This was it. This was the big exclusive experienced reporters always go on and on about. I took a second to mentally compliment myself for taking the initiative and tracking down Ern. “You don’t mean that,” I said, egging him on.
“Like hell I don’t. If I told you what the real Debbie was about, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Try me. I’m very gullible. Everyone says so.”
“First of all, get this straight. It was my idea.” He stabbed his thumb into his chest. “I was the one with the information. Debbie stole it from me and took over everything. It wasn’t her scam. It was mine. She got too greedy.”
I repeated the words in my mind so I could write them down later. I didn’t dare bring out my notebook now. No telling how Ern might react seeing me with pen and paper. Not many hairdressers take notes.
“What kind of scam?” I took a step closer.
Ern was very tall with the wiry frame you often see on righteous dudes who prefer to hang out at NASCAR races or on death row. “Why should I tell you?”
I thought fast. “Because what you know might clear an innocent woman. My boss and best friend who owns the House of Beauty is watching her life fall down around her. Everyone thinks she is at fault in Debbie’s death, and I know in my heart she wasn’t. She’s going to be punished unfairly, either with a civil suit that’ll close her salon or worse. Possibly”—I took a breath—“criminal negligence charges.”
“You think that gets to me? That doesn’t get to me. I know all about being innocent in prison. I just spent the last five years being innocent in prison.” He held on to the bottle so precariously I worried he’d toss it like he had the bell and that it would land on some commuter’s windshield. Then there’d be trouble. “And do you know why I went to prison even though I was innocent?”
I stopped myself from answering. This might have been what they call a rhetorical question. I wasn’t really sure what a rhetorical question was. It was like irony, I figured. Indefinable, yet beloved by English teachers everywhere. As part of my self-improvement program, I had set a goal to be able to identify rhetorical questions with ease by the new year. So far, I wasn’t doing so well.
“Is that a rhetorical question?” I asked.
Ern didn’t answer. Maybe he didn’t know either?
“Debbie. She was the one who put me in prison. Wanted me out of the way so she could run our scam without giving me a cut. The bitch. Though it was good she was stopped. That scam of hers could’ve turned this town upside down.”
We were silent, watching the cars zip by, Ern probably thinking about the unfettered scam, me trying to analyze what made that a rhetorical question. Why did they call it a question if you weren’t supposed to answer it? I couldn’t see the point.
Also, I thought about Debbie. She was certainly shaping up to be a far cry from the self-satisfied, perfect wife and travel agent I’d known for years as my neighbor and client. Yet Ern, being drunk, a criminal and dressed in a slim-fitting Santa suit, wasn’t what one called a “reliable source.” Plus, he smelled really, really bad.
“I’m confused,” I said. “What, exactly, was this scam? Did it have something to do with her travel agency?”
He jerked his chin to a car across the street. “There’s something you don’t see every day.”
He was right. Though it was dusk and traffic was whizzing by, it wasn’t hard to miss the shiny black late model Mercedes. Foreign cars are cars you don’t see much in Lehigh. We don’t like them, nor do we trust them. We don’t have mechanics to service them because buying one is right out of the question. Foreign cars push local people out of jobs. That was why the Mercedes kind of stood out.
Along with the fact that behind the wheel was a hulking man dressed in a Santa suit, a pair of what might have been either binoculars or night-vision goggles held up to his eyes.
“He’s Santa Claus,” I said, under my breath. “Just like you!”
“ ’Tis the season.”
The Santa Claus dropped his binoculars to take a cell phone call. Still, he kept his gaze on Ern.
Or was it me?
“If I were you,” Ern said, sounding surprisingly sober, “I’d get real interested in buying a Christmas tree before that guy gets a bead on your head.” Ern retrieved the bell from the gutter, gave it a shake and returned to his clanging. “Christmas trees. Get your Christmas trees here. Ho . . . ho . . . ho. Cheap.”
My pulse was now racing. I stole another quick peek at the Mercedes. Santa was still on his cell phone, and I observed as I walked away, his gaze was focused one hundred percent on me.
Shit! What was going on? Why would I be followed for asking questions about what a few hours ago had appeared, by all accounts, to have been an accidental death from a latex allergy?
