Dying to Call You (13 page)

“Helen!” Vito’s shout broke into her thoughts. “Thank God you’re still here. Can you work the survey side tonight?”

A rose from Jack and a night in survey heaven. Helen was in such a good mood, she decided to call Savannah. She stopped at the Riverside Hotel and used one of the pay phones. Might as well make this call in comfort.

“No word from Miss Debbie,” Savannah said. “I called all last night until two o’clock and she didn’t answer. That little blond snip is not getting away with this. This is my sister we’re talking about. I’ll choke the information out of Debbie with my bare hands. I’m going to her apartment. You’re off work now, right?”

“Until five,” Helen said.

“I haven’t had lunch yet, and the boss isn’t around this afternoon. I can take a little longer. Let’s drive over to Debbie’s.”

“Are you packing a weapon?” Helen said.

“I told you, I don’t like guns.”

“I’m talking about oven cleaner.”

“You got my last can. I’ll be outside the Riverside Hotel in five minutes.”

Savannah’s Tank pulled up in front of the hotel, rattling and rumbling. Savannah put it in PARK, and it farted black smoke. The doorman averted his eyes.

“Nice troll doll.” Helen pointed to the orange-haired toy swinging from the rear-view mirror.

“I brought it for luck,” Savannah said. “Laredo gave it to me.”

There was a sad silence.

“I raised her, you know,” Savannah said. “Mama didn’t want her. She only had Laredo because Woodbridge Manson wanted a boy child, and she thought she could keep him if she gave him a son. Guess she figured she had a fifty-fifty chance of pleasing him.

“Mama gambled and lost. You can’t return a baby like a wrong-size dress. Manson took off when Laredo was two months old. Mama wasn’t mean to Laredo or anything. Just not real interested.

“I was ten years old. I thought Laredo was the cutest thing. She was my own baby doll. I liked everything about her. Her baby smell. The way she kicked her little legs and squinched up her eyes when she cried. And her smile. She could light up a room with that smile. She was bald as Dwight Eisenhower until she was almost two. I used to tape a pink bow on her head, so everybody would know she was a girl.

“By the time she turned twelve, they sure knew. She had bazooms out to here, and boys following her like dogs in heat. Laredo had man trouble from then on. I figured it was because she couldn’t keep the first man in her life, her daddy, Woodbridge Manson. I was always getting her out of scrapes with boys. She got knocked up at fifteen, but I talked her into getting rid of it. Mama never knew. I went with Laredo to the clinic and held her hand. I thought it was my fault. I didn’t raise her right.”

“You were ten years old.”

“Yeah, well, I was a failure as a mother. I don’t have any daughters of my own. Laredo’s the closest I’ll ever have to a child.”

She touched the troll doll. “Maybe she had itchy feet after all. Maybe she’s not dead. Maybe she ran off with another man. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Helen thought Savannah was trying to convince herself.

She knew the truth, and so did Helen. She was glad when they pulled into Debbie’s apartment complex. She spotted the waitress’s purple Neon in the lot.

“She’s home,” Helen said.

“I thought so. Little witch wasn’t answering my calls.”

Savannah grabbed her purse, slammed the car door, and marched up the stairs. Helen ran after her, hoping she’d kept her promise about the oven cleaner.

Savannah rang the doorbell. Nobody answered.

“Ring it again,” Helen said.

Savannah did.

Helen did not hear anyone moving around in the apartment.

“Must be taking a nap. This will wake her.” Savannah smacked the door with a powerful wallop. It swung open.

“Place smells funny,” she said.

They walked in cautiously, Savannah first. “She’s a messy housekeeper, too. There are things all over the floor.”

Helen spotted a chair lying on its side, stuffing flowing from the slashed seat. A lamp was tipped over, the bulb shattered. “Something’s not right here. Don’t touch anything.”

“You think it’s burglars?” Savannah stepped cautiously around a ripped couch pillow. “Or mean kids? They knocked over that knickknack stand and broke everything. Look.”

Helen saw a headless china cat, a shattered cupid and a porcelain hand on the tile floor. The hand looked intact.

There were no chips in the pale fingers.

Debbie had uncommonly pale skin, like fine porcelain.

Helen froze. Her legs weighed ten tons each. They refused to move.

