“Hop in, Lacey!” They tore off at top speed. “One great thing about this car is that cops don’t actually believe it can go fast. It’s not even on their radar screen.” Stella floored it and made it to the funeral home in twenty-five minutes. “What did I tell you? We’re invisible!”
“In a red-and-white Mini with a flag on the roof? I don’t think so.”
Angela Woods’ memorial service was the featured ten o’clock attraction at Evergreens, so named for the impressive trees surrounding the building in its Northwest Washington neighborhood. The casket had been moved and was now centrally located in the main chapel, accented by pastel flower arrangements.
Angie appeared serene after Stella’s ministrations. The blond wig resembled her original hair, although it was considerably shorter. Angie’s mother and two younger sisters were in the front row, dabbing at their red eyes and sniffling. Theirs was a family of women. The missing father occupied a spot in the family plot in Atlanta that Angie would soon join.
The bewildered Woods family was from the Deep South and apparently did not consider black a staple of their sunny wardrobes. They wore shades of blue, which were as somber as they could summon from their optimistic closets. Neither sister was as pretty as Angie, but the glorious hair was a family trademark, though not quite as glorious as Angie’s. The sisters wore theirs pulled into long tails cascading down their backs, caught at the nape with blue velvet ribbons. Angie’s mother wore a navy blue suit with pearls and a broad-brimmed navy hat that shadowed her light blond waves. The suit was summer and the hat was winter, but no one cared.
The stylists from the Dupont Circle salon were scrubbed clean in deference to Angie’s family.
How sweet. They’ve left their usual pledge-night-at-the-coven look at home.
Lacey noticed several black cocktail dresses in attendance, looking a little too festive for the occasion and a little too bare for the weather.
Lacey and Stella were seated in the third row of the chapel, which accommodated about two hundred people and was nearly full. The entire Stylettos empire seemed to be present, all twenty-five salons. Lacey recognized a few other customers from the Dupont Circle salon, no doubt some of Angie’s regulars. She scanned the room for the notorious Marcia Robinson, but the sullied congressional staffer failed to present her new glossy chestnut hairdo. Lacey realized that was a long shot. Marcia was being dogged by the media until she made her appearance before the special prosecutor to testify, presumably not in pink. Her attorney was keeping her under wraps. And so far, the mainstream press had not made the connection between the dead stylist and Ms. Robinson. If they had, it apparently didn’t carry a large enough news hook.
Lacey leaned in to Stella and asked, “When was Marcia Robinson’s last appointment with Angie?”
“A couple weeks ago. Marcia needed a blow-dry for some court appearance. Then she was supposed to see Angie last week, but she canceled.”
“What day was that?”
“Saturday, I think.”
“The day Angie died?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Why did she cancel?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t take the call. Is it important?” With the thought that it might be, Stella was now on full quivering alert.
An obviously distressed woman walked by. Stella made a face. “That’s Sherri Gold,” she whispered. “She was Angie’s last client, Saturday night. She’s a trip.”
“You mean, right before . . . ?”
“She’s a total psycho. Wanna meet her?” She waved Sherri over. “Sherri, I want you to meet Lacey Smithsonian from
The Observer
.”
“
The Eye Street Observer
? I never read it,” Ms. Gold lied. The woman’s lips curled with disdain. “I read
The Post
.”
“Nice outfit.”
“It’s designer.”
An inmate in a nineteenth-century women’s prison would be dressed more attractively.
Of course Lacey wasn’t really sure what nineteenth-century prison garb looked like, but the woman’s dirty gray outfit was punitive enough. The long, wrinkled skirt was gathered at the waist and would flatter no one. With it, the woman wore a matching oversized shapeless gray top, probably costing hundreds of dollars. Lacey hated gray. It was personal.
Sherri Gold was angular and muscular in an aggressively overtrained way that looked obsessive. She had medium brown hair and a bony face that some might call striking, even scary runway-model beautiful, but to Lacey the flaring nostrils and oversized mouth resembled a gargoyle. Sherri opened that mouth and wailed. “What am I going to do? No one can cut my hair like Angie.” She pushed her hair away from her face with both hands. “It’s so curly. Angie was the one who taught me how to blow-dry it straight.”
So you, too, can achieve the Washington Helmet Head.
