The Brush Off (20 page)

Trudy had extracted from Crandall the jewel that the police had deactivated the alarm system so they could come and go during the investigation. If she hadn’t done that, I would’ve had to drag Gerald into the whole deal, and that wouldn’t have been pretty. He broke out in a cold sweat if Ricardo’s bank account didn’t reconcile by ten cents. What would breaking and entering do to him? I popped my heel out of my shoe, recovered the key from my instep, and fit it into the lock. Holding my breath, I turned it, trying not to imagine the alarm going off and me trying to run away through the woods behind in shiny fuchsia. Scary.

Silence greeted us as I eased the door open. We both let out our air and stepped over the threshold. I could see everything was as I remembered, except for the sprinkling of fingerprint dust on every surface. I resisted the impulse to clean it up.

“Don’t touch anything,” I told Trudy. What kind of criminal was I to have forgotten gloves? “We need to find something to wear on our hands so we don’t get fingerprints everywhere.”

Every hairstylist uses thin rubber gloves to apply chemicals. As a rule, we are vain about our hands for good reason. Our customers look at our hands while we do their hair, and no one wants someone with nasty-looking fingers going through their precious locks. That’s why most of us use gloves for other chores, such as washing dishes and cleaning house. Ricardo’s hands were the most beautiful I’d ever seen on a man. He had to have a box of gloves here somewhere.

It struck me as we tiptoed from the foyer to the kitchen that this looked like a model home, and, in fact, he may have bought it as one, furnished and all. He agonized over every small detail in each salon, but at his home, I doubted he agonized over anything. The greasy dust covered the emerald-green marble countertops and an island big enough to house my entire kitchen. I’d bet he had rarely cooked in there. The pantry, whose door I opened using a kitchen towel, held a bare minimum—a box of crackers, a can of salmon, ultra-virgin olive oil, a can of Rotel tomatoes, a box of Grape-Nuts. No pudding. None was to be found in the refrigerator, either, which held a few vegetables, fruit, and a package of gouda cheese. I got lucky under the sink, where I found not pudding but the box of gloves. I handed two to Trudy and snapped on a pair myself.

We moved from room to room, whispering. Why we whispered, I don’t know, since the nearest home was a half-acre away. Still, our stealthy mission seemed to call for it.

“You know, it doesn’t seem lived in,” Trudy observed.

“Yes, the décor is vanilla, but even the worst décor gets a personality from its owner. I don’t feel anything here. No personal photos are out. Even the art on the walls is motel bland. I wonder if Zorita could feel anything if we brought her through here?”

“Zorita would feel the presence of greenbacks if he had any hidden away.”

“You’re so callous, Reyn. Speaking of green, you need to remember the green aura she saw around you. I’ve been reading up on auras, and that’s a real warning sign that you’re going to get hurt.”

“I’ve already been hurt. My back. Your husband tried to cripple me.”

Trudy shook her head at my aura ignorance. “I’m going to hate to have to say I told you so.”

I moved to the final bedroom, which Ricardo used as an office. Only it didn’t much look like he used it. Of course, the space where the computer had been was empty, the police no doubt having taken it for evidence. Damn, I wished I could see if he had any files that referred to any of the ten names in my pocket. Except for the fingerprint dust, the desk was pristine clean, with not even a scrap of paper or a stray pen. The drawers were perfectly organized with office supplies.

Disappointed, I closed the last drawer and turned away. I guessed this was a big waste of time. Scythe and his crew had swept out anything that was potentially useful. I moved back to the master bedroom and went through the bathroom drawers and cabinets. No revelations there, beyond the fact that he preferred Rembrandt toothpaste and Charmin toilet paper. A weird-looking brush sat next to a pile of fingerprint dust. The handle read “SAPD”. It looked like one of the evidence techs had forgotten it.

Determined to find something, anything, I went to his walk-in closet and began searching the pockets of the pants hanging there. I looked around. If anyplace in the house showed Ricardo’s personality, it was here. The clotheshorse owned a six-figure wardrobe.

I could hear Trudy opening and shutting drawers in the bathroom. “Where do you think he kept his condoms?”

