A Parfait Murder (8 page)

“It’s too high if Kristen was crouching in the bottom of the car, but what if she was sitting or standing in the car?”

He looked from the balcony to the tracks and back again. “Maybe,” he conceded.

I pulled my purse from my shoulder and dug around for a ballpoint pen, dropped the purse to the ground, hustled over to the train, and stepped into the car. I suppressed a shudder at the thought I was standing on the spot where Kristen died, and crouched down to the floor. “I’m about Kristen’s size,” I said.

Without me asking, Cal walked back to the X on the floor, bent his knees a bit, and lifted his arm as though he were shooting at my head. Carefully, I brought the pen to my forehead, trying to match the angle of the bullet from Cal’s imaginary gun.

He stepped forward, gently shifted the pen in my hand to correct the angle.

Then, holding the pen steady, I climbed onto the car’s seat.

Cal’s long legs made short work of clambering into the next car back and then into the seat beside me. He hunkered down on the seat so his face was nestled close to mine. I could feel his warm breath stirring the wisps of hair at my temple. I shivered.

“No,” he said finally. “Still not right.”

His hand cupped my elbow and, with just a little pressure, he urged me to stand. I rose to my feet, shaky.

His large fingers rested on the back of my neck, subtly adjusting the angle of my head. My head tipped back, chin raised. The stance was proud, defiant. And my eyes were fixed firmly on the dancing girl.

“There,” he said softly. “The angle matches.”

I opened my fingers, letting the pen drop to the metal floor of the car with a hollow rattle. “The shooter was on the balcony,” I said.

I shivered again as Cal pulled away from me, as cool air filled the space between us.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “Either the shooter was on the balcony, and Kristen was standing in the car looking up at him—”

“Or,” Cal said, “the shooter was in the middle of the floor—right where Bree was standing when we found her—and Kristen was cowering in fear.”

“How can we tell what happened?”

He set his hands on my upper arms, shifting me to the side so he could get past. Once again, he crossed the floor to the saloon doors. I followed.

We both edged around the zombie, pushing aside the swinging doors to peer at the back of the facade.

Between the fake saloon wall and the real wall of the attraction, there was a gap of about four feet. Looking along the real wall, I could make out the faint glow of sunlight around two separate doors to the outside, probably emergency exits, though they weren’t marked.

“Someone else could have been in here,” I said. “They could have shot Kristen and slipped through one of those doors.”

Cal nodded once, a tight gesture. “Yep. I’ll give you that. If someone got up to the balcony and back down. But that’s a mighty big ‘if.’”

I wedged in farther behind the cowboy zombie and looked up. Lights were set in the real wall just above the height of the saloon door opening. Beyond the lights, there was nothing but metal braces and cobwebs.

Two-inch pipes, spaced about six feet apart, supported the back of the saloon facade. About fifteen feet up, the pipes were joined by horizontal lengths of slightly narrower pipe.

Directly above our heads, light shone through the opening for the balcony. On the backside, there was no lip or ledge from the balcony.

I ducked back to the front of the facade and studied the fake balcony a bit closer.

The dancer sat on a ledge no more than eighteen inches deep.

There wasn’t much room to either side of her, and even less behind her.

I looked at Cal questioningly.

“No way,” he said.

“There’s enough room for a person up there,” I insisted.

“Barely. And how would a person get up there? There isn’t enough room back behind that facade for a ladder.”

“Maybe someone put a ladder up on the front side.”

“So where did the ladder go? Bree didn’t mention seeing any ladder, much less seeing someone climb down and haul a ladder away with them. And you and I got inside here within five minutes of the first shot being fired. A single person, moving fast, could have gotten out one of those emergency doors. But I don’t buy someone dismantling a ladder from out here, squeezing it around the mannequin, working it through all those pipes and struts behind the facade, and getting out an emergency door before we came in.”

He shook his head.

“I’m sorry, Tally. As much as I want to believe her, Bree’s story just doesn’t add up. And all the physical evidence points to her being in here alone with Kristen when she was killed.”

S
ome folks might think it strange that, with my life lying in ruins at my feet, I would bother to keep a hair appointment. But those folks wouldn’t be from Dalliance. Frankly, personal crisis is no excuse for dark roots.

