Part 3 (1/2)
”Bill's going to owe me big time for this,” Hannah grumbled as she loosened the tie on the green plastic bag and began to search through the contents. Several crumpled bread wrappers and a slew of illicit cigarette b.u.t.ts later, she encountered two Styrofoam cups.
”Gottcha!” Hannah crowed. She was about to grab the cups when she remembered that movie and television detectives always used protective gloves and evidence bags. If there were fingerprints on the cup with the lipstick, she certainly didn't want to smudge them. Since Hannah didn't happen to carry gloves or evidence bags on her catering jobs, she settled for slipping a bread wrapper over her hand, plucking out the two cups, one by one, and depositing them inside a second empty bread wrapper.
With the evidence secured, Hannah slid down from the hood of her Suburban and climbed into the driver's seat. As she started her engine and drove out of the school parking lot, she felt a little foolish about the elaborate precautions she'd taken. Modeling herself after a television detective was crazy unless she was dumb enough to believe that the prefix of every telephone number in the entire country was five-five-five.
Chapter Four.
Lisa was filling a bag with Peanut b.u.t.ter Melts and her eyes grew as round as saucers as Hannah blew in the back door. ”Hannah! What...?”
”Don't ask. I'm going in to take a quick shower.”
”But Bill's here and he needs to talk to you.”
Hannah ducked into the bathroom and poked her head out the door. ”Where is he?”
”Out in front. He's minding the counter while I pack up this order for Mrs. Jessup.”
”Give him a mug of coffee and send him back here. I'll be out just as soon as I'm decent.”
The moment she'd closed the bathroom door behind her, Hannah peeled off her filthy clothes and stuffed them into a laundry bag. Then she climbed into the minuscule metal enclosure that Al Percy had called an ”added bonus” when he'd shown her the building, and cranked on the water. She'd used the shower once before, when a fifty-pound bag of flour had burst as she'd muscled it up to the surface of the work island. Her shower might be tiny and cramped, but it worked. Once she was as clean as she could get within the tight confines, she shut off the water and stepped out, toweling off in record time.
She put on the extra set of clothes she kept for emergencies: a pair of worn jeans with a threadbare rear and an old Minnesota Vikings sweats.h.i.+rt that had faded from royal purple to a dull shade of pewter. The gold block letters had deteriorated into a peeling smudge, but at least she didn't smell like decaying food. After running a wide-toothed comb through her frizzy red hair, she slipped her feet into the pair of cross-country trainers she hadn't worn since the last time she'd fallen for the old ”jogging is good for you” routine, and opened the door.
Bill was sitting on a stool at the work island. There were cookie crumbs on the otherwise sparkling surface and Hannah a.s.sumed that Lisa must have plied him with cookies to keep him from becoming too impatient.
”About time,” Bill commented. ”Lisa said you smelled worse than the panhandler that hangs around the Red Owl. What happened?”
”I was just helping you. Edna Ferguson told me that Max hired a woman a.s.sistant for Ron. I was collecting the coffee cups they used this morning.”
Bill looked confused. ”But Ron didn't have an a.s.sistant. I asked Betty about that. If there was a woman with Ron this morning, she wasn't hired by the dairy. Didn't Edna recognize her?”
”Edna didn't see her. Ron and this woman left before she came in to work.”
”Wait a minute.” Bill held up his hands. ”If Edna didn't see this woman, how did she know about her?”
”From the cups. Edna always leaves a jar of instant coffee out for Ron and there were two cups on the counter this morning. One of them had a smear of lipstick on the rim and that's how she knew that Ron was with a woman. I collected them and they're right over there by the dishwasher in that bread wrapper.”
”Why did Edna save them?” Bill looked puzzled as he got up to retrieve the cups.
”She didn't. I dug them out of the cafeteria Dumpster. They were all the way in the bottom and I had to climb in to get them.”
”That's why you smelled like a panhandler?”
