Chapter Twelve

I worked the lunch shift at Abuelita’s, waiting tables on autopilot. As Sylvia and I walked around each other, serving warm chips and salsa, carrying steaming plates, and refilling drinks, my mind stayed on Jennifer Wallace. I couldn’t get her love life—or her way of life—off my mind. How many of the girls broke the rules?

“Mija.” My grandfather crooked his finger at me, motioning me over to his table.

“¿Qué, Abuelo?”

“¿Dónde está Antonio?”

I scanned the dining room. Wasn’t Antonio here? I shrugged. “¿No está aquí? No sé.” Sylvia slowed as she walked behind me and I turned to her. “Antonio’s not here?” I asked.

She raised her brows. “I don’t know.”

I wasn’t sure I believed her. Damn. My job was making me cynical.

I put a hand on my hip and eyed her. “Sylvia?”

She threw up her hands, palms facing me. “I don’t know anything. You have to talk to him.”

Turning back to Abuelo, I shrugged. “There you go. We know nothing.”

The rest of my shift passed without incident, and without Jack stopping by. Which made me wonder if he was more put out by my display at the game than he was letting on. Or maybe my not telling him had really crossed a line.

I chose to deal with that little worry by eating. I tossed my apron into the laundry bin in the kitchen and smiled at my father. “Papi, would you make me a taco salad, por favor?”

My father didn’t understand my driving need to be a detective, but he’d never deny me food. He tossed beans, rice, lettuce, cheese, sour cream, guacamole, and salsa into a fried flour tortilla shell and slid it across the warming shelf. I perched on a stool behind the cooking line, forking the salsa-vinaigrette-covered lettuce leaves into my mouth. Halfway through the massive salad, my cell phone rang.

Having learned from past mistakes, I read the LCD readout before answering this time, but it wasn’t a number I recognized. “Hello?”

“Lola? It’s Selma. From the Royals?”

I started to greet her, but she cut me off, her tone urgent and scared. “I need to talk to you. Can you meet me?”

My spine instantly stiffened, and zip, just like that, my appetite was gone. “Sure. When?”

“It’s kind of…urgent. Can you come now?” She rattled off the name of a restaurant, then click, she was gone.

Urgent. As in something to do with the case. It was the only thing that made sense. If only I could beam myself over there, maybe I’d finally be able to move forward with solving it.

I dumped the rest of my salad in the trash, tossed the plate in the industrial sink, and flew up the steps two at a time to the break room upstairs, then hurried back down with my purse.

“Hasta luego, Papi,” I called, waving to my father as I barreled through the kitchen door and into the back parking lot.

On the way, my mind ran through the possible reasons Selma would want to meet with me. She’d received a letter. She had a theory. Or, if I was really lucky, she knew something about Jennifer’s death.

…

In ten minutes flat, I was at an eatery on the edge of downtown and midtown Sacramento. Toby’s was a mom-and-pop restaurant and Selma stood out like a defiant bull in a china shop, daring the customers to recognize her and disturb her meal. I’d met her that first day when she’d come to Camacho & Associates with Jennifer, and I’d seen her at practices and the two games I’d danced at, but this was our first one-on-one meeting.

Out of her dance outfits, she was still über sexy in her thin, gauzy skirt and the plunging neckline of her red halter top. She was striking in a nontraditional way, with shiny cinnamon-colored hair and golden skin. Tanning salon—that had to be it. What surprised me most was how young she was. Without the heavy makeup, I realized that she couldn’t be more than eighteen or nineteen.

“Hey,” she said when I sat down opposite her. Her eyes flittered about, repeatedly searching every area of the room. I had my back turned to the parking lot, angling myself to face her. I took out my notebook, glad that I didn’t have to hide from her the fact that I was a detective.

“What’s up?” Cut to the chase. I was tired of having nothing to show for my investigation.

“I didn’t know who else to call. I don’t really know any of the other girls.” Her voice had a deep tenor to it and I had to lean in a bit to hear her over the clacking stoneware, clinking glasses, and roar of chatter in the dining room. I moved the silver-capped salt and pepper shakers out of my way, pushing them next to the artificial flower poking out of a thick bottled vase.

“You haven’t made any friends?”

“A couple, but no one to just go hang out with, you know? They’re mostly veterans with the team, so they’re all tight. I don’t really fit in.”

I forgot about my notebook and just concentrated on her. “What about the other newer girls?”

She shrugged her naked shoulders and abruptly changed the subject. “Your boss is intense.”

I wanted to say, “So are you.” Instead I said, “Yeah. But a very good detective. The best.”

