Dead Body Language (22 page)

“Wow! You have so many,” I said, fingering the collection. There must have been several thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry in the drawer. “Don’t you worry about theft?”

He looked at me, then called out what looked like, “Bitch!” snapping his finger. Unseen until that moment, a Great Dane emerged from under the table. The dog stretched, stood erect, and either smiled or snarled, depending on your attitude. I chose to call it a smile.

I smiled back. “Down, killer—uh,” I said. “Nice doggy. Sit. Roll over. Play dead.” The dog continued to smile/snarl. “You call her Bitch?”

Wolf said “Butch,” then something I didn’t catch, mainly because I was looking at his dog. The hound relaxed, circled me and sniffed Casper on me before returning to his spot under the bench. Then Wolf nodded toward a security system panel on a far wall. I got the picture. Fort Knox.

I nodded. “Butch! Good. Yes. Well.” I went back to rifling through the rings until I found one that looked oddly familiar. “This one …” I held it up.

Wolf shook his head. “Not for sale. Sorry.” He took it from my hand and slipped it into his pocket. That pocket was filling up.

I had seen that ring before. I made mental pictures of people’s hands—Celeste, French, Sluice, Jilda, Dan …

Lacy. She was wearing it—or one like it—when she’d come to my office. And again at her funeral. In fact, hadn’t she been buried with it? Odd—had Wolf made a copy of it? I supposed with all the jewelry-making equipment in the shop, Wolf could duplicate just about any gold jewelry pieces he fancied.

I sifted through a few more, said I didn’t see anything just right, then thanked Wolf and told him I’d be back with my uncle so he could choose something for himself. Wolf nodded, but didn’t follow me out of the back room and into the main part of the store. As I left the double swinging doors, a young couple was headed inside.

I swung by the Nugget Café to think, and sipped a toxic coffee and ate a blueberry bagel with strawberry cream cheese. As I glanced around the restaurant, it seemed as if everyone sported fancy gold rings. Were all of them from Wolf’s store?

They all looked real. But you could tell the real thing from the imitations easily, if you took a moment to examine them. The weight and feel of real gold is something you cannot duplicate. You’d have to be dead not to know you weren’t really wearing the authentic ore.

You’d have to be dead.

Like Lacy. I thought about Lacy’s fingers and the scraped knuckle covered with makeup. I thought about Sluice’s gold ring with the initials, “L.F.S.” Had Wolf
“borrowed” her ring, made a copy, and then replaced it? I thought another moment. Maybe he didn’t replace it with the original. Maybe he made a copy in faux gold and replaced that on Lacy’s dead finger. Who would know the difference?

If he’d done this to Lacy, had he done it with others? Was Wolf somehow removing the deceaseds’ jewelry, copying it, then replacing the real thing with gold-plated phonies? If that were true, he could sell the real gold to the tourists at a tremendous profit with no one the wiser—except the inside person helping with the exchange.

Sluice Jackson?

Sluice could have done the switching. He had full access to the mortuary and cemetery grounds. He was there at all hours. And he had that gold ring with him when he fell into the open grave. French had reported the loss of someone’s rings this morning.

But if any of this was true, and not just my imagination, what did it have to do with Lacy Penzance?

Nothing that I could figure. I was getting off track. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that there had to be some connection.

“God, Connor, so much coffee isn’t good for you, you know. You should switch to, like, herbal tea or something,” Jilda said, as she cleared away the boneyard of bagel remnants I hadn’t managed to squeeze in.

I didn’t think so much mascara was good for her either, or so much nail glue or hair color, but what did I know? I wasn’t the Surgeon General and if Jilda Renfrew wanted to risk her health, it was her business. Coffee was mine. Sure, it tasted like poison, but I didn’t figure it would actually kill me. For awhile.

I reached out and took Jilda’s hand to get a close-up of her nails. They were painted in hot pink with silver moons and featured a tiny diamond at each tip, trimmed with two thin diagonal gold strips. She also wore two gold rings, free-form in shape, on both her middle fingers.

