The Brush Off (12 page)

“If my mouth’s so lethal, why don’t you cuff it instead of my hands?” I pointed out sourly.

His jaw clenched as he stuck an open hand out the car door and addressed Crandall. “Hand me some of that duct tape.”

Ee-yew. I shook my head violently as Scythe turned back to me. I forced a semiapologetic smile. “Never mind. Just joking.”

“This is no joke, Miss Sawyer. This is murder, and you are a suspect.”

“What’s my motive?”

“Jealousy,” Scythe said. “Ricardo was an infamous ladies’ man. Or considering where you’ve just visited, maybe he was a man’s man, too. At any rate, he had the gall to come borrow a brush to use on the latest piece of ass he was balling, and you couldn’t take it anymore. You snuck up on them last night, and once his lover left, you made sure he couldn’t cheat on you ever again.”

I squirmed in the seat in fury. “Is that the best you can do? Sounds like a tired soap opera episode.”

“Hey, it’s not my fault people are generally stupid and uncreative.”

“Are you calling me stupid?”

Shockingly, he laughed. It was low and rumbly and took way too long. I felt my toes curl. Fortunately, he spoke again, and what he said cured the curl.

“I can’t believe you’re more up in arms over being called stupid than being called a suspect. That’s a new one on me.”

“Nobody calls me stupid and lives to tell about it,” I shot back without thinking. Duh.

Scythe’s eyes glittered. “Is that what Ricardo called you right before you stuck the homemade pick in his back?”

“No, Ricardo knew better than to call me stupid. He might have teased me about my business acumen or my boot collection, or any number of things, but he would’ve never called me stupid. Besides, I thought you were stuck on the jealous lover angle.”

“I’ll work whatever angle gets you to give us more information. Or confess. Or get out of our way.”

“Well, you’re about to work a whole geometry lesson full of angles with no results, because I didn’t do it. Ricardo might have tried to get me to sleep with him, but I didn’t go for it.”

“I see.” I saw a question flash in his eyes before he extinguished it. “So maybe you were fighting him off when you accidentally stuck the pick in his back.”

“Not hardly. Ricardo was so arrogant he would never have pushed himself on anyone. He was more like, ’Here I am, baby, come and get it.’ He thought himself too irresistible to chase anything. He expected to be chased, by every woman. It was more the fact that I didn’t find him sexually attractive that kept him half-heartedly teasing me about a liaison. He never found
me
irresistible, I can assure you.”

“I can believe that,” he put in.

“What? Why wouldn’t he find me irresistible?”

Scythe cocked his head thoughtfully and paused—a little too long, in my opinion. How long could the list be? He shook his head. “You just don’t seem like his type.”

“Whose type am I, then?”

Scythe shrugged. “Maybe a deaf mute’s type. You’re not bad on the eyes, and he wouldn’t be able to hear you or fuel your unflagging ability to argue.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You just hate a woman who always has a comeback.”

“You’re right about part of that statement.”

“Which part?”

“You’re so smart, you figure it out.”

“I’m not the one who should be figuring anything out. You are. Instead, you’re wasting your time trying to pin the murder on me when you should be out finding the real killer.”

“As soon as I eliminate all your potential motives, I can move on,” he said airily.

“What’s left? Greed?”

He held his palms up.

“That’s easy. Just check my finances. I am a conservative spender, don’t gamble, don’t have any outrageous expenses outside of one too many pair of cowboy boots and a fortune spent on Eukanuba dog food. My business is in the black, moderately successful—”

“But not a major moneymaker like Ricardo’s Salons is.”

“So what?”

“So, it might be nice to have the cash flow from a couple dozen salons instead of just one.”

I slid a glance at Trudy, who was accepting a stick of Juicy Fruit from Crandall while still managing to talk a mile a minute. While she might be spilling the beans to the old guy about Ricardo’s weird offer to me right now, Scythe didn’t find out from her, because she’d been with me almost all day. Who did that leave? Mario, who was, if humanly possible, an even bigger blabbermouth. I grimaced. “I don’t need the cash flow from a couple dozen salons.”

“There’s a fine line between need and want. And when one crosses that line, one embraces greed.”

“Okay, Psychologist Scythe,” I said. “I don’t
want
the income from a couple dozen salons. How about that?”

“So, what are you going to do when you get them in his will? Give them away to charity?”

“I doubt I am going to get anything in his will besides a lump of coal. He was just talking off the cuff last night. He was in a bizarre mood. Even if he were serious, I can’t see that he had time to change his will between his visit to me and the hair appointment he was so frantic to get to in time.”

“Maybe he’d already changed his will,” Scythe offered as he pulled my purse up from between his feet onto his lap. He pried open the snap and looked askance into the dark, overfilled depths.

