by Elaine Viets
“Then I found out I was pregnant. I tried to trace him, but I didn’t have any money to hire a private eye. I went to the hotel myself. The desk clerk said he couldn’t give out the names of guests. I tried to bribe the kid. He said there was no way to track him down. Skip was one of six guys who’d crashed in a room. He didn’t use his credit card. The hotel clerk recognized his picture, but had no idea who he was.
“Skip—what a joke. That’s what he did. I never saw him again until he turned up at the Full Moon all these years later.”
“You didn’t recognize him, did you?” Helen said.
“Not at first. I couldn’t believe my hot beach boy was that fat old businessman. Skip had lost his hair and gained fifty pounds. But it was more than that. He looked so serious, so pompous.”
“What tipped you off?”
“He looked vaguely familiar in that photograph. Remember, that’s what I said. The Scotch bottle by the bed stirred up my memory. Skip drank Johnnie Walker Black when most kids were still chugging Coors. He made a big deal about buying the best. But the Phi Beta Kappa key finally did it. I used to tease him about that. He was so proud of it. He even wore it on his bathrobe when we made love. He still wore it after all these years. That key unlocked my memory. Ironic, wasn’t it?”
Helen remembered the scene. Cheryl had dropped the spray bottle when Helen mentioned that key. The maid had dithered about being a klutz. But she was shocked, not clumsy.
“That’s when I took a good look at the picture on his desk,” Cheryl said. “I recognized those mean little eyes. I knew it was him. I should have seen the resemblance sooner.
“I looked at the two children in that photo and thought I’d explode. Those kids had everything, while I was buying clothes for Angel at garage sales. I was furious. I wanted justice. Dean was going to pay child support for Angel or his wife would find out exactly what kind of man she’d married. My Angel deserves a decent life.”
“So you confronted Dean in his room,” Helen guessed.
“I hid in the hall bathroom until all the maids were gone. I’d already called my mom and said I had to work late. I asked her to watch Angel. She bitched about it, and that had me on edge. I waited till Sondra was busy checking in a long line of customers. Then I used my passkey card on Skip’s room.”
Cheryl wasn’t crying now. Her voice was steady. “I walked in on him in the shower. He’d been drinking, and that made him slow and stupid. He recognized me. I guess I haven’t changed as much as I thought. He wasn’t scared. He was”—she hunted for the right word—“contemptuous. He thought he was so far above me. He was standing on a bath mat wrapped in a skinny hotel towel, but he acted like he was the king of the world, and I was some peasant.
“I told him we had a child. He knew it. He knew it and he never said anything. He let me struggle alone all these years. He said he couldn’t be sure the baby was really his.”
“The oldest deadbeat-dad excuse in the world,” Helen said.
“He was my first,” Cheryl said. “Am I a fool or what?”
“How did Skip find out you were pregnant?” Helen said.
“The hotel clerk. The one who wouldn’t help me. He called the guy who’d rented the room at spring break, and that guy called Skip to warn him. Men stick together. Skip said I was trying to blackmail him into paying child support for some other man’s kid. He told everyone I was a money-grubbing slut, and then he went on with his life. He never came back to Fort Lauderdale. Skip said he hated Florida.”
“So how’d he wind up at the Full Moon?” Helen said.
“He had to attend that business conference here. He had no choice. His boss ordered it. Skip—Dean I guess he is now—thought it was safe to come to Florida after all these years. The hotel where he’d spent spring break had been torn down.”
“He didn’t know you worked here?”
“Of course not. He’d forgotten all about me until I turned up in his room. I showed him the photo of our child and said, ‘How could you abandon our Angel?’
“He looked at her picture, grunted, and said, ‘What’s wrong with it?’ It! He called our child it.
“I said, ‘Her name is Angel and she has Down syndrome.’
“He said, ‘She’s a retard? You want my money for a retard? That’s not my fault. That’s your stupid cracker genes.’
“I was so mad, I picked up the first thing I could lay my hands on. It was the Scotch bottle he’d brought into the bathroom. I swung it as hard as I could and hit him in his lying face. The next thing I knew, the bathroom was covered in blood, glass and Scotch, and he was on the floor. He was dead. I didn’t care.”
