Dead Head: A Dirty Business Mystery (2 page)

“No,” she said, rubbing the hand that was still smarting from the ill-advised smack. “These were four-legged culprits with glow-in-the-dark eyes and pointy little noses. I’d think they were cute if I saw them on the Nature Channel, but not in my parking lot!”

I empathized; I felt the same way about deer. In a national park, Bambi. In my garden, Godzilla.

In the years since we’d become friends Babe and I had transformed the glass-and rubbish-strewn parking lot outside the Paradise Diner into a tropical oasis. Never mind that this part of Connecticut frequently saw ten to fifteen snowstorms a season. Babe chose to live on island time. She had made her own rules and blissfully ignored convention for so long that people in Springfield rarely commented on it anymore, unless it was to acknowledge her latest makeover—her current look featured spiky blond hair and fingernails the color of Granny Smith apples.

We walked back to the planters. She circled one anemic lamium, moved it slightly to the right, and gave it careful consideration before giving it a thumbs-up. The plant had made the cut. We reenacted the same pas de deux with each perennial and shrub every planting season, and she’d never yet turned down one of my suggestions.

“Why do you do this,” I asked, “when you always say yes?” I made a note to order six more false lamiums from the nursery.

“I just don’t want you to think I’m a pushover.”

As if that were likely.

I’m Paula Holliday, sole proprietor of Dirty Business, formerly known as PH Factor, but the longer I did it the more dirt I dug up, so I changed the name and it caught on. It was also my intentionally vague way of saying
that I’m not a licensed landscape architect and I’ll do pretty much anything garden related from long-range design plans to houseplant care.

The traditional property maintenance business had all but disappeared these days. People were cutting back, and I’d had two clients stiff me for an entire summer’s work last year by moving out and neglecting to leave a forwarding address so that I could send them a final bill. Anna Jurado, my part-time bookkeeper, felt responsible, but it was my own fault. I should have read the telltale signs—the tag sale, the rented Dumpster, the “Oh, no, we’re just doing some fall cleaning.” Right, and I’m just doing this because I’m a madcap heiress waiting for my inheritance to come through.

The good news was that those two miscreants inspired my latest professional brainstorm—the quickie curb-appeal face-lift. Makeup for your home. With all the
for sale
signs dotting the area, these instant-gratification jobs had turned into the most lucrative and least-labor-intensive part of my business. I suppose I had cable television to thank.

For three to five hundred bucks, depending on the size and selling price of the house, I’d sweep in with a horticultural Band-Aid for a plain house—containers, annuals, and a few small trees. Pumpkins and ornamental kale in the fall. Just about the only thing I couldn’t orchestrate was a thin wisp of smoke emanating from the chimney to give it that final Norman Rockwell touch.
If you lived here you’d be happy, warm. Your house would be filled with the smell of homemade bread or apple pie. Your kids wouldn’t smoke pot or give you a hard time. And all your in-laws would be people you’d actually hang out with if you had a choice.
All courtesy of a few plants, a vivid imagination, and a fondness for Norman Rockwell.

At the Paradise, on the other hand, that wasn’t required. Not that Babe had anything against Norman Rockwell, but she saw my work at the diner as a calling card—not unlike the display gardens at a flower
show. Babe had insisted I put Designed by Dirty Business signs on the planters as a way to drum up business. It had worked for the past three seasons, and I had my fingers crossed for next year.

I allowed myself to think about a vacation. I hadn’t had one since leaving my old job, but once my assets and debits were on speaking terms I was heading to Jost Van Dyke. I’d lie in a hammock and read the water-swollen paperbacks—thoughtfully left by previous travelers—that smelled of the sea and suntan lotion. And the biggest decision I’d have to make was which high-calorie local drink to order, the painkiller or the bushwhacker.

In the meantime the Paradise Diner would serve as my Caribbean surrogate. Earlier in the season, Hugo Jurado and I had turned one corner of Babe’s parking lot into an outdoor café, something sorely missing in suburban Springfield. Hugo was Anna’s husband and my part-time helper; sometimes it seemed as if they were the brains of the business and I worked for them instead of the other way around.

