Tressed to Kill (6 page)

[Friday]

I’M NO FONDER OF TOTAL HONESTY IN SELF-ANALYSIS than the next person, but the episode with Richardson forced me to admit I was stupid and cowardly. Stupid for meeting Richardson in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t believe I confronted him without proof of any kind, with no more than the suspicion raised by overhearing his confrontation with Constance. But I so wanted to find Constance’s murderer quickly, to clear Mom’s name. And cowardly because I had no intention of telling my mom or the ladies at Violetta’s about the encounter. As it turns out, the next morning was so busy—we had a bride and her bridesmaids in for mani-pedis and updos—that I barely had time to draw breath. Mom was securing curls atop the maid of honor’s head, and the bride and two bridesmaids were giggling in the Nail Nook when the door swung open.
Special Agent Dillon stood on the threshold. Conversation stopped for a moment as all the women stared. One of the bridesmaids whispered “hottie” as conversation resumed. Apparently unaware of the interest his masculine presence excited, Special Agent Dillon looked around and stepped toward the counter. His glance might seem casual, but I was sure he could describe everyone in the room, list the magazines in the waiting area, and had probably noticed the dead fronds on one of the ferns and the chip in the shampoo sink’s enamel. Or maybe I’m paranoid. I said neutrally, “May I help you?”
“I need a hair cut,” he said. His navy eyes studied me, and I wondered if he were really here looking for probable cause for a search warrant. Although I didn’t know what he could possibly find that would relate to Constance’s murder.
“Do you have an appointment?” I asked, pretending to thumb through our scheduling book.
“Do I need one?”
“Of course not, Agent Dillon,” Mom intervened before I could tell him to try Chez Pierre. She gave me a “mind your manners” look and actually smiled at him. “Grace has an opening right now. I’d do you myself, but I’ve got to finish up with the girls in Lacey’s wedding party.” She turned to smile at Lacey, who waved the hand Stella wasn’t working on.
“Congratulations,” Special Agent Dillon said with a genuine smile.
I rolled my eyes, but the smile made it hard to catch my breath. It cut creases into his lean cheeks and showed a deep cleft—I’m sure he hated having it called a dimple—in his chin. Even his eyes lightened, transitioning from a somber navy to the marine blue of a sunlit sea, like a mood ring. His effect on me took me by surprise, and I said more coldly than I intended, “This way. I’ll get a smock.”
He handed me his navy blazer and I hung it in the closet where we kept the smocks. I helped him into the violet garment, privately awarding him points for not balking at the color. Settling into the chair by the sink, he tipped his head back. I wished Rachel were here and not sitting in a history class or chem lab so I wouldn’t have to wash his hair. Conscious of my mother’s eyes flicking my way, I adjusted the water temperature and squirted shampoo into my hand. Feeling strangely tentative, I began to work it into his scalp. His hair was bristly under my fingers, his skull hard. He closed his eyes as I massaged his temples, and I felt him relax infinitesimally. I got the feeling he didn’t relax often and I took it as a challenge. The pads of my fingers dug into his scalp, and I worked them in small circles from the crown of his head to his nape. The bracing scent of eucalyptus and honeydew floated up from the lather. Dillon’s head weighed heavy in my hands as he finally let the taut muscles in his neck relax. Suddenly aware of a strange sense of intimacy that made me as uncomfortable as a hamster at a cat show—did he feel it, too?—I began to rinse his hair, deliberately keeping the water on the cool side. Giving his hair a perfunctory toweling, I led him to my station and adjusted the chair down as he sat.
“What did you have in mind?” I asked. Not that he had a lot of options with less than an inch of growth.
“The truth?” he suggested, his eyes meeting mine in the mirror.
“Well, if you let it grow another six months or so, we could do a Brad Pitt sort of fringe—”
His brows drew together, and his eyes were a dark navy again. “Just a trim, Miss Terhune.”
“Oh, call me Grace,” I said, impatient with the formality. “And I’ll call you Marsh, okay?” I knew I was picking a fight because the intimacy of shampooing his hair had unsettled me, but I couldn’t help myself. I snipped at the hair just over his right ear.
“Miss. Terhune.” He emphasized each word. “I got a call from Del Richardson this morning.”
I hesitated a moment, trying to still my trembling fingers, before saying, “Really? Did he confess to stabbing Constance?” I pressed Dillon’s head down so he couldn’t read my face as I trimmed the hair at his nape.
“Not hardly. He said he remembered seeing a woman walking with the victim in the parking lot. The description he gave sounded a lot like your mother.”
“That . . . that lying swine!” I gritted between my teeth. Anger rose in me with such force I accidentally nipped Dillon’s ear with the scissors.
“Ow!”
I inspected his ear, rubbing it between my thumb and forefinger. “It’s not even bleeding . . . don’t be a baby.”
