Deadly Debut Read online

  In the next room, heads were lined up on a counter, women’s heads, with poreless, rubber skin and lustrous hair that seemed to grow out of tiny holes in their rubber scalps. One of the heads, a brunette whose high brows gave her face a surprised look, was having her hair set by a young woman with vivid orange curls. Other young women were working on the rest of the heads.

  “Somebody’ll help you in a second,” the young woman with the orange curls said. “Have a seat.”

  I settled into a chair covered in cracked Naugahyde and grabbed a magazine. The cover showed a gorgeous model in narrow-legged jeans, a filmy top that flared to her hipbones, and stiletto-heeled shoes.

  The next thing I knew, Dianne Ferrara was striding toward me. From the neck down, she looked like the model on the magazine cover, complete with impractical shoes and fashion forward outfit. From the neck up, she looked like her brother, except she’d plucked her brows into graceful curves, darkened her lashes, and emphasized the shape of her mouth with wine-colored gloss.

  “Here’s a customer for you,” she said to the young woman with the orange curls as she studied my hair. “Shampoo, trim, and blow dry?” I was tempted to resist the trim, but it occurred to me that between the gush of the water and the roar of the dryer, there’d be no opportunity for a chat.

  I complimented my stylist, Cherry, on her orange curls and her shampooing technique, so by the time she had my hair toweled off and combed out, she was putty in my hands.

  “How are jobs for hair stylists now?” I asked. I opened the magazine absentmindedly. It was clear that Dianne Ferrara got her fashion ideas from the publications in her reception room.

  “Oh, good. Really, really good.” She had a sweet, high-pitched voice and pale eyes that blinked a little too often. “I want to work in Manhattan.” She giggled. “That’s my dream.”

  “When do you finish here?”

  “I’ll be done by Christmas. It’ll be sort of my present, you know?” Another giggle.

  Meanwhile one hand lifted bits of my hair and the other snipped the ends with a pair of surgical-looking scissors. “Not too much off,” I said. “If it’s too short, it won’t dry right.” I still had the magazine open, and a small clump of hair fell onto an image of a gorgeous model in uncomfortable-looking shoes.

  “This seems like a pretty nice school.” I glanced around the room. Dianne was standing in the doorway.

  “Oh, it is. It really, really is.” Cherry leaned down and whispered, “I’d say that even if the manager wasn’t listening.” She punctuated the statement with another giggle. “She’s such a wonderful person. Too bad she’s leaving.”

  “Where’s she going?”

  “Florida.” Cherry had worked her way around to my bangs. “Close your eyes,” she murmured. I could feel tiny clumps of wet hair skim my eyelids and my cheeks. “She’s leaving in a year or so. That’s what I heard anyway.” A soft brush dusted my face.

  “Why Florida?” I asked.

  “It’s warm all the time, and it’s pretty. Wouldn’t you want to live there?” She ran the brush over my face again. “You can open your eyes.” She reached for the hair dryer.

  When she was done, I gave her a ten-dollar tip.

  Out in the reception room, I fished out another ten-dollar bill and handed it to Dianne Ferrara. My hair looked pretty good, and the price was right.

  “I hope you’ll come back,” she said.

  While I tucked my wallet away, a burly guy in biker’s garb entered.

  “Is that the restroom?” I asked, spying a door with the outline of a woman on it. “I’ll just pop in for a second.”

  “Did you find them?” I heard Dianne ask as I closed the door behind me.

  The building was fairly new and cheaply built—I’d noticed that from outside. The restroom door was one of those hollow jobs. I held my breath and stuck my ear against the flimsy wood panel that made up the inner surface.

  A male voice said something I couldn’t make out, then Dianne said, “One thing at a time. I give him a year. Tops.”

  I DROVE to my dad’s, and we walked up the hill to Eric’s place, an apartment in a nondescript brick building. We knew he wouldn’t be there, but that was the point. A couple of black kids loitered on the sidewalk, grooving to whatever they were listening to on their iPods. I reached for my lock-pick kit.

  “Whatcha got there?” My dad eyed the plastic case.

  “We have to get in,” I said. I studied the lock and selected a pick.

