“Can I help you?” she said. “Would you like your palm read?”
“We’re more interested in the past than the future,” Helen said. “What were you doing in Page Turner’s office the day he died?”
“Warning him about his terrible fate.”
“Bullfeathers,” said Margery. That bird must be driving her crazy if she was cussing with feathers, Helen thought.
“You told him you were his long-lost daughter,” Helen said.
Madame Muffy turned pale. “You were listening at the door.”
“What was in that Bawls bottle you took out of his office?”
Muffy looked puzzled. “In it? Nothing.”
“Why did you take it?” Margery said.
Madame Muffy gave a little yip.
“I’ll tell you why,” Helen said, double-teaming her. “You drugged him so you could kill him.”
Muffy turned whiter still. Now she was the color of dingy teeth. “What? I didn’t want him dead. He’s my father.”
“Not according to him. He said you were nuts.”
“That hurt,” Muffy said. “But I knew my father would change his mind once he was presented with the proof.
That’s why I took his bottle of Bawls. I wanted his DNA off the straw.”
The straw. Of course. She’d shipped it off to the lawyer.
Now she was waiting on the lab report. She didn’t care what was in the bottle.
“Why do you think Page Turner is your father?” Helen said. Actually, it wasn’t an unreasonable assumption. Muffy was young enough to be Page Turner’s daughter, and he could have fathered half of Fort Lauderdale.
“My mother said that she had an affair with him. Page wouldn’t marry her when he found out she was pregnant.
My mother married another man, who raised me as his child. After Daddy died, she told me who my real father was. The spirit voices told me I would come into a lot of money.”
“You actually hear voices?” Helen said.
“Not all the time. But I heard them about Peggy, and look what happened to her. And I heard them this time. I heard the number nine hundred and the word ‘book.’ When I saw an article in
I was entitled to my share of the Turner family fortune.”
“I saw that article,” Margery said. “That’s the family’s combined business fortune, if you count all their holdings.
Page’s share is only worth about ten million.”
“It’s still a lot of money,” Muffy said. “It would have been easier for me to get it when he was alive. Then he could have acknowledged me. Now I’ll have to contest the will.”
“How’d you get in to see him at the bookstore?”
“I have a sexy voice on the phone. I said I’d always admired him and wanted to meet him. Of course, he was disappointed when he met me, but he’s not supposed to be attracted to me. He’s my father.”
“Where’s your mother fit into this? Won’t she testify on your behalf?”
“My mother has Alzheimer’s, so her word would not be good. But DNA would tell the truth. I got a lawyer who said I needed a DNA test to prove my case. So I stole the bottle of Bawls from my father’s office.
“But I couldn’t have killed him. I was reading palms at the Sunnysea Condo get-acquainted party. They expected me to dress up in scarves and beads like some carnival act.
It was demeaning, but at least they paid me.”
Muffy’s eyes grew narrow. “And in case you’re trying to accuse me, I was there until midnight the night my father died. I had about a hundred witnesses.”
She handed Helen a pink flyer announcing
“You really have to lose that name,” Margery said as Helen pulled her out the door.
Helen would check, but she knew the psychic’s story was true. Their best chance was dead. Helen did not have to be psychic to see Peggy’s hopeless future.
“You still believe she’s innocent, don’t you?”
Sarah called Helen at work the next day to find out how the Madame Muffy search went. She did not seem as discouraged by the results as Helen.
“Yes, I do. But Muffy was our best candidate,” Helen said.
“But not your only one. You have to check out all the people who hated Page Turner.”
“There’s too many,” Helen said. “And I didn’t travel in his social circles. I couldn’t get in any doors in Palm Beach.”
“The last door he walked out alive wasn’t in Palm Beach,” Sarah said. “It was at that bookstore on Las Olas.
Something happened there that led to his death. You have to find out what it was. Check out everyone at the store who had a good reason to kill Page Turner.”
“But that could take years,” Helen said.
“Peggy will be on death row a long time,” she said.
Chapter 16
“There are two people in the large stall in the women’s rest room,” the woman said. She was forty- something, with the look of a no-nonsense mom. “One is a teenage boy about fourteen. The girl is about the same age. You can’t miss them. The boy has blue hair.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Helen said. “You shouldn’t have to put up with that.”
The mom shrugged. She seemed immune to teenage folly.
Anyone who believed bookstores celebrated the life of the mind didn’t know about the bathrooms. Weird things happened there. People got naked. People got crazy. People had sex and drugs in the stalls. They pried open shoplifted CDs and buried the packaging in the rest-room trash. Public bathrooms were the bane of a bookseller’s existence.
Helen spotted the kid when he came out into the store a few minutes later. He was all nose and bones, with hair the color of blueberry Jell-O. His plump girlfriend was dressed in black with dead-white skin and bug-blood nails. The pair left. That problem took care of itself, Helen thought.
But it didn’t. Half an hour later, Blue Hair and the girl in black were back, heading for the bathroom.
“Oh, sir,” Helen said loudly. The boy stopped.
“This time you might want to use the men’s room,” she said.
Blue Hair’s face turned bright red. His girlfriend giggled.
He made a U-turn and walked out the front door, the snickering girl following. Helen didn’t think he’d be back soon.
Twenty minutes later, another woman was up at the cashier’s desk. She had gray hair in a short sensible cut and wore a comfortable blue cotton dress. She looked smart, practical, and in charge. A nurse possibly, or a teacher. She said, “There’s a man in the women’s rest room. He’s in the handicapped stall.”
“Skinny kid with blue hair?” Helen said.
“Preppy in a pink shirt. I got a good look at him through the space in the door. He’s about twenty-five, sandy hair, wearing khakis, boat shoes, and no socks. I didn’t see a knife, gun, or other weapon, and he wasn’t talking to himself.”
The woman knew her Florida crazies. “Thank you for handling this so well,” Helen said. The woman gave a
