Wash, Rinse, Die: Cozy Mystery (The Teasen & Pleasen Hair Salon Cozy Mystery Series Book 2)

by Constance Barker

  “This time.”

  “Exactly. So am I going home? No. Is anyone going to stay home? No. If you won’t let me kibbutz I’ll get over to join the others at Bacon Up where we will most definitely talk about the murder and drink coffee. And there will probably be large amounts of hand wringing.”

  He sighed again. “Fine. I’ll concede that trying to prevent people from comparing notes in this town is a lost cause. So go to the Bacon Up. Stay there and I’ll meet you there when I’m done. After I turn off the lights and lock up. Tell everyone to wait there for me.”

  “I just know they’ll be delighted.”

  There are times when it’s hard to coat your words with enough sarcasm to make your point. It all tends to drip off halfway to the target. As it was I was halfway to Bacon Up when I remembered that I hadn’t gotten around to telling Woodley about Pete’s missing key and the noises I’d heard. I doubted those items made it into the official reports he’d been given.

  * * *

  I arrived at the Bacon Up to find Claude smiling at the unexpected boost to his morning business. I was late for the blame fest that inevitably had begun. Not that any of us knew what we might be blamed for, exactly, because we didn’t know the official cause of death.

  Because it was her customer and she was new to the chemistry of hair coloring, Betina kept asking Nellie if there was anything she might have done, without knowing, that would make the dye poisonous.

  “Nothing,” Nellie said. “I’ve mixed them every which way myself, tossed the stuff in higgly piggly and while I wouldn’t recommend drinking any of it, mixed or not, I can’t imagine any combination of those things that would make a healthy young person croak on the spot.”

  “Assuming she was healthy,” Pete said. “Maybe we’ll have to start insisting on people bringing a note from their doctor when they want a radical dye job.”

  “And an environmental impact report?” I asked.

  He gave me an embarrassed grin.

  “Maybe she was allergic to something?” Margie suggested as she served the coffee. She was doing her two handed routine, regular in the pot with the blue ring in the right hand, and decaf in the pot with the orange ring in her left hand. I’m not sure why she brings both pots every time. I think about one person in town drinks decaf. As best I can figure it’s a matter of balance.

  “Allergies?” Betina asked. “She wasn’t sneezing, you know. She died. She screamed and died.”

  Margie was happy to take center stage for a moment. “Allergies can be deadly. You hear about all sorts of crazy food allergies. We had a man in here, just passing through, who ate one of Claude’s sundaes. He forgot he was allergic to peanuts or didn’t realize that Claude always sprinkles them on top. The poor guy almost died. And I remember seeing a show about a woman who is allergic to plastic. She can’t even use a cell phone.”

  “Neither can we,” Nellie said, “although not because of that.”

  Margie snorted. “Please! That’s just because the nearest cell tower was made by Defective Products Inc, and it isn’t worth fixing for just us. I don’t mean can’t that way — I’m talking about not being able to hold one in your hand without getting sick.”

  “You’d think a person would know if they were that sensitive,” Pete said.

  “Maybe she took some medicine, or illegal drugs, that made her body react to the dye.” Margie was trying to be reassuring.

  “It had to be an accident of some kind,” Betina said. “The girl hardly knew anyone here, and even if she really got on someone’s bad side, she was leaving that afternoon anyway.”

  “You’re assuming the killer, if there was one, knew that.”

  “But we know there wasn’t one,” Pete said.

  “Right.” Betina was determined to hang onto the idea that the death was an accident.

  Selina Ferrara and the Bald Eagle were having a late breakfast at the next table, easily within chat range, so they joined in. “She walked by my house, ” he said. “I’m sure it was her.”

  “Have you seen her picture?”

  “No but how many pretty girls, strangers, ya’ll figure would be walking around town on a given day? She and some guy were talking as they walked by my house, with me sitting on the front porch minding my own business.”

  “What were they talking about?” Betina wanted to know. “Did you hear anything while your were minding your own business?”

  “You know, it seems the more I mind my own business, the more I hear about other people’s business.”

  The way he was drawing this out had Betina frustrated. “What did you learn?”

  “It wasn’t any of my business,” he said.

  Nellie made a fist. “If Betina doesn’t hit you first, I’m going to hurt you Sanders.”

  “Well they were arguing. I didn’t recognize the kid. Might’ve been from Delhi in India for all I know.” A light came on his eyes. “Speaking of that…” then he came back to the discussion at hand. “He wasn’t real thrilled with something. Telling her she needed to get herself back home.”

  “You said ‘ass’ when you told me this story,” Selina said. “He said the boy told her she needed to get her ass back home.”

  Sanders cleared his throat. “I was trying to be genteel, Selina. My feeling was that the exact wording he used didn’t add any relevance to the story.”

  “He said ‘ass,’” Selina said.

  “When was that?”

  “A few days ago.”

  Pete rubbed his chin. “So maybe she thought getting the new dye job would make him forget whatever he was mad about.”

  “If that was her boyfriend,” Betina said.

  “If that was even her,” I said.

  Nellie said, “Whoever they were I can’t imagine he’s mad at her now.”

