by Elaine Viets
Helen was rolling with her sales pitch on the next call, well into her fourth sentence. “One of your neighbors in Missoula, Mr. Dixs, gave me your name as a homeowner with a septic tank.”
A voice like an ax blade cut her off. “A neighbor, huh? I don’t have any neighbors, you lying bitch,” he snarled and hung up.
Helen sent Mr. Dixs to telemarketing hell. Two more nasty men joined him. Thanks to Helen, they’d all get up to seven septic tank calls a day.
A weary mother with two sick kids (Helen heard one barfing) went to heaven. So did a sad, polite man who sounded like a movie cowboy. When he said simply, “Ma’am, I’m out of work,” Helen gave him a break and rescued him from further calls.
Helen woke up a sick woman and atoned for her sin by sending her to heaven. If people were having a worse day than she was, Helen took them off the list. They never knew what she did. She enjoyed her secret power: punishing the outrageously rude and helping the downtrodden with a small kindness.
Nine calls, nine minutes. Her time was almost up. She could only play Goddess once more.
“Hi, Mr. Richards, this is Helen with Tank Titan Septic System Cleaner. We make—”
“Mr. Richards?” the man said scornfully. “You’re retarded. What are you, stupid? Mr. Richards doesn’t live here, moron.”
“Thank you, sir,” Helen said, and happily sent him to hell.
Two sales later, her shift was over. Vito looked at her sales figures and said, “I’m going to reward you, Helen. Tonight, you work the survey side.”
Vito was playing telemarketing God. He sent her to telemarketing heaven.
Helen walked out of the building and blinked at the harsh South Florida light. In the windowless boiler room, she’d had no idea it was a sunny November day. When she’d lived in St. Louis, she’d dreaded November, the gray month that brought the first ice and snow. But winter in Florida was gorgeous. Red impatiens bloomed in planters. Purple passionflowers rioted on garden walls. Palm trees rustled like taffeta skirts.
As she walked home, she tried to clear her head of the nearly three hundred phone calls that had pounded her ears in the last five hours. Tank Titan telemarketers worked a brutal schedule: The first shift was eight A.M. to one P.M. The boiler room closed in the afternoon, when many people weren’t home. Then the telemarketers came back to work from five to ten P.M. Each shift was five hours straight, with only one five-minute break each hour.
Helen worked ten-hour days, taking nearly six hundred calls each day.
For that, she was paid five dollars and fifteen cents an hour, plus a ten-dollar commission on each sale. Three commissions per shift were good. She’d worked there four weeks and made at least five hundred dollars a week. She sometimes earned more, but Vito helped himself to about fifty bucks of her commission each week. That was his reward for paying her in cash. Helen did not want her name in any company computers. She’d be too easy to trace.
She walked home quickly, stretching her sore arms, neck and back, reveling in the warm sun. Survey work was like a vacation after the slamming boiler room calls. She’d make ten to twenty calls an hour, instead of sixty. It was a reward for the top sellers. The well-spoken top sellers. Telemarketers like Taniqua, who started her spiel with, “I wanna ax you a queshun” could make a hundred sales a day, and they’d never get survey duty at a snotty place like Girdner Surveys.
But Helen had a college degree. Helen had once made one hundred thousand dollars a year in a St. Louis corporation. Then she’d come home early on a balmy day like this and found her husband Rob with her next-door neighbor, Sandy. They were buck naked on the sun-drenched deck. Sandy was wrapped around her husband like an Ace bandage.
Helen had picked up a crowbar lying nearby and felt the satisfying crunch! That crunch changed her life. Now she was on the run, reduced to dead-end jobs. She felt safe in these awful jobs. No one from her old life would look for her in a boiler room.
This job was a fifteen-minute walk from the Coronado Tropic Apartments, where she lived. Helen loved the swooping Art Deco curves of the old white and turquoise building. On her days off, she sat out by the pool, drinking wine and watching the purple bougainvillea blossoms float on the water.
Her landlady, Margery Flax, must have heard her walking by. She opened her door and called, “Come join me for lunch by the pool.”
