Revenge of the Chili Queens Read online

  It took a couple seconds for the sense of this to sink in. When it did, I turned as much as I was able in the confines of my seat belt so that I could see Nick better. “You were married?”

  “For like a second and a half.”

  “And Dom . . .”

  “Dom and Nichole—”

  “Wait!” Yes, we were talking about a serious subject, but really? I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Nick and Nichole? You’re kidding, right?”

  “It gets worse. Her family called us Nicky and Nicki.”

  “Sweet.”

  “Too.”

  “What was she like?”

  Since we were stopped at a red light, he had a chance to give me a sour look. “That’s not what we’re talking about.”

  “We’re talking about Dom and how he stole your wife and—” I didn’t like it one bit, but I couldn’t deny it; my stomach soured. “Wife or ex-wife?” I asked Nick.

  “Definitely ex.”

  I hoped he didn’t notice when I let out a breath of relief. “So you and Dom were partners. And you and Nicki were married and she was . . . ?”

  “Cheating on me.”

  “Which wasn’t what I was going to ask. Not yet, anyway. I need some background so that I can understand the whole thing better. What was she like?”

  He slapped the steering wheel in frustration. “She was like the woman I thought I wanted to spend the rest of my life with!” he said.

  “What does she do for a living?”

  “Really?” Nick rolled his eyes. “I got in the car with the Chili Chick and now I’m sitting with Dr. Phil?”

  “I’m curious.”

  “You’re nosy. And none of this matters. Nicki is the office manager for a cosmetic surgeon. There, you satisfied?”

  “What does she look like?”

  “She’s a blonde.”

  “You like blondes.” I hoped my disappointment didn’t ring as loud in Nick’s ears as it did in my own.

  “She’s tall.”

  And I’m a shrimp.

  “She’s smart.”

  I wasn’t willing to go there so instead I said, “But not smart enough to resist those dreamy eyes of Dom’s.”

  Nick made a face. “Did he have dreamy eyes?”

  “You were partners for three years and you never saw that his eyes were dreamy? What kind of cop were you?”

  “Not that kind of cop.”

  “Well, he did have dreamy eyes. But dang, what was that Nichole chick thinking? You have dreamy eyes, too.”

  For the first time since we’d started the conversation, the barest of smiles relieved Nick’s thunderous expression. “Do I?”

  I pretended that smile didn’t sizzle through the space that separated us and heat me inside and out, and kept my voice light when I told him, “I suppose some people might think so.”

  “Well, Nichole was one of those people, but obviously, she has a pretty short attention span.”

  I didn’t even know Nichole and I thought she was crazy. I’d met Dom, and while his eyes were plenty dreamy, he didn’t even begin to compare with Nick. Especially if he was the kind of sleazebag who would fool around with his partner’s wife.

  “I guess I can see why you were mad at Dom,” I said.

  “I was. Mad enough to request a transfer out of homicide. I couldn’t partner with him anymore.”

  This, I understood. “You know all that only makes you look guiltier.”

  “I know.”

  “And you’ve told the cops?”

  “I’ve told them.”

  “And that detective . . .” I didn’t need to remind myself that she was a blonde. “What does she say?”

  “She says the same thing I say. If I was going to kill Dom, I would have done it back when I walked in from work early one day and found him in bed with Nichole. I wouldn’t have waited this long. And I couldn’t possibly have known he was here in San Antonio. After I left the police force, I never heard another word about Dom. Not until Monday night, anyway.”

  “Unless even after all that time you were still mad. Or jealous. Or if you still care about your wife.”

  “My ex-wife, and believe me when I tell you that after what she put me through, I no longer care.”

  This, too, I understood, because I’d had the same sort of reaction when I found out what Edik did to me. Sure, it hurt like hell, but that wasn’t because I wanted to get back together with him. After what happened, my hurt was all about betrayal. Just like Nick’s must have been.

  Still, I understood that there was a huge gulf between that sensible little voice in your head that tells you you’re better off and that hollow feeling in the pit of your gut, the one that tells you that it’s going to be a long, long time before you meet someone who can hug you so tight, it will put all your broken pieces back together again.

  “Do you miss her?” I asked Nick.

  “Not anymore.”

  “Do you miss the police force?”

  “Like hell.”

  “Are you sorry you beat up Dom?”

  Nick barked out a laugh. “Not even a little. And speaking of Dom . . .” He slowed at the entrance to an apartment complex and turned down a driveway lined with blooming roses. “We’re here.”

  Just thinking about what we were up to caused a crazy beat to start up inside my rib cage. I sat up and looked around.

  The apartment complex that Dom had once called home was a series of four-story, light-colored stone buildings. Each unit included a balcony. Nick pulled up and parked outside the clubhouse. I couldn’t help but notice that he kept far away from the nearest streetlight.

  “Dom lived in the clubhouse?”

  “It wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense for us to park right in front of his building, would it?” He locked the car, and instead of starting off down the sidewalk, he grabbed my hand and pulled me behind the building.

  “We’re staying in the shadows,” I said.

  “Let’s just say that we don’t want to be too obvious.”

  “And how exactly are we going to break in without being too obvious?”

