A Parfait Murder

by Wendy Lyn Watson

  I decided not to point out that Tucker wasn’t very good at following his attorneys’ instructions.

  If he was telling the truth—and his righteous indignation suggested he was—then Tucker didn’t have any motive to kill Kristen Ver Steeg. He didn’t want to keep the lawsuit quiet or even make it go away. He wanted his day in court, his chance to defeat Satan with a gavel.

  “If you were so gung ho to litigate, why did you leave that threatening message for Kristen?” Finn asked.

  “What threatening message?”

  “The one about minding her eternal soul.”

  Tucker smiled, without a trace of malice. “That wasn’t a threat. Just good advice. The church and I, we didn’t mind fighting evil because we recognized its true face. But it would be selfish to allow Miss Ver Steeg to take the side of Satan unwittingly, just so we could be vindicated. I gave her the information. She made the choice, of her own free will, to ignore it.”

  So. Tucker Gentry. Certifiable whack job, yes. Murderer, probably not. The man might do any number of crazy things in the name of his faith—I wouldn’t even rule out the possibility of violence—but he would do it in the bright light of day. He saw himself as a champion of good. He wouldn’t see any need to skulk around in the shadows. If he’d decided to gun down Kristen, he would have done it on the midway in broad daylight, not in the haunted rodeo.

  Tucker’s tale, though, presented another mystery. Why was Dani so determined to defy her mother and attend services at One Word? I knew that young converts were often the most zealous, but Dani didn’t seem like the type of kid to get swept up by religious fervor. She was smart, well-to-do, from a stable home, and, most important, popular. As evidenced by her flag corps friends’ willingness to cut off their hair in solidarity with her.

  Maybe that was it. Maybe the cancer had made Dani go searching for meaning. And maybe there was something in the message at One Word that resonated with her in a way her own church’s teachings didn’t.

  “Pastor Gentry, we blew a fuse on the big amp. Can I take the van to go buy a new one?”

  I turned to face the newcomer with the blown fuse. His arms were sleeved in tattooes, including a blocky X on the back of each hand, and a silver stud in the shape of a fish adorned his lower lip. And the sides of his head were shaved in a modified Mohawk.

  It was the hair that gave him away. He was the boy I’d seen groping Dani at the fair.

  Tucker dug in his pants pocket and produced a set of keys. He held them up, jingling them, offering them to the boy. “Here you go, Matt,” he said as the boy took them from his hand.

  And there was my answer.

  Kyle’s friend Matt had a girlfriend all right. But her identity was a secret no longer. Dani’s fervent devotion to the One Word Bible Church had less to do with love of God and more to do with love of her straight-edge beau . . . who wasn’t even faithful to her.

  chapter 23

  Finn and I regrouped at the A-la-mode. “I feel like we’re spinning our wheels,” I said.

  “Not true. We’re crossing off suspects. That’s helpful.” He held up his right hand and began ticking off items on his fingers. “It probably wasn’t Neck. And it probably wasn’t Maddie. And it probably wasn’t Tucker.”

  I still had my doubts about Maddie, but I decided to let that slide for the moment.

  “Who’s left?”

  “I don’t know.” He took a sip of his soda. Diet. He’d put on a few pounds once we started dating. Apparently, between his own fabulous baking skills and my ice cream, he was finding it more and more difficult to keep his girlish figure.

  “The one piece of information we’re still missing, which I really, really wish we had, is that ethics question. We know it’s out there, but all our attempts to guess what it might be about have failed to play.”

  “Hmm. Maybe she knew that Sonny was a fraud and wanted to go to the authorities. If Sonny knew his own lawyer was going to rat him out, maybe he killed her to protect his con.”

  Finn’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe. But as much as I’d like to have some reason to pin this on Sonny, all we can do is speculate until we get our hands on that letter to the ethics board.”

  I nodded and sipped my own diet soda. “I could try Jason again. I feel bad. Poor kid is trying to do the right thing, you know.”

