by Webb, Peggy
After Uncle Charlie pays the cab fare and we’re left alone in front of Cozumel Palace, I reference the driver’s family resemblance to Tulum’s surly cook.
“I noticed,” he says. “Small island, small native population. I’ll look into it.” Uncle Charlie hails a bellhop. “Let’s get settled in, then meet in Callie’s room. Say, twenty minutes.” He looks Mama straight in the eye. “Ruby Nell, till then, stay out of trouble.”
“I never have let you tell me what to do, Charlie Valentine. Do you think I’m going to start taking your advice at this late date?”
“Probably not. Still, it’s worth a try.”
I’m so glad to see the easy camaraderie has returned between Mama and my daddy’s brother. There were times back during the Elvis Ultimate Tribute Artist Competition in Tupelo and during the Memphis Mambo Murders when I feared they’d alienated each other so much that we’d have an empty seat at Mama’s Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners down on the farm.
Checking back into the hotel is no problem. We never checked out of our rooms. While Uncle Charlie pulls a few strings to get Mama and Fayrene switched to the room next to mine so we can keep an eye on each other—his words, not mine—I take the elevator up and walk straight back into civilization. Flat screen TV, carpet, ornate bedspread and draperies, watercolors on the walls, Jacuzzi calling my name.
It will have to wait. Twenty minutes is not time enough to do a hot tub justice.
Though everything looks the same as when I left, I enter my room cautiously, peering under the bed, inside the closets, and under the draperies for snakes and kidnappers and no-telling-what-all. Listen, I know I’m not in the middle of a B-grade movie, but I can’t forget how I almost donated body parts to the Frankenstein aspirations of Morgan a.k.a. Bela Lugosi.
The coast looks clear. Usually the first thing I do is unpack my bag and hang my clothes. Not today. The first thing I do is strip off my shorts, strap on my leg holster, and change into a denim miniskirt. I view myself from all angles in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. Satisfied the holster doesn’t show, I slide a clip into the gun, heft it for balance (which makes me feel as if I know what I’m doing), and secure it in the holster.
Now I’m a hairdresser packing heat. And I’m not talking blow-dryer.
Standing in front of the mirror, I practice my draws. Clint Eastwood in Jimmy Choo stilettos. John Wayne in Bare Minerals Clear Radiance and Blush Secret.
I draw again and hit Morgan three times, twice in the groin, and once in the heart, for good measure. He’s going down and I’m giving a rebel yell, when there’s a knock on the door.
My watch tells me it’s too early for Uncle Charlie and the gang.
“Maid service.”
With my hand on the gun-size lump on my hip, I leave my phantom corpse on the carpet and move toward the door, expecting to find the ubiquitous Juanita standing there with an armload of sheets.
To my relief, the maid is an Asian teenager in pigtails, with buckteeth.
Well, I’m sure she’s not really a teenager, but when your eggs are fainting from despair and you’ve just aged sixteen years at the hands of a kidnapper threatening to turn you into Peg Leg Pete, anybody under the age of thirty looks like a teenager.
“You called for fresh linens?” The maid holds out an armload of fluffy towels.
I’m getting ready to tell her I didn’t call for linens when my instincts start screaming bloody murder. Stepping quickly into the hallway and around the startled maid, I spot a dark-haired woman vanishing into the snack room down the hall.
“Rosita!” I’d know that tacky hair anywhere. I take off running. Tulum’s cook can only be in the Cozumel Palace for one reason: she’s Morgan’s female partner, and she’s here to finish the job he started.
“Stop!” I yell, then nearly crash into a cart emerging from the room three doors down. The tiny Mayan maid pushing it jumps back into the room and slams the door, the devil take her cart.
Pumping into high gear, I sprint toward the snack room, round the corner, and skid to a stop. Sitting at the small formica-topped table with a diet Pepsi and a pack of Nabs, Rosita looks at me as if I’m three years old and not very bright.
“Señorita?” Her unplucked eyebrows rise toward an ugly hairdo that would take a miracle for even someone of my styling talents to fix. “Is there something you wanted?”
