Death by Devil's Breath Page 12

  With no choice, I headed out, and though Creosote Cal’s isn’t nearly as big as some of those mega-hotels over on the Strip, it wasn’t exactly easy finding Sylvia in a place filled with one-armed bandits, an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant, and a pool shaped like the skull of a steer, complete with gigantic horns on the shallow end. I finally located her in the coffee shop. Notice I said located. No mention of talking to her.

  That was because the moment I saw who she was with, I stepped out of her range of vision so I could watch.

  Sylvia and Tyler York, Mr. Shiny Devil’s Breath Contestant, sat across from each other at one of the two-seater tables along the far wall. Sylvia’s hands were clutched ever so daintily around her coffee cup. Tyler’s eyes were on her. But then maybe, like me, he was trying to figure out which of them sparkled most brilliantly in the glow of the overhead lights.

  Tyler spoke.

  Sylvia laughed. Even from where I stood peeking out from behind a phony wood pillar, I could hear the silvery sound. Tyler slid his hand across the table and squeezed hers.

  Sylvia and Tyler York?

  It took a few moments for me to process the thought and only a few after that to decide it was a terrible, awful, horrible situation. If Sylvia and Tyler ever got together—I mean really got together—they’d produce children who would be so shiny, they’d glow in the dark.

  Thank goodness, before the idea had a chance to fully form, Sylvia pushed back from the table. I knew she’d see me right away when she walked out of the coffee shop, so I ducked around a corner and into the gift shop, where I stationed myself behind a rack of Creosote Cal hoodies. A funny sort of lump in my throat, I watched Sylvia walk across the lobby and back toward Deadeye with an uncharacteristic spring in her step.

  I swallowed around the painful knot at the same time I asked myself what it was all about. It wasn’t possible that I was actually feeling affection for Sylvia, was it? That I was touched to see her happy?

  Or maybe it was the other side of the coin that had me suddenly feeling as if I’d swallowed a cotton ball.

  Maybe seeing Sylvia happy and smiling with a guy as wholesome as Tyler only served to underscore what was wrong with me: I’d spent my love life brushing aside the shiny guys, the ones who were too good to be true, the guys who were steady and reliable. Instead, I’d made a play for the bad boys—every single time—and those bad boys had lived up to their reputations and my expectations. They’d left me alone and brokenhearted. Every single time.

  Maybe the pang I felt when I saw Sylvia and Tyler together was nothing more than good old-fashioned jealousy.

  The thought slammed into me right between my heart and my stomach, and still considering it, I watched Tyler, chin up and arms swinging, leave the coffee shop. The gift shop was directly across from the hotel registration desk, and there was a young woman with long auburn hair standing over there. The moment she caught sight of Tyler, her expression brightened. She met him halfway, and he slipped his arms around her and gave her a long and very sloppy kiss.

  What had been confusion about my feelings of jealousy and longing vanished in an instant, replaced by an anger so overpowering, I didn’t even realize I had stomped out of the gift shop until I was in the lobby. “Two-time my sister, will you?” I growled, only by the time I did, I realized that Tyler and the redhead, their arms linked around each other’s waists, were already on their way out the front door of the hotel.

  A woman possessed—though what possessed me, curiosity, jealousy, or some kind of crazy devotion to Sylvia, I couldn’t say—I followed them outside, and when they hopped into a cab and it sped away, I flagged down another waiting taxi, jumped in, and delivered the classic line, “Follow that car.”

  We were in Vegas; the driver never questioned my motives or my sanity.

  A short time later, Tyler’s cab slowed in front of a gleaming (was I surprised?) white building with a steeple on one end and what looked like Rapunzel’s tower on the other. There was a new sign just being installed over the front door, a gigantic red neon heart, and it swayed on the ropes and pulleys that held it.

  “Love Chapel.” I burbled out the words on the end of a harrumph of disgust. “What’s that lousy, weasely two-timer doing at Reverend Love’s wedding chapel?”

  “Biggest chapel in town,” my cab driver informed me. “They do a bunch of weddings, every single day.”

