The salon was a madhouse when Max arrived at a little before nine in the morning.
Witt had taken her home, tried to coddle her like an invalid until she’d shooed him away. Go do some detecting, she’d admonished. And he had. She hoped.
There’d been a message on her machine from Miles Lamont. Could she please come to work by nine? The Saturday receptionist wasn’t going to make it. Or something. She hadn’t listened to the end, erasing him in mid-word. Spending the day sifting through conversational clues at A Cut Above would sure beat waiting for Witt to tell her they’d found Nadine’s body.
“Oh Max.” When she walked in, Miles grabbed her arm with both hands, cooing, “thank you, thank you, thank you. Someone booked Ariel with two highlights half an hour apart. Rochelle,” Larry, “is PMSing. Danny,” Curly, “just broke up with her boyfriend and she’s an absolute wreck, and Brenda,” who else but Moe, “turned Mrs. Graham’s hair orange.”
Max couldn’t believe those things were his major concerns in life, so she verbally deflated his balloon. “You forgot to mention that today is the one-week anniversary of Tiffany’s death.”
His features hardened for a split second, and his grip on her arm tightened, his fingernails digging into her like talons. Then his face fell. His jaw went slack, his jowls hung, his lips curved down in caricature of a frown.
But it was feigned. She knew it. He could be The Watcher. At the very least, he knew way more about Tiffany’s death than he’d told the police. But how to get it out of him without arousing his suspicion?
But did it even matter? If he was The Watcher, Jake would have told Miles about the accusations she’d tossed out. He should already be suspicious. He should already have fired her.
Why hadn’t he?
Too many questions, too few answers. For the moment, Max let Miles try to wriggle out of the embarrassing position she’d put him in. He cleared his throat. “I hadn’t forgotten that our dear Tiffany died a week ago. I do think it’s better to put these things behind us. I mean, murder, it’s ... ” He waved his hand in the air, searching for a word.
“Messy?” she supplied. “Makes you wonder if it could happen this close to home again.” She folded her arms across her chest and regarded him over her upturned nose. “Are you walking the girls to their cars at night?”
He looked at her a moment. His chin shifted subtly to the left. The conversation shifted with it, and Miles assumed control. She had the sense that up to now he’d been acting for her benefit. “Why, that’s an excellent idea, Max. Though of course, Tiffany wasn’t killed here.” His gaze slid from her eyes to the end of her nose, then down to her throat.
Max pursed her lips. “As I recall, the police don’t know where she was killed, only where her body was dumped.”
“But,” he raised his index finger, “she was seen at the Round Up that night. And her body was found behind the building.”
Max pushed on doggedly. “That doesn’t mean she wasn’t followed from here to the Round Up.”
“She went home first.” He ah-hummed, then added, “Or so the police said.”
For the life of her, she couldn’t say what the throat-clearing meant. She had no idea how to read the man. It had been that way from the beginning, and she was getting nowhere fast with her questions.
And why hadn’t he squashed her questions? Positions reversed, that would be the first thing she’d have done.
“Someone might have been stalking her.” Desperation crept into her voice. She tamped it down. “One of her clients. One of her old boyfriends. Did the police ask you if you’d seen anyone hanging around?”
“I don’t remember what they asked. Perhaps you should bring it up with them. You could call them.” He lifted his habitual black tunic to reach for his wallet, then flipped through wads of crumpled paper and one dollar bills. “I have a card here somewhere. The dark one. He definitely needed shaping to cover that receding hairline. Ahh.” He found it and handed it to her. “Talk to them. They need every bit of information they can get if they’re to catch our unlucky Tiffany’s killer.”
Max took the card. She just might use it, help Witt out in his quest to pump the detectives for information. “Luck had nothing to do with what happened to her.”
“Poor choice of words.” Fire sparked to life in Miles’s eyes. Stroking his chin, he said, “Now that you mention it, I do recall seeing a man. Quite a few times, in fact. Across the street at the liquor store. Outside the Jack-in-the-Box on the corner. By the barber shop.”
Yeah, right. “What did he look like?”
Miles gave her a wide, innocent look that said the little dumpling was getting ready to tell a whopper of a lie. Had he told the cops the same one he was about to tell her?