Killer Hair (3 page)

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. . . .

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.