Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (23 page)

The plane from Atlanta was on time and when Frances came through the doorway into the waiting room, he was so glad to see her that he rushed forward to take her bags and fold her in his arms.

They were not ordinarily a publicly demonstrative couple and Frances brushed his lips with hers and said, “Goodness! I believe you
did
miss me!”

She had limited herself to a couple of carry-on pieces so they didn’t have to waste time standing around the baggage carousel. Frances Eberstadt was a sensible woman little given to intuition and imagination; but when they were in the car and driving away from the airport, she looked at Matt’s drawn face with concern and said, “Is everything okay at home? The boys behave themselves while I was gone?”

“Oh, sure,” he replied, maneuvering through the traffic patterns that surrounded JFK until he was in the correct lane. “Well, except for Tuesday night.”

They had talked every day by phone, so she’d already heard about the boys staying out till nearly one in the morning while he’d driven all over Ozone Park looking for them, earlier in the week.

“I think I might have caught a cold then,” he said.

Instantly, her hand was on his forehead. “You do feel a little warm.”

He caught her hand and brought it to his lips. “I missed you, kid. The house always feels cold when you’re not there.”

Pleased, Frances patted his thigh. “As soon as we get home I’m going to fix you a nice hot bowl of soup. And then straight to bed for you.”

“What about the boys’ basketball game?” Matt protested weakly. “We promised we’d go. Kenny thinks the coach might let him start tonight. You don’t want to miss that.”

“No,” agreed Frances, who had once led her high school basketball team in field goal percentages. “But there’s no need for us both to stay home if you’re going to be sleeping.”

To ease her conscience, she added, “I’ll tell Pam to tell Bernie that you’re going to call in sick tomorrow.”

The moment of truth had arrived, Berthelot told the group. Analysis over, now was the time to implement their discoveries. Back to the working area of the salon they would now go. Hair would be cut and styled, stripped and dyed; and individual palettes of makeup colors would be blended to complete their total metamorphosis into the gorgeous butterflies they’d heretofore kept hidden inside cocoons of timidity.

As Berthelot pronounced final categories (Phyllis was a California Autumn), each woman’s earlier attendant reappeared to take a checklist of styling instructions from Berthelot before leading her charge away.

Sigrid was willing to agree that she should perhaps go through her closet and weed out any clothes with a yellow-based color, but she’d be damned if she’d spend the afternoon having “ashy highlights” added to her hair while Anne was having the flicks of gray removed from hers and she said as much when the other three women had been led out and only she and Berthelot and Carina were left in the conference room.

Berthelot signaled the platinum blonde attendant to wait outside.

“Ah, Sigrid, Sigrid, Sigrid,” he crooned, more in sorrow than in anger when they were alone. “Why do you resist me so? All morning, you have fought me. So much negativity. Why?”

“I can’t do this. It feels too artificial. Too sybaritic.”

“But of course it’s sybaritic. Why are you here if not to enjoy this experience?”

“It wasn’t my idea,” Sigrid muttered. “Today’s a gift. From my grandmother. I don’t know how much she paid but—”

“Money!”
the little man exclaimed. “You think of this day in terms of
money?”

“Don’t you?” Sigrid asked coldly.

Berthelot drew himself up to his full five foot five. “My fee is no secret. An all-day seminar with me, Berthelot, is six hundred and fifty dollars.”

“Six hundred?”
Sigrid was appalled.

“And fifty,” he snapped.

“That’s obscene! That much money frittered away on skin colors and makeup charts and clothing styles to fit some idiotic category? Out there on the street, hungry people are freezing, while in here—”

“Yes?” he asked dangerously.

“I’m sorry.” She drew the collar of the robe up tightly around her neck. “I knew I shouldn’t have come. This place makes me feel like Marie Antoinette just before the deluge. I can’t stay.”

“You
will
stay.” Berthelot stamped his foot. “The makeup and lotions and colors are frivolous, you think? And you are Mother Theresa?”

“No, as a matter of fact, I’m a—”

“Silence! I do not wish to know. What you do is irrelevant. What you
are,
what
I
am is important. You look at me and you see a simpering old fairy, playing the fool so bored women will spend their money with me, no?”

“I’m sorry,” Sigrid repeated. “I didn’t mean to insult you.”

“But you have!” he said huffily. “Cosmetics frivolous? Perhaps. But do they not each year send ten fine young people from the projects to—”

He caught himself, shook his head and walked away. “This you did not hear! Forget I have said this,” he ordered imperiously, clearly annoyed with himself for his outburst. “What I—
how
I choose to amuse myself, to puff my ego with my money—
n’importe.
But my clients—what do you know of the suffering my clients endure before they find the courage to come to me?”

“Suffering?” Sigrid’s scorn was undermined by the altruism Berthelot had almost revealed, but her skepticism remained. “Courage?”

“A matter of degree, of course, but suffering—yes, and courage, too—comes in many forms. A woman who feels herself unlovely in a world which places physical beauty above so much else, does she not suffer?” He gave a Gallic shrug. “Be honest,
ma chérie.
Your grandmama clearly loves you and has given you a gift which costs you nothing but courage to accept. And if courage is not needed, why are you so afraid to let me bring out your true beauty?”

