Bubbles Ablaze (5 page)

S
omething was missing in the Main Mane and it wasn't pink organdy curtains, mint-green walls, rust-colored shag carpeting, plastic plants and a low table littered with tattered magazines. It was customers. Thursday morning and the place was dead empty. In the hairdressing world, this meant Roxanne was at the edge of bankruptcy, if she hadn't fallen over already.

“Bubbles, how are you, hon?” Roxanne stepped out of the supply room and clicked over to me in her purple high heels, clasping me so hard to her bosom that puffs of Lily of the Valley powder rose from her chest. “Chief Donohue telephoned me this morning and told me the whole story.”

I wiggled free of her perfumed grasp and sucked in fresh air before I passed out. As a kid, I had been in awe of my older cousin Roxanne's flair with cosmetics. She'd been the one to teach me that white shadow across the bottom of my lids made my eyes wider and that the key to plucking eyebrows was to carefully trim them first. She was still doing that white lid thing, although at age forty it merely accented her wrinkles instead of making her look like a go-go girl, and she hadn't cottoned on to the concept of “light fragrance.”

“Did Donohue mention that someone tried to kill me?”

“He did, but I didn't believe it. I mean, who would want to kill you, Bubbles, especially by blowing you up? It's so violent.”

“Don't take offense, but my personal opinion is it was one of Stinky's practical jokes that got out of hand. I was hoping maybe you'd heard from him so we could clear this mess up. I'd like to
find out if I've offended him or ticked him off in such a way that he needed to get back at me.”

At the mention of Stinky's name, Roxanne's face melted. “I haven't heard ‘boo' from the Stinkster. After Donohue told me that you spotted the Lexus there, I worried Stinky blew up, too.” Tears sprung from the corners of her eyes. “He hasn't even called me to say he's okay.”

“I'm sure he's okay,” I said, although I doubted that highly. I put my arm around her and squeezed her shoulder. “Stinky's fine.”

“You don't know. Stinky hasn't been fine for some time.” She turned away and wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. I couldn't help but notice a pair of glittery amethyst earrings and matching necklace. Stiletto was right. No matter how weirded out Stinky might be these days, he was doing very well—at least financially.

“Gotta keep positive,” she said, sniffling. “Say, where's that well-hung hunk of yours, Stiletto?”

“Stiletto's having a problem with the rented Crown Victoria.” I nodded in a what-can-you-do way. “I'm sure he'll be around.” Oh, yes. He'd be around.

“A Crown Victoria. My, my.” Roxanne fanned herself at the thought. “Nice to have boku bucks. Is it true that he's a millionaire?”

It was true but not a fact Stiletto was proud of. In Stiletto's mind the wealth he had inherited from Henry Metzger, his heartless stepfather, was dirty money. Out of nostalgia he maintained the family mansion back in Saucon Valley, an exclusive suburb for steel executives near Lehigh, but he had set aside the rest for charity and still kept his apartment in New York. We didn't talk about his portfolio much.

“He lives mostly on his AP salary,” I said. “Anyway, what's this about—”

“I hear he's got a set of shoulders on him that could build Rome,” Roxanne interrupted, her eyes gleaming.

“More like Easton.”

“That'll do,” she said. “And to think of you stuck with that chastity vow. Girl, I'd have thrown myself on that man without so much as a howdy-do.”

I would have thrown myself on him if it hadn't been for that bogus fax sent by your crazy husband, I thought ruefully.

“So what do you mean by Stinky hasn't been fine for some time?” I asked.

I expected Roxanne to tell me what a rat her blackmailing psycho husband had been. Instead she said, “I did an awful thing, cousin. Just awful.” She brushed back a strand of copper hair. “Coffee, sugar?”

Was that an offer of coffee or coffee with sugar? “Thanks,” I said, perching myself on a padded stool by the makeup counter.

“You know that he quit his six-figure job at McMullen Coal, right?” Roxanne poured the coffee.

