna smiled tearfully at Bud, and he smiled back, but when his eyes met mine, I knew he was thinking the same thing I was. “Was this Carlos guy ever violent with her, you know, slap her around, push her, yell at her?”

  “I was pretty sure a couple of times that he might’ve slapped her around some and I know he used to yell at her, but Hilde said he didn’t, that she never would’ve stood for anything like that. She’s got a lot of pride and self-respect, and she’s strong. She works out on weights every day and runs three miles.” I was watching her face and saw the exact moment that the fact hit her that her sister hadn’t been strong enough to fight off her killer. She burst into fresh tears and buried her face in her palms. This was not going well.

  Bud draped an arm around her and pulled her head against his shoulder. I could barely stand the pained expression on his face. This was tearing him up. I went on, but tried to be gentle. “Do you have Carlos Vasquez’s address and telephone number?”

  “I think it’s the same as it was when she lived with him. She’s the one who packed up and moved out when they split. The two of us own a nice little beach house up the coast near Hollywood, pretty far away from all that stuff going on in South Beach. She’s been living there alone since I moved up here.”

  “Okay.” I thought about things for a minute or two. “Was she down there recently? Before the Kansas City gig, the last one she won?”

  Brianna nodded. “She always scheduled a week or two off between pageants. She was in San Diego earlier this month, then spent a week at home in Florida, I think, before she flew to Kansas City. The only reason she entered the pageant here was so we could spend time together. We’d grown apart the last few years. She thought it was kind of rinky-dink after the big-city ones. I encouraged her to come early so she could meet Bud, so I guess this is all my fault!”

  She dissolved into a torrent again and I sat mutely and watched Bud soothe her. He was doing a pretty good job of it, and I felt like an interloper in a private, intimate moment and wished I could get up and leave, but I couldn’t. I hated interviewing friends, especially distraught friends. I gave her some more time to calm down, and she eventually did.

  I said, “Did Hilde have any other boyfriends, other than this Carlos guy?”

  “No. There were others in her past, of course, but I don’t think she’s kept in touch with any of them.”

  “Were they down in Florida, too?”

  “Uh-huh, yeah. Some were. Hilde and I both moved down to Miami for college. You know, the beaches drew us. We both went to the University of Florida.”

  “Where did you live before moving to Florida?”

  She hesitated. “Maine. A little bitty place near the Canadian border.”

  Bud seemed interested in this direction of questioning, so I suspected he was learning stuff he didn’t know about Brianna’s background.

  “I understand that the two of you were close?”

  “Oh, yes. We were always together, lived together and everything, until the last few years when I moved up here.”

  “Why did you move up here, Bri?”

  Again, a bit of hesitancy. “I don’t know, really. I didn’t like the humidity in south Florida. It made my hair kink up. And it was too crowded for me, way too many people everywhere you went. I came up here once for a fashion seminar over at Cedar Bend Lodge and just fell in love with the lake. It was so quiet and peaceful with all these pretty views. It reminded me of the place where we were born.”

  “Why didn’t you go back there if you missed it so much?”

  Bud was frowning, like he didn’t like where I was taking this, but Bri’s past was pretty much Hilde’s, too. And pretty murky, at that. I wanted to know who and why and what and where. I’m pushy that way.

  “I guess because both my parents are gone now. Nobody’s left up there on the farm. It’s been closed up for years and is even more out in the sticks than this is.” She stopped, coughed a little, and delicately moistened dry lips some more. “Bud, would you mind getting me a bottle of Evian? It’s in the fridge.”

  “Sure, babe.”

  I watched him walk into the kitchen. He returned with the water and handed it to her, then I said, “Bud mentioned this morning that you said Hilde had a stalker a few years back. Do you remember his name?”

  “Oh, no, she never found out who he was. The harassment just stopped one day, and he’s left her alone ever since.”

  “What kinds of things did he do?”

  “He left messages on her phone, and put gifts outside her door, stuff like that. I think he was a fan who’d seen her win a title somewhere, or something like that. I was living here when it happened so I don’t know much else about it. Only what she told me in passing.”

  “Did he ever try to harm her?”

  “No, I don’t think he ever approached her in person. One day he just stopped bothering her. I guess he gave up.”

  “What can you tell me about Hilde’s lifestyle?”

