The Brush Off (11 page)

Emitting a choking sound, Trudy grabbed my arm, pulled me to the exit, and shoved me out the door. The door clicked shut. We both jumped when we saw the silent, watchful redhead from the dressing room leaning against the wall of the building, cigarette dangling from one broad hand. Close up, I could peg his color as the unusual Egyptian Plum. He wore a black cotton outfit that looked like a cross between medical scrubs and pajamas. He must have noticed me studying them. I needed to work on subtling my method of visual detection, which consisted of a hard stare, often accompanied by a dropped open mouth.

“I teach karate for fun and do this”—he waved toward the interior of Illusions—“for a living.”

He took a long drag and blew out the smoke before he spoke again.

“Gregor’s a prick. But he’s no killer. He doesn’t have enough imagination for that.”

I thought anyone who could run a drag queen show probably had more imagination than the average Joe, but I didn’t argue, for fear it would shut up what might be our best source of information so far.

“Listen,” the redhead whispered, looking off into the bamboo as if he expected a panda to jump out any minute. “Ricardo came in a couple of times and seemed to enjoy the show, but he was more being polite, I think, than being a real fan. He talked to us, sure, about all sorts of stuff—politics, sports, hair. He treated us like we were his equals, never looking down on what we are or what we do. He was a class guy. But I think his visits were part of a plan. He was staking out the place.”

“For what?” Trudy interrupted. I stepped on her foot to shut her up. She kicked me in the shin.

“For a meeting about a week ago that he had with another guy. Ricardo had come lots of times before. See, the way I figure it, by then he’d satisfied himself that he could be safer and more invisible here than anywhere in town. No one will admit to seeing someone else here. How could they without incriminating themselves by admitting to being in a transvestite club?”

“Ingenious,” I whispered, and meant it. This guy was smart, and so was Ricardo, although not smart enough, apparently.

“Yeah, plus Ricardo then had insurance—the knowledge of the power brokers who come here.”

The source of many of his owed favors, no doubt. Perhaps I was off-base when I thought it was Gregor out for Ricardo. Maybe it was a member of the club who wanted his secret kept, wasn’t willing to pay, but was willing to kill.

“What power brokers?” I couldn’t help asking.

Long Egyptian Plum’s hair rippled as he shook his head decisively. “No way. I’m not stupid. But I will tell you the guy Ricardo met that night looked familiar to me, not because he comes here regularly but because I saw him somewhere on TV or in the newspaper. He wasn’t someone I’d know to name, though. And he never came again.”

“When was this?” I asked, instinct telling me to follow this.

“Maybe a month ago.”

“What did he look like?”

“Improved average.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Trudy interjected, clearly more interested in the term as a general cosmetic description than as a way to find this man for our case.

“A middleaged guy, average height, average weight, who wouldn’t attract attention except for the tan he bought, the pricey jewelry he wore, the expensive highlights in his hair, his clothes.”

“What clothes?” I asked.

“Tennis whites.” Redhead blew out another mouthful of smoke. “We see a lot of weird getups in here, but tennis whites? It’s not something you wear to be incognito, which people tend to want to be in Illusions. So, this guy either has the balls not to care if he’s recognized, or he thought he was meeting Ricardo at a club where they swing rackets instead of both ways.”

“Did you hear what they talked about?”

“No. They knew each other, but they weren’t friends. Body language told me that.”

“Who left first?”

“The tennis guy, tense and angry, kind of like he had a stick up his butt.”

“Would you recognize him if I showed you a photo?” I asked. Trudy looked hopefully at me, as if I might know who Ricardo’s mystery date had been. I had no clue.

“Sure.” He let the glowing butt fall to the ground. The roar of a car engine pulled my attention to the parking lot as a dark blue late-model Crown Victoria with tinted windows squealed around the corner of the building.

It must be our ride, I thought, though come to think of it, no one at the salon drove a Crown Vic. Sherlyn’s Escort was often on the blink, and she probably had to call a car service. As the car lurched to a stop at the base of the stairs, the driver’s side door flew open. I reached inside my purse for my wallet.

