It would be an understatement to say the intel was a major blow to my ego. I’d sincerely thought I shared a bond with at least some of those clients. Turns out they weren’t really that into me, just the convenient parking and free chardonnay.
I got that the CUTTERZ location was nowhere near as glamorous—and nowhere near as convenient. But my schedule was wide open and I’d even lowered my rates. Twice. And still, I couldn’t figure out how to get business in the door.
As I approached the shop, coffee in hand, I noticed a big A-frame sign outside the shop. Black and red helium balloons tied to the sign were bapping against the building in the wind. I suspected someone with idle hands would set them free within the hour. In fact, the sign itself might walk away too—this wasn’t Lincoln Square, after all, and it wasn’t chained down. Foot traffic was fairly nonexistent with the shop tucked away on the second floor of the building, so I was glad to see Gail had done something to draw in some fresh meat…at least until I saw exactly what her irresistible offer entailed.
CUTTERZ $20 walk-in special! Ask for Gail!
Fucking hell. There I was, struggling to schedule clients at a bargain basement thirty-five bucks, while she undercut me by nearly half. Even worse, she was setting up the expectation that a haircut wasn’t worth a round of drinks. There had to be some kind of diplomatic way I could dissuade her from screwing us all with her $20 price tag. I climbed the narrow staircase and scrabbled to come up with something less hostile than, What the fuck, Gail? but unfortunately I was drawing a blank. And when I opened the door and found my nine o’clock sitting in Gail’s chair with her hair sectioned and her baseline already shaped, I nearly choked on my tongue stud to stop from blurting it on out.
My client was an airheaded middle-aged soccer mom who’d never worked a day in her life, so apparently it didn’t occur to her that it was seriously uncool to park her ass in Gail’s chair when she’d been scheduled for mine. “Hi, Crash! I love the new shop, the neighborhood is so artistic.”
“Gail,” I said calmly, “Mrs. Palmer was scheduled to see me.”
Gail raised her meticulously thin eyebrows and gave me an oops! shrug.
The oblivious client piped in, “I just figured since you weren’t here yet and I need to make sure I stop at the stationery store before lunch, Gail could do my cut this time.” Same difference to her, maybe, but for Gail to agree to the arrangement was a major faux pas. “Especially since you weren’t here.”
“It’s five to nine. I’m early.” I couldn’t quite keep the anger out of my voice, either.
“Don’t be mad,” she said with a ludicrous pout. “I’ll wait for you next time.”
“You can have my next walk-in,” Gail offered.
I hadn’t even cleared the threshold and I was already angry enough to beat someone to death with a curling iron, so I turned around and walked right back out. I had to cool off before I told Gail exactly where she should shove her next walk-in. Red Turner would’ve told her how he felt in no uncertain terms, but me, I didn’t know how to be angry without exploding. And what difference did it make what Red would have done? It was no use pining after him. He’d fallen off the grid and didn’t want to be found.
As I thundered down the steps, lighter clicking furiously at the cigarette now clamped between my lips, a first-floor door opened and a woman called out, “Hey, Blondie, hold on a second.”
I paused in the cramped vestibule. Between my coffee and my lighter, I had no idea how I thought I’d get out of there unless I planned on kicking the door down, and probably burning myself in the process.
“I hate to ask, but can I bum a smoke?”
The mood I was in, I wanted to bite her head off. But she was an old lady, and my downstairs work-neighbor, too. And she wasn’t the one who’d just poached one of my clients.
My unlit cigarette stuck to my lip, and it bobbed as I spoke. “That ginormous neon palm reader sign in the window—is it yours?”
“Guilty as charged. Marketing. Back when I was your age, a cheap ad in the paper was all it took to get more bookings than I could handle. But now everyone and their brother claims to be psychic. Name’s Lydia.”
“Crash.”
I pocketed my lighter and held out the pack. She tapped out a cigarette and handed it back. “C’mon in, if you want. It’s cold outside, but I’ve got a back hall where we can smoke.”
