Shop Till You Drop

Chapter 22

It was two a.m. and too hot to sleep. Helen didn’t want to turn on the window air conditioner. Its rattling would only keep her awake. Besides, it was expensive to run. She had to save money.

Helen got up and slid open the patio door. Cool night air poured into her stuffy apartment. She stood in the doorway, letting the tropical night embrace her. Something sweet bloomed in the velvety dark and sent out a heavy perfume. She heard some small creature rustling in the foliage. Unknown insects sang a high-pitched chant.

Then Helen heard another, wilder sound. At first, she thought it was two cats. Then she realized the wild moans were from Daniel’s apartment. Some woman was having perfect sex with the perfect man. The stripper with the Day-Glo bra? Or had he moved on to someone else? Daniel had not promised to be faithful. Unlike Rob, her ex-husband.

The moans grew louder, sweeter, and more excited. She and Rob had sounded like that, long ago. Love with Rob had been good, right up until the day she discovered him with another woman. Only later did their love feel wrong. Rob had betrayed her with dozens of women, while Helen foolishly believed he’d loved only her. When Helen finally realized her husband had been unfaithful, she felt as if acid had been thrown on her soul.

In South Florida, she seemed to be healing. Her anger had faded to a deep, piercing sadness. Her recovery was slow, but it was happening. Around single men, Helen still felt awkward as a teenager, except she had zits and wrinkles.

Helen also felt lost. After seventeen years of marriage, she didn’t know the rules of the dating game any more. She couldn’t even tell when a man was flirting with her. But she wanted to learn.

The extravagant cries from Daniel’s room reached a crescendo. Helen shut her patio door and returned to her empty bed.

It was even hotter at Juliana’s the next morning. When Helen opened the green door, she was hit with a blast of warm, muggy air.

Tara tripped in behind her on pink flowered mules, fanning herself. “Feels like Sumatra in here,” she said. “The air conditioner must be broken.”

“Another crisis,” Helen said.

“A big one,” Tara said. “You can’t survive in South Florida without air conditioning.”

“Lord, I hope it doesn’t need major repairs,” Helen said. “Mr. Roget will hit the roof.”

“Check the filter first, and maybe you won’t have to deal with Old Tightwad,” Tara said. “Our air conditioning acts this way sometimes when the filter needs changing.”

“Come to think of it, no one’s changed the filter since I started working here,” Helen said.

Helen opened the utility closet and stared at the air conditioner. It made its usual hum-chugging sound. The large olive green machine had pipes snaking all over. Some were wrapped with black foam padding and silver duct tape. All were thickly layered with dust. A big square vent trailed long wisps of gray dust, like an old man’s beard. A box of filters leaned against the air conditioner. But Helen could not see where to install the filters.

“Yuck-o,” Tara said, stepping back so she wouldn’t get dirt on her pink outfit. “Where does the filter go in that thing?”

“Beats me,” Helen said. “I’m wearing a black pants suit. I’ll try to change it. You watch the door. There’s a pile of manuals back in the stockroom for the cash register and stuff. Maybe I can find one for the air conditioner.”

The stockroom was even hotter, but Helen didn’t dare carry the appliance manuals into the store to sit on the forbidden loveseats.

Helen leaned against a stockroom table and started shuffling through the foot-high stack. She could feel sweat trickling down her neck. I’ll have to send this suit to the dry cleaner, she thought resentfully. Mr. Rich Guy Roget will never pick up the tab. He doesn’t have to worry about my dry-cleaning bills, but I’m supposed to save money for him.

Stop this. Start looking for another seven-seventy-an-hour job.

But they are all bad, she told herself.

Then go back to St. Louis and make real money.

That was worse.

Helen began shuffling through the stack again. Juliana’s seemed to have saved every appliance manual since the store opened in 1965. There were manuals for outdated cash registers, obsolete clothing steamers, even a long-deceased stereo.

Finally, Helen spotted the instruction booklet for the air conditioner under an old refrigerator manual from 1972. That fridge probably had been junked years ago. Why did Christina keep these things?

The refrigerator manual slipped out of Helen’s sweaty hand, and a pink flyer fell out. With a nearly naked woman on it.

Whoa! She was way too hot for a Frigidaire.

The flyer looked like the sort that Las Vegas prostitutes slipped under hotel room doors. Helen had seen them when she attended a CPA convention in Vegas years ago, before it became a so-called family gambling center. The male convention-goers laughed and snickered like school boys at the flyers’ innuendoes. Helen was fascinated by the ads. Where she came from, prostitutes didn’t advertise like pizza parlors.

This flyer said “Let Jasmine show you the secrets of the Orient.”

The woman in the flyer was showing most of her secrets already. She was a slender, full-breasted Asian with long dark hair. Jasmine’s mouth was open and pouty. Her breasts and buttocks were thrust out, bold and inviting. She was both submissive and brazen. It was clear what Jasmine was selling: The string bikini covered almost nothing.

It certainly didn’t hide the fact that this was a much younger Tara.

