Petty Crimes & Head Cases
Page 9
“Ow!” I said. “Don’t do that!”
He did it again.
Outside in the reception area, I was handed an invoice for $350.00—80 percent to be paid by my insurance company and 20 percent to be written off by Whiteside Chiropractic as my “complimentary service.” Tucking the paper in my pocket, I asked the China Doll receptionist for Harriet Carpenter. She ushered me to her office.
“Harriet,” I said, my neck listing to starboard as I approached her desk. “How wonderful to see you.”
She glanced up from her computer with a perplexed expression.
“I’m Tracy Lemon, the hairdresser. Remember? You wanted to do some reciprocal marketing?”
“Oh, yes.” She shot me a porcelain smile brighter than an Audi’s headlights.
“I’ve just had an appointment and sampled all your services.” I lowered my frame into her guest chair. “I’m very impressed.”
“Marvelous.” Her fingers flew over the keyboard and a machine on her credenza pumped out a dozen color-printed pieces of paper. “I have just the thing for our first promotion.”
She thrust the papers into my hands. One set were coupons for 20 percent off a manicure at The Citrus Salon; the other set was for 20 percent off an introductory exam at Whiteside Chiropractic.
I didn’t need to be an accounting whiz to calculate that 20 percent off a manicure at The Citrus Salon would net me $12.00 and 20 percent off a first visit at Whiteside Chiropractic net them $280.00.
“What a great idea,” I said. “I’ll be sure to send a lot of business your way.” I looked Harriet in her plucked eyebrows. “And that Dr. Whiteside is so personable. So attractive; what a great guy!” I clasped the coupons to my heart. “Now I know why my dear friend Margaret Pyle is so taken with him. Have you met her? No? They’re quite an Item. He’s taking her on a trip to Venice.”
Harriet’s eyes narrowed, the creases at the bridge of her nose became as black as ash on the first day of Lent. Her dark eyes smoldered. Her lips twisted up and collided with the hairs around the rim of her nostrils.
“Did I say something wrong?”
“Dr. Whiteside’s trip has been canceled,” she said.
“Oh, that’s too bad.” I stood up. “When did that happen?”
“Recently.”
“Margaret will be so disappointed.”
“I dare say.”
“Is there no rain check?”
“His wife is terminally ill.”
“Wife! Dr. Whiteside is married?” I let my voice rise on the last word like a rocket from Cape Canaveral.
“She still lives in Scottsdale. He’s been commuting every weekend by private jet.”
“Dear me.” I fanned myself with the coupons. “I didn’t know. Margaret didn’t know. I’m glad you told us.” I turned to go.
“I wouldn’t want your friend to labor under any delusions,” she said, advancing on me.
“None of us, Harriet, want to labor under any delusions.” I opened the door. “Thanks for the coupons. Bye bye.”
I shut the door, and skipped down the hall.
Three weeks passed. I was running inventory on hair accessories for the high school prom when Annabelle walked in with a young black woman. She had a ’Fro and a muscular body. If I had to compare her with anyone famous, I’d say she looked like Angela Davis, the Sixties civil rights activist who’s sometimes mentioned in one of the pictorial news magazines.
“Tracy, this is Rasheeta Jackson,” Annabelle said. “I’m training her to be my replacement at Whiteside Chiropractic.”
I smirked at Rasheeta and she smirked back.
“Energy work is so fruitful,” I said. “Have you been investigating its benefits for long?”
“My search for true meaning began a few weeks ago,” she said, “when I sought the insurance of a higher power, the ethics of the common man, and the true profits of a bonehead.”
I winked at Annabelle. “You two can do energy work at my salon anytime.”
She and Annabelle disappeared into the massage room and soon spa music emanated throughout the salon. Annabelle was teaching an apt pupil—Rasheeta, a Federal Bureau of Investigation insurance fraud investigator.
It turns out Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance companies, and the FBI all employ expert health care fraud investigators. When Carl brought Shelley Prothero’s bills to the attention of our local FBI agent, Rasheeta and her colleagues set up camp right down the street from the cop shop.
That evening Margaret came over to our house for dinner. I told her the latest news about the FBI undercover agent and swore her to secrecy. “Don’t tell Carl I told you about Rasheeta.”
“My lips are zipped,” she said.
Carl came in from the deck bearing meat from the grill. “What’s that you said?”
“Just discussing the Whiteside case.”
As we sat down to a meal of ham steak with potatoes, grilled onions, and cauliflower, Margaret said, “I always felt he was a two-timing S.O.B.”
I rolled my eyes heavenward, but not for her to see.
“It pays to be suspicious,” Carl said.
“What does suspicious mean?” asked Jamie.
“It’s like that word ‘bogus,’ Jamie,” I said, casting a glance at the cauliflower on Jamie’s plate. “You don’t trust it.” The white florets had been pushed under his ham steak.
“If something’s too good to be true, be suspicious,” said Margaret.
I caught Jamie’s eye.
“I’m going to eat all my cauliflower tonight, Mom,” he announced.
“Highly suspicious,” I said, looking at Carl. “Highly suspicious.”