Lacey shook herself. “It’s tragic about Angie, don’t you think?” Lacey glanced toward the coffin.
“My God, yes! Now I’ll have to go to New York just to get my hair cut. And it costs a fortune in New York. You have no idea.”
“Yeah, first you gotta take the Metroliner,” Stella said.
“Did Angie seem depressed when you saw her last?” Lacey asked Sherri. “Suicidal?”
Sherri looked puzzled. Thinking about someone else apparently was a challenge. “I don’t know. We talked about conditioners.”
“Did she seem unhappy, or upset about anything?”
“Yes. She thought my ends were too dry. But she didn’t have what I needed. Why?”
“Because she died that night,” Lacey said.
“I know. Isn’t it awful? What am I going to do?” Sherri wailed and stalked off, leaving Stella doing a slow burn.
“New York can have her.”
“I’m with you, Stel,” Michelle Wilson, Stella’s assistant manager, said as she slipped in to sit on the other side of Stella. Michelle was a pretty black woman with skin the color of warm honey and striking amber eyes. Dark locks were coiled elaborately on her head. “Sherri’s one of those clients who just wants a celebrity stylist. She switched to Angie as soon as Marcia’s makeover was in the paper. With any luck she’s out of our hair now.”
“What does she do?” Lacey asked.
“I don’t know. Something on the Hill.”
“Like Marcia?”
“I guess.”
“Did they know each other?”
“I don’t know. But maybe, because Sherri was able to get Marcia’s slot after she canceled. Maybe Marcia told her the time was open.” Michelle picked up a memorial card and studied it.
“There’s Ratboy.” Stella nudged Lacey and indicated a man of about fifty seated two rows behind them and to the right. He caught Lacey’s eye and winked. She turned back to Stella.
“Ratboy? Your boss?”
“Boyd Radford. The one and only.”
Lacey turned back again and stared. From certain angles, the man did resemble a sleek, prosperous rodent. Radford must have been better looking when he was younger, she thought, but time was bringing out the rat in his DNA. Full-face he was almost handsome, in a high-school-jock-gone-to-seed way. But in profile, he had an elongated snout, a weak chin, mean little black bullet eyes, and slightly protruding teeth. His dark, slicked-back hair revealed a bald spot. The Rogaine wasn’t working, Stella reported; he was considering plugs. Apparently every stylist he employed called him “Ratboy” behind his back. Nevertheless, in the tradition of rich creeps everywhere and despite all evidence to the contrary, he believed he was a babe magnet.
Boyd Radford was the owner of Stylettos, a growing chain of salons throughout Washington, Maryland, and Virginia. He was mean and feral, but he had managed to lock on to success in spite of himself. Boyd had inherited the salons from his uncle Maximilian, and with the genius of Boyd’s former wife, Josephine Radford, had seen them grow from a chain of cheap chop shops to a reasonably well-respected group of salons with a sprinkling of star stylists.
It was Josephine who also changed the name from Chez Max to Stylettos, designed the Stylettos smocks, got rid of substandard stylists, and created training programs. Radford raised the prices, taking them out of the bottom of the shampoo bowl.
Like his uncle Max, Radford started out as a stylist. And although he hired many gay hairstylists, he was one of the straight men who become stylists because that was where the women were. He liked to have them at his mercy with dripping wet hair.
Ratboy’s hobby was sleeping with the female stylists, and sometimes the customers too, according to Stella, whose number-one hobby was talking. Sexual harassment was not a well-understood concept at Stylettos, and the stylists were not on the cutting edge of political awareness. Some may have realized they could sue his pants off, but unemployed hairstylists can’t afford legal counsel. And many found that sleeping with Ratboy enhanced their careers, if not their self-esteem. Most of his conquests wound up hating him, but oddly, Boyd was sentimental. He liked to keep them around. That’s how Stella herself had become manager at the Dupont Circle salon.
“I can’t believe you slept with him,” Lacey whispered. She knew far too much about Stella from their salon chair sessions, and she suspected Stella knew too much about her as well. In self-defense, they had forged a friendship.
“It was five years ago,” Stella whispered back.
“He’s repulsive.”
“I closed my eyes.”
“It gives me hives just to look at him.”
“You! He gave me a rash.”
