The Brush Off

by Laura Bradley

He wrote that down. I didn’t know whether that was good or bad.

  “What’s it called?”

  “Transformations: More than Meets the Eye.”

  His Bic stopped in midair, and his eyes shifted their focus from the page to meet mine. “Is that the name or a social statement?”

  “Both. Books have subtitles, why can’t stores? Beauty’s about more than what’s on the outside, although what’s on the outside can change the way one feels on the inside.” Except for underwear, I almost added, then stopped myself. I didn’t need to have that argument with Jackson Scythe. Not yet, anyway, I added slyly.

  “Whoa,” he said, holding up the last three fingers of the hand holding the Bic. “I’m not equipped for a philosophical discussion right now. I’m just here to solve a murder which, no matter how complicated, promises to be less of a bog than a beauty debate with a woman who could clearly outargue me from its every angle.”

  How did he issue a compliment and a criticism in the same sentence so damned smoothly? It effectively tied my tongue, which was well practiced in pithy rejoinders. I hadn’t been this self-conscious since high school. “You sound just like my aunt Mavis,” I muttered under my breath.

  Unexpectedly, Jackson Scythe chuckled. The skin along the nape of my neck tingled in response to the conservative rumble, the rusty essence of which made me think the lieutenant didn’t laugh often. That the fingerprint tech nearly dropped her kit was another clue.

  Scythe cut it short at her wide-eyed stare. He cleared his throat. “Sounds like aunt Mavis has her priorities in order.”

  Like I didn’t? I wondered suddenly if Jackson Scythe kept his cabinets organized.

  “Speaking of priorities, hotshot.” Crandall reappeared, lumbering into the room and pausing for a few juicy smacks. “You have to decide when to talk to the vultures. They’re setting up camp.”

  “Great. They can wait all day for my ‘No comment.’ ”

  “Ah, you gotta give ’em more than that,” Crandall argued halfheartedly.

  “The hell I do.”

  “We’re not really gonna be here all day, are we?” Crandall reached into the rear pocket of his polyester slacks and pulled out another piece of Juicy Fruit. He unwrapped it, slowly, reverently, as if it were a precious gift. Everyone in the room watched, except the fingerprint technician, who seemed only distracted by the unusual. Like that chuckle of Scythe’s. Hearing it again in my mind’s ear, I stopped my body in mid-shiver with a stomp of my foot. I was getting sick of this guy’s effect on me. He glanced at me and went back to reviewing his notebook. I couldn’t help noticing the cute cowlick where his wavy hairs met his neck. It was something he couldn’t see unless he held a second mirror behind his head, and he didn’t seem the type to do that. For some odd reason, his cowlick made him seem more vulnerable to me. Good girl, I thought, grasping at whatever worked to keep me ahead in the head game were were playing.

  Scythe glanced up from his notes. I smiled like I had a secret. He half hitched his eyebrow. Oops. I shifted my gaze back to a safer subject, Crandall, who was winding up his gum ritual. He wadded up the silver foil, flipped it over his shoulder, and added the piece to the wad in his mouth. It made me wonder if it was a continuous piece of gum, set aside at night like a watch, only to be popped back into his mouth again in the morning.

  I watched Scythe walk over to the desk table and use the butt end of his Bic to shift around the papers on the glass top.

  “Know this stiff’s last name?”

  Crandall’s insensitive question startled me out of falling deeper into some kind of hormone-induced trance.

  “Yes,” I answered cautiously as I racked my brain for his surname.

  “Yeah?” Crandall snorted. “Everybody but me and Jack here knows about this guy, but nobody knows his last name.”

  “He liked to go only by his first name,” I responded distractedly.

  “Like Madonna, that nutso?”

  Cocking my head, I considered his comparison. I hadn’t thought of Ricardo as aping Madonna before, but you couldn’t look anywhere for a better miracle marketer, that was for sure. I nodded. “Yeah, like Madonna. Or Cher, I guess.”

  He flapped his notebook within an inch of my nose. “Hey, don’t go knocking Cher. I like her.”

  “Uh, okay.” I tried to imagine this gum-smacking, insensitive, foul-mouthed, paunchy, redneck tough guy as a Cher fan. Go figure.

