by Elaine Viets
“Oh. That.” Rod belched delicately. “She didn’t come home the night before. The housekeeper and I thought Kiki spent the night with some guy. She did that more and more. I drove to the church, figuring the guy already took her there. I sat in the car, getting up the courage to go inside and see if she was with her new chauffeur. I ran the air conditioning in the Rolls. I wasn’t supposed to do that if she wasn’t in the car. But I wanted to look good. I was afraid she’d lost interest in me. What a fool. She never cared in the first place. She was one hot geezer babe, too. Joke’s on me. The hot old babe left me cold. Didn’t give me a nickel. Did I tell you that?”
“Yes,” Helen said. “I’m really sorry. You were talking about a fight with Luke?”
“Oh, yeah. She told Luke no movies. Luke said then there would be no wedding. Kiki said if he didn’t marry her daughter, she’d ruin him with every agent and acting company from Miami to New York. She could do it, too.”
“And if he did marry, he’d never act again,” Helen said.
“Riiiiiiiight. Oh, he could go back to it after Desiree got her own money, but that would be ten years, and the momentum would be gone. His looks, too. Luke’s career was starting to take off. If he handled things right, he could go national. Movie parts and theater roles in national companies. If he waited ten years, he’d be doing local stuff the rest of his life. Kiki gave him one of those choices—the lady or the tiger.”
“This time, the lady was a tiger,” Helen said.
“Riiiiiight. Except he picked door number three. A dead Kiki. Solved everything for everybody, except me.”
“Do you think he killed Kiki?”
“If he didn’t”—he hiccupped—“he should have. But it could have been that other guy she had the fight with.”
“What other guy?” Helen said.
“Didn’t see him. Didn’t hear much, except he was real mad. That one was at the church. I had to take the Rolls back over there. Then she sent me home.
“She’s an evil little woman. Looking all sad and talking all soft. Had me thinking about crazy stuff I never would have considered. Almost did it, too.”
Rod suddenly stood up. “I’m gonna be sick.” He sprinted for the bathroom.
“You better go, miss,” the bartender said. “I’ll make sure Rod gets home.”
Chapter 13
The cops thought she was a killer. Her romance was on the skids. Her job was drying up. Her mother was going to marry Lawn Boy Larry.
Helen had one consolation: It wasn’t snowing.
This morning was a sunny seventy-two degrees. Helen poured herself a cup of coffee, grabbed the paper, and sat by the pool.
A soft breeze playfully flapped the front page as she read the headlines. Kiki’s murder had been preempted by a vicious snowstorm that hit the East Coast. Like all Floridians, Helen read the reports of stranded motorists, ice-slick roads, and power outages with satisfaction.
Her life might be a mess, but she didn’t have to shovel her car out of a snowbank.
The day seemed less sunny when she read the want ads. In some ways, an arrest would solve her problems. She’d have a place to sleep and three meals. Helen knew Millicent would probably have to fire her. There was still no business.
What was she going to do? More than a quarter of Florida workers were “working poor,” people who made less than eight dollars an hour. Helen was one of them. When she lost her job, she’d be just poor. All she had was seven thousand dollars stashed in a Samsonite suitcase. That wouldn’t go far.
The want ads had plenty of high-paying jobs for exotic dancers, escorts, and lingerie models. Keeping your clothes on didn’t pay nearly as well. The best Helen could find was an ad for “medical receptionist, must be bilingual, $7 an hour.” Helen doubted her high-school Spanish counted as a second language.
A job in a dentist’s office promised “competitive pay to commiserate with experience.”
I’d like someone to commiserate with my experience, Helen thought.
Wait! This job looked promising: “Ground-floor opportunity in the advertising industry. No training required. $6.25 plus commission and meals.”
The pay was less than she made now, but free meals would make up for it. Helen wondered if the company would pay her in cash under the table. It was worth checking. She needed Margery’s phone.
Her landlady was hosing purple bougainvillea blossoms off the pool deck.
“Margery, I have a shot at an advertising job,” Helen said. “Can I use your phone to call for an interview?”
