Snippets

MURDER, CURLERS, AND CREAM

Welcome to Rueland, Massachusetts, where secrets are rarely buried, keeping your mother off your back is impossible, and running a salon can be deadly. Beautician Valentine Beaumont survives all three and is in for a hair-raising shock when her spoiled client, socialite Portia Reynolds, is strangled right under her nose.

Unfortunately, a dead customer in the beauty industry is not exactly a drawing card, and Valentine feels obligated to find Portia’s killer. Too bad Detective Michael Romero doesn’t agree. He’s a hard-nosed cop who feels she should leave investigating to the police. However, Valentine doesn’t heed the detective’s advice. Instead, she learns Portia had more kinks than curls in her personal life and, as she tries to avoid the difficult but handsome detective in untangling the murder, she finds out just how nasty Portia was.

With Guccis on her feet, a bag full of tools-of-the-trade on her back, and a kooky cast of characters in her midst, Valentine holds her own investigation, discovering Portia wasn’t the only one with dirty secrets.

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“This is a joke, right?  You wound a perm rod around a man’s what?”  Detective Romero checked his notes and looked around the salon for clarification.  “Five times!”

I bravely faced forward, catching the glint of humor in his eyes.  

“Is this something you’re in the habit of doing regularly?” he asked.

“It sounds worse than it was,” I said.

“Worse than it was!  Lady, this is about as worse as it can get for a man.”

What was I supposed to say?  That the truth was more embarrassing than being caught without shaving your legs?  I could explain, but I didn’t see how that incident had anything to do with the corpse in the facial room.  I drew my mouth into a hard line, giving him a biting peroxide stare.  “That individual, Detective, was a murderer.  And there were extenuating circumstances to that case.”

He didn’t look like he was buying it, and the grin widened. 

I folded my arms, my cheeks flaming, tears boiling up behind the mascara.  All the lessons my mother drilled into me on being respectful went swoosh out the window, and a boldness struggled to surface.  “Are you here to talk about castration or the dead body in the back room?” I asked. 

My eyes held his for a brief second, and I felt my confidence caving.  I gave a sigh of defeat and forced back the waterfall that was threatening to spill.  Then a small voice inside argued no cop was going to get the better of me.  There was a cadaver in the back room.  I maybe didn’t know much about how to catch a criminal, but I did know something had to be done about the present situation, and soon, before I lost what little business I had.  I brushed a runaway tear off my cheekbone and raised my eyes to him, wondering how I got in this mess. 

My name is Valentine Beaumont, and I’m a certified hairstylist, aesthetician, and electrologist.  Before my hands made headlines, life seemed like it was going down the right path, at least I thought so when I was a little girl.  In those days I’d plunk myself on the living room floor in my frilly underwear and fasten my mother’s sponge rollers to the family cat’s ears.  Pusso didn’t like rollers, and I have the battle scars to prove it, but he did teach me a thing or two about clients.  Some love what you do no matter what the results because they like being pampered.  Some don’t notice what you do because they’re more consumed with life’s problems.  Some like nothing you do because, well, some people are impossible to please.  And some don’t see what you do because they end up dead before you can finish. 

I don’t work on cats anymore.  Now I have a hefty mortgage on a building a few blocks from downtown Rueland, Massachusetts, and my clients are paying.  Except for the dead one.  She’s a bit of a problem.

MURDER, CURLERS, AND CANES

Valentine Beaumont is back in her second hair-raising murder mystery, this time trying to find out who had it in for an old nun.

It’s Monday morning, the salon is closed, and Valentine’s tearing out her hair in an effort to find a new stylist. After exhausting a long list, she hires a motorcycle-riding, leather-wearing jock named, well, Jock. After admittedly making a colossal error, she scrambles to stay on schedule with her usual hair appointments at the seniors’ villa, Rueland Retirement Home, smack dab in the middle of Rueland, Massachusetts. But when Valentine steps her Fendi heels into Sister Madeline’s apartment, she finds the sweet nun dead. What’s more, she wonders what the nun wished to share with her only days before her suspicious death.

