The Brush Off

by Laura Bradley

  “Hey, I’ve got a deal. I’ll promise not to stick my nose into your secrets after you die if you stick your hand in there”—I nodded toward the hole—“and get out whatever is in that box.”

  Trude, nose wrinkled, was already shaking her head. “There’s spiders. Plus, I’ll get dirty.”

  Okay. I guess her secrets weren’t that incriminating. Darn. So, I would have to risk my life instead. I held my breath and reached back in, feeling for the latch or, worse luck, a lock. After imagining at least half a dozen encounters with brown recluses, I found it on the short side. It was my lucky day—a simple, unlocked latch. My heart pounded. I popped it and lifted the lid. Tentatively, I tiptoed my fingers inside, remembering the bowls of peeled grapes that felt like eyeballs at the haunted house the Daleys ran in Dime Box every year in high school.

  My hand shrank back for a minute.

  Sometimes I wished I didn’t have such a good imagination.

  Eyeballs and spiders shoved out of my mind, I made contact with the contents—slick photo stock and news-print. Something that felt like hair.

  My hand had already drawn back instinctively, scraping my forearm along the top edge of the hole. Ouch.

  “What is it?”

  “I felt hair.”

  “Hair, like on something alive?” Trudy grimaced and backed up a few steps. Guess I couldn’t talk her into grabbing whatever was in there. I should’ve said it felt like a silk negligee trimmed in fur. Maybe then she would’ve reached in to get it. I wished I thought faster on my feet.

  “Hair like on something that used to be alive, anyway. It didn’t move when I touched it.” I drew in a deep breath and stuck my hand back in, gathering up as much as I could in one handful. As I was drawing it out, I felt tiny feet crawling on the back of my hand. Ack. My elbow flexed faster than the hammer of a gun, dumping my booty all over the floor. Dozens of photos and a news clipping scattered. No hair. Great. Before I could think too long about it, I stuck my hand back in and grabbed the hair, throwing it out of the hole.

  It was a nine-inch lock of straight black hair—human—tied with a purple bow. It smelled like lavender.

  I looked up at Trudy. Her eyebrows hovered around her hairline. She looked at the mystery hair and at me and back again. “This is weirder than a dead rat,” she observed.

  “Yeah, who would’ve guessed we’d be wishing for a dead rat,” I said as I stared at the odd collection of things at my feet.

  I rolled off my haunches and onto the floor. Trudy joined me. The newsprint was yellowed. I unfolded it carefully and read the date aloud. “It’s twenty-four years old.” The article was about the death of a local scion of San Antonio society, sixty-one-year-old Paul Johnstone. He resembled a toad dressed in a monkey suit. Not a handsome man but apparently a generous one. The article described him as one of the city’s premier philanthropists—seemingly supporting every nonprofit artistic enterprise in town at the time—from museums to dance troupes to botanical gardens to choirs. The directors of such were quoted as saying art in San Antonio was much poorer with his loss. I guessed so. Literally and figuratively. Especially since his wife was quoted as saying her husband had been in the process of reviewing the allocations of his donations. She hinted the recipients in the past might be disappointed because the money would be going elsewhere.

  “Elsewhere,” I muttered aloud. “Yeah, I bet right in her pockets.”

  The story continued on a page stapled to the first, including a three-year-old wedding photo of the couple. He looked the same as he did in the first photo. His pretty blond wife, Sarah, looked about eighteen.

  “Talk about May-September romance,” Trude said with a little giggle-snort. “Try January first–December thirty-first romance.”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” I admonished. “Besides, I’m sure it was love.”

  “How did he die?” Trudy asked.

  It was a carefully written obit, which made me wonder if Johnstone had supported the newspaper as well. Finally, we found it buried on the back of the second page, barely escaping the city editor’s scissors to make the page.

  “He was found unconscious in his study near midnight, his brandy half drunk. It doesn’t say who found him. We can assume wife, maid, or butler. He died en route to the hospital.”