  I reached over. “Sanders, did you hear any names? Especially his? Did she call him by name?”

  Sanders shook his head. “I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, and mostly heard the loud part. So no. I was thinking about something else.”

  “Who was that?” Nellie asked mischievously. The Bald Eagle is in his seventies.

  “Not who, what. I read about a program where you can get your dive certification and then go under the ice cap at the south pole.”

  “You said something about that the other day,” Betina remembered. “What about the skydiving?”

  “I’ve done fourteen jumps and it’s getting a little repetitive. When you fall through the sky there isn’t that much to see. I was thinking of scuba diving and read about this program. The profits go to scientific research.”

  “And where do they send your life insurance payout when you freeze to death?”

  “Algeria,” Sanders said quite seriously.

  “Algeria?”

  “My son is there.”

  “We could hold a seance,” Selina said.

  The Bald Eagle nodded. “Think we can find out if my son will blow his inheritance?”

  “No, to talk to the dead girl.” Seeing Selina in the grip of this new idea gave me a chill. She does seances often, at least whenever someone is willing to host one. She works in the drug store for a living, and her forays into the supernatural are… not exactly a hobby, but some kind of passion. “If you people who met her, who experienced her essence, would help me out, we could contact her spirit and ask her who killed her.”

  “Her essence?” Betina asked.

  “What if she doesn’t know?” Pete asked. “I mean we were all there in the room when it happened and we don’t know.”

  Selina glared at him. “The spirit will know. The truth will have been revealed. She will know everything.”

  “Then she’d know how to contact us if she wanted us to know,” I pointed out earning myself an angry glare.

  “Even if you don’t believe in the power of the spiritual you should be willing to help friends who are.”

  Clearly Pete and I were earning ourselves places on the spiritualist black list. An
d I had to admit that talking to the girl’s spirit held more appeal than going out into the swamps to ask the aliens what was going on.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Not tonight though,” Pete said.

  Selina didn’t like that. “Why not?”

  “It’s Thursday.” Selina didn’t get the point. “This is open mic night.”

  “This is important.”

  The Bald Eagle coughed. “So is our open mic. Important and a local cultural tradition.”

  “He’s afraid you’ll steal his audience,” Betina said.

  He nodded and we all saw his shiny dome. “You have all these people over at your seance and we lose half our regular audience.”

  Pete nodded. “We need to support our local people. Even the ones who are still alive. If this seance will uncover anything important, I’m sure it will keep one night.”

  I smiled at Pete. His interest in open mic was rather new, and I was sure it had something to do with his new-found love for the blues, not Sander’s standup routines. “Is Leander playing?”

  “You bet he is.”

  “Here, here,” Nellie said. “Rudy was making noises about coming down to perform.”

  “Not the talking banjo thing?” Sanders asked.

  “What else does he do?” Nellie asked.

  As we all contemplated the idea of Rudy’s routine accompanied by his out of tune banjo, I saw James Woodley, Investigator James Woodley, walk in with his serious face.

  “So Friday night then,” Selina said. “Tomorrow.” She watched our faces.

  I nodded toward Woodley. “I’ll be there. First, however, we have to hold hands around a table and commune with another set of powers that be—the more official kind.”

  Everyone looked toward the door. Betina waved and smiled at Woodley, but no one else did.

  Woodley walked over and dropped my keys on the table. “The lights are off,” he said.

  “Did you solve the crime?”

  “I found a lot of stale cookies in the back room.”

  I winced. “Tina brought those in a few days ago.”

  Pete wrinkled his nose. “I hid them back there. I meant to toss them as soon as she left but we got distracted.”

  “They aren’t bad,” Woodley said, taking one out of his pocket. “I took some for evidence.”

  I put my hand on his arm. “Investigator Woodley, you can have them all.”

  “Good. I like chocolate chip cookies.”

  Pete choked. “Chocolate chip? Is that what they are supposed to be?”

  He sat down. “I need to talk to you all.”

  You could almost hear the collective groan that went up from around the Bacon Up.

  · CHAPTER SIX

  Even though everyone had expected Woodley, although they all knew he would be coming and what it meant, his actual arrival at the Bacon Up that afternoon, fresh from his analysis of the crime scene known as Teasen and Pleasen, cast a pall over what was already a rather depressed audience. After all, he was a bearer of actual facts, or was supposed to be. I think we all knew that he was about to dispel any idea that the girl’s death was some kind of accident. None of us was ready to hear that someone we knew was a killer — not again. It had been hard enough to learn that Connor deliberately killed Annie — this was more premeditated and cold blooded. And although we were delighted to gossip and speculate about the killing, having all revealed was going to be hard emotionally.

  “I can tell you that this is officially a murder investigation now,” he told us after Margie brought him his coffee. Hearing that cheerful opening, she lingered, holding her pots and waiting to hear the news first hand. “According to the lab boys, someone used a syringe to inject a toxic chemical into one of the plastic tubes containing hair dye. That means a deliberate act, nothing accidental.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  “I was surprised that the colors come in small tubes like that,” he said. “I thought a salon would have big bottles of the stuff.

