Color Me Dead

by Constance Barker

  “Cute,” Nellie said.

  “It’s important and more than simple lesson about posture. We build you up as a personae—create an image for you that we sell to the client. You know how certain models become the face for a product line? It’s like that, only a step beyond. We make sure you are seen, noticed by the people who matter.” Suddenly she laughed. “I can see by your face that I’m dumping far too much on you at once.” She opened her purse and took out a brochure. “This is the brochure we give potential clients. Our web site is listed on here. Check us out and see what we do. If you are at all interested, I’d like you to come to our office, meet the staff and some other models, and find out if it’s something you’d like to do.”

  “I never imagined…”

  “But you’ve dreamed,” the woman said gently. “I encourage you to check us out and let yourself imagine being the person in the magazines. Modeling is not easy, and certainly not for everyone. I did it for a time, but I discovered that I was better suited to scouting and recruiting than walking catwalks.”

  Betina looked at me. I could see her asking for help or maybe just permission. “If it interests you at all you owe it to yourself to do what she’s suggesting,” I said. “It won’t obligate you to anything and I can’t imagine a better time to explore the opportunity—her firm is interested in you.”

  Her eyes registered a huge thanks. She turned back to the woman. “Okay. I’ll take a look at this stuff.” The poor girl was so excited I thought she might stop breathing.

  “Why don’t you make an appointment now?” I suggested. “If you decide you don’t want to do it before then, you can always cancel.”

  “What an excellent idea?” the woman said. She pulled out a day planner. “If you are available next Friday…”

  Again Betina looked at me. “Take what time off you need,” I said. “I would never hold you back from anything you want to do. I hope you know that.”

  “I live way out in Knockemstiff. I guess I could take a bus to New Orleans.”

  The woman nodded. “I know. Well, I looked it up. I’d be happy to send a car for you on Thursday. We’d put you up at a hotel near the office and you could spend the day with us. Then we can have dinner Friday night and have you taken back Saturday morning.”

  “You’d do all that?”

  “Betina, we have a first class operation. We don’t expect someone we are courting to pay to explore the possibilities with us. This is all on us.” She held out a hand. “Do we have a deal? Your yes just means agreeing to come, visit, and chat.”

  Betina took the hand. “Thursday afternoon then.”

  I handed Betina one of the salon cards and a pen. “Write your cell number on the back of this and give it to the woman so she can contact you.”

  “Right,” she said, more than a little flustered.

  The agency lady thanked us all and left. Betina turned and stared at us. Pete put his arms around her and hugged her. “What an exciting chance,” he said.

  “I’m a little scared,” she said.

  “That’s a good thing,” Pete said. “That means you won’t just jump into it.”

  “You really are doing the right thing by checking them out,” I said.

  Nellie was strangely quiet. I wondered what she was thinking about.

  # # #

  “I’m going to the room to watch television,” Nellie said.

  “I’ll call James and get a recommendation for dinner this evening,” I said. “Say hi to Aubrey for me. While you are watching television.”

  She flashed a smile and left.

  Now that Betina, and Pete were both pumped up and nervous, they needed to burn off some energy. “Let’s go to the quarter,” she suggested.

  “I need some kind of distraction,” Pete said. “Wandering around the expo looking at salon stuff isn’t going to cut it.”

  “Come back around six and we can all go out together,” I said.

  “Cajun food?” Pete asked.

  “What else? I’ll get a recommendation from James.”

  “Great. Leander is playing the whole evening with Marshall so we’ll be on our own for dinner.”

  We all wandered into the lobby and as they left I bumped into a rather frazzled looking James Woodley. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I’ve decided that having too many suspects is worse than none,” he said. “I’ve been going through the list of people you gave me and no one has a real alibi, and with all the serious business going on, people trying to get backing for this and that, and other people not wanting them to, I have enough motives for a massacre. And I haven’t even started exploring people that might have crossed swords with our victim in the years since you last knew her.”

  “That’s a lot,” I said.

  “Too much.”

  “I think you can eliminate Dave the Dwarf,” I told him.

  He grinned. “I already did, but I’d love to hear your reasoning.” When I told him my theory about the angle of attack, he grinned. “The medical examiner said the same thing. The killer had to be at least five foot five and right handed. Dave is nowhere near that tall and left handed.”

  “So that leaves… well Sylvia—we don’t know the details but there is bad blood there.”

  “And she was in that hallway around the time. She had a meeting with potential backers earlier. She was presenting a plan for opening a franchise of her salons. The thing is, other than wanting to beat Victoria in the competition, she didn’t have a real motive for murder.”

  “Although if Victoria won that wouldn’t be good. And if Sylvia won the competition… well, she probably knew that Victoria was claiming Sylvia stole her style and that might cast a shadow over her franchise idea.”

  “So she might kill Victoria on the off chance that one of them would win? There are eight other competitors, and ego aside, how could she be sure she’d win—sure enough to make it worth committing murder?"

