Death by Tiara Page 8

  Now she blinked out into the audience.

  Anybody seen the complimentary breakfast buffet?

  “Prozac!” I cried.

  “What’s this cat doing here?” Candace asked, her voice hard as steel.

  In fact, she’d just begun examining her privates.

  “She’s mine!” I admitted. “I’m so sorry.”

  But just as I was about to go to get her, a white ball of fur whizzed past me up to the stage. It was Elvis, undoubtedly miffed that another four-legged creature was hogging the spotlight.

  He raced over to where Prozac was lolling on Cleopatra’s chaise and started barking furiously.

  If he thought he was going to intimidate Prozac, he was sadly mistaken.

  On the contrary, Prozac looked down at him and sniffed.

  Hey, I’ve smelled you before. You’re the one Jaine’s having an affair with!

  And without any further ado, she leaped down off the chaise, lunging at poor Elvis, who—suddenly terrified—came skittering off the stage as fast as his little legs could carry him.

  Prozac, hot on Elvis’s heels, now began chasing him up one aisle and down another, both of them yapping and meowing at the top of their lungs.

  Wasting no time, I charged after them, and after what seemed like a small eternity, I finally managed to catch Prozac, scooping her up in my arms before any fur could fly.

  Heather came racing over to rescue Elvis, who began baring his teeth most ferociously once he was safe in her arms.

  The next thing we knew, Luanne was at our side.

  “You!” she shouted at Heather. “You sabotaged my daughter’s act with your accomplice’s cat!”

  “I did no such thing!” Heather insisted.

  “She had nothing to do with this,” I said. “It’s all my fault.”

  “Look who’s talking about sabotage,” Heather huffed at Luanne. “You’re the one who stole my daughter’s Vera Wang gown.”

  “Don’t be absurd! I didn’t go anywhere near your silly gown.”

  “Silly gown? It’s a work of art compared to that chintzy Cleopatra outfit your daughter’s wearing. She looks like a hooker at Caesars Palace.”

  “Well, at least my daughter has talent. She doesn’t sing like a leaky balloon.”

  “Leaky balloon?” Heather sputtered, her face a fiery red.

  I just hoped it wasn’t a cardiac flush.

  “I’ve never heard worse singing in my life,” Luanne sneered, now on a roll. “It was like asthma set to music.”

  That did it. Heather had reached her boiling point. Her daughter’s angelic voice had been besmirched.

  Holding Elvis under one arm, she hauled back with the other and whacked Luanne in the jaw, sending her sprawling to the ground.

  In my arms, Prozac looked up, delighted.

  Now that’s entertainment!

  At which point, Candace came stomping over.

  “Okay, that’s it,” she snapped at Heather. “You’re out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your daughter’s disqualified. She’s out of the competition. Pack up your things and go.”

  “But you can’t do that!” Heather cried in protest.

  “Yes, I can. It’s in the official rules. Creating a public disturbance is grounds for disqualification.”

  “What about her?” Heather said, pointing to Luanne, who was still on the floor rubbing her jaw. “She started it.”

  “But she didn’t resort to physical violence. Now pack up your things and get out.”

  “I demand my money back,” Heather cried. “All my entry fees.”

  “Forget about it,” Candace said, her face hard as nails. “That’s in the rules, too. Entry fees are non-refundable.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Heather said, hair extensions quivering with indignation. “I paid for two nights in this hellhole, and I’m damn well staying here. I’m calling my lawyer!”

  With that, she grabbed Taylor by the elbow and headed for the door. But not before turning back and hissing at Candace:

  “Better watch your back, lady. I’m gonna get you for this.”

  And off she stormed with Taylor, Elvis yipping in her arms.

  “Damn!” I heard Candace mutter to Amy. “I’m going to have to call national headquarters about this. That woman is a walking lawsuit if I ever saw one. You’ll have take over for me at the dance rehearsal.”

  “Of course,” Amy stammered, a trace of panic in her eyes.

  “And you,” Candace hissed at me, “get your scruffy little fleabag out of here.”

  Prozac swished her tail in indignation.

  Hey, who’re you calling “little”?

