“You think he’s working with someone else?”
“I don’t know. We need to get in touch with this Kristi.
She knows something. But I’m fresh out of ideas.”
“I’ll call Steve and see if he needs a bartender,” Helen said.
“You’re going to tend bar topless? Nice lady like you?
You’ll be too embarrassed.”
“I’m beyond embarrassment,” Helen said. “I’m a telemarketer.”
Chapter 12
It was only two thirty in the afternoon when Savannah dropped Helen off at the Coronado. It seemed much later.
Time had slipped sideways in Debbie’s apartment. Helen felt oddly boneless. And she was tired, so very tired. She had to get some sleep before she went to work, or she’d never stay awake tonight. Helen set her alarm for four o’clock.
As soon as she crawled under the covers, Helen was wide awake. She saw the dead Debbie, her long hair twisted cruelly around her neck. Helen could not picture her as a blond beauty anymore. Debbie was a bloated face and a bruised neck, a bedroom nightmare.
She rolled over on her back and stared at the ceiling.
Maybe she should go see Margery. Her landlady would make a screwdriver that would knock the nightmares out of her head. But she would also tell Helen to quit telemarketing.
Look where it got her: working with junkies and bikers and listening to murders.
Helen didn’t want to hear that lecture. She turned restlessly in her bed and punched her pillow.
Why didn’t she quit?
Helen knew telemarketing was a terrible job. But for some weird reason, she was good at selling septic-tank cleaner. Sometimes, she was ashamed of talking lonely people into buying a product they didn’t need. She knew she should get a decent job.
But Helen was stubborn. It was her greatest virtue and her biggest fault. The more her friends urged her to quit, the more she clung to the job out of perverse pride. Besides, the money was better than any dead-end job she’d ever had.
She shut her eyes and saw Debbie again. She hadn’t liked the greedy little tease. But no one deserved to die like that.
Helen flopped onto her stomach. The sheets were hopelessly twisted. The pillows were squashed into comfortless lumps.
At three thirty, she gave up on sleep and fixed herself a pot of coffee. She drank the whole thing. She’d have to get by on caffeine instead of sleep. At least she was working the survey room. She couldn’t take the boiler room’s insults tonight.
As soon as the elevator doors opened on Girdner Surveys’ luxurious office, Helen felt calmer. Her feet were cushioned by the deep carpets. Her eyes rested on the expensive paneling. She was soothed by the sight of her coworkers: Nellie, the big butterscotch blonde with the creamy voice. Berletta, thin and efficient, with her beautiful Bahamian accent. There was no sign of Penelope, her prissy boss. That was good.
“Tonight’s survey is for a disposable-razor company, Nellie said. “Respondents must answer question five and the answer must be yes.”
Question five. Helen skimmed the survey. Ah, there it was: “Do you shave your armpits?”
“I actually have to ask women that? That question is the pits,” Helen said.
“So to speak,” Berletta said.
“Yes, you must ask it,” Nellie said. “And remember, we don’t want the hairy ones.”
“Sweet Gloria Steinem,” Helen said. “Women won’t answer that question.”
Helen sure wouldn’t. For her, there was only one correct answer: “Get off my phone, you pervert.”
But she forgot she was in Florida. Helen made her first survey call to Nancy, age thirty-three, in suburban Weston.
Nancy lived in a mini-mansion on the edge of the mosquito-ridden Everglades. She sounded awfully chirpy. Maybe she wouldn’t slam down the phone when she heard question five.
Helen took a deep breath, then asked, “Do you shave your armpits?”
She waited for Nancy to yell, or scream or hang up on her.
“Oh, yes,” she said proudly.
Five more women responded with equal enthusiasm, as if they were reporting to the pit police.
The sixth was shocked and angry. “Of course I shave, she said. “Do you think I’m European?”
America: land of the free and home of the shaved.
Helen was working on her seventh questionnaire when her pencil broke again. Surveys had to be filled out in pencil, and the phone-room staff was given cheap orange ones that often cracked under the strain.
“Third time tonight this pencil broke. I hate these things.”
Helen ground it into the electric sharpener. “I need a break.”
“Just like your pencil,” Nellie said.
Helen peeked out the phone-room door. No clients. Good.
Survey riffraff weren’t supposed to be seen by the sacred suits. She tiptoed down the hall to the employee lunchroom for a soda. Maybe she could scrounge a cupcake from a dayshift birthday party. There was always leftover food.
Tonight she found something much tastier on a countertop: a whole box of shiny black pencils. They were fat and sturdy-looking, a higher grade than the cheap orange ones.
They wrote thick and black, not scratchy pale gray like the cheap pencils. They even fit her hand better.
Helen took one pencil. Finally, she could complete a survey in comfort.
She was carrying her prize back to her desk when she ran into Penelope, stiff as a department-store dummy. Her boss’s tight mouth was crimped in disapproval. “What are you doing with that?”
“With what?” Helen said.
“That black pencil.”
“There’s a whole box in the lunchroom,” Helen said.
“You obviously didn’t know, so I will excuse you this time,” Penelope said, clipping each word. “But you are not allowed to use a full-size black pencil. Those are for clients and management only. You may use the black pencil stubs or the orange pencils provided for you.”
Penelope held out her small white hand and Helen surrendered the black pencil. How far she’d fallen. In her old job, Helen had once received a four-hundred-dollar Montblanc pen as a gift. Now she was reprimanded for taking a pencil.
“Everything OK?” Nellie asked, when she returned.
“Penelope caught me with a black pencil. She acted like I was stealing the copy machine.”
“Oh, hell, honey, that’s my fault. I should have told you.
Penelope has a bug up her ass about those pencils.”
Somehow, those words in Nellie’s come-hither voice sounded elegant. Helen laughed out loud and went back to asking strange women strange questions about their underarm hair.
She was on her tenth survey when Nellie said, “Phone call for you, Helen.”
“I’m swamped. Can you or Berletta take it?”
“She says she’ll only speak to you.” Helen heard a slight curdle of disapproval in Nellie’s whipped-cream voice. Personal calls were forbidden. Helen quickly finished her survey and picked up the call, her heart beating faster in alarm.
Something was wrong. She never got calls at work.
“Helen?” said a distraught voice. “It’s Savannah.”
“Are you OK?” Helen could tell this was no social call.
“Helen, I know I shouldn’t call you at work, but they got my trailer. I got home from my office job about five-
