The Dead-End Job Mysteries Box Set 1

by Elaine Viets

  Then she realized that the man and woman were not together. He was homicide detective Dwight Hansel, and he’d bulled his way into the shop. Helen ignored him and settled the woman into a dressing room with enough evening gowns to keep her busy.

  Hansel was standing at the counter when she returned. Helen was freezingly polite. “May I help you?” she said.

  “Yeah, you can help me,” Hansel said, taking out his nail clippers. “You can help me figure out what’s going on in here.”

  Clip. Clip. He was clipping his nails. Gross.

  “We sell women’s apparel,” she said.

  “Do you now?” he said. “Well, I had the phone company run some numbers here. You been talking to some suppliers, all right, but they ain’t dealing dresses.”

  Clip. Clip. Clip. Little bits of gray-white nail flew in every direction. One landed on the counter.

  “I’ve worked here less than two months,” Helen said. “I have no idea who Christina called. I told you everything I know.”

  Clip. Clip. Clip. More nail bits pinged on the counter.

  “Maybe you’d like to tell it to a grand jury,” he said.

  Helen felt the fear grip her. Hansel saw it in her face and pushed harder. “If you lie to a grand jury, that’s a crime. Or should I say another crime? You might want to think about what you’ll be wearing then. Are two-piece suits in fashion?”

  Clip. Clip. Helen didn’t answer.

  “The Broward County Jail’s got some nice ones for their women prisoners. Sort of a beige-brown. That color would look good with your hair. On the back they say ‘Broward County Jail.’ How’s that for a fashion statement?”

  Helen said nothing. She was too frightened. Hansel put away his nail clippers, threw his business card on the counter, and walked out.

  She used the card to scrape the nail bits off the counter. Then she tore it into pieces.

  Dwight Hansel would keep harassing her until he found something, then he’d lock her up. It wouldn’t matter that Christina had called those drug dealers. Helen would get the blame.

  Meanwhile, she was getting death threats. She had stumbled onto something. She just didn’t know what. The police, or at least Dwight Hansel, might think Christina was too much of a bimbo to blackmail people, but Helen knew better.

  She thought there might be more secrets in the CDs. There was still one tower she had not examined. But she didn’t want to stay alone in the store after closing, not after that creepy phone call.

  Tara had called in sick that morning with the wine flu, so Helen was at the store alone. Business was slow. She decided she’d made enough money for Mr. Roget yesterday. She would take a break and look for the Dylan CD, the one that held Joe’s secrets.

  Helen put out the “back in 15 minutes” sign and pulled on her formal twelve-button search gloves. She checked every CD in the tower. Nothing. There were no Dylan albums.

  There were two hundred forty CDs in those towers, and she was going to open every case if she had to. She grabbed one from the middle: Music for Lovers, a collection of love songs.

  Wait a minute. “You Gotta Serve Somebody” might be in a collection. Maybe that’s why she couldn’t find it. Five minutes later, Helen spotted the Dylan song in the “Sopranos” sound track.

  She held her breath as she opened the CD. The photos inside were so sad she could hardly bear to look at them.

  The first was taken at night. It showed a ramshackle boat loaded almost to the waterline with passengers. The people looked thin, brown-skinned, and miserable. Some were shivering, others were clinging to one another. A woman in the foreground was so weary, she seemed near collapse. Helen thought she was no more than twenty, but her eyes were much older.

  The boat was aground near a mangrove swamp. What didn’t show were the hordes of hungry mosquitoes and the rank stink of the murky water. Some passengers were wading in the dark water or helping others off the boat. Helen thought of sticking her own feet in that snake-infested muck and shuddered.

  These were illegal immigrants. Helen knew it. She had seen too many scenes like this on TV, when their boats landed in Miami or Hollywood Beach. The INS sent them right back where they came from.

  Then she looked a little closer. One of the men helping people off the boat was Joe.

  Christina’s ex was bringing in illegal immigrants. Maybe that was why he had no alibi for Christina’s death. He could not tell the police he was handling an illegal shipment of people.

