by Elaine Viets
The man was maddening.
Sarah pulled up in her Range Rover right on time, and Helen settled into its unaccustomed luxury. Her friend had played the stock market, parlaying a small inheritance into major money, thanks to Krispy Kreme doughnut stock. Now she indulged a taste for pretty clothes and jewelry. Today, she wore a silver and shell pink necklace that highlighted her rosy skin and dark hair.
“Nice jewelry,” Helen said.
“It’s a modern Navajo design,” Sarah said.
The Range Rover was soon in the desolate wilderness by the Lauderdale airport. “Where are you taking me?” Helen said, looking uneasily at the acres of empty scrub, abandoned boatyards and rusting trailer parks. Sarah was wearing a small fortune around her neck.
“Ever been to the Rustic Inn Crabhouse?”
“Never heard of it. But if you say it’s good, it must be.”
Sarah was a woman of size, free of the modern mania for dieting. She liked to eat well.
The Rustic Inn lived up to its name. It was a series of long, low buildings sprawled along a canal. They looked like they’d been tossed there. Inside, the decor was early beer sign with offbeat touches: a Victorian bronze of a boy holding a crab, art-glass windows, a monster lobster claw over the bar. The claw was as long as an average lobster. Helen wondered what the outrageous crustacean had weighed.
She breathed in the air, a heady mixture of butter and garlic. Then she heard the pounding. It sounded like the building was infested with carpenters. The tables were covered with newspapers and set with wooden mallets. The customers wore bibs, and were happily pounding crab legs and cracking claws.
A waitress tied bibs on Helen and Sarah, and brought out their crab samplers: long golden crab legs, garlicky little blue crabs, pink Jonah crabs and half a lobster with clam stuffing, all swimming in butter.
Helen picked up her mallet and hit a thick Jonah crab claw. Nothing happened.
“You’re too polite,” Sarah said. “You’ve got to whack it hard, like this.” She dealt her crab claw a crushing blow.
Helen swung her mallet harder. The claw cracked slightly.
She thought of Nick and Vito, and Fred and Ethel, and hit the claw with a resounding thwack. It split wide open. This meal was downright therapeutic.
“A little frustrated, are we?” Sarah said. “Want to tell me about it?”
Helen did, starting with the night she heard Laredo die.
When she finished, Sarah said, “Savannah sounds like a loose cannon. You’re lucky you weren’t arrested at Debbie’s.
Now that the sister’s on the scene, why don’t you back away?”
“I heard a murder. I can’t,” Helen said.
“Of course you can,” Sarah said, sucking the meat out of a crab leg.
“Savannah’s all alone. I have to help her.”
“Savannah can take care of herself.”
“She only looks tough,” Helen said. “She could disappear tomorrow and who would look for her? She’s one of the disposable people. I guess you’d call her trailer trash, but she’s braver than anyone I know. I don’t know how she keeps working those awful jobs.”
“Are you doing this for her—or you?” Sarah said. It was amazing how shrewd she looked covered in butter sauce.
Helen picked crab bits out of a smashed leg, while she searched for an answer. “I hate to see a rich guy like Hank Asporth get away with murder. He’s a skirt-chasing, martini-drinking user. He’s never worked a day in his life.”
“Like your ex?” Sarah said.
Another direct hit, Helen thought, and pounded a crab leg to inedible mush.
“You can tell all that about Hank Asporth from a computer survey and one very strange phone conversation?” Sarah said.
“Yes,” said Helen. She walloped a crab claw. “I know he’s a rich bully because he sent his lawyer to shut me up.”
“But he didn’t succeed,” Sarah said. “You kept going. You found the sister. You’ve done your part—more than your part. You have a way out of this, but you won’t take it.”
Helen swung her mallet again. The only sound was the crunch of buttered crab.
“Helen, why are you being so stubborn?”
“Because I’m sick of rich people trying to push me around. Rich people who never did anything to deserve their money, while Savannah and I work our fingers to the bone and get nowhere.”
