The Dead-End Job Mysteries Box Set 1

by Elaine Viets

  “For my own clarification, you did not hear shots,” the operator said. “You heard the male subject strangle the female?”

  “Yes,” Helen said. “I didn’t hear a gun. I think he killed her with his bare hands. It was horrible. Then he hung up the phone.”

  “How much time has gone by since you hung up?”

  “I don’t know,” Helen said. “A couple of minutes. Maybe five at the most. Nellie—she’s my supervisor—she told me to call. It hasn’t been real long. And I didn’t hang up the phone. He did.”

  “Did he sound like an older male or a younger male?”

  “Old. No, young. But not too young. He was grown up.”

  “Did it sound like there was another male present?”

  “I didn’t hear another man. Just Hank Asporth and the woman he strangled.” And maybe another woman, Helen thought. But before she could say it, the operator said, “What makes you think that he strangled her?”

  “I heard him! It was this awful choking noise.”

  “Was she choking on food?” the 911 operator said.

  “No, it wasn’t choking like that. She was fighting, trying to stay alive, and then she made this terrible sound.”

  “What sound?”

  Helen couldn’t describe the sound and she couldn’t forget it.

  “A dying sound,” Helen said. “She was murdered and I heard it.”

  All her doubts went away. At least for the moment. After Helen repeated everything Hank had said again, the 911 operator told her the police and paramedics had been dispatched and that the police would contact her later. Helen put down the receiver. It felt like it weighed twenty pounds in her hand.

  “Are you OK?” Nellie asked.

  “I’m fine,” Helen said.

  “You don’t look fine,” Berletta said. “Not unless you’re wearing flour for makeup. Let me get you some water.”

  Penelope had strict rules about telemarketers being seen but not heard. “You can’t go out now,” Helen said. “There are clients here. If you’re caught roaming the halls, you’ll be fired.”

  “If they want to fire me for acting like a human being, shame on them,” Berletta said.

  Helen started to get up, but Nellie pushed her down. “Sit. You look like particular hell. I’ll lie for Berletta if I have to.”

  “It’s too big a risk,” Helen said. “Berletta needs this job.”

  Berletta had a ten-year-old daughter with cerebral palsy. Her free days were spent fighting with the insurance companies for disallowed medicine and treatments. Her evenings were spent at Girdner, trying to pay off medical bills that had climbed to six figures.

  “Don’t worry, I’m packing protection,” Berletta said. She picked up a clipboard. “This is a trick my husband learned in the army. If you walk around with a clipboard, nobody questions you.”

  Helen laughed. The laugh turned into a shrill giggle that she had trouble stopping.

  “Do you want to go home?” Nellie said to Helen. “I’ll write you an excuse.”

  “I’m fine,” Helen said. She could feel tears clogging her throat, but she fought them back.

  “How about some chocolate therapy?” Nellie said. “Sugar and caffeine are good for shock. The almonds will give you protein.” She pulled out a gold-wrapped chocolate bar.

  “Ah, the healing powers of Godiva,” Helen said. She ate the chocolate. Berletta returned unscathed with a bottle of water and a damp paper towel. Helen gulped the cold water, then wiped her face with the towel and took a deep breath.

  “Enough,” she said. “I’m going back to work.”

  “You’re one tough woman,” Nellie said.

  “It’s all the abuse I take as a telemarketer.”

  The hourly insults, sexual slurs and questions about her parentage had toughened her up. She could work. She would work. She had a quota to fill, or she’d never get survey duty again.

  Helen didn’t want to think about what she had unleashed.

  If the cops really did find a dead woman, they might look into Helen’s past. She’d changed her name, but she was still on the run. Any halfway smart cop could figure it out.

  The cops would find no credit cards, no bank account, no phone in her name. They’d realize she was using a false name in about thirty seconds. She’d be on her way back to St. Louis. Helen wondered if she’d have to wear handcuffs the whole trip.

  She went back to the computer, and called the next person, a thirty-two-year-old stockbroker named Ashley Lipston. “May I speak to Ms. Lipston?” Helen’s voice sounded like it came from a newly opened tomb.