He looked up at her, an absurd, flattering court jester of a man. And yet . . .

“No dye,” she said, wavering.

“Only to bring out those glorious highlights? No? Very well,” he agreed. “No dye.”

“And no mousse.”

“No mousse.” Beaming, he opened the door and called for Carina.

“We have reached a compromise,” he told her. “No dye for Sigrid.
But,”
he added, “we
will
reshape her eyebrows.”

CHAPTER 20

By the time his shift ended Saturday afternoon, Bernie Peters felt he’d wrapped up a solid case against Zachary Caygill, the beefy bartender soon to be formally charged with the brutal stabbing of Harold Jackson.

“It’ll take one very slick lawyer to convince the jury that the signet ring Cohen took out of Jackson’s body has nothing to do with Caygill,” Bernie Peters told Sam Hentz as he finished up his paperwork.

Caygill was not one of those heart-of-gold bartenders beloved by customers and coworkers alike, and Bernie had found three witnesses willing to swear they’d seen Caygill wearing the ring the evening before Jackson’s death. Two of the three could also testify that Caygill had not been wearing the ring the next day.

“I still think it’s odd,” said Dinah Urbanska. She spread her sturdy fingers, on which three rings were firmly wedged. “I’ve never had any of my rings fall off.”

“Probably the only thing,” Sam said, tossing over an earring that had gone flying when Dinah tugged off her woollen cap upon arrival a few minutes earlier.

“Yeah, well,” said Bernie, “according to one of the witnesses, he’s put on a lot of weight this past year and had to start wearing the ring on his pinkie a couple of months ago.”

“Ever had your hand in fresh blood, kid?” asked Sam. Dinah made a face and shook her head.

“Slippery as motor oil,” he told her succinctly.

The telephone rang on the squad’s line and Dinah answered automatically. “Detective Unit. Urbanska. Sorry, they’re off today. Can I—?” She listened intently. “Yeah? Okay. I’ll tell them.”

She hung up and began to scrabble through the papers on her desk for a proper memo form. “That was Transit,” she told the two men. “They spotted that witness Lowry and Albee want. Jerry the Canary. He was doing his bird imitations on one of the Grand Central Station platforms, but he got away before they could grab him.”

“Which platform?” asked Sam.

“Uptown Lexington,” she said, placing the memo where Albee would see it when next she checked in.

“Hardly worth bothering with,” said Bernie. “Dollars to doughnuts he was passed out and didn’t see a damn thing Thursday morning.”

“Bet he did,” said Dinah. “Why would he run if he didn’t?”

The two men shared a look of vast experience; then Sam said, “Come on, kid, use your brain. Guys like him always have reasons to run. Mostly in their heads. That doesn’t make him a witness. And speaking of witnesses,” he continued, turning back to the work at hand, “that baby-in-the-dumpster canvass has turned up three possibles. You can check them out tonight while I—”

“I’m outta here,” said Bernie. He zipped up his heavy parka and left them to it.

“Ah-h-h,” sighed Anne Harald when their waiter had brought them drinks and then gone away again with their dinner orders. She leaned back against the cushioned banquette in the midtown restaurant they’d chosen. “I’d forgotten how exhausting getting beautiful could be.”

Sigrid smiled and lifted her bourbon and Coke. “Here’s to beauty.”

“Berthelot alone has looked on Beauty bare,” said Anne, raising her own drink.

“I thought that was Euclid.”

“Do you suppose Euclid ever stepped inside the Greek equivalent of
Imagine You!?”

“I doubt if the ancient Greeks had an equivalent,” Sigrid said. She took a sesame breadstick from the basket and snapped it in two, sending a shower of small seeds and crumbs across the white tablecloth. Lunch had looked perfectly elegant, but the porcelain plates had held only skimpy fruit salads, and plain Perrier with slices of lime had filled the crystal goblets. Sigrid was ready for some real food and drink. She buttered the tip of the breadstick and bit it off.

“What do you want to bet there wasn’t an Athenian Berthelot hawking kohl and henna around the Aegean and telling those Greek women that the gods hated naked eyes and gray hair?” Anne touched her own hair ruefully. “It’s not
too
dark, is it?”

“No,” Sigrid answered truthfully. “It looks right on you.”

“I should have taken some Before pictures so Mama could see the difference.” Her eyes swept over Sigrid. “I do like what he did with yours.”

Sigrid had gone in with hair so short that there wasn’t an awful lot Berthelot could do with it, but he’d managed an asymmetrical cut that gave a slightly different emphasis to the sweep of her forehead. She usually felt defensive when her mother looked at her like that, as if through a camera’s range finder or close-up lens, but after a full day of being turned and prodded and hearing every physical feature objectively dissected in minute analysis, one more observation didn’t bother her.

“Actually, I like it, too,” she admitted, reaching for a second breadstick.

Anne passed her the butter again. “Thanks for going through with this. For a minute there after lunch, I thought you were going to bolt or blow up.”

“When did I ever bolt or blow up?”