“What about the shears?”
Alex stamped her sandal-clad foot. “Someone swiped them.”
A small ray of sunshine. “Be sure to tell that to the police.”
Craig Gluck’s office was on Pleasant View, in the same Smithfield strip mall where my sister had her salon. Convenience must have been the reason she’d chosen him to be her lawyer. It couldn’t have been his credentials.
“Where is the Thin Mint Legal Studies Institute?” I said, squinting at the blurry photocopied degree that hung behind Craig’s desk.
“Thirment,” Craig corrected. “California, I think. It’s an accredited online program.”
I tried to suppress my incredulity, for Alex’s sake. She’d insisted on dragging me out to see her lawyer the minute the detectives told us we were free to leave. Any hope I had of seeing the chimps that morning was gone; reluctantly, I’d called my supervisor and asked for time off. Family emergency.
The three of us were sitting around Craig’s conference table, one of those folding metal tables with a vinyl top in simulated wood grain. Our mother kept one just like it in the garage, to haul out every spring for her annual yard sale. Come to think of it, Craig’s entire office looked as if it had been furnished from yard sales, lending his practice a fly-by-night appearance. His suit looked like a hand-me-down, too, the baggy jacket dwarfing his small frame, and he blinked a lot behind his owlish eyeglasses. Everything about him proclaimed his inexperience: hardly reassuring, even for mundane transactions, and positively alarming when Alex was a “person of interest” in a murder investigation.
“Craig knows that I’m the last person in the world who’d have wanted Mimi dead,” my sister was explaining. “Mimi and I were going into business together. Doing the show was part of the build-up. That’s why she agreed to be my model. Her customers would see how gorgeous I made her look and they’d sign on for the full package: facials, waxing, make-up—the stuff she does. Cuts and color—the stuff I do. We had a name picked out and everything. We were going to announce it today, after they named the winners.”
The final round had been postponed until evening. Several of the contestants were still being questioned in an effort to establish who’d seen the victim last, and the police were reviewing footage from various security cameras throughout the Convention Center, looking for the culprit. Needless to say, the press was all over the story. Alex was not an official suspect, although the police had made her promise she’d stay in the area, readily available for further questioning. When they brought her in again, she intended to be prepared with documentary evidence.
“Craig negotiated the contract with Mimi’s attorney and we both signed it in the presence of a notary,” she said. “We’d played with the idea of calling it ‘Courvoisier and After,’ but we both decided that sounded like someone who had too much to drink. Mimi came up with ‘Happily Ever After.’”
“That was generous of her,” I said, “giving you top billing.” After was our last name.
“Mimi was incredibly generous. I think I was in shock this morning, when I found her…the way she was.”
Alex, I realized, was genuinely upset. In the course of the morning, she hadn’t bothered to touch up her face, and her mascara was flaking, the liner smeared. I’d never once seen her with raccoon eyes.
“I can’t stop thinking about her being stabbed in the back,” she said. “Who would want to kill Mimi?”
Craig cleared his throat. “Erm, I’m afraid you’ve got a pretty good motive.”
“Why would I have wanted to kill my business partner?”
“Erm, she wasn’t your business partner. Not legally. Not anymore, I mean. She, erm, backed out of the contract.”
“She what?”
The attorney (if that’s what he was) had a fit of coughing. “I got a call yesterday afternoon from her lawyer. He was overnighting the paperwork. I left a message in your voicemail. You must have gotten it.”
“I checked my messages when I got home last night.”
“I left it on your business number.”
My sister flipped her hair, a key sign of irritation. “The shop was closed yesterday. I was at the hair show.”
“Oops,” said Craig.
I chose that moment to step in. “Who else would have had a motive to kill Mimi?”
“Who besides me, you mean? If I’d known—which I didn’t—that Mimi welched on our agreement.” Here Alex glared at her attorney, who withered, looking even smaller inside his hand-me-down suit.