Case 4
The Cat in the Suitcase
Checking my calendar a few weeks later, I saw an appointment with Ralph Abramowicz. I opened my Client Notebook. Age: 37. Beard trim. Layered cut. Never married. From New York. Skier. Night staff at the Resort.
The Resort is our town’s big draw—the most prestigious de-tox ranch west of the Mississippi and east of California.
Ralph sauntered in just past one o’clock. Muscular and bearded, he greeted me with a big wide grin revealing natural white teeth. When I offered refreshments, he settled for a probiotic on ice after glancing ever so briefly at my fake harvest from Bali. Ralph was the only customer who mourned the passing of my bowl of fresh fruit.
I draped him in sable brown, then set to work.
“How’s Jamie?” Ralph always asks about my son. He loves children. I couldn’t figure out why he’d never married.
“Doing well in school. He’s on the soccer team and goes to Make-It Club every Thursday afternoon.” I pulled out my cell phone. “Check this out.”
Ralph admired the picture of Jamie with his robot made from recycled materials. “Is that an operational arm?” he asked.
“Complete with a retractable rope for tying up bad guys.”
“Awesome.” Ralph laughed. “Shows some real creativity.” He looked closer at the picture. “That’s a lot of duct tape!”
“Give a boy some duct tape, coffee cans, and cardboard tubes, and he’ll have hours of fun.”
“Right on, Tracy. You’re such a good mother.”
I glowed with pride. Ralph made this compliment with such sincerity I felt as if the world were painted-rose colored and I were Glinda, Good Witch of the South.
We lapsed into a companionable silence as I re-cut layers grown long over the past month. “How’s work for you?” I asked.
“Good. Fairly quiet at night. A lot less stressful than the day shift.”
“Is the Resort full?”
He sighed. “We’re always full.”
“The celebrity magazines often cover prescription drug abuse among the rich and famous.”
He laughed.
“Why do people get addicted to pills, Ralph?”
“If I knew that, I would have the antidote.”
I laughed.
“But I can tell you about my own exper
ience with prescription painkillers,” he said.
I held my breath. Ralph was about to tell me his deepest secret and I was all ears.
“I started when I was fifteen. My father had a knee operation so the doctor gave him a prescription for a strong narcotic. Kids at school had been getting high and I wanted to be like everybody else. They told me it felt tingly and blissful. So I took one. It was everything they said. I felt as if I were floating away. All my teenage troubles were gone. The next day after school I got high again.
“Pretty soon Dad’s prescription ran out and so did his need for painkillers. I had to figure out where else to get them. That’s when I began stealing. I would go through medicine cabinets in my friends’ houses. I found pills everywhere. I went to bed high and I went to school high. My grades went to shit. My parents couldn’t understand what the problem was.
“But then one night in my senior year I went to a party. It was classic; the parents weren’t home and we took over the house. Kids were drinking beer and slobbering all over the furniture. Girls and guys were draped everywhere—on the sofas, in the beds—and I was with my friends and a vial of OxyContin. We each took several pills and chased them down with beer. I was floating away as usual but my friend, Isaac, was zonked. We put him in a bed and partied on until the cops came at about three in the morning. Everyone scattered except Isaac.”
Ralph lifted his head. I had stopped snipping a long time before.
“His heart had stopped.”
My jaw dropped.
“That was the end of pills for me and the beginning of a new career. Of course, it didn’t happen overnight. I confessed to my parents and they supported me. They sent me to a place like the Resort but for kids, and I recovered. I vowed I would help whoever I could to get free of drugs, and I’ve kept my promise. So that’s a long answer to a very short question.”
I didn’t know what to say. Luckily, Ralph kept talking. “But why? Why do people get addicted to drugs? I’ll never forget how one of my counselors gave me the answer. He asked me to think of that first high when I was floating the farthest away. He reminded me that all you can think about is feeling that way again. Only it’s physically, chemically impossible. Your brain has changed and you need more drugs to repeat the first high, but you never come close. That’s why I think I’m effective at the Resort. The patients know I’ve tried drugs and I’ve found out they don’t work.”
He stopped talking. There was silence for a while.
“I never knew,” I said.
“Of course you never knew. I never told you. But, Tracy, I’ve told this story many times. I’m not ashamed to tell it or who knows. Because it’s made a difference in so many people’s lives at the Resort, just as it did when my counselor walked me through it. Because he too had been there. You see?”
“Yes,” I said. “I see.”
Soon after Ralph left, Harry came in for his usual cut and blow dry. He was the twenty-something friend of April—the girl who was left unconscious in the beer cooler at the Maverik gas station.
“Did you hear about the guy who went berserk in the cemetery?” he said, as I draped him in beige.
“Is this a joke?” I asked. Harry didn’t usually make jokes.
“No, no, it’s for real,” he said.
“Okay, I’ll bite. What did he do?”
“He destroyed a dozen old headstones at the pioneer cemetery, and then—get this—he left his cell phone behind.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“The police knocked on his door and he admitted right away he did it, but he had a reason: Headstones prevent resurrection; dead people can’t go to heaven with all that weight on top of them.
“Now I know you’re kidding.”