“What are you doing here?” I know. I know. Not very subtle. But if you’d spent the last day chained to a bed with threats of knives and dismemberment in your immediate future, you’d ditch subtlety, too.
“Visiting my mother. Carmita.” She indicates the woman beside her.
Chagrined, I notice a woman in the uniform of the Cozumel Palace maids sitting at the table. She looks old enough to be Juanita and Rosita’s mother. The older woman is much darker, one hundred percent Hispanic, I’d guess, while Rosita has the café au lait coloring of someone with mixed heritage.
Rosita’s companion is beautiful in the way of older women who age gracefully and well—no artifice, no makeup, no niptuck enhancements, just a sweet spirit that shines through her tears.
If Carmita is really the mother of the hard-as-nails Rosita, no wonder the poor woman is crying.
The least I can do is be nice to her. I introduce myself and extend my hand.
“It’s lovely to meet you.”
She grabs me and hangs on as if I’m a long lost friend. Then she proceeds to nod and pat my hand.
I guess that means she speaks no English. Or that she’s discovered that pretending not to know what some of the guests in this hotel are saying saves her all kinds of grief. Smart woman, Rosita’s mama.
Now what? I fumble in my pocket, come up with change, and get a 7-Up from the soda machine.
“Thirsty,” I say. I lift the can and take a long swig. Let them think I was running because I was practically dying of thirst. Let them think I’m an ugly American who likes to make a scene wherever I go. I don’t care. They don’t fool me and I probably don’t fool them.
“Enjoy your visit,” I say, all smiles, then stroll back down the hall determined to find out more about the mysterious Carmita and why on earth the surly cook, Rosita, followed us to Cozumel.
I’m about halfway down the hall when Mama and Fayrene streak out of the adjoining room, howling. As much as I’d like to think they’re hungry and racing to be first in the lunch buffet line downstairs, the one coherent word I pick up tells another story.
“Cannibals!” This from Fayrene, who streaks past me. The door to the fire stairwell bangs open and the last I see of her is the tail of her pea green housecoat disappearing into the bowels of the stairwell.
I grab Mama before she lopes past. But not before I peer down the hall toward the snack room to see how Rosita and her mother are reacting to this disturbance. They’re staying out of sight.
Is that a sign of innocence or of guilt? My money is on guilt. Listen, if I’d been messing around in the room of somebody with Mama’s known volatility, I’d be fully prepared for the ensuing hullabaloo. I’d sit tight with my diet Pepsi too and play blind and deaf.
“Mama, what’s going on?”
“This.” Mama hands me a voodoo doll riddled with pins in painful places.
Furthermore, the doll looks suspiciously like Mama, with raven hair and brightly colored caftan, Mama’s usual and most distinctive garb of choice. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s a note attached that reads, You’re next.
“You shouldn’t have touched it, Mama.”
“I’d like to know why not? If you think I’m going to keep this ugly thing sitting around staring at me, you’re wrong.”
“Uncle Charlie might be able to have prints lifted.”
“Well, listen to you. I do believe my daughter’s turning into a detective.”
“I’d as soon turn into a fashion disaster as spend the rest of my life chasing petty criminals and major monsters.”
“What you ought to do is ch
ase Jack.” Leave it to Mama to find a way to bring my love life into the conversation. I believe she could do it from the front pew of Wildwood Baptist Church in the middle of a hellfire and damnation sermon.
“That subject’s off-limits.”
“Flitter, nothing’s off-limits with me. It comes with the territory.”
“What territory?”
“Motherhood, which you’d find out if you’d let that hunk of a husband back in your house.”
“Ex.”
“Not yet.”
I give up. But I’m not about to let on to Mama. It won’t do to let her see how easy it is to win every argument with me. Lovie says I’m a pushover, that I let people take advantage of me. I’m trying to turn over a new leaf. Really, I am. The only problem is, there are so many leaves to choose from, I can’t make up my mind which one to turn over first.
I lead Mama back into her room. “Listen, we’ve got to find out everything we can about a maid named Carmita.”
I quickly fill her in on the family reunion in the snack room.
“You’re going to tell Charlie?”
“Of course. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to sit back and do nothing.”