“Without telling me? Right.”

Tentatively, he put a hand into the purse. “Happens all the time. Will readings are rife with happy and, more often, unhappy surprises for those concerned.”

I shrugged—or, rather, tried to. Considering my handcuffed wrists and tightening back, it probably looked more like a hunchback having a spasm. “You’d know better than I would. The only will reading I’ve ever been to, my great-grandma gave every heir one plastic flamingo from her front yard, a pie plate, and a hundred bucks. We were all pretty satisfied with that. Well, except for her favorite grandson, who actually got her most prized possession.”

He was clearly resisting the invited question. Finally, he gave a small, indulgent groan. “Which was?”

“A pair of ornamental yard deer that Jackie Dean from two streets down had welded into the, uh, breeding position.”

“Your grandmother kept that in her front yard?”

“Well, until some city slicker got elected sheriff and gave her so many tickets for public indecency that he threatened to take her to jail unless she moved them. That’s when we really knew Great-Gran was sick. She moved those deer without another word. If she’d been feeling up to par, she would’ve called his bluff and gone to jail.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. His hand felt around inside my purse. “Sounds like you have an interesting family.”

“I’m the most ordinary member of it,” I said proudly.

Scythe whistled under his breath. “Remind me to come armed to the Sawyer family reunion.”

“What reunion?” I demanded. I didn’t think he was joking anymore. His voice had gotten hard and very sure.

His laser-sharp eyes met mine as he pulled out a black leather case, extracted what was inside, and flicked it open.

“The reunion at the county jail when they have to come bail you out. Maybe trouble with the law runs in the family.”

Light from the setting sun winked off the razor-sharp edge of the steel blade as the rock in my stomach hit bottom and bounced.

O
UR GAZES WERE LOCKED FOR WHAT SEEMED LIKE
a minute but was probably only a second or two. Still, those damned dry-ice lasers made their point. Finally, I had to swallow, which of course meant he’d won, didn’t it? I parried by using the only weapon at my handcuffed personage’s disposal: my tongue

“What will you arrest me for? Not having a permit to carry a concealed hairdresser’s razor? That will certainly make you hero of the SAPD,” I quipped.

“Just because you don’t need a permit doesn’t mean you ought to be carrying something like this around.”

Scythe snapped the razor shut and put it on the seat between him and the car door, as far away from me as he could. As if I could pick it up with my teeth and lash him with it? Get real. His oversized hand reached in and pulled out the battery-operated mini-hairdryer, the battery-powered curling iron, the three different sizes of brushes, the hairspray, piling them in his lap. Twisting the cap off the tube of hair gel, he smelled it appraisingly and frowned. What was wrong with cucumber mint, anyway? He then pulled out the teasing comb and tested its point with the pad of his forefinger.

“What are you, the purse police?”

“I’m the everything police, since somebody killed your pal with a brush instead of something reasonable like a gun or a knife or even poison, for God’s sake.”

I didn’t have a comeback for that one. I hate it when that happens.

He cleared his throat. “Where’s the pepper spray?”

I blinked at him.

He sighed. Heavily. That damned eyebrow half hitched. “Little canister, defensive weapon, shoots out liquid pain? Your pal Mrs. Trujillo said you had some…”

“It’s in there somewhere.” I tried not to sound churlish. From the look on his face, I failed.

“
Somewhere
being the operative term,” he shot back as he flung out my key ring, my checkbook, my calendar, my thesaurus. Pausing there, he retrieved the three-by-three-inch book, held it up, and looked at me in question.

“Is this so you’ll never be speechless?”

“I hate to be stuck anywhere without something to read, so I always carry a book or a magazine. This week, I decided to improve my vocabulary.”

“Lucky us,” he muttered under his breath.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, ‘How admirable,’ ” he deadpanned, loudly.

Sure.
My common sense told me to keep teeth firmly on tongue.

“Like the new word I learned today,” I blurted out, ignoring my common sense.

He sighed but couldn’t resist biting. “Which is?”

“Vainacious.”

“That is
not
in there.”

“Well, every now and then, when properly inspired, I took in the thesaurus for a word, and I don’t find one that quite does it, so I embellish.
Vainacious
is a perfect description.”

For what,
is all he had to ask.
You
is what I was dying to answer. Instead, he dropped the thesaurus onto the seat between us, along with the subject in general, and looked askance at the bag. I could tell he was considering sticking his face into the black, cavernous hole but thought better of it. He shook his head instead. “Better not go there. Something might bite me.”

“Very funny.” I strained against the handcuffs. “If you’d just undo these, I’ll find it myself.”

