The Brush Off (5 page)

“Great. They can wait all day for my ‘No comment.’ ”

“Ah, you gotta give ’em more than that,” Crandall argued halfheartedly.

“The hell I do.”

“We’re not really gonna be here all day, are we?” Crandall reached into the rear pocket of his polyester slacks and pulled out another piece of Juicy Fruit. He unwrapped it, slowly, reverently, as if it were a precious gift. Everyone in the room watched, except the fingerprint technician, who seemed only distracted by the unusual. Like that chuckle of Scythe’s. Hearing it again in my mind’s ear, I stopped my body in mid-shiver with a stomp of my foot. I was getting sick of this guy’s effect on me. He glanced at me and went back to reviewing his notebook. I couldn’t help noticing the cute cowlick where his wavy hairs met his neck. It was something he couldn’t see unless he held a second mirror behind his head, and he didn’t seem the type to do that. For some odd reason, his cowlick made him seem more vulnerable to me.
Good girl,
I thought, grasping at whatever worked to keep me ahead in the head game were were playing.

Scythe glanced up from his notes. I smiled like I had a secret. He half hitched his eyebrow. Oops. I shifted my gaze back to a safer subject, Crandall, who was winding up his gum ritual. He wadded up the silver foil, flipped it over his shoulder, and added the piece to the wad in his mouth. It made me wonder if it was a continuous piece of gum, set aside at night like a watch, only to be popped back into his mouth again in the morning.

I watched Scythe walk over to the desk table and use the butt end of his Bic to shift around the papers on the glass top.

“Know this stiff’s last name?”

Crandall’s insensitive question startled me out of falling deeper into some kind of hormone-induced trance.

“Yes,” I answered cautiously as I racked my brain for his surname.

“Yeah?” Crandall snorted. “Everybody but me and Jack here knows about this guy, but nobody knows his last name.”

“He liked to go only by his first name,” I responded distractedly.

“Like Madonna, that nutso?”

Cocking my head, I considered his comparison. I hadn’t thought of Ricardo as aping Madonna before, but you couldn’t look anywhere for a better miracle marketer, that was for sure. I nodded. “Yeah, like Madonna. Or Cher, I guess.”

He flapped his notebook within an inch of my nose. “Hey, don’t go knocking Cher. I like her.”

“Uh, okay.” I tried to imagine this gum-smacking, insensitive, foul-mouthed, paunchy, redneck tough guy as a Cher fan. Go figure.

“So, you gonna tell us his last name, or we gonna have to pull it out with tweezers?”

“Speaking of tweezers,” said another plainclothes cop who walked through the office door, opening and closing the tweezers in my direction like mini crocodile jaws. I didn’t want to think of what he was going to do with those.

“His name was Ricardo Montoya,” I blurted.

The tweezer cop joined Jackson Scythe at the desk, plucked up a few hairs, and put them into a plastic bag before walking out.

“Know anybody who had a beef with Ric?”
Smack. Smack.

“No.” I shook my head. “But I wasn’t as close to Ricardo as I once was. We were old friends, we ran into each other occasionally, by accident or when one of us wanted a favor…” Scythe appeared to be ignoring us, reading over the papers in front of him. But I knew he was listening closely. I could feel that intense focus. He thought he was tricky, but he couldn’t fool me.

“Favor? That wouldn’t be sexual favors, would it?” Crandall asked with a leer that compressed his face into layers of gray-brown fleshy folds.

Guess I didn’t remind him of his daughter anymore.

“No, it wouldn’t,” I snapped a little too vehemently. Scythe looked up, met my eyes neutrally, and looked back down.

“Why? Was Ricky here a
hoto?
” While looking askance at the body, Crandall emphasized the Tex-Mex word for
homosexual
in such a way that he thought was cool and I thought was ignorant.

“No,” I said too forcefully. “He was not. He had lots of…” What would be accurate while not too telling here? Sex? Girlfriends? Female bed partners? “Dates. With girls. I mean, women.”

“You one of those ‘dates’?” Crandall put in knowingly.