  Candace shot me a filthy look, then headed up to the mike, cool as a vodka tonic, not a hair out of place.

  “Let’s not let that horrid display of bad manners spoil our fun,” she said to the pageant moms, who were, on the contrary, in seventh heaven over this latest bit of drama. “But before we continue with the show, a change of plans about today’s dance rehearsal. I’ve got some pressing matters to attend to in my office, so my assistant Amy will be pinch-hitting for me.”

  Amy smiled nervously at the crowd.

  “And now, on with the talent,” Candace said, passing the mike back to Eddie.

  The last thing I heard as I headed out the door were the sounds of Chelsea Sternweiss from Riverside yodeling an aria from Madame Butterfly.

  Chapter 11

  I hurried over to where Heather and Taylor were waiting at the elevator, Elvis nestled in Heather’s arms.

  At the sight of Prozac, Elvis let out an angry yip. But Prozac just gazed up at him from hooded lids.

  Cool it, powder puff. Can’t you see I’m trying to nap?

  Then, with a dismissive flap of her tail, she turned to me.

  What a pill. I don’t see what you ever saw in him.

  Meanwhile, Taylor was whining, “Mom, can’t we please go home?”

  “Are you kidding? We’re not going anywhere without my tiara—I mean, your tiara.”

  Oh, boy. I could see who was the real contestant in this pageant.

  “One call to Daddy’s attorney, and you’ll be back in the contest before that pageant director knows what hit her.”

  Taylor sighed in defeat.

  “No,” Heather proclaimed, “none of us is going anywhere. And that means you, too, Jaine. Stick around, and I’ll let you know the minute I have news.”

  Damn. It looked like I was in for another night in the Broom Closet Suite.

  From my arms, Prozac meowed.

  First dibs on the pillow!

  Back in my room, I read Prozac the riot act about her disgraceful performance at the talent show.

  “It’s all your fault Taylor got kicked out of the contest. If you hadn’t horned in on Gigi’s act, Luanne never would have picked that fight with Heather, and Heather never would have wound up decking Luanne. You were a bad, bad, bad kitty! And Mommy’s very disappointed in you.”

  She looked up at me with wide green eyes that could mean only one thing.

  What’s for lunch?

  Yes, I could tell by the way she was doing her patented Feed Me dance around my ankles that she was feeling a bit peckish.

  And she wasn’t the only one.

  It had been hours since my buffet breakfast, and I definitely needed a little pick-me-up. So I headed down to the Amada Inn’s coffee shop, where I ordered a roast beef sandwich on rye for myself and a side order of tuna salad for Prozac.

  Whatever the failings of the Amada Inn, I must admit they did a great job in the chow department. My roast beef sandwich (with a side of fries) looked positively scrumptious when I unwrapped it back in my room.

  Prozac’s little pink nose twitched with excitement the minute she saw me take it out of the box.

  Yum! Roast beef! Just what I wanted!

  “No, no, sweetheart. The roast beef’s for Mommy. Look what I got you. Yummy tuna.”

  I
held it out to her, but she sniffed in disdain.

  No, thanks. Roast beef for me! And you’re not my mommy.

  Well, if she thought she was going to horn in on my roast beef, she had another think coming. I told her in no uncertain terms that she couldn’t always have what she wanted. The roast beef was for me, the tuna was for her, and that’s the way it was going to be.

  I don’t suppose you bought that, did you?

  Of course, I let her eat the roast beef. I mean, what else could I do? She’d already poked her nose into the stuff. And besides, the tuna was really quite tasty. I even got to eat a few of the fries.

  I was sitting there, munching on one of them, when my cell phone rang.

  My heart did a little somersault when I saw it was Scott. I answered it, willing myself to be cool and collected.

  “Scott! Thank heavens it’s you! I thought you’d never call!”

  Okay, so I’ve got to work on Cool and Collected.

  “I feel horrible about last night. I made such a fool of myself.”

  “You did no such thing. You were perfectly charming.”

  “But spilling the wine like that—”

  “Accidents happen. Nobody’s blaming you.”

