by Elaine Viets
“But you were fighting with the club member,” Paige said. “You know that’s grounds for dismissal, no matter who started the fight. It’s in the handbook. It was explained to you in detail at orientation. If there was a problem with the member, you should have called security. I understand that you were startled, but I have no choice. This is one issue where we can’t give you a second chance.
“I’m so sorry, Helen. We’re going to have to let you go.” Paige sounded as if she meant it. She even managed a regretful sigh.
Paige handed Helen a termination statement and explained that the personal items in her desk would be sent to her home address and her paycheck would be mailed to her. Helen heard some legalese about how she was not eligible to file for unemployment compensation and something else about no health insurance.
Helen was having trouble following the conversation. She’d expected to be fired. She’d prepared herself for it. But she still felt like someone had broken a chair over her head.
“Any questions?” Paige said.
Helen had a lot of questions: How was she going to explain this to Margery? How was she going to pay the bills she’d run up? Did she have enough money stashed away for next month’s rent? Helen had been spending like a Superior Club member, instead of an employee.
“No questions?” Paige said. “Well, again, I’m very sorry, Helen. Mr. Noote will escort you to your car.”
The HR director stood up, the signal that the termination interview—and Helen’s time at the Superior Club—were over. Helen staggered down the steps with the strange, underwater movements of a catastrophe survivor.
She was surprised to find a white golf cart with a striped awning waiting in the courtyard, along with the two security guards. Good, Helen thought. She didn’t think she could make the long walk to the parking lot.
One guard climbed in the front. The guard who’d taken her elbow when she’d stumbled sat in the back with Helen, carefully adjusting the razor crease in his trousers. He wore black socks that were too short and thick-soled lace-up shoes with a military shine. Helen saw gray in his buzz cut, and wondered if he’d retired from some security job up north.
Noote, the head of security, drove. The gaily striped golf cart had a ridiculous holiday look. Helen was bone tired, and she could feel her stomach twisting itself into knots. She wanted this over. She still had to face Margery.
No one said anything as the little cart lurched over the paved paths to the employee lot. Helen studied the back of Noote’s silver-gray head. He had a bald spot at the crown. He’d just had a haircut, and there were two small clipped hairs on his jacket collar. She resisted the urge to brush them off. Noote’s head looked thick and square and he had almost no neck. As the cart turned into the employee parking lot, Helen caught a glimpse of his clenched jaw.
Two yellow-and-white Golden Palms police cars were parked by the entrance to the employee lot. The entrance was roped off with yellow crime scene tape. A patrol officer waved in the golf cart. “See you Saturday night, Mr. Noote,” he said. The club hired a lot of off-duty Golden Palms officers.
Helen saw a yellow evidence van parked near the police cars. A woman in a white jumpsuit and booties was scraping at something on the ground.
The whole back lot by the Dumpsters—over an acre, Helen guessed—was roped off with more yellow crime scene tape. Helen wondered where the staff was parking. In the bright sunlight, the old ficus tree looked green and friendly, its branches home to twittering birds.
“My car’s in the second row,” Helen said.
“We have something we’d like to show you first,” Noote said.
He parked the cart, then crunched through the dead ficus leaves to the edge of the yellow tape and pointed. Helen followed. At first, she thought he was pointing at a tree shadow. Then she saw dark red-black stains on the Dumpster, and more on the ground. It looked like blood. Flies buzzed around it. Helen was afraid she might throw up.
The blood on the tall blue Dumpster was in ragged arcs, and there was a small dark red puddle. A trail of fat round blood drops led from under the tree to the Dumpster. The trail was marked with numbered yellow tented signs.
Helen felt her heart seize. There couldn’t be that much blood from when she hit Rob. Did her punch cause some weird, fatal injury? Did Rob die after she left? But Jessica said he was fine. He was walking toward the yacht club. Where was his body? Had they found it at the end of that blood trail?
