“That’s my best guess,” Helen said. “It would be information worth killing for. If Laredo had the facts and figures on interstate drugs and money laundering, Hank Asporth could do federal time. No more parties in Brideport. No more barbecues for mobsters, or bimbos in bikinis sitting around his pool. No wonder she called it her lottery ticket. Hank Asporth killed her for it. He must have thought she had the disk with her the night he strangled her.”
Helen instantly regretted her brutal words. But Savannah was busy tearing apart her toast and smearing it with bloodred jelly.
“Laredo got her revenge. She hid the disk well. That’s why Asporth ripped your trailer apart. He was looking for it.”
“Listen, did your sister have a favorite coffee shop she hung around?”
“Laredo? No, she liked bars with rich men, not coffee shops with poor college students.”
“I keep going back to her last words, ‘It’s the coffee.’ I thought she might have hidden the disk at a Starbucks or something.”
“Laredo wouldn’t pay that kind of money for coffee,” Savannah said. “But I guess that’s why whoever trashed my place dumped my can of Folger’s in the sink. They were looking for that disk. They didn’t know Laredo drank instant.
There’s no coffee connection I can think of.”
“Any other ideas where your sister could have stashed it?”
“Her car, maybe,” Savannah said. “She used to hide things under the spare tire. But we can’t find that, either. God knows how a car that color yellow could disappear, but it has.
What if she hid the disk at the Mowbrys’?”
“Then we’ll never find it,” Helen said. “That place has a zillion bedrooms and acres of reception rooms. It could be anywhere there.”
“But my sister wasn’t,” Savannah said. “Laredo wasn’t a guest. Most of the house would be off-limits to her. She tended bar. She pretty much stayed in one spot all night.”
“Except when she worked the back room,” Helen said.
“But she stayed in one place there, too.”
Yeah, a coffin, Helen thought. But she couldn’t say it.
That would be too cruel.
Savannah took her silence for assent. “If she hid the disk at the Mowbrys’ place, wouldn’t it be in one of those rooms?” she said.
Unless someone took her upstairs to a bedroom, Helen thought. But Savannah didn’t need to hear more dirt about her sister. Instead, she said, “Those are good places to start.”
“Maybe she hid it in her portable bar at work.”
“The bars have lots of cubbyholes,” Helen said. “But if she hid it there, the disk would have been found weeks ago.
The bus staff takes the bars apart to clean them. They have to. Drinks are sticky. They attract ants and roaches. Bugs would be all over those bars if they weren’t cleaned thoroughly. I don’t think a portable bar would be a good hiding place.”
Helen was distracted watching Savannah eat her ham.
First, she sliced all the round edges off the steak, reducing it to a square. She ate those slices first. Then she cut her steak into stamp-sized pieces with surgical precision. It was as if she could reverse the chaos in her life by squaring that steak.
“What about that back room?” Savannah said, between neat bites.
“There wasn’t much in there but flowers, candles and that black coffin.”
Helen could see its polished darkness, absorbing the flickering candlelight. She saw Kristi with her white lace and lilies. The devil-horned man in the leather harness was climbing inside...
“Wait!” Helen said.
Savannah jumped, sending her fork skittering over the side of the table. She fished around for it on the floor, then asked the waitress for a new one. It was several agonizing minutes before Savannah went back to her squares of ham steak, and Helen could continue.
“You said Laredo liked to hide things in mattresses. The coffin’s got a mattress. It has a lining, too, with lots of tucks and folds. There would be plenty of places to hide a disk.”
Something zinged in Helen’s brain. Maybe it was because she’d spent the day looking at caskets, but Laredo’s last words finally made sense. “That’s it.” Helen slammed her hand down on the table. Savannah’s fork went flying again, but this time she didn’t notice.
“I heard her wrong,” Helen said. “Laredo wasn’t saying, ‘It’s the coffee.’ She was trying to say, ‘Coffin.’ ”
Helen stopped just in time. She was going to say that Laredo’s words were cut off by a scream. She would have been really hurting to scream like that. Poor Laredo, struggling to choke out the words that could have saved her life.
Helen and Savannah were both silent. The remains of the ham steak, squarely subdued, sat untouched. The cheerful noise of the restaurant flowed around them. Life went on.
But not for Laredo. She’d told Hank, but it was too late.
Savannah did not ask for another fork. Their silence grew larger and heavier, until it seemed to sit between them. At last they understood what had happened. Laredo had desperately wanted to live. She’d tried to say the words that would stop her killer, but she’d been fatally misunderstood.
“Can I get you anything else?” the waitress said. She was brisk and chipper. The heavy silence disappeared.
“No, I think we have all we need,” Savannah said.
When the waitress left with a pile of their plates, she said, “How are we going to check that coffin?”
“Looks like I have to go to another orgy,” Helen said.
Chapter 26
The second time at an orgy was boring.
Helen had seen better bodies in the dressing room at Loehmann’s. Too many of the naked people here tonight had wrinkles, flab and hairy patches on their hide.
Taking off their clothes didn’t make them more interesting or improve their conversation. Just like being half-naked didn’t make Helen a better bartender.
When this is over, I’ll probably join a convent, Helen thought. My ex-husband will never find me there, and I won’t have to worry about my next meal. Except didn’t nuns have jobs now? Maybe so, but she didn’t think there were many nun-telemarketers. Or topless bartenders, for that matter.
She did feel a sizzle of excitement. But it wasn’t sex—it was stealing. God knows what would happen if she was caught prowling the Mowbry mansion. But she was going to find Laredo’s disk in that coffin.
As Helen sprinted across the park-sized lawn, she stumbled over a copulating couple. They grunted, but paid her no attention. She passed a daisy chain that included two lawyers and an insurance executive. She hoped they got mosquito bites in places they couldn’t scratch. Helen didn’t know anything about orgies, but she suspected this one would not be very shocking in New York or L.A.—or even Miami.
Broward County would put on a suburban satyricon.
She saw the Cigarette boat, tied up at the Mowbrys’ dock.
Its flames looked like a childish cartoon.
No one was near the mansion’s service door. Helen walked in as if she had every right. So far, the party goers had acted as if she were invisible. Her disguise was working.
Helen had refused to go naked this time. She couldn’t take off her shirt again, no matter how she rationalized it. Instead, she’d come up with a good way to keep her clothes on. At least, she’d thought so back at the Coronado.
Now that she was sliding along a dark corridor in the depths of the Mowbry mansion, Helen wasn’t so sure. It was midnight. Somewhere, a clock bonged twelve gloomy notes.
