The Dead-End Job Mysteries Box Set 1

by Elaine Viets

  “Good lord,” Savannah said. She looked over the fern barricade. “It’s Ethel. Blood is gushing from her mouth.”

  Helen poked her head up through the ferns. “Do you think her tuna bit her?”

  Ethel was moaning and holding her jaw. Blood dripped through her fingers and onto her T-shirt.

  The waitress came running over. “What’s the matter, ma’am? Are you hurt?”

  “This piece of metal was in my tuna melt,” Ethel said. “I bit right into it. I’m cut bad.”

  “I’m taking my wife to the emergency room,” Fred said. “What’s your manager’s name?”

  “Mr. Wilson,” the waitress said. “He’s in back. I’ll get him.”

  Fred helped Ethel up and put his arm around her. She was dabbing at her face with a napkin, smearing the blood around.

  The manager came running over. He saw bloody Ethel and turned the color of yesterday’s oatmeal.

  “My wife hurt herself on a piece of metal in your food,” Fred said. “Look how she’s bleeding. I’m not a suing kind of man. But she needs to be stitched up and I got a four-hundred-dollar deductible for my emergency room insurance.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the manager said, wringing his hands like an old dishrag. “If you’ll bring your receipt from the ER, we’ll be happy to pay the deductible.”

  “In cash?” Fred said.

  “Absolutely,” the manager said. “Here’s my card. Just call and we’ll settle up. I hope your wife will be OK. We’re so sorry. Next time, your dinner is on us.”

  Ethel was still holding the bloody napkin to her mouth and dripping dramatically. Helen saw she developed a limp as Fred helped her out to the car. Strange. That metal had been nowhere near her foot.

  “There’s something funny going on,” Helen said. “Let’s see if they really go to the emergency room.”

  Savannah threw down some bills and they ran to the Tank. Fred and Ethel didn’t notice the lurching, smoke-belching car. They went nowhere near a hospital. Instead, they drove straight to the Coronado. When Ethel got out of the car, there was no blood on her face. She was smiling. A blue wind-breaker hid her bloodstained shirt.

  “I knew it,” Helen said. “She faked that injury.”

  They drove past, so Fred and Ethel wouldn’t see they were being followed. A half an hour later, Savannah dropped Helen at the Coronado. The sunset had painted the sky a glorious rose-pink. Wild parrots settled into the rustling palms. The soft evening breeze was scented with chlorine and Coppertone.

  This was Helen’s favorite time of day. A few months ago, she would have been sitting by the pool, toasting the sunset with white wine. Margery and Peggy would have been relaxing on chaise longues, Pete patrolling Peggy’s shoulder while she discussed her latest lottery scheme. Margery would snort and smoke and ignore Pete’s squawks. They would all be laughing.

  Now Peggy and Pete sulked inside. Margery was barricaded in her home.

  Their poolside evenings had been hijacked by Cal, Fred and Ethel. The couple claimed to be teetotalers. Helen thought they were drunk with disapproval.

  Florida was warm and accepting, more interested in committing sin than condemning it. Fred and Ethel’s moral superiority had soured too many evenings. Ha. They were nothing but small-time scam artists.

  Helen banged on Margery’s door until the jalousie glass rattled. Helen knew her landlady was home. Her car was in the lot.

  “Margery, it’s me,” Helen said.

  The door finally opened. Swirls of cigarette smoke poured out. Helen choked.

  “Quiet. I’m avoiding the pool party,” Margery said. “They’ve already complained twice. Fred said the chlorine was too strong in the pool. Ethel saw a palmetto bug.”

  “Only one?” Helen said.

  Even in the darkened kitchen, Helen could see Margery was a mess. Her purple shorts were wrinkled. Her red lipstick had crawled up into the cracks in her lips and her nail polish was chipped. She was drinking a screwdriver that didn’t even have a full shot of orange juice.

  “You need your vitamin C,” Helen said, heading for the fridge. She poured a hefty jolt of juice into Margery’s half-empty glass of booze. Then she opened the blinds.

  “Let in some light. We need to celebrate. We’re getting the fun couple out of here. I caught Fred and Ethel in a big fat fraud.”