  Unless Joe had another good reason for no alibi: he killed Christina that weekend. His ex had enough material to put him away for a long time.

  Helen remembered Brittney and Christina sitting in the back of the store, cackling like witches and brewing revenge for Joe: “Immigration? No. Bad idea . . . Some guys in Miami would like to know what he’s up to, though, and they aren’t as nice as the IRS . . . When I finish, Joe will wish he was never born.”

  Instead, Christina had been destroyed.

  The second photo looked like those 1890s pictures of New York tenements. More people than Helen could count were crammed in a high-ceilinged, windowless room. They could hardly move, it was so crowded. Stained, sheetless mattresses were on the floor. Four people were sleeping on one. Laundry was hanging across a back corner. Through the limp and tattered clothes, Helen saw a toilet. It was near a table with bread, a giant can with a knife stuck in it (peanut butter? meat spread?), and soda cans.

  This wasn’t a photograph of 1890s immigrant misery. These pictures were recent. The clothes and shoes were modern.

  Illegal immigrants.

  There was another photo of what was probably the outside of the same building. At least, the yawning doorways were similar, and the inside walls were the same dingy green. The building looked like a warehouse. The street number was painted over the front door. In the background were four giant candy-striped smokestacks, a Port Everglades landmark. Sailors steered their boats by those smokestacks.

  Helen remembered the business story Christina squirreled away in the manuals. It said Joe’s company had bought a warehouse near Port Everglades. What was that address? Helen stood up, heard her knees crack, and felt needles and pins in her feet. She limped over to the stack of manuals and found the dull story.

  Now Helen found that story riveting. The addresses were the same.

  Joe was mixed up with importing illegal immigrants, probably from the Caribbean, and Christina had the pictures to prove it. “You Gotta Serve Somebody” was another of her ugly jokes.

  Immigrant smuggling was a lucrative business, if Joe’s Ferrari was any indication, but you needed the morals of a slave trader. The immigrants paid high prices to be packed in leaky tubs and smuggled to America. The cruelest smugglers didn’t even take their passengers ashore. They dumped them in the water within sight of land. Some never knew they’d arrived in America. Their dead bodies washed ashore.

  Once here, the unlucky worked as wage slaves, making far less than Helen’s seven seventy an hour. Helen remembered Christina asking Tara about the kind of maid she wanted.

  “Do you mind a Haitian?” Christina had said. “What about someone who doesn’t speak English?”

  “I don’t care what they speak as long as they scrub my floors,” Tara had said. “Brittney has a real gem. She pays her almost nothing but room and board. The woman is practically a slave.”

  They were slaves, chained to their low-paying jobs by their fake papers, their lack of education, and sometimes, their lack of English. They lived in little rooms in luxurious homes and were utterly isolated. Domestics did not hang around the yacht club or get a cappuccino at the local patisserie. They couldn’t complain about their pay or working conditions or they’d be deported. They had no job benefits and no future.

  Anyone who hired illegal immigrants broke the employment laws, but few of Juliana’s customers wanted cabinet posts.

  Joe was Christina’s source for those reliable scrubbing slaves. Helen would bet the rent that Christ
ina collected a fee for finding maids for her customers. Joe probably got a kickback, too.

  When they split, Christina wanted revenge, and she knew enough to get Joe in big trouble. Maybe Detective Dwight Hansel wasn’t so dumb after all, if he believed Joe had killed Christina. Helen had the motive right in her hand.

  Helen dusted herself off, put away her twelve-button kid gloves, and called Sarah to crow about her discovery before she opened the store again. (Well, she didn’t say which fifteen minutes she’d be back, did she?)

  She was lucky. Sarah was home and answering her phone.

  “I’ve got something,” Helen said. “Something big. These have to be pictures of an illegal immigrant smuggling operation. And Joe’s involved.”

  She described the photos.

  “That’s what you say when you see the photos,” Sarah said. “Joe could say he was rescuing some poor strangers when their boat went aground. Does the photo indicate these are illegal immigrants?”

  “No,” Helen said. “But it’s obvious.”