I wanted to refuse, but a peek out front told me it was crapping down sleet, and I didn’t want my hair to sag. Plus, as much as I think official so-called psychics are a bunch of bullshit artists, the Tarot Card Palm Reader sign appealed to my nostalgic side, like the Ouija Boards of my childhood.
I followed her in.
Her store was smaller than CUTTERZ, a square room draped in black, punctuated with framed motivational posters of corny sayings. She had a pair of black couches that almost matched. The coffee table was scattered with well-thumbed copies of Astro Fortune and Lucky Numerology, and the far corner housed an altar type thing with statues of Buddha, Ganesh, and the Virgin Mary, all of them in sore need of a good dusting.
“This is the waiting room.” Lydia pointed at a sign on the coffee table that read, Have a seat—Your future awaits. “Walk-ins can park themselves here and I don’t need to pay a receptionist.”
We crossed through to a black-painted door in the far wall. The next room was smaller, maybe the size of my den at home, and hung with beads and boas, psychedelic paisleys and tie-dyes. A round table draped in black and a few dining room chairs were the only furniture. “I do readings in here. Nothing else. The routine helps me get in the zone, and there’s sound-blocking foam underneath the hangings. Just a tiny chime when the front door opens—and the Buddha’s got a nanny-cam in his belly button I can see from my cell phone.”
Through the reading room were even smaller rooms: a bathroom, a kitchenette, a bedroom sized more like a walk-in closet. A similar setup to CUTTERZ, in miniature. But there was an additional door off the kitchen we didn’t have upstairs, and that door led to a stairwell. A damp, rusty stairwell to a scary meter room, but at least we could smoke in it. There was an old barstool on the corner of the landing. Lydia parked herself there, so I sat on the stairs.
She lit her cigarette, took a deep drag, and exhaled. “So you’re one of the new hairdressers, huh?”
“Stylist.” I suspected the difference was lost on her. “Did your psychic telepathy tell you that?”
“Just observation and common sense. I’ve seen you coming and going from the shop. Either you work there or you get your hair done an awful lot.”
“Too bad you’re not for real. I could use some psychic advice right about now.”
The crow’s feet around Lydia’s eyes crinkled in amusement. “Who says I’m not real?”
“You tell me about your secret Buddha-cam but you still feel the need to peddle the psychic song and dance?”
“What can I say about letting you in on my secrets? You strike me as a good guy.” And she struck me as someone who knew how to sweet-talk people to her advantage. I could probably take a lesson from her and use it to deal with Gail. “But the Psych stuff? That’s not just a marketing scheme. I’m a certified level four.”
“Okay, Psychic Lydia, if you’re so perceptive, then tell me. Why did my colleague just put herself on my shit list over twenty lousy bucks?”
“I can’t answer you as a Psych. You’d need an empath or a telepath to figure that one out. I’m a precog.”
“Oh. That’s convenient.”
“I am picking up something, though: if you change your tune, I won’t be the one to convince you.” Which she knew by reading my body language, since in fact she could safely say that no one would convince me that palmistry was any more legitimate than spirulina cleanses or karma.
Lydia had my number, all right. I could definitely take notes from her.
Chapter 16
Confrontation isn’t my forte—I enjoy it a little too much. But unless I wanted to
start my professional life over in another city, I’d need to figure out how to work with Gail. First, though, I had to bring in some money.
I’d crunched the numbers. If I didn’t take in two hundred bucks a day, come the end of the month, I’d be short. That would mean putting my expenses on plastic. And my credit cards were getting a vigorous enough workout as it was.
By the time I got back upstairs, my stolen client was already gone. I hoped Mrs. Palmer was happy with her fifteen-minute hack job. No, scratch that—I wasn’t thinking out loud, so I might as well be authentic. What I really hoped was that she hated her hair and was kicking her traitorous self all the way home.
And I would indeed take the next walk-in, thank you very much. Sure, I was accustomed to $20 tips, not $20 cuts. But I couldn’t let Gail get away with pushing me around.
