Sprayed Stiff

by Laura Bradley

  “How long have you been doing makeup?”

  “As a business?” she asked. I nodded, and she smiled that wide, hapless grin of hers. “About two months now. My boyfriend set me up in business. It’s a good thing, too, because I didn’t know what I was going to do to make a living. But he said, do what I was good at. I didn’t really want to charge guys for what he always tells me I’m best at”—she paused to blush prettily and giggle—“so I decided to do what I was second-best at—makeup.”

  Okay. Shauna was sweet, but Shauna was stupid. It was beginning to get on my nerves. Thankfully, the telephone rang in another room. She excused herself to answer it.

  I rose and began to scour the room for any clues that Percy was the boyfriend she’d mentioned. I wondered how I could get her to cough up his name. How tricky would I have to be? If it weren’t such an unusual name, I could pretend to have a boyfriend named Percy. I ambled down the hall, looking at the photos presumably of makeover customers. I noticed a room that looked like an office and had nearly passed it by when I did a double take. Was that who I thought it was in a framed photo on the desk? Looking down the hall both ways, I ducked into the office and peered at the photo. It was Annette, arm in arm with Shauna. They looked younger, high-school age, perhaps. Shauna was exhilarated. Annette had forced the smile. Why?

  The girls weren’t talking. I’d have to get the answer elsewhere. No other photos in the room held any familiar faces besides Shauna’s. No Percy. Damn, that would’ve been too easy. I retreated to the hall and peeked into the next room and nearly had a heart attack.

  Clowns.

  Photos of hundreds of clowns lined the walls from ceiling to floor. I walked into the dim room and tripped into a clown dummy. I grabbed him by his stuffed shoulders to keep him from sliding off the hat rack where he hung, and came face-to-face with a familiar face.

  Wilma’s, to be exact.

  I screamed.

  Twelve

  OKAY, SO IT WASN’T WILMA’S FACE. To be precise, it was a face done in the same clown makeup I’d seen on Wilma’s corpse.

  It was still freaky.

  “Are you afraid of clowns?” Shauna asked as she rushed into the room.

  “Of clowns?” I still gripped the poor dummy by the shoulders. “Of course not. I love clowns. In fact, I grabbed this clown for dear life because I saw a…” I paused. “A mouse.”

  “A mouse?! Shauna’s hand went to her throat as she jumped backward. “What happened?”

  “Well,” I explained, making it up as I went along, “the mouse, he ran over my toes and I grabbed this friendly clown to fend off the marauder.”

  Apparently easily distracted from her rodent paranoia by her clown passion, Shauna smiled as she flipped on the light and gazed around the room. “Yes, that’s how I feel about clowns, too. They are wonderful. That’s why I made clown makeup my specialty. I do all the rodeo clowns in South Texas and I’m setting up a schedule of clinics around the country next year.”

  The room was even more shocking in full Technicolor, with the recessed lighting arranged to spotlight the rows and rows of framed photos. My clown friend was still swinging eerily from his hat rack. I shivered again.

  “You are cold. You’re just too polite to admit it. I’ll turn down the air-conditioning.”

  Shauna disappeared again. The phone rang. I willed the thousand clowns to stop staring at me. Just between you and me, clowns gave me the creeps, always have. She only spoke for a few seconds before she returned. “That was my boyfriend again, just making sure we were okay. I hung up on him when you screamed. Percy is a little sensitive to disaster right now because he just lost his wife. She was murdered.”

  My eyebrows flying up to my hairline was probably an appropriate response by a stranger to that out-of-the-blue statement. The “hot damn” I was about to say was probably not, so I bit my tongue. Hard.

  Those azure eyes blinked at me. Either she’d made me for a fraud and was trying to psych me out, or she was clueless that it might be bad form to admit to an extramarital affair with a dead woman’s husband.

  “I’m sorry,” I finally croaked out when I realized she was waiting for a verbal response.

  “Yeah, it’s been a real bummer. I haven’t been able to see him much with the funeral plans, the police stuff, and all that.”

  “I imagine.”

