A Hair Raising Blowout: Cozy Mystery (The Teasen & Pleasen Hair Salon Cozy Mystery Series Book 1)

by Constance Barker

  “Here’s a question: Was August angry that Annie outed her?” Nellie asked.

  “Because,” I said, “whether we think August is a slut doesn’t matter. It’s what August wants us to think that matters.”

  “Because,” Nellie said, “August clearly hid her older-man thing from everybody.”

  “If she actually does have an older-man thing,” I noted.

  “Are we just making this up?”

  I sighed. “Let’s go cut some hair.”

  “Actually,” Nellie said, “I was going to ask if I could take the afternoon off to fetch my two boys from the Tickfaw campground. Having them there by themselves kept me awake most of last night, and I’ve been frazzled all morning. I’ve only got two clients this afternoon. Could you cover for me?”

  I readily agreed. I only had two clients myself, and the idea of the boys camping by themselves in the swamp kept me awake, too.

  The afternoon got under way at the same sedate pace as the morning. But as the earlier overcast had gradually broken up and the sky looked less like rain, more people came to hang out in our café area. Someone asked if we were about to start offering Botox injections — “news” of our morning Botox discussion had got out — and an afternoon Botox discussion was well underway. The afternoon crept by until Connor showed up.

  I wasn't happy to see him and I’m sure the look on my face said, What are you doing here? What I said out loud was, “Do you need a trim?”

  He answered the look on my face. “You asked me to come look at a rack that’s broken?”

  “Ah,” I said, with a tone of voice that must have communicated, Why couldn’t you have forgotten and never darkened my door again?

  I showed him the foot of the rack Betina noticed was broken. We had propped up that corner with a brick. I was thinking now that I liked the look of the brick. Gave it a shabby chic, well mainly shabby look. I could definitely live with the brick if Connor would just go away.

  He took a quick look and told me that the rack was wrought iron, which I already knew, and that welding wrought iron wasn’t a good idea, especially in a high-stress area.

  “Like my salon?” I asked, puzzled.

  “What?” he asked, equally puzzled.

  “My salon is a high-stress area?”

  “Ehm, no, no, the foot of the rack has a lot of stress on it because of the weight. A weld won’t hold.”

  I thanked him for taking a look and said, “See you later,” as I walked back to my station.

  “I could forge a new part,” he said then, “and fasten it on with stove bolts, just like the original.”

  I walked back toward the rack trying to think of a way to say Please go away with a look on my face, or my tone of voice, or should I just say it out loud? Why was this man being so exasperating?

  When I got close to him he surprised me by leaning down and saying quietly in the Irish accent I used to find so charming, “I know what you must think of me. I’m sorry.”

  I looked into his eyes and saw just about the deepest sadness I’d ever seen, loss pulled out from under loss. He quickly bowed his head and said he’d be going.

  “Conner?” I said. “Go ahead and forge a new part.”

  He nodded quickly and was gone. My heart felt like it'd been whacked around like a raquet ball. Maybe staying single and forgoing all men was what I needed. And men say women are difficult. Pshaw!

  A little before five Nellie came bursting in the front door, all out of breath.

  “That was fast,” I started saying before I switched quickly to “Is something wrong with the boys?”

  “No,” she gasped. “They’re fine. But they discovered something that will make your head spin.” She leaned against the front counter. Everyone in the salon stopped what they were doing. “On the Internet they found pictures of August Anderson in several different outfits that were very revealing.”

  “Slut dresses?” I asked.

  “Some people might call them that,” she replied with a wry smile. “The thing is, they were expensive-looking dresses, not cheap trash. And that’s not the most amazing part.”

  The jaws of most people in the salon had already dropped because the cat was out of the bag that the SLUT painted on August’s windshield just might be accurate. Nellie proceeded to dump out another cat...this one more like a cougar.

  “Some of the photos show a man helping August out of the outfits and, as my oldest son put it, ‘doing the nasty.’”

