Rubbed Out (7 page)

I
finished off the day by going to see Alima Matterson. There was a slim possibility that she might know something about Janet Wilcox's whereabouts, and even if she didn't, talking to her seemed better than going home and staring at the four walls. Which I'd be doing soon enough anyway.

I got to Le Bijou a little before ten. The place was located off Erie Boulevard, shoved back from the main street and bordered on one side by a welding business and on the other by a printing company.

The parking lot was only half shoveled. Judging from the number of cars in it, business was not booming. The place looked like a warehouse for dry goods. The sign out front—L
E
B
IJOU
. L
IVE
A
LL
N
UDE
R
EVIEWS
A
LL THE
T
IME
—and the picture of the girl on the wall were the only things that said different. As I entered, I noticed that a couple of corner slats on the lower wall were working their way loose.

The place was as erotic as a hardware store. The walls were covered with fake wood paneling. A sheet outlining rules of conduct was prominently posted in the entranceway. The space was large and sparsely furnished. No attempt at decoration had been made. There was the stage, a bare platform where a bored-looking girl was doing a desultory dance with a fire pole; the bar, which featured coffee and juice (liquor being off limits in joints like this); and the VIP rooms, where the girls did their lap dances.

The description Kira had given me of Alima turned out to be fairly accurate, and it didn't take me long before I spotted her cozying up to a guy at the bar. The guy was in his forties and looked like a mid-level insurance salesman.

Alima had her face turned up toward him and was gazing at him as if he were a god. Calli does that too. I've always wanted to go up to the guy she's talking to and say, “Don't you realize she's putting you on?” But maybe I'm just jealous because I've never mastered “the look.” Alima had, though. For sure.

“Yes?” she snapped when I got near her.

She wasn't what I would have picked for Wilcox. Usually men go for women like their wives, only fifteen years younger, so I'd figured him for something conservative. But she wasn't. I couldn't imagine Janet Wilcox wearing the equivalent of safety pins through her cheek, a ring through her nose, or stretchers in her ears even when she was younger.

This girl was prettier as well, with small, regular features and large eyes that offset her blotchy skin and the scar above her upper lip where her cleft palate had been fixed. Her body was good. Certainly a lot lusher than Wilcox's wife's, voluptuous without being flabby. But it was the kind of body that would turn to fat by the time she was twenty-five if she didn't hit the gym three or four times a week.

“I'd like to talk to you about Walter Wilcox,” I told her.

“You don't look like the police.”

“That's because I'm not.” I took out my card and gave it to her. “He hired me to find his wife.”

“So?” She handed the card back. “What does she have to do with me?”

“I was hoping you might know something.”

“About her? Why would I?”

Before I could answer, the bartender ambled over. He was as big and as tall as he was wide. Tanned. Relaxed. Balding. Fortyish. The gold chain he was wearing around his neck served to emphasize its girth.

“You okay?” he asked Alima. “She bothering you?”

Alima nodded. He looked at me and jerked his thumb toward the door.

“Leave.”

I opened my mouth.

“Now,” he added before I could say anything. “You want to talk to Alima, talk to her on her own time. This is a place of business, and you're interfering with it.”

I glanced around. “It doesn't look that busy to me.”

He took another step forward. “I've never thrown a woman out, but that doesn't mean I won't.”

“Fine.” I put both hands up. “I'm going. You mind if I leave my business card?”

“Put it on the bar.”

I did. I certainly wasn't going to argue with him, especially since he looked as if he could shot-put a small building.

“Call me if you think of anything,” I told Alima.

She sniffed and turned back to the man she'd been talking to. When I left, she had taken his hand and was leading him to the VIP room for a lap dance. A sign on the wall said,
TWENTY BUCKS PER SONG.
When you considered the fact that a song usually lasted no more than three minutes, I decided I was definitely in the wrong field. I wondered if this was how Alima and Wilcox had met, and if he was the only guy she was playing. Somehow I didn't think so.

I drove back to the store, picked up Zsa Zsa, went home, and watched old Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell movies till three in the morning while I drank Scotch and ate a bag of chocolate chip cookies. It was a surprisingly good combination. I passed out on the sofa with Zsa Zsa snuggled up behind my knees.

 

 

I woke up to the phone ringing. I opened one eye and stared out through the picture window. It was dark. The streetlights were still on. It felt like four in the morning, and I felt like shit.

“What?” I croaked into the receiver.

“Did you find anything yet?” It was Wilcox.

“What time is it?” I was still logy. My head was throbbing and my throat was dry.

“I don't know. Seven o'clock.” I wondered how long he'd been up.

I groaned. “You gotta be kidding me.”

“You said to call.”

“Not this early.” I hung up and burrowed my head in the pillow. I was just falling back asleep when the phone rang again. Why I answered it, I don't know. It was Paul.

“How's the Janet Wilcox thing coming along?” he said, speaking way too loudly.

I moved the phone away from my ear. “Why are you up this early?”

“I never went to bed.”

I turned onto my back and rubbed my eyes. It didn't help. Everything still looked blurry. Maybe I was getting nearsighted in my old age.

“Robin, are you there?”

“I'm going back to sleep. Call me later.” And I hung up.

The phone rang again. Probably Paul. But it could have been the Pope for all I cared. I disconnected it, stumbled upstairs, and crawled into bed. Zsa Zsa jumped up and curled up on the pillow next to me. When my alarm went off at nine o'clock, I felt marginally more human. Four cups of coffee later, I was ready to function. I spent the rest of the day making phone calls from the store, trying to track down Janet Wilcox and failing.

I started with her daughter, Stephanie, who was down in New York City. She sounded even more annoyed with me this time around.

“I don't suppose you've heard from your mother yet?”

