The New Black Mask (No 8)

Commenting on “Skin Deep,” which features detective V. I. Warshawski, Miss Paretsky writes, “I got the idea while pursuing my futile but rigorous quest for perfect beauty at a skin-care salon in Chicago. In a small, darkened cubicle, one lies supine in a reclining chair, eyes covered with thick layers of wet cotton, face encased in mud, for perhaps half an hour. As I lay there, alone, I heard the sliding door to my little cubicle open and footsteps approach. The paranoia never far from a mystery fan made me give a gasp of horror. I tore at the swathing on my face. But it was too late: the cosmetologist had returned. And I thought, as one does, if someone wanted to come in here and kill you, it would be so simple. You cant see a thing, and the cosmetologist is painting your face with wet stuff, you don’t know what, and some of it smells a bit unpleasant. So there you’d lie, getting poison painted into your skin without even letting out a yelp.

“I had wanted for some time to do a story with Sal, the owner of V. I.’s favorite bar (the Golden Glow), and this skin-care tale seemed a good place to do a little more with her. Since these beauty salons often don’t employ blacks in other than menial jobs, it seemed like a good place to highlight some of the subcutaneous racism of wealth.”

Sara Paretsky’s most recent novels are Deadlock (Doubleday, 1984) and Killing Orders (Morrow, 1985).

1

The warning bell clangs angrily and the submarine dives sharply. Everyone to battle stations. The Nazis pursuing closely, the bell keeps up its insistent clamor, loud, urgent, filling my head. My hands are wet: I can’t remember what my job is in this cramped, tiny boat. If only someone would turn off the alarm bell. I fumble with some switches, pick up an intercom. The noise mercifully stops.

“Vic! Vic, is that you?”

“What?”

“I know it’s late. I’m sorry to call so late, but I just got home from work. It’s Sal, Sal Barthele.”

“Oh, Sal. Sure.” I looked at the orange clock readout. It was four-thirty. Sal owns the Golden Glow, a bar in the south Loop I patronize.

“It’s my sister, Vic. They’ve arrested her. She didn’t do it. I know she didn’t do it.”

“Of course not, Sal— Didn’t do what?”

“They’re trying to frame her. Maybe the manager... I don’t know.”

I swung my legs over the side of the bed. “Where are you?”

She was at her mother’s house, 95th and Vincennes. Her sister had been arrested three hours earlier. They needed a lawyer, a good lawyer. And they needed a detective, a good detective. Whatever my fee was, she wanted me to know they could pay my fee.

“I’m sure you can pay the fee, but I don’t know what you want me to do,” I said as patiently as I could.

“She... they think she murdered that man. She didn’t even know him. She was just giving him a facial. And he dies on her.”

“Sal, give me your mother’s address. I’ll be there in forty minutes.”

The little house on Vincennes was filled with neighbors and relatives murmuring encouragement to Mrs. Barthele. Sal is very black, and statuesque. Close to six feet tall, with a majestic carriage, she can break up a crowd in her bar with a look and a gesture. Mrs. Barthele was slight, frail, and light-skinned. It was hard to picture her as Sal’s mother.

Sal dispersed the gathering with characteristic firmness, telling the group that I was here to save Evangeline and that I needed to see her mother alone.

Mrs. Barthele sniffed over every sentence. “Why did they do that to my baby?” she demanded of me. “You know the police, you know their ways. Why did they come and take my baby, who never did a wrong thing in her life?”

As a white woman, I could be expected to understand the machinations of the white man’s law. And to share responsibility for it. After more of this meandering, Sal took the narrative firmly in hand.

Evangeline worked at La Cygnette, a high-prestige beauty salon on North Michigan. In addition to providing facials and their own brand-name cosmetics at an exorbitant cost, they massaged the bodies and feet of their wealthy clients, stuffed them into steam cabinets, ran them through a Bataan-inspired exercise routine, and fed them herbal teas. Signor Giuseppe would style their hair for an additional charge.

Evangeline gave facials. The previous day she had one client booked after lunch, a Mr. Darnell.

“Men go there a lot?” I interrupted.

Sal made a face. “That’s what I asked Evangeline. I guess it’s part of being a Yuppie — go spend a lot of money getting cream rubbed into your face.”