“Good try,” he muttered as he dumped my purse upside-down on the floor between his feet. Wadded-up receipts, three pens without caps, my wallet, an all-inone screwdriver set, scissors, a pair of orange socks, and four dog biscuits cascaded out.

“Interesting taste in snacks.” He picked up a dog biscuit with a thumb and a forefinger and sniffed. This was obviously a man guided by his olfactory nerves. Before I could properly wonder what I currently smelled like, he dropped the biscuit onto the seat between us and conducted an exaggerated visual review of the assembled mess. “But no pepper spray.”

Then I remembered. “Uh-oh.”

He rolled his eyes. “What now?”

“I was running about ten minutes late for my first appointment this morning, so I was racing up my porch steps, when Jolie, my seven-thirty, came hurtling around the corner and bashed into me. Jolie is a little high-strung anyway, and my being late just—”

Scythe interjected. “Please get to the point.”

“Don’t be in such a rush. You want to know about Jolie Dupont, anyway, she might be a suspect.” I paused for dramatic effect.

Scythe ignored the drama. “Okay, why would this Jolie be a murder suspect?”

“She used to be a client of Ricardo’s and was acting weird this morning, like she didn’t want me investigating his murder.”

“If that’s what putting her on your suspect list, put me on it, too.”

I kicked at his shin with my Justin. He moved it out of the way just in time.

“Do you want to be arrested for assaulting a police officer?”

“If I’m gonig to be arrested for that, take off the handcuffs so I can do it right.”

The edge of his mouth twitched. He glowered to try to cover it up, but it was too late. “You’re lucky I have a sense of humor, or you’d be sitting in a cell block right now.”

“I’m shaking in my boots. If you’re done wasting your time trying to scare me, do you want to know what happened to my pepper spray or not?”

He pulled his eyebrows together in an exaggerated thoughtful expression. “I’m not sure now.”

I glared and pursed my lips.

“Okay, okay, what happened to it?”

“Well, I don’t know to swear on Grandpa’s grave, but my purse went flying. I thought we got all the stuff back in, but I didn’t have time to inventory everything, so I guess maybe some could have skidded into the front flower beds. I didn’t look there.”

Shaking his head, Scythe blew out yet another sigh. If I speeded up the irritating comments, I’d have him hyperventilating in no time. Then he’d pass out, and I’d find the handcuff key, free myself and find Ricardo’s killer before he came to. He reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulled out a cell phone, punched in a number, and KO’d my escape fantasy. “Soila, will you let the doc BOLO for traces of pepper spray on the Montoya body when he does the post? I’d like to be there, too. Call me when he starts, okay? Thanks, darlin’.”

“What?” My legs straightened so much in shock I nearly banged my head on the ceiling of the Crown Vic.

“You think I shot Ricardo with pepper spray?”

Scythe flipped his phone closed. “I don’t believe in coincidences, and one of your weapons of mass destruction is missing the day after your mentor is murdered with your other one. Seems like a logical thing to do, to check for the pepper-spray traces.”

I had to admit to myself it
was
logical. Fruitless but logical. “You’re wasting your time,” I advised sourly.

“Thanks to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you’re withholding information and then proceeding to get in our way as we try to find out who killed your pal, which gives more opportunity to the real killer to get away with it. Why don’t you give up the hunt?”

“No can do.”

“Come on,” Scythe insisted in a tone I recognized as nearly desperate. “What if I agree to concentrate on some other suspects if you go back to cutting hair?”

I narrowed my eyes and winced at the handcuffs scraping against my wrists as I tried to jam my hands on my hips. “Are you trying to tell me you’ve been turning the heat on just to get me to lay off the investigation? All this was pure intimidation?”

“Look, we checked phone records, and a call was placed from Ricardo’s Broadway salon at two thirty-four that lasted about three minutes. He could’ve pissed you off. You could’ve gone down to meet him and killed him in a crime of passion, but I doubt that you would’ve used your own brush to do the deed. Still, maybe you’re that stupid or got that blinding mad. But then this morning, we get an anonymous call on our info hot line that claims you’re asking lot of nosy questions about Ricardo. And now, you’re at this drag-queen club, a place an informant tells us Ricardo began to frequent recently. Either you’re looking for someone else to pin the murder on so you stay in the clear, or you’re a busybody with misguided loyalty to your friend. Frankly, I’m betting on the latter, but you know things you’re not telling us, and you’re meddling to the point where I might just have to lock you up. There’s a lot of media heat on this case, and the police chief is not going to be patient. Why don’t you just come clean? Then you can go back to your job, and we can do ours.”

Even though I knew how much that honest speech cost him, I shook my head.

He blew out a sigh and laid his head on the back of the car seat. “Why?” he muttered, more to the car ceiling (or maybe God) than to me.

“Because I owed him.”

