Kookaburra Gambit

by Claire McNab

  I considered mentioning the robbery of Ralphie Bates's Opalarium back in Wollegudgerie, but somehow that wouldn't be fair-not until I'd got the full story out of Alf and Chicka.

  "I guess this has something to do with the twin brothers I overheard Melodie babbling on about," said Fran. "She was telling someone on the phone they were so alike it was creepy."

  Obviously the receptionist network had been activated. "The Hartnidge brothers," I said. "Alf and Chicka."

  "If they've got nothing to do with the smuggling, why don't they go to the authorities and say, 'Gee, fellas, look what we found' and be done with it?"

  "Lamb White," said Bob.

  Fran frowned, then comprehension dawned. "Lamb White, the Christian movie company? These guys have a deal with them?"

  "Pending," said Bob. "And if a breath of anything illegal gets out, the deal's canned."

  "Best not to mention a movie company to Melodie," said Ariana.

  Fran actually laughed-cynically, of course. "Fat chance you'll keep that little item from her. I'll guarantee she'll sniff it out."

  Three

  After Fran left, Ariana, Bob, and I discussed the matter further, and to my delight it was decided we'd go ahead with the case. "From the Hartnidges' point of view, we'll call it your case, Kylie," said Ariana, "but don't forget you're under Bob's strict supervision."

  Her subtle emphasis on "strict" deeply irritated me. "Fair go," I said. "You know I won't make a single move without checking first."

  Bob grinned. "Like last time?"

  He had me there. I'd got myself into a real pickle with an earlier investigation right after I'd arrived in L.A. "I've learnt my lesson," I said.

  Ariana's mouth quirked, but she didn't say anything. Bob chuckled.

  "I have," I said firmly. "True."

  While Ariana put the opals in the safe and Bob went off to ring Alf and Chicka to tell them Kendall & Creeling would take the case, I hoofed it to the reception area to ask Melodie for her advice.

  Thing was, I needed a haircut. Last time I'd had one was back at Wollegudgerie's only beauty salon, run by Maria, who'd taken up with my girlfriend, Raylene, and broken my heart in the process. This alone had turned me off hairdressers in general.

  This morning, however, when I was cleaning my teeth, I noticed how my head looked like it had exploded. I've always had strong hair-as my mum says, it has body to burn-but there's a point where I start to look like one of those supershaggy dogs who spends life peering through a screen of hair.

  When I got to reception, Melodie was on the phone. "And even if he is Australian, he's real nice. And Tiffany-get this! He's swinging a deal with Lamb White… Yeah, the goody-two-shoes movie company. And if I play my cards right-" She broke off as she saw me. "Tiff? Call you back, OK?"

  "How did you hear about Lamb White?" I asked.

  Melodie gave an airy wave with one hand. "Oh, around…"

  "You've been listening in."

  Melodie's perfectly arched eyebrows drew themselves into an aggrieved frown. "I never listen in. I may catch a word now and then." Her expression lightened. "Anyhow, Chicka Hartnidge told me himself. He called to ask me on a date."

  "Blimey, he's a fast mover," I observed. Chicka Hartnidge and Melodie Schultz-stage name, Davenport-was a combination to boggle at.

  "Chicka said I was a bonzer sheila." Melodie looked at me intently. "That's good, isn't it?"

  "Bonzer means excellent, and a sheila's a woman, so I reckon you could say that was pretty good."

  She nodded complacently. "I thought so."

  "Melodie," I said, "I need some help."

  "With what?" She was suspicious. Like, maybe I was going to ask her to do some work.

  "It's about my hair."

  Melodie leaned back to take me in from head to toe. "That's the least of it," she said. "Frankly, Kylie, you need Extreme Makeover'.'

  Fran came tootling along in time to hear this last observation. She looked me up and down too. "I hardly ever agree with Melodie on anything," she said, "but this time she's right."

  "Are you fair dinkum? I'm not that far gone, am I?"

  Melodie and Fran looked at each other, then at me. "How can we count the ways?" Fran asked.

  "OK, I admit I haven't got anorexia, and I do need a haircut pretty desperately, but otherwise I don't look too bad, do I?"

  "Hmmm," said Fran, folding her arms. "What do you think, Melodie?"