  “I can’t hear you. Speak up.”

  “I’m doing a sturbay, I mean, a survey for Spilver Sur—”

  Ms. Lipston slammed down the phone.

  Helen stumbled through her next presentation, too. Then she started signing up Silver Spur martini drinkers, finding a strange relief in doing her job.

  A shaky hour and a half later, two Brideport police officers came to Girdner Surveys. The night receptionist, who looked like Helen’s third-grade teacher, Sister Wilhelmina, brought them back to the phone room.

  “These police officers are here to see you,” she said.

  The receptionist gave Helen a disapproving look, as if she’d just earned six demerits. Helen wondered if any clients had seen the cops.

  Nellie and Berletta put down their phones and frankly eavesdropped.

  The two officers were as clean and new as their uniforms. One was dark, compact and muscular—a farm boy with a nose like a new potato. The other was a blond woman with short, untidy hair. The shirttail of her uniform blouse was creeping out of her waistband and her collar was crooked. Helen had an urge to straighten it.

  “There was no murder, ma’am,” the boy officer said. “We wanted to set your mind at ease. What you heard was a movie. The guy was watching it when we got there.”

  Hot shame flooded Helen. She remembered the woman’s teasing tone at first: “You’ve been a very bad boy, Hank. You’re just lucky I like bad boys.” That did sound like a line from a movie.

  She was a fool. A public fool. She would lose her job. All because she’d overreacted and called the police. But then she remembered that desperate, guttural choking noise. That was no movie sound effect. She’d heard a woman die. She was sure of it. . . . Almost sure.

  “He killed a woman,” she said. “It wasn’t a movie. She said his name, Hank. Twice. Explain that.”

  “You heard wrong.” Officer Untidy tucked in her shirttail. “You said you couldn’t hear what the man said, just the woman.”

  “I heard a woman being murdered.” It came out stronger than she felt.

  “No, ma’am,” Officer Untidy said. She had a coffee stain on her shirt. “We found no sign of anyone else living there. We found no women’s personal effects. No female clothes, shoes or makeup.”

  “He’s very rich. Maybe you didn’t look hard enough,” Helen said.

  Berletta sat at her desk, frozen. Nellie gave a warning cough.

  Good move, Helen thought. Insult the police. That will make them change their minds.

  The boy cop, the muscular one, moved forward in a way that seemed threatening. But Helen realized every move this young tank made would seem that way. “Ma’am, I will put that remark down to stress, because of the situation. We didn’t take Mr. Asporth’s word for it. We had reasonable suspicion to search the house and the garage without a warrant. The yard could be seen from public view, so we had cause to search that, too. Mr. Asporth also gave us permission.”

  “How much time was there between my call and your response?” Helen interrupted.

  “We responded in a timely manner,” he said, which was no answer at all.

  “Inside the house we looked in the closets and under the beds. We checked his storage containers and his walk-in freezer. We even checked the bait freezer on his boat. A guy hid his wife in one of those a couple of years ago.”

  When you were still in diapers,
Helen thought. I’ve got sweaters older than these two. When did they graduate from the police academy—yesterday?

  The boy cop frowned, as if he could read her thoughts.

  Office Untidy started talking. “We found nothing. There was no sign of a struggle. There was no blood. The neighbors heard no unusual noises. The vehicles in the garage were registered in his name. He wasn’t hiding her car in there.”

  “Did you look in his cars?”

  “He opened them for us. They were empty.” Officer Untidy was wrestling with her shirttail—and losing.

  “You made an honest mistake, ma’am,” the boy officer said. “You did your duty as a citizen and called us. You reported what you thought was a murder. We checked it out and found nothing.”

  Helen couldn’t bear the condescension in his voice. This young twerp thought she was a hysterical woman.

  “It wasn’t a mistake.” Helen sounded really hysterical now. “I heard him murder a woman.”

  “I wouldn’t say that too loud if I were you,” the boy officer said. “He could sue you for your last nickel.”

  Chapter 3

  “Ten. Twenty. Thirty.”

  Helen was counting crumpled ten dollar bills. The money had been stuffed inside her teddy bear, Chocolate.