  I nodded. “We used to, but the industry changed. This is more hygienic. Not that heads are a big source of contamination and we shampoo clients before we color their hair, but with the concerns about transmitting disease these days, the companies that make the stuff started selling them so that each person has a fresh batch.”

  “And you said that when a client comes in you just grab the right color? You don’t set aside a tube for a particular client?”

  “There’s no point in doing anything that elaborate. The tubes are all supposed to be the same. We just need to make sure we have enough of the right….” A thought popped into my head. “The poisoned tube — was dye or tint?” I asked.

  Woodley looked puzzled. “There’s a difference?”

  Betina was happy to explain. “Standard hair colors, the regular colors we use are all dyes. To get the alternative colors, non-standard hair colors like fuchsia or green, are usually tints. You need to bleach the hair to ensure a tint will take.”

  “The report didn’t mention any different kinds of coloring. I guess I can find out if it’s important.”

  “It does matter,” I told him.

  He caught the certainty in my voice. “Why?”

  Nellie looked distraught and took point on this one. “Because if it was a tint, then the intended victim would be the girl or someone else who gets their hair tinted. She asked Betina for wild colors. Anyone who knew she had an appointment would know that too. If they knew enough to spike the coloring, they’d know to put it in a tint rather than a dye.”

  Woodley took out his notebook and wrote something in it with a cheap ballpoint. The end of it was pockmarked with tooth marks. “I’ll have to check with the lab and find out.”

  Betina stared at Woodley and then nervously asked, “What color was poisoned? It wasn’t the red, was it?” Betina is a redhead and color was a sensitive issue for her.

  Woodley checked his notes. “The yellow.”

  “That’s a dye,” I told him. “That makes it likely that she wasn’t the intended victim.”

  “Wait a minute. You know the girl wasn’t the intended victim because she needed her hair tinted, but she was killed because you used the poisoned dye? Why was her hair being dyed?”

  It was a fair question and we all looked at the only person who could answer that question — Betina. She grimaced. “When I went in back I found out that we were out of orange tint. She wanted orange. I mixed some dyes to get the color — I mixed the yellow with red to get a perfect chintzy orange…” She looked at me. “I was going to add the other colors with tint later.”

  I shook my head. “That opens up a big, squiggly bag of worms.”

  Woodley was obviously out of his depth with salon murders. “Why?”

  Nellie groaned. “That’s the dye I always use on both Dawn and Hildegarde.”

  “And a lot of others,” I added. “Yellow is a popular color.”

  “Which is stupid too,” Betina said.

  Woodley turned to her. “Why is that stupid? What is stupid?”

  “The popularity of yellow hair. It’s a fact that blondes do not have more fun, no matter what people say.”

  Woodley was trying to ignore this latest revelation and digest the rest. “So you are saying the intended victim would be a client who gets her hair dyed yellow.”

  “That makes the most sense.”

  “Can you get me a list of those people?”

  “Can you promise confidentiality?” I asked. “Some of them wouldn’t be thrilled reading in the paper that they are among a number of people who get their hair dyed.”

  “Colored,” Betina said.

  “Colored,” I corrected myself. I looked at Woodley. “Another politically incorrect word. We use hair dye or tint to color hair. We don’t dye it.”

  Woodley sighed. “Another question. Since the… coloring is just taken out of a box at random how would the killer be sure that the next client was the one it was used on.”

  “H
e or she couldn’t be sure. There are lots of ways it could go wrong, but there are just a few of each color and if you poison the one on top it’s pretty likely that the next client will get it. So to speak. We don’t rummage around in the box for a tube. They are supposed to be all the same.”

  Woodley sat his notebook on the table and picked up his coffee. He slopped coffee on the notebook. I found that a little endearing. He wasn’t a bad guy, just infuriating.

  After that exchange the reality of the situation really sank in and the table grew quiet. Even though we’d been pretty sure that the girl’s death wasn’t any sort of accident, hearing it was officially murder still came as a shock. Knowing a standard tool of our business had been used to kill someone made it worse.

  I realized that I’d been hoping this wasn’t a murder as much as anyone. I’d been thinking it might be some kind of a mistake made by the supplier, some screw up at the factory. Of course then someone would be in trouble there, and I didn’t want anyone to be in trouble, but I liked the idea of a stranger’s negligence a lot better than thinking another murderer was loose in Knockemstiff. The scenario Woodley was exploring meant it had to be someone who knew where we kept the colors and how we worked. That meant it was someone we knew and, frighteningly, trusted.

  The facts, their relationships, bounced around my head. The look on Nellie’s face told me she was processing similar thoughts.

  “It’s starting to sound like there’s a possibility that the victim was killed by mistake,” Woodley said, letting his cop eyes take in all our faces.

  Betina made a face. “Like, duh. No one here knew her enough to want to kill her.”

  I agreed. “She was a girl from Delhi who came in for a manicure and, more or less on a whim, decided to get rainbow colors in her hair for a party,” I said. “Even if someone knew her and wanted to kill her, then they’d know she wanted bright colors. They’d know that Betina agreed to experiment and they would’ve poisoned a tint.” I looked at Nellie. “Did you know we were out of orange tint? I didn’t.”