I zigzagged crazily to the lot entrance, where a man in blue overalls sat on a metal folding chair, smoking and tapping his foot to Elvis Presley’s bluesy “Merry Christmas, Baby.”
“I’d like to buy a Christmas tree. Fast.”
“Saw you talking to my mascot over there,” the Christmas tree salesman said, the cigarette dangling from his lips. “What were you up to?”
Panic. He might be in cahoots with the Mercedes. All this talk about Debbie’s paranoia had rubbed off on me. “Oh, nothing.” Crap. My voice was shaking. “Just asking for tree advice. You know, which ones smell good, which ones hold their needles, which ones last the longest.”
“He don’t know squat about trees. What were you really talking about?”
“Honest. Trees. He said I should get that blue spruce.” I pointed to a mangy one—well, they were all pretty mangy—propped up against the fence. “That’s the one he suggested.”
“That’s not a blue spruce. That’s a pine.”
How could he tell with his sunglasses on? And wasn’t a spruce a pine anyway? “I don’t care. That’s the one I want, please. And could you tie it to the top of my car?”
I glanced over my shoulder. The Mercedes was gone. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or more worried.
“That’ll be twenty bucks, plus a buck for rope.”
Rip-off! At the prospect of being swindled, I momentarily forgot my stalker.
“That’s not worth twenty bucks. The bottom branches are brown and it’s almost bare of needles. You should be thanking me for taking it off your hands. That thing’s a fire hazard.” I was not Lulu Yablonsky’s daughter for nothing. Just because some fancy Santa was tracking me in the midst of a murder investigation was no reason to pay retail for a discount Christmas tree.
“Why do you want it then, if it’s so lousy?”
“Because I’m banking on it being cheap—like your sign says.”
“Eighteen.”
“Ten,” I said, “and you throw in the rope for free.”
“Okay. But only because I’m filled with holiday cheer. Ho ho.”
“Yes. That’s obvious.”
I pulled out my wallet and handed him the cash. Elvis had signed off and now Eartha Kitt purred “Santa Baby.” The Christmas tree guy counted my money, cut off a line of rope and said, “While you were haggling over your tree, looks like my star attraction took a powder.”
I checked the sidewalk. Ern had fled, too.
And then my not so cheerful tree salesman grabbed me and shoved me to the ground. Hard. Covering my body with his.
Chapter Seven
T
he boom that rang out echoed off the pizzeria joint where my Camaro was parked. Even with my savior on top of me, muffling the noise, protecting me from the needles and splintered wood that rained down on us, I could tell that it had been the unmistakable blast of a .22.
That’s what happens when you hang around gun nuts like Genevieve.
We lay there, the two of us, cold pebbles digging into my cheek as we waited breathlessly for a follow-up. I could hardly breathe under his weight. The smells of pine sap and dirt filled my nose and I calculated that between this and the black water that had splashed on me from the gutter, my outfit was ruined.
“Stay down,” he ordered with clear-cut authority.
His massive hand missed my nose by an inch as he hoisted himself off me. My chest ached, I realized, from being squished.
He crouched, unsure, listening. I rolled over and lay on my side, looking up at the trees under the streetlights, large snowflakes seemingly increasing in size the closer they got. I thought,
My ass Debbie was killed by an allergic reaction. This is what Jeffrey Andre was talking about when he said he hoped there would be no more, how you say, killings.
“I’ll tell you what it was,” he said with a slight chuckle. “It was that violent wing of the anti-Christmas lobby, that’s who.”
I sat up. “What violent wing of the anti-Christmas lobby?”
“You know, the people who are trying to ruin Christmas. The ones who won’t let you play ‘Hark the Herald Angels’ in Almart or mention Jesus’s birthday in public schools. Now they’re shooting up Christmas trees. Damn them.”
I studied him carefully. He didn’t seem that convinced of his own theory.
“How’d you know to get me down?”
He answered by pushing up his sleeve and revealing an impressive tattoo on his forearm. It was of a pair of green Army boots and a bulldog against a golden sunset. In bold black letters it said MIKE. “Marine. Served three tours of duty in Iraq. I can sense when a bullet’s coming before the trigger’s even pulled.”
“Impressive.”
