Killer Hair (20 page)

“I’m the victim, aren’t I?” Marcia didn’t look surprised.

“I wouldn’t say victim, exactly,” Lacey said.

“But you gotta give me credit for not wearing pink, right?”

“Yeah, Marcia, you get extra points.”

Chapter 15

Lacey spent all day Thursday sorting out her notes and writing up the secret interview with Marcia Robinson. She worked diligently without attracting attention. She just hoped she could sneak the story in without having to explain how she got an exclusive interview, something no one else had managed, or why she forgot to tell Mac or Peter Johnson.

There was an unwritten policy for reporters to stick around while an editor read their stories, just in case there were questions or fact checking was needed, but occasionally a reporter slipped out without the final read, particularly if it was a run-of-the-mill effort. Lacey was hoping to move quickly.

She finished the story by late afternoon, moments ahead of deadline: “Robinson Feared Dead Stylist Would Be Subpoenaed; Told Her Too Much, Marcia Says.”

Lacey nearly made it out the door before Mac hollered. “Smithsonian!” She turned slowly to see him waving her back to his office. Mac was a fast reader. “We’ve got to stop meeting this way, Lacey. What the hell have you been up to? An exclusive with Marcia Robinson! Good God Almighty!” Several people turned to stare. He gestured her into his office and slammed the door after her. “I told you to keep me in the loop!”

“And you would have sicced Johnson on me.”

“It’s his beat.”

“Marcia would never have spoken to him. She called me.”

“She called you?”

Lacey was offended by his tone. “Yes, at home, after I nailed her at the courthouse. Angela Woods is my story.”

“Your beat is fashion.”

“My beat is my oyster; that’s what you said, Mac. I can cover anything as long as it’s fashion related. That’s a quote. A dead hairstylist is fashion related.”

“Smithsonian—” He sounded dangerous.

“Marcia said she would only meet with me. Woman-to-woman. Her attorney’s got her under wraps like she’s radioactive. She’s feeling suffocated. She’d have talked to Eleanor Roosevelt’s ghost before Peter Johnson.”

“Do you know how many reporters have been trying to get an interview with her? Holy mackerel.” Mac was weakening. “But you have to tell me things, Lacey. You have to trust me.”

“There’s a concept.”

Mac glared at her. “This will not happen again. I’m willing to stand behind you, support you. But I can’t if I don’t know what in damnation is going on. Do we understand each other?” She nodded. “Good, now get out of here. By the way, Lacey, it’s a good story. Page one.”

 

Lacey’s front page story on Friday generated unusual excitement at
The Eye
. Word was that the new publisher, Claudia Darnell, liked the story. Mac actually smiled.

Curiosity compelled Lacey to go back to the DeadFed Web site, which she had bookmarked. There was a flashing headline with a link to her story. Her follow-up on Angie had appeared on the “Suspicious Suicides” page. Lacey scrolled down a growing list of names compiled by conspiracy theorists all over the country. The bodies were scattered over different scandals during different administrations, but all dead nonetheless. As if there were one Überconspiracy.
Ridiculous.

Listed by method, several caught Lacey’s eye, including a suicide shot twice in the back of the head. Apparently one of several. Just like Vic said. Numerous victims seemed compelled to throw themselves out of windows or die conveniently in unwitnessed one-car crashes on lonely side roads in the early hours of the morning.

Lacey noticed how many of the suicides seemed to slit their wrists, including a woman who had packed her bags as if for a sudden departure, but was found in her bloody bathtub. A freelance journalist, also found with slit wrists, told friends his story was so hot his life was in danger. His notes for that hot story were still missing, but the official version was suicide. She gave up on the Web site. It was too bloody to continue and it gave her a headache.

Peter Johnson appeared in the newsroom, his lips drawn in a tight line. There was an immediate drop in the ambient temperature. He caught her in the small kitchen where a substance alleged to be coffee brewed.

Lacey struck first. “She called
me
, Peter. Not you. Get over it.”

