by Kate Benitez
Now Anneliese was headed to the glass-enclosed room at the very front of the building—the one overlooking Newbury Street and the Boston skyline from the fifth floor of an original brownstone—and the stares turned more critical and a little intense from more than one of the waiting women as they shifted their designer bags on their laps.
She hoisted her own, perfectly serviceable yet no-name, red leather bag higher on her shoulder then Anneliese smiled a ‘thank you’ at the girl on the front desk then followed her past the well-lit aisle of stylists. As soon as she entered the glass enclosure at the front of the building, Andrew greeted her warmly with a kiss on either cheek.
“I’m so glad it’s you that’s taken my case and not that serious Leo guy. I just don’t know how a man that austere could deal with such artistry as my hair extensions.”
Anneliese pushed at the annoying curl that kept drifting into her eye line. “Oh, he’s very good. It doesn’t seem to matter what position Leo is put in, he always finds the cracks.” She couldn’t help but defend her boss, even if he hadn’t deemed the extension theft as a case worthy of his attention.
Andrew looked quizzically at Anneliese and, too late, she realized that by complimenting Leo so much, she may have downplayed her own skills in Andrew’s mind and although Andrew didn’t know it, right now, she was all he had.
“However, as a woman with hair, I think I’m more suited for the job, don’t you?” she said as she smiled at the man dressed today in a shimmering black suit with silver pinstripes running through it.
“Is there someplace you’d like us to go and talk, Andrew?” Anneliese looked around the room and noted a distinct lack of seating where they could sit and have a conversation.
Andrew waved his hands at her. “Girl, don’t you worry about a thing, honey. This room is soundproof. I’ve built my reputation on keeping my clients’ secrets… well, secret,” he chuckled. “No one but me needs to know who’s a natural blonde and who isn’t, right?” then he raised an eyebrow and said, “and if the collars and cuffs don’t match? Hell, that ain’t nobody’s business but their own. Know what I mean?” then he looked pointedly at another seat, not visible from the outer area, that was surrounded by a selection of colored hair dye and his famed extensions.
Anneliese made a move toward the secret side area, but Andrew stopped her. “Hold on, girl, you’re good here. Just have a seat. I’m more comfortable talking while my hands are busy.”
“Oh,” she said softly giving the sleek chair and diva lighting a dubious glance. “And what, exactly, will your hands be doing?”
“I don’t know, whatever they feel like. These hands are magic, trust me.”
Anneliese bit her lip. She’d told Leo she had an appointment so surely a new hairstyle wouldn’t raise any suspicion?
“Okay, but I don’t want you to go to too much trouble.”
Again, Andrew waved his hands at her. “It’s no trouble at all. Like I said, I’m much better with busy hands. Now sit down.”
Andrew patted the leather seat which looked inviting and comfortable. Anneliese set down her bag and sat in the seat with her cell phone opened to a new note. No paper and pencil for her, they’d only get lost.
“Now, start from the beginning. How did you first find out that your hair extensions were being stolen?”
Andrew threaded the fingers from both of his hands into her hair, massaging and playing with the bounce of her curls while Anneliese focused on his face in the mirror instead of her own.
“Well, at first, I assumed the girls were lying. I had a few clients, maybe three months ago, come in without their extensions, claiming they were stolen right off of their heads.”
Andrew played with the part in Anneliese’s hair, thoughtfully flipping it from one side to the other before letting her hair settle into its natural part.
Anneliese frowned. “Isn’t that normal, though? That girls would come in without their previous extensions? Don’t they just fall out after a time?”
Andrew nodded to her reflection and started walking around the room, gathering various items as he spoke.
“They do, but most of the time they can save a fair amount of those tied in with their hair and if they’re in good condition, we can reuse them. Like I said, extensions are pricey, but these girls had the clip-in extensions that can be used and reused over and over.”
