Dying to Call You

Chapter 9

I’m going crazy, Helen thought, as she made her shaky way down Debbie’s steps. First, I heard a woman die, but the police wouldn’t believe me. Now, I’m hanging around with an insane redneck, forcing my way into apartments. What’s next?

“Kristi’s next,” Savannah said, marching past her down the stairs. “She’s going to tell me what she knows about Laredo.”

“What are you going to do?” Helen said. “Squirt her with Windex until she comes clean? I can’t believe you were going to shoot that woman in the face with lye.”

They were arguing in whispers in Debbie’s parking lot so they wouldn’t wake the neighbors.

“Hey, I promised you I wouldn’t use a gun, and I didn’t.

I’m trained in the use of household products.”

“You threatened to blind a woman, and I stood there and let you. If Debbie complains to the police, I could be arrested.” Then the cops would find out I was on the run, Helen thought, and send me back to St. Louis.

“She’s not going to complain,” Savannah said. “She doesn’t want them to know she lied about Laredo.”

Helen relaxed a bit. Savannah was right about that, at least.

“OK, but I’m not getting in that car until you hand over that oven cleaner. You’re a menace with that stuff.”

Some threat, Helen thought. Savannah has the car keys. I could wind up walking home.

“Oh, all right.” Savannah surrendered her weapon. Helen dumped it in her purse before she changed her mind and grabbed it back, then opened the Tank’s dented door and sat down heavily. A seat spring stuck her in the rump.

“I knew that murdering Hank Asporth was behind this, Savannah said. “We’ve got to get to him.”

Helen said nothing. She didn’t want to talk anymore about Hank Asporth. She just wanted to know that Laredo was dead, so she could get on with her life. Great. Now I sound like some sort of self-help book: Browbeat Your Way to Closure.

The two women rode in silence while the Tank bucked and rumbled past karate schools, XXX-rated topless joints, cheap bars and check-cashing stores. It was not a landscape to inspire optimism.

My life is a mess, Helen thought. My job is a nightmare.

People hate me from coast to coast. I’ve been cussed in sixteen languages. I don’t enjoy my evenings by the Coronado pool anymore, thanks to Fred and Ethel. I don’t have time to see my friend Sarah. I’ve gained almost ten pounds eating potato chips and Pria bars.

The private litany of failure continued until Savannah pulled in front of the Coronado. She put the Tank in PARK and set off a symphony of squeaks and rattles. “You’ll call me when you get off work tomorrow night, right? So we can talk about our next step?”

“There is no next step,” Helen shouted over the engine noise. “Not when you want to maim people.”

“It won’t happen again,” Savannah said. “I admit my temper got the best of me. But I wouldn’t have hurt Debbie.

Really.”

Helen had seen the murderous look in Savannah’s eye.

“Please,” Savannah said. “My baby sister’s lying somewhere in an unmarked grave. I’ve got to find her.”

A light came on in a second-story apartment. The Tank had awakened Fred and Ethel. Helen would never hear the end of it.

“I’ll think about it.” Helen wanted to slam the Tank’s door for emphasis, but it refused to catch. Savannah had to lean across the seat to close it, which spoiled the drama.

The Coronado’s turquoise pool shimmered invitingly, but the chaise longues were empty. Helen was disappointed. It was warm tonight, and she’d hoped that Margery and Peggy might be out by the pool. Especially when she saw the lights in Fred and Ethel’s apartment.

A single ficus leaf dropped into the pool and drifted aimlessly. Helen felt just as lost. She missed Peggy and Margery, but it was more than that. She longed for someone to love, even though she’d been badly hurt.

Right. You really need another man, she told herself. You can sure pick ’em. So far, in Florida she’d dated a cheapskate, a con artist, a married man who said he was single and a guy so possessive he gave her a bracelet of bruises for talking to another man. No chance of her falling for anyone as long as she worked in the boiler room. The only men she saw all day were her crude boss, Vito, and Nick the junkie.

She sniffed the night air and caught the thick, heavy scent of marijuana. Oh, yeah, there was Phil the invisible pothead. Just what she needed after dating drunks, crooks and deadbeats—a druggie. She wondered what he looked like. Even when he saved her life, there was only the slogan on his T-shirt, floating in the air like a dream message:

“Clapton Is God.” She still remembered the feel of his hands, strong and sure, as he pulled her from the deadly fire.

Was Phil straight or gay, single or married? She didn’t know. He seemed complete in his chemically altered world.

He didn’t need any woman.

