Sprayed Stiff

by Laura Bradley

  I dreamed about mutilated animals with clown makeup, Lexa in Valentino in a Jag running the Junior League, and Scythe marrying Zena Zolliope. When I woke up surrounded by my dogs on the couch, I was humming a song that had something to do with an armadillo, a cowboy boot with a golden heel, and a palomino Appaloosa in a limo stocked with Perrier on their way to Bismarck. I was a little afraid that somebody had slipped something funny into the canapés I’d tasted at the Junior League function when I heard the second verse of the song and realized I wasn’t crazy or high—it was coming through the half-open window on the Ugartes’ side of my house. Rick Ugarte had evidently been up working all night, and this was the result. My neighbor was a songwriter, once of rock but now, thanks to my complaints, of country. He’d sold one about me and my mostly fictional shenanigans. Lyle Lovett was said to be interested in a couple of others, including this one. I’d bet money.

  I threw a grumbling Beau off my legs and stretched. Her two daughters jumped up and licked me before running to the door to go out. In my bra and panties, I shuffled over and opened the door, then ground some Costa Rican coffee beans and set the pot to brew. I wandered back into the living room and swore. I’d shucked the designer raccoon wear before passing out, and Char had apparently slept on it, chewing a little on one cuff sometime during the night. I grimly examined the dog-slobbered fur and knew my first stop had to be the miracle-worker dry cleaner. I could guess how much outfits straight off Milan’s catwalk cost, and I’d have to sell my truck to replace this hideous thing.

  What a great start to a Monday.

  Sipping my coffee, I found the address of Shauna’s business, Makeup Magic with Shauna, in the yellow pages. Reviewing my appointments, I decided I could pay her a visit about ten that morning between a perm and a foil highlight. As for Scythe, I hadn’t quite decided how to tell him my treasure trove of information. Maybe Shauna would implicate herself or, better yet, confess, and I wouldn’t have to tap-dance around Annette’s involvement. He could pull out my toenails, and I wasn’t ratting her out. I’d decided that when she pulled out her key ring with a black and white rabbit’s foot. When I’d asked where she’d gotten it, she flashed this queer little smile that reminded me she’d disposed of Percy’s mutilated gift animals. Uh-oh. Maybe she was into recycling.

  I hadn’t completely disposed of the notion that she might be on Percy’s list of girlfriends and was setting me off on a wild-goose chase with the story about mean Mexicans and sexy Shauna. Frankly, ambitious Annette scared me a little, so I was hoping someone else would pan out as a murder suspect.

  The doorbell rang me out of my reverie. I grabbed a gingham tablecloth out of the buffet drawer and wrapped it around me. As I passed the mirror, I saw my reflection and yipped out a short scream. My plastered-down flip-out do had, with eighty percent humidity, ten pounds of hairspray, and six hours on a couch pillow, morphed into something out of Aliens Among Us.

  The bell was ringing wildly, then something thumped against the door. It flew open and my new receptionist, Bettina Huyn, having shouldered open the door, stumbled into the foyer. The door latch hung at a funny angle. So much for the lock. I guess I’d have to get Bettina a key to my house as well as the salon if she insisted on doing any more Rambo imitations. “Are you okay, Reyn?” she asked in a deep baritone. “Why did you scr—” Then she saw me and, hand to chest, screamed before she could finish.

  “What the hell happened to your hair, girlfriend?” Bettina moaned, having recovered her feminine alto. Bettina (aka Bert) was an attractive Korean undergoing a series of operations to change her into a woman. She worked as a dancer at a transvestite club at night and for me during the day. Trudy said she gave my salon’s name, Transformations, a new meaning. As a small-business owner, I had bad luck with receptionists—I hadn’t been able to keep one more than six months. My last one, Sherlyn Rocca, was getting close to setting a new record when I found her doing the nasty on the reception desk with the Redken supplier. That might not have been a firing offense, except that the Biolage supplier walked in on them and got jealous—it was apparently his “turn”—and knocked the Redken guy through the original front window of my historic residence, which cost a fortune to replace. It had pissed me off.