“Who says he needed any?”

“Come on, Reyn. Every single man should have some.
Modern Sex
magazine says that the percentage of men who contract a disease from sex is—”

I stuck my head out of the closet. “Trude, how many magazine subscriptions do you have?”

She jutted her chin in the air. “None of your business. Besides, I’m just trying to help.”

I went back to my search. At slacks number twenty-one, I found a business card from a Mexican food restaurant on the near west side, with “3/tacos $1.99 before 10:30
a.m.
” written on the back. Probably not the case breaker, but I slipped it into my shoe anyway. Never know when one might get the munchies.

The alarm pad on the wall beeped. The alarm was deactivated, but it still announced when a door or a window was breached.
Uh-oh.
I grabbed Trudy and dragged her into the closet, closing the door softly and switching off the lights.

“Do you think it’s the killer?” Trudy whispered.

Holding my finger to my lips, I shook my head hard. No, I did not think it was the killer, although he or she was better than the alternative. The alternative being the police. I had a momentary flash of hope that it was Gerald. But then I remembered I had his key.
Damn.

In the pitch dark, I searched my visual memory for the best places for us to hide should whoever it was open the closet door. I shoved Trudy into the corner behind a long alpaca coat. Her skinny black legs would blend into the shadows. My pink ones were an issue, though. Eye-catching, to say the least. Listening for the intruder, I slid two plastic storage bins off the top shelf, put them against the wall behind the shirts, and stood on them, crouched in a semifetal position.
Uh-oh.

“Ack,” I moaned.

“What?” Trudy whispered.

“Shut up,” I said through clenched teeth. “It’s just my back. I don’t know how long I can hold this.”

As I began to catalogue every nerve in my lower lumbar region, we heard voices. A man and a woman passed the closet door, grousing about detectives.

“They can leave doors to vics’ houses unlocked, and they don’t get any heat, but we leave one small tool and get an ass chewing. Is that fair?” the man said.

“Crime scene is what solves the case, and they get all the credit,” the woman agreed. “Their heads are so big it’s amazing they fit through the doors every morning.”

Thank the good Lord for professional jealousy and office politics. I heard them pick up the forgotten dusting brush and walk back out, passing the closet door again.

“Whose the worst, d’ya think? That Scythe?”

I nearly fell off my perch, I was nodding so hard.

“Oh, no,” she said. “He can be a little brusque, and some things he says come out wrong, but he’s just really driven to solve cases. And every now and then, he can be so charming. One time, before you started, he brought flowers to all the women in our department and the receptionist on his floor.”

Huh?

“Aw, he’d just dumped his last Flavor of the Week and was looking for a new one.”

“You’re just jealous because girls don’t swoon over you like they do him.”

“Yeah, they swoon, and even before they’re done fainting, Scythe’s through with them and,
bash,
they hit the ground.”

“You should be grateful he leaves something for you to pick up.”

“Hey! I’m not that bad!” the man shouted after her. The front door opened and shut.

We waited what seemed like an eternity but was probably only a few minutes. It wasn’t long enough to be safe but, damn, my back was killing me. I unfolded myself from my position of torture and opened the closet door. Trudy left the alpaca with a good-bye pet.

“You shouldn’t listen to that guy about Scythe”

“Yeah, I’m sure I want to be his flavor of this week.”

We’d turned the corner, and Trudy started to argue, but instead, she looked at the wall, then at me and back again. “Something’s not right. That wall is a little too thick. There’s not enough room in the closet to account for the design on this side. Let’s go back in and check it.”

I never guessed that a Watson with an interior design degree would be the one to break the case, but she was. When we went back into the closet, I pulled the Prada lavender silk shirt back from the wall on the fat side, and there was a framed photo of a handsome teenager, his black hair moussed into spikes.

“He looks familiar somehow,” Trudy murmured.

I wasn’t distracted by the kid but by the fact that it was the only framed photo in the house, and it was against a wall that Trudy said was too fat. I carefully took the photo off its hanger, but the wall was blank. No secret door. Not even a safe that we probably couldn’t have cracked. I knocked all along the wall, but all sounded the same. It sounded like Sheetrock, and it felt like a piece of it dropped in my stomach.