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” he muttered. His hand fumbled with the smock’s Velcro closure at his neck.
“You can’t leave with your hair like that,” I said, visions of the salon’s reputation taking a nose-dive if he told anyone where he got his cut. I put my hands on his shoulders to hold him in place, then jerked them away as the heat of him warmed my palms. “The cut’s on the house,” I said.
He gave me a considering look, then leaned back in the chair. “At least put the scissors away,” he said.
I decided to tell him the truth—I had nothing to lose and maybe something to gain if he believed me instead of Richardson. “Look, I’m sorry . . .” And as I shaved his neckline, I told him about meeting the Morestuf VP the night before. Not wanting anyone to overhear, I leaned in close to tell the story, my voice barely above a whisper. The warm scent of him, a mix of soap and clean sweat and a spicy aftershave tickled my nose, but I ignored it. Mostly.
When I finished, he was silent for a long moment. He shut his eyes as if in pain and then opened them to glare at me in the mirror. “You seriously met a man you think is a murderer in a field in the middle of nowhere.”
“Ssssh,” I hissed as my mom turned to stare at us. “I guess it wasn’t the brightest thing I’ve ever done.”
“That’s one way to put it,” he said. “The word stupid comes to mind. And idiotic. And foolhardy.”
“Fine,” I said, jerking the smock off him with a ripping sound. “Don’t believe me.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t believe you.” He rose to his feet in a leisurely way. “I only said you were stu—”
“I heard you the first time!”
He continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “I didn’t say I
did
believe you, either. We haven’t been able to verify your so-called alibi yet. Judge Finnegan hasn’t returned my calls. I find that suspicious.”
“She’s in Haiti!”
“Convenient for you. At any rate, the investigation is ongoing. I suggest you let us do our jobs and not muddy the waters any more with your Miss Marple amateur hour.” His voice was stern.
“Veronica Mars, actually,” I said, then clapped a hand to my mouth.
“What?”
“Nothing.” The door jangled open, and I looked over with relief to see Patricia Farnsworth enter, her blond hair two weeks past due for a touch-up. “My client’s here.”
“We’re done for now,” Special Agent Dillon said, retrieving his blazer from the closet and shrugging into it. “Let Mrs. Terhune know I’d like to chat with her again when she has a chance. Just routine.”
Yeah, right.
He handed me his card. “She can call my cell.” And with a generalized wave to the salon’s occupants, he left.
Relief slumped my shoulders, and I took a deep breath, holding it for a moment before blowing it out. I hadn’t been aware of the tension building up in my muscles. “I’ll be with you in a minute, Patricia,” I said. I handed the man’s card to Mom and gave her his message.
“What was that all about?” She gestured with her comb toward my station.
“Nothing much. What do you think about trying to attract more male clients?” I asked in an effort to distract her. “Of course, we’d have to get smocks in a more . . . neutral color. Say, black. Or dark green.”
She pursed her lips with interest. “It’s a thought. Let’s see what Stella and Althea think.”
“More men get their nails done these days and have facials, too.” I kept an earnest expression on my face, but inside I was celebrating. I’d done it—successfully led her away from the explosive topic.
“Why not? Skin care is for everybody,” she said. She peered at me over the top of her glasses. “And don’t think you’re putting one past me, missy. You can fill me in when this place clears out.”
My distraction techniques never worked when I was in high school, either. Well, two could play that game. “Fine. And you can tell me why Althea ran out of here in a lather yesterday.” I turned on my heel to shepherd Patricia to the sink.

Chapter Six

MOM AND I ROCKED ON HER VERANDA AT SEVEN thirty that evening, enjoying the cooling air and the chirrup of crickets as the sun lazed its way down the horizon. Citronella candles kept the mosquitoes at bay and their scent mingled with the perfume of gardenias and camellias floating up from bushes planted at the base of the house. I love summer nights, where twilight lasts longest and the world seems peaceful, suspended in time by the magical gloaming. I sipped my Budweiser and rocked, unwilling to shatter the serenity to interrogate my mom.
She showed no such reluctance. Setting her beer can on the ceramic elephant plant stand we use as a table, she said, “So. What were you telling Special Agent Dillon about meeting someone in a field last evening?”
The woman had a bat’s hearing. I swear, when I was a teenager, she could hear Vonda and me plotting mischief even if we were in my bedroom with the door closed and she was cooking dinner. I sighed and took another sip of beer. Mom watched me, not pushing, her hair spikier than usual, wearing a touristy St. Elizabeth tee shirt with a beach scene silk-screened on the front, and cropped pants. Freeing my ponytail from its elastic, I shook my hair so it fell around my face. It was a trick I’d learned in middle school when I didn’t want too much scrutiny from a teacher. I combed it with my fingers. With another deep breath, I told Mom about meeting Richardson and about the threat he’d made good on by calling Special Agent Dillon.