  And then Nellie let out the final screeching banshee. “The man having sex with August was Burl Botowski.”

  Now every jaw in the place dropped because Burl Botowski was more than twice August’s age, and more importantly, because Betina was at that moment doing the highlights in Hildebrand Botowski’s hair. Strands of hair all over Hildebrand’s head were wrapped in foil.

  Every slack-jawed person in the salon looked at Hildebrand except Betina, who looked at Nellie, who looked at Betina. Nellie was mystified why everyone was not looking at her, until she recognized Hildebrand, who had not moved, aside from her jaw. It dawned on Nellie that letting that last cat out of the bag in front of Hildebrand might have consequences.

  With the pink salon smock billowing around her, foil-wrapped hair sticking out all over her head, and a look of murderous intent on her face, Hildebrand exploded out of the chair and through the front door. Nellie and I bounded after her, followed closely by everyone else in the salon.

  We all knew where Hildebrand was going and what she was going to do when she got there. For an older and slightly rotund woman, she could sure move when a fire was lit under her tail.

  She blew down Clifton Street and into Botowski Hardware. As we came in the door, we heard the roar of a Stihl MS250c chainsaw cranking up. Hildebrand favored that model because of its easy-start feature. Two or three gentle tugs on the starting cord, and you’re ready to dismember your philandering husband.

  I don’t think Hildebrand intended to dismember Burl. On the other hand, her intentions probably weren’t clearly formed in her mind even when she revved the Stihl and ran with it full tilt toward the back of the store where she knew he'd be.

  Burl had come out of the back office when he heard the chainsaw start, since he didn’t trust their only employee (a teenager named Douglas) to demo a chainsaw properly. When Burl saw Hildegard in the pink smock sprinting toward him with the Stihl, he ducked back into the office and slammed the door. Douglas was standing in the paint section looking on with a gaping mouth.

  Hildegard had already engaged the saw’s chain before she passed the hand tool section. She put the tip of the 16-inch bar against the office door, and the saw bounced around for a while before the chain caught purchase and began to rip. She cut a clean oval out of the door that was about her size. I can only imagine what this must have been like from Burl’s point of view, trapped inside the office.

  It’s possible that cutting a Hildegard-sized hole in the hardwood door appeased her anger a little, or it could be that her exertions had tired her out. Or, as I say, she never intended to dismember Burl....I think.

  Whatever the reason, Hildegard paused before going through the hole she’d made, and we saw a stream of red hit her face. Burl had pepper-sprayed her. Not the best idea.

  This was not necessarily a good defensive play because Hildegard immediately plunged through the opening in the door with the chainsaw, completely enraged and blind as a bat. We could hear the chainsaw biting through a lot of stuff and feared that some of it might be Burl.

  With a hunch that Hildegard wasn’t going to last long with pepper in her eyes, Nellie asked Douglas if the store had an eye-wash station. Of course, they didn’t, but Nellie remembered the Gatorade in a cooler by the register. She threw a couple of bottles to me, grabbed a couple more, and we headed toward the back of the store.

  By that time Hildegard had thrown down the chainsaw with a thud. When we got through the hole in the door, expecting to see blood everywhere, Hildegard was s
tanding with her face covered in red pepper spray and her hair flailing out all over her head in strips of aluminum foil. She was screaming in anger and frustration. Also pain.

  As we doused Hildegard’s face with Gatorade, Burl made his getaway through the hole in the door. He didn’t seem to be missing any parts as far as I could see. Fortunately, Hildegard couldn’t see him. Nellie told Hildegard sensibly that she needed to calm down and come back to the salon right now or her highlights would be ruined. Now that's how you calm down a vengeful woman...tell her her hair will be fried to a frizzle if she doesn't cooperate.

