Chapter One
For most of my adult life, people in this town have passed me over as just another dumb blonde fascinated by sex, soap -operas and gossip. My name, Bubbles Yablonsky, doesn’t help matters any. Nor does the fact that my profession is hairdressing, my body resembles a Barbie doll’s and my fashion weaknesses are hot pants and tube tops.
Okay. So, I might not appear to be the brightest bulb in the vanity, but I know something even the police don’t know. I know what really happened to Laura Buchman. Or, at least I think I do.
Like I told my boss and best friend, Sandy, seventeen-year-old cheerleaders as lively as Laura don’t off themselves, not here in Lehigh, Pennsylvania. Lehigh is a no-nonsense, gritty steel town on the Jersey border. Here we treat our cheerleaders with a reverence customarily reserved for minor saints. Here the most important accessories a girl can wear are a homecoming crown on her head and a pom-pom in her hand. A cheerleader from Lehigh would be crazy to give that up.
And Laura was not crazy. Foolish, maybe. Naive. Girlish. Even reckless. But not crazy. I know because I did her hair the day of the so-called suicide. That was ten years ago.
Sandy’s House of Beauty, my place of employment, hasn’t changed much since then. It is still a circa 1960, pink-walled hair salon located on the South Side, four blocks from the maroon Lehigh Steel blast furnaces and right next door to Uncle Manny’s Bar and Grille. This way the men can grab a beer and watch a game at Manny’s while their wives get a comb and set at Sandy’s. Many a Lehigh marriage has been saved by this arrangement.
It’s a pretty tight community of Poles, Slovaks, Germans and Italians on the South Side. Frowning babushkas keep their tidy homes spotless, right down to the sidewalk cracks they scrub with toothbrushes. Every porch has a red geranium for color and a green plastic welcome mat for wiping feet. Every door is decorated with cardboard hearts, leprechauns or ghosts, depending on the nearest upcoming minor holiday. Every kitchen is filled with the spicy aroma of sausage and sauerkraut for dinner, which is served promptly at five. Every woman over forty gets her hair done at the House of Beauty.
We do a big blue-hair business at our salon, which is why the conversation stopped when Laura arrived as a walk-in that Friday morning in September looking as cute as could be. She was wearing a bright white cheerleader’s sweater on which was embossed a big brown F. I assumed F stood for Freedom High School, known in our part of town as the “rich kids” school. Her wavy hair curled into a natural flip at her neck, and her overall demeanor was perky, perky, perky. Standing still she was exhausting.
Her hair, though, was a mess. Roots so dark they screamed for immediate emergency highlights pronto.
“Can you take me?” she asked, holding out a golden strand.
“Honey,” I replied, steering her toward my chair, “it’d be a violation of the stylists’ code of ethics not to.” I launched into a major discussion of treatment options.
“Actually, I’m not looking for more highlights. I want to go black,” she said, appraising herself in the mirror. “Jet black.”
“Black?”
“Black like death.”
“Freedom cheerleaders go black like death, then?” In Lehigh, we often turn statements into questions by ending them with then or say. Keeps the conversation going.
“They do when they’re singing backup.”
I warned Laura that once she went black, there was no turning back. She’d either have to keep it black or grow it out.
“Do it!” she said eagerly. I snapped a plastic apron around her shoulders, mixed the dye (Mediterranean Night) with peroxide and began squirting it over Laura’s scalp, setting the timer for thirty minutes.
In the meantime, I handed Laura a Diet A-Treat Cola. She kicked off her sneakers and relaxed, began to open up. I tend to have this effect on clients, especially women. They trust me with their most personal secrets, most of which center around how much they despise their in-laws or other clients at the salon. When they talk, I keep my mouth shut and my ears open. You’ll get no judgment from Bubbles Yablonsky.
Laura spent most of the wait raving about a garage band called Riders on the Storm and the to-die-for lead singer who sounded to me like he was overdue for a turpentine scrub and rabies shots. Laura said she had a major crush on him and that, on the following night, he was going to play down at The Mill, an old hippie hangout by the park once renowned for regular drug busts. He asked her to do vocals. Hence the radical hairdo and her efforts to drop five pounds by Saturday.
