Spawn With the Wind, page 9
part #5 of Matchmaker Marriage Mysteries Series
Well, that was honest. No doubt he had quite a reputation, and I was pretty certain pink hair dryers didn’t play into it. Murder and mayhem were his reputation, instead. But neck tattoo or no, reputation or no, I had never met a client I couldn’t convince that they needed some kind of service.
I never let a woman leave my salon with a mustache. I always insisted that she get it waxed before she walked out of my door. Ditto cracked heels. The first sign of heel callouses, I sent them directly from my chair to the pedicurist. I had a reputation, too, and that meant that I didn’t let anyone leave my salon without being, at the very least, decent.
So, I had practice telling people what to do. All of my career led up to this point. I had to convince Jim Slice to get a deep-conditioning hair massage treatment. Whatever that was.
“I’m so sorry about the hair dryers,” I told him in my meekest voice. “I’ve been meaning to get those changed out. We don’t want to turn off our male clientele. We cherish your business. Especially someone like you, so strong and so obviously successful. I mean, look at you, you probably don’t let a month go by without edging your hair.”
He sat up straight in his chair. “Like I told you, I have a reputation. I can’t go around looking ragged.”
“Of course not. Of course not. Right, Martha?”
Martha had finished his haircut and was brushing off the back of his neck. “Huh?” she asked me. “Oh, yeah. Right.”
“I mean, just the other day I had a man who looked a lot like you come in here for his deep-conditioning hair massage treatment. You may have heard of him. Eminem,” I lied and looked at my nails so he wouldn’t catch the dishonest play over my face.
“Get the hell out of here,” he said, swiveling his chair around to see me face to face instead of through the mirror. “Eminem was in here?”
“Was he in here?” I asked. “When is he not in here?”
I began to sweat. I wasn’t used to lying about salon customers and treatments. I was a professional, after all. There was a code of conduct. Well, not really, but I had my personal code of conduct, and it didn’t include lying about rappers.
“Eminem? Slim Shady?” he asked.
I leaned forward. “Between you and me, I’ve been doing that man’s hair for fifteen years. That’s when I started to get all of his friends, too. You’ve heard of Jay-Z?”
I was really sweating now.
“No way.”
“Yes, way,” I said. “Anyway, this isn’t about them. It’s about you. It’s about you being the best you that you can be. It’s about your reputation. Yes, it’s fine that you have a reputation. It’s a very good thing, actually, especially at your young age. But a reputation shouldn’t be a stagnate thing.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that you need to grow your reputation. Expand. You don’t want to be a shark who stops moving. Does Jay-Z ever stop moving? I’ll answer that for you: No, he doesn’t. If you want to be bigger and better, you need to focus on your hair. Hair says a lot about a man. And that means that you need a deep-conditioning hair massage treatment. Normally, it costs twelve thousand dollars, but like I said, it’s your lucky day.”
“Twelve thousand dollars,” he said, like he was rolling the words around his mouth, tasting them, knowing that the same words rolled around Eminem’s mouth. I had him hooked. He would do anything for a twelve thousand dollar treatment that was free for him and him only.
“Right this way,” I told him and walked him to the washbasins. Leaning him back, I went right for the kill. “So, what do you do for a living, Jim Slice?”
“Why do you want to know? That doesn’t have anything to do with my hair.”
“Oh, everything has everything to do with hair,” I told him in my calmest, wisest tone. “If I know how you spend your days—or nights, depending on your career—I will know how to fine-tune the treatment exactly toward your needs.”
“I’m in business for myself. I’m an entrepreneur.”
“Very impressive, Mr. Slice. What kind of business?”
“Let’s just say I’m well-diversified.”
I sighed and turned the water on. I was getting nowhere. I didn’t know why I thought Jim Slice would just cough up his confession to me, but I had. Gladie always got murderers to talk to her. Why would they talk to her, but not to me? What was I doing wrong?
