The Brush Off

by Laura Bradley

  Trudy’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head as she looked back at me. I narrowed my eyes at her. “Notice Zorita said would’ve.” Listen to me, it sounded like I was buying into this crap. Argh.

  “I’m going to have to watch you a little more closely from now on, Reyn,” Trudy warned, suddenly the expert.

  Before I could properly unleash some of those vibrant red spikes on my best friend, Zorita stepped back and swept her pudgy arm to grant us entrance to her human fishbowl. “Please, come in.”

  We stepped onto the pine hardwood floor, which—surprise, surprise—was beige and completely bare. I finally noticed the top of a ladder peeking out of a four-foot circular hole in the floor next to the right wall—or the right side of the circle—and what looked like a double handrail, sort of like what helps heave one out of the deep end of a pool. Okay.

  Zorita followed my glance or else read my mind. “That’s where I live. The basement contains my living area, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. Here is where I work.”

  “Ah-ha,” Trudy murmured, impressed.

  “I sit on the highest peak for miles. Nothing distracts me from reading my clients’ auras or seeing through the sky into their future.”

  “Oooh, can you tell me my future?” Trudy asked.

  “Of course, my dear. As soon as we’ve done our business, it would be my pleasure. I’m sure you have a happy road ahead; your wonderful blue aura is that of a healing, spiritual teacher.” She slid a sidelong glance at me before bestowing a beatific smile on Trudy. “And with that confident, affectionate pink in your aura, it’s a good thing she has you at her side.”

  Spiritual? Trudy? Maybe the fashion spirits. Teaching what? The survey results from women’s magazines? “What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded.

  Zorita waved both hands as if to clear smoke. “With all your green and yellow—”

  I’d had about enough of this. “Don’t forget the red.”

  “Yes, and the red.” Zorita nodded grimly. “Spikes.”

  “What’s green and yellow?” Trudy asked.

  “A light green indicates the potential onset of injury. She should be careful for the next few days—”

  “Too late. I already hurt my back.” I grimaced. “Helping Miss Pinky Blue’s husband, it just so happens. Big help she is.”

  Zorita looked unconvinced, pausing just a second before she continued to answer Trudy’s question. “And the yellow, well, that can denote intelligence, success or creativity…”

  I grinned self-righteously.

  “…Or jealousy, selfishness, or negativity, depending on the shade of yellow it is.”

  My grin faded.

  Zorita clapped her hands. “But let’s get on with it. I know why you’ve come.”

  “You do?” I blurted. Well, good, I thought, that will spare me all those tedious questions. She can just come out and tell us who killed Ricardo. Or, sparing that, maybe she’ll hint at the evil forces around him so we can get busy ferreting them out.

  “Yes.” Zorita nodded, then rudely interrupted my grandiose plans. “You’ve come to pay his outstanding bill.”

  “What?” Trudy and I said in unison, although I must admit I sounded much more distressed than she did. With good reason, it turned out. I was the one getting the shakedown.

  “I’ll just go downstairs and get the invoice for you.” She leaned her round body toward the hole in the floor.

  “Wait.” I put a hand on her doughy arm. She looked at my fingers like they were hateful vermin.

  “Please remove your touch. You have a very powerful personality. It interferes with my psychic abilities.”

  I felt a shot of perverse satisfaction and battled with the urge to grab her with the other one and maybe breathe on her real hard or shoot her with some red spikes. Instead, I remembered we needed to use her psychic abilities, so I dropped my hand. “I just want to know why you think I’m going to pay Ricardo’s bill.”

  “Because you’re inheriting most of his estate, that’s why.”

  I snorted in disbelief. “I don’t think so.”

  “I know so.”

  “You have a copy of his will?”

  “No!” Her hand flew to her chest like I’d aimed for her heart. “I don’t need one.”

  “Okay, so you’re guessing.”

