Hotter than Helen (The Bobby's Diner Series)

by Wingate, Susan

  “It’s okay, Mrs. Carlisle. This way, ladies.” He led them closer to the body, letting them follow him. “Try not to walk outside of where I’m stepping,” he called back, making Georgette look down as she walked. Lights flashed. No one was speaking, not by the time they reached the ambulance anyway. Any talk had hushed when they recognized the person being brought in to identify the body.

  A black bag lay up on a portable gurney. It seemed like there should be a siren blaring or a dirge, people praying… anything but the only thing Georgette heard was a soft breeze hitting the yellow tape as it flapped, as it snapped to and fro in the wind. The lack of noise gave sent a shiver that capped Georgette’s skull, that then snaked down her back.

  Finally, Willard spoke. “Georgette. Will you be okay?” Her voice stalled and she wondered why he asked, if she was going pale, if she looked like she might faint but then, when she did answer, her voice nearly disappeared into her throat. “Yes… sir…” she coughed to clear her throat, “I’m okay.”

  He gestured for her to step in closer, past Roberta and to stand next to him by the gurney.

  Georgette looked back at Roberta, who tipped her head at the black bag and signaled to her with a single finger and mouthed the word “onece” as she gestured. Then Roberta pulled her finger down and placed the nail of it into her mouth. She was clearly rattled.

  “Mrs. Carlisle?” Willard’s words barely registered in Georgette’s mind and he repeated, “Mrs. Carlisle? We’re going to lift the plastic now. Are you ready?” He looked at Georgette and then over to Roberta. She could see Roberta nodding from her peripheral vision. As he reached to pull up the plastic, Georgette placed her hand on his arm, stopping him. She placed the other hand on her chest and took in a few deep breaths.

  “Oh my.” The air escaped when she spoke. “Oh, this is terrible. Let me breathe. I need to catch my breath.” She held his arm down and took in two more deep breaths. Then slowly slid her hand off his arm and placed it near her eyes, ready to cover them if she had to.

  When he rolled the plastic off, Georgette said to herself, Only once. That she will look only once like Roberta had told her.

  But the problem was, she couldn’t stop looking. No, not looking—staring. Georgette’s eyes felt glued to Helen’s face. She couldn’t stop staring at her or the sheets. They looked so familiar. As she stared she thought, Weren’t those the same ones off the guest bed? The ones she’d given to Hawthorne to dispose of?

  As she stared, she noticed how that face didn’t look like Helen’s. That face was from someone older now, someone sad—old and sad. Not what she expected. But it was Helen just not the Helen she remembered.

  With her eyes, Georgette traced a thin streak of blood along her hairline, blood dripping from her right eye, from her nose was caved in—probably the blow that killed her. She saw bruising had already begun to appear on her forehead and rings shadowed her eyes like a raccoon but these rings didn’t look black, they looked blue. Georgette heard people talking behind, voices rising like someone switched a loud radio on but the words jumbled like everyone talking at the same time. The words were directed at her. Then someone’s hand grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back.

  And, she still couldn’t take her eyes off of Helen.

  Willard covered Helen’s view by blocking her with his body.

  The next thing she knew Georgette’s face was buried in Roberta’s shoulder.

  She heard her voice quaver through tears as she answered Willard when he asked if she knew the deceased.

  “It’s Helen.” She said.

  Then she was walking back to the Roberta’s car. “I only looked once.”

  When the car’s engine started up, she said it again, “I only looked once.”

  The car shimmied forward felt as though it were on a conveyor belt. Then, suddenly, they were back home.

  After they got out, Roberta held her around the shoulders as they walked to the door. Roberta had somehow fished her house key out and was opening the door for her. They walked together inside where Gangster lay waiting for her on the kitchen counter. Roberta closed the door and helped Georgette to the kitchen table.

  25

  Roberta was going on and on how she was only supposed to look once—a short once—as she hustled about the kitchen getting water, going through cupboards, futzing. The words slid off Georgette because the past was gone and now she was thinking about the present and what lay ahead. And, what lay ahead, didn’t look all that rosy.