  “Well, they better not be doing one with those two!” I slammed out of the cab and marched inside. The main hallway was a gleaming (there’s that word again) maze of mirrored walls, giant fake flower arrangements, and blush carpeting. My footsteps muffled by the plush, I followed the sounds of voices, turned a corner, and found Tyler and the redhead, lip-locked.

  “What kind of lowlife are you?” I pointed one shaking finger in Tyler’s direction. “How can you do this to my sister?”

  The couple broke apart and Tyler looked from the redhead to me. “Meghan is your sister?”

  “Not her!” There was no way to deal with the anger that pounded through me other than to tug at my spiky hair. I tugged away. “Sylvia. How can you do this to Sylvia?”

  Some of the shine went out of Tyler’s expression. “Sylvia from the chili cook-off?”

  “Oh, that’s just great! That’s very sweet! One minute you’re making eyes at Sylvia—”

  Meghan slipped her hand from Tyler’s grasp. “You were making eyes at some other woman?”

  “I was not!” Tyler’s denial echoed along the hall of mirrors. He scraped his left hand through his hair and curled his right hand into a fist. “This woman doesn’t know what she’s talking about, Meghan, darling. You’re the one I’m here to marry.”

  “You’re getting married? Now?” The news was like a slap in the face and I flinched. “But what about Sylvia?”

  “Sylvia . . .” Tyler pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “What on earth makes you think that Sylvia and I—”

  “You were talking to her.” I threw an arm out in the general direction of Creosote Cal’s. Maybe. I actually wasn’t sure where we were in relation to Creosote Cal’s, but if nothing else, I figured the gesture underscored our little melodrama. “You were sitting in the coffee shop, and the two of you, you were chatting and—”

  Tyler’s laugh cut me short. “And do you always make wild assumptions about people just because you happen to see them together? Sylvia and I . . .” He turned to Meghan and took both her hands in his. “Sylvia’s the one I told you about,” he said. “The cooking chick. You know, the one I’m doing the job for.”

  Good thing this made sense to one of us. When Meghan smiled, Tyler gave her a peck on the cheek. “You’d better go finish getting ready,” he crooned. “Soon-to-be Mrs. York.”

  Giggling, she scampered down the hallway and disappeared into a door marked Brides Only. It was going to take a little more than that to get rid of me.

  I stepped back, my weight against one foot. “Explain,” I demanded.

  Tyler did. “Sylvia, she’s your sister, right?”

  “Half sister,” I corrected him.

  “Well, I can’t believe she didn’t tell you. The whole thing about me being a chili contestant—”

  Before he could say another word, the truth dawned as bright as Tyler’s smile. “You’re a phony!”

  “I’m an actor.”

  “And Sylvia hired you—”

  “To pretend I’m a chili chef.” Tyler nodded. “Only the recipes I’ve won the regional competitions with—”

  “They’re Sylvia’s recipes.” My jaw flapped. “She . . . you . . .” I shook my head, hoping to order my thoughts. “You and Sylvia aren’t—”

  “Involved?” Tyler threw back his head and laughed. “Not hardly! Sylvia is the most straitlaced, uptight, inflexible, hidebound—”

  It was all true, but that didn’t keep me from growlin
g, “That’s my sister you’re talking about!”

  “Well, your sister and I are not romantically involved,” he told me in no uncertain terms. “We never have been. We never will be. Meghan and I are getting married today.”

  “Then why were you holding Sylvia’s hand?” I asked. “Back at the coffee shop.”

  Tyler reached into his pocket and pulled out a check. The signature was Sylvia’s. “I wasn’t holding Sylvia’s hand, I was getting the last of what she owed me, and we were trying not to be too obvious about the payoff. You know, in case any of the Showdown people were around. I’ll say this much for your sister—she agreed to pay me in full for this last gig, even though the contest was canceled. So . . .” He tucked the check back where it came from, turned, and walked away. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get married now.”