  Was he kidding? I could just picture Ma Willis stabbing pins in my voodoo doll.

  “Anyhow,” Scott was saying, “I called to see if you want to go to Santa Barbara with me on Wednesday. I’ve got the day off, and I thought we could drive up there for lunch.”

  “Just the two of us?” I asked. The last thing I wanted was a rematch with Ma Willis and Chloe.

  “Just the two of us.”

  “Sounds heavenly.”

  And it did. After a weekend in the Broom Closet Suite, I’d be ready for a little treat.

  “Great. I’ll pick you up around ten?”

  I hung up in a happy daze, already picturing myself whizzing up to Santa Barbara with Scott at my side. Just the two of us. No disapproving moms. No fabulously beautiful ex-girlfriends.

  Damn that Chloe, anyway. Why the heck did she have to be so pretty—and thin? My goodness, I’d seen bigger thighs on Barbie dolls.

  I stared down at my own two thighs, redwoods to Chloe’s twigs, and groaned. I really had to whip myself into shape for my date with Scott. Was it possible, I wondered, as I popped the last of the fries into my mouth, to drop fifteen pounds by Wednesday?

  And then I remembered the Amada Inn’s gym, the one I’d passed by yesterday on my way to the sauna.

  True, it had been a tad run-down, but then, so was I.

  Within minutes, I’d changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt and was out the door, leaving Prozac sprawled on the bed, belching roast beef fumes.

  This time, I was careful to hang up the DO NOT DISTURB sign.

  So eager was I to get started on my workout that I didn’t even wait for the Amada Inn’s geriatric elevator to show up. Instead, I clomped down to the lower level and made a beeline for the gym.

  Thank heavens it was empty when I got there. When it comes to exercise, I prefer to do my grunting and groaning in private.

  Looking around, I saw three treadmills, two StairMasters, and a recumbent bike. I figured I’d get the best workout on the treadmill or the StairMaster, so naturally I headed for the recumbent bike. I mean, why exercise standing, when you can do it sitting? That’s my motto, anyway.

  After dusting off the seat (heaven knows when it had been last used), I climbed on board.

  I was fully intent on pedaling my pounds away, but I hadn’t counted on just how comfy it felt to lie back on that recumbent seat. If you recall, I’d been up since the wee hours, having been rudely awakened by the tap-dancing teen in the room above mine. And what with all the hoo ha of Prozac’s surprise appearance at the talent show—not to mention Heather’s brawl with Luanne, and trekking up and down the Amada Inn stairwell—I was tuckered.

  I started off pedaling with vigor, but soon I felt my eyelids grow heavy. And before I knew it, I was out like a light, having the most wonderful dream.

  There I was, cuddled on a chaise with Scott, wearing Taylor’s Carmen Miranda outfit. (Somehow in my dream I’d magically morphed into a size two.) Scott was running his hands along my impossibly slim hips, setting my pulse racing with his smoldering gaze.

  Then—just as he was leaning in to kiss me—guess who came sauntering out from behind the chaise in her two-hundred-dollar jeans and pristine white T-shirt? Chloe! How annoying was that?

  Suddenly I felt like an overdressed rube with a bowl of fruit on my head. I was so darn angry at Chloe for breaking into my dream, before I could stop myself I was taking a peach from my headdress and throwing it at her. Only it wasn’t plastic, but a real peach. And it sailed past Chloe and landed splat in the middle of Ma Willis’s tablecloth which had sprung up out of nowhere, along with—gasp!—Ma Willis, who looked at the big peach blob on her priceless white tablecloth and started screaming at the top of her lungs.

  I raced over to wipe off the stain, but the more I blotted it, the bigger it grew. And the bigger it grew, the louder Ma Willis screamed. Louder and louder until I woke up with a jolt and realized someone was actually screaming.

  Jumping off the bike, I hurried outside into the hallway where I saw Candace, staring, horrified, into her office.

  I followed her gaze and gasped.

  There, lying in a pool of blood, face down, was mousy little Amy, her head bashed in with the prized “Tiphany” tiara.