Helen saw the boiling anger in Cheryl’s eyes. She was still furious at the insult to her child. Cheryl’s arms were roped with muscle from years of making beds, moving furniture and hauling heavy trash bags. She could easily kill an overweight, out-of-shape man.
“What did you do then?” Helen asked.
“I’d been wearing my cleaning gloves, so my fingerprints weren’t on the bottle. It wouldn’t have mattered if they were. I was the maid. I packed up the big pieces and buried them in the Dumpster, just in case. I checked the room to make sure I didn’t leave anything behind, like my photo of Angel. Then I put out the privacy sign and shut the door.
“Nobody saw me. I was invisible, even with blood-stains on my smock. I threw it away, along with my clothes and the shoes. Nobody missed the smock. Nobody cleaned the room the next day. The Dumpster was emptied the next morning, and the bloody clothes and bottle pieces were buried in a landfill. It was two more days before Skip was found.”
“The cops think Craig killed him,” Helen said.
“Yes,” Cheryl said. She stripped off her gloves. She wasn’t crying now. Her voice was quiet, matter-of-fact. “I guess you’ll be calling the police.”
“Who will take care of Angel if you go to prison?” Helen said.
“My mother,” Cheryl said. “She doesn’t like my little girl, but she’ll do it out of duty.”
Angel would live on cold charity, because her mother had lashed out in a moment of rage.
Helen remembered the day she’d caught her husband with Sandy. Her hot red anger had overflowed like lava, and she’d started swinging that crowbar. If she’d connected with her ex-husband’s head instead of his SUV, she wouldn’t have stopped until she’d beaten the scumbag to death. And she’d had less provocation than Cheryl.
“I deserve to go to jail,” Cheryl said. “He had a family.”
But they would be well provided for, Helen thought. Skip—or Dean—would have had plenty of insurance. Men like him always did. If Cheryl went to prison, Dean would still be dead and Helen would have created a new orphan. The lake of blood would grow deeper. She would drown in it for sure.
“I’m not calling the police,” Helen said.
She picked up the gym bag. It was so heavy, it wrenched her back. “I think there’s a hundred thousand dollars here. Take the money. Wait a month, then give Sybil notice, quit your job, and leave town. Go to Ohio.”
“You’re not going to turn me in?” Cheryl said.
“A jury of women would never convict you,” Helen said.
“What about the company it was stolen from?” Cheryl sounded slightly dazed. “The money belongs to them.”
“The telemarketers? They’re out of business,” Helen said.
“Don’t you want any?” Cheryl said.
“That would be stealing,” Helen said.
CHAPTER 30
Helen did not get justice when she divorced Rob. But she knew how to give it. Her judgment on Cheryl was just. The abandoned mother had already served seven years of hard labor. Working as a hotel maid was the hardest physical labor Helen had ever done. Add the burdens of caring for a child, dealing with a mean mother, and scrounging for money, and Cheryl had shouldered more than her share of punishment. It was time to set her free from her prison. The robbery money would give Cheryl and Angel the life they deser
ved.
Helen felt no guilt for covering up the murder of Dean Stamples. The police had told his family that Craig was the killer. They would have closure (how she hated that cheap word). Pinning Dean’s murder on Craig wouldn’t ruin an innocent man’s reputation. Craig had committed plenty of crimes.
With Craig as the killer, the family would never suffer through a murder trial. Dean Stamples would stay the picture-perfect daddy, killed in a senseless crime. His wife and children would not find out that he was a heartless seducer who’d abandoned a pregnant woman.
Helen wondered if his wife already knew Dean’s cruelty. Men like Dean didn’t get kinder and gentler as they aged. Maybe she saw her husband’s death as a release.
The sun was low in the sky when Helen left work. At the far corner of the lot she was transfixed by a strangely beautiful sight. Three large green iguanas and half a dozen doves were sitting together on the warm asphalt. The iguanas were the brilliant color of a new leaf. Their saw-toothed heads and scaly backs were magnificently grotesque. The largest was nearly four feet long. The gray doves were softly pretty. Beauty and ugliness existed side by side in South Florida.
