Sunset Beach

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “Which is why it makes sense to at least give it a try,” Drue urged. “Rae, I honestly think this could work. The night I met her, we clicked. She approached me, not the other way around. And if this doesn’t work, you can still do it your way.”

  “Come on, Rae. Admit it. You never would have figured any of this out without me. I found Neesa and got her to admit to her connection with Byars. You owe me that much. You owe Jazmin.”

  “No! I absolutely forbid it.” Brice slapped the hood of the minivan with his open palm.

  “Easy there, Perry Mason,” Hernandez said. “Watch the paint job.”

  “Dad?” Drue spoke up. “No offense, but I’m thirty-six years old. I don’t need a signed permission slip for this field trip.”

  She turned pleading eyes toward Hernandez. “I’ll call her later this morning, after we’ve both gotten some sleep.”

  “I don’t know,” Hernandez said uneasily. “Let me think about it. There’s no rush, right?”

  “We don’t know that,” Drue said. “I mean, right now, Brian Shelnutt probably has no idea why a woman named Drucilla Campbell was skulking around that room at the Gulf Vista earlier tonight. But if we wait, he might put it all together and realize why I was trying to get into that particular room. We don’t know if he’s involved in Jazmin’s murder or not.”

  Hernandez ran her hands through her dark hair, still shaking her head, but Drue knew the detective knew she had a point.

  “Okay,” Hernandez said finally. “But there’s gonna be ground rules. And you’re gonna do exactly as I say, or the whole thing is off. Understand?”

  “Perfectly,” Drue agreed.

  Brice glared at Hernandez as she got into the minivan. “You better have a backup plan to your backup plan, Hernandez.”

  * * *

  It was surprisingly easy to convince Neesa Vincent to make a hair-color house call, especially after Drue proved amenable to Neesa’s unconventional pricing system.

  “Ooh yeah, I remember you,” Neesa said, when Drue mentioned how they’d met. “You’re the girl I met at Mister B’s, with the good hair texture. But now, listen, Saturdays are my busy day. Where’d you say you live?”

  “Sunset Beach,” Drue said.

  “That’s right, you did tell me that,” Neesa said. “Okay, I think I can move some appointments around, but if I come all the way out there, on short notice, on a Saturday, I’mma have to charge you my surge price.”

  “That’s fine,” Drue said. “Just how much is your surge price?”

  “Three hundred,” Neesa said promptly. “You know, because that’s a lot of chemicals to take you from ebony to ivory. And just so you know, I don’t take checks or cards. Cash only, okay?”

  “I can do that.” Drue gave her the address, and they set the time for two o’clock.

  * * *

  Neesa Vincent showed up at two-thirty, at almost the exact moment Drue was about to give up hope.

  She bustled into the house carrying a large plastic shopping bag and an open liter bottle of Mountain Dew. The platinum-blond wig was gone today, and her long hair hung straight past her shoulders in ombré shades of lavender to violet.

  “Ooh, this is a nice house,” she said, fanning herself as she unloaded her supplies onto the tiny kitchen counter. “But how come you don’t run the AC up in here?”

  “I don’t have air-conditioning,” Drue said.

  “Girl, that’s crazy! A house like this, right on the water?”

  “I inherited it from my mother. My grandfather built this house back in the 1950s,” Drue said. She looked at the line-up of bottles emerging from the plastic bag and felt a new twinge of anxiety. “Wow, that’s a lot of chemicals.”

  “That’s why I got to charge you my surge price,” Neesa said. “I spent a hundred dollars on supplies at Sally’s just now.” She turned and took a strand of Drue’s hair, rubbing it appreciatively between her fingers. “You got a lotta hair, you know? I bet you got more hair on your bathroom floor than some of these old lady clients I get at cosmetology school put together.”

  “Thanks,” Drue said. “Can I get you something to drink? I’ve got some beer and some prosecco in the fridge, and I’ve got a bottle of Tito’s too.”

  “Okay, yeah,” the hairdresser said, holding up the Mountain Dew. “You could just pour some of that Tito’s right in my soda bottle. My nerves got kinda worked driving over here.”