  “It sounds like a heart attack or maybe a stroke.”

  “It sounds like an episode of Murder, She Wrote. Maybe the butler did it.”

  “Quit being so suspicious.”

  “Well, why did Ricardo have it in here? You think he was good friends with a member of high society two and a half decades ago? That was before he started his first salon.” I did some mental math. “He started his first salon the next year. So, at the time this was written, he was still a south side nobody.”

  We stared at the article in silence for a few minutes. It didn’t make any more sense. I reached for the stack of photos. One was a snapshot of a dark-haired woman in her twenties who was looking at someone away from the camera. The wind blew her hair back from her face. She was laughing and glowed with happiness. She looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t place her.

  “This could be her hair,” Trudy pointed out, wagging the lock at the photo.

  I nodded and gathered up the rest of the photos, all of which were smaller. There were at least two dozen of what looked like school photos of the same black-haired Hispanic boy from kindergarten to high school. It was the young man whose framed photo hid the secret compartment in the closet wall. Why did Ricardo have a photo history of a boy? Handsome but serious, he looked like he carried the world on his shoulders.

  “You think this is her son?” Trudy asked, holding the photo of the woman next to the photo of the boy at maybe twelve.

  “Yes, he looks like her through the mouth and the eyes,” I agreed. “Although maybe that’s just what we want to believe. Then at least two of these three things would have some connection to each other.”

  “I think I know who she is,” Trudy said, cocking her head as she studied the photo of the woman.

  “Who?”

  “She looks like a younger version of Senator Villita’s wife. I just saw her on the noon news doing a piece on fashion in Washington, D.C. She was saying that they really are going more for the traditional lately. What with the ecomony in a slump and the threat of terrorism, we as a nation need to feel some security. My new Girl’s World said the same thing about skirt length.”

  “Trudy,” I snapped, “enough about the fashion.” I squinted at the photo. Celine Villita was my client Jolie Dupont’s best friend. I’d met her a couple of years ago, when Jolie had brought her in for an emergency ’do since her regular stylist was ill. I certainly hadn’t seen her smile—the woman was way too uptight for that—but it could be the same person twenty years later.

  Why did Ricardo have an old photo of another man’s wife? Long-lost sister? Long-lost lover? Current lover?

  Was this the reason Jolie didn’t want me digging into Ricardo’s past? To save her friend from an embarrassing revelation or worse? “How long have the Villitas been married?” I wondered aloud, not really expecting an answer from the heavens.

  “Oh, oh!” Trudy chirped. “I know that because Gigi Gleason asked her that in the interview I watched. They celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary last year.”

  “So all this”—I waved my hand over the photos and the newspaper article—“happened about the same time. Some old rich guy dies. Some one-day-will-be-a-senator’s-wife laughs in a picture. Some little kid is born. A boy who has grown up to have his photo hung in Ricardo’s closet on the wall.”

  “Maybe Ricardo swings both ways, and this is his young lover,” Trudy offered with a quick grin.

  “Okay, you made your point. I’m doing too much guessing. I need to go see Celine Villita.”

  “If she’ll see you.”

  “If she won’t, then we know we’re barking up the wrong tree and this photo is not of her. Because she’s got to be nervo
us as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs wondering if the police are going to stumble upon whatever is the secret she and Ricardo shared.”

  “But even if we can make Celine Villita and Ricardo fit somehow,” I continued, “I still don’t see any middleaged Anglo man who’d wear tennis whites and meet Ricardo at a transvestite club. Do you?”

  Trudy thought for a while. It was so scary-looking I almost made her stop. “Just Paul Johnstone, and he’s dead.”

  “Maybe his ghost came to Illusions,” I offered under my breath.

  Trudy brightened. “Maybe. Let’s call Zorita and ask her.”

  “Enough with her, already!”

  “She’d probably be able to help more if you’d just let her.” Trudy pouted.

