Scent to Her Grave

by Yasmine Galenorn

  And Melinda and her aunt Heddy desperately wanted to be accepted by the snot-nosed group of upstarts, but neither would ever make it further than the outer court. They simply didn’t have the necessary cachet.

  “Is that a Donna Karan?” I pointed to Melinda’s dress. “It’s pretty.”

  Allison broke in, with a fractured laugh. “Oh, no, that’s a knock-off. It’s actually a dress my cousin bought me for my birthday, but it’s too big for me and besides, I’m totally loyal to Versace and won’t wear anything else this season. So I gave it to Melly.” She smiled at Melinda, showing just a little too much teeth. Oh yeah, she was keeping Melinda in line. One of those friends that some women kept around to make themselves look better.

  Melinda blushed and fiddled with her nails. I had already noticed the scuffed toes on her shoes. That alone was fashion faux pas enough to keep her out of Allison’s little club. But her long straight hair shimmered gold under the light, and when she smiled, she lit up the room. Quite different from her aunt in that respect.

  I studied her a little more. Behind that desperate need to please I had the feeling there was a good brain, but little self-esteem. I sighed. Yet another young woman cowed by the unattainable goal of perfection. It occurred to me that perhaps Melinda wasn’t altogether happy with the role she was trying to play. Perhaps her desperation to fit in was borne out of an attempt to pacify family rather than her own desires.

  “Well, I think it’s pretty, regardless of whether it’s a knock-off. And that’s really what counts. Something hideous isn’t going to be appealing just because you slap a designer label on it.” I flashed Melinda a wide smile.

  Allison broke into a throaty laugh. “True… true,” she said. “But the lack of a label doesn’t make for appeal, either. In some quarters, hideous might just be considered gorgeous. Look at the goth kids. After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?” With a soft pout, she gave me a quick wink.

  I arched one eyebrow. “Touché.” So Allison was smart as well as beautiful. She looked like she’d just stepped out of a planning meeting for a debutante ball. Southern charm with northern reserve.

  The waitress hurried over to our table again. The girls ordered plain salads with dry toast on the side, diet Cokes to wash them down. Melinda looked longingly at the menu as she handed it back to the waitress.

  I scanned the menu quickly. “I’ll have a cheddar, Swiss, and roast beef on sourdough with all the trimmings, and black tea with lemon, please.”

  Melinda gave me a little “o” of surprise, but said nothing. Allison raised one eyebrow. “Skip breakfast?” she asked.

  “No, I like food,” I said. “And I’ve got a fast metabolism.”

  She murmured something that I didn’t quite catch. Not worth pursuing. What Allison Montgomery thought of my eating habits had absolutely nothing to do with why I’d asked them to lunch. I took a deep breath. Time to wade in and hope for the best.

  “As you know, our gardener, Trevor Wilson, has been accused of murdering Lydia. We don’t think he did it.” Before they could say a word, I held my hand. “I know, I know—he had motive. But frankly, I don’t believe he’s capable of killing anybody.”

  An undercurrent rippled between them and Allison asked, “What do you want from us?”

  I gave her the once-over. “I know Lydia was seeing somebody else, so don’t try to cover it up. A man that may—or may not—be dangerous. I’m thinking that we shouldn’t overlook the possibility that he might be her killer.”

  Melinda shrugged. “Well, if she was seeing someone else, and I’m not saying she was, maybe she didn’t want anybody to know about it. Her reputation had to remain spotless in order to win that contest.”

  Bingo. Just as I thought—Mystery Man was somebody who could have hurt Lydia’s reputation. Melinda, like her aunt, seemed to have trouble with the art of keeping secrets. In fact, I’d bet that she’d never be able to hide anything from anybody.

  “You’re right,” I said. “And if she was dating somebody who could have tarnished it, maybe he was also capable of murder.”

