The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies (17 page)

A longer silence. “You’ve
got
to be kidding,” Liz said at last, with a little whoosh of her breath.

“On my honor,” Verna replied grimly. “It’s true, every word of it. I just double checked the street number in the magazine where I read about it.” She took a deep, shivery breath. “And what’s more, I have the feeling that the gentleman who came to my door is an associate of that fellow we’re talking about.”

Liz gulped. “Gee whiz,” she said incredulously. “You mean—”

“That’s right,” Verna said quickly. “That’s exactly who I mean. And now I really do need your help, Liz. The address of that house you mentioned—do you think you could get it to me tomorrow morning?”

“I . . . I can’t promise,” Liz said slowly. “I’m not sure I ought to do it. And anyway, what makes you think that an address will be any help?”

“I know it’s a long shot. But given the situation, don’t you think somebody ought to . . . investigate?”

“Well, I’ll think about it,” Liz said at last.

“Thank you.” Verna knew that Liz took her work—and its confidentiality—seriously. A promise to think about it was the best she was going to get.

She said good-bye and hung up, but she didn’t go back to her book. She was remembering the bulge of the shoulder holster under Mr. Gold’s coat and the hard look in his eyes when he said Lorelei LaMotte’s name. Fictional detectives—not even those tough-talking tough guys she liked to read about—no longer seemed terribly exciting, not when she suspected that she had just been talking to one of Al Capone’s henchmen, in person!

But while Verna was sure that she could trust her instincts on this, she knew that suspicion wasn’t enough. She needed to find out whether this man was really connected to Capone—some sort of positive identification. But what?

She went back to the kitchen table and sat down to think for a few minutes. She picked up a pencil and doodled on a piece of paper, pushing her lips in and out, in and out, still thinking. Outside in the yard, Clyde was barking excitedly again—this time, to announce the arrival of their next-door neighbor, Buddy Norris. At the sound, Verna got up and went to the window that looked out on the grassy side yard between her house and the Norris place, where Buddy—a Cypress County deputy sheriff—lived with his elderly father.

Actually, Verna didn’t need Clyde’s barking to know that Buddy had arrived. The racket of Buddy’s motorcycle took care of that. He rode a 1927 red Indian Ace, which, if truth be told, was probably the reason Roy Burns had picked him to be his deputy. Sheriff Burns had read that the New York Police Department’s crack motorcycle squad rode nothing but Indian Aces, so when Buddy applied for the position vacated by the retiring deputy, the sheriff hired him without hesitation. Buddy’s Indian Ace gave Sheriff Burns the right to brag that Cypress County had the only mounted deputy in all of southern Alabama.

Frowning speculatively, Verna watched as Buddy—who everybody said looked so much like Charles Lindbergh that he could be his brother—cut the engine on his motorcycle. He swung a leg over, got off, and pushed it toward the back of the house. He was favoring his arm, which he had broken some months before when he rode his motorcycle through Jed Snow’s cousin’s corncrib. Buddy had always been a reckless sort.

Verna tilted her head, watching him. She didn’t think much of Sheriff Burns, who kept his job by staying on the good side of the local heavyweights. Of course, Darling wasn’t Cicero or Chicago, and its law enforcement officers didn’t have to deal with any serious lawlessness, except for bootlegging, of course. Even so, when it came to investigations, Sheriff Burns didn’t display a lot of initiative. And when it came to fighting crime, he wasn’t inclined to step out swinging.

But Buddy was a different matter. If push came to shove, he might—just might—be useful in dealing with Mr. Gold. For one thing, he was enterprising, and even ambitious, always looking for a way to stand out from the crowd. He was smart: he had bought a mail-order how-to book on scientific crime detection from the Institute of Applied Sciences in Chicago and taught himself how to take fingerprints, identify firearms, and take “crime scene” photographs. He had taught himself to shoot, too. Verna knew this for a fact, because he’d rigged up a shooting range in the pasture behind the Norris house and spent a couple of hours a week (and way too much expensive ammunition) practicing with his service revolver, much to the consternation of Mr. Norris’ old horse Racer, who lived in that pasture and hated loud noises. And because he had only recently celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday, Buddy was inclined to believe that he was immortal, which made him brave, as well as reckless. If there was trouble, Deputy Norris might be a good man to have around.

