“The last time I was in Vito’s office, I saw some papers on his desk. Vito’s kind of a slob. He leaves things around. The papers said there were ninety people working in the boiler room and listed their names and addresses. But I know there are only sixty telemarketers. That’s how many phones we have. Vito created thirty phantom employees. I bet he gave them phony sales. That’s another way to launder money.”
“That’s the kind of information I need,” Phil said. “Looks like I’ll be working in the boiler room.”
“You can’t,” Helen said. “You’ve been to the Mowbrys’ parties. Cavarelli will recognize you.”
“Not when I cut off my hair and dye it brown.”
The thought of amputating that ponytail was painful to Helen.
“There’s no need,” she said. “I know what those papers look like. They’re probably still on Vito’s desk. We’re always being dragged into his office for pep talks. I can find them.”
“No,” Phil said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Don’t pull that big strong male routine on me again, Phil.
I’m a telemarketer, and a good one. Besides, I’m already in place there.”
“You shouldn’t be,” Phil said. “What if the boiler room gets raided?”
“Exactly what I’ve been telling her,” Margery said.
Whose side was Margery on? First she praised Helen for noticing things on the job. Now she said it was too dangerous.
Helen shrugged. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Do you think Cavarelli cares what happens to you or anyone else? You said he was armed. He could start shooting.
He could take hostages.”
Helen shivered at the thought of Cavarelli’s flat yellow eyes. She could feel his reptilian hands, dry and pebbly, as he clutched her for a human shield.
“You haven’t told Phil why you were bartending topless, Margery said. “There’s two dead girls mixed up in this, Phil.
Helen forgot to mention that.” She handed Phil a brownie the size of a potholder.
He didn’t touch it. He sat there, waiting for Helen to talk.
His stillness was uncanny.
“I told you about Laredo,” Helen began. “I heard her die while I was making a call for Girdner Surveys.”
“Tell me again,” Phil said. “I want to hear it all from the beginning.”
She told him the whole story. Each time, it seemed a little less shocking to her. Phil listened with that full- body concentration, occasionally interrupting to ask a question. He believes me, Helen thought. If the police had shown this kind of interest, Debbie might still be alive.
Helen noticed something else. She thought there was a layer of loneliness under Phil’s professional manner, like a vein of something soft running through granite.
“And you think Laredo was killed for that computer disk,” Phil said, when she finished her story.
“Yes. I think she used it to blackmail Henry Asporth. She pushed too hard and he killed her. But that’s where Asporth made his mistake: He thought Laredo had the disk with her when she came to his house. Laredo was smarter than that.
She hid it. Her last words were ‘It’s the coffee.’ Her sister Savannah and I can’t figure out what that means. The disk is supposed to prove that Hank was laundering money and mixed up in a fraud with some big names. Laredo called it her lottery ticket.”
“You’ve searched her home?”
“Yes. So has the killer.”
Suddenly, a thought slammed into Helen. “The break-in here. It was Fred and Ethel.”
“I thought we’d already established that,” Margery said, dryly.
“But that means I didn’t bring the killers to the Coronado.
They don’t know about me. I’m safe. We’re safe.”
A weight the size of a stone sofa was lifted from her.
She’d been sick with guilt since the break-in, thinking she’d exposed Margery and the Coronado to danger. But Fred and Ethel had trashed her apartment and taken her money. That fact put a different light on her investigation, too. She wasn’t on Hank Asporth’s radar. She was still invisible.
Margery yawned, but it was not dainty and catlike. She looked like a hibernating bear.
“It’s four o’clock in the morning,” she said. “I’m throwing you both out so I can get some sleep.”
“I have to be at work in four hours,” Helen said.
As she walked across the foggy courtyard with Phil, Helen was not tired. She didn’t want this night to end. Phil lingered, too. The hazy moon silvered his biceps and shimmered in his hair. Helen thought of that poem she had to memorize in high school, about the moon being a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
Phil looked like the highwayman.
“Can I have one last question?” she said in a whisper.
They were standing so close, they were almost touching.
“You can have anything you want,” Phil said, and raised that eyebrow again.
Helen wanted him to kiss her. She wanted him to wrap her in his big strong arms and rip her clothes off. She wanted to drag him into her bedroom and lock the door. Helen wanted sweaty, twisted sheets. She wanted beard- burn all over her body and cheap champagne for breakfast.
Her lips parted slightly. She tilted her head upward, so he could kiss her more easily. She was ready for mad, impulsive sex. She said the first thing that came into her head.
“What is that ray gun thing?”
Phil looked surprised. But not as surprised as Helen. Why the hell had she said that? Some alien had taken possession of her body.
Phil became all business.
“It’s a target pistol with a red-dot sight,” he said.
“That’s all? It looks like it could vaporize buildings.”
“It made Fred and Ethel disappear,” he said. “That was enough.”
Helen woke up the next morning on sweaty, twisted sheets. She’d tossed and turned all night after she went to bed alone.
Chapter 24
“So how did you two make out last night?” Margery said.
“You were drooling over Phil like a pup with a porterhouse.
That’s why I left you alone.”
Helen didn’t want to talk at seven thirty in the morning.
She didn’t want to talk about Phil any time ever. She stepped around Margery and plowed toward the sidewalk, head down.
“I can’t stop now,” she said. “I’m going to be late for work.”
But Margery was not to be ignored—not in purple clam-diggers and red tennis shoes. She stomped right alongside Helen, keeping up with her long, loping strides. Smoking Marlboros didn’t slow her down.
“I’ll walk with you,” her landlady said. “I’m going in the same direction.”
“Then you’re going nowhere,” Helen said. “That’s where we went last night. You know why? Because I opened my big mouth. We were all alone in this romantic setting, surrounded by fog and flowers. He moved in closer. I was sure he was going to kiss me. And do you know what I said?” She glared at Margery until the glaze on her good cheer cracked.
“Do I want to know?” Margery said.
“I asked him what kind of gun he had.”
“That science fiction thing? What did he answer?”
Margery was genuinely curious.