She scanned the room again, then settled her gaze back on me. “Maybe.”

“Selma, are you okay?”

Her expression faltered. “Not quite,” she said, her voice low.

A silence hung in the air between us. The pointed peaks of her upper lip and the slight flair of her nostrils at the end of her straight nose gave away the nerves zinging inside her. She brushed a wing of hair from her face.

“Do you wanna talk about it?” Since you called me here, I added to myself.

She arched a brow and seemed to study the people in the room. “My real name is Selma Winchester, not Selma Mann,” she said, but stopped as the waitress came to our table. Selma quickly picked up her menu, her painted blue fingernails popping out against the red of her halter.

“Ready to order?” The waitress leaned her weight on one leg and tapped her foot.

I’d hadn’t regained my appetite, so I was good on the food front. “Just coffee for me,” I said.

The waitress frowned, then sent a hopeful look to Selma.

“The veggie omelet.” Selma folded the menu and handed it to the waitress. Her hands trembled as she took a sip of her water. She could say she was fine all she wanted, but it was clear she was freaked out.

“Sourdough, wheat, or white?”

“White, please,” she said into her glass.

The waitress stomped away, her white orthopedic shoes gleaming against the dark carpet. I made a mental note to leave her a killer tip for bogarting the table without ordering. We waitresses—even the part-time ones—had to stick together.

“I’ve been coming to this place since I moved to Sacramento,” Selma said. “Maybe too much.”

So we were going to go slowly and Selma would set the pace of the conversation. Good to know.

As our coffee was delivered, I remembered what Victoria had said to me that day in the Camacho conference room. Every girl wanted to be a cheerleader—in Victoria’s world, anyway. “Has it always been your dream to be a dancer?”

“It was until I realized what it’s really all about.” She gestured at me, waving her hand up and down. “Look at me. Look at you. Who can see beyond the package? Taping up our boobs and doing a million butt crunches. We’re more than bodies, you know, but you sure couldn’t tell from the way we’re treated.”

She was preaching to the choir. I was a Latina woman from a traditional Mexican family trying hard to compete with some tough hombres in a man’s job. “Of course we are.”

“People can’t see beyond”—she flung her arms out—“beyond this. I thought being a dancer would be awesome. Freeing. But it’s not. It’s oppressive.”

Hello? Had she seen the outfits we had to wear before she’d signed up? It was total objectification. Not to mention her current ensemble. “If you don’t like it, why do you do it?”

“You’re perfect, you know,” she said, instead of answering my question. “You have perfect breasts.” She floated her hands through the air in the shape of an hourglass. “The ratio of your hips to your waist. It couldn’t be more ideal.” She ran her palms down her sides. “I don’t have that ratio, but that’s what people want. We have to strip it all away.”

I had no idea what she was getting at so I sipped my coffee, wishing it had a splash of chocolate and some frothy milk stirred into it. “What do you mean, ‘strip it all away’?”

She took a bolstering breath before lowering her voice to a secretive level. “Have you ever heard of Cuerpo y Alma?”

I translated. Body and Soul. It rang a bell, but…“No.”

“People there see inside of you.” She put her hands on the table and leaned toward me, lowering her voice even more. “It takes away the importance of the outside package. Do you understand?”

I shook my head, trying to make sense out of what she was saying. “What’s Cuerpo y Alma?”

She searched the parking lot behind me. “It’s where I belong,” she finally said, drawing out the last word.

“O-kay.” I was not connecting the dots, and it wasn’t from lack of brain cells or effort. “So why not go there?”

Wherever there was.

She hesitated, a long, weighty pause, then finally said, “Because people need real jobs. Jennifer did. We all do. But…”

I leaned closer, hoping we were finally getting to the point of this rendezvous.

“I think the notes we’re all getting at the games are because of me.”

Phew. She’d had my full attention all along, but now I was giving 120 percent. I opened my notebook and grabbed a pen from my purse. I wrote down Cuerpo y Alma and Selma’s full real name. Then I prompted her to go on. “What exactly do you mean when you say it’s where you belong, and why do you think the notes are because of you?”

She flicked her eyes around, as if she were making sure we weren’t overheard. “The package doesn’t matter there because people don’t care about it.”

Either she wasn’t making sense or I was slow on the uptake. “I don’t understand, Selma.”

“It’s a naturist resort.” There was the low voice again. “You know, clothing optional?”

“Oh.” ¡Dios mío! “Nudists.”

“Naturist is more PC, but yeah, it’s basically the same.” She shook her head and whatever sadness was in her seemed to deepen. “The outside and inside can’t be separated, no matter how much I might want them to be. I can’t change who I am.”