Noote was watching her, as if he expected her to scream, faint or blurt out a confession. His hard eyes were washed-out blue. His face was red and thick and he had razor burn on one cheek, near his ear. When Helen didn’t say anything, the network of wrinkles around his eyes tightened and his forehead creased into a deep frown.
He thinks I’m a hard case, Helen thought.
A police officer was standing nearby. His name tag said RULEY. I know it’s a sign of age when the cops look young, she thought, but Officer Ruley should be in a Boy Scout uniform. His face was pink, smooth and hairless, except for a small blond mustache that looked like a dirty toothbrush.
Noote gave him a slight nod. The officer produced a paper evidence bag and pulled out a shirt covered in beige palm trees.
“Do you recognize this?” Ruley said.
The front was stiff with dark, dried blood. The shirt looked like the one Rob had worn, except for all that blood. There’d been only a drop or two on his shirt when Helen saw him. Also, the shirt had been intact. Now the collar was nearly torn off, and the shirt was missing two buttons.
Helen remembered her ex opening his shirt and dramatically displaying the bruises and scratches on his chest. But nothing was ripped then. Certainly not the collar.
“I didn’t do that,” she said.
“Didn’t do what, ma’am?” Officer Ruley said. His smooth face was merciless.
“I didn’t do anything to his shirt—or to him. It didn’t look like that when I saw him. It was fine. He was fine.”
“Where is he, ma’am?” The cop spent a lot of time in a gym. His upper arms bulged.
“I don’t know,” Helen said. “The last time I saw him, he was walking toward his home.” Then she remembered something that filled her with relief. “Wait! May I see that shirt again?”
Officer Ruley held up the shirt, just out of Helen’s reach. She couldn’t touch it, but she was close enough to see it.
“It rained last night,” she said. “That shirt is dry. I don’t know who tore it or how it got so bloody, but the damage happened after I left and after the storm. It was just starting to rain when I pulled out of the parking lot. By the time I got to I-95 it was a deluge. The shirt would have been soaking wet.”
“We got a couple of drops here at the beach, ma’am. The heavy rain was to the west, by the highway.”
Florida weather was perverse. There could be a downpour in one neighborhood, and a few blocks away the sky would be clear.
“Look around the parking lot if you don’t believe me,” Ruley said. “Do you see any puddles of water?”
Helen just saw one puddle—of blood.
“You don’t know if that’s Rob’s blood on the shirt,” she said.
“No, ma’am. We’ll run tests for that. We’re also going to check and see if there’s any other blood. Like yours. May I see your hands, ma’am? Hold out your hands, palms down.”
It looked worse than this morning. The knuckles were red, swollen and streaked with purple and green. The scabs were the size of dimes.
“Unfortunately, you’re under arrest,” the young cop said.
“Arrest? What for?”
“For the domestic abuse of your husband.”
“Ex-husband,” Helen said.
“We have witnesses that there was an altercation resulting in trauma,” Ruley said. “You were the aggressor in the situation.”
“Domestic abuse! I’m not married to him. We haven’t lived together for years.”
“Florida law states if family mem
bers who once lived together batter each other, they can go to jail for domestic abuse.”
“I didn’t abuse him,” Helen said. “I punched him in the mouth. He deserved it.”
“That’s what they all say,” the cop said.
Helen’s heart sank. She did sound like one of those hateful wife beaters.
“What were you fighting about? Alimony?”
“He doesn’t pay alimony,” Helen said.
“Your children?”
“We don’t have any,” Helen said.
“Your sex life?”
“We don’t have any of that, either,” Helen said.
“You had to be talking about something,” Ruley said.
“His current wife,” Helen said.
“That would be related to your prior relationship,” the officer said.
“No,” Helen said. “She can have him. I’m glad he married Marcella.”
“So glad, you had a fight with your ex. Witnesses saw you hit him. He was bleeding. Your knuckles are bruised and scabbed, so you hit him hard. Now he’s missing.”
“Witnesses also heard him say that there was nothing wrong,” Helen said. “Rob asked the witnesses to forget the whole episode. He said it wasn’t my fault.”
