The Dead-End Job Mysteries Box Set 1

by Elaine Viets

  He would be panhandling soon enough.

  At the Coronado that afternoon, Margery was drinking a screwdriver by the pool.

  “I thought you’d be high on life,” Helen said.

  “OK, I admit it. Fred and Ethel are getting on my nerves, too,” Margery said. “But they pay the rent, they aren’t weird, and they aren’t conning anyone—unlike some of my previous tenants.”

  “I’m beginning to miss the con man,” Helen said. “At least he never lectured me on the joys of clean living. How long are they staying?”

  “For the season, at least. They signed a lease through March.”

  March seemed a long time away, especially when Fred and Ethel came bouncing through the gate, looking preternaturally chipper.

  “We had a lovely lunch on Las Olas,” Ethel said. Helen could just imagine what the exclusive Las Olas restaurants made of her gold tennis shoes and I LOVE FLORIDA sweats printed with maps. The state looked even bigger stretched across Ethel’s rear end.

  “It was lovely till some bum asked us for money,” Fred said.

  “I told him to get a job,” Ethel said. “I don’t know why those people won’t work.”

  Helen saw Nick sitting by the trash can, crying for his lost job and soon-to-be-lost home.

  “Because you people hung up on him.” Helen stormed off, slamming the gate. She heard Ethel say, “What set her off?”

  I can’t take any more misery, Helen thought, as she wandered aimlessly around her neighborhood. The walk did not comfort her. The neighborhood was disappearing. The exuberant Art Deco apartments and affordable cottages were being torn down for overpriced condos. Soon only the rich would live here.

  Porta-Potties and construction Dumpsters camped on every block. A construction worker whistled at her, and Helen glared at him. He was the enemy, the destroyer. She shouldn’t complain about Fred and Ethel. If her landlady couldn’t keep their unit rented, the Coronado might be torn down, too. Then where would she live? In a soulless shoebox like Debbie.

  Everything she cared about seemed to be slipping away. She couldn’t stop the construction, but she could keep in touch with her friends.

  Helen rummaged in her purse for change, and then for Sarah’s phone number. She found a pay phone on Las Olas. “Hi, Sarah,” she said. “I haven’t talked to you in way too long. Want to meet for lunch sometime this week?”

  “Anything wrong with today?” Sarah said. “When do you have to be back at work?”

  “Not till five.”

  “Good. Do you like crab?”

  “Love it,” Helen said.

  “I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.”

  Helen ran back to her apartment. The pool was once more deserted. Helen was glad she didn’t have to face Margery after her outburst. She fed Thumbs and changed into her good black pantsuit, which was only a little tight from the potato chip binges.

  Chocolate, her stuffed bear, was nice and fat. She reached inside for a fistful of money and caught a flicker out of the corner of her eye. Someone had passed her window. She hadn’t shut the blinds. She tiptoed to the window hoping she would finally see her neighbor Phil, but no one was there. The man was maddening.

  Sarah pulled up in her Range Rover right on time, and Helen settled into its unaccustomed luxury. Her friend had played the stock market, parlaying a small inheritance into major money, thanks to Krispy Kreme doughnut stock. Now she indulged a taste for pretty clothes and jewelry. Today, she wore a silver and shell pink necklace that highlighted her rosy skin and dark hair.

  “Nice jewelry,” Helen said.

  “It’s a modern Navajo design,” Sarah said.

  The Range Rover was soon in the desolate wilderness by the Lauderdale airport. “Where are you taking me?” Helen said, looking uneasily at the acres of empty scrub, abandoned boatyards and rusting trailer parks. Sarah was wearing a small fortune around her neck.

  “Ever been to the Rustic Inn Crabhouse?”

  “Never heard of it. But if you say it’s good, it must be.” Sarah was a woman of size, free of the modern mania for dieting. She liked to eat well.

  The Rustic Inn lived up to its name. It was a series of long, low buildings sprawled along a canal. They looked like they’d been tossed there. Inside, the decor was early beer sign with offbeat touches: a Victorian bronze of a boy holding a crab, art-glass windows, a monster lobster claw over the bar. The claw was as long as an average lobster. Helen wondered what the outrageous crustacean had weighed.

