by Elaine Viets
“There was no murder, ma’am,” the boy officer said. “We wanted to set your mind at ease. What you heard was a movie. The guy was watching it when we got there.”
Hot shame flooded Helen. She remembered the woman’s teasing tone at first: “You’ve been a very bad boy, Hank. You’re just lucky I like bad boys.” That did sound like a line from a movie.
She was a fool. A public fool. She would lose her job. All because she’d overreacted and called the police. But then she remembered that desperate, guttural choking noise. That was no movie sound effect. She’d heard a woman die. She was sure of it. . . . Almost sure.
“He killed a woman,” she said. “It wasn’t a movie. She said his name, Hank. Twice. Explain that.”
“You heard wrong.” Officer Untidy tucked in her shirttail. “You said you couldn’t hear what the man said, just the woman.”
“I heard a woman being murdered.” It came out stronger than she felt.
“No, ma’am,” Officer Untidy said. She had a coffee stain on her shirt. “We found no sign of anyone else living there. We found no women’s personal effects. No female clothes, shoes or makeup.”
“He’s very rich. Maybe you didn’t look hard enough,” Helen said.
Berletta sat at her desk, frozen. Nellie gave a warning cough.
Good move, Helen thought. Insult the police. That will make them change their minds.
The boy cop, the muscular one, moved forward in a way that seemed threatening. But Helen realized every move this young tank made would seem that way. “Ma’am, I will put that remark down to stress, because of the situation. We didn’t take Mr. Asporth’s word for it. We had reasonable suspicion to search the house and the garage without a warrant. The yard could be seen from public view, so we had cause to search that, too. Mr. Asporth also gave us permission.”
“How much time was there between my call and your response?” Helen interrupted.
“We responded in a timely manner,” he said, which was no answer at all.
“Inside the house we looked in the closets and under the beds. We checked his storage containers and his walk-in freezer. We even checked the bait freezer on his boat. A guy hid his wife in one of those a couple of years ago.”
When you were still in diapers, Helen thought. I’ve got sweaters older than these two. When did they graduate from the police academy—yesterday?
The boy cop frowned, as if he could read her thoughts.
Office Untidy started talking. “We found nothing. There was no sign of a struggle. There was no blood. The neighbors heard no unusual noises. The vehicles in the garage were registered in his name. He wasn’t hiding her car in there.”
“Did you look in his cars?”
“He opened them for us. They were empty.” Officer Untidy was wrestling with her shirttail—and losing.
“You made an honest mistake, ma’am,” the boy officer said. “You did your duty as a citizen and called us. You reported what you thought was a murder. We checked it out and found nothing.”
Helen couldn’t bear the condescension in his voice. This young twerp thought she was a hysterical woman.
“It wasn’t a mistake.” Helen sounded really hysterical now. “I heard him murder a woman.”
“I wouldn’t say that too loud if I were you,” the boy officer said. “He could sue you for your last nickel.”
Chapter 3
“Ten. Twenty. Thirty.”
Helen was counting crumpled ten dollar bills. The money had been stuffed inside her teddy bear, Chocolate.
“Two hundred. Two ten. Two twenty.”
She pulled more stuffing out of the bear. The pile of wrinkled tens grew higher. Helen breathed in the dirty perfume of used money. Last night, she’d heard a woman being murdered. Then two cops treated her like a nutcase. It was a trying evening. But this morning, Helen had her hands on something reassuring: money. She knew she’d be fired in a few hours. But if her bear Chocolate was as fat as Helen hoped, she could tell Girdner to go to hell.
“Two ninety. Three hundred. Three ten.”
Telemarketing was wretched work, but Helen made more at it than at any other dead-end job she’d ever worked. She had an odd, embarrassing knack for selling septic-tank cleaner. The money was piling up. Helen couldn’t have a bank account or even a safe-deposit box. Those would make her too easy to trace. Instead, she stashed her money in a place she thought un-bear-ably clever.