I tapped the tip of my pen against my notepad, a slew of questions going through my mind. Topping the pile was: Is it a coincidence that Selma and Jennifer both had ties to nudist resorts?

“So you go to Cuerpo y Alma?”

“As much as possible.”

“Selma—?” I said, hesitating because I knew that I had to tread carefully.

She raised her gaze to mine, waiting.

“Did you ever see…” I trailed off. Even though Jennifer was gone, it felt wrong to be the one outing her as a nudist.

A tear slipped down Selma’s cheek and she quickly brushed it away. “Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

Her voice got small and quiet. “You were going to ask if I’d ever seen Jennifer there. Weren’t you?”

I reached into my purse again, this time pulling out the brochures I’d taken from Jennifer’s apartment. “I found these in a drawer at her house last night. She was a member?” I asked the question, but I already knew the answer. Although how in the world she hid that from the world when she’d been part of Living the Royal Life was a big mystery. Even I would have gotten wind of that, I think, had it been public.

“She was a member there. We both are…were…I still am,” she finished.

A wave of knifelike pricks traveled up my back. Now we were really getting somewhere. “Member?”

Selma lifted her shoulders to her ears, her cheeks turning scarlet. “She pretty much lived there. That’s where I met her. She’s the one who told me about the tryouts for the Royals.”

“So you were good friends?” Selma was young, innocent, and earthy, while Jennifer had had a sleek sophistication about her. They were an unlikely duo, but I suppose a common interest in nudity could be a bonding agent.

“Not good friends, but friends. We spent some time together at NudeStock over the summer.”

Every cell in my body went on freak alert. “Um, NudeStock?”

“It’s a week of concerts. You know, like Woodstock? They have it every summer. A couple of L.A. bands come up. Some local groups. Vendors have booths around the grass.” Her face lit up. “It was fantastic. Amazing to see all those bodies, all those people so sure of who they are.” Her eyes sank to half mast, like she was picturing the scene. “They were dancing and singing and just so…so comfortable in their skin.”

I tried to get a visual on hundreds of naked bodies grooving to rock music, but my Catholic mind wanted to block it. My upbringing ramped up full force and I shuddered.

The waitress came by with Selma’s veggie omelet, then quickly disappeared to deliver more food to other hungry customers.

Selma pushed her fork around the plate. “Do you ever get a feeling that you can’t quite put into words, but that you just can’t shake and you know is right?”

All the time, I wanted to say, but mostly that was related to my family and the unconditional love I had for them, despite their old-fashioned beliefs and their…craziness. My intuition with crimes was more sketchy. “Sometimes.”

“I have that feeling. What if her death had to do with her being a member at Cuerpo y Alma?” Selma’s voice cracked. “I’m scared.”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Did she have a reason for believing she was in danger, or had fear seeped in and filled her with irrational thoughts? “Why do you think that, Selma?”

She shifted in her seat. “We have to sign a contract—”

“Right. No dating the players.” Which Jennifer clearly hadn’t followed.

“No going out unless we’re fully presentable—”

“And a morality clause.”

Ha. Ditto.

“It doesn’t say you can’t be a nudist, but you have to be a role model in the community, you know? They wouldn’t like it if they found out about her lifestyle.”

“Who? Lance and Victoria Wolfe?”

“Mmm-hmm. Jennifer and me…we had to stay away from Cuerpo y Alma during filming. No one knew.” She choked on her words, her voice straining. “It was like denying who I really was. Am. It still is. Nobody knows.”

“Nobody.”

“Jennifer made me swear that I wouldn’t tell anyone our secret, but what if the Wolfes found out?” Her voice rose at the end as if she were on the verge of tears.

“What are you saying, Selma? You think Lance or Victoria would have killed Jennifer because she broke her contract?”

Selma gave a desperate shrug. “Maybe?”

My hope that this meeting would reveal some great clue faded. I suppose it was possible that someone would kill over a morality clause, but it didn’t seem probable. “I think they’d just fire her.”

She shook her head. “But there’s something going on. First, all those letters. I mean, what are they about? We’re not doing anything except trying to live our lives. And now Jennifer.” She rubbed her eyes as if she were trying to control her tears. “Sometimes I get the feeling I’m being watched.”

Ay, Dios. The girl was on edge. “Have you gone to the police?”

Her cheeks flushed pink. “And say what? That I’m a naturist and I’m scared?” She scoffed. “They’ll laugh me out of the station.”