  “Probably. My loss.”

  Rising up on my knees, I put everything back, latched the box, and replaced the hole covering.

  “Are you crazy? Aren’t we going to need that in our investigation?” Trudy asked.

  For all my rebellious nature, I was raised a rule follower. “If we really do find who planted the brush in Ricardo’s back and this stuff is vital to proving it, the fact that we removed the evidence will give the defense a big enough loophole for the killer to step through. I don’t want that. We can ferret out the killer, let the police do the catching, and let the lawyers keep him—or her—behind bars.”

  “Lieutenant Scythe would be very proud of you.” Trudy winked at me.

  “Ugh, that almost makes me want to take it.” I straightened up—or, rather, tried to. My back clutched up, and I stumbled into the rack of clothes, my tennis shoe stomping on something in the dark space underneath that crunched like paper. I held on to the rack and tried not to cry. “Trude, reach down under my feet and get whatever I just stepped on.”

  She bent her perfect nubile body down and collected what looked like another old newspaper clipping. “This will teach you to get things out of secret compartments in an orderly manner. It must’ve flown out without us seeing when you were doing your hurricane imitation.”

  “Very funny. Let’s see what it says.”

  It was an old wedding announcement—a photo of Paul Johnstone’s widow and a man more her age, dated just two years after Paul’s death. Mike Van Dyke was a tanned bleached blond, handsome as a movie star, with eyes as dead as a shark’s. Or maybe that’s just what I wanted to see, I cautioned my overactive imagination.

  “I don’t understand why Ricardo had this squirreled away, but at least we know Sarah Johnstone’s new last name.”

  “And we might have found the guy who likes to wear tennis whites,” my fashion maven friend pointed out.

  “He’d look pretty damned good in them.”

  Could it be? But why? Mike Van Dyke wasn’t on the list of clients Zorita had given us. What was he to Ricardo? Another husband of an old lover?

  But the biggest question was, who knew that the fashion-conscious interior designer would be the one to make the two biggest breaks in the case? I was still mulling that over as I replaced the wedding announcement in the hidey hole.

  “What time is it?” I asked Trudy as I clipped the box shut.

  “Wow, time sure flies. It’s already three-thirty.”

  Uh-oh.

  Before I panicked, I reminded myself that Trudy only wore a watch as a fashion statement—this one an elaborate number with a couple hundred colored stones—so I couldn’t be sure it was even set to the right time. I double-checked Cinderella on my wrist, but, sure enough, her hands were pointed due north and slightly south of west. She was smiling. Bitch.

  Okay, now I could panic.

  “Damn,” I swore, calculating our travel time to the church. It would take us at least ten minutes to get back to the car at a dead run and twenty to make it to the church. This wasn’t counting traffic. “I’m going to miss the memorial service if we don’t hustle.”

  Trudy looked from my Nikes to my fuchsia legs to my bare midriff to my sports bra and back down again. “Are you going to give the eulogy in that? ”

  “What choice do I have?” I grabbed her arm and prepared to drag her back to the car.

  Trudy planted her feet, cocked her head, and swiveled her gaze across Ricardo’s wardrobe.

  “No, absolutely not.” I shook my head so hard I felt my brain ricocheting off the sides of my skull. “I will not wear a dead man’s clothes to his own funeral. No way, no how.”

  Famous last words.

  nineteen

  I MIGHT HAVE BEEN ABLE TO SLIP INTO THE CHURCH unnoticed if it weren’t for the sound of the Miata’s tires squealing as Trudy laid about a hundred feet of rubber on the asphalt in front of the building. I might have been able to overcome the initial curiosity of the third of the congregation that was either still on its way in or came out to check for an incoming missile if I hadn’t been wearing every color in the rainbow.

