Dying to Call You (22 page)

She’d told the cops the same thing when they pried the crowbar from her hands and pulled a buck-naked Rob from the wreckage. She could see the cops fighting back snickers.

Rob and Sandy didn’t press attempted-assault charges.

Sandy was afraid her husband would find out what she’d been doing when Helen started swinging that crowbar. He did anyway.

“I know you were upset, dear,” Dolores said. “But now you’ve had time to cool off. Rob just made a mistake.”

“Not a mistake, Mom. A bunch of mistakes. He hopped into bed with women I knew at the tennis club, the health club and our church. He’s an incurable adulterer.”

“You must hate the sin, but not the sinner,” her mother said. “You promised to love, honor and obey Rob forever.”

“And what did he promise?” Helen said. “After he lost his job, I supported him for five years while he did nothing.”

“He looked for work, dear. He talked to me about it.”

“He talked to everyone. He just didn’t do anything.”

But Rob had worked hard during the divorce, spreading his lies. His lawyer portrayed Rob as a loving househusband married to an angry, erratic woman. When he showed the photos of the smashed SUV, the judge winced.

Rob got his old girlfriends to testify to the work he did around the house. No one mentioned that Helen paid a contractor to finish his botched handyman jobs.

Helen wanted her lawyer to ask these women if they’d had a sexual relationship with her husband. But her attorney was too much of a gentleman.

Helen prepared herself to lose the house she’d paid for.

But she didn’t expect the judge’s final pronouncement. She could still see him: hairless, smug and wizened, like E.T. in a black robe.

“This woman is a successful director of pensions and benefits, making six figures a year,” his honor said. “She earns that money because of her husband’s stabilizing influence, because of his love and support. He made her career possible at the expense of his own livelihood. Therefore, we award this man half of his wife’s future income.”

A red rocket of rage shot through Helen. She must have stood up, because she could feel her lawyer trying to pull her back down into her seat.

Helen grabbed a familiar-looking black book with gold lettering. She put her hand on it and said, “I swear on this Bible that my husband, Rob, will not get another nickel of my salary.”

Later, the black book turned out to be a copy of the Missouri Revised Statutes, but Helen still considered the oath binding. She also believed the judge had been dropped on his head at birth.

Helen slipped out of St. Louis, packing her clothes and her teddy bear, Chocolate, into her car. She left everything else behind. She didn’t tell anyone goodbye, except her sister, Kathy. Kathy was a traditional wife and mother, but she understood Helen’s anger.

“I wouldn’t have bashed in his SUV, Sis,” Kathy had told her. “That poor Land Cruiser didn’t do anything. I’d have taken that crowbar to Rob’s thick skull.”

Kathy was the only person on earth who knew how to find Helen. She had zigzagged across the country for months, trying to evade any pursuers. She didn’t know how far the court would go to track down a deadbeat wife, but she knew that Rob would go to the end of the earth to avoid work. He wanted her money.

Sometime during her flight, Helen traded her silver Lexus for a hunk of junk. It finally died in Fort Lauderdale, and that’s where she stayed. Now she worked for cash only, to keep out of the computers. Her dead-end jobs brought her a kind of freedom: no memos, no meetings, no pantyhose. She would never go back to corporate America. If Rob did find her, he’d get half of nearly nothing. Her old life and her old ambitions had vanished in easygoing South Florida.

“Helen, are you listening to me?” her mother said. “I can help you. I can make your problem go away.”

“I won’t go back to Rob, mother.”

“You won’t have to, Helen dear, if you’re really deter-mined. Lawrence and I have been talking it over. He has some friends in the archdiocese and I have some money. We want to start the proceedings for an annulment. It would be like your marriage never took place.”

“But it did,” Helen said. “For seventeen years.”

“Well, you’d still have a civil divorce. But if you got an annulment, in the eyes of the Church your marriage never happened.”

“But it did,” Helen said. “I have the pictures to prove it.

Mom, an annulment won’t erase my marriage. It renders it sacramentally invalid. It’s nothing but a divorce for rich people, and in my opinion, it’s for hypocrites.”

“Helen, I’m trying to save your immortal soul.” Her mother started crying. She was terrified her divorced daughter would go to hell.

