The Brush Off (17 page)

“Whoa.” I put up a hand. As if she could see it. Maybe it gave my voice more authority. “I don’t want to know.”

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t want to know how much the company is worth.”

“B-But—” I’d finally rendered Ms. Gibson speechless.

“But nothing. I have enough rattling around in my head without those numbers.”

“That’s very strange, Miss Sawyer.”

“This whole thing is strange, Ms. Gibson. And I intend to get to the bottom of it.” I unbuttoned my pocket, removed the violet paper, and smoothed it out on the desktop. “I’m going to find out who killed Ricardo and why, before I sit on any corporate throne.”

“Oh, dear.” Wow, maybe she did care. “Please don’t do that until you’ve accepted ownership of the salons.”

She did care, all right. About herself and the pain in the ass the paperwork would be if I got killed and she had to track down my heirs.

“Listen, I said, as she was no doubt already searching her lawyer brain for some obscure statutes that would apply to the death of an heir before the transfer of property. “If you would be so kind as to get me copies of the scripts of the actors so I won’t be repeating all the wonderful things they’re going to say about Ricardo in the service, I’d really appreciate it.” Truth is, I really wanted to see if there would be any more clues in what he had to say about himself. I was honestly considering not speaking at the funeral. I’m that perverse. I hated it when people manipulated me, even from the grave. I might have relayed this information to Ms. Gibson, but it probably would’ve given her a heart attack.

“Of course. I’ll have them messengered over immediately.”

“You don’t have to be that quick about it.”

“Yes, I do. The service is today at four o’clock.”

“Why so soon?” I squawked.

“Ricardo’s stipulation was that his memorial would take place within forty-eight hours of his death.”

“But wasn’t he Catholic?”

“You’re his friend, you should know that,” she snapped. Maybe she was human after all. Not very, though, because she got herself back under control again. “The service is at a nondenominational church. The burial will take place privately and separately after the body has been released. That can take a while in a case like this.”

“Okay.” I sighed. What else could I do?

“And if you’d like, when it is convenient, you can have your attorney contact me regarding the dispensation of the will.”

If
I’d
like? She’d like, that was for sure. She’d rather do the lawyer-speak thing with her own kind than have to translate it all to me. I almost told her to forget it, until I remembered the attorney on the list Zorita gave me. I could call him on the pretense of looking for a recommendation for an attorney. What a great excuse to weasel information out of a weasel. “I’ll do that,” I told her.

“One more thing,” she said. “Ricardo’s instructions are to tell you, ‘I’ve made two mistakes. The first was the best thing I ever did. The second was the worst thing I ever did.’ ”

“What!?”

“That is a direct quote. That was the last thing I was to tell you in this phone call,” she said, and hung up before I could ask more.

Huh?

I stared at the receiver in my hand a few minutes before I replaced it. Grabbing the frame in front of me, I stared at the photo of Ricardo, hoping to see the key to all this in his eyes. If he’d felt threatened, why hadn’t he told me? Why hadn’t I probed his odd attitude the night he died instead of pelting him with sarcasm? Why hadn’t I rushed right over when he called in the middle of the night, instead of going back to sleep?

What the hell was I going to do with Ricardo’s empire? I didn’t want it. That might seem crazy, but I always liked to do things the hard way. My goal in life was to make a name for myself, and I couldn’t do that by taking over a company emblazoned with someone else’s name, built on someone else’s blood, sweat, and tears. Money didn’t interest me nearly as much as success did. Well, I’d do a Scarlett O’Hara and think about it tomorrow. It wasn’t mine yet, anyway.

“You’re a big help,” I told Ricardo’s image as I moved to put it back.

“Seems to me you’d be a little more grateful to the man who’s made you a millionairess.”

The frame slipped out of my hands as I spun around, sending it flying against the wall.

Jackson Scythe was leaning against the doorjamb of my office, arms crossed smugly across his chest, unsmiling, laser beams turned on high. This was a man who relished the sneak attack. He didn’t even flinch with the shattering of glass.

