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

by Constance Barker

  I puttered around the salon wondering if Woodley had been fishing for confirmation of theory one when he talked to me. Or did he really think August could be another victim?

  One thing I was sure of: Woodley wasn’t sharing information with me randomly —except for the information about searching August’s house that I’d tricked out of him. I smiled in amused self-appreciation. Sometimes I feel so clever I can hardly stand it.

  I stopped puttering in front of the rack that Connor fixed. He said that August had a severe allergic reaction. When was that exactly? If it had been early last week, it was unlikely that August had been out shooting anybody.

  I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down. Did Woodley know about the allergic reaction? Dr. Cason must have told him about treating August, and Cason would have known where August was at that time. Or did Cason keep that to himself? He could be trying to protect August as well as his own reputation. He wouldn’t want anyone to know that he’d let Annie harm patients for so long. Well, that wasn’t under wraps any more.

  I took my coffee into the back room and thought about how the previous day had finished in the salon. When I returned to the salon with Woodley after our late lunch, we found that Dolores was still there, afraid to go out. She said she’d only left her house that morning when the mailman arrived and she could walk to town with him. He had persuaded her to leave her shotgun at home.

  Woodley apologized for frightening her and “attempting to violate the sanctity of her garden shed.” A sudden downpour had prompted him to seek shelter. He explained that he'd been walking all around Knockemstiff, admiring our pretty little town. This was the best thing he could have said to Dolores, who was one of our most active and vocal town boosters — so active and so vocal that most of us wished she’d give it a rest now and then.

  Woodley also apologized to Betina, who said she hadn’t really been afraid. While Woodley was asking Nellie how Dale was doing, Betina turned around and undid two or three buttons at the neckline of her sun dress. Actually, it could have been four buttons.

  Nellie had already told us that Dale was fine. In fact, she had dropped him off at Mrs. Chabert’s as usual. Nellie said that she didn’t feel like staying home with him, and she figured he wasn’t likely to find another gun in the ditch.

  After that, while Betina with her undone buttons was chatting up an amused Woodley, Nellie told me that she had gone to Betina’s cottage at lunch time to look at the shotgun Digby had brought. The shotgun was not loaded. “It’s a big old blunderbuss of a gun with plugs in the barrels so you couldn’t load it if you wanted to,” she said. “Betina can’t hurt herself with it, so long as she doesn’t drop it on her foot.”

  Nellie hadn’t let on to Betina that the gun wouldn’t fire. In fact, she had explained to Betina how the safety worked and that Betina should keep the gun broken until she wanted to use it. Betina observed that the term “broken” could not possibly be correct, and wondered why Nellie always acted as though Betina was a dim bulb. “I had trouble sounding sincere when I said that I didn’t think she’s a dim bulb,” Nellie told me, “so this discussion was longer than it should have been.”

  In any case, Woodley had gone away forgiven by everyone but me, Dolores had gone home relieved, Betina had done up her buttons, and we all cut hair without further hubbub. I’d had a pleasant evening at home, not watching a Godzilla movie.

  Now on Thursday morning I was sitting at my little desk in the back room thinking about everything except my paperwork. I picked up a stack of bills and got to work.

  By the time the others came in, I had paid all the bills with money left over — always a nice feeling. Actually, the salon had pulled in more money than usual in the past week and a half, so Woodley was right. The murder had been good for business. That was not a nice feeling, but I could live with it.

  We eased our way through the morning, talking about movies, current events and Botox, until Angela Ladecky brought in blueberry cupcakes for the café area. As icing on the cupcakes, she asked if we’d heard that Dr. Cason had had a fling with August.

  Nellie looked at me and shrugged. I shrugged back. She and I hadn’t spread around our knowledge of this fling, mostly because Nellie didn’t want to have to explain how she’d come by that knowledge.

  Nellie hadn’t been back to visit her boys at the Tickfaw campground, so we didn’t know if they had successfully shared the passwords to Annie’s laptop with the police. Now I wondered if Nellie’s boys had put some of the Dr. Cason photos on the Internet.

