These were illegal immigrants. Helen knew it. She had seen too many scenes like this on TV, when their boats landed in Miami or Hollywood Beach. The INS sent them right back where they came from.
Then she looked a little closer. One of the men helping people off the boat was Joe.
Christina’s ex was bringing in illegal immigrants. Maybe that was why he had no alibi for Christina’s death. He could not tell the police he was handling an illegal shipment of people.
Unless Joe had another good reason for no alibi: he killed Christina that weekend. His ex had enough material to put him away for a long time.
Helen remembered Brittney and Christina sitting in the back of the store, cackling like witches and brewing revenge for Joe: “Immigration? No. Bad idea . . . Some guys in Miami would like to know what he’s up to, though, and they aren’t as nice as the IRS . . . When I finish, Joe will wish he was never born.”
Instead, Christina had been destroyed.
The second photo looked like those 1890s pictures of New York tenements. More people than Helen could count were crammed in a high-ceilinged, windowless room. They could hardly move, it was so crowded. Stained, sheetless mattresses were on the floor. Four people were sleeping on one. Laundry was hanging across a back corner. Through the limp and tattered clothes, Helen saw a toilet. It was near a table with bread, a giant can with a knife stuck in it (peanut butter? meat spread?), and soda cans.
This wasn’t a photograph of 1890s immigrant misery. These pictures were recent. The clothes and shoes were modern.
Illegal immigrants.
There was another photo of what was probably the outside of the same building. At least, the yawning doorways were similar, and the inside walls were the same dingy green. The building looked like a warehouse. The street number was painted over the front door. In the background were four giant candy-striped smokestacks, a Port Everglades landmark. Sailors steered their boats by those smokestacks.
Helen remembered the business story Christina squirreled away in the manuals. It said Joe’s company had bought a warehouse near Port Everglades. What was that address? Helen stood up, heard her knees crack, and felt needles and pins in her feet. She limped over to the stack of manuals and found the dull story.
Now Helen found that story riveting. The addresses were the same.
Joe was mixed up with importing illegal immigrants, probably from the Caribbean, and Christina had the pictures to prove it. “You Gotta Serve Somebody” was another of her ugly jokes.
Immigrant smuggling was a lucrative business, if Joe’s Ferrari was any indication, but you needed the morals of a slave trader. The immigrants paid high prices to be packed in leaky tubs and smuggled to America. The cruelest smugglers didn’t even take their passengers ashore. They dumped them in the water within sight of land. Some never knew they’d arrived in America. Their dead bodies washed ashore.
Once here, the unlucky worked as wage slaves, making far less than Helen’s seven seventy an hour. Helen remembered Christina asking Tara about the kind of maid she wanted.
“Do you mind a Haitian?” Christina had said. “What about someone who doesn’t speak English?”
“I don’t care what they speak as long as they scrub my floors,” Tara had said. “Brittney has a real gem. She pays her almost nothing but room and board. The woman is practically a slave.”
They were slaves, chained to their low-paying jobs by their fake papers, their lack of education, and sometimes, their lack of English. They lived in little rooms in luxurious homes and were utterly isolated. Domestics did not hang around the yacht club or get a cappuccino at the local patisserie. They couldn’t complain about their pay or working conditions or they’d be deported. They had no job benefits and no future.
Anyone who hired illegal immigrants broke the employment laws, but few of Juliana’s customers wanted cabinet posts.
Joe was Christina’s source for those reliable scrubbing slaves. Helen would bet the rent that Christina collected a fee for finding maids for her customers. Joe probably got a kickback, too.
When they split, Christina wanted revenge, and she knew enough to get Joe in big trouble. Maybe Detective Dwight Hansel wasn’t so dumb after all, if he believed Joe had killed Christina. Helen had the motive right in her hand.
Helen dusted herself off, put away her twelve-button kid gloves, and called Sarah to crow about her discovery before she opened the store again. (Well, she didn’t say which fifteen minutes she’d be back, did she?)
She was lucky. Sarah was home and answering her phone.
“I’ve got something,” Helen said. “Something big. These have to be pictures of an illegal immigrant smuggling operation. And Joe’s involved.”
She described the photos.
“That’s what you say when you see the photos,” Sarah said. “Joe could say he was rescuing some poor strangers when their boat went aground. Does the photo indicate these are illegal immigrants?”
“No,” Helen said. “But it’s obvious.”
“Why? Because they’re not holding visas? You can’t even prove that boat photo was taken in Florida. It could have been the Bahamas or some other island.”
“What about those awful warehouse photos?” Helen said. “One shows the striped smokestacks. That’s definitely Fort Lauderdale.”
“Any date on those pictures?”
“No.” Helen could feel her triumph slipping away.
“I didn’t think so,” Sarah said. “Joe could say the photos were taken before he bought the warehouse. He’s not in those pictures, is he?”
“No,” Helen said. “I have absolutely nothing.”
“But you do. You have a place to start.”
“You don’t expect me to go to Joe’s office and confront him, do you?”
“Are you nuts?” Sarah said. “The cops think Joe did it, too. Stay away from that man. He’s dangerous.”
“But I can talk to Brittney,” Helen said. She remembered those long afternoons the women spent on the black loveseats, whispering their hatred for Joe, planning his downfall. “Brittney had no love for Joe. She helped plot revenge against him. I bet Brittney has the dirt on that maid business.”
“What are you going to do?” Sarah asked.
“Something safe and smart for a change,” Helen said. “Brittney has the key to this. I have her address in our files. It’s time I paid her a visit.”
Chapter 29
Fifty-five. Sixty. Sixty-five.
Helen felt around inside Chocolate, her stuffed bear, for more money. She pulled out a crumpled five dollar bill and two singles. Seventy-two dollars. That was all she had saved after the rent was paid.
The cab to Brittney’s house should cost about twenty dollars round-trip, but you never knew. Peggy would have driven her, but Helen didn’t want to drag Peggy into this. A bus was two bucks, but the next one wasn’t until eight p.m., and the last bus left Brittney’s neighborhood before ten. That might not give her enough time.
Helen put the seventy-two dollars in her purse, then walked to the Riverside Hotel on Las Olas and asked the doorman to call a cab. She gave him the two singles.
The cab driver had a heavy accent Helen could not place, but she understood one thing: he was rude. He listened to a radio station turned up loud. It sounded like French, but not quite. Haitian-Creole? He did not turn on the air conditioner. Helen amused herself by counting the acne scars on the back of his neck while the cab idled in traffic.
Brittney lived in Bridge Harbour, a high-priced neighborhood near the Seventeenth Street Bridge. It was an odd mix of architecture. The older houses were sprawling one-story places that knew how to hunker down in a