Here, the bond between hairdresser and lady ranks right up there with that between doctor and patient, lawyer and client, priest and penitent. A sacred trust is forged in the shampoo bowl and tempered by countless blow-outs, a trust that cannot be broken. That trust kept me loyal to Karla Faye Hoffstead of the Hair Apparent Salon for two and a half decades. During my marriage to Wayne Jones, I could have gone to fancier salons—in fact, Wayne begged me to go mingle with the high-class ladies at the day spas that cropped up along FM 410—but I’d stayed true to Karla Faye.

Everything about the Hair Apparent—the scuffed linoleum floors, the acrid scent of perm solution and overheated plastic, and the chaos of women shouting to be heard above hair dryers and running water—felt familiar, comfortable.

About an hour after I left Cal McCormack outside the haunted rodeo ride, I took my seat in Karla Faye’s chair and gripped the arms as she pumped the foot pedal to raise me up to a more convenient level. She whipped one of her leopard-print capes around my shoulders and began segregating and studying hanks of my hair with a critical eye.

“Unh, unh, unh,” she muttered. “Tally, don’t you ever deep condition your hair? I could use these ends for kindling.”

I grimaced. “I know. It’s pitiful. But I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

Karla Faye met my gaze in the mirror. “Lordy, don’t I know it? The shop’s been buzzing all day about the murder.”

“What are people saying?” The Hair Apparent clientele was a microcosm of Dalliance. If you wanted to see which way the wind of public opinion was blowing, Karla Faye could give you a pretty accurate forecast.

She busied herself parting and reparting my hair with a rat-tail comb, inspecting my roots as she went. “Mmm. Well, I’d say folks are split about seventy-thirty that Bree did it.” She shrugged. “But a hundred percent of ’em think Kristen had it coming.”

I half turned in the chair, trying to look her in the face, but she grasped my shoulders in her strikingly strong hands and held me in place. “Unless you want to lose an eye, you need to stay still.” She waved the comb with its stiletto-like handle for emphasis.

“Sorry.”

“Come on, let’s get you shampooed.” Karla Faye helped me out of the chair and led me over to the shampoo bowl.

“So, why do people think Kristen deserved to be killed?” I asked.

Karla Faye snorted. “Lord only knows what all that uppity woman had going on. That woman was colder than a witch’s tit.”

“Karla Faye!”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, I know. I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.” She paused while she doused my hair with lukewarm water. As hot as it was outside, the water felt deliciously cool against my scalp.

“Anyway,” she continued, squirting some citrusysmelling shampoo into her hand, “you know what that woman was doing?”

I sighed. Karla Faye always had the juiciest information, and she loved to share it, but she took her own sweet time doing it. She’d milk a bit of gossip harder than a dried-up milch cow. She began working the shampoo through my hair, her fingers massaging in circular motions that seemed to keep time with the cadence of her chatter.

“Well, Shelley Alrecht came in to get her highlights touched up for the big karaoke contest at the fair. And she told me that she heard from Cookie Milhone—you know Cookie? She runs that new flower shop over in Lantana Plaza? And she’s the hospitality chair for the League of Methodist Ladies?”

I did, indeed, know Cookie Milhone. Cookie had eaten chicken cordon bleu at my dining table and sipped pinot grigio by my pool . . . and, as I learned during my divorce proceedings, diddled my ex-husband. Before he was my ex.

“Well,” Karla Faye continued, “Cookie Milhone told Shelley that Kristen Ver Steeg was going to disqualify Dani Carberry from the Rodeo Queen Pageant.”

I was grateful for the lull in conversation as Karla Faye rinsed me. It gave me a chance to work through that big ol’ clump of information. I didn’t know the Carberrys very well, but Finn worked with Mike Carberry at the
Dalliance News-Letter
. Mike and his wife, Eloise, had a daughter who was just about Alice’s age. In fact, I seemed to recall that Alice and Dani Carberry were in the same class until Alice started skipping grades.

