I treated him to a third nod, but somewhat annoyed by his lack of confidence in me, I didn’t bother to tell him Eileen’s handwriting showed that she was possibly the sexiest woman in Naples.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Rossi left for work the next morning without saying goodbye. I was asleep, but for him to leave without kissing me awake meant last night’s mini argument still rankled. Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe he didn’t understand that my interference in the Kay Hawkins case—all right I’m admitting it—was an act of love. I guess he just saw it as the act of a non-professional pretending to be a pro.
Anyway, needing a morale boost, I dressed to kill in the black halter dress I usually reserved for dinner dates and sexy high-heeled sandals that really did kill. But that was all right. I planned to eat sitting down. To keep the look edgy, I carried a shocking-pink nylon tote.
My one new wardrobe purchase of the season, the mustard-yellow shift, hadn’t survived the chlorine swim. Clothes shopping was definitely in my immediate future, but not today. Today I had house calls to make. A new client wanted me to take a look at what she called her blah family room. Blah rooms were mother’s milk to me, but there were various shades of blah, and it would be interesting to see exactly how blah this one was. Actually, the worse the room, the more it needed my input. At least I was good at my job if not, in Rossi’s view, at graphology.
After checking in with Lee and learning that everything was cool at the shop, I made Whiskey Lane my first call of the day.
With two clients in mourning, I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived at the Lane, but everything seemed normal enough. Tom’s vehicles clogged the driveways of both 590 and 595. Since no one could drive in or out of the garages, I assumed Stew and James had already left. Just as well.
I parked on the Stahlman drive behind Tom’s SUV. Not wanting to bother the painters, I strolled around back to the kitchen entrance and rang the bell. No one answered, not even after several tries. Strange. Busy in the front rooms, the painters couldn’t hear the bell over their blaring radios and probably wouldn’t answer if they did. But where was Eileen?
After another futile attempt, I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered through the glass-paneled door at a kitchen long overdue for a revamp—a project I had a feeling was currently low on James’s bucket list.
Though no one was moving around in the kitchen, a circular heating coil on the vintage electric stove glowed as red as a traffic light. Unattended, without a single pan on its top, the stove was a disaster in the making.
Without bothering with the bell, I grasped the door handle. To my relief, the door wasn’t locked. I hurried in and turned off the burner. What on earth...? The refrigerator door gaped open. I slammed it shut. Food littered the countertops: flour and sugar, eggs, milk and spices were scattered everywhere.
A sudden soft moan scared me. I whirled around to face it, and there was Eileen, lying spread-eagled on the breakfast nook bench, her uniform skirt hiked to her thighs, her legs and mouth open wide.
Good heavens, what was wrong? I hurried across the room and bent over her. As I did, my foot struck something hard and sent it spinning. Like an aimless soccer ball, an empty Dewars scotch bottle rolled around under the nook before hitting the wall and coming to rest with a thump.
Eileen didn’t hear a sound. She lay without moving, snoring softly and exhaling ripe, boozy breaths. No need to bend in any closer.
I was glad James wasn’t home. He didn’t need this on top of yesterday’s tragedy. But what did Eileen need? Something obviously. According to her handwriting, I think I knew what that might be, but as Rossi had correctly pointed out, I was no graphology whiz.
What I could do well was make coffee. A brew pot sat on one of the littered countertops, its carafe empty. I tossed the basketful of soggy grounds in the trash and foraged in the pantry closet for a fresh supply. The hunt turned up only whole beans. Figured. With some difficulty I located the grinder, threw in a handful of Kona’s Finest, and turned it on, hoping the loud pulsing would awaken Eileen. But she snored on, oblivious.
Well, maybe the aroma of brewing coffee would do it.
Nope.
Maybe actually drinking some would help. I carried a mug of strong black brew over to the breakfast nook and placed it on a corner of the tabletop out of harm’s reach.
If I couldn’t rouse her soon, I’d have to call 9-1-1. She might need to have her stomach pumped.
