Murder Between the Covers

Turner’s main squeeze.”

“Main squeeze?” Helen said.

“Quiet,” Margery said. “The car door is opening. Looks like a skinny guy getting out.”

“That’s no guy,” Helen said.

“Definitely not,” Margery said. “I should have put on my glasses. That’s a woman.”

“That’s Gayle,” Helen said.

Chapter 24

“More coffee, honey?”

Helen was a sucker for coffee shops where the waitresses called her “honey.” This one was the real thing, a neon-and-metal diner off the highway. At midnight, the place looked like that Edward Hopper painting, Nighthawks. The fluorescent lights turned Margery’s amethyst outfit a sickly purple and her skin an unhealthy yellow. Helen knew she looked equally exhausted. They both needed a caffeine infusion.

It was raining again and the diner’s air-conditioning was on full-blast. The place was freezing. Helen spent most of the summer shivering in the refrigerated indoor Florida air.

She wrapped her hands around her thick white coffee mug to keep warm.

“Maybe Astrid needed some records from the bookstore,” Helen said. “Maybe that’s why Gayle was there tonight.”

“How does Astrid usually get the store reports?”

Margery lit up a cigarette now that the surveillance was over.

“We send them by courier every Monday morning.”

“Not at eleven-twenty at night,” Margery said. “Not delivered by an attractive young lesbian. Who, by the way, wasn’t carrying anything.”

“Astrid can’t be gay. She was married to Page, who was this hot stud.” Helen let go of the coffee cup long enough to take a drink, hoping it would warm her insides.

“That’s what he said,” Margery said. “Ever ask any of the women if he was any good?”

“No,” Helen said.

“Ha. I thought so. John Kennedy was supposed to be a stud, too, but a lot of women said he wasn’t much of a lover. Don Juans rarely are. More interested in scoring than thinking about what a woman needs.”

Helen took another drink while she considered this. It made sense. She wanted to ask Margery how she knew these things, but didn’t dare. Her landlady probably had a fling with JFK. “I feel so Midwestern,” Helen said. “Astrid was married, so I didn’t expect her to have a gay lover.”

“You’d be surprised by the rich women who have female lovers,” Margery said. Helen really wasn’t going to ask how she knew that. “In the nineteenth century, lesbianism was tolerated, even encouraged, in certain upper- class circles. Appearances were all that mattered, and it was perfectly acceptable for a woman to have a female friend.”

“Even one as butch as Gayle?” Helen said. “In her Doc Martens, she could hardly mingle with Astrid’s country-club friends.”

“Astrid doesn’t want to play tennis with her,” Margery said. “I can’t think of a better way to get revenge on an unfaithful husband than to cuckold him with a woman. So much for his stud rep.”

“Do you think Gayle helped Astrid kill her husband?”

Helen said.

“I think it’s the best lead we’ve had so far. Let’s take one more swing by the house and see if Gayle is still there. It’s heading toward one a.m.”

Margery drove back to Palm Beach in a pounding rain.

Sometimes the road vanished completely into the wall of water. All Helen could see was the center line unwinding like a ribbon into the gray rain. She stayed silent while Margery handled the big Cadillac with considerable skill.

The rain stopped suddenly as they came over the bridge into Palm Beach. The shining moon lit the ragged clouds and turned the water into a sea of silver.

This time, the Turner mansion looked totally different.

The huge house was dark and silent. Gayle’s Honda was parked in the circular drive.

“Do you have to be anywhere tomorrow morning?”

Margery said.

“No, I have the whole day free.”

“Good. We’re spending the night at a motel. I want to see something,” Margery said. “Don’t worry. I’ll pay for it.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Helen said. “I have money.”

“I have more,” Margery said. “Besides, I want that damn squawk box out of my house.”

They got a no-frills motel room with two double beds in lower-rent Lake Worth. It was a smoking room and stank of stale tobacco. Helen didn’t complain.

Her pillow smelled like an ashtray, but Helen was asleep as soon as her head touched it. Margery shook her awake at five-thirty a.m. and handed her a cup of coffee made in the motel room’s little coffeepot. It tasted thin and bitter, but Helen was grateful for any hot caffeine.

“Throw on your clothes,” Margery said. “Let’s check something out.”

By six a.m., they were back at the Turner mansion.

Gayle’s car was gone. “She’s out before the day help arrives,” Margery said. “They’re hiding their relationship. I’d say we have a good, solid theory. Your work is cut out for you. Find out where they both were the night of the murder.”

Astrid was easy. Women like her had their lives chronicled in the society columns. Helen walked over to the Broward County Library that morning, and began combing the Florida magazines and newspapers. She found what she needed two hours later in the Florida High Life weekly.

On the night her husband died, Astrid had hosted a benefit for the You Gotta Have Heart Association in Vero Beach, a hundred miles north of Fort Lauderdale. The newspaper photos showed Astrid at the head table, next to a well-upholstered gentleman shoving a forkful of food in his mouth. Good thing he was a major donor. The guy would need the heart association’s services soon.

The photos accompanied a column called “Samantha’s Society Rambles,” which Helen thought was a remarkably accurate description. It was headed by a photo of Samantha, who looked like Dick Cheney in drag.

Astrid was wearing a black strapless Gucci gown, according to Samantha, who pronounced her “stunning.”

Helen wouldn’t go that far, but Astrid was regal-looking.

Her dress must have cost a fortune. More than I make at her bookstore in a year, Helen thought.

Samantha the society columnist had a positive mania for reporting the designers of all the women’s dresses. Helen wondered if the charity would have made more money if the women had stayed home and donated the price of their dresses.

Samantha kept rambling, but Helen followed her to the bitter end, slogging through designer and guest names. In the last paragraph was the information she needed. Astrid had “danced till dawn to the music of Peter Duchin’s Orchestra.” There was a photograph to prove it. She and the well-upholstered gentleman were holding each other at arm’s length, as if they were coated with anthrax.

Helen didn’t know if Astrid actually stayed until the sun peeped over the horizon, but one thing was clear. She was there late. Astrid could not have slipped out for an hour to kill her husband in Fort Lauderdale. It was a two- hundred-mile round trip.

Astrid did not put the pillow over Page’s face, but she wasn’t off the hook. Not after what Helen saw last night.