“Six-figure job? What are they mining over there, gold?”

“That was a recent salary hike. Stinky was making one-sixth that before.” She dumped two spoonfuls of sugar in each cup. Gag. “Early this year, McMullen Coal moved Stinky off maps and over to special projects where he got tons more money and even two new cars. We were in heaven for about six months and then . . . I probably shouldn't talk about it.”

“Then Stinky got fired for going wacko. Donohue told me.”

“That's a bunch of bull, if you pardon my French.” She held out her pinky. “Pinky promise to keep this quiet, just between you and me. Because I definitely do not want this to get out around town.”

I dreaded promises. As soon as you make them, you want to break them. “Pinky promise,” I reluctantly agreed, hooking my pinky in hers.

“Stinky discovered that after he left the cartography division of McMullen Coal, the maps of the Number Nine mine had been tampered with. They hadn't been updated since the mine reopened briefly earlier this year.”

I dropped her pinky. “Is that a big deal?”

“If they didn't update the maps intentionally, it is. It could mean McMullen was trying to rob coal.” Roxanne stirred the coffee slowly. “Stinky told his supervisors at McMullen that fudging maps could get miners killed and he demanded they correct them. He even threatened to tell the state if they didn't. But despite all the promises from the supervisors that the maps would be updated, last month Stinky checked the records and found out that no maps had been changed. Then he went into the Number Nine mine and found out that more coal was gone.”

My internal alarmed beeped so loudly Roxanne could've heard it. News story. News story.
Ding. Ding. Ding
. I glanced at my pinky. Drat that pinky.

“So he quit. And then things got really nuts.” She poured a half a carton of Lehigh Valley Dairy milk in our coffee. “The day Stinky left his job, he came home from the hardware store with a bag of locks. Put new deadbolts on all the doors and windows.”

“Why?”

“Beats me.” She slid me my cup of coffee. “He spent those first few days doing nothing but writing letters to the state and following me around the house ranting and raving about spheric trigonometry and the CMIS and interlobate moraine.”

“I buzz cut an interlobate moraine once,” I said. “For a tip, he gave me advice.”

“I think interlobate moraine is some kind of dense rock, Bubbles,” Roxanne suggested.

“So was he.”

I thought that was pretty funny, but Roxanne didn't crack a smile. “I was so eager to get him out of the house and out of my hair that I let him go with his buddy up to the Hole, a bar on the north side of town.”

Roxanne sipped her coffee and I recalled what Donohue had said about the fax coming from a pay phone outside the Hole. Score one for my theory that our intended killer was really the Stinkster.

“Next thing I know,” she continued, “Stinky stopped complaining about McMullen Coal and was spending every night at the Hole and every day in the basement, hammering and sawing and drilling. Wouldn't let me come down to see what he was up to. And then they stopped calling.”

“Who?”

“My clients, of course.” Roxanne said this as though I hadn't been following along. “Ten women whose hair I've been cutting for two decades suddenly don't show. They were such regulars I mentally referred to them by their time slots. You know how that is. Tuesday at one. Friday at four. That kind of thing.”

Regulars that regular don't simply quit a salon without some drama. Two women in a spat might stop coming so they won't run into each other. One woman might leave because she had a fight with a stylist, but ten? No way. Not without rumors of legionnaires in the air conditioner or bubonic plague on the toilet seat. A prized Friday at two would be hard-pressed to no-show should a nuclear war be imminent.

“What happened?”

“Stinky and his practical jokes is what happened.” Roxanne rolled her eyes. “Get this. The first client I telephoned, Thursday at ten, said Stinky had left a message on her answering machine saying that if she didn't pay him fifty dollars, he'd tell her husband, Joe, that she was really a size sixteen, not a ten like Joe thought, and that she had no intention of going on a diet like he wanted. Cookie?” She handed me a half-eaten box of Shop Rite oatmeal raisin frosted.