  Back in the salon, Nellie rinsed off her thoroughly at the hair-washing station. Hildegard told us that she'd mainly been angry because she had realized why money must have constantly been missing from the hardware store’s accounts. “It won’t break my heart that he bonked that tart,” she said. “But he better stop messing with my money.” Ahhh, true love.

  Chapter 14

  Nellie invited me to my house for dinner. She said she would have invited me to her house, but she had left her boy Dale with Mrs. Chabert, who lived a couple of houses away from me. As long as she was picking up Dale so close, we might as well eat at my house. All very logical.

  Dinner consisted of tacos I picked up from the Paramabets on my way home. We parked Dale in front of the TV with his taco so we could talk in the kitchen.

  Nellie’s tale of the August pictures was even stranger than what she had revealed in the salon. When she arrived at the boys’ tent in the campground, they were wearing ear buds and sitting in front of their laptop computers. A slide show was clicking by on each of the laptops.

  She quickly realized that some of the slide show photos looked like porn. She was about to swat Aubrey’s head when she recognized August in the photos. And then she recognized Burl. Then she swatted Aubrey’s head.

  The boys hadn’t simply found this material deposited on the Internet somewhere. They had got it off the state of Louisiana’s law enforcement network.

  The father of the nice family from Shreveport the boys had befriended turned out to be an ex-cop who was disgruntled with his former superiors. He'd showed the boys how to get into the state’s network, which was great fun as well as useful. The boys regularly checked the law enforcement database to see if anyone was investigating the moonshining operation.

  On one of their research expeditions into the database, they noticed the name of Annie Simmerson. They knew that Annie was a witch because she'd been mean to them at their doctor appointments. They reminded Nellie they’d complained at the time about Annie poking them and banging them with things for no reason. Nellie had waved off their complaints as typical kid discomfort with medical procedures.

  The boys did a search for everything on the law enforcement network relating to Annie and found that a forensics team had attached Annie’s laptop to their network so that everyone on the team could work on hacking into it. Now the boys could try hacking it, too, and because they had poked around in Annie’s purse when she wasn’t looking in the doctor’s office, they had a starting point for guessing her password. That’s how they found the photos.

  “You’re saying they found the August porn on Annie’s computer?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” she said, putting down her taco. “So when I told the story in the salon this afternoon, I couldn’t mention the most amazing fact of all. Annie had those photos. It looked like she had somehow taken them secretly, but I wonder if she kept it a secret from Burl.”

  “You think she was blackmailing him?”

  “If she wasn’t blackmailing him, what was she doing with the photos?” Nellie said.

  “Maybe she just liked watching,” I said doubtfully. I chewed on my taco for a moment. “She could have been blackmailing August, but August didn’t have money. Did she?”

  “She did if she got money from Burl,” Nellie said. “But surely Annie would go directly to the source. Unless.”

  “Unless she was just interested in tormenting August,” I said, catching Nellie’s drift.

  “Whatever’s going on, I’ve got a little problem now that I’ve gone public with some of this info, and Hildegard has carved up the hardware store. Investigator James Woodley will want to know how I came by this info. I left the two boys in the campground so they wouldn’t be handy for him to interrogate.”

  “That was smart,” I said. “Even if it makes the mom uncomfortable. Can’t have him finding out about the moonshining before the new still is licensed.”

  “Mom will just have to have faith that her boys can take care of themselves.”

  “As they obviously can,” I observed hopefully.

  “In any case, we need to figure out what we can tell Woodley,” Nellie said. “What I can tell Woodley, I mean.”

  I got up and threw our empty taco containers in the trash. “You could play dumb,” I suggested.

  “It’s an approach that plays to my strengths,” Nellie said. “It’s also a lie on the face of it. I demonstrated that I do know something in front of a salon full of people. And it’s something that the police don’t know about.”

  “And since they don’t know about it, you were just passing on gossip.”

  “Ah, good point. I was thinking I had revealed facts.”

  “How about some ice cream?” I asked. “Choc chip?”

  She held out her arm. I twisted it. “If you insist,” she said.