“Three seventy. Three eighty. Three ninety.”
The money pile had grown to a fat mound. Helen had not had so much cash since she worked for that St. Louis corporation. Actually, she hadn’t had much cash then, although she made a hundred thousand plus. She spent her salary on designer suits for a job that bored her, massages to ease the work tension, and Ralph Lauren window treatments (when you spent that much, you did not call them curtains) for a house designed to impress other people.
“Four ten. Four twenty. Four thirty.”
She threw away more money on Rob, her rat of a husband. He’d looked for work for years, but never found a job. Rob needed a Rolex to get to job interviews on time, a new SUV to get there in style, and a state-of-the-art sound system to soothe his shattered nerves when he was rejected—again. But Rob was no mooch. He was building a new deck, wasn’t he?
“Six forty. Six fifty. Six sixty.”
When Helen remembered what happened on the deck, she started counting faster, spilling bills every which way. One hot summer day, Helen decided not to be such a corporate grind. For the first time in seventeen married years, she left work early. She would surprise her husband, handsome and sweaty in the sun. They would make passionate love on the new deck furniture, then swim naked in the pool.
Her husband had had the exact same thought. Helen found him sweaty and naked with their next-door neighbor, Sandy.
“Eight seventy. Eight eighty. Eight ninety.”
Bills leaped like spawning salmon as Helen recounted her humiliation that awful afternoon. She’d picked up a crowbar on the deck and started swinging. When she finished, she’d smashed her old life completely. Now she was on the run in South Florida, a female version of The Fugitive, condemned to nowhere jobs that paid in cash under the table.
“Nine twenty. Nine thirty. Nine forty.”
Helen pulled out one last ten-spot wedged inside Chocolate’s paw. Nine hundred fifty dollars. She shoved the money back in the bear and patted his swollen belly.
Rich Chocolate, indeed. But she had another money cushion. She unzipped the couch pillows and started counting. She had seven hundred dollars stuffed in the turquoise throw pillows. Twelve hundred fifteen dollars in the black couch pillows. Seven thousand and something in the old Samsonite suitcase in the closet. She could survive for months on her stash while she looked for another job. She was going to be fired, but people at her level didn’t need references.
Helen wished she could get last night’s sounds out of her head. That gurgling scream played in an endless loop. But the police said she’d imagined it. Hot humiliation overwhelmed her. The police had been inside Hank Asporth’s house. They’d seen no overturned furniture. No sign of a woman, dead or alive. They told Helen she’d heard a movie. But no movie victim had ever screamed like that. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was right.
She was also sure she was right when she followed her first instinct. Look where that got her. Out of work.
She was ready to face the firing squad.
Helen clocked in at seven fifty-eight A.M. on what she knew would be her last day in the boiler room.
Taniqua was spraying her phone with Lysol. She said she hated when the night shift used her desk and left their trash on it. Taniqua had style. She looked like she walked off a New York runway in her red silk crop top, tiny skirt and sexy four-inch satin heels with rhinestone buckles. She’s young, pretty and ready to party, Helen thought, and she’s stuck here.
Nick, skinny and jittery, came in carrying his usual breakfast of orange so
The computers came on at precisely 8:01. This morning, they were dialing New Hampshire. Helen glanced at her screen. “Hello, Mr. Harcourt. This is Helen with Tank Titan . . .”
Mr. Harcourt had just finished cussing her for waking him when she was called into Vito’s office.
Vito looked more like a sausage than ever, with a tight red shirt for a casing. He was not his usual chipper self.
“They want to see you upstairs,” he said. “I hear you called the cops on a survey client and accused him of murdering some broad. Helen, did you have to pick a rich one on the A-list? You’re a good seller. I’d like to keep you. But I hired you. It’s my heinie in the wringer, too.”
Helen didn’t say anything. It wasn’t Vito’s fault. For all she knew, the New York lizards would come down and fire him or break his legs or whatever those scary guys considered corporate discipline.