“I think that’s a very good question,” said Craig. “Who else in Ms. Courvoisier’s circle of associates would have liked to see her dead?” His words came out in a rush, as if he were attempting to get the sentence out before he was felled by another fit of coughing. Or by my sister.
“Her boss, maybe. At Spa Europa. Signora Carla.” Alex grew pensive. “If she found out.”
“Found what out?” I asked.
“Mimi hadn’t told her she was quitting to go into business with me. She made me promise to keep it quiet until the show. I would’ve told you, Ashley, but you’re always at the zoo.”
“I’m sorry.” As a rule, Alex and I told one another everything, but it had been a while since we’d really talked. Maybe I was spending too much time with the chimps.
Craig raised his hand, as if he needed one of us to call on him before he dared to speak again.
“Yes?” I prompted.
“Ms. Courvoisier’s attorney made it clear, when he phoned to say that his client had voided the agreement, that we could not disclose the, erm, prior contract. They did offer an incentive for holding up your end of the bargain. A pretty healthy incentive, if you want my opinion. Off the record,” he added hastily. “It’s all in the documents that came in this morning. I’ve only given them a cursory glance, but the terms are more than fair.”
This was the longest speech I’d heard him make, and he did sound more lawyerly, when he used words like incentive and cursory and insisted on speaking off the record. But I still didn’t understand why Mimi had been so hush-hush.
“Spa Europa is a very upscale place, very expensive,” Alex explained. “Their treatments start at a hundred and twenty-five dollars, and that’s for a fifty-minute facial. Massages are two hundred. That includes the use of the sauna, and they’ve got these posh robes and slippers. A class joint. With those prices, you’d think the staff would be doing okay, but they’re not.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because Signora Carla pays them peanuts. Mimi said she wouldn’t give them more than thirty-four hours a week so she doesn’t have to provide benefits. Well, the schedule says they’re part-time workers, but most of them end up working extra shifts because Signora Carla overbooks.”
Craig slammed his hand down on the table. “That’s illegal!”
We both looked at him, startled less by the noise than by the assertiveness of the outburst. Craig seemed startled too.
“Erm, I got an ‘A’ in labor law,” he said, shrinking back inside his suit.
“Mimi said it was practically a sweat shop, and she was positive that some of the manicurists are undocumented. She was totally fed up, but she kept putting off telling Signora Carla that she was leaving.” My twin shivered involuntarily. “The woman’s a terror.”
“You mean the employees are afraid of her?” Craig was getting worked up again.
Alex didn’t dispute this. “There’s only one person at Spa Europa who’s not afraid of Signora Carla. Her head esthetician, Daniél, does pretty much as he pleases—not that he isn’t good at his job. He’s brilliant, and that’s why he’s untouchable. He’s got such a following, the place would fold if he left and Signora Carla knows it.”
“I want to talk to this man,” I told her. “How do I get to him?”
Daniél’s treatment room was a shrine for Liz Taylor. Framed stills from every phase of the actress’s career covered the walls. Liz as Cleopatra: black hair bobbed, violet eye
s rimmed with kohl, she stared out exotically from beneath a beaded headdress. Liz in National Velvet, clear-eyed innocent and so young. The ripe Liz of BUtterfield 8, luscious in a close-fitting sheath. By then she’d become a home-wrecker, but who could blame Eddie Fisher for succumbing to those succulent charms? I guess I was used to the blown-out Liz whose face used to adorn the tabloids I saw in the supermarket checkout line. Padding in my spa slippers from one photograph to the next, I was awestruck by the woman’s beauty.
“She must taste like butter,” Daniél said, coming in to find me standing in front of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected from a black male esthetician named Daniél, but it certainly wasn’t the person who was now helping me onto the bed in the center of the room and getting me settled under the covers.
“You’re a client of Mimi’s?” he said dubiously.
