stock. Now she indulged a taste for pretty clothes and jewelry. Today, she wore a silver and shell pink necklace that highlighted her rosy skin and dark hair.
“Nice jewelry,” Helen said.
“It’s a modern Navajo design,” Sarah said.
The Range Rover was soon in the desolate wilderness by the Lauderdale airport. “Where are you taking me?” Helen said, looking uneasily at the acres of empty scrub, abandoned boatyards and rusting trailer parks. Sarah was wearing a small fortune around her neck.
“Ever been to the Rustic Inn Crabhouse?”
“Never heard of it. But if you say it’s good, it must be.”
Sarah was a woman of size, free of the modern mania for dieting. She liked to eat well.
The Rustic Inn lived up to its name. It was a series of long, low buildings sprawled along a canal. They looked like they’d been tossed there. Inside, the decor was early beer sign with offbeat touches: a Victorian bronze of a boy holding a crab, art-glass windows, a monster lobster claw over the bar. The claw was as long as an average lobster. Helen wondered what the outrageous crustacean had weighed.
She breathed in the air, a heady mixture of butter and garlic. Then she heard the pounding. It sounded like the building was infested with carpenters. The tables were covered with newspapers and set with wooden mallets. The customers wore bibs, and were happily pounding crab legs and cracking claws.
A waitress tied bibs on Helen and Sarah, and brought out their crab samplers: long golden crab legs, garlicky little blue crabs, pink Jonah crabs and half a lobster with clam stuffing, all swimming in butter.
Helen picked up her mallet and hit a thick Jonah crab claw. Nothing happened.
“You’re too polite,” Sarah said. “You’ve got to whack it hard, like this.” She dealt her crab claw a crushing blow.
Helen swung her mallet harder. The claw cracked slightly.
She thought of Nick and Vito, and Fred and Ethel, and hit the claw with a resounding thwack. It split wide open. This meal was downright therapeutic.
“A little frustrated, are we?” Sarah said. “Want to tell me about it?”
Helen did, starting with the night she heard Laredo die.
When she finished, Sarah said, “Savannah sounds like a loose cannon. You’re lucky you weren’t arrested at Debbie’s.
Now that the sister’s on the scene, why don’t you back away?”
“I heard a murder. I can’t,” Helen said.
“Of course you can,” Sarah said, sucking the meat out of a crab leg.
“Savannah’s all alone. I have to help her.”
“Savannah can take care of herself.”
“She only looks tough,” Helen said. “She could disappear tomorrow and who would look for her? She’s one of the disposable people. I guess you’d call her trailer trash, but she’s braver than anyone I know. I don’t know how she keeps working those awful jobs.”
“Are you doing this for her—or you?” Sarah said. It was amazing how shrewd she looked covered in butter sauce.
Helen picked crab bits out of a smashed leg, while she searched for an answer. “I hate to see a rich guy like Hank Asporth get away with murder. He’s a skirt-chasing, martini-drinking user. He’s never worked a day in his life.”
“Like your ex?” Sarah said.
Another direct hit, Helen thought, and pounded a crab leg to inedible mush.
“You can tell all that about Hank Asporth from a computer survey and one very strange phone conversation?” Sarah said.
“Yes,” said Helen. She walloped a crab claw. “I know he’s a rich bully because he sent his lawyer to shut me up.”
“But he didn’t succeed,” Sarah said. “You kept going. You found the sister. You’ve done your part—more than your part. You have a way out of this, but you won’t take it.”
Helen swung her mallet again. The only sound was the crunch of buttered crab.
“Helen, why are you being so stubborn?”
“Because I’m sick of rich people trying to push me around. Rich people who never did anything to deserve their money, while Savannah and I work our fingers to the bone and get nowhere.”
“You could get somewhere,” Sarah said, “if you’d let me get you a decent job. I’m worried about you, Helen. You’re mixed up in a murder. It’s because you’re working that ugly job. People call you terrible names all day. How can you stand it?”
“I’m making twice what I made at the bookstore,” Helen said.
“You’re paying too high a price. Let me find you a good job. I know lots of people—”
Helen cut her off. She couldn’t be in a corporate computer and she couldn’t tell Sarah why. “I have a job. I’m through with corporate life. I’m never wearing a suit and pantyhose again.”
“But you have no life. You work morning and night, two five-hour shifts with a four-hour break in the afternoon.
When’s the last time you kicked back and had white wine with Peggy by the pool?”
“Weeks ago, but that’s not because of my job. Margery rented 2C to this awful couple, Fred and Ethel Mertz.”
“Nobody’s named that.”
“They are. They’re so smug. They give sermons. Peggy and I can’t stand them. When they show up, we go inside.”
“They sound horrible.” Sarah must have seen she was getting nowhere trying to change Helen’s mind. She changed the subject instead. “How’s your crab?”
“Spectacular,” Helen said. “The butter, the garlic, the parsley potatoes. This is heaven on earth.”
After a brief interlude of pounding and picking crab meat, Sarah returned to her theme. “You can’t date anyone with the hours you work. And you won’t meet a nice man in that boiler room.”
Helen had been telling herself the same thing, but she didn’t want to hear it from Sarah. “Don’t need men when there are buttered crab claws.”
“Helen, be serious.”
“Sarah, you used to say my problem was I dated too many men. You were right. I made some bad choices. Now you complain I don’t date enough. I’m learning to live without men. I’m sick of men. Men have brought me nothing but misery.”
Her friend looked sad. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. You’re still not over the man who betrayed you.”
“Which one?” Helen said, and hit a crab so hard it exploded like a bomb.
Chapter 10
A black Mercedes with smoked-glass windows slid into the boiler room’s parking lot, silent as a shark. It looked ominous. It also looked out of place. The power car sat among the beat-up staff clunkers like a prince in a housing project.
Was someone from the New York office here to squeeze higher quotas out of the overworked staff?
Helen ducked behind an old lime green Dodge and watched. The man who got out was not an elegant New York lizard, but she recognized his type. He was an executive from his high-priced haircut to his shined shoes.
At her old job in St. Louis, when she made six figures, Helen wouldn’t have given him a second look. But he was so unusual here, she studied him. His hair was a meticulously cut and shining black. He was beautifully shaved. Most boiler-room men had
This man had the sleek, well-fed look of someone who dined on expense-account lunches. His shirt was professionally pressed and white enough to snow-blind. His gray suit pants broke perfectly on his shoe tops. There
