The Brush Off (14 page)

We hadn’t gone a hundred yards when the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The sun’s rays shone through the trees in long, thin, illuminated paths that made the close, low woods seem otherworldly. I looked at Trudy, who met my expression with her own raised eyebrows. Were we being weird, or was there something weird going on? I checked the dogs. Animals respected that sixth sense that we humans probably all still possess but tend to overanalyze or completely ignore. Maybe it was nothing more than the survival instinct we think we don’t need because we’re so smart. Anyhow, mine was definitely too hard to read, so I was relying on the girls to tell me. All three dogs held their ears pricked and their necks stiff, and their eyes roamed out the windows with obvious purpose.

Trudy still wasn’t talking, which for her was sign enough of trouble.

The wind picked up; branches shook; shadows danced.

My foot had eased so far off the accelerator that the truck was barely crawling down the driveway.

I shook off the shiver that was slithering down my back, blew out a breath of frustration at my ridiculous imagination, and pressed on the gas. Too hard. The truck leaped forward, spewing white gravel in our wake and scattering whatever spell we’d put ourselves under. Trudy wrapped her raspberry talons around the grab bar at the dashboard and held on tight as her cotton-candy-colored booty bounced wildly on the seat. The dogs, knocking heads against the windows and each other, alternately growled and moaned. I gunned it more as the driveway headed in a sixty-degree angle up a hill. Whatever might have been eerie in the woods would have to chase us. I pressed harder on the gas, and now the truck complained with a suspicious engine whine. The cedars ended abruptly, and we climbed to the pinnacle of the now bare hill, where a structure stood.

“Wow,” Trudy intoned, wide-eyed. “Weird.”

I’d remembered Zorita’s house as odd, but it was worse than that. Worse than weird. It was bizarre. The last time I’d come, I’d only seen it from the driveway, where Zorita had met me. Close up, it looked to be about a thousand square feet built in a circle.
Would that be circular feet, then, instead of square feet?
I wondered. My gazelle mind in action. Anyhow, the shape wasn’t the bizarre part. The walls were glass from three feet up to the ten-foot ceiling. All the way around. From ground to three feet was limestone and mortar, an attractive complement to the sandstone-colored tile roof, so someone had taste that took a big detour when it came to the glass deal. No curtains of any kind lined the windows, which made the contents of the home visible from where we stood. There were no interior walls. A single beige parson’s chair sat squarely—and it seemed especially square in that round environment—in the middle of the room.

Okay.

Trudy had been watching my reaction, I suppose, because she looked a little impatient when I finally turned to her.

“Does she really live here?” she asked.

I shrugged, glancing around for another building.
Nada.
I began walking toward the house, stepping over stray limestone rocks, cedar bark, and a baby prickly pear. So much for landscaping. “Maybe it’s some kind of observation hut.”

“A hut that costs more than my retirement fund.”

“I thought you used up your retirement fund with your boob job.”

“Mario’s got to have something to look at when the rest of me goes. I call that a retirement fund,” Trudy returned rather defensively—for her.

I slid her a look. “So why didn’t he use
his
retirement fund for it?”

Trudy glared. We didn’t fight often, but when we did, we went for the jugular—the advantage of knowing someone as well as you know yourself. “What’s your point, anyway?”

“Everybody has different priorities, that’s all,” I offered judiciously as I approached the front door. Or side door or back door. The house was round, after all. The door was beige. I knocked. Somebody really liked beige. That occurred to me only because I absolutely despise beige. It’s such a gutless color.

“I didn’t see anyone home,” Trudy stage-whispered.

“And it’s not like they could hide real well.”

“Then why are you whispering?” I asked loudly.

The door flung open. Trudy jumped and knocked me off the limestone rock on which I’d been balanced. Zorita stood—all four feet, ten inches, hundred and eighty pounds of her—in the doorway, dressed in a beige rough-weave linen shift. She wore beige Birkenstocks on feet that looked like a pair of rolls that had been left to rise too long. Even her feet were beige. Her long, straight hair was beige—no kidding. That had been no easy task for her stylist, either, because her skin tone told me she was a natural black-brunette. I could understand why, as a psychic, she’d beiged herself—it drew all attention to her dark eyes. I resisted their hypnotic effect, because all the beige was beginning to piss me off.

“I saw that red spike, so don’t try to hide it,” Zorita directed at me, left hand extended, fingers wiggling, off to my right about a foot. Instinct won over intellect, and I glanced into the space indicated. I saw nothing but more beige—beige rock, beige sand. Of course.