  My head spinning, I stood in the center of the hallway and stared at my own dazed reflection in the mirrors that surrounded me. As far as I knew, there was actually no written rule about how a Showdown vendor couldn’t enter one of the competitions, but I’d bet any money that Sylvia realized if she entered, she’d never win. Not in a million years. Sylvia, see, has a reputation. What was it Tyler said? Straitlaced, uptight, inflexible, hidebound? Sylvia was all those things, and everyone who ever got close to the Showdown knew it. It was no surprise to me that she was also a little sneak. If Tyler won a few cook-offs using Sylvia’s recipes, she could take advantage of the publicity and talk up how she’d taught him everything he knew, and once he made a name for himself on the chili circuit, she could piggyback off his fame and publish that cookbook she’d always wanted to write. A cookbook that would, no doubt, feature Jack’s famous—and currently missing—recipe as its centerpiece.

  It was so devious a plan, it made me see red, and I turned on my heels to leave the chapel so I could go back to Cal’s and have it out with Sylvia. That’s when I caught sight of a door with a tasteful brass plaque on it: Reverend Linda Love.

  Chili judge, I reminded myself, and there when Dickie (literally) bit the big one.

  The thought knocked up against my anger and nudged it out of the way. Maybe it wasn’t too late to salvage something useful out of the fiasco that was my visit to the Love Chapel.

  I knocked and was ushered into an outer office by a middle-aged woman in a neat, and a little over-the-top, pink suit.

  “The reverend is officiating at a wedding,” she told me. “If you like, you can wait in her office.”

  Linda Love’s office was bigger than my apartment back in Chicago. It featured a tasteful mahogany desk that was about a mile wide, with a matching ceiling-high bookshelf behind. There was an Oriental rug in shades of red and deep green on the floor, and framed photos on the walls. I strolled over to take a gander.

  Reverend Love with her hands out in blessing over a newly married couple, an Elvis impersonator at her side.

  Reverend Love standing between a bride and a groom both dressed in purple, a black-caped vampire looming behind them, his arms out and his fangs bared.

  Reverend Love with marrying couples decked out like aliens, and some in Renaissance costumes, and others in gangster gear complete with toy tommy guns.

  From the photos, I moved to look over the bookcase, but there wasn’t anything there nearly as interesting as aliens or vampires. She’d been awarded a crystal bowl from the local Chamber of Commerce for congeniality. She’d matted and framed her minister’s license and had it set up on an easel next to a tasteful bouquet of red and white fabric flowers.

  It was all pretty ordinary and just what couples would expect to see when they came to sign up for what a framed poster on the opposite wall said could be a Standard, a Special, or a Theme Wedding Package.

  In fact, the only thing that struck me as interesting was the one thing on the bookshelf that seemed out of place.

  It probably goes without saying that I am not the doll type. I never was, even as a kid. Skateboards were more my thing. And bikes, and softball. Fistfights and football. Even so, I will admit that the doll propped against a fat book was way cute.

  She was a foot tall, and not scary like so many of those dolls that are meant to look realistic. This one was completely made of fabric, from her skinny little stuffed legs and arms to her big round head. Her dress was pink satin and she wore a black felt scarf and beret. Her brown hair was made out of felt, too, strips of it sewn close to her head to look like a bob, and she had rosy pink cheeks (also round dots of felt) and a sweet little bowed mouth.

  I couldn’t resist; I had to play with her. She wore a white cotton petticoat under her dress, and I fluffed it and noticed that there was a name embroidered in powder blue on the inside. Curious, I turned to the light to read the lettering and saw that there were, in fact, two names.

  “Noreen Pennybaker.” I read the name that flowed along the hem of the petticoat in slanting stitches that made it look like a signature. Above that in blocky, more childlike letters were the words Tout Sweet.

  Finished looking the doll over, I set her back where I’d found her, but before I could turn around, I heard a voice behind me, “Cute, isn’t she?”

  Reverend Love crossed the office, her footsteps silenced by the thick Oriental rug.

  “I’m glad you knew better than to touch her,” she said. “This doll is very special to me. She was handmade for me by my Aunt Louise, and I’m afraid I’m a little overprotective. I’d hate to see anything happen to Tout Sweet.”