“Seems to me you’d be a little more polite and not eavesdrop on other people’s conversations.”

“Seems to me you’d know that eavesdropping is Chapter Four in the detectives manual.”

“Very funny.”

“Is that your default comment when your brain can’t catch up with that mouth of yours?”

“Only with you. I’m trying to make you feel better about your complete lack of good humor.”

His lips thinned, and his eyes narrowed. Just barely but enough for me to know I’d hit a nerve. Was he a little sensitive about his hard-ass attitude? I’d have to file that one away in his list of vulnerabilities. A list of one. He probably already had a list as long as his arm of mine. I can’t help it that I’m easy to read.

“You think you’re going to get away with it?”

“With what? Insulting you? Well, I
was
hoping—”

“With killing Ricardo Montoya and walking away with his multimillion-dollar fortune.”

I started laughing. A combination of lack of sleep, the shock about the will, and the repeating vision of Ricardo lying there with the brush sticking out of his back had made me semihysterical. Or maybe it was the overly serious way Scythe had delivered the accusation, like he’d stun me into confessing right then and there. Or maybe it was the absurdity of the notion—of me killing my mentor to walk away with something I didn’t want.

Whatever the reason, I couldn’t stop laughing. Scythe had gone from ominous to bumfuzzled in two seconds flat.

The bell on the front door tinkled. “Reyn? Reyn Marten Sawyer, is that you?”

“Back here,” I sputtered, and struggled to compose myself. I recognized the soprano as one I’d heard before, but I couldn’t place whom it belonged to.

Wedge heels clunked down the hardwood. I swallowed another laugh that rose in my throat. Scythe, having recaptured his menace, glared. The broad, smiling face of number eight on my violet paper list peered around Scythe’s right shoulder.

“Reyn, is there any way on God’s green earth you could squeeze me in today? What with—”

“Of course,” I cut in before she could let on she was one of Ricardo’s clients. “How about right now?”

Scythe’s eyebrows drew together in frustration.

“Ms. Janice Hornbuckle, meet Jackson Scythe.” I introduced then, knowing my next comment might just send him flying. They shook hands. “Mrs. Hornbuckle owns My Mother Earth, maker of feminine-hygiene products.”

“Really?” I could see a flash of panic in his eyes.

“Oh, yes, young man.” She turned back to me, excited. “And Reyn, I can’t wait to ask your opinion about a new product we have under development.”

That did it. Scythe ran his hand through his hair. “I’m sorry to have to leave you ladies.”

I decided to ignore the sarcastic inflection he put on the last word for my benefit. I didn’t mind. I’d gotten rid of him. Hee hee. I almost started chortling again, until I saw his laser beam catch sight of the violet paper on my desk.
Damn.
I’d forgotten it was right there in plain view. “What’s that?” he asked, nodding toward it, eyes narrowing.

“Oh, that? A recipe a friend passed along.” Well, I wasn’t lying. It was a recipe of sorts. Recipe for finding a killer, right? I coolly tucked it in between hairstyling books on the shelf.

“A new recipe. I’ll just have to stop by for dinner, then, won’t I?”

“You won’t.”

“I will.”

Mrs. Hornbuckle’s head bobbed back and forth between us like a tennis ball on match point.

I smiled suddenly. “Great. Make it a little early, so I can give you a hair trim first to thank you for all your kindness.”

The panic flashed again. Before he mouthed a smile that didn’t even get close to his eyes. He made a visual pass over my hairstyle. Okay, so the asymmetrical bob wasn’t my most flattering style ever, but I figured it would grow out. Story of my life.

“A trim won’t be necessary,” Scythe forced out.

“Oh, of course it will. You really need your hair cut. It’s starting to curl around your ears and cover that sexy neck of yours,” Mrs. Hornbuckle put in with a wink.

I could see Scythe fighting the urge to look into the mirror to check out his sexy neck. Gag. What a big head.

