“The men in her life treated her like dog crap, pardon my French. No man would get away with that kind of bull around me. A frying pan right between the eyes is what they’d get.” Lilah reached for a pair of clippers, then cut back Max’s cuticles. “I used to say, ‘Wendy, get a grip. You don’t have to take this. Tell ’em to go blow. Give ’em a taste of their own medicine.’”
“And did she?”
“What do you think?” Lilah rolled her eyes beneath heavily mascaraed lashes. “She’d say ‘you’re right, Lilah,’ and then she’d come back the next time with the same story. I encouraged her, I even coached her exactly how to say it, but she just didn’t have enough...” Searching for a word, she waved the nail implement in the air. “Moxy, I guess.”
“Did she ever fight with her husband?” The questions went on. During the next half hour, Max learned everything she could possibly want to know about Wendy’s feelings, but not one thing that might lead to her killer.
The buffing, filing, shaping, and clipping part was done, and the manicurist was silent a moment as she poured white acrylic powder into one small bowl and some foul-smelling astringent solution into another. “This might sting a little when it first goes on.” She moistened the powder and spread it onto Max’s nails. “I was the last person to see her alive, you know.”
The damn stuff did sting. “Mmm.” Max’s answer was non-committal, designed to draw Lilah out. Not that the woman needed any help. This could prove promising.
“The last person except for her killer, of course. The police are real interested in whatever I might know,” the manicurist continued.
Ahh, so Detective DeWitt had already been here. Max would’ve been disappointed if he hadn’t traced every move of Wendy’s last day on earth. “I guess they must have asked you if Wendy seemed strange or preoccupied.”
“Sure did. She was real keyed up. Worse than usual. I couldn’t get her to relax, even had to redo her polish on two fingers when she muffed ’em up.” The stroke of the brush against Max’s nails was almost soothing. Lilah went on. “Wendy always wore real placid colors, you know, pastels, like Hawaiian Sunset or Bali Blush or Peach Blossom. Not that they didn’t look good on her, but she never went for the wild stuff.”
That didn’t jibe with the vibrant colors in Wendy’s date book.
“I tried to get her to go for Down-n-Dirty Burgundy, but she freaked just at the name. It was that husband of hers.” Max’s blood pulsed a half beat faster as Lilah spoke. “He hated it when she wore anything bright. He was the one who insisted on a silver car. Wendy wanted red. She loved red. But I never could get her to wear Red Hot Lips.”
Lilah didn’t miss a brushstroke as she talked, dipping the tip into both solution and powder. She finished one hand and waggled her fingers for the other.
“And that’s what you told the police? That Hal wouldn’t let her wear red nail polish?”
“Are you kidding?” she scoffed. “What the hell would they care what nail polish she wore or that her husband even had to approve the color of her car?”
What those insightful goodies revealed about Hal and their relationship would definitely interest Witt.
Lilah lifted Max’s hand, studying the thickness of the goop she’d just applied on each nail. “What I told the police was that after wearing pastel colors for the five years she’s been coming here, Wendy suddenly wanted Cajun Spice. And she bought some navy mascara when she was strictly black-brown.”
Max gasped for emphasis. “Where do you think she went that night?”
“Somewhere that husband of hers would have been pissed as hell about if he’d known.”
An image of Nicholas Drake popped into Max’s head, followed by that of Hal Gregory admitting his wife had had an affair.
The question was had Hal known Wendy planned to see her lover that night? And if so, what had he done about it?
*
Max’s fingers still tingled as she left the shop. Holding her nails up to the late afternoon sunlight, she admired the Cajun Spice polish. It was bright, not quite red, not quite orange. Sexy. It made her feel sexy.
“Like a woman who enjoys letting a man fuck her up the ass,” Cameron murmured from somewhere off to her right.
“Quit mentioning that,” she whispered in case anyone noticed she was talking to herself.
“I’ll quit talking about it when you admit you liked it.”
She had liked it.
“Say it aloud, so everyone can hear you. So you can hear yourself.”
Never. But she did wonder if Cajun Spice had made Wendy feel sexy and alive at six o’clock last Monday night. Five hours before she died.
Max ran across the street, then turned at the corner by the bank.
“Oof.” She smacked into a well-muscled chest. Her nose bumped the man’s chin, and her purse skidded down her arm. She had time only to register the fact that he smelled of some subtle aftershave before she remembered her manicure. “My nails!”
He steadied her, his big hands on her shoulders—God, he smelled good—and asked, “All right now?”