by Elaine Viets
“Daniel said he didn’t want to go stand-up paddleboarding that morning because he was drinking the night before,” Helen said. “Was that true?”
“Oh, he was liquored up, all right,” Sybil said. “Bourbon, by the smell of it. But he didn’t need booze to be mean. It came natural.”
“Did he make any calls from his room?” Helen asked.
“Used his cell phone,” Sybil said. “He’s not going to pay hotel rates for calls. This morning he asked me if I knew the name of a crematorium.”
“He’s going to cremate Ceci?” Helen asked. “So soon?”
“As soon as the medical examiner signs off on it,” Sybil said. “Daniel said he should get the autopsy results by noon today. He’s out making the arrangements now. He told me he’s leaving Florida the minute the autopsy report is in and he can cremate that poor girl and bring her home.”
“But her death was sudden,” Helen said. “Her family won’t get to say good-bye. Did she want to be cremated?”
“She’s only thirty. Probably too young to think about it,” Sybil said. “He’s the husband, so he can do what he wants. That son of a bugger will have her cremated for two hundred dollars and carry her ashes on the plane. Save himself the expense of embalming, a casket, flying her body home and a St. Louis funeral.”
She mashed out another cigarette, then lit a new one. As the flame flared up, Sybil said, “I’d like to see him burn. In hell.”
CHAPTER 10
Helen breathed in the heavenly scent of the hotel’s lemon polish. It was a relief to escape Sybil’s smoky cave. Helen’s hair reeked of cigarettes.
She was eager to hurry back to Riggs Beach in her cool white Igloo. The PT Cruiser had earned its nickname for its rounded shape and blasting cold air-conditioning. Even this early in May, Helen could feel the heat building. By June, South Florida would feel like warm soup.
Ceci Odell’s autopsy report was due any moment, according to Sybil. Once the medical examiner declared her death an accidental drowning and Daniel took his wife home, Helen hoped Coronado Investigations could investigate Ceci’s nasty husband. She’d love to destroy the hearts-and-flowers image of that photo flashed on TV. She didn’t want Daniel getting rich from Ceci’s death.
Maybe Sunny Jim will want us to go to St. Louis, Helen thought. It would be nice to have a free trip home to see my sister, Kathy, and her family.
No, it wouldn’t be nice. Not anymore. Not since Kathy and I buried Rob.
Helen skidded away from the subject of her ex like a car sliding across a slippery road, and flipped on a classic rock station. Debbie Harry was singing “Eat to the Beat.” She upped the volume, but even a blast of Blondie couldn’t clear her conscience.
Rob was buried under tons of concrete. But he might as well be sitting in her car. He never left her.
She glanced in her rearview mirror and thought, I can almost see him. When I first met Rob, he had a kind of sexy teddy-bear cuteness. Women saw it and men didn’t. I saw it, all right. I was blinded by love. So blind I didn’t see that Rob cheated on me, starting with my own maid of honor.
Helen steered the Igloo onto I-95 toward Riggs Beach. She didn’t notice the green Toyota behind her in her blind spot and got a well-deserved horn blast.
Now she was safely on the highway and quickly traveling back into the past.
I had a six-figure job in human resources and all the fast-track prizes, she thought. A closet full of pricy, sexless suits, a Lexus and a suburban McMansion I rarely saw. I worked from sunup to sundown.
I had it all. As long as I didn’t look too closely.
The Igloo was barreling down the fast lane, but not fast enough for the pickup behind it. The truck impatiently roared around Helen.
I kept my eyes shut when Rob lost his job, she thought. I wanted to believe he couldn’t find work worthy of his talents. For seven years I listened to his excuses while he lived off me.
A black Mercedes flashed its headlights at her. Helen realized she was going the speed limit—too slow for a South Florida fast lane. She switched to the middle lane.
The wife is the last to know, she thought. That sure was true for me. I was the only one who didn’t know Rob was sneaking around. I didn’t realize it until I caught him with his pants off.
I got my rude awakening when I was a restless forty. I bought a silly women’s magazine for its ten tips to add romance to my married life. One was: surprise your man in the middle of the day. You’ll find him ready to make love.
