“I don’t suppose you know who the woman was?”
Jackie shakes her head. “No, I’ve never seen her before. But I did see her get into a little cherry-red convertible sports car of some type and it had a vanity plate on it.”
I raise my eyebrows in question.
“It was an easy one to remember,” Jackie adds with a smile, “because the lady was rather well-endowed and her license plate read HOT 44D.”
Chapter 21
After borrowing Dairy Air’s phone to make a quick call, I drag Bjorn away from the ice cream display and ask him to drive me across town. He stares at me, blinks hard several times, and asks, “Who are you again?”
It seems his daughter’s suspicions about possible senility might be on target.
“I’m Mattie, remember? The nurse? I emptied your bag for you?” I say, gesturing toward his leg.
He nods, but still looks confused. It doesn’t exactly warm the cockles of my heart knowing that I have a half-blind, slightly confused, incontinent old man for a chauffeur. So I offer Bjorn a deal.
“Tell you what. How about if I drive the cab for a while and you ride along? It’s going to be dark in a couple of hours and I have a few other places I need to go.”
Bjorn considers my proposition for a second or two, then counters with, “Okay, but will you empty my bag again?”
“You betcha.” It’s a no-brainer. Either I empty the bag or risk the explosion of urine all over the cab.
We climb into the van with me behind the wheel and I drive us to the Keller Funeral Home. As I pull up out front, Bjorn looks at the building and then gives me a questioning stare.
“Is there something you’re not telling me?” he says. “I know I’m old but I think I’m in pretty good shape.”
“Relax,” I reassure him. “I’m just here to get my hair done.”
He looks back at the building, then at me and mutters, “And they think
I laugh. “I know it looks odd but there’s a woman named Barbara who works here as a beautician and she is quite talented, with both the living and the dead.”
We get out and head inside. I steer Bjorn toward the main office because in order to get to Barbara, who works her magic down in the basement, we will have to get past a locked door. An elderly woman who looks a little too close to casket-ready is sitting behind a desk in the office. She starts to get up from her chair to greet us but then recognizes me and plops back down. This is a good thing because the first time I came here I had to watch her negotiate the distance from her chair to mine and feared I’d be doing CPR before she reached me. Her name is displayed on a metal bar on her desk: Irene Keller.
“I’m guessing you’re here to see Barbara again,” she says to me.
I nod. “Yes, I just spoke with her on the phone.”
She gives me a quick once-over, clucks her tongue several times, and shakes her head, though I’m not sure if the shaking is a tremor or a judgment. “You know, a little basic maintenance goes a long way,” she chastises. “Barbara is very talented but if you don’t do your part, you’re just wasting her time.”
“It’s been a rough couple of days,” I explain. “I haven’t had the time to tend to myself the way I should.”
She rolls her eyes at me. “I don’t understand you young folks these days. You need to find the time. If you don’t care how you look, why should anyone else? I mean, seriously, even at my age I manage to find the time to work at my appearance.” She waves a hand around in front of her face. “Do you think this look is easy to maintain?”
Yikes! I’m not sure a monster special-effects expert could duplicate her look. Her skin has more wrinkles than a shar-pei, and her white hair has a faint green tint to it and is so sparse I can count the individual follicles in her scalp. Her eyebrows are drawn on and the rest of her make-up is boldly colored, a garish contrast to her translucent skin and pale coloring. And her lipstick is drawn on so far outside the normal lines of her lips that it looks like a three-year-old did it.
Bjorn apparently thinks it all looks fine because he says, “You are a beautiful woman. How is it I’ve never met you before?” Obviously his cataract surgery wasn’t as successful as I’d thought.
Irene shifts her attention from me to Bjorn and does another quick once-over. I notice that her eyes stall briefly and widen when her gaze nears his crotch. There is a noticeable bulge there, thanks to Bjorn’s catheter, but Irene has no way of knowing that’s what it is. She shifts her gaze to his face and smiles. “I’m Irene Keller,” she says. “I own this place and I’m a widow.”
“Bjorn Adamson,” Bjorn says with a sideways nod of his head. There is a definite twinkle in his eye. “I drive a cab and I’m a widower.”
Nothing like getting the preliminaries out of the way, though I guess when you get into Bjorn and Irene’s age group, time is a valuable commodity.
“Barbara is expecting you. She’s just finishing up with another customer,” Irene says to me, never taking her eyes off Bjorn. “The door is unlocked.”
“Is the other customer dead or alive?” I ask.
“Alive,” Irene says, still maintaining eye contact with Bjorn.
I look over at Bjorn. “Do you want to wait up here or come with me?”
“I think I’ll wait up here. That is if Irene doesn’t mind.”
“Of course not,” Irene says, smiling broadly and revealing a mouthful of yellowed, lipstick-stained teeth.
“Do you have anything to eat?” Bjorn asks.
“I have some cookies.”
“I love cookies.”
As I leave the office and head for the basement door, I hear Irene ask Bjorn if he’s done any preplanning for his funeral. He says he has not, but would love to hear what she has to suggest. Foreplay for eighty-year-olds.
I head downstairs and enter the main prep room. There is an elderly female corpse stretched out on one of the tables and for a minute I think Irene must have been confused. But then I hear voices in a room off to the side and head that way.
Barbara sees me and waves me into the room. A tall blond woman is standing beside her looking picture- perfect and utterly radiant in a tight-fitting pencil skirt, tailored blouse, and peep-toe pumps. As I take in the sleek hair, the deftly applied makeup and the long-legged, stylish grace, something about her strikes a familiar chord. A second later it hits me.
“Chris!”
“Hey, girlfriend,” Chris greets back. “Good to see you again.” Chris, despite the feminine good looks, is actually a transvestite. I met him a few weeks ago at a trendy bar outside of town while investigating the Karen Owenby case. I found myself then feeling much as I do now—envious as hell and amazed that a man can look that good as a woman, not to mention that much better than me.
“I took your advice and met with your stylist here,” Chris says. “You were right. Her talents are magical.”
Barbara smiles at me and says, “Thanks for the referral.”
“My pleasure.”
“Oh, the pleasure is all mine,” Chris says, admiring himself in a mirror hanging on the wall. “And the ambience here is so . . . so . . . delicious.”
That’s not how I would describe it, but hey . . . different strokes and all that.
“And it’s like a two-for-one deal,” Chris goes on. “Barbara helped me pick out all my funeral accessories, everything from the coffin and satin pillow down to the music and flowers.” He pauses and sighs delicately. “I’m going to be a knockout as a corpse.” He walks over to a counter, picks up a large ring-binder notebook, and starts flipping through it. I see several color head-shots of women on the pages. Chris settles on one—an adorable Audrey