“That was the last thing he said right before he disappeared,” Ruley said. “We have witnesses to the altercation. We have blood and physical evidence, including your own hands. I’m taking you into custody, Ms. Hawthorne. Put your hands behind you.”
He began reciting the Miranda warning, “You have the right to remain silent—”
As Helen was handcuffed, she saw Jessica running up to the entrance of the lot, calling her name. The officer on guard stopped her. Jessica clung to the chain-link fence, eyes wide, hair wild, looking like a scene in a movie Helen couldn’t remember.
“Helen,” Jessica shouted. “What can I do?”
“Call Margery, the name on my employee contact sheet,” Helen said. “My landlady, Margery Flax. Tell her I need a lawyer.”
That was about the last thing Helen said for the next five hours.
CHAPTER 7
“I’m not talking until my attorney arrives,” Helen said.
“That is your right,” Officer Ruley said, sitting across from her in the bleak Golden Palms police interrogation room. "But silence makes you look guilty. Why not have a little chat and straighten things out? I could take off that handcuff and get you a decent cup of coffee. Or better yet, a cold bottle of water. It’s hot in this room. You don’t want to sit here and sweat. It could be hours before your lawyer shows up.”
He looked so boyishly earnest, Helen knew he was lying.
Three years ago, she would have told the nice officer everything. He might have even let her go. But not now. The system didn’t work for Helen anymore.
“I’m not talking until my lawyer arrives,” she said. “This is my third request for my attorney.”
“Okay, okay,” Ruley said, and held up his hands.
Helen considered breaking her silence to tell him the mustache was a mistake, but he’d already left the room. It was two o’clock. She’d been here an hour already. Her stomach growled and reminded her she hadn’t had lunch.
The Golden Palms police station was a small pink cube hidden behind the elaborate firehouse. The city was proud of its firehouse and the state-of-the-art equipment. Crime was something it tried to keep out of sight.
Helen had been fingerprinted and her damaged hand was photographed. Officer Ruley had asked for a DNA sample and she’d let him swab the inside of her cheek with a Q-tip. She figured he could get that with a warrant, anyway. Might as well seem cooperative. She guessed the police were looking for her blood either on the Tommy Bahama shirt or in the parking lot. She had the awful feeling they would find it.
Now she sat alone in the hot, windowless room, her left hand cuffed to a ring on the metal table. That hand chafed. The other itched from the scabs on her knuckles. The air stank of fear-sweat and despair. She hoped her own terror wasn’t part of the smelly atmosphere.
Helen had been set up, and she knew it. Ruley, the young cop, knew too much about Helen’s fight with Rob and Brenda’s statement to security. That was Marshall Noote’s doing. The club’s security chief was way too cozy with the Golden Palms police. Noote had given that little nod and Ruley had waved the bloody shirt at her, hoping to shock Helen into some kind of admission.
Ruley also knew about Rob’s disappearance.
It was too soon for the police to be concerned. The cops usually didn’t care about missing adults for at least twenty-four hours—any Court TV buff knew that. The Black Widow reported Rob missing to club security at nine this morning. Her errant husband hadn’t been gone half a day yet.
Why wasn’t the eager young cop asking the Black Widow some serious questions? Marcella had more missing husbands than Helen did.
Helen knew the answer to that question: The Black Widow was a Superior Club member. It was Noote’s job to protect and serve those members. Helen was a minor clerk and nonresident of Golden Palms. She was easy to sacrifice. That was how the system worked in the world of the rich.
Helen used to believe in the system. Its rules had worked for her. She’d dressed for success—and succeeded. She bought the right home in a safe suburb. Her granite kitchen counters and Pella windows said the right things about her: She was ambitious but no risk taker. Let the crazy folks in advertising buy Victorian mansions in dicey city neighborhoods. Helen lived sensibly.
She never wanted children. She embraced her career instead. Everyone knew Helen always worked late. Especially her husband. That’s why Rob was stunned when Helen came home from work early and found him with another woman. But he was not as surprised as Helen.
