Dying to Call You

by Elaine Viets

  “Bitch,” Patricia said and relaxed her grip for a split second.

  Helen pulled free and ran. Out the door and down the hall. Past the empty slumber rooms. Past the bronze casket, where dying carnations covered a dead man. Through the double front doors and into the hot Florida sun.

  Chapter 25

  Helen shivered in the blazing sun.

  It was ninety degrees. The sidewalk sparkled and shimmered in the heat. But she felt bone-cold after being strong-armed by the coffin pusher, Patricia Wellneck.

  I imagined that scene, Helen told herself. I was never in any danger. Patricia Wellneck is a respected funeral director. She thought I was upset because I’d been looking at coffins. She offered me a comfortable chair and a cup of tea.

  But the bruises on Helen’s arm were already turning purple.

  After she ran out the front door, Helen hid behind an SUV in the parking lot for fifteen minutes, waiting to see if Patricia Wellneck would come after her. No one left the funeral home. But three people arrived in somber black. Patricia had funeral business, Helen decided. And she figured I got the message.

  Helen didn’t feel safe catching a bus in front of the funeral home. She ran half a mile before she waited at a bus stop. That left her panting and out of breath, but it didn’t warm her. Now Helen was pacing anxiously, peering down the sun-hazed street, praying her bus would come soon.

  The street was deserted. No one was following her. The land was flat as a kitchen counter. There wasn’t a bush to hide behind. She should feel safe. But she didn’t.

  Get a grip. Quit behaving like a wimp. Patricia doesn’t even know your name.

  But Helen knew where that ebony coffin came from. She wondered if Patricia and her horny husband were connected with the boiler room. Were the Mowbrys laundering cold cash from her funeral homes—or sawbucks from her sawbones spouse? Did they know about the murdered Debbie? Were they in on her murder?

  No, she decided. Patricia would never leave a body unburied.

  Helen should feel triumphant. She’d found an important connection. Instead she was uneasy. Casket shopping would give anyone the shivers, she decided. Fashionable caskets were even creepier, as if death were a Vanity Fair feature. Eternally cool.

  At last, she heard the screeching rumble of bus brakes. Helen climbed on, sat down and sighed with relief, glad to be on her way. It was only three o’clock. Two more hours before she went to work at the boiler room. She wondered how much more trouble she could get into.

  Might as well call Savannah. Helen had a lot to tell her.

  The bus let off Helen in front of a convenience store. She went in to buy a large coffee, determined to throw off the graveyard chill.

  “You don’t want to drink the stuff in that pot. It’s turned to sludge,” the woman behind the counter said. She was a scrawny fifty and moved like her feet hurt.

  “It’s OK.” Helen poured herself a big cup of something drained from a crankcase. “I’m not going to drink it.” She carried it to the cash register, wincing when she saw a bucket of “love roses” next to the beef jerky.

  “I’m not charging you for that stuff,” the footsore woman said. “I was going throw it out. Just don’t tell anyone you got it here.”

  Helen thanked her and stood outside the store, holding the hot foam cup. She wondered how the woman stayed so nice in these depressing surroundings. The parking lot was littered with trash, spilled drinks and fluids she didn’t want to examine.

  When her fingers were warmed enough so she could punch the buttons, Helen walked over to the pay phone. It was encrusted with chewing gum blobs like fake jewels. She dialed Savannah’s number.

  “We need to meet.”

  “I can’t. Too busy,” Savannah said. She’d even speeded up her drawl. “See you at the Floridian after we both get off work tonight.”

  She hung up before Helen could answer.

  Savannah didn’t show up at the Floridian until nearly eleven p.m., which gave Helen plenty of time to contemplate the cheap champagne breakfast for two on the menu, and wonder if she’d ever have anyone to share it with. She sucked up coffee till she was jittery as her old junkie seat-mate, Nick.

  Finally, Savannah arrived, trailing apologies and excuses. She wore the same seat-sprung jeans and scuffed cowboy boots. She looked thinner. Her face was more lined, as if it had been freeze-dried. Her eyes were tired. Her sister’s death was taking its toll.

