The Brush Off

by Laura Bradley

  As we walked to my sink station, Janice shook her head. “I just wish I could have done something.”

  “What could you have done?”

  She shook her head again and seemed lost in thought. I counseled myself on the benefits of patience as I leaned her head back and washed, massaging her scalp, hoping to rub the secret out like Aladdin’s lamp. When I was finished and was wrapping the towel around her head, she sighed heavily. “I think if I would’ve pried a little more, he would’ve opened up to me, and maybe all this could’ve been avoided. Ricardo might be alive today.”

  I swallowed the What? and led her to my room, settling her in the chair. I tried to imagine myself like the cool psychologist who listens to Tony on The Sopranos. You know she wants to lean over and shake him sometimes or have her mouth drop open wide enough to admit a semi, but she just sits there. Calmly. Waiting. My hero.

  I waited.

  I bumped into my tool cart and sent it crashing into the wall.

  Obviously, not calmly.

  I righted my cart, chose a comb and some scissors, and willed her to start talking before I started snipping so she wouldn’t need stitches by the time I was finished.

  “Why don’t you tell me about it?” I said to Janice. Very cool.

  “I met him last night about nine.”

  Ah-ha. She was the mystery customer.

  “I was scheduled to get my regular trim and condition,” she continued, watching my poised scissors rather nervously. “First he tried to talk me into going shorter. He showed me photos, a shag, like we had back in the sixties. But he started waving this weird-looking brush around, and I realized this shag was going to need some twenty-first-century styling, so I said no.”

  At least that answered the question of why Ricardo needed the brush. Janice paused. I started snipping so she’d keep talking. “His cell phone rang, and you know how he is, he ignores it if he is with a customer. I imagine he doesn’t turn it off because he wants to know he’s had a call, but I’ve never known him to allow an interruption when he’s with me—or, I assume, with any other client.”

  “That’s right,” I confirmed. That was part of Ricardo’s deal. Two big ones for—I looked again at Janice’s hair—a twenty-five-dollar cut, but you would have his undivided attention.

  “This time, he excused himself and walked to his bathroom, but with all that tile and mirror and chrome, it’s like an echo chamber. I heard everything he said.”

  I held my breath so I wouldn’t blurt anything out, like What the hell did he say? Instead, I smiled and nodded.

  “I really shouldn’t tell you.” She mulled.

  My fingers tightened around the handles of the scissors. Janice swallowed hard.

  “You just said you should’ve said something last night. Now is your chance,” I reminded her, exchanging my scissors for the comb and beginning to work it through her hair. She winced. This might be better than the scissors for extracting info.

  “Too late to save him.” Was she ever stubborn. I had to admire that.

  “But maybe not too late to find his murderer.”

  “You’re right. Protecting his privacy now won’t help him, will it?” She paused, watching a woodpecker choose just the right piece of oak tree outside the window.

  I marveled at Ricardo’s privacy even beyond the grave. How did he instill this powerful instinct in all his friends and customers to keep our mouths shut about his business, when human nature is the complete opposite? Of course, with our tongues quiet, our imaginations went into overdrive, and we made up elaborate scenarios miles from the truth. I know I did in the beginning. He’d threaten to pluck me bald if I told anyone he was going home early. It was probably just to watch Oprah, but I assumed he had a hot rendezvous until I got to know him better. He cultivated that air of mystery, though.

  Janice sucked in a breath and finally gave it up. “He told the person on the other end that if ‘he’ didn’t do what Ricardo asked, Ricardo would tell everything he knew.”

  “Blackmail?” I was shocked.

  “It sounded like it.”

  “He was talking directly to the person he was blackmailing?”

  “Oh, no. I’m sorry. He was talking about the person he was blackmailing. He referred to ‘he.’ I got the impression he was talking to a woman. He called her ‘mi cara’ once and then cautioned her to keep calm, that everything would work out for the best.”

  Best for whom? Not Ricardo, obviously. “Anything else?”

  “No. It was a short conversation, whispered. And I missed the end, because he flushed the toilet and drowned out whatever else I might have heard. When he came back to me, his hands were shaking so badly that I told him I had a dinner date I’d just remembered, and we could reschedule my trim for another time. He agreed, obviously relieved. I’ve never seen him so distracted.”

  I wondered if the police had already traced the call and were on the hunt for another suspect I didn’t know about. That bugged me.

  “Have you told the police?” I asked.

  “No!” Janice almost shouted. Her hand flew to her throat protectively. “I won’t talk to police. Not voluntarily. Not ever.”

  “Why?” I tried to hide my shock at her reaction

  “I have a distrust of governmental authority. I demonstrated against the war in Vietnam in the sixties and seventies.” That explained the expensive fringed purse and hairstyle—holdover hippie. “I’ve seen the view from behind bars. I think politicians are more corrupt now than they were then, only now I’m more selfish, too. I have a company to protect, women who rely on my products. Besides, the IRS audits me every year. One visit to the fuzz, and they’d find some reason to close me down for good.”