  “Oh, by the way, Percy thought he might know you.”

  Uh-oh. My breath stuck in my lungs. I felt dizzy. How would Percy know me under my assumed name? Had Shauna described me well enough that he’d caught on to me snooping into his affairs? Had Annette set me up, sending me straight into a trap?

  “But then”—Shauna giggled—“I realized he heard me wrong. He thought I said Sherry Aid when I said Charade.”

  Sherry Aid? Sounded like a stripper who dressed like a nurse. Perhaps one of the stars of the video library in his office?

  “You don’t dance for a living do you, Charade?”

  “No, no. Can’t keep a beat to save my life.”

  Shauna shrugged. “Wrong girl, I guess.”

  Okay, panic attack averted. Now to figure out how this ding-a-ling and her honey figured into the murder. I sucked in a deep, cleansing breath. Had Shauna had something to do with Wilma’s death and had no conscience or apparent fear of discovery? Was it a coincidence that she was interested in clown makeup and had a clown identical to her lover’s dead wife’s face? Or was someone trying to frame the sweet, empty-headed girl?

  Someone like Annette? I wouldn’t put it past her if it forwarded her ambitions. Someone like Percy? It might be a way to get away with murder by fobbing it all off on a jealous lover. Someone like Lexa?

  I refused to consider that.

  I knew I had to get Scythe over there to collect the clown dummy as evidence. I didn’t want to leave for fear it would disappear. Maybe I could take Shauna to lunch while the cops got a search warrant. I considered several scenarios.

  “You didn’t say, Charade, what happened to the mouse? I guess you could tell, I’m deathly afraid of rodents.”

  “The mouse?” I’d forgotten all about my fib. That was the problem with fibs, you had to keep such close tabs on them; it was just easier to tell the truth. “Uh, the mouse.” I did a visual survey of the hardwood floors and the surprisingly tight molding. No potential mouse holes. The clown had a hole in his bootie, however. “The mouse ran into the clown.”

  With a small yip, Shauna snatched the clown off the rack with lightning speed, raced out the front door, and cocked her arm to throw the clown into the yard. I saw evidence about to take a tumble and, on impulse, grabbed at her arm. My interference sent the clown careening toward Bettina’s car instead of the grass, where its porcelain face smashed into a thousand pieces on her hood.

  Oops.

  “I’m so sorry about your car,” Shauna apologized. running to collect the pieces of the clown face off the scratched puce paint, humming “Send in the Clowns.”

  “I’m so sorry about your clown,” I said grimly, meaning it more than she knew.

  “I wish you hadn’t grabbed my arm,” she said, poufing her lip out in a pout.

  I had to think fast. My evidence was shattered. The clown shrine might be enough to throw suspicion on Shauna, but it was very circumstantial.

  “Let me make it up to you. You could make me up just like your clown dummy. Then you’d at least have a photo to put on your wall until you can get a replacement.”

  Shauna brightened. “Really? You’d do that for me?”

  I gulped. “Sure. I’d love to.”

  “I’m a clown,” I said reluctantly into my cell phone two hours later. I tried to ignore the vanful of toddlers kicking their legs in their car seats, laughing and pointing at me as I sat at the world’s longest stoplight.

  “I was wondering when you’d admit it,” Scythe answered dryly.

  “No, really, I look like I’m ready for Ringling Brothers.” A man to my left was shouting, “Hey, Bo
zo!”

  “Good for you. Maybe they’re hiring. Since you aren’t ever working at your real job, might as well get one you’re probably more qualified for.”

  “How do you know I’m not at my job right now?”

  “Because I just left there looking for you.”

  “Why were you looking for me?”

  “I’m not telling now. You don’t get any goodies if you go sneaking off.”

  “What kind of goodies? Another set of handcuffs? Another trip to the pokey?”

  “Watch out what you say, you’re turning me—”

  “Besides which,” I interrupted, “I didn’t sneak off.”

  “What do you call running off in another vehicle to throw me off?”

  “I wasn’t trying to throw you off, stupid, just the media.” I shook my head and the wig went a little askew. I glared at the light through the red curls.