Harry shook his head. “You can’t make this stuff up.”
I started giggling and ended up coughing. “Don’t make me laugh.” I held a towel to my mouth. “My allergies are kicking in.”
“He couldn’t believe the police arrested him because he had such good intentions, so he put up a fight. They got him for resisting arrest and criminal mischief. I’m surprised Carl didn’t tell you about it.”
So was I. We would have laughed over this one. So why didn’t he mention it?
The minute Carl came in the door that night, I asked about the graveyard vandal. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It slipped my mind,” he said, “because there was something else in the cemetery that got my attention.”
“What was that?”
“A suitcase with a dead cat in it.”
My eyes widened.
“It was behind a gravestone and when I opened it, there was a note inside with a dead cat.” He grimaced. “Its throat was slit.”
“Whoa.”
“I don’t remember the exact wording but the note started with ‘Please bury my sweet cat. There’s nowhere to put her but here.’ The last two lines were smudged but legible. We’re having that analyzed, but it looked to me like a child’s handwriting all messed up with tear stains.”
“A child?”
“Probably a girl.”
“And what were her last two lines?”
My husband’s brows furrowed. “I know he didn’t mean it. I know he loves me and he didn’t mean it.”
Carl went upstairs to change. I got a cold beer out of the refrigerator and a glass mug from the freezer. I know he didn’t mean it. I know he loves me and he didn’t mean it.
When Carl returned to the kitchen, I handed him the cold beer. He took a long pull, grabbed me by the shoulders, and clutched me to him. “Did I ever tell you how wonderful you are?”
“Not today,” I said.
“Well, you are.” He took another pull from his beer and kissed me on the mouth. I tasted the nut-brown ale and felt the heat rising under my skirt.
“Where’s Jamie?” he asked.
“In the den.”
“Later then.”
“Promise?” I said.
He grinned.
I began washing dishes left over from breakfast. “So what about this cat?”
“Ordinary orange and white tabby. Bled out before it was put in the suitcase.”
“An act of cruelty?”
“Not torture. The cut was deep, so death would have been swift.”
“A warning?”
“Possibly.”
“An act of vengeance?”
“Possibly.”
“Come on, give it up.”
“Experts say there’s a correlation between animal abuse and child abuse.”
I submerged my frying pan in the dishwater. Sausage grease rose to the top, infusing the white bubbles with a brown oil slick. “So you think whoever wrote this note might be a victim, too?”
“Can’t be ruled out.”
Now there were two people whose attention was disturbed by that suitcase.
On Wednesday, my first appointment was Hawk Reynolds. Hawk was wearing a biker T-shirt that said “Riding the Good Life.” Tattoos crawled up his arms and around his neck. I was sure there were tattoos elsewhere on his body, but I’d never cared to investigate. All I did was shave his head.
Hawk Reynolds might have looked like a biker, but he was big business. His tow truck operation removed all the wrecks on our interstates. He got calls from the cops in the ski town next door where there was no place to park. Hawk really cleaned up when they had the international film festival over there. With 40,000 people packed in a canyon that could only fit 20,000, he towed cars night and day.
“How are things going?” I asked, draping his burly shoulders in black.
“Jeez, my guys make me crazy.”
The men who drove Hawk’s wreckers looked like a bunch of bikers too. Not one of his so-called “staff” came to my salon for grooming, although they needed to.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“No one wants to own up to keeping a slideback out overnight.”
“You mean unauthorized?”
“Maybe you should persuade them with these,” I said, pulling a pair of electric hedge clippers out of my cabinet. The noise accelerated as I pretended to discipline the bad boys.
Hawk laughed, as he did every time I pretended hedge clippers were my shaving instruments of choice. He cheered up right away and I wondered why his drivers didn’t own up to a boss who was as easy going as he was.
Martha Farquhar came in a few hours later. She’s earned a place at the top of my list of Least Favorite Clients. She’s gruff, opinionated, and self-absorbed, not to mention that she has a really bad hairstyle I can’t do anything about. She’s rejected every suggestion I’ve made to soften the lines of the steel bowl on her head.
Martha is vice president of operations at the Resort and a city councilor. She hiked into my back workroom and dumped herself onto my chair, reached into her briefcase, and pulled out a sheaf of papers two inches thick.
“Good morning, Martha,” I said. “Would you like something to drink?”
“Coffee.”
When I brought her a cup, she was already reading the packet that all city councilors review to prepare for their next meeting. The pages were printed on both sides and filled with dense copy.
I had to attend a city council meeting once and I was amazed at the amount of repetition in these documents. For some legal reason, many of the pages are repeats, repeats and nothing but repeats.
I draped her in ice blue nylon and wrapped her neck in a royal blue terry. She moved the papers up and out of the way as I arranged the drape around her meaty body.
“Shall we consider angling your hair down around your neck instead of the neck shave and horizontal blunt cut we’ve been doing?” I asked.
“Nope.”
Hope springs eternal, but in reality nothing could improve Martha’s mannish look. My eyes roved to the page and I caught the title: “Pet Cemetery Issues.” I stopped snipping and read the first paragraph.