  The reverend slipped behind her desk. “You look familiar so I know we’ve met. You’re . . . Maxie!” Her eyes lit when she got the name right. “You were at the Showdown. Are you looking to schedule a wedding?”

  “Wedding?” The word barely made it past the sudden clog in my throat. “Oh, no!” For the second time in as many minutes, I backed away, this time from the very thought. “I just happened to be here. On account of Tyler and Meghan.”

  The reverend smiled. “Cute couple. I’m sure you’re very happy for them.”

  “You betcha!” She hadn’t invited me, but I took the chair across from her desk. “I figured as long as I was here, I’d ask you about the other day. You know, about Dickie.”

  Her smile dissolved and she puckered her lips.

  “Did you know him?” I asked.

  The reverend’s shrug was as elegant as the steel gray suit she wore with tasteful pearls and a white cami. “Everyone in Vegas knows . . . er . . . knew Dickie,” she said when she sat down. “He was quite a character.”

  “And now he’s dead and someone murdered him.”

  The reverend opened a desk drawer and brought out an eight-by-ten glossy. “He just did a wedding here,” she said, sliding the photo across the desk to me. “I haven’t even had a chance to have the picture framed yet.”

  I studied the photo that showed a grinning Dickie in a pink-and-black-plaid sport coat standing with a middle-aged couple. “Dickie was a minister like you?”

  Reverend Love laughed. “Oh, my goodness, no! But like so many people, this particular couple wanted to make their wedding ceremony different and distinctive. They were both fans of Dickie’s so—”

  “Dickie had fans?”

  Her smile was mischievous. “That’s the rumor. My own personal opinions aside, we are a full-service chapel. So when this couple asked for Dickie, I got them Dickie. He wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but hey, who am I to judge?”

  “He sure got on people’s nerves. But Dickie liked you.” I cocked my head, thinking. “At the show the night before the cook-off started, and that morning when Dickie died . . . he was nasty to everyone else, but he said you were a doll. A doll!” I glanced over the reverend’s shoulder. “Like Tout Sweet!”

  I don’t know if the reverend got the joke. She folded her hands on the desk. “Believe it or not, Dickie Dunkin was a smart businessman. He knew which side his bread was buttered on. Of
course he went out of his way to be nice to me. This is the biggest and most successful chapel in Vegas. He knew if I was going to hire him to appear at comedy wedding services—”

  “Then he had to stay on your good side and then he’d get the jobs, and a little publicity while he was at it.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Whoever sells the most tickets this week and appears with you at the big wedding ceremony on Sunday, that person will get publicity, too.”

  “And let me guess, Dickie claimed he was going to win.”

  “Hermosa and Osborn and Yancy . . . they all claim they’re going to win,” I told her.

  The reverend’s eyes went wide. “You don’t think that the silly contest had anything to do with—”

  “I can’t say. I do know there are plenty of people who didn’t like ol’ Dickie.”

  “Oh, come on! I know there were people who didn’t appreciate Dickie’s sense of humor, and I can certainly understand why. He could be pretty scathing. Not to mention insensitive and insulting. But I can’t imagine there are people who would take that shlock act of his so seriously that they’d want to kill him. Maybe wring his neck!” She grinned, but only for a moment. Then her mouth settled into a hard line. “But murder? No, not murder.”

  I weighed the advantages of letting her in on Dickie’s dirty little secret against keeping it to myself and decided that I might find out more—and possibly cultivate a useful ally—if I was aboveboard. “There was obviously somebody who really wanted Dickie dead because we both saw him do a header into the Devil’s Breath. I can’t say for sure at this point, but I think it might have been one of the people he was blackmailing.”

  The reverend opened her mouth in astonishment, but before she had a chance to say a word, her phone buzzed. She flinched and picked up the receiver. “Is it time already?” she said, then nodded.

  “I’ve got Tyler and Meghan’s wedding to take care of,” she said, and when she stood, her message was clear.

  I got up and moved to the door.