  Helen gave Margery the details. She could see her landlady perk up with every sentence. By the time Helen finished, Margery looked ten years younger. The wrinkles were even gone from her shorts.

  “Are you working tonight?” Margery said. “No? Good. It’s the Mertzes’ bingo night. They leave about six thirty. We’ll wait until they’re gone and check out their place. I have a passkey.”

  At six twenty-six, Fred and Ethel left. Cal trailed along with them. Margery and Helen heard two cars start on the parking lot. They waited another half hour to make sure the trio didn’t come back. Then they crossed the yard and went up the steps to 2C.

  Fred and Ethel’s apartment was a furnished unit, done in wicker and seashells. “She keeps the place clean, I’ll say that for her,” Margery said.

  The living room was tidy, except for the wicker couch. It was covered with stacks of newspapers. The coffee table had a pile of torn-out restaurant ads, mostly for family restaurants.

  “The next victims,” Helen said.

  The kitchen table had been turned into a desk. A laptop and laser printer were set up on it. “Bet that’s where they do their fake emergency room receipts,” Helen said.

  Next to the printer was a pill box.

  “Wonder what drugs they’re taking?” Margery opened the pill box. “My, my. Fred and Ethel figured out how to turn base metal into gold. These aren’t pills. They’re metal slivers. Ethel probably carried some in her purse and slipped them in her food. And what’s this?”

  She opened a small brown paper bag and pulled out a package.

  “Fake-blood capsules,” Helen said. “The kind kids use on Halloween. See, the package says, ‘Bite me for that vampire look.’”

  “‘Bite me,’” Margery said. “That’s how Ethel had blood running out of her mouth. She used fake Halloween blood.”

  “‘Not harmful to humans or animals,’” Helen read from the package. She slipped one blood capsule into her pocket, and put a pinch of metal slivers in an envelope.

  “Those cheap bastards. That’s really cruel, scamming little restaurants for cash,” Margery said.

  “And free dinners,” Helen said. “This routine could be pretty lucrative. Hit two restaurants a week, and they’d make eight hundred dollars in cash, tax free. They pick mom-and-pop places that are afraid of lawsuits. These little restaurants are happy to pay four hundred cash and avoid big legal bills.”

  “If we can catch those crooks in the act, they’re outta here,” Margery said. “And I know how to do it. Fred brags how often he takes Ethel out to dinner. ‘I don’t want my Ethel slaving over a hot stove,’ he says. ‘I’m retired, so she is, too.’

  “I’ll find out when they’re eating next at one of these little places. We’ll go there and catch them.”

  Helen felt a huge weight lift from her spirit. She was going to get back her tropical nights by the pool.

  Margery was nearly dancing with glee. “I can’t wait to throw out Fred and Ethel. By the way, why did you think there was something wrong in the first place?”

  “I don’t trust a woman who doesn’t like bread pudding,” Helen said.

  Chapter 19

  Mother Nature made a mistake. Helen should have had Margery for a mother.

  Helen admired her landlady’s courage, her candor and the way she held her liquor. She liked Margery’s purple shorts and sexy shoes. She was touched when Margery defended and protected her.

  But Helen already had a mother, and though she tried to deny it, Helen loved her. She thought her mother’s problems started with her name: Dolores. That name would make any woman sorrowful.

  Dolores was sma
ll and fearful. She lacked the courage to sin, but lived in terror that she would lose her soul. Helen thought it might slip away, like an escaped mouse.

  Dolores never made it into the twentieth century, much less the twenty-first. She disapproved of Helen’s corporate career. “A woman’s highest calling is a wife and mother,” she said.

  Dolores told Helen she had a duty to take back her unfaithful husband, Rob. “If you hadn’t spent so much time at work, he might not have strayed. Men are different.”

  “Only because we let them get away with it,” Helen said.

  Her mother burst into tears, making the conversation even more dolorous.

  Dolores believed what the old priests told her: Birth control was a sin. Wives should endure their husbands’ faults, from alcoholism to adultery. Catholics who divorced and remarried would burn in hell. Helen was on the path to perdition.