“I’ll be finished here in a minute.” Margery wore a new plum shorts set and flirty kitten-heel slides.
“You look chipper this morning. Out dancing with Warren last night?” Helen said.
“Till three o’clock.” Margery gave a little grin. “Elsie and Rita folded early, but Warren and I stayed out late. Might as well enjoy it while I can. His new condo will be ready soon and he’ll be moving.”
“You won’t have any trouble renting 2C again,” Helen said. “The paper says it’s supposed to be a cold winter. The first big snowstorm hit up north already. The Midwest and East Coast were slammed with a foot of snow.”
“Oh, good.” Margery dropped the hose and headed for her place. “I have to find my list.”
“What list?”
“I keep a list of all the people who call me when a hurricane’s heading this way and say, ‘I don’t know how you can live in Florida with the hurricanes, the bugs, and the heat.’ Now it’s my turn. Watch.”
Helen followed Margery into her kitchen. Her landlady started dialing her purple princess phone. Her voice oozed concern. “Hi, Betty, I thought I’d find you inside today. I heard about your ice storm. I’m sitting out by my pool and thought I’d give you a call.
“How’s Ed? He’s shoveling snow? Oh, Betty, he should be careful. I don’t know how you can live in Michigan: the icy roads, the cold, the snow. I heard six people died in snow-related accidents, and that doesn’t count all the snow-shoveling heart attacks.
“What? You have an ice problem? I have one, too. It keeps melting in my glass.
“She hung up,” Margery said. “OK, make your call.”
The man who answered sounded like Helen’s idea of an ad man. He was a fast talker and a little slick. “I’m calling about your ad in this morning’s paper, the ground-level advertising job,” she said.
“Can you get here by eight thirty?”
Helen checked her watch. It was seven thirty. “Sure.”
“If I like your looks, I can start you out tonight. Dinner’s included. Ask for Frank.”
Frank gave her an address in a new shopping center on Federal Highway, a brisk ten-minute walk.
“I think I have a live one,” Helen said. Margery waved good-bye absently. She was tormenting a snow-bound friend in Connecticut.
As Helen passed Phil’s place, she couldn’t resist peeking through his half-open miniblinds. She was relieved to see Kendra sleeping on the couch instead of sharing Phil’s bed. The Kentucky Songbird’s mouth was wide open. She was drooling.
Probably drooling over Phil, Helen thought. She slammed her own door hard and hoped it woke Kendra.
Helen dressed quickly in a dark suit and heels and arrived at her job interview five minutes early. It was a pink stucco building with a “Hot and Ready Pizza” sign.
The man who unlocked the front door looked like he’d been put together from pizza circles: a small white doughy one for his bald head, a large one for his round gut, a medium for his oddly round hips. His flaming orange T-shirt said, “I’m hot and ready.”
“I’m Frank.” He looked Helen up and down like he was going to stamp Grade A on her rump. “You’ll do. Got any red shorts?”
“Is that the office uniform?” she said.
“You won’t be working in an office. You’ll be out on Federal Highway with this sign.”
Frank unrolled an orange banner that said, “I’m hot and ready for six bucks!
” There was no mention of pizza.
Helen was appalled. She’d be a walking double entendre. “You want me to hold up that thing on the highway? I’ll have to put up with every creep in a car.”
“That’s why we pay the big bucks,” Frank said. “You’ll make a dollar more than the industry standard. Plus, you can have any leftover single-topping pizza. We’ll charge you fifty cents for each additional topping. And don’t forget your commission. You get twenty-five cents if a guy comes in and says he saw you. They’re bound to notice you. With those legs, you should get an extra two or three bucks a night.”
The guy really thought he was offering her a good job. Helen was hot and ready to set him straight. “You can take your pizza sign and put it right”—Frank’s eyes were now circles, too—“in the middle of the road.”
She walked to Millicent’s, wondering if this was her last day. The salon seemed so refined after her encounter with Hot and Ready.
