Killer Hair (4 page)

“Her name was Angela Woods. Another Stylettos stylist. She was a sweet kid. Blonde. I used to see her at the salon.”

“One bad haircut too many, no doubt.”

“Maybe. Who knows.”

“I’m actually surprised that it doesn’t happen more often.” Brooke stopped, the popcorn halfway to her mouth. “Wait a minute. My God, not that stylist you wrote about, Marcia Robinson’s stylist?” Her antennae were quivering. “Wow, that Robinson bimbo is really bad luck, isn’t she?”

“Slow down, Brooke, I know what you’re thinking, but there is no connection.”

Although she could pass for the ultimate conservative poster model, nothing Brooke wore betrayed her love for clandestine political plotting, her belief that evildoers were around every corner, or her sheer delight in the drama of it all. Brooke embraced conspiracy theories like some women did their Jimmy Choo shoes.

“Six Hill staffers lost their jobs so far. More to come. Porno Web sites. Now this. Coincidence? Ha. And you’re going to investigate? I love it.”

“No, wait. I’m not. I’m just telling you about it.”

“Great. So what did the stylist know and when did she know it?”

“Would you like to hear about it before you solve it?”

“Of course I would. The stylist obviously knew too much. Now she’s dead. No connection? Bull. In this town everything is connected.”

“The cops say it’s suicide. Stella says no way.” Lacey recapped the theory that someone else cut off Angie’s hair, sliced her wrists, and made it look like a suicide, on Stella’s unassailable logic that a stylist wouldn’t be caught dead with that haircut. “Obviously I can’t encourage her. I don’t know anything about murder.”

“No, but you know about killer style.”

The hair rose on the back of Lacey’s neck. “Not you too.”

“It’s because of your column. All that chat about fashion clues and deadly styles and you are what you wear. I see Stella’s logic.”

“So it’s my column’s fault that I’m suddenly a sleuth?” Lacey was appalled.

“It’s entertaining,” Brooke admitted. “And it tells the truth. So rare in journalism today.”

“Gosh, Brooke, don’t be so nice.”

“I’m never nice. Your column is a great guilty pleasure. Hence, its popularity.”

“I can’t believe you actually read my column.”

“You write it for real women. I’m a real woman.”

“Yeah, but you don’t need my help.”

Brooke had flair that Lacey admired. Far from the stereo-typical dumpy D.C. attorney, Ms. Barton, Esquire, knew how to wear a suit and still look feminine, adding touches like antique lace handkerchiefs and lace blouses that on another woman would look silly. Tonight she was wearing a cherry red sweater with jeans and pearls. All blondes think they look good in red, but Brooke really did. It made her eyes look more blue. More innocent.
Looks can be deceiving.

In contrast, Lacey looked far from innocent. Her delicately arched brows gave her a knowing look she didn’t feel. Tonight she wore comfortable old blue jeans, two or three washings away from ripping through, and a black V-neck sweater. You can never have too many black sweaters, according to Lacey. One of her rules for life, along with: Never let anyone take pictures of you naked. Never keep a diary you would not want published in a family newspaper. And never secretly tape-record your conversations, even in Virginia, where it is legal.

“I’ll tell you one thing.” Brooke broke into her thoughts. “It’s just as well you don’t get involved. You don’t want to wind up dead, do you?”

“No one involved with Marcia Robinson has died.”

“Until now.”

“And that may have nothing to do with Marcia.”

“That we know of.”

“You have to keep in mind there could be jealous stylists, unhappy clients, psycho boyfriends. And maybe it was suicide, after all.”

“Point taken. Of course if you
do
look into it . . .”

“If I do?”

“Be interesting to see if Marcia has serious hair issues,” Brooke suggested. “I wonder what she told her stylist. You know, ‘Only her hairstylist knows for sure.’ ”

“Who knows? It’s way too easy to blab away while someone is massaging your head,” Lacey said. “Remind me to gag myself the next time I get my hair cut. You don’t really think it’s dangerous, do you?”

“Not really. But I’d like to think so.”