“See you tonight.” I pulled a pair of scissors out of my tool cart and tested their sharpness with my index finger. Shaking his head slightly, Scythe turned away and let himself out.

Janice Hornbuckle looked at me over the top of her wire-rimmed eyeglasses. “I’m so relieved we finally got rid of him. I have something important to tell you.”

I
SILENCED
J
ANICE WITH A FINGER TO MY LIPS AND
stalked over to the front door. I didn’t trust Scythe. I could imagine him making sure we heard the door shut while still standing in the foyer with his ear pressed against the wall. I guess it takes a sneak to know a sneak. I ducked behind the ficus I kept in the corner of the lobby as I saw a Crown Vic, with Crandall at the wheel, make a U-turn on Magnolia and head west. I swear, I could feel Scythe’s gaze burning through the dark-tinted windows of the sedan. Where were they off to now? I couldn’t worry about it right now. I had a hot one in my salon chair.

“Coast is clear,” I told Janice as I strode back into my room. I motioned to her naturally wavy hair, which she wore surprisingly long—to her waist. It made me think of peace signs and tie-dyed shirts. “What do you need done?”

“Just a trim, Reyn. It’s the same style I’ve had for fifty years. I do hope I can start coming to you now that Ricardo is in another dimension.”

Like the Twilight Zone? I fought to keep my face neutral. “Of course you can. If you’d like a regular appointment, we can work you into my book after we’re finished.” I threw a smock around her shoulders and ran my hands through her fine salt-and-pepper hair. Her style was unusual for a middleaged CEO dressed conservatively in khaki trousers and white silk blouse. It would take me ten minutes to trim it, if I stretched it out. “Let’s go ahead and wash and condition first.”

As we walked to my sink station, Janice shook her head. “I just wish I could have done something.”

“What could you have done?”

She shook her head again and seemed lost in thought. I counseled myself on the benefits of patience as I leaned her head back and washed, massaging her scalp, hoping to rub the secret out like Aladdin’s lamp. When I was finished and was wrapping the towel around her head, she sighed heavily. “I think if I would’ve pried a little more, he would’ve opened up to me, and maybe all this could’ve been avoided. Ricardo might be alive today.”

I swallowed the
What?
and led her to my room, settling her in the chair. I tried to imagine myself like the cool psychologist who listens to Tony on
The Sopranos
. You know she wants to lean over and shake him sometimes or have her mouth drop open wide enough to admit a semi, but she just sits there. Calmly. Waiting. My hero.

I waited.

I bumped into my tool cart and sent it crashing into the wall.

Obviously, not calmly.

I righted my cart, chose a comb and some scissors, and willed her to start talking before I started snipping so she wouldn’t need stitches by the time I was finished.

“Why don’t you tell me about it?” I said to Janice. Very cool.

“I met him last night about nine.”

Ah-ha.
She was the mystery customer.

“I was scheduled to get my regular trim and condition,” she continued, watching my poised scissors rather nervously. “First he tried to talk me into going shorter. He showed me photos, a shag, like we had back in the sixties. But he started waving this weird-looking brush around, and I realized this shag was going to need some twenty-first-century styling, so I said no.”

At least that answered the question of why Ricardo needed the brush. Janice paused. I started snipping so she’d keep talking. “His cell phone rang, and you know how he is, he ignores it if he is with a customer. I imagine he doesn’t turn it off because he wants to know he’s had a call, but I’ve never known him to allow an interruption when he’s with me—or, I assume, with any other client.”

“That’s right,” I confirmed. That was part of Ricardo’s deal. Two big ones for—I looked again at Janice’s hair—a twenty-five-dollar cut, but you would have his undivided attention.

“This time, he excused himself and walked to his bathroom, but with all that tile and mirror and chrome, it’s like an echo chamber. I heard everything he said.”

I held my breath so I wouldn’t blurt anything out, like
What the hell did he say?
Instead, I smiled and nodded.