  Brianna lowered her eyes and her voice became defensive. “Like what? What do you mean?”

  Bud knew what I meant and didn’t look happy with the question, either.

  “I’m sorry, Bri, but I’ve got to ask. Was she a party girl? You know as well as I do that South Beach’s got that reputation, especially with all the beautiful people hanging around. I understand the party scene can get really wild with a lot of drugs and fast living going on.”

  I braced for a quick, indignant retort or a termination of the interview, but Brianna was only quiet a moment longer than usual. She finally said, “Hilde wasn’t any angel, but she was a really good person. I swear it.”

  Uh-oh. Red flashing signals, siren wailing, and now we’re getting somewhere. I chose my next words as carefully as I knew how. “What exactly do you mean when you say that she wasn’t any angel?”

  “She liked men, it’s as plain as that. She liked to party, just like most girls our age. She liked to drink, too, but she wasn’t an alcoholic, or anything, and she liked men paying attention to her.”

  Crap, that was something I wasn’t thrilled out of my mind to hear. It wasn’t something I wanted to follow up on, either. Bud didn’t look ecstatic over this new insight about Hilde, to be sure, but he knew me well enough to know that I couldn’t and wouldn’t let it drop. Pursue it I must, friend or not. I tried to do so in a friendly fashion. “Liked to party as in…”

  “As in she liked to party.” Now Brianna sounded like a rearing mama bear, claws extended, daring me to come closer to little partying baby bear. I was sorry, but I wasn’t going anywhere.

  “You know, Brianna, I’d rather be anywhere than here at your house, asking you all these personal questions about your sister. I know she was a great person or she wouldn’t’ve been related to you, but I’ve got to know these things if Bud and I are going to find out who did this terrible thing to her. I hope you understand that and don’t think I’m enjoying this.”

  More tears, more agony, more comforting, during which I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, feeling like a jerk. Worse, an unfeeling jerk.

  “I know, I know, I’m sorry, Claire, I just can’t believe any of this has happened. She can’t be gone, my God, why did this have to happen to her? That’s what I don’t get. She’s not even from around here. And I don’t care what she’s done in the past, she didn’t deserve to die.”

/>   “No, no, it’s okay, don’t feel bad. It’s hard to answer all this stuff when you’re this upset. I understand, believe me.” And I did. I’d lost so many loved ones, I had no family left at all. I had buried those memories down so deep, slammed and bolted so many trapdoors that I never wanted to pry open again. Black said I needed to face some of that pain, work through it, take a crowbar to those locked places, but that was easy for him to say. Shrinks talked a good talk, but they didn’t have to be the one to take the arrows in the heart, now did they? So I kept those memories buried in some very dark places in my psyche. Brianna would learn to do that, too, if she was lucky.

  She cried some more. Bud and I waited some more.

  In a little bit, Brianna sat up straighter, looked at me. Her eyes were not focusing so well anymore, but her makeup still looked good. I had a feeling the Darvocet was kicking in big time. She said, and her voice slurred on a couple of words. “Okay, I’m all right now. It’s just this simple. Hilde liked the lifestyle at South Beach, and I didn’t. I thought it was too slick and wild, and to be truthful, stupid, with all the emphasis on beauty and ultra-thin, muscular bodies. I mean everybody was anorexic or bulimic down there. It was more than appalling. You’d think that South Beach Diet book would’ve gotten through to some of those people about healthy eating, but it didn’t. I couldn’t wait to get away from all those shallow, self-centered types, but Hilde didn’t feel that way. She thrived on excitement and important men in clubs who were always hitting on her. She especially liked celebrities.”

  “So, just that I understand you. Are you saying she’s had lots of lovers in her life?” There it was, out in the open, hanging in the air between us like a big, ugly helium balloon filled with some kind of terrible odor, about to burst in a stinking explosion that would destroy our budding friendship.

  Brianna heaved in a deep breath. “I am saying that she really liked to drink and dance and have fun, and when she got high, she liked to have sex, sometimes with men she hardly knew. She found that a big turn-on, not to know them, I mean. Sometimes she went home with them or to hotels, but she never took them to our place. She knew better than that, thank God. I tried to tell her that it was dangerous, that she was going to get herself in trouble, but she said she had a sixth sense when it came to guys. She said she could tell the crazies before she’d been with them five minutes.”