Helen was happy to forego the scrambled eggs she’d planned to eat. Especially when she saw the spinach salad on the picnic table. It had fat slices of chicken and avocado and lots of crumbled blue cheese. There were hot pumpernickel rolls and chocolate-covered strawberries.
Margery was opening a bottle of wine that had a real cork. She always wore purple, but today’s shorts outfit looked positively royal. Helen’s landlady was seventy-six, with a face as wrinkled as a shar-pei puppy. She also had some of the best legs in Lauderdale. Today, she showed them off in jaunty purple suede mules.
“What’s the occasion for a real bottle of wine, not a box?” Helen said.
“I’ve finally rented 2C, so we’re celebrating,” Margery said. “I swear that apartment had a weird magnet. It’s attracted one wacko after another.”
Helen wasn’t going to argue with her. The last tenant was a psychic named Madame Muffy. The one before that was still in jail.
“So who’s the new person?”
“Persons. A nice normal retired couple from New Jersey. Fred and Ethel Mertz.”
“Like on I Love Lucy?”
Margery looked at her blankly.
Helen said, “Lucy’s sidekick was Ethel Mertz. She was married to Fred.”
“Before my time.” Margery poured Helen a generous glass of wine.
“Not too much wine,” Helen said. “I leave for work again at four-thirty.”
“You still have that worthless job? No, I shouldn’t have to ask. I can see you do. You look beat. Those coast-to-coast insults are taking their toll on you, Helen. Why do you work there?”
“For the money.” Helen took a bite of her salad. She hoped Margery would start eating and get off this subject.
“An attractive, hardworking woman like you should have no trouble getting a decent job. Why don’t you let your friend Sarah give you some good leads? She has lots of corporate contacts.”
Because I can’t be in a corporate computer, Helen thought.
“I make twice as much here as my last job. It’s good money,” she said.
“No,” Margery said. “It’s bad money, and you’ll pay a high price for it.”
Helen suddenly lost her appetite. She didn’t want this conversation. She didn’t like to think about her old life, or some of the things she did in this new job. She didn’t want to think, period. She was too tired.
She put down her fork. “Margery, I’m dead tired. I really need a nap before I go back to work. Lunch was lovely. Let me help you clear up and I’ll go inside.”
“I’ll do that,” Margery said. “Go get your sleep. Take your salad with you. You can eat it later.”
Helen was greeted at her door by her gray and white cat. Thumbs looked like a stuffed toy, until you saw his outsized front paws. He had the biggest feet Helen had ever seen on a feline. He was a polydactyl cat, with six toes on each paw. She absently scratched his ears while she surveyed her two-room furnished apartment. It was like a fifties exhibit. Helen loved the turquoise couch with the triangle pattern, the lamps shaped like nuclear reactors, the boomerang coffee table. The Barcalounger was the best. Helen didn’t dare sit down in it this afternoon. She’d never get up if she did. She put her salad in the fridge and stretched out on her bed for just a moment.
Helen woke up at four-forty-five and ran all the way to work. She didn’t want to be late for survey duty.
Girdner Inc. was a company with a split personality. The Girdner Sales boiler room was on the first floor of the office building. Dirty, dingy, hidden from sight in the back of the building, its staff sold septic-tank cleaner from Maine to California.
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p; On the top floor was their showcase, Girdner Surveys. They conducted slick surveys for suits at the national ad agencies. Girdner Surveys looked like an expensive lawyer’s office. A rain forest had been cleared to provide its mahogany paneling. The carpet was expensively subdued, some color between blue and gray. It was like walking through a soft smoky fog. The dignified receptionist could have been a dean at an exclusive women’s college.
Helen thought there was something weird about the dual operations. Why was the survey side fit for corporate kings, while the boiler room was the most awful office squalor? Couldn’t Girdner afford fresh paint and carpeting for the boiler room? Couldn’t they at least clean the place?
Vito, the boiler-room manager, was never seen in the elite Girdner Surveys. Neither were most of his telemarketing employees. The Hispanics and young blacks in their tight tank tops and outrageous platform shoes, the junkies, felons and bikers, were not allowed through the mahogany doors.