Anyway, Darnell was to have had his hair styled before his facial, but the hairdresser fell behind schedule and asked Evangeline to do the guy’s face first.

Sal struggled to describe how a La Cygnette facial worked — neither of us had ever checked out her sister’s job. You sit in something like a dentist’s chair, lean back, relax — you’re naked from the waist up, lying under a big down comforter. The facial expert — cosmetician was Evangeline’s official title — puts cream on your hands and sticks them into little electrically-heated mitts, so your hands are out of commission if you need to protect yourself. Then she puts stuff on your face, covers your eyes with heavy pads, and goes away for twenty minutes while the face goo sinks into your hidden pores.

Apparently while this Darnell lay back deeply relaxed, someone had rubbed some kind of poison into his skin. “When Evangeline came back in to clean his face, he was sick — heaving, throwing up, it was awful. She screamed for help and started trying to clean his face — it was terrible, he kept vomiting on her. They took him to the hospital, but he died around ten tonight.

“They came to get Baby at midnight — you’ve got to help her, V. I. — even if the guy tried something on her, she never did a thing like that — she’d haul off and slug him, maybe, but rubbing poison into his face? You go help her.”

2

Evangeline Barthele was a younger, darker edition of her mother. At most times, she probably had Sal’s energy — sparks of it flared now and then during our talk — but a night in the holding cells had worn her down.

I brought a clean suit and makeup for her: justice may be blind but her administrators aren’t. We talked while she changed.

“This Darnell — you sure of the name? — had he ever been to the salon before?”

She shook her head. “I never saw him. And I don’t think the other girls knew him either. You know, if a client’s a good tipper or a bad one they’ll comment on it, be glad or whatever that he’s come in. Nobody said anything about this man.”

“Where did he live?”

She shook her head. “I never talked to the guy, V. I.”

“What about the PestFree?” I’d read the arrest report and talked briefly to an old friend in the M.E.’s office. To keep roaches and other vermin out of their posh Michigan Avenue offices, La Cygnette used a potent product containing a wonder chemical called chorpyrifos. My informant had been awe-struck — “Only an operation that didn’t know shit about chemicals would leave chorpyrifos lying around. It’s got a toxicity rating of five — it gets you through the skin — you only need a couple of tablespoons to kill a big man if you know where to put it.”

Whoever killed Darnell had either known a lot of chemistry or been lucky — into his nostrils and mouth, with some rubbed into the face for good measure, the pesticide had made him convulsive so quickly that even if he knew who killed him he’d have been unable to talk, or even reason.

Evangeline said she knew where the poison was kept — everyone who worked there knew, knew it was lethal and not to touch it, but it was easy to get at. Just in a little supply room that wasn’t kept locked.

“So why you? They have to have more of a reason than just that you were there.”

She shrugged bitterly. “I’m the only black professional at La Cygnette — the other blacks working there sweep rooms and haul trash. I’m trying hard not to be paranoid, but I gotta wonder.”

She insisted Darnell hadn’t made a pass at her, or done anything to provoke an attack — she hadn’t hurt the guy. As for anyone else who might have had opportunity, salon employees were always passing through the halls, going in and out of the little cubicles where they treated clients — she’d seen any number of people, all with legitimate business in the halls, but she hadn’t seen anyone emerging from the room where Darnell was sitting.

When we finally got to bond court later that morning, I tried to argue circumstantial evidence — any of La Cygnette’s fifty or so employees could have committed the crime, since all had access and no one had motive. The prosecutor hit me with a very unpleasant surprise: the police had uncovered evidence linking my client to the dead man. He was a furniture buyer from Kansas City who came to Chicago six times a year, and the doorman and the maids at his hotel had identified Evangeline without any trouble as the woman who accompanied him on his visits.

Bail was denied. I had a furious talk with Evangeline in one of the interrogation rooms before she went back to the holding cells.

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me? I walked into the courtroom and got blindsided.”

“They’re lying,” she insisted.

“Three people identified you. If you don’t start with the truth right now, you’re going to have to find a new lawyer and a new detective. Your mother may not understand, but for sure Sal will.”