“Where?” Trudy twisted her body around mine so she could see in the space beyond me. “Oh, yeah…”

“Oh, yeah, what?” I followed her searching gaze. More beige.

Poker-faced Zorita was nodding sagely, the lowest of her three chins echoing the gesture. She had been looking at me. Rather, not precisely at me but near me, all around me. It was disconcerting.

“You see it, then?” She turned her face and looked directly at Trudy. Why did she rate the direct treatment and I got the dog-searching-where-to-pee look?

“I think I do. A red flash…there! Another one, coming from her chest!”

“Oh, come on. Now I’m Supergirl about to be transformed into my costume to save the world?”

Trudy and Zorita both ignored me. At least half a minute ticked by before Trudy finally shook her head. “That’s it. I don’t see another one. What did it mean?”

“A red spike like that is the sign of sudden deep emotion. Did you notice it being dull red or vibrant red?”

Trudy was thinking so hard she looked like she might hurt herself. A raspberry fingernail tapped her temple. “Dull, I guess. But deep, rich.”

Zorita nodded once. “Excellent! A spike of dull, deep, or, as you said, rich red indicates a sudden flash of anger. Spikes are showing us only a temporary emotion, but if it had been brighter, it would’ve revealed sudden violent tendencies. Like those of a murderer.”

Trudy’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head as she looked back at me. I narrowed my eyes at her. “Notice Zorita said
would’ve
.”
Listen to me, it sounded like I was buying into this crap. Argh.

“I’m going to have to watch you a little more closely from now on, Reyn,” Trudy warned, suddenly the expert.

Before I could properly unleash some of those vibrant red spikes on my best friend, Zorita stepped back and swept her pudgy arm to grant us entrance to her human fishbowl. “Please, come in.”

We stepped onto the pine hardwood floor, which—surprise, surprise—was beige and completely bare. I finally noticed the top of a ladder peeking out of a four-foot circular hole in the floor next to the right wall—or the right side of the circle—and what looked like a double handrail, sort of like what helps heave one out of the deep end of a pool.
Okay.

Zorita followed my glance or else read my mind. “That’s where I live. The basement contains my living area, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. Here is where I work.”

“Ah-ha,” Trudy murmured, impressed.

“I sit on the highest peak for miles. Nothing distracts me from reading my clients’ auras or seeing through the sky into their future.”

“Oooh, can you tell me my future?” Trudy asked.

“Of course, my dear. As soon as we’ve done our business, it would be my pleasure. I’m sure you have a happy road ahead; your wonderful blue aura is that of a healing, spiritual teacher.” She slid a sidelong glance at me before bestowing a beatific smile on Trudy. “And with that confident, affectionate pink in your aura, it’s a good thing
she
has you at her side.”

Spiritual? Trudy? Maybe the fashion spirits. Teaching what? The survey results from women’s magazines? “What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded.

Zorita waved both hands as if to clear smoke. “With all your green and yellow—”

I’d had about enough of this. “Don’t forget the red.”

“Yes, and the red.” Zorita nodded grimly. “Spikes.”

“What’s green and yellow?” Trudy asked.

“A light green indicates the potential onset of injury. She should be careful for the next few days—”

“Too late. I already hurt my back.” I grimaced. “Helping Miss Pinky Blue’s husband, it just so happens. Big help she is.”

Zorita looked unconvinced, pausing just a second before she continued to answer Trudy’s question. “And the yellow, well, that can denote intelligence, success or creativity…”

I grinned self-righteously.

“…Or jealousy, selfishness, or negativity, depending on the shade of yellow it is.”

My grin faded.

Zorita clapped her hands. “But let’s get on with it. I know why you’ve come.”

“You do?” I blurted.
Well, good,
I thought,
that will spare me all those tedious questions. She can just come out and tell us who killed Ricardo. Or, sparing that, maybe she’ll hint at the evil forces around him so we can get busy ferreting them out.

“Yes.” Zorita nodded, then rudely interrupted my grandiose plans. “You’ve come to pay his outstanding bill.”

“What?” Trudy and I said in unison, although I must admit I sounded much more distressed than she did. With good reason, it turned out. I was the one getting the shakedown.

“I’ll just go downstairs and get the invoice for you.” She leaned her round body toward the hole in the floor.

“Wait.” I put a hand on her doughy arm. She looked at my fingers like they were hateful vermin.

“Please remove your touch. You have a very powerful personality. It interferes with my psychic abilities.”