Andrew approached the chair again, holding a long, thin box containing a deep peacock extension, much like the color the blonde had when she’d passed her by twenty minutes earlier. Anneliese pulled the hair out of the box, and she was amazed at how natural-looking they were. The hair was so realistic-looking, so perfect, it looked like someone had been scalped for it, and when Andrew flipped it over, Anneliese saw that it had a system of clips and combs set in the back to secure it firmly in place.
“My clients are free to put them in themselves, but more often than not, they come here and have us fit them for a short period, or even just a night out. You don’t wash your hair with these in, they’re not designed for that, but they should be secure enough not to just fall out at a bar—not even if the client manages to fit them herself.”
Anneliese nodded. Seeing them for herself, she could tell that they wouldn’t be the easiest things to remove without the wearer noticing anything. No wonder Andrew had been skeptical at the start.
“So, if they’re so well made, how are they being stolen? And how come you’re so certain that they’re actually being stolen?”
Andrew took a comb and sectioned off Anneliese’s hair then he took the peacock strands and expertly snapped them into her hair in just a few seconds. Unpinning the hair above the extension, he fluffed it all into place and then crossed his arms over his broad chest. His eyes daring her in the reflection from the mirror, Andrew’s deep voice demanded, “Now try to pull it out.”
Anneliese looked at herself in the brightly lit mirror, reached up to the deep blue strands and gave them a gentle tug. Nothing—no give at all. She frowned and pulled harder, wincing when she felt some of her own hair give, but the extension stayed put. Now a little frustrated with the task, she reached into the depths of her curls and tugged at the base. She felt the skin of her scalp pull from the tension, but the extension itself stayed properly in place.
Finally, she dropped her hands back to the armrests and sat back in defeat. Andrew smiled triumphantly and reached out to fix the rat’s nest that was now Anneliese’s hair from all the tugging.
“It’s fully patented. The best hold on the market.”
“Well, how women are having these stolen off their heads with all that sensation is beyond me,” Anneliese grumbled and stared hard at her reflection. Maybe Leo was right. This case had no real merit, although she would have loved to have solved the mystery of how it was being done if Andrew’s allegations were true.
While Anneliese wondered how she was going to let Andrew down easy, he ran his fingers through her hair and with only the slightest sensation, he removed the inch-wide extension and Anneliese’s eyes popped open in awe.
“How did you do that?”
Andrew flipped the hair over again and pointed to a small metal bump hidden in the side of the extension’s base.
“If you press on that, it’ll release the clips and slide out easy as pie on a Sunday. That’s patented as well. I had to design a way to get the extension out without ruining the hair follicles. What’s the use of these things if they can’t be easily removed?”
Anneliese nodded and watched as Andrew replaced the piece in her hair then continued the process all the way around the circumference of her head. The extensions were hidden underneath with the blue peeking out and accenting her entire look. Suddenly Anneliese looked exotic—and she liked it.
“They’re definitely heavy. I can definitely feel they’re in my hair,” she said as she shook her head, enjoying the look of how the peacock-colored curls threaded beautifully through her own dark locks.
Andrew leaned ag
ainst her chair and nodded. “Even with the easy removal button, they’re still something you’d notice once they’re gone. When the girls came in, clueless as to how they’d lost an entire head of extensions, I started to worry that there was something wrong with the design of my clip system. However, even before I realized it was only mine that was being stolen, it crossed my mind that maybe they’d been drugged.”
Anneliese shivered with the possibility and the ramifications of that, if it were true. Were extensions the only thing being stolen? And heaven forbid, thinking about anything else.
Andrew pulled out his phone and opened a note. “I’ve kept track of all the places my clients have been losing them. It’s pretty scattershot, but there’s a string of events being publicized in a local magazine that’s a fairly consistently hit.”
Anneliese scanned the name and recognized the club that hosted the events. It was popular with the up-and-coming society crowd. Exactly the type of girl who would want such high-quality and expensive hair extensions such as Andrew’s.