But there wasn’t any trouble just yet, Verna thought. And there was no point involving Buddy until she had some idea what kind of situation she’d be asking him to get involved in. Still staring out the window, she thought for several moments, then turned and went to the telephone again.

She rang up Coretta Cole, her part-time assistant in the probate clerk’s office, to see if she could come in the next morning, instead of her usual Tuesday. When Coretta agreed, Verna thanked her, hung up, and stood for a moment, debating whether to telephone Myra May or walk up the street to the diner and have a conversation with her in person.

She decided on the conversation, since the favor she had to ask was a little complicated and might require that Myra May bend a few rules. She would rather ask the favor face-to-face. And she certainly didn’t want to risk anybody listening in.

She pulled on a cardigan over her housedress and went out into the quiet Sunday evening twilight.

When Beulah Trivette woke up on Monday morning and began to think about the week ahead, she counted herself as the luckiest woman in Darling—and with good reason. She herself was beautiful, a fact that she recognized every time she looked into the mirror and saw her blond curls, her dimples, her generous mouth, and those cornflower blue eyes. What’s more, she had a deep-seated artistic appreciation for true beauty. And even better, she had the privilege of spending all day, every day (except Sunday, of course), making ordinary women pretty and pretty women beautiful. Which as she saw it, was one of the worthiest occupations any woman could be lucky enough to choose.

Beulah’s natural sense of beauty had been enhanced by a degree (the certificate was framed and hung on the wall at her haircutting station) from the Montgomery College of Cosmetology. She saw herself as a true artist, especially where hair was concerned. She could cut the latest bob, manage a marcel iron, work miracles with a curling iron, and color hair in all shades. In fact, Beulah sometimes worried (just a little) that her training and talents were wasted in Darling, for most of the ladies who came to her Beauty Bower merely wanted a quickie shampoo and set, or a trim and shampoo, and sometimes a permanent wave. They plucked their own eyebrows, used lemon to bleach the age spots on their hands, and even made their own dry skin lotions, rather than purchasing the products she displayed on glass shelves beside the door. Still, Beulah was for the most part happy and fulfilled in her work, even though she occasionally wished for a greater artistic challenge.

Of course, a big chunk of the reason for Beulah’s happiness was the fact that she owned her very own Beauty Bower, which was a beautiful place to work. The first thing she did when she and her husband Hank bought the house on Dauphin Street was to paint a beautiful sign for the front of the house and decorate it with a basket of lush pink roses. BEULAH’S BEAUTY BOWER BLOOMING SOON!! (In addition to her other talents, Beulah could paint beautiful pictures of flowers.)

While she was doing this, Hank enclosed the screened porch across the back of the house so it would be comfortable during cold weather and installed two shampoo sinks and haircutting chairs and two big wall mirrors in front of the chairs. He also wired the place for electricity so that Beulah could have the latest beauty equipment. The new Kenmore handheld hair dryer she coveted, for instance, and the electric permanent-wave machine with amazing drop-down curlers that heated the hair to create a long-lasting curl, not to mention the electric hot water heater, which meant that there’d be no more pouring hot water out of teakettles and pitchers, with the danger of scalding somebody. Beulah added the finishing touches, painting the wainscoting peppermint pink (her favorite color), wallpapering the walls with fat pink roses, and spatter-painting the pink floor with gray, blue, and yellow. Then she painted out the BLOOMING SOON on the sign and replaced it with BY APPOINTMENT & WALK-INS WELCOME and she was in business.