  We found out more before the morning was out. Nadine Hines, Chief Tanner’s part-time secretary, came in for a cup of coffee. When she heard everyone discussing Dr. Cason and August, she figured that cat was out of the bag so she could feel free to talk about it. (We found out later that Angela Ladecky had heard about this cat from Margie at the Bacon Up, who had heard it from Nadine — circular justification.)

  “The state forensics lab succeeded in cracking Annie’s laptop,” Nadine said. “They must be very smart guys.”

  Nellie and I shared another shrug.

  “They found photos of August with Dr. Cason and Burl Botowski,” Nadine said. Then she added, “Separately, not all together,” and blushed. “Anyway, that confirms the rumors that have been circulating for a couple of days about Burl. It’s funny how gossip so often turns out to be true.”

  I hoped she was being ironic but noticed that Pete and Betina glanced at Nellie with admiration. Breaking a major story in the Teasen and Pleasen was an award-worthy accomplishment, especially when it generated drama with a chain saw and (incidentally) turns out to be true. Pete gave Nellie a thumbs-up. Nellie couldn’t help smiling. I was sure that the smile was about relief that her boys hadn’t been revealed as the source of this “gossip.”

  Nadine said that the laptop also contained a list of evil deeds that Annie had perpetrated. “Chief Tanner has a printout of this list,” Nadine told us. “Next to most of the items on the list Annie put notes about seeing or talking with the victims afterward. She seemed to be boasting to herself about the suffering she caused.”

  Nadine recounted some of the entries, which included details such as the look on Mr. Keshian’s face when Annie told him that “it must be terrible to know that people in town didn’t like him.” Annie had also described the things she’d done to Dr. Cason’s patients. “She was one sick puppy,” Nadine concluded.

  After Nadine left, as people in the salon talked about the murder, for the first time some of them were willing to say out loud that they thought Annie had it coming. Everyone still wanted to know who had done the deed, but it was hard to tell if they wanted this person caught or congratulated.

  A lot of the talk centered on Dr. Cason as the murderer, now that his relationship with August was known. It seemed obvious to some that Dr. Cason killed Annie because she was blackmailing him and harming his patients. Others pointed out that a doctor’s murder weapon of choice was always going to be a syringe rather than a thirty-ought-six. “Maybe he used a rifle to throw us off the scent,” shouted one woman who was getting her hair blow-dried.

  Betina was certain that the doctor had had an affair with Annie before August came along. When Dr. Cason threw over Annie for August, Annie was jealous, and that’s when she began to behave badly, prompting him to kill her. It was therefore all Dr. Cason’s fault. Or Annie had been the one to spurn Dr. Cason for another lover, so he was the jealous party and that’s why he killed her. Again, Dr. Cason’s fault.

  Someone protested that Annie was clearly the bad guy in this story. Why blame the doctor?

  Nellie, who was rather put out with Dr. Cason after seeing the photos of him playing doctor with August, was inclined to agree with Betina that Dr. Cason was at the root of the situation. When Betina heard this, she stopped clipping hair and looked hard at Nellie, trying to figure out what the trick was. Nellie ignored her and went on to speculate that the doctor could have been cheating his patients or health insurance
companies as well as cavorting with August. Annie discovered all these infractions, and he shut her up.

  Dolores Pettigrew, who had returned for a cupcake, proposed that the doctor had a secret crush on Annie but had never dared act on his desires. He used August as a substitute young woman to fulfill his fantasies, but at last his analytical medical mind couldn’t cope with the hurt emotions caused by the yawning gulf between him and Annie, so he did the only thing he could to close the gulf — or, specifically, as Dolores put it, “stop the yawning.”

  This is a concise version of Dolores’ theory. As her discourse unfolded, most people in the salon wondered when the yawning might stop. It didn’t help that the rain had returned, dampening the energy of the morning.

  To help curb the yawning, other people offered embellishments to the Dr. Cason theories. I didn’t really believe that he was a murderer, but I pointed out that Annie was in charge of administration for the doctor. She might have been committing insurance fraud or embezzling from the medical accounts. These offenses made the doctor snap.