Rob was ready, she thought. Just not for me.
For the first time ever in my career, I left work early, hoping for hot honeymoon sex at three in the afternoon. Rob said he’d be working on our back deck. That’s where I found him—nailing our neighbor, Sandy. I picked up a crowbar and started swinging.
Buck-naked Rob abandoned Sandy. He ran to his Land Cruiser, jumped in and locked the doors, while Sandy screeched behind the deck furniture.
And I slammed that crowbar into his true love—the Land Cruiser.
I couldn’t stop myself. While I wrecked the Land Cruiser, Sandy called the police. I didn’t see the cops enter our yard. One had to shout, “Drop the weapon, ma’am.” I did. Rob, naked and pale as a boiled egg, crawled out of the ruined SUV, while the cops tried to hide their smiles.
Rob and Sandy refused to press charges for assault. She didn’t want her husband to find out. He did, anyway, and she lost her meal ticket.
I filed for divorce. The judge, dumber than the crowbar but not as useful, awarded Rob half of our house. I expected that. But the judge also said Rob was entitled to one-half of my future income.
My lawyer, that blockhead, sat there like a stuffed vulture.
Good thing there wasn’t a crowbar in the courtroom, or I’d have attacked all three men and gone to prison for triple homicide.
Instead, I swore on the Bible that Rob would never see another nickel of mine. Actually, I swore my oath on the Missouri Revised Statutes. But it was still binding.
I tossed my wedding ring in the Mississippi and left everything behind, driving in crazy crisscrosses around the country. Only Kathy knew how to reach me. My own mother thought I should forgive Rob and go back to him. Somewhere in Kansas, I traded in my Lexus for a clunker. It died in Fort Lauderdale. That’s how the Coronado became my home and Margery the mother I should have had.
Rob searched for me relentlessly. He wanted his money. If he’d worked as hard to find a job, he would have been a millionaire. My ex finally trapped me when I went back to St. Louis for Mom’s funeral.
Funny, wasn’t it? Mom brought us together again. They were buried the same day.
Helen looked up and realized the Igloo was behind a flatbed truck loaded with concrete burial vaults.
My mother’s casket is in a vault like those, she thought. Rob is sealed under the concrete of the church hall basement. Both of them were buried in the church.
A horn blast brought Helen back to the present. She saw the Riggs Beach exit, swung across two lanes and soon found herself at the pier parking lot.
Once again, Helen couldn’t bury her terrible memories. The air in the Igloo felt dirty and bitter, but she knew Sybil’s cigarette smoke wasn’t to blame. She would never rid herself of her ugly role in Rob’s burial.
Helen stepped out and breathed in the soft ocean air. She saw Phil at Sunny Jim’s, pulling a yellow paddleboard off the rack for a dreadlocked beach bunny. As she got closer, Helen saw the young woman had roses tattooed on her pale back and a green lizard on her foot. The lizard’s tail wrapped around her ankle.
Helen found the reptile oddly appealing. The woman’s pale skin was a good canvas for the needle artist’s work. The roses-and-lizard woman insisted on carrying her own board to the water, so Phil loped alongside with her paddle and made sure she had the life jacket on her board.
Sunny Jim was leaning against his trailer, pulling frantically at his frizzy hair and talking on his cell phone. As she got closer, Helen hea
rd him say, “Are you sure?”
Then he punched his fist in the air and said, “Yes! I knew it. Thanks for telling me.”
Phil rejoined Jim and Helen. Jim clicked off and smiled for the first time since Ceci died. “That was Becky, the nurse at Riggs Beach hospital,” he said. “She told me Ceci Odell was murdered.”
“What? She couldn’t have been,” Helen said. She felt like she’d been walloped with a wet towel.
“She was. The ME said so,” Jim said. “Becky read me the autopsy report. It said she was stabbed twice in the back by a knife with a serrated edge, like a dive knife.”
“Stabbed in the back?” Helen said. “Are you sure? I saw a cut on her forehead.”
“That was there, too,” Jim said. “The stab wounds went through two right ribs, lacerated the right lung and slashed some large vessels. They bled into her chest cavity and gave her a hema-something.”