  Wow, was she paranoid, or did Big Brother really lean on her that hard? After thirty years? She must have been a pretty big thorn in their side. I admired her for that, but looking at her now, I realized no matter what she had been and the trappings she tried to hang on to—the long hippie hair that she had expensively cut, the Sandra Acuna fringed pouch purse that was retro-sixties but cost in the neighborhood of two hundred dollars, her talk of the “other dimension”—Janice now was really no different from any corporate stooge. Protecting what she had was more important than anything—like truth, justice, what was right.

  That scared me. I hoped age would make me wiser, not clinically cautious.

  Then I thought about my gran and relaxed. If genetics had anything to do with it, I’d be okay. Gran was anything but cautious.

  “I appreciate you telling me, Janice,” I said as I retrieved my scissors and began snipping.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “I’m just checking around, doing things the police don’t have the time or the inclination to do.”

  “You won’t tell the police about me, will you?” She gripped the armrests so tightly her knuckles went white.

  Man, I really wondered what she’d done in her past to warrant this kind of paranoia. Or was it all in her past? “No, Janice, I promise your name won’t pass my lips, even under the influence of thumbscrews. I’m not on the best terms with the police, anyway.”

  “Don’t get hurt. I don’t want your blood on my conscience, too.”

  What an odd choice of words. Or was I becoming as paranoid as she was, suspicious of everyone who mentioned Ricardo’s name? “Don’t worry about me, Janice. I can take care of myself.”

  “With a little help from her friends,” Trudy chirped as she swung her head around the doorjamb. I saw she was doing lime green today as the rest of her body encased in silk and spandex danced into the doorway. She’d even changed her fingernail polish, although I wasn’t entirely sure that ice blue was the perfect complement to lime. Trudy made it work somehow. She always did.

  “And her friends’ mothers-in-law,” I couldn’t resist adding.

  Trudy hung her head for a moment, then put her hand on my forearm as I replaced my scissors on the cart, picked up a brush, and reach
ed for my blow-dryer. “Reyn, I’m sorry about Mama Tru.”

  We shared a moment of silence, during which I realized that despite all her faults, Mama Tru was another example of a geriatric with spunk. Okay, so I didn’t have to dread my twilight years anymore. I looked at Trude, about to forgive her for the family she married into, but she ruined it by breaking into a lascivious grin.

  “But I hear that you were tight with Policeman Perfect, sharing a glass of wine, cozy in the kitchen. I want the skinny.”

  That’s all Janice had to hear. She jumped up out of her chair, ripped off her smock, and swung her half-dry hair out of her face. “Reyn! You’re involved with a cop? You lied to me.”

  “I did not. It’s not what it sounds like. Not even close.” I spared a glare at Trudy before focusing back on Janice, who was now grabbing her fringed bag on her way out the door.

  “I just hope you don’t betray my confidence. I don’t want to wear black-and-white stripes again.”

  I wanted to tell her they dress you in orange in our county jail, but it probably wasn’t what she wanted to hear. I listened as she nearly stampeded down the hall and slammed the front door on Sherlyn’s good-bye. I might be wrong, but I don’t think she took the time to schedule her next appointment with me. There went another potential regular customer thanks to a Trujillo big mouth.

  I turned to my erstwhile buddy, whose mouth was actually looking the part at the moment, hanging wide open in shock. “You already found the killer?”

  I snorted as I put the blow-dryer and brush back on the cart. “Not hardly.”

  Trudy followed me into my office. I plucked the list out from between the hairstyle books, smoothed it out on the desk, and made a check mark by number eight. I scanned the other names. Was Ricardo’s mi cara on here, or was she merely a confidante?

  “But she said—”

  I waved off the rest of her statement as I closed the office door. “Paranoid ex-hippie.”

  “Oh. I thought she was trying to be pop with the peace ring, the purse, and the platform sandals.”

  “No, she’s just hanging on to the wrong parts of her past.”

  “I’ll say,” Trudy intoned. A fashion faux pas was the biggest sin in her book, although sometimes I wondered if she ever looked in the mirror. Of course, when I looked at fashion magazines, I rarely looked down past the shoulders, and my own fashion consisted of whatever I chose to go with cowboy boots.

  Trudy read the list over my shoulder. “You really think one of them did it?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s a place to start.” I told her what Janice had overheard. “So, all we know now is that Ricardo was apparently blackmailing someone, met a guy in tennis whites at a transvestite club, was inordinately interested in one local political race, and—” I paused. I wasn’t ready to tell her about my potential inheritance. I wasn’t ready to accept it, and I knew if I told Trudy, it would be in the newspaper tomorrow morning. I love my friend, but she doesn’t know how to keep her mouth shut, especially about things that need to be kept secret. “And last night, while he was cutting Janice’s hair, he talked to someone who knew about the blackmail and called her mi cara.”

  “Could mi cara be a man?”

  “I don’t think Ricardo was gay or swung both ways. It’s just an instinct, and we have to rely on that, since we have little else to rely on at the moment.”

  “If Janice was the appointment he had last night, you don’t think she did it?”

  I shook my head. “It just doesn’t make sense for her to come here and offer the information willingly if she killed him.”

  “Okay. What’s our next move?”