I marched straight through the salon and into the bathroom to brush my teeth and douse myself with Febreeze. On a good day I’d wait until I got home to have a cigarette, but frankly, I couldn’t even remember my last good day. To top it all off, when I grabbed the towel to dry my face, something fell out of it. Something big and brown and hard-shelled that hit the sink with an audible clack, then scurried down the drain.
I stared in dismay. If I ever brought home roaches in my clothes, no two ways about it—I’d have to burn my building down. Gingerly, I rehung the towel and blotted my face on my sleeve…and tried to ignore the sinking feeling that $20 tips were unlikely to happen in a second-story ghetto salon infested with vermin.
I was so busy feeling sorry for myself that the sound of my own name almost didn’t register.
“I don’t care about your special. I came here to see Crash. Specifically.”
I knew that voice. That wonderful, bitchy voice. And I was so tickled to hear it, I didn’t even need to act delighted when I burst forth from the back room to rain on Gail’s parade. “Detective Brinkman. A pleasure, as always.”
Carolyn had planted herself in a spot where she could take in all of CUTTERZ. Hands on hips. Frowning. Then she got a load of me and said, “I went through a lot of trouble to find you.”
So sentimental. That’s my girl. I gave her one of my new cards with only my name and my cell phone. No salon.
She tucked it into her suit jacket. “Do you have time to touch up my roots?”
“Always.”
I ushered her over to my chair, and paused to give it a final whisk-down before she sat—sentimental or not, I didn’t think she’d take too kindly to bringing home roaches either.
“So what’s going on? Red’s not taking my calls. His apartment is up for rent. Neither of you are at Luscious anymore.”
I shook out my cape, checking for hangers on. None.
“It took three tries, but I finally got the receptionist to tell me where you were.”
“And was she crying by the time you dragged it out of her?”
Carolyn scowled for a moment, then said, “A little.”
We watched each other in the mirror as I combed through. She’d been keeping up with her home care. The ends were healthy and the cool tones looked fresh. She didn’t pry. And I didn’t owe her any explanations. And yet that night we’d spent at Red’s place hung between us, an intimacy forged by circumstance. “It’s complicated,” I finally said.
“I figured.”
Touching up regrowth is more exacting than people realize. You can’t just slop the chemicals on. You only want to lift the virgin hair at the root, with as little overlap as possible. I was careful with Carolyn’s hair, and not just because she’d tell me exactly what she thought if I didn’t do an immaculate job. Unlike my other fair-weather clients, she’d jumped through hoops to find me. We had a bond now, and I was determined to deliver.
Gail butchered three $20 walk-ins by the time I rinsed. And we still had toning to see to.
I remembered which main toners Red used on Carolyn, and I could deduce the rest. And once I mixed, I made sure to key it all in to my phone for future reference. “Too bad you couldn’t just read that crybaby’s mind,” I remarked as I painted in the cool beiges.
“What?”
“At the salon.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Oh, you know how the news is. They love a good PsyCop story.”
“I wasn’t on the news.”
I gave her a quick wink in the mirror. “And you’re not the only one with deductive powers of reasoning.”
Between the chatter and the blow driers and the sound system piping in pretentiously obscure underground punk, no one else could hear our conversation, but Carolyn dropped her voice low anyway. “Don’t tell anyone, okay? As a favor to me.”
“You know what they say. Only her hairdresser knows for sure.” So she didn’t want to talk shop. That was fine. But with my palm reader encounter fresh in my mind, I couldn’t help but add, “It must be a real treat dealing with that so-called psychic every day. Strikes me as an insufferable know-it-all even without seeing the official certification claiming his mental telepathy is real.”
Carolyn whipped her hair around so fast I dropped a glob of violet where it wasn’t supposed to be. “My partner?”
“Big guy, bigger attitude? That’s the one.” As I blended in the toner, I could tell I’d rattled her more than I anticipated. “So…you two aren’t an item, are you?”
“Of course not. I told you, I’m married.”