“You could get somewhere,” Sarah said, “if you’d let me get you a decent job. I’m worried about you, Helen. You’re mixed up in a murder. It’s because you’re working that ugly job. People call you terrible names all day. How can you stand it?”
“I’m making twice what I made at the bookstore,” Helen said.
“You’re paying too high a price. Let me find you a good job. I know lots of people—”
Helen cut her off. She couldn’t be in a corporate computer and she couldn’t tell Sarah why. “I have a job. I’m through with corporate life. I’m never wearing a suit and pantyhose again.”
“But you have no life. You work morning and night, two five-hour shifts with a four-hour break in the afternoon.
When’s the last time you kicked back and had white wine with Peggy by the pool?”
“Weeks ago, but that’s not because of my job. Margery rented 2C to this awful couple, Fred and Ethel Mertz.”
“Nobody’s named that.”
“They are. They’re so smug. They give sermons. Peggy and I can’t stand them. When they show up, we go inside.”
“They sound horrible.” Sarah must have seen she was getting nowhere trying to change Helen’s mind. She changed the subject instead. “How’s your crab?”
“Spectacular,” Helen said. “The butter, the garlic, the parsley potatoes. This is heaven on earth.”
After a brief interlude of pounding and picking crab meat, Sarah returned to her theme. “You can’t date anyone with the hours you work. And you won’t meet a nice man in that boiler room.”
Helen had been telling herself the same thing, but she didn’t want to hear it from Sarah. “Don’t need men when there are buttered crab claws.”
“Helen, be serious.”
“Sarah, you used to say my problem was I dated too many men. You were right. I made some bad choices. Now you complain I don’t date enough. I’m learning to live without men. I’m sick of men. Men have brought me nothing but misery.”
Her friend looked sad. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. You’re still not over the man who betrayed you.”
“Which one?” Helen said, and hit a crab so hard it exploded like a bomb.
Chapter 10
A black Mercedes with smoked-glass windows slid into the boiler room’s parking lot, silent as a shark. It looked ominous. It also looked out of place. The power car sat among the beat-up staff clunkers like a prince in a housing project.
Was someone from the New York office here to squeeze higher quotas out of the overworked staff?
Helen ducked behind an old lime green Dodge and watched. The man who got out was not an elegant New York lizard, but she recognized his type. He was an executive from his high-priced haircut to his shined shoes.
At her old job in St. Louis, when she made six figures, Helen wouldn’t have given him a second look. But he was so unusual here, she studied him. His hair was a meticulously cut and shining black. He was beautifully shaved. Most boiler-room men had Miami Vice stubble. Even the clean-shaven ones missed little patches, as if they were too hungover to handle razors.
This man had the sleek, well-fed look of someone who dined on expense-account lunches. His shirt was professionally pressed and white enough to snow-blind. His gray suit pants broke perfectly on his shoe tops. There was one odd note. He wasn’t wearing a suit jacket or tie. His type was rarely out of uniform, even in South Florida’s heat.
She followed him into the boiler room. He went straight to Vito’s office. Helen clocked in for the evening shift.
Someone had left a f
ull ashtray on top of her computer, bristling with lip-sticked butts. A half-empty Big Gulp was leaking on her desk. Where did that come from? She dumped the mess in the trash and wiped up the sticky soda. She tried not to look at Nick’s sad, empty chair. Sitting next to the jangled junkie had been an ordeal, but she still felt sorry for him.
“Hi,” said a cheerful male voice, and a soft, manicured hand was stuck in her face. “I’m Jack Lace, your new seat mate.”
The executive with the smoked-glass Mercedes sat down in Nick’s chair. She’d bet his pampered bottom had never touched anything but leather office chairs before it landed on Nick’s ripped seat.
“You’re working here?” Helen couldn’t hide her surprise.
“Absolutely,” he said. “A new day, a new challenge, that’s what I always say.”
“But you don’t look like... I mean you’re so...”
“I used to be a broker,” he said.
“Oh. Nine-eleven do you in?”