  Drue siphoned a good six ounces into the bottle and Neesa took a sip. “That’s smooth,” she said. She took another sip, and then another, and then snapped her fingers. “Damn. I shoulda told you about the coconut oil.”

  “What about it?”

  “At cosmetology school, we tell our clients to put coconut oil all over their hair the night before and sleep on it like that. You know, to protect the hair from getting damaged by the bleach.” She shrugged. “Oh well.”

  “How badly could it get damaged?” Drue asked nervously.

  “I mean, the ends could break off, but then we just trim it.” Neesa took a long gulp from the Mountain Dew bottle and held it out to Drue. “How about you top me off, and then we’ll get started?”

  Drue did as she asked. “How far along in cosmetology school are you? I mean, you’ve done platinum-blond before, right?”

  “Yeah, well, on a wig, I’ve done it twice. And my instructor said my toning technique was excellent. Tell you what,” Neesa said, handing Drue a small plastic tub of coconut oil. “Why don’t we put some of this on your hair now and let it sit for a while? You know, just have a cocktail, and then after an hour, that oughtta be good enough to get started.”

  “Great idea,” Drue said, seizing on any delaying technique available. “Be right back.”

  She went into her bedroom and shut the door. Rae Hernandez sat on the bed, paging through a magazine, looking bored.

  “Are you hearing everything okay?” Drue asked.

  “Good thing there’s no insulation in this old house. I can hear every word,” the detective said. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t let that stupid bitch touch my hair.”

  “That’s why I’m stalling,” Drue said. She turned to the mirror over her dresser and began lathering coconut oil into her hair.

  “Try to get her talking about the Gulf Vista,” Hernandez urged. “How much vodka has she had?”

  “A lot. Like, half a fifth,” Drue said. “If I’d had that much, I’d be on the floor.”

  Drue went into the bathroom, grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her head, turban-style.

  When she returned to the kitchen, she found Neesa mixing chemicals in a large plastic bowl. The odor of bleach filled the room and stung her nostrils.

  “How’s it going?” Drue asked.

  “Okay,” Neesa said. “Lemme see your hair?”

  Drue removed the towel and before she had a chance to protest, Neesa grabbed a pair of scissors, flipped up the back of Drue’s hair and cut a long strand.

  “What the hell!” Drue said, when she saw the hunk of hair Neesa was clutching. “What did you do that for? I didn’t want my hair cut.”

  “This is for the test strand,” Neesa explained. She laid the hair on some paper towels, dipped a flat plastic brush into the bleach mixture, then painted it onto the test hair. She turned to Drue. “This way we see how long it takes the bleach to lighten up your hair like we want. You got an oven timer? Let’s give it fifteen minutes.”

  Drue started the timer and noticed that the Mountain Dew bottle was now empty and in the trash, along with the Tito’s bottle.

  “Did you say you have some wine?” Neesa asked, seating herself at the dinette table.

  Drue retrieved the bottle of prosecco she’d bought earlier in the day and held it up.

  “Ooh, perfect,” Neesa said. “Bubbles.”

  * * *

  “Are your nerves getting settled any better?” Drue asked, after Neesa drained her first glass of wine.

  “A little,” Neesa said. “Being out her
e, you know, so close to the hotel where I used to work, it kinda does a number on my head.”

  “That’s right,” Drue said innocently. “The Gulf Vista. And you knew the girl who got killed, right?”

  “Jaz. My best friend.” Neesa looked over at the hair strand. “Me and that girl, we went through some crazy stuff together. I tell you the truth, I ain’t been back out here to the beach since I left that place.”

  “Kinda sucks that they let you go, huh?” Drue said.

  Neesa gave her a sharp look. “They didn’t fire me. I quit.”

  “What about your boss? The one you told me about, Herman the Munster?”

  Neesa giggled. “Yeah, old Herman the Munster. Now, he did get his ass fired, or so I heard.”

  “Why did he get fired?”

  The hairdresser looked at her over the rim of her wineglass. “How should I know?”

  “More wine?” Drue asked.

  Neesa nodded and Drue poured.

  “You know, it’s too bad old Herman did get fired,” Neesa said, after a second glass of prosecco. “They shoulda locked his ass up for the way he did me and Jaz.”