“You’re making a mockery of this story.”

“Are you serious, Peter? How could anybody make a mockery of a congressional staffer’s Internet pornography scandal involving the Speaker of the House, interns, pages, possibly the White House, and the attorney general mud wrestling nude with an alligator? How?”

Johnson spoke through clenched teeth. “Stay. Off. My. Beat. Fashionista.” He was sweating, but it might have been the humidity.

“I’m wounded, Peter. Deeply.”

She returned to her desk with a cup of bitter black coffee and checked out her other article, in LifeStyle. Lacey’s satisfaction with her column on Angie evaporated when she saw the headline. Mac had only to approve the headline and keep his hands off. But he couldn’t be happy until he mucked it up somehow.

“Oh Mac, how could you?” Lacey waved the paper at him. Her column—“Who Killed Rapunzel?”—appeared under the new headline: “Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow—Hairstylist Was Fashion Crime Victim.”

He was unrepentant. “Needed some pizzazz, Lacey.”

“It’s tasteless.” She hoped Stella wouldn’t hold it against her.

“I’m crushed.” He obviously was not. Mac was still sore at her. “Everyone in Washington wants to talk to Marcia Robinson. You get her and all you talk about is clothes.”

“Clothes and other scandalous things.”

“Lucky for you.”

“Or what? You’d bust me down to obituaries?”

Mac grumbled, sounding like a panther with indigestion. “So, you finished the Sunday piece, right?”

The Sunday piece. “I’m working on it.”
Maybe I should start.

“Deadline is four. Is it funny?”

He always had to ask. It drove her nuts that he couldn’t read something and tell if it was funny, sarcastic, or just plain rude. This was a man who was wearing an orange-and-green-plaid short-sleeved shirt with bright blue pants, topped off with a red-white-and-blue striped tie. He didn’t think there was anything funny about that.

“It’s a scream.” Lacey thought the piece would hold its own, when she got around to actually writing it. At least she had the headline: “Penitent, Prim, and Proper: Scarlet Woman Wows Courthouse Crowd.”

Lacey looked at the proof sheets with Todd Hansen. She selected five photos: Each would be a column wide and side by side across the top of the page. At the bottom of each would be a box with a score: Wardrobe, 8.5; Hair and Makeup, 8.0; Congeniality, 6.0; Poise, 7.5; and Visible Contrition, 8.0.

The composite score was 7.6, which was respectable. Actually, it was a great score for a Washington woman. And Lacey threw in a bonus point for not wearing pink, arriving at an 8.6 score on a scale of 9.9.
Only Rosalind Russell gets 10.0,
Lacey thought. She congratulated herself on using the photo spread, as it cut down on the copy she would have to write. A few sparkling paragraphs, including some choice words about the sweaty media mob, and it was done.

Lacey was only a half hour past deadline when she filed her story and shoved the photos at Mac.

“Good. Get out of here.” He waved at the half-empty newsroom, which on a Friday afternoon wasn’t going to have any more heavy traffic. She didn’t need to hear it twice.

“Thanks, I’m all out of vocabulary.”

Felicity Pickles appeared out of nowhere and made Lacey’s stomach jolt. Lacey hated sitting next to Felicity,
Eye Street
food editor, resident cookie baker, and part-time copy-editing bitch from hell. Felicity wasn’t unattractive. She may even have been pretty under the extra forty-five pounds packed on her small frame. She had long, thick, chestnut-colored hair and cold violet eyes. Unaccountably, Felicity had a reputation for being nice.

From the start she and Lacey rubbed each other the wrong way. Felicity secretly wanted to be the fashion editor, but she had never dared broach the subject with Mac. Instead, she watched her dream job handed over to Smithsonian, who didn’t want it. She never missed an opportunity to insult Lacey.

Felicity cooked up her frustrations in cakes and other goodies, which she lugged to the office in hopes of fattening up everyone else. When she wasn’t trying to force-feed Lacey brownies, she was offering work advice. “If you’d only let me help you, Lacey, maybe someday you could learn to write a good article,” she once said.