“I’m sorry,” I finished. “It was stupid.”
“Oh, Grace,” Mom said. “If he really killed Constance, he could have hurt you. Made you disappear. Whatever possessed you?”
“If we don’t figure out who killed Constance DuBois, the police are going to keep harassing us. It’s going to hurt the business. I just want it cleared up.”
“It’s not worth putting yourself at risk for. Losing the salon wouldn’t be the end of the world.” The tightness in her voice communicated her unspoken thought: Losing you would be.
I leaned over and held her hand. She squeezed mine hard and released it to reach for her beer. “Besides,” she said with determined cheerfulness, “the women of St. Elizabeth couldn’t survive without Violetta’s. Can you see Miss Willa or Cassie Beaumont sashaying into Chez Pierre? Why, the women around here come to Violetta’s as much for the socializing as for the haircuts and facials.”
“They do indeed,” I said, helping her lighten the mood. And it was true. Sometimes women stopped into the salon even if they weren’t having their hair done, just to catch up on gossip or chat with friends. I finished my beer. It had grown darker as we talked, and I couldn’t see Mom’s face clearly anymore. I didn’t want to upset her again, but I forced myself to say, “What about Althea?”
“What about Althea?” came a voice from the foot of the steps.
I jumped, knocking over my beer can. It rolled to the top of the stairs where Althea picked it up. She straightened, a dark figure in a tunic top and jeans.
“I asked Althea to come over,” Mom said. “It didn’t feel right to tell you her story without her permission.”
Of course not. Mom was totally discreet and sensitive to her friends’ confidences, despite what she did for a living. The gossip swirling around Violetta’s did not originate with her.
“So, you want to go poking around in my past, Grace?”
“I want to keep my mom from getting arrested,” I said, keeping my tone neutral despite the edge of anger in her voice. “I don’t want her to lose Violetta’s because clients stop coming, afraid of guilt by association, sure there’s ‘no smoke without fire.’ ”
“Well, hell, baby girl, I don’t want that to happen, either,” Althea said with a sharp laugh. “You may have noticed that I get my paycheck from Violetta’s. Let’s take a walk. Your mama doesn’t want to hear my story again.”
Mom looked from Althea to me but said nothing. I couldn’t read her expression, but her voice was calm as she said, “I’m going to lock up and read for a while before bed. See you in the morning. Althea, don’t forget Sissie Lingenfelder is coming at seven thirty for her facial. I booked her before we open so she can catch a plane out of Jacksonville. She’s off to California for her daughter’s graduation.”
“I know, Vi. I’ll be there.”
“Good night, Mom.” I bent to kiss her cheek.
Althea and I clomped down the stairs together and turned right. The sidewalks in the older section of town buckled up from the thrusting of tree roots, mostly big live oaks that had probably watched Sherman march across Georgia. Wearing only flip-flops, I kept my eyes on the ground, not wanting to stub a toe.
“You don’t remember my William, Grace, because you were knee high to a grasshopper when he died. But he was a good man. A very good man,” Althea began.
“I’ve seen pictures. He was handsome, too.”
“Yes, he was.”
I heard the smile in her voice and wondered what memories she was reliving.
“But that’s neither here nor there. Fact is, he was a sweet man, but he wasn’t much of a judge of character. Some of the men he called friends . . . lordy. There was one in particular, a skunk named Carl Rowan. He was white—not that I hold that against him—but this was back in the early ’80s when it was still unusual to see a white man hanging with a black man, at least in small-town Georgia. William always held to it that Carl was a real friend because he didn’t pay any mind to the threats he got sometimes for hanging with a black man. The Ku Klux Klan even burned a cross in his yard once. Me, I think Carl took up with William because he’s the only one who would tolerate him.
“William worked in the paper mill in those days, and I did facials sometimes to make ends meet, with your mama. Your daddy was still alive then, so there wasn’t really a salon, but we had friends who wanted us to cut their hair and do their facials—they said we were as good as any of the stylists in the high-class beauty parlors. Carl, he didn’t work. He’d inherited some property from an uncle or something and he spent his time drinking and smoking and playing cards.”
“Sounds like a real bum.”
“You got that right.”
We walked in silence for a few minutes, turning east, and the smell of the ocean grew stronger. It wasn’t a happy smell tonight, like it usually is; it smelled mournful. But maybe that was just me reacting to something I heard in Althea’s voice.