Helen had expected the system to right this wrong. Instead, the divorce judge awarded half of Helen’s income to her unfaithful ex. That’s when something broke inside Helen. She couldn’t believe anymore. Once Helen didn’t believe in the system, it didn’t believe in her.
Her ex-husband was the cosmic monkey wrench tossed into her life. Rob knew how to work the system and he knew how to work her. Rob had cheated on her and destroyed their marriage, yet the judge rewarded him and punished her.
Rob had chased her across the country, trying to get that miserable money. When he finally tracked her down, the cosmos rewarded him with a fabulously rich wife. The Black Widow was probably a serial spouse killer, but Helen knew Rob would cheat death the same way he cheated on his wives.
Her new life handed her one more surprise: Helen liked living outside the rules. She actually enjoyed her new world. She no longer ate rubber chicken dinners with balding bigwigs to advance her career. Now she sat by the Coronado pool with her blue-eyed lover. Instead of breakfast meetings, she had sunrise picnics on the beach. She traded in her business suits and sensible heels for sandals and T-shirts. She no longer clawed her way up the ladder to make a hundred thousand a year. Instead, she took home minimum wages and toasted the sunset with cheap wine.
Her new job at the Superior Club had been a partial return to respectability. Margery had urged her to make some decent money. Now Helen was confined in a tailored uniform and panty hose. She also had a car, a credit card, a cell phone and a debt load that kept her awake at night.
Look where it landed her: broke, busted and in jail.
By her old standards, Helen was ruined. Even now, she felt shame and anger. She wanted to blame Rob, but it was her fault. If she’d left him alone, she wouldn’t be sitting in jail. She shouldn’t have hit her ex, no matter how good it felt.
And Phil—what would he think of her? She wished she’d asked Jessica to call him, but there wasn’t time. She’d barely managed to shout Margery’s name before she was shoved into the cop car.
Helen checked her watch for the hundredth time that afternoon. Four o’clock.Where was Margery? What was taking so long? The lawyer should have been here hours ago. Jessica had delivered the message. She wouldn’t d
esert Helen.
Maybe Margery wasn’t home. Maybe Colby, the criminal lawyer Margery called when there were emergencies, was in court or out of town.
Maybe Margery was sick of Helen and her self-inflicted problems. Margery had warned her that Rob wasn’t her business. He belonged to Marcella. The man wasn’t worth worrying about. He was pampered as a pet poodle.
Until he disappeared.
Where was Rob? Where had that blood come from? And the torn shirt? Did Marcella follow her husband last night and kill him? Rob knew how to bring out the rage in a wife. But why attack him in the parking lot? It would have made more sense to lure him onto the yacht and shove him overboard.
Helen remembered the bruises and the ugly wound on Rob’s chest. Did those really come from Marcella? Rob hinted he’d made some very bad people angry. There were plenty of them around, including more than a few club members. Did he make some sort of dirty deal with the mobster, Angelo Casabella? His thugs could have easily beaten Rob to death, then hauled off the body.
If her ex was dead, Helen didn’t know how she felt about that. She’d wished him dead so often. But if he really was gone, would she be free?
Free wasn’t the right word to describe her current circumstances. Her growling stomach let her know she’d been hours without food. Her tongue was dry and cottony. Her imagination ran wild. She saw herself in a courtroom, on trial for Rob’s murder with only a bumbling public defender. Then the door to her room was opened.
Helen stared. This must be a hunger hallucination.
A lawyer was standing in the doorway. It wasn’t Colby Cox. This lawyer didn’t have to introduce himself. Helen had seen him a hundred times on Court TV.
She recognized that bulldog walk, the outsized head with the leonine hair, the hand-tailored suit. It wasn’t shiny, like Angelo Casabella’s suits. It had a burnished glow. The lawyer was shorter than Helen expected, the way famous Hollywood actors are short.
But he was definitely a big man.
He was Honest Gabe Accomac, the most famous trial lawyer in America.
“Officer,” Honest Gabe called out. “Could you uncuff my client? And bring her some water, while you’re at it.”