Springfield’s downtown had evolved, even in just the few years since I’d arrived. We had an art house movie theater and an all-night deli, but further out of town Babe’s and the Dunkin’ Donuts were the only two gastronomic and social destinations. Double D had the edge on the coffee, but no one could touch the donuts at the Paradise.

Hugo and I had constructed wooden flower boxes two feet high and four feet deep creating a modular enclosure for a twenty-by-twenty-foot area in the front of the diner. In the spring and summer the boxes dripped with colorful annuals and perennials, and Babe wanted to extend the season with a fall display that included shrubs and ornamental grasses. All of them were a charming counterpoint to Babe’s deliciously trashy message marquee and neon sign, where one of the bulbs was always burned out or smashed. I half suspected that kids came by at night when the diner was closed and tossed rocks at the lightbulbs, to help Babe maintain the diner’s slightly seedy look, or maybe it was Babe herself, who knew?

She had added picnic tables and unmatched tag-sale umbrellas, so now in addition to being a must stop for every trucker in this part of the state, the shabby chic café was attracting the Main Street Moms who had previously been too timid or too snobby to venture in, preferring the overpriced gourmet bakery three towns away.

One or two curmudgeonly regulars had grumbled that Babe was tarting up the place, but just as many appreciated the new and better-looking faces. The early shift of day laborers and long haulers who camped out at Babe’s—whether they were hungry or not—was now followed by clusters of suburban matrons, sometimes with their kids, fresh from soccer or ballet or dressage. Sometimes they overlapped.

“When you pay my bills,” she told the complainers, “you can tell me how to decorate and who to serve.”

I didn’t pay her bills either, and she rarely paid mine, except for materials. For the most part, Babe and I had an in-kind arrangement. I worked on her outside space and she let me use a corner booth at the Paradise as an informal office where the coffee kept flowing and Pete number two (so named to distinguish him from Babe’s late husband) used me as a guinea pig for new recipes. It was an arrangement that suited me fine despite the three or four pounds I’d put on since I had relocated to Springfield from New York City and our unspoken agreement had started. And Babe’s bulletin board was my private ad space, touting my services to residents and small businesses up and down the Merritt Parkway, which brought Babe many of her non-truck-driving customers.

This was a far cry from Babe’s previous life twenty or so years earlier when she was a backup singer traveling with a band and the dear departed Pete number one. Late in the day when there were no kids around, she would let slip one of her more outrageous anecdotes, and she never failed to gather a crowd at the diner’s counter, leaving most of her listeners feeling Walter Mittyish for living vicariously through
her adventures instead of getting off their butts and having some of their own. Once in a while a story sounded suspiciously like something I’d seen in a movie or read in a novel, but if she was embellishing, who cared? Who didn’t relive the past and burnish some stories to make herself seem smarter, hipper, and funnier? And she told the stories well, with enough brio and detail to make you feel as if you’d been there with her, partying with rock stars and dancing on yachts.

“I miss it sometimes,” she’d said, “traveling with the Jimmy Collins Band. A different city every week. Hell, sometimes every night. That was a lifetime ago. I have no complaints. Somebody once told me there are only two stories: a man goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. The first half of my life, I went on the journey. Now I’m here and the people who come to the diner are the ones who come to town.” A bittersweet smile had crossed her face when she said it, and I wondered if she was thinking about Pete number one and how they had come to this town so many years ago.

Babe brushed her hands on her tight black jeans, held the diner’s screen door open, and shooed me inside. “C’mon, Linnaeus,” she said. Babe was a quick study.

“Town” was Springfield, Connecticut, somewhere between Boston and New York and light-years from both. I had come to Springfield from New York City years earlier as a summer renter, thinking everything was so much smaller and simpler than my life in New York. People said hello. After only two trips to the diner I was asked if I was having “the usual.”

Arrogantly, I found everything
quaint
. Then a few years back I lost my job and my boyfriend in one sixty-day period. I came here to lick my wounds and I never left. Small and simple was just what I needed.

