Free Deadly in High Heels by Gemma Halliday

us made our way over to Dempsey.
    It wasn't until we were blocking his sun that he opened his eyes and squinted in our direction.
    "May I help you?" he asked. Up close I could see that Dempsey's hair was a dyed black and he almost looked as though he were wearing a layer of makeup over his face. (A face which held a pair of eyes that were brown, I noted, not emerald green.)
    "I'm so sorry to bother you," I started. "But I wanted to offer my condolences. Maddie Springer." I stuck my hand out toward him. "I'm doing the footwear for the pageant."
    "Oh. Right." Dempsey struggled to a sitting position while he reached one sweaty hand out to shake mine. "Right, I recognize you. And you're Dana, right? One of the judges?"
    She nodded, sipping at her smoothie. "I'm so very sorry about your client. She was a very talented competitor."
    Dempsey's jaw clacked shut, though I didn't know him well enough to say whether it was due to grief, guilt, or coveting that smoothie as he sweated in the sunshine.
    "Thank you. It's true, Jennifer was very talented."
    "Do the police have any leads on what happened to her?" I asked.
    He shook his head, his jowls wavering with aftershocks. "None that they're sharing with me. Though, who am I? Just the person she spent twenty-four seven with for weeks leading up to every competition," he said, heavy on the sarcasm.
    I jumped on the opening. "It sounds like you probably knew Jennifer as well as anyone."
    "I should say so."
    "I don't suppose you know if she'd made any enemies? Why anyone would've wanted to hurt her?" I fished.
    I half expected him to deny it and talk about how perfect Jennifer had been like everyone else, but instead he shrugged. "Well clearly somebody wanted to hurt her, didn't they?"
    "There's a rumor running around that you might be the next director of the Miss Hawaiian Paradise competition," Marco jumped in.
    Dempsey grinned, showing off what a great set of veneers could do. "It's a lovely rumor."
    "How long were you Jennifer's coach?" I asked.
    His smile immediately faded, his expressions sagging in a way that added ten years to his age. "Two years," he said. "Ever since she started going for the national titles."
    "How long had she been doing pageants?"
    "Oh, honey, she'd been in pageants her entire life. Started off as one of those tiny-tot things before she moved on to bigger and bigger titles. They were paying her way through nursing school."
    "I hadn't realized she was going to school." I guess I sort of pictured all of these girls as professional pageant women.
    Dempsey nodded. "She had big dreams." The catch in his voice was unmistakable. If Dempsey was faking grief, he was doing a darn good job of it. He cleared his throat. "Most of the girls are in school, though they sometimes take a semester off here and there for a really big pageant like this one. It's worth it to most of them. Pageants are for the young. They all know that at some point they will be aging out of the competitions where there's any real money to be had."
    "But Jennifer was a long way from that, wasn't she?" Marco jumped in.
    Dempsey paused. "She was twenty. She had a couple of good years left."
    "Wow, I didn't realized 'aging out' happened so young," I mused.
    Dempsey nodded. "Like I said, it's a young woman's game. The end comes quickly."
    I bit my lip, mental wheels turning. "Were any of the other contestants closing in on that end?"
    Dempsey shrugged. "Sure. I can think of a couple who have been circling the drain, so to speak, for at least a couple of years."
    I cringed at his metaphor. "Who?"
    "Well," Dempsey hedged. "Whitney Lexington for one."
    "Miss Delaware."
    He nodded, a slow smirk spreading across his face. "She's been competing in the eighteen-to-twenty-five category for at least eight years now."
    I raised an eyebrow, doing the math. "That would make her twenty-six. I thought the cut off for this pageant was twenty-five?"
    "That's what I thought too," Dempsey said with a knowing nod.
    Dana did