was crooked.
Helen had an urge to straighten it.
“There was no murder, ma’am,” the boy officer said. “We wanted to set your mind at ease. What you heard was a movie. The guy was watching it when we got there.”
Hot shame flooded Helen. She remembered the woman’s teasing tone at first: “You’ve been a very bad boy, Hank.
You’re just lucky I like bad boys.” That did sound like a line from a movie.
She was a fool. A public fool. She would lose her job. All because she’d overreacted and called the police. But then she remembered that desperate, guttural choking noise. That was no movie sound effect. She’d heard a woman die. She was sure of it.... Almost sure.
“He killed a woman,” she said. “It wasn’t a movie. She said his name, Hank. Twice. Explain that.”
“You heard wrong.” Officer Untidy tucked in her shirttail.
“You said you couldn’t hear what the man said, just the woman.”
“I heard a woman being murdered.” It came out stronger than she felt.
“No, ma’am,” Officer Untidy said. She had a coffee stain on her shirt. “We found no sign of anyone else living there.
We found no women’s personal effects. No female clothes, shoes or makeup.”
“He’s very rich. Maybe you didn’t look hard enough, Helen said.
Berletta sat at her desk, frozen. Nellie gave a warning cough.
Good move, Helen thought. Insult the police. That will make them change their minds.
The boy cop, the muscular one, moved forward in a way that seemed threatening. But Helen realized every move this young tank made would seem that way. “Ma’am, I will put that remark down to stress, because of the situation. We didn’t take Mr. Asporth’s word for it. We had reasonable suspicion to search the house and the garage without a warrant.
The yard could be seen from public view, so we had cause to search that, too. Mr. Asporth also gave us permission.”
“How much time was there between my call and your response?” Helen interrupted.
“We responded in a timely manner,” he said, which was no answer at all.
“Inside the house we looked in the closets and under the beds. We checked his storage containers and his walk-in freezer. We even checked the bait freezer on his boat. A guy hid his wife in one of those a couple of years ago.”
When you were still in diapers, Helen thought. I’ve got sweaters older than these two. When did they graduate from the police academy—yesterday?
The boy cop frowned, as if he could read her thoughts.
Office Untidy started talking. “We found nothing. There was no sign of a struggle. There was no blood. The neighbors heard no unusual noises. The vehicles in the garage were registered in his name. He wasn’t hiding her car in there.”
“Did you look in his cars?”
“He opened them for us. They were empty.” Officer Untidy was wrestling with her shirttail—and losing.
“You made an honest mistake, ma’am,” the boy officer said. “You did your duty as a citizen and called us. You reported what you thought was a murder. We checked it out and found nothing.”
Helen couldn’t bear the condescension in his voice. This young twerp thought she was a hysterical woman.
“It wasn’t a mistake.” Helen sounded really hysterical now. “I heard him murder a woman.”
“I wouldn’t say that too loud if I were you,” the boy officer said. “He could sue you for your last nickel.”
Chapter 3
“Ten. Twenty. Thirty.”
Helen was counting crumpled ten dollar bills. The money had been stuffed inside her teddy bear, Chocolate.
“Two hundred. Two ten. Two twenty.”
She pulled more stuffing out of the bear. The pile of wrinkled tens grew higher. Helen breathed in the dirty perfume of used money. Last night, she’d heard a woman being murdered. Then two cops treated her like a nutcase. It was a trying evening. But this morning, Helen had her hands on something reassuring: money. She knew she’d be fired in a few hours. But if her bear Chocolate was as fat as Helen hoped, she could tell Girdner to go to hell.
“Two ninety. Three hundred. Three ten.”
Telemarketing was wretched work, but Helen made more at it than at any other dead-end job she’d ever worked. She had an odd, embarrassing knack for selling septic-tank cleaner. The money was piling up. Helen couldn’t have a bank account or even a safe-deposit box. Those would make her too easy to trace. Instead, she stashed her money in a place she thought un-bear-ably clever.
“Three seventy. Three eighty. Three ninety.”
The money pile had grown to a fat mound. Helen had not had so much cash since she worked for that St. Louis corporation. Actually, she hadn’t had much cash then, although she made a hundred thousand plus. She spent her salary on designer suits for a job that bored her, massages to ease the work tension, and Ralph Lauren window treatments (when you spent that much, you did not call them curtains) for a house designed to impress other people.
“Four ten. Four twenty. Four thirty.”
She threw away more money on Rob, her rat of a husband.
He’d looked for work for years, but never found a job. Rob needed a Rolex to get to job interviews on time, a new SUV to get there in style, and a state-of-the-art sound system to soothe his shattered nerves when he was rejected—again. But Rob was no mooch. He was building a new deck, wasn’t he?
“Six forty. Six fifty. Six sixty.”
When Helen remembered what happened on the deck, she started counting faster, spilling bills every which way. One hot summer day, Helen decided not to be such a corporate grind. For the first time in seventeen married years, she left work early. She would surprise her husband, handsome and sweaty in the sun. They would make passionate love on the new deck furniture, then swim naked in the pool.
Her husband had had the exact same thought. Helen found him sweaty and naked with their next-door neighbor, Sandy.
“Eight seventy. Eight eighty. Eight ninety.”
Bills leaped like spawning salmon as Helen recounted her humiliation that awful afternoon. She’d picked up a crowbar on the deck and started swinging. When she finished, she’d smashed her old life completely. Now she was on the run in South Florida, a female version of
“Nine twenty. Nine thirty. Nine forty.”
Helen pulled out one last ten-spot wedged inside Chocolate’s paw. Nine hundred fifty dollars. She shoved the money back in the bear and patted his swollen belly.
Rich Chocolate, indeed. But she had another money cushion. She unzipped the couch pillows and started counting.
She had seven hundred dollars stuffed in the turquoise throw pillows. Twelve hundred fifteen dollars in the black couch pillows. Seven thousand and something in the old Samsonite suitcase in the closet. She could survive for months on her stash while she looked for another job. She was going to be fired, but people at her level didn’t need references.
Helen wished she could get last night’s sounds out of her head. That gurgling scream played in an endless loop. But the police said she’d imagined it. Hot humiliation overwhelmed her. The police had been inside Hank Asporth’s house.
They’d seen no overturned furniture. No sign of a woman, dead or alive. They told Helen she’d heard a movie.