”You got it.” Hannah gasped as Bill started to reach inside the bread wrapper. ”Don't touch them, Bill! I went to a lot of trouble to preserve any fingerprints.”
Bill's eyebrows shot up and he froze for a second. He took one look at her earnest face and then he began to laugh. ”The lab can't lift prints from this kind of cup. The surface is too rough.”
”I knew I never should have climbed in that Dumpster!” Hannah groaned. ”How about the lipstick? Can you do something with that?”
”It's possible, unless it's such a popular color that half the women in Lake Eden wear it.”
”It's not.” Hannah was very sure of herself. ”Most women look awful in bright pink.”
”How would you know? I've never seen you wear lipstick.”
”That's true, but Andrea bought a color like that once and it looked horrible on her. She's got every other shade there is, so I figure that this one can't be very popular.”
”You've got a point.” Bill started to smile. ”Good work, Hannah.”
Hannah was pleased at the compliment, but then she started thinking about the logistics of finding the Lake Eden woman who owned that color of lipstick. ”What are you going to do, Bill? Inspect every powder room in town?”
”I hope it won't come to that. I'll start with the cosmetic counters and see if they carry this color. Whoever she is, she had to buy it somewhere. That's called legwork, Hannah, and I'll need your help. You may not know much about lipstick, but you've got to know more than I do.”
Hannah sighed. Watching paint dry held more interest for her than cosmetic counters, and legwork didn't sound like very much fun.
”You are are going to help me, aren't you?” going to help me, aren't you?”
”Of course I am. I'm sorry I'm not more enthusiastic, but rooting around in all that garbage got me down.”
”Next time just call me and I'll do it. I've got coveralls in the cruiser and I'm used to stuff like that.”
”I did did call you. I even left a message, but you didn't get back to me in time. And since Edna told me that the trash company was coming to empty the Dumpster at five, I figured that I'd better do it.” call you. I even left a message, but you didn't get back to me in time. And since Edna told me that the trash company was coming to empty the Dumpster at five, I figured that I'd better do it.”
Bill reached out to pat her on the back. ”You'd make a good detective, Hannah. Your dip in the Dumpster gave us the only real clue we've got.”
Rhonda Scharf, her plump middle-aged body encased in a baby-blue angora sweater that might have fit her thirty pounds ago, leaned forward over the gla.s.s-topped cosmetic counter at Lake Eden Neighborhood Pharmacy to stare at the smudge of pink lipstick on the white Styrofoam cup. Rhonda was wearing a scowl that turned down the corners of her heavily rouged lips, and her too-long, too-thick, too-black-to-be-real eyelashes fluttered in distaste. ”That lipstick didn't come from my counter. I wouldn't be caught dead displaying a product like that!”
Bill pushed the bag closer. ”Take another look, Rhonda. We need to make sure.”
”I did look.” Rhonda pushed the bag back to him. ”I do all the ordering and I've never carried that brand or that color.”
”There's no doubt in your mind, Rhonda?”
Rhonda shook her head, her coal-black hair swaying from side to side. The strands moved together, like they'd been dipped in glue, and Hannah suspected that Rhonda must get a ma.s.sive employee's discount on hairspray.
”See how it's smeared?” Rhonda poked at the bag with the pointed tip of a long, manicured nail. ”I don't sell any lipstick that isn't smudge-proof, and the lines I buy from don't make garish shades like that.”
Hannah looked up from the color charts that Rhonda had handed her. Her grandmother had always said that you'd catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, and she was about to put that old maxim to the test. ”We really need your help, Rhonda. You're Lake Eden's only cosmetic expert.”
”Then why did you go to CostMart? I know you did, Hannah. Cheryl Coombs called to tell me.”
”Of course we went there,” Hannah acknowledged. ”We checked out every cosmetic counter in town. But we saved you for last because I told Bill you'd know more about lipstick than anyone else in town. Your makeup is always so perfect.”