After wetting his head, I squirted on some shampoo and gave him my very best massage. The second I felt him relax under my touch, I asked him more questions. I went around the murder and burglaries every which way except for dead on. I tried to trick him into confessing, but he wasn’t having it, and I knew that if I accused him, he would just storm out or choke me to death.
I rinsed his head and then slathered it with a deep conditioner. “Just close your eyes and rest. This must stay in for seven minutes before I continue with the treatment.”
With his eyes closed and him resting, I ducked to the back room and called in for backup. After all, I had the suspect in the salon, but I couldn’t do anything with him. Having him was half the battle. Someone else needed to fight the other half of the battle. Someone qualified. I needed professional help.
I called Spencer. Even though Gladie solved the murders in this town, Spencer was a very competent police chief. And he was very well-dressed. He never did his own hair or any of his other important grooming appointments himself. He drove out to San Diego every month for that. So, he had my respect.
But Spencer’s phone went to voicemail. He must have been busy with Gladie, helping her in her time of need, I thought. I didn’t want to bother her, so I decided to bother her best friend Lucy instead. Lucy was one of my very best clients. She never left her house with a hair out of place or a fingernail unmanicured. She used to come into the salon, but in the past couple of years, I gave her house call service every week, just like I did with a few other clients, including Zelda.
Lucy and Gladie were thick as thieves, and I was sure she would know what to do, or at very least how to get Spencer over here. She picked up on the second ring.
“Hello.”
“SOS,” I told her. “I’ve got the burglar cornered under an inch of deep conditioner, but I can’t get him to talk. Spencer isn’t picking up his phone, and this behemoth is going to scatter in ten minutes.”
“You’ve found the burglar? What happened to Mary Kay?”
“Who’s that? I’ve got Jim Slice. And believe me, Lucy, he looks just like a Jim Slice, if you know what I mean. Can you get Spencer out here?”
“I can do you one better,” she told me. “I’ll send Harry right away. He can fix a Jim Slice. No problem.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” I said. Her husband Harry knew about the underworld and about good grooming. I was sure he could help out.
“Keep him conditioned for a little while longer,” Lucy told me.
“Okay. I’ve trained my whole life for this. I’ll give him every hair treatment I’ve ever heard about.”
Chapter 10
Ruth Fletcher
Coffee. Coffee. Coffee. That’s all anyone came into my tea shop for anymore. It was like a disease. Like the bubonic plague or Twitter. It was disgusting. Grotesque. It was a blight on our country, that’s what it was.
Our country. Oh, please. I remembered when our country meant something. Something good. Now, it only meant caramel macchiatos and decaf mocha extra whips. Or something equally revolting.
My name’s Ruth Fletcher, and I own the local tea shop in Cannes, California. I’ve owned Tea Time for dog’s years, since dinosaurs roamed the earth. At least, that’s how most folks around here think of me. But actually, I’m not that old. I’m younger than the queen of England. Or is she dead already? I’ve forgotten. Don’t get me wrong. That’s all I’ve forgotten. I’m sharp as a tack, no matter if my ear drums have calcified, and all the cartilage between my bones has whittled away decades ago.
Today, Tea Time was packed with coffee drinkers. I couldn’t give away tea, even if I offered them a side of crack and an orgasm with each cup. Sometimes, I thought about retiring and closing up shop. I mean, why was I doing this anymore? To provide espressos laden with sugar to the masses? Whatever happened to a leisurely cup of tea and a good conversation? That’s how it used to be when we were a civilized nation. Now, we were a bunch of trolls on comment streams on the internet, guzzling whipped cream topped pseudo-coffee with enough sugary syrup in it to choke a horse.
It made me so mad.
I took my anger out on the counter, wiping it down with a rag with all of my strength. What made me even angrier was that the worst coffee drinker of all of them, the one who came in here every single morning and ordered a large latte, was making me worry about her. Not that I would ever admit it. Nope. Even through torture, I wouldn’t admit that all I kept thinking about this morning was Gladie, Gladie, Gladie.