“Mom, I was married. You can’t say I wasn’t. I slept with the guy all those years. You can’t save my soul with a lie.”

“You’re stubborn,” her mother said angrily. “You don’t want to be helped.”

Helen had to end this hopeless conversation. She brought out the pink cellophane from the gift basket and crackled it near the phone.

“Hello, Mom? We’re breaking up. I have to go now. I love you.”

Helen pressed the END button. The last thing she heard was Dolores’ heartbroken weeping.

Helen found she was clutching the phone and her cat. As she stroked Thumbs’s soft, thick fur, she wondered:

What if my mother had believed in me more and the Church less? What if she’d said, “Rob is a rat. Pack your bags and come home to your mother, where you belong”?

Then I would not have had that screaming scene in court.

I would never have run from St. Louis.

I would not be living in South Florida.

I would not have this dead-end job.

I would not have heard a woman die.

Chapter 20

Someone had sucked all the air out of the room.

Helen couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t stop thinking about her mother, pulling strings to make Helen’s marriage disappear. Dolores had denied her husband’s infidelity for forty years. Now she was denying her daughter’s failed marriage.

Helen felt as if her mother was trying to wipe her out.

She ran outside. It was only eight o’clock. The winter evening was velvety warm, scented with night-blooming flowers and Phil’s pot smoke. Phil. Now there was a man worth thinking about. Except Helen had a perfect record of picking losers.

“You going to stand there like a lawn ornament?”

Helen jumped. Margery had materialized in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Her landlady was in deep purple down to her ankle-strap platforms. Those shoes took guts. Helen would kill herself walking in them.

“Sarah called,” Margery said. “You want to use my phone to call her back?”

Once they were inside, Margery said, “Sarah did call, but I wanted to tell you about Fred and Ethel. They’re going to the Happy Cow tomorrow. I’ll pick you up outside your office.”

“Let’s hope they bite,” Helen said.

“Is that a pun? And will you stop pacing?”

Helen realized she’d been marching back and forth across Margery’s kitchen.

“You’re wearing me out watching you. Sit down. You look like hell. Have some chocolate.” Margery handed Helen a Godiva truffle, like a doctor dispensing a pill.

“Should I take two and call you in the morning?”

“Wake me up and you’re a dead woman. Now make your call.”

Margery tactfully left the room. Helen settled into the puffy purple recliner. Her landlady’s vintage lavender Princess phone was on a metal TV tray. It had been awhile since Helen had used an actual dial. It felt heavy and awkward.

Sarah answered on the third ring. “Helen, have you seen the paper today?”

“Not yet.”

“See if Margery has one.”

Margery either had powers of divination or she was listening on the extension. She plopped a paper in Helen’s lap.

“What was the name of that guy you were calling when, uh, everything started?” Sarah asked.

“Hank Asporth.”

“There’s a story about some big society party in the feature section. I think his picture is in there.”

Helen found the party story. “Holy cow. It’s the Mowbry mansion,” she said.

In the newspaper photos, the place looked like a museum.

The furniture was so gold-trimmed and gaudy she knew it was either really cheap or really expensive.

“Helen,” Sarah said, “did you say Mowbry? I thought his name was Asporth.”

“The Mowbry mansion is where this party took place.

These photos make it look even spookier than when I was there.”

The guests were pretty frightening, too. The women’s surgically stretched, chemically peeled skin made them look like burn victims. The men were old and dissipated.

Helen was fascinated to see Parrish Davenport, the jowly old man in the shamrock shorts, identified as a lawyer with a major Lauderdale firm. He was holding a drink. The pouches in his puffy face proved he’d held a lot of them.

“I’m impressed,” Sarah said. “How do you know what the Mowbry mansion looks like?”

Helen was still staring at the pictures. Good Lord. The lecher who tried to squeeze her breasts was a prominent plastic surgeon. Maybe he wanted to know if they were real.

The woman in the La Perla panties was a real estate agent who sold multimillion-dollar properties. In the photo, her real estate was covered with a chic black dress.

And there was Hank Asporth, with his oiled hair and eyebrow like a furry black caterpillar. He was in another mobster knit, this one gray with black trim. He had one arm around an over-dieted society type, a stick figure with blond hair and balloon breasts. Her dress was weirdly exaggerated, the way only couture can be. It was the party’s hostess, Mindy Mowbry.