I leaned over her...phew...and shook her by the arm. She moaned in protest. I patted her cheeks and called her name, trying to coax her out of her stupor. In a way, I hated to. She’d tried to escape from some painful reality, and here I was insisting she return to it.
Poor thing. Life could be so damned difficult, but bottom line, it wasn’t five o’clock anywhere in Eileen’s world. She couldn’t stay like this. The painters might barge in at any moment and see her lying there drunk, her skirt flying at high mast. Worse, no telling when James would be home expecting a lovely little lunch.
“Come on, Eileen. Come on. Wake up now.”
She grunted and attempted to roll onto her side. I grabbed her shoulder and shook it. “No, you can’t do that. You’re not in bed. You’ll fall off.”
One of her eyes slit open.
Okay, a good sign.
It closed.
I patted her cheeks.
“No,” she moaned. “No.”
“Eileen, you have to wake up. Come on, open your eyes. I made some coffee for you. It’ll make you feel better.”
“Coffee? Nooo. Jimmy. Thash what I want. Jimmy.”
Jimmy? Omigod. So her handwriting sample hadn’t spoken with forked tongue after all.
“I want Jimmy.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, pretending not to understand her meaning, “but Mr. Stahlman isn’t here right now.”
Her eyes snapped open. Though slightly bloodshot, they were a gorgeous lapis lazuli blue. Funny, before now I’d never noticed how beautiful they were.
“Hesh never here. Not for me.” Hic.
Lowering her legs off the bench she tried, and failed, to sit up. I sat next to her, put an arm around her shoulder and together we pulled her torso into an upright position. But not for long. Like a willow in the wind, she swayed several times then, abandoning the struggle, fell forward onto the tabletop, her head lolling on her arms.
One more try, and if that didn’t work, I’d call for help. I shook her. Her arms slid back and forth on the polished wood, taking her head with them, but she didn’t awaken.
I leaned over and whispered in her ear. Hissed really. “Eileen, listen up, girlfriend. We’ve got to get you out of here and into bed.”
Not a muscle quivered.
In desperation, I went for the jugular, emotionally speaking. “If you don’t wake up, I’ll call an ambulance.”
An eyelid fluttered.
“It’ll come roaring down the street with the sirens blazing and haul you out of here on a stretcher. Is that what you want?”
Both eyes opened.
To keep them open, I upped the ante. “Think of what Jimmy will say then.”
She lifted her head and ran both hands through her hair. A bemused expression flitted across her face as if she were surprised she still had a head. Peeking at me from the corner of one bloodshot lapis-blue eye, she said, “He woulden give a shit.”
I nearly fell out of the breakfast nook. “Eileen, what are you saying? You’re his most devoted...ah...employee.”
“Thash the problem.” She clutched at her left breast. “Ish this fuckin’ uniform. I look like a refrigerator in it.”
Who could argue with logic like that?
“He doshunt see me as a...hic...woman.”
“Be that as it may, you don’t want him to see you as a lush, do you?”
“Yesh.” She beamed her Dewars breath my way. I tried not to inhale. “At leasht he’ll know I’ve got feelingshs.” She jabbed a finger on the tabletop. “Feelingsh.�
��
“Eileen, I don’t know what’s bothering you, but whatever it is, you need to sleep it off. If Mr. Stahlman comes home, I’ll tell him you’re ill and went to bed. Okay? That way, he’ll never know about this. But first you have to get off the bench.”
She shook her head. “No I don’t. I’ll be out of here shoon enough.”
“What does that mean?”
No answer. Her head was back on the table.
Okay, she hadn’t vomited and she had been conscious, however briefly. Two pluses. I glanced down at her. Her thick dark hair, freed from its bun, lay spread across her arms like glossy black silk.
Between the bun and the uniform, Eileen clearly hadn’t been able to shine.
I heaved a sigh. We were both working girls, and my heart went out to her. I couldn’t just leave her where she was. Working girls in distress needed a helping hand from time to time. So my options were to call 9-1-1, or less drastically, to enlist the aid of one of the painters in getting her into bed.
While I stood there trying to decide what to do, the back door opened.