  Trudy, who’d been watching our conversation like it was the final round at Wimbledon, gasped. I suppose I’d hit one into the net. “Reyn, that’s blasphemous. Psychics don’t guess.”

  Zorita threw Trudy an approving look before shaking her head at me. “She’s a skeptic, my dear. Don’t try to protect me. We deal with this every day.”

  “Yes, but not from someone who wants your help,” Trudy pointed out all too accurately. Damn her. She could be such an airhead and then with no warning act like she belonged to Mensa.

  “My help?” Zorita asked, stunned.

  Trudy looked from Zorita to me and back again. “Yes. We want you to help us find out who murdered Ricardo.”

  Zorita swallowed hard, closed her eyes, and began hyperventilating. Sweat beaded on her upper lip. I thought she might be having a heart attack, so I took a step forward. Her left arm flew up, hand splayed out in front of her. “Stay back.”

  Yikes. I got the creepy-crawlies up and down my arms. Trudy looked completely—and happily—entranced.

  After about a minute, Zorita’s eyelids lifted with the speed of a sloth on quaaludes. Sweat now dripped down the corners of her mouth. Ick. Her dark eyes widened until we could see the whites all the way around. “You do not want to know who killed Ricardo.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because when you take that dark road, I don’t see you coming out.”

  Then, with a quickness that was stunning for one so heavy and short-limbed, she spun and disappeared down into the hole.

  thirteen

  I IMAGINE THAT TO ANYONE PSYCHICALLY TUNED, I looked like a human firecracker right about then, what with my aura all green and yellow and red spikes flying out with lightning speed. Zorita had never reappeared, having hollered up through the hole in her floor that she would forgive “my” bill if we would just leave. My bill, my rear. I guessed that by predicting I was about to inherit Ricardo’s estate, she was trying to get me not only to cough up the money for his last reading but to beg her to read my future as a millionairess as well. She predicted the future wrong there, didn’t she? I wasn’t going to ask squat.

  I was going to let my faithful assistant ask instead.

  “Zorita,” Trudy cajoled, perched on her spike heels on the edge of the hole in the floor. “We so need your help. The police really don’t seem to be on the right track, and we’d hate to see the person who did this to Ricardo get away with no punishment.”

  “We all will meet divine punishment for our sins one day,” came the response from the hole. “The guilty one will pay that way.”

  Great, a Bible-thumping psychic. I thought those who relied on otherworldly talents were supposed to be the spawn of Satan or some such. At least, that’s what Great-Granny Penscik always warned me about. My luck to have encountered the only psychic in this zip code who wanted to let divine redemption instead of mortal law deal with a homicidal maniac.

  “All we really need is a list of Ricardo’s clients. Not for all the salons, of course, what a chore that would be,” Trudy explained patiently. “We would so appreciate it if you could pass along just the names of the women he still personally serviced.”

  Trudy caught my jolt and blushed, stammering down the hole. “I mean, I mean, you know, the ones he still did the hairdos for.”

  “I know what you meant, Trudy,” Zorita sent back up the hole. “With your truly good heart, you aren’t the kind of woman to imply otherwise, although your friend is. However, you are a good enough friend to her to do whatever she wanted you to do. And to say whatever she wanted you to say.”

  She was right, of course, on both counts. Maybe there was something to this psych
ic stuff, after all.

  “Hey!”

  Trudy was mad now, spitting mad, as we call it back in Dime Box. It didn’t happen often, but I loved to see it happen when it did. I had the short fuse, she had the long one. It took a lot to push her over the edge, and Zorita just had. No doubt, there were red spikes shooting out at that moment amid all her placid blue and pink, although it would take someone more psychically tuned than I to ascertain them. Imagining them was enough for me. I grinned.

  Trudy stomped over to the edge of the hole and hollered at the top of her lungs. “If being a good friend is a bad color aura in your book, then you can have it, lady, because I will keep being a good friend no matter what color it turns my aura. Right now, you ought to be reading whatever is the most threatening color to you, because I am about to crawl my heinie down there and get the list of Ricardo’s clients from you, whatever it takes. So what’s the color for stubbornly persistent and fiercely loyal?”