“I really shouldn’t tell you.” She mulled.

My fingers tightened around the handles of the scissors. Janice swallowed hard.

“You just said you should’ve said something last night. Now is your chance,” I reminded her, exchanging my scissors for the comb and beginning to work it through her hair. She winced. This might be better than the scissors for extracting info.

“Too late to save him.” Was she ever stubborn. I had to admire that.

“But maybe not too late to find his murderer.”

“You’re right. Protecting his privacy now won’t help him, will it?” She paused, watching a woodpecker choose just the right piece of oak tree outside the window.

I marveled at Ricardo’s privacy even beyond the grave. How did he instill this powerful instinct in all his friends and customers to keep our mouths shut about his business, when human nature is the complete opposite? Of course, with our tongues quiet, our imaginations went into overdrive, and we made up elaborate scenarios miles from the truth. I know I did in the beginning. He’d threaten to pluck me bald if I told anyone he was going home early. It was probably just to watch
Oprah,
but I assumed he had a hot rendezvous until I got to know him better. He cultivated that air of mystery, though.

Janice sucked in a breath and finally gave it up. “He told the person on the other end that if ‘he’ didn’t do what Ricardo asked, Ricardo would tell everything he knew.”

“Blackmail?” I was shocked.

“It sounded like it.”

“He was talking directly to the person he was blackmailing?”

“Oh, no. I’m sorry. He was talking
about
the person he was blackmailing. He referred to ‘he.’ I got the impression he was talking to a woman. He called her
‘mi cara’
once and then cautioned her to keep calm, that everything would work out for the best.”

Best for whom? Not Ricardo, obviously. “Anything else?”

“No. It was a short conversation, whispered. And I missed the end, because he flushed the toilet and drowned out whatever else I might have heard. When he came back to me, his hands were shaking so badly that I told him I had a dinner date I’d just remembered, and we could reschedule my trim for another time. He agreed, obviously relieved. I’ve never seen him so distracted.”

I wondered if the police had already traced the call and were on the hunt for another suspect I didn’t know about. That bugged me.

“Have you told the police?” I asked.

“No!” Janice almost shouted. Her hand flew to her throat protectively. “I won’t talk to police. Not voluntarily. Not ever.”

“Why?” I tried to hide my shock at her reaction

“I have a distrust of governmental authority. I demonstrated against the war in Vietnam in the sixties and seventies.” That explained the expensive fringed purse and hairstyle—holdover hippie. “I’ve seen the view from behind bars. I think politicians are more corrupt now than they were then, only now I’m more selfish, too. I have a company to protect, women who rely on my products. Besides, the IRS audits me every year. One visit to the fuzz, and they’d find some reason to close me down for good.”

Wow, was she paranoid, or did Big Brother really lean on her that hard? After thirty years? She must have been a pretty big thorn in their side. I admired her for that, but looking at her now, I realized no matter what she had been and the trappings she tried to hang on to—the long hippie hair that she had expensively cut, the Sandra Acuna fringed pouch purse that was retro-sixties but cost in the neighborhood of two hundred dollars, her talk of the “other dimension”—Janice now was really no different from any corporate stooge. Protecting what she had was more important than anything—like truth, justice, what was right.

That scared me. I hoped age would make me wiser, not clinically cautious.

Then I thought about my gran and relaxed. If genetics had anything to do with it, I’d be okay. Gran was anything but cautious.

“I appreciate you telling me, Janice,” I said as I retrieved my scissors and began snipping.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I’m just checking around, doing things the police don’t have the time or the inclination to do.”

“You won’t tell the police about me, will you?” She gripped the armrests so tightly her knuckles went white.

Man, I really wondered what she’d done in her past to warrant this kind of paranoia. Or
was
it all in her past? “No, Janice, I promise your name won’t pass my lips, even under the influence of thumbscrews. I’m not on the best terms with the police, anyway.”

