Hide nor Hair (A Jersey Girl Cozy Mystery Book 2) (11 page)

“This is Bevin Thompson,” I told Trina. “She came to give me moral support.”

Bevin gave Trina’s hand a limp shake. “Pleased to meet you, Trina,” she said. “This is quite a place you have here. If you don’t mind my asking, what’s going on at the top of that spiral staircase?”

“We do makeup, facials, and waxing on the second floor. Down here, it’s hair and nails.”

I detected a slight accent, something immediately noticeable to my Central Jersey ears.

“You’re not from here originally, are you, Trina?” I asked.

“Upstate New York, as a matter of fact. Albany.”

“That’s a long way off. That’s somewhere near Cooperstown, isn’t it?” I asked, recalling a long car trip Neil and I took with the kids, so Bobby could visit the Baseball Hall of Fame.

“Cooperstown is about sixty miles west of Albany, but from here you’d be in the general vicinity.”

“I have no sense of direction,” I said.

“Me either, my dear. I can get lost going around the block. So, let’s get down to something we both have a sense of—hair business. You told the receptionist you were interested in having those lovely curls straightened. Do you have a preference, Colleen?”

“I want it straight,” I said.

“Well, there’s the La-Brasiliana treatment or maybe thermal reconditioning.” Trina reached out and ran her fingers through my hair. “I think you’d be okay with a Brazilian Blowout, my dear. Let’s consult with the technician first,” she said and turned to find someone on her staff.

The technician?
I thought.
Like I’m having a virus removed from my computer?
And, boy, I hated being called “my dear,” especially by someone younger than me. It was one of those phrases that made me feel elderly, like when someone calls me “sweetheart,” or even worse—“ma’am.” I glanced Bevin’s way.

“Bev? Is this Brazilian thing the way to go? Maybe I should think this over.”

“I don’t know a thing about hair straightening. I’ve never had anything like that done. I only get my hair trimmed, and I only let Dizzie touch it. She said I had the best hair in town.”

Of course, Bevin had the best hair in town. She had the best everything in town—or as close as anyone could come to the best. With her brilliant red hair, extraordinary face, and Barbie-doll figure, Bevin Thompson was the envy of all who knew her.

Trina returned with wonderful news. “Muffy will be working on your hair, Colleen! She’s fabulous at making curls go away! You’re so lucky she’s free! And I’ll be around to supervise,” she said.

I had hoped to have some private time to talk to Trina, but with the technician taking charge of my hair, I wasn’t certain it would happen.

An hour and change into the treatment, Muffy took a breather before the next step in the straightening process began. I found plenty of time to talk to Trina.

“Dear God! How long does this take? I’ve been sitting here for days for end!” I complained.

Trina laughed. “You have at least an hour to go. Muffy still has to flat-iron you, and then you’ll need the solution rinsed out, a conditioning mask, and of course you’ll want your hair trimmed and styled. I’ll be doing the trimming and styling myself.”

I glanced in the mirror and stopped myself from frowning. My hair looked pretty flat as it was, and I wasn’t at all sure anymore that having super-sleek hair was the look for me.

“This is all really great,” I lied. “I’d love to get the process down step-by-step for our readers.” Bevin, as if on cue, handed me my pocketbook, and I pulled out my notebook and a pen. “Does it always take this long to get straight hair?”

Trina laughed. “It’s not the kind of thing you’d want to rush. If you’d like, I can give you a brochure that explains the process. Make sure you mention our Brazilian Blowout process is formaldehyde-free.”

That sounded pretty good to me. I hated the thought of my hair being straightened by stuff meant to preserve removed internal organs. “Terrific. You know, I originally had an appointment with Dizzie Oliver to get this done. Of course, we all know why my hair was so curly when I first walked in here.”

Trina shook her head. “Awful. Simply ghastly.”

“Did you know Dizzie well?” I asked. “Were you two friends?”

“No, we were more acquaintances than friends,” Trina explained. “I guess we were competitors, but not in that really nasty way some people are. We were very different types. She was, well, extremely gregarious … and I have to admit, a little on the loud side. Very Central Jersey.”