  "Hard to know where to begin."

  While they had a little giggle about that, I tried to be absolutely objective about myself. Mum, being part Aborigine, had given me her dark hair, deep brown eyes, and olive skin. My dad's genes had passed on my height, my hands, and my quite elegant nose and squarish chin.

  I thought of Ariana, what she must see when she looked at me. An outback sheila, rough 'round the edges, who'd made foot-in-mouth her second name. It wasn't that I hadn't had a good education-I'd aced it at Wollegudgerie High-but no one would call me sophisticated, especially not by L.A. standards.

  "OK," I said to Melodie and Fran. "I'm yours."

  Two hours later, there I was in the professional clutches of Luigi of Beverly Hills, or would be any minute. We'd hardly met before his cell phone went off, playing the first few bars of the overture to The Barber of Seville. Now Luigi was deep in a conversation that required him to march up and down, making many sweeping hand gestures.

  I looked around. The beauty salon was long and narrow, with mirrors down both walls. Facing the mirrors were a multitude of hairdressing chairs. I'd never seen so many in one place. Crikey, Wollegudgerie's Snip & Slather beauty salon looked like a broom cupboard next to this one. The place was filled with loud techno music, almost drowning out the constant noise of people coming and going, screaming "Dahling!" and air-kissing, or, as I soon discovered, recounting in astonishing detail very private crises in their lives.

  I became entranced by the blond woman sitting in the chair next to me. Her hairdresser, a large bloke with very tight curly black hair, who answered to the name Albert, was hard at work eliminating her dark roots. While he slapped stuff on her scalp, she gave him the gruesome details about the bizarre sexual favors her life coach had demanded.

  "My God!" exclaimed her hairdresser. "I call that sexual harassment."

  "Sexual harassment?" the blond said. "That's not my complaint. The SOB was just no good in the sack."

  Albert gave a cry of commiseration. "Major disappointment."

  Before I could hear more, Luigi, tall, thin, and with an almost unruly head of silver hair-I reckoned he was going for a Greek-godish look-finished his call and came to stand behind the chair. We both regarded my reflection in the mirror.

  "By luck I had a last-minute cancellation," Luigi said. He was in his fifties, I reckoned, but fit with it, and had a charming Italian accent. "Melodie made it clear it was an emergency." He shook his silver head. "She didn't exaggerate."

  "It's that bad?"

  He lifted a chunk of hair, held it out from my head for a few moments, then let it drop. Sighing, he asked, "My dear! Who is responsible for this?"

  "I suppose I am."

  Plainly horrified, he stared at me in the mirror. I expected him to cross himself any moment. At last he got out, "You styled it yourself?"

  "Of course not. But it's been a while since I had a haircut. I've been putting it off."

  "We don't have our hair cut!' Luigi's tone was severe. "We have it styled"

  "Fair enough. It's been a while since I had my hair styled"

  After he examined more strands closely, his lips tightened as if in pain. "What conditioner do you use?"

  "I don't use a conditioner. I just wash my hair."

  Luigi closed his eyes. "I see." He rallied to say, "You must promise me to never, repeat never, let whoever did this to you touch your head again." He clicked his tongue. "Should be a capital offense."

  I could have told him there was no way Maria would ever get within cooee of my hair again, not after
what she'd done. Oh, I had to be honest. It took two to tango. Maria couldn't have led Raylene astray if Raylene hadn't fancied a tango on the side with someone other than me.

  "Marta!" Luigi was beckoning imperiously to a tiny woman in a turquoise smock. "Marta! Over here. Take this woman to the basins!"

  He patted my shoulder consolingly. "Put yourself in my hands," he said. "It will take all my skill, but Luigi can repair the damage."

  I knew from what Melodie and Fran had told me it would also take an astonishing amount of dollars. "How much?!" I'd yelped when they'd told me. "Stone the crows! That'd cover years of haircuts back in the 'Gudge."

  The two of them had also got me up to speed on the subject of tipping. Back home we didn't tip much-maybe round up the taxi fare to the nearest dollar, or put a bit extra on a restaurant bill-but here in the States it seemed you tipped everybody, all the time.