“No. I haven't. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm on the other line.” And she clicked off. Bet she didn't send Janet a Mother's Day card.

I spoke to two of her cousins. Wilcox had been right. They just corresponded over Christmas. They'd stopped trying to get Janet to come out and visit them a long time ago.

“What's the point?” one of them said. “All she does is complain.”

“About what?” I asked.

“Everything,” she replied. “Absolutely everything. And then she denies she said anything. She's a very difficult person.”

I managed to locate three members of her book group. They didn't know anything about Janet Wilcox either. They didn't discuss their personal lives when they met. But they could say this about her: She was always well prepared for their discussions, unlike some people they could mention, who actually lied about reading the book. If I could imagine that. I said I could and tried Janet Wilcox's physician and got as far with him as I had with her psychologist.

At this point it was four o'clock in the afternoon, and I decided to go over the credit card receipts Wilcox had collected for me again. I'd done it before and nothing had popped up at me, but I was running out of options.

It was a fairly simple task because Janet Wilcox didn't charge that much. Most of her purchases seemed to center around her house and involved things like dishes and sheets and picture frames. She bought her clothes at Talbot's and her shoes at Easy Spirit. Both stores that catered to conservative, suburban women of a certain age—as the French like to say.

Occasionally Janet Wilcox splurged and bought herself a couple of boxes of chocolates and a book, but I could tell from the receipts that the books were paperbacks. Her only real luxury appeared to be getting her hair done every week at the Final Cut Beauty Salon.

I was musing about the name being one I would never have chosen for a beauty parlor when it hit me. Sometimes women tell their hairdressers things they don't tell anyone else. A cliché, but that didn't make it any less true. I got out the phone book and looked up the address for the salon. It was over in Eastwood. Close enough. I told Manuel I'd be back in an hour and drove over.

The place had that familiar permanent-wave smell. It took me back to when I used to go to the beauty parlor with my mom. I'd hated every minute of it, from the shampoo to the dryers, which burned the back of my neck. My mother always wanted me to get my hair curled. I always wanted it straight. The last time I'd gone, I'd come out looking like a poodle. That was when I was thirteen. The next time I'd gone back, I'd been twenty-six.

The salon was tiny. A strictly two-person operation. Two sinks. Two cutting stations. A line of chairs along the far wall. A large wicker basket filled with kids' toys. Another one filled with magazines. It was the kind of place that catered to the locals. The walls were painted lilac and hung with framed photos of Tuscany landscapes. A vase at the reception counter was filled with a bouquet of ferns and spider chrysanthemums.

A collection of vintage Bakelite and rhinestone jewelry was neatly displayed in a glass case below the cash register.
ASK ABOUT OUR PRICES,
said the hand-lettered sign standing by them. A badly bleached blonde somewhere in her seventies was getting her hair cut when I walked in.

“I'll be with you in a minute,” the hairdresser said to me as he lifted a lock of her thinning hair and snipped at its ends.

I sat down on one of the chairs and waited. The man trimmed and studied his cut. Hair rained down on the black plastic cape covering the woman's shoulders. Occasionally she'd brush a piece off her nose.

“Chris, I think you're going to like this,” he said to her, his face a picture of concentration.

“You're sure?” the woman said. “I want to look nice for my niece's wedding.”

The hairdresser patted her shoulder. “You'll look gorgeous, darling. I promise. You'll be the belle of the ball”

Somehow I doubted it. The woman had a receding chin and the eyes of a basset hound. But that was what she needed to hear because she beamed. The hairdresser put down his scissors and reached for a bottle of conditioner. He squirted a dab of it into the center of his hand, then proceeded to massage it into the woman's scalp.

“So,” he said to me as he worked. “What can I do for you?”

I told him.

“Janet,” he said as he turned on his hair dryer and began fluffing out the woman's hair. “Of course I know Janet. She's a regular.”

“So you think you'll be able to help me?”

“Possibly.” He assessed my hair with a practiced eye. “You need to have your split ends trimmed.”

I reached for my ponytail and studied the ends. “They're fine.”

“They're damaged.”

“No more than a quarter of an inch,” I conceded.

Over the years I've noticed that people tend to be chattier when they're comfortable, and they're comfortable when they're doing the things they're used to doing. Usually I cut my hair myself, but if I needed to get my hair trimmed to get the information I wanted, so be it. I've done a lot worse in my time.

“No problem,” he said before turning back to his customer.

I watched while he finished her up. He back-combed her hair, then brought it forward and sprayed each curl into place. It was like watching someone construct a building.

“You work it, girl,” he said as the woman reached in her purse to pay.

She was still giggling as she walked out the door. He had made her feel good. Maybe that was why Janet Wilcox had come here each week. To get what she couldn't get at home.

“Remember,” I reminded him as I sat down in the chair. “Not more than a quarter of an inch.”

He picked up my hair, weighed it in his hand, then undid the rubber band, fanned it out, and studied it some more. “Half. You should use a better conditioner. Your hair is really dry. I have one you might like.”

“Fine.” I'd take it out of my expense money along with the haircut. “Janet Wilcox.”

“My. Aren't you the persistent one.” He sprayed water on my hair with a mister. I felt like a fern.

I must have made a face because he said, “Just wetting it down, dear. By the way, my name is John, and yours is—?”

“Robin.”

“You have a card?”

When I gave it to him, he glanced at it and slipped it into his pocket. “A real private detective. The boys at the club are going to love this.”

And him too, I'd wager. He had closely cropped hair that had been bleached white, a diamond stud in his left ear, and a tight ass his black pants showed off. His black T-shirt hugged his ribs. Very Manhattan. Just like Janet's daughter Stephanie.