  She interrupted Roberta’s tirade, “Those were my sheets.”

  “What?”

  “Helen. The sheets.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They were mine.”

  Roberta unscrewed the bottle of scotch she had located and poured it into two glasses. “I’ll see you get them back.”

  “No. I don’t care about that. That’s not what I mean.”

  Roberta turned to her, holding both glasses in between three fingers. She reached into the freezer, pulled some ice out of the bin, dropped some in each glass and closed the freezer door again. “What do you mean, then?”

  “I don’t want the sheets back.”

  “Okay… what then?” Roberta set a drink in front of her and took a swig of her own scotch.

  “I ripped them off the bed. After… you know.” She toggled her head and grimaced.

  “Okay. So?”

  “So? So, then I put them into a plastic bag and took them to the diner. I meant to incinerate them. But then Hawthorne showed up.”

  Roberta took another sip and sat down across from Georgette at the table. “And...”

  “Roberta. For crying out loud,” she pressed. Her eyes shot back and forth from one of Roberta’s eyes to the other. “Don’t you get it?”

  “Guess not. Get what?”

  “I gave those sheets to Hawthorne.” She opened her eyes wide hoping it would illuminate something in Roberta.

  Roberta set her drink down very slowly, not looking at it but finding the table anyway.

  “Oh dear lord. You’re not thinking…”

  “We have to tell Willard, Rob. Those sheets went from my hand to Hawthorne’s. How did they end up wrapped around Helen?”

  Georgette looked at her drink once, lifted it and slugged it back in three gulps. By the time she finished, by the time she set the glass back onto the table, Roberta had her cell phone out, dialed and up to her ear.

  Looking around the room, she felt scared somehow. She went over to get the cat, who had fallen asleep on the counter. Leaving him there in his solitude, she picked up the receiver on her phone. The distinct beep beep beep of a voice message rung in her ear. She dialed the number to retrieve the missed messages. There was only one. From Hawthorne.

  Anger fumed through his words. She hadn’t taken his call, asking if she knew who she was dealing with, saying things like “how could she” that he was “trying to patch things up” and she was “being a bitch.” He mentioned the ring, something like, “you can keep the ring,” laughing, but with anger spewing through the phone. She hung up making sure not to press the delete button on the keypad.

  Roberta, still speaking to Willard, didn’t catch the fear in her face. Georgette opened the scotch bottle again and poured two more drinks and waiting for Roberta’s call to end.

  Staring at the floor, Georgette watched as Roberta flipped her phone closed. Roberta’s face went through a gamut of emotions in the last couple of days, ranging from worry about her, to scorn about Helen, to sadness to fear and anger and something else Georgette couldn’t identify—a look something between horror and fury.

  “What.” It wasn’t a question.

  “The coroner has made a preliminary examination of her body.”

  “Homicide, right?”

  “Yes.” She twitched her head up and down and grabbed her second drink, slugging half of it back and then setting it down, staring at it the whole time. A new look had brushed over her eyes, a sensitive compassionate look
that turned Roberta’s eyes wet. She put both hands over her face.

  “Rob. What?”

  “Oh, George… there seems to have been a molestation as well.”

  “A molestation? What does that mean?” Helen had been beaten and tossed about, what more of a molestation could there be?

  “A sexual molestation.” Roberta pinned Georgette’s eyes to hers.

  “Oh my lord. No. No, no.” Georgette’s hand covered her mouth as she repeated the words until they sounded like an elegy, a psalm.

  “During the preliminary, they noticed vaginal tearing and bruising.”

  “They did that there?” Georgette pushed her drink back away from her. She stood, looking nowhere in particular and toward the kitchen. Then she looked at Roberta. “You don’t think…” Roberta looked at her with pity. “No, Rob. That couldn’t have been Hawthorne.” She crossed both hands over her heart. “No. Not Hawthorne, Roberta. He wouldn’t do anything like that. Would he? I mean, he was never rough or anything with me. You know? Always a gentleman, Rob. Oh, sure, we’d play and he’d slap my butt every now and… No. Rob. It wasn’t Hawthorne. Was it?”