  Finn shook his head. “I think you’re better off hitting up Maddie again. She may be turning over a new ethical leaf, but we have a bit of leverage against her. And she seemed sincere about wanting to know who killed Kristen.”

  “Oy,” I moaned.

  “Here, let me try.” He fished his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed.

  “Hey, Maddie. Finn Harper.” A lopsided grin spread across his face. He covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “Maddie can cuss a blue streak,” he said to me.

  “Listen, we don’t want to jam you up. Honest. I think we ought to swing by your office again and give you back that envelope so you can return it to your associate.”

  He paused, listening.

  “You’re a smart woman. But we wouldn’t be so crass as to resort to extortion. However, if a certain letter to an ethics board happened to be on the receptionist desk, it would let us know where we ought to file the envelope. Make sense?”

  He flipped the phone closed, and held out his hand for the infamous envelope.

  “Finn, I don’t know about this. I mean, I want to get my hands on that ethics letter, too, but what Maddie’s been doing is really bad. Selling out her clients to protect a bunch of drug dealers? I don’t think I can help her cover that up.”

  “Oh, never fear,” he said. “The envelope you got from Neck helped us figure out what Maddie was up to, but it’s not really evidence of anything. She may feel more secure having it back in her hands, but I guarantee she won’t be so pleased with me when she reads the article I’m planning to write.”

  “Yeah?”

  He laughed. “Even if I didn’t share your moral concerns with her behavior, I couldn’t let an opportunity for a juicy story pass me by. I took notes at the courthouse, have a long list of clients of Maddie Jackson who are serving the max for their petty possession charges. I’m guessing that some of those guys who are cooling their heels in jail will be happy to talk to me about the advice Maddie gave them and how they chose her as their lawyer, especially once I tell them what she’s been doing.”

  “You’re my hero,” I teased.

  His smile faltered, and suddenly the moment felt serious. He looked at me hard, as if he were trying to figure out a puzzle he saw in my eyes. Then he cleared his throat, and his smile returned . . . a bit forced.

  “All I need is a cape. You sit tight, and I’ll take care of this. Be right back.”

  After he left, I went back behind the counter and tidied up. I usually kept the place spotless, terrified of an impromptu health inspection. But that afternoon, the counter was littered with dirty scoops and drips of ice cream. What with splitting our crew between the store and the fair, me being busy investigating a murder, and Bree busy getting arrested, we’d been stretched a little thin.

  “Finn leave?” Bree emerged from the back of the store, using her apron to dry her hands.

  She’d been nervous around Finn ever since it came out that Alice was his daughter. I guess she’d been able to shove their one-night stand into a corner of her brain, pretend it had never happened, and she’d been able to laugh and joke and be normal around him. But she couldn’t ignore it anymore. Alice was a living, breathing reminder.

  “Yeah, but he’ll be right back.”

  She leaned back against the counter, lifting each leg in turn to flex her ankles. She insisted on wearing heels when she worked, and by the end of the day her calves were always aching.

  “Are we okay?” she asked.

  I wiped up a smear of butter pecan. “We’re okay.”

  When she exhaled, I realized she’d been holding her breath.

  “Dang, Bree, you and I have been
through everything together. I’ve been there for every one of your marriages and every one of your divorces. You helped me take care of my mom, and held me when she died. You were there to kick me in the pants when my marriage to Wayne ended, kept me from slipping into a horrible wallow of self-pity. At this point, I don’t think there’s anything on God’s green earth you could do to break us apart.”

  She nudged my leg with the toe of one strappy, high-heeled sandal. “What about you two?”

  I didn’t have to ask who she meant. “I don’t know.”

  “Tally, I couldn’t stand it if what I did came between you and Finn. You two, you were meant to be. For crying out loud, he came back after seventeen years. Seventeen years, and still you’ve got that magic between you. Don’t let that go.”

  I looked at her then. Saw the pain and pleading in her face. “Honey, I just don’t know yet. But I’ll tell you this. If things don’t work out between me and Finn, it’s not on you. Not one little bit. It’s on him, for leaving Dalliance all those years ago. It’s on me, for pushing him away in the first place. But it’s not on you.”

