She gave us both a bright, toothy, lipstick-smeared smile. “Okay? I gotta get back to work before someone gets a crew cut by mistake.”
Sammie and I watched her totter away between rows of mismatching barber chairs, most of which were manned by young, nervous neophytes holding scissors with expressions of wonder and apprehension. It made me happy I’d been cutting my own hair for decades, even if the end result was what Gail called a “prison ’do.”
We each took a book and began leafing through its contents, pausing occasionally at some nearly indecipherable scrawl, our eyes preconditioned for anything approaching “Davis.”
About a half hour later, I found it, clearly written, along with the date-April 23rd of the previous year. I showed the entry to Sammie. “If J.P. was right about her dying a month and a half after she got her hair colored, that would put her death into June. When did Norah say her chickadees built their nest?”
“Early July.”
I caught the eye of the manager, far to the back of the salon, and beckoned to her. “Last June was hotter’n hell. By July, a corpse left in the sun would have decomposed enough for hair to slough off. Ron’s PKU test, if he finds it, will make it official, but Shawna looks pretty good as our victim.”
The manager approached us, still beaming. “Find what you were after?”
I pointed out the entry. “Yes, thank you. You said you could tell us what all these numbers mean.”
“Right. This is the code for the procedure-a cut and dye-purple and orange. The cut was half shave, and half left long-very popular. Let’s see, the hairdresser was… Hang on a second.” She went back behind the counter and retrieved another ledger. After a minute spent flipping through its pages, she announced, her voice flattening, “Susan Lucey.”
I broke into a smile. “You’re kidding. Is her address still Prospect Street?”
She looked at me with eyes wide, confirming I had the right Susan Lucey. “You know her?”
I laughed. “Yeah. I take it she hasn’t changed much over the years.”
The manager suddenly became guarded. “I don’t know. She didn’t do too well with us. And she lives on Washington now.” She handed me the book so I could read the address.
I shook her hand. “Not to worry. Thanks for your help.”
“She’s a hooker, isn’t she?” Sammie asked me as we crossed the sidewalk to the car.
I caught the disapproval in her voice. In her way, Sammie was quite old-fashioned, and prostitution was one of the things she utterly condemned. But the older I became the less judgmental I felt-there are a lot of prostitutes out there, after all, and only a few of them are women selling their bodies for sex.
Plus, I genuinely liked Susan Lucey. She’d been a big help to me on a case years before-at personal risk to herself, as it turned out-and I’d never forgotten the favor. And she had spirit-plying her trade in Brattleboro, Vermont, was not the sign of an overachiever, but she carried herself with a pride I respected. As the saying had it, “She walked like she was going places and looked like she’d been there.”
I was struck by the change of address. Prospect Street, where she’d previously lived, followed the crest of a bluff overlooking Canal and most of the town, like a sentry’s high catwalk. A few years back, as with the neighborhood behind it, Prospect had been much the worse for wear-a neglected offshoot of a more boisterous commercial age and now an example of society’s frayed edge.
But times had improved, and with them Prospect Street’s fortunes. While still no yuppie enclave, it was looking much better. It saddened me to know that Susan had not been able to keep pace and had instead been forced back-a single, significant block-to the kind of environment where she seemed fated to spend her whole life. Not that Washington Street was a ghetto-it even sported some very handsome, well-maintained houses. But it was also a harbor of endless economic struggle, where a single bad year could mean the loss of a home. Cheek-to-cheek with those occasional gingerbread showpieces were tired, old, patched-together multi-tenant dwellings that stood like reminders of a very thin margin.
Without specifically knowing the address we’d just been given, my gut told me which of the two above options it was going to be.
Sadly, my fears were confirmed. We pulled up opposite one of the dreary, gray-sided triple-deckers so common to New England factory towns. It looked like the landlord would soon be choosing between a whole new foundation, or complete demolition.
I left Sammie in the car. I had no desire to rub her nose in something she didn’t like, nor in subjecting Susan to a scrutiny she didn’t deserve.
The manager’s ledger had indicated the top floor, so I circled the building, stepping carefully through snowdrifts littered with hidden trash, until I got to the exterior staircase running up the back wall. Switchback on switchback, balcony to balcony-one of which was festooned with frozen laundry-I climbed to the third-floor apartment. There I found a blank door, curtained windows, and an empty porch. The pleasure I’d first felt at hearing Susan’s name had by now been corroded by gloom.
I knocked on the door several times before I heard a shuffle of feet and the sound of something being jarred, as if bumped into. By the time the door swung back several inches, I was braced for the worst.
“Hi Susan, it’s Joe.”
“No shit. Blind I’m not.”
I couldn’t see much through the narrow opening, but what little there was didn’t look good. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face drawn and tinged yellow, her hair flat and oily. “Can I come in?”
“What for? Can’t be a social call, right?”
I suppressed the polite lie forming in my brain. “No.”
She looked at me without expression for a few seconds and then vanished from sight, leaving the door ajar. I pushed it open, stepped inside, and closed it behind me. Susan was moving slowly away, heading for a well-used armchair that she sank into with a tired sigh. The girl who’d once walked like she was going places was gone, leaving a giant void behind.
I sat opposite her in a straight-backed chair, my elbows on my knees, and looked at her more carefully. She was thinner than in the old days, when she’d been a compact fireplug of a woman, full of sexual vitality. Her skin now hung on her loosely. At most, she was in her mid-thirties, but she was looking fifteen years older.
“Like what you see?” she asked bitterly.
“I always have, but you don’t look healthy. You okay?”
“I don’t have AIDS, if that’s what you mean.”
“I’m glad to hear it. It wasn’t what I meant.”
She sighed again and rubbed her forehead. “I’d forgotten what a Boy Scout you are. What do you want?”
“Information, but only after you tell me what’s been going on.”
“I’m a tired old fuck. What’d you think? I sleep, I eat, I get laid, I have a drink every once in a while. Life goes on-takes its toll-the johns drop off-money’s tight. You figure it out.”
“You’ve tried other jobs,” I said, telling her I knew at least that much.
She smiled wistfully. “Yeah. Can’t seem to concentrate. And I don’t like the bullshit. Never liked taking orders. I quit a lot.”
“And drink?”
A murmur of the old gleam returned to her eyes. “A lot.”
“You doing anything about it?”
“No.”
“You want to?”
She stretched in her seat-arching her back like an old cat. She closed her eyes briefly. “Who wouldn’t want to change this?”
It was an ambition I thought Wilma Davis had probably lost long ago. “I can help.”
She looked at me. “How? Get me into AA? Tried it. Don’t like all the God stuff.”
“Doesn’t have to be AA. I was thinking more of a one-on-one arrangement. Have someone come by to talk with you-figure out a game plan.” I cut off her darkening scowl by adding, “You don’t have to do anything about it. Just listen and see if it sounds right.”