I thought about the size sixteen. “No thanks.”

“To each her own.” Roxanne bit into an iced oatmeal and continued. “Wednesday at six-thirty said Stinky vowed to show up at a PTA meeting and announce that her kids had lice and couldn't get rid of them 'cause she cared more for her job than her family. And Saturday at eight said Stinky knew all about her pregnancy scare and how miraculous it was since Mr. Saturday at eight had undergone a vasectomy years before.”

“Oops.”

Roxanne played with her pink leatherette cigarette case while I stared at the sugar-laden coffee. Then it dawned on me. The worst that can ever befall a hairdresser had happened to my cousin. She'd been bugged.

“He'd been eavesdropping on the salon,” I blurted. “Stinky was listening from the basement.”

“Ain't that a pisser?” Roxanne said, slipping into Pennsylvania vernacular. “What a sense of humor that clown has.”

“Did you ask him if he'd been eavesdropping?”

“See now, there's the worst part. I got so mad at him that I broke my promise and went down to the basement. You wouldn't believe what I found. Wires. Tubes. All these canisters and—this is the strangest part—blow-dryers.”

“Blow-dryers?”

“I counted twenty of them, though others were in pieces.”

“Did you ask him what he was doing with all those blow-dryers?”

Roxanne shook her head. “Didn't have a chance. I was too mad. When Stinky came home from the Hole, I was waiting with that stuff in a pile and his bags packed at my feet. Then I read him the riot act. Cuz, I really went to town.”

She started tearing up again. “I told him it was bad enough, the years of fake dog doo and the nut jars with springing snakes. I didn't like his little pranks. Still, I had tolerated them. But this, listening in on clients and then pretending to blackmail them, this was too much. It wasn't just tasteless and cruel, it stood to ruin my business.”

“You were right, Roxanne,” I said, handing her a tissue from a box on the counter. Your business has been ruined, I caught myself from adding.

“I wasn't right. I was wrong. I lost my husband and now I'm alone. I was stupid.” She dabbed her eyes. “How could I have been so stupid?”

I rubbed circles on her back. “Roxanne, I do something stupid every day.”

“Yeah, but you can't help it,” she said. “You're Bubbles. You bleached your eyebrows in junior high school and ended up in the emergency room.”

I dropped my hand. Perfectly innocent mistake. How was I to know Clorox could make you blind? Wasn't bleach, bleach? “So what was his response?”

“He was stunned.” Roxanne blew her nose. “He was so . . . crushed. Stinky took his bags and left. He said, ‘I should have left a long time ago.' That was the last I heard from him. Until Donohue called me this morning and said you'd seen his Lexus at the Number Nine mine.”

I twirled the glass ashtray, thinking of Stinky. Then a bell rang in what some people consider a very large space between my ears. “Hold on. What buddy did he meet at the Hole?”

“Bud.”

“Okay.” Let's try it again. “What bud?”

“That was his name, Bud. He was a car salesman, I think.”

A mouthful of supersweet coffee log-jammed in my throat. With great effort I swallowed it and said, “Bud Price?”

Roxanne's eyes opened wide. “You know him?”

Even though I was a tad sketchy on Bud myself, I related what Stiletto had told me and Roxanne snapped her fingers. She slid off the stool and skipped over to the magazines on the coffee table, pulling out a copy of yesterday's
Slagville Sentinel
newspaper. She opened it to a feature on Bud Price and a picture of him standing at the entrance of a mine, a roulette wheel in his hand. He was dressed in the same pink Izod shirt I'd seen on the corpse.

I gasped. “That's him! That's the man I saw shot dead last night.”

“Gosh. It never occurred to me that they were one and the same.” Roxanne stared at the newspaper. “Guess I should start reading the paper instead of buying it just for the customers. Mostly I skip to the coupons and ‘Dear Abby.' ”

Must be genetic.

The headline read: “Price Sure Casino Is Safe.”