I bristled at the comment. I wondered who this alluring, plastic-looking creature thought she was anyway? I could understand why someone like Trina would consider Dizzie a bit uncouth. But I could also see that big-mouth Dizzie Oliver didn’t have a fake bone in her body, while Trina Cranford was nothing but phony from her dark brown roots all the way down to her acrylic toenails.

“But you knew each other,” I continued to pry.

“Oh, yes. I knew both of the Olivers. Dizzie, of course, but I met her husband, Matthew Oliver, through the Tranquil Harbor Chamber of Commerce. He fixed my furnace when I moved here last year in the absolute dead of winter. He came out to the house in a near blizzard. It took him hours and hours to fix it. I was just so grateful.”

Really?
I thought.
How grateful?

“Dizzie was also a member,” she continued. “We were the only two full-service salons in town. Of course, now there’s just me—unless you count that little salon, that ridiculous place on the shady side of town—Short and Long of It.”

I hadn’t heard of Short and Long of It. “What happens there?” I asked.

“They mostly cater to people who actually walk in off the street for a haircut. Their stylists wet hair, cut it, and send their clients, if you could call them clients, on their merry way. I think their customers must be very poor, or they have the world’s tightest purse strings!”

I figured I’d be one of their clients in a year’s time, maybe less, if I didn’t go full-time at the paper soon.

“I’d better send your tech over. You’re ready for the next step,” Trina said. She left us in search of Muffy the technician. I looked at Bevin.

“She’s a cow,” Bevin whispered.

I laughed out loud.

“Now, girls, you’re having entirely too much fun,” Muffy told us, hurrying over. “We need to rinse you out and do that conditioning, Colleen. Let’s get you started.”

After all the processing was done, I was led to a chair for a trim and a blowout. Bevin followed me every step of the way, with her face screwed up in an ugly frown. As promised, Trina came back to work on me.

She ran her talons through my newly-straight hair. “Lovely job,” she muttered. “Simply gorgeous. Muffy is one of the very best—a true artist!”

I glanced in the mirror. I looked like one of those Afghan hounds people go crazy for at the Westminster Dog Show. Though I hated my insane, abundant curls, it was clear the arrow-straight look wasn’t for me.

“Is there some way you could trim it that would give it a little more body and bounce?” I asked Trina.

“Well, of course, my little darling. Hair is all about bounce and flow, isn’t it?” she said.

Bevin snorted from the chair next to mine. Trina gave her a long sideways look before she began cutting.

A half an hour later, the damage had been done. I looked at myself in the mirror and bit my lower lip to keep from crying.

Everything looked flat. My hair did glisten with amazing shine, but that’s where the beauty of it ended. The sleek look did nothing for my face. Clearly, I was meant to have curls.

“What do you think?” Trina asked, turning the chair and offering me a hand-held mirror to check out the back. “Amazing, isn’t it? Truly amazing!”

“I …” I began, but couldn’t finish. There were no words.

Trina smiled. “I know. I know. It simply takes your breath away.”

“Like a punch in the gut,” Bevin mumbled.

* * *

Bevin dropped me off at home, where I picked up the Sentra and drove myself to the newspaper office. I knew when Willy Rojas saw me, he’d torture me with nasty hair comments for the rest of the day.

I steeled myself and walked through the door and into the newsroom.

“Oh my God!” Meredith Mancini muttered. She was standing in the aisle, munching on a cookie and shooting the breeze with Mark Doran, the sports editor.

“You’re kidding, right?” Doran said. “I mean, really, you’re kidding.”

Everyone stood up in their cubicles to see what was going on. There were a few giggles. I even heard a long, hearty laugh from across the room. Calypso Trent, the normally reserved head of accounting, covered her mouth in an attempt to hold it in, but it was clear she thought the sleek new me wasn’t making the grade.

Ken Rhodes stepped out of his office. “What’s going on around here?” he asked.

Meredith pointed in my direction.

“Seriously?” he said when he saw me. “You mean we’re footing the bill for that?”

I had had enough. “So it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it! Big freaking deal!”

Ken beckoned me to join him in his office with a curl of his finger. I hated when people did that, like I was some kind of dog—though with my Afghan hound hair, it wasn’t entirely inappropriate. I went to Meredith’s cubicle and found a rubber band to make a ponytail out of my newly tamed mane.