  “Because he was pressuring both of you for sex?” Drue asked.

  “That and all the rest of it,” Neesa said, gesturing grandly. “Like, if I ever told what all I know? That old perv would prob’ly get the chair or something.”

  “Instead he just walks away like nothing happened,” Drue encouraged her.

  “And my poor ‘lil Jaz is dead and her baby ain’t never gonna see her mama again.” Neesa dabbed at her eyes with the hem of her shirt. She held out her empty glass and Drue refilled it.

  Drue looked over at the oven timer, and then at the test strand of her hair, which had already turned an unnatural shade of green with five minutes still left on the timer. If she had any hope of saving her hair, and Hernandez’s case, she needed to get Neesa to get to the point before that timer went off.

  “So, you think Herman had something to do with Jaz’s death?”

  Neesa set her glass down on the table, sloshing a little wine over the edge. “Think it? Girlfriend, I know it. Say, you got anything to snack on?”

  Drue jumped up and found a box of Cheez-Its in the cabinet.

  “That’s good,” Neesa said, opening the box and shoving a handful of crackers into her mouth. As she chewed, shards of orange crumbs rained down on her shirtfront. She took another swallow of wine.

  “Wow,” Drue said softly. “So, were you there? I mean, what exactly happened?” She emptied the prosecco bottle into Neesa’s glass, silently cursing herself for buying only one bottle.

  “I wasn’t there when it happened,” Neesa said. “I mean, maybe if I had been, I coulda done something to stop him, but prob’ly not. He was hella strong for an old dude. By the time I got there, poor Jaz, she was already dead. Nuthin’ I could do about it.”

  Drue realized she’d been holding her breath. She exhaled slowly and glanced quickly at her cell phone propped up on the windowsill behind a bottle of dish detergent. She hadn’t mentioned the phone to Hernandez, who would have objected, but she thought of it as insurance.

  “You’re saying this Herman guy killed your friend? But why?”

  “He said she went crazy, soon as she went in that hotel room and saw him standing there. Told me she picked up a lamp and swung it at him, and it was self-defense. I knew that was bullshit. Jaz couldn’t have hurt him. She wasn’t any bigger than a fly. I think he grabbed her, you know, because he wanted sex, and she said no and probably tried to fight him off.”

  Neesa shrugged. “She shoulda just kept on letting him do what he wanted to do and kept her mouth shut. Like I did.”

  “When did Herman tell you all this?” Drue asked. She was pushing things now, she knew, but if she could keep the other woman talking, maybe she’d lay out the whole scheme.

  “After he’d done it, he called me on the radio and told me I needed to come to that room right quick. Only, he told me to come the back way, so nobody would see me.”

  “What was the back way?”

  “The balcony,” Neesa said. “The rooms in that old wing, the first floor was only a few feet above the ground. There was a stepladder stuck behind the ice machine, so the engineering guys could use it to fix lights and stuff. He told me to climb up that and he’d let me in through the sliding-glass door. So I wouldn’t be on the security cameras, ’cause there weren’t that many in the old wing.”

  Gotcha, Drue silently mouthed.

  “Huh?” Neesa leaned back in the chair, glassy-eyed, open-mouthed.

  “Nothing,” Drue said. “Why did Herman call you?”

  “To clean up the mess he’d made,” Neesa said scornfully. “And help him get the body outta there.”

  “That’s awful,” Drue said, meaning it.

  “Yeah. You know, it’s been two years, and I think maybe I got me some of that, what do they call it, after you been in combat?”

  “Post-traumatic stress disorder?”

  “That’s it,” Neesa said. She held both hands in front of her. “See this? My hands are shaking real bad, ’cause we been talking about it.”

  “How do you hide a body in a hotel room?” Drue asked. She could hear the oven timer ticking away.

  “He put her in the big cleaning cart Jaz had brought when she came up to the room. Then, he had me put on this hat she always wore, like, pulled down over my face so couldn’t nobody watching the security cameras tell it was me instead of her, then I took it on down to the laundry room. He was supposed to take that cart out of there, and do something, but before he could get there, one of the other girls, Lutrisha, she came in there and started dumping out the dirty sheets, and that’s when she found the body.”