  Bettina needed the money, so I was giving her a go. So far, so good, except for the days she didn’t wake up early enough to put her woman together and had to come as a man. Some of my clients thought I had two receptionists. Some thought they were brother and sister. Some just stayed confused.

  “The line at Starbucks was ten miles long, so I came over to get a decent cup of java so I could function this morning. You know”—she paused—“gingham really isn’t your pattern.” Bettina eyed my makeshift shift, then reviewed the wreck of my living room, waving toward the suit on the couch. “What died?”

  “A raccoon. I had to go to a Junior League party last night with Daffy, Trude, and Charlotte.”

  “Hey, maybe those society girls are a lot more interesting than I gave them credit for, what with animal sacrifices, New Age hairdos, and gingham togas.”

  “Very funny.” I rolled my eyes. “The corpse on the couch is part of Daffy’s million-dollar designer suit that Char got a bit too friendly with.”

  Bettina scooped it up. “I’ve got a tailor who can do wonders. I’ll make it right.”

  “Thank you. I owe you.”

  “What you owe me for is not taking a blackmail photo of you right now, girlfriend.” She chuckled. “Wouldn’t Scythe pay the big bucks to see you this way!”

  “Don’t even think about it,” I warned. I had enough trouble getting him to take me seriously.

  “Nah, I like you owing me. I’ll take this over at my lunch hour.” With a wave, she vanished into the salon.

  In the shower, I shampooed my hair fourteen times to clear it of the hairspray, then re-created my Meg Ryan messy with a sigh of relief. I’d tried for years to cover up my freckles, and at thirty gave up. Now I just wore the minimum of makeup. I dabbed on transparent foundation that I used just for the sunscreen value, and mascara, a must, because God shorted me on eyelashes. If you want proof that life is not fair, just look at my brothers, Dallas and Chevy. Their lashes are so long they brush their eyebrows. Grown women swoon when those boys blink. Without mascara, no one could tell if I blinked. They got the thick, black, naturally curly hair, too, the bastards. My sisters and I got the fine, straight, dirty-blond hair. I find being naturally blond terribly boring, so I dye it various colors. Right now I was going conservative.

  I gave the girls their breakfast and let myself into the salon through the kitchen. A couple of the stylists who work with me were already on the brush. Enrique was rolling a blue-hair’s perm. Cameron was doing her weekly style on a local newscaster. Uh-oh. I’d forgotten Amethyst Andrews came in on Mondays. I tried to slink by. Too late.

  “Reyn?” That fakey newscaster voice always sounded wrong coming out of anything but a TV. The bobbed brunette with the Pan-Cake makeup spread her rose-red lips in a semblance of a smile. “Reyn Mar-ten Sawyer. I need to talk to you.”

  I’d refused to turn on the television or radio this morning because I really didn’t want to hear my name associated with another murder. Being mixed up in Ricardo’s was bad enough, although, ironically, it did increase my business. Life’s warped.

  “How are you, Amethyst?” I’d found in my brief dealings with the on-air talent that shifting the focus back on them was sometimes an effective distraction technique.

  “Fabulous! Thanksforasking! Ratingsareup, you know.”

  She talked that way, running four and five words together to sound like one. I don’t think she ever took a breath.

  “We are now number one at six. Our consultant says it’s the new set and our new investigative segment that he recommended but I think it’s that viewers are tuning in to see the rapport between me and Mark. We’ve developed a trust with the viewership and something strong like that takes time to develop, longer than one
rating period. Don’t you agree?” I would’ve liked to see Amethyst in a conversation with Charlotte. They’d probably talk right over one another like my mother’s sisters.

  “Oh, yes.” I nodded sagely. “Without a doubt.”

  Bettina stuck her head around the corner and called down the hall, “Your eight o’clock is in the chair, Reyn.”

  That wo-man was getting a raise.

  “Oops, gotta go, Amethyst. Talk to you later.”

  Poor Amethyst’s face clouded as she realized that her ego had eaten up her opportunity to get the scoop on Wilma’s murder. “Can I call you later, Reyn?”

  “Anytime.” Call all you want, I won’t answer.