She had a point. Other than her intuition, she hadn’t provided a single solid reason, and certainly no proof, that Jennifer’s murder had anything to do with the broken contract, morality clause, or Cuerpo y Alma. Officer Bennett would show her the door and let it smack her on the behind as she left.

Which just made me want to prove him wrong. And as Jack had once told me—and I completely agreed—people kill for the most ridiculous reasons.

I stretched my arms across the table and took her hands in mine, squeezing. “It’s going to be okay.”

She straightened her spine and pulled her hands away. Her eyes grew wide and she lifted her chin almost in defiance. “But what if it’s not? What if she really was killed because she belonged to Cuerpo y Alma? The letters all say that the writer knows what we’re doing. Maybe he or she’s giving them to everyone to throw us off the trail. Maybe Jennifer”—she swallowed hard—“and I are the real targets?”

She emptied a tiny container of cream into her coffee, then cut her omelet into bite-size pieces, pushing them off to one side of the plate once they were severed from the semicircle. “You’re supposed to be able to be free there and not hide behind the constraints society puts on you. Since your body is exposed, people are supposed to be able to see beyond it.” She spoke to her plate, an aching bitterness in her voice. “But what if a killer is hiding there, judging us?”

“But then whoever it is would be a member, too, so why would he or she judge?”

“You don’t have to be a member to go,” she said after she swallowed a miniscule bite of her omelet.

“How does it work, then?”

“You can become a member or you can pay for day use. Like a campground.”

“And what does ‘clothing optional’ mean, exactly? People can wear clothes if they want to?”

“If it’s your first time, they let you work up to taking it all off…if you need to, you know, adjust. But otherwise it means no clothes at all.” She gave me an encouraging smile. “It’s really freeing, you know.”

No, I didn’t know, and I was A-OK with that. I liked my wardrobe and my Victoria’s Secret collection, muchas gracias. A little imagination was a good thing in my book. “I’m partial to clothes.”

Selma finally worked her way through her eggs in earnest and even dipped into the side of country potatoes. “It’s a way of life, you know? Even when I’m not there, I’m a nudist in clothing. What I wear or don’t wear doesn’t define me. My clothes can’t convey the real me. It’s just my body. Being there gives people an opportunity to want to delve deeper and not get stuck at what they think is underneath.”

Writing down what she said didn’t help me understand it. I glanced at her halter top. It seemed to define her pretty well. Young. Nubile. Sexy. “So you feel free at the resort—not wearing clothes.”

“Totally. My parents live at a nudist place up past Napa. I grew up in the life.”

Pobrecita. She had a pretty warped sense of what fashion could do for a girl.

She chatted about her naked childhood for a minute before getting back to the point. “Jennifer was spending a lot of time with this one guy she met at NudeStock,” Selma said. “She told me about him. Said it was just like in the movies. He saw her from across the grass. He couldn’t take his eyes away from her face.” Selma’s fingers spread across her cheeks. “Her face,” she said again, as if those two words held some extra-special meaning.

I was skeptical. I’d seen Jennifer’s body. She had a rockin’ physique, no duct tape needed. I bet he caught sight of it even if he didn’t let on.

“Were they dating?” She wouldn’t have had a jersey to add to her collection if she’d been seeing a nudist.

“Dating’s so Fifties. People hook up at the resort. I know they had a standing meeting. In the hot tub every Monday at six o’clock, or sometimes they’d meet at the bar.”

A naked bar. That wasn’t something I was dying to see. “Then what happened?”

“They broke it off for a while. She said he wasn’t a nudist at heart, but then last Monday, we went over there together after a dance practice. She stopped at the message board—”

“What board?”

“There’s a message board just outside the office. People leave notes for each other on it. You know, since we can’t carry our smartphones,” she said.

“So this guy left Jennifer a message?”

Her head bobbed up and down. “Said he was trying to understand and live in her world.” Selma bit her lip, lost in the sadness of her memory. Finally, she came back to the present. “She was mad at first, but then I think she realized that he was a keeper.”

After seeing Jennifer’s trophies, I could believe it. It seemed to me like she was the one who loved ’em and left ’em. After getting a dose of that herself, maybe she’d reformed.

Selma continued. “I tried to ask her about him, but she kept him private.”

“So you never met him?”

“No. I always went with Parker—that’s my boyfriend—to our tent.”

She left the sentence hanging there for me to fill in the blanks. “Um, tent?”

“People pitch tents or come in motorhomes.”

Right. She’d said it was like a campground.

“It’s fantastic,” she said.