“There’s a party tonight. I saw it advertised,” Anneliese said, her mind whirling. Suddenly, she was hit with an idea. “Andrew, would you mind if I wore these out for a while?”
“Girl, I can’t resell them once they’ve been in someone’s hair, and those are from my sample stock anyway so you go right ahead. I’ve been dying to put them in your hair since we first met so how about you think of me as your fairy godmother and I’ll think of you as free advertising,” he chuckled and Anneliese’s smile grew as wide as her face.
“Deal,” she said, hopping out of her chair and grabbing her handbag. She checked her watch and decided she had enough time to buy all she’d need for the evening. It would be tight, but it could work.
“Find out who’s doing this, and why, and you’ll be looking at a lifetime of free extensions, girl.”
With one final air kiss and a light spritz of hairspray, Anneliese was off. Energized and revived, she no longer worried about what Leo might say. Her only thought was if she had shoes and a purse to match this new hair.
Chapter 6
Leo’s visit to the auction house had proved fruitful. The staff had told him that a few small, but expensive items were no longer where they were supposed to be and that verification led Leo to consider the case to be a real one. When the auction house provided the Tate family with a page-long list of items such as etchings, fine porcelain, jewelry, and in one case, a fairly large mirror that was missing from their usual location, Mrs. Tate’s eyes had practically glowed with vindication. While Leo couldn’t say for sure that Robert had taken them, it did prove that she hadn’t simply imagined the theft.
At the end of that day, Leo called on Mrs. Tate for an update and once he was back in her house, he found himself wandering away from the areas he’d inspected earlier with the auction house and into a small sitting room at the rear of the Back Bay brownstone. Leo waited for the woman to sit in a light blue brocade chair before updating her on the day’s findings.
He pushed up the sleeves of his light blue button-down shirt and said, “Well, Mrs. Tate, as you know by now, you were correct in that there appear to be several valuable items missing from your family home, or at least, they’re no longer where they should be according to the auction house records and generally, they were small pieces that were originally located in the guest rooms. The thefts seem to have all been isolated to that wing.”
Mrs. Tate’s smug face lit up and her smile could have cut glass. “Thank you, but I already knew I was right, even before the auction house called to inform me an hour ago.”
Leo gritted his teeth at her passive-aggressive response and it reminded him why he’d left this world of untold wealth, greed and condescending bullshit in the first place. He much preferred the military way of dealing with aggression—and that was head on.
Mrs. Tate flicked her hair back off her face and continued, “I’m sure Robert Blackstone must have taken them. He and a few of his committee members stayed in some of the guest rooms during weekends when we held fundraisers here.”
Leo nodded, taking the black leather notebook out of his back jeans pocket to jot down the dates of the weekends in question and all the while, he thought that Mrs. Tate was the worst kind of client he had to deal with. Not just because the woman was an uptight WASP, but because she was utterly convinced that she knew the identity of the person who was behind the crime, and also exactly what the crime was.
There had been times when the client’s paranoid assumptions had proved to be correct, and all Leo needed to do was uncover the evidence. At other times, however, their confidence clouded clues that would have easily led to the real suspect. He needed to get as much accurate information about the situation before Mrs. Tate’s guess became a foregone conclusion.
She paused after she’d finished recounting the days and times that Blackstone had stayed at her home and Leo tried to get her back on track. “Let’s start from the beginning, Mrs. Tate. Who has access to the guest rooms?”
At this question, Mrs. Tate froze. Leo watched as the previously confident woman started to fidget with the hem of her shirt. He guessed that like many of the wealthy homeowners with staff, Mrs. Tate wasn’t quite sure who had access to her rooms. Nor did she like a question that so thoroughly poked a hole in her cast iron theory.
“Well, I suppose a fair amount of people have access to the rooms. We entertain regularly, and the staff has to get in and out of them to clean, make up beds and so forth, though there generally isn’t any reason for them to be in there if we don’t have guests staying.”