If Helen believed in signs, she could take this as a blessing on her plan for Cheryl. Helen didn’t. Believe, that is. But as she walked home from the Full Moon, she felt at peace for the first time since she’d looked into the lake of blood. She would find Phil as soon as she got home. She’d dress up and they’d go out and celebrate. She’d been moping alone in her room too long. Of course, she couldn’t tell Phil why she was celebrating. He thought too much like a cop to understand. But he’d be happy that her mood had finally lightened.
When she got back to the Coronado, Margery had already started celebrating. She met Helen at the gate and handed her a chilled flute of champagne. “Cheers,” she said. “You’re a free woman.”
“What happened?” Helen said.
“Marcella is going to marry your ex-husband on her yacht, the Brandy Alexander. The wedding’s at sunset tonight.”
Helen spilled her drink on the sidewalk. “Ohmigod. That’s less than an hour away. We have to do something. We can’t let Rob marry the Black Widow.”
“Why not? You’re divorced. Why should you care?” Margery said.
“I’m not a murderer,” Helen said.
“You won’t be killing him,” Margery said.
The way she said it, Helen wasn’t sure if she meant Rob was in no danger—or she was absolving Helen from blame when Marcella killed him.
“What do you know about this Marcella?” Helen said. “Tell me the truth.”
“She’s someone I’ve known forever,” Margery said. “We were in the secretarial pool together when we were very young. I was already married when I met her. She married the company owner and hit it big. We keep in touch, maybe because we still remember what we used to be and no one else does. We have dinner when she’s in town between husbands.”
“I heard she was beautiful,” Helen said.
“When she was young, she was a knockout,” Margery said. “I was cute, but she had the real thing. She looked like Annabella Sciorra, only sexier.”
“Tony Soprano’s dead girlfriend?”
“Among other roles. The first time, Marcella married for money and got it. She spent the rest of her life trying to marry for love.”
“Will she get it?” Helen asked.
“No, she only finds soul mates—other people like herself. When she’s disappointed, she moves on to another man.”
“After she murders the man she married,” Helen said. “She’s a self-made widow.”
“You can’t prove that,” Margery said. “Her husbands died from accidents or natural causes.”
“But they’re all dead. Rob will be number six,” Helen said. “He’ll die, too.”
“Not if he really loves her,” Margery said. “If it’s true love, he’ll live happily ever after.”
“He never loved anyone,” Helen said. She was surprised by the bitterness in her voice.
“He never loved you,” Margery said. “That’s not the same thing. This is Rob’s last chance to catch a rich wife. Don’t you see his potbelly, his thinning hair, his thickening features? His looks are going. He’s been cute all his life, but the teddy bear is going to turn into a gargoyle real soon, unless he gets a major infusion of money for a makeover. He won’t even be attractive to a woman Marcella’s age much longer. Rob can’t support himself, not the way he likes to live. Let him try to have the life he wants. Let him go.”
But Helen couldn’t. She’d wanted to kill Rob. In her daydreams she stabbed, shot and strangled him a thousand times. But she couldn’t send him off to be murdered in cold blood. He’d been a lousy husband, but he didn’t deserve the death penalty for adultery. She had to warn him. It was a question of justice.
“I have to go to the port,” Helen said. “You told me her yacht was there.”
“Find your own way,” Margery said. “I’m not driving you. I won’t help you screw up your life.”
“Phil will help me,” Helen said.
“Don’t count on it,” Margery said. “Anyway, he’s not home. He and Peggy are picking up something for me at Home Depot.”
“You deliberately sent them away,” Helen said.
Margery said nothing.
Helen didn’t have time to argue. She grabbed her purse and ran for the bus stop on Las Olas. She’d missed the five-thirty bus. The next one wasn’t for another forty minutes, if it was on time. A cab. She could take a cab. She checked her purse. She had three dollars and twenty-one cents. She’d lose valuable time walking back to her apartment for her money. Calling a cab would take more time. Port Everglades was what—two, maybe three miles? She started running.