My sister had wangled a favor out of the spa’s receptionist, a girl she’d known from beauty school, and managed to get me slotted into Daniél’s schedule that same afternoon. We decided it would be the best way to get him alone without putting him on his guard. I hadn’t been keen on subjecting myself to a facial. The chimps were very sensitive and found most fragrances off-putting although Bart, the bonobo, was fond of my coconut shampoo.
“When are you going to stop playing with monkeys and get a real job?” Alex had said when I complained about the scents I’d be subjecting myself to at the spa.
“I have a real job.”
“I mean a job where you don’t play in monkey poop all day long.”
Although I was wearing the same robe and slippers as everyone else in the salon, I must not have looked like someone who was a regular client at Spa Europa.
“A friend recommended Mimi, but this is actually my first facial,” I admitted.
Daniél closed his eyes and it took a moment for him to answer. “Mimi passed away this morning. A terrible tragedy.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “My friend thought the world of her.”
“Most people did.” Brushing the hair off my forehead, he wound a powder blue turban around my head. His touch was remarkably gentle. “The first thing I’m going to do is clean your face. Then I’ll analyze your skin.” He squirted some pale green lotion into the palm of his hand and began to massage my face, fingers dancing in small circles from my forehead to my temples, inwards from my cheekbones to the bridge of my nose, down around my mouth to the point of my chin, then up and outwards along my jaw. I closed my eyes and let myself be soothed by the new age music they’d piped into the salon, whales singing amidst the splashing of waves. Not my thing ordinarily, but here it was exactly right.
“This is our chamomile cleanser,” Daniél said. “It contains the essence of eleven herbs and flowers.” He moved away and I heard the sound of water running in the sink. “Tell me if this is too hot.” He placed a warm towel over my face and blotted the lotion from my skin. I felt my pores opening to the heat.
“No, that feels good,” I murmured from under the towel. I would have liked to forget everything and enjoy the treatment, but my twin was a “person of interest” in a murder investigation. I opened my eyes when he lifted the towel off my face and got right to the point. “What was Mimi like?”
Daniél moved to sit on the stool beside me and tucked a stray hair back inside the turban. “Please close your eyes,” he said. He placed a moist cotton pad on each of my eyelids, pressed lightly around the edges, then directed a high-intensity light on my face. Even through my closed eyelids, I sensed its harsh glare. The esthetician’s fingertips moved briskly over my skin, feeling the wrinkles beginning to form in the corners of my eyes and the blackheads embedded around my nostrils. I wondered if he was going to ignore my question.
“Mimi?” I asked, again.
“You’re very yin,” he said, squeezing a blackhead. “She was too.”
Ouch, I thought. But he’d given me an opening. “Really? I had the impression she was a yang. My friend described her as nurturing, an earth-mother type.” Considering the way she’d looked that morning, this was a stretch.
“She came on like a yang,” acknowledged Daniél, squeezing a spot on my forehead. “But she was a lot shrewder than she looked. Most people didn’t look. They thought they could trust her because she smiled a lot and told them personal things about herself.”
“You didn’t trust her.”
“It’s not wise to trust anyone,” he said, “particularly on a first acquaintance.”
Daniél switched off the light and I was relieved to be back in darkness. I heard the sound of glass clinking and imagined him rooting among the bottles on the counter. He returned to my side and began spreading a thickish substance over my face.
“What’s that?” The goo smelled like peppermint and made my skin tingle. Bart liked the taste of peppermint. We’d trained him to brush his teeth and zoo patrons got a kick of watching him lick the toothpaste off the brush. Sometimes he’d try to eat the brush.
“This is our exfoliating masque. It penetrates your pores and removes the dead layer of skin. While it dries, I’m going to massage your hands. You might feel a little tightness as the masque hardens.” I heard the squeak of a pump bottle followed by the sound of him rubbing his palms together. He took my right hand and began to knead it, starting with the fleshy place at the base of my thumb and working outwards along my fingers. I was suddenly aware of how much tension I’d been carrying around for the past several hours. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, making a conscious effort to relax.