  “So, you gonna tell us his last name, or we gonna have to pull it out with tweezers?”

  “Speaking of tweezers,” said another plainclothes cop who walked through the office door, opening and closing the tweezers in my direction like mini crocodile jaws. I didn’t want to think of what he was going to do with those.

  “His name was Ricardo Montoya,” I blurted.

  The tweezer cop joined Jackson Scythe at the desk, plucked up a few hairs, and put them into a plastic bag before walking out.

  “Know anybody who had a beef with Ric?” Smack. Smack.

  “No.” I shook my head. “But I wasn’t as close to Ricardo as I once was. We were old friends, we ran into each other occasionally, by accident or when one of us wanted a favor…” Scythe appeared to be ignoring us, reading over the papers in front of him. But I knew he was listening closely. I could feel that intense focus. He thought he was tricky, but he couldn’t fool me.

  “Favor? That wouldn’t be sexual favors, would it?” Crandall asked with a leer that compressed his face into layers of gray-brown fleshy folds.

  Guess I didn’t remind him of his daughter anymore.

  “No, it wouldn’t,” I snapped a little too vehemently. Scythe looked up, met my eyes neutrally, and looked back down.

  “Why? Was Ricky here a hoto?” While looking askance at the body, Crandall emphasized the Tex-Mex word for homosexual in such a way that he thought was cool and I thought was ignorant.

  “No,” I said too forcefully. “He was not. He had lots of…” What would be accurate while not too telling here? Sex? Girlfriends? Female bed partners? “Dates. With girls. I mean, women.”

  “You one of those ‘dates’?” Crandall put in knowingly.

  “No.” I kept to myself that it wasn’t for lack of trying on Ricardo’s part. I was getting smarter. Surely, the cops would’ve seen somewhere in my rebuff a motive for murder. I had enough trouble having apparently furnished the murder weapon.

  “What’s this ‘old friend’ sh…uh…stuff, then? I mean, was he your old man’s bud or something?”

  “Yes, perhaps Claude knew him,” Scythe offered from across the room. I wondered why the Claude farce seemed to bother him so much. His verbal shot flew on past Crandall, who wrinkled his forehead for a moment and decided figuring it out wasn’t worth the effort.

  “I don’t have any old man,” I retorted, ignoring Scythe’s comment.

  “So.” Crandall smirked. “You and Ricky here really weren’t old friends, then, were you?”

  His point was slowly beginning to dawn on me, like the sun through a foggy day in Transylvania.

  “Why? Do you think a woman can’t be friends with a man unless she knows him by association through a husband or she goes to bed with him?”

  “Right.” Crandall double-smacked with pleasure at his universal wisdom.

  “Then you’re an idiot.”

  Jackson Scythe emitted a heavy sigh but didn’t look up. Somehow, I sensed the sigh was directed at me instead of Crandall.

  Crandall couldn’t have been more surprised by my attack if I’d kicked him in the groin. He blinked and looked for an instant like he might cry. A teary redneck Cher fan. I was disgusted to find regret welling up in my throat. It derailed my feminist lecture. “Look,” I said to Crandall. “Ricardo gave me my first job out of high school, let me have flexible hours to finish college. Then he lent me seed money to get my salon business started, which I’ve since paid back, with interest that he didn’t ask for. He is—was—what I call a friend. I don’t give a damn what you call it.�
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  Crandall had recovered rather quickly and, ignoring my sentimentality, zeroed in. “Why the hell would he bankroll the competition?”

  “You don’t understand.” I shook my head, then explained. “Ricardo didn’t have competition.”

  “What d’ya mean? There’s a barbershop on every corner. A haircut’s a haircut.”

  “That’s not true.” I glanced at Scythe, whose attention intensified a few degrees.

  “Ay-yi.” Crandall dismissed me with one paddycake-shaped, hairy hand. “You’re just saying that because you’re a barber.”

  “No, I’m saying it because I know the business, and I knew Ricardo. Our hair is very important to us. A study done by a Yale University professor not long ago backs that up—within the first three seconds of meeting someone, we develop a first impression entirely from that person’s hair.”