After a few months, the Beauty Bower was such a runaway success that Beulah advertised for a helper, which resulted in Bettina Higgens. Bettina was not what you might call pretty (her brown hair was stringy and thin and she was as skinny as a bean pole) and she had never been to beauty school. But Beulah saw an innate talent in Bettina’s nimble fingers and knew that she had what it took to make women beautiful. Within a couple of weeks, the two were wearing twin pink ruffled aprons embroidered with
Beulah’s Beauty Bower
and working elbow-to-elbow at the shampoo sinks.

One of the things that Beulah and Bettina liked best about their workplace was its conviviality, for each day of the week brought its regulars who looked forward to seeing their friends, saved up their tidbits of gossip to share, and even brought cookies and cupcakes to go with the hot coffee and iced tea that Beulah always kept ready, depending on the season. Beulah was careful not to schedule the day’s appointments so tightly that they couldn’t accommodate somebody with a hair emergency, though. She hated to turn away a potential customer. Why, the person might get in over at Conrad’s Curling Corner and be lost to the Bower forever!

Fridays and Saturdays were always the Bower’s busiest days, with people getting prettied up for Saturday night parties and Sunday morning church. Monday mornings were usually fairly quiet, with Myra May Mosswell and Miss Dorothy Rogers coming in at nine and Bessie Bloodworth and Leona Ruth Adcock at nine thirty.

But on this particular Monday morning, both nine o’clocks had already canceled, Myra May because she was shorthanded at the diner and the telephone exchange (Violet Sims was still out of town), Miss Rogers ostensibly because she was coming down with a head cold and didn’t want to sit around with wet hair. Beulah suspected that it was because Miss Rogers was short of funds again, and the thirty-five cents she spent on a shampoo and set had a better use elsewhere. But of course Miss Rogers couldn’t be blamed for she, like so many others, was in a very difficult predicament. Beulah was just grateful for every customer who could still afford the luxury of becoming beautiful.

So this morning, when the clock said nine and there was still a half-hour before the regular nine-thirties arrived, Bettina sat down with a tray of metal Kurley Kew curlers in her lap and began to sort them by size, while Beulah went out to her backyard garden to pick an armload of chrysanthemums, gerbera daisies, and zinnias, along with some ferns for greenery. Flowers, she always thought, gave the Bower the “salon look.” She had brought them in and was arranging them in a big glass bowl when the door opened and a stranger walked in.

Beulah knew right away, however, that this woman was no stranger. She was a kindred soul who obviously cared deeply about beauty. Her platinum blond hair (Beulah always saw hair first, before she saw anything else) was styled in loose, soft curls like Jean Harlow’s, although the roots were in definite need of some attention and the curls were a trifle untidy. She was stylishly dressed in a bright blue dress with a bolero jacket trimmed in blue velvet (which did nothing to hide her generous bosom), a blue pillbox hat with a veil, blue gloves, and shiny patent shoes with tasteful rhinestone-trimmed buckles on the straps, just as if she had stepped off the streets of New York or out of the pages of
Vogue.
She had a pretty face, with pencil-thin plucked eyebrows, a delicate nose, a rosebud mouth, and a dark beauty mark just above her lip. Beulah, whose experienced eye could catch the flaws and imperfections in even the most expert makeup job, noticed that there were a few crow’s-feet wrinkles around the woman’s eyes, and if you looked close, you might see a sprinkling of largish pores on either side of her nose. But as Beulah often put it to her customers, what did a few wrinkles and pores really matter? A beautiful woman was beautiful at any age. And in Beulah’s expert opinion, this stranger was a beautiful woman who was simply in need of a few touch-ups here and there.

Beulah’s feeling of kinship was reinforced when the stranger lifted her hands, gasped at the flowers, and cried, “Oh, how stunning! What a lovely thing to see on a Monday morning. Flowers do get the week started out just right, don’t they?” She sounded like a Yankee, but as far as Beulah was concerned, anybody who loved flowers was a true sister.