  I was impressed.

  So was Zorita, apparently. Because within a minute, a sheet of what looked like hand-beaten papyrus decorated with dried violets appeared at the hole’s opening. A list of about a dozen names and corresponding addresses had been written down on it in a crooked mess amid the squashed stems and petals. What was the purpose of paper like this? Hmmm. Before I could entertain too many thoughts of the deep meaning of violets and the scary curses they might represent, Trudy plucked it out of her hand and mince-marched on her spikes toward the door, cocking her head at me to get a move on. She is a bossy britches when she gets mad.

  I followed. She had gotten the goods.

  “Before you go off on this ill-advised journey of discovery,” came Zorita’s disembodied voice rising from the hole, “I have to warn you…”

  Trudy paused in mid-mince. I kept going. My hand was on the doorknob when I realized Trudy just might not be able to resist asking the question Zorita wanted asked. I spun and tried to get Trudy’s attention with my zip-the-lip motion, but her gaze was glued to the hole in the floor.

  “Warn us about what?”

  I groaned.

  “You must know, Trudy, not everyone on the list is a client. They are the names that came to me. And holding that list is shaking hands with fate.”

  “Uh-huh,” I muttered. “A fate named Violet.”

  Shooting me a glare, Trudy put her finger to her lips.

  “Whose fate?” she asked the hole.

  “The fates of six people. Leave the list here, it goes one way. Take the list with you, it goes another.”

  “Which way is it supposed to go? One way or another?”

  “Ah, Trudy,” she said, buying time as Trudy’s insistence clearly surprised her. “The age-old question.”

  I silently mimicked what she’d said so pompously. Trudy glared. We waited. When Zorita added no more, Trudy asked, “Okay, I guess what you’re telling me is we don’t know which way fate is supposed to go. Which are the six people, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No duh,” I said under my breath. Trudy threw me a warning look.

  Zorita wasn’t finished. “But I do know that many things die in the face of truth.”

  I grunted. “Yeah, like lies.”

  “Lies and more,” Zorita intoned, having heard me, apparently. “Happiness, peace, and, often, lives.”

  Trudy gasped. “Someone’s gonna die?”

  I rolled my eyes, reached over, grabbed the violet papyrus, and pulled open the door. “Turn on your brain, Trude. Someone’s already dead.”

  “I mean someone else besides Ricardo,” Trudy snapped at me as she made a dive for the list. I held it up over my head, wrenching my back but successfully keeping it out of her hands. I dashed for the truck.

  “If we take this list, Zorita, is someone else gonna die?” I heard Trudy call back into the house.

  The front door banged closed in Trudy’s face, and the dead bolt shot. Now, I never saw Zorita’s rotund shape rise up out of the hole, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t, right? And I wasn’t telling Trudy the windowed room backlit with the setting sun looked empty when I jumped into the truck, cranked the engine, and honked her out of her daze.

  We didn’t talk much on the way back. Trudy was so spooked she could hardly put a sentence together, and I was so frustrated that I wasn’t able to answer one as sensitively as I should have for my pinky-blue friend, anyway. Our one attempt to converse went something like this.

  “Trude, can you read me the names on the list?” I reached to retrieve it from the side pocket of the truck door.

  “I, I’m not…ah…I don’t think we should have it.”

  “Trudy, please! I am dying to know who’s on it.”

  “Reyn! Don’t…I mean, you can’t…say that word.”

  “Word? What word?” I really was stumped for a moment, before bursting out, “Dying! Dying! Dead! Die! Died! Maybe I’ll really do it, and then all the suspense will be over, and you can snap out of this trance, you freak.”

  Then she started crying. “I’m (sniff)…I’m sorry I care (snort) about you. Finding Ricardo’s killer isn’t worth losing your life.”