  “The thing is,” she said, “the police will get into Annie’s laptop at some point, and they’ll wonder how I knew what was in it before they did. I would really prefer not to be mixed up in a murder case, you know?”

  I put a bowl of ice cream in front of her. “Speaking of which,” I said, “there’s a murderer out there. None of us are safe until they catch this person. We can’t hold back information that could be important.”

  I took a bowl of ice cream out to Dale and then sat down at the table with my own.

  “How about if I get my boys to spread the August-and-Burl photos around the Internet?” Nellie said. “I told people in the salon that that’s where the boys found the photos.”

  “That’s cruel to August, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Nellie admitted. “It’s one thing to tell people that a girl is a slut and another thing to give photographic proof.” Nellie studied the taste of her ice cream for a moment. “She looked hot, by the way.”

  “Nellie!”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “The other issue,” I said, “is that the police don’t know that Annie had the photos. They need to know that.”

  “August is already a suspect,” Nellie said. “This makes her more of a suspect. And now Burl is added to the suspect list.”

  “But only if the police know all this.”

  “How about if my boys give Annie’s password to the police?” Nellie proposed. “Help those guys out a little?”

  “That would work, if they can do it without blowing their cover.”

  “Beyond me,” Nellie said. “The other problem with any plan involving the boys is that I’ll have to drive back over to the Tickfaw.”

  “And you still need a cover story to tell Woodley.”

  “I could drive over to the Tickfaw and stay there until the heat blows over,” Nellie said. “Is that the right way to say it?”

  “Something like that,” I said, “And it’s a good plan if you want to look more suspicious.” I put our empty ice cream bowls in the sink. “Hey, how about all of the above?” I said.

  “All of us go stay on the Tickfaw?”

  “Yeah, get away from here. That sounds nice,” I said. “But what I mean is, spread some of the less revealing photos around the Internet and give the police the password.”

  “OK,” Nellie said. “That would give the police the evidence they need, and it would mean I could have seen the photos on the Internet.” She frowned. “If only I had a way to see anything on the Internet. How does that work?”

  “I’ve nev
er been on the Internet,” I said.

  “Me neither.”

  “But Woodley doesn’t know that. You just need a good story about how you’ve been on the Internet. You tell him where you saw the photos. He goes and finds them there. Everything looks good.”

  “Actually, I just remembered that my brother told me about those photos. He knew August before he moved to Houston. I think he’d be willing to confess that he trolls the Internet for porn.”

  Sounded like a plan to me. I offered to drive to the Tickfaw to spare Nellie another trip, but she figured she might as well take the opportunity to see the boys again. We agreed that I’d keep Dale overnight and drop him off at Mrs. Chabert’s on my way to the salon in the morning.

  Before Nellie left, she had a moment of doubt about what she was planning.

  “Isn’t it a felony to lie to a state investigator?” she wondered.

  “Probably,” I shrugged. “What’s your point?”

  She admitted that it was just one more thing. We tallied up her family’s felony count: moonshining for Rudy and his granddaddy; aiding and abetting for Nellie and the boys; hacking into the state law enforcement network; interfering with a murder investigation; and now lying to a state investigator.

  “What’s the old saying?” I asked. “Hang for a penny, hang for a pound?”

  “Thanks, that’s making me feel better,” she said. “And I don’t even know what that means.”

  “I think it means they’ll nail you for part of a Monty, so you might as well go for the full Monty.”

  “That seems to be what August went for.”

  ***

  I was relieved to see Nellie coming in the front door of the salon the next morning, safe and sound. Other people were already there, so she gave me a casual thumbs up and went to work on Dolores Pettigrew’s perm. The café area filled up early as people came in wanting to talk about August and Burl.

  We expected to see Investigator Woodley first thing. I don’t know why, since he always looked as if he’d just woken up if we saw him early in the afternoon. Nellie was anxious to get the interview over, so the wait was wearing on her.