Max smiled. “Thanks a bunch.”
Waving a hand in Moe’s direction, Ariel grimaced. “And don’t mind them. They go a little wild when Miles isn’t around.”
“And where is Miles?” Max had expected the answer to come up in conversation some time during the morning. She’d been wrong. It now required the direct approach.
“Beauty college.”
“My God, he owns his own shop, and he’s still going to beauty school?”
“They’re interviewing new stylists.” Her voice dipped on the last, and she glanced over her shoulder at the three girls on the other side of the room.
“Boy, that’s quick,” Max shot back.
“Pippa says we’ll lose clients if we don’t find someone ASAP.”
“Pippa?”
“Pippa Louise Lamont. Miles’s wife. Pippa has the business sense, and Miles has the people sense.”
And Miles liked women especially, as evidenced by his shop harem. Max wondered how Pippa felt about that. As soon as the infamous couple arrived, Max was sure she’d find out.
“Why a beauty college? I’d think Miles would want someone with experience.” Considering that he’d asked her for five years of work history on only a receptionist’s position.
Ariel made a face. “He likes to mold his girls. We all started with him.”
“Amazing.” Max took the conversation one step further. “What happens if anyone ever wants to leave?”
“None of us has ever left.”
Except Tiffany. And she’d been murdered.
Ariel clamped her lips shut as if the very same thought had occurred to her.
She watched the approach of a middle-aged, impeccably dressed woman with stylish, silvery hair. “Here’s my next client. Gotta get back to work.” Ariel spoke quickly, her tone tinged with what seemed like relief.
That seemed to be as much gossip, if it could be called that, as Max was going to get for one day. “Thanks for the help. I can see why your last receptionist quit.”
“Nadine?”
“Was that her name?” Max, having looked through the mail and every other written piece of evidence she could get her hands on, already knew the previous receptionist’s name had been Nadine Johnson. No sense, though, in telegraphing to Ariel that she’d been snooping.
Ariel touched the beads she wore at her throat, twirling them around her fingers nervously. “You better not mention Nadine, okay?”
“Why not?” And to whom, Max wondered.
“Take my word for it, Miles wouldn’t like it. So don’t ask about Nadine, and for God’s sake, don’t mention Tiffany, either.”
Hmm, interesting. Very interesting. Max decided she’d ask the head honcho the first opportunity she got.
*
The opportunity did not present itself that day. Neither Miles Lamont nor his supposedly demanding wife Pippa Louise arrived at the salon.
Max couldn’t ask any burning questions of Miles, nor did she get her promised haircut.
She was too damn tired to care.
At a little before seven that night, Max lay spread-eagled across her twin-size bed. Buzzard had curled into ball in the area beneath her armpit. Her discarded shoes lay on the fifth and the eighth step of the staircase that led up from the outside door of her second-floor studio. Her jacket never made it to the back of the chair, falling instead in a heap two feet short of its mark. Her tie had slithered from the closet doorknob into a crumpled ball on the floor.
Max’s feet throbbed. Her head pulsed in time with the rap beat from her neighbor’s open window. Her stomach growled in rebellion against the smell of curry something-or-other drifting in on the breeze.
Not that curry was bad, it was just strong. Max’s stomach, after the anorexic abuse it had suffered in her teens, was not courageous under stress. Besides, the steak she’d eaten in Witt’s company last night still seemed to wriggle inside her.
“You’re too skinny, my love.” Cameron liked to punctuate a criticism with an endearment.
If she wasn’t on the ball, sometimes he got away with it. But not tonight. Despite her exhaustion, Max was definitely up for some verbal sparring. She didn’t even bother to open her eyes. “Shut up.”
“Ah, you’re in a good mood.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“I just have a couple of questions.”
“Funny, you don’t look like my shrink.”
He laughed easily. “I’m all the shrink you need. When I’m done with you, you’ll be healthier than Freud himself.”
“That’s not saying much. Now leave me alone. I’m going to sleep.”
“Like I was saying, I have a question. Tell me, why you didn’t ask Ariel where she got the name Sanchez?”
She made a face, but kept her eyes closed. “Why on earth would I ask that?”
“You wondered about it. Maybe you should ask her.”
“It isn’t any of my business.”
“It is when you’re trying to find a killer.”
Her lids snapped open. “You’re not saying that Ariel—”