  A tear slipped down her cheek, and she pulled me close in a fierce hug.

  “Ahem.”

  Bree and I pulled apart when Finn cleared his throat.

  He stood there, a few feet away, looking at as both. He knew we’d reached some sort of peace. And I could see the question in his eyes, whether that peace included him.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but you two are gonna want to hear this.” He held up a stapled packet of papers. “It’s quite a story.”

  The Carberrys lived in the same moneyed neighborhood where Finn had grown up and to which he had returned to take care of his mother. Two-story brick houses squatted on generous squares of too-green lawn, each suburban fiefdom separated from the others by stands of bamboo and hedges of holly. The children in this neighborhood splashed away the summers in backyard pools, the primal scents of beef and charcoal adding a certain urgency to their late-evening games of capture-the-flag.

  Mike Carberry opened the door to Finn’s knock. He was in his midforties, had been just a year behind my ex-husband, Wayne, in school. Mike had grown up a few blocks over, left Dalliance to earn a degree in kinesiology at Oklahoma State before returning home to find a job. He’d stumbled into a position at the Dalliance News-Letter, but ended up being a decent reporter. He didn’t have a particular gift with words, but folks in Dalliance trusted him. That trust opened doors, and access mattered more than eloquence in small-town journalism.

  We’d caught him on a day off. He wore paint-stained cargo shorts, a Dalliance High Wild-Catters T-shirt, athletic socks, and a pair of orange molded-plastic clogs.

  “Hey, guys,” he said. “Didn’t expect you two. Come on in.”

  He held the door wide. As we passed him, he yawned hugely, opening his mouth wide enough that I could see the gold crowns on his molars. At the apex of the yawn, he reached back to grab a handful of his own mussed brown hair as though he were trying to hold his head on his shoulders.

  “Sorry,” he muttered. “I was napping.”

  I smiled. “I know the feeling. It’s been a crazy couple of days.”

  “Ain’t that the truth? Can I get y’all something to drink?”

  “No, thanks, Mike. Look, we were wondering if Eloise was at home. Maybe we could talk to you both for a few minutes.”

  Something in Finn’s tone must have signaled that we hadn’t just stopped by to hang out. Mike stood up a little straighter, a little more alert.

  “Sure. Eloise is out back, working in the garden.”

  Mike led the way through their tasteful house. With walls and floors covered in tones of coffee—from a rich mocha to a pale café au lait, furniture upholstered in traditional blues and dark greens, and absolutely no clutter, the house felt like a model home. I glanced at Mike’s rumpled clothes and wondered where his den was, the man cave where he was allowed to put his feet on the couch and eat in front of the TV.

  As we passed through the great room at the back of the house, I noticed a family portrait hanging over the mantel: Mike’s thinning hair combed neatly over his bald spot, Dani with her natural, caramel locks in a glossy bob, the whole family wearing matching red sweaters and khaki pants.

  In the picture, there was a look in Eloise’s eyes, a look that mingled triumph and challenge. As if sitting for that portrait was the equivalent of her planting her flag at the summit of Everest . . . and she was daring the world to try to knock her off.

  We slipped from the cool dim of the house through the sliding door in the back and into a perfect suburban retreat. The motor for the pool filters hummed softly, and in the distance I could hear children playing a rambunctious game of Marco Polo.

  Eloise knelt with her back to us, a blue latex pad protecting her knees from the pebbly aggregate of the pool’s patio. She wore a broad-brimmed straw hat, though she worked in the shade, yanking weeds from between hostas that were spaced with military precision, as though the plants were afraid to grow too close together. I looked around at the raised beds that circled the pool deck. All of the plants were spaced apart from each other, lonely soldiers guarding the perimeter of the Carberry compound.

  “Eloise,” Mike called. “We have visitors.”

  “What?” Eloise twisted around, raising the back of her wrist to her forehead and squinting at us from beneath the floppy brim of her hat. “Oh, Finn! And Tally? Good heavens, Mike. You should have told me we were expecting company.”