  She breathed in the air, a heady mixture of butter and garlic. Then she heard the pounding. It sounded like the building was infested with carpenters. The tables were covered with newspapers and set with wooden mallets. The customers wore bibs, and were happily pounding crab legs and cracking claws.

  A waitress tied bibs on Helen and Sarah, and brought out their crab samplers: long golden crab legs, garlicky little blue crabs, pink Jonah crabs and half a lobster with clam stuffing, all swimming in butter.

  Helen picked up her mallet and hit a thick Jonah crab claw. Nothing happened.

  “You’re too polite,” Sarah said. “You’ve got to whack it hard, like this.” She dealt her crab claw a crushing blow.

  Helen swung her mallet harder. The claw cracked slightly. She thought of Nick and Vito, and Fred and Ethel, and hit the claw with a resounding thwack. It split wide open. This meal was downright therapeutic.

  “A little frustrated, are we?” Sarah said. “Want to tell me about it?”

  Helen did, starting with the night she heard Laredo die. When she finished, Sarah said, “Savannah sounds like a loose cannon. You’re lucky you weren’t arrested at Debbie’s. Now that the sister’s on the scene, why don’t you back away?”

  “I heard a murder. I can’t,” Helen said.

  “Of course you can,” Sarah said, sucking the meat out of a crab leg.

  “Savannah’s all alone. I have to help her.”

  “Savannah can take care of herself.”

  “She only looks tough,” Helen said. “She could disappear tomorrow and who would look for her? She’s one of the disposable people. I guess you’d call her trailer trash, but she’s braver than anyone I know. I don’t know how she keeps working those awful jobs.”

  “Are you doing this for her—or you?” Sarah said. It was amazing how shrewd she looked covered in butter sauce.

  Helen picked crab bits out of a smashed leg, while she searched for an answer. “I hate to see a rich guy like Hank Asporth get away with murder. He’s a skirt-chasing, martini-drinking user. He’s never worked a day in his life.”

  “Like your ex?” Sarah said.

  Another direct hit, Helen thought, and pounded a crab leg to inedible mush.

  “You can tell all that about Hank Asporth from a computer survey and one very strange phone conversation?” Sarah said.

  “Yes,” said Helen. She walloped a crab claw. “I know he’s a rich bully because he sent his lawyer to shut me up.”

  “But he didn’t succeed,” Sarah said. “You kept going. You found the sister. You’ve done your part—more than your part. You have a way out of this, but you won’t take it.”

  Helen swung her mallet again. The only sound was the crunch of buttered crab.

  “Helen, why are you being so stubborn?”

  “Because I’m sick of rich people trying to push me around. Rich people who never did anything to deserve their money, while Savannah and I work our fingers to the bone and get nowhere.”

  “You could get somewhere,” Sarah said, “if you’d let me get you a decent job. I’m worried about you, Helen. You’re mixed up in a murder. It’s because you’re working that ugly job. People call you terrible names all day. How can you stand it?”

  “I’m making twice what I made at the bookstore,” Helen said.

  “You’re paying too high a price. Let me find you a good job. I know lots of people—”

  Helen cut her off. She couldn’t be in a corporate computer and she couldn’
t tell Sarah why. “I have a job. I’m through with corporate life. I’m never wearing a suit and pantyhose again.”

  “But you have no life. You work morning and night, two five-hour shifts with a four-hour break in the afternoon. When’s the last time you kicked back and had white wine with Peggy by the pool?”

  “Weeks ago, but that’s not because of my job. Margery rented 2C to this awful couple, Fred and Ethel Mertz.”

  “Nobody’s named that.”

  “They are. They’re so smug. They give sermons. Peggy and I can’t stand them. When they show up, we go inside.”

  “They sound horrible.” Sarah must have seen she was getting nowhere trying to change Helen’s mind. She changed the subject instead. “How’s your crab?”

  “Spectacular,” Helen said. “The butter, the garlic, the parsley potatoes. This is heaven on earth.”