I felt a shot of perverse satisfaction and battled with the urge to grab her with the other one and maybe breathe on her real hard or shoot her with some red spikes. Instead, I remembered we needed to use her psychic abilities, so I dropped my hand. “I just want to know why you think I’m going to pay Ricardo’s bill.”

“Because you’re inheriting most of his estate, that’s why.”

I snorted in disbelief. “I don’t think so.”

“I know so.”

“You have a copy of his will?”

“No!” Her hand flew to her chest like I’d aimed for her heart. “I don’t need one.”

“Okay, so you’re guessing.”

Trudy, who’d been watching our conversation like it was the final round at Wimbledon, gasped. I suppose I’d hit one into the net. “Reyn, that’s blasphemous. Psychics don’t guess.”

Zorita threw Trudy an approving look before shaking her head at me. “She’s a skeptic, my dear. Don’t try to protect me. We deal with this every day.”

“Yes, but not from someone who wants your help,” Trudy pointed out all too accurately. Damn her. She could be such an airhead and then with no warning act like she belonged to Mensa.

“My help?” Zorita asked, stunned.

Trudy looked from Zorita to me and back again. “Yes. We want you to help us find out who murdered Ricardo.”

Zorita swallowed hard, closed her eyes, and began hyperventilating. Sweat beaded on her upper lip. I thought she might be having a heart attack, so I took a step forward. Her left arm flew up, hand splayed out in front of her. “Stay back.”

Yikes. I got the creepy-crawlies up and down my arms. Trudy looked completely—and happily—entranced.

After about a minute, Zorita’s eyelids lifted with the speed of a sloth on quaaludes. Sweat now dripped down the corners of her mouth. Ick. Her dark eyes widened until we could see the whites all the way around. “You do not want to know who killed Ricardo.”

“Why not?”

“Because when you take that dark road, I don’t see you coming out.”

Then, with a quickness that was stunning for one so heavy and short-limbed, she spun and disappeared down into the hole.

I
IMAGINE THAT TO ANYONE PSYCHICALLY TUNED,
I looked like a human firecracker right about then, what with my aura all green and yellow and red spikes flying out with lightning speed. Zorita had never reappeared, having hollered up through the hole in her floor that she would forgive “my” bill if we would just leave. My bill, my rear. I guessed that by predicting I was about to inherit Ricardo’s estate, she was trying to get me not only to cough up the money for his last reading but to beg her to read my future as a millionairess as well. She predicted the future wrong there, didn’t she? I wasn’t going to ask squat.

I was going to let my faithful assistant ask instead.

“Zorita,” Trudy cajoled, perched on her spike heels on the edge of the hole in the floor. “We
so
need your help. The police really don’t seem to be on the right track, and we’d hate to see the person who did this to Ricardo get away with no punishment.”

“We all will meet divine punishment for our sins one day,” came the response from the hole. “The guilty one will pay that way.”

Great, a Bible-thumping psychic. I thought those who relied on otherworldly talents were supposed to be the spawn of Satan or some such. At least, that’s what Great-Granny Penscik always warned me about. My luck to have encountered the only psychic in this zip code who wanted to let divine redemption instead of mortal law deal with a homicidal maniac.

“All we really need is a list of Ricardo’s clients. Not for all the salons, of course, what a chore that would be,” Trudy explained patiently. “We would so appreciate it if you could pass along just the names of the women he still personally serviced.”

Trudy caught my jolt and blushed, stammering down the hole. “I mean, I mean, you know, the ones he still did the hairdos for.”

“I know what you meant, Trudy,” Zorita sent back up the hole. “With your truly good heart, you aren’t the kind of woman to imply otherwise, although your friend is. However, you are a good enough friend to
her
to do whatever she wanted you to do. And to say whatever she wanted you to say.”

She was right, of course, on both counts. Maybe there was something to this psychic stuff, after all.

“Hey!”

Trudy was mad now, spitting mad, as we call it back in Dime Box. It didn’t happen often, but I loved to see it happen when it did. I had the short fuse, she had the long one. It took a lot to push her over the edge, and Zorita just had. No doubt, there were red spikes shooting out at that moment amid all her placid blue and pink, although it would take someone more psychically tuned than I to ascertain them. Imagining them was enough for me. I grinned.

Trudy stomped over to the edge of the hole and hollered at the top of her lungs. “If being a good friend is a bad color aura in your book, then you can have it, lady, because I will keep being a good friend no matter what color it turns my aura. Right now, you ought to be reading whatever is the most threatening color to you, because I am about to crawl my heinie down there and get the list of Ricardo’s clients from you, whatever it takes. So what’s the color for stubbornly persistent and fiercely loyal?”

