The Brush Off (2 page)

Suddenly, Ricardo’s eyes hardened, and he bored a serious look through each of us in turn. “That revelation was careless of me. I want you to forget you know about that; it would ruin my image.”

He was right about that. The legend of Ricardo was that he came from a moneyed, aristocratic family from Mexico City and had been the lover of every Mexican president’s wife before he left to seek his fortune in our humble town north of the border. I knew the truth (except the paramedic thing), that he’d grown up in the poorest neighborhood in South San Antonio.

Orphaned at thirteen, he’d worked his way through high school doing anything for money while living like a transient, eventually to become one of the richest businessmen in the city. For the longest time, I could never figure out why he wouldn’t be proud of what he’d accomplished. But, of course, I’d been naive. Older and more cynical, I now realized he might not have accomplished what he had without the legend. San Antonio society matrons didn’t like the idea of a hardworking southside boy doing their hair and charging $200-plus for the favor.

“Reyn?” he demanded, breaking into thoughts I hadn’t realized had drifted so far.

“What? Uh, sure, Ricardo. Not a word.” Flexing my stiff fingers, I nodded distractedly along with Trudy’s and Mario’s eagerly bobbing heads.

“I can always trust you, Reyn.” Ricardo smiled as he ran a finger along my jawline. “You’re a good girl. Can’t run a business worth a black bean, but you’re a good girl.”

“Gee, thanks, Ricardo,” I huffed, planting my hands on my hips with barely a wince at my back’s clutching response. “Just because I don’t have my own personal empire doesn’t mean I’m not a good businesswoman. Maybe I don’t want to have twenty-five stores. Maybe I like life simple.”

Ricardo laughed in pure disbelief. “
Pobrecita!
Maybe if you started sleeping with your clients, you’d have an empire of your own.”

“No, thank you.” I grimaced, more at the thought of him sleeping with the crones I’d seen in his chair than at me doing anything with any one of my customers.

Ricardo shot an amused glance at Mario before he looked back at me. “I don’t blame you, Reyn.”

I bit my tongue to keep from laughing. After all, I had to live with Mario and Trudy nearly every day. Ricardo’s visits were few and far between.

“Maybe I’ll have you run the salons when I retire,” Ricardo offered with a strange light in his angular amaretto-colored eyes.

“I’ll be too old to do you any good by then, Ricardo. You forget how well I know you; you live for that business. You’re not giving it up until you have one foot in the grave.” I dismissed his fantasy with a flip of my hand, then I winced. Even that hurt.

“Reyn, it will be much sooner than you think, so consider it. I’m serious.” He glided over to my three-tiered tray of tools, fingering the pair of scissors and tapping his sleek black Italian loafer on the floor, while looking out the nearby window. “There’s no one I would trust more to make sure my customers are taken care of while I yacht around the Mediterranean for the rest of my life. I have enough properly saved and wisely invested so that you could lose money with the salons and it won’t matter.”

“Gee, thanks,” I muttered.

“Need a boat boy?” Mario chipped in hopefully.

Ricardo smiled lightly but kept his gaze focused out the window.

Something about the secret in his eyes made me uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure if the shadow I saw there was sorrow or defeat. Perhaps he was tired of building his way up from scratch; he had sacrificed a lot—no close friends, no wife and kids. Maybe he wanted to take some time off to explore all he’d missed. Or was something more sinister at work here? I glanced over at him again and decided I wasn’t buying. Ricardo always did have a flair for the dramatic that complemented his selfish streak. Here I was suffering with a killer back, and he had me worrying about
him
. Enough was enough. I was tired and wanted to go upstairs to my bed and crash.

“Why’d you come by, Ricardo?”

He turned to look at me, the half-smile still on his full, sensual lips. His striking black eyebrows arched. “You mean, besides to offer you the chance of a lifetime?”

“Besides that.” In the mirror, I watched as his fingertips toyed with the sharp tip of the scissors, then pressed it into the pad of his thumb. Hard. The cuticle of his nail turned white. I watched for blood. Maybe he wasn’t as cool as he appeared on the surface. What was going on?

“I need to borrow one of your brushes,” Ricardo answered. “The new metal round with the pick, for a special client I have coming in tonight.”

“You must have a thousand of those at your shops,” I pointed out mulishly, suddenly tired of trying to figure out his mercurial moods and odd innuendos.