“I guess I was wrong.” Trudy sighed. “Sometimes contractors make mistakes and then cover it up. The owners never catch it.”

Reluctantly, I went to replace the photo. As I ran my hand along the back of the frame to line up the nail with the hanger, my fingers caught something square on the back of the frame. I turned it over. A flat magnet was taped there. I peeled it off and stared at it, wishing it could talk.

The whole purpose of a magnet was to meet another magnet. I held it flat against the wall, starting as high as I could reach and working down in grid fashion. On my last pass, next to the baseboard, I heard a crack and felt the magnet pull. Slowly, I drew the magnet off the wall, and a one-foot-by-one-foot piece of the wall came with it.

T
HE DOOR HAD BEEN CAMOUFLAGED BY USING AN
uneven edge that blended with the texture on the Sheetrock so well it was invisible.

“Wow,” Trudy said, more impressed with the secret hidey hole than with her expertise in finding it.

We could see nothing but a dark space and the shadows of the frame and pipes. This time, I didn’t let myself get disappointed. Not yet. I stuck my hand into the hole and felt, trying not to imagine how many brown recluse spiders lived there. This would be their textbook favorite environment. I’d take on a thousand rats over one brown recluse. The tiny, unassuming arachnids abounded in South Texas, and one bite was so poisonous that at worst it shut down human organs and at best rotted away the skin and muscle surrounding the bite. It was not pretty. The gloves only covered my hands, leaving my wrists and forearms feeling very vulnerable, and who’s to say brown recluses couldn’t bite through thin plastic? After a few seconds of morbid contemplation, my curiosity won over the potential for being permanently disfigured. I reached in farther. My fingertips made contact with cold metal. They followed it around a rectangular container about the size of my aunt Big’s toolbox. I extended my arm around the space surrounding the box and felt nothing. I wished we had a flashlight, but I didn’t want us separated in case the cops came back. I made a mental note that the next time I went breaking and entering to pack some
luz
or take a smoker who’d at least be equipped with matches.

“I think that’s the only thing in here,” I muttered, extracting my arm, which was now dusty and trailing cobwebs.

Cobwebs?

I swallowed my terror and wiped my arm clean with only a minimum of heebie-jeebie shivers.

“What’s the only thing in there?” Trudy demanded in a whisper.

“A box.”

“Let’s see it.”

“It’s too big to take through the hole. Ricardo must’ve put it into the wall when he had the house built and accessed it through the hole. I just hope it’s not locked.”

“Locked? Wouldn’t that be a little paranoid?”

I craned my neck to look back at Trudy. “Isn’t having a metal box hidden behind the Sheetrock paranoid enough?”

“Not really. I’m thinking I need to get some kind of secret compartment to hide the things I don’t want to come out when I die.”

“What things? The sex house you designed isn’t a secret anymore. How much worse can it get?” I grinned.

Trudy raised her eyebrows, crossing her arms over her chest. “Don’t you wish you knew?”

“I will know. Look at how hard I’m poking around in Ricardo’s life, and he wasn’t as good a friend to me as you are.”

A flash of fear reflected in Trudy’s eyes for a second.
Hmm.
I’d only known Trudy for five years this week. We’d been best friends for four years, eleven months and 364 days. Ours was just one of those relationships that clicked from the very beginning. She was a little dingy, too fashion conscious, a lot of fun, and loyal as a dog, and sometimes we could read each other’s mind. We were very different, but I’d never gotten along better with anyone in my life. Still, I didn’t know everything about her. Obviously.

“Hey, I’ve got a deal. I’ll promise not to stick my nose into your secrets after you die if you stick your hand in there”—I nodded toward the hole—“and get out whatever is in that box.”

Trude, nose wrinkled, was already shaking her head. “There’s spiders. Plus, I’ll get dirty.”

Okay. I guess her secrets weren’t
that
incriminating.
Darn.
So, I would have to risk my life instead. I held my breath and reached back in, feeling for the latch or, worse luck, a lock. After imagining at least half a dozen encounters with brown recluses, I found it on the short side. It was my lucky day—a simple, unlocked latch. My heart pounded. I popped it and lifted the lid. Tentatively, I tiptoed my fingers inside, remembering the bowls of peeled grapes that felt like eyeballs at the haunted house the Daleys ran in Dime Box every year in high school.