The smell of Phil’s weed was extra thick tonight. It reminded her of the rock concerts she used to go to in St. Louis. That made her feel old. It had been eons since she’d held up a lit Bic and gotten silly.

When she opened her front door, Thumbs was waiting for her, rubbing against her legs and purring his greeting. Usually her cuddly cat made her feel better. Not tonight.

I’m an old maid living alone with my cat, Helen thought.

And I’m only forty-two years old.

The next morning Helen was back in the boiler room.

Discouragement—or maybe it was dirt—settled on her as she walked through the grimy door. Her phone stank of cigarette smoke. She wished she had Taniqua’s Lysol to wipe it down.

In ten minutes, the computers would come on, and she would start waking up East Coast home owners. But now, sick and tardy telemarketers were calling Vito with their excuses.

She could hear Vito was yelling into the phone, “Your hand is all swollen and hurts? So what do you want me to do?

Kiss it? If you’re not coming in, I need a doctor’s note.”

The phone rang again. “You promised me you weren’t going to do this shit again,” Vito screamed. “You want the day off? Take the rest of the week off—at your expense. No, don’t come in. You screw up one more time and you’re fired.”

Vito slammed down the phone and said, “Seven fifty-five and the fuckups are calling.”

The phone rang again. Vito picked it up and shrieked, “If you’re not here at eight A.M. you’re fired. Fired. Get it? Oh, hi, Mr. Cavarelli.”

Suddenly Vito’s voice was soft and respectful. “You’ll be in this week? Yes, sir. No, sir. No, we didn’t make our quota last week. We’ll make it this week for sure. I’m trying to fire the junkies and bring in quality people, but it takes time, Mr. Cavarelli.”

“I’m one of the junkies,” Nick said.

He was eating his usual breakfast of jelly doughnuts and orange soda. Despite his sugary diet, Nick was a skeleton. He talked in nervous bursts. “Finally got out of the halfway house. I’m sharing a trailer now. My own place. First time in years. I used to live on the street. I’ve come a long way. I don’t want to lose my home, but if I don’t sell something today I will.”

“You’ll make a sale,” Helen said. But she knew Nick was doomed. This morning, he couldn’t sit still long enough to sell. He’d flit to his computer and make a call, then buzz around, bothering everyone. He looked like a big dragonfly in his bright yellow shirt.

“Nick, sit down and sell,” she hissed.

“I will, but I gotta get a sody,” he said, and zipped up front to the machine. Next she saw him crawling on the filthy carpet with Marina’s little boy, Ramon, playing with his dump truck, promising to get him a candy bar.

Nick had an unerring instinct for bothering the wrong person. He tried to borrow a quarter for the candy machine from Mabel, the boiler room’s longest survivor. She’d been there an astonishing five years. She was a large, placid woman who used a headset so she could knit while she called. Mabel seemed friendly, but Helen noticed that she watched everyone. Helen heard her reporting their minor infractions to Vito at the end of the shift. The Madame Defarge of the phone room would complain about Nick panhandling for sure.

Nick sat down at his computer and made a call, then threw down his phone and said, “They hate me. Everybody hates me. I can’t get any sleep. My roommate was drunk and he kept me awake all night. How am I going to sell if I can’t sleep?”

“I’m sorry, Nick,” Helen said. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

By twelve thirty, Helen had been insulted one hundred and twenty-six times, propositioned twice, and hung up on sixty-three times. Some woman in Oklahoma blew a police whistle into her phone. Helen’s ear was still ringing from that. She put the whistle woman on CALL BACK. She’d be pursued by septic tank calls till her last breath.

Helen managed to make two sales, one in Maine and another in Kentucky. It wasn’t enough to get her into survey heaven, but at least her job was safe for the day.

Nick had not sold anything. Helen was not surprised.

When he did sit down at his phone, he argued with the callers. She heard him saying, “Listen, lady. I’m trying to tell you something. I can save you thousands in septic-tank bills.

Lady, please don’t say that.”

He hung up his phone in despair. “It’s over. I didn’t sell anything again. That lady just told me to fuck myself and die.

I can’t take all this hate with no sleep.” He put his forehead down on his sticky desk. It was five minutes to one.

“Nick!” Vito called. Nick sat up with a trapped, panicked look. He knew the end was coming. He hunched his skinny shoulders and went up front. Vito’s firings were always done in public.

“Nick, you haven’t had a sale in two weeks. You’re out of here.”

“Please, Vito,” Nick said. “Give me one more day.”

“I can’t waste space on losers. And I can’t have you bothering the help. You’re out.”

“I’ll lose my home,” Nick pleaded.