By the time Helen reached Federal Highway, she knew she should have waited for the bus. She was hot and sweaty. Her shoulder ached and her head throbbed. She had to go into the tunnel under the river, and it was dark and thick with exhaust fumes. Cars honked and darted around one another, ignoring the STAY IN YOUR LANE signs. She was coughing and drenched with sweat when she climbed out of the steep—or what passed for steep in flat Florida—tunnel. She ran faster.
Davie. She was at Davie Boulevard, eager to cross the street. Every nerve seemed to burn and crackle under her skin. But the red light lasted an aeon. Entire species went extinct, stars died and mountains pushed up out of the sea while she waited for the light to change.
Finally, it was green. Run! she told herself. Faster! She tried not to think about Rob and all the ways he’d cheated and humiliated her. She didn’t want to remember the other women’s perfume on his shirts, the lipsticked cigarettes in his SUV ashtray, the single gold earring she’d found wedged in the seat. An earring that did not belong to her.
She tried not to remember the good times, either, the long nights in their four-poster bed. Rob had always been an enthusiastic lover, at least until the end. She remembered the night they were married, when he’d given her a full-body kiss, starting with—
She pulled herself out of the past. Where was she?
At some big intersection. A sub shop was on one corner, a Denny’s on another, and a Burger King squatted on a third. She could be at any city intersection in America.
Wait! There was the street sign. It was Southeast Seventeenth Street. The port was down here. All she had to do was turn left.
Again, the red light refused to change. She tapped her foot impatiently. She caught a glimpse of herself in the window of a turning car. She looked like a crazy woman with her wild hair and damp, bedraggled clothes. How was she going to convince Rob he was with the Black Widow? Marcella would be cool, calm and insanely rich. Her ex would never listen to Helen. He’d never listened to her even when they’d been married.
I’ll worry about that later. First, I have to find him.
Helen ran past pizza places, burger joints and chicken shacks. By the time she hit Miami Road, the shops and restaurants were richer. The stoplig
hts were kinder, too. They turned a friendly green when she reached the corner. Now she was running past gourmet delis and yacht outfitters. Even the supermarket had an ornamental fountain, like a park. A bus stop bench said, INJURED ON A SEA CRUISE? CALL 1-800-SEASICK.
Yep, she was definitely approaching the port. There it was, the entrance to Port Everglades, where the giant cruise ships docked. Traffic was backed up for nearly half a mile, an impatient line of cars and trucks. Helen skimmed past the lumbering, rumbling machines spewing exhaust. Now she was glad she was on foot. She was swift. She was sure. She was going to make it. Then she got to the guard kiosk and skidded to a stop.
“May I see your identification, ma’am?”
“My identification?” she repeated, panting, trying to catch her breath.
“Your driver’s license or passport. I need a picture ID.”
Helen didn’t have one. She didn’t cash checks, use a credit card or an ATM machine. She didn’t carry her fake driver’s license unless she was actually driving. It was at home in a drawer.
“It’s—” Helen said, and stopped. She wanted to tell the guard, “It’s a matter of life and death.” But she could see his face clouding. She was a disheveled, hysterical-sounding woman with no identification. She would seem crazy—or worse, threatening—if she made a scene.
Helen gave up. She knew it was hopeless. “It’s at home. I forgot it. I’ll go get it.”
The guard turned away from the silly woman to confront a honking truck.
Helen felt hot, scared and furious. This is all your fault, Rob, she thought as she ran back to Seventeenth Street. If you hadn’t betrayed me and tried to take all my money . . . If I wasn’t on the run from you . . . I would have a car and a driver’s license. And you wouldn’t be marrying your killer.
Then Helen saw one more chance to save her ex-husband. The megayachts were parked—no, docked, they docked boats, didn’t they?—near the Seventeenth Street Causeway. Maybe Helen could get Rob’s attention from the monster drawbridge. She started running again.
The great sweep of the causeway loomed before her, a concrete mountain.