  “Maybe not, but is it worth getting me hooked up with Detective Darling?”

  A glimmer came into her eyes then, and I thought I had her back, but her eyes filled up with tears. “You can’t date him if you’re dead (intense sobbing).”

  I stopped trying after that. Dusk fell fast, and the stretch of Highway 281 we were on was so busy I couldn’t even turn on my interior light and take a look at the violet-pitted page. It would have to wait until we got home. I weaved in and out of traffic, knowing the girls must have their legs crossed in the backseat. I’d intended to let them out to relieve themselves on the top of Zorita’s hill before we started back to the city, but, considering the way our close encounter had ended, I had a vision of them coming out of the woods as a trio of horny toads or armadillos or something worse, so I decided they could hold it until we got home.

  Chardonnay was whining in my ear by the time we turned into my driveway. I parked, snatched up off the console the damned barf bag Scythe had slipped me at the crime scene, stuffed the violet list in the rear waist-band of my skirt, opened the back door for the girls, and walked around to the iron gate at the side of the house to let them into the backyard. Trudy had gotten out and walked around the left side that front McCullough, where the salon parking lot is, presumably to get into her car and go home to Mario. Just as well. I wanted to review the list alone and collect my thoughts about it before I got her input. I crunched my way across the grass, littered with the hard, waxy leaves of the three-hundred-year-old oak trees in my front yard. They were evergreens that molted spring and fall, and I thought with some sense of relief that it would be pretty hard to sneak up on my house while the trees were shedding their leaves. See, sometimes it pays to be a lazy gardener.

  I heard Trudy talking to someone in the parking lot. A baritone someone. Not the flasher, I hoped, especially hoping it was not the murderer. My heart pounded.

  As I was about to round the fat, blooming gardenia bush that sits at the southeast corner of my house, I heard Trudy giggle. “Lieutenant Scythe, you rascal.”

  Not the flasher; not the murderer, much, much worse.

  “Just telling the truth, ma’am, that’s all.”

  That again. Did he know the truth can kill? Zorita told us so. I leaned into the gardenia bush and peeked through the leaves. He’d shed the sport coat, and his baby-blue knit shirt fit a little too tightly across the chest and biceps and a little too loosely at his abdomen. They need to redesign polo shirts to fit his body type.

  “I just don’t think I look all that good,” Trudy was saying modestly. “I mean, after Reyn dragged me all over the county and beyond today.”

  “I’ve just never seen a woman look so pretty and fresh at the end of the day like you do,” Scythe lied.

  Didn’t Trudy realize that it was night, and night meant it was dark? The s
ecurity light over the salon’s front door was about fifty watts shy of doing any good and only highlighted their shadows. I leaned deeper into the bush. What was Scythe up to?

  “To look so good (tsk), especially after all your cross-county adventures,” he added, saccharine-sweet. “Where all did you say you’d been?”

  Ah-ha. The light might be dim out there, but it lit up in my head. How could Trudy not know he was pumping her for information with his lame flirting? He wasn’t even any good at it. The flirting, that is, although there was no proving that by the way Trudy giggled again. Maybe she was just trying to be polite.

  She twisted a lock of hair around her forefinger. “We went—”

  “Shopping.” I extracted myself from the bush and swung around the corner very suavely and just in time to stop the blabbermouth from spilling our secret.

  They both turned to me. Trudy blushed. “We did?”

  “Shopping for what?” Oh, but that Scythe was quick. Damn him.

  “Uh, baby clothes,” I blurted. Well, I figured the only three things I might know more about than he did were salon products, feminine hygiene products, or baby stuff. I discarded the first one, since he might know more than I thought he did, considering it was his business because of Ricardo’s murder. I discarded the second, because I didn’t want even to mention anything that remotely had to do with sex in front of him. So that left the third. And, yes, I did consider all this in the approximately five seconds it took to answer his question. As I said, a chaotic mind but a swift one.