My hand shrank back for a minute.

Sometimes I wished I didn’t have such a good imagination.

Eyeballs and spiders shoved out of my mind, I made contact with the contents—slick photo stock and news-print. Something that felt like hair.

My hand had already drawn back instinctively, scraping my forearm along the top edge of the hole.
Ouch.

“What is it?”

“I felt hair.”

“Hair, like on something alive?” Trudy grimaced and backed up a few steps. Guess I couldn’t talk her into grabbing whatever was in there. I should’ve said it felt like a silk negligee trimmed in fur. Maybe then she would’ve reached in to get it. I wished I thought faster on my feet.

“Hair like on something that used to be alive, anyway. It didn’t move when I touched it.” I drew in a deep breath and stuck my hand back in, gathering up as much as I could in one handful. As I was drawing it out, I felt tiny feet crawling on the back of my hand.
Ack.
My elbow flexed faster than the hammer of a gun, dumping my booty all over the floor. Dozens of photos and a news clipping scattered. No hair. Great. Before I could think too long about it, I stuck my hand back in and grabbed the hair, throwing it out of the hole.

It was a nine-inch lock of straight black hair—human—tied with a purple bow. It smelled like lavender.

I looked up at Trudy. Her eyebrows hovered around her hairline. She looked at the mystery hair and at me and back again. “This is weirder than a dead rat,” she observed.

“Yeah, who would’ve guessed we’d be wishing for a dead rat,” I said as I stared at the odd collection of things at my feet.

I rolled off my haunches and onto the floor. Trudy joined me. The newsprint was yellowed. I unfolded it carefully and read the date aloud. “It’s twenty-four years old.” The article was about the death of a local scion of San Antonio society, sixty-one-year-old Paul Johnstone. He resembled a toad dressed in a monkey suit. Not a handsome man but apparently a generous one. The article described him as one of the city’s premier philanthropists—seemingly supporting every nonprofit artistic enterprise in town at the time—from museums to dance troupes to botanical gardens to choirs. The directors of such were quoted as saying art in San Antonio was much poorer with his loss. I guessed so. Literally and figuratively. Especially since his wife was quoted as saying her husband had been in the process of reviewing the allocations of his donations. She hinted the recipients in the past might be disappointed because the money would be going elsewhere.

“Elsewhere,” I muttered aloud. “Yeah, I bet right in her pockets.”

The story continued on a page stapled to the first, including a three-year-old wedding photo of the couple. He looked the same as he did in the first photo. His pretty blond wife, Sarah, looked about eighteen.

“Talk about May-September romance,” Trude said with a little giggle-snort. “Try January first–December thirty-first romance.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” I admonished. “Besides, I’m sure it was love.”

“How did he die?” Trudy asked.

It was a carefully written obit, which made me wonder if Johnstone had supported the newspaper as well. Finally, we found it buried on the back of the second page, barely escaping the city editor’s scissors to make the page.

“He was found unconscious in his study near midnight, his brandy half drunk. It doesn’t say who found him. We can assume wife, maid, or butler. He died en route to the hospital.”

“It sounds like a heart attack or maybe a stroke.”

“It sounds like an episode of
Murder, She Wrote.
Maybe the butler did it.”

“Quit being so suspicious.”

“Well, why did Ricardo have it in here? You think he was good friends with a member of high society two and a half decades ago? That was before he started his first salon.” I did some mental math. “He started his first salon the next year. So, at the time this was written, he was still a south side nobody.”

We stared at the article in silence for a few minutes. It didn’t make any more sense. I reached for the stack of photos. One was a snapshot of a dark-haired woman in her twenties who was looking at someone away from the camera. The wind blew her hair back from her face. She was laughing and glowed with happiness. She looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t place her.

“This could be her hair,” Trudy pointed out, wagging the lock at the photo.