  He pulled a set of keys from his pocket. “You can save yourself the effort,” he told me. “Eric liked me to keep an eye on the place when he had road gigs.”

  Once we were inside, he headed for a stairwell at the back of the tiny lobby. “I don’t trust the elevator,” he called over his shoulder.

  The stairwell was amazingly dirty and it smelled like McDonald’s takeout.

  Being in somebody’s house when they don’t know I’m there always gives me a creepy feeling. I wonder what they’d have gotten rid of if they’d known somebody was going to be snooping.

  At first glance, it was pretty much what I expected—music gear in the living room, dirty dishes in the kitchen, and an unmade bed in the bedroom.

  In the bathroom, a couple of none-too-clean towels hung from the towel rack. I wasn’t convinced that Eric was innocent, so I shoved back the shower curtain and checked the tub for signs of blood or dirt. But I found nothing except the grime that accumulates in tubs that aren’t scrubbed very often.

  Back in the bedroom, I twisted the knob on what I assumed was the closet door. That’s when things got interesting.

  The door was locked.

  “Hey, Mutt,” I called. He was in the living room thumping on one of Eric’s basses.

  “Find something?” he yelled back.

  “Have you got a key for this closet?”

  He came in jingling the keys. “There’s three on here,” he said, “the downstairs door and the upstairs one, but I think the little one is for the mailbox.”

  I tried the closet door once more, then got to work.

  “What do you think is in there?” my dad said, stooping to watch as I inserted the pick and listened for the click that would tell me I’d nudged a pin out of the way.

  “Something he wants to keep private,” I said. I held up a finger. A click, and then another click, told me I was getting close. A few more clicks and I twisted the pick. Then I turned the knob. The door swung open to reveal women’s clothes. Lots of them.

  “That looks like Linda’s stuff,” my dad said. He shook his head. “The poor guy. It’s like a shrine.” He fixed me with mournful eyes. “He couldn’t be the one that killed her.”

  “Fancy stuff.” I reached for a black-and-pink taffeta number with a full skirt and a scoop neck outlined in sequins and held it to my shoulders.

  “Wait a minute,” my dad said, a look of horrified puzzlement on his face.

  “Not my style?” I laughed.

  “That can’t be Linda’s.”

  “Better taste?”

  “No, it’s not that.” He smiled sadly. “Linda was tiny.”

  Still holding the dress to my shoulders, I looked down. The waist hung three inches below my waist, and the skirt, even though the proportions of the dress suggested that it was meant to skim the calves, reached my ankles.

  “This is huge.”

  My dad nodded. “Huge.”

  “Something that might fit Eric.”

  He nodded again. “Something that might fit Eric.”

  I pawed through the dresses—silks, satins, some trimmed in lace, one with marabou feathers waving gently around the neckline. And arranged in neat pairs below were shoes, high-heeled shoes, in colors that matched the dresses. I turned toward my dad.

  “He never said anything to you?”

  “No,” my dad said. “He didn’t.”

  “Did Linda know?”

  He shrugged. I reached for one of the most striking dresses and fingere
d the fabric, purple shantung with flecks of gold.

  I remembered the shoes on Richmond Terrace. Purple, with gold stiletto heels. The criminal leaves something at the crime scene and takes something away. Everybody knows that now because they watch CSI.

  So let’s say somebody drags a body through the mud. He gets mud on his nice purple shoes and he says to himself, mud will get in the car, and the cops will find the mud and pin the crime on me when they check my shoes. Better to jettison the shoes along with the body.

  I couldn’t imagine what else I might find to rival this discovery, but for the sake of thoroughness, I headed for the kitchen.

  “Is Eric’s grandmother still alive?” I wanted to know as soon as I looked around.

  “How could she be?” he asked. “Eric’s my age.”

  “What do you think this means?” I pointed to a calendar. The square for October twentieth, the previous Saturday, had been filled in with the notation “Grandmas—8 sharp.”

  “Don’t have a clue,” my dad said.

  THE next morning, the yellow tape and the cop car were gone from the dump site, together with the purple shoes. But checking on the shoes wasn’t the main reason for my visit.