  “You really shouldn’t be telling me any more, George.”

  In lieu of the new information, Georgette’s seemed tenser. But how could he? There was no way in hell Hawthorne had been a party to any of this. She had to somehow let Willard know.

  “It wasn’t Hawthorne, Rob. We need to let the police know.”

  “They have evidence, Georgette.”

  “What kind of evidence?” Her face darkened again and her eyes swelled with tears.

  “Well, the sheet, Georgie. Crap. They have the sheet. You said yourself…”

  “It could’ve been stolen from his truck. He might’ve just tossed it in a garbage can somewhere and some homicidal maniac fished it out. He’s not like that, Roberta. He’s not a murderer and he’s certainly not a rapist.”

  Roberta saw how riled Georgette was becoming and tried to appease her by saying, “Well, we just have to let the police do their job now. It’s out of our hands.”

  But Georgette stuck to the subject like a fox chasing a rabbit, “You have to tell them that Hawthorne has never even shown an inkling of being like, like, like that! Roberta. Please! Call them back.”

  26

  Sunshine cracked through the whitewashed shutters of the lawyer’s office. The room—decorated meagerly, some would call it contemporary with desert motif and lithographs of saguaro and roadrunners on the jade walls—felt organized. The floor contrasted warmly with a powdery washing of pinkish pine planks. Georgette and Roberta sat side-by-side in front of his desk in run of the mill metal office chairs with comfortable tweed upholstered seats and rounded wooden armrests.

  Kaplan Hayes had been the same lawyer who had read Bobby’s will five years before to the three of Bobby’s women, Georgette, Roberta and Vanessa, Roberta’s mom. It made for an uncomfortable couple of minutes as they reacquainted each other and were asked to sit, that is, until Hayes spoke.

  “Now, why didn’t we do this all five years ago and just cut to the chase?” The wide smile on his thick face had nothing but kindness behind it and his words broke the ice. When he laughed, his neck jiggled around his collar, making the tie look like a noose around a hanging man.

  Smiling lately was difficult in light of all the information implicating Hawthorne to Helen’s lust murder—that’s what the Roberta kept calling it but she smiled at Georgette making a show of camaraderie for the lawyer. Georgette reached to Roberta and grabbed her hand.

  “We’re slow learners, aren’t we, Rob?”

  “Guess so.”

  Roberta appeared nervous to Georgette, almost to the same level of nervousness as the day they went to the hotel.

  “Mr. Hayes—”

  He interrupted. “Call me Kaplan, Georgette, please.”

  “Kaplan. Thank you. Kaplan, we wanted to know how long all this will take.” Roberta had to review the police report on Helen and all of the sudden her office was popping in activity because of Helen’s murder.

  “Basically, you sign and you sign,” he tipped his head toward Roberta, “we have a witness, one of the gals in here can do that, notarize it and it’s a done deal. The technical stuff, like filing and making copies, all that, we do for you. That’s why you pay me the big bucks, Georgette.” He flashed another fat smile at her. “Once you sign these here papers, the deal has been brokered. Of course, either one of you has the boiler-plate seventy-two hours to renege, if you don’t, basically it’s a done deal.”

  “Well, how about you get our witness in here, Kaplan. I’m ready. Are you, Rob?”

  Roberta’s head bounced fast. She hardly blinked as she stared at the document lying on the desk. Georgette was right. She was nervous.

  So she patted Roberta’s hand. “You want a glass of water or something, Rob? It looks like you’re about to keel over.”

  Roberta turned to Georgette and flashed an awkward smile. “Are you sure about this, George. I mean, you don’t have to do this, ya know.”

  “I wouldn’t want anything but this, Roberta. What if something were to happen to me? Who would get this place? Gangster?”

  Roberta shrugged her shoulders and Georgette continued, “That’s right, no one, that’s who. This way,” her voice pitched up, “the diner stays in the family.” Georgette paused and then nodded to Hayes to go get a witness. He rose and left the two women alone momentarily.

