She stared at me and I stared at her and then Phil took off, laying a patch of rubber so thick it produced smoke.
For good reason, too. The woman had been dressed in Debbie’s clothes, right down to Debbie’s famous mink coat and right up to Debbie’s blond—and lethal—hair extensions.
Chapter Sixteen
I
t would have been pointless following Phil, who’d zoomed off like a bullet despite the thirty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. As a popular plumber, he could snake his way around town faster than a slimy ball of grease in kitchen pipes.
I pointed my own trusty Camaro in the direction of the South Side, home to the House of Beauty and the
News-Times,
figuring I’d stop at whichever one was higher priority. I was on autopilot trying to process what I’d witnessed. It had definitely been Phil. I knew that green Dodge Neon and the hula dancer on his dashboard.
But that woman dressed in Debbie’s clothes. Oh my God. It was just so . . . tasteless. And let’s not even start with what she was doing to Debbie’s grieving husband. That was taking consolation a bit too far, if you ask me.
Against my better judgment, the Camaro passed the
News-Times
. Already I was breaking the new rule Mr. Salvo had imposed to keep me from investigating stories that weren’t mine to investigate.
Rule #1 was that on days when I wasn’t scheduled to cover night meetings I was to report to the newsroom promptly at ten a.m. I was to punch out at six thirty with a half hour for lunch. If I needed to go out on assignment, I must file a slip with Veronica specifying where I’d gone, for what purpose, how I could be reached by telephone and when I’d return.
The clock turned ten as I pulled in front of the House of Beauty where an ominous CLOSED sign hung in the doorway, though I could see Sandy’s car in back. All the blinds were drawn. The heavy layers of plastic Christmas decorations fluttered in the breeze, forlorn and dirty. Even the ripped Santa Claus seemed to be in desperate need of a Prozac prescription. The yellow police tape draped across his pack didn’t help.
This might take hours, getting Sandy to open up. Sigh.
So much for Rule #1.
“Sandy! Open this door right now. It’s Bubbles and you know it.” I turned the cold handle.
“Bubbles?” Sandy was peeking out from her office door, which opens to the parking lot she shares with Uncle Manny. “Come in the side. I don’t want anyone to see me from the street.”
Oh, for heaven’s sake. I marched around and entered the side door to Sandy’s office and storeroom. The washer and dryer were churning. Sandy must have overdone it on the Clorox because it smelled like the Lehigh public pool during an E. coli scare. Complete with the haze from Sandy’s cigarettes.
She was chain-smoking. Sandy hadn’t done that in years.
She was a worn-out, haggard rag of a thing. Her hair was frizzy, out of its neat hair band, and she wasn’t in her polyester peach uniform or even the jeans she irons. (Irons! With a crease down the middle. Can you believe it?) What she was wearing was an old zip-up blue house-coat, the same kind her mother used to wear.
“Have you been drinking?” I asked, eyeing the overflowing ashtrays.
“Only coffee black.”
“That’s good. That’ll calm your nerves.”
“Hmph.” Sandy stubbed out another cigarette. Her fingertips were turning yellow. “Like I’ll ever sleep again. I killed a woman, Bubbles. I
murdered—”
I slapped my hand over her mouth. “Don’t you ever say that, Sandy. Don’t even think it.”
Sandy bit the palm of my hand.
“Ouch!” I waved it in the air, trying to cool the searing pain. Two neat rows of teeth marks, proof of Sandy’s obedience to twice-yearly dental visits, were embedded between my heart and life lines.
Sandy checked out my palm and shrugged. “Sorry. I can’t stop thinking about murder. Do you know that the police are over at my house right now, doing a search? Martin’s there with the lawyer we hired last night. The warrant says that the police have found undisclosed evidence linking me to”—she choked back tears—“to Debbie’s murder.”
This was stunning. So Mickey had been right. Burge was determined to bust one of us.
The idiot.
Sandy and Martin lived a quiet life above his bakery in a tidy apartment outfitted almost entirely by Sears. Sandy even had Sears shower curtains, a heavy set of green flowered fabric and liner that could double as hazmat protection. The curtain coordinated with the valance in her bathroom window, the green shag toilet-lid liners and rug, even the wallpaper which was done in a Colonial theme of little farmers sawing wood. Sandy was very big on the whole Colonial style. Though I’d never known ye olde Pennsylvania colonists to sport thick green shag toilet-top covers.