“You can’t tell my mother. You can’t tell Sal!”

“I’m going to have to give them some reason for dropping your case, and knowing Sal it’s going to have to be the truth.”

For the first time she looked really upset. “You’re my lawyer. You should believe my story before you believe a bunch of strangers you never saw before.”

“I’m telling you, Evangeline, I’m going to drop your case. I can’t represent you when I know you’re lying. If you killed Darnell we can work out a defense. Or if you didn’t kill him and knew him we can work something out, and I can try to find the real killer. But when I know you’ve been seen with the guy any number of times, I can’t go into court telling people you never met him before.”

Tears appeared on the ends of her lashes. “The whole reason I didn’t say anything was so Mama wouldn’t know. If I tell you the truth, you’ve got to promise me you aren’t running back to Vincennes Avenue talking to her.”

I agreed. Whatever the story was, I couldn’t believe Mrs. Barthele hadn’t heard hundreds like it before. But we each make our own separate peace with our mothers.

Evangeline met Darnell at a party two years earlier. She liked him, he liked her — not the romance of the century, but they enjoyed spending time together. She’d gone on a two-week trip to Europe with him last year, telling her mother she was going with a girlfriend.

“First of all, she has very strict morals. No sex outside marriage. I’m thirty, mind you, but that doesn’t count with her. Second, he’s white, and she’d murder me. She really would. I think that’s why I never fell in love with him — if we wanted to get married I’d never be able to explain it to Mama.”

This latest trip to Chicago, Darnell thought it would be fun to see what Evangeline did for a living, so he booked an appointment at La Cygnette. She hadn’t told anyone there she knew him. And when she found him sick and dying she’d panicked and lied.

“And if you tell my mother of this, V. I. — I’ll put a curse on you. My father was from Haiti and he knew a lot of good ones.”

“I won’t tell your mother. But unless they nuked Lebanon this morning or murdered the mayor, you’re going to get a lot of lines in the paper. It’s bound to be in print.”

She wept at that, wringing her hands. So after watching her go off with the sheriff’s deputies, I called Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star to plead with him not to put Evangeline’s liaison in the paper. “If you do she’ll wither your testicles. Honest.”

“I don’t know, Vic. You know the Sun-Times is bound to have some kind of screamer headline like DEAD MAN FOUND IN FACE-LICKING SEX ORGY. I can’t sit on a story like this when all the other papers are running it.”

I knew he was right, so I didn’t push my case very hard.

He surprised me by saying, “Tell you what: you find the real killer before my deadline for tomorrow’s morning edition and I’ll keep your client’s personal life out of it. The sex scoop came in too late for today’s paper. The Trib prints on our schedule and they don’t have it, and the Sun-Times runs older, slower presses, so they have to print earlier.”

I reckoned I had about eighteen hours. Sherlock Holmes had solved tougher problems in less time.

3

Roland Darnell had been the chief buyer of living-room furnishings for Alexander Dumas, a high-class Kansas City department store. He used to own his own furniture store in the nearby town of Lawrence, but lost both it and his wife when he was arrested for drug smuggling ten years earlier. Because of some confusion about his guilt — he claimed his partner, who disappeared the night he was arrested, was really responsible — he’d only served two years. When he got out, he moved to Kansas City to start a new life.

I learned this much from my friends at the Chicago police. At least, my acquaintances. I wondered how much of the story Evangeline had known. Or her mother. If her mother didn’t want her child having a white lover, how about a white ex-con, ex- (presumably) drug-smuggling lover?

I sat biting my knuckles for a minute. It was eleven now. Say they started printing the morning edition at two the next morning, I’d have to have my story by one at the latest. I could follow one line, and one line only — I couldn’t afford to speculate about Mrs. Barthele — and anyway, doing so would only get me killed. By Sal. So I looked up the area code for Lawrence, Kansas, and found their daily newspaper.

The Lawrence Daily Journal-World had set up a special number for handling press inquiries. A friendly woman with a strong drawl told me Darnell’s age (forty-four); place of birth (Eudora, Kansas); ex-wife’s name (Ronna Perkins); and ex-partner’s name (John Crenshaw). Ronna Perkins was living elsewhere in the country and the Journal-World was protecting her privacy. John Crenshaw had disappeared when the police arrested Darnell.

