Death by Devil's Breath Read online

  Jarrett backed away from the display case. “Take my word for it, everything is just as it should be. Just as the story says it is. You do know the story?”

  I gave him the smile that had once been known to charm men. Yeah, the one I didn’t bother with much these days because, let’s face it, none of the men I knew were worth the effort. “I bet anything you can tell it like nobody else can.”

  It worked. Jarrett’s shoulders shot back. “Legend says there are others of these dolls. But this is the only one that’s ever been found anywhere,” he added quickly, just so I didn’t get the idea that the seven hundred and fifty dollars was the rip-off I’d already decided it was. “Each and every one of them was made by a woman named Noreen Pennybaker. Woman? I should say artist! Look at the sweet details.” He pointed. “The darling expression on Honey Bunch’s face. The cute little outfit. Those adorable spots of pink color on her cheeks. This doll has personality, and . . .” He leaned over the table toward me. “I have the little book, too. I don’t like to say it too loud because I wouldn’t want to start a stampede. But I do, I do have the book, the storybook Noreen Pennybaker wrote and illustrated to go along with each of the dolls she made.”

  “Each of the dolls that have never been found except for this one.”

  Jarrett nodded. “Pity. If I could only find the rest of them!”

  “Wouldn’t that make this one worth less?”

  “Ah, you are a sly buyer!” He waggled a finger at me. “Of course, if more dolls came on the market, Honey Bunch here would lose some of her value. But none of her charm! The trick is, there have been rumors about these dolls for thirty years or more. But this is the only one that’s ever come to market. If there were more, they’re gone now. And if someone ever discovered them . . .” His brown eyes lit up. “My goodness, what a collector would pay for all of them would be simply astounding.” Jarret seemed to remember himself and wiped the smile off his face. “Since that’s not ever going to happen, that makes Honey Bunch unique.”

  Maybe not so much.

  Rather than point this out, I stepped back and out of the way when a middle-aged woman raced to the table.

  “I just heard the news!” As if she might have a heart attack, the woman pressed a hand to her ample chest. “You said you’d do it, George, and you were right. You got Honey Bunch! She’s . . .” She sucked in a breath and let it out slowly. “She’s exquisite. And the book? You have the book, too?”

  Jarret assured her he did, and I didn’t wait around to hear any more. See, I’d just learned all I’d needed to learn, not from George Jarret, but from his customer.

  He hadn’t had Honey Bunch.

  And now he did.

  Just like he hadn’t had those pictures of Dickie Dunkin.

  And now he did.

  Of course I knew just how he got the photographs.

  The only question now was where Honey Bunch came from.

  * * *

  When I got back to the Palace, a couple things happened that made me forget all about George Jarret and Honey Bunch.

  First of all, Sylvia met me at the door. “I’m going to dinner,” she said, even before I set foot inside the bordello. “And just so you know, I’ve learned a thing or two from you, Maxie. I’m not going to hurry back. I’ll let you see what it’s like to work here for hours and hours all by yourself.”

  Before I had a chance to make a face at her, she was gone.

  Work by myself I did and—don’t tell Sylvia—but it actually was kind of fun. Instead of thinking about murder, I got to think about chili and chili peppers and chili seasonings and all the wonderful ways chili can be served. I took the bland chili that Sylvia had prepared for samples and jazzed it up with spicy goodness and watched with real satisfaction when customers tasted, smiled, and said they had to buy whatever seasoning it was that was in there, it was that good.

  I rearranged the shelves, not because they needed it, but because I knew it would push Sylvia’s buttons, and I did a quick mental inventory of what we had left in the way of dried peppers and spices and figured out what we might need for the next day, the last day of the Showdown. With all those weddings that were going to take place in the auditorium the next afternoon, I knew there would be plenty of extra potential customers around, and thinking about how I could turn them into buyers, I made up some signs that said things like Spice Up Your Honeymoon and Every Romance Needs a Little Extra Heat and taped them in the windows.