  Allison shifted in her seat, picking at a breadstick. “Lydia wouldn’t want anybody to know—”

  Time to wake them up a little. “Listen girls, Lydia’s dead. Dead as in forever. Dead as in stone-cold-on-the-slab, -won’t-ever-see-her-next-birthday dead. She’s not coming back. And a young man is accused of snuffing out her life and I don’t think he did it. You went to school with Trevor. Whether or not you like him is moot. The question I’m asking you is this: Can you honestly sit there, look me in the face, and tell me you believe that Trevor murdered Lydia?”

  Allison closed her eyes briefly, and for one moment I saw a distraught young woman instead of a polished mannequin. She snapped the breadstick in half and tossed it on her plate. “No, I guess I can’t.”

  She knew something, all right. “Who was Lydia dating, Allison? You were her best friend, from what I hear. She would have told you, of all people.”

  “Dating wasn’t exactly the word I’d give it,” she muttered, and Melinda gave her a startled look. Allison shrugged it off. “Melly, they’re going to find out sooner or later. I might as well tell them what I know before things get ugly.” She didn’t look happy about the idea but with a little more prodding, I could probably get her to cave.

  “Good idea. Somehow I doubt if you want the chief of police to show up on your doorstep. This way, nobody else has to know you were the one who divulged the information.” One thing I’d learned from all the cop shows I watched with my aunt was that the fear of the rumor mill often outweighed the fear of spilling the beans.

  Melinda toyed with her salad, moving the lettuce around with her fork but not eating. She was eyeing my sandwich with a look that reminded me of a vulture. Poor thing was probably starved. I fought back the desire to push aside her plate and order her a real meal.

  “You might as well tell her, Ali,” she said. “You know more about him than I do. I only know what you told me.”

  I leaned across the table and gazed into Allison’s eyes. “If you want to help find the person who murdered your friend, you’ll tell me what you know.”

  Allison sighed. “I don’t know his name—really, I don’t.” She dug through her purse and tossed a packet of matches on the table in front of me. “All I know is that he works at this club.”

  I picked up the matches. The flap had a blue dragon etched on a white background and the logo below it read: The Blue Dragon. The address was from a seedier part of Seattle. I tried to envision the neighborhood—I’d spent a lot of time driving through it on my way to the outskirts of the city when I was working temporary jobs. Then, something in the back of my mind clicked.

  The Blue Dragon—a recessed hole in the wall that I’d passed on my way to Xander Dreams Potpourri Company, where I’d churned out hundreds of buckets of a dried, heavily scented mishmash waiting to be shoved into plastic bags and fobbed off as the real thing. Shortly after taking that job, I got hired by the Alternative Life Center and turned in my resignation. Working at Xander’s hadn’t been my proudest moment, but it had paid the rent for a few months.

  “I remember this place. I never went in, but there were always a few well-dressed thugs standing around outside. She was dating somebody who works there?”

  Allison nodded. “Uh huh. She wouldn’t talk about him much, though. And I think…” Allison paused and her eyes flickered up to meet mine.

  “Yes?”

  Melinda cleared her throat. “We might as well tell her the rest.” She turned to me. “Three weeks ago, Lydia told us she had broken up with Trevor. She said he was a wimp and could only hurt her career.”

  “They’d been going together for quite a while, hadn’t they? Since before I moved back, and that was in December. I seem to remember Trevor mentioning Lydia shortly before Christmas.”

  “They started dating in September. Lydia won the contest in February.�
�� Melinda toyed with her salad. “Trevor really believed she loved him. I think she was duping him all along.”

  “I don’t think she was,” Allison broke in. “But she didn’t respect him—she liked ambition, and Trevor was happy with a simple life.”

  “Why would she go out with somebody she didn’t respect?” I asked.

  Melinda stared at me like I was blind. “Have you seen the man? He’s gorgeous. And let’s face it, eye candy is a whole lot better than nothing until the real thing comes along. Lydia was in a dry spell, as far as her love life was concerned.”

  “But then she won the contest,” I prodded.

  Allison nodded. “She was supposed to go to New York next month—the last week of June. The week after Easter, we were trying on new clothes and Lydia pulled off her blouse and she had this big bruise on her upper arm. I asked her what had happened and she said that she tripped and fell against the corner of her dresser. But the bruise wasn’t an accident—it looked like fingerprints to me. Like somebody had grabbed her by the arm and pinched her really hard.”