  I checked that I had the tip money in my pocket as I followed Marta's diminutive form to the back of the salon. We passed through the manicuring section, full of people talking nineteen to the dozen while seated opposite each other at tiny tables. My nose twitched at the smell of acetone and nail polish. Melodie had suggested I have my nails painted with her favorite color, Dark Desire, and had even tried to give me a bottle of the stuff to take with me for my manicure. I didn't want to hurt Melodie's feelings, but it really was an awful color, like clotted blood, so I'd conveniently forgotten to take the bottle with me when I'd left the office.

  Marta, with me bringing up the rear, arrived at the washing area, where a row of bright pink basins were set along one wall. All the accompanying chairs were occupied by people with their heads dangling while lather flew. There seemed to be a bit of a traffic jam; three other clients were waiting for a vacant spot. Like in the rest of the salon, everybody was talking extra loud to be heard above the music.

  Marta got me a black robe to put on, then hovered like a vulture until one of the chairs freed up. The moment it did, she went in for the kill, beating another turquoise-smocked woman to the punch. "Mine, I believe," said Marta, baring her teeth as she shoved me into the chair.

  In a flash she had me where she wanted me. As she hit one lever to drop the back, and another to raise a support under my legs, the chair immediately became an instrument of torture, stretching me out helpless on my back, with my neck in what felt like a plastic vice and my head hanging over the basin.

  "Comfortable?" Marta inquired.

  "Not really."

  Marta didn't hear me, her attention being caught by the conversation at the washing station beside us. "A breast lift that went tragically wrong," the woman washing the hair of a fellow victim was saying. "Poor thing's quite lopsided."

  My neck was immovable, but I rolled my eyes to see who was speaking. Oddly, as well as her turquoise smock, the woman wore a wide-brimmed hat.

  "And he's supposed to be the best plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills!" exclaimed Marta.

  "I've heard he's a pig," said the hatted woman's client.

  "Really?" said Marta. "Where did you hear that?"

  "At a fund-raiser for Afghanistan orphans. Deanna Dorrell was at the same table. Had an awful time with him, she was saying."

  "Face-lift? I thought she looked tight around the eyes in her last photo."

  "Botox only." The client sniffed. "Of course, they all say that."

  Belatedly, Marta remembered me. "Comfortable?"

  An industrial-strength blast of water spared my need to reply. "Too hot?" Marta inquired.

  "Well…"

  "Good."

  Marta might be little, but crikey, she had hands that could tear a phone book in half. I squeezed my eyes shut as she vigorously massaged, wondering if she might actually rip my scalp from my head. Scalped in a Beverly Hills hairdressing salon? I was just imagining how I'd break the news to Mum when Marta hit me with the water again.

  "Conditioner?"

  Bearing in mind Luigi's shock that I didn't use such a thing, I said, "Good-oh."

  "That a yes?"

  "Yes."

  More violent massaging. My neck was breaking, my ears were ringing, I was vowing this was the last time I'd go through this hell, when Marta announced, "There you go."

  Abruptly I was returned to an upright position. Marta fixed me with a cheerful smile as she deftly wound a white towel around my head. I fumbled in my pocket and found the folded dollars. I'd erred on the generous side after Melodie and Fran had told me how much to tip the hair washer-maybe too much, as Marta's smile became quite manic.

  "Next time," she said, tenderly dabbing a stray drop of water on my face, "ask for me."

  Back at the station, Luigi was on the phone again, shouting in Italian-a language I knew a bit about because I'd done a course in conversational Italian. I wasn't awfully good at it, and Italian-Australians had been known to snigger at my accent, but I'd persevered, and as long as people spoke slowly, I could understand quite a bit.

  Luigi appeared to be arguing with someone about the installation of a toilet suite in his apartment, but he spoke so fast I couldn't be sure. After a final yell, he slapped his little cell phone shut, snarling a few harsh words that definitely hadn't been included in my curriculum.

  As he caught sight of me standing there, his expression changed to one of resolution. Then he forced a smile. "Come," he said. "Your transformation begins."

  Four

  Feeling light-headed, in more ways than one, I reclaimed my generic rental sedan from a nearby parking structure. The notice at the entrance proclaimed first two hours free! but my mini makeover had taken rather longer than that, so I had to pay on my way out.