Poor Gladie Burger was having a blind day. Not that I believed in blind days or all-seeing days or third eyes or intuition or any such mumbo jumbo. In my day, folks just worked hard. They didn’t go on and on about knowing things that couldn’t be known or telling me to bring an umbrella when the weathermen called for sunny skies.
But I had known Gladie her entire life, ever since she was born. I had been friends with her grandmother since we were in grammar school together. I’ll never forget when our first grade teacher rapped Zelda’s knuckles so bad because she talked too much. If memory serves me, she was talking about an impending attack on Pearl Harbor, but I might be wrong. Anyway, Zelda went home with her knuckles bruised and swollen. The next day, her mother brought Zelda into class, shoved her hands in the teacher’s face, and screamed at her in Yiddish.
Then, she went for the teacher’s throat. It took the principal and two janitors to get her off the teacher, and when she was finally free, Zelda’s mother threw a litany of curses at the teacher. She told her she was going to have three strokes before she was fifty. She told her that she would get married, but he would never love her. Instead, he would love the milkman. She told her that she would die in debt with no children and no one to love her.
Of course, all of that came true, but for the moment, it just sounded like a crazy witch was cursing my teacher. That’s how it sounded to my teacher, too. She never used that ruler, again except to draw straight lines.
After that incident, Zelda was persona non grata in our first grade class and everywhere else in Cannes. The town was much smaller then. Everyone knew everyone. Nobody locked their front doors, and kids roamed the streets as soon as they could walk on two feet, finding other children to play with. I, for one, ate dinner at friends’ homes more often than at my home.
So, it was a blow to Zelda when suddenly all the parents would cross themselves when they would see her, and they categorically forbade their children from having anything to do with her. My parents were no different. They crossed themselves a lot and told me that if I even looked at Zelda or her mother, my soul would be lost to the devil forever.
Well, that was good enough for me. The next day, I marched over to Zelda and declared her to be my best friend for life. I insisted on sitting next to her in every class all the way through high school, and I became a fixture at the old Victorian Burger house.
It drove my parents crazy. Good. Nobody tells me who I can or cannot be friends with. Of course, that was stupid. Zelda is a pain in my caboose, just like her granddaughter. Where I was tweed slacks, Zelda was designer dresses. Where I was a tight bun, she was a bouffant. Where I was a union organizer, she was a yenta.
Yes, that’s right. I said it. Yenta. You can’t be a fixture in the Burger house for long without learning Yiddish.
Even though Zelda and I were an odd couple friendship, and even though she was a pain in my patooty, the day she gave birth to Jonathan, all that changed. I was made godmother, and I never had so much joy doing anything else in my life. Back in those days, Tea Time only served tea, and that sweet little boy used to come visit me just as soon as he could walk, and I would fill his belly with iced tea and chocolate chip scones, and he would sit at the center table for hours just watching people and listening to their stories.
He was an angel among mortals. I loved him so. There was a light in him that never went out, a light that lit me up, too. I never had a sorrowful day when he was on the earth. Even when he moved away for a few years and came back with his wife, I was still lit up. He used to write to me once a week, long descriptive letters of his days, and he would top them off with a bawdy rhyme or two to make me chuckle. Then, on special occasions, he would spend his money—and as a poet, he didn’t have much—on a long-distance call to wish me a happy birthday or a merry Christmas or just to make fun of Lipton drinkers in San Diego.
Then, he was gone, and it was like all the light went out in the world. It was a loss that I couldn’t get over, and it had a ripple effect. His wife Luann, Zelda, Gladie, and I… we all suffered. We all died a little, too. I kept all of his letters in a cedar box in my bedroom. It was the last glimmer of light from him, and the only thing that kept me going. I seriously thought of closing up shop when he died, but every day when I opened the shop, I had the memory of him as a little boy sitting at my center table, and I couldn’t let that go.
Recently, Zelda and I had patched things up, and the light came back into our lives after we found out who had killed Jonathan. Zelda was no longer a shut-in. Luann was no longer a drunk. And I was no longer grumpy. Okay, you got me. I lied about the last bit.
