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

by Constance Barker

  She shook her head. “My clients aren’t into orange.”

  Pete hung his head. Woodley caught it. “What is it, Pete?”

  “It’s all my fault.”

  “What?”

  “This girl’s death.”

  The table got deathly quiet. Woodley focused on the young man. “You killed her?”

  “Sort of. I used the last of it. I’d forgotten.”

  “The last of what?”

  He sighed. “I used up the last two tubes of orange tint and forgot to write it on the inventory log.”

  “Who did you use it on?” Nellie asked. “I didn’t see you do anyone with orange hair.”

  “It was after work. I took it home and did Milo’s hair.”

  We all laughed.

  “Who is Milo?” Woodley asked grabbing for his notebook.

  Nellie was wiping away tears. “A big, mangy dog.”

  “Deputy Digby’s dog has a skin condition,” I explained. “He was looking dreadful.”

  Pete folded his hands on the table. “Digby was all upset about it. I told him I could cover it up the bad patch where the fur was bleached out. He’s an orange hound.”

  “The girl would’ve been so colorful,” Betina said sadly. She didn’t care about Milo.

  Margie seemed to realize that there wasn’t going to be any other breaking news. “I better get back to work.”

  I found that curious. The place was empty. “Expecting a rush?”

  She nodded her head toward a young girl who looked to be around twenty. She was attractive, with long bright red slightly curly hair. “We have a new girl, Laura. Laura O’Finnegan. I need to train that kid if I expect to get a vacation this year. She’s not too bright, but she’s nice and of course the men all like her.”

  Betina scowled. Another curvaceous redhead moving into town wasn’t the kind of news guaranteed to make her day.

  A couple of guys wearing the work clothes of the highway department were sitting at the bar talking to the new girl animatedly.

  “Ah, those sweet gentlemen are making the new girl welcome,” Nellie said. “How kind of them.

  Woodley touched my arm. “Miz Jefferies, I’d like to talk to you privately,” Investigator Woodley said.

  “Just me?” I didn’t care for that. “Do I need a lawyer?”

  “I have their statements,” he said.

  “You should have mine too.”

  Then he gave them all an official look. “Stay in town and make sure you are available if I need to talk to you.”

  Pete groaned. “But I already paid for my tickets for the vacation in Morocco. I was planning to spend the entire season.”

  Woodley shook his head. “None of you leaves town until this is sorted out. You are all material witnesses.”

  “Can I get witness protection?” I asked.

  “If it’s necessary.” His stony faced expression told me nothing. I was still trying to figure out if Woodley got that Pete’s crack about Morocco was a joke. Was this cryptic response to my witness protection question his idea of a joke?

  I stood up. “Let’s get a booth and have that talk. Margie, put all these coffees on my tab.” I nodded my head toward Woodley. “When the police allow me to open up again, I’ll work my fingers to the bone and pay my debt.”

  “Claude will be delighted to hear that.”

  * * *

  Woodley and I took our coffee and moved to a booth away from the others. Even from there, I heard the tide of gossip begin to rise behind us, a growing roar resulting from the dual forces of nature and duty. Removing Woodley from the table had reduced the pressure on the conversation. In my absence, the others felt entrusted to carry the necessary but heavy burden of serious speculating, postulating, brainstorming, and theorizing about what was becoming widely known, as I predicted, as the dyeabolical murder.

  I know Woodley caught that name for the murder as if floated through the diner, because I saw him wince. I was pleased to learn he could be gotten to.

  “You can open the salon again on Saturday unless the forensics people find any new evidence that might need more exploration. You can’t have the dyes and other chemicals back though. The lab is still doing tests, trying to determine what the poison is. To be honest there won’t be much left that’s usable.”

  “Isn’t that police brutality?”

  “It’s official procedure.” He turned his coffee cup on the saucer. “You seem rather cheerful about it. I’d expected you to be righteously indignant.”

  “More like justified. No matter what the Sheriff said I was sure that there was no way I’d get that stuff back, which is why I made a fuss about them not taking the tools. I called in an order for a new batch last night and that will be here in a day or two. Meantime, I’m pleased that we can get back to cutting hair. I doubt we’ll do much hair coloring for a time anyway.”

  “Tanner mentioned something… you told him that you heard something in the salon the night before.”

  I smiled. “I’m pleasantly surprised he remembered. He didn’t seem particularly interested.”

  “He wasn’t.” Woodley winked. “I was giving him a rough time, suggesting that he wasn’t telling me everything he’d learned, and that he was filtering things, so he tossed that out as a bone.”

  “And you think…”

  “What I think is that I want to hear the facts, preferably without your assumptions or conclusions.”

  “Just the facts, Ma’am. Why? Are your afraid of being contaminated by my amateur conclusions?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Okay. Like he told you, I’d gone back to the salon that night and I heard something.” And I repeated the story about hearing the noises on my way home from the Bacon Up. Woodley was curious about the dumpster story, but when I finished he nodded as if it was old news.

  “I’ll keep that in the tickler file and see what else it fits in with. Now I want to go over the time line one more time.”