  Jessica Szabo sat in my chair studying a chemistry textbook. She was a hardworking, hard-partying college student who was going to make a great physician someday. She’d been accepted into medical school and was just trying to tie up her hours as an undergrad. Jess always asked for the style worn by the girlfriend of her favorite member of the group Limp Bizkit. Since he always had a different girlfriend, we were always changing her hair. Today she presented a photo from the Internet—I recognized the color as RubyRedSlipper and the cut as a graduated buzz. There was no use trying to talk Jess out of it. I’d tried that before. Instead, I got to work mixing the color.

  “What did the on-air-head want?”

  I smiled at her pun and whispered back, “I never let her get to it, but I’m guessing she wanted to ask me about Wilma Barrister’s murder.”

  “Probably.”

  “Was my name mentioned in the news this morning?”

  She nodded. “They had a view of this grim-looking house and a Terrell Hills cop car out front. They just said she’d croaked, likely from a gunshot wound, and that you were a friend of the family and among those brought in for questioning.”

  Hmm. Could’ve been worse and could’ve been better. I didn’t know whether to thank Scythe for masking the arrest or holler at him for getting my name involved. Oh, well, I guessed I’d gotten myself involved, so I couldn’t expect miracles.

  I was thankful Jess was my appointment this morning. She was not a gossip, too busy with her own life to want to dig around in other people’s, unlike most of my clients. I worked in silence while she went over chemical formulas. As I began to rinse out her color, she asked, “How’s Alexandra holding up?”

  “You know Lexa?”

  “Vaguely.” Jess shrugged. “She was three years ahead of me at Alamo Heights. I hadn’t seen her in years, and met up with her backstage at a Limp Bizkit concert a few months ago. We talked for a few minutes.”

  “Was she there with a bunch of scuzzbags?”

  “No, she was there by herself.”

  “She went by herself to a concert?” It sounded odd.

  “Well, she wasn’t there for Bizkit. She said she was there for one of the bands that opened for them. She was pretty cozy with the bassist, little skinny guy—real polite, though, with old-world manners you usually don’t find at one of those things, believe me.”

  Lexa had done a lot of things to bother her mother, like hang with creeps and listen to headbanger music, but I’d never known her to date any of the pals she picked up. Frankly, I think the idea scared her, like getting romantically involved would be getting in over her head. My heart was pounding at the possibility of another break in the case. One minute I’d had no suspects; now I had at least three. I swallowed and tried to resist hyperventilating. “So they were going out, you think? Lexa and this guy.”

  “The vibes were definitely there.”

  “Do you remember his name? Or the name of his band?”

  She shook her head, and I nearly drowned her with the spray nozzle I’d forgotten to move away from her rotating head. After we’d dried her off, she continued, “I don’t think she ever said his name. And the name of the band escapes me, too. I’m sorry, when I’m around my man I just lose my mind. The name of her boyfriend’s band was something gruesome, though—had to do with death.”

  Swell. I wanted to make sure it was the same guy the Carricaleses had seen. “Dark-haired, pale, thin guy in all black?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  Well, that was definitive. I gave her a thumbnail sketch of Lexa’s general mental state and she only half-listened, with one eye on her book. After I’d shaved her temples one last time and was sweeping her newly red hair off the floor, Jess turned to me as she shinnied into her ripped jean jacket and said, “Oh, yeah, I remember that the band was a regular at Bangers, a club on Sixth Street in Austin.”

  Now, with that, I could go somewhere. Bangers, here I come. But first, a makeover from a potential murderess.

  I’d called Shauna Rollins and asked for an emergency makeover. I’d just wanted to make sure she’d be in her office and alone. But she had been so sweet and agree-able on the phone that I felt guilty for falsifying my reason for seeing her. I reminded myself I was lying for a good cause, clearing Lexa and myself in the process, although the more I found out about Lexa and her secret life, the more I wondered if I shouldn’t stop digging. A couple of reporters, who’d likely gotten run off from the Terrell Hills PD by Manning’s halitosis, were sitting in front of my salon. I escaped through my kitchen and borrowed Bettina’s puce sports car just in case any of the reporters knew my truck.