“What’s the matter?” Savannah said. “Did you see this kitchen? Someone dumped sugar all over the counter. She’s going to have ants everywhere. Flour and coffee are in the sink. And look at this. They threw raw chicken on the floor.

I guess that’s the bad-meat smell.”

“The hand. Her porcelain hand,” Helen said.

“My grandmother had one of those,” Savannah said, peering around the doorway.

Helen got her legs to move again, and slowly walked behind the beige couch. The pale hand was connected to a white lace cuff. The cuff was connected to... nothing.

“It’s just like Grandma’s,” Savannah said. “Except hers had a china rose on the little finger. And look at that thing on the pedestal. Debbie sure likes body parts, doesn’t she?”

It was a heavy-breasted female torso, a plaster copy of something Greek or Roman, Helen thought. For some reason, the vandals hadn’t toppled it.

“I bet Debbie’s hanging out by the pool. Is she in for a surprise when she gets back,” Savannah said.

Helen stepped carefully around some spilled CDs to get into the bedroom. “The covers and pillows are torn off the bed and the mattress is slashed,” she reported. “And there’s a marble foot by the bed.”

“Another body part,” Savannah said.

Helen saw that the foot was connected to a long white leg.

The leg went up to a flirty cheerleader’s uniform and a tangle of blond hair.

“Debbie!” Helen said, her voice sounding small and scared. “Debbie, are you OK?”

Even as she said the words, Helen knew Debbie wasn’t.

One look at her purple, distorted face told her that. There was a cruel line of bruises around her throat. Her long white-blond hair had been twisted into a silver rope and pulled tight around her neck. Debbie had been strangled with her own hair.

Savannah came up behind Helen and touched her shoulder. “Jesus,” she whispered.

Helen jumped at her touch. “You said you wanted to strangle Debbie with your bare hands.”

“I didn’t kill her. Someone else did.” Helen backed away, putting the bed between her and Savannah.

“You strangled her,” Helen repeated. She took another step back. Now she could run for the door.

“Hell’s bells,” Savannah said. “Use your head. If I was the killer, would I drag you to the scene of the crime? I’d let the cops think it was a burglary gone bad and never come back here.”

That made sense, but Helen was still wary. “We better call the police,” she said.

“Uh, I can’t be around the police. Little problem with my former employer,” Savannah said.

“I understand.” Helen wasn’t anxious to contact the police, either. “Let’s leave and call them from a pay phone.”

She wanted out of that place. Now.

“I’m not leaving until I look for Kristi’s address,” Savannah said.

That declaration convinced Helen: Savannah was either innocent or putting on a good show.

“Don’t touch anything. Just stand there. I’ll be finished in two shakes.” Savannah pulled a pair of yellow rubber gloves out of her purse and began searching. She pawed through the papers scattered on the floor and checked the message slips by the phone. She poked in the wreckage of overturned drawers. She picked through the contents of Debbie’s purse, spilled across the bedroom floor.

“Nothing. Either Debbie never had Kristi’s address, or it’s gone,” Savannah said. “We better make ourselves scarce.”

Savannah and Helen used their shirttails to wipe the doorbell, doorknob and door. “We didn’t touch anything else with our hands. The floor is tile. I don’t see where we left any footprints.”

“What if the neighbors see us?”

“What neighbors? Everyone’s at work.”

They stopped at a pay phone on Dixie Highway and called the police non-emergency number. Savannah disguised her voice to sound like an old woman. She said there was a funny smell coming out of apartment 203. No, she wouldn’t leave her name, just check it out, please. That’s why she paid taxes.

Savannah hung up. The Tank rumbled and bucked down the highway. Helen felt sick and dizzy, but she wasn’t sure if it was the lurching car or... She saw Debbie again, her blond hair twisted around her white neck. Debbie had used her beauty as a weapon. It didn’t save her this time.

Debbie was dead.

And I stepped over her body, wiped my fingerprints off her door, and left her to rot. What’s wrong with me? How could I be so cold?

Helen remembered Debbie in the parking lot, flipping her long hair, flirting with the dazzled cook, driving home in her purple jellybean of a car. She was young, silly and sure she could conquer the world—at least the male half.

Like Laredo. And now Debbie was dead. Like Laredo.

A single tear splashed in Helen’s lap. She tried to hold the others back. She didn’t want to cry, but she couldn’t stop.

“What’s wrong?” Savannah said.