I bet. Not. Jack’s bed, now that was fantastic. Or at least I thought it would be if I ever found myself in it. I refocused. “So you went to your tent…”

“And when we came back out, Jennifer was gone.”

“Did she meet up with him again, then?”

Selma absently opened another creamer and poured it into her cup. “Yes.”

“And she never told you his name?”

Selma shook her head.

Great. How could I track down Jennifer’s nudist lover?

Before I had any ideas, Selma dropped her voice and said, “There’s one more thing.”

I waited as she poured more sweetener into her coffee, tapping my fingers in a random rhythm against the slightly sticky table.

“Someone graffitied her car,” she said.

“What did it say?”

A shudder passed through her and she shook her head, her eyes welling up. She breathed deeply then spat out the words, clipped, to get it over with. “Slut, whore, white trash, traitor. It was all in red.”

My skin pricked. To see that kind of hatred and judgment against you would be awful. Pobre Jennifer. I might not ever want to go to a nudist resort, but I thought people should have the right to choose and not be judged for it.

“Any idea who could have done it?” Surely not the boyfriend?

“No idea.”

“What about other people at the resort? Did she ever have run-ins with anyone else?”

“Not that I saw. Everyone loved her—it was like the whole place was her family. She was everyone’s best friend.”

I could see that. We hadn’t made it to best friends, but Jennifer had been the only dancer to really welcome me into the fold.

Selma paused for a beat, then asked in a trembling voice, “Do you think he killed her? The boyfriend, I mean?”

That was the million-dollar question. “I don’t know, Selma.” My heart plunged to my stomach. As much as I pushed down the idea percolating in my head, I knew what I should do. What I ought to do. What I had to do.

“The other dancers, do they know about the resort?”

Her eyes widened, her skin turning pale. “No! They wouldn’t understand.”

I wasn’t sure about that. Young, beautiful cheerleaders weren’t shy about showing off their bodies. They’d probably dig a field trip to Cuerpo y Alma.

“I’m already an outsider,” Selma continued. She met my eyes. “You know what it’s like. You’ve seen the girls. They’re like a junior high school clique. You have to try to fit in however you can.”

Except at the resort. There, everybody was the same. Bare naked. Ay caramba.

“We’ll figure this out.”

“Will you come to the resort? I’ll show you around. Maybe you can find something.”

The idea had already crossed my mind, but the direct proposition made a knife twist in my gut. First nearly nude as a Courtside Dancer, then totally in the buff at Cuerpo y Alma.

My thoughts skipped straight to Jack. The question he’d thrown out at the restaurant the night before shot into my mind. How far was I willing to go for my job?

I put off answering Selma, instead asking her, “Have you seen his car? Make and model?”

She shook her head.

Scratch that avenue off my list of possible means to track down a mystery nudist.

A lightbulb suddenly seemed to go off for Selma. “If he killed Jennifer, he would still follow his regular routine, right? So he wouldn’t, you know, raise suspicion? They always met at the hot tub.” Selma leaned forward as I took a sip of coffee. “I’m meeting Parker tonight. Come with me. You can go, you know, spy at the hot tub.”

The coffee caught in my throat. I snatched a napkin and held it to my mouth, trying not to spew it across the table at her. “Tonight?”

Selma brushed away the piece of hair that fell into her eyes. “If he’s there, you can talk to him. You’ll know if he’s the murderer, right?”

Ay, loca. My intuitive powers weren’t good enough to judge a naked man in a hot tub and determine if he’d recently killed a woman, as handy as that particular skill might be. I tried to picture myself in the steam bath at Cuerpo y Alma making that determination, but the faces bobbing in the water around me were those of my parents and grandparents, my grandmother clasping her beaded rosary between her pruned fingers, praying for my soul in an endless Spanish loop.

I blinked, chasing the vision away. I couldn’t tell them about this assignment; that’s all there was to it.

I started to wonder how Jack would take it. He understood my passion for this job. He’d been by my side, said we were a team, and didn’t mind me shimmying in cheerleading costumes. But a nudist resort was a big step over what I imagined his morality line to be.

I immediately scolded myself. I could tell him—after the fact. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission. That was my motto today. Mi novio, Jack Callaghan, could not factor into my career decisions.

Selma tapped her fingernails on her front teeth. Click. Click. Click. The sound grated into my brain. “So you’ll come?” she finally asked.

I ran through my list of obligations. Dance practice was from three to six this afternoon. No shifts at the restaurant. And so far this was the only lead I had. “I’ll be there,” I agreed. The thought of pulsing, hot water on my aching muscles actually sounded pretty good.

As long as I had on my swimsuit.