“Stella, please!”
“Nothing serious. I was younger. You know, lately the worm was trying to get into Angie’s drawers.”
“But he’s way too old for her.”
“Tell him that. He liked it that she was getting so hot in the newspapers. She wouldn’t do it with him, though. Said he made her skin crawl.”
Stella looked back at Ratboy and gave him the evil eye. He looked away.
A well-preserved woman on Ratboy’s right side smacked his arm and glared first at Boyd and then at Lacey and at Stella, who smiled and waved in response.
“The bitch is Ratboy’s ex-wife, Josephine,” Stella whispered. “Mean as a snake and twice as deadly. Makes his life miserable. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”
“I thought you said they were divorced,” Lacey said.
“A couple of years ago. She got half the business, but it’s still not all settled. She likes to keep an eye on him. Partners till death do they part.”
Lacey fished out a mirrored compact from her purse, opened it, and angled it just so to take a better look.
Josephine Radford was French and lived up to all the implied stereotypes. She was thin, stylish, and had a temper that could launch missiles, Stella said. She was great at small talk and fun to be around, if you didn’t get too close. Josephine was not conventionally pretty, but she was dark and exotic. She was clad in a killer designer suit, royal purple trimmed with black grosgrain ribbon. Her glossy black hair was caught back in a chic chignon with a black bow at the nape.
Entirely too refined for Stylettos,
Lacey thought.
And how did she wind up with that crude animal Boyd?
“How did she get along with Angie?” Lacey whispered.
“Actually, they had a fight a couple of weeks ago.”
“What about?”
“I’m not sure, but Angie was crying, something about Marcia Robinson or maybe it was Ratboy. I tried to stay out of it.”
It was common knowledge, Stella said, that Josephine hated all the women Boyd slept with. Although they hadn’t lived together in years, neither could let go. In some weird way, they were still passionate about each other. Boyd enjoyed taunting Josephine about his other women, so she was able to keep an accurate running tally. He did the same with her conquests. Because they were divorced and civilized, they considered this good fun. They informed people they had a “cordial” relationship for the sake of the business and their family, which consisted of Beauregard Radford, or “Beau,” a perennial college student. Wired together by recrimination and revenge. And Stylettos.
Beau, the heir apparent, was present and accounted for, sitting beside his mother. The stylists called him “Shampoo Boy,” after the menial position he had held in the various salons when he was in high school. He looked slightly bored and somewhat less feral than Dad. He was neither as repulsive as his father, nor as exotic as his mother. It was as if the family genes had petered out by the time Shampoo Boy came along. His thin hair was nearly black and he wore it in a modified Prince Valiant that reached his shoulders. He had a smattering of freckles, the Radford nose, and an apparent inability to grow a beard. Beau was twenty-four years old, and had been sent home from another school in what seemed like an endless tour of colleges, due to his fondness for recreational drugs and naughty pranks. Beau wanted to go into the business as a stylist just like Dad, but Ratboy insisted he get a degree first. The son yearned to be like his father in the seduction category as well. Stella reported all this with relish.
“What kind of naughty pranks?”
“Don’t know, Boyd doesn’t broadcast Beau’s crimes.”
“Like you would.”
“It’s what you don’t know, Lacey, that can kill you.”
At fifteen minutes past ten, the short, pudgy minister cleared his throat and the room came to attention. There was a good deal of sniffling and teary eyes. A soloist sang “Bridge over Troubled Water,” not quite hitting the high notes.
After the long wait, the service was short. The nondenominational preacher, squeamish about offering a eulogy for a suicide, and a stranger at that, gave a generic talk suitable for any candidate on his or her generic ride to a generic afterlife. Most of the mourners seemed willing to be generically comforted.
Not so Stella. “That’s just not good enough,” she growled to Lacey, who stared at her in alarm. “You call that a send-off?” Stella rose and strode purposefully to the podium, her beret bobbing. People turned to stare at her. Stella was not scheduled to speak, but the spirit moved her and there was no stopping her now. She cleared her throat and blew on the microphone. It squealed. “Is this thing on?” Stella’s voice boomed over the speakers. Just to make sure no one slept, she scratched her long nails over the microphone, creating a shriek that opened every eye in the house. Except Angie’s, of course.