  I sighed. “A long shot. It would indicate she didn’t take murder seriously. Okay, what about Manus Jenkins…”

  “Who met with his potential investors that morning. Again, he and Victoria had a nasty relationship. He told me he worked for her for a year, and she fired him. According to him, it was because too many clients were asking for him.”

  “That would upset her. She’s the star in her salon.”

  “He took a part time job selling scissors and found he had a knack for it—made decent money. So he expanded.”

  “And then he decided to design his own scissors.”

  “Not exactly. Talking to stylists, he got some ideas about what he saw as shortcomings in the existing products. He took notes and then paid someone else to do that. Then he went to Asia and talked to manufacturers and found someone to make a few thousand for an initial run. But it seems that his efforts to introduce his own product line weren’t going well. He’s a bad business person and it seems that he didn’t stop to think how his suppliers would react to the idea of him introducing a competing product.”

  “Really?”

  “I talked to two reps of products he handled. They were conveniently here at the show—with booths on the expo floor. They said that as soon as they heard what he was doing, they dropped him as a distributor immediately. They said the contract with him explicitly prohibits him from competing with them but he clearly never read it because he was shocked when they told him.”

  “He just assumed they wouldn’t mind, or notice.”

  “And, oddly enough, according to one investor I talked to, despite being a distributor for the other companies, the weak link in Manus Jenkins’s plan for his own scissors wasn’t the quality or price of the product but that he hadn’t talked to any of the online distributors or set up any channels for himself. He hadn’t given any thought to that beyond selling them himself and maybe on Amazon. Of course from an investor’s viewpoint, no matter how good the scissors were, if he was the only one selling them, there wasn’t any money in it.”

/>   “He must’ve been crushed.”

  “Emotionally and financially. He spent the last of his cash sponsoring the contest and putting on his presentation. He needed to get a backer. When I talked to him, one of the other scissor manufacturers had made him a token offer to buy all the rights to the design, but it isn’t a lot. It won’t even cover his development costs.”

  “So although he is floundering, Victoria doesn’t factor into his disaster at all?”

  “Not directly. If he killed her, it was out of rage. She mocked him at his presentation, I was told, but nothing she did or said had any effect on his badly planned business.”

  # # #

  My phone beeped. It was a text from Nellie. “She says we need to see what’s going on the lobby,” I told James.

  We settled the bill quickly and went out and found a shrieking Sylvia. She was at the concierge desk screaming at a perplexed young woman. She looked like something from a horror movie—her hair had been crudely chopped and splattered with colors. It looked hideous. “Someone did this to me while I was asleep!” She seemed almost hysterical.

  “Another bit of sabotage?” Nellie asked as she sidled up to me.

  “I better try and calm her down and see if I can get any details,” James said.

  I doubted he’d get much more than what we’d already heard from across the room. “You might want to ask where her husband was.”

  “Husband?”

  “Earlier I saw a man at her station. Tall, well dressed, in a businessman like sort of way. From the way they were acting I guessed it was her husband or boyfriend. He was hovering, seemed out of place.”

  “I would’ve thought he would’ve been in her room.”

  “I’ll ask.”

  “He’s a brave man,” I said as he walked away.

  “Or stupid,” Nellie said.

  “I thought you were going to our room to watch television,” I said.

  “Hey, I walked out into the opening act of this show. No commercials or anything. First run comedy.”

  “As long as it isn’t you that has your hair hacked up like that.”

  “Very true.” She nudged me. “If we get closer we can eavesdrop.”

  “That wouldn’t be right.”

  “But efficient. It would mean you wouldn’t have to worm the story out of James later. By listening we’d be doing him a favor.”

  “Well, if you put it like that….” so we edge close to where James and a female officer wielding an official-looking notepad, sat talking with Sylvia. James grinned at me as he saw us move close.

  “Sylvia, why don’t we go up to your room. You can give us a complete statement… in private.” He looked at me when he said that part.

  “A statement?” she said.

  “About the crime.”

  “What crime?”

  “This constitutes an assault,” James said. “We need to file a report and investigate. I’ll need to determine how someone got into your room.”

  Suddenly Sylvia looked upset. “It was just a prank,” she said. “It isn’t anything important. I must’ve left the door ajar or something.”

  “It is important,” James said calmly. “So if you’ll give me permission to check your room.”

  “Stay out of my room,” she said.

  “Where was your husband when this happened?” he asked.

  “My husband?”

  “I understood that your husband was here yesterday.”

  “Oh yes, but just during the day… to support me. I’m in the competition and he encourages me.”

  “So he wasn’t in the hotel last night or this morning.”

  “No. He’s coming later. He was going to stay last night but after the murder he was rather upset.”

  James blinked. “So upset by someone being killed that he left you here alone?”

  “Good question,” Nellie whispered.

  “He knew Victoria too. I had to stay. Because of the competition. He went home.”

  “So tell us what happened.”