“Hemathorax?” Phil guessed.
“That’s it,” Jim said.
“Did Ceci drown, or did the stab wounds kill her?” Phil asked.
“She had salt water in her lungs,” Jim said. “She might have been breathing for a little bit, but the stab wounds were enough to kill her. I don’t know if she was conscious.”
Now Helen felt sick. The sun seemed unbearably hot. “That poor woman,” she said. Those three useless words were all she could manage.
“You gotta find out who murdered Ceci,” Jim said.
“How? You saw her die,” Phil said. “We were all there when it happened. There was nobody in the water near her. Her husband is the main suspect, and he was sitting on the beach in front of us.”
“Somebody killed her,” Sunny Jim said. “Maybe Daniel Odell hired the killer. Or one of my competitors did.”
He must have seen the doubt on their faces. “I know what people say about me. They think I’m paranoid and my enemies are all in my head.”
Helen felt a guilty stab. That was exactly what Margery had told them.
“But this killer is real,” Jim said. “I want to pay you to find him. We couldn’t save Ceci Odell, but it’s not too late to save me.”
“Tell me something,” Phil said casually. “How did you get that information? That Ceci’s death is murder. The police don’t release autopsies in an open murder investigation.”
“I told you: Becky is a friend,” Jim said. “She’s an ER nurse at Riggs Beach General Hospital. She has a friend who works at the Riggs County Medical Examiner’s Office. That’s how we do things here in Riggs Beach. There are no secrets in this city.”
Except who killed Ceci Odell, Helen thought.
“Wait! I forgot something else,” Sunny Jim said. “Becky told me there’s going to be a story about the medical examiner’s findings on the noon news. Channel Fifty-four again.”
“We don’t have a TV,” Phil said.
“But I have an app for Channel Fifty-four on my iPad,” Jim said. “They have streaming video. We can watch it here.”
They ran for the trailer. “Maybe now I’ll catch a break,” he said. “Last time, Commissioner ‘Want More’ Wyman said my business wasn’t safe. It’s time for Fifty-four to tell the other side.”
Good luck with that, Helen thought. You could trust Fifty-four to put the most sensational spin on any news.
Jim called up the station on his iPad, and they crowded around his plywood desk to watch it.
“The story is on now,” Jim said, turning up the sound.
The same blond bubblehead was now reporting. She held a microphone up to a lean, lantern-jawed man identified on-screen as Riggs Beach crimes against persons detective Emmet Ebmeier.
“We have investigated the victim’s husband,” he said. “Mr. Odell was on the beach in front of witnesses when the murder occurred. His recent cell phone records show no calls to anyone but friends and family members. We do not believe he harmed his wife. The medical examiner has released Mrs. Odell’s body to her husband.”
“What about life insurance?” Helen asked the TV.
The blond reporter never asked that key question. “We also interviewed Commissioner Charles Wyman at his office,” she said, “about this new development in the death of Mrs. Odell.”
If the commissioner was lining his pockets with bribes, he sure wasn’t spending the money on his office decor, Helen thought. The walls were covered with cheap plywood paneling and plastered with framed certificates, plaques and photos. Wyman was sitting behind a dented black metal desk. His comb-over emphasized his balding scalp.
“It is my duty to continue calling for more regulation for the water sports industry,” the commissioner said, his voice as thin and high as if he’d sucked helium. “The Riggs Beach tourism industry needs to meet the highest standards of safety.”
“Will you be voting to renew the city lease for Sunny Jim’s Stand-Up Paddleboard Rental on Riggs Beach in June?” the blonde asked.
“At this point in time,” he said, “I don’t believe renewing Jim’s lease is in the best interests of Riggs Beach. A tragedy occurred on his watch. Maybe it’s not his fault, but his beach business will be a constant reminder of that death. We can’t afford that on our beach.”
“Then you’ll vote to give the space to a competitor?” the news anchor said.
“That’s one option,” Commissioner Wyman said. “Another would be to use the area for more parking. I am carefully considering which would be best for the future prosperity of Riggs Beach.”
“Hah!” Sunny Jim said. “He means the future prosperity of ‘Want More’ Wyman.”
