Sprayed Stiff

by Laura Bradley

  Wait, I was within the Terrell Hills city limits. Yahoo. That meant we’d be calling its tiny police department, not the SAPD. Scythe would never know I’d been here. Boy, what a relief. I’d just have strangers to answer to, and that I could handle. No laser blue eyes and no half-hitched rusty blond eyebrow to contend with. I was home free.

  Well, except for the body in front of me and the crackpot next to me.

  “That’s right, Wilma,” Lexa called out. “No worries.”

  Understatement of the year. The only thing Wilma was worrying about right now was choosing which cloud to lounge on in heaven, or choosing which hot poker on which to perch in hell. I glanced over at her slightly un-hinged daughter. Wilma had to be blamed for loosening those nuts.

  Even though the hole in her chest was pretty definitive and her eyes were open in an unblinking look of perpetual surprise, I thought it might be good form to check for a pulse. I swallowed bile and strode forward, put a finger to her cold wrist, then used the opportunity to backhand the cat onto the worn (read, “expensive antique”) Tabriz rug. She growled at me, swished her tail, and sashayed off like it was her idea to find something better to do than gnaw on her dead mistress’s fingertips. To be fair to the feline, perhaps she had been abused by Wilma, and this was her revenge. Like a rubbernecker with no self-control, I glanced at Wilma’s fingers even though I knew I shouldn’t. Eee-uw. The mortician would have to employ some creative hand positioning if the family wanted an open casket.

  Wilma had been secured to the Duncan Phyfe straight-back chair with clear packing tape before she’d been shot. The hole went through the tape and the taffeta before going through Wilma. Blood wasn’t still flowing from the wound, so she’d been dead awhile. That was the extent of my postmortem expertise. I’d seen only one other dead person before and not this close. Besides, the police had already been there and that somehow made seeing that body easier. And I’d had the comfort of a barf bag. I glanced at Wilma’s gnawed-on pinkie again and turned away. That sight made me want to hurl more than the bullet hole. Go figure.

  I spun around to put some distance between me and the departed to see Lexa holding up a Fendi makeup case.

  “What are you doing, Lex?” I asked after a pause during which I warned myself to be patient.

  She zipped it open and pulled out a bottle of Erno Laszlo foundation. “I thought I could redo her makeup while you repair her hair.”

  I sucked in a cleansing breath. I blew it out. “Lexa, we need to call the police.”

  She shook her head and dove back into the makeup bag for a sponge. “Come on, Reyn, we have to fix her. For the cameras.”

  I put a hand on her arm and gentled my voice. “Lex, your mom is, uh…” I searched for a way to relate to her odd mental state. “…deceased.”

  Shaking off my hand, Lexa looked at me, raised her eyebrows, and widened her eyes. “I am aware of that, Reyn. That’s why I called you.”

  Oh, good. That was good, wasn’t it? But it was also disturbing—that she was cognizant enough to realize Mum had moved to another reality but not cognizant enough to know that she needed to notify the authorities first instead of her hairdresser.

  Maybe I should focus on the friend angle. Sure, that’s why she’d called me—to provide moral support for the call to the cops. She probably told me more things while sitting in my chair than she’d ever admitted to her bizarre band of buddies, an interchangeable group that had in common the ability to irritate Wilma. None of them hung around long. Hadn’t Lexa said I was the only one she could trust to come tonight? Yes, that must be it. I could hold her hand. Maybe I’d even dial. Anything to get the cops there and me outta there. I looked around for a phone. “Okay, let’s go ahead and call nine-one-one.”

  Lexa produced a round boar’s-bristle brush from somewhere and smacked it into my hand, bristles first. Ow.

  “Not until you fix her hair.” Wilma’s hair hadn’t been the only thing fortified with steel. Lexa’s voice was suddenly hard.

  “Lex…” I paused, grabbing the brush handle with my left hand, extracting the bristles from my right palm. Skinny little Lexa had quite an arm on her. Who was to say that refusing to fix Mum’s hair wouldn’t shove her over the edge into complete insanity? What if she arm-wrestled me into doing the style? Hmm. The cops would put me behind bars for interfering with a murder investigation. Upon further contemplation, I decided I’d rather face a crazy Lexa than a pissed-off policeman.