  Chapter 12

  “It’s all my fault!” Candace moaned, sinking to her knees. Gone was the tough martinet who’d ruled the pageant with an iron fist. In her place sat a frail, frightened woman.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, kneeling down to talk to her. “How is Amy’s death your fault?”

  “The Coke,” she said woodenly.

  “What Coke?” I asked, wondering if the stress of the murder had sent her to la-la land.

  “I spilled some Coke on Amy’s red blazer at lunch,” she explained. “So I gave her one of my blue blazers to wear. Amy always wore a red blazer, and I wore blue. Then I finished my phone calls sooner than I expected. So I decided to go to the dance rehearsal and left Amy behind to unload the trophies.”

  She pointed to a stack of cartons up against the back wall.

  “We give out souvenir trophies to all the girls so they don’t feel bad about losing. Anyhow, poor Amy probably had her back to the door unloading the trophies, so whoever killed her saw her blond hair and blue blazer and thought she was me. Especially in the hotel’s crummy lighting.”

  It was true; the lighting in the office, just as in the Broom Closet Suite, was awfully dim.

  “Everyone thought I was going to be in the office,” Candace said. “I announced it over the mike. Whoever killed Amy was trying to kill me!” She put her face in her hands and moaned. “If only I hadn’t spilled that Coke on her blazer!”

  Looking down at Amy—dressed in Candace’s blazer, her blond hair styled just like Candace’s, working in the office at a time when only Candace was supposed to be there—I couldn’t help but think that Candace was right, that Candace was the intended victim and that Amy had been murdered by mistake.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Eddie came rushing up to us, his face flushed under his toupee.

  “Amy’s dead,” Candace said, pointing to the corpse.

  Eddie looked inside the office, and his face froze in shock.

  And suddenly I wondered if he knew about his wife’s affair with Tex. A short, stocky guy with a bad toupee, had Eddie flipped out at the thought of his wife making love with the hunky car dealer? Had he tried to kill her in a jealous rage?

  Was that look of shock on his face because Amy was dead—or because he just realized he’d killed the wrong woman?

  Eddie quickly recovered his composure and did what I should have done—called 911.

  I stayed with them while Eddie tried to soothe Candace, patting her shoulder, assuring her ever
ything would be okay. But Candace, swatting away his hand like a pesky gnat, was not about to be reassured. By the time the cops showed up, she was in an advanced state of panic, convinced someone was out to kill her.

  “Call off the rest of the pageant, Eddie. We’ll reschedule the crowning for another date.”

  “But the mothers will be furious.”

  “Who cares? I’m not going to stick around and wait for someone to take potshots at me.”

  Just then the detective on the case, a towering blond Brunhilde of a woman, came stomping over to join us. She stood before us, tall and big-boned, her blond hair scraped into a tight ponytail, muscles straining against the fabric of her uniform.

  “Any of you have any idea who might have done this?” she asked, gesturing to Amy’s body.

  “I think I know!” Candace piped up. “It was that dreadful Van Sant woman.”

  “Who?”

  “Heather Van Sant. One of the pageant moms. Just this morning she told me she was going to ‘get’ me! Isn’t that right?”

  Candace turned to me for confirmation.

  “Well, technically, yes, but—”

  “See? Heather’s the one you want.”

  Brunhilde dutifully wrote down Heather’s name in her notebook, then told us to go back to our rooms to await further questioning.

  Just as I was about to head for the elevator, I heard one of the cops in the office say, “Looks like we have our time of death. The clock in the tiara stopped when the victim’s head was bashed in. At two-thirty-four p.m.”

  My gosh. I’d shown up at the gym at a little after two. If only I hadn’t fallen asleep, I might have heard the murder, seen the killer, solved the crime, and saved myself from my own little brush with death.*

  (*Coming soon to a chapter near you.)

  Pacing the floor of the Broom Closet Suite (a whole three and a half steps in each direction), I thought about the time of the murder. If it had taken place at 2:34 like the cops said, then Candace and all the teens except Taylor were in the clear. Because from 2 to 3 PM they were all at the dance rehearsal.

  I just hoped Taylor wouldn’t join her mother on Brunhilde’s suspect list.