  At the last minute, I decided to add a little more pizzazz to my display and ducked out to the RV. Even though Sylvia and I had long outgrown the crayon stage, I knew there was still a box of colored pencils and crayons and glitter on the top shelf of the closet in my bedroom that Jack used occasionally to make up signs and jazz up displays. When I returned to the Palace, I found Gert behind the cash register.

  “I didn’t think you’d mind if I took care of a couple sales for you,” she said. “I’ve got Janna from the coffee place watching my stuff for a couple minutes and no customers right now so I stopped by. Wondered if you’d seen today’s paper. There’s an obituary for Dickie.”

  I told her that while I’d seen enough of the morning paper to catch the photograph of Hermosa along with the story about how she claimed that Osborn was trying to poison her, the obits were something I didn’t normally pay any attention to.

  “I think they’re fascinating.” Gert laid out the paper on the counter. “The well-written ones say so much about a person’s life. Look, look at this one here.”

  I glanced at the picture Gert pointed to. It showed a woman with bare shoulders, long, dangling earrings, and hair piled up on her head.

  She laughed. “Where else but in Vegas would you read an obituary that says this woman was proud of the fact that she was the first to ever dance topless at a charity fund-raiser? I swear, this town is unreal!”

  I looked over the rest of the obituaries. Dickie’s stuck out like the sore thumb Dickie was. It was longer than the rest of the obits, and the picture that went along with his life story was the same publicity photo I’d seen George Jarret selling just a short time before.

  “He was such a nasty man, wasn’t he?” Gert’s shoulders trembled. “I mean, that act of his certainly was. He poked fun at everyone. He said mean things. But then you read this and you get insight into the real person. Listen.”

  Gert read from the paper. “‘Richard (Dickie) Dunkin, Vegas mainstay and master comedian.’” She screwed up her mouth. “Obviously written by a friend. But that’s not the important part. Here it says that every year, he gave a performance for the local animal rescue organization. And here it says that he was involved with the Shriners. They do lots of good things for kids. So maybe Dickie wasn’t such a terrible person after all.”

  “Maybe,” I conceded. “But somebody sure didn’t like him. It doesn’t say anything about who’s left behind, does it?” I asked her. “Like maybe he was some kind of secret millionaire and somebody was going to inherit a whole bunch of money when Dickie died?”

  Gert shook her head. “Nothing like that. It says he was preceded in death by his brother, Lawrence, and it doesn’t say anything about a father, but it does mention his mother, Noreen Pennybaker.”

  I froze where I stood. “What did you just say?”

  “Yeah, I think it’s pretty funny, too.” Gert laughed. “Dickie Dunkin must have been a stage name. Poor kid growing up must have been Dickie Pennybaker. Imagine the razzing he got for that. No wonder he turned out to be so sour.”

  I wasn’t listening. But then, I was pretty busy thinking.

  “Can you do me a favor?” I asked Gert. “Could you stay here, just for a couple minutes? I’m going to . . .” What? Somehow it didn’t seem fair to tell Gert the truth and maybe involve her in breaking and entering. “I’m just going to run back to the RV and grab something to eat. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”r />
  “Sure.” Gert got her phone out of her pocket. “I’ll give Janna a call and tell her I’ll be just a few minutes longer.”

  “Great. Good.” I headed out the door. “I’ll be right back,” I promised Gert.

  Dickie’s dressing room was locked, but really, I only tried the door for the hell of it. What I really needed to find was the storeroom where Hermosa had showed me the sum total of Dickie’s worldly possessions.

  It wasn’t locked, thank goodness, so there was no breaking and entering involved after all. I turned on the light, scooted inside, and closed the door behind me.

  The place was just as I remembered it, with metal shelves along the walls packed with props and all the stuff from Dickie’s apartment piled on the floor. Hermosa had told me that Dickie’s lease ran out the week before, and until they had time to get his stuff moved to her place, they’d stashed it here.

  Here, not in his dressing room, which, Hermosa pointed out, was way too small.

  Here, where nobody was likely to find it.

