KillerHair
Chapter 2
There’s an old newspaper saying: If you’re blind, they’ll make you the art critic. If you’re deaf, they’ll make you the music critic. But if you’re blind and deaf, they’ll make you the drama critic.
By this logic, the fashion critic should be blind, deaf, and dressed in a burlap bag. Lacey didn’t know what she had done to deserve being the fashion reporter—or antifashion reporter. She didn’t dress badly. She knew a gore from a tuck and a ruffle from a pleat; she could use “ruching” in a sentence. Frankly, she loved good clothing. However, she didn’t want to write about it. You didn’t see Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday shuffled off to the fashion beat, even though she was dressed like a million bucks. Rosalind Russell went right out in her best suit and found the killer. Ooh, bad example.
Lacey had never asked for the fashion beat. But then, life had never gone smoothly for her. She saw her friends climb the ladder of success and roar into high positions with acclaim and money. Meanwhile, her so-called career path was littered with potholes and detours.
She had finally made it back to D.C. after working for years on some of the worst small newspapers in Colorado. She had spent her college summers in D.C. with her favorite aunt, now deceased, Great-aunt Mimi. Those summers gave her the first full taste of freedom she had ever had. She had wound up in small Western towns, but always with her heart set on the East.
Now she was thirty-three years old and still trying to land a decent job at a decent paper. Instead, she was slinging words at The Eye Street Observer like a waitress slinging hash at a roadside diner. She had been there three years.
The Eye, as employees and other media types tended to call it, was a feisty wannabe news sheet in the Nation’s Capital. It was located on Eye Street between Sixteenth and Seventeenth streets in a granite and glass building facing Farragut Square, under the watchful eye of Admiral David “Damn the Torpedoes” Farragut in all his bronze glory. The Observer, as everyone else called it, was a daily broadsheet rag with a tabloid heart, the mutant offspring of a weekly alternative paper and a local dot-com millionaire with a Citizen Kane obsession, since departed.
It would never be top dog. Washingtonians clung to the established Washington Post with dismaying faithfulness. The Washington Times soldiered on to the right, spending bottomless Moonie money as if it were newsprint. The Eye, with no political bent except “throw the rascals out,” got by on sheer nerve.
The paper’s most popular feature was “The Daily Jam,” a sarcastic and brutally accurate District traffic forecast that ran on the front page, below the fold. The new publisher was convinced that the single most important daily news story in Washington was the specific pothole, parade, detour, or demonstration that would make today’s morning or evening commute a living hell. Features like “The Daily Jam” and “Crimes of Fashion” were winning The Eye an oddball niche in a tough media market, much to Lacey’s chagrin.
But in a town glutted with journalists fighting for jobs, Lacey at least had a job on a real newspaper and was not stuck in one of the hundreds of trade associations, slapping together an in-house newsletter on the rubber industry or paper clip regulations.
On the other hand, she had to write about fashion, or what passed for it in the District of Columbia. The only upside was that other people thought it sounded glamorous. And Stella thinks I’m the Sherlock Holmes of Style. The Philip Marlowe of Fashion. In the least fashionable city in America: The City That Fashion Forgot.
Back at the overstuffed cubicle she called her office, Lacey couldn’t get the images from the mortuary out of her mind. Angie with blond Guinevere tendrils in the photo. Angie almost bald in her polished coffin. Stella with her insane idea. A ghoulish rhyme thumped in Lacey’s head. A tisket, a tasket, a dead girl in a basket.
Lacey was grateful that the evil food editor, Felicity Pickles, wasn’t around. Instead, Felicity had left a dangerous batch of brownies at her desk, which was just across the aisle from Lacey’s. The food editor was forever dieting and brought something fattening to the office every day. Today, the chocolate-iced fat bombs bore an elaborate handwritten note inviting everyone to Eat Me.
She has a gingerbread house in the forest somewhere. But she can’t make me take one.
Lacey rubbed her temples and opened her eyes to see Tony Trujillo approaching. He grabbed a couple of brownies from Felicity’s desk.
“Careful, they’re poison,” Lacey said.
“Don’t I know it.” He made a glutton of himself. She was, at that moment, in no mood for Tony, the police reporter extraordinaire. Tony’s thick black hair, his smooth olive skin, his self-professed writing prowess, and his status as the cops writer, which entitled him to abuse the language in new and colorful ways, attracted women in droves.
Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, his Western nonchalance was a welcome change from uptight East Coast boys. He also appeared to like women, whereas most D.C. men seemed too busy, or too terrified. He wore his blue jeans and tight T-shirts so well that coming or going, Lacey had to admit, he was a feast for the eye.
Women on the staff who didn’t know him called him “Tony Terrific.” Although he had gone through a number of them, who later referred to him as “Terrible Tony,” he was hard to dislike. He and Lacey started at the paper the same week. It galled her that his star rose, while she had been shanghaied to LifeStyle.
“Hey, Smithsonian. I hear blue is the new black. Or is beige the new white, green the new blue, purple the new brown?” He shoved some papers out of the way and perched on the end of her desk, licking brownie crumbs off his fingers. She looked up briefly.
“What’s on your mind, Tony? New boots?”
Tony smiled, the corners of his cocoa-brown almond eyes crinkling. He propped one boot on her desk to show it off. He was the Imelda Marcos of the police beat.
“Pretty slick, huh, Lacey? Armadillo by Tony Lama. What do you think?”
“I suppose you think I’m jealous that your wardrobe is bigger than mine.” Her eyes wandered up his leg.
“Just feel that leather. Smooth, huh? Last boots I bought, you said looked like roadkill.”
“Ah. So these died of natural causes?”
Tony grinned. There was something about him. Something besides his smooth pecs. And his armadillo boots. Time to change the subject, Lacey.
The only subject that came to mind was a dead girl in a basket. Lacey figured that asking a few hypothetical questions of the police reporter wouldn’t hurt. She didn’t have to mention Angie specifically.
“Tony, if someone commits suicide in the District, who makes the official determination?”
He moved his boot off her copy. “Medical examiner. Why? Had a bad week?”
“Not as bad as those armadillos. So, if someone is ruled a suicide, how long do the cops investigate?”
“Not long. Suicide means case closed, move along to something else. And there’s always something else here.”
“Even if friends and family swear the victim was killed?”
“Police don’t overrule the medical examiner.”
“What if someone finds new evidence?”
“Better be good or the cops wouldn’t care. What kind of evidence? You working on something I should know about?”
“Lower your radar, Boot Boy. Just a question.”
“Interesting question, Smithsonian.” Tony winked and strutted his armadillos toward the coffee machine.
As she watched him go, Lacey briefly wondered if the right guy would ever materialize or if she’d left her last best hope in the dead-end town of Sagebrush, Colorado. There’d been a man there once who’d looked even hotter in a pair of boots and jeans. . . . But she didn’t have time to think about him.
Away from Stella, Lacey hoped she could reflect on Angie Woods’ death more logically. But the waxy face of the young woman and the chilling silence of the mortuary were the only images she could fix on.
Unfortunately, “Crimes of Fashion” wouldn’t wait. She had been toying with an idea not yet fully formed, after a D.C. city councilman introduced a new antiprostitution measure that would allow the police to arrest women for merely dressing provocatively, on the theory that “If you look like a hooker and quack like a hooker, you are a hooker.” She had a couple of possible headlines: “This Look Is So Hot, It Got Me Arrested” or “Wear a Wonderbra, Go to Jail.” But after that she was stuck.
Lacey wasn’t in the mood to sit and stare out the window until the column fell into place. She grabbed her purse for a quick getaway. Luckily, the fashion beat and her process of generating ideas were a complete mystery to her editor, Mac. He didn’t care as long as copy magically appeared at the appointed time and place. Out of the corner of her eye Lacey saw him sidling up to her desk. He glowered like a black G. Gordon Liddy.
From the moment he met her, Douglas MacArthur “Mac” Jones thought her name was hilarious.
“Smithsonian? That’s not a name. That’s a museum.”
Lacey once made the mistake of telling Mac the family legend of how her great-grandfather, who emigrated from England, saw the Smithsonian Institution mentioned in a magazine and figured that if it was good enough for the Nation’s Capital, it was good enough for him. “Smithsonian” would be much tonier than the original family name of “Smith,” which was far too common for a Cockney shop-keeper. His Irish Catholic wife, Maura Kathleen O’Brian Smithsonian, laughed about it till the day he died.
