by Elaine Viets
“Maybe we need to see what Arlene saw. Anybody got a camcorder?” Helen said.
“I do,” Peggy said. “At home.”
“It’s still light out,” Helen said. “Let’s go to the Full Moon and shoot what Arlene did.”
Margery raced through the back streets to the Coronado like she had lights and sirens. Helen grabbed the seat and hung on while her landlady drove, cigarette clenched in her teeth. The Town Car screeched in front of the Coronado, and Peggy flung open her door, ready to dash inside.
“Be careful you don’t run into Arlene,” Margery said to Peggy. “One look at your face and she’ll know something is wrong.”
While Peggy sprinted across the lawn, Helen said, “Do you really think Arlene skipped with Glenn?”
“Glenn’s skipped and we haven’t seen Arlene lately.” Margery said. “That’s not quite the same thing. But I’m worried. Arlene’s car isn’t here.”
“Maybe she’s trolling another hotel lobby,” Helen said.
“Maybe,” Margery said.
They watched Peggy unlock her door and heard Pete’s welcoming squawk.
“Do you think she’ll be OK?” Helen asked.
“She’s strong,” Margery said. “Besides, Peggy is used to losing. She plays the lottery.”
“But this time she lost her money and her man,” Helen said.
“Peggy has a good job. She can make more money. That man was no loss. I’m glad she didn’t marry him. We’ll just have to make sure we have plenty of wine and time for her until she recovers. Quiet. Here she comes.”
“Got it,” Peggy said, and threw the camera bag on the car seat. Margery pulled out into the street before Peggy shut the door and forced the car through the honking, lurching traffic. The tires squealed when she pulled up at the Full Moon.
“Look at that,” Helen said. “The hotel’s parking lot is almost deserted. There’re only four cars. It should be packed to the curb.”
“Dead guests aren’t good for business,” Margery said.
Inside they found Sondra sitting at the front desk, reading a thick textbook. There was nothing for her to do.
Then Helen heard giggles and the pounding of wet feet. A little blond girl in a tiny, saggy swimsuit was running down the hall. She looked about six, with adorably wispy hair and a missing tooth.
“No running, sweetheart,” Sondra said. “Your feet are wet and you’ll hurt yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The child flashed a jack-o’-lantern grin.
“Ma’am?” Helen said. “Does any kid say that anymore? What’s a family doing here? I thought everyone had checked out.”
“Shh,” Sondra said.“They’re from the Midwest, where people still have manners, and they obviously haven’t turned on the TV news. It’s a mom, dad, two little ones, and a sulky teenage boy who spends all day making calls on the lobby phone and listening to his iPod. The parents and little kids hang out by the pool. What are you doing here? You don’t have to be at work until tomorrow morning.”
“We’re trying to figure out why that odd lady Arlene was hanging out in the lobby the other day,” Helen said. “Can we video the same stuff she did?”
“Suit yourself,” Sondra said, “but it was pretty boring.”
A car pulled up and parked in the darkest side of the lot. A man about sixty got out, and pulled a fishing hat down low on his forehead. A woman, her face in shadow, waited in the car.
“Look how she’s keeping her head down,” Sondra said. “Bet you anything they’re sneaking around.”
“What are they doing here?” Helen said.
“They think no one else will be at the murder hotel.”
“They figured right, except for Mr. and Mrs. Midwest,” Helen said.
“And two other cheating couples who ducked in about half an hour ago.” Sondra rolled her eyes. “Now, shoo with that camera. These types are skittish enough, and every room rented keeps us in business.”
Helen found Margery and Peggy pacing by the fountain. “Could you take any longer?” her landlady grumped. “The light’s going to be gone.”
Peggy handed Helen the camcorder. “You use it. You know what Arlene shot.”
Helen put her eye to the viewfinder and waited a moment for her vision to adjust to the world in miniature. Then she walked the route that Sondra said Arlene had taken.
“Flowers and trees first,” Helen said. She looked at them through the viewfinder. Nothing unusual. Just flowers and trees.