Oh, no.
“Well this is a first. A messy kitchen.” Marilyn, a tall tanned goddess in sawed-off jeans and shit-kickers, strode into the kitchen as if she owned it. Well in a way, I guess she still did.
We nodded at each other, wary as two feral cats. Catching sight of Eileen, she gasped. “Omigod. What happened to her?” She hurried across the room and bent over Eileen’s sleeping form. Straightening up fast, she said, “She’s drunk.”
“My conclusion exactly.”
A moment of stunned silence, then Marilyn threw her head back and laughed, a deep, full-throated belly laugh.
“Glad you think it’s funny,” I said with a sniff.
“It’s not funny. It’s a riot. Good for her. High time she broke out of her shell. Waiting on James hand and foot. Yes-siring and no-siring him, and all the while madly in love with him.”
Ah. “You’re sure?”
“I lived here, remember? She’d die before admitting it but—”
“Actually she just did admit it.”
“In vino veritas.” Marilyn shrugged. “That coffee I smell?”
I nodded. “Help yourself.”
She shot me an ironic glance and without any fumbling opened the cabinet containing the mugs.
Eileen, in LaLa Land, slept on.
“Will you help me get her to bed before James or somebody else finds her like this?” I asked.
“Yes, of course, but she’s a sizable woman, and she’s out cold. How are we going to lift her?”
“We need some old-fashioned smelling salts or something,” I said. “Anything, to bring her to. I wonder if...” I got up from the breakfast nook bench and hurried over to the sink. As I’d hoped, underneath with the other cleaning supplies was a bottle of ammonia.
I opened it, inhaled and wished I hadn’t. That should do it. Bottle in hand, I went back to Eileen and rubbed her back. When she stirred and moaned a little, I held the opened bottle near her face. Nothing. Did the woman never inhale?
I glanced back at Marilyn who was hovering nearby. “She might respond to your voice,” I said.
Marilyn nodded and, leaning over Eileen, she shouted in her ear, “Eileen Bennett, this is Mrs. Stahlman. I insist you wake up immediately.”
At the no-nonsense command, Eileen inhaled and came to with a start. I held the bottle under her nose, and with a shriek of protest, she bolted upright on her seat.
I capped the ammonia and put it down. “Now!” I said. Marilyn grabbed Eileen’s arm and tugged her toward the end of the bench.
“Whash goin’ on?”
Once we had her precariously perched on the edge, I slid an arm around her waist, and Marilyn, on the other side, did the same.
“One, two, three” and up she came. Sort of.
Lord, she was heavy, dead weight really. Sagging between us she more or less stood, and together we all stumbled forward a few steps.
“I’m gonna be sick.”
Uh-oh. Across Eileen’s slumping body, Marilyn shot me a horrified look. Now what? If we let go, she’d plunge to the floor. Helpless, Marilyn and I stood frozen in the middle of the kitchen while Mount Vesuvius erupted, spewing lava all over the place, including my best black dress and the ocelot slides.
This was definitely not part of my job description, but I hung in there, retching, as did Marilyn, until the spasms ceased, then we soldiered on down the narrow back hall into Eileen’s modest room.
“Thash my bed,” she said. With a sigh of satisfaction, she lurched forward a step and fell onto the mattress.
“She stinks,” Marilyn said with a laugh. “We all do.”
“What do you say we strip off her uniform and wash her face and hands? She can shower when she comes to. And we can’t leave the kitchen reeking like that.”
Marilyn wrinkled her nose at my suggestion. “Yuk,” she said, giving her shorts a hike. “But okay. You’re right. I’ll start out there, and you take care of Sleeping Beauty. No point in getting cleaned up ourselves until after we’ve dealt with the mess.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Yup.”
With no further ado, Marilyn strode out of the bedroom and headed into a tough mission in besmirched shorts and vomity shit-kickers.
Chapter Forty
Sometimes women bonded at spas while they were being pampered with facials and massages or munching on body-sculpting food out by the pool. As for Marilyn and me, we bonded without any frills back in the breakfast nook of recent memory.