Helen rode up the elevator up to Girdner Surveys, feeling like she was ascending into heaven for final judgement. She would be cast out into boiler-room hell soon enough. When the doors opened, Helen was once again startled by the contrast between the boiler room’s dirt and the survey side’s elegance.
Melva, the dignified day receptionist, said, “You’re supposed to go to Penelope’s office. Some lawyer’s been in there since seven thirty. And Helen . . . good luck.”
“I’ll need it,” Helen said.
She knocked and went in. Penelope was sitting more rigidly than usual, like an Egyptian stone statue. She did not invite Helen to sit down. Helen stood there like a kitchen maid who’d dropped the best teapot, while Penelope talked about her. Penelope’s buttoned-up suit had a tight bow at the throat, as if she needed to hold in her rage.
If I get to tell her to go to hell, it just might be worth it, Helen thought.
A sleek, plump man in blue pinstripes was sitting across from Penelope. This must be the lawyer. Penelope indicated Helen with a nod of her head. “This woman used this office to create an incident last night. It was unforgivable, but Mr. Asporth has graciously decided to overlook it. You’re sure you don’t want her fired?” Penelope acted like a queen, casually offering to execute a worthless slave.
“Mr. Asporth has specifically requested that she not be fired,” the lawyer said. “It is his express wish that she return to her job as a—what is it?” He looked at his notes. “Oh, yes, a survey taker.”
Smart man, Helen thought. Mr. Asporth is afraid if I’m fired, I’ll make a stink and have plenty of time to do it.
“But if she discusses this incident with anyone, including the authorities, we’ll be forced to take action against your company. After all, she is an employee of Girdner Surveys and its parent company as well.”
I don’t have any money, Helen thought. But Girdner was loaded. Asporth knew what he was doing.
The lawyer rose, fat with confidence, and left without a goodbye.
Helen was still standing. Penelope turned furious eyes on her and said in a hissing whisper, “You heard him. You’ll keep your job, but not because I want you to. If I hear you’ve been talking to anyone, you’re out on the street. I’ll make sure you never work in Broward County again.”
Helen breathed a sigh. By some miracle, she still had her job. She went back down to the boiler room and told Vito.
“Good,” he grunted. “Sit down and start selling.”
Helen tried to concentrate on her sales pitch, but she couldn’t. The scene in the office had been humiliating. Her hands itched for that crowbar. She longed to smash Penelope’s computer. And that was just the beginning. But she tamped down her rage. She still had her job.
She had something else, too. Hank Asporth’s actions had just confirmed that he’d murdered that woman. An innocent man would demand she be fired, not send a slippery lawyer to shut her up—and make sure she kept her job. An out-of-work Helen would have time to stir up trouble. She would trust her instincts once again and hope she didn’t get herself into trouble. But she knew better.
Maybe Helen couldn’t talk about the murder here at work, but she could do some background checking. She had to sell so she could get survey duty again and look at those computer files.
“I gotta get a sale,” jittery Nick said. He had the computer next to hers. “I really want to keep this job.”
“Me, too,” Helen said.
“But you’re selling,” Nick said, biting into his fifth jelly doughnut of the day. “I saw your numbers on the board yesterday. I haven’t had a sale in two weeks. If I don’t sell anything soon, I’m gone.”
He was right, and they both knew it. Nick was a junkie trying to go straight. He’d been on the street, then moved into a halfway house. Now he was living in a rented trailer. He was touchingly proud of that. But the less he sold, the more twitchy he grew. Now Nick could hardly sit still long enough to sell anything. Helen suspected he was back on drugs.
“I’ve got to work, Nick,” she said.
Helen tried to sell all morning. But the more she pushed her potential clients, the more phones were slammed down. She was cursed, insulted and propositioned. The computers were calling Kentucky and Tennessee in areas where the gene pool needed some chlorine.
“Hi, Mr. Moser, this is Helen with Tank Titan. We make a septic-tank cleaner that is guaranteed to help reduce large chunks, odors and wet spots.”
