Chapter 7

CHAPTER SEVEN

Curl Up and Dye Beauty Salon

Dudley turned the car in the direction of the salon where Laura worked.

“Do you think she was telling the truth?” Jack asked.

“I don’t know. The intruder was real, but was he a stranger to her or a cohort? She’s always been a sort of mystery to me. Charlie loved her, and that was always good enough. Until now.”

“We need to do a thorough check of her background.”

Jack was right. In spite of the overwhelming evidence, Dudley’s gut instinct, and his horrible nightmare, he still wasn’t ready to concede that his brother was gone forever.

He was relieved when the Curl Up and Dye shop came into view. It was incongruous in the midst of the smart-looking business section along Poplar: a small cottage painted a shocking pink with a sign out front topped by flashing orange neon in the shape of scissors so huge they looked as if they were ripping the sky into tattered bits of blue.

The shop smelled of nail polish remover and that peculiar stench Dudley knew to be permanent wave solution. His grandmother, Junie Mae, had given herself home permanents ever since he could remember. The solution smelled like rotten eggs and kinked her red hair into little corkscrew curls all over her head.

The owner, a leggy, peroxide blond wearing too much lipstick and so much mascara her eyes looked as if spiders were trying to take over her face, sashayed toward Jack, smiling, her hips swaying. Women of all sizes, shapes, and ages flocked to Jack.

Dudley welcomed the blessed flash of comic relief.

The young woman stopped just short of him and posed with one hand propped on her hip. “What can I do for you, handsome?”

Saints preserve us.

“We’re here to ask a few questions.” Jack flashed his badge, and she stepped back so fast she almost came out her sling-back high heels. The shop was filled with women at the skinks, under the hair dryers, and in the swivel chairs where their hair was in various stages of repair. “Do you have a separate room where we can be discreet?”

His smile restored her, and she winked. “Janine’s the name. Follow me. There’s no tellin’ what all we can do in my private room.”

Dudley nearly laughed at the pleading look Jack sent his way. He nodded, then clumped along behind them like a boxcar full of coal following a sleek, smoking engine.

It turned out Janine had nothing but praise for Laura Stephens. She was full of sympathy for her plight. When she found out Dudley was her brother-in-law, she told him she was going to stop at Kentucky Fried Chicken after work to take Laura some supper and keep her company for a while.

He couldn’t imagine a more incongruous pair, plain, shy Laura and flamboyant Janine. Still, his conscience eased a bit knowing Charlie’s wife had someone to help her until they could find out what happened to him.

Janine sent her employees in, one at a time. It was a large shop, so they divided up, with Jack taking interviews in the larger room and Dudley taking them in the tiny storage room that felt claustrophobic.

The stories he heard stories were all much the same. Laura was a quiet, hardworking woman who had a seemingly perfect marriage. This was consistent with what he had believed since Charlie married her.

He and Jack took a lunch break before they questioned the rest of the staff. At the back booth of a nearby Corky’s Ribs & BBQ, one of the many locations in the city, they compared notes on the interviews.

“Two of the women I interviewed gave glowing reports on Laura.” Jack polished off his barbecue sandwich and wiped his mouth. “But the third woman, the pretty one…”

“The pretty one?”

Jack grinned. “Well, yeah. I might have to give Lucille a call when all this is over. She was just… I don’t know. Nice . And different.”

“What did this lucky woman have to say?”

“All right. Rub it in.”

“I intend to,” Dudley said. It felt good to have a moment of normal in the middle of a waking nightmare.

Jack sipped his coffee and got back to the task, his face turning sober. “Lucille said Laura had been crying a lot in the last couple of months.”

“Any reason?”

“She claimed it was because she couldn’t have children, but Lucille didn’t think that was it. She told Laura they could adopt or find a surrogate mother so Charlie would be the biological father, but she said that made Laura even more upset.”

“Charlie never said a thing to me about any of that.” Dudley sipped his own coffee. “Did Lucille ever find out what was upsetting her?”

“She said Laura got a call at the shop about two weeks ago that had her a nervous wreck and crying all day. Then last week, Laura said she’d had an unwelcome visitor from Arkansas.”

“Who?”

“Laura wouldn’t tell her.”

“We need to subpoena her phone records. She came from Little Rock. Best I can tell, she had a hard life before she met my brother. These attacks could have happened because of something in her past instead of Charlie’s.”

After lunch Dudley drove back to Curl Up and Dye so he and Jack could finish the interview with Laura’s coworkers.

He hit pay-dirt with the last hair stylist, Belinda Martin, an older, motherly-looking woman with salt and pepper hair and thick wire-rim glasses. Right off the bat, she said, “Laura trusted me. I don’t tell my friends’ secrets.”

Dudley held his tongue. He hated having to deal with a close-mouthed witness. Jack should be the one questioning Belinda Martin. He could win over a tree stump.

She settled into the chair, her hips spreading over the edges of the seat, then pulled a tissue from her purse to wipe her face. “I’m getting too old to stand on my feet all day.”

“I can sympathize.” Dudley shifted his sizable bulk in the uncomfortable metal chair. “I’m just thirty-five, but my knees are telling me I either need to lose weight or quit chasing criminals through back alleys.”

Brenda laughed. And just like that, she was suddenly on his side. The tells were there: the way she relaxed into her chair, the way the vertical lines between her eyes smoothed out.

“I’m family, Laura’s brother-in-law, and I can assure nothing will be shared unless it’s relevant to finding out what happened to my brother.”

“Janine told us this morning why Laura didn’t come in. It’s just awful. I’m going to call her this afternoon, see what I can do.”

“Good. Thank you.” Dudley pulled the little spiral bound notepad and a stubby pencil from his pocket. He felt like Columbo, the scruffy, seemingly innocuous detective from the only cop show his wife would watch. “We already know Laura received a phone call and a visitor from Arkansas who upset her. Can you give us more details.”

“Yes. She didn’t give me a name, but she told me somebody she had known well when she lived in Little Rock was harassing her. He showed up at her house while Charlie wasn’t there and upset her so bad, she was crying when her husband got home.”

“What did he want?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Did Charlie know the man?”

“Not until she told him about the visit.”

This could be the lead they’d been hoping for. “Did Laura describe him or say anything else about him, or what happened next?”

“She said Charlie was so mad, he drove off looking for the man. But she didn’t say whether he ever caught up with him, or what happened. She never mentioned the man again.”

Bingo. His brother would have been fighting mad at anyone who threatened his wife. The mysterious man from Arkansas just moved into prime suspect territory.

But why hadn’t Laura mentioned him? Who was she protecting? Herself, or the man?

What had his wife called Laura? Sneaky. Holier than thou.

Could it be she had made up the whole story to throw suspicion in another direction?