Mama gives me a wink and a high-five, then I pull out my cell phone to call Uncle Charlie. Within five minutes he’s in the room.
“Show me exactly where you found the voodoo doll, Ruby Nell.”
“Over there. Sitting on my bedside table putting the evil eye on me.”
“There’s no such thing as the evil eye, Mama.”
“That’s what you said about my inner animal, and look how that turned out.”
I have to agree, but I don’t tell Mama. Any further ammunition and she’s going to turn completely native on me.
“Any word from Jack?” I ask my uncle.
“No, but that’s a good thing.”
Meaning Jack can handle anything. Meaning Jack won’t call unless he’s surrounded by Morgan’s minions who plan to use him for target practice. Or he’s fending off cannibals with a hankering for a very tough bad boy.
I wish I could control my own hankering. Sounds like leaf number one to me. As in turning over a new . . .
“Cal,” Uncle Charlie tells me, “I found out Lulu Farkle’s in charge of the seminar on ‘Makeup for the Final Journey.’ You need to go.”
“Holy cow, is that what they’re calling it?”
“Lulu’s from Arkansas,” Mama says, which explains everything.
We Southerners love our euphemisms. The dead never die. They pass on, go to Glory Land, embark on a final journey, expire, head to the great tent revival in the sky. Or as Mama is fond of engraving on tombstones at Everlasting Monuments in Mooreville, they boogie on up to dance with the saints. What can you expect? She’s fond of the TV show, Dancing with the Stars.
“While you’re in the makeup seminar, I’d better find Fayrene,” Mama says. “She’s probably halfway to Mooreville by now.”
She grabs her purse and hustles out the door while I explain to Uncle Charlie about seeing Rosita and her so-called mama. Our plan is for him to follow that lead, plus others I’m sure I don’t even know about, and see if he can get fingerprints from the voodoo doll, while I waltz on down to the seminar.
First I zip into my room, refresh my makeup—listen, I’m not about to attend a seminar on beauty, even if it’s for the dearly departed, without looking my best—then face the mirror and do my best imitation of Rita Hayworth to Glenn Ford in the film noir classic, Gilda.
“If I’d been a ranch, they would’ve named me The Bar Nothing.”
With a lethal weapon up my skirt and a recently adopted bad attitude, I head out the door to the elevator. The electronic ping announces its arrival, and I slip inside, grateful I’m alone for a few minutes. Leaning my head against the wall, I deep breathe as I glide downward.
When the doors slide open on the mezzanine, I take a slow breath and step into the midst of Cozumel’s biggest party of the year, otherwise known as the undertakers’ convention.
“All right, muffin, let’s have a little dose of straight talk,” I say to myself. (Thelma Ritter to Jean Peters in Pickup on South Street.)
A few people give me funny looks, but what do I care? Lulu Farkle had better watch out. Her worst nightmare is headed her way.
Chapter 20
Botched Plans, Marilyn Monroe, and a Farkle Future
Weaving through the crowd of undertakers, stylists for the deceased, and marble monument salespeople, I try to blend in. No easy feat. A woman my height—five feet, nine inches—always stands out. Not to mention that my sleek, swingy brown bob always attracts admiring glances.
Some might call it vanity, but I call it good advertising.
Over the heads of a group of portly, pasty-faced men wearing tags that identify them as hailing from Seattle, Washington, I spot Lulu Farkle, heading into Salon B. She pauses in the doorway to glance over her shoulder.
Quickly, I whirl around to hug the person behind me. A surprised Seattle citizen who calls me Julia.
“Julia! Long time, no see,” he says, his big grin showing gold-capped molars.
“Indeed, how long has it been?” I try to pull myself out of his embrace, but he holds on tight.
“Too long. Let’s catch up over a drink tonight. Say, six? The Turquesa?”
“Super. See you then.” He releases me and I give him a little beauty queen wave. Something all my Southern female clients have down to a fine art. “Toodle-oo.”
Ever since Lovie and I ended up in Las Vegas chasing the missing corpse from Uncle Charlie’s funeral home, I’ve turned into a woman of bad habits. I can lie, break and enter, and impersonate anybody who suits my purposes at the drop of a hat. Or a corpse.