“No.” I kept to myself that it wasn’t for lack of trying on Ricardo’s part. I was getting smarter. Surely, the cops would’ve seen somewhere in my rebuff a motive for murder. I had enough trouble having apparently furnished the murder weapon.

“What’s this ‘old friend’ sh…uh…stuff, then? I mean, was he your old man’s bud or something?”

“Yes, perhaps Claude knew him,” Scythe offered from across the room. I wondered why the Claude farce seemed to bother him so much. His verbal shot flew on past Crandall, who wrinkled his forehead for a moment and decided figuring it out wasn’t worth the effort.

“I don’t have any old man,” I retorted, ignoring Scythe’s comment.

“So.” Crandall smirked. “You and Ricky here really weren’t old
friends,
then, were you?”

His point was slowly beginning to dawn on me, like the sun through a foggy day in Transylvania.

“Why? Do you think a woman can’t be friends with a man unless she knows him by association through a husband or she goes to bed with him?”

“Right.” Crandall double-smacked with pleasure at his universal wisdom.

“Then you’re an idiot.”

Jackson Scythe emitted a heavy sigh but didn’t look up. Somehow, I sensed the sigh was directed at me instead of Crandall.

Crandall couldn’t have been more surprised by my attack if I’d kicked him in the groin. He blinked and looked for an instant like he might cry. A teary redneck Cher fan. I was disgusted to find regret welling up in my throat. It derailed my feminist lecture. “Look,” I said to Crandall. “Ricardo gave me my first job out of high school, let me have flexible hours to finish college. Then he lent me seed money to get my salon business started, which I’ve since paid back, with interest that he didn’t ask for. He is—was—what I call a friend. I don’t give a damn what you call it.”

Crandall had recovered rather quickly and, ignoring my sentimentality, zeroed in. “Why the hell would he bankroll the competition?”

“You don’t understand.” I shook my head, then explained. “Ricardo didn’t have competition.”

“What d’ya mean? There’s a barbershop on every corner. A haircut’s a haircut.”

“That’s not true.” I glanced at Scythe, whose attention intensified a few degrees.

“Ay-yi.” Crandall dismissed me with one paddycake-shaped, hairy hand. “You’re just saying that because you’re a barber.”

“No, I’m saying it because I know the business, and I knew Ricardo. Our hair is very important to us. A study done by a Yale University professor not long ago backs that up—within the first three seconds of meeting someone, we develop a first impression entirely from that person’s hair.”

“Nuh-uh,” Crandall argued as he looked in the mirror at his own Marine-issue style—dishwater-brown hair clipper-cut on the sides with number ½ blade complete with flattop.

I continued, “That’s what the study said, and I believe it. Think of how differently you might approach a witness who has a bleached mohawk versus one who has a natural brunet bouffant. People will go through a lot to stick with a stylist. I know women who flew in from around the state just to get their hair done every six weeks at one of Ricardo’s salons. A lot of us have that kind of customer loyalty. But Ricardo went a step further. Going to Ricardo’s was more than a trip to the beauty salon; it was a social event, and ultimately a bragging right.”

That silenced the room for a moment. Then Crandall snapped a bubble in his mouth. His eyes were lit up like he’d hit the jackpot. I didn’t know I’d been
that
convincing. “So, sounds like you have plenty of reason to be jealous of him. Your beauty shop’s not doing as hot, huh?”

I fought the urge to give a lesson in the difference between jealousy and envy to this lughead who thought anybody with a pair of scissors could style hair. Instead, I answered the question. “My salon is doing just fine, thank you. I admired Ricardo’s business acumen, but I wasn’t envious of it.”

Scythe, who’d been following the conversation without comment, now asked, “What did Ricardo say to you over the phone?”

“It was jumbled and didn’t make much sense. His voice sounded weak, but I thought it was because…”

Scythe’s eyebrows rose, way too slowly to be considered appropriate. He knew it, too. “Because?” he finally prompted.

“Because I thought he was with a date.”

“You heard someone else’s voice?”