  Each month, when she hung up on her tearful, fearful mother, Helen told herself this was the last call. But thirty days later, she called her mother again.

  Helen had a ritual to help her through it.

  She took her old Samsonite suitcase out of the closet, crammed with rump-sprung cotton panties and circle-stitched Cross Your Heart bras that were gray as grandmothers. Thumbs jumped up on the bed and began playing with a dangling bra strap. Helen tossed her cat off the bed. She was in no mood for frivolity.

  Helen had bought that snake-tangle of old lady lingerie at a yard sale, hoping it would scare away any thief. Underneath it, she hid her remaining money, a little over seven thousand dollars. She also buried a cell phone bought under a fake name in Kansas City. Helen had sent her sister Kathy a thousand dollars to pay the phone bills. She only used the cell phone once a month to call her mother and her sister.

  Each month, Helen hoped her mother would miraculously become a strong, independent woman who believed in her daughter. But in case that didn’t happen, Helen also brought out a piece of pink cellophane from a gift basket.

  Helen always called her mother on the same day at the same time: seven P.M. She dreaded this one call more than a whole day in the boiler room.

  This time, Helen got a recording, one she heard a dozen times a day. “The number you are calling does not accept unidentified calls. If you are a solicitor, please hang up now.”

  My own mother has blocked me out, Helen thought.

  “Helen, is that you?” her mother said. Dolores sounded frailer than the last time.

  Helen could see her: a withered woman wearing a luxuriant brown wig. Helen wanted to rush home and fold her small, faded mother in her arms. But she knew that was hopeless, too. Dolores would turn Helen over to the court and send her back to her cheating ex-husband.

  “Helen, I have good news,” her mother said.

  If the news was good, why did she sound so tentative?

  “I’m seeing Mr. Lawrence Smithson.”

  Lawrence? Helen flashed on a bandy-legged old man in baggy shorts and a flat yellow cap, mowing his lawn at six A.M.

  “You’re dating Lawn Boy Larry?” Helen said. “The guy who trims his lawn with nail scissors? I can’t believe you’re going out with that geezer.”

  “Don’t call Lawrence that,” Dolores said.

  “That’s what Dad called him,” Helen said. “My father was a real man.” A real unfaithful man, but no one ever questioned his virility. “Lawn Boy just wants to get his hands on your dandelions.”

  What’s wrong with me? Helen thought. Why do I care who my mother dates, if he makes her happy? It’s none of my business. My father’s been dead for ten years.

  “I have no one to talk to,” her mother said. “Your sister Kathy has Tom and the children. You’re living God knows where. You won’t even tell your own mother.”

  “It’s better that way.” Rob would charm the information out of Dolores. She still saw him.

  “Lawrence has been so helpful,” Dolores said. “He fixed my toolshed. He mows my lawn every Wednesday. He cleans my gutters.”

  “Does he grease your griddle and haul your ashes?”

  “Don’t be disgusting.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m happy that you have a romance.”

  “It’s not like that,” her mother said. “I’m too old for romance.”

  “You’re only seventy, Mom.”

  “I won’t live much longer,” her mother said. “I want you to come home.”

  All aboard for the guilt trip, Helen thought. “Mom, I can’t go back to Rob, not after what he did.”

  “You didn’t try,” her mother said.

  “I did,” Helen said. “But every time I looked at Rob, I saw her.”

  It was worse than that. Every time Helen looked at Rob, she saw him naked with their neighbor, Sandy.

  Helen had come home early from work and found them on the deck. At first, Helen couldn’t make sense of the tangle of Rob’s hairy legs and Sandy’s waxed ones. Then she understood all too clearly. That’s when Helen picked up the crowbar and—

  “You should have offered it up.”

  Helen had a vision of Rob and Sandy humping away, while she knelt by the teak chaise longue and prayed.

  “Offered what up?” she said.

  “Your suffering. The saints did it. I did it for forty years with your father.”

  “Did you offer it up when Dad died at the Starlite Motel with the head of the St. Philomena Altar Society?”

  There. She’d said the words that had been buried for a decade. She expected Dolores to burst into tears. But her mother said with simple dignity, “Yes, I did. It was my duty as his wife and your mother.”