“Ah, no,” Ricardo said, frowning. “The supplier, he got me angry, hiking prices only for my stores and not for others. I refused to buy anything else from him or use his products, yet he does carry the only metal rounds that really work on certain hair types.”

“I thought you’d stopped styling.”

“I still have about a half-dozen of the old clients who started when I started. I reward loyalty. They keep it quiet, otherwise I’d have hundreds demanding the same treatment. How exhausting that would be.”

With an affected sigh, he shook his perfectly proportioned head of burnished black hair, thick and brushed back off his forehead to flow smoothly and curl at his earlobes. It was a style I well knew was cultivated for the best impression. Medium-length dark hair on men bespoke ultimate success and an even-tempered personality, according to a Yale-sponsored survey that was well circulated among hairstylists.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mario studying it with tangible envy.

“I just sold my last one at the front this morning, and the rep won’t be here until Wednesday. But you can take mine,” I offered, heading gingerly to my supply tray. “I really don’t use it as often as I used to when they first came out.”

Ricardo stepped back to give me access to the tray but intentionally kept within my space. It irritated me. I’d spurned his advances years ago when we’d first met, and he’d never stopped—in unspoken ways—trying to prove how irresistible he was. I guess he thought one day I’d give in to his charm. The truth was, I considered him too slick to be attractive, too put-together to be my kind of man. I guess I like my men rougher and tougher. Give me a country cowboy over a couture king any day. I thought of Ricardo as a big brother, a friend, a mentor. He had given me my first job in the business a decade ago. I’d do a lot for him, but not
that,
and not because of his charm. I’d help him because I respected him and I owed him.

Trudy led Mario to the sink, wet his hair, and squirted about half the bottle of shampoo onto his head. I had visions of unending bubbles cascading over the sink and onto the newly cleaned wood floor. Of course, I had more important things to worry about, like my back, and getting everyone out of there so I could go to bed. I kept casting baleful glances at the floor nevertheless.

“Reyn, this is a mess,” Ricardo observed with disdain as he began going through my cabinets. A blow-dryer fell out, bouncing off his shoulder, the end of the cord catching on his belt loop on its descent. “Everything so clean and neat on the outside, yet here, behind the scenes, complete chaos. You disappoint me.” He plucked the metal tooth of the connection off his burgundy silk trousers and let it fall to the ground with a clatter.

I shrugged. It hurt. I glared. I wasn’t about to explain my lifestyle to this prima donna of perfection. He’d never understand that I liked to shove stuff under beds and into cabinets. What were dust ruffles and cabinet doors for, anyway?

Ricardo had moved around the cabinets to the door that hid the utility area where I kept brushes to be cleaned and towels to be washed. I also kept the door closed. Another mess hidden.

“If the cabinets grossed you out, I wouldn’t go in there,” I warned.

“Normally, I would take your advice,” Ricardo said from behind the cabinets. “But I need that brush. Now. You know how I despise tardiness, and I’m close to committing that sin.”

Just as I realized my supply tray did not, in fact, hold the brush in question, I heard the door open, a condescending groan, and then his triumphant “Ah.” I was in the process of straightening inch by painful inch when I felt Ricardo’s trousers brush by my hip.

“You’re a true
amiga,
Reyn. I owe you one.”

By the time I’d straightened enough to look at the doorway, he was down the hall. I stepped into the cloud of Polo that followed ten steps behind him and wrinkled my nose at its cloying tanginess.

“No, I owed you double for your last favor,” I yelled as the front door swished open.

“
Bueno,
so you still owe me one,” he said as the door clunked behind him.

I turned my gaze to Trudy, who had, with only a small lake of bubbles at her feet, washed all the goop out of Mario’s hair. She tenderly dabbed at his dripping tresses with a towel, as if they’d been critically wounded.

Resisting the urge to roll my eyes, I smiled instead. “All done? See you later.”

Trudy shoved the swell of her raspberry lower lip out in a pout. “I thought we might stay, have a glass of merlot, talk.”

“Oh, no. Your husband has done enough in one day. Sharing a glass of wine might require EMS.”

Mario issued a small wail of protest. “Your back is
not
my fault.”

“You’re right, Mario, we can trace it to when I said yes. Now, scram.”