“Pool next.” Helen saw the kids splashing in the water. The little blond girl ran out of the pool, suit straps slipping off her shoulders, showing little pink breast buds. Her baby brother toddled after her, his diaper drooping to reveal a bare bottom. They were so beautiful—and so innocent. Was Arlene taking shots of naked children? Helen felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. Please, let me be wrong. She swung the camera around.
“Then the lobby,” Helen said. There was the man with the fishing hat, haggling over the room rates at the front desk. His hat was pulled down so low, the top half of his head was hidden.
“Seventy dollars is our lowest senior rate,” Sondra told him.
Senior rate? Now, that was romantic. How old was Lover Boy?
“Come on, honey, you can give us a better deal than that,” he whined. “Who else is going to stay here?”
“Sixty-seven fifty,” Sondra said.
“Done,” he said, and counted out the cash. Affordable adultery.
Was that someone else’s wife waiting in the car? Helen wondered. Sondra thought the man was sneaking around, and she’d seen plenty of guilty couples. Was Arlene indulging in a little garden-variety blackmail?
Helen swung the camera away from the front desk before the sneaky man saw her. “Snack bar now,” she said, using the hotel’s grand name for the cluster of vending machines. Helen watched a kid wearing baggy shorts and a rumpled T-shirt try to slide a dollar bill into the soda machine. It spit the money back. Was this some sort of vending machine scam? Why video it? The kid turned the bill around, stuck the money in again, and scored a Mountain Dew. Then he slouched over to the pay phones with a calling card.
“Pay phones.” Helen swung the camera to the phones on the wall, while the surly kid punched in numbers.
He looked up, saw Helen with the camcorder, and said, “Hey, bitch, do you mind?” The kid’s hand was cupped over the calling card.
“Do I mind what?” Helen said, the video camera still trained on his face. It was blotched with anger and zits.
“Do you fucking mind not shoulder surfing?” Manners evaporated after a certain age, even in the Midwest.
“What’s shoulder surfing?” Helen asked, lowering the camera.
The kid clenched his long, skinny fingers protectively over the card face. “You know what it is. Put that camcorder down or I’ll call the fucking cops. It’s bad enough I lost my cell phone when I got grounded and I’m stuck with a fucking calling card. Now every asshole with a camcorder thinks he can steal my card numbers. I already got ripped off at a turnpike rest stop. My dad bitched me out for being careless. Drop the fucking camcorder or I’ll call 911.”
The kid’s words suddenly skidded to a halt, as if he was surprised to be saying so much. Helen suspected he communicated with adults mostly by grunts and single syllables. She turned off her camera. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you very much.”
The kid stood there openmouthed, but that may have been his usual expression.
Helen ran back to Margery and Peggy, who were once more pacing the lobby.
“I’ve got it! I think Arlene was shoulder surfing.”
“What?” Peggy and Margery said together.
“She was stealing calling card and credit card numbers with a video camera.”
“I’ll be damned,” Margery said.
“It makes sense,” Peggy said. She was starting to show signs of life again. Maybe Margery’s folly made her feel better about her own mistake. “That’s why she
hung around vacation hotels and cultivated that harmless-tourist act with the knitting and the video cam. She took a bunch of innocent pictures, then swung the camera toward the phone bank.”
“Well, well, it’s time to have a talk with her,” Margery said.
“Unless she’s run off with Glenn,” Peggy said. She was getting used to the idea of losing her man.
“Maybe she’s at home watching TV,” Helen said.
Margery fixed her with a glare. “Do you believe that?”
“Uh, no,” Helen said.
“Then let’s quit wasting time and go home.”
Margery drove to the Coronado as if she got a bonus for running yellow lights. She stopped by her apartment just long enough to grab her passkey.
Helen and Peggy followed her up the stairs to 2C, then stood back while Margery pounded on the door. There was no answer.
Helen felt sick, and leaned against the wall.
Margery looked over at her. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m getting a complex,” Helen said. “Every time somebody knocks on a door, the people inside have either skipped or died.”