  “Fine.”

  “The murder was on Wednesday and the woman who was killed was more or less a last minute walk in.”

  “Right. Dawn was originally scheduled for that slot.”

  “I thought Mrs. Botowski was.”

  “You’re right. So let’s back up one day. Dawn was scheduled for Tuesday and Mrs. Botowski on Wednesday. But she, Mrs. Botowski, had a calendar malfunction and came in Tuesday morning thinking it was Wednesday.”

  “So she said.”

  “It wouldn’t be that unusual. She does get confused.”

  “What did you do?”

  “We got the phone message saying Mrs. Botowski was on her way. Dawn was in the back room. She picks up my accounting and does the books—we give her a coloring treatment as part of the payment and she does both in one trip. I went in back and asked Dawn to shift to Mrs. Botowski’s slot.”

  “Why couldn’t you do them both? Were you that busy?”

  “First of all, Nellie is the one who does their hair. Once they find someone who does their hair the way they like it clients prefer to stick with them. More importantly, we didn’t want fireworks. Hildegarde doesn’t think kindly of Dawn Devereaux ever since her affair with Burl was made public.”

  “Oh right. I see the problem. And Dawn agreed?”

  “She did. She extracted a price for her cooperation and then I left her to sneak out the back way.”

  Woodley signaled for more coffee and after Margie swung by with her two pots and refilled our cups, he rubbed his mouth. “So Dawn Devereaux knew that Mrs. Botowski was getting her hair colored that morning instead of the next day?”

  “Right.”

  “And she sat in the back room alone?”

  “She did.” I was curious where this was leading. “Are you thinking she might’ve poisoned the dye herself and called in sick so that someone else would die?”

  Woodley stared at me. “Don’t get ahead of things. What I’m thinking is that I don’t have all the facts. That’s an import
ant fact — her being alone in that room. I’ll work out what the facts mean when I know all of them.”

  “Okay, I am suitably chastised for my amateur conclusion jumping.”

  “Noted. Who else had access to that room in the last few days?”

  I remembered the people by counting them off on my fingers. “Everyone who works there, Dawn, the delivery guy who put some supplies in there for us on Friday, and anyone who might have wandered back there when I wasn’t looking. Not to mention whoever took Pete’s key. Oh, and the guy from the electric company who came to check something.”

  “Pete’s key?”

  “I thought Tanner told you everything.”

  “Obviously he neglected a few items.”

  “On Wednesday, before the murder, Pete told me he’d lost it the night before. He thought he’d had it when he went to the tavern after work.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Just that I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he lost the key and then later that night I heard something or someone in the salon and the next day we find we have poisoned dye, leading to a death.”

  “I’ll talk to Pete about that.”

  “About losing his keys?”

  “About who might have helped him lose them. If this was a planned murder, someone needed to get their hands on a set of keys. Knowing who was around him at the time might narrow the number of suspects.”

  I grinned at him. “Or give you some.”

  He got that offended look. “We have suspects.”

  “I see. Fine.”

  “And what are you going to do?”

  “Me?”

  “I know you won’t stay away from the investigation.”

  I sipped my coffee. “My friends and I are going to pursue an angle I’m sure you have ignored. It might provide eyewitness accounts.”

  That got his interest. “What exactly do you have in mind?”

  “We intend to ask the victim who killed her.”

  “And how do you intend to do this?”

  “Selina wants to hold a seance.”

  It was all James Woodley could do from spitting out his coffee. “Really?”

  “She says that you never know what a spirit will come up with. My angle is that I’m always happy to see what I can learn from a gathering of people who are looking for answers.”

  He nodded. “I’ll expect a full report.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, to be honest, I’d appreciate an executive summary. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go talk to a living witness — Pete. Maybe he can tell me something useful about where and when he lost his key.”

  “Unbeliever,” I said, trying to sound dismissive. Clearly he was glad that I’d be occupied with some harmless activities while he went about solving the case. Well, we each had our own methods for getting to the truth. I was just happy that Woodley had taken the bait and would be following what I considered the most profitable path of investigation. In my, less than humble opinion, it was important to find out who had made those unaccounted for noises. I wanted to know who’d been in my salon without my permission.

  · CHAPTER SEVEN

  Once Woodley finished with me, I went home and apologized to Fin for leaving him to suffer. Then, he forgave me when the two of us went to pick up Sarah at school.

  "I heard you had to talk to the police," she said.

  "Of course."

  "You can tell me anything you told them."

  That didn't seem unreasonable, but I decided to fend off Sarah's curiosity with a capsule summary that went, "A lady came in to have her hair colored and she died. The police don't yet know what happened, except that somehow she was poisoned, and we don't know who she is. The salon has to stay closed for a bit. And now we are going to make cookies. Peanut butter and oatmeal."

  Sarah was happy about the idea of baking cookies and we got right on it. She wasn't fooled at all by my capsule summary, and as we stirred the batter and dropped spoonfuls onto parchment paper, she revealed her suspicions of my motives. After we put the cookie sheet in the oven, closed the door, and put the oven mitten on the counter, she looked up at me: "Why?"