  He didn’t have an answer to this. In fact, he didn’t say another word until we’d walked all the way to the last building in the complex.

  “Third floor,” Nick said.

  I glanced up. It wasn’t late, and light shone through the windows of most of the apartments.

  “We’re not climbing the balconies, are we?” I asked him.

  “Don’t have to.” Nick reached into his pocket and pulled out a key.

  “Let me guess. Detective Gilkenny.”

  For this brilliant bit of observation, I got a sour look. “Don’t be ridiculous. I told you, the cops don’t know we’re here.” He stuck the key in the front door and we went inside.

  “Then how—”

  Nick pocketed the key and hit the call button on the elevator.

  “Nichole,” he said.

  “She lives here?”

  He shook his head. “She’s visited a time or two. She and Dom were trying to reconcile.”

  We stepped into the elevator, and I tried to make sense of this. “So they were together and then . . .”

  “And then they broke up,” Nick said. “And just recently, they were thinking about getting back together again. Nichole came to visit a couple times.”

  “You know this because . . .”

  “Because someone had to tell Nichole that Dom was dead.”

  The elevator stopped at the third floor, and we got off.

  “How did she take the news?” I asked.

  Nick didn’t so much shrug as he twitched his shoulders. “Like I said, they were trying to reconcile. A stupid move on Nichole’s part, if you ask me. But she didn’t ask me.”

  “She d
idn’t kill him, did she?”

  He shot me a look. “She was in LA.”

  “And you know this . . . how?”

  “I actually checked.” His brow furrowed; he hated admitting this. “On Tuesday morning, I called the doctor’s office where she works. I told them I’d misplaced her phone number and needed to talk to her. She was at work that day.”

  “And the day before?”

  “Thank you for the suggestion, Sherlock. I do have some experience. I thought of this, too, and I asked. She was at work the day before. All day and into the evening. No way she could have gotten to San Antonio on Monday night then back to LA for work on Tuesday morning.”

  “But she did send you a key.”

  Nick took the key out of his pocket and stuck it in the lock on the front door of apartment 316. “She said I had to do whatever I could to find Dom’s killer.”

  “So we’re not breaking and entering?”

  He pushed the front door open, looked around quickly to make sure no one was nearby, and ushered me inside. “No,” he said, “we’re not.”

  I was actually kind of disappointed.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Nice!” I crooned, when Nick arced the beam of a flashlight against a black leather couch and chair, sleek stainless and glass tables, understated artwork, and a wet bar along the far wall of the living room. “Dom had good taste. I mean, in apartments,” I added quickly, just so Nick didn’t get some sort of idea that I was referring to Nichole.

  “Dom was a no-good lowlife.” Maybe he did think I was referring to his ex, but even if he did, Nick didn’t take it personally. With a practiced eye, he glanced around. There was a wall of windows to our right and a balcony outside that overlooked a garden where there were benches set along a brick walk. Two buildings over and to our left, I could see just a smidgen of the swimming pool that belonged to the apartment complex and the couple dozen people in it splashing around.

  Following the beam of the flashlight, I sidled toward the dining room on our left and into the galley kitchen with its stainless appliances and Corian counters in a shade that, in the dim light, reminded me of buttered rum.

  “So what are we looking for?” I asked Nick, careful to keep my voice down when I followed him along a hallway and into a bedroom.

  “Anything.” Since the bed had been left unmade, it didn’t make much difference when Nick threw back the blankets. He looked under the mattress, too, and since he was the one with the flashlight, there wasn’t much I could do. Just like in the living room, there were floor-to-ceiling windows on one wall. Curious, I peeked around the vertical blinds and saw that outside, the balcony continued around from the living room. There was a small table and chairs set up there, and I thought about what it must be like to roll out of bed and have a morning cup of coffee on the balcony. While I was at it, I dreamed about that big ol’ swimming pool I could see from there, too, and how a dip on a hot evening sounded like heaven on earth.

  “You do the dresser.”

  Nick’s command snapped me out of my thoughts. He was done with the bed and the nightstand next to it, and he flashed the light toward the opposite wall and a chest of drawers. The light glanced against a photo in a frame, and I picked it up and studied a smiling Dom who had his arm around a blonde with big dark eyes, a killer figure that was shown to perfection in a tight-fitting red sundress, and an ear-to-ear grin.

  “Told you they were attempting a reconciliation.” Nick took the picture out of my hands and set it back where it came from.

  “That’s Nichole.”

  He barely spared the photo a look. “Yes, that’s Nichole.”

  “She’s gorgeous.”

  As if he’d forgotten, he glanced at the photograph. “I suppose.”

  In my mind, I pictured Nick instead of Dom in the picture standing beside Nichole. They must have been a beautiful couple.

  I am not usually sappy, but dang, I just couldn’t help myself. A ball of emotion clogged my throat. “Do you miss her?” I still somehow managed to ask.

  “You asked me that before. And I told you, not anymore.”

  “But you did miss her.”

  “I was married to her.”

  The way Nick held the flashlight, I was pretty sure he couldn’t see my face, but I screwed up my mouth and crossed my eyes, anyway, when I looked at Nichole. “Well, I don’t like her,” I said.