Recently, I had gotten used to Gladie. Not only did she have her grandmother’s obnoxious third eye and was a dreaded coffee drinker, but she also was determined to stick her nose in where it didn’t belong and solve every murder she came across. You would think that in an idyllic small town like Cannes, we wouldn’t have a lot of murders, but somehow, ever since Gladie moved here four years ago, we’ve had more than our share of corpses showing up, murdered in almost every way imaginable.
Despite all of that, the girl had grown on me, and I couldn’t deny—well, I could deny to anyone who asked, but I couldn’t deny to myself—that I sort of liked her, and now I was worried about her. How long would this blind day last? Could she overcome it? And was Zelda right about us needing to solve Annie Benoit’s murder in order to help Gladie? I hated to admit that Zelda was right about anything, but something told me that Zelda was right again, just like she was about the weather and about that lump I found on the bottom of my foot.
But how could I help Gladie solve a murder? What did I know about solving crime? I didn’t even read mystery novels. I didn’t even watch mystery shows on TV. Frankly, I had never watched one Rockford Files during my long life.
I did know a little about Annie Benoit, though. She had married very well, eons ago, to a man in business. They used to spend money like it was tap water. They had season tickets to the symphony and opera in Los Angeles, and to the baseball and football games in San Diego. They gave a lot to charity, too, mostly so that Annie could sit on numerous boards, which allowed her to prance around town in her fancy clothes and laud it over everyone that she was on the board of this or the board of that. That was a while ago, though. I hadn’t heard much about her for years, and yesterday when she was at Tea Time with Gladie was the first time that I had seen her here in forever.
Hunh.
I wondered what that was about. Why wasn’t she prancing around town anymore, buying things? She must have gotten a fortune in the divorce. Had she decided to travel instead of being Ms. Fancypants in town? But I hadn’t heard about her traveling. She was the kind of woman who would have bragged about that.
Hunh.
I wondered what that was about.
I kept wondering and wiping down the bar when Lucy and Bridget walked in. They sat at a table in the corner, and I went over to them to take their order and get an update. “What’s happening with Gladie?” I asked them.
“Still the same,” Bridget said. “We just dropped off Danish and hamburgers, but she wasn’t hungry.”
“She wasn’t hungry for Danish and hamburgers?” I asked, so shocked that I had to grab onto the table for balance.
“We need to help her,” Bridget said.
“And that’s just we’re doin’, darlin’,” Lucy drawled. “Guess who we found? We found the murderer.”
“Actually, we found the maybe murderer, but the probable burglar,” Bridget clarified. “Remember, innocent before proven guilty. We must fix the criminal justice system in this country, once and for all.”
“You found the burglar?” I asked.
“I’ve got a special man on him right now,” Lucy said. “This whole thing is nearly locked up.”
“Did he confess?” I asked.
“No,” Lucy admitted.
“What evidence do you have?”
“Why do we need evidence?” Lucy demanded. “Gladie never got evidence. She just solved the cases without it.”
“I don’t know if that’s totally true,” Bridget said.
I rolled my eyes. I was too old to listen to this dribble. “What’ll you have?”
They ordered, and I went back to the bar to get their food and coffee. I wasn’t very confident in their ability to solve a murder. Maybe they found the burglar. Maybe. But it was all way too easy for my money. It never went easy when Gladie was sticking her nose in, and I was completely certain that it would be less easy for Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
What was our town coming to? We weren’t supposed to be a place where folks couldn’t even go to a funeral and know that their houses were safe.
Hunh.
Funerals.
That was quite a coincidence that all the burglaries happened when they were out at a funeral. Annie had been supposed to be at a funeral, but she had been late.
Hunh.
That couldn’t be a coincidence. The funerals had to be important in this whole thing. I never liked that funeral parlor, anyway. It used to be owned by Morris Tatum. He ran that place for seventy years. It all ran smoothly under his guidance. They didn’t fuss with nonsense kinds of funerals, but only did sedate, serious funerals. The right way. The way it was supposed to be done. But a year or two ago, Morris sold it to someone. To who? I couldn’t recall.
