“Did Page Turner suffer?”
“I don’t think so,” Helen said.
“Too bad,” he spat. Helen did not know how Brad’s skinny body could hold so much hate. She was afraid it would overflow and scald her.
Helen hid in the break room and made phone calls. She thanked Rich for the wonderful roses. He’d heard about the murder and wanted to take her away, but Helen insisted she was fine. She talked with her friend Sarah, who was equally worried. Helen assured her that she’d be all right.
At nine-fifteen, Gayle arrived, an avenging angel in Doc Martens and a black turtleneck. She read a prepared statement asking the press to respect the Turner family privacy and please stay out of the store. The reporters interviewed customers going in and out for a while, then drifted away.
Rich called again at eleven. And at noon. And at one and two. Albert, his composure regained, frowned with disapproval every time. “It’s your boyfriend,” he’d say, handing her the phone like it was a dead fish. When Rich called at four she said, “I appreciate your concern, but I can’t keep taking personal calls at work.”
“I’m worried about you,” he said. “There’s a killer loose.”
“I’m fine. I’m in a bookstore. It’s perfectly safe.”
“That’s what Page Turner thought. Be careful talking to strange men.”
“It’s South Florida. All the men are strange.” A man walked up to her register, his feet making an odd
“Forgot my shoes,” he said, and handed her a copy of
Helen put Rich on hold while she rang up Swim Fins, and hoped he wouldn’t be there when she came back.
But he was, giving advice and orders. “Don’t speak to any men. Don’t encourage them in any way. It could be a serial killer. They’re attracted to unstable situations. It’s where they hunt women.”
“Rich, I’m forty-two. I can take care of myself. I really have to go. Please don’t call again. I need this job.”
This is Page Turner’s fault, she thought. His death had unleashed some streak of protective paranoia in Rich. It was ruining her romance.
Page was not done causing problems for Helen. When she got off work at six that night, Helen called Margery and asked if the TV reporters were back at the Coronado.
“I ran them off my parking lot, but the damn satellite trucks are parked in the street, thanks to that blasted Madame Muffy,” Margery said. “She’s outside talking to them again. I ought to raise her rent. I can’t even sit out by the pool with a glass of wine or I’ll wind up on TV looking like a lush. Call me in another hour, and I’ll let you know if they’ve left.”
Helen sat in the cafe, eating free, slightly stale eggplant sandwiches and drinking coffee bought with her employee discount. She found a paper on the table and read the employment ads. Most were for people with special training:
Welder... window installer... wood finisher. All skills Helen didn’t have.
Wait! Here was something she could do. A “busy young company” wanted a word processor. They paid nine dollars and eighty cents an hour, good money in South Florida.
Helen checked her watch. It was seven p.m. She slipped into the bookstore’s deserted office and typed up a resume with impressive speed. That alone should qualify me for the job, she thought. She checked it for errors. Perfect.
She tried to fax the resume, but the line was busy. She kept trying in between calls to Margery. She still had not gotten through to the company by ten o’clock, when Margery told her it was safe to come home. Helen figured the busy young company must have taken the phone off the hook.
The next morning at Page Turners, she faxed the resume once again. The line was busy. She tried fifteen minutes later. Still busy. She tried all morning whenever she could get into the office. The fax line stayed busy.
At noon, Helen called the phone company to see if something was wrong. The fax line was not out of order. By five o’clock, Helen knew she didn’t have a chance for this dream job. The company must have had hundreds of faxes already. The phone line was jammed with job hopefuls.
But she tried the fax line one more time before she left. It was still busy.
That night, the TV news stories said Trevor the termite fumigator was cleared. Margery had the inside scoop when Helen got home. No reporters were lurking about, so Margery was smoking and sipping a screwdriver out by the pool. Peggy and Pete were nowhere to be seen.
“I called a friend on the force,” Margery said. “I found out Trevor had an alibi for the time of the murder, but he’d been hiding something. They cut him loose because he had no connection to the murder.”
“How come?”
“Can’t find out any more. My source clammed up.”
“I know who will tell us,” Helen said. “I have my own inside source.”
“You do?” Margery couldn’t hide her surprise.
“Sure, Trevor. We got along great on the final walkthrough. I think we bonded after I had to take that frozen urine sample out to the Dumpster. If he’s innocent, he’ll want to tell the world. We can talk to him tomorrow. I don’t go in to work until eleven.”
Helen called the termite company the next morning and said the crew had left some clamshell clamps behind and she would drop them off if Trevor was working in the area.
The receptionist told her where Trevor was tenting on Hollywood Boulevard. Margery drove Helen there in her big white Cadillac. Helen thought it was like driving a living room. The seats were like sofas. There was room for a coffee table and a TV.
They found Trevor tenting a two-story motel. Trevor looked a little thinner after his ordeal, and he seemed a bit subdued. But he did not mind telling them what happened.
They stood out by the motel pool and Trevor worked on a cylinder of Vikane gas. Helen was fascinated that the top of the gas cylinder was coated with dry-ice frost.
“Everything looked normal on Monday morning,” he said. “I put on my SCBA gear and went into your tented building. Nothing was disturbed. No one had touched the clamps on the tent. Except when I opened Peggy’s apartment, I found that man, Page Turner, on the bed. One look and I knew he was dead.”
“It must have been horrible,” Helen said. She remembered those hot, dark rooms, the canvas flapping ominously in the breeze.
“It was a shock,” Trevor admitted, connecting the Vikane to a plastic hose. “I turned the dead man over enough to see the face. He was starting to smell like a meat freezer when the electricity went off. I’d never seen him before. I thought somehow this man died of Vikane. It was all my fault. I didn’t check the room.”
“But you did,” Helen said. “Margery and I were with you. We would have said you did your job.”
“I wasn’t thinking,” Trevor said. “I knew there would be trouble. I was a black man. This was a white neighborhood.”
Maybe Trevor did not believe that two white women would stand up for him.
“I was the only one who could go into the tent when it was filled with tear gas and poison. I had the breathing apparatus. I was the first and easiest suspect. I panicked, shut the door, then relocked it. I did not tell George and Terrell, the guys working on the tent. I was sweating, but not from the heat. I completed my rounds, all the while asking myself, Should I move the body? Should I dump it in the Everglades? How am I gonna haul a body out of here? The neighbors are watching.
“For a long time, I sat in my truck, thinking about what to do. This was a fumigator’s worst nightmare. The only people who would understand how I felt were other fumigators. So I called two friends in the business. They gave good advice. They told me moving the body was only going to make me look guilty. ‘Stay cool,’ they said. ‘Get a lawyer.’ They knew a good one who would work cheap for a brother.”
“So what did you do?”
“I saw the lawyer,” he said. “When it came time to open the doors Monday afternoon, I unlocked Peggy’s apartment and looked surprised. I pretended I’d never seen that dead man before.