“If that crook Arlene skipped, she’s going to wish she was dead,” Margery growled. She banged on the door again. “No answer. I’m going in.” Margery unlocked the door with her passkey. The sharp, dizzying odor of bleach, ammonia and lemon polish poured out.
“That’s one good thing about renting to crooks,” Margery said. “They always clean up any fingerprints when they split.”
Helen and Peggy followed her inside. The apartment looked ready to show. The tabletops and counters sparkled. The floor was shiny clean.
“She’s gone,” Margery said.
“She take the towels?” Helen said. The residents of 2C usually departed with souvenirs.
“Nope. She got my whistling teakettle and the seashell mirror.”
Helen saw the blank spot on the wall by the front door and the empty stove burner.
“But I got first and last month’s rent and a cleaning deposit,” Margery said. “I won’t lose any money. But I liked that mirror.”
“Too bad she got away,” Helen said.
“She left,” Margery said. “That doesn’t mean she got away.”
CHAPTER 27
“They grabbed those children and ran out of this hotel like the devil was chasing them,” Sondra said.
“Who?” Helen said. She’d walked in on Sondra and Craig at the front desk.
“That nice family from the Midwest,” Sondra said. “I don’t know how they found out about the deaths, but they packed up and left at two thirty this morning. Wouldn’t even wait until daylight. Sybil was on duty. She said they acted like she was going to murder them in their beds.”
The hotel was unnaturally quiet for eight thirty in the morning. There was no line of impatient travelers at the front desk. No guests waited for the elevator. No one poured coffee or nuked a cinnamon roll in the breakfast room. The room’s TV was off, too. The employees couldn’t bear to watch the morning news.
“Did the other couples check out, too?” Helen said.
“All gone. The hotel is empty,” Sondra said. “All our reservations are canceled for the next month. We have fifty-two rooms to clean today, but then there’s no work. Sybil says she’ll put you both on vacation pay for a week. After that, you may have to look for another job if business doesn’t pick up.”
“No,” Craig said. “I want to work here.”
“We all want to work here,” Sondra said. “We’ll never find another boss as nice as Sybil. She even let me take off time for important tests at school.”
Helen looked down and saw that Craig was holding Sondra’s slender brown hand. Helen couldn’t blame him. The desk clerk was impossibly lovely in a long cream skirt and silk blouse.
Sondra deftly took back her hand. She was used to dealing with smitten men. “Well,” she said, “I have work to do. Cheryl’s cleaning on two. Denise said to tell you that you’re both working together on the third floor. Room 322 still has the police seal on it, so you can skip it, but you’ve got your work cut out for you. A boys’ soccer team stayed in 323, but they checked out the day of the murder. It hasn’t been cleaned yet. Denise said it was trashed. The couple who checked into the honeymoon suite last night carried a bag of fresh produce. They didn’t look like vegetarians to me.”
“Yuck,” Helen said.
“That’s why I like the front desk,” Sondra said. “Nothing but good, clean complaints.”
“I don’t know where to start,” Helen said, as she and Craig rode the elevator upstairs. “They both sound bad.”
Craig pulled out a coin. “Heads or tails,” he said. “Heads we do the soccer room first. I want to start there.”
“Tails we do the honeymoon suite first,” Helen said. “Produce puts me off my feed. I want to get it over with. Loser cleans the Jacuzzi.”
Craig flipped the coin. “You lose,” he said. “We start with the soccer room.”
“I’m afraid to see what those kids did to it,” Helen said.
She unlocked the door to 323, stopped at the threshold, and stared. “I don’t think you won,” she said.
“The little bastards,” Craig said.
The room was looped with toilet paper. It zigzagged over the bed and around the lamps. It crisscrossed the chair backs, wrapped around the mirror, and clung to the bathroom fixtures. TP trailed down the shower curtains and ran along the rug. The toilet paper was covered with squiggles of red and yellow Silly String.
Scrawled in Silly String on the bedroom walls was: We’re Going All the Way—State Champs!
“I hope they lose,” Craig said.
“I assume red and yellow are the school colors,” Helen said. She looked at the toilet paper draping the desk. “It’s stuck to the furniture. Oh, no. It’s wet.”
