Joey laughed. A car honked as the Viper cut it off. Joey rolled down the window and flipped off the driver.
Helen wanted to jump out at the first red light. She wanted to tell this racist creep exactly what she thought of him. But she wanted inside Hank Asporth’s house even more. So she kept quiet, hating herself and hating him. How could someone so handsome talk so ugly?
Mercifully, they were soon in Brideport. Helen saw the Latino man being pounded into the mat as the Viper roared into the driveway. It was already bumper-to-bumper Range Rovers, Jaguars and Cadillacs. They parked in front of a long, low white house built in the seventies. Joey opened Spanish-style double doors with fake stained- glass insets.
“Go on in,” he said. “The guys are in the kitchen.”
Helen stopped dead in the hall. Hank’s decorator must have been Hugh Hefner. The walls were done in black patent leather, accented with smoked mirrors. There were black leather couches, chrome coffee tables and a flat- screen TV mounted on the wall, tuned to the boxing match. Now a Latino man was beating up a black one.
“Hank’s got a lot of money riding on that match,” Joey said.
In the patent-leather gloom, Helen saw a mahogany pool table and six colossal LeRoy Neiman paintings. The sports subjects were brightly colored as crayons.
“Look at that,” Joey said. “Real art on the walls. Hank’s got class, huh?”
“The pink flamingos are a nice touch,” Helen said. There must have been twenty of them in the room.
Joey tapped one on the head. “No plastic for Hank. These are genuine hand-painted plaster.”
Five men were in the vast kitchen, standing around a stove. An enormous pot of red sauce was simmering on a burner. Helen smelled five brutally strong colognes, overlaid with garlicky tomato. A black-haired man was alternately tasting and stirring the sauce with a wooden spoon.
“You’re wrong, Gino,” he said. “It’s perfect. It’s my mother’s recipe.”
“I don’t mean to insult your mother, Hank, but it needs more oregano,” said a paunchy man with long, rubbery ears.
“Maybe you read her recipe wrong or something.”
“I said it’s fine,” Hank said. He put down the spoon and stepped away from the steamy stove. For the first time, Helen saw his face clearly.
She studied the killer. His thick black hair was coated with something shiny. Did they still make Brylcreem? His skin was pitted by ancient acne scars, like dead volcanic craters.
His single black eyebrow crawled across the top of his nose.
He wore what Helen thought of as a mobster knit shirt. It had a collar, a zip front, and black and white panels. His black pants were well cut but shiny. Sharkskin would be the right fabric for this man.
Helen thought his hands were made for strangling. They were blunt, muscular and studded with gold rings like tumors. The wooden spoon, dripping tomato sauce, looked like a bloody weapon.
“This here’s Helen,” Joey said. The men nodded without interest. Hank didn’t even look up from his sauce.
“The girls are out by the pool,” Joey said. “We’re talking business in here. Why don’t you run along and join them?”
He slapped her on the rump like a horse.
Helen smiled and thought, I’ll get them. I’ll get them all.
She was furious at the dismissal. They didn’t even offer her a drink.
Helen looked out the sliding glass doors. Under a striped awning was a pool with a pink deck. The grass seemed striped, too. It led to a red-striped Cigarette boat. Four bikinied blondes with inflated chests were sprawled on chaise longues, sipping pink drinks. One was filing her nails.
All looked terminally bored. Helen decided they wouldn’t miss her.
“I’ll just go find a ladies room,” she said. She kept her purse with her. She wasn’t going to set it down around this crowd.
Hank gestured vaguely down the hall, but didn’t look up.
Joey was respectfully approaching a fat man with bad skin.
Helen thought he was going to kiss his ring. She ducked down the hall. This was her chance to search Hank’s house.
There was just one problem.
What was she looking for? Some trace of the Six Feet Unders? She didn’t think Hank would keep a coffin in his house.
Not unless it was black leather and chrome.
Laredo. She was looking for some trace of Laredo. She needed a sign that Laredo had actually been in Asporth’s house the night of the murder. But how would she find that incriminating evidence?
Helen searched a guest room first. It was fairly tasteful, with a white bedroom suite trimmed in gold and a puffy pink satin spread. The closet was empty, except for several suitcases and some heavy winter clothes. Hank must make trips up north.
The bathroom had new toothbrushes and disposable razors, shampoo and conditioner. There was a fresh white terry robe.
The second guest bedroom was done in flamingos. Even the tall bedside lamps were flamingos wearing slightly crooked lampshades, which made them look tipsy. Helen liked the room. That scared her. She was losing all taste and proportion, living in Florida.
The closet had accumulated odds and ends: an ironing board, two fifteen-pound weights, a briefcase, an old set of encyclopedias. The dresser drawers were stuffed with women’s underwear in small sizes. There was no way to tell if it was Laredo’s, but Helen doubted it. This was expensive lingerie.
The master bedroom across the hall was a Playboy dream.
The round bed was covered with a sable spread. The ceiling and walls were mirrored. So were the lamps.
The bathroom was deep brown, from the Jacuzzi to the commode. The commode sat in a mirrored alcove. Who would want to look at himself on the john?
She opened one side of the double medicine cabinet. It was standard stuff: shaving cream, aspirin, a metal nail file and clippers. The other side wouldn’t open. It was locked.
Helen saw a small lock on the underside. It looked a lot like the one on her sister Kathy’s diary. She reached for the nail file. Yep, it opened just like Kathy’s diary.
Inside was Hank Asporth’s dirty little secret.
She saw a prescription bottle of Viagra. Another jar of pills was called Last Man. Helen thought she’d seen it on late-night TV being peddled by a former fullback. Creams, pills and gels for “male enlargement” promised “longer pleasure for you—and her. Four inches of penis growth in three weeks or less!”
Helen giggled. Big, beefy Hank suffered from teeny-weenie syndrome.
Then she quit laughing. Footsteps. Someone was coming down the hall. Quickly, she shut the cabinet and slipped into the flamingo guest room. The footsteps were coming closer.
Helen opened the closet door and crawled in behind the ironing board.
She cracked the closet door open half an inch. She could see Hank heading for the bathroom. He didn’t bother to shut the door. Thanks to the mirrors, she could see his every move.
Please, please, don’t use the john, she prayed. He blew his nose noisily, then fished a small key from under the marble soap dish. The locked cabinet swung open when he touched it. Hank looked startled. She wondered if he’d locked it specially because he was having company.
Something definitely made him suspicious. Hank ripped back the shower curtain. He opened the master- bedroom closets and looked under the bed. Helen tried to make herself smaller behind the ironing board, in case he flung open the guest-room closet.
He came angrily out into the hall, heading right for the flamingo guest room, when his cell phone rang.
Helen jumped, and the pile of encyclopedias tilted forward. She caught them before they fell. The briefcase tobogganed down the pile, and she stopped it with her chin. She sighed with relief. She tried to settle back behind the ironing board, but a spike poked her in the back. What was that? She couldn’t look now.
“Yeah,” Hank said into his cell phone. “No. Yeah.” Hank snapped it shut and went back into the bathroom.