“Something like that,” Jack said. “But sales are sales. If I can sell stocks, I can sell septic-tank cleaner. Right now, both are in the toilet.”
He laughed at his own joke. Helen noticed he wore no wedding ring. He must have seen her staring at his hand.
“I’m divorced,” he said. “It’s the main reason I’m here.”
“Bad?” Helen asked.
“The worst,” Jack said.
“Another veteran of the marriage wars,” she said. “Well, we’ve got plenty of them. See Zelda over there—the tiny woman in the big red sweater? She’s always cold, poor thing.
Husband divorced her after thirty-five years. Didn’t give her a nickel. She’s sixty-one, with no work skills outside the home.”
“Um, yes. Well, I’m sure there are two sides to every story. Are you married?”
“Not anymore,” Helen said.
“Good,” Jack said.
The computers beeped on. “We’re calling Connecticut this evening,” Helen said. “It’s fairly decent. New Hampshire and Vermont are harder sells.”
“All right, people, let’s get our heinies in gear,” Vito bawled, ending their conversation. Helen’s evening went strange from the first call.
“Hi, Jody. I’m Helen with Tank Titan and—”
Jody was weeping. “Me and my boyfriend are breaking up. I’m moving out. I caught him with the lady next door.
Walked right in on them. I never knew they were making it.
I feel like such a fool. He said he was lonely.”
“Well, well,” Helen said. “I’ll fix it so he’s never lonely for a telemarketer.”
“You do that, honey,” Jody said. “And thank you.”
Helen hit CALL BACK. Women had to stick together.
“Loud and proud people, let’s hear you loud and proud, Vito yelled, but Helen had nothing to be proud about. A tired mother, her voice trembling at the breaking point, was next.
“I’m trying to get four kids to bed,” she said.
Four kids? At least I’m not in that trap, Helen thought.
While she worked, Vito stalked the aisles, plump and pink as a prize pig, listening to their sales pitches on his black monitor phone, telling them what to say to make a sale.
Helen thought she was doing well with an Indianapolis woman. Then the woman said, “I don’t know. My septic-tank man told me to never put anything in my tank.”
She was about to hang up, but Vito materialized at her desk with his black phone, whispering lies in her ear like a swinish Satan.
“Of course he did, ma’am,” Vito said softly. “Your septic-tank man would lose his job if you used Tank Titan. Buy our product and you’ll never have to pump your septic tank again. We guarantee it. Otherwise, we’ll refund every penny of the cost of our product.”
But not the repair costs, Helen thought.
Vito poked her back with a meaty finger, and she parroted his words. The woman bought a five-year supply. Helen wished she hadn’t.
“You made the sale,” Vito said. “Great way to end the night.” He turned to Jack. “And how did you do on your first night?”
“I sold six,” Jack said, with the proud air of a retriever that brought home something smelly.
“Phenomenal,” Vito said. “You’re a natural.”
He was. Helen rarely made more than four sales on one shift, and she was good.
“Congratulations,” she said when the computers shut down.
“Thanks,” Jack said. “Like I said, sales is sales. Listen, would you like to go for coffee or a drink?”
Helen started to say, “I don’t know you.” But she did.
Helen had worked with men like Jack Lace for almost twenty years. She thought of Sarah’s luncheon lecture about her love life, and worse, of another night alone with her cat.
“Yes,” she said. “I’d like that very much.” She was glad she was still wearing her good black pantsuit from her lunch with Sarah.
“What about your car?” Jack said.
“A friend dropped me off at work,” Helen said. She couldn’t admit she didn’t even have a clunker.
“Good,” Jack said. “We’ll take mine.”
Jack’s car no longer looked threatening, shining in the moonlight. It looked rich and comforting. For the second time that day, Helen sank into luxurious leather seats and listened to the hum of a well-tuned engine.
“I thought we’d go to the Pier Top Lounge.”
“Jack, can you afford that?” Helen knew from bitter experience that it took time to realize you no longer had money.