  “We can fix her hair after the police are finished with their business. You want to find out who did this, right? Wait, have you checked the house?” I found it suddenly hard to swallow as I walked to the door and peeked down the darkened hallway. I whispered, “The killer could still be here.”

  Lexa didn’t answer, so I turned around and saw her standing behind the oversize mahogany desk, pointing what looked suspiciously like a pistol in my general direction. “You will redo Mo—Wilma’s hair, and then we will call the police.”

  Uh-oh. What was that I was saying about facing a crazy Lexa? It had been a figure of speech, that’s all. I eyeballed the gun, a two-shot derringer. Maybe we wouldn’t have to look for the killer after all. I wondered if the thing was loaded. With one bullet left, perhaps? The knot in my throat clotted my words together. “Lexa”—I jangled the knot around with a clearing sound—“what are you doing?”

  She glanced down at the derringer and looked embarrassed. “I have to make sure Mother…” She paused and shook her head in frustration. For a moment I thought she would cry. “I mean Wilma. I have to make sure Wilma is not seen in this condition by anyone. You know how much appearance meant to her. It’s the least I can do for her now.”

  “Lexa…” My chest tightened, and I forced out the rest of the words: “Did you and your mother have an argument? Was it an accident? Did she force you to protect yourself?” And then force you to make her look like an extra on the set of Star Trek: the Next Generation at the Barnum and Bailey Circus?

  Lexa recoiled and blinked twice. Her face flushed with anger, which I was actually glad to see. This was a normal emotion. “No. No! You think that I…” She waved the gun toward her mom, and I ducked for Wilma. I’m empathetic that way. “Don’t be ridiculous, Reyn. I couldn’t hurt Wilma.”

  And Lexa didn’t think every time she pierced another hole in her nose that it didn’t hurt the Queen of the Junior League? I didn’t need to go there as I watched her blink rapidly at the tears forming in her eyes. Her shoulders slumped as she heard her own words and realized the hurt she and her mother had traded back and forth over the years.

  Suddenly she collapsed into the deep burgundy leather chair behind her, and the gun clattered onto the desktop. She buried her face in her hands and began sobbing, her soprano ragged through her tears. “I know photographers arrive with the police. Their photos are displayed in the trial, sometimes leaked to the media. If she knew anyone would see her looking this hideous, Wilma would die a thousand deaths….”

  “But she already has died, Lexa. I don’t imagine she’ll care now.” I eyeballed the gun, estimating the distance between it and my hand. Lexa was sounding more reasonable by the minute, but her eyes didn’t look quite right.

  “I know I didn’t appreciate it, but she worked her whole life to become a famous social standard, a well-known philanthropist. Every charitable act she performed, every miracle she managed, every hairstyle that was emulated by the masses, will fade in comparison to this picture of a…farce. A laughingstock.”

  Lexa was right, of course. But, frankly, I’d rather have laughter than the shivers of horror that any memory of Wilma as dictatorial philanthropist might elicit. I decided it was probably not a good time to bring up that factoid. I could see Lexa was about to break. Her whole body was shaking now. Tears made rivers down her cheeks.

  “And if I allow that to happen to Mother, she will be unable to rest in peace.” Sob.

  Hmm, I hadn’t thought of that. Although I still thought she’d be a
more likely candidate for the stiff hot poker than the fluffy cloud option, I tried to humor Lexa. “I understand.”

  “And if she can’t rest in peace, then she will undoubtedly haunt me. Day after day. I can just hear her: ‘Why did you let this sully my memory forever, you stupid ingrate?’ ” Lexa let out a long, wracking sob. Ingrate? She called her own daughter a stupid ingrate? I looked back at Wilma, eyes wide in her full clown face, hair sprayed out like a wicked halo. To avoid being haunted by this image would be a powerful motivator, maybe more powerful than the sudden bout of guilt to which I was attributing Lexa’s bizarre actions.

  She had a point about the whole preserving-her-memory-so-as-not-to-be-haunted thing.

  I had to get her back in action, back in control, or the cops would be carting her off to the funny farm before they got Wilma to the morgue. I was just considering my options when she snatched the derringer back up and pointed it at me again.