  “Nuh-uh,” Crandall argued as he looked in the mirror at his own Marine-issue style—dishwater-brown hair clipper-cut on the sides with number ½ blade complete with flattop.

  I continued, “That’s what the study said, and I believe it. Think of how differently you might approach a witness who has a bleached mohawk versus one who has a natural brunet bouffant. People will go through a lot to stick with a stylist. I know women who flew in from around the state just to get their hair done every six weeks at one of Ricardo’s salons. A lot of us have that kind of customer loyalty. But Ricardo went a step further. Going to Ricardo’s was more than a trip to the beauty salon; it was a social event, and ultimately a bragging right.”

  That silenced the room for a moment. Then Crandall snapped a bubble in his mouth. His eyes were lit up like he’d hit the jackpot. I didn’t know I’d been that convincing. “So, sounds like you have plenty of reason to be jealous of him. Your beauty shop’s not doing as hot, huh?”

  I fought the urge to give a lesson in the difference between jealousy and envy to this lughead who thought anybody with a pair of scissors could style hair. Instead, I answered the question. “My salon is doing just fine, thank you. I admired Ricardo’s business acumen, but I wasn’t envious of it.”

  Scythe, who’d been following the conversation without comment, now asked, “What did Ricardo say to you over the phone?”

  “It was jumbled and didn’t make much sense. His voice sounded weak, but I thought it was because…”

  Scythe’s eyebrows rose, way too slowly to be considered appropriate. He knew it, too. “Because?” he finally prompted.

  “Because I thought he was with a date.”

  “You heard someone else’s voice?”

  “No, I guess I just assumed it, from his reputation and the breathlessness of his tone.”

  “You have an active imagination.”

  If you only knew, I thought. A light in his eyes sparked as if he did know.

  “So, he never confirmed he’d seen anyone that night, not even the client he was expecting?”

  “No, he said something about danger, about pudding, and about me taking care of what was his.”

  “What did he mean about danger? Was he specific? Are you two into some dealings together?”

  “I don’t know. No and no.”

  Scythe stared at me a beat longer, then turned to Crandall.

  “Make a note to check with the doc about pudding in the stomach contents.”

  My eyes stole to the clock set in the center of Ricardo’s mirrored ceiling. It intrigued me; I’d never seen anything like it. Its foot-long gold chrome hand showed just five minutes shy of seven-thirty a.m.

  “Damn,” I muttered. “I have an appointment coming in, and no one’s there to open up until eight.”

  Jackson gauged me with a look, then sent some telepathic message to Crandall, who gave his gum a break to grunt and shove his notebook in the outside pocket of his 1970s polyester navy-blue blazer, the elbows of which were polished to a tacky shine. I wasn’t sure whether his grunt was assent or indigestion.

  “So, I can go?”

  Crandall smacked and nodded. “Yeah. You know the drill.”

  Drill? What drill? The only drill I knew about was the one in my dreams, and surely Crandall wasn’t referring to it. I stole a look at him and dismissed the thought. I tried to catch Scythe’s eye, but he was reading a piece of paper on the desk. I could feel him taking in our conversation on another level, as if he were storing it for future contemplation.

  “No,” I admitted carefully. “What drill?”

  “Don’t leave town. And don’t go trying to do a chemical peel on those fingerprints. We’re gonna require those at a near juncture in time. Unless you’ve done some business with us before. Then that won’t be necessary.”

  My heart banged up against the bottom of my throat. I pivoted from the smirking Crandall to meet Jackson Scythe’s eyes. They’d warmed to a polar summer. Maybe I wasn’t in trouble after all. “We go through a process of elimination on fingerprints. Ricardo’s. Yours. Anyone else you can think of who might have touched the brush at your shop before Ricardo took it?”

  I shook my head, feeling a little lightheaded with relief. Why had I been so tense? I didn’t have any reason to feel guilty. Guess I just didn’t trust the justice system to spare the innocent.

  Scythe left the papers on the desk and walked up to me, pulling his wallet out of his back pocket. Lucky wallet. He extracted his business card and handed it to me without a word.