  The thought sang through my bloodstream like a shot of tequila, and I scanned the mismatched suitcases, the boxes, and the trunk that Hermosa had told me had come from Dickie’s.

  My money was on the trunk, and I dragged the boxes out from around it and got down on my knees. The trunk was locked, but a prop rifle and a prop bow and arrow went a long way toward helping me out. I sat back on my heels and threw open the lid.

  They stared up at me, all those fabric eyes.

  They smiled at me, dozens of pairs of pink, bowed lips.

  They twinkled, I mean what with all those pink felt dots on fabric cheeks.

  My heart in my throat, I stared down at a trunk filled with Noreen Pennybaker’s legendary dolls and thought about what George Jarret said about how if they were ever discovered, they’d be worth a fortune.

  The dolls that had once belonged to Dickie Dunkin and had been moved to the casino along with the rest of his things.

  Just to be sure, I checked the hem inside a few of the dolls’ dresses. There was Noreen’s looping, slanted signature embroidered into the fabric along with the block letter names of each of the dolls: Fairy Wight and Buttercup. Polly Petals and Anna Banana and Sweetheart Sue.

  I was so busy looking over the dolls and the handmade storybooks that went along with each one of them, I guess I didn’t hear the door of the storeroom open.

  But then, I didn’t hear the person in back of me, either.

  And by the time that person conked me on the head and knocked me out cold . . .

  Well, by that time, it was way too late.

  CHAPTER 15

  “Why were you messing around in there?”

  “Messing?” My throat was raw from screaming. My knuckles bled from pounding. My eyes were screwed up against the light that exploded like fireworks when Nick threw open the lid of the trunk where I’d been stuffed for who-knew-how-long.

  “I wasn’t messing,” I rasped, the emphasis on that last word because, let’s face it, he deserved every ounce of sarcasm I was capable of delivering. My muscles screamed in protest when I got to my knees and unbent myself from the pretzel shape I’d been forced into. “I was trapped. In this trunk. Someone knocked me on the head and . . . ow!”

  That last bit was thanks to the fact that Nick put a hand on the back of my head and found the goose egg right about in the middle of it.

  “You did get hit.” He looped his arms around me and plucked me out of the trunk before I even had a chance to say no, duh!

  “Here.” With one foot, he dragged over a metal folding chair and plunked me down in it. “Who did this to you?”

  Like the look I shot his way didn’t speak volumes?

  Apparently, not volumes Nick could read.

  “Lump,” I told him. “Back of the head. Obviously, I didn’t . . .” My throat was raw; it hurt when I talked. I braced myself and tried again. “I didn’t see who hit me.”

  He pulled a walkie-talkie out of his back pocket, called hotel security, and told them to send somebody over. When he was done, he paced to the other side of the storeroom (it didn’t take long) and came back toward me, acting out the motions he described. “So somebody snuck up on you.” He stopped right behind where I’d been kneeling by the trunk and raised his hand. “And that somebody whacked you.”

  When he brought his arm down, I winced.

  Nick slid me a look. “And you were in this storeroom bent over that trunk to begin with . . .” He glanced around the room with its metal shelves and props, and something told me that back in the day when he was a cop and interviewing a victim, he never would have had the nerve to shrug the way he did. Like he knew that even once I told him what was going on, he’d already convinced himself he wasn’t going to believe it. “Why?”

  Lucky for me, I didn’t have a chance to answer. A couple security guards chose that moment to show up, and Nick stepped out into the corridor to talk to them. When he came back, he had an ice pack and he pressed it (another ow!) to the back of my head and told me to hold it there.

  “Explain,” he said.

  Though it didn’t do much for the pounding behind my eyes and the aching in my neck and the fact that I was pretty sure my brain was about to pop and ooze out my ears, the cold felt heavenly on the lump on my head. I allowed myself exactly five seconds to enjoy it before I shot him a look. “You explain first. How did you—”

  “Find you?” Nick crouched down in front of me so he could look me in the eye. “I heard a report over my walkie about some frantic pounding and muffled screaming coming from inside one of the storerooms. Call me crazy, but it sounded so odd, I just had this gut feeling it had something to do with you.” He took my free hand in his and studied the scrapes on my knuckles. “You’re lucky someone heard you.”