“Anyway,” Althea resumed, kicking at a pinecone on the sidewalk, “something happened between Carl and the DuBoises—they were the only bank in town then, in that building Walter Highsmith has now. Carl said they stole property from him, that Philip DuBois convinced him to put it up as collateral to buy into a development Philip and his partners were undertaking. Something went wrong—they were denied the licenses or permits they needed, or something—and the project never got off the ground. Everyone involved lost a lot of money. Carl had to forfeit the land. Carl would have it that Philip deliberately sabotaged the project so he could get his hands on the property. He ran off at the mouth, saying he was going to contact the attorney general, go to the newspapers, tell what he knew about Philip DuBois and his business dealings. Only he was killed before he got the chance. And my William with him.”
We had reached the boardwalk that ran along the St. Elizabeth beachfront. Reggae music filtered from a bar down the block, and lights from restaurants and bistros spilled into the night. The Intracoastal Waterway was a dark presence on our right, separating the mainland from the offshore islands and the Atlantic beyond. Its gentle waves welled up and subsided with a shushing both monotonous and vaguely ominous, like jungle drums throbbing. I shivered and made myself remember the beach on a sunny day when Alice Rose and I splashed in the surf and built sand castles or when Vonda and I lay on our towels and scoped out the boys playing Frisbee or bodysurfing.
“Did they catch who did it?” I asked. By mutual accord we stopped walking, and the beach breeze flapped at Althea’s loose shirt.
“They never found the bodies,” Althea said, her voice cracking. “The police said there was no evidence that the men hadn’t gone off on their own, so I don’t know how hard they tried to get at the truth. I don’t think they ever even interviewed Philip DuBois about it.”
“You think—”
“I
know
Philip DuBois either killed Carl Rowan or paid to have it done. And William died because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong sorry-ass friend.” Althea spat the words with a bitterness that almost thirty years hadn’t sweetened. “I never heard from my William again after he left that February evening to meet up with Carl and play some poker. He wouldn’t walk out on me, just disappear. And with Carl?” She snorted.
“I tried to get someone to believe me, make ’em keep investigating, but Rowan’s widow packed up her stuff and moved north with their kids not a month after Carl disappeared, and there wasn’t anybody else, with the exception of your mama, who was interested. And your daddy was sick by then. Violetta had her hands full taking care of him and you and Alice Rose, who was just a baby. She did what she could, though, and after your daddy passed, well, we got together and started Violetta’s, which kept the wolf from the door.”
I wanted to ask for more details, but I couldn’t force Althea to relive the horror of that night, those weeks. Maybe I could find something in back issues of the
Gazette
about the disappearances. Instead, I asked, “Is that why you and Constance DuBois didn’t get along? Because you think her husband was mixed up in William’s death?”
Althea took a deep breath in through her nose and didn’t speak for a long minute. I thought she wasn’t going to answer.
“When I got to thinking about that time more clearly, a year after William died, about what happened with Rowan’s property and all, I realized Constance must know something. She was as much a part of the bank’s business as Philip was. Hell, some people thought she was the one who called the shots. Anyway, I went to talk to her. At the house, not at the bank. To give her her due, she agreed to see me.”
“What did you say?” I found myself caught up in Althea’s story, envisioning a younger Althea, maybe wearing gloves and a hat, calling on the wealthy Mrs. DuBois at her mansion.
“She offered me lemonade. I asked her if she’d had my husband killed.”
“You didn’t!”
Althea nodded grimly. “Yes, ma’am, I did.”
“What’d she say?”
“She got all icy—like she did with Walter at the salon the other day—and told me I was getting uppity and that I’d better learn my place.”
I gasped.
Althea seemed pleased with my reaction. “And this was in 1984, not 1954. Anyway, I stared her down and told her she should think shame on herself. Then I said I knew something hinky had happened with Carl Rowan’s property and that he and my William had been murdered because they knew. Well, at that, she got all quiet for a moment, and then she pulled out her checkbook. She said she could see that the strain of making it on my own was telling on me and she wanted to help out. She wrote me out a check for fifty thousand dollars.”
“Wow,” I breathed. That seemed very un-Constance-like to me.
“I tore it into shreds and let them fall on her antique carpet,” Althea said with satisfaction. “It was blood money, I told her, and you can’t try to make yourself sleep better at night by buying me off. I was shaking with fury, Grace, shaking, and I think I scared her. She’s given me a wide berth ever since because she knows I know.”
Even in the dim light, I could see the grim set of her mouth and chin. A silence fell between us, broken only by a burst of laughter and music as The Roving Pirate’s door opened, spilling light and partiers onto the boardwalk.
“What happened with the property, Rowan’s property?”
“A couple of years after the murders, why, the DuBoises developed that property and made themselves millions in the process. It was the last stretch of undeveloped coast-line in these parts. Sea Mist Plantation. No more problems with building permits or what have you once the DuBoises owned the land.” Weary cynicism weighted her voice. “Of course, Beau Lansky was on the zoning commission back then, Constance’s cousin’s husband.”
And our current governor.