“Freeze!”

The voice and the command were familiar but terribly out of context. Shocked, I looked up to see a big black gun trained at my forehead.

“W
HAT IS THAT
?” I
DEMANDED AS SOON AS MY EYES
defrosted enough to seethe frowning face behind the gun. For once, Scythe’s emotions were easy to read—he had none. His laser-light blues trained on me like I was a cardboard cutout at the firing range.

“Police-issue nine-millimeter Glock.”

My tongue was feeling a little thick, what with my adrenaline all going to my lower intestines, but I forced it to work anyway. “What are you doing with it?”

“I’m going to use it to shoot you unless you take your hand out of your purse very slowly and very immediately.”

“You know just what to say to make a girl go weak at the knees,” I muttered, while obeying Scythe’s order, though I was sorely tempted to pull my checkbook out and aim it at him. Only problem was, it wasn’t loaded with much.

A smile muscle twitched at the corner of his unforgiving mouth. That left eyebrow half hitched. His eyes thawed by about ten degrees. While common sense told me to be nothing but grateful, I recognized that look. I’d seen it on my brother Chevy’s face when, as he changed a diaper on his firstborn, the brand-new baby boy had used his dad’s head for target practice. It was that combination of disgust and grudging respect I now saw on Scythe’s face.

Wow, what a way to impress a man. I really had a touch, now, didn’t I?

Trudy swaying next to me drew my attention away from both my lack of sexual charm and impending mortal harm. “We’re going to die!” Trudy exclaimed with a squeal as her eyes began to roll back into her head. Only then did I notice that Redhead had at some point disappeared back into the building, no doubt having sagely recognized the squeal of police tires. He won the IQ test of the day.

I slapped Trudy across the face. Her eyes snapped back to reality. One problem solved.

“Hands back up over your head,” Scythe commanded, what little emotion he’d displayed fleeing his face. My mouth went dry. I did as I was told. I didn’t think being shot by a man with the body of a Greek god and the charisma of Houdini would be a consolation when I was bleeding to death in the parking lot of a transvestite club. My mother would never forgive me. I wonder if I would care about that from heaven. Optimistic thinker that I am.

Shaking sense back into her head, Trudy leaned her hip against the metal railing for support as her hands joined mine in the air. “Thanks, Reyn, but I’d rather you’d have let me faint. I don’t want to see my best friend gunned down.”

“I’m not going to gun anybody down,” he said, reluctantly letting exasperation creep into his tone, which gave me a little shot of perverse satisfaction. He slipped his sleek black gun back into the shoulder holster hidden under his blazer. “Is everything always so chaotic with you two?”

Trudy and I seriously considered the question with a long look at each other, finally nodding at the same time as we turned our wide-eyed attention back to Scythe. He shook his head with a grunt.

The passenger door opened, and for the first time I saw we had more unwelcome company. Crandall, shaking and red in the face, looked like he was having a heart attack as he struggled to unfold his blocky body from the seat. Scythe’s eyes cut to his partner for a second, his frown deepening. How insensitive, I thought, for him to find his colleague’s discomfort irritating. Tears began rolling over the paunchy dunes in Crandall’s cheeks. Only then did it dawn on me that the old guy was laughing, albeit with one hand resting on his shoulder holster.

So my prospensity for inducing hilarity wasn’t taking much edge off their perception that I was potentially violent. How much more insulting could this get?

I was about to find out.

“I guess we oughta search her.” Crandall punctuated his lackluster tone with a gummy snap.

Scythe shot another look, this one completely unreadable, at Crandall. Trudy, reviving miraculously from her near faint, bobbed her head up and down. “Yes, I think you
should,
Detective Scythe.”

Hands still up in the air, I balanced on my left leg in order to stomp on Trudy’s foot with my right, but Scythe caught my eye and shook his head once, decisively. I put my boot back down on the concrete reluctantly, settling instead for mumbling under my breath what I’d do to Trudy when we were no longer in the presence of the law. Her grin just widened. Bitch.