  Speaking of might-have-beens, I might have been able to arrive on time, in a dignified manner, wearing black, and delivered a well-studied, socially acceptable speech about the life of a good, if slightly selfish and more than marginally narcissistic, man, if I hadn’t been so damned curious and driven to find his killer. And if I hadn’t forgotten to keep an eye on the time when I was breaking into his house.

  So much for might-have-beens.

  Instead, I was striding down the center aisle of the Clear Creek Church in scuffed-up Nikes (I fell once in our dash back to the car), a silk Aloha shirt with a wild print of palm trees, hibiscus flowers, flamingos, exotic and scantily clad buxom bathing beauties (it was the only shirt in the closet that had any fuchsia in it, which was Trudy’s requirement, and it covered my heinie, which was my requirement), my hot pink legs flashing with each step. In this get-up, I didn’t think it mattered if my speech was so socially acceptable. I knew Ricardo wanted a sendoff fit for the Salon King of San Antonio, but I’d bet he didn’t expect to be offed with a brush. I felt compelled to change the plan for him.

  The minister was trying—and failing—to hold the congregation’s attention with a passage from the Bible. I’d like to think that the ear-piercing tire squeal was what woke up every news photographer in the place, but this was a jaded bunch, so I imagine my first step in the door was what did it. From wars to wrecks, I’d bet they hadn’t seen anything like me before. At any rate, all the red lights were on and the film running as I plunked myself down in the first pew next to one of the hired actors.

  Father Gallego passed the service off to one of them, who, in a slick script, sprinkled with Bible verses, outlined Ricardo’s perfect life, from his privileged upbringing in Mexico to his success as owner of a small empire. Lies, mostly, but they sure sounded good and made us all wish we could have such a perfect life. Then a delicately beautiful Hispanic actress got up and delivered a heart-stopping description of the lives Ricardo had changed with his support of children’s charities in the city. Much closer to the truth, but it made me wonder why he couldn’t have had one of the organization’s presidents give the speech. Probably because they wouldn’t have made such good sound bites for television.

  I could tell it was nearly my turn, because Father Gallego was glancing nervously my way, hoping, no doubt, that I would disappear before he would have to introduce me. Too bad. He said my name like it tasted rancid, so much for “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Even without the love, I rose bravely and marched to the podium.

  I almost lost my nerve when I saw half my clients and old coworkers in the pews. I regained it suddenly when I caught sight of Scythe and Crandall in the back. Crandall was shaking with pent-up laughter. Scythe was scowling ominously. He’d better not think of telling me what I could and couldn’t do. I’d show him.

  “Today is a day to celebrate.” I paused as a collective gasp ran through the crowd. “That’s why I’m dressed this way. I want to celebrate the life of Ricardo Montoya, businessman, benefactor, and friend. He would want us to remember him with pleasure instead of tears. Think of the legacy he leaves behind—e
very day, hundreds of men and women will have their self-esteem boosted and, through that, their lives improved in countless ways. So smile when you leave here today, smile every time you leave one of his salons, and thank him for what he has done for you.

  “But what can you do for Ricardo? You can help find the one who took him from us by sharing his secrets. I know Ricardo was a private man and never wanted his privacy breached. But did you ever wonder if that was because he was protecting someone or being threatened in some way? Maybe keeping secrets is what got Ricardo killed. What if what you know about his life could get you killed, too?” Another gasp rose, followed by jagged whispers.

  I pointed at a man sitting in the third pew. “What you know might not seem like much, sir, but…”I pointed at a woman on the other side, in the twentieth pew. “If you combine it with what she knows, it might just solve the puzzle that Ricardo’s left with his murder.” The sound of whispering was rising, and I was about to lose them. Scythe stood, and he and Crandall moved to the back wall of the church. Scythe’s laser blues caught me in their sights and pinned me with an intensity that stopped me for a moment. Hey, just watch, he was going to thank me for this later. “I know enough to see some of the patterns on the puzzle but not the whole picture. Help the police get the whole picture. Tell them what you know about Ricardo. Before it’s too late for one of you here today.”