  “Two hundred. Two ten. Two twenty.”

  She pulled more stuffing out of the bear. The pile of wrinkled tens grew higher. Helen breathed in the dirty perfume of used money. Last night, she’d heard a woman being murdered. Then two cops treated her like a nutcase. It was a trying evening. But this morning, Helen had her hands on something reassuring: money. She knew she’d be fired in a few hours. But if her bear Chocolate was as fat as Helen hoped, she could tell Girdner to go to hell.

  “Two ninety. Three hundred. Three ten.”

  Telemarketing was wretched work, but Helen made more at it than at any other dead-end job she’d ever worked. She had an odd, embarrassing knack for selling septic-tank cleaner. The money was piling up. Helen couldn’t have a bank account or even a safe-deposit box. Those would make her too easy to trace. Instead, she stashed her money in a place she thought un-bear-ably clever.

  “Three seventy. Three eighty. Three ninety.”

  The money pile had grown to a fat mound. Helen had not had so much cash since she worked for that St. Louis corporation. Actually, she hadn’t had much cash then, although she made a hundred thousand plus. She spent her salary on designer suits for a job that bored her, massages to ease the work tension, and Ralph Lauren window treatments (when you spent that much, you did not call them curtains) for a house designed to impress other people.

  “Four ten. Four twenty. Four thirty.”

  She threw away more money on Rob, her rat of a husband. He’d looked for work for years, but never found a job. Rob needed a Rolex to get to job interviews on time, a new SUV to get there in style, and a state-of-the-art sound system to soothe his shattered nerves when he was rejected—again. But Rob was no mooch. He was building a new deck, wasn’t he?

  “Six forty. Six fifty. Six sixty.”

  When Helen remembered what happened on the deck, she started counting faster, spilling bills every which way. One hot summer day, Helen decided not to be such a corporate grind. For the first time in seventeen married years, she left work early. She would surprise her husband, handsome and sweaty in the sun. They would make passionate love on the new deck furniture, then swim naked in the pool.

  Her husband had had the exact same thought. Helen found him sweaty and naked with their next-door neighbor, Sandy.

  “Eight seventy. Eight eighty. Eight ninety.”

  Bills leaped like spawning salmon as Helen recounted her humiliation that awful afternoon. She’d picked up a crowbar on the deck and started swinging. When she finished, she’d smashed her old life completely. Now she was on the run in South Florida, a female version of The Fugitive, condemned to nowhere jobs that paid in cash under the table.

  “Nine twenty. Nine thirty. Nine forty.”

  Helen pulled out one last ten-spot wedged inside Chocolate’s paw. Nine hundred fifty dollars. She shoved the money back in the bear and patted his swollen belly.

  Rich Chocolate, indeed. But she had another money cushion. She unzipped the couch pillows and started counting. She had seven hundred dollars stuffed in the turquoise throw pillows. Twelve hundred fifteen dollars in the black couch pillows. Seven thousand and something in the old Samsonite suitcase in the closet. She could survive for months on her stash while she looked for another job. She was going to be fired, but people at her level didn’t need references.

  Helen wished she could get last night’s sounds out of her head. That gurgling scream played in an endless loop. But the police said she’d imagined it. Hot humiliation overwhelmed her. The police had been inside Hank Asporth’s house. They’d seen no overturned furniture. No sign of a woman, dead or alive. They told Helen she’d heard a movie. But no movie victim had ever screamed like that. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was right.

  She was also sure she was right when she followed her first instinct. Look where that got her. Out of work.

  She was ready to face the firing squad.

  Helen clocked in at seven fifty-eight A.M. on what she knew would be her last day in the boiler room.

  Taniqua was spraying her phone with Lysol. She said she hated when the night shift used her desk and left their trash on it. Taniqua had style. She looked like she walked off a New York runway in her red silk crop top, tiny skirt and sexy four-inch satin heels with rhinestone buckles. She’s young, pretty and ready to party, Helen thought, and she’s stuck here.