Telling myself it’s all for a good cause—finding Lovie and Elvis—and that when I get back home I’m going to ditch every one of my recently acquired bad habits and go back to being nothing but a hairstylist, I slip into the back of Salon B.
Perfect timing. The room is teeming with people, mostly female, who have come to learn the latest techniques for putting an appealing face on folks waiting for their last, long journey.
Listen, I don’t think about that too much. All I know is that my skills—both with the living and the dead—make people happy, either the client or the surviving relatives.
Quickly I locate an empty chair in the back row, slide into it, and then slouch down in the hopes that Lulu won’t notice me.
Fortunately, she doesn’t. She’s up front tapping the microphone in a way that reminds me of Mayor Robert Earl Getty back home. I almost stand up and say, hon, it’s working.
Since I’m here without even a half-baked plan, I hunker down to see what will happen next. Lulu drones on awhile about a new line of pancake makeup. I’m about to chalk the seminar up to a lost cause when a bellhop rolls a sheet-draped gurney onto the dais. He brings it to a stop beside a table filled with familiar pots of pancake and blush.
Lulu climbs aboard, then announces that she’s going to be the guinea pig while volunteers from her esteemed audience of makeup artists—her words, not mine—come on up and demonstrate what they’re doing in their own hometowns.
“Surprise me,” she yells. “I’m just going to lie down, shut my eyes, and wait for a brave volunteer.”
I seize my chance. The minute Lulu lies down, a woman in the third row springs up and starts for the steps, but she doesn’t stand a chance against Hair.Net’s long-legged beauty goddess with a mission.
I grab a pot of pancake and tower over the unsuspecting Lulu.
“Can I peek now?” she says. I never would have put coy in the same sentence with Lulu Farkle.
“You can look.”
Her eyes snap open and she almost comes off the gurney. I put my hand on her chest and push her back down.
Listen, in spite of Lovie’s opinion that I’m all skin and bones, I work out regularly at the Wellness Center back home. I’m much stronger than I look.
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br /> “Now, now, have a little faith in your volunteer.” I get a ripple of chuckles from the audience and a huge scowl from Lulu.
“What do you want?” she hisses.
“This is one feisty dearly departed,” I tell the audience. To Lulu, I hiss, “Where’s Lovie?”
“In hell, I hope.” Lulu’s latest, through clenched teeth.
I plop a big glob of pancake onto her face and cover her mouth. “We start with the base.” I smile at the audience while Lulu bucks. “My corpse won’t be still. Do you think I should drive a stake through her heart?”
The audience roars. Maybe there’s more to being onstage than I ever knew. Maybe the heady, triumphant feeling is why Lovie always lobbied for the lead in school plays.
“Blend well.” I keep Lulu relatively immobile while I use both hands to smear pancake. “Oops. Missed a spot.” Leaning close, I whisper. “Why do you hate her?”
“She spoiled the plan.”
“What plan?” Still hovering close, I pretend to be taking great pains to cover every inch of Lulu’s bad skin so she can go on to Glory Land looking more like Beauty than the Beast.
“The merger with Charlie. A chain of Farkle Funeral Homes.”
Uncle Charlie would never consider a merger with anybody, let alone Alvin Farkle. Though he’s never interfered with Lovie’s love life, I know for a fact that he didn’t cotton to the idea of his only daughter hooking up with a man he considered lacking not only in manners but also in skills as a funeral director.
A few women in the front row are leaning forward in their chairs, apparently catching on that there’s more taking place on the dais than a simple makeup demonstration.
I bedazzle my audience with a smile. I hope.
“Sorry about that. I was catching up on news about Lulu’s brother, Alvin. What a hunk.”
“Die in hell,” she hisses.
“You first.” I tell her, all smiles and good cheer, as I hold her mouth shut with one hand, uncap a lipstick with the other, and paint her surly lips in a perfect cupid’s bow, à la Marilyn Monroe.
Listen, I’m a natural. Most people take years to learn what I sprang from the womb knowing. Give me a few pots of paint and some tubes of lipstick, and I can make the deceased look so good they practically rise up and shout.