The morning Kristen was killed, Cal was on his way to a meeting of the pageant judges, a meeting Kristen had called to deal with a problem. Maybe that problem had been Dani Carberry. And if that was so, it might explain why Kristen had recused herself from mediating the dispute between Eloise Carberry and Tucker Gentry over Tucker’s ice cream entry. But I’d be the first to admit I was reaching here.

And Eloise Carberry wasn’t really the type to patronize the Hair Apparent, so I couldn’t imagine why Karla Faye and the rest of the girls would get so out of whack about Dani being disqualified from the pageant, anyway. Why would the Hair Apparent tribe choose sides at all in a battle between two women from the Botox and designer shoes crowd?

Karla Faye wrapped a towel around my head and helped me back to my feet.

“Why would Dani be disqualified?” I asked.

She spun around on her spiky heels. I loved her to pieces, but Karla Faye always dressed like an extra in
Grease
. That day, she was decked out in white skinny jeans, a tight purple tank top, wide white patent leather belt, and purple sparkly high-heeled sandals, her orangepainted toenails peeping out like teeny tiny kumquats. I hesitated to think what her veins were like, after thirty-odd years of ten-hour days, on her feet, in totally ridiculous shoes. But Karla Faye was a firm believer in suffering for beauty.

“Shelley didn’t have all the details, but I’m guessing it’s because of the wig.”

“You lost me.”

“Dani’s wig,” she said again, as if that made everything clear.

“Why would Dani wear a wig? Bad dye job?”

She clasped her hand to her breast in shock. “Lord, haven’t you heard?”

“For the love of God, Karla Faye . . . heard what? Let’s just assume I’ve been living under a rock for the past year and don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

I plopped down in the chair at Karla Faye’s station. I was starting to get a little irked.

“Oh, honey, Dani Carberry has the cancer.” She whispered “the cancer” as if it were a dirty word.

“What?” How on earth had I missed that? I mean, Finn and Mike Carberry worked together.

Karla Faye nodded solemnly. “Yeah, poor kid.”

“What kind of cancer?”

“Oh, I’m sure I don’t know. But something bad. She’s been getting treatments all summer and her hair all fell out. She’s a flag corps cadet at the high school, and the other flag girls did that thing where you cut off your hair and send it to some place to make wigs for girls with cancer. I had about a half dozen in here one day a few weeks ago, all crying like babies while I hacked off their ponytails and wrapped ’em up in tinfoil. They walked out of here with a big ol’ bag of hair.”

“Wow, that’s horrible. Poor Eloise.”

Karla Faye combed out my hair and began carving off little sections that she twisted up and pinned on my head.

“That little girl has been so brave,” she said. “The flag girls said Dani was going to enter the Rodeo Queen Pageant to raise awareness about cancer and how bad it is. And they’re already talking about how she’s a lock for homecoming queen. Can you imagine getting up on a stage and smiling and waving when you’re wearing someone else’s hair on your head?”

I shook my head. Honestly, it was pretty moving.

“And then that awful Kristen woman comes along and plans to crush her dreams, just like that”—she snapped her fingers. “What kind of horrible, heartless person tells a little girl with cancer that she has to walk that pageant all bald-headed?”

I frowned. “Wait. Are you sure that’s what happened? I mean, do you know that she was going to disqualify Dani and that the wig was the reason?”

Karla Faye stiffened. “Well, no. But Shelley said that Cookie is on the panel of judges for the pageant, and Kristen called her and said they had a problem with Dani. I mean, what else could it be?”

An excellent question. And one I surely intended to answer. Even if it meant standing face-to-face with Cookie Milhone.

 

By the time Karla Faye was done snipping and styling my chestnut hair into something approaching a hairdo, I was itching to get out of the Hair Apparent and find out more about Dani Carberry’s alleged expulsion from the Rodeo Queen Pageant.

Finn was expecting me at his house for dinner before the two of us spent the evening going through the boxes stashed in his mother’s attic.

Finn had moved back to Dalliance to take care of his widowed mother after her second major stroke. Over the summer, she’d begun having mini strokes, what the doctors called transient ischemic attacks, on an increasingly regular basis. It meant she might suffer another massive stroke, and she needed more constant monitoring of her situation. As a result, Finn bit the bullet and moved his mama into a nursing home in July.