“So tell me, Brooke, about that Marcia Robinson mess. Tell me why, instead of actually trying to talk to a real woman, men will spend hours on the Internet surfing Web sites where virtual women take off their clothes?”

“Pheromone jammers.” It was Brooke’s current favorite theory of why men and women in Washington, D.C., could not connect with each other. Obviously the Pentagon had installed pheromone jammers on its roof, beaming relationship-killing Romance Death Rays at every man within the Beltway. “It does something to their testosterone. Something weird. Turns it into decaf.”

“Makes perfect sense to me,” Lacey said. “My signals have been jammed for years.”

“Romance Death Rays. We’ve been irradiated. You have to admit, it’s pretty crazy purveying naughty photos of the Small Business Committee staff on the Internet. Good Lord! More of a horror show than erotica. Here in the Capital City of dweebs, geeks, and nerds.”

“No one actually believed that was the attorney general wrestling nude with an alligator on Marcia’s Web site,” Lacey said. “Did they?”

“You had to buy the video for a better look. That was just a teaser. I was pulling for the alligator.”

“Washington, D.C., the only place on earth where Henry Kissinger could be considered a sex symbol.”

“There’s a woman in my office who has a crush on James Carville,” Brooke said, passing the popcorn.

“Oh please, the Human Snake Head? You just killed my appetite.” Lacey swallowed her last handful and wiped off her hands.

“People think D.C. is full of sex scandals. The real scandal is that’s all the sex there is,” Brooke said. “I haven’t had a date in two months. How’s that cute cops reporter of yours?”

“Trujillo? Stomping on women’s hearts with his new armadillo boots.”

“Too bad.” Brooke had only met Trujillo once, but the memory lingered. “So what about you, Lace? Any prospects?”

“Sorry. Long dry spell. No rain in sight.”

“What about the one who got away?”

“He got away.”

“I hate when that happens. At any rate, I think it’s time for a new salon, Lacey. Crazy hairstylists. Crazy hair killers. You don’t need the aggravation. And that Stella’s a little strange.”

“Yeah, but it’s hard to get rid of your hairstylist. Especially when she knows where to find you.”

Brooke fingered her own blond locks. She treasured her hair, which she wore in a long French braid when she went to court. “You know, if a crazy haircutting killer were out there, not only would you be dead—you’d be bald too!”

 

After Brooke left, Lacey lingered outside to admire the view. Gazing south down the Potomac, it was easy to forget the city and the noise. Spring was stealing over the landscape, creating a hush of green along the riverbanks. In just a week or two, the trees would be full and bushy, but she loved warm days like this when the first sign of green signaled that the long, dull winter was conquered at last.

Ah, spring in Washington—and pheromone jammers. It’s such a good explanation, it should be true.
Lacey wondered if she could still attract a man.
Maybe if I lived somewhere else.

Lacey had a face that a man had once told her belonged on the cover of a pulp-fiction magazine. Pretty, but a little exaggerated, a little extreme for comfort. There were even men who had called her beautiful.

She didn’t kid herself about her looks. She knew she was attractive, but she’d never be the most beautiful, the thinnest, or the most sought-after woman. She was five-foot-five with a curvy build that she fought to keep on the slim side. Her hair was good: thick, manageable, and slightly wavy. She wore it a couple of inches below the shoulder, long enough to wind into a French knot on bad-hair days. As a package deal, she figured she was pretty good. But the package was still on the shelf.

Her thoughts paused on one man from her past, but she told herself to forget him. After all, he was merely a footnote in her romantic history, a footnote that would take volumes to explain, even to Brooke. The last she heard, he had left Sagebrush, Colorado, but that’s where the trail ended. Just another tumbleweed tumbling through. Like her.

Before she moved to Washington, Lacey was used to feeling strange, an outsider, an observer. When she was little, she had always considered herself a swan, and her family of ducks never knew what to make of her. Her mother often said she had no idea where Lacey came from, and she apparently was not implicating the mailman. Rose Smithsonian suggested that it was likely a caravan of gypsies had dropped in one night, stolen the real baby Smithsonian, and left Lacey as a little joke. The real baby Smithsonian would be perky and have cheerleading genes and wear what Mother wanted.