Like that meant squat. But I knew when to back off—especially since this was the last client I wanted to alienate. I changed the subject and prattled on about the traffic and the weather, but it felt hollow, filling the space with meaningless words when I really wanted to troop out some “psychic” facts and figures and make her admit it was all a bunch of PR and spin.
Rinse, dry, smoothing serum, blowout. Perfect. I stood behind her and angled her head so the lights hit the color just so, and watched her carefully in the mirror. “Not to toot my own horn,” I finally said, “But this touch-up is impeccable. So why the frowny face?”
She struggled with something for a moment, then said, “Can I meet up with you later? Somewhere more…private?”
Curiouser and curiouser.
* * *
The day wore on. I had two more clients scheduled. One cancelled and the other was a no-show who claimed she couldn’t find the new salon. If I’d brought a laptop like one of the other stylists, I could have been putting together a mailing list or building a fabulous social media presence. But I’d been telling myself all that marketing stuff was beneath me since I had my loyal clientele. Right. Eventually I argued for another one of Gail’s walk-ins. And I had the sinking feeling that not only would I eventually need to drum up all new customers at CUTTERZ, but I couldn’t get away with charging anywhere near what I was worth. Not in a salon with roaches in the bathroom and an owner who’d shill herself for twenty lousy bucks.
I was so eager to get out of there I nearly tripped over the battered box at the foot of the stairs. I picked it up and glanced at the address label. Fair Fortune LLC, attn: Lydia Vallecillo. As much as I wanted to be anywhere but there, I could hardly leave Lydia’s stuff in the vestibule for someone to steal. I tried her door. It was open. And weirdly enough, I felt myself calm down a few notches in the atmosphere of that tacky waiting room with its black-hung walls and dusty shrine.
I leaned over the Buddha and waved at his jeweled belly button. The inside door opened, and Lydia greeted me with, “Hello, neighbor.”
I held up the dented package. “Personally folded, spindled and mutilated by your friendly local mail carrier.”
“C’mon back. Let’s see if there’s a damage report in my future.”
“I really should head home.”
“Truth be told, I’m dying for a smoke. C’mon, kiddo, don’t abandon me in the throes of a nicotine fit.”
She headed toward the back stairwell and I followed. Another piece of furniture had joined the barstool on the landing: an old wooden school desk with a
chipped saucer to use as an ash tray. She perched on the stool and I crammed myself onto the desk’s attached chair. I barely fit. Even so, I was touched by the sudden urge to launch a spitball. Amused, but slightly saddened.
When had all the playfulness drained from my existence?
Lydia took a deep drag to stave off her withdrawal, then tore into the side of the box. She dumped out a clear plastic bag full of hemp and beads. “Looks like they made it intact,” she said.
“What’s with those bracelets, anyway? Even my mother has one.”
“Some study they did in Denmark last year—I don’t bother trying to puzzle through the dry research, but I know a good profit margin when I see one.”
“What kind of study?”
“Figuring out whether gemstones affect mood.”
“Puh-lease. That’s so subjective.” I made a may I? gesture at the plastic bag and Lydia motioned for me to go ahead. I plucked out one of the bracelets. String, a couple knots and a few pinkish beads. “How much are people willing to pay for one of these?”
“That depends…mostly on how you present them. Thrown in a pile like this, they look as cheap as they are. But in a glass case, or maybe a fabric pouch, I’ve seen them go for fifteen, maybe twenty.” She tugged a bracelet out of the pile and one of the knots unraveled, sending beads pinging to the cracked cement. “Of course, they’d need to hold together long enough for the customer to try them on.” She sighed and picked up a bead, which she rubbed against the crumbly brick wall a few times, then ran her thumb over the bead’s surface. “And to top it off, these aren’t even gemstone, they’re glass.”
Big whoop, it was all a placebo anyway…. But I was curious. I traded Lydia a few cigarettes for one of her ugly beaded bracelets.
“And you picked a black bracelet,” she said. “Why?”
“It…matches my wardrobe?”
Skin After Skin - PsyCop 8 Page 12