“I gotta have sellers. Get lost.”

Nick left. She saw him sitting next to the smokers’ trash can at the entrance, weeping. He didn’t notice he was sitting in a pile of cigarette butts. Helen averted her eyes and walked past him, then wondered if she should go back and give him some money. Would it be an insult, reducing him once more to a homeless beggar?

In their world, money was never an insult, Helen decided.

She found twenty-two dollars in her purse, and gave it all to Nick. “Here, buddy. Dinner’s on me.”

He would be panhandling soon enough.

At the Coronado that afternoon, Margery was drinking a screwdriver by the pool.

“I thought you’d be high on life,” Helen said.

“OK, I admit it. Fred and Ethel are getting on my nerves, too,” Margery said. “But they pay the rent, they aren’t weird, and they aren’t conning anyone—unlike some of my previous tenants.”

“I’m beginning to miss the con man,” Helen said. “At least he never lectured me on the joys of clean living. How long are they staying?”

“For the season, at least. They signed a lease through March.”

March seemed a long time away, especially when Fred and Ethel came bouncing through the gate, looking preternaturally chipper.

“We had a lovely lunch on Las Olas,” Ethel said. Helen could just imagine what the exclusive Las Olas restaurants made of her gold tennis shoes and I LOVE FLORIDA sweats printed with maps. The state looked even bigger stretched across Ethel’s rear end.

“It was lovely till some bum asked us for money,” Fred said.

“I told him to get a job,” Ethel said. “I don’t know why those people won’t work.”

Helen saw Nick sitting by the trash can, crying for his lost job and soon-to-be-lost home.

“Because you people hung up on him.” Helen stormed off, slamming the gate. She heard Ethel say, “What set her off?”

I can’t take any more misery, Helen thought, as she wandered aimlessly around her neighborhood. The walk did not comfort her. The neighborhood was disappearing. The exuberant Art Deco apartments and affordable cottages were being torn down for overpriced condos. Soon only the rich would live here.

Porta-Potties and construction Dumpsters camped on every block. A construction worker whistled at her, and Helen glared at him. He was the enemy, the destroyer. She shouldn’t complain about Fred and Ethel. If her landlady couldn’t keep their unit rented, the Coronado might be torn down, too. Then where would she live? In a soulless shoebox like Debbie.

Everything she cared about seemed to be slipping away.

She couldn’t stop the construction, but she could keep in touch with her friends.

Helen rummaged in her purse for change, and then for Sarah’s phone number. She found a pay phone on Las Olas.

“Hi, Sarah,” she said. “I haven’t talked to you in way too long. Want to meet for lunch sometime this week?”

“Anything wrong with today?” Sarah said. “When do you have to be back at work?”

“Not till five.”

“Good. Do you like crab?”

“Love it,” Helen said.

“I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.”

Helen ran back to her apartment. The pool was once more deserted. Helen was glad she didn’t have to face Margery after her outburst. She fed Thumbs and changed into her good black pantsuit, which was only a little tight from the potato chip binges.

Chocolate, her stuffed bear, was nice and fat. She reached inside for a fistful of money and caught a flicker out of the corner of her eye. Someone had passed her window. She hadn’t shut the blinds. She tiptoed to the window hoping she would finally see her neighbor Phil, but no one was there.

The man was maddening.

Sarah pulled up in her Range Rover right on time, and Helen settled into its unaccustomed luxury. Her friend had played the stock market, parlaying a small inheritance into major money, thanks to Krispy Kreme doughnut stock. Now she indulged a taste for pretty clothes and jewelry. Today, she wore a silver and shell pink necklace that highlighted her rosy skin and dark hair.

“Nice jewelry,” Helen said.

“It’s a modern Navajo design,” Sarah said.

The Range Rover was soon in the desolate wilderness by the Lauderdale airport. “Where are you taking me?” Helen said, looking uneasily at the acres of empty scrub, abandoned boatyards and rusting trailer parks. Sarah was wearing a small fortune around her neck.

“Ever been to the Rustic Inn Crabhouse?”

“Never heard of it. But if you say it’s good, it must be.”

Sarah was a woman of size, free of the modern mania for dieting. She liked to eat well.

The Rustic Inn lived up to its name. It was a series of long, low buildings sprawled along a canal. They looked like they’d been tossed there. Inside, the decor was early beer sign with offbeat touches: a Victorian bronze of a boy holding a crab, art-glass windows, a monster lobster claw over the bar. The claw was as long as an average lobster. Helen wondered what the outrageous crustacean had weighed.