  Nick, skinny and jittery, came in carrying his usual breakfast of orange soda and jelly doughnuts. Marina’s toddler, Ramon, was trying to put a hairy pink piece of chewed gum in his mouth. His mother snatched it from his chubby hand, and Ramon burst into loud sobs. Marina swung the howling child onto her hip with an easy motion. The woman has the balance of a tightrope artist, Helen thought, lifting that kid when she’s wearing tight jeans and skinny heels. Ramon cried and clutched his mother’s long dark hair while she soothed him into silence.

  The computers came on at precisely 8:01. This morning, they were dialing New Hampshire. Helen glanced at her screen. “Hello, Mr. Harcourt. This is Helen with Tank Titan . . .”

  Mr. Harcourt had just finished cussing her for waking him when she was called into Vito’s office.

  Vito looked more like a sausage than ever, with a tight red shirt for a casing. He was not his usual chipper self.

  “They want to see you upstairs,” he said. “I hear you called the cops on a survey client and accused him of murdering some broad. Helen, did you have to pick a rich one on the A-list? You’re a good seller. I’d like to keep you. But I hired you. It’s my heinie in the wringer, too.”

  Helen didn’t say anything. It wasn’t Vito’s fault. For all she knew, the New York lizards would come down and fire him or break his legs or whatever those scary guys considered corporate discipline.

  Helen rode up the elevator up to Girdner Surveys, feeling like she was ascending into heaven for final judgement. She would be cast out into boiler-room hell soon enough. When the doors opened, Helen was once again startled by the contrast between the boiler room’s dirt and the survey side’s elegance.

  Melva, the dignified day receptionist, said, “You’re supposed to go to Penelope’s office. Some lawyer’s been in there since seven thirty. And Helen . . . good luck.”

  “I’ll need it,” Helen said.

  She knocked and went in. Penelope was sitting more rigidly than usual, like an Egyptian stone statue. She did not invite Helen to sit down. Helen stood there like a kitchen maid who’d dropped the best teapot, while Penelope talked about her. Penelope’s buttoned-up suit had a tight bow at the throat, as if she needed to hold in her rage.

  If I get to tell her to go to hell, it just might be worth it, Helen thought.

  A sleek, plump man in blue pinstripes wa
s sitting across from Penelope. This must be the lawyer. Penelope indicated Helen with a nod of her head. “This woman used this office to create an incident last night. It was unforgivable, but Mr. Asporth has graciously decided to overlook it. You’re sure you don’t want her fired?” Penelope acted like a queen, casually offering to execute a worthless slave.

  “Mr. Asporth has specifically requested that she not be fired,” the lawyer said. “It is his express wish that she return to her job as a—what is it?” He looked at his notes. “Oh, yes, a survey taker.”

  Smart man, Helen thought. Mr. Asporth is afraid if I’m fired, I’ll make a stink and have plenty of time to do it.

  “But if she discusses this incident with anyone, including the authorities, we’ll be forced to take action against your company. After all, she is an employee of Girdner Surveys and its parent company as well.”

  I don’t have any money, Helen thought. But Girdner was loaded. Asporth knew what he was doing.

  The lawyer rose, fat with confidence, and left without a goodbye.

  Helen was still standing. Penelope turned furious eyes on her and said in a hissing whisper, “You heard him. You’ll keep your job, but not because I want you to. If I hear you’ve been talking to anyone, you’re out on the street. I’ll make sure you never work in Broward County again.”

  Helen breathed a sigh. By some miracle, she still had her job. She went back down to the boiler room and told Vito.

  “Good,” he grunted. “Sit down and start selling.”

  Helen tried to concentrate on her sales pitch, but she couldn’t. The scene in the office had been humiliating. Her hands itched for that crowbar. She longed to smash Penelope’s computer. And that was just the beginning. But she tamped down her rage. She still had her job.

  She had something else, too. Hank Asporth’s actions had just confirmed that he’d murdered that woman. An innocent man would demand she be fired, not send a slippery lawyer to shut her up—and make sure she kept her job. An out-of-work Helen would have time to stir up trouble. She would trust her instincts once again and hope she didn’t get herself into trouble. But she knew better.