The Dead-End Job Mysteries Box Set 1

by Elaine Viets

  The search was swift and efficient. The police took some papers and computer disks, but it seemed clear they found nothing exciting. Christina had removed her troublesome special purses before she left for vacation. The police did find some tiny baggies, but they held extra buttons. If there were any stray pills from the infamous purse spill, the cleaning service had vacuumed them up weeks ago.

  The two detectives gave Helen a receipt for the items they took and said they would get more detailed records from the phone company. Helen wondered if they would find any suspicious calls and felt another jagged stab of fear. There was no way she could prove Christina made those calls, not her.

  Helen and Tara were both relieved when the two detectives left but wary of talking about the search.

  “Did they bring in the drug-sniffing dogs?” Tara asked.

  “No,” Helen said.

  “We’re lucky Detective Hansel is lazy,” Tara said. “The cops did that to a friend of mine. He’d moved his stash, but the dogs knew it had been there and set up a racket. The cops made his life hell.”

  Tara knows about the purses, Helen thought. But all she said was, “Detective Hansel didn’t mention anything about the two armed men who forced their way in here.”

  “Oh,” Tara said. That single syllable held immeasurable relief. Both women hoped the poor communication between the two police departments would keep that event buried.

  The awkward silence was broken when the doorbell rang. Juliana’s regulars began stopping by like mourners visiting a funeral home. They were dressed in impeccable black and had the air of women at a wake. They knew Christina would have no memorial service. This was the only way her favorites could pay their respects.

  Brittney, Tiffany, and Bianca all showed up, fortunately after the police left. The three chief mourners huddled together on the silk-satin loveseats with Tara, drinking bottled water, remembering Christina, and discussing their favorite plastic surgeries. Helen, mindful that she was not one of them, stood respectfully nearby, feeling like a funeral home attendant. Actually, she felt more like the corpse. She was still hungover from last night.

  Brittney was talking about a society dinner party. “The hostess was a rich doctor’s wife,” she said in a ghostly whisper.

  “Aren’t they all?” Tiffany said.

  “Except for the rich lawyer’s wives,” Tara said.

  “Her penthouse condo cost millions,” Brittney said. “It was right on the water. But she has the worst eye job in Lauderdale. When she blinked, one eyelid closed slower than the other. I couldn’t stop looking at her. Finally, I had to ask the name of her surgeon. I wanted to make sure I never went to him.”

  The others shuddered delicately. Tiffany seemed unaware that her own eye job was less than successful.

  “It takes such courage to have any work done,” said the radically rearranged Brazilian, Bianca. “One slip and you’re ugly forever.” Helen figured with all the surgery they’d had, these women had the courage of a Roman legion.

  They discussed who did the best eye jobs (upper and lower), which plastic surgeons corrected the other doctors’ mistakes, and the merits of face lifts versus fat injections.

  “Fat injections have less risk, but they only last eight months,” Tara said.

  “And that’s if the doctor doesn’t get greedy and dilute the fat. If he does, then it’s four to six months,” Tiffany said.

  “Or if she does,” whispered Brittney. “Women doctors are just as greedy as men.”

  “Greed is the one place where women have true equality,” Tara said. Helen found that line strangely haunting.

  The doorbell chimed, and the women looked up. “Helen, you can’t let that one in,” Tara said, alarmed. “She’s wearing a beige Ann Taylor suit. Christina said anyone who wore Ann Taylor was too boring for words. This woman is definitely too boring for Juliana’s.”

  Helen liked the suit. In fact, she had one almost like it. “She’s carrying a Kate Spade bag,” Helen said firmly.

  “It’s last season’s,” Bianca sniffed. “They sell them at no-name designer sales. Look inside. It will be stamped ‘salvage. ’ ”

  Helen buzzed in the woman anyway, to the fierce disapproval of the loveseat set. It was not enough for them to be admitted. Others must be excluded. Otherwise, the green door meant nothing.

  The Ann Taylor woman only confirmed Helen’s poor judgment in their surgically altered eyes. She committed one faux pas after another.

