A Hair Raising Blowout: Cozy Mystery (The Teasen & Pleasen Hair Salon Cozy Mystery Series Book 1)

by Constance Barker

  ***

  Did Annie really treat Jewel so badly? I was sure Jewel wasn’t lying. And in hindsight, Annie’s sweet nature looked too good to be true. But I still held out hope that Jewel had misunderstood. My mama always said to not speak ill of the dead.

  It certainly looked as though Annie had been doing some bad mischief, however, and my daddy would say that she had some reason. If that were the case, what did Annie want?

  Chapter 7

  Investigator James Woodley finally arrived at the salon a little before closing time wearing the same rumpled sport coat I’d seen him in before. He looked like he’s just woken up from a rough night. I motioned him toward our back room while I finished the haircut I was working on.

  Nellie asked if he’d like a cup of coffee. “We don’t usually drink coffee this late,” she said, peering at his haggard face, “but you look like you could use a cup.” He accepted the cup she handed him without comment and took it into the back room.

  Some of the people in the salon looked puzzled at the presence of this quietly intense stranger. Those in the know filled them in. I was surprised that the investigator had managed to keep such a low profile in this small town. I guessed that this might have something to do with his not being seen much during daylight hours.

  When I finished the haircut, I went into the back room. Woodley was sitting on a stack of cardboard boxes, sipping his coffee and reading notes he’d made on a tiny pad of paper he held cradled in his hand.

  He stood up when I came in and closed the door behind me.

  “Ms. Jefferies,” he said, extending his hand toward a rolling desk chair, the only chair in the room, without really looking me in the eye.

  “Investigator Woodley,” I said. I sat down. “What can I help you with?”

  “Chief Tanner tells me that you found spray painting on the window of Mr. Keshian, the owner of the shoe repair shop.” He continued to look absently in the direction of his notes. “Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you describe what you found, please?”

  I told him about the red-painted shards of glass that Nellie and I had pulled out of the dumpster.

  “What kind of paint would you say this was?” he asked.

  “Spray paint, the same shade of red and the same type of letters as on the Paramabets’ window.”

  He surprised me by looking up from his notes. He fixed me with his piercing gray eyes in a way that was disturbingly intense. “You saw the paint on the Paramabet window before it was broken?”

  “Ah, no. No.” His attention was making me feel clumsy, vaguely guilty. “I went by there for take-out food and saw where Connor O’Sullivan had reassembled the broken glass.”

  “Connor O’Sullivan?”

  “The man who fixed the window.”

  “He had reassembled the broken pieces of the original window?”

  Had he not seen that glass? Had Connor thrown it away?

  “Yes, sir,” I said. Where did that come from? “I mean, yes.”

  I told him what Connor had put together and what we thought the spray-painted word was. “Didn’t you see it?”

  Woodley didn’t answer. He continued to look at me in a vaguely accusatory way.

  Finally it dawned on me why he hadn’t seen it. “You didn’t see anything that happened before Annie was killed.” And he couldn’t admit that because it made him seem ignorant? This man needed help.

  “Do you want to see the pieces of Mr. Keshian’s window?” I asked him.

  His eyes went a little wide before he got them under control.

  “You know where the pieces of Mr. Keshian’s window are?”

  I got up and walked over to the end of the room where Nellie and I had stashed the painted shards of glass at the end of our dumpster-diving expedition. I pointed down at the space behind a small cabinet. “I know exactly where they are,” I said.

  He walked over and peered down at the glass. He looked back at me, took a handkerchief out of his pocket, used it to pick up one of the pieces, and held it to the light. “What are you doing with this?”

  “I’m not doing anything with it.” Did he think I wanted to make a broken-glass collage?

  “Why do you have the broken, spray-painted pieces of another person’s vandalized window, Ms. Jefferies?”

  My mouth dropped open. I closed it as soon as I could. I thought of that time my daddy had appeared around the corner of the house and brought with him a whole new point of view, only this time I seemed to be the dog in the trough.

  “Uh,” I said.

  “Were you involved with Annie Simmerson in vandalizing the window? Did you break it after she painted it?”

  “No!” I said.

  “Yet you get some kind of pleasure from collecting the pieces of glass?”

  “Pleasure? No, of course not. This is ridiculous.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes. And,” I reflected, “everyone says that, don’t they?”

  He looked down at his tiny pad of paper and wrote something on it. “I’ll tell you someone who doesn’t say that, Ms. Jefferies. Annie Simmerson doesn’t say that. And she doesn’t say that because she’s been murdered.” He looked back at me. “What I want to know is, what’s your involvement in Annie Simmerson’s death?”

  “Look,” I said, “I heard about August’s window being painted, I saw the broken window at the Paramabets’, and it made me wonder if Mr. Keshian’s window had been painted before it was smashed. I had seen him cleaning up the glass because he’s just a couple of doors down from here. I knew he’d put the glass in the dumpster out back. I didn’t think the Knockemstiff police would follow up on it. I was just curious.”

  “Killed the cat, Ms. Jefferies,” he said as he wrote something on his pad. “Killed the cat.”

  “Including the professionally curious cat, Mr. Woodley?”