  This time Savannah did not pick at her food. She ate like it was her last meal before a seven-year famine. She ordered an astonishing four fried eggs, a ham steak and a loaf of buttered toast. Helen felt positively virtuous with her single egg and English muffin, so she added a chocolate-cake chaser.

  When their food arrived, Helen told Savannah everything.

  Well, almost everything. She did not mention Phil. But she said she’d heard some things at the party: The Mowbrys could be involved in drugs and money laundering and so, possibly, could their good buddy, Hank Asporth.

  “So you think that’s what my sister had on that disk? She was going to nail the Mowbrys and that murdering buzzard Asporth for drugs and money laundering?” Savannah stabbed the ham steak through the heart. Her egg yolks bled onto the plate.

  “That’s my best guess,” Helen said. “It would be information worth killing for. If Laredo had the facts and figures on interstate drugs and money laundering, Hank Asporth could do federal time. No more parties in Brideport. No more barbecues for mobsters, or bimbos in bikinis sitting around his pool. No wonder she called it her lottery ticket. Hank Asporth killed her for it. He must have thought she had the disk with her the night he strangled her.”

  Helen instantly regretted her brutal words. But Savannah was busy tearing apart her toast and smearing it with blood-red jelly.

  “Laredo got her revenge. She hid the disk well. That’s why Asporth ripped your trailer apart. He was looking for it.”

  “Listen, did your sister have a favorite coffee shop she hung around?”

  “Laredo? No, she liked bars with rich men, not coffee shops with poor college students.”

  “I keep going back to her last words, ‘It’s the coffee.’ I thought she might have hidden the disk at a Starbucks or something.”

  “Laredo wouldn’t pay that kind of money for coffee,” Savannah said. “But I guess that’s why whoever trashed my place dumped my can of Folger’s in the sink. They were looking for that disk. They didn’t know Laredo drank instant. There’s no coffee connection I can think of.”

  “Any other ideas where your sister could have stashed it?”

  “Her car, maybe,” Savannah said. “She used to hide things under the spare tire. But we can’t find that, either. God knows how a car that color yellow could disappear, but it has. What if she hid the disk at the Mowbrys’?”

  “Then we’ll never find it,” Helen said. “That place has a zillion bedrooms and acres of reception rooms. It could be anywhere there.”

  “But my sister wasn’t,” Savannah said. “Laredo wasn’t a guest. Most of the house would be off-limits to her. She tended bar. She pretty much stayed in one spot all night.”

  “Except when she worked the back room,” Helen said.

  “But she stayed in one place there, too.”

  Yeah, a coffin, Helen thought. But she couldn’t say it. That would be too cruel.

  Savannah took her silence for assent. “If she hid the disk at the Mowbrys’ place, wouldn’t it be in one of those rooms?” she said.

  Unless someone took her upstairs to a bedroom, Helen thought. But Savannah didn’t need to hear more dirt about her sister. Instead, she said, “Those are good places to start.”

  “Maybe she hid it in her portable bar at work.”

  “The bars have lots of cubbyholes,” Helen said. “But if she hid it there, the disk would have been found weeks ago. The bus staff takes the bars apart to clean them. They have to. Drinks are sticky. They attract ants and roaches. Bugs would be all over those bars if
they weren’t cleaned thoroughly. I don’t think a portable bar would be a good hiding place.”

  Helen was distracted watching Savannah eat her ham. First, she sliced all the round edges off the steak, reducing it to a square. She ate those slices first. Then she cut her steak into stamp-sized pieces with surgical precision. It was as if she could reverse the chaos in her life by squaring that steak.

  “What about that back room?” Savannah said, between neat bites.

  “There wasn’t much in there but flowers, candles and that black coffin.”

  Helen could see its polished darkness, absorbing the flickering candlelight. She saw Kristi with her white lace and lilies. The devil-horned man in the leather harness was climbing inside . . .

  “Wait!” Helen said.

  Savannah jumped, sending her fork skittering over the side of the table. She fished around for it on the floor, then asked the waitress for a new one. It was several agonizing minutes before Savannah went back to her squares of ham steak, and Helen could continue.