Crenshaw had done an army stint in Southeast Asia in the late sixties. Since much of the bamboo furniture the store specialized in came from the Far East, some people speculated that Crenshaw had set up the smuggling route when he was out there in the service. Especially since Kansas City immigration officials discovered heroin in the hollow tubes making up chair backs. If Darnell knew anything about the smuggling, he had never revealed it.

“That’s all we know here, honey. Of course, you could come on down and try to talk to some people. And we can wire you photos if you want.”

I thanked her politely — my paper didn’t run too many photographs. Or even have wire equipment to accept them. A pity — I could have used a look at Crenshaw and Ronna Perkins.

La Cygnette was on an upper floor of one of the new marble skyscrapers at the top end of the Magnificent Mile. Tall, white doors opened onto a hushed waiting room reminiscent of a high-class funeral parlor. The undertaker, a middle-aged highly made-up woman seated at a table that was supposed to be French provincial, smiled at me condescendingly.

“What can we do for you?”

“I’d like to see Angela Carlson. I’m a detective.”

She looked nervously at two clients seated in a far corner. I lowered my voice. “I’ve come about the murder.”

“But... but they made an arrest.”

I smiled enigmatically. At least I hoped it looked enigmatic. “The police never close the door on all options until after the trial.” If she knew anything about the police she’d know that was a lie — once they’ve made an arrest you have to get a presidential order to get them to look at new evidence.

The undertaker nodded nervously and called Angela Carlson in a whisper on the house phone. Evangeline had given me the names of the key players at La Cygnette; Carlson was the manager.

She met me in the doorway leading from the reception area into the main body of the salon. We walked on thick, silver pile through a white maze with little doors opening onto it. Every now and then we’d pass a white-coated attendant who gave the manager a subdued hello. When we went by a door with a police order slapped to it, Carlson winced nervously.

“When can we take that off? Everybody’s on edge and that sealed door doesn’t help. Our bookings are down as it is.”

“I’m not on the evidence team, Ms. Carlson. You’ll have to ask the lieutenant in charge when they’ve got what they need.”

I poked into a neighboring cubicle. It contained a large white dentist’s chair and a tray covered with crimson pots and bottles, all with the cutaway swans which were the salon’s trademark. While the manager fidgeted angrily I looked into a tiny closet where clients changed — it held a tiny sink and a few coat hangers.

Finally she burst out, “Didn’t your people get enough of this yesterday? Don’t you read your own reports?”

“I like to form my own impressions, Ms. Carlson. Sorry to have to take your time, but the sooner we get everything cleared up, the faster your customers will forget this ugly episode.”

She sighed audibly and led me on angry heels to her office, although the thick carpeting took the intended ferocity out of her stride. The office was another of the small treatment rooms with a desk and a menacing phone console. Photographs of a youthful Mme. de Leon, founder of La Cygnette, covered the walls.

Ms. Carlson looked through a stack of pink phone messages. “I have an incredibly busy schedule, Officer. So if you could get to the point...”

“I want to talk to everyone with whom Darnell had an appointment yesterday. Also the receptionist on duty. And before I do that I want to see their personnel files.”

“Really! All these people were interviewed yesterday.” Her eyes narrowed suddenly. “Are you really with the police? You’re not, are you? You’re a reporter. I want you out of here now. Or I’ll call the real police.”

I took my license photostat from my wallet. “I’m a detective. That’s what I told your receptionist. I’ve been retained by the Barthele family. Ms. Barthele is not the murderer and I want to find out who the real culprit is as fast as possible.”

She didn’t bother to look at the license. “I can barely tolerate answering police questions. I’m certainly not letting some snoop for hire take up my time. The police have made an arrest on extremely good evidence. I suppose you think you can drum up a fee by getting Evangeline’s family excited about her innocence, but you’ll have to look elsewhere for your money.”

I tried an appeal to her compassionate side, using half-forgotten arguments from my court appearances as a public defender. (Outstanding employee, widowed mother, sole support, intense family pride, no prior arrests, no motive.) No sale.

