Liquidambar by Chris Bell

Author:Chris Bell [Bell, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780992248901
Publisher: wordsSHIFTminds
Published: 2004-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

*

I take the stairs down to the restaurant. It’s another fifteen minutes after that before Detective Oakway emerges from it, leaves the food halls and strolls out of the building as though it’s a pleasant Sunday afternoon and not the afternoon of the day on which Shirley Nivison was murdered.

He crosses Shakespeare Square at a diagonal. I tail him at a distance, and watch him enter a basement barbershop on Grand Avenue. At street level is a double railing through which I can just see, above half-curtains hanging on a brass rail, the top of Oakway’s head as he shakes a hand on the end of a white sleeve.

The barber is a diminutive Mediterranean type, and has a roundish face that has never quite grown up. Although he has a good head of thick black hair, it looks as though he has dyed it for the sake of his business. He has rounded, down-turned ears like a baby’s — they haven’t grown up either, although he must be well into his fifties.

A brunette in her mid-twenties is sitting at a narrow, glass-topped table, studying the appointments book. She is wearing an unflattering olive-green dress with a broad white collar that gives her the look of a clown; but she has very kissable, crimson lips and a round, cherubic face with eyebrows plucked down to a thin arc. She might be the barber’s youngest sister or niece and, from the look of her French-polished fingernails, could be a manicurist.

The barber makes a good impression on me even before he starts to cut hair. He puts a cotton bib around Oakway, takes a length of four-inch-wide crepe bandage from a chrome dispenser on the counter and inserts a loop of this around Oakway’s neck, under his shirt collar. He then shakes out a grey pinstriped cape, drapes it over Oakway’s front, pins it at the back of his neck and folds the crepe down over it to cover his shirt collar entirely.

He holds up his scissors to catch the light while looking intently at his customer’s reflection, as the blades close against one another.

The doorbell gives a tidy, satisfying gong as I enter and the cherubic assistant looks up from the book, proffering a welcoming smile.

“Do you have an appointment, sir?”

“Just about to make one,” I lie. “Good afternoon, Detective-Lieutenant Oakway.”

Oakway lowers his eyes, the barber raises his and we all meet briefly at the mirror. “Afternoon,” he barks.

“Can you fit me in on Tuesday?” I ask the cherubic assistant, still looking at Oakway’s reflection in the mirror. His own eyes have gone back to the ceiling.

“That’s today, sir. Today is Tuesday.” She looks up at me with a confused expression on her round, angelic face.

“Next week?”

All the pages of her appointments book appear to be quite blank, but she makes a big act of studying them carefully. “At eleven-thirty or at three o’clock, sir.”

“Three will be fine. The name’s Blod. May I take a seat?” I take one without waiting for

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