For fun, Sandy and Martin clogged. To them it was a hoot. Most of their friends were cloggers and they camped at clogging campsites, where there were nightly clogging contests.
When they weren’t stomping their feet hard enough to break the floorboards, their big treat was to hit the all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch (the one morning Martin didn’t have to work) at Kunkleman’s, where there was a “live jazz band,” i.e., an eighty-year-old guy on an electric piano playing the theme from
Sesame Street
. Then, stuffed and groggy from lack of oxygen, they toured the flea markets looking for more Colonial stuff to go with their Sears, before heading home for an afternoon nap on their matching Sears bedspread.
Is this the kind of woman who murders people? I mean, really, Burge. Get a clue.
“What kind of evidence?” I asked.
Sandy shook her head. Hair fell out onto her desk. “The police won’t say. Except that . . . they got a tip.”
“Another tip!”
“Another anonymous tip.”
That was some busy tipster. Boy, he really had a beef with Sandy.
Sandy reached for her pack of Virginia Slims, but I snatched them away. “Enough, Smokey. Besides, I just saw something that might raise your hopes.”
I got up and opened the fridge for a bottle of Diet A-Treat cola. Sandy was low on supplies. I flipped open the cap with my acrylic nail and took a swig. It was the first thing I’d consumed all day. Diet cola. Breakfast of champions.
“Prepare yourself.”
“Debbie’s back from the dead?” Sandy asked.
“Pretty freaking close,” I said.
Sandy dropped the unlit cigarette she’d been preparing to inhale. She picked it up and said, “Don’t fool with me, Bubbles.”
“I’m not fooling with you. At least, not on purpose.” I pushed her so she sat on the desk. “Two minutes ago, maybe five, I dunno, I was parked at the light at Broad and Elm, you know, right by Moravian Academy. It was the extended light, so I had time to kill. I looked over to the car next to me and, sure enough, Phil Shatsky.”
She shrugged. “So? He’s allowed to go out and about.”
“Yeah. Except he wasn’t going—he was
getting
. The woman sitting next to him had her face in his lap, and when she lifted it, I swear to God”—I crossed myself to show that, indeed, this was a formal swear to God—“she was dressed head to toe in Debbie’s clothes, including the hair extensions. And she was . . . you know.”
Sandy said, “No. I don’t know.”
I mimed a few motions.
Sandy’s eyes popped out. “She was pulling a Sweeney?”
“A Full Sweeney. You can take it to the bank.”
“You’re joking.”
“She might have been trying to unstick his fly with her teeth, but I don’t think so.”
Sandy slid off the desk, gaping. “Did Phil see you see him?”
“Uh, yeah. And he flipped out big-time. Took off before the light changed. Could have killed a whole handful of preppies the way he barreled through that red light.”
Sandy ran her fingers through her hair so it stood straight on end. “What does this mean?”
“I don’t know. I’m even more confused because Phil came over to my house last night playing the grief-stricken husband. Sobbing like a baby who’d lost his balloon. The only way he found to calm down was to organize my spice rack.”
“That’s nice,” Sandy said, “though kind of strange.”
“It was helpful. That spice rack was in disarray. When was the last time I used cumin or coriander?”
Sandy rolled her hands. “Let’s get back on track, Bubbles. Then what happened after he got rid of your cumin and coriander?”
“He made a pass at me in front of a curtainless window.”
“Get out!” Sandy was so riveted she still hadn’t lit that cigarette.
“I kid you not. All the housewives who’d brought him casseroles were standing outside, including Detective Burge’s wife. I bet she’s the reason your house is getting searched as we speak.”
“Wow.” Sandy played with the zipper at the top of her ugly blue robe, going over the details in her mind. “Ginger. Ginger Burge. I used to do her hair before her husband got promoted. Now she goes to Jeffrey Andre.”
Yes,
I thought,
won’t they all
.
The phone rang. Sandy ignored it. Instead, she got up, unloaded the dryer and began folding towels.