Boiler-room refugees like Helen came in the side entrance and were hidden away in a phone room. That door was kept shut. She was below-stairs help, well-spoken enough for survey work, but never seen by the high-priced clients.
Girdner Surveys was presided over by a preppie named Penelope. In her early thirties, Penelope’s beige hair, skin and suits were forgettable. What Helen remembered was her stiff, rigid manner. She reminded Helen of those dolls with the bendable joints. Penelope talked through clenched teeth. Helen thought her other orifices were probably clenched, too.
Penelope did not give pep talks to the phone staff like Vito. She hated talking to them. When she was forced to communicate with the lower orders, she sat behind her desk, gripping her chair arms and staring straight ahead.
Mostly she issued orders to the phone-room supervisor, Nellie, a lively blonde who had more personality in her little finger than Penelope had in her whole body. Nellie, fat and fifty, had a voice so alluring that men proposed marriage when she called them.
“OK, ladies, it’s just the three of us tonight,” Nellie said. “We’re recruiting from the A-list, which does not stand for asshole, no matter how abusive these guys get. These are the richest names in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward Counties. We’ll pay good money—two hundred bucks if they’ll participate in a martini study. Just remember, two hundred bucks is pocket change to these people.”
Berletta, the other woman working the phones, groaned. “The richer they are, the meaner they are,” she said in her beautiful Bahamian accent.
It was true. Surveys for beauty products, candy and beer paid only forty or fifty dollars. But most blue-collar subjects needed the money. They were polite.
“Cheer up,” Nellie said. “You could be calling doctors.”
Doctors were paid the most—up to three hundred dollars per survey. Arrogant and greedy, they acted as if they were stepping off their thrones to participate.
“You know the drill,” Nellie said. “Be polite. Be persuasive. We need to sign up thirty people, ages twenty-five to forty, who make more than one hundred thousand a year and drink martinis made with Silver Spur vodka. The computer database is sorted and ready. Start dialing.”
Girdner’s computers had incredible information on their survey subjects. Tidbits mentioned in a casual phone conversation with a survey recruiter found their way into the database.
The computer told Helen who took Prozac, lived with a boyfriend, split with their mate or suffered from bipolar disorder. She knew who just had a baby—a newborn opportunity for diaper and formula surveys. Helen could see which women used tampons or pads, information used for personal-care product surveys. She knew who had hysterectomies, disqualifying them for those same surveys.
For nearly an hour, she labored through voice mail, answering machines, “he’s not home” and “don’t call me at dinner” without one bite. Not even a nibble. She was getting discouraged.
She looked at the information on the next prospect: “Age 40. Occupation: Financier. Annual income: More than five hundred thousand. College educated. Smokes Dunhills. Drives a Land Rover and a vintage Porsche 911. Owns a Cigarette boat. No pets. Uses MCI long-distance service. Drinks martinis made with Silver Spur vodka more than three times a week.”
There was one other comment, this one by a survey recruiter: “Good talker in focus groups but has a bad temper on phone. Can be mean.”
Mean or not, he had the right demographics for this survey. Helen took a deep breath, dialed and said, “May I please speak to Mr. Henry Asporth?”
“This is Hank.” The man had a rich voice to go with all that money.
“Hi, this is Helen and I’m with the—”
“What? Sweetie, wait a minute.” Sweetie. Helen ground her teeth. She’d rather he was mean than call her sweetie.
Asporth had put the phone down. Helen would wait thirty seconds before she hung up on him. An old anti-telemarketer trick was to put down the phone and never come back.
Helen heard someone say, “Hey! Wait a minute.” A woman. She sounded young. She seemed surprised and a little scared. Then Helen heard a man and a woman arguing, but it sounded far away. It probably was. A house like Hank’s was measured in acres, not square feet.
“What do you mean, ‘What am I doing in here?’” The woman’s voice was higher and clearer than the man’s.
The man’s voice was a low, angry rumble, but Helen couldn’t pick up any words.