“Don’t get hurt. I don’t want your blood on my conscience, too.”

What an odd choice of words. Or was I becoming as paranoid as she was, suspicious of everyone who mentioned Ricardo’s name? “Don’t worry about me, Janice. I can take care of myself.”

“With a little help from her friends,” Trudy chirped as she swung her head around the doorjamb. I saw she was doing lime green today as the rest of her body encased in silk and spandex danced into the doorway. She’d even changed her fingernail polish, although I wasn’t entirely sure that ice blue was the perfect complement to lime. Trudy made it work somehow. She always did.

“And her friends’ mothers-in-law,” I couldn’t resist adding.

Trudy hung her head for a moment, then put her hand on my forearm as I replaced my scissors on the cart, picked up a brush, and reached for my blow-dryer. “Reyn, I’m sorry about Mama Tru.”

We shared a moment of silence, during which I realized that despite all her faults, Mama Tru was another example of a geriatric with spunk. Okay, so I didn’t have to dread my twilight years anymore. I looked at Trude, about to forgive her for the family she married into, but she ruined it by breaking into a lascivious grin.

“But I hear that you were tight with Policeman Perfect, sharing a glass of wine, cozy in the kitchen. I want the skinny.”

That’s all Janice had to hear. She jumped up out of her chair, ripped off her smock, and swung her half-dry hair out of her face. “Reyn! You’re involved with a cop? You lied to me.”

“I did not. It’s not what it sounds like. Not even close.” I spared a glare at Trudy before focusing back on Janice, who was now grabbing her fringed bag on her way out the door.

“I just hope you don’t betray my confidence. I don’t want to wear black-and-white stripes again.”

I wanted to tell her they dress you in orange in our county jail, but it probably wasn’t what she wanted to hear. I listened as she nearly stampeded down the hall and slammed the front door on Sherlyn’s good-bye. I might be wrong, but I don’t think she took the time to schedule her next appointment with me. There went another potential regular customer thanks to a Trujillo big mouth.

I turned to my erstwhile buddy, whose mouth was actually looking the part at the moment, hanging wide open in shock. “You already found the killer?”

I snorted as I put the blow-dryer and brush back on the cart. “Not hardly.”

Trudy followed me into my office. I plucked the list out from between the hairstyle books, smoothed it out on the desk, and made a check mark by number eight. I scanned the other names. Was Ricardo’s
mi cara
on here, or was she merely a confidante?

“But she said—”

I waved off the rest of her statement as I closed the office door. “Paranoid ex-hippie.”

“Oh. I thought she was trying to be pop with the peace ring, the purse, and the platform sandals.”

“No, she’s just hanging on to the wrong parts of her past.”

“I’ll say,” Trudy intoned. A fashion faux pas was the biggest sin in her book, although sometimes I wondered if she ever looked in the mirror. Of course, when I looked at fashion magazines, I rarely looked down past the shoulders, and my own fashion consisted of whatever I chose to go with cowboy boots.

Trudy read the list over my shoulder. “You really think one of them did it?”

“I don’t know, but it’s a place to start.” I told her what Janice had overheard. “So, all we know now is that Ricardo was apparently blackmailing someone, met a guy in tennis whites at a transvestite club, was inordinately interested in one local political race, and—” I paused. I wasn’t ready to tell her about my potential inheritance. I wasn’t ready to accept it, and I knew if I told Trudy, it would be in the newspaper tomorrow morning. I love my friend, but she doesn’t know how to keep her mouth shut, especially about things that need to be kept secret. “And last night, while he was cutting Janice’s hair, he talked to someone who knew about the blackmail and called her
mi cara.”

“Could
mi cara
be a man?”

“I don’t think Ricardo was gay or swung both ways. It’s just an instinct, and we have to rely on that, since we have little else to rely on at the moment.”

“If Janice was the appointment he had last night, you don’t think she did it?”

I shook my head. “It just doesn’t make sense for her to come here and offer the information willingly if she killed him.”