I was impressed.

So was Zorita, apparently. Because within a minute, a sheet of what looked like hand-beaten papyrus decorated with dried violets appeared at the hole’s opening. A list of about a dozen names and corresponding addresses had been written down on it in a crooked mess amid the squashed stems and petals. What was the purpose of paper like this?
Hmmm.
Before I could entertain too many thoughts of the deep meaning of violets and the scary curses they might represent, Trudy plucked it out of her hand and mince-marched on her spikes toward the door, cocking her head at me to get a move on. She
is
a bossy britches when she gets mad.

I followed. She had gotten the goods.

“Before you go off on this ill-advised journey of discovery,” came Zorita’s disembodied voice rising from the hole, “I have to warn you…”

Trudy paused in mid-mince. I kept going. My hand was on the doorknob when I realized Trudy just might not be able to resist asking the question Zorita wanted asked. I spun and tried to get Trudy’s attention with my zip-the-lip motion, but her gaze was glued to the hole in the floor.

“Warn us about what?”

I groaned.

“You must know, Trudy, not everyone on the list is a client. They are the names that came to me. And holding that list is shaking hands with fate.”

“Uh-huh,” I muttered. “A fate named Violet.”

Shooting me a glare, Trudy put her finger to her lips.

“Whose fate?” she asked the hole.

“The fates of six people. Leave the list here, it goes one way. Take the list with you, it goes another.”

“Which way is it supposed to go? One way or another?”

“Ah, Trudy,” she said, buying time as Trudy’s insistence clearly surprised her. “The age-old question.”

I silently mimicked what she’d said so pompously. Trudy glared. We waited. When Zorita added no more, Trudy asked, “Okay, I guess what you’re telling me is we don’t know which way fate is supposed to go. Which are the six people, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“No duh,” I said under my breath. Trudy threw me a warning look.

Zorita wasn’t finished. “But I do know that many things die in the face of truth.”

I grunted. “Yeah, like lies.”

“Lies and more,” Zorita intoned, having heard me, apparently. “Happiness, peace, and, often, lives.”

Trudy gasped. “Someone’s gonna die?”

I rolled my eyes, reached over, grabbed the violet papyrus, and pulled open the door. “Turn on your brain, Trude. Someone’s
already
dead.”

“I mean someone else besides Ricardo,” Trudy snapped at me as she made a dive for the list. I held it up over my head, wrenching my back but successfully keeping it out of her hands. I dashed for the truck.

“If we take this list, Zorita, is someone else gonna die?” I heard Trudy call back into the house.

The front door banged closed in Trudy’s face, and the dead bolt shot. Now, I never saw Zorita’s rotund shape rise up out of the hole, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t, right? And I wasn’t telling Trudy the windowed room backlit with the setting sun looked empty when I jumped into the truck, cranked the engine, and honked her out of her daze.

We didn’t talk much on the way back. Trudy was so spooked she could hardly put a sentence together, and I was so frustrated that I wasn’t able to answer one as sensitively as I should have for my pinky-blue friend, anyway. Our one attempt to converse went something like this.

“Trude, can you read me the names on the list?” I reached to retrieve it from the side pocket of the truck door.

“I, I’m not…ah…I don’t think we should have it.”

“Trudy, please! I am dying to know who’s on it.”

“Reyn! Don’t…I mean, you can’t…say
that
word.”

“Word? What word?” I really was stumped for a moment, before bursting out, “Dying! Dying! Dead! Die! Died! Maybe I’ll really do it, and then all the suspense will be over, and you can snap out of this trance, you freak.”

Then she started crying. “I’m (
sniff
)…I’m sorry I care (
snort
) about you. Finding Ricardo’s killer isn’t worth losing your life.”

“Maybe not, but is it worth getting me hooked up with Detective Darling?”

A glimmer came into her eyes then, and I thought I had her back, but her eyes filled up with tears. “You can’t date him if you’re dead (
intense sobbing
).”

I stopped trying after that. Dusk fell fast, and the stretch of Highway 281 we were on was so busy I couldn’t even turn on my interior light and take a look at the violet-pitted page. It would have to wait until we got home. I weaved in and out of traffic, knowing the girls must have their legs crossed in the backseat. I’d intended to let them out to relieve themselves on the top of Zorita’s hill before we started back to the city, but, considering the way our close encounter had ended, I had a vision of them coming out of the woods as a trio of horny toads or armadillos or something worse, so I decided they could hold it until we got home.