  “Why? Because they’re not holding visas? You can’t even prove that boat photo was taken in Florida. It could have been the Bahamas or some other island.”

  “What about those awful warehouse photos?” Helen said. “One shows the striped smokestacks. That’s definitely Fort Lauderdale.”

  “Any date on those pictures?”

  “No.” Helen could feel her triumph slipping away.

  “I didn’t think so,” Sarah said. “Joe could say the photos were taken before he bought the warehouse. He’s not in those pictures, is he?”

  “No,” Helen said. “I have absolutely nothing.”

  “But you do. You have a place to start.”

  “You don’t expect me to go to Joe’s office and confront him, do you?”

  “Are you nuts?” Sarah said. “The cops think Joe did it, too. Stay away from that man. He’s dangerous.”

  “But I can talk to Brittney,” Helen said. She remembered those long afternoons the women spent on the black loveseats, whispering their hatred for Joe, planning his downfall. “Brittney had no love for Joe. She helped plot revenge against him. I bet Brittney has the dirt on that maid business.”

  “What are you going to do?” Sarah asked.

  “Something safe and smart for a change,” Helen said. “Brittney has the key to this. I have her address in our files. It’s time I paid her a visit.”

  Chapter 29

  Fifty-five. Sixty. Sixty-five.

  Helen felt around inside Chocolate, her stuffed bear, for more money. She pulled out a crumpled five dollar bill and two singles. Seventy-two dollars. That was all she had saved after the rent was paid.

  The cab to Brittney’s house should cost about twenty dollars round-trip, but you never knew. Peggy would have driven her, but Helen didn’t want to drag Peggy into this. A bus was two bucks, but the next one wasn’t until eight p.m., and the last bus left Brittney’s neighborhood before ten. That might not give her enough time.

  Helen put the seventy-two dollars in her purse, then walked to the Riverside Hotel on Las Olas and asked the doorman to call a cab. She gave him the two singles.

  The cab driver had a heavy accent Helen could not place, but she understood one thing: he was rude. He listened to a radio station turned up loud. It sounded like French, but not quite. Haitian-Creole? He did not turn on the air conditioner. Helen amused herself by counting the acne scars on the back of his neck while the cab idled in traffic.

  Brittney lived in Bridge Harbour, a high-priced neighborhood near the Seventeenth Street Bridge. It was an odd mix of architecture. The older houses were sprawling one-story places that knew how to hunker down in a hurricane. The new up-thrusting tract mansions were two- and three-story affairs, badly designed for high winds. The fake Spanish tiles would turn into Frisbees. The balconies, cupolas, and other gewgaws would sail off into the storm. The builders swore the tall windows were hurricane-proof, but that claim had not been tested yet.

  Helen could not admire the view. New houses were popping up like zits at prom-time in Bridge Harbour. Magnificent mansions overlooked the aqua Porta-Potties of the construction site next door.

  Brittney lived in a two-story white cube. It looked starkly expensive, like the offices of a top-notch plastic surgery group. Helen could see a swimming pool with a waterfall. A Hatteras cabin cruiser was tied up at the backyard dock. Parked in the driveway was a black Land Rover and a red Porsche. Brittney had a few bucks. Why was she dating aging mobsters? Or was that how she got her money?

  Luxury cars were common as Hondas in this neighborhood. Helen wondered how the neighbors tolerated the old gray beater next door. Its rusted trunk was tied with twine. A tired woman in a white uniform heaved two bags onto the seat and drove off. The beat-up car must belong to a servant.

  “This is the house. Stop here and wait, please,” Helen said, yelling at the driver above the Haitian radio station.

  “You pay me up front now,” the driver said. He did not put the car in Park.

  “I’ll pay, but you have to wait for me,” Helen said. She counted out the fare to the exact penny.

  “You didn’t tip me,” the driver said, indignantly.

  “I won’t, unless you wait,” she said.

  Only then did he put the cab in Park. He was going to wait.

  Brittney’s house looked bigger and more impersonal as Helen approached. The flower beds had spiky plants and bristly bushes growing in rocks. The bronze front doors belonged on a museum. The pet flap cut into the garage door looked too ordinary for this place.