CHAPTER 11
“Now what?” Helen asked Phil.
The two partners of Coronado Investigations held a hasty meeting on a bench near Riggs Pier. Three feet away, a young mother washed salt and sand off her little girl. In front of them, two boys horsed around on boogie boards in the surf. Behind them was a beery game of beach volleyball.
No one paid them any attention.
“Jim wants us to solve a murder and we don’t have a clue,” Helen said.
“Clue?” Phil said. “We saw the woman die and had no idea she was being murdered.”
“We can’t even call this a locked-room mystery,” she said. “It took place on the ocean in broad daylight.” Helen threw out her arms to take in the roasting sun, the rowdy tourists and the wrinkled sea. “Ceci was killed in front of hundreds of witnesses. And they all disappeared.”
“I guess that’s where we start,” Phil said. “We have to find someone who saw something. You go to Cy’s restaurant and see if you can learn anything. I’ll review those security videos of the break-in at Jim’s again and see if anything was overlooked.”
“From spring break?” Helen said. “You still have them?”
“I want to study them again,” Phil said. “I’ll also wander around the beach bars for gossip on the murder.”
“You would choose a bar,” Helen said and laughed.
“Hey, it’s where people talk if I ply them with drink,” Phil said.
“And have a few beers yourself,” Helen said. She grinned at him.
“I’d look suspicious if I didn’t drink, too,” Phil said.
“I love how you say that with a straight face,” Helen said, and kissed his ear.
“Hey,” he said, “we’re supposed to be undercover.”
“We’ll go undercover tonight,” she said, and headed for Cy’s on the Pier.
Cy’s was decorated like every beach restaurant, with fishing nets, seashells, life preservers, and a candle on each table. At two thirty, the lunch rush was over, and only three tables had customers. Helen saw Joan, the blond server, filling a water glass at a corner table, and asked to sit in that section.
She ordered a grilled fish sandwich, fries, and a Coke. Joan brought her food quickly. The fish was fresh, but the fries were pale and greasy. Helen finished her fish and left most of the fries. The warm sun and heavy food made her sleepy. Time to get moving.
“Check, please,”
she said when Joan passed her, and handed her a credit card.
The server was back quickly. Helen started to leave a tip.
“Excuse me,” Joan said. “I really appreciate the tip, but could you leave it in cash, please? If you put the tip on the credit card, the owner takes ten percent of it.”
“You’re kidding,” Helen said, and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. She hoped the generous tip would pay off in information when she needed it.
“Thanks,” Joan said, stuffing it into her pocket. Once again, Helen was struck by the woman’s weary beauty. Her green uniform shirt brought out her sea green eyes, but there were dark circles under them.
“You left a nice tip when you had breakfast here, too,” Joan said. “Lots of our customers are tourists. They figure they’re never coming back here, so they don’t bother tipping. I’m having a hard time making ends meet.”
“You must have had a bunch of people in here when that woman drowned,” Helen said.
“Most were out on the deck watching,” Joan said. “They didn’t eat. I saw the lifeguards taking her out of the water. I thought they would save her.”
“Me, too,” Helen said.
“I guess this sounds terrible, but I took a cell phone video of the accident and rescue. I was hoping to get it on Channel Fifty-four. They give viewers fifty-four dollars for photos or videos used on the air.”
Now Helen was alert. “You have a video? Did you see anything?”
“A scuba diver,” Joan said. “He was near the pier before the accident. I got him on video.”
Joan opened her cell phone and called up the video. “Look,” she said.
But before Helen could see it, she heard a man say, “Hey, Joanie, I’m not paying you to stand around and yak. Refill the saltshakers before the dinner rush starts.”
“I’m just finishing up with this customer,” Joan said, collecting Helen’s plate and silverware.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. “That’s Cy, the owner.”
Cy was a tubby fifty who looked like he’d been eating his own food for way too long. Joan’s boss was pale as biscuit dough and just as flabby. Cy’s thick hair was dyed a startling black, making his face seem vampire white. Helen wanted to check for fangs, then remembered the undead wouldn’t survive daylight.