  After a brief interlude of pounding and picking crab meat, Sarah returned to her theme. “You can’t date anyone with the hours you work. And you won’t meet a nice man in that boiler room.”

  Helen had been telling herself the same thing, but she didn’t want to hear it from Sarah. “Don’t need men when there are buttered crab claws.”

  “Helen, be serious.”

  “Sarah, you used to say my problem was I dated too many men. You were right. I made some bad choices. Now you complain I don’t date enough. I’m learning to live without men. I’m sick of men. Men have brought me nothing but misery.”

  Her friend looked sad. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. You’re still not over the man who betrayed you.”

  “Which one?” Helen said, and hit a crab so hard it exploded like a bomb.

  Chapter 10

  A black Mercedes with smoked-glass windows slid into the boiler room’s parking lot, silent as a shark. It looked ominous. It also looked out of place. The power car sat among the beat-up staff clunkers like a prince in a housing project.

  Was someone from the New York office here to squeeze higher quotas out of the overworked staff?

  Helen ducked behind an old lime green Dodge and watched. The man who got out was not an elegant New York lizard, but she recognized his type. He was an executive from his high-priced haircut to his shined shoes.

  At her old job in St. Louis, when she made six figures, Helen wouldn’t have given him a second look. But he was so unusual here, she studied him. His hair was a meticulously cut and shining black. He was beautifully shaved. Most boiler-room men had Miami Vice stubble. Even the clean-shaven ones missed little patches, as if they were too hungover to handle razors.

  This man had the sleek, well-fed look of someone who dined on expense-account lunches. His shirt was professionally pressed and white enough to snowblind. His gray suit pants broke perfectly on his shoe tops. There was one odd note. He wasn’t wearing a suit jacket or tie. His type was rarely out of uniform, even in South Florida’s heat.

  She followed him into the boiler room. He went straight to Vito’s office. Helen clocked in for the evening shift.

  Someone had left a full ashtray on top of her computer, bristling with lipsticked butts. A half-empty Big Gulp was leaking on her desk. Where did that come from? She dumped the mess in the trash and wiped up the sticky soda. She tried not to look at Nick’s sad, empty chair. Sitting next to the jangled junkie had been an ordeal, but she still felt sorry for him.

  “Hi,” said a cheerful male voice, and a soft, manicured hand was stuck in her face. “I’m Jack Lace, your new seat mate.”

  The executive with the smoked-glass Mercedes sat down in Nick’s chair. She’d bet his pampered bottom had never touched anything but leather office chairs before it landed on Nick’s ripped seat.

  “You’re working here?” Helen couldn’t hide her surprise.

  “Absolutely,” he said. “A new day, a new challenge, that’s what I always say.”

  “But you don’t look like . . . I mean you’re so . . .”

  “I used to be a broker,” he said.

  “Oh. Nine-eleven do you in?”

  “Something like that,” Jack said. “But sales are sales. If I can sell stocks, I can sell septic-tank cleaner. Right now, both are in the toilet.”

  He laughed at his own joke. Helen noticed he wore no wedding ring. He must have seen her staring at his hand. “I’m divorced,” he said. “It’s the main reason I’m here.”

  “Bad?” Helen asked.

  “The worst,” Jack said.

  “Another veteran of the marriage wars,” she said. “Well, we’ve got plenty of them. See Zelda over there—the tiny woman in the big red sweater? She’s always cold, poor thing. Husband divorced her after thirty-five years. Didn’t give her a nickel. She’s sixty-one, with no work skills outside the home.”

  “Um, yes. Well, I’m sure there are two sides to every story. Are you married?”

  “Not anymore,” Helen said.

  “Good,” Jack said.

  The computers beeped on. “We’re calling Connecticut this evening,” Helen said. “It’s fairly decent. New Hampshire and Vermont are harder sells.”

  “All right, people, let’s get our heinies in gear,” Vito bawled, ending their conversation. Helen’s evening went strange from the first call.

  “Hi, Jody. I’m Helen with Tank Titan and—”

  Jody was weeping. “Me and my boyfriend are breaking up. I’m moving out. I caught him with the lady next door. Walked right in on them. I never knew they were making it. I feel like such a fool. He said he was lonely.”