It’s too bad that the music from
Jaws
does not swell every time she swims by.
Lacey took one look at the food editor and the thought of poor Angie Woods in her coffin surfaced.
Things like that never happen to people like Felicity.

It was a horrible thought. Lacey tried instead to imagine Felicity as a gnat to be swatted away. The gnat was wearing a large floral-patterned dress. An enormous fly swatter reached down from the sky and—splat! It didn’t help.

“Why, Lacey, you’re usually gone by this time on a Friday. Don’t tell me you’ve been working.” She said it loud enough for Mac to hear. He looked over the top of his newspaper at them, then turned away, rolling his eyes.

“I’m on my way out.” They smiled falsely at each other. Lacey made a show of locking up her desk. She suspected that Felicity went through her things as soon as she left.

As Lacey stood to leave, the phone rang. “Ms. Smithsonian, this is Special Agent Jim Thorn with the FBI. I’d like to discuss your story on Marcia Robinson in today’s
Eye Street Observer
.”

“What?” It came out shrill. “Me? Why?”

“Can I come over right now?” he asked.

Her stomach flipped over. “No. Anything you have to say to me you can tell my editor.” She rattled off the number.

“You’re overreacting, ma’am.”

“I don’t think so. Call him. Douglas MacArthur Jones. Good-bye.” Lacey fled as she heard the phone ring in Mac’s office.

It was the kind of day that made her want to ride a horse named Desperado into the nearest saloon, slam down whiskey shooters and riddle the ceiling with bullets just for fun. It wasn’t really her style, but she liked to think it was.

But this was D.C. There were no saloons, six-shooters were outlawed, outlaws had automatics, and anyway, shooting up a bar was antisocial.
And the FBI wants to talk to me.

A manicure and a pedicure were no solution to Lacey’s new problem, but they were a start. Lacey cruised through the doors of Stylettos just as Jamie with the Hair of Many Colors was reading this week’s “Crimes of Fashion” column about Angie. The rest of
The Eye Street Observer
had already gone into the trash. Jamie told her it was totally great and didn’t mention the headline. Stella pulled her aside.

“The column is perfect. And the headline really says it all.” There was no hint of sarcasm in Stella’s face.
Go figure,
Lacey thought. “But getting Marcia to spill her guts! Wow, that was incredible, Lacey.”

If you only knew.

“How do you do it? How do you get them to open up?”

“Generally, people just won’t shut up.”

Stella picked up a fresh paper with the column and handed it to Lacey. “Would you autograph it for me?”

“I actually just came for a manicure and a pedicure.”

“Sure. Sign first.” Stella handed her a pen. Lacey was embarrassed, but she hated it when her stylist whined. She signed. “Thanks, Lacey. You really wrote it. You told the world that Angie didn’t kill herself, the cops have it all wrong, and she was murdered.”

“But what about the murderer?”

“Even real detectives don’t always find the killers. They practically have to stumble over them as they’re fleeing the scene. That’s what Vic says.”

“Oh, he does, does he?”

“Do you think maybe the Feds did it? Like Marcia suggested? It would really be dangerous for you. The Feds, they can make anything look like suicide.”

“Have you been reading that DeadFed Web site?”

Stella nodded somberly. “Bobby has a laptop. He’s like a Web wizard. That ‘Conspiracy Body Count,’ it scares the pee out of me. But Angie’s on it now, so people all over the world can read about her. I really appreciate it, Lacey.”

“Wait a minute. This doesn’t sound like the Stella Lake I know. That Stella would be sending me out in the night with a pat on the back and a mission. A suicide mission.”

Stella’s voice dropped and she pulled Lacey out of the doorway traffic.

“Ratboy is freaking furious. He was here before I got the shop open. He’d already read it. I’ve never seen him so mad. He threatened to fire me and he nearly broke my arm.” She showed Lacey a bruised patch on her upper arm.