  He looked up. “Is that a threat, Ms. Jeffries?”

  I was putting on my stupid look to follow my alarmed look when I noticed that Investigator Woodley was smiling. Just a little.

  “You knew all along I had nothing to do with Annie,” I said.

  “Ah, well,” he said looking back down at his notes. He took a gulp of coffee, which must have been cold by now. “It’s not entirely true that you had nothing to do with Annie. Besides finding her dead, I mean.”

  “Certainly, I knew her. Lot’s of people knew Annie.”

  “And you in particular knew her well enough to ask her to walk Sarah Jameson home on Monday morning.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That was the morning after Mr. Keshian’s window was broken.”

  “And did you know that Sarah arrived home crying?”

  “Sarah’s mother told me, yes. I assumed it was because Sarah was upset by the broken window. She and Annie walked right past it, and Annie spoke with Mr. Keshian.”

  “Sarah may have been upset by Mr. Keshian, but she was crying for another reason. Did you give her a lollipop?”

  This man had done more legwork than I gave him credit for. “I did give her a lollipop. How do you know about the lollipop? Or I should ask, why is the lollipop important enough for you to want to know about?”

  “Details, Ms. Jefferies. The devil is in them.”

  I thought of Jewel calling Annie a devil.

  “In this case,” he continued, “one detail is that Annie asked Sarah if she knew that lollipops make little girls stupid.”

  “Sarah is a smart little girl. That would bother her.”

  “If she believed it. Another detail is that Annie snatched the lollipop out of Sarah’s mouth and tossed it in one of the lovely trash bins you people have put up in this town. That bothered Sarah a lot. And that’s why she arrived home crying.”

  “Another bit of Annie meanness,” I said. Then I remembered that the previous bit of meanness I’d heard was from Jewel, and I was hoping I could avoid mentioning that. I wanted to spare her an interrogation like this one. Was this obstructing
justice? I thought that Woodley had plenty of evidence about Annie’s meanness. And I was sure that Jewel was not a murderer. Fortunately, Woodley let my comment pass.

  “And another detail,” he said, “is that Sarah’s father was upset when Sarah told him what Annie had done. Do you know Mr. Jameson?”

  I thought of Sarah sleeping on the lawn with her daddy’s rifle. “Not very well. Bee Jameson is a regular at the salon, but we don’t see her husband Lester much. Surely you don’t think he’d kill Annie over a lollipop?”

  “Apparently, he had other reasons to be angry with Annie. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that?”

  “News to me,” I said. “But I’m finding out a lot about Annie that I didn’t know. It’s odd that in a town this small, Annie was so poorly understood.”

  “Mmm,” he said. “Depends on who you ask.”

  “Could I ask you something, Investigator Woodley?”

  “You can ask,” he said. He said it in a way that implied that he asked questions; he did not answer questions.

  “Could you tell me if Annie was sexually assaulted the night she was killed?”

  “Yes, I can tell you that, no, she was not sexually assaulted. At least, we found no evidence of it. That’s the kind of information we’d release to the press if there were any members of the press here. You seem to be living in this planet’s only press-free bubble.”

  “We had a weekly newspaper when I was little,” I said. “Now it’s word of mouth.”

  “A game of post office then.”

  “Yes, for a small town it can become a rather large game of post office, with certain people passing on increasingly creative ‘information’ every time they have a conversation.” I thought of an anthrax scare we’d had the year before. News of a farmer’s test for anthrax was blown up into an imminent terrorist attack in which anthrax bombs were about to rain from the sky. Knockemstiff’s little Botowski Hardware store sold out of plastic sheeting and duct tape in an hour and a half.

  “Say,” I offered, “what if we post official news releases from you on our bulletin board? It would be like having a little newspaper.”

  “Good idea. People could come in to find out what’s going on. That would help your business, wouldn’t it?”

  Just when I was starting to think he was a decent human being, he says this.

  “Possibly,” I said. “Let me check.”

  I went out to the salon and looked around quickly. Everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at me. I popped back into the back room.

  “One of the extra folding chairs we put out in our café area is currently unoccupied, so you’re right, Investigator Woodley. Posting official news about the case could increase our business. If we could suck in one more person, that would be highly profitable for us — another couple of dollars in the collection basket for pastries. And coffee.”

  I picked up his half-full cup of cold coffee and poured it in the sink.

  “Any other questions I can answer for you, Investigator Woodley?”

  “Sorry, Ms. Jefferies.” He stood and bowed his head in a gracious apology. “I accused you groundlessly.”

  “That seems to be your stock in trade,” I observed, not quite ready to let him off the hook.

  “And it is effective. You’d be surprised how often it turns a practiced song and dance into a confession. You can learn a lot by putting people under a little bit of pressure.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Please do understand that it’s nothing personal. A woman has been murdered. That’s intolerable. She might not have been the Susie Sunshine that some people thought, but she didn’t deserve to be murdered. I have to find the murderer, whatever it takes.”

  Maybe he was a decent person after all.

  He was looking at his tiny pad. “A couple more things that might help. Do you happen to know Annie’s family?”