Scythe sighed laboriously and cocked his head at his partner as he approached. “Do you have reason to believe that Miss Sawyer is carrying a concealed weapon, Mrs. Trujillo?”

“A concealed weapon? No.” Trudy started to laugh. I was insulted. Did she not think me capable of being armed, of killing? I was tough stuff. Suddenly, Trudy cut her laugh short. She cocked her head and drew her expertly penciled eyebrows together. “Except…”

Everybody froze; Scythe and Crandall pinned stares on me. I gawked at Trudy. What on earth was she up to?

“Except?” Scythe prompted tensely from the bottom of the six stairs. His hand was back on the butt of his damned gun.

“Except her pepper spray,” Trudy announced with a bob of her head, obviously proud she possessed such intimate knowledge of her best friend’s belongings. I just wished she possessed some common sense. Oh, no, she wasn’t done yet. “Not to mention the hair dryer she carries in her purse.
And,
I suppose if someone just used a brush to kill Ricardo, you police officers would consider a curling iron a weapon, now, wouldn’t you?”

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Scythe sighed again and looked to the sky (for heavenly guidance or for a weather update, I wasn’t sure) before he motioned to me. “That doesn’t leave us any choice now, Miss Sawyer. Come on down and get searched.”

An electric thrill zapped through me at the uncontrollable image of his fingers exploring all the places on my body that might be concealing a weapon. Then reason prevailed, taking the thrill and turning it into fury. I jammed my fists onto my hips. “Now, just a minute—”

“Hands back up, and take the stairs slowly,” he ordered, pulling handcuffs from an interior pocket of his jacket. “Or I can come up there and get you.”

The temptation of having him exert some extra effort rivaled my need to be independent. Independence won. I descended the stairs, but ever so slowly, pleased to see Scythe’s eyebrows begin to draw together in irritation. If
I
was getting some additional wrinkles out of this encounter, he would, too. Of course, the way the world worked, his would be written off as character lines, while mine would just make me look older.

I finally reached the pavement.

“Come on down, Mrs. Trujillo,” Scythe ordered in a much gentler tone than he had used with me. She skipped down the stairs, forcing me to move to let her pass, putting me way too close to Scythe, who wouldn’t clear away from my right side and give me my space. I could feel his body heat through the denim at my hip. He jangled the handcuffs. Turd. I hugged the wall. Trudy hipped her way past me, something sticky on her catching on my bodysuit.

“What the hell?” Trudy grabbed hold of the metal stair railing with her right hand, her left arm still up over her head, and began twisting at odd angles. I heard a brutal rip as she clawed at it with her right hand, then she waved a piece of duct tape under my nose.

“Where did this come from?” she demanded.

I pulled a face and pushed her hand away, remembering what Lady Godiva had been doing with tape before coming to Trudy’s rescue. “You don’t want to know, trust me.”

She raised her eyebrows.

Crandall smacked his gum and snorted, cocking his head toward the club building. “If you got it inside there, I can tell you what it was used for, darlin’.”

Trudy gave me a black look before smiling winningly at Crandall. “How sweet of you.”

Scythe looked at me. “Is she really that naive?’

“Worse.”

“What’s she doing hanging around you, then?”

“Everyone needs a little corruption.”

“A little?” Scythe asked, deadpan. I glared.

“Well, handsome?” Trudy prompted Crandall.

“The freaks use it to make their hot dogs look like pussies.” Crandall’s mouth spread in a gap-toothed grin that showed his sadistic side.

Blinking rapidly, Trudy sucked in enough air to fill a hot-air balloon, then swayed. This was no dress rehearsal. I leaped forward, knocking Scythe off-balance with the purse I had slung over my shoulder as I reached out to catch her. Scythe spat out a rather creative invective as he ripped my purse off my arm. Then I felt long, strong fingers clamp down on my right hand, yanking it back into a circle of steel that snapped shut. My back wrenched as my left arm moved to break Trudy’s fall, which never came because Scythe had grabbed her around the waist with
his
other hand, tucked her under his arm, and used both hands to fasten a handcuff around my other wrist. Superman from hell.