But Helen was a realist. Millicent hadn’t had a single sale since that awful “Weddings to Die For” ad. She’d love to know who placed it and why. Millicent swore her competitor, Haute Bridal, planted the ad. Helen didn’t believe that. She thought it was tied somehow to Kiki’s murder.
The person who bought the ad had long white hair and red polish like Millicent. But anyone could put on a white wig and red polish. Even a man. Especially an actor. Helen thought someone wanted to ruin Millicent.
They might have succeeded, if it wasn’t for the shower-curtain dress. When Helen entered the store at nine that morning, she was surprised to hear voices. Customers, at long last.
A short, dark man in a too-tight knit shirt was shopping with his wife. She was a size sixteen squeezed into a size-twelve dress. Her long curly hair was dyed dead black. She balanced her thick body on teeny black heels with big red bows. Her hands—and his—were loaded with diamonds. Their necks were heavy with gold chains.
Mob money, Helen thought.
Lou, the husband, did not sit on the gray couch and read Forbes magazine like most men. He personally picked his wife’s clothes. So far, he’d rejected everything the woman put on. Helen could see the panic in Millicent’s eyes. She had to make this sale to save the store, and she was running out of choices.
His wife, Patti, came out of the fitting room in a black lace dress. Helen thought it was attractive. Lou didn’t.
“It don’t look like the money,” he said. “It looks like a nightgown.”
“It’s twenty-three hundred dollars,” Patti pouted.
“We’re looking for something unique—like you won’t see on every broad.”
“Well, I do have a special dress,” Millicent said. “But it takes a certain kind of customer to appreciate it.”
One with no taste at all, Helen thought. Millicent had hit rock bottom. She was going for the shower-curtain dress.
Millicent had exquisite taste. But occasionally, for reasons Helen never understood, Millicent would buy a dress of breathtaking ugliness. The shower curtain was hideous. The blue polyester fabric was so shiny it looked like plastic. The pink rosebuds looked like a rash. The lumpy overskirt added ten pounds to the slimmest figure.
The first time Millicent showed her the dress, Helen said, “Where did you get that: Bed Bath & Beyond?”
“I know. It looks like a shower curtain,” Millicent said. “We should accessorize it with a sponge and a soap bar. What was I thinking when I bought this?”
Millicent kept the shower-curtain dress hidden. She only brought it out when she thought someone might like it, which wasn’t often. Today she was desperate.
Lou examined it from the neck to the hem. “Now this is very unique,” he said.
“That it is,” Helen said.
Millicent kicked her. “I promise you no one at the wedding in Jersey will have a dress like that,” she said.
“Try it on,” Lou commanded his wife.
A few minutes later, Patti teetered out in the shiny dress. It rustled noisily and hung in bunchy folds at her waist. But it showed off the woman’s huge chest.
“I love it,” Lou said. “How much?”
“Twenty-seven hundred dollars.” Millicent had doubled the price. She knew her man.
“See?” Lou said. “It’s better than that black nightgown thing. We’ll take it.”
Millicent waited until the couple drove off in their black Lincoln Town Car. Then she did a triumphant dance around the store. “Yes! I can’t believe I sold it. And to a mob wife. It’s perfect. Who’s going to tell Lou his wife’s dress is ugly? They’d wind up in cement shoes. It’s gone. I’m free.”
Until Millicent bought the next ugly dress she had to get rid of.
But sales is about confidence. Millicent was on a roll. She sold dresses all day long. If a bride even walked down the block, she was sucked into the shop and bought a dress.
The only one who didn’t buy was Cassie. The chunky little bride had come back three more times. She’d tried on her dream dress for her sister, her mother, and her maid of honor. She still hadn’t bought it.
Now Cassie showed up with a tiny wrinkled woman in black. “This is my grandmother!!” Cassie said. “I want to show her my dress.”
Helen thought it was getting a little gray from all the try-ons, but she brought Cassie’s lacy dress to a fitting room once more.
“Grandma loves it!!” Cassie squealed, when she came out. “There’s just one more person I need to show it to.”