Chardonnay was whining in my ear by the time we turned into my driveway. I parked, snatched up off the console the damned barf bag Scythe had slipped me at the crime scene, stuffed the violet list in the rear waist-band of my skirt, opened the back door for the girls, and walked around to the iron gate at the side of the house to let them into the backyard. Trudy had gotten out and walked around the left side that front McCullough, where the salon parking lot is, presumably to get into her car and go home to Mario. Just as well. I wanted to review the list alone and collect my thoughts about it before I got her input. I crunched my way across the grass, littered with the hard, waxy leaves of the three-hundred-year-old oak trees in my front yard. They were evergreens that molted spring and fall, and I thought with some sense of relief that it would be pretty hard to sneak up on my house while the trees were shedding their leaves. See, sometimes it pays to be a lazy gardener.

I heard Trudy talking to someone in the parking lot. A baritone someone. Not the flasher, I hoped, especially hoping it was not the murderer. My heart pounded.

As I was about to round the fat, blooming gardenia bush that sits at the southeast corner of my house, I heard Trudy giggle. “Lieutenant Scythe, you rascal.”

Not the flasher; not the murderer, much, much worse.

“Just telling the truth, ma’am, that’s all.”

That again. Did he know the truth can kill? Zorita told us so. I leaned into the gardenia bush and peeked through the leaves. He’d shed the sport coat, and his baby-blue knit shirt fit a little too tightly across the chest and biceps and a little too loosely at his abdomen. They need to redesign polo shirts to fit his body type.

“I just don’t think I look all that good,” Trudy was saying modestly. “I mean, after Reyn dragged me all over the county and beyond today.”

“I’ve just never seen a woman look so pretty and fresh at the end of the day like you do,” Scythe lied.

Didn’t Trudy realize that it was night, and night meant it was dark? The security light over the salon’s front door was about fifty watts shy of doing any good and only highlighted their shadows. I leaned deeper into the bush. What was Scythe up to?

“To look so good (
tsk
), especially after all your cross-county adventures,” he added, saccharine-sweet. “Where all did you say you’d been?”

Ah-ha.
The light might be dim out there, but it lit up in my head. How could Trudy not know he was pumping her for information with his lame flirting? He wasn’t even any good at it. The flirting, that is, although there was no proving that by the way Trudy giggled again. Maybe she was just trying to be polite.

She twisted a lock of hair around her forefinger. “We went—”

“Shopping.” I extracted myself from the bush and swung around the corner very suavely and just in time to stop the blabbermouth from spilling our secret.

They both turned to me. Trudy blushed. “We
did?
”

“Shopping for what?” Oh, but that Scythe was quick. Damn him.

“Uh, baby clothes,” I blurted. Well, I figured the only three things I might know more about than he did were salon products, feminine hygiene products, or baby stuff. I discarded the first one, since he might know more than I thought he did, considering it was his business because of Ricardo’s murder. I discarded the second, because I didn’t want even to mention anything that remotely had to do with sex in front of him. So that left the third. And, yes, I did consider all this in the approximately five seconds it took to answer his question. As I said, a chaotic mind but a swift one.

Clearly too chaotic.

“Baby clothes?” He sounded skeptical.

“Yes, rompers, jumpers, and those cute little onesies…” Thank the good Lord for big families, especially the mini-humans, my nieces and nephews.

“Onesies?”

“Brilliant inventions.” I smiled, nodding idiotically.

“Cotton knit deals that button…”I started to demonstrate, Scythe’s gaze following as my hand went to my crotch. I blushed and dropped my hand. “Between their, uh, legs.” That one eyebrow half hitched. I rushed to fill up the air. “Kind of like the leotard I have on.”

Both eyebrows shot up. He smothered a grin and looked studious. “Now, with the babies, I could understand that the design is one of convenience. For diaper changing, of course. For you, however, I fail to see the advantage of extra buttons. Unless it is some variation on a chastity belt,” he offered, glancing at Trudy in exaggerated question.

Trudy looked at me thoughtfully. “Maybe
that’s
why you don’t get dates. You need to be more accessible!”

“Trudy!” My face was blazing hot now, and I never blush. I didn’t even feel like myself. My tongue felt thick. My mind felt loopy. Zorita must have put a curse on me. Either that, or I wasn’t cut out for this investigating stuff.