  “Well, I’m no saint,” Helen said. “And I’ve got the police report to prove it.”

  Helen had brought the crowbar down on the chaise with a loud crack! Rob jumped up and ran for his Land Cruiser, locking the doors and abandoning his lover.

  Sandy, naked as a newborn but not nearly as innocent, scuttled toward her cell phone and called 911.

  Helen started swinging. The Land Cruiser’s windshield cracked into glass diamonds. The side mirrors disintegrated. She trashed the taillights and smashed the doors, while Rob cowered on the floor and begged for his life.

  “You tried to kill your own husband,” her mother said.

  “I wasn’t going to kill the SOB. I wanted to wreck his SUV. That was his true love. And I bought it for him.”

  She’d told the cops the same thing when they pried the crowbar from her hands and pulled a buck-naked Rob from the wreckage. She could see the cops fighting back snickers.

  Rob and Sandy didn’t press attempted-assault charges. Sandy was afraid her husband would find out what she’d been doing when Helen started swinging that crowbar. He did anyway.

  “I know you were upset, dear,” Dolores said. “But now you’ve had time to cool off. Rob just made a mistake.”

  “Not a mistake, Mom. A bunch of mistakes. He hopped into bed with women I knew at the tennis club, the health club and our church. He’s an incurable adulterer.”

  “You must hate the sin, but not the sinner,” her mother said. “You promised to love, honor and obey Rob forever.”

  “And what did he promise?” Helen said. “After he lost his job, I supported him for years while he did nothing.”

  “He looked for work, dear. He talked to me about it.”

  “He talked to everyone. He just didn’t do anything.”

  But Rob had worked hard during the divorce, spreading his lies. His lawyer portrayed Rob as a loving househusband married to an angry, erratic woman. When he showed the photos of the smashed SUV, the judge winced.

  Rob got his old girlfriends to testify to the work he did around the house. No one mentioned that Helen paid a contractor to finish his botched handyman jobs.

  Helen wanted her lawyer to ask these women if they’d had a sexual relationship with her husband. But her attorney was too much of a gentleman.

  Helen prepared herself to lose the house she’d paid for. But she didn’t ex
pect the judge’s final pronouncement. She could still see him: hairless, smug and wizened, like E.T. in a black robe.

  “This woman is a successful director of pensions and benefits, making six figures a year,” his honor said. “She earns that money because of her husband’s stabilizing influence, because of his love and support. He made her career possible at the expense of his own livelihood. Therefore, we award this man half of his wife’s future income.”

  A red rocket of rage shot through Helen. She must have stood up, because she could feel her lawyer trying to pull her back down into her seat.

  Helen grabbed a familiar-looking black book with gold lettering. She put her hand on it and said, “I swear on this Bible that my husband, Rob, will not get another nickel of my salary.”

  Later, the black book turned out to be a copy of the Missouri Revised Statutes, but Helen still considered the oath binding. She also believed the judge had been dropped on his head at birth.

  Helen slipped out of St. Louis, packing her clothes and her teddy bear, Chocolate, into her car. She left everything else behind. She didn’t tell anyone goodbye, except her sister, Kathy. Kathy was a traditional wife and mother, but she understood Helen’s anger.

  “I wouldn’t have bashed in his SUV, Sis,” Kathy had told her. “That poor Land Cruiser didn’t do anything. I’d have taken that crowbar to Rob’s thick skull.”

  Kathy was the only person on earth who knew how to find Helen. She had zigzagged across the country for months, trying to evade any pursuers. She didn’t know how far the court would go to track down a deadbeat wife, but she knew that Rob would go to the end of the earth to avoid work. He wanted her money.

  Sometime during her flight, Helen traded her silver Lexus for a hunk of junk. It finally died in Fort Lauderdale, and that’s where she stayed. Now she worked for cash only, to keep out of the computers. Her dead-end jobs brought her a kind of freedom: no memos, no meetings, no pantyhose. She would never go back to corporate America. If Rob did find her, he’d get half of nearly nothing. Her old life and her old ambitions had vanished in easygoing South Florida.

  “Helen, are you listening to me?” her mother said. “I can help you. I can make your problem go away.”