“Killer nails, Jilda. Did you do that?”

“Yeah. You should come by the shop some afternoon when I’m there, Con. I’d do you up so cool.”

“You do a lot of nails around here, don’t you.”

“Oh, my God, yeah. Everyone in town practically. Women, that is. The guys haven’t gotten into it yet, but you never know. Some people thought the cowboys would never wear earrings either and look at them all.”

I tried to picture Dan Smith with red nail tips, enhanced with gold and diamonds. I preferred his nails the way they were: short, ragged, and bitten to the quick.

“Jilda, did you ever do Lacy’s nails?”

Jilda shook her head, turned her back to me for a moment, then turned back. I caught the end of it.

“… but she was a regular customer over at Nail It To You.”

“How come she didn’t go to you? People say you’re the best.” Vanity never questions veracity.

She blushed a little and shrugged a shoulder. “We didn’t get along that well, you know? When her husband died, she like started flirting with all the men in town. Even my Frenchy. A friend of mine caught them out to dinner one night over in Whiskey Slide, and I was totally pissed. But he said they used to go together, you know, back in high school, and it was for old times. He said she was real lonely and he was just trying to help her and all. But I know she was totally on the make.”

“So he didn’t see her after that? As far as you know?” I prodded.

Jilda sat down across from me and looked me in the eye. I could see dots of makeup shadowing beneath her eyes from excessive mascara coupled with repeated blinking.

She leaned in when she spoke. “Look, she was kinda desperate after Reuben died. It’s understandable. But she had some therapy with Celeste. You know she got her face done, her boobs lifted, her tummy tucked, and then had a liposuction, a few months after Reuben died. No one was supposed to know, but she didn’t fool me. I’m training to be an esthetician, after all.”

“Esthe-what?”

“A beauty expert.”

“So Lacy had cosmetic surgery?”

Jilda bit her lip and nodded. “It was like she was a new woman. She started going out with a bunch of guys. Actually, only the ones who had some sort of status in the town, like lawyers, doctors, even the sheriff, and of course she tried Frenchy, but not for long.”

The sheriff. He’d never mentioned it. “What about Wolf?” I asked, sipping on the coffee and blinking back the tears in my eyes from the taste.

“No way! They didn’t get along at all.”

“But he made a ring for her, didn’t he?”

Jilda cleaned out her nails. “I don’t know anything about that. All I know is, she thought he was a loser. She used to walk out of a room when he entered and make rude comments under her breath about him. I don’t know what her problem was, not that Wolf is the easiest person to get along with. Then again, neither was she when you really got to know her. She didn’t like me that much, either.”

“So you don’t think anything really happened between French and Lacy those times they got together?” I remembered what French had said about going out more than once.

Jilda blinked. Uh-oh. Had I gone too far? Maybe she only knew about one meeting. Jilda looked away, didn’t speak for a few moments, then worked on her nails again, a little more urgently.

“I remember French was kind of weird for a couple of weeks there, when she was coming onto him. But he snapped out of it. I saw to that.”

“Jilda, do you have any idea who Lacy might have been dating right before she died? Apparently she was involved with someone, but nobody seems to know who.” I figured if anyone would know, it would be the town waitress/manicurist.

Jilda put a nail in her mouth for a moment. “No. Could have been anyone. Just as long as it wasn’t French, that’s all I care. French would never cheat on me, I know that now. Celeste even says so.”

“Celeste? How would she know?”

Jilda giggled into her hand. “You know, I thought she might have been a lesbian or something for a while there. She never dates or anything. Never seemed to be interested in men. But I figure she’s just real dedicated to her job. She’s real good at helping people overcome their sadness and stuff when a relative dies. She really helped Mrs. Penzance. I hope she’s there for me someday.”

“How do you know she doesn’t date anyone?”