She breathed in the air, a heady mixture of butter and garlic. Then she heard the pounding. It sounded like the building was infested with carpenters. The tables were covered with newspapers and set with wooden mallets. The customers wore bibs, and were happily pounding crab legs and cracking claws.

A waitress tied bibs on Helen and Sarah, and brought out their crab samplers: long golden crab legs, garlicky little blue crabs, pink Jonah crabs and half a lobster with clam stuffing, all swimming in butter.

Helen picked up her mallet and hit a thick Jonah crab claw. Nothing happened.

“You’re too polite,” Sarah said. “You’ve got to whack it hard, like this.” She dealt her crab claw a crushing blow.

Helen swung her mallet harder. The claw cracked slightly.

She thought of Nick and Vito, and Fred and Ethel, and hit the claw with a resounding thwack. It split wide open. This meal was downright therapeutic.

“A little frustrated, are we?” Sarah said. “Want to tell me about it?”

Helen did, starting with the night she heard Laredo die.

When she finished, Sarah said, “Savannah sounds like a loose cannon. You’re lucky you weren’t arrested at Debbie’s.

Now that the sister’s on the scene, why don’t you back away?”

“I heard a murder. I can’t,” Helen said.

“Of course you can,” Sarah said, sucking the meat out of a crab leg.

“Savannah’s all alone. I have to help her.”

“Savannah can take care of herself.”

“She only looks tough,” Helen said. “She could disappear tomorrow and who would look for her? She’s one of the disposable people. I guess you’d call her trailer trash, but she’s braver than anyone I know. I don’t know how she keeps working those awful jobs.”

“Are you doing this for her—or you?” Sarah said. It was amazing how shrewd she looked covered in butter sauce.

Helen picked crab bits out of a smashed leg, while she searched for an answer. “I hate to see a rich guy like Hank Asporth get away with murder. He’s a skirt-chasing, martini-drinking user. He’s never worked a day in his life.”

“Like your ex?” Sarah said.

Another direct hit, Helen thought, and pounded a crab leg to inedible mush.

“You can tell all that about Hank Asporth from a computer survey and one very strange phone conversation?” Sarah said.

“Yes,” said Helen. She walloped a crab claw. “I know he’s a rich bully because he sent his lawyer to shut me up.”

“But he didn’t succeed,” Sarah said. “You kept going. You found the sister. You’ve done your part—more than your part. You have a way out of this, but you won’t take it.”

Helen swung her mallet again. The only sound was the crunch of buttered crab.

“Helen, why are you being so stubborn?”

“Because I’m sick of rich people trying to push me around. Rich people who never did anything to deserve their money, while Savannah and I work our fingers to the bone and get nowhere.”

“You could get somewhere,” Sarah said, “if you’d let me get you a decent job. I’m worried about you, Helen. You’re mixed up in a murder. It’s because you’re working that ugly job. People call you terrible names all day. How can you stand it?”

“I’m making twice what I made at the bookstore,” Helen said.

“You’re paying too high a price. Let me find you a good job. I know lots of people—”

Helen cut her off. She couldn’t be in a corporate computer and she couldn’t tell Sarah why. “I have a job. I’m through with corporate life. I’m never wearing a suit and pantyhose again.”

“But you have no life. You work morning and night, two five-hour shifts with a four-hour break in the afternoon.

When’s the last time you kicked back and had white wine with Peggy by the pool?”

“Weeks ago, but that’s not because of my job. Margery rented 2C to this awful couple, Fred and Ethel Mertz.”

“Nobody’s named that.”

“They are. They’re so smug. They give sermons. Peggy and I can’t stand them. When they show up, we go inside.”

“They sound horrible.” Sarah must have seen she was getting nowhere trying to change Helen’s mind. She changed the subject instead. “How’s your crab?”

“Spectacular,” Helen said. “The butter, the garlic, the parsley potatoes. This is heaven on earth.”

After a brief interlude of pounding and picking crab meat, Sarah returned to her theme. “You can’t date anyone with the hours you work. And you won’t meet a nice man in that boiler room.”

Helen had been telling herself the same thing, but she didn’t want to hear it from Sarah. “Don’t need men when there are buttered crab claws.”

“Helen, be serious.”

“Sarah, you used to say my problem was I dated too many men. You were right. I made some bad choices. Now you complain I don’t date enough. I’m learning to live without men. I’m sick of men. Men have brought me nothing but misery.”

Her friend looked sad. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. You’re still not over the man who betrayed you.”

“Which one?” Helen said, and hit a crab so hard it exploded like a bomb.