The woman sounded defiant, but there was a taunting, teasing quality to her voice. She seemed to have the upper hand. “You want it? Well, then you better give me what I want. Otherwise, you’ll never get your hands on it. You’ll be sorry. I can put you away for a long time. You’ve been a very bad boy, Hank. You’re just lucky I like bad boys. I’ve waited long enough. I want an answer, and I want it tonight.”
Helen heard the man’s voice again, low and angry, but still impossible to decipher. Even without the words, Helen felt its cutting edge.
“I’m not lying,” the woman insisted, her voice rising.
Then the woman’s voice changed. Now she was afraid. “What are you doing here? Get away from me. No!” More voices, talking over each other. The man, angry. The woman, sounding more frightened. Her high, light voice was easier to understand. His was a low rumble. And was that a third person? Helen couldn’t tell. They were too far away.
Helen heard a loud clunking noise, like something heavy was overturned. Then the woman said something that didn’t make sense. It sounded like, “It’s the coffee—” Her words were stretched into a short, explosive scream.
But there was no misunderstanding her next frantic words: “What are you doing? No! No! Hank!” Her scream was cut off.
Helen had never heard anything as terrifying as the next sound. It was an awful guttural choking noise. It sounded like someone was fighting for air. Helen had her hand protectively on her own throat, as if the strangler might grab her through the phone.
“Hello?” Helen said, her voice a frightened croak.
Dead air. Then a click.
Someone had hung up the phone.
Chapter 2
“Oh, my God,” Helen yelled to the other survey takers. “Someone’s being killed. I heard it. He’s killing her right now. What do I do?”
“Call 911,” said her supervisor, Nellie. “Now.” She put down her phone and came over to stand by Helen. The big blonde’s presence was solid and reassuring. Nellie was one of those people who became calmer in a crisis. Berletta, the other woman working in the survey room, stopped calling but said nothing. She was there if Helen needed her.
Helen’s fingers moved slowly, as if she was dialing under water.
“Wait. Nellie, what if I’m wrong? What if he really didn’t kill her? What if I didn’t hear what I think I heard? What if I’m sending the police to an innocent man?”
“Then the cops will leave, no harm done. But ask yourself this: What if you really did hear someone killing a woman, and you did nothing? Could you sleep at night?”
“No, of course not. It’s just that . . .”
“Helen, what was your first thought when you heard those sounds?” Nellie said. “Your first thought—not your second.”
“A woman was being killed.”
“Then listen to your instincts. Make the call.”
Helen’s fingers felt cold and unwieldy, a dead woman’s fingers. Her brain was racing: Nellie believed her, but what if the cops didn’t? What if—?
“911. Do you need police, fire or medical?”
“Police.” Helen had trouble getting out that one word. The others came in a gasping rush, as if she’d been running for miles. “I just called a house. I heard a woman being hurt. No, killed. I heard her die. They were having a fight and she was screaming and he killed her.” At least I think so. Helen silently smothered her doubts.
The 911 operator said, “Where is help needed?”
Helen found her businesslike tone soothing. Just the facts, ma’am. We can deal with this, no matter how bad it seems. Helen read the address on her computer screen. “It’s 1751 Seamont. On the Intracoastal Waterway. Hurry, but I think it’s too late.”
“What city?”
“Brideport,” Helen said.
“What was the phone number of the person you were calling?”
Helen read it from the computer screen.
“What is your name and telephone number?”
“Helen Hawthorne.” She gave the Girdner number.
“Where are you calling from?” The litany of questions was comforting. The 911 operator’s voice was soothing as poppy syrup.
“Girdner Surveys,” Helen said. “It’s near Broward Boulevard and U.S. 1. I’m a telemarketer there. I was calling the Asporth house when I heard someone murder this woman.”
“And the name of the person you were calling?”
“Henry Asporth. He answered the phone. He said his name was Hank. Then he put the phone down and I heard him arguing with a woman. She sounded young, but I don’t know who she was. She screamed, but it was cut off. I think he strangled her or broke her neck. He killed her. I heard it.”