“Just lucky you weren’t named Lacey Airandspacemuseum,” Mac had said.
Mac was now descending on her desk. She waited for the usual pleasantries. “Nice of you to grace us with your presence, Smithsonian.”
Lacey decided not to tell him she’d been out viewing a corpse. He’d just assume there was some style angle. And he’d say, as he often did when she suggested something new, “Well, you’ve offended everyone else, why not?”
Mac flourished a wad of letters. “Six for, eight against, and we got a call from the former First Lady’s press secretary. Wants to know what your problem is. I bet you haven’t even checked your e-mail yet.”
“I haven’t even peeked. So is this about the ‘Never Wear Pink to Testify’ column?” she asked. She tried to remember what she wrote. . . .
. . . When accused of high crimes, Crimes of Fashion suggests you dress in high style. Meet your interrogator looking like a woman of substance, not an escapee from Mother Goose. When you’re matching wits with the special prosecutor, we suggest that you dress with serious intent.
Nevertheless, the former First Lady chose to make her appearance before the grand jury in a sweet little pink suit dress with baby-blue trim. She looked like Bo Peep had lost not only her sheep, but her mind as well. We hear she left the sunbonnet and lollipop in the limo at the last minute.
Contrary to popular opinion, spun-sugar pastels do not signal a woman’s innocence—merely a clumsy and obvious attempt to appear guileless. It screams manipulation and not sophistication. Get a new consultant. Get a clue. And plead guilty to a “Crime of Fashion.”
With so many high-level officials called to testify in the Washington scandal of the week, “Never Wear Pink” was the kind of column that received a higher-than-average readership.
“My problem is that the former First Lady wears pastels every time she gets into trouble,” Lacey said.
Mac wore the editorial I-don’t-get-it look.
“She’s trying to disarm people by—very obviously, I might add—looking like Little Miss Muffet. You copyedited it, Mac. Remember?”
“Sure, but I didn’t exactly read it. It’s like it’s in a foreign language.”
“Like sports?” she asked. He looked blank. “Tell her press secretary that if the FFL must take her inspiration from fairy tales, she should dress like the evil queen in Snow White. Blood reds, passionate purple, poison-apple green. Now, that was a dame with style.”
Mac groaned. He had a soft spot for the FFL, the Dragon Lady, but Lacey couldn’t care less. Left, right, or center, a Crime of Fashion was a crime against the senses. While Mac yammered on, Lacey cleared her desk, switched off the desk lamp, turned off the computer, and packed her buff-colored leather tote bag. She freshened her lipstick and switched into comfortable, yet still attractive, low-heeled shoes. So many women still clung to the worn-out cliché of suits and clunky athletic shoes, even though there were other choices. A definite Washington look, Lacey thought. Maybe a column for next week.
“Hey, where are you going?”
“I need inspiration, Mac. This beat is deadly.”
“Murder? Wait a minute. Your hairstylist wants you to investigate a murder? I thought she wanted to give you highlights.” Brooke Barton, a thin, blond, K Street lawyer driven by dreams of conspiracies, nursed a gin and tonic on Lacey’s balcony, one of Lacey’s favorite sources of inspiration.
“I already got the killer highlights. This is murder.” Lacey sipped her own drink and felt the day finally slip away. After she escaped from the office, she fought her way through the cherry-blossom-crazed tourists and made it back to her apartment just in time to buzz in her best friend.
“Right.” Brooke squinted at Lacey. “They look very nice. The highlights, I mean. My contacts are fuzzy. Or maybe it’s the gin.”
“She wants me to play detective. Follow the fashion clues to the killer.” Lacey sighed and admired the view. A slight breeze rippled the air. It was understood that on lovely spring evenings Brooke was always invited. Lacey supplied the gin and the seventh-floor balcony overlooking the Potomac River in Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia. Brooke brought the tonic and limes. It was pleasant on the balcony, even though Lacey hadn’t planted her petunias yet, the only flowers that would grow for her. She and Brooke had nursed more than a few drinks—and broken hearts—right here.
“So who’s dead?” Brooke grabbed a handful of microwave popcorn.
Lacey’s kitchen was always well stocked with liquid refreshment and popcorn. The vintage fridge contained two bottles of champagne, a few eggs, muffins, a variety of expensive cheeses, exotic olives, and open boxes of crackers. Low on balanced nutrition but high on instant gratification.