“Aren’t you going to get it?”
She shook out a washcloth. “Nope. Why bother? I’ll just get harassed. People have been calling me all night and all morning telling me that if I had any decency I’d come clean and issue a public apology and surrender my license.”
I remembered the expired license on the wall. It must have been eating at her something awful, all this controversy. The House of Beauty was everything to Sandy. Well, next to Martin and her clogs.
The phone stopped ringing and Sandy asked casually, “Is that guy across the street still there?”
I felt a dull thud somewhere deep inside me. “There’s a guy across the street?”
“He was there last night when I closed up and I just noticed him again when I went to get more Tide. Figured he’s an undercover reporter or a cop. Though I didn’t figure undercover reporters or cops drive Mercedes.”
Holy crap!
I tiptoed to the door that opened from Sandy’s office to the salon. It was disturbing to see the House of Beauty so quiet and dark on what should have been a bustling December morning. The red light on Sandy’s answering machine blinked madly. The fish in the fishbowl swam. Other than that, there was no movement. Even the Christmas trees had been turned off.
Kneeling on the wicker couch by the plate-glass window, I pried open the venetian blinds with two fingers. Sure enough, there he was. The Mercedes Santa at the wheel.
He saw me.
I hit the floor on instinct, before the glass shattered and the discharge of the shotgun rocked through every fiber of my being. I don’t know if I saw the barrel or if I was spooked by his movements. All I remember is being eye to eye with the dust bunnies under Sandy’s couch as the glass rained over me and asking myself what the heck I’d done to deserve this kind of shoddy treatment.
“Bubbles!”
“Drop!” I yelled to Sandy, who was standing in her office doorway like a deer on I-80. “Get down!”
Sandy didn’t have to be asked twice. She fell to the floor dutifully and covered her head as I was doing, though I didn’t realize it.
We held our breath and waited. A second later, maybe less, the Mercedes peeled away with a screech. I needed that guy’s license-plate number. Another opportunity missed.
Sandy and I didn’t dare move.
“I could have told you this would happen,” I said. “He pointed a gun at me yesterday, though I didn’t see it. Shot the top off a Christmas tree down at the lot on Broad and Union. There were rumors afoot that he was a member of the violent wing of the anti-Christmas lobby, but I had my doubts.”
“See, that’s the kind of secret friends shouldn’t keep from each other.” She got up on one elbow. “You think the coast is clear?”
“I’m not sure the coast will ever be clear.”
The phone rang. Sandy lay there, propped up on her elbow.
“Are you going to get that?” I asked.
“I’m never going to answer another phone again.”
“I can’t stand it,” I said, counting the rings. We were up to nine.
“The answering machine should be picking up.”
“The answering machine is full.” Stiffly I hunched up, glass tinkling around me as I gently wiped off my hands and inched over to the phone.
“Bubbles, don’t.”
“I have to.” I reached up and knocked the phone off the counter. Sandy flinched when it hit the floor. We were both a bit shell-shocked, I suppose. Jumpy.
I was surprised to hear a woman’s voice.
“I’m looking for a Bubbles Yablonsky.” She sounded like any number of my regular clients.
“This is she. But I’m sorry. The House of Beauty isn’t taking appointments. We’re closed until next year.” I watched as Sandy crawled to her office.
“I’m not interested in making an appointment. I’m calling about Debbie Shatsky.”
I didn’t say anything. Perhaps this was the infamous tipster who’d been calling in tips all over town.
“You are a reporter, too, right?” she asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, you might be interested to learn that Debbie was in real hot water at the travel agency where she worked. Something to do with fraudulent credit card transactions. She was about to get fired and worse.”
“How worse?”
“Criminal charges. Talk to Ken.” A phone rang in the background. “I gotta go. Just thought you’d wanna know.” And she hung up.
I pressed *69. The recording informed me that the number was private and could not be traced.
Sandy came back clutching her cell. She flicked on the light. “The cops are on their way. Who was that?”
“A woman with a tip that Debbie was in hot water at work.”
“Oh.” Sandy glanced at the plate-glass window. The blast had brought down the blinds and there was a large star-shaped hole in the middle. “Now what?”