I rinsed out the dye with warm water. On her forehead Mediterranean Night left a thin line of black that I removed by rubbing it with cigarette ashes, an old hairdressing trick.
“Your parents must like him, say?” I asked, knowing full well the answer to that one.
“Uhm, it’s just my dad and me, and he’s totally out of it because he’s never home,” she said as I massaged shampoo behind her ears. “If he knew half the stuff that went on under his roof when he was out of town, he’d flip.”
Ding! Off went my internal maternal warning bell. I conditioned and rinsed her. Then I sat her up and wrapped a green towel around her head. “Like what kind of stuff?”
Laura hesitated. Could she confide in me?
“Like all the parties,” she said finally, “and friends of friends I hardly know who do it in his bed.”
Laura didn’t explain further, and I didn’t press. How many times have I regretted that?
“She was slumming it, coming here to the House of Beauty, you know,” observed Sandy as we watched Laura step into her shiny, apple-red Honda Accord. A gift from Daddy, no doubt. Kids on the South Side don’t drive red Accords. The only red vehicles they drive are rusted.
“Probably she didn’t want her regular beautician to get wind of her skipping school and singing backup down at The Mill,” said I, the sudden voice of reason.
“Hmmm, I wonder. If you ask me, what that girl needs is a mother.”
The next day Laura was dead. Her lifeless body was found behind her house on a chaise longue in the pouring rain.
It was all over the TV news, complete with special reports on the intense peer pressure facing today’s cheerleaders and shots of friends gathered on the Buchmans’ front lawn, hugging and crying. As Sandy rightly assumed, Laura Buchman was from the privileged side of town, near Camelhump. She lived in a modern, cedar-sided house amidst crushed stone, trimmed hedges and an in-ground swimming pool.
None of the news reports mentioned her budding career as a groupie, the Buchman central party house or the scummy boyfriend rock singer. The coroner was mum about the cause of death, except to say preliminary examinations pointed to suicide. Already rumors were flying around town that Laura had killed herself with drug-laced Slim Fast, a freshly blended pitcher of which was discovered in her refrigerator.
“So, that’s why she didn’t care about turning black,” Sandy said. “She knew all along she wouldn’t need a color correction.” Sandy, who had obviously missed her calling as a nurse, handed me a cup of water to calm me down. She even looked like a nurse, from her neatly permed, short brown hair to her blue polyester uniform and sensible-soled Florsheims.
“She didn’t kill herself,” I said, staring at the water.
“Oh? And how do you know?”
“A girl doesn’t commit suicide right before singing backup for a guy she worships. At seventeen you live for that.”
I could not understand why the police weren’t more suspicious, too. It made me angry. “My question, Sandy, is why somebody doesn’t care enough about this girl to at least look into the possibility that she was murdered?”
Sandy held up her hands in surrender. “Don’t yell at me, Bubbles. Yell at the police. You know how they think. They think murders just don’t happen on that side of town.”
That seemed like a stupid policy to me, so I put a call in to the cops about Laura’s last hair appointment. An overworked dispatcher took down the essentials and promised a response. I didn’t hold out much hope, though. Lehigh’s finest is essentially an oxymoron, and as I predicted, the men in blue never stopped by.
For the rest of the day I obsessed about Laura’s death. Twice I left clients too long under the dryers so that their scalps turned the color of boiled lobster. Once I nearly nicked off part of an ear.
“You better go home early,” Sandy said, picking up a pair of scissors I’d dropped for the fifth time that day. “Go get Dan the Man, that lame husband of yours, to wait on you for once.”
Dan the Man was not one of Sandy’s favorite acquaintances. Sandy’s low opinion of Dan stemmed from her fairly accurate observation that he treated me like soap scum. I put Dan through law school by shampooing days at the House of Beauty and waitressing nights at the Tally Ho Tavern after our daughter, Jane, was born. Jane’s infancy was a blur of diapers and cream rinse, talcum and beer, thanks to him.
And what did I get in return? Bupkis. No champagne, no roses, not even a “Thank you, Bubbles, for working two jobs so I could get a degree” note.
I pointed out to Sandy that Dan was busting his butt at work these days, trying to make enough money to move us to the suburbs. Two years earlier we’d bought my childhood home, a brick row house on West Goepp, from my mother, who was itching to liv...