  I didn’t need the reminder. If I let myself slip and allowed my mind to wander and I thought about waking up to blackness and the heart-stopping realization that someone had dumped me in that trunk and wedged the lid so I couldn’t open it . . .

  I sucked in a painful breath and shook away the thought, and when I did, I saw that sometime when I was lost in the panic that gripped me by the throat and refused to let go, Nick had taken a handkerchief out of his pocket and gently pressed it against my knuckles. “ER,” he said.

  “No. Not again. I’m fine.” To prove it, I lowered the ice bag.

  “Just like you were fine when that neon sign nearly cut you in half. Maxie . . .” He sat back on his heels. “You’re obviously—”

  “Sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong. Pissing someone off. Making enemies. Yeah.” I did my best to stir up some of my usual moxie, but my supply was completely drained. My shoulders drooped, and as much as I told myself it was a bad idea, I let the warmth of Nick’s touch seep through the hankie and into my hand. From there it wormed its way into my bloodstream, and inch by inch, I felt relaxed, cared for, safe.

  I sighed, then instantly regretted it. Sighing is for sissies. “I think I know what’s going on,” I told Nick. “Everything that’s happened . . . everything that happened tonight . . . it’s all because of those dolls.”

  “What dolls?” When Nick stood up, he left his handkerchief with me.

  It was easier to show him than to explain so I pulled myself to my feet and walked over to the trunk. No easy thing considering that with every step I took, the room pitched. Rather than let Nick know it, I leaned against the now-open trunk lid and pointed. “Those—” My mouth fell open and memory flooded through me. My shoulders ached from where they were pressed against the sides of the trunk. My knees were red from kneeling against the hard trunk bottom. When I was locked in there in the dark, I guess I knew all along that there was nothing in there to cushion me, but thanks to my slightly scrambled brain, it had taken a while to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

  No
w the empty trunk brought it all home.

  “The dolls are gone!” I told Nick.

  At my side, he, too, peered into the trunk. “Unless they were never there to begin with.”

  “Are you saying—”

  “Come on, Maxie, you did get hit on the head.” He put a hand on my arm. “Maybe you’re mixing up some memory you have of dolls you had as a kid with what really happened.”

  “No!” I swatted his hand away. “No, no, no! First of all, I didn’t have any dolls when I was a kid. Does that surprise you? It shouldn’t. Something tells me you’d be the first to admit I don’t have a warm and fuzzy bone in my body. And second of all . . . I saw the dolls. Of course I saw the dolls. The dolls were what I was looking for when I came in here. And they were there!” I poked a finger toward the trunk. “I saw them. All those big felt eyes and the little mouths and the stuffed arms and legs and—”

  “And so somebody conked you on the head and knocked you out. Then they took the dolls out of the trunk so they could put you in it. And the dolls are . . .” Nick scanned the storeroom. “Where?”

  Getting my thoughts in line, I bit my lower lip. “The dolls aren’t here. Don’t you get it? The person who conked me on the head took the dolls!”

  “This person assaulted you so he could take a bunch of dolls?”

  I decided to play it cool, and before Nick noticed that my knees were Silly Putty, I went back over to the chair and plunked down. “Not just a bunch of dolls. Noreen Pennybaker’s dolls. That’s what this whole thing is about.”

  I didn’t bother to wait for him to ask me to explain. “It’s like this,” I told Nick. “Noreen Pennybaker was Dickie Dunkin’s mother, right? Well, of course it’s right. That’s what it said in Dickie’s obituary. It said his mother’s name was Noreen Pennybaker. And Noreen, she’s famous in doll-collecting circles for making these really adorable—” I cleared my throat and gathered my wits and remembered what I’d told Nick just a minute earlier: I didn’t have a warm and fuzzy bone in my body. No use making myself sound like a liar.