Helen stared at the flyer, until a drop of sweat plopped on the paper. Maybe she’d made a mistake. But the photograph was clear and sharp. There was no doubt this was a younger Tara. The face was a little rounder. The breasts were a little higher. The hair was just as long and black. Too bad, Helen thought, she hadn’t used that curtain of hair to hide her face.

There was something written on the flyer in black ink: “Love Will Keep Us Together.”

It didn’t look like Tara’s handwriting. Tara’s script was as small and delicate as she was. Besides, she liked to dot her i’s with tiny hearts. No, that bold dark scrawl was Christina’s. But why would she write “Love Will Keep Us Together” on the flyer? What did it mean? Was it a slogan? Or a song title?

Helen was too hot and sweaty to figure anything out in that airless room. She’d fix the air conditioner first. Maybe she could think better when she cooled down.

Helen hid the flyer under the stack of manuals and began reading the filter-changing instructions. She found the Phillips screwdriver, unscrewed the dust-bearded vent on the air conditioner. Inside, the filter looked like it was wearing an inch-thick blanket of gray felt. Big wads of dark fluff and mounds of dirt spilled out behind it. No wonder the air conditioner wasn’t working.

Helen changed the filter, vacuumed the vent inside and out, and while she was at it, cleaned the whole utility closet. All the while, she thought about Tara.

Christina had found out Tara had been a prostitute and hidden the proof in the store. Was she blackmailing Tara? How much money was Tara paying to keep her past quiet? And why . . . ?

“You fixed it!” Tara said. “Cool air is coming out. The store should be liveable pretty soon.”

Tara stood silhouetted in the stockroom doorway, a small, slender woman in a fashionably fringed skirt and a shoulder-baring top. Her pink mules were embroidered with flowers. Her long hair was soft and shining. Her skin glowed. She looked sweet and vulnerable, unlike the brazen tart in the flyer. Tara had reinvented herself.

“What’s wrong?” Tara said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Helen reached for the flyer. “You were a Las Vegas . . . sex worker?” she said, proud she’d remembered the politically correct term for hooker.

She could see Tara’s body tense, as if she were turning to stone. “Yes,” she said, defiant but also afraid. “So?”

“Is that where you met Paulie?”

“God, no. He thinks I’m a mail-order bride from Thailand. He paid a fortune to get me here. I banked it all.”

“You’re kidding,” Helen said. “Paulie thinks you’re from Thailand? With that Midwest accent? Where are you from—Chicago?”

“Cleveland. I told him I’d listened to Berlitz tapes,” Tara said.

“And he believed you?”

“Men believe what they want to believe, especially when it comes to sex,” Tara said. “I’m the fantasy woman he’s always wanted—exotic, quiet, submissive. Paulie really wants a hooker, but he doesn’t know it. I give him what he wants. He gives me what I want—money and security. He’d drop me like a hot potato if he knew my past. He thinks I was a virgin when we met.”

“How much was Christina blackmailing you for?” Helen said, deciding to bluff.

“I paid her two thousand a month,” Tara said. “Recently, she wanted to raise it to twenty-five hundred dollars. I could barely make the two thousand, even with all Paulie gave me. I was desperate.”

“That’s why you faked that robbery,” Helen said. “You were looking for this flyer, weren’t you?”

“Yes, but I was also looking for some photos. She has pictures of me with my clients . . . doing things. She showed me the flyer first, and I laughed and said flyers could be faked. Then it was her turn to laugh. She said she had some photographs Paulie would love to see.”

“Photos can be faked, too,” said Helen.

“Not these,” Tara said, sadly. “I saw them. They’re real. I searched the store, but I couldn’t find the flyer or the photos anywhere. The search took longer than I expected. I couldn’t explain to Paulie why I was so late.”

“Why not? You could have said you were delayed by an accident on the road.”

“You don’t know Paulie. He’s so jealous, he’d check. He calls my cell phone if I’m half an hour late.”

“So you tossed some clothes around, hit your forehead on the wall, and made up the story about the two men with guns,” Helen said.

Tara nodded, the curtain of hair sliding across her face.

“Don’t worry,” said Helen. “I won’t tell the police about the break-in unless I absolutely have to.” For my sake, she thought, not yours.

“I didn’t kill Christina,” Tara said. “You believe me, don’t you? I’d be crazy to kill her before I found out where she stashed those photos. If the police find them, I’m in trouble. That’s why I came back to work here, to see if they turned up anywhere.”

“I thought you and Christina were friends,” Helen said.

“We started off that way. Friends, I mean. Then she showed me the photos and asked for money. I was afraid she would tell Paulie and ruin everything. So I pretended we were still friends. It wasn’t too hard. I pretended with Paulie, too. Most of the time, I could forget what Christina was doing.”

Tara said it without bitterness. Helen wondered if she was faking that, too.

“Where did you find the flyer?” Tara asked.

“In the filter box,” Helen lied. “Do you know what ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’ means?”

“It’s a song by Captain & Tennille, isn’t it? An old one.” She shrugged. Obviously, it meant nothing to her.

“Are you going to tell Paulie?” Tara said. “Are you going to ruin the only good thing I’ve got?”

“No, Tara,” Helen told her. “Your past is your own.”

Unless you killed Christina, she told herself.