  “If you’d stay out of trouble, you wouldn’t have the media on your butt.”

  “If I stayed out of trouble, you wouldn’t be on my butt, either,” I pointed out, my voice rising. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the toddlers had stopped laughing and instead were looking concerned.

  There was a long pause. “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes I do. I was out of trouble for several months, thank you, and heard from you twice.” I flipped the receiver the bird. Oops, I’d forgotten I had an underage audience. I smiled benignly at the kids. One of them stuck her tongue out at me.

  “I’d think you’d like that,” he snapped defensively.

  “Like it? I loved it!” I shouted. One of the toddlers started crying and his mother shot me a wicked look as she zoomed off.

  “Hmm.” Another long pause, during which he was probably thinking about Zena Zolliope’s legs.

  “Are you going to come to my house right now or not?” I said impatiently before I started to imagine what he was imagining he’d like those long Zolliope legs to wrap around.

  “Not. If you have something to show me, come to the police department. You can’t be far.”

  Actually, I had just driven within a block of the Terrell Hills PD, but I wasn’t telling him that. “I’m not showing this in public.”

  Scythe’s baritone dropped to a tigerlike purr. “Oh, really? Now, this is getting interesting.” I squirmed in my seat.

  “Interesting enough to come to my house?”

  “It depends. If you’re ready to culminate our deal, I’ll come. If not, I won’t.”

  Damn. I squirmed harder. The temperature of this typical South Texas spring day had climbed from the morning’s midfifties to the midnineties by the time I’d gotten out of Shauna’s shop. The topic of our conversation drove my temperature up an additional ten degrees. Bettina’s little car didn’t have air-conditioning. I refused to roll down the windows because the obnoxious guy was keeping even with me, shouting lewd things he’d like to do with clowns. I could feel the oily makeup starting to melt off my face. It was now or never.

  “Okay, okay, Scythe. Come get your end of the deal. And bring a camera.” I rang off before he could heavy-breathe any harder into the phone.

  I tucked my wig under my arm and made a mad dash for the door. I thought I’d made it into my house unseen, but of course I am the unluckiest woman on the planet (not counting Wilma), so I was wrong. My songwriting neighbor appeared at my elbow as I was unlocking my kitchen door.

  “You’ve got to start shaving your armpits, Reyn,” Rick teased as he tickled my red curls. He followed me in, shadowboxing with the dogs all the way to the kitchen.

  I threw my purse and keys on the kitchen table. “I’m not in a mood for jokes.”

  “What are you in the mood for? Your boyfriend on his way over?”

  Uh-oh, what was he going to think when Scythe did show up? Probably the same thing Scythe would be thinking when he showed up. Both were going to be sadly disappointed. I sighed. How did things get so ass-backwards in my life? Did I naturally complicate things, or did they just work out that way accidentally?

  “I don’t have a boyfriend, Rick.”

  He reviewed my clown face with raised eyebrows. “Maybe you could get one with a different makeup technique. This color scheme seems a little extreme.”

  I glared. He put his hands in the air. “Hey, it’s jolly. I guess I’m wrong. Perhaps it’s better to clown around when it comes to romance.”

  Rick grinned, and I tweaked his beaked nose. He was an irrepressible goofball, albeit a creative one, and the antithesis of his wife, a deeply serious, intensely intellectual criminal attorney. I adored them both, but never would’ve put them together in a love match. Sixteen years later, they were still as happy as newlyweds. Maybe that’s why I didn’t have Cupid’s job.

  “The makeup is a long story I can’t explain right now.”

  “I bet you’ve gone undercover to work for the cops—something sinister at the circus.” He started to hum a tune, throwing out a few lyrics.

  Time to distract him. “I’m glad you’re here, Rick, I have a question. But you can’t stay long.”

  “Aha! I knew you were having company. A nooner, huh?”

  I ignored him. “Have you ever heard of a club called Bangers on Sixth Street in Austin?”

  Rick pulled a kitchen chair around and sat on it backward. “Heard of it. Know the manager.”