“No, I guess I just assumed it, from his reputation and the breathlessness of his tone.”

“You have an active imagination.”

If you only knew,
I thought. A light in his eyes sparked as if he did know.

“So, he never confirmed he’d seen anyone that night, not even the client he was expecting?”

“No, he said something about danger, about pudding, and about me taking care of what was his.”

“What did he mean about danger? Was he specific? Are you two into some dealings together?”

“I don’t know. No and no.”

Scythe stared at me a beat longer, then turned to Crandall.

“Make a note to check with the doc about pudding in the stomach contents.”

My eyes stole to the clock set in the center of Ricardo’s mirrored ceiling. It intrigued me; I’d never seen anything like it. Its foot-long gold chrome hand showed just five minutes shy of seven-thirty
a.m.

“Damn,” I muttered. “I have an appointment coming in, and no one’s there to open up until eight.”

Jackson gauged me with a look, then sent some telepathic message to Crandall, who gave his gum a break to grunt and shove his notebook in the outside pocket of his 1970s polyester navy-blue blazer, the elbows of which were polished to a tacky shine. I wasn’t sure whether his grunt was assent or indigestion.

“So, I can go?”

Crandall smacked and nodded. “Yeah. You know the drill.”

Drill? What drill? The only drill I knew about was the one in my dreams, and surely Crandall wasn’t referring to it. I stole a look at him and dismissed the thought. I tried to catch Scythe’s eye, but he was reading a piece of paper on the desk. I could feel him taking in our conversation on another level, as if he were storing it for future contemplation.

“No,” I admitted carefully. “What drill?”

“Don’t leave town. And don’t go trying to do a chemical peel on those fingerprints. We’re gonna require those at a near juncture in time. Unless you’ve done some business with us before. Then that won’t be necessary.”

My heart banged up against the bottom of my throat. I pivoted from the smirking Crandall to meet Jackson Scythe’s eyes. They’d warmed to a polar summer. Maybe I wasn’t in trouble after all. “We go through a process of elimination on fingerprints. Ricardo’s. Yours. Anyone else you can think of who might have touched the brush at your shop before Ricardo took it?”

I shook my head, feeling a little lightheaded with relief. Why had I been so tense? I didn’t have any reason to feel guilty. Guess I just didn’t trust the justice system to spare the innocent.

Scythe left the papers on the desk and walked up to me, pulling his wallet out of his back pocket. Lucky wallet. He extracted his business card and handed it to me without a word.

“Great, I’ll add this to my little black book,” I mumbled.

The icy-blues moved a few degrees closer to the equator. “You do that.”

“Now that all the pleasantries are over, hotshot, let’s get to work,” Crandall grumbled as he ambled over to the desk. He sucked in a bubble.

“Hey, get away from there, Crandall,” the fingerprint tech piped up in what sounded like an angry Chihuahua’s bark. “You’re spraying gum spit all over that desk. Steer clear until I’m done, or I’ll be using this brush on you.”

Everyone was making jokes about the brush—even me—and I suddenly felt the tears welling up in my eyes. Blinking them away quickly, I swallowed the lump rising in my throat. What a time to get emotional. Scythe would think it was a sudden onslaught of guilt.

“I’m real scared,” Crandall groused, but he did move away from the desk to study the phone in the righthand corner of the room. “Why’d he have so many phones? I hope to hell they all aren’t different lines, or we’ll be knee-deep in fu…uh…effing paperwork.”

I’d been watching Crandall hard, in order to get my grief under control, but I suddenly realized Jackson Scythe had been watching me. “Well?” he said.

What was he after? I looked down at my left hand, which I’d forgotten was holding the barf bag. I handed it, unused, back to him. It was the perfect way to lighten the moment. I forced a dazzling smile. “Thanks.”

“You keep it. Never know when it might come in handy.”

What did
that
mean? He still looked expectant, if a six-foot-three great stone face with dry-ice eyes can show such an emotion.

Though not usually patient, I found myself standing there, not moving a muscle, just to bug him.