  “I have to tell you, Roberta. I couldn’t believe you refused to take your half of the diner after your mother died. She only left it to me because you had been so stub… so adamant about it.”

  “Honestly, George? I needed some time to deal with her death. I just would’ve been a one-hundred-sixty pound piece of meat standing in your way. I just needed some time, that’s all. I’d already resolved myself to the fact that if the chance came up again, I would agree.”

  “Oh, honey. I’m so glad to hear that.” She patted her arm again and then crossed them both in her lap. “So why the nerves?”

  “Holy crap, George. It’s worth $3.5 million dollars!” she screamed although attempting to hush her words. “I’ve never owned anything worth that much before.”

  “It’s just money, Roberta. It’s not God. It’s how we pay our bills. It’s how we pay our employees. It’s a tool not a status symbol. If you remember that, you’ll be fine. Hell, you already know how to run the place.”

  Upon ending her statement, Kaplan Hayes walked back in with a tight-looking, thin-lipped woman who couldn’t have been more than twenty-six but her serious demeanor made her look much older.

  “This is Candace Smally.” She nodded at both women, said “hello” and reached out to shake both women’s hands.

  “If you ladies sign on the pages with the yellow sticky notes and initial every single page in this document, Candace will witness it for you.” He yelled back and over his shoulder, “Anytime, Beth. We don’t want to go into the next Ice Age waiting for you.” He winked at Georgette.

  From down the hall, they could hear Haye’s wife responding. “I’m coming, Kaplan. Sorry.” And as the words grew closer, she entered the room. “I’m sorry ladies, George, Roberta. I had to get off that blasted phone. I’m afraid it never stops ringing.”

  “Beth here will…”

  “Hi, girls.” Beth said again, smiling and acknowledging both women.

  Hayes went on, “Beth’ll notarize everyone’s signature.” Roberta spoke low and nodded to Georgette, “You go first.”

  “Chicken.” She chuckled and picked up one of the pens lying next to the contract.

  “Shut up,” Roberta chided back, but smiled and picked up the other pen.

  “You will owe me one thing though.” Georgette flipped sheets as she spoke initially and signing where indicated.

  “What’s that?” Roberta signed and initialled too.

  “If anything does happen to me, you have to promise to take care of Gangster.” />
  Roberta chuckled, “I will. Did you even have to worry?”

  Georgette grinned as she continued to initial the pages of the document and as she got lost in thoughts of how this is what family did, they lived near each other and they made something great together.

  27

  Willard Cleary had been appointed to Police Chief a couple years back after he’d done such bang-up detective work discovering the killer of former Sunnydale mayor, Harold Pyle. He carried himself taller somehow. When he walked into the meeting room, Georgette felt the urge to stand and pushed her chair back to do so.

  “Sit, please, Mrs. Carlisle.” Hearing him refer to her by her proper name reminded Georgette that Willy intended the meeting to formal. He fingered the pencil he had stuck above his ear before closing the door and turning to her.

  “Oh, thank you,” she paused, wondering how she should address him again and feeling Police Chief was too awkward to get out, she said, “your honor.”

  He looked at her as he pulled a chair from under the table to sit. A glint in his eyes showed her he thought the comment was funny.

  “Crap, Willard, right. Sorry, Willy. I just should have stayed with Police Chief, right?”

  “Georgette. Relax. Call me Willard for now. This is preliminary. If anyone else needs to be in the room with us, then call me Police Chief.”

  “Willy. Okay. Great. Thanks.”

  Her green eyes flashed at him. He squinted, smiling back at her.

  “Your freckles match the color of your hair.”

  Georgette didn’t know how to respond. She tugged at her pony tail and ground her rump down in to the hard wood seat of the chair, then she wiped her hands across her face from the bridge of her nose to the edge of her cheeks. “Well…” is all she managed to get out as she shook her head nervously and paused. But recovering she said, “Look, Willard. Like Roberta told you. Hawthorne couldn’t have done this.”

  “On with business, huh, George? Sorry. Still. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many freckles.”

  “Willy. At a time like this? I can’t believe you want to talk with me about my freckles.” A soft frown made her eyes flash a brighter green.