  Neesa picked up the wineglass. It was empty. “And then all hell broke loose,” she said.

  “I can’t believe this creep Byars got away with killing Jazmin,” Drue said, her indignation sincere. “Didn’t the police or anybody else ask you about any of this stuff? Are they that clueless?”

  “I talked to the cops, I didn’t tell ’em anything. Some private investigator dude came to the dry cleaners where I was working, asked me a couple questions about Jaz, but hell, I’m not that stupid. After that, I went off the grid, big-time.”

  She sighed and peered down at the test strip of hair. “Yeah. This looks real good for the first go-round. It ain’t all the way platinum, but I think I could come back next week and take it to the next level.”

  “Next week?” Drue glanced over at the hair on the paper towel. It was a pale orange.

  “No charge,” Neesa said, pulling on a pair of disposable gloves. “Let’s get this party started.” She removed the towel from Drue’s head and began combing and clipping it into quadrants. She pulled out a long strand of hair and began painting at the hairline.

  “Ow!” Drue screeched, feeling the burn of the bleach on her scalp.

  “Oh yeah,” Neesa mumbled. “I think I was supposed to put some Vaseline on your hairline to keep the chemicals offa you before we started. You got any Vaseline?”

  “No!” Drue screeched. “I don’t have any damned Vaseline.”

  The oven timer dinged.

  Rae Hernandez walked into the kitchen. “Time’s up, Neesa,” she said pleasantly. “And you’re under arrest.”

  52

  Neesa’s jaw dropped open and she struggled to jump up from the chair, but Detective Hernandez easily pushed her back down.

  “Stay seated,” Hernandez said, her face stern.

  “Who’s she?” Neesa asked, pointing at the newcomer.

  “This is my friend, Detective Rae Hernandez, with the Treasure Island Police Department,” Drue said. “She’s been listening in the other room.”

  “Shhhhhiiiiit.” Neesa buried her head in both hands. After a moment, she looked up, shoulders slumped in defeat. “Y’all got to know, I didn’t have nuthin’ to do with what happened to Jaz. That was Byars. He said he’d fuck me up bad if I
didn’t do what he said.”

  “Okay,” Hernandez said. “Let’s talk about what he said and did, and what you said and did.”

  “What? Aw, hell no. I been running and hiding out from that dude for two years. I can’t talk to you. He’ll kill me. He told me that night, he would kill my ass if I ever said anything to anybody.”

  “You already did.” Hernandez walked over and picked up the cell phone. She held it up and showed it to the other woman. “And we’ve got you live and in color.”

  “That ain’t cool,” Neesa said angrily. “You can’t bug somebody without asking their permission. I know my rights. I ain’t saying nuthin’ else. I want a lawyer.”

  “You forget, I was in the next room, listening, and I heard every word you said,” Hernandez said.

  “Look, Neesa,” Drue chimed in. “Aren’t you tired of running? Look at it this way. It’s him or it’s you. I think you should talk to this detective.”

  “I don’t give a shit what you think.” Neesa folded her arms defiantly across her chest.

  “Okay,” Hernandez said. She whipped a set of handcuffs from her belt and snapped them over the girl’s wrists. “Neesa Vincent, you’re under arrest for murder and accessory to murder. Anything you say can be held against you in a court of law…”

  “I never killed nobody,” Neesa protested.

  Hernandez pulled Neesa to a standing position. “Let’s continue this at the police station.” She gave her a gentle push in the general direction of the front door.

  “Don’t touch me,” Neesa hollered. She turned to Drue. “You saw her. She tried to knock me down. Put that camera back on again. I want this shit recorded.”

  “Enough chitchat,” Hernandez said, putting her hand on the girl’s shoulder.

  Drue followed the two women outside to where Hernandez had parked her Honda Odyssey across the street.

  “Get in,” Hernandez said, opening the passenger door.

  “What the hell kind of bougie police car is this?” Neesa said. “I bet you’re not even really a cop.”

  “Shut up,” Hernandez said, taking a seat behind the steering wheel. She lifted a lock of Neesa’s hair and whistled softly. “Girlfriend, I don’t think this purple hair of yours is gonna look too good with that orange jumpsuit you’re gonna be wearing.”