“Ah, don’t be that way, Reyn. Let us at least get you settled in, help you up the stairs,” Mario insisted as he heaved his semi-flabby bottom up out of the chair. I wondered, not for the first time, why my best pal had chosen this man as her husband. Made me downright terrified of the Big L. What had my father told me when I was fourteen?
Reyn-Reyn, you can’t choose who you fall in love with, so let go, and leave it up to fate
. This is not a good feeling for a control freak. Geez! No telling whom my funky heart would pick out. So far, I was still waiting to find out. Looking at Mario now, I was eternally grateful that my true love was still a mystery. Certainly, my Prince Charming couldn’t be any worse than this?

I waved my hand toward the front door, and, grumbling all the way, they finally left me in peace, locking the door behind them.

My mind returned to Ricardo. Why had he really come? Did he have a hidden agenda, or was I psycho-analyzing something that I should take at face value?

A whine—this one from the backyard and of the canine variety—called me out of my reverie. I hobble-slid to the door at the opposite end of the salon, which led to home. It wasn’t until after I’d let the dogs in, fed them, then dragged my own dogs up the stairs and collapsed into bed that I remembered. The brush in the utility room was the one with the plastic pick that, in a fit of frugality, I’d sharpened to clean other brushes and tools in my salon. Oh, well, too late now.

If I’d only known how right I was.

And how wrong life was about to be.

S
OMEONE STUCK THE ELECTRIC SCREWDRIVER INTO
my right ear and drilled, the motor pulsing with a strangely familiar, regular rhythm.
Pause, buzz, pause.
Adrenaline spurted into my veins, making me realize the urgency of needing to do something.
What?
I asked myself through the fog infiltrating my mind.
Get away from the drill,
my brilliant self replied.

I nestled deeper into my plush pillow. But the drill didn’t go away. No telling how many times the damned phone rang before I realized it
was
the phone. As soon as I did, I reached for the handset on the nightstand and collapsed back onto the bed in pain. Someone had taken the drill to my back.

The phone kept ringing.

What kind of person dreams about electric drills? Carpenters? Building contractors? Hard-up women? Hard-up women dreaming about carpenters?

Setting my teeth on my lower lip to offer pain a momentary distraction from my back, I sat up, again reached for the receiver, collared it, and fell back onto the mattress.

“Urgh,” I moaned, squeezing my eyes shut against the crimp in the cramp in my back. “Yul-lo?”

“Reyn,” a masculine voice, made nearly eerie by its soft weakness, breathed in my ear.

“Hello?” I demanded strongly now, ready to call my fictitious husband “Claude” into action. He always seemed to get the cranks off the phone but quick.

“Reyn.” The voice, weaker, rang a few familiar bells in my head this time.

“Ricardo?” I peered at the clock across the bedroom but couldn’t make out the glowing digital numbers. It looked like 33:44:22 to me. I blinked, and it became 234:432. One of the dogs put her forepaws on the bed next to me and licked my face. Oh, great, dog spit would clear things up right away.

“Reyn. I need your help.”

A thread of fear and the whisper of resignation in his voice sent me shooting up in bed despite my back. “My help?” I parroted dumbly. “In the middle of the night?”

“Reyn…”

“Ricardo!” I yelled, waking all the dogs. I could sense their attention in the pitch black. “What do you need help with? Where are you?”

I heard a peculiar sucking sound and wondered if Ricardo were drunk. He certainly didn’t sound like his usual sober, arrogant self. Although I’d never seen him have an alcoholic drink, much less overindulge, I didn’t know him all that well anymore, and I certainly didn’t know what he did with his “valued and loyal” customers, one of whom he’d been meeting last night, tonight, whatever day and time it was. I squinted at the clock again.

“It’s late. Too late.” His voice had dropped to a near whisper. “I just want you to remember what I said today. You get the salons—”

“You win the lottery after all, Ricardo?” Having decided he was indeed high on something, I was waking up to my smart mouth. “Listen Reyn…
peligroso
…to wonder.” He paused with a tortured groan, and I tried not to think what had caused that. Or who. My hard-up-woman imagination filled in the blanks as he let out another heavy sigh before saying, “Be careful.”

I knew that comment was meant for his companion, who was doing something likely featured on the Playboy Channel, so I didn’t respond. He was quiet for a moment, and I thought he’d hung up or perhaps had been otherwise distracted. Then he whispered, “Take care of what’s mine. The proof…it’s there…in the pudding…”

It wasn’t like Ricardo to use a corny cliché, but I didn’t give it a passing thought. Then.

Suddenly, I was sleepy again, and my back was clutching up. “Ricardo, I appreciate the sentiment, but I have my own business to run. I like my little business. It’s not much, but it’s mine. And there was that ‘black bean’ comment of yours…”

A wheeze interrupted my independent-woman lecture. “Promise…you’ll…” he choked out.