  She looked up, her eyelashes glittering tears. Her finger stayed on the trigger. “Say you’ll help me.”

  “Say you’re not really going to shoot me if I don’t.” I know it wasn’t the smart thing to say, but my mouth operates on its own most of the time.

  “Try me,” Lexa threatened.

  “You know, I was feeling so sorry for you that I was ready to agree to help you without the gun.”

  “Really?”

  “But now, somehow, I don’t feel so sorry for you anymore.”

  “So it’s a good thing I have the gun, huh?”

  Smart aleck. She was feeling better. “I’ll help you. But only if you drop the gun.” She relaxed her fingers and let go, and I hoped to holy hell she had the safety on. It skidded across the desk, and I dove for it, scooping it up and shoving it into my back pocket. I’d worry about where it came from and what to do with it later.

  Had this been Lexa’s intention all along, to recruit me as a red herring for investigators to throw them off her scent? Well, if she was going to be that sneaky, it wouldn’t do much good to have pulled out a gun when she couldn’t coerce me. No, I really didn’t think she’d done anything other than be misguided. But, thanks to Wilma, she’d been that way her whole life.

  “I’ll wipe off her makeup,” Lexa said as she jumped up on her thin legs and looked like she was pulling her psyche together.

  I hated to rock it a little, but I had to. “Lex, we can’t change her makeup. These makeup artists are very distinctive—the techniques they use are like signatures. That could be the only evidence that convicts the killer. Or, better yet, the techs may get lucky and find a fingerprint in there, or whatever was used could be so unique that it might lead right to the one who did this.”

  Blowing out a broken breath, Lexa considered it. She sniffed and nodded. “But the hair, you’ll fix that?”

  “Yes,” I said in a determined, doomsday tone. “Go get me a rattail comb. But try not to mess up potential evidence by touching anything.”

  With a quick nod, Lexa ran out of the room. I was surprised to hear the door slam behind me, followed by the ominous sound of a lock tumbler falling. Her voice rang through the thick mahogany: “I’m going to lock you in there, Reyn, just to make sure you really mean to help. When you are finished with her hair, I’ll let you out.”

  Well, swell.

  “What about the comb?”

  “Do without it.”

  I remembered the derringer. Aha! “What if I decide to shoot my way out?”

  “Then I hope you brought a gun with you, because mine isn’t loaded.”

  Double damn, did I ever feel stupid.

  “How will you know I’m finished?” I stuck my tongue out at the door.

  “We have security cameras.”

  “Good, then you can see when I flip you off,” I said churlishly. Then a lightbulb went off. “Hey, the cameras will have filmed Wilma’s murder!”

  “No. I wish. They run in real time without a tape. Wilma installed them when Kermit and I were kids so she’d know what we were doing all the time.”

  “That’s sick,” I told the clown-faced corpse in Yves Saint Laurent in front of me. “Talk about not letting your children learn independence.”

  “Get busy, so we can call the cops,” Lexa advised helpfully through the door. I heard the floorboards creak as she walked down the hall.

  Emitting a huge sigh, I looked around for an easy escape—but the study had no desktop computer, no telephone. I saw a flash of white and my heart jumped into my throat. I yipped. In answer, a feline face peered around the corner of the massive desk.

  Guinevere.

  This just kept getting better and better. Locked in a room with a clownish corpse and a creepy cat. At least I had somebody to talk to. Besides a body.

  “Hey, Guiny, what’s wrong with your dumb master anyway? Hasn’t he heard of e-mail?” With my bad luck, Lexa’s father was probably one of those old-fashioned guys who let their “secretaries” do all their high-tech work. Humph. Just because I thought my luck might be changing, I tried the doorknob. It was indeed locked.

  Guinevere wound her way around my ankles. I looked down to find she was licking her little kitty lips. Oops, time to get moving before she thought I was dead, too.