“Her name was Angela Woods. Another Stylettos stylist. She was a sweet kid. Blonde. I used to see her at the salon.”
“One bad haircut too many, no doubt.”
“Maybe. Who knows.”
“I’m actually surprised that it doesn’t happen more often.” Brooke stopped, the popcorn halfway to her mouth. “Wait a minute. My God, not that stylist you wrote about, Marcia Robinson’s stylist?” Her antennae were quivering. “Wow, that Robinson bimbo is really bad luck, isn’t she?”
“Slow down, Brooke, I know what you’re thinking, but there is no connection.”
Although she could pass for the ultimate conservative poster model, nothing Brooke wore betrayed her love for clandestine political plotting, her belief that evildoers were around every corner, or her sheer delight in the drama of it all. Brooke embraced conspiracy theories like some women did their Jimmy Choo shoes.
“Six Hill staffers lost their jobs so far. More to come. Porno Web sites. Now this. Coincidence? Ha. And you’re going to investigate? I love it.”
“No, wait. I’m not. I’m just telling you about it.”
“Great. So what did the stylist know and when did she know it?”
“Would you like to hear about it before you solve it?”
“Of course I would. The stylist obviously knew too much. Now she’s dead. No connection? Bull. In this town everything is connected.”
“The cops say it’s suicide. Stella says no way.” Lacey recapped the theory that someone else cut off Angie’s hair, sliced her wrists, and made it look like a suicide, on Stella’s unassailable logic that a stylist wouldn’t be caught dead with that haircut. “Obviously I can’t encourage her. I don’t know anything about murder.”
“No, but you know about killer style.”
The hair rose on the back of Lacey’s neck. “Not you too.”
“It’s because of your column. All that chat about fashion clues and deadly styles and you are what you wear. I see Stella’s logic.”
“So it’s my column’s fault that I’m suddenly a sleuth?” Lacey was appalled.
“It’s entertaining,” Brooke admitted. “And it tells the truth. So rare in journalism today.”
“Gosh, Brooke, don’t be so nice.”
“I’m never nice. Your column is a great guilty pleasure. Hence, its popularity.”
“I can’t believe you actually read my column.”
“You write it for real women. I’m a real woman.”
“Yeah, but you don’t need my help.”
Brooke had flair that Lacey admired. Far from the stereo-typical dumpy D.C. attorney, Ms. Barton, Esquire, knew how to wear a suit and still look feminine, adding touches like antique lace handkerchiefs and lace blouses that on another woman would look silly. Tonight she was wearing a cherry red sweater with jeans and pearls. All blondes think they look good in red, but Brooke really did. It made her eyes look more blue. More innocent. Looks can be deceiving.
In contrast, Lacey looked far from innocent. Her delicately arched brows gave her a knowing look she didn’t feel. Tonight she wore comfortable old blue jeans, two or three washings away from ripping through, and a black V-neck sweater. You can never have too many black sweaters, according to Lacey. One of her rules for life, along with: Never let anyone take pictures of you naked. Never keep a diary you would not want published in a family newspaper. And never secretly tape-record your conversations, even in Virginia, where it is legal.
“I’ll tell you one thing.” Brooke broke into her thoughts. “It’s just as well you don’t get involved. You don’t want to wind up dead, do you?”
“No one involved with Marcia Robinson has died.”
“Until now.”
“And that may have nothing to do with Marcia.”
“That we know of.”
“You have to keep in mind there could be jealous stylists, unhappy clients, psycho boyfriends. And maybe it was suicide, after all.”
“Point taken. Of course if you do look into it . . .”
“If I do?”
“Be interesting to see if Marcia has serious hair issues,” Brooke suggested. “I wonder what she told her stylist. You know, ‘Only her hairstylist knows for sure.’ ”
“Who knows? It’s way too easy to blab away while someone is massaging your head,” Lacey said. “Remind me to gag myself the next time I get my hair cut. You don’t really think it’s dangerous, do you?”
“Not really. But I’d like to think so.”
“So tell me, Brooke, about that Marcia Robinson mess. Tell me why, instead of actually trying to talk to a real woman, men will spend hours on the Internet surfing Web sites where virtual women take off their clothes?”