“With a shift in attention that was simultaneously lazily slow and intensely focused, he turned. That torpedo gaze got me in its sights again.“
Now
we’re getting somewhere. What did you owe him?”

I shrugged, trying not to show how those eyes affected my insides. “I owed Ricardo like one friend owes another a favor. Ever since I went to work with him, we kept a running tally of who owed whom. You see, I was just about the only person who worked with him who would actually treat him like a person rather than some kind of demigod. We joked, and I talked back to him sometimes…”

“I can’t imagine,” Scythe threw in under his breath.

“And,” I said, with a defiant head toss, “I think he liked it.”

“Whatever you say.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that all pushy women think men like to go toe to toe, while in fact we might like our women soft and feminine and agreeable, not tough and smart-mouthed and difficult.”

Just barely managing to remember that he had the power to throw me behind bars, I swallowed the growl that rose in my throat, making it sound like a gurgle. Cool, I know. “I hope you’re speaking for yourself and not trying to burden the entire male gender with your small-minded insecurities.”

He turned his palms up. “See, that is what I’m talking about. How attractive is this?”

“Pretty attractive to a man who would rather have a woman who can beat him at Cranium than beat him off.”

“Who’s that? A gay man?”

I let the growl out this time. He looked unrepentant.

“I’m finished talking to you. I refuse to answer any more of your questions, you chauvinist pig.” I leaned over his lap and hollered out the door. “Crandall, get in here. I want you to continue my interrogation. I’m not saying anything else to your partner.”

Crandall and Trudy exchanged a look that might be interpreted as one of shared long-suffering. After a moment or two, Crandall snapped his gum as he ambled over to the car, hiking up his polyester slacks. I straightened up and focused out the windshield, ignoring the gaze I could feel burning into the side of my face.

“Used your charmer routine on her, I see, hotshot.” Crandall chuckled.

“I’m finished with her, anyway,” Scythe clipped out as he reached between the seat and my lower back to grab my wrists. His knuckles brushed my hip. I doubled over, face on my knees, to avoid his touch as he unlocked the handcuffs.

“Yeah, you macho guys, use your women, abuse them, then you’re finished with them.” Even as I said it, I knew I shouldn’t. I mean, here I was being questioned for murder. The cop—albeit one who was a
vainacious
jerk—
was
, in fact, taking off the handcuffs and letting me go.
Keep your mouth shut,
the angel on my shoulder warned. The devil on the other won. I was still boiling over his idiotic chauvinism. I wasn’t
that
pushy, was I?

The cuffs came clanking off. I straightened my upper body and surveyed the scene of the crime against my purse. The truth was, I wanted to avoid the arctic torpedoes, because I can hide behind the bravado of my mouth just so long before my eyes give away everything I’m thinking and feeling. Especially to those eyes. I gathered what was on the seat cushion, jamming it back into my bag. I paused. The items on the floor were going to be a problem, because the only way I could reach them was by sticking my hands between a pair of muscular male legs. Hmm. Maybe I could accidentally drop something heavy on his
cojones.
I wanted him to hurt.

He saved himself by reaching down before I could and scooping up the junk on the floor. I opened the purse so he could dump it by handfuls. I only thought I was safe, though. He paused at my billfold and opened it up.

“Hey,” I protested as he scanned my driver’s license photo.

The twin torpedoes met mine, their power softened by amusement. “You’re not very photogenic, are you?”

“What does it matter to you? I have a brain, and I’m not afraid to use it and therefore qualify as unattractive in your book, camera or no camera.”

Scythe referred back down to the photo in question. It was two years old. In my typical expedient fashion, I’d swung by the license office after spending an entire weekend with my nutty relations at Mom’s surprise birthday bash. My big brother Chevy’s two kids had come down with chicken pox (what kind of parents are conscientious objectors to a vaccine for a childhood virus?). Chevy developed shingles as a result, leaving me mostly in charge of the itchy, speckled crew as his wife, Barlow, was off on a “girls’ weekend” in Aruba with her friends. My sister Pecan’s on-again, off-again boyfriend drove his Harley-Davidson up for the event and kept getting run out of town by a small but energetic group of born-again Baptists who thought he was a drug-addict member of a motorcycle gang intent on selling the two children into white slavery. Dallas announced he was having an early midlife crisis and decided to quit his job as a stockbroker and join the Marines, only the Marines wouldn’t take him because he was too old, so he was going to take them to court on principle. Charade had just had her chakras read by a psychic who warned her not to go “into the light,” so she stayed locked in a closet for two days. Gran had run off with the man who owns the funeral parlor in my hometown, and it had taken us most of Sunday to find her shacked up at a Motel Six in the nearby “city” of Bastrop, population six thousand.