“I came home. Mike didn’t.”
I smiled sympathetically. There wasn’t much to say. Whoever this guy was, he wasn’t an ordinary Christmas tree salesman—that much I could figure out on my own. He’d acted with rapid reaction and protected me as if I were the president of the United States.
He was a goddamn pro.
Once again I couldn’t help but be confused. “Do you think he’s gone? The shooter, I mean.”
“Probably. That was a twenty-two long-rifle hollow point, sounded like to me, probably shot out of a modified KGB one-shot sniper no bigger than a lipstick you got in your purse.”
A lipstick gun! That could be dangerous. I mean, what if you were late to work, applying your makeup in the rearview and you accidentally reached for the wrong tube?
“You know a lot about guns,” I said. “Guess that comes from being stationed in Iraq, say?”
He didn’t respond. Instead, he rose and brushed himself off.
“How about you lay low until I get this tree on,” he said, wrapping the rope around his fist. “Just in case.”
The way he said it, there was no room for me to argue. I lay there in the dark, thinking as he tied the tree to the top of my car.
Ern Bender had said Debbie deserved to die. He’d said she’d been running a scam that could have turned this town upside down if she hadn’t been murdered and then he disappeared and then some jerk shot at me. A warning shot from a tube of lipstick.
I’d like to see Alison Roach, Columbia University Journalism School graduate, top that.
“The powers that be are in the nightly edit meeting. You can’t disturb them,” Veronica said, closing down her computer for the evening as I rushed in, breathless and excited, demanding to meet Notch. “And your mother owes me a new manicure. Look, I broke a nail.” She held out her hand to display the chipped nail.
Welcome to my world, I wanted to tell her. “Lookit, Veronica, I will pay for a new manicure. Heck, I’ll give you a new manicure myself, if you’ll just buzz Notch and tell him that what I have to say can’t wait.”
Veronica did a quick check of my own nails for reference. They were slightly messy from digging into the dirt. “You do those yourself?”
“I nearly strangled my ex-husband/fiancé today and I got pushed to the ground when someone tried to shoot my head off and they still held up.”
“You do French?”
“Pink and natural.”
“Pink will do. With acrylic tips.”
“With tips,” I agreed.
She buzzed Mr. Notch, and one minute later, I was in his office facing him at his large mahogany desk, Mr. Salvo sitting off to the side looking particularly weary, various other editors also gathered for the five p.m. edit meeting, including JoBeth Marquard, the lifestyle editor.
I had developed an instinctive aversion to this room, to its institutional green walls, the American flag drooping in the corner, the lone rubber plant and stacks and stacks of newspapers. However, I still liked the red leather couch. Stiletto and I had fooled around on it once. It brought back fond memories.
“This better be worth it,” Notch said, eyeing my dirty leggings with repulsion. “I have a six thirty dinner date at the Union Club with the mayor and I’m not in the mood to be toyed with.”
I swallowed. Notch’s Xanax prescription must have worn off because he was no longer in his new age, touchy-feely mood.
“Debbie Shatsky did not die by accident today. It was murder. I have proof.”
Notch tossed his pencil. “Here we go. Let me guess, you heard it from the girls at the salon.”
“Better. I interviewed two key sources. Then, during one of the interviews just now, I was shot at, possibly by a representative of the violent wing of the anti-Christmas lobby.”
Water off a duck’s back. Mr. Notch rolled his hand. “And . . .?”
Right. Notes. “And I have notes.” Okay, I might have taken them in my car afterward, writing from memory, but notes were notes. And I should know because recently I was threatened with jail for not turning over my notes to the prosecution.
“Let’s see them.” Notch held out his hand and I gave him my notebook. He flipped through a few pages and said, “They’re awfully neat.”
“Stenography 101 at Two Guys, Dictation for Dummies.” I winked at Mr. Salvo, my editor and former Two Guys journalism instructor, the one who first convinced me I was a natural reporter, if not a natural blonde.
“Who’s this Andre guy?” Notch asked.
“He runs a competing salon. He has some connection with Debbie, though I don’t know what. She was on the phone to him when she dropped dead. I obtained her cell and counted over twenty-six incoming and outgoing calls to his salon and home within twenty-four hours of her death.”