I wondered for the first time if Ricardo were sick. I might as well humor him. He probably wouldn’t remember he’d even called by morning.

“Sure, Ricardo. I’ll take care of everything for you. Now, I’ve gotta go get some beauty sleep. I need a helluva lot more just to look half as good as you do.”

I waited for his reply and got none. Patience isn’t one of my virtues and certainly isn’t a word I even understand in the middle of the night with canine halitosis breathing on me, particularly while talking to a drunk, high, crazy, or horny once-upon-a-time boss, while my back was thrown out.

“Good night, Ricardo. Sleep tight.”

I threw the handset back into its cradle, eased gently back into the bed (this seemed less excruciating than my earlier flop), and pulled the covers up to my chin. By the time I shut my eyelids, I was drifting back to Dreamland, hoping to avoid the tool-wielding Sandman this time, unless he had some X-rated plans for that tool that involved me.

The next time the phone rang, no dreams interfered, and I was able to recognize the ring for what it was. My eyelids wouldn’t peel open, though, and I had to roll over onto my side to do the blind man’s grope for the handset. My back felt pretty darn good, I noted with pleasure. That extra slab of Ben Gay, applied with a back scratcher stabbed into a sponge, must have done the trick.

“Hello,” I answered cheerily.

An unfamiliar baritone rumbled some indistinguishable rush of words into my ear, made more indistinguishable by the fact that Beaujolais was sticking her big dog tongue into my other ear. I swatted her away just as I heard, “And who is this?”

My spirits plummeted. An anonymous crank first thing in the morning. That was worse than being awakened by a familiar one in the middle of the night. I sat up gingerly and called in my invisible reinforcements.

“Claude!” I screeched, half into the handset and half out. Pretty convincing, I thought.

“Please tone it down, ma’am,” warned the caller with a decidedly impolite inflection on the polite term. “Your name’s Claude?”

“No. Claude’s my honey.”

“Can you tell me, was it you or Claude who talked to someone at Ricardo’s Realm on Broadway last night?”

Words caught in my throat for a moment. This was not a voice I recognized as someone who worked for Ricardo—too much bass, if you get my meaning. He never hired anyone who’d compete for the affections of the ladies. Yet there was something professional about his tone.

I’m rarely at a loss for words, so I recovered quickly. “Who wants to know?”

I think my directness set him back for a moment. There was a bit of a pause where I hoped I’d persuaded him to set the receiver back in the cradle. No such luck. “I need to know who called Ricardo last night, ma’am.”

“Who’s ‘I’?” By now I was pissed off, but so was he, even if he was trying to mask it in politeness. I was beginning to get the hint that this was no crank caller. I wondered what he was trying to sell.

He blew a big breath that sounded like a hurricane in my right ear. “Let me talk to Claude. Please, ma’am.”

Oh, a male chauvinist salesman. I’m not sure that was better than a crank caller. “He’s not available at the moment. And if you’re selling something, we’re not interested.”

“The only thing I’m selling you, ma’am”—he nearly choked on that last word—“is a trip to the Bexar County cooler unless you begin to cooperate.”

A trip as in vacation? Something about the place rang a bell. A new resort? One of those chic restaurants over at the trendy Quarry Market shopping complex? But I was digressing. Back to the subject at hand. Who was this guy? And what was this insistent, hard-sell attitude? Where did he think he was calling, the Bronx? This was friendly San Antonio, Texas, mister. Wait—how did he know Ricardo called me, anyway? Had telephone tracing technology become so common that any telemarketer could get hold of it? I felt fresh anger building. There are few things in life I hate more than telemarketers. I looked around for a pen to write down the company name. All I could find were some fingernail clippers and a Q-tip. I poised the little cotton wand like a pen—hoping the pose would make me somehow sound more threatening—and asked, “And with
whom
am I supposed to be cooperating?”

“Ma’am.” He sighed heavily as if
I
were the one who woke
him
up. “I apologize. I identified myself at the beginning of our conversation, but it’s, ah, early. Your ‘whom’ is the police. SAPD. I’m afraid you’re
required
to cooperate with me.”

Oh,
that
Bexar County cooler.

Just as my mouth fell open, “I Feel Good” screeched from across the bedroom. James Brown on my customized alarm, designed to shock me out of bed in the right frame of mind every morning.