  As this discussion rambled on, I thought more about the financial angles. The revelations about Annie’s evil deeds had made revenge seem the most likely motive for murder. Revelations of August’s affairs had made jealousy seem a strong possibility. But what if it all came down to money?

  This line of thought brought me back to Rudy’s granddaddy. His motive for murder would have been basically about money. Well, that and staying out of jail for moonshining.

  Pinning down the revenge motive or the jealousy motive seemed speculative, but the money angle could be checked. Did Annie have more money in her bank account than she should have? Did August have payments coming into her account that were not from her job at the Grosri? I was sure that Woodley would do this kind of checking. How could I get him to tell me what he’d found?

  I felt like the money theory was a useful line of inquiry that would definitely clinch the case, until I realized that it wasn’t. Even if everybody had been blackmailing and defrauding everybody else, it didn’t mean that any of them had killed Annie over it.

  The Knockemstiff landscape was crowded with people who had motivations to kill Annie. Only one person pulled the trigger. Who had been willing to do it?

  Late in the afternoon, Bee Jameson came in to get her nails done. She brought little Sarah with her. Sarah also wanted to get her nails done, explaining that she and her mother would be performing at open mic that night.

  While Nellie was working on Bee’s manicure, Sarah was allowed to have one cupcake. When Bee’s manicure was done, Nellie asked Sarah what they would be performing that night.

  “We will be performing a Broadway song and dance routine,” Sarah said. She raised her arms in the air and sashayed back and forth. Pete said that looked like a good routine.

  “Do you know about Broadway?” Sarah asked. “My daddy says they call it Broadway because it’s done by a bunch of broads.”

  “Oh, Sarah,” Pete started. And stopped. How do you explain politically incorrect language to a six-year-old?

  “Pete,” I said, “you can try the ‘Nice young ladies don’t talk that way’ approach, although I haven’t gotten much traction with that.”

  “Lester sets a bad example for Sarah almost every time he opens his mouth,” observed Bee.

  “I know it’s a bad example, Mama,” Sarah said. “I try to set a good example for Daddy. I think he’s improving.”

  Bee just said, “Ummm,” and asked if Sarah could stay in the salon while Bee got some things at the Grosri. Sarah pointed out that she still needed to get her nails done anyway, and Nellie assured a doubtful-looking Bee that Sarah would get the special six-year-old rate.

  “Six-and-a-half,” Sarah corrected.

  “Six-and-a-half-year-old rate,” Nellie said.

  As she worked on Sarah’s nails, Nellie asked, “So you think your daddy’s language is improving?” Sarah nodded, entranced by the manicure.

  “Does that mean he’s not using bad words as much?” Nellie asked.

  “I haven’t noticed that,” Sarah said, “but when he goes to swearing nowadays, he tends to do it more in complete sentences.”

  “That’s a good start,” Pete said.

  “Yes,” Sarah said. “I try to encourage him. When he says something to Mama like, ‘Damn. You and that woman,’ I say, What Daddy means is that he does not approve of you spending so much time with Annie Simmerson. And Daddy says, ‘Thank you for clarifying that Sarah.’ And then the next time Daddy complains about Miz Simmerson, I hear him say to Mama, ‘I do not approve of you spending so much damn time with Annie Simmerson.”

  When nobody said anything, Sarah looked up at Nellie and said, “See, he used a complete sentence. That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Excellent,” Nellie confirmed.

  “Sarah,” I ventured, “did your mama spend a lot of time with Annie Simmerson?”

  “It seemed that way to me,” she said. “And to Daddy, obviously.”

  I think we were all racking our brains trying to figure out a way to ask what Bee and Annie were spending all that time doing. Pete gave up and asked what Sarah and her mama would be singing at open mic. Sarah named a couple of tunes from South Pacific.

  “That’s going way back,” said Pete.

  “Mama says that’s what people like in New Orleans — classic tunes. She thinks we’ll be very popular. We’ll be NOLA belles!”