“Speaking of a man going on a journey, have you heard from Neil?” I asked casually, sliding onto a counter stool and positioning my backpack on the one next to it. I peeled off my garden gloves, shoved them
into a back pocket, and checked out the day’s specials on the blackboard. I made an extra effort to appear to be studying the menu in case the subject of her relationship with Neil was off-limits.

Babe’s face softened. Neil was her sweet young thing. He had gone home to Scotland because his mother was ill and wound up staying longer than any of them had expected. “He’s supposed to be back in two weeks, according to the last round of electronic missives.”

Neil had been e-mailing and Twittering lists of movies, foods, and recreational activities he expected to indulge in once he got home. They were sweet, like two teenagers separated during summer vacation. Babe smacked her lips as if Neil were one of Pete number two’s architectural, Food Network desserts. “His mom is out of the woods medically, but it sounds like she didn’t change a lightbulb or hang a picture in the seven years he’s been in this country. You’d think no one else in Scotland knew how to use a spanner. That’s a wrench…or a hammer. I forget which.”

“C’mon, isn’t it just the mom thing? Don’t you have it have with your kids?”

“My kids? They’ve been independent from a very early age.”

That’s right. I recalled one of Babe’s late-night storytelling sessions. She told us how one night her sons, Dylan and Daltry, had borrowed a friend’s car to catch Hootie & the Blowfish at a club called Emerald City, more than a hundred miles away. They almost made it, when a couple of bored staties pulled them over on the Jersey Turnpike for driving with a broken taillight. Her sons were eleven and thirteen at the time and the only thing that bothered Babe was that they’d done it all to see Hootie and not some edgier, hipper band.
Independent
was an understatement. So independent that I’d never met them and neither had anyone at the diner. They hadn’t been back east since their father had died. That was a subject I didn’t touch. People were funny when it came to their kids.

I placed my order—red, white, and blueberry waffles, probably the
reason for my extra four pounds—and went to wash my hands. When I got back, Babe was peering out the window through the miniblinds.

“What have we here?” she said under her breath. “If it’s Tuesday it must be…what, horseback riding or lacrosse? Convoy of Main Street Moms arriving, Pete. Crank up the cappuccino machine.” Which was a joke, since she didn’t own a cappuccino machine, although Pete was lobbying hard for one, as well as a copper milk steamer he’d seen on QVC.

I half stood in my seat to see what was holding her attention for so long. A flotilla of sleek cars had arrived and pulled into the angled parking spots adjacent to the entrance as if they were a team of synchronized swimmers or trained seals. Just as gracefully, out the drivers came, first one smooth fair head, then the next.

All the moms wore slightly different permutations of the same early fall outfit—turtlenecks, leather vests, quilted jackets, quilted vests, leather jackets, with well-coordinated gloves, scarves, and bags that were like the colors on creamy decorator paint chips. Pricey paint.

Four or five kids who could have belonged to any of the women piled out of the back of the largest SUV. Towheaded angels, a cross between the psycho kids from
Village of the Damned
and those from the latest Ralph Lauren ad campaign whose little duds probably cost more than my first car, although that wasn’t saying much. Something about the mothers suggested they had just parked Thoroughbred horses, like their cars, on similar angles, and left them in the nearby Mossdale Stables.

Caroline Sturgis was the last to dismount from a silver, or maybe it was a Paul Revere pewter Land Rover. Caroline was one of my first customers in Springfield. We’d met at a local thrift shop—I was buying, she was donating. Despite the differences in our ages and socioeconomic groups, she seemed to gravitate toward me. As a newcomer with a business, I needed all the contacts I could get, so I responded.

This would be the third year I’d looked after Caroline’s property, weaning her from the pedestrian triumvirate of impatiens, marigold, and red salvia and steering her toward more adventurous plantings, or at least my notion of them. But I’d kept my distance for the last month or so because making a house call inevitably involved a pitcher of something alcoholic. I’d succumbed in the past and it resulted in my losing a day’s work and once, a dozen flats of pansies that had sat wilting in the sun for hours while Caroline and I got very happy on a bottle of Mouton Rothschild. Getting loaded early in the day was something a rich suburban matron might be able to do, but it was a no-no for a woman of modest means who was struggling to keep her small business afloat.