The real baby Smithsonian would have grown up and found a man by now. She’d be tied down to a house, kids, and meatloaf once a week.

Lacey let her eyes sail down the verdant Potomac.
My pheromones may be jammed,
she thought,
but at least I’m a swan on my own river.

Chapter 3

It’s probably a character flaw that I am more concerned at the moment with what to wear to the funeral than whether it was suicide or murder,
Lacey thought. She figured she’d give herself time and some fragment of noble character would emerge. The darn job was turning her into a shallow caricature. She told herself that she had values. Somewhere.

Now that she wrote “Crimes of Fashion” everyone expected her to look totally put together all the time. Only Lacey knew how far below that ideal she fell. Like the memorial service: People always think they know what to wear to a funeral, but in fact they have no idea, and neither did Lacey. The “little black dress,” for instance, is supposed to go everywhere. But showing up for a funeral in a little black cocktail dress simply does not demonstrate the proper respect. Unless the funeral is in a bar.

Wearing black seems appropriate, but it could be presumptuous if you’re not a member of the immediate family, especially if none of them is wearing black. Your display then casts doubt on the family’s grief—a breach of etiquette.

On the other hand, Stylettos’ stylists almost always wore black and owned few clothes in anything remotely resembling a color. Lacey assumed they would look like true mourners anywhere, even at a picnic. Not that they would be caught dead at a picnic.

The April weather had taken a cool turn. Lacey selected a marine-blue wool crepe dress with princess lines and deep black cuffs, which she wore with dark stockings and black heels. She grabbed her favorite black wrap jacket, a vintage find from the Forties. She loved the clothes of that era. With vintage clothing, Lacey felt as if something of the original owner remained. There was a bravado about those clothes, a swagger that was both feminine and functional. They were classic. No matter how she tried, she could not rustle up the same feeling in a Lycra miniskirt and a tube top.

She always chose Forties clothes when she needed strength of character. The gabardine jacket had beautiful set-in shoulders and fine top stitching. It fit beautifully. Lacey considered it a work of art, and the union label attested to its creation by a member of the now-historic International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which had morphed into UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. Lacey wondered how much they paid a woman to make a work of art like this in 1945. Whatever it was, they couldn’t have paid her enough. A vintage gold and pearl lapel pin finished the look. She tucked a lace hanky in the pocket, just in case she felt weepy. She got emotional at the worst times, reading sob stories in her own newspaper, for instance, or watching sappy commercials on television, especially during the holidays. Blubbering at the funeral of a near stranger was well within her realm of possibility.

Going to the funeral would merely encourage Stella’s detective delusion. But she had already advised Lacey that she would be picking her up at nine-thirty, and there was no graceful way to back out. Lacey left a message at the paper that she would be in after lunch. She waited outside the front door of her apartment building. The dogwood buds were almost ready to pop open and scarlet tulips bloomed along the brick walkways.

Lacey’s car was in the shop. Again. Her beautiful silver and burgundy Nissan 280ZX was deteriorating before her eyes, causing her pain and betraying her trust after she had poured thousands of dollars into the ungrateful hunk of steel. And it was starting to wear rusty accents around the doors and wheel wells, not a good sign in this humid swamp. But she loved driving it. The way it hugged the road and highway access ramps was a dream. It was not a car to scorn, even though it spent more time at Asian Engines than it did at home.

Paul, her mechanic, was intimately acquainted with the Z, having laid his healing hands upon its every moving part. She had yet to meet the man who would understand her as well as Paul understood her Z.

A car that looked like a crazed windup toy pulled into the circle drive of her building, driven by the relentless Stella. Lacey prayed she wouldn’t have to help pedal the stylist’s new pride and joy, a tiny red-and-white BMW Mini Cooper with a giant American flag on the roof. Stella wore a black leather jacket and a black beret with a pin shaped like a broken heart. With a pair of sporty aviator sunglasses and a long red silk scarf, she looked like a bomber pilot on a mission of mercy. It was as if she belonged to some strange female army where they dressed with style and lived to break men’s hearts. Maybe a French army: the French Fashion Legion.
Maybe I could join up too.