…you know that I would now…do, do, do-do, dodo-do…

“That Claude now?” he asked.

I ignored his heavy sarcasm, not only because I’d been caught in a lie—by the cops, no less—but because my mind was galloping off in a thousand different directions, and I was trying to keep up with eyelids that still refused to open fully.

…I feel good…

“Sounds like someone had a good night,” he observed. Could you despise someone you didn’t even know? I wondered. Someone with this deep and rich a voice? Even politely pissy, he sounded pretty damned sexy. With a flush that seemed to precede conscious thought, I remembered him blowing into my ear—more accurately, into the phone and into my ear, and, to be fair, it really was a sigh of frustration. But if a pissed-off sigh was that good, just imagine what an amorous sigh would do to me.

“Well, it wasn’t me,” I snapped, suddenly irritated with the implications of my own thoughts as well as those in his tone. He was sneaky, this detective, couching his pointed sarcasm in ma’amy politeness. Plus, I didn’t like the fact that he could evidently read my hormones long-distance. “How do you know I was talking to Ricardo last night?”

“Ma’am, I’m a detective; I’m paid to figure out these things. Plus, when we got here, Ricardo was holding the phone, and your number’s the one it rang on redial.”

“Great investigative work,” I muttered with a frown at the image of Ricardo sitting in his office chair, snoring, holding the phone for hours. Had he been drunk enough to pass out? I hoped he’d gotten dressed after his lady friend left. Maybe he’d called so I could drive him home. What a jerk I was.

How
right
I was, and I still didn’t know the half of it.

“And why didn’t Ricardo hang up the phone?” I finally asked, hating to hear that my vain friend, so concerned with appearances, would end up with his customers titillated by an embarrassment in the
Express-News
’s gossip columns.

“Because he’s dead.”

As I punched “end” on the phone, I looked around through the pale yellow morning light streaming through the windows at three pairs of eyes staring at me in questioning sympathy. The dogs always sensed my moods but must have been dumbfounded by the mixture of horror, grief, disbelief, and guilt swimming around in my head, clogging my throat, and congealing in my stomach right then. All they knew was that it was something they’d better pay attention to.

“Girls, Ricardo’s dead.” I winced at the finality of my words.

Beaujolais, recognizing me in a weak moment, snuck a paw onto the bed and licked my hand sympathetically as she inched the rest of her eighty-five-pound body onto the mattress. As if I wouldn’t notice. I noticed, all right, but right then, I didn’t much care.

“What if I had talked to him longer, really tried to understand what he was saying to me? Would he be dead now? Why did he call me? Why didn’t he call 911? Why didn’t
I
call 911?”

Two blinks and a yawn didn’t qualify as an answer, but somehow it was comforting.

That’s why I had dogs—they were someone to talk to. I have no respect for people who talk to themselves. With a mouth like mine, I had to use it regularly, or I was afraid the words would come out in an indistinguishable rush to the first person I ran across in the morning. I consider my dogs a community service.

The two youngsters, Chardonnay and Cabernet, three-year-old sisters, yellow and black respectively, followed me into the bathroom. Their mother stretched out on my pillows.

I stripped off my oversize Lyle Lovett “Fat Babies Have No Pride” nightshirt and jumped into the shower before the water warmed up. I figured the blast of ice water would serve me right for choosing sleep over sticking on the phone with my friend…former friend…
dead
friend. I put my face into the stream from the showerhead, letting it take my tears down the drain. I cried through the shampoo and sobbed over my leg shave. I eschewed touching up my bikini line as too dangerous in my current frame of mind. I stepped out of the shower, feeling cleaner on the outside but without managing a Pontius Pilate on the inside.

After toweling off quickly, I pulled on some of my utilitarian cotton panties and unmatching—frayed, faded, toad-green polyester (hey, it was on sale!)—bra. I thought of the times Trudy had berated me for wearing ugly underwear. No one but the dogs see my underwear, I’d argued. She told me it didn’t matter who saw it, you knew what you had on, and it changed your whole attitude on life. Her theory is that women who wear sexy underwear move sexily, thus radiating sensuality. Translated in my case, it meant I clomped around, moving like my plain yet useful panties, radiating—no doubt—pragmatism. I told her they just got covered up with clothes, anyway, so if they did the job, their looks didn’t matter. She told me I was a disgrace to the beauty business, that beauty should come from within. I told her she was right about the latter but that I didn’t consider underwear to be within.