I would never have run from St. Louis.
I would not be living in South Florida.
I would not have this dead-end job.
I would not have heard a woman die.
Chapter 20
Someone had sucked all the air out of the room.
Helen couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t stop thinking about her mother, pulling strings to make Helen’s marriage disappear. Dolores had denied her husband’s infidelity for forty years. Now she was denying her daughter’s failed marriage.
Helen felt as if her mother was trying to wipe her out.
She ran outside. It was only eight o’clock. The winter evening was velvety warm, scented with night- blooming flowers and Phil’s pot smoke. Phil. Now there was a man worth thinking about. Except Helen had a perfect record of picking losers.
“You going to stand there like a lawn ornament?”
Helen jumped. Margery had materialized in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Her landlady was in deep purple down to her ankle-strap platforms. Those shoes took guts. Helen would kill herself walking in them.
“Sarah called,” Margery said. “You want to use my phone to call her back?”
Once they were inside, Margery said, “Sarah did call, but I wanted to tell you about Fred and Ethel. They’re going to the Happy Cow tomorrow. I’ll pick you up outside your office.”
“Let’s hope they bite,” Helen said.
“Is that a pun? And will you stop pacing?”
Helen realized she’d been marching back and forth across Margery’s kitchen.
“You’re wearing me out watching you. Sit down. You look like hell. Have some chocolate.” Margery handed Helen a Godiva truffle, like a doctor dispensing a pill.
“Should I take two and call you in the morning?”
“Wake me up and you’re a dead woman. Now make your call.”
Margery tactfully left the room. Helen settled into the puffy purple recliner. Her landlady’s vintage lavender Princess phone was on a metal TV tray. It had been awhile since Helen had used an actual dial. It felt heavy and awkward.
Sarah answered on the third ring. “Helen, have you seen the paper today?”
“Not yet.”
“See if Margery has one.”
Margery either had powers of divination or she was listening on the extension. She plopped a paper in Helen’s lap.
“What was the name of that guy you were calling when, uh, everything started?” Sarah asked.
“Hank Asporth.”
“There’s a story about some big society party in the feature section. I think his picture is in there.”
Helen found the party story. “Holy cow. It’s the Mowbry mansion,” she said.
In the newspaper photos, the place looked like a museum.
The furniture was so gold-trimmed and gaudy she knew it was either really cheap or really expensive.
“Helen,” Sarah said, “did you say Mowbry? I thought his name was Asporth.”
“The Mowbry mansion is where this party took place.
These photos make it look even spookier than when I was there.”
The guests were pretty frightening, too. The women’s surgically stretched, chemically peeled skin made them look like burn victims. The men were old and dissipated.
Helen was fascinated to see Parrish Davenport, the jowly old man in the shamrock shorts, identified as a lawyer with a major Lauderdale firm. He was holding a drink. The pouches in his puffy face proved he’d held a lot of them.
“I’m impressed,” Sarah said. “How do you know what the Mowbry mansion looks like?”
Helen was still staring at the pictures. Good Lord. The lecher who tried to squeeze her breasts was a prominent plastic surgeon. Maybe he wanted to know if they were real.
The woman in the La Perla panties was a real estate agent who sold multimillion-dollar properties. In the photo, her real estate was covered with a chic black dress.
And there was Hank Asporth, with his oiled hair and eyebrow like a furry black caterpillar. He was in another mobster knit, this one gray with black trim. He had one arm around an over-dieted society type, a stick figure with blond hair and balloon breasts. Her dress was weirdly exaggerated, the way only couture can be. It was the party’s hostess, Mindy Mowbry.
Hank Asporth had his other arm around a man, identified as Mindy’s husband. Helen could identify him, too. He was the guy with the tan and the too-white teeth. He’d burst in on her in the bathroom and asked, “Wanna get it on?”
“Dr. Melton Mowbry (left), a partner in the Prestige Perfect Plastic Surgery Group. Mr. Asporth (center), a Brideport financier, is an investor in Dr. Mowbry’s enterprises,” the newspaper cutline said.
Hank Asporth definitely knew Melton and Mindy Mowbry. Probably in the biblical sense.
“Helen, are you there?” Sarah said. “You seem distracted.
Have you really been to a party at the Mowbrys’? You didn’t tell me you moved in such exalted circles.”
“I’ve been to a couple of parties there,” Helen said. “But not as a guest. As a bartender.”
“There’s a bartender in the photo on the right. Well, part of one. I see the arms and chest. Is that you?”
“I doubt it,” Helen said, absently, still studying the photo of Hank Asporth draped around the Mowbrys like a fur stole.
“I don’t think the paper runs pictures of topless bartenders.”
There was a loud clunk. Margery must have dropped the phone.
“I’ll be over in fifteen minutes,” Sarah said.
Uh-oh. Helen wished she’d thought before she spoke.
Margery was standing over the purple recliner. “Would you care to explain why you were tending bar topless?”
“I’m forty-two. I don’t have to explain.”
“I don’t care if you go streaking buck-naked down Las Olas,” Margery said. “But I know you too well, Helen Hawthorne. There’s only one reason why you’d work a job like that. You’re trying to solve that girl’s murder, aren’t you?
You’ve set something loose. That’s why your place was torn apart. The Coronado never had a break-in before. You’ve brought those people onto my property. You better tell me what they’re looking for.”
“Can I wait until Sarah gets here, so I don’t have to tell the whole thing twice?”
“No. Start talking.”
Helen obeyed. Those purple platforms made Margery look ten feet tall.
She told her landlady everything from Debbie’s death to Kristi in the coffin. When Sarah showed up, she started over again. Margery listened with her arms folded over her chest and her mouth in a tight line.
“And I thought society parties were boring,” Sarah said.
“They are boring,” Helen said. “Those people aren’t any more interesting naked than they are clothed.”
“They’re deadly boring,” Margery said. “We’ve got two young women strangled and two ransacked homes. Those killers have been at the Coronado. What are you going to do about it?”
“They’re trying to find that red disk,” Helen said. “That’s why they trashed my place. I don’t know everything that’s on it, but they want it bad. I have to find it first.”
“And how are you going to do that, Sherlock? I assume you’re not going to the police?”
“That’s a lost cause. The cops think I’m a nutcase,” Helen said. “I have to find it myself. I’m going to take another look in the Girdner computers. I’ll use the names in this newspaper story and see what I can find out about these people.