“Ms. Carlson, you the owner or the manager here?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Just curious about your stake in the success of the place and your responsibility for decisions. It’s like this: you’ve got a lot of foreigners working here. The immigration people will want to come by and check out their papers.

“You’ve got lots and lots of tiny little rooms. Are they sprinklered? Do you have emergency exits? The fire department can make a decision on that.

“And how come your only black professional employee was just arrested and you’re not moving an inch to help her out? There are lots of lawyers around who’d be glad to look at a discrimination suit against La Cygnette.

“Now if we could clear up Evangeline’s involvement fast, we could avoid having all these regulatory people trampling around upsetting your staff and your customers. How about it?”

She sat in indecisive rage for several minutes: how much authority did I have, really? Could I offset the munificent fees the salon and the building owners paid to various public officials just to avoid such investigations? Should she call headquarters for instruction? Or her lawyer? She finally decided that even if I didn’t have a lot of power I could be enough of a nuisance to affect business. Her expression compounded of rage and defeat, she gave me the files I wanted.

Darnell had been scheduled with a masseuse, the hair expert Signor Giuseppe, and with Evangeline. I read their personnel files, along with that of the receptionist who had welcomed him to La Cygnette, to see if any of them might have hailed from Kansas City or had any unusual traits, such as an arrest record for heroin smuggling. The files were very sparce. Signor Giuseppe Fruttero hailed from Milan. He had no next-of-kin to be notified in the event of an accident. Not even a good friend. Bruna, the masseuse, was Lithuanian, unmarried, living with her mother. Other than the fact that the receptionist had been born as Jean Evans in Hammond but referred to herself as Monique from New Orleans, I saw no evidence of any kind of cover-up.

Angela Carlson denied knowing either Ronna Perkins or John Crenshaw or having any employees by either of those names. She had never been near Lawrence herself. She grew up in Evansville, Indiana, came to Chicago to be a model in 1978, couldn’t cut it, and got into the beauty business. Angrily she gave me the names of her parents in Evansville and summoned the receptionist.

Monique was clearly close to sixty, much too old to be Roland Darnell’s ex-wife. Nor had she heard of Ronna or Crenshaw.

“How many people knew that Darnell was going to be in the salon yesterday?”

“Nobody knew.” She laughed nervously. “I mean, of course I knew — I made the appointment with him. And Signor Giuseppe knew when I gave him his schedule yesterday. And Bruna, the masseuse, of course, and Evangeline.”

“Well, who else could have seen their schedules?”

She thought frantically, her heavily mascaraed eyes rolling in agitation. With another nervous giggle she finally said, “I suppose anyone could have known. I mean, the other cosmeticians and the makeup artists all come out for their appointments at the same time. I mean, if anyone was curious they could have looked at the other people’s lists.”

Carlson was frowning. So was I. “I’m trying to find a woman who’d be forty now, who doesn’t talk much about her past. She’s been divorced and she won’t have been in the business long. Any candidates?”

Carlson did another mental search, then went to the file cabinets. Her mood was shifting from anger to curiosity and she flipped through the files quickly, pulling five in the end.

“How long has Signor Giuseppe been here?”

“When we opened our Chicago branch in 1980 he came to us from Miranda’s — I guess he’d been there for two years. He says he came to the States from Milan in 1970.”

“He a citizen? Has he got a green card?”

“Oh, yes. His papers are in good shape. We are very careful about that at La Cygnette.” My earlier remark about the immigration department had clearly stung. “And now I really need to get back to my own business. You can look at those files in one of the consulting rooms — Monique, find one that won’t be used today.”

It didn’t take me long to scan the five files, all uninformative. Before returning them to Monique I wandered on through the back of the salon. In the rear a small staircase led to an upper story. At the top was another narrow hall lined with small offices and storerooms. A large mirrored room at the back filled with hanging plants and bright lights housed Signor Giuseppe. A dark-haired man with a pointed beard and a bright smile, he was ministering gaily to a thin, middle-aged woman, talking and laughing while he deftly teased her hair into loose curls.

He looked at me in the minor when I entered. “You are here for the hair, Signora? You have the appointment?”

“No, Signor Giuseppe. Sono qui perchè la sua fama se è sparsa di fronte a lei. Milano è una bella città, non è vero?”