  “Great!” That was better than I’d hoped for. “You think you can call him up, ask if someone in a band playing there, or that once played there, that opened for Limp Bizkit recently, is dating a friend of mine, or at least had a recent romantic involvement with her?”

  Rick rolled his head around, letting his tongue loll out of his mouth. “That was worse than a promo for All My Children. Look, my guy wouldn’t be able to follow the first quarter of that question, much less the whole thing, and especially not over the phone. What does the band player look like?”

  “Pale, skinny, wears black.”

  “Swell, that’s half the rockers in Austin.”

  “Is exceedingly polite.”

  “That ought to narrow it down some. Of course, polite is relative. Not sticking your hands down your pants to scratch could be considered polite in some circles.”

  “These circles?”

  “Definitely.” Rick shrugged at my grimace and stood. “Look, if you really want to find this guy, your best bet is to go in person. Why don’t I round up Tess early from work tonight, and you ask Trudy and Mario to come so Mama Tru will watch my kids.”

  “Mama Tru will watch your kids anytime until she gets grandkids of her own.”

  “Hmm, I think I’ll be slipping Trudy lots of birth control.” Rick grinned. “Now, to find you a date. How about the police dude?”

  I was already shaking my head before he got the words out. “No can do. He’s working that murder case.”

  “This trip is about the murder case, isn’t it?”

  I hadn’t said that. Sometimes I wondered just how much Rick heard about my life through his open office window. Maybe I talked in my sleep.

  “What’s his name—Jackson something?”

  I shook my head harder. “He cramps my style.”

  “What is it with you two?” Rick sighed heavily, and fingered his goatee. “I’d suggest the vitamin salesman you’ve been panting over—the guy who lives down the street—but I think he’s still pretty steamed about his baked Porsche, even though that wasn’t your fault.”

  I had no response for that one. Another case of circumstances killing my love life. My friend Ricardo’s murderer had torched the Porsche to create a diversion when he came after me a few months ago. Rick pressed on. “Okay, what about Jon Villita? He used to come around all the time after your last brush with the law. I haven’t seen him lately.”

  “He’s been working long hours—he’s expanding his business into Dallas and Houston.”

  “There you go, invite him to come along so you won’t have to dance alone. All work and no play makes a boy a d
ull drip, and that boy has a tendency to be a bit drippy anyway. Consider it your community service.”

  I agreed readily, mostly so that Rick would drop the Scythe suggestion, but also because I liked Jon. He was a kindhearted young man who’d survived some difficult revelations in the past year, including the fact that he was really Ricardo’s son. He was only a handful of years younger than I was, but for some reason I felt decades older in wisdom. Scary, I know.

  I was flipping through my Rolodex for Jon’s number when Rick let himself out the kitchen door with a warning to be ready to leave by eight o’clock. When I finally got Jon on the phone, he was surprisingly game. Trudy beeped in, having ascertained with her uncanny buddy ESP that she might be missing out on some action. I’d just finished juggling their calls when I heard the door open behind me.

  “They said they’d come,” I threw over my shoulder, assuming Rick had come back to check on the status of our plans.

  “Hopefully, they won’t come until I’ve collected on my deal,” Scythe purred as he wrapped his arms around my midriff and kissed my neck. I have to admit, I swooned a bit. Just for a few seconds, understand, but it was enough to forget everything but the moist caress of his lips at my nape, the heat of his body through my jeans, the press of his fingertips on my hip bone.

  I turned around, already tasting the kiss.

  His eyes widened as he gasped and stumbled back.

  Thirteen

  IT TOOK SCYTHE, the jerkasaurus, a good five minutes to stop laughing. I mean, that’s when he could actually finish an entire sentence without bursting out into gales of laughter or having a chuckle rumble up out of his chest.

  “When you said you were a clown, I didn’t think…”

  He-he ha-ha.

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “You got that right. You didn’t think.”

  “…didn’t think you actually meant the red rubber nose. This wig goes with it?” he asked, clearing his throat, probably to drown another guffaw. I nodded sullenly. Scythe plucked it off the counter, perched it on my head, and considered me from top to toe.