“Debbie’s dead and it’s our fault.” Helen wiped her eyes with her palms and sniffled back more tears. “She was afraid to tell us anything. She said, ‘They’ll hurt me. They’ll hurt me bad.’ If we hadn’t forced Debbie to talk, she’d still be alive. We’ve blundered around and killed another person.”

“Excuse me?
We’ve
killed another person? Where are you getting that crap?”

“I heard a woman being strangled. Now I’ve seen one.”

Savannah turned on her angrily. “You didn’t hear a woman being killed. You heard my little sister Laredo die.

She had blond hair and the sweetest smile you ever saw. She wanted to be a famous actress and she had a part in a real Shakespeare play. Now she’s dead and I can’t even find her body to bury her.”

The Tank died at a light, and Savannah smashed her foot down on the gas until the car shot forward, belching smoke.

“You want to know why I can’t find her? Because Debbie told the police Laredo took off. She took a thousand dollars to say that.

“I’m sorry Debbie’s dead, but she made her mistake when she lied about my sister. I didn’t kill her and you didn’t, either. Debbie’s own greed killed her.”

Savannah was so upset she ran a light and nearly hit a delivery truck. There was a rousing chorus of honks punctuated by one-fingered salutes, then a long silence.

“Who do you think killed her?” Helen said. “Hank Asporth?”

“He’s the most likely candidate,” Savannah said. “But why did Debbie say ‘They’ll hurt me’? Why not ‘He’ll hurt me’?”

“You think he’s working with someone else?”

“I don’t know. We need to get in touch with this Kristi.

She knows something. But I’m fresh out of ideas.”

“I’ll call Steve and see if he needs a bartender,” Helen said.

“You’re going to tend bar topless? Nice lady like you?

You’ll be too embarrassed.”

“I’m beyond embarrassment,” Helen said. “I’m a telemarketer.”

Chapter 12

It was only two thirty in the afternoon when Savannah dropped Helen off at the Coronado. It seemed much later.

Time had slipped sideways in Debbie’s apartment. Helen felt oddly boneless. And she was tired, so very tired. She had to get some sleep before she went to work, or she’d never stay awake tonight. Helen set her alarm for four o’clock.

As soon as she crawled under the covers, Helen was wide awake. She saw the dead Debbie, her long hair twisted cruelly around her neck. Helen could not picture her as a blond beauty anymore. Debbie was a bloated face and a bruised neck, a bedroom nightmare.

She rolled over on her back and stared at the ceiling.

Maybe she should go see Margery. Her landlady would make a screwdriver that would knock the nightmares out of her head. But she would also tell Helen to quit telemarketing.

Look where it got her: working with junkies and bikers and listening to murders.

Helen didn’t want to hear that lecture. She turned restlessly in her bed and punched her pillow.

Why didn’t she quit?

Helen knew telemarketing was a terrible job. But for some weird reason, she was good at selling septic-tank cleaner. Sometimes, she was ashamed of talking lonely people into buying a product they didn’t need. She knew she should get a decent job.

But Helen was stubborn. It was her greatest virtue and her biggest fault. The more her friends urged her to quit, the more she clung to the job out of perverse pride. Besides, the money was better than any dead-end job she’d ever had.

She shut her eyes and saw Debbie again. She hadn’t liked the greedy little tease. But no one deserved to die like that.

Helen flopped onto her stomach. The sheets were hopelessly twisted. The pillows were squashed into comfortless lumps.

At three thirty, she gave up on sleep and fixed herself a pot of coffee. She drank the whole thing. She’d have to get by on caffeine instead of sleep. At least she was working the survey room. She couldn’t take the boiler room’s insults tonight.

As soon as the elevator doors opened on Girdner Surveys’ luxurious office, Helen felt calmer. Her feet were cushioned by the deep carpets. Her eyes rested on the expensive paneling. She was soothed by the sight of her coworkers: Nellie, the big butterscotch blonde with the creamy voice. Berletta, thin and efficient, with her beautiful Bahamian accent. There was no sign of Penelope, her prissy boss. That was good.

“Tonight’s survey is for a disposable-razor company, Nellie said. “Respondents must answer question five and the answer must be yes.”

Question five. Helen skimmed the survey. Ah, there it was: “Do you shave your armpits?”

“I actually have to ask women that? That question is the pits,” Helen said.

“So to speak,” Berletta said.