  Although I'd only been in L.A. a few weeks, I'd already found driving in the shopping area of Beverly Hills held particular challenges. Herds of tourists, necks hung with cameras, wandered along, eyeballing all the famous retailers, no doubt hoping to see a celebrity popping into Gucci or being ushered out of Giorgio Armani.

  I'd discovered tourists had to be watched closely. Apparently bemused by the heady influence of the conspicuous consumption surrounding them, they often wandered off the footpath and onto the roadway, or crossed against don't walk signals.

  Things were made even more interesting by the drivers of luxury cars and fat SUVs. I wished I could multitask like they did. It seemed child's play for Beverly Hills denizens to negotiate the crowded streets, all without actually running into another vehicle or mowing down a tourist, at the same time carrying on an animated cell phone conversation, spying a rare parking spot, ignoring the furious horns of inconvenienced motorists, and reversing into the spot.

  When I ground to a halt outside Yves Saint Laurent I realized I'd made a poor decision to use Rodeo Drive to get to Santa Monica Boulevard. Rodeo was so clogged with traffic, vehicular and human, that I was doomed to stop-start, with a predominance of stop, all the way. However, this did give me opportunities to steal looks at my new hairstyle in the rearview mirror. Of course I'd seen myself in the salon, but now that I was out in the real world I wanted to reassure myself my initial impressions were right and that people wouldn't break into helpless laughter when they saw the new me.

  The mirror being small, and my head quite large, I had to rotate this way and that to build up a visual jigsaw of my hairdo. I had to hand it to Luigi-I did look different.

  He'd spent ages evaluating, lips pursed, before seizing his scissors and beginning to cut infinitesimal amounts off here, there, and everywhere. It took forever. He snip-snip-snipped until I got restive, then he blow-dried until I got really twitchy, then he snipped some more. I'd been about to whinge that my nether regions had pins and needles, when he'd stood back to admire his work.

  "Bellisimo," he'd said, crinkling his eyes attractively. He made a sweeping gesture in my direction. "L’una bella donna."

  "Grazie.”

  I'd been told the thing to do was to give Luigi's check and tip to him unobtrusively, but I couldn't see why one had to be underhanded about it, so I gav
e it to him straight. He slipped it quickly into his pocket without even looking.

  "What if I haven't paid you enough?" I said.

  He gave me a big grin. "In that case, I'll have your legs broken."

  I smiled back. Of course he was joking, but then again, he was Italian.

  Then it had been Perdita's turn to have a lash at improving me. She was one of the manicurists I'd passed on my way to the basins. Perdita wore a pink smock and had a disturbingly intense stare. She sat knee to knee with me, the tiny manicure table between us, and turned her piercing gaze onto my fingernails. I held my breath. I had a nasty feeling the verdict would not be good.

  Perdita peered more closely. Then she blinked rapidly. It was only a minor version of Luigi's horror at the state of my hair, but I felt defensive anyway. "I've never had a professional manicure," I said.

  Perdita had been too polite to announce this regrettable fact was obvious, but her expression had said it for her.

  "I've got good, strong nails," I'd announced, as if this might excuse the inexcusable.

  "Your cuticles!" Perdita's face had contained a mixture of revulsion and grief. She'd shaken her head. "Your cuticles…"

  Now, stuck at yet another red light, this time outside Cartier, I snuck a look at my hands. My cuticles were exemplary. It'd been a battle, but I'd persuaded Perdita I didn't want nail polish, even the clear stuff. Hiding her contempt, she'd buffed my nails furiously, until they shone.

  Something was ringing. I was puzzled for a moment, then realized it was my mobile. Making a mental note to call it a cell phone like Americans did, I flipped it open.

  Chantelle said in a rush, "Kylie? How did it go? Do you look totally adorable?"

  I didn't ask how Chantelle knew where I'd been. Back at the office, Melodie had tapped into the amazing outreach of the receptionists' network. Possibly thousands of people in L.A. were now aware I'd recently challenged the creative abilities of Luigi of Beverly Hills.

  "Doesn't look too bad," I conceded.

  Chantelle chuckled. She had a dusky, warm laugh that went with her smooth, dark skin. "This I've got to see. Tonight?"