  “Sorry, Eloise. We dropped by without calling.”

  A flash of irritation tightened her features, but then she smiled as she struggled to her feet.

  “Our house is always open,” she said. “What brings you by?”

  “Maybe we should sit,” Mike suggested, ushering us to a round, umbrella-topped patio table.

  Finn held out an iron-backed chair for me. Mike tried to do the same for Eloise, but she brushed his hand away and seated herself.

  “What’s this all about?” Eloise bit out the question through teeth clenched in a hard smile.

  “I, uh, heard that Dani is sick,” I said.

  For a heartbeat, Eloise studied me with narrowed eyes. “Yes,” she said simply.

  Finn cleared his throat. “Mike? You never said anything.”

  Mike’s shoulders tensed, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Karla Faye down at the Hair Apparent said Dani’s lost her hair to chemo,” I continued. “She’s wearing a wig now.”

  “That’s right.”

  “There’s a rumor going around that Kristen Ver Steeg was going to disqualify Dani from the pageant because of her wig. Which sounds pretty coldhearted.”

  Eloise sniffed, as though the mere mention of Kristen had offended her sensibilities.

  “That’s what Cookie told you the night before Kristen was murdered, right? That Kristen was going to kick Dani out of the competition?”

  She looked over my shoulder, studying her own neat and soulless backyard. “So?”

  “So, Cookie was wrong,” Finn said.

  Eloise’s head snapped around. “What?”

  “Cookie was wrong. Kristen didn’t call for that meeting of the pageant judges because she wanted to disqualify Dani, or any other contestant. She was planning to recuse herself from the competition.”

  “I don’t . . . ,” Eloise stammered.

  “It’s true,” I said. “At the ice cream competition the other day, Jackie Conway mentioned that Kristen had contacted her the day before she was murdered and asked Jackie to take over all her responsibilities at the fair, including the pageant. I didn’t understand then why, and I was too distracted to ask, but now I know it was because of you.”

  “Me?” Eloise gasped.

  “Well, you and Dani,” I amended.

  Finn leaned forward. “We know about your lawsuit against Tucker Gentry and the One Word Bible Church.”

  Mike piped up. “It wasn’t right, what
that preacher did. He had no business interfering with how we raise our child, especially when it comes to something as important as our faith.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Tucker overstepped his bounds. But that doesn’t excuse what you did.”

  The sliding glass door whooshed open and Dani bounded out onto the patio. “Mom? I want to go. . . Oh. Hey, Mr. Harper.” She glanced at me, puzzled.

  “Hi, Dani,” Finn said. “You look like you’re feeling good.”

  Dani’s face turned crimson beneath the bangs of her espresso-colored wig. She wore tiny denim shorts, a tight Texas Rangers ring tee, and flip-flops. Chipped turquoise polish coated her finger- and toenails. She was the picture of the all-American girl.

  “I am, Mr. Harper. Thanks.” Her mouth tightened, and she slid a hard glare toward her mother.

  “Dani’s been doing much better. It’s a miracle, really,” Eloise said, a tremor in her voice.

  “Aw, come on, Eloise,” Finn said. “Let’s cut it out, okay? We know it’s not a miracle. We know Dani is perfectly fine. Always has been.”

  “What?” Eloise gasped, drawing herself rigid with outrage. “How dare you come into our house and—”

  “Mom! Enough. Jeez, they know, okay?”

  Mike slumped in his chair, as if he wanted to slither under the table and just trickle away. Eloise looked back and forth, from me and Finn to her daughter.

  The silence stretched out to uncomfortable lengths, while Eloise tried to figure out her next move. Finally, Dani made it for her.

  With a sigh, she pulled off the wig and plucked off the skullcap she wore beneath it. She sighed again, this time in relief, as she ruffled her fingers through the short, purple hair she had liberated.

  “That thing is so freakin’ hot,” she grumbled.

  In an instant, she transformed from all-American girl to the goth girl I’d seen canoodling with young Matt the night of the karaoke contest. Matt was cheating on Dani with Dani, two sides of the very same girl.