  Sylvia pouted. “No. Someone played a prank on me. They wanted to unsettle me for the competition and that’s all it is. Doing all this nonsense just helps them. I won’t have it.”

  “So you refuse to file a statement.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll let the hotel know that you are not holding them responsible for what happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can’t expect the hotel to assume any responsibility, especially if you are saying nothing actually happened.”

  She sulked for a moment. “Fine then.”

  “She thought they wouldn’t charge her for the room after that,” Nellie said. “Nice try, Sylvia.”

  I wondered if that’s what this was all about.

  James walked over to us, shrugging. “No crime, I guess.”

  “That haircut should be,” Nellie said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “How is everything?” I asked Nellie when we went back to the room.

  “You mean here or at home? Because I’d have to say that things aren’t so great here, with people dying and getting scalped and all.”

  “I meant at home.”

  “Well, no one has been killed there… yet. So it's fine, more or less, although Rudy decided to make spaghetti and managed to set it on fire. He said that he got distracted by wrestling on television.”

  “Any damage? I mean any serious damage?”

  “No, the kids acted fast and put it out before the fire got out of the pot. Aubrey said that the chemicals from the fire extinguisher probably improved the taste.”

  “They ate it?”

  She made a face. “I think he was joking. I hope he was.”

  “And the bear?”

  “Fine too, as far as I know, but I think he didn’t like the dog food all that much. He hasn’t come back.”

  “That’s good.” I watched her. “You aren’t pleased about the job offer Betina got, are you?”

  She scowled. “Does it show?”

  “Every mood you have shows to me after so many years. I doubt Betina or Pete noticed your sudden quiet after a single caustic cautionary remark, which was a good one, by the way. I have to admit that.”

  She sat down. “She was just offered a chance to chase her dream. She’s always loved to look better than other people and here someone is offering her a chance to make good money doing that.”

  “So we should be happy for her.”

  “I am. The thing is… Being away from home is bittersweet. I know that you remember how much I always wanted to get out of Knockemstiff when we were in school. I had plans. Big plans.”

  “Until Rudy got you pregnant.”

  “Which changed things forever. As crazy as my home life, my family is, they are wonderful. I adore them and wouldn’t have things different, significantly different at least, for anything. Yet seeing how people live in the city… I can’t help but think that dreaded ‘what if’ about my life.”

  “We all have those moments, and questions.”

  “And then, with this door suddenly opening up for Betina, someone making her an offer like this when she’s been here one day, I ache a little for missing out on the chance to find out what life would have been like. It’s not sensible, but there it is. So, I guess I’m jealous. How stupid is that?”

  “Not stupid at all. And please keep in mind that by coming here you got your own job offer.”

  “Which makes it even harder. It’s like finding out that there was gold lying in the streets, like everyone said, but I let myself get distracted or didn’t believe and missed out.”

  “Yet, you are happier than most of these city people.”

  She grinned. “I’d like to believe that.”

  “I think it’s true. I lived in the city and left it unhappy. Even though there were some magical moments, they were illusionary. Betina might try modeling, leave us and go to the city and have incredible success. Or she might fail. Or she might
be successful and miserable. And if she leaves, she’ll never know what would have happened if she stayed. You can play that wondering game, but you can’t win it. I’ll always wonder what might have happened if I’d never gotten married, or if I’d stayed with my husband. Or even stayed in Baton Rouge, working for Victoria as a divorced woman. I can’t know, so I don’t intend to be miserable from my wondering.”

  “Easier said than done, not being miserable.”

  “My daddy always said that advice is often easy to give, harder to take. That’s why we are so happy to give it. ”

  She laughed. “Did anyone ever tell you that your daddy was a bit of an idiot?”

  I suddenly remembered a teenage version of the woman in front of me. We were standing in front of a cinema waiting for Rudy and a boy named Roger I was dating at the time to show up. Nellie was going to a lake with Rudy the next weekend and Roger wanted us to go with them. I’d asked for permission and my daddy said no. As clear as day I could see Nellie leaning up against the brick wall, looking at me scornfully. Then she said it: “Did anyone ever tell you that your daddy is a bit of an idiot?”

  Now I went to the mini bar and took out a small bottle of scotch and divided it into two glasses. I handed her one.

  “Yes, Nellie. You did. Several times.” I raised my glass. “Join me in toasting idiots?”

  She grinned. “Of course. May all of us who are idiots be protected.”

  # # #

  “Bubba’s Barber Shop,” Pete said, reading the sign on the building across the street from us on Royal Street in the French Quarter.

  We were walking through the quarter, searching for the cajun restaurant James had recommended.

  “Look. It’s got a barber pole and everything,” Betina said. “How quaint.”

  Pete laughed. “Did you know that until 1950 there were four manufacturers of barber poles in the US?”

  “And you know this why?” Nellie asked.

  He shrugged. “When I was studying haircutting I got curious about them. I found a paper on their origins. They were developed in Europe in medieval times when barbers were surgeons and also did tooth extractions.”