Murder Between the Covers (25 page)

“You see why I hate working nights?” Helen said. Gayle managed a weak smile.

“I live at the Coronado Tropic Apartments,” Helen said. “You make a left at the next street.”

“I know how to get there,” Gayle said. “What time do you come in tomorrow?”

“Not till eleven. And if you want me to work tomorrow night, the answer is no.”

Gayle pulled into the Coronado parking lot.

“Listen, I really appreciate this,” Helen said.

“No biggie. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Helen waved good-bye, waiting until the silver Honda was out of sight. It was easy to get lost in these side streets. But the little car found the way back to the main highway.

The Coronado was dark and still. Even Margery’s light was off. Hungry insects sang their blood songs. Predators rustled in the plants. Phil’s perpetual pot smog perfumed the air. As Helen passed through, she took a deep breath and inhaled. Maybe secondhand sensimilla smoke would help her sleep.

Shoosh. Shoosh. Clunk-thud.

Helen woke up at the noise and grabbed the pistol by her bed. Too late. Her cat Thumbs sent a book sliding off her nightstand. She shot him once with the water pistol. That usually sent him scurrying for cover.

But this morning the big gray-and-white cat didn’t budge. He sat defiantly on her nightstand and with his huge six-toed paw flipped the clock off the edge. Helen caught a glimpse before it went overboard. Nine forty-five.

It was hours past his feeding time. She must have slept through his breakfast cries. Now Thumbs was telling her to feed him or else. He had a system of escalation. Unbreakables like the book went first, followed by semisurvivable items like the clock. Fragile knickknacks were next. She heard the clink of china, and saw his catcher’s mitt of a paw scooting the bud vase to the edge of the nightstand. She caught it and picked up the cat before he could send anything else flying off.

“All right, I’ll feed you,” she said, and carried Thumbs into the kitchen. He purred all the way.

“My alarm didn’t go off at nine,” she said as she filled his food bowl. “So I should thank you that I’m not late for work.”

I’m having a conversation with a cat, she thought. But I’d rather talk to Thumbs than think about today. I dread going to the store. If I can just make it through the next eight hours, I’ll have two days off.

As soon as she walked into the bookstore, she knew something was different. Mr. Davies’ chair was gone, but more than that seemed missing. The store seemed barren and cold without the gentle old bookworm. He’d been so happy there, surrounded by piles of paperbacks.

She stood on the spot where his chair used to be and said, “I’ll miss you, Mr. Davies.”

“What were you doing back in that corner?” Albert said when she returned to the front. The prissy bookseller looked as if his starched shirt was holding him up. “I won’t go near it. It’s like that old man is still there.”

“I wish he was,” Helen said. “Mr. Davies wouldn’t hurt anyone, alive or dead.”

“I miss him,” Brad said. “We used to talk about J.Lo. He particularly appreciated her performance in
Enough.
He said her acting was underrated, although he agreed that some of her clothes in that movie did not flatter her opulent figure.”

“She’s not opulent, she’s obese,” Albert said nastily. Brad looked stricken.

Helen intoned:

“Pain.

“Pain.

“Pain is a red scream in my head… .”

Albert turned dead white.

“We all have things we care about,” Helen said. “We should respect them.”

Albert didn’t say another word about J.Lo or anyone else.

“Thanks,” Brad whispered, and went back to gathering up the books scattered all over the store. He moved slower today and smiled less.

Only Gayle was her usual cheerful self, laughing and chatting with the customers. At the cashier’s counter, a little boy about four proudly presented his new book to Helen. It was shaped like a fire truck.

“Here,” he said. His mother put a twenty on the counter.

“Do you want to be a fireman?” Helen asked him as she rang up the book and bagged it.

“Yes,” he said.

“My brother is a firefighter in Fort Lauderdale,” Gayle told him. “He’s very brave.”

“I’m brave, too,” the little boy said. “I’d like to be a fireman. Or an alligator. Then I could eat the bad people.”

Helen stopped laughing abruptly. Firefighter. Firefighters have breathing gear. They could get into a tear-gas-andVikane building. Maybe Gayle got the SCBA equipment— or stole it—from her brother. Did she hate Page Turner enough to kill him?