  He barked out a laugh. “Something tells me your opinion wouldn’t faze her.”

  “I mean it.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Any woman who could do that to a guy like you who—”

  Who what?

  The words bounced around inside my head, just daring me to complete the sentence.

  What had I just been about to say?

  A guy like you who is so nice?

  That definitely did not apply to Nick.

  Then what about, A guy like you who I have no doubt was loyal to a fault and who must have felt like he’d had a ton of bricks dropped on him when he realized what was going on between Dom and Nichole?

  Yeah, that was more like it, and thinking it through, I liked Nichole even less than I had before. And I didn’t like her very much to begin with.

  But even dislike didn’t explain why just thinking about the whole Nick and Nichole thing left me feeling like I’d been kicked in the gut.

  Just like Nick must have felt when it happened.

  It was stupid. And useless. And way too mushy, too, and since I am usually anything but, I pushed the sensation away and got to work.

  “The dresser,” I said, and pointed toward the top drawer so Nick could aim his light that way.

  “Underwear and socks,” I said, after a brief (no pun intended) look. Not that I needed to tell Nick what was in the drawer. In order for me to see what I was doing, he had to come stand behind me and slant the light down to where I rummaged through the top drawer of the dresser.

  “Ties in this drawer,” I said, starting in on the next. “And in this bottom one . . .” I pulled out a stack of T-shirts. “Not much. Except . . .” There was something that looked like paper at the bottom of the drawer. I moved aside another stack of T-shirts, grabbed for it, and instead of coming out with one piece of paper, I found two.

  “Menus.” I held them closer to the light so that both Nick and I could see them. “One from a place called El Restaurante del Rosa and the other from La Cocina de Martha. Rosa and Martha!” I glanced over my shoulder at Nick to make sure he caught the significance of this, but I shouldn’t have bothered. Of course he had. He was Nick, and Nick didn’t miss a thing. Well, except maybe the thing his wife was having with his partner.

  I shook away the thought. “What do you suppose it means?” I asked him, but I didn’t wait for him to answer. Instead, I scooted over to the bed and sat down so that I could take a better look at the menus.

  Rosa’s menu was the prettier of the two, oversized and decorated with flowers and foliage in lush, vibrant shades of red, green, and yellow. The flowers twined around the lettering on the front and framed a grainy, old-fashioned photograph of a woman who was dressed kind of like I was, in a skirt that went down past her knees and a sleeveless blouse. She had an apron around her neck and a ladle in one hand.

  “Rosa Garcia,” the caption said. “San Antonio Chili Queen.”

  Inside the menu . . .

  I flipped it open.

  “Look at this.” I pointed. “Dom has a couple of the menu items circled. Hey, and check out the names of the chilies on the list! Rosa’s got Leve; that means mild,” I told Nick. “And Picante, which is spicy, and Caliente, which means hot, and Hirviendo—”

  “Is boiling hot. I know that much Spanish.”

  “Well, Dom must have been keeping track of what he thought of each of the chili dishes on Rosa’s menu. He’s got notes in the margin, too. And awfully cram
ped handwriting.” I bent closer for a better look. “This one next to Hirviendo says, ‘No way!’ and the one next to Caliente says, ‘Too spicy for most tastes.’”

  “And Picante?” Nick asked.

  Since there was a listing of margarita flavors and prices right next to the chili selection, Dom didn’t have much room to write. There was an arrow drawn from Picante up to the top of the menu, where he’d written, “Spicy enough to satisfy most chili lovers but doesn’t have a burn.” I looked over my shoulder at Nick. “Do you think he wanted to be a food critic or something?”

  Nick grabbed for the menu from Martha’s restaurant. It was smaller than Rosa’s menu, and the front of it featured a drawing of the Alamo along with cameo portraits of four men.

  Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and William Travis.

  I remembered the names I’d heard Martha and Rosa tossing around on the first night of the fund-raiser and wondered if the fourth man—a guy with a big nose and a droopy mustache—was that ancestor Martha was so proud of.

  “Dom was more of a basic meat and potatoes kind of guy than a foodie,” Nick said, studying the menu. “At least back when I knew him. I suppose a person’s tastes can change.”

  “Did he make notes in that one, too?” I asked Nick when he flipped open Martha’s menu, and when he didn’t answer right away, I stood up and sidled closer so I could read what he was reading.

  “More notes next to chili entrees,” I said, even though Nick could see that. “‘Too hot’ next to that one.” I pointed. “‘Just right’ next to this one, the one for Chili ala Martha.” I sat back down on the bed. “What does it mean?”

  “I guess it means he couldn’t remember which chili he liked and which he didn’t like. He wanted to be sure of what to order next time he went to one of the restaurants.”

  “Really?” I plucked Martha’s menu out of Nick’s hand. “That’s the dumbest theory ever. Who doesn’t remember which chili they like? You know you like your chili hot or you like your chili mild. With beans or without. Everybody knows stuff like that. You know if you like the smokiness of poblanos or the three-alarm of ghost peppers or—”

  “Not everyone lives and breathes chili,” he snapped.