“With what?” Craig said. “This was a room full of feral boys.” He sniffed the paper. “It’s water.”
“Don’t expect me to thank the little slobs,” Helen said. “This is going to be a bear to clean.”
“Did they leave a tip?” Craig asked.
“A penny on the dresser,” Helen said. “Look at this mess. What kind of men are they going to be?”
“The kind who stay in 323,” Craig said.
After two hours of scraping, scrubbing and swearing, they’d stripped off the wet toilet paper and Silly String. Helen cleaned the last sludge out of the tub and stood up, dizzy with fatigue. Craig was looking tired, too. As they pushed the heavy housekeeping cart past room 322, Helen could see fingerprint powder on the door. She was glad the room was still sealed.
“How long do you think it will be before we clean that?” Craig said.
“If we’re lucky, the hotel will close first,” Helen said. “That fingerprint stuff is worse than Silly String.”
The morning was long and hot. Most guests had turned off their room air conditioners to be environmentally conscious. They forgot about the hotel maids, who roasted while they cleaned the steamy rooms. Helen turned the air conditioners back on, but the rooms didn’t cool down quickly. She and Craig were both sweating by the time they took their eleven o’clock break.
At eleven fifteen they were ready to tackle the honeymoon suite. Neither had much enthusiasm for the job. The two randy adults had made almost as much mess as a whole teen soccer team. The sheets had been dragged off the bed. Beer cans littered the tabletops, and a bottle of red wine was spilled on the carpet.
“At least they put the cucumbers in the wastebasket,” Craig said.
Helen grabbed the alcohol spray off the cart and studied the Jacuzzi. It was streaked and smeared like a first grader’s finger painting. “This is disgusting,” she said. “I hate fresh fruit in the Jacuzzi. There’s squashed peaches, bananas and strawberries, plus whipped cream, dark chocolate—and dark hair.”
“You sound just like Rhonda,” Craig said absently, as he gathered up the dirty bedsheets.
Helen was too stunned to say anything.
“Rhonda was always bitching about the whipped cream and shit,” Craig said. “Every damn time she had to clean that Jacuzzi, she complained about crawling into the tub. She could gripe for hours. I got sick of listening to her.”
“How did you know?” Helen’s voice was a croak. “You never met Rhonda. You came here after she was killed.” She looked at his sweaty hair. It was blond. But he had dark roots.
“What do you mean?” Craig unfurled a clean sheet across the huge mattress, and the damp Band-Aid flapped up on his wrist. There was no wound. It covered a tattoo—Bart Simpson on a surfboard saying, “Cowabunga, dude.”
Something to do with a cow, Penny the waitress had said, or a cowboy or a ranch. Dude ranches. Dude. Cowabunga, dude. Bart’s words had gotten a little twisted in Penny’s mind, but she was right. There was a tattoo on the cute surfer dude. And he had dark hair that he’d dyed blond.
Helen stared at the tattoo, fascinated. She was looking at the hand of a killer.
Craig’s voice went shrill, and he started talking faster. “You all said she bitched and whined.”
“No,” Helen said. “You said she complained to you. For hours. We never said anything to you about her complaints. Denise is too professional to criticize the staff to a new hire. I sure didn’t say anything. After Rhonda died we were all too ashamed of ourselves. We made her into a saint. We would never have told you that.”
“Cheryl told me,” Craig insisted. “That’s right. It was Cheryl.” He gave Helen that sun-drenched smile.
“No, it wasn’t,” Helen said. “Cheryl felt guilty because she’d turned down Rhonda’s money. She wouldn’t have bad-mouthed her.”
She looked him right in his lying hazel eyes. “You’re Rhonda’s mystery boyfriend. She talked about you all the time. You’re her handsome dark-haired man with the money.”
“You think I dated that skank?” he said. “You’re crazy, bitch.”
Helen knew she was right. Craig’s odd behavior made sense now. She saw him crawling around in the housekeeping room, giving her a lame excuse about dropping a spray can cap. She heard Craig asking her out—and Cheryl, too. He didn’t like older women. He wanted to pump the maids about hotel hiding places.