  "Why what?"

  "Why are we making cookies?"

  "Three reasons. One is that the salon is closed and this gives us something fun to do together. Two, I like cookies. Three, I like cookies."

  "And four, baking is a way to keep from talking to the kid about the murder."

  "OK, four reasons."

  "I heard Nellie named it a dyeabolical murder."

  "She seems to have done that."

  Sarah double-checked the timer. "What's a bolical?”

  “A bolical?”

  “Whatever made her die, right?”

  “Well...”

  And does dyeabolical mean a bolical killed her, like in 'died by a bolical' or does it mean there are two of them, like a diorama?"

  "I can't handle more than one. Maybe not even one bolical. I'm not sure how to answer your question except to say that Nellie was making a bad joke."

  "A bad joke killed someone?"

  "No. Yes." I wasn't sure I was capable of sorting out the pun for her. It would take some thought. I held out a warm cookie and when she opened her mouth, I popped it in and watched her chew it. "I'll tell you what…. how about I research that problem and get back to you when I can think straight? We will sort out puns and bolicals and death by both."

  "Okay, but in that case I have a simpler question. Since you like cookies enough for it to be two reasons for making them, does that mean we can eat them all?"

  "That would ruin your dinner."

  "Not if peanut butter and oatmeal cookies are my dinner. And then you wouldn't have to cook another meal."

  She had a point. "Well, they aren't all for us. While you do your homework I'm going to take some to Dawn Devereaux."

  That earned me a nearly seven-year-old squint. "Why?"

  "Why not?"

  "Two reasons." She was mimicking my earlier bluff. "One, because you barely know her, and I haven't heard that she's sick or anything. And two, 'why not?' is something adults say when they have no reason for what they are doing."

  "True."

  "Or when they don't want to tell the reason and can't think up a decent lie."

  "Also true. You can contemplate which of those it is while you do your homework."

  "I already know."

  "Then contemplate that while you do your homework."

  "And eat cookies."

  "A few." I could see the wheels turning. "No more than six."

  "Oh." Then she grinned. “If one few is six, then twelve would be two few." She held up two fingers.

  "And I couldn't possibly let you have two few."

  "Three few would be okay."

  "One few. We can negotiate further when I get home and decide what we are having for dinner."

  "Peanuts and oats are health food."

  "In moderation. Go do homework."

  As I left I knew what she was going to contemplate. While she did her homework Sarah would be thinking of some way to convince me that more cookies would make a fine, wholesome dinner.

  ***

  Dawn was as surprised by my visit as Sarah had been at the idea I was going over there. She stood in the door of the little cottage she rented from Ellen Hart, blinking her eyes. She seemed at a loss for words, staring at me, and then the plate of cookies, then back at my face.

  “Cookies,” I said.

  She smiled. “Right. The plate has cookies on it. Like at the salon.”

  “Sort of.”

  “I got that. Now I’m trying to figure out why you are bringing me fattening cookies.”

  “Nellie said you weren’t feeling well and had to cancel your appointment.”

  Her face twisted. “I never said I wasn’t feeling well. I said I was busy.”

  “She thought you said something about the plague.”

  She laughed. “Maybe I did at that. I
picked up Mel Krisller’s books after I left the salon…” she gave her voice a dramatic depth, “…on the day of the near encounter with Burl’s dragon of a wife. I intended to do them, Mel’s books, that afternoon but they turned out to be a disaster. The numbers are in as bad shape as most of the cars he sells.” She let me in the house and I saw papers strewn across her dining table weighted down with a large calculator.

  “You don’t use a computer?”

  “Once the books are set up, sure, but first I have to figure out the various categories of costs and income, and make a list of accounts.” She sighed. “With sufficient patience I’ll figure out what he thought he was doing, but it is taking time. And I still have to do your books.”

  “I see.”

  “But enough about me. You haven’t explained the offering of cookies.

  “You’ve caught me out. The truth is I brought the cookies as a flimsy excuse to have a chat.”

  “How quaint. Like girl talk? I’ll get us some coffee.”

  “To go with the cookies you won’t eat?”

  “A perfect complement.” She went into the kitchenette where a coffee pot gurgled happily. “I heard about the murder,” she said, pouring two mugs and handing me one that said, “Today is much better than yesterday,” on it. On the other side it said, “Don’t ask me about yesterday.” Hers said, “Bookkeepers have better figures.” This bookkeeper had a better figure than mine for sure.

  The coffee tasted better than I expected. “I imagine everyone has heard about it by now.”

  “No one knew her? Knows her? Whichever it is with a dead person?”

  “Maybe you do.” She raised her eyebrows. “She’s a young girl from Delhi who wanted her hair colored like Joseph’s coat—in many colors.”

  She made a face. “You do know that Delhi has about 3,000 people in it? I’m only there two weeks out of the month. Unless she’s a client or works for one I doubt I know her. I also don’t think you and these cookies arrived on my doorstep to ask if I knew her.”