  “We asked her if Trevor did it. She said ‘no,’ and that’s when she told us that she was breaking up with him.” Melinda bit into another breadstick. “Things really got out of hand between them after that.”

  So Lydia had been abused. Had Trevor been the culprit? Or her mystery man? If Trev had been the one, I had my doubts as to whether she’d have kept quiet about it. Obviously, she didn’t want anybody to know who hurt her. But why had she broken up with Trevor? Could she be in love with somebody who beat her? I shuddered.

  “Do you know if she ever loved Trevor?” I asked. “He seems to think that they had a future together. I wonder if maybe he proposed to her?”

  Another unspoken look passed between them, then Allison took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You know a lot more than I thought you did. Trevor did propose. Told her he wanted to marry her and have a baby. That was oh… a month or so ago?” She looked at Melinda for confirmation.

  Melinda nodded. “Yeah, about then. About a week before the bruises showed up.”

  “Lydia told us that she didn’t love him, that it wasn’t a good idea but she hadn’t said no yet,” Allison continued. “Then she made a trip up to Seattle and when she returned, she told Trevor to beat it. That’s the last she ever mentioned getting married. It was right after that when we saw the marks on her arm.”

  “So he loved her and she… wasn’t ready for a nice guy.”

  “Oh, it’s more than that,” Melinda said. “Her family would never have accepted him. Trevor comes from a poor family. The Wangs are rich and they didn’t see him as good husband material. They also didn’t want her marrying outside their ethnicity. Family honor or something like that.”

  That, I already knew. Some loyalties ran deep and Lydia would never have dared to disappoint her parents that way, dragon lady or not. “What do you think happened over in Seattle?”

  Allison shrugged. “I have no idea what happened to her. She wouldn’t say and I’m not going to speculate.”

  I could tell that Allison’s patience was wearing thin, and Melinda seemed lost in her own thoughts. One last question. “This other man… suppose he knew something that kept her in his power? Maybe he scared her enough to push Trevor away? What could he give her that Trevor couldn’t?”

  Allison pushed back her chair. “Well, that’s a nobrainer.”

  “What’s the answer, then?”

  With a gaze as steady as a rock, she said, “I think this other guy was her dealer. I think she got her speed from him.”

  I fell back against my seat. “Speed? Lydia was using?”

  Allison snorted. “Using? How do you think she kept so thin? She was hopped up most of the time. I doubt that Trevor knew. He wouldn’t have put up with it. Although it was against the contest rules, I think Radiance Cosmetics looked the other way. In fact, I’ll bet almost all the girls were on something—diet drugs, mainly. If anything about it hit the papers though, Radiance would have booted Lydia out the door—they have their reputation to protect. Do not pass Go, do not collect your prize package.”

  I gave her a long look as she picked up her purse and motioned for Melinda to follow her out the door.

  “Thank you both,” I said. “If you remember anything else, let me know. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

  I poured myself another cup of tea and added lemon. So Lydia had been a speed freak. No wonder she was so tightly wired. There was a lot more to her than met the eye. And maybe, just maybe, her mystery boyfriend-slash-dealer held the answer to who murdered her. Or maybe, her mystery man had a reason to want her dead.

  Chapter 12

  ON MY WAY over to talk to Kyle, the thoughts whirled through my mind. What if Lydia’s boyfriend really was a drug dealer and she’d ratted him out? Or he thought she had? Or he’d gotten worried that she would? And what if he thought she might tell Trevor about him? Maybe he’d kill two birds with one stone—shut her up and frame somebody else who had a reason to be jealous.

  But that didn’t solve the question of why she’d been killed in our shop, or how the murderer had gained access and lured her inside, or why Aphrodite’s Mirror was missing.

  I almost managed to run a red light in front of the police station but saw it just in time to stomp on the brakes. Fortunately, nobody was in back of me, and I managed to clear my head enough to focus on parking.