“That’s better,” Daniél said. “Now why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?”
With my eyes closed, I told him everything. How Alex had found Mimi’s body in the Hospitality Lounge, the red herring of the bottle of dye and the suicide note. The scissors in Mimi’s back. How the two of them were planning to open their own shop, only Mimi’d had second thoughts. Daniél had warned against trusting people on a first acquaintance, but I trusted him completely. It comes from hanging around with the chimps, I think. My instincts about humans are rarely wrong.
“At least she had the decency to compensate my sister when she decided to back out,” I concluded. Craig had mentioned a figure. Twenty-five thousand dollars was a very healthy incentive for keeping silent.
As I talked, Daniél finished massaging my hands, much to my regret. He cleaned the masque off my face and applied a soothing moisturizer, all without saying a word. Now, as he helped me sit up and removed the turban to release my hair, he offered a single sentence of advice.
“You and your sister might want to investigate how Mimi managed to come up with that kind of money, working in a job that pays minimum wage, plus tips.”
“Blackmail,” said Craig. “That explains this.” He held up a handwritten list of Asian names for Alex and me to see. “I found it in the documents Ms. Courvoisier’s lawyer FedExed over, sandwiched between the pages.”
Alex and I scrutinized the list, but neither one of us could figure out what it meant. Each name had a date beside it, a number in a column marked “hours,” followed by an amount of money in a column marked “earnings.” All totaled, the sums didn’t amount to very much.
“It’s nowhere near twenty-five thousand dollars,” Alex pointed out. She was nervous because the final round of the competition would be taking place in less than an hour and she still hadn’t met her model. Craig and I were sitting with her in the food court of Providence Place, the fancy mall across the skybridge from the Convention Center. Craig and I had plates of Chinese take-out in front of us. Alex wasn’t eating, having recently reapplied her make-up, but her attorney and I were both ravenous. Apart from the herbal infusion Daniél had handed me at the end of my treatment, to clear out any toxins that remained in my system, I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
“No,” Craig agreed. “This is a list of undocumented employees and what they earned. Your sister’s boss was paying them under the table. Paying them pennies. Just lo
ok at these numbers. Twelve hours of work for forty-eight dollars to Lin Yee on November 12th. Ten hours for forty dollars, and she was docked three dollars for lateness, according to this notation.”
“So you think Signora Carla killed Mimi to keep word from getting out?” I had to admit, I was impressed by his deductive abilities.
He nodded. “I can take this evidence to the police and your sister will be cleared of all suspicion of wrongdoing.”
“Not totally cleared,” Alex interrupted. “The news picked up on the hair dye and the note. It makes me look bad.” Not only did it make her look bad, I realized, it had shaken her belief in her own abilities. She needed to go into the final round with her confidence intact.
Craig removed his glasses. He straightened his shoulders and somehow seemed to fill out his suit jacket. When he smiled, I noticed that he had dimples. My sister noticed too.
“I talked to Mimi’s lawyer. Mimi was planning to fake her suicide and skip out of town with the money. The new business was just a front, so she could open a bank account in the name of Happily Ever After and transfer the money without attracting suspicion. She was using you, but she thought if she paid you off, you wouldn’t be sore.”
“How’d you get the lawyer to admit to everything?” Alex wanted to know.
“I, erm, threatened him.”
My sister and I spoke in unison. “You did?”
“Just a little. Hiring undocumented workers is a big-time no-no. If he knew about it—and this list suggests that he did—then he was obligated to report it to ICE.”
“Could you get Mimi’s lawyer to explain about the fake suicide on camera?” I asked.
Craig smiled. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”
My sister leaned across the table and planted a kiss on her attorney’s cheek. She left a big smear, and she didn’t even care that she’d marred her perfectly glossed mouth. “You know, Craig. With the right haircut, you could attract a better class of client.”
The Best Laid Plans Page 22