  Ms. Taylor asked where the price tags were, and the loveseat women rolled their eyes. Juliana’s customers knew price tags were never displayed.

  They sniggered openly when Ms. Taylor said, “Excuse me, but someone left her high heels in the dressing room.” Juliana’s customers knew the shoes were there as a courtesy if they needed to see how a dress looked with heels.

  They were not surprised when Ms. Taylor left without buying anything.

  Helen sighed and, for the tenth time that morning, wished Christina was there. She always knew what to say to her regulars, how to sell to them, and how to soothe them. Helen liked Juliana’s customers, most of the time. She pitied them sometimes, and she always envied their money. But she felt they were from some alien planet. They were so small, so delicate, so dependent on men.

  But we’re all dependent on men, Helen thought. I could only go so far at my corporation before I hit my head on the glass ceiling, and I hit it hard.

  Director of Human Resources was the title with the money and the power. It was the job Helen wanted, but it always went to a man at her company. Helen settled for second best, the duller, safer title of benefits director. Her career was good, but not great. But she had her marriage. Then she found out her husband had betrayed her, and she’d picked up the crowbar that wrecked her life. In court, the judge, another man, decided her awful future.

  Maybe we aren’t so different after all, Helen thought. But she could never say that to Juliana’s women. They seemed to know that Helen’s pantyhose had runs in the toes stopped with clear nail polish. They would look at her self-manicured nails and four-year-old Ungaro suit and see no resemblance.

  Precisely at one, Bianca, Brittney, and Tiffany rose gracefully from the silk-satin loveseats. Each woman told Helen how sorry she was to learn of Christina’s death. Each bought something for a few hundred dollars—a purse or a scarf or a belt—as if she was making a memorial donation in Christina’s name. Then they were gone. Helen wondered if they would come back.

  Helen knew she was not the right person to run Juliana’s. There was something wrong with her. She hated needless cosmetic surgery. Helen thought most people looked better with their original face, unless they were disfigured. To her, the marks of maturity were not disfiguring. They gave people character. So she told the regulars she didn’t know who did the best lip work and breast implants. They knew she was lying. These women did not want to hear Helen’s lectures on the dangers of silicone and collagen.

  When Juliana’s regulars wanted biopolymer injections, Helen did not tell them about exotic South American doctors, like Christina did. Instead, Helen gave them the phone numbers of the reporters who investigated the horrific damages. No one took the numbers.

  The next afternoon, Helen made her worst mistake. It was with Melissa, the little blonde with the large implants and the sexy, slightly popped gray eyes. Helen knew she’d mishandled the woman, but she felt she had to try to stop her.

  “You’ve taken over for Christina?” Melissa asked her.

  Helen said yes.

  “Then you must have her list of plastic surgeons. I need my eyes done. I have terrible bags.”

  Helen looked at Melissa’s smooth pale skin. It was flawless.

  “How old are you, Melissa?” Helen asked.

  “Twenty-seven,” she said.

  “You don’t need an eye job,” she said. “Your skin is perfection.”

  “It’s not,” Melissa said. She squeezed out one crystal tear. “My boyfriend left me for
a younger woman. It’s my eyes. I know it. If my eyes were OK, I’d still have him.”

  “Did you ever wonder if the problem was not your face?” Helen said.

  “What do you mean?” Melissa said, suddenly alert and tear-free.

  “I mean,” Helen said, “that you are beautiful, but you don’t believe it. You cannot see yourself as others do. Why let some quack cut on you? He could ruin your looks forever. A therapist would be less painful.”

  “Are you calling me crazy?” Melissa’s eyes were not popped now, but hard and narrowed.

  “I’m merely suggesting—” Helen began.

  “I’m outta here,” she said. “And I’m not coming back. I don’t have to listen to some nowhere sales clerk tell me I’m crazy.”

  Melissa stalked out, slamming the green door.

  Another customer lost forever, Helen thought. Soon, the sharp-eyed owner would notice that sales were down. Helen would be out of a job. No one else could take Christina’s place. No one else had the right combination of sophistication and sleaze.

  Juliana’s was slowly dying, and Helen could not prevent that death, either.

  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 in
side 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.”