  “I remember she had an older sister who lived here for a while. I can’t recall ever meeting her parents. Odd.”

  “Have you met everyone else’s parents?”

  “You jest, but yes, I have, just about. And if I haven’t met someone’s parents, I know some reason why. With Annie, there’s just a blank. Sorry. I’m surprised you didn’t find that info on her phone.”

  “Phone?” he said with some excitement. “Annie had a cell phone?”

  “I saw her with one. Just once. I suppose she could have borrowed it?”

  The electricity went out of his excitement. “Yeah. One last question, please: the night that Annie was shot, did you hear that shot?”

  “No! I hadn’t thought about that. How could that be? A thirty-ought-six makes a lot of noise.”

  “How did you know it was a thirty-ought-six?” he asked, his suspicion getting a reprise.

  “I heard a deputy say so, and he also said that it was from a few feet away, and that’s how I knew that Annie had been murdered.”

  “Right. Thanks. There were thunderstorms in the hours before you found the body. Still, someone should have heard the shot. It wouldn’t have sounded like thunder.”

  “Everybody in town knows what a thirty-ought-six sounds like,” I said.

  “Is that because everybody in town has one?” he asked ruefully.

  “Just about,” I said. “I ran into a six-year-old recently who was carrying one. I suppose that would make her a suspect.”

  “If this was the six-year-old I’m thinking of, she definitely had a motive, but she also had a strong alibi.”

  We walked out of the back room. Everyone was staring again.

  Betina came over and said, “I took care of your 4:30. Is your interrogation over?”

  “Interview!” Woodley said.

  “If it’s over,” Betina said to me, looking at Woodley and ignoring him at the same time, “some of us are going to the Bacon Up before the open mic starts.”

  “Good plan,” I said. “Don’t want to do open mic on an empty stomach.”

  I was raised to include people in whatever was going on, so before I could stop myself, I invited Woodley to go with us to the amateur night goings-on at the Knockemback Tavern. It was one of those invitations like when people are visiting the house near supper time and you say, “Y’all stay for supper,” without ever intending they should stay for supper, and they don’t.

  I was relieved when Woodley declined my invite, and then heard myself say, “Open mic would be good for your research, Inspector Woodley. You’d get to meet people who live here.”

  “Investigator,” he said. “And maybe you’re right. Thank you for inviting me.”

  Well great, I thought. Open mic night was going to be subdued after the murder. Now I’d gone and shot a tranquilizer dart in its posterior.

  “Great,” I said out loud. “Let’s get us some bacon.” Half a dozen of us headed for the diner.

  Chapter 8

  Dinner at the Bacon Up was indeed a restrained affair for the first 20 minutes or so. Nobody knew what to do with Woodley, me least of all, and nobody could have a conversation that didn’t include him. So everything revolved around Woodley, except nothing was revolving. What do you say to a detective who’s investigating a murder in your little town?

  “So how’s the murder thing going?” It was one of those rare times when the conversation could have been improved by Dolores Pettigrew, who would have chattered away about whatever random factoids passed through her head.

  Then Nellie said something about a bar in Baton Rouge that Woodley had visited. This turned out to be a rich vein of conversation, relatively speaking, because Woodley had visited a lot of bars. He was busy replying to whatever Nellie had said when Margie, the waitress, started bringing food.

  “That’s the shrimp-and-grits for you, hon” she said, putting down the plate in front of me. “And the fried chicken for your date?”

  Woodley’s head whirled around as if he’d been whacked with a tennis racket. Before he could open his mouth, I said to him, “You wish!”<
br />
  The poor man was stuck in a jam with his mouth open. I felt so sorry for him. Not.

  Margie interrupted his thoughts. “You want this fried chicken or not?” As she set the plate in front of him, she winked at me. If you need help managing somebody, ask a waitress.

  After that, Woodley made a point of chatting up the people on the side away from me, which livened up that half of the table and left me free to turn away from Woodley and talk with Betina. We talked about a little of this and a little of that in a way that made me think Betina had something on her mind.

  She mentioned that she was concerned about the elaborate wrought-iron rack the salon had “inherited” when Mrs. Houghnard had closed her shop next door and gone to live with her sister in Atlanta. Everyone had called her Madame Houghnard. She ran her shop for 43 years, a little longer than I’ve been on earth. She carried whatever she thought was elegant and that people in Knockemstiff would buy — not a combination you’d think would work. With a few antiques, fancy stationary, even unusual baked goods, she made it work. Everyone in town missed her, and the salon had become custodian of the fancy display rack that was a reminder of the woman we no longer got to see. Betina told me that one of the legs had broken, so I made a mental note to ask Connor O’Sullivan if he could fix it.

  We talked about the young man Betina had gone out with the previous weekend. That seemed so long ago now.

  Finally, Betina mentioned what was really on her mind: August. Betina had had no contact with August since the phone conversation on Monday that was just after the SLUT painting was found on August’s windshield.

  “I call her and go by her duplex every day,” she said. “Since Tuesday, her car has not been in the driveway.”

  “Have you talked to the Bald Eagle since Monday? Maybe he’s seen her come and go from next door.”