  “Great, I’ll add this to my little black book,” I mumbled.

  The icy-blues moved a few degrees closer to the equator. “You do that.”

  “Now that all the pleasantries are over, hotshot, let’s get to work,” Crandall grumbled as he ambled over to the desk. He sucked in a bubble.

  “Hey, get away from there, Crandall,” the fingerprint tech piped up in what sounded like an angry Chihuahua’s bark. “You’re spraying gum spit all over that desk. Steer clear until I’m done, or I’ll be using this brush on you.”

  Everyone was making jokes about the brush—even me—and I suddenly felt the tears welling up in my eyes. Blinking them away quickly, I swallowed the lump rising in my throat. What a time to get emotional. Scythe would think it was a sudden onslaught of guilt.

  “I’m real scared,” Crandall groused, but he did move away from the desk to study the phone in the righthand corner of the room. “Why’d he have so many phones? I hope to hell they all aren’t different lines, or we’ll be knee-deep in fu…uh…effing paperwork.”

  I’d been watching Crandall hard, in order to get my grief under control, but I suddenly realized Jackson Scythe had been watching me. “Well?” he said.

  What was he after? I looked down at my left hand, which I’d forgotten was holding the barf bag. I handed it, unused, back to him. It was the perfect way to lighten the moment. I forced a dazzling smile. “Thanks.”

  “You keep it. Never know when it might come in handy.”

  What did that mean? He still looked expectant, if a six-foot-three great stone face with dry-ice eyes can show such an emotion.

  Though not usually patient, I found myself standing there, not moving a muscle, just to bug him.

  Finally, he cleared his throat. “I was hoping to get your card, Miz Sawyer.”

  I flashed a grin—a real one this time. “I thought you guys were Big Brother, had all citizens’ vitals in a database.”

  “We don’t always like the trouble of searching it, and we often don’t have the time when we need an answer to something.”

  “I’m worth the time and trouble,” I threw over my shoulder as I walked out the door in the wake of his disbelief, the Chihuahua’s giggle, and Crandall’s Juicy Fruit snort.

  I know it was stupid in light of the power of his position and especially in light of his gorgeousness, but I couldn’t help myself. Pomposity and arrogance wrapped up in testosterone do that to me.

  five

  JOLIE DUPONT’S GOLD LEXUS WAS IN THE CRAMPED six-car parking lot off McCullough, next to my house, but I hadn’t seen
her standing at the main door of the salon. Nor was she at the back door, which led to the living quarters section of my old home. I didn’t want to incur the dogs’ mournful gazes through the kitchen window, so I parked the truck and walked along McCullough to unlock the door to the salon. I glanced down at my Cinderella watch and saw it was twenty minutes after seven. Damn, the day’s schedule was shot to hell. Especially if Jolie had lost patience and had walked down two blocks to the Bake ’N Brew for a cappuccino and a croissant. She’d return in the middle of my eight o’clock and expect to be worked in.

  I fished for the keys I’d absentmindedly thrown back into my cavernous black leather tote. Far from vogue, it resembled a Mafia wife’s shopping bag. I’d tried other, smaller purses and wound up putting as much in them, so that it looked as if I were walking around carrying a sausage on a string. Finding stuff in there was hell, too. So I gave up fashion and carried the tote around with me, along with all the necessities, including a battery-powered curling iron in case I needed a touch-up or ran into a customer who did (don’t laugh, it happens more often than you think), dog biscuits in case the girls were with me, and pepper spray. Ever since I bought the little canister after our neighborhood flasher opened his coat for me, I’ve been dying to use it to spray him where it hurts. So far, he’d denied me the fun by hanging out (literally) nine blocks north, nearly to where Monte Vista becomes the incorporated and exclusive city of Olmos Park. He must’ve been ready for a couple of square meals and a bed. Those Olmos Park cops would collar him for stepping foot in their city limits. He’d have to do a lot more than showing his hot dog to get the attention of the SAPD. They had gangbangers, drive-bys, domestics, and chop shops to worry about. Not to mention a dead hairdresser now. A homeless flasher wasn’t tops on their priority list.