Eileen was peacefully sleeping it off in her red lace bra and panties—who would have guessed? I had showered and, for the second day in a row, borrowed one of her uniforms. Then I bundled up the black dress and slides and threw them in the trash. After Marilyn showered, she put on an old flannel robe while her shorts and T-shirt whirled around in the washer.
Needing an energy jolt, we sat sipping the rest of the coffee as the clock on the wall ticked peacefully and, in the distance, a radio belted out an old Elvis hit.
“I wonder what made her break down like that?” Marilyn asked. “It’s so unlike her.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, but she did say something about leaving. That might explain it.”
“Oh?” Marilyn was all ears.
“Yeah, she said she’d be gone soon. I asked her why but she passed out before she could answer.”
“I know one thing,” Marilyn said. “She’d rather die than leave James. He’s her life. He doesn’t see it of course.” She picked up her mug and took a sip. “He sees only what he wants to see. What suits him. And what suits him best is a woman of means.” She shrugged. “I guess I fit that description...and so did Kay. Poor Kay. She should be alive today, not lying on a slab in some morgue.”
I hardly dared breathe. Did she suspect Kay had been murdered?
She set down her mug so hard a little of the coffee slopped over the edge. “Bottom line, I don’t trust James...I mentioned that to the sexy lieutenant when he questioned me yesterday. What’s his name? Rossi?”
I nodded. Sexy.
“I told him to check out both Kay’s will and James’s. I think he played the same game with Kay that he tried on me—and on his first wife.”
“Game?”
Marilyn nodded. “He’s clever and so very polite and correct that you don’t suspect a thing. At least not at first. It’s an old con. I found that out a little late, but not too late, thank God.”
“Marilyn, you’ve lost me.”
Cradling her mug in both hands, she glanced across at me. Her eyes narrowed. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“Honestly, I don’t know what to think.”
“Well, let me tell you how James worked his con on me. He began by saying he wanted to change his will. Leave everything he had to me—the woman he loved. Everything, got that? So if anything should happen to him, I’d be protected financially.
“We w
ere engaged at the time, and I was in love with him. Ha! What a mistake.
“Anyway I swallowed the bait and said I wanted to do the same for him—in case anything happened to me. Oh, he protested very effectively, but I insisted. Wasn’t my love and concern as strong as his? I’d be hurt and insulted if he refused, etcetera, etcetera.”
“If you were both sincere, I see no problem.”
“If is the operative word. I married him, and the rest as they say is history. Or maybe not. When I found out he had the same arrangement with his first wife, I never trusted him the same way again. Like Kay, Number One died unexpectedly. OD’d on sleeping pills. There was gossip when it happened, but nothing was ever proven.”
She looked up from the coffee, straight into my eyes. “The night...when I dove off the boat...he upped anchor and sailed off.” She let go of her mug and shoved it aside. “He left me to die. He wanted me to drown.”
Wow. “Maybe he was sailing around, looking for you. Worried sick that he couldn’t find you in the dark. That something had happened...it’s understandable,” I finished somewhat lamely, my voice conveying anything but conviction.
She shook her head so hard her hair whipped around her face. “No way. The only reason I come here to use the pool is to rub in the fact that I’m still alive. Still swimming.”
“Did you tell the lieutenant about your suspicions?”
“Yes, I told him everything.”
And he told me nothing. I tried not to be hurt, but a lump rose into my throat. Rossi knew all this last night and had kept silent about it. That was the right thing to do, I told myself, the professional thing. My face flushed as I recalled nattering on about graphology. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to reveal any more about the case.
“Anyway,” Marilyn was saying, “that moonlight swim was the best one of my life, even better than when I qualified for the U.S. team.”
“You were rescued.”
She smiled, remembering. “In more ways than one. Who knows? I may never have returned. There was no one left to miss me. Not really. My parents passed away several years ago, and I have no family. But when I read of James’s engagement in the Palm Beach paper, I couldn’t let him trap another woman without trying to warn her.”
[M. by D. #5] The Design Is Murder Page 18