  Since Monte Vista is adjacent to Alamo Heights, another small city within the big city of San Antonio, I eschewed the highway that ran between the two and cut through neighborhoods. Alamo Heights, like Terrell Hills, is real Old San Antonio and very high-society. It makes historical sense, I suppose. The headwaters of the San Antonio River were the place to be in the seventeenth century, serving as an Indian campground for decades, and later European explorers, missionaries, troops, and visitors congregated there. The area is now home to Brackenridge Park, named after one of the original settlers. To the south is downtown, and to the north are Alamo Heights and Terrell Hills. San Antonio was established as an official city in 1718, but it wasn’t until two hundred years later that the city tried to annex Alamo Heights. The residents wanted to remain unique, so they voted to become a private municipality. It still carries a strong religious influence from being home to Incarnate Word College and the headquarters of the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas.

  I imagined Shauna chose to work where the money for luxuries was, hence the quaint little cottage that housed her business on one of two main drags in the posh 78209 zip code. I parked in front and knocked on the fancy stained-glass door as I let myself in. I walked toward the sound of someone humming “You Are My Sunshine.” A caramel blonde in her late twenties came from the back of the four-room cottage, ponytail swinging, jeweled zoris twinkling, tiered rainbow minidress floating. She smiled, her wide blue eyes guileless, her face open and sweet. Shauna Rollins looked more like an overgrown child than any adult I’d ever seen. She stared at my outstretched hand for a moment, as if she wasn’t sure what to do with it, like she might have hugged me hello instead of giving me the awkward, limp handshake she finally performed.

  “I’m looking for Shauna Rollins,” I said.

  “I’m Shauna. You must be Charade.”

  When I’d heard that my name was in the news again in connection with Wilma’s murder, I knew I had to use an alias to see Percy’s girlfriend. On the phone with Shauna earlier, I’d given my sister’s first name off the top of my head, not realizing what a double entendre it was. “Yes.” I fought to keep a straight face. “That’s me.”

  Her gaze flicked over me. “Boy, you were right. Do you ever need a makeover.”

  I know that sounded rude, but this girl was so damned sweet that it didn’t come across that way at all. It just seemed refreshingly honest. How come it didn’t work that way for me? I said honest things all the time that offended people.

  “Why don’t you have a seat in here”—she waved an arm toward the kitchen she’d converted into makeup central—“and we’ll talk about what kind of lifestyle you lead, so the make o
ver is something that mirrors your personality.”

  Devil horns and Pinocchio’s long nose would work right now. This girl made me feel positively evil for duping her for information.

  “I just want something simple.”

  “Makeup is never simple, Charade. Even the most subtle of cosmetics take a great deal of artistry. Everyone is beautiful in their own way. Bringing out that beauty is just my joy in life.” Smiling, she studied me for a moment, humming a bar of “Everything Is Beautiful.” I felt a little like I was in The Twilight Zone, then felt guilty for being so cynical. “Your hazel eyes are your best feature. I bet we can make them look green or gold or brown depending on our surrounding color choices.”

  I was beginning to think that Annette definitely had some ulterior motive in putting the heat on sweet Shauna. If Percy was having an affair with her, I couldn’t blame him. She was the polar opposite of his demanding, controlling wife. Even if she was the impetus for Percy blowing Wilma away, this girl herself couldn’t have killed a fly, much less a human being. I was here, though; might as well try to dig up some more dirt on Percy. Shauna deserved better than a unibrow troll whose kisses undoubtedly tasted like garlic.

  “Are you cold?” Shauna asked when I didn’t properly suppress my shiver of revulsion.

  “I’m okay. I guess someone just walked over my grave, as my gran used to say.”

  She wrinkled her pretty brow. “Huh?”

  “Oh, it has something to do with alternate universes and our souls existing throughout time.”

  Her brow wrinkled tighter. “I don’t understand.”

  I was afraid she was going to hurt herself. “Never mind. I’m not cold.”

  “Oh, okay.” She nodded, then started humming another bar of “Everything Is Beautiful” as she spun through a color wheel, finding a color and holding it up to my face.