Crandall watched, snapping his gum, as Scythe sat a woozy Trudy on the bottom step.

“Keep an eye on her,” Scythe ordered as he dragged me by my handcuffed hands, backward over the black-top to his Crown Vic.

“What’s your problem?” I demanded, trying to maintain some dignity as I scuttled, hunched over, gritting my teeth against the clenching pain in my back.

“My problem is you.”

“That makes us even, because my problem is
you!
” I returned.

“No.” He stopped me long enough to fling open the back door to his car. He shoved me in headfirst. Just like they show on prime time. And they say TV is unrealistic. “
Your
problem is you need Ritalin. You can’t stay still for one second.”

“And
you
need some common sense,” I fired back, some of my fury diffused by my face being buried in the worn fabric seat cushion. I felt a bit of a draft on my rear end and wondered how high my skirt had been hiked up in my current unladylike position. I wedged my feet under the seat and tried—with my hands still bound together behind my back—to winch my upper body into a semi-sitting position. I wiggled my rump inch by inch until it was almost underneath me again. I looked down to find my skirt bunched up at mid-thigh. I bounced up and down, moving the skirt lower, in order to prevent the jerk from seeing my unflattering underwear. Why did I care? He deserved to see the world’s ugliest panties for his shoddy treatment of me. I looked up to see him leaning into the car, dangling my heavy purse from one hand, the corner of his lip twitching. I let him have it. “For your information, the reason I had to move so fast was to prevent my best friend from smacking her head on the pavement in a dead faint.”

“You are so unpredictable that for all I knew you could’ve been going for the concealed weapon—blowdryer, curling iron, one of those coloring squirt guns—that you keep hidden in your friend’s cleavage.”

“What are you doing looking at her cleavage?”

“Who said I was looking at her cleavage?”

“You knew she
had
cleavage.”

“Yes, which is more than we can say about you.”

“Don’t try to distract me with insults. What makes you think I’d be concealing a weapon, anyway? I haven’t shown you any propensity for violence.”

“I wouldn’t put it past you. I wouldn’t put anything past you, Reyn Marten Sawyer.”

I shoved my chin up with pride. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“I wouldn’t,” Scythe pointed out drily as he eased down in the backseat next to me.

Obviously surprised I had no comeback, Scythe half hitched that right eyebrow before continuing. “Let me let you in on a little investigator’s secret. We usually narrow our list of suspects down by ability, opportunity, and motive. You and I agree on your ability.”

He paused. I slid him a sideways glance. The backseat of the sedan wasn’t made for a man with legs as long as his, so it forced his knees up about chest-high. He had those unfortunately incredible hands wedged between his thighs, three fingers of his left hand extended, the pointer on his right counting off the reasons I should be locked up for Ricardo’s murder. I sucked in a deep breath to fortify my resolve and only ingested air laced with musky wood. My brain clicked. Mesquite, that’s what kind of wood it was. Did he wear a subtle cologne, or did he just naturally smell like the signature tree of the dry West Texas desert, the one with the long thorns on its trunk, the tree so tough it was impossible to kill?

“Since the invisible Claude isn’t going to be able to provide you an alibi,
and
you used to work at the murder scene,
and
you likely still have a key to the lock that hasn’t been changed since he built that chrome palace, you clearly had opportunity. The motive remains to be explained, but we’re ready to run through several tried-and-true options, including greed, jealousy, and revenge.”

My instinct was to jam my hands on my hips in indignation. I tried, only to have the handcuffs stop me all too cruelly. I winced. His lips thinned. What did
that
mean? Was he feeling guilty? Well, he should. I glared at him. “Talk about revenge! I’ll have a case for that against you, not Ricardo.”

Scythe’s hands balled into fists. “Your mouth is going to get you in serious trouble one day.”