  We were all wondering if Lester Jameson was in on this New Orleans plan when Bee returned. Sarah did her Broadway sashay for her mother, this time waving her hands with her newly painted nails facing out. Then they sashayed out of the salon. Bee opened her umbrella, and they skipped down Clifton Street singing “Singing in the Rain.”

  Chapter 18

  When our late lunch time rolled around, I decided to go home for lunch. I had an extra hour after lunch until my next haircut appointment and I needed a break. When I came out of the salon, Dolores Pettigrew was across the street holding her umbrella way up over her head with one hand and her cell phone high in the air in the other hand facing east.

  “Can you understand me now?” she shouted at the phone. I heard something garbled from the phone. “Oh, I know I’m breaking up,” Dolores said. “You’re breaking up too. I’ll say it three times. Maybe one will go through, dear. What? I said I know…”

  I got in my car and drove home, thinking about cell phones, and I had an idea about one cell phone in particular. I parked in my driveway, got out with my umbrella and walked back out my driveway to Tennessee Street. Then I turned down the narrow lane that ran along the side of my lot. This was a dirt track that turned to mud when it rained, and it was very muddy today.

  I squelched along in the shallowest patches of mud I could see, wishing I had thought of doing this when it hadn’t been so wet or had at least put on boots. On the night I had seen Annie here, we had had thunderstorms that day and for several days before, and the lane would have been quite muddy. Annie must have been determined to get back here with her phone.

  When I got to the mulberry tree, I stood under it for a moment, listening to the big drops coming off the tree thunking onto my umbrella. I remembered how as a little girl I loved to walk in the rain in my yellow raincoat, listening to the sound of my own voice loud in my ears inside the yellow canvas “helmet,” and the rain drops pattering on me. A couple of crows landed in the mulberry tree, cawing, and shook loose a torrent of drops that cascaded down the leaves.

  I didn’t see Annie’s phone anywhere around the base of the tree, but the leaves under the tree had obviously been trampled on repeatedly over a period of time. Either deer had been lying here or a person had stood here a number of times and probably paced around.

  After a few minutes of searching through the tall grass and shrubbery on the south side of the tree, there it was, a dim black rectangle under an ancient holly tree. I reached carefully through the scratchy leaves, past the red berries, and retrieved the phone.
It was in a rubberized case, wet. Was it too wet to work? The battery was probably dead.

  I did one of the few things I know how to do on a smart phone: held down the ON button. The phone started. After a few seconds it beeped and displayed a message that the battery was low. Yeah, yeah, I thought and tapped the message. It went away, and I was looking at rows of choices. What did I do now?

  Give the phone to Woodley, said a little voice in my head. It was the voice of my sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Delouche. “Yeah, yeah,” I said out loud. “Eventually.”

  I looked for a “contacts” icon. I remembered that from the few times I’d used my cell phone before I gave up on it. I found the icon and tapped. The contacts list seemed to be empty. I dragged my finger down the little screen.

  Finally, at the very end of the contacts list, I found a single entry labeled “Zero” and pressed it. I could hear the person’s phone ringing. I was calling the one contact on the phone of a murdered woman. What did I think I was doing?

  The ringing was interrupted by a faint click. I heard a voice say, “Hello” with a heavy Irish accent.

  “Connor!” I said. “It’s you!” But my voice sounded weird, like I was a robot in an outer space movie.

  Connor said, “You? It can’t be you! You’re dead!”

  “Connor!” I said again, louder, as if shouting would clarify the situation. My voice still sounded weird. The phone beeped to tell me the battery was low. “Damn!” I said in frustration. I was about to say that this was Savannah when the phone went dark.

  I put the phone in my purse and tramped back up the lane, not being careful where I stepped, mud sucking at my feet with every step. I opened my car door and sat in the seat, and it wasn’t until I swung my feet in that I noticed they were balls of mud. That must be why my feet were cold, I reasoned.

  I shoved the mud aside so I could unlace my shoes and left them by the driveway. I used the green garden hose to wash off my feet. With the water from the hose making my feet colder than they'd been already, I noted to myself that I’d been about to drive to Connor’s. Was this a good idea?