  “You said Laredo liked to hide things in mattresses. The coffin’s got a mattress. It has a lining, too, with lots of tucks and folds. There would be plenty of places to hide a disk.”

  Something zinged in Helen’s brain. Maybe it was because she’d spent the day looking at caskets, but Laredo’s last words finally made sense. “That’s it.” Helen slammed her hand down on the table. Savannah’s fork went flying again, but this time she didn’t notice.

  “I heard her wrong,” Helen said. “Laredo wasn’t saying, ‘It’s the coffee.’ She was trying to say, ‘Coffin.’”

  Helen stopped just in time. She was going to say that Laredo’s words were cut off by a scream. She would have been really hurting to scream like that. Poor Laredo, struggling to choke out the words that could have saved her life.

  Helen and Savannah were both silent. The remains of the ham steak, squarely subdued, sat untouched. The cheerful noise of the restaurant flowed around them. Life went on. But not for Laredo. She’d told Hank, but it was too late.

  Savannah did not ask for another fork. Their silence grew larger and heavier, until it seemed to sit between them. At last they understood what had happened. Laredo had desperately wanted to live. She’d tried to say the words that would stop her killer, but she’d been fatally misunderstood.

  “Can I get you anything else?” the waitress said. She was brisk and chipper. The heavy silence disappeared.

  “No, I think we have all we need,” Savannah said.

  When the waitress left with a pile of their plates, she said, “How are we going to check that coffin?”

  “Looks like I have to go to another orgy,” Helen said.

  Chapter 26

  The second time at an orgy was boring.

  Helen had seen better bodies in the dressing room at Loehmann’s. Too many of the naked people here tonight had wrinkles, flab and hairy patches on their hide.

  Taking off their clothes didn’t make them more interesting or improve their conversation. Just like being half-naked didn’t make Helen a better bartender.

  When this is over, I’ll probably join a convent, Helen thought. My ex-husband will never find me there, and I won’t have to worry about my next meal. Except didn’t nuns have jobs now? Maybe so, but she didn’t think there were many nun-telemarketers. Or topless bartenders, for that matter.

  She did feel a sizzle of excitement. But it wasn’t sex—it was stealing. God knows what would happen if she was caught prowling the Mowbry mansion. But she was going to find Laredo’s disk in that coffin.

  As Helen sprinted across the park-sized lawn, she stumbled over a copulating couple. They grunted, but paid her no attention. She passed a daisy chain that included two lawyers and an insurance executive. She hoped they got mosquito bites in places they couldn’t scratch. Helen didn’t know anything about orgies, but she suspected this one would not be very shocking in New York or L.A.—or even Miami. Broward County would put on a suburban satyricon.

  She saw the Cigarette boat, tied up at the Mowbrys’ dock. Its flames looked like a childish cartoon.

  No one was near the mansion’s service door. Helen walked in as if she had every right. So far, the party goers had acted as if she were invisible. Her disguise was working.

  Helen had refused to go naked this time. She couldn’t take off her shirt again, no matter how she rationalized it. Instead, she’d come up with a good way to keep her clothes on. At least, she’d thought so back at the Coronado.

  Now that she was sliding along a dark corridor in the depths of the Mowbry mansion, Helen wasn’t so sure. It was midnight. Somewhere, a clock bonged twelve gloomy notes. Black shadows stretched down the corridor. She could hear party laughter, but the sound was distorted. It sounded demonic. She was afraid the boredom underneath it would suck her bones dry.

  Helen counted at least six doors on the long corridor. About half opened onto lighted rooms. The rest were dark. She didn’t know which looked more ominous.

  It had been easy to find out when the next charity orgy was. She’d called Steve for a bartending job. “I could use you tomorrow night,” he’d said. “Wanna work? I hear you were a hit with a certain guest.”

  “He was pretty cute,” Helen said. Cute? Where did that come from? What was this, high school? “But I’m booked tomorrow night.”

  “Suit yourself,” Steve said, his voice like a slap. “Don’t call again unless you want to work.”