I nodded and gathered up the rest of the photos, all of which were smaller. There were at least two dozen of what looked like school photos of the same black-haired Hispanic boy from kindergarten to high school. It was the young man whose framed photo hid the secret compartment in the closet wall. Why did Ricardo have a photo history of a boy? Handsome but serious, he looked like he carried the world on his shoulders.

“You think this is her son?” Trudy asked, holding the photo of the woman next to the photo of the boy at maybe twelve.

“Yes, he looks like her through the mouth and the eyes,” I agreed. “Although maybe that’s just what we want to believe. Then at least two of these three things would have some connection to each other.”

“I think I know who she is,” Trudy said, cocking her head as she studied the photo of the woman.

“Who?”

“She looks like a younger version of Senator Villita’s wife. I just saw her on the noon news doing a piece on fashion in Washington, D.C. She was saying that they really are going more for the traditional lately. What with the ecomony in a slump and the threat of terrorism, we as a nation need to feel some security. My new
Girl’s World
said the same thing about skirt length.”

“Trudy,” I snapped, “enough about the fashion.” I squinted at the photo. Celine Villita was my client Jolie Dupont’s best friend. I’d met her a couple of years ago, when Jolie had brought her in for an emergency ’do since her regular stylist was ill. I certainly hadn’t seen her smile—the woman was way too uptight for that—but it could be the same person twenty years later.

Why did Ricardo have an old photo of another man’s wife? Long-lost sister? Long-lost lover? Current lover?

Was this the reason Jolie didn’t want me digging into Ricardo’s past? To save her friend from an embarrassing revelation or worse? “How long have the Villitas been married?” I wondered aloud, not really expecting an answer from the heavens.

“Oh, oh!” Trudy chirped. “I know that because Gigi Gleason asked her that in the interview I watched. They celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary last year.”

“So all this”—I waved my hand over the photos and the newspaper article—“happened about the same time. Some old rich guy dies. Some one-day-will-be-a-senator’s-wife laughs in a picture. Some little kid is born. A boy who has grown up to have his photo hung in Ricardo’s closet on the wall.”

“Maybe Ricardo swings both ways, and this is his young lover,” Trudy offered with a quick grin.

“Okay, you made your point. I’m doing too much guessing. I need to go see Celine Villita.”

“If she’ll see you.”

“If she won’t, then we know we’re barking up the wrong tree and this photo is not of her. Because she’s got to be nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs wondering if the police are going to stumble upon whatever is the secret she and Ricardo shared.”

“But even if we can make Celine Villita and Ricardo fit somehow,” I continued, “I still don’t see any middleaged Anglo man who’d wear tennis whites and meet Ricardo at a transvestite club. Do you?”

Trudy thought for a while. It was so scary-looking I almost made her stop. “Just Paul Johnstone, and he’s dead.”

“Maybe his ghost came to Illusions,” I offered under my breath.

Trudy brightened. “Maybe. Let’s call Zorita and ask her.”

“Enough with her, already!”

“She’d probably be able to help more if you’d just let her.” Trudy pouted.

“Probably. My loss.”

Rising up on my knees, I put everything back, latched the box, and replaced the hole covering.

“Are you crazy? Aren’t we going to need that in our investigation?” Trudy asked.

For all my rebellious nature, I was raised a rule follower. “If we really do find who planted the brush in Ricardo’s back and this stuff is vital to proving it, the fact that we removed the evidence will give the defense a big enough loophole for the killer to step through. I don’t want that. We can ferret out the killer, let the police do the catching, and let the lawyers keep him—or her—behind bars.”

“Lieutenant Scythe would be very proud of you.” Trudy winked at me.

“Ugh, that almost makes me want to take it.” I straightened up—or, rather, tried to. My back clutched up, and I stumbled into the rack of clothes, my tennis shoe stomping on something in the dark space underneath that crunched like paper. I held on to the rack and tried not to cry. “Trude, reach down under my feet and get whatever I just stepped on.”

She bent her perfect nubile body down and collected what looked like another old newspaper clipping. “This will teach you to get things out of secret compartments in an orderly manner. It must’ve flown out without us seeing when you were doing your hurricane imitation.”