Her landlady was hosing purple bougainvillea blossoms off the pool deck.
“Margery, I have a shot at an advertising job,” Helen said. “Can I use your phone to call for an interview?”
“I’ll be finished here in a minute.” Margery wore a new plum shorts set and flirty kitten-heel slides.
“You look chipper this morning. Out dancing with Warren last night?” Helen said.
“Till three o’clock.” Margery gave a little grin. “Elsie and Rita folded early, but Warren and I stayed out late. Might as well enjoy it while I can. His new condo will be ready soon and he’ll be moving.”
“You won’t have any trouble renting 2C again,” Helen said. “The paper says it’s supposed to be a cold winter. The first big snowstorm hit up north already. The Midwest and East Coast were slammed with a foot of snow.”
“Oh, good.” Margery dropped the hose and headed for her place. “I have to find my list.”
“What list?”
“I keep a list of all the people who call me when a hurricane’s heading this way and say, ‘I don’t know how you can live in Florida with the hurricanes, the bugs, and the heat.’ Now it’s my turn. Watch.”
Helen followed Margery into her kitchen. Her landlady started dialing her purple princess phone. Her voice oozed concern. “Hi, Betty, I thought I’d find you inside today. I heard about your ice storm. I’m sitting out by my pool and thought I’d give you a call.
“How’s Ed? He’s shoveling snow? Oh, Betty, he should be careful. I don’t know how you can live in Michigan: the icy roads, the cold, the snow. I heard six people died in snow-related accidents, and that doesn’t count all the snow-shoveling heart attacks.
“What? You have an ice problem? I have one, too. It keeps melting in my glass.
“She hung up,” Margery said. “OK, make your call.”
The man who answered sounded like Helen’s idea of an ad man. He was a fast talker and a little slick. “I’m calling about your ad in this morning’s paper, the ground-level advertising job,” she said.
“Can you get here by eight thirty?”
Helen checked her watch. It was seven thirty. “Sure.”
“If I like your looks, I can start you out tonight. Dinner’s included. Ask for Frank.”
Frank gave her an address in a new shopping center on Federal Highway, a brisk ten-minute walk.
“I think I have a live one,” Helen said. Margery waved good-bye absently. She was tormenting a snow-bound friend in Connecticut.
As Helen passed Phil’s place, she couldn’t resist peeking through his half-open miniblinds. She was relieved to see Kendra sleeping on the couch instead of sharing Phil’s bed. The Kentucky Songbird’s mouth was wide open. She was drooling.
Probably drooling over Phil, Helen thought. She slammed her own door hard and hoped it woke Kendra.
Helen dressed quickly in a dark suit and heels and arrived at her job interview five minutes early. It was a pink stucco building with a “Hot and Ready Pizza” sign.
The man who unlocked the front door looked like he’d been put together from pizza circles: a small white doughy one for his bald head, a large one for his round gut, a medium for his oddly round hips. His flaming orange T-shirt said, “I’m hot and ready.”
“I’m Frank.” He looked Helen up and down like he was going to stamp Grade A on her rump. “You’ll do. Got any red shorts?”
“Is that the office uniform?” she said.
“You won’t be working in an office. You’ll be out on Federal Highway with this sign.”
Frank unrolled an orange banner that said, “I’m hot and ready for six bucks!” There was no mention of pizza.
Helen was appalled. She’d be a walking double entendre. “You want me to hold up that thing on the highway? I’ll have to put up with every creep in a car.”
“That’s why we pay the big bucks,” Frank said. “You’ll make a dollar more than the industry standard. Plus, you can have any leftover single-topping pizza. We’ll charge you fifty cents for each additional topping. And don’t forget your commission. You get twenty-five cents if a guy comes in and says he saw you. They’re bound to notice you. With those legs, you should get an extra two or three bucks a night.”
The guy really thought he was offering her a good job. Helen was hot and ready to set him straight. “You can take your pizza sign and put it right”—Frank’s eyes were now circles, too—“in the middle of the road.”
She walked to Millicent’s, wondering if this was her last day. The salon seemed so refined after her encounter with Hot and Ready.
But Helen was a realist. Millicent hadn’t had a single sale since that awful “Weddings to Die For” ad. She’d love to know who placed it and why. Millicent swore her competitor, Haute Bridal, planted the ad. Helen didn’t believe that. She thought it was tied somehow to Kiki’s murder.
The person who bought the ad had long white hair and red polish like Millicent. But anyone could put on a white wig and red polish. Even a man. Especially an actor. Helen thought someone wanted to ruin Millicent.
They might have succeeded, if it wasn’t for the shower-curtain dress. When Helen entered the store at nine that morning, she was surprised to hear voices. Customers, at long last.
A short, dark man in a too-tight knit shirt was shopping with his wife. She was a size sixteen squeezed into a size-twelve dress. Her long curly hair was dyed dead black. She balanced her thick body on teeny black heels with big red bows. Her hands—and his—were loaded with diamonds. Their necks were heavy with gold chains.
Mob money, Helen thought.
Lou, the husband, did not sit on the gray couch and read
His wife, Patti, came out of the fitting room in a black lace dress. Helen thought it was attractive. Lou didn’t.
“It don’t look like the money,” he said. “It looks like a nightgown.”
“It’s twenty-three hundred dollars,” Patti pouted.
“We’re looking for something unique—like you won’t see on every broad.”
“Well, I do have a special dress,” Millicent said. “But it takes a certain kind of customer to appreciate it.”
One with no taste at all, Helen thought. Millicent had hit rock bottom. She was going for the shower-curtain dress.
Millicent had exquisite taste. But occasionally, for reasons Helen never understood, Millicent would buy a dress of breathtaking ugliness. The shower curtain was hideous. The blue polyester fabric was so shiny it looked like plastic. The pink rosebuds looked like a rash. The lumpy overskirt added ten pounds to the slimmest figure.
The first time Millicent showed her the dress, Helen said, “Where did you get that: Bed Bath & Beyond?”
“I know. It looks like a shower curtain,” Millicent said. “We should accessorize it with a sponge and a soap bar. What was I thinking when I bought this?”
Millicent kept the shower-curtain dress hidden. She only brought it out when she thought someone might like it, which wasn’t often. Today she was desperate.
Lou examined it from the neck to the hem. “Now this is very unique,” he said.
“That it is,” Helen said.
Millicent kicked her. “I promise you no one at the wedding in Jersey will have a dress like that,” she said.
“Try it on,” Lou commanded his wife.
A few minutes later, Patti teetered out in the shiny dress. It rustled noisily and hung in bunchy folds at her waist. But it showed off the woman’s huge chest.
“I love it,” Lou said. “How much?”
“Twenty-seven hundred dollars.” Millicent had doubled the price. She knew her man.
“See?” Lou said. “It’s better than that black nightgown thing. We’ll take it.”
Millicent waited until the couple drove off in their black Lincoln Town Car. Then she did a triumphant dance