Hank Asporth had his other arm around a man, identified as Mindy’s husband. Helen could identify him, too. He was the guy with the tan and the too-white teeth. He’d burst in on her in the bathroom and asked, “Wanna get it on?”

“Dr. Melton Mowbry (left), a partner in the Prestige Perfect Plastic Surgery Group. Mr. Asporth (center), a Brideport financier, is an investor in Dr. Mowbry’s enterprises,” the newspaper cutline said.

Hank Asporth definitely knew Melton and Mindy Mowbry. Probably in the biblical sense.

“Helen, are you there?” Sarah said. “You seem distracted.

Have you really been to a party at the Mowbrys’? You didn’t tell me you moved in such exalted circles.”

“I’ve been to a couple of parties there,” Helen said. “But not as a guest. As a bartender.”

“There’s a bartender in the photo on the right. Well, part of one. I see the arms and chest. Is that you?”

“I doubt it,” Helen said, absently, still studying the photo of Hank Asporth draped around the Mowbrys like a fur stole.

“I don’t think the paper runs pictures of topless bartenders.”

There was a loud clunk. Margery must have dropped the phone.

“I’ll be over in fifteen minutes,” Sarah said.

Uh-oh. Helen wished she’d thought before she spoke.

Margery was standing over the purple recliner. “Would you care to explain why you were tending bar topless?”

“I’m forty-two. I don’t have to explain.”

“I don’t care if you go streaking buck-naked down Las Olas,” Margery said. “But I know you too well, Helen Hawthorne. There’s only one reason why you’d work a job like that. You’re trying to solve that girl’s murder, aren’t you?

You’ve set something loose. That’s why your place was torn apart. The Coronado never had a break-in before. You’ve brought those people onto my property. You better tell me what they’re looking for.”

“Can I wait until Sarah gets here, so I don’t have to tell the whole thing twice?”

“No. Start talking.”

Helen obeyed. Those purple platforms made Margery look ten feet tall.

She told her landlady everything from Debbie’s death to Kristi in the coffin. When Sarah showed up, she started over again. Margery listened with her arms folded over her chest and her mouth in a tight line.

“And I thought society parties were boring,” Sarah said.

“They are boring,” Helen said. “Those people aren’t any more interesting naked than they are clothed.”

“They’re deadly boring,” Margery said. “We’ve got two young women strangled and two ransacked homes. Those killers have been at the Coronado. What are you going to do about it?”

“They’re trying to find that red disk,” Helen said. “That’s why they trashed my place. I don’t know everything that’s on it, but they want it bad. I have to find it first.”

“And how are you going to do that, Sherlock? I assume you’re not going to the police?”

“That’s a lost cause. The cops think I’m a nutcase,” Helen said. “I have to find it myself. I’m going to take another look in the Girdner computers. I’ll use the names in this newspaper story and see what I can find out about these people.

There are all sorts of useful tidbits in the Girdner database.

There have to be some connections between these people at the party.”

“It’s a start.” Margery’s mouth was no longer a straight line. She’d unfolded her arms. She was coming around.

“Here’s my plan,” Sarah said. “I’m taking Helen to Jimmie’s in Dania Beach. She can use a little chocolate therapy.”

Sarah looked like a bonbon herself in a pink caftan frosted with a white turquoise necklace.

“I’ve already had Godiva.” Helen pointed to the gold wrapper on the TV tray.

“Chocolate isn’t like booze. You can mix,” Sarah said.

“And Jimmie’s chocolates are pure South Florida.”

When they were in Sarah’s Range Rover, Helen said, “I’ve been eating a lot of junk lately. I’m not sure—”

“Oh, please, Helen, don’t fall into the great American pastime of obsessing about food. I may be fat, but I’m not boring.”

“You’re not fat,” Helen said. “You’re just you.” Sarah, like Pavarotti, looked best as a person of size.

Jimmie’s was in a little pink house with a candy-striped awning. Above the door, an evergreen wreath framed three white plastic swans. Pink flowers bloomed everywhere.

“This place looks like it was made out of gingerbread, Helen said.

“Are you going to be the witch?” Sarah said. “Jimmie’s has champagne. I think you need some.”