Soon, he would have to sell this extravagant car. He’d never be able to afford the upkeep.
“Hey, I’m the top seller in the boiler room.”
Jack was a fast, aggressive driver, weaving in and out of traffic, cutting people off, refusing to give anyone a break.
They were at the Pier Sixty-Six resort in ten minutes. Jack pulled into valet parking, another outlandish expense.
I won’t say anything, Helen thought. He’ll learn the same way I did. A few missed meals and he’ll figure out he needs to budget.
Jack handed over the keys to the valet and reached into the backseat for his suit jacket and a Ralph Lauren tie. Now he looked complete. Even at ten thirty at night, he had no beard shadow. How did he do that?
It was fun to take a hushed elevator to the penthouse. The Pier Top was a revolving bar with a panoramic view of Fort Lauderdale. Helen had forgotten the simple, overpriced pleasures of sitting in a lounge chair and drinking cosmopolitans. They kept the conversation impersonal at first, discussing the view and their work. Then Helen asked, “Do you live in Lauderdale?”
“I do now,” he said, “in a crappy apartment near I-95. I used to live in a big house in Coral Springs. My wife got it.
She got my Range Rover, too. And both kids. Like the song says, she got the gold mine, I got the shaft.”
“You must miss your children,” Helen said.
“I do. But she’s turned them against me. It’s like they aren’t even my kids anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” Helen said. “My marriage was a mess, but at least there weren’t any kids.”
“I’m not going to sit around feeling sorry for myself, Jack said, and stood up. He held out his hand. “Come on, let’s go out on the observation deck.”
They were alone on the windswept deck. The Pier Top was seventeen stories above the city, a skyscraper by Lauderdale standards. Helen felt queasy. She backed away from the edge, wondering if anyone had ever jumped off the deck.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Jack said.
It was. She forgot her fear, caught by the glittering view: the sweeping glory of the Seventeenth Street Causeway, the splendor of the cruise ships. The sparkling tourist hotels and the outrageous mansions. And the black, shining water that made all this wealth possible.
Helen shivered. It was cold up here, so high above the city. All this beauty, and no one to share it with. She wondered if she would ever find
someone to love, or if she would die alone. There are worse things for a woman than being alone, she reminded herself. But that thought didn’t warm her.
Jack took off his suit coat and put it around her shoulders.
It smelled of some manly cologne, with a hint of citrus. He put his arms around her and pulled her close. He felt warm and strong. He felt right.
This was happening awfully fast, she thought. But she’d watched Jack today. He was decisive. He knew what he wanted—and he wanted her. She was flattered. She was forty-two, but she made this man act like an eager young lover.
“Helen, I promise you, the telemarketing is only temporary,” he said. “I’ll be back on top of the world soon and you’ll be with me.”
He believes it. She liked his promises, even if they could never come true. He seemed hopeful. That’s what her life was missing. Hope. The promise of something better.
Then Jack kissed her. The city sparkled below, just for her.
It was after midnight when Helen wove her way to her apartment, giggly from kisses and cosmopolitans. The night had been perfect. There was a slight awkwardness when Jack had wanted to come back to her place. But she’d said, “Not tonight,” and he’d obeyed.
Then he’d kissed her so hard she’d almost changed her mind. But she wasn’t that drunk. She’d had too many wrong men. She wasn’t going to hop into bed with this one. Not right away, anyway.
She passed Phil’s door and inhaled deeply. “I’m higher than you are.” She was startled that she’d said it out loud.
She unlocked her door and nearly fell inside.
“Hi, cat. Did you miss me?” Thumbs sniffed her with disapproval.
“Don’t look that way. I deserve a good time. I’ll tell you all about it. Just let me sit down a minute.” She flopped into the turquoise Barcalounger.
She woke up at six A.M. She’d slept in her pantsuit. It was covered with wrinkles and cat hair. Her mouth felt like it was stuffed with fur. Thumbs had slept on her chest, judging by the large patch of cat hair on her suit. The ten-pound tom was gently patting her face with his huge six-toed paw.