  I paced along the road, scanning the strip of dirt between the asphalt and the grass that edged the scruffy woods. I was looking for tire tracks. Asphalt wouldn’t retain much, nor would grass—dirt would.

  Cop cars and the crime scene guys had come and gone over the past couple of days, and any tracks near the road had been pretty well obliterated. But leading right into the trash pile, there was a bare patch of earth where cars backing up with stuff to dump had worn away the grass.

  I studied it, looking for patterned grooves. I noticed several sets, and it was obvious that a few brands of tires had left marks in last week’s fresh mud. But one seemed most recent, overlapping and obliterating parts of the others.

  Back at my car, I pulled my casting kit, a plastic zipper bag, and a bottle of water out of the trunk and set to work making an impression of the tracks.

  WHEN I got to my dad’s place, he was still asleep. I made a cup of herbal tea—I was longing for coffee, but he doesn’t keep it around—and sat at the table in the kitchen while he and Ernest snored in the next room. Several copies of the Village Voice were lying on the kitchen counter. I was idly paging through one when something caught my eye—that week’s band lineup for the Coven Club.

  I picked up another copy of the Voice, an older one, and checked the ad for the Coven Club. Same deal. Forgetting my tea, which was pretty forgettable anyway, I rummaged through the whole pile of papers, getting more excited by the minute.

  I left a note for my dad, slipped out the front door, and took the ferry to Manhattan. There, I went strolling down Second Avenue, past the curious assortment of storefronts that make up the East Village—tattoo parlor side by side with Ukrainian bakery, thrift shop neighbor to upscale restaurant.

  The Coven Club turned out to be a storefront with the windows painted black and a wood-plank door like something from a medieval castle. The bartender was a blond guy with a stud in his lower lip. He was leaning on the bar and humming along to a song that featured a tormented vocal against a synthesized rhythm backup.

  It was early, and only a few people were drinking, spread out along the rough wood bar so nobody was right next to anybody else. Before I sat down, I scanned the wall opposite the bar. Posters from the bands that played there were tacked up, some simple black-and-white, done crudely on purpose to look homemade, others full-color professional jobs.

  The one I was looking for made me giggle when I found it. It was a poster for a band called “The Grandmas.” The lead singer was posed like a diva with an armful of flowers, while another band member was knitting. A third sipped from a china teacup, his pinkie in the air.

  Yes, his pinkie. They were all guys in drag, and Eric, number four, wore the taffeta dress with the sequins around the neck.

  I climbed onto a bar stool a few stools away from the nearest person, a young woman in leggings and an oversized gray turtleneck.

  “Music tonight?” I asked when the bartender set a draft in front of me. I raised it to my lips and tilted it back till I tasted beer instead of foam.

  “Only weekends.”

  “When will the Grandmas be back?”

  “Not sure,” he said. “They’re havin’ some problems.”

  “Did they play Saturday?”

  “Nope.”

  “Were they having problems then?”

  “Nope.” He shook his head. His blond hair was shaped into stiff points that didn’t move when his head moved. “Private party.”

  “Do you know where?”

  He looked at the young woman in the turtleneck. “Did Jason say where the Grandmas were playing last Saturday night?”

  “Uptown somewhere. Some big deal thing in the East Sixties.”

  I TOOK the Number 6 train up to Sixty-eighth, then cut over to Fifth and zigzagged south. It was pretty much one consulate after another, grand brownstones with flags in front and Department of Transportation signs restricting parking to cars with diplomat plates. At the corner of Fifth and Sixty-fourth, a tow truck was hauling somebody’s BMW away.

  I pulled out my cellphone.

  My dad’s machine picked up the call, and his recorded voice told me he was hip to my jive and he’d catch me later. I prayed he was just feeling lazy, not out walking Ernest or drumming so loud he hadn’t heard the phone.

  “Mutt?” I said to his machine. “This is important. Please, pick up.”

  In a second I heard his real voice. “What’s happening?”

  “What kind of car does Eric drive?”

  “I don’t know . . . a van or something, maybe one of those Econoline things.”