  That was Steve, always ready with a threat or a putdown. She was glad she’d never work his parties again, even if they paid obscenely well.

  It was also easy to find the clothes for her disguise. Helen had a pair of beige khaki pants in her closet and sensible shoes from another dead-end job. She borrowed a khaki work shirt from Margery. It had BILLY sewn on the pocket. She knew better than to ask her landlady who Billy was.

  All she needed to complete her scam was a toolbox. She used the gray metal box she kept under the kitchen sink. No one would know it held only a hammer with a duct-taped handle, a screwdriver and rusty pliers. She added enough cash for a water-taxi ticket, so she wouldn’t have to carry her wallet. While she was rooting around in her purse, Helen found the can of oven cleaner she’d confiscated from Savannah and threw that in. She might need it for protection.

  In her pocket was the envelope with the rest of Fred and Ethel’s metal slivers. They were going on a final fraudulent mission.

  “What in hell’s name do you think you’re doing?”

  Helen nearly dropped the toolbox. She recognized that bullying bark. It was Steve. She froze against the wall, hoping the shadows would hide her, knowing they wouldn’t.

  I’m caught, she thought. He’ll see the toolbox and think I’m a jewel thief or something. I’ll spend the night getting cavity-searched at the city jail.

  “I told you before,” Steve said, “Wedges and peels. Wedges and peels. We don’t use lemon slices at a service bar. The limes are wedges. The lemons are peels. Always. Only. Why can’t you get that through your thick head?”

  Steve was screaming at some hapless bartender.

  The door to the next room was partly open. Helen caught a glimpse of a bare-chested blonde and a red-faced Steve. The bullied blonde cringed against a supply rack as Steve whipped her with his words. Helen felt sorry for the woman, but she had to get past that open door.

  Don’t stop yelling now, she thought, as she sidled past the doorway. But Steve didn’t see her. He was too busy badgering the bartender.

  Helen almost made it when her toolbox banged against the doorframe with a loud clunk.

  “Who’s there?” Steve said.

  Helen ducked into the next open door, one of the dark ones, and bumped against someone. “Sorry,” she whispered.

  No answer. She could feel hard, pointed breasts jutting into her back. This woman was packing serious silicone. Why didn’t she say anything? Was this another kinky game?

  Steve went back to verbally beating the bart
ender. He’d forgotten about the noise.

  Helen’s eyes slowly adjusted to the dark. She was in a closet. She could see brooms, mops and buckets. Her back was pressed against a strange woman’s chest. A woman who wasn’t talking. Helen was afraid to turn around, in case she knocked over something noisy. She carefully moved her hand back a few inches. She felt a leg. In black leather. It seemed lifeless and rigid.

  The hair went up on the back of Helen’s neck. Was she in a closet with a dead body? Helen stepped back and hit something metal with her foot. It felt like . . . a stand.

  Helen almost giggled. She was up against a department-store dummy. There’s another big dummy in here, she thought. Dead body, indeed. I should know better. A real leg doesn’t feel like that.

  Helen wondered what the Mowbrys were doing with a dummy, and decided she didn’t want to know. By the time she could breathe normally, Steve and the freshly battered bartender were gone. Helen started down the hall again, keeping her toolbox away from the wall. The corridor stretched endlessly. How long was it? She’d taken shorter walks down Las Olas Boulevard. Her neck and shoulder muscles ached from tension. The toolbox weighed a thousand pounds.

  Three more doors to go. She scooted past another one, then saw that the next opening wasn’t a door. It was a window. What did her mother always say? God didn’t close a door without opening a window. Helen had had a roommate like that. It was annoying.

  This window was at least seven feet high and gave Helen a good view of the pool area. She leaned out the open window and looked down on the party. From this height, the writhing couples in and around the pool were white and wormlike. She recognized a few. Mr. Shamrock Shorts was pawing another waitress.

  Helen was relieved she didn’t see Patricia Wellneck, theme funeral planner. She wondered if Patricia had ever buried any of her surgeon husband’s mistakes. She was even happier to see no sign of the boiler-room reptile, Mr. Cavarelli.