  I considered our options. We could go systematically down the list, paying visits one by one. But first, I thought we needed to go to Ricardo’s house. Perhaps there was something the police missed that a friend would see as odd or out of place. But surely it was still sealed as an extension of the crime scene, and I doubted the cops would invite us in. Unless we had an official reason to be there. Perhaps on an errand for the man who was running Ricardo’s salons? “Let’s go see Ricardo’s right-hand man,” I told Trudy. “Then we’ll tackle the rest of the list.”

  Gerald told me on the phone that he was working from home since the police wouldn’t let him back in his office located at the rear of the Broadway salon. We followed his directions to a tiny but well-kept gray asbestos-siding house in a lower-middle -class neighborhood built in the fifties off Vance Jackson Road. As we pulled into the concrete driveway, I decided my first act as head of Ricardo’s, Inc., would be to give Gerald a raise, because he was either grossly underpaid or was socking away a ton of money.

  He met us as the door wearing a navy-blue suit, white shirt, conservative tie, and that deep side-parted, Ward Cleaver hairstyle he used Dippity Do on to keep motionless. The hand that shook mine was damp with perspiration. He flashed a shy smile. Poor guy was nervous. I wondered if the attorney had passed along my message. I wanted to reassure him but remembered I had to be careful because I still didn’t want Trudy to know. “How are you holding up, Gerald?”

  “Great, just great,” he stuttered, then caught himself, obviously wondering if that sounded too crass. “I mean, I have so much work to do that I haven’t had time to really think about losing him. I mean, there’s just so much to get arranged, and there’s the daily crises that crop up that take my attention. I mean—”

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “We know what you mean. It’s easier to keep busy. I imagine it will really hit you hard once you get back to work at your Broadway office and he’s not there.”

  It sounded a little awkward, but he got my message—he wouldn’t be fired. His eyes brightened, and he smiled a little more confidently. “Thank you, Reyn.”

  Trudy’s eyebrows drew together. She knew she was missing something but wasn’t sure what. I moved out of the small foyer and into the living room, choosing the worn but clean plaid love seat. Gerald had to be on Scythe and Crandall’s suspect list, but I didn’t see him ever having the balls to bury a brush in his boss’s back. I knew from reading enough true crime that a meek personality often hid homicidal tendencies, but I couldn’t make the stretch in Gerald’s case. Ricardo’s murder was obviously a murder of the moment, using a weapon of convenience. What would have tripped Gerald’s temper? Love or money? I couldn’t see him harboring a secret crush on Ricardo all these years, then finally coming out with it. Even if he had, Ricardo was the kind of man who, despite his machismo, would’ve dealt with it kindly. He genuinely liked and respected Gerald. I’d seen it every day at work for years. On the other hand, if Ricardo had made an unwanted pass at Gerald, I saw Gerald being embarrassed, not bloodthirsty. If it had been a money issue, Gerald finally having enough of his millionaire boss taking advantage of him, I saw Ricardo not realizing how cheap he was being and easily increasing Gerald’s salary. Ricardo had such tunnel vision that I doubted it ever occurred to him that he was underpaying the man who was keeping his business running on a daily basis. No, I’d bet Gerald had never asked for a raise in his life.

  I just couldn’t make it fit. Or maybe I didn’t want to.

  Trudy and Gerald were making their way slowly into the living room. Trudy was asking him how he had found out about Ricardo’s murder.

  “I went into work that morning, and the police stopped me.” He sat on a recliner while Trudy sat down next to me.

  “I’m sorry, Gerald, I didn’t see you there,” I said, racking my memory for something other than the sight of Ricardo’s bloody body.

  “I was sitting in a police car when you came out of the salon. I knew when I saw your face how bad it must be. The police wouldn’t tell me. I guess they think I might have done it.”

  Gerald stared at his hands, which he’d clasped between his knees.

  “Well, if it’s any consolation, you’re below me on the suspect list.”

  “I suppose you have more of a motive than I do,” he commented.

  Uh-oh.
Trudy looked at him sharply, then questioningly at me. I forced a smile. “You’re right. I was well known for locking horns with Ricardo a lot more times than you ever did. I suppose the cops would look there first, huh?”

  “But that’s not what I mean—” Gerald drew his eyebrows together in confusion. He must have assumed I’d told my best friend about my inheritance.

  “Oh, don’t try to excuse my bad temper.” I waved my hand at him, hoping to wave away any more that he might say. “You saw it enough times when I worked at Ricardo’s.”

  Gerald smiled then. “It was good entertainment.”

  Oh, swell. If I ever got tired of styling hair, I could just sign on as entertainer on my prickly personality alone.

  “Maybe they’ll hire you at Illusions,” Trudy put in with a cruel grin. She was mad at me.

  “I think Ricardo really missed you when you left. He’d comment on how calm and quiet it was every day for nearly a year,” Gerald reminisced.

  A lump rose unexpectedly in my throat. Tears welled up in my eyes. Why this would make me want to cry when his dead body didn’t, don’t ask me. A forgiving Trudy patted me on the shoulder. That took care of it. I hated to show weakness, and crying was weak in my book. I blinked the tears away, then focused back on how I could get the key to Ricardo’s house from Gerald without letting Trudy in on the inheritance deal.