“This is your fault, you know,” I said, slipping into a chair in front of his desk. “You forced me to go there!”

“Just how much did that set us back?” he inquired.

I dug in my pocketbook and retrieved the corporate card and a receipt from my wallet. “Four hundred dollars,” I told him, tossing them both on his desk.

His face went so deeply, richly purple that I thought for sure he had burst his aorta. He took a few seconds to recover and actually smiled, or maybe grimaced, depending on whether or not his heart had stopped beating.

“Dear God, Colleen,” he said. “How do I justify this as an expense?”

“You told me to get my hair straightened because it would give me more time to talk to Trina Cranford. It took over three hours. Unfortunately, most of the work was done by the hair technician, Candy, or Pumpkin, or something like that.”

“You don’t even remember who worked on your hair?” he asked.

I took out my notes and flipped the pages. “Oh, her name’s Muffy. It figures.”

Ken shook his head. “Did you manage any time at all with the Cranford woman?”

“I did. The Cranford woman is no lady, though she tries her best to fake it. What a complete snob! And unless I’m mistaken, I think she had something going on with the Hot Air King at one point last year.”

“Maybe,” Ken said noncommittally.

“Well, Dizzie and Matthew were married a few years ago, so maybe he had this high-maintenance chick on the side. I’d love to learn a little more about that. He doesn’t really seem like the type, though. He cut money off his installation bill for my furnace and air.”

“That doesn’t automatically make him a model husband. Besides, your column is about crime, not affairs,” Ken told me. “What about that other body, the one in the field?”

“I haven’t had the chance to write much about that yet. I was thinking about doing a tie-in. Maybe something about how two recent, suspicious deaths are tarnishing Tranquil Harbor’s fine reputation.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“They have to be connected,” I said. “I mean, two really odd deaths in the span of a couple of weeks?” I thought about what the mechanic told me. “That guy at the airport. What’s his name?” I flipped through a few more pages until I found my notes about the flying-lessons story. “Drake Tuttle. Let’s see. He told me Hank Barber’s wife walked out on him a couple of weeks before we spotted that body from the plane. That
was
his wife’s body, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, that was her body in the field. Leona Barber. You should know this, Colleen. You should have been all over this since day one.”

I had never been good dealing with criticism, even when it was warranted. “Look, there’s a lot going on right now, and I’m doing my best.”

“I don’t want excuses. I want you to start doing the legwork on these deaths. Your column’s due tomorrow. Think you can you manage that?”

I closed my notebook, got out of the chair, and headed for the door. “Yeah, I can manage that,” I told him. My feathers were ruffled. I had thought Rhodes was a surly but decent guy with who also just happened to be sexy and debonair. The last five minutes, though, gave me another view. At the moment, he seemed nothing more than a run-of-the-mill, sarcastic, unsympathetic boss.

12

The medical examiner released what remained of Leona Barber’s remains, but I didn’t have a reason to go to her wake. I knew the casket would be closed. How could it not be? There was no point attending if I couldn’t examine the body. Besides, I barely knew Hank, and I had never met Leona.

I let sufficient time pass before contacting the airport guys to finish the story on flying lessons and, of course, interviewing Hank would be killing two birds with one stone, so to speak. I would be able to question him, as well as Drake Tuttle, about Leona’s death.

The temperature was a delicious seventy degrees when I drove out to Tranquil Harbor Airport during the second week of October. The leaves on several of the smaller trees, though still mostly green, had begun to turn. Hints of bright red and orange could be seen on a few of the uppermost branches. Humidity was low—not that it mattered anymore. My super-straight hair was gathered into a ponytail, just as it had been every day since Trina Cranford and her young technician chemically flattened every curl on my head.

I coaxed Hank Barber out of his tiny office and into the snack bar, where we had more room to chat. We sat at a worn-out table sipping coffee between questions. I began the interview with the most pressing issue—his wife, Leona.

I wracked my brain for a delicate way to approach the subject. Nothing came to me. I figured the direct approach would have to do. “I heard Leona died from massive trauma. Is that what you were told?”

“Massive trauma?’ Hank asked. He leaned over the table and took a glimpse at my notes. “Every bone in her body was shattered.”