He stopped his work for a moment and held up a deprecating hand. “Signora, it is my policy to speak only English in my adopted country.”

“Una vera stupida e ignorante usanza io direi.” I beamed sympathetically and sat down on a high stool next to an empty customer chair. There were seats for two clients. Since Signor Giuseppe reigned alone, I pictured him spinning at high speed between customers, snipping here, pinning there.

“Signora, if you do not have the appointment, will you please leave? Signora Dotson here, she does not prefer the audience.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Dotson,” I said to the lady’s chin. “I’m a detective. I need to talk to Signor Giuseppe, but I’ll wait.”

I strolled back down the hall and entertained myself by going into one of the storerooms and opening little pots of La Cygnette creams and rubbing them into my skin. I looked in a mirror and could already see an improvement. If I got Evangeline sprung maybe she’d treat me to a facial.

Signor Giuseppe appeared with a plastically groomed Mrs. Dotson. He had shed his barber’s costume and was dressed for the street. I followed them down the stairs. When we got to the bottom I said, “In case you’re thinking of going back to Milan — or even to Kansas — I have a few questions.”

Mrs. Dotson clung to the hairdresser, ready to protect him.

“I need to speak to him alone, Mrs. Dotson. I have to talk to him about bamboo.”

“I’ll get Miss Carlson, Signor Giuseppe,” his guardian offered.

“No, no, Signora. I will deal with this crazed woman myself. A million thanks. Grazie, grazie.”

“Remember, no Italian in your adopted America,” I reminded him nastily.

Mrs. Doston looked at us uncertainly.

“I think you should get Ms. Carlson,” I said. “Also a police escort. Fast.”

She made up her mind to do something, whether to get help or flee I wasn’t sure, but she scurried down the corridor. As soon as she had disappeared, he took me by the arm and led me into one of the consulting rooms.

“Now, who are you and what is this?” His accent had improved substantially.

“I’m V. I. Warshawski. Roland Darnell told me you were quite an expert on fitting drugs into bamboo furniture.”

I wasn’t quite prepared for the speed of his attack. His hands were around my throat. He was squeezing and spots began dancing in front of me. I didn’t try to fight his arms, just kicked sharply at his shin, following with my knee to his stomach. The pressure at my neck eased. I turned in a half circle and jammed my left elbow into his rib cage. He let go.

I backed to the door, keeping my arms up in front of my face and backed into Angela Carlson.

“What on earth are you doing with Signor Giuseppe?” she asked.

“Talking to him about furniture.” I was out of breath. “Get the police and don’t let him leave the salon.”

A small crowd of white-coated cosmeticians had come to the door of the tiny treatment room. I said to them, “This isn’t Giuseppe Fruttero. It’s John Crenshaw. If you don’t believe me, try speaking Italian to him — he doesn’t understand it. He’s probably never been to Milan. But he’s certainly been to Thailand, and he knows an awful lot about heroin.”

4

Sal handed me the bottle of Black Label. “It’s yours, Vic. Kill it tonight or save it for some other time. How did you know he was Roland Darnell’s ex-partner?”

“I didn’t. At least not when I went to La Cygnette. I just knew it had to be someone in the salon who killed him, and it was most likely someone who knew him in Kansas. And that meant either Darnell’s ex-wife or his partner. And Giuseppe was the only man on the professional staff. And then I saw he didn’t know Italian — after praising Milan and telling him he was stupid in the same tone of voice and getting no response it made me wonder.”

“We owe you a lot, Vic. The police would never have dug down to find that. You gotta thank the lady, Mama.”

Mrs. Barthele grudgingly gave me her thin hand. “But how come those police said Evangeline knew that Darnell man? My baby wouldn’t know some convict, some drug smuggler.”

“He wasn’t a drug smuggler, Mama. It was his partner. The police have proved all that now. Roland Darnell never did anything wrong.” Evangeline, chic in red with long earrings that bounced as she spoke, made the point hotly.

Sal gave her sister a measuring look. “All I can say, Evangeline, is it’s a good thing you never had to put your hand on a Bible in court about Mr. Darnell.”

I hastily poured a drink and changed the subject.