“Wet spots?” Mr. Moser had a Gomer Pyle accent. “Wet spots are a big problem for me, honey. Got them all over my mattress. You wanna come over and—”
Helen hung up and hit REMOVE FROM LIST so no other telemarketer would be subjected to him.
No one was selling that morning. There wasn’t a single sale posted on the board. All around her, she heard the rustle of candy wrappers and chip bags. Telemarketers ate through their stress. Jittery Nick ate yet another jelly doughnut and popped the top on his third can of orange soda. Marina, the Latina single mother, was scarfing Snickers. She couldn’t afford day care. Ramon, her dark-eyed toddler, played at her feet on the dirty carpet, a truck in one hand and a melting candy bar in the other.
Taniqua was popping Pringles. Helen noticed a slight bulge above her red skirt. When Helen first met Taniqua, she’d had a model’s flat stomach. Now, like nearly everyone else in the boiler room, she’d packed on pounds. Helen had put on five pounds in two weeks, which was why she struggled to ignore the call of the salt-and-vinegar chips in her desk drawer.
“I don’t hear you talking,” Vito said. He walked the aisles with a fat black monitor phone, listening in on conversations, trying to get the staff to say the right stuff and sell. Finally, even he gave up.
“Break time!” Vito said. “Everyone clock out and come into my office.”
The telemarketers groaned. They would have to listen to a Vito lecture at their own expense. Sixty telemarketers piled into Vito’s plywood-paneled office. The crowd pushed Helen forward until she was sitting on the edge of Vito’s dusty desk. Vito marched up and down behind it, a rotund general trying to rally his dispirited troops.
“You!” he said, pointing at Taniqua. “Why didn’t you make your last sale?”
“When I say she ought to buy it from me, she say she want to think about it,” Taniqua said in a soft voice.
“And you said?”
“I say she should buy it.”
“But she didn’t, did she? Here’s what you should have said, ‘What’s there to think about? It’s like putting oil in your car every three thousand miles. It’s more expensive not to do it than to do it.’ Then she would have bought it.
“You! Richie! What about your last call?”
“Some old lady said, ‘I’m not interested’ and hung up.”
“And you said?”
Richie shrugged, too discouraged to answer.
“You should have said, ‘Not interested? Not interested in saving over seven thousand dollars in repairs?’
“You gotta fight for those sales, people. You got to use psychology. How many of you heard, ‘I have to ask my wife’?”
Most of the room raised their hands.
“Don’t let any guy use that excuse. Here’s what you say: ‘Does your wife ask you when she buys fifty bucks worth of lingerie? Be a man. Make your own decisions.’
“Make him feel like he doesn’t have anything between his legs unless he buys that septic-tank cleaner. That’s psychology. Selling is aggressiveness. It’s a tug-of-war. The last one to let go is the loser. And I don’t employ losers.”
With each word, Vito punched the air with thick pink fingers like hot dogs. He’d attack someone’s manhood to make a sale, but Helen didn’t work that way. Watching him shout, pace and punch made her more tired. She looked down at Vito’s desk, and saw the boiler-room employee roster for the week. Helen looked at the ninety names on the list. She only recognized sixty of them. That’s because there were only sixty desks in the phone room. Vito’s list had thirty phantom employees. What was he doing?
“What am I doing? I’m trying to get you to sell. Right, Helen?”
She looked up, startled and guilty. “Right, Vito,” she said. When in doubt, always agree with the boss. Her eyes shifted back to the bloated roster. She checked the names again. No doubt about it. Vito had listed thirty people who didn’t exist.
“End of lecture,” he said. The effort left him red-faced, with sweat rings on his shirt. “Go get me some sales.”
Helen couldn’t sell beer at a frat party today. It was hopeless. She would not get upstairs to do survey work tonight, and she had to. How else could she search for more information about Hank Asporth? What if she went into a sales slump and got fired? She’d seen it happen before. She might never get up to the survey section again.
-->