  “Well, well,” Helen said. “I’ll fix it so he’s never lonely for a telemarketer.”

  “You do that, honey,” Jody said. “And thank you.”

  Helen hit CALL BACK. Women had to stick together.

  “Loud and proud people, let’s hear you loud and proud,” Vito yelled, but Helen had nothing to be proud about. A tired mother, her voice trembling at the breaking point, was next. “I’m trying to get four kids to bed,” she said.

  Four kids? At least I’m not in that trap, Helen thought.

  While she worked, Vito stalked the aisles, plump and pink as a prize pig, listening to their sales pitches on his black monitor phone, telling them what to say to make a sale.

  Helen thought she was doing well with an Indianapolis woman. Then the woman said, “I don’t know. My septic-tank man told me to never put anything in my tank.”

  She was about to hang up, but Vito materialized at her desk with his black phone, whispering lies in her ear like a swinish Satan.

  “Of course he did, ma’am,” Vito said softly. “Your septic-tank man would lose his job if you used Tank Titan. Buy our product and you’ll never have to pump your septic tank again. We guarantee it. Otherwise, we’ll refund every penny of the cost of our product.”

  But not the repair costs, Helen thought.

  Vito poked her back with a meaty finger, and she parroted his words. The woman bought a five-year supply. Helen wished she hadn’t.

  “You made the sale,” Vito said. “Great way to end the night.” He turned to Jack. “And how did you do on your first night?”

  “I sold six,” Jack said, with the proud air of a retriever that brought home something smelly.

  “Phenomenal,” Vito said. “You’re a natural.”

  He was. Helen rarely made more than four sales on one shift, and she was good.

  “Congratulations,” she said when the computers shut down.

  “Thanks,” Jack said. “Like I said, sales is sales. Listen, would you like to go for coffee or a drink?”

  Helen started to say, “I don’t know you.” But she did. Helen had worked with men like Jack Lace for almost twenty years. She thought of Sarah’s luncheon lecture about her love life, and worse, of another night alone with her cat.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’d like that very much.” She was glad she was still wearing her good black pantsuit from her lunch with Sarah.

  “What about your car?” Jack said.

  “A frie
nd dropped me off at work,” Helen said. She couldn’t admit she didn’t even have a clunker.

  “Good,” Jack said. “We’ll take mine.”

  Jack’s car no longer looked threatening, shining in the moonlight. It looked rich and comforting. For the second time that day, Helen sank into luxurious leather seats and listened to the hum of a well-tuned engine.

  “I thought we’d go to the Pier Top Lounge.”

  “Jack, can you afford that?” Helen knew from bitter experience that it took time to realize you no longer had money. Soon, he would have to sell this extravagant car. He’d never be able to afford the upkeep.

  “Hey, I’m the top seller in the boiler room.”

  Jack was a fast, aggressive driver, weaving in and out of traffic, cutting people off, refusing to give anyone a break. They were at the Pier Sixty-Six resort in ten minutes. Jack pulled into valet parking, another outlandish expense.

  I won’t say anything, Helen thought. He’ll learn the same way I did. A few missed meals and he’ll figure out he needs to budget.

  Jack handed over the keys to the valet and reached into the backseat for his suit jacket and a Ralph Lauren tie. Now he looked complete. Even at ten thirty at night, he had no beard shadow. How did he do that?

  It was fun to take a hushed elevator to the penthouse. The Pier Top was a revolving bar with a panoramic view of Fort Lauderdale. Helen had forgotten the simple, overpriced pleasures of sitting in a lounge chair and drinking cosmopolitans. They kept the conversation impersonal at first, discussing the view and their work. Then Helen asked, “Do you live in Lauderdale?”

  “I do now,” he said, “in a crappy apartment near I-95. I used to live in a big house in Coral Springs. My wife got it. She got my Range Rover, too. And both kids. Like the song says, she got the gold mine, I got the shaft.”

  “You must miss your children,” Helen said.

  “I do. But she’s turned them against me. It’s like they aren’t even my kids anymore.”

  “I’m sorry,” Helen said. “My marriage was a mess, but at least there weren’t any kids.”