Between brushing off Jock’s advances and splitting hairs with the handsome Detective Michael Romero, Valentine sweeps up the crime amidst a crazy cast of characters, utilizing her tools-of-the-trade in some pretty wacky circumstances.

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“What was wrong with her ?” Max asked, licking the powder off a jelly donut while watching me slash a red mark through the name of the last hairstylist interviewed. “You don’t like beauticians who wear leather miniskirts and spiked boots up to their dippity doo-dah?”

I’ve had several stylists through the years, but Maximilian Martell or Max is my sidekick, my Steady Eddie, my confidant. And if I had a dollar for every time he had a comeback I’d be richer than Oprah.

My name is Valentine Beaumont, and presently I was wondering why I ended up in the beauty industry. I mean it’s not like I didn’t have any other aspirations in life. I had a musical background; I could’ve been a concert pianist. I could’ve played Carnegie Hall. I could’ve been in the Boston Pops. But an insane desire to beautify others won out. So here I was, in my sparkly lit, Mediterranean-styled salon, Grecian sheers flowing in front, two facial rooms in back, thinking memorizing thirty pages of music had to be easier than hiring a beautician.

“It was the choker and black pointy bra with studs I had a problem with,” I said, massaging my temples. “Plus I wasn’t too crazy about leather slappers, surgical steel anal thrusters, and handcuffs being her primary tools. I’m running a salon, not a massage parlor.”

This was a window into my Monday morning. It was ten-thirty, pouring rain, the salon was closed, I was having no luck in hiring a stylist, and by mid-afternoon the retirement home would be calling my name. But I couldn’t think about seniors and curlers just yet; I was still reeling in shock after the Elvira look-a-like stormed out of the salon.

“You know what your problem is, lovey?” Max said. “You’re too fussy.”

Oh, boy. Here we go.

He balanced his donut in one hand and flapped his other hand in my face. “This one’s too quiet. That one’s too loud. For Pete’s sake, you had Godzilla working here until a few months ago. What made you hire her ?”

“I just had my breakfast,” I said. “Let’s not talk about Phyllis.” It not only hurt to speak about Phyllis, my eyes crossed whenever I thought about her. You see, Phyllis is a distant cousin on my mother’s side though I’m still not sure how distant. Somewhere in the same league as horses being related to asses. Oops, I mean donkeys. Phyllis couldn’t find anyone who appreciated her lack of skill, and she was sort of forced on me because it was my Grandma Maruska’s dying wish.

Here’s the thing about being born into a European family. You have no life of your own nor do you live your life based on rationale. You operate on a stress level with guilt as your main motivator. At least one thing was certain; the Phyllis secret was safe with me.

A few months ago, a brutal murder took place inside Beaumont’s, and I sort of helped solve the crime. It’s not something I’m proud of since things got pretty intense. Business became even more unstable, and Phyllis left on the pretense of having a long vacation. Some would say good riddance, but deep down I have a soft spot for her. Max has taken her absence fairly well. The appointment book is full of yellow happy faces for every day Phyllis has been gone, and his breath no longer smells of stale wine.

I could see Max was debating the wisdom of furthering this particular line of questioning, since it wasn’t easy understanding why a seemingly normal boss would keep on such a failure. And hey, I couldn’t blame him there. I had a large mortgage, and employing someone without talent was professional suicide. He held my stare for a moment then took a dainty bite of his donut.

I sighed, relieved by his withdrawal, yet still anxious about my present predicament. And the rain pelting on the roof didn’t help lighten my mood. This was the time of year Rueland, Massachusetts, a borough north of Boston, received its share of rain. Personally I had nothing against a good shower as long as it didn’t do its thing on my hair and clothes.

I patted my temples with cotton pads splashed with peppermint essential oil, hoping it would ease the low-grade headache that was coming on. Then I fixed my stare on the page.

“Hmm. J. de Marco,” I said, “what kind of fruitcake do you think this one’ll be?”

Max stopped squeezing red jelly into his mouth, giving me an accusatory stare. “Watch who you’re calling fruitcake, honey child. And think positive. The next one will be it. If it means never seeing Phyllis’s ugly mug again, I’d work with Saddam Hussein.”

“He’s dead.”

“See what I mean? Even the dead seem more appealing.”