  I inched forward, just close enough to touch Wilma with the brush, my arm fully extended. The stand-up hair didn’t budge. What the heck had been put on it to make it so stiff? Could it be that new gel the kids were using to spike their hair? I hadn’t tried any, since most of my customers were the over-thirty crowd, but it sure looked like it made concrete out of hair strands. Still, it would be more like dried goop than whatever was in Wilma’s hair. Her gray bob looked like it had been shellacked. With a blowtorch. I took another step forward and sniffed. I recognized it in an instant—Main Mane by Hair’s Breadth. It had a distinctive horehound scent that couldn’t be missed. This was the triple-super-extra-hold variety, no doubt. I was impressed. And to think the beauty supply distributor had told me when he visited my shop just last week that Main Mane worked better than any hairspray on the market, and I hadn’t believed him. Maybe he’d killed Wilma and sprayed her hair just to prove his point. Silly, I know, but I had to admit the state her hair was currently in would make a great advertisement if it weren’t so morbid. Something wet and rough tickled my elbow.

  “Ack!” Guinevere had jumped back into Wilma’s lap and was tasting me. I ran to the window.

  What was I going to do? I knew that messing with her hair was going to get me in a mess of trouble. But each second I hesitated was one second further from the murder, one second longer for the killer to get away. I wondered which would be a bigger sin in the crime-fighter’s bible. Not that it really mattered beyond my ability to rationalize my screwup, because as I glanced out the window down to the lawn, I realized the second story in a mansion is more like the sixth floor of a high-rise and way too far to jump.

  It was a good thing the window wasn’t open, because when an orchestra blasted out a dramatic phrase at about ten thousand decibels I jumped straight into the glass. I would have a goose egg above my right eyebrow. Good, maybe I could claim a concussion made me do it.

  “What’s that?” I shouted. Had Guinevere become musical? Nope, she’d leaped off Wilma and was stalking toward me with her tail swishing in that pissed-off way cats have.

  “This is Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, first movement,” came Lexa’s disembodied voice from a speaker in the ceiling camouflaged within a flying bust of Benjamin Franklin.

  “Turn it off! Guinevere doesn’t like it.” I shooed at the cat, hoping to change her course. She was not initimidated, and kept padding toward me.

  My answer from Lexa was a rise in the decibel level. Goody.

  “Lexa!”

  No answer. Of course. Furious, I scanned the room for the control of the intercom. Knowing what a control freak Wilma was, I figured it was probably in the room with the security camera screens. Would her husband, Percy, have stood for this, though? Music not of his own
choosing in his private domain? Sitting down in Percy’s leather throne, I searched the desk, remembering at the last minute to grab a piece of paper to shield any fingerprints. His middle desk drawer was depressingly tidy—pens organized by color, then size. The rest of the drawers held file after file of dry legal documents. A cat paw appeared on top of the left row of files, and Guinevere slithered up on top. I scooted to the right and paused at a metal drawer divider, struck with an idea. Prying it loose, I marched over to the door and tried to wedge the divider between the door and the jamb, not caring if Lexa saw me. After all, I had the unloaded gun.

  The divider was too thick. I let it drop to the carpet. It missed Guinevere by inches. Too bad. She meowed at me in warning.

  I looked at the cabinet that flanked the window. It was a unique design, with open segments for books interrupted by small cabinet doors every foot or so. Maybe the intercom was hidden behind one of the doors. Maybe he stored a laptop I could plug into a handy-dandy modem and use to summon the authorities. I reached for a pencil and, carefully holding it between my index finger and thumb around the metal band, popped open the first cabinet door. It held a collection of porno tapes along the lines of Debbie Does Dallas. I sighed. Did all men have to be so predictable? I was moving to the next cabinet when my subconscious warned me I hadn’t had a Guinevere encounter in the expected amount of time. Where was she?

  I spun and found her on Wilma again, having a snack.

  “Shoo!” I waved my arms. She flicked me a look, and promptly ignored all my flapping. I stamped my foot toward her. She chewed harder. I grabbed one of the videotapes and flung it at her. It smacked the cat on the shoulder, sending her back under the desk with an angry growl. I would certainly pay for that later, but now it was way past time for me to get lucky. I popped open the next cabinet door. Jackpot! There was a collection of cameras. Most were so sophisticated that it would take a point-and-shoot woman like me years to learn to use them, but one camera was a simple 35mm auto-focus. Thank goodness. I felt my shoulders relax a degree and tried to act like I was still looking for the intercom. If I could take pictures of Wilma’s hair and face now, I wouldn’t feel so bad about messing around with the crime scene.