money for him.
Stop this. Start looking for another seven-seventy-an-hour job.
But they are all bad, she told herself.
Then go back to St. Louis and make real money.
That was worse.
Helen began shuffling through the stack again. Juliana’s seemed to have saved every appliance manual since the store opened in 1965. There were manuals for outdated cash registers, obsolete clothing steamers, even a long-deceased stereo.
Finally, Helen spotted the instruction booklet for the air conditioner under an old refrigerator manual from 1972. That fridge probably had been junked years ago. Why did Christina keep these things?
The refrigerator manual slipped out of Helen’s sweaty hand, and a pink flyer fell out. With a nearly naked woman on it.
Whoa! She was way too hot for a Frigidaire.
The flyer looked like the sort that Las Vegas prostitutes slipped under hotel room doors. Helen had seen them when she attended a CPA convention in Vegas years ago, before it became a so-called family gambling center. The male convention-goers laughed and snickered like school boys at the flyers’ innuendoes. Helen was fascinated by the ads. Where she came from, prostitutes didn’t advertise like pizza parlors.
This flyer said “Let Jasmine show you the secrets of the Orient.”
The woman in the flyer was showing most of her secrets already. She was a slender, full-breasted Asian with long dark hair. Jasmine’s mouth was open and pouty. Her breasts and buttocks were thrust out, bold and inviting. She was both submissive and brazen. It was clear what Jasmine was selling: The string bikini covered almost nothing.
It certainly didn’t hide the fact that this was a much younger Tara.
Helen stared at the flyer, until a drop of sweat plopped on the paper. Maybe she’d made a mistake. But the photograph was clear and sharp. There was no doubt this was a younger Tara. The face was a little rounder. The breasts were a little higher. The hair was just as long and black. Too bad, Helen thought, she hadn’t used that curtain of hair to hide her face.
There was something written on the flyer in black ink: “Love Will Keep Us Together.”
It didn’t look like Tara’s handwriting. Tara’s script was as small and delicate as she was. Besides, she liked to dot her
Helen was too hot and sweaty to figure anything out in that airless room. She’d fix the air conditioner first. Maybe she could think better when she cooled down.
Helen hid the flyer under the stack of manuals and began reading the filter-changing instructions. She found the Phillips screwdriver, unscrewed the dust-bearded vent on the air conditioner. Inside, the filter looked like it was wearing an inch-thick blanket of gray felt. Big wads of dark fluff and mounds of dirt spilled out behind it. No wonder the air conditioner wasn’t working.
Helen changed the filter, vacuumed the vent inside and out, and while she was at it, cleaned the whole utility closet. All the while, she thought about Tara.
Christina had found out Tara had been a prostitute and hidden the proof in the store. Was she blackmailing Tara? How much money was Tara paying to keep her past quiet? And why . . . ?
“You fixed it!” Tara said. “Cool air is coming out. The store should be liveable pretty soon.”
Tara stood silhouetted in the stockroom doorway, a small, slender woman in a fashionably fringed skirt and a shoulder-baring top. Her pink mules were embroidered with flowers. Her long hair was soft and shining. Her skin glowed. She looked sweet and vulnerable, unlike the brazen tart in the flyer. Tara had reinvented herself.
“What’s wrong?” Tara said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Helen reached for the flyer. “You were a Las Vegas . . . sex worker?” she said, proud she’d remembered the politically correct term for hooker.
She could see Tara’s body tense, as if she were turning to stone. “Yes,” she said, defiant but also afraid. “So?”
“Is that where you met Paulie?”
“God, no. He thinks I’m a mail-order bride from Thailand. He paid a fortune to get me here. I banked it all.”
“You’re kidding,” Helen said. “Paulie thinks you’re from Thailand? With that Midwest accent? Where are you from—Chicago?”
“Cleveland. I told him I’d listened to Berlitz tapes,” Tara said.
“And he believed you?”
“Men believe what they want to believe, especially when it comes to sex,” Tara said. “I’m the fantasy woman he’s always wanted—exotic, quiet, submissive. Paulie really wants a hooker, but he doesn’t know it. I give him what he wants. He gives me what I want—money and security. He’d drop me like a hot potato if he knew my past. He thinks I was a virgin when we met.”
“How much was Christina blackmailing you for?” Helen said, deciding to bluff.
“I paid her two thousand a month,” Tara said. “Recently, she wanted to raise it to twenty-five hundred dollars. I could barely make the two thousand, even with all Paulie gave me. I was desperate.”
“That’s why you faked that robbery,” Helen said. “You were looking for this flyer, weren’t you?”
“Yes, but I was also looking for some photos. She has pictures of me with my clients . . . doing things. She showed me the flyer first, and I laughed and said flyers could be faked. Then it was her turn to laugh. She said she had some photographs Paulie would love to see.”
“Photos can be faked, too,” said Helen.
“Not these,” Tara said, sadly. “I saw them. They’re real. I searched the store, but I couldn’t find the flyer or the photos anywhere. The search took longer than I expected. I couldn’t explain to Paulie why I was so late.”
“Why not? You could have said you were delayed by an accident on the road.”
“You don’t know Paulie. He’s so jealous, he’d check. He calls my cell phone if I’m half an hour late.”
“So you tossed some clothes around, hit your forehead on the wall, and made up the story about the two men with guns,” Helen said.
Tara nodded, the curtain of hair sliding across her face.
“Don’t worry,” said Helen. “I won’t tell the police about the break-in unless I absolutely have to.” For my sake, she thought, not yours.
“I didn’t kill Christina,” Tara said. “You believe me, don’t you? I’d be crazy to kill her before I found out where she stashed those photos. If the police find them, I’m in trouble. That’s why I came back to work here, to see if they turned up anywhere.”
“I thought you and Christina were friends,” Helen said.
“We started off that way. Friends, I mean. Then she showed me the photos and asked for money. I was afraid she would tell Paulie and ruin everything. So I pretended we were still friends. It wasn’t too hard. I pretended with Paulie, too. Most of the time, I could forget what Christina was doing.”
Tara said it without bitterness. Helen wondered if she was faking that, too.
“Where did you find the flyer?” Tara asked.
“In the filter box,” Helen lied. “Do you know what ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’ means?”
“It’s a song by Captain & Tennille, isn’t it? An old one.” She shrugged. Obviously, it meant nothing to her.
“Are you going to tell Paulie?” Tara said. “Are you going to ruin the only good thing I’ve got?”
“No, Tara,” Helen told her. “Your past is your own.”
Unless you killed Christina, she told herself.
Chapter 23