She looked at Gayle with the golden hair … and the silver car.

What’s wrong with me? she thought. How can I suspect Gayle?

How can you not? said a small voice. Gayle wasn’t upset at Mr. Davies’ death. That wasn’t natural.

Gayle hated Page Turner. She was working at the store the night Page Turner died. She had an hour for dinner— enough time to get to the Coronado and back.

Of course, someone else could have hated Page Turner. Someone who looked even more like Cinderella.

And Astrid’s silver Mercedes was a much grander coach.

“I have two promising leads,” Helen told Margery.

They were drinking screwdrivers in her landlady’s kitchen. Margery’s recipe was light on the orange juice and heavy on the vodka, with a hint of Key lime.

Helen came home from the bookstore feeling like she’d been beaten with bamboo. The booze hit her like a brick. She estimated she could down another three ounces before her lips went numb.

“Squawwwk!” said Pete. She didn’t even jump when he screeched. The screwdrivers were mellowing her out.

“You really think your manager is a killer?” Margery looked frivolous in amethyst shorts and tangerine toenail polish. But her shrewd old eyes watched Helen carefully.

“I don’t know,” Helen said, and took another sip. Jeez, that drink was good. “I just know Gayle’s very smart. Something’s not right about her. She was at the store when Mr. Davies was killed, and she didn’t seem very sorry that he was dead. Plus she has blond hair and a silver car.”

“Ever stand on Las Olas and count blondes in silver cars? You’d run out of fingers pretty fast.”

“I still want to check her out,” Helen said. “But I’ll have to do my research on Gayle at the store. She’s off the next two days and so am I. I thought I’d use this time to check out Astrid, the merry widow. She had her late husband underground awfully fast.”

“A quick burial in a hot climate. Is that all you have on the wife?” Margery knocked back a slug that would have paralyzed Helen. The woman could pound it down.

“She had a fight with her husband the day he died. I’d like to know what that was about. And I’d really like to see if Astrid has any gentleman callers. She’s a good-looking woman. My theory is she got her boyfriend to kill her husband. He’d have quite an incentive. He’d get to marry an attractive society blonde and enjoy the dead Turner’s millions.

“Astrid could have been the blond bait who picked up her husband. Maybe she promised him something special when they made up after their fight. She could have delivered him to her boyfriend for the kill.”

“But she didn’t kill Mr. Davies.”

“No, but the boyfriend could have been in the bookstore. Astrid is the type to have someone spy on the help. He could have heard me talking to Mr. Davies. During the mommy riot, he could have smothered Mr. Davies and slipped out. No one would have noticed in the confusion.”

“Possible,” Margery said, although she still sounded skeptical. “You planning round-the-clock surveillance of Astrid’s house?”

“Not necessary,” Helen said. She took a bigger sip this time. In fact, it was close to a gulp. She was feeling nicely numb, with a hint of a giggle underneath. “Astrid’s no dummy. She must know the police consider her a suspect. The wife always is. She can’t go to parties and dinners with her lover right now. But she must want to see him. Rich ladies aren’t good at denying themselves what they want. If he’s visiting her, it’s going to be late at night.”

“I like this,” Margery said. “You’re thinking. And the widow lives where, Palm Beach?”

“Right,” Helen said. It came out more like “Riiiiiight.” It wasn’t the orange juice making her talk like that. She looked at the drink longingly, then put it back down. No more until she explained her plan to Margery. “I already have her address. From the bookstore files.”

“So how are you going to get there, Samantha Spade? Hitchhike? Palm Beach is eighty miles round-trip. You don’t have a car.”

“Thought I’d borrow Peggy’s Kia and drive up there.”

“That cheap car would stick out there like a sore thumb,” Margery said. “Maybe you could get by with it when the day help was around, but at night it’s too noticeable. We’ll take my big white boat. Half the old bags in Palm Beach drive Cadillacs like mine. No one will notice us.”

“You don’t mind doing surveillance?” Helen’s tongue got tangled in the L’s.