“You should charge her rent on that dress,” Helen said.
“She’s about ready to buy,” Millicent said.
“I’m about ready to win the lottery,” Helen said. “As soon as I buy a ticket.”
Millicent’s most haunting sale that day was to Becky. Thirteen-year-old Becky had a doelike softness. Her mother had the same face, except it looked freeze-dried.
Becky wanted a special dress for her bat mitzvah, the coming-of-age ceremony for Jewish women. She tried on an electric-blue gown that was perfect for her dark hair and eyes. The style was right for her. So was the price.
Her mother started picking it apart. “The color’s too bright. I don’t like the material.” On and on she went, finding flaws in a flawless dress.
Becky apologized for her mother. “She doesn’t mean it. She’s a careful shopper.”
“You need to try on more dresses,” her mother said. Millicent dutifully brought them back. None were as electrifying as the blue dress.
“We need to see some selections at another store,” the mother said.
“But, Mummy . . .” The girl was near tears.
“Let’s go, Becky,” her mother said.
“Please, don’t sell my dress,” Becky told Millicent. “I’ll make her come back today. I promise.”
“We’ll never see her again,” Helen said.
“Wait and see,” Millicent said.
Two hours later, Becky was back. “You’ve come for your dress,” Millicent said.
Becky nodded shyly and smiled.
“Not so fast,” her mother said. “I want her to try on the black satin suit again. And the pink outfit.”
Becky tried them both. Then she said, “Mummy, I’ve tried on every dress in the store. I want this one. I feel like a princess.”
Becky got her electric-blue dress. She carried it like an actress clutching her Oscar.
“That’s one determined little girl,” Helen said, as Becky left with her prize. “What happens to girls like that?”
“She’ll either grow up like her mother and become mean, controlling, and critical,” Millicent said. “Or she’ll rebel and turn out totally different. If that happens, she’ll have a hard fight on her hands, poor child. I don’t know if the girl will be strong enough. But she did get her dress. Maybe there’s hope.”
Helen wondered if there had ever been any hope for Desiree. In some ways, the bride seemed more helpless than thirteen-year-old Becky.
Chapter 14
Millicent was saved.
Helen was not.
Her job was safe, but how long would she have it if the cops arrested her for murder? Helen felt a sick, twisty feeling. She’d been inside a women’s prison, all cinder block and steel. She’d talked to her best friend through a Plexiglas partition. Helen couldn’t bring her flowers, chocolate, or comfort. She’d watched her wither away in jail.
I have to get help, Helen thought. I can’t do this by myself. I’m too scared to think straight. Peggy was at work. Margery was wrapped up in Warren. And Phil. She didn’t want to think who Phil was wrapped up in. Helen sneaked back to the shop’s office and called the one friend who helped her see problems clearly.
“Helen!” Sarah said. “What’s happening?” She sounded cheerful, but then she had a home office overlooking the beach.
“Lots of things,” Helen said. “None of them good.”
“Then we need to meet,” Sarah said. “When can you do lunch?”
“Tomorrow is my day off.” Helen said those words with satisfaction. A few hours ago, she’d been facing a permanent unpaid vacation.
“Wear black,” Sarah said. “We’re going to South Beach.”
“I’ve never seen you in anything but bright colors,” Helen said.
“I don’t want to be mistaken for a beach ball.”
Sarah was a woman of size. Helen couldn’t imagine her any other way. She had a Kewpie-doll face and energetic brown curls. She also had a shrewd money sense. Sarah had made a fortune in Krispy Kreme doughnuts and adult diaper stock.
That was why she picked up Helen the next afternoon in a green Range Rover. Helen settled into the luxurious leather seats with an appreciative sigh. The bridal-shop van had all the comfort of a welfare office.
As Helen’s guts knotted into a rope, she tried to pretend she was going to South Beach on a sunny day. She soon ran out of chitchat. The traffic was the only subject left.
“Is this a street or a parking lot?” Helen said, as they crawled along Ocean Drive. “We’ve gone one block in the last five minutes.”