“Pheromone jammers.” It was Brooke’s current favorite theory of why men and women in Washington, D.C., could not connect with each other. Obviously the Pentagon had installed pheromone jammers on its roof, beaming relationship-killing Romance Death Rays at every man within the Beltway. “It does something to their testosterone. Something weird. Turns it into decaf.”
“Makes perfect sense to me,” Lacey said. “My signals have been jammed for years.”
“Romance Death Rays. We’ve been irradiated. You have to admit, it’s pretty crazy purveying naughty photos of the Small Business Committee staff on the Internet. Good Lord! More of a horror show than erotica. Here in the Capital City of dweebs, geeks, and nerds.”
“No one actually believed that was the attorney general wrestling nude with an alligator on Marcia’s Web site,” Lacey said. “Did they?”
“You had to buy the video for a better look. That was just a teaser. I was pulling for the alligator.”
“Washington, D.C., the only place on earth where Henry Kissinger could be considered a sex symbol.”
“There’s a woman in my office who has a crush on James Carville,” Brooke said, passing the popcorn.
“Oh please, the Human Snake Head? You just killed my appetite.” Lacey swallowed her last handful and wiped off her hands.
“People think D.C. is full of sex scandals. The real scandal is that’s all the sex there is,” Brooke said. “I haven’t had a date in two months. How’s that cute cops reporter of yours?”
“Trujillo? Stomping on women’s hearts with his new armadillo boots.”
“Too bad.” Brooke had only met Trujillo once, but the memory lingered. “So what about you, Lace? Any prospects?”
“Sorry. Long dry spell. No rain in sight.”
“What about the one who got away?”
“He got away.”
“I hate when that happens. At any rate, I think it’s time for a new salon, Lacey. Crazy hairstylists. Crazy hair killers. You don’t need the aggravation. And that Stella’s a little strange.”
“Yeah, but it’s hard to get rid of your hairstylist. Especially when she knows where to find you.”
Brooke fingered her own blond locks. She treasured her hair, which she wore in a long French braid when she went to court. “You know, if a crazy haircutting killer were out there, not only would you be dead—you’d be bald too!”
After Brooke left, Lacey lingered outside to admire the view. Gazing south down the Potomac, it was easy to forget the city and the noise. Spring was stealing over the landscape, creating a hush of green along the riverbanks. In just a week or two, the trees would be full and bushy, but she loved warm days like this when the first sign of green signaled that the long, dull winter was conquered at last.
Ah, spring in Washington—and pheromone jammers. It’s such a good explanation, it should be true. Lacey wondered if she could still attract a man. Maybe if I lived somewhere else.
Lacey had a face that a man had once told her belonged on the cover of a pulp-fiction magazine. Pretty, but a little exaggerated, a little extreme for comfort. There were even men who had called her beautiful.
She didn’t kid herself about her looks. She knew she was attractive, but she’d never be the most beautiful, the thinnest, or the most sought-after woman. She was five-foot-five with a curvy build that she fought to keep on the slim side. Her hair was good: thick, manageable, and slightly wavy. She wore it a couple of inches below the shoulder, long enough to wind into a French knot on bad-hair days. As a package deal, she figured she was pretty good. But the package was still on the shelf.
Her thoughts paused on one man from her past, but she told herself to forget him. After all, he was merely a footnote in her romantic history, a footnote that would take volumes to explain, even to Brooke. The last she heard, he had left Sagebrush, Colorado, but that’s where the trail ended. Just another tumbleweed tumbling through. Like her.
Before she moved to Washington, Lacey was used to feeling strange, an outsider, an observer. When she was little, she had always considered herself a swan, and her family of ducks never knew what to make of her. Her mother often said she had no idea where Lacey came from, and she apparently was not implicating the mailman. Rose Smithsonian suggested that it was likely a caravan of gypsies had dropped in one night, stolen the real baby Smithsonian, and left Lacey as a little joke. The real baby Smithsonian would be perky and have cheerleading genes and wear what Mother wanted.
The real baby Smithsonian would have grown up and found a man by now. She’d be tied down to a house, kids, and meatloaf once a week.
Lacey let her eyes sail down the verdant Potomac. My pheromones may be jammed, she thought, but at least I’m a swan on my own river.
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