laughingstock.”
“Right,” Helen said. “Hoffman’s running on a family-values, anti-drug platform. If the voters saw his coke- snorting son saying what a hypocrite he was, the senator couldn’t run for a bus.”
“Page hoped to get his money back by threatening Hoffman with the tape. But it would also ruin my life. I’d be a national joke, worse than Monica Lewinsky. At least she didn’t have sex with a man who turned up dead the next day. I’d kill myself before I went through a scandal like that. I called Page and tried to appeal to his better instincts.”
“So you picked him up at the bookstore,” Helen said.
“I told him it wasn’t fair. I would be destroyed because he was angry at the senator. Page laughed at me. He said this was payback for when I ran into the store in my nightgown.”
“And then what?”
“I knew it was hopeless,” Peggy said. “He got that cell phone call. I drove him back to the bookstore. I hated him.
I wanted him dead.
“Then someone who hated Page even more killed him and left him to rot in my bed.”
Chapter 18
“Wanna dance on the table with gorgeous men?” Sarah said when Helen answered the bookstore phone.
“Best invitation I’ve had all day,” Helen said. “Where are these dancing men?”
“They’re the waiters at Taverna Opa, a Greek restaurant in Hollywood. The female servers are good-looking too, but they’re not my type. Anyway, the staff dances with the diners on the tabletops. The music is loud, the food is good, and the male waiters look hot in tight white T-shirts. It’s tough getting a table on the weekends, but tonight we should have no problem.”
“I have a problem,” Helen said. “I don’t have any money.”
“Oh, come on. You can afford an appetizer and a drink.
You’re turning into a mope.”
“Sarah, I’d love to go, but when my hours were cut, so was my pay.”
“So let me buy.”
“No,” Helen said. “I’ll pay my own way, or not go at all.”
“This isn’t charity. It’s friendship.”
“Friends should be equals,” Helen said.
“It’s just money,” Sarah said, irritated. “Look, it’s ten a.m. Call me if you change your mind.”
Did she slam down the phone, or did Sarah? Helen used to think it was just money, back when she made six figures. Now that she had to struggle, she knew money gave you peace of mind and independence. (But not happiness, a voice whispered. It gave you a lying, cheating husband.)
Helen sighed and looked around at the nearly empty bookshelves. With no new books coming in, the shelves were growing bare. The booksellers had covered the empty spaces by turning the books face-out, like the letter tiles in a Scrabble game. It worked for now. But as those books sold, Helen wondered what they would do. Maybe the store would be closed by then. She had to keep looking for a job.
At lunch, Helen ate a Luna bar, bought a cup of coffee, and went out for a free paper. She found a bench under a palm tree and read the want ads. The only jobs that paid anything were for telemarketers, and Helen hadn’t stooped that low. Yet.
Then she saw something promising:
Good money within walking distance. The upstart Down & Dirty was giving Wal-Mart a run for its money. Helen would apply for a job as soon as the stores started accepting applications. She walked back to work with a spring in her step, admiring the warm blue sky, the pink and red impatiens blooming around the tree trunks. She saw something greenish gray on the sidewalk. Wait! Was that what she thought it was? Did someone drop a dollar? She bent down and picked up— A hundred-dollar bill! Half a week’s pay was at her feet.
Helen couldn’t believe her luck. The most she’d ever found had been a Georgia quarter. Now Ben Franklin was smiling coyly at her. The redesigned currency made the founding father look like a Grateful Deadhead. She wanted to kiss him.
She saw two young men elbowing each other and thought, They want my hundred. They’re going to say they dropped it. Helen wasn’t going to let anything happen to her windfall. She shoved the bill into the inside zip pocket of her purse, then hurried into Page Turners to call Sarah.
“God wants me to go to Taverna Opa,” she told her friend.
“The devil is more like it,” Sarah said.
“Nope. God must be a woman. She put a hundred-dollar bill right in my path, so I can see the natural beauties of Florida. Take me to Taverna Opa.”
“I’ll pick you up at seven,” Sarah said.
Just the thought of that much free money was liberating.
Helen felt inspired. She would save Peggy. She would find out who killed Page Turner. She’d love to pin Page’s murder on the preppy prowler, Harper Grisham IV. But he wouldn’t give her the time of day, much less tell her where he was the night Page died. There had to be a way to make him tell her.
“Son of a bitch,” said Brad the bookseller, as he came back from lunch. “I got a twenty-dollar ticket. All because this place is too cheap to give us free parking.”
Parking was scarce on Las Olas. The lot behind the bookstore cost four dollars an hour. Most booksellers were not about to spend half their pay on parking. Instead, they found free parking five or six blocks away.
“What happened?” Helen said.
“The ticket says I was in a no-parking zone,” he said. “I didn’t see the yellow paint on the curb. First my hours were cut, now this. I don’t know how I’ll make the rent.”
The little bookseller’s shoulders were hunched, and his head hung down in defeat.
“I’m sorry, Brad,” she said. But Brad’s misfortune was her gain. She knew now how to question the preppy prowler. It was risky. If he had caller ID, she would be fired, but this job wouldn’t last much longer anyway.
When there was a lull in the customers, she asked Brad to cover for her and headed for the break room. She dialed Senator Hoffman’s Tallahassee office and said, “Hello, may I please speak to Mr. Harper Grisham?”
After a brief wait, his arrogant voice was on the phone.
“This is Harper Grisham.”
Helen held her nose to make her voice nasal. “This is the city of Fort Lauderdale,” she said. “You have an unpaid parking ticket for two hundred dollars, plus fifty dollars in court costs and overdue fines. We are issuing a bench warrant for your arrest.”
“You’re joking,” Grisham said. His voice was relaxed, affable, as befit a future ruler of the free world.
“I am completely serious, sir,” Helen said, still pinching her nose. “The ticket was issued June second at eight p.m.
You were ticketed a second time at eleven-thirty p.m. for non-removal of your vehicle.” She was making up the charges as she went along.
“I was in Tallahassee that night at a rally for Senator Colgate Hoffman,” Grisham drawled. “I can have my office send you a news clip that shows me on the platform.”
Suddenly the affability was gone, and there was a lash in his voice. “But if I have to do that, I’ll have your job, you incompetent moron. What is your name?”
Helen hung up and let go of her nose.
The preppy prowler wasn’t guilty of murder. Too bad.
Helen would have loved to administer that lethal injection herself. She wondered how she was going to help