  A chunky brown-skinned woman in a snow-white uniform answered the door. Helen wondered if this was the wonderful wage slave, Maria.

  “You wait here, please,” the woman said.

  The inside of Brittney’s home was all white: white marble floor, white textured walls, angular white couches like ice floes next to ice shards of glass tables. White orchids were the only living things in this ice palace, and they looked made of wax.

  The walls boasted a lesser Picasso. Helen thought the colors were drab.

  The air conditioning was set so low, Helen was shivering by the time Brittney appeared. She walked languidly, as if she was drifting in a dream.

  Brittney wore a white string bikini. Helen had flossed her teeth with more material. Brittney was almost nude and absolutely perfect. She was not cold in that getup. She was the princess who ruled this ice palace.

  “Helen, from the shop. What brings you here today?” Brittney said. Her whispery voice was clear and cool, like a breeze from a cave. She did not offer Helen anything to drink or ask her to sit down.

  “I wanted to ask about your maid,” Helen said.

  “Do you need one?” Brittney said. Was there a hint of contempt? Helen couldn’t tell. As usual, Brittney showed no emotion.

  “No, a customer does,” Helen lied. “Tara raves about your maid, Maria.”

  “Christina made the arrangements,” Brittney said. “And Christina’s dead.”

  “Do you know where she got the maids?”

  “Why do you ask?” Brittney did not deny that she knew.

  “Was it Joe? Was he part of an illegal immigrant operation?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Brittney said.

  She did, Helen thought.

  “I think he helps bring them in and keeps them at his warehouse.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Brittney said.

  “I think you do,” Helen said. “The police believe Joe killed Christina. Don’t you care?”

  “Of course I care,” Brittney said. But a look at the ice palace showed Brittney did not care for any living thing except herself. Helen tried to appeal to her self-interest.

  “You and Christina were plotting against Joe,” Helen said.

  “Why do you say that?” Brittney whispered.

  “Because I heard you. If Joe found out about your plans, you may need protection. I could put you in touch with a homicide detect
ive.”

  “And get myself in trouble? No, thank you,” Brittney said.

  “I’m sure you could get immunity for hiring an illegal alien.”

  “I’m not worried about that,” Brittney said. “Telling the police about Joe will get me killed. Do you know the kind of people he deals with? They would put me in a barrel.”

  “Who are they, Brittney? Tell me, if you’re afraid to tell the police.”

  “They’re—”

  But Brittney never finished. A big ball of white fur streaked into the room, then stopped at Helen’s feet. It was a cat with golden eyes, a cuddly gray-and-white body, and front feet the size of catchers’ mitts.

  “Thumbs!” Helen said.

  “Mrrrrr,” the cat said, rubbing against her legs.

  “His name is Mittens,” Brittney said.

  The maid came running in. “Sorry, missis, sorry. I know you say lock him in, but the cat he got out. He opens doors. He is very smart.”

  “Don’t stand there jabbering, Maria,” Brittney said. “Get him out of here.”

  Maria picked up the big cat. It struggled to get free, scratched her arm, and jumped down.

  “Here, Thumbs,” Helen said. The cat tried to run to her, but Maria tackled the animal, this time successfully. She carried him into the depths of the house.

  Helen had no doubts now. “That’s Thumbs. That’s Christina’s cat. The one the police can’t find. You killed Christina.”

  “Killed her? That’s ridiculous. You are accusing me of murder because I have a cat?”

  “A six-toed cat,” Helen said. “Just like Christina’s.”

  “Polydactylism is not uncommon,” Brittney said.

  “You wanted Christina’s cat. You tried to buy it from her. I was there.”

  “You better watch what you’re saying,” Brittney said. Ice crystals seemed to form in that cold whisper. “I can slap you with a lawsuit.”

  She was almost naked in her string bikini, but her nudity gave her a greater authority, as if clothes were for lesser mortals.

  “If you’re going to accuse me of murder, you better prove it. Now get out before I call security and have them throw you out.”