  “Color?”

  “White?” He took a bite of something. “By the way, he’s out.”

  “What?”

  “Out on bail. His son sprang him.”

  THE tow pound is on the Hudson at Thirty-eighth Street. I’d been hoping to see a lot with all the towed cars looking kind of like the lot at Island Pre-Owned, something where I could browse along till I found Eric’s van.

  But wherever the cars were, they weren’t visible from the street, so I walked up a narrow ramp that led to the office.

  The tow pound lady’s head nearly filled the frame of her grime-streaked window. There were five other windows just like it, and a row of twenty beat-up plastic seats bisected the large room. I was the only customer.

  “Registration and license?” She was a pleasant-looking black lady in a chartreuse sweater and hoop earrings.

  “I don’t have them,” I said. “I lost my wallet.”

  She raised her hands to where I could see them through the window and made a palms-up gesture. “Nothin’ I can do for you then.” She smiled like this was good news. One of her front teeth was outlined in gold.

  “Is there some way I could make sure it’s here,” I said. “Make sure it was towed and not stolen. I’ve been having a lot of bad luck . . .”

  “I got hundreds of cars here—”

  “Where are they?”

  “Out back.” She tilted her head toward a doorway at the far corner of the room.

  Before she could say anything else, I scuttled past the other five windows and launched myself through the doorway.

  Rows and rows of cars. Then a cop blocked my way and nodded back toward the office.

  Back at the window, I begged. “Please tell me if it’s here,” I said. “Please. It’s gonna take me a lot of effort to come up with one hundred eighty five dollars . . .”

  “Plus twenty a day for storage,” she said. “And whatever the ticket was for.”

  I let my lip quiver like I was about to cry, then I hid my face in my hands. “Oh, no,” I murmured in my most piteous voice. I let my hands fall away. “It’s a van,” I said. “An Econoline. White. Maybe the officer . . .” I glanced toward the doorway. He was standing
inside now, and I gave him a mournful smile.

  She sighed. “Okay,” she said. “Tell him I said it was okay. But you stay inside.”

  It took fifteen minutes, but he confirmed that, yes, a white Econoline van had been towed the previous Saturday night. “Sorry it took me so long,” he said. “There’s a lotta cars out there. After a while, you forget what you’re lookin’ for.”

  So Eric must have come home on the ferry.

  Rows and rows of cars, I said to myself as I headed east on Thirty-eighth. Just like the lot at Island Pre-Owned. So many cars the cop hardly knew what he was looking for. A person could hide a car in a lot like that.

  IT was dinnertime when I got back to my dad’s. I hadn’t even eaten lunch, so I took him for Chinese food on the crowded shopping street down the hill from his place. On the way, I bought us some beer.

  “How long has Eric been out?” I asked after I’d opened two beers and waved away the glass he offered.

  “Since Sunday afternoon.” He smiled sadly. “Plenty of time for him to retrieve his fancy shoes.” I had told my dad about my early-morning visit to the dump site.

  “Don’t worry, Mutt,” I said. “Those weren’t his shoes. He didn’t do it.” I took a long swallow of beer. “I’m glad he’s out.”

  “He didn’t even call his kids,” my dad said. “They heard about it on the radio.”

  “Why wasn’t he home when we went to his place?”

  “He’s staying with his daughter.”

  Then my dad told me about Eric’s kids, the college-professor son and the daughter with the law degree and the top-level government job.

  “Still no alibi though?”

  My dad shook his head. “No alibi.”

  I told him about the Grandmas, then said, “I guess he’d rather have his kids believe he killed their mother than let on that he likes to wear women’s clothes.”

  “I don’t know,” my dad said. “I asked him that. I told him we found his dresses in the closet.” He picked at the label on his beer. “I think there’s more to it than the dressing up thing, but I don’t know what it is.”

  WE ate our stir fry, then I drove out to Island Pre-Owned Cars.

  The lot wasn’t as dark as I would have liked. Floodlights on tall poles made the cars gleam like it was noon. And that stretch of Hylan Boulevard is wide and bustling, even at night, with a McDonald’s on one corner and a gas station on another.