  Kyle was behind his desk when I knocked on his door. He motioned me in. “What can I do for you?” he asked, taking off his wire-rimmed glasses. As he leaned back in his chair, he looked comfortable, more than I’d ever seen him. His desk was clean and tidy. Neat stacks of paperwork lined one box, and another held a handful of letters and memos.

  Feeling a sudden goodwill toward my prickly nemesis, I said, “You were born to be a policeman, weren’t you? I can tell that you love your job.”

  Startled, he gave me a tentative smile. “Well, I can’t fault you there. You’re right—I was born to be a cop. It’s what I do best. Now what can I do for you? You find out anything important?”

  “I think so.” I filled him in on what the girls had told me and showed him the matchbook. “Somebody needs to go over there and check on this guy. What if he killed Lydia?”

  Kyle frowned. “All very interesting, but just how am I supposed to do that? And it still wouldn’t explain why he picked your aunt’s shop for the scene of the crime. Or how he got in. Do you have anything more to go on?”

  “Apparently Lydia was bruised up on a return trip from seeing him. He sounds like a rough character.”

  He waved me into a chair. “There could be lots of explanations for her bruises. Trevor, for one. Don’t forget that he was arrested for assault once before. Or she could have fallen into or hit a door. Or her father might have slapped her—I gather Charles Wang isn’t above disciplining his children with the rod, even the ones who are over eighteen.”

  Damn, I’d forgotten about Trev’s record. And I hadn’t known that Mr. Wang was abusive, though it fit in with what Allison had told me about him not wanting Lydia to marry outside their ethnicity. Which brought up an entirely new thought.

  “If Charles Wang hits his kids, maybe he killed Lydia?”

  Kyle shook his head. “We checked. He’s been known to bust their butts, but never anything much worse than that. He was home the night Lydia was murdered and can prove it. Nope, he’s clean.”

  “Okay. So what about the drug allegations? Can you have Lydia’s body exhumed? If there were drugs in her system, that might give more credence to the theory that this guy is responsible.”

  Kyle blocked me at the pass on that one, too. “Yeah, the lab results tested positive for speed, but there’s not much we can do. Her levels were fairly high, but not enough to OD on. You’re right, though. It looks like she was a chronic user. But it’s too late to exhume the body for further testing. The Wangs had her cremated yesterday. Th
ere’s nothing left of Lydia now but an urn full of ashes.”

  He stared at the top of his desk. “I’d like to help you. I really would, but I can’t afford to send a man over to Seattle to check on everybody who works in or patronizes this club. What if the guy is just a customer? What then? Waste days on a wild-goose chase? I don’t have the budget.”

  “But what if this dude’s involved?” I slammed my hands down on his desk and leaned across to stare him in the face. Didn’t he understand the consequences? “Trevor’s life could be at stake here, Kyle.”

  “Listen, I know you’re looking for every possible angle to help out the kid, and I don’t blame you.” He tossed the matches back across the desk. “I’m sorry, Persia, but I have to have more to go on than that.”

  Disappointed, I picked up the packet and shoved it in my purse. “You aren’t even going to consider the possibility?”

  “I didn’t say that.” He sighed. “Look, you bring me something solid, like a name, and I’ll do what I can.” Before I could say another word, he held up his hand. “Whatever you bring to me has to be something that I can act on. Something substantial. I recommend that you talk to Trevor’s lawyer. He might want to hire a P.I. to go take a look. Then maybe I can do something. But with the evidence that we have against Trevor, there’s no real justification I can make to slow down the trial.”

  I sighed. “All right, I’ll talk to Winthrop about it.” I took a deep breath. “Now, on a totally different subject, what do I need to do in order to take out a restraining order?”

  He leaned forward, eyes narrowing. “Somebody bothering you?”

  “Yeah, my ex-boyfriend showed up drunk out of his mind last night.” I laid out the bare bones of the situation. “I don’t want Elliot hanging around, especially if his friends are anywhere near to getting out of prison. Big bad, you know. Not conducive to good health.”