“Is there a housekeeper or senior staff member who would know the exact rotations of the staff who would clean those rooms?”
Mrs. Tate nodded and pulled out her cell phone. “I’ll text her now.”
Leo made the note and moved on. “I noticed that the rooms in that wing are fairly isolated from the rest of the house.”
“Yes, that’s why I know it had to be Robert. It had to be someone with free access to them and on more than one occasion. That list of missing items is too long to have been stolen in one visit.”
Leo nodded, encouraging her, but in the back of his mind, he thought that the staff had far more free access and they’d know what wouldn’t be easily missed, which was a definite advantage. However, after going over the public records of Blackstone’s campaign, Leo had discovered that it was in desperate need of funds so he had both motive and opportunity against him.
“In any event, I’ll need to speak with the staff and anyone else who has, or had access to those rooms. They may be able to shed new light on the times when it appears your things went missing.”
Mrs. Tate checked her watch. “Yes, I’ll set something up in the next day or two. However, for now, I think I have an opportunity you may want to take advantage of.”
Leo cocked an eyebrow and watched as she reached down into her purse and sifted through it. Finally, she pulled out a five-by-seven piece of card stock and her eyes flicked over the front before handing it over to him.
It was an invitation, a VIP invitation that is, to a party that was going be open to the public. A masked ball that had been advertised by the Young Professionals Club of Boston for the past few weeks in magazines, online, and on the radio. Leo had already received his invitation over three weeks ago, and he’d immediately filed the damn thing into the trash can as soon as it came through the door.
He took the card and said, “Why would I be interested in this party?”
“Robert Blackstone is one of the hosts,” she replied.
Leo re-read the invite then flipped it over, but nowhere did he see Blackstone’s name or campaign logo printed on it.
Mrs. Tate realized his confusion and hurried to explain, “He’s a donor to the Young Professionals’ cause. He’ll be sponsoring an hour of free drinks for the public and giving a small speech for his campaign, but the VIP area is drinking on him all night. Apparently, his advisers think he ne
eds to solidify his vote with the under 40’s population.”
Leo nodded. It made sense, and it would be an event that the Boston media would eat up—something that would do a lot of good at this point in his campaign. He checked the time on his phone and realized he needed to get moving if he was going to make it in time. He had planned to check in with Anneliese but that could wait until the next day. A masked ball would be a great way to subtly question Blackstone without tipping his hand.
Leo stood and excused himself. “Alright, Mrs. Tate, I’ll leave you for now. Please let me know when each of your staff are available for interviews. The sooner, the better for me.”
Mrs. Tate stood up and Leo noted she declined to shake his hand. “Of course. You’ll keep me abreast of any new developments? Slightly faster than you informed me about the auction house findings, I trust?”
Leo’s smile turned brittle on his face. The faster he could solve this and get her out of his face, the better—Mrs. Tate was enough to drive any man to drink. As he left the beautifully appointed brownstone, he reveled in the thought that tonight’s events would provide ample opportunity to scratch that particular itch, but only after he’d grilled Mr. Blackstone.
*****
Only an hour later, Leo pulled at the cuffs of his suit—the platinum Tiffany Marine Corps cufflinks glinting in the streetlight as he did so. They’d been a gift from his father before they fell out and it was one of the few times he’d thought the man had made a personal gesture of acknowledgment for Leo’s accomplishments in the military. That was until he found out later that his father’s secretary was simply very good at selecting the right gifts.
In any event, Leo liked the cufflinks, and tonight he had a part to play. As he approached The Mandarin Hotel on Boylston Street, Leo had to dodge a taxi as well as a limo or two to fight his way to the entrance of the swanky hotel bar. He was happy to see that he’d guessed right—all the men waiting in line were dressed similarly in high-end suits with a vast array of ties, pocket squares, and the occasional bow tie.