“It’s a small town. French told me he asked her out when she first came to the mortuary—before we got involved. But Celeste wasn’t interested, thank God. French is no slacker, you know. She’s pretty and all, for her age, you know. She told me once that French was a good catch. But I guess they just didn’t hit it off that way.”

“Anyone else?”

“Well, I know Wolf has hit on her, too, but she fanned him. That’s why I thought she might be gay. Wolf’s a stud, you know, even for an old guy. I wouldn’t kick him out of the covers. But Celeste wasn’t interested. Then when Lacy’s husband died, Celeste spent so much time with her, I thought there might be something more between them, you know? Oh, God, I shouldn’t be saying this! It’ll be in your paper tomorrow!”

I smiled reassuringly. “No, no. I just want to know more about her so I can write a good story. I won’t put any of that personal stuff in it. The information I print has to be fact, not opinion. You don’t think Celeste and Lacy were, uh, more than friends?”

She held her nails up for scrutiny. “Nah. But even if they were, it really doesn’t matter, you know, just so it doesn’t involve me. Gross. I’d die if some woman came onto me. God.” She giggled again behind her hand, her nails forming a kind of glittery fan.

“Jilda, do you have any idea what happened to Lacy? Do you think someone around here might have had a reason to kill her?”

Jilda rubbed the imaginary lipstick off her teeth, ran her tongue over them, and smacked her lips. “I really
don’t know. I wish I did. I’m totally dying to find out who did it. God, what if it
is
someone in town? If she was messing with someone’s husband or boyfriend, I wouldn’t blame them, you know, if they got even. I might have done it myself if French hadn’t come back. Well, maybe not killed her exactly. But I would have been real, real mad.”

A
fter phoning the locksmith to order a new set of locks for my diner, I thought about stopping by Croaky Wheeler’s to see about Lacy’s five-thousand-dollar check. I could use a few more megs for the computer and the Chevy would look a lot cherrier with some body work. But I decided to hold off. The money wasn’t really mine. And it might obscure my reasons for trying to figure out what happened to Lacy.

I headed for the mortuary. The place was beginning to feel like my home away from home. Not a good feeling.

Celeste was conferring with an elderly woman when I entered. The woman looked distraught, forcing a brave smile through tear-rimmed eyes. Celeste caressed the back of the woman’s hand, working her magic. Gazing intently into the grief counselor’s eyes, the woman seemed to pour out her heart to the nurturing friend of the bereaved. No wonder Celeste was so good at her job. She knew how to listen.

Celeste caught sight of me, dipped her head slightly in my direction and gently pulled back from the distressed woman. I watched her give the woman’s hand a couple of
let’s-wrap-it-up pats, then write something down on her business card. In a few moments Celeste walked the grieving client to the door of Memory Kingdom, arm around her as if she were a grown daughter comforting her aging mother.

Celeste closed the door and wiped what might have been a tear—or a dust particle—from her eye. “Poor Mrs. Kossow. She’s lost without Allen. Just lost. I hope I can help her. No family to speak of. She’s going to be so lonely. That’s the worst part for most of these women.”

Celeste seemed genuinely concerned. Or maybe she was using skills garnered from years of working in Hollywood. After all, wasn’t everyone in L.A. trying to become an actor, working the restaurants and beauty salons and morgues on the side until that all-important call came from the studio?

“She lost her husband?” I asked.

Celeste smoothed the front of her silk blouse, as if brushing away all contact with the woman who had just left. “Cancer. He was seventy-eight years old. She’s only sixty-nine. She’s still got lots of life left in her. I hope we can spend a few hours together. I really think I can help her.”

“Through counseling?”

“I hope so. Many widowed people are without friends or loved ones at that age. They can always use someone to talk to.” Celeste sighed. “So what are you doing here, Connor? I hope you haven’t had bad news.”

“What? Oh, my aunt. No, thank goodness. I’m here on another matter, Celeste. It’s about Lacy Penzance.”

Celeste looked puzzled. She crossed her arms in front of her.