The only drawback is she wants cash. But she has to in her situation. She can’t keep records.”
“Speaking of not keeping things, did you really dump Vinnie?” Christina said.
“I had to tell him good-bye. It was just too dangerous to date him any more.” Brittney crossed her long legs, and Helen noticed her cerise Moschino mules.
“How come?” Helen asked.
“Too many of his friends were dying,” Brittney said earnestly.
“They were sick?” Helen said.
“No, silly. They were turning up in barrels in Biscayne Bay.” This was a favorite form of mob body disposal in Miami. In New York and New Jersey, the home of many mobsters of Italian extraction, bodies were simply dumped in the river. Then the dead did not rise until May, when the water warmed up. But here in Florida, it was always warm. So the Miami mobsters used barrels. The bodies stayed down until the decomposition gases caused them to rise and float.
“Six of them were found dead. Two more are missing, and the police think they’re probably dead.”
Helen did not know what to say.
“Vinnie is in construction,” Brittney said, as if that explained something. Maybe it did. Construction could be a rough business in South Florida.
“He’s also in import-exports.”
Helen had been in Florida long enough to know that was code for drugs.
“Does he have a boat?” Christina asked, shrewdly.
“Oh, yes. A Cigarette boat.”
Helen took that as proof.
“The last ones were Vinnie’s good friend Angelo and his date, Heather. They turned up dead last week. Now the FBI has been following me around, asking me questions and making my life miserable,” Brittney said. She looked like an indignant Barbie doll.
“The FBI are everywhere. Two of them even rang my doorbell at seven a.m. They asked if they could come in, and I had to let them. I couldn’t have the neighbors see me with the FBI. But I didn’t offer them coffee or juice or anything.”
Brittney acted as if she’d punished the agents severely. Helen listened, spellbound.
“See, Vinnie and I had dinner with Angelo and Heather about a week before they died. We didn’t know they were going to die, of course. They seemed just fine. Heather was wearing the cutest Dolce & Gabbana outfit —the black one that was in the last issue of
“After their bodies were discovered, the FBI showed me the grossest pictures. Polaroids of those poor dead people. They were in awful shape from the water and the sun. Heather had always taken such good care of herself, too.
“That FBI agent said, ‘Did you have dinner with these people Wednesday, August first?’ I looked at those terrible photos and I said, ‘Would I have dinner with someone who looked like that?’ ” Brittney was trembling with indignation. “That’s when I told Vinnie that I couldn’t see him any more. It’s too dangerous to go around with him. That’s why he has a wife.”
“Vinnie’s married?” Helen blurted. Christina frowned at her, and Helen felt like a hayseed from the Midwest, as she often did at Juliana’s. But Brittney was not offended.
“Of course he’s married,” she said. “His wife knows we date.” Helen thought “date” stood for another four- letter word.
The doorbell chimed. Christina buzzed the green door, and it swung open to admit a young Asian woman with straight black hair down to her size-two tush. She was accompanied by a forty-something boyfriend with a bull neck and a bald spot. He had one hand possessively on the small of her back.
“You wait on them,” Christina said. “I’ll take Brittney.”
The long-haired lovely was named Tara. Her boyfriend was Paulie. Paulie had her try on everything in the store and made crude comments like “Those pants really show off your ass.” Tara simply smiled and tried on more short, tight clothes. Paulie dropped nearly nine thousand dollars, a sweet sugar daddy indeed.
After the couple left, Christina congratulated her warmly. Helen barely heard her. She couldn’t get the woman who could not frown out of her mind. Helen was haunted by Brittney’s sweet nature and her oddly immobile face. She did not know why such a lovely creature would go out with a mobster. Brittney did not seem to understand that dumping Vinnie might not be enough. If all the mobster’s friends were dying or disappearing, then she might be in danger, too.
She wondered if Brittney would live long enough to get wrinkles.
Helen was not really surprised three weeks later when she read in the paper that the body of a ninety-eight- pound woman with blonde hair and sapphire-blue contacts was found in a barrel in Biscayne Bay.
But she was surprised whose body it turned out to be.
Chapter 2
Thursday was Helen’s worst day since she fled St. Louis. It was raining that morning, a hard tropical downpour. A relentless wind drove the rain under her umbrella. Helen was soaked by the time she’d walked to work. Her black silk Ungaro suit was wet and wrinkled. Her hair was damp and frizzy. She squished watery footprints across Juliana’s freshly vacuumed carpet.
“You look like a bag lady,” Christina said. “You can’t wait on customers dressed like that.” Christina’s own clothes—white Chanel pants and an Italian knit top—were perfectly dry. Her blonde hair curled obediently around her shoulders. Maybe she had teleported to Juliana’s, Helen thought.
“But if I go home for more clothes, I’ll just get wetter,” Helen said.
“Then borrow something in the store, and don’t get anything on it,” Christina snapped. “There’s a hair dryer you can use in the stockroom for your damp hair.”
Helen dried her hair, then looked for something to wear. Nothing fit. Not one single item in the whole store. She found scores of size twos, fours, sixes, several zeroes, some eights, and one size ten, but no twelves she could wear.
Juliana’s women were built like little girls with big breasts. Helen was a big woman. Not a fat woman. At six feet and one hundred fifty pounds, she was slim and willowy by some standards. But in Juliana’s she felt like a great galumphing giant. Sometimes she thought that was why Christina had hired her. Even on their fattest day, the teeny customers could feel superior to the huge Midwestern saleswoman.
“I’m not huge,” Helen told herself. “Twelve is not a big size for a grown woman my height. And I’m good- looking.”
So good-looking my husband of seventeen years hopped into bed with another woman, she thought. And now I’m on the run.
Helen was feeling low. The storewide clothes search depressed her, and the pounding rain didn’t help. She finally plugged in the steamer in the stockroom and used it to get the wrinkles out of her suit. Then she reapplied her makeup.
“Much better,” Christina said, when the spruced-up Helen emerged from the stockroom. “I’m sorry I grumped at you. You don’t have to worry how you look, anyway. I expect this will be a slow day with the rain.”
With that, the doorbell rang and didn’t stop ringing for the next two hours. They were overrun with customers that morning. Perversely, the rain seemed to bring them out, the way a hard rain brought out earthworms on the sidewalks in Helen’s hometown of St. Louis.
And worms were all that came to Juliana’s that morning. The little sweethearts with the sunny dispositions stayed home. Helen and Christina waited on complainers, crabs, grumps, and grouches. They brought racks of