“Awwwwk,” said Pete. Helen winced. Even the booze didn’t help that time. Pete’s squawk was like a stiletto in her brain. The little parrot sat on his perch, hunched and unhappy. Margery glared at him. He glared back.

“I don’t mind anything that gets me away from that birdbrain,” Margery said. “Parrots live even longer than Florida old farts. If you don’t get Peggy out of jail, I’m facing a life sentence with Pete.”

Pete screeched in protest behind his cage bars.

It rained all day, which was unusual for South Florida. Rain was usually liquid sunshine, short bursts that caught people without umbrellas. This was an old-fashioned frog strangler that flooded the flat streets.

Helen ran down to the newspaper boxes and brought back an armload. She sat at her kitchen table listening to the rain and looking at the employment ads. It was a de pressing business, and the rain didn’t help. Debt was a growth industry in Florida. The ads seemed to feed off the current financial crisis. Employers were looking for collection agents, credit counselors, and repo people.

If she didn’t want to service the rising tide of debt and bankruptcy, there were a zillion ads for telemarketers.
Earn
$700 to $1,200 weekly! … $12 an hour guaranteed! …
Earn $100K,
they promised.

The more a job paid, the less useful it was, Helen decided. Selling books had redeeming social value. Calling people at dinner to peddle vacation time shares did not.

And look at this prize catch in the job pool. It paid six times what she made at the bookstore:
Spa attendants. At
tractive bikini types. $1,200 a week guaranteed.

Bet I wouldn’t have to wear my ugly granny shoes, Helen thought. Or my pants with the pinpoint holes. Bet I wouldn’t have to wear anything at all.

She sighed and nearly threw the paper across the floor when she saw the display ad:

Maybe there was hope after all, she thought.

Margery’s day had been equally depressing. She’d been to see Peggy.

“She looks like death on toast,” Margery said. “The trial’s in three weeks. Her lawyer, Colby, is supposed to be the best, but for the life of me, I don’t know what she’s doing. She hired a private detective to help establish an alibi for Peggy. He came up with nothing.”

“What was Peggy doing after she left the barbecue?”

“She says she was driving around. But she didn’t buy gas—or anything else. No one saw her.”

They were in Margery’s big white Cadillac. The rain had stopped, and it was nearly nine at night. I-95 was a demented dodge-‘em game. Cars weaved in and out of traffic, or stomped on their brakes for no reason. Sometimes they did both at the same time.

“I remember reading an article in the 1980s that twenty percent of the people arrested for traffic violations on I-95 were on Quaaludes,” Margery said.

“It explains a lot of this driving,” Helen said.

“Not really,” Margery said. “I think ‘ludes are out. Who knows what they’re on now.”

The construction work started at the Palm Beach County line. The highway became a nightmare of lumpy patched asphalt and blinking barricades.

An SUV the size of an armored personnel carrier was tailgating the Cadillac. Helen could see its grille, like an evil grin, in the rearview mirror. When the SUV hit its high beams, urging Margery to get out of the way, the inside of the Caddy lit up.

“I hate when people do that,” she said, and slammed on her brakes. The SUV honked loudly, then pulled in front of Margery.

“Good,” she said, flipping on her high beams. “Let’s give this bird a taste of his own medicine.”

She tailgated and high-beamed the SUV all the way to Okeechobee Boulevard. Helen was relieved when Margery finally took that exit, even if it meant more torn-up roads in West Palm. About two blocks later, she was able to talk again.

“Can I ask a question?” she said.

“Go ahead.”

“What does Phil the invisible pothead do for a living?”

“I told you, he’s not invisible,” Margery said, sounding irritated. “I see him at least once a month when I collect the rent.”

“Well, I’ve never met the man and I’ve lived next to him almost a year. I just smell his burning weed. He’s supposed to be a Clapton fan, but I never hear a note from his apartment.”

“He’s a considerate Clapton fan.”

“Does he have a job?”

“Yes, it’s something with the government. Broward County, I think. Building division, variances and permissions.”

“No wonder he smokes so much dope. He must be crazy with boredom.”

“He’s got another five years and he can retire and do what he wants.”