by Elaine Viets
Helen looked at the water lilies and thought of groundwater seeping around her body. Florida flooded a lot.
“Uh, no thanks,” she said.
“If you are religious, we have many beautiful expressions of faith. Like this one.”
Helen saw a sky-blue casket covered with flying seagulls.
She looked for the telltale white splotches left by seagulls, but apparently that didn’t happen in heaven. Two curlicued words announced, “Going Home.”
Helen thought of herself stuck in her mother’s home for all eternity and shuddered.
“There’s also this one with Raphael’s angels on the casket.” The two cherubs, who looked like winged juvenile delinquents to Helen, stared out from the coffin lid. Helen had also seen them on umbrellas, cocktail napkins and candles. She felt like a gift-shop special.
“Pretty,” she said. “But I don’t think I’m the angelic type.”
Patricia was not discouraged. “If you have a profession, she said, “we have many choices to honor it. This model is for firefighters.”
The bright red casket was covered with fire trucks, which Helen liked a lot. But she thought the flames were asking for trouble.
“Veterans prefer this model,” Patricia said, showing Helen a coffin with the Stars and Stripes, an abandoned rifle, and an empty helmet. What a way to go: at war, with a permanent reminder of defeat.
“Very patriotic,” Helen said. “But the only place I ever served was a Greek diner. I was a waitress. I had to fight off the owner, so maybe I qualify as a combat veteran.”
Patricia didn’t laugh.
“Did you attend college?”
“University of Missouri at Columbia.”
“Then perhaps you’d like a college scene or your school colors on your casket.”
Mizzou had never cared two hoots about Helen until she started making a hundred thou a year. Then the alumni association dunned her for contributions until she finally wrote “deceased” on their begging envelopes. Now the university could follow her to the grave. She would never be free.
“Do I need ivy on my tombstone?” Helen said.
“I see you have a sense of humor,” Patricia said. “This model might be the one for you. It packs you for the trip home, so to speak.”
The casket was a giant brown package stamped with “Express Delivery” and “Return to Sender.” Great. She could be an eternal joke.
“Elvis fans would like it, too,” Helen said. “But I’m more of a Clapton fan.” Or a fan of a Clapton fan. Helen knew where she’d wind up if she had a black coffin emblazoned with “Clapton Is God”—some place even hotter than Florida.
“These are certainly unusual,” Helen said. “But perhaps I’m more of a traditionalist than I thought.”
“We have many traditional styles. Some have the newest features, like memento drawers. That’s if you want to send something special with your loved one: a photo, medals, letters. We’ve had wedding photos, jewelry, children’s drawings and many other meaningful keepsakes.”
She showed Helen a bronze casket with a flat pullout section at the bottom, like a pencil drawer on a desk. Helen had slipped a six-pack of Falstaff beer into her grandfather’s coffin, along with a bottle opener and a bag of Rold Gold pretzels. The drawer didn’t look big enough for her kind of memento.
“I have an odd request,” Helen said.
“We will do our best to accommodate your wishes.” Patricia smiled her skeleton grin.
“Could I have the coffin delivered to my home? Before I’m dead.”
Patricia didn’t bat an eyelash. Maybe she couldn’t with her tight eye job.
“Well, yes, you could,” she said. “The casket company does not like to deliver to private residences. You’d have to order it from us and have it delivered here at the funeral home. Then you’d pick it up from here with your own truck.
Are you interested in one of these models?”
“I was thinking of something in wood,” Helen said.
“Pecan, pine, cherry or walnut?”
“Ebony,” Helen said.
“Fine woods such as ebony are very expensive,” Patricia said.
“I bet they are,” Helen said. “But I saw one at a party and really liked it.”
Patricia turned white as a satin lining. Her surgery scars glowed red with rage. She rose like a zombie from a new grave.
“I don’t believe I can help you after all,” she said. “My assistant will show you out.”
“I believe you can, Ms. Wellneck. Tell me about the Six Feet Unders. Drop-dead sexy, aren’t they? Especially in coffin clothes. Did they buy them here?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Patricia stepped around her desk and clamped her hand on Helen’s arm. It was cold as ice, but steel-strong. Patricia could have been a South Beach bouncer. She’d spent years dealing with the overwrought at wakes and funerals. She knew how to subdue someone while making it look as if she was helping the person out of the room.
Helen struggled to get free, and Patricia changed her grip.
Pain shot up Helen’s arm. Patricia dragged Helen out of her office.
“Buying a casket can be an emotional experience,” Patricia said. “Perhaps you would like to rest a moment in our family comfort room. I’ll bring you a cup of tea.”
She steered Helen toward a gloomy green-curtained area with a dark door. Helen knew if she went through that door, she’d come out feet first. She took her size-eleven shoe and stomped down hard on Patricia’s foot.
“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 sunhazed 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 seatmate, 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 bloodred 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.