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Authors: Joan Hess

BOOK: A Diet to Die For
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It seemed equally practical for me to leave the building, find a telephone, and send in the cavalry, but I continued to hesitate by the door, straining to hear a voice or a footstep. I had not been in the back
room, so I had no idea how large it was, or if it had doors to the dressing rooms, et al.
Something wafted across the doorway, but so quickly I wasn’t sure I hadn’t worked myself into such a nervous dither that I’d seen the Phantom of the Weight Room. I decided to take a quick look for Jody to warn him; if I couldn’t find him, I would get myself out of there as quickly as possible. I went to the doorway. There was less light and no sense of movement. The machines were glinting metallic skeletons, some tall, some squat, and all contorted and bizarre. A graveyard of dinosaurs.
“Jody?” I whispered. Recklessness overrode terror, and I edged into the room and whispered his name again. I moved around what I deemed to be a Pectoralsaurus, avoided a Tricepstopis, and crept to the door I saw in one corner. As I eased it open, I heard a loud explosion. A gunshot.
Terror overrode recklessness, and I backpedaled into a machine that ripped at my leg, then turned and blundered into a second that caught me just above the knees and sent me head first onto the floor. My purse flew out of my hands and the contents scattered into the darkness. I opened my eyes in time to see the potassium bottle roll under a machine and disappear.
It was the only evidence that linked the Ultima Center with the scheme to kill Maribeth. I got to my knees and crawled in the direction the bottle had rolled. It was not lodged under the bench contraption. I continued on my mad hunt, aware that someone had fired a gun in the building. Had Jody shot Bobbi? Had Bobbi shot Jody? Had Bobbi’s boyfriend shot one of them, and did he still have a bullet or two to spare?
A fluorescent light came on overhead, brutally
bright. I scrunched under the bench, trying my best to be invisible, but two feet came across the room and stopped a few inches from my nose.
“Claire? I thought you went to call the police?”
“Jody,” I said with a whoosh of relief, “thank God you’re all right.” I rolled out from under the machine and stood up. “I heard a shot fired, and I was afraid you’d been hurt. What happened?”
He rubbed his face with his hands, his shoulders hunched as if we were in a blizzard rather than a room filled with equipment that looked strange even in the light. “Bobbi was in the storage room all the way at the back, stuffing bottles and packages in her bag. I guess that’s where she was keeping the drugs. Anyway, I showed her the gun and told her we were going to the office to wait for the police. Halfway down the hall, she jumped me. It was my fault, but I was having a hard time with her being a drug pusher and using my center. She’s been doing an aerobics class or two for a couple of years.”
He sat down on a particularly torturous-looking machine and stared numbly at the floor. I sat down beside him and touched his arm. “Then what happened?” I said.
“She’s pretty strong for a girl—no offense intended. She grabbed my wrist, and I tried to jerk free, and we both crashed through the door into the Jacuzzi room. The gun just kind of went off of its own accord.” He broke off and took a deep breath, then said in a low voice, “She took it in the gut. She gave me this godawful look, then fell back. I grew up in the Bronx and I’ve seen enough street fights to know there wasn’t anything I could do for her, so I was heading for the front door when I heard a noise in
here.” He gave me a perplexed look, as if he’d just realized my presence. “I thought you went to call the police, Claire. It seems like forever, but it must have been five or ten minutes ago.”
“I was too worried about you, but I think I’d better call them now.” My knees were as sturdy as tomato aspic, but I managed to stand up and gather the contents of my purse, including the pesky potassium bottle that had rolled all the way to the wall. I followed Jody into the main room.
The window was ablaze with blinking blue lights and the glare of flashlights shining in our faces. More blue lights were speeding through the parking lot, and shadowy figures darted in front of the window like commandos on a midnight maneuver. A fist pounded on the door, and an imperious voice shouted, “Open up! Police!”
Jody opened the door to admit several uniformed officers, and one grim lieutenant in a three-piece suit. Jorgeson followed his boss. When he saw me, gave me an apologetic smile.
The lieutenant was less cordial. “Are you all right?” he snapped at me, looking as if he wanted to grab me by the arms and shake me with the fury of a bulldog (which I presumed he did).
“I’m fine. Bobbi Rodriquez, on the contrary, is not. She attacked Jody, and they got into a struggle over his gun,” I said. “Down that way, in one of the back rooms.”
“She had hold of my wrist,” Jody said miserably. “I can’t believe it. She was a nice kid, a little bouncy at times, but a nice, clean kid—until she met that football jerk. She’s in that first room on the left.”
Peter gazed stonily at me, then stalked down the
hall, pushed open the door, and flipped on the light. I’d trailed silently after him, but I let out a gasp as I looked over his shoulder.
Bobbi floated facedown in the Jacuzzi, her arms spread as if she were lazily observing marine life through a mask. The Jacuzzi was on, sending streams of bubbles from each side and making small waves that made Bobbi’s body drift lazily. But a ribbon of blood curled from under her, then dissipated into swirls of pink. It looked exactly as if she were drifting in a pool of fizzy pink champagne.
I stepped back, leaned against the wall, and let myself slide to the floor. I’d never had a fondness for champagne, pink or otherwise. Now I doubted I could be in the same room with it—ever.
S
hortly thereafter the hallway and Jacuzzi room were swarming with the investigative team, and Jody and I were escorted to the office to wait until Lieutenant Rosen had time for us. A uniformed cop watched us from beside the door, his hand resting on his weapon and his expression icy.
It was approaching midnight by now. I hadn’t left a note when I dashed to Delano’s to find a clue to Caron’s whereabouts; now she was at home and probably worried about me. I picked up the receiver and was rewarded with a dial tone. I called my house and braced myself for an onslaught of accusations.
“Hello,” Caron said in a thick voice.
“Hello, dear, I’m glad you made it home safely.”
“Yeah, well, Jorgeson gave us a ride.”
“So I learned after worrying about you for four hours,” I said, frowning at the telephone. “Didn’t you think about letting me know where you were all that time?”
“I didn’t know where
you
were all that time. You’re the one who forgot to pick us up. Anyway, can I go back to sleep now? I’m sort of tired from
the aerobics class.” She loosed a yawn of epic proportion to melodramatize her point.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Don’t you want to know where I am?”
“Not especially, but if you insist, I’ll write down the number on something. Hold on till I find a pencil.”
I waited until she announced she’d found one, then told her I was at Delano’s Fitness Center and apt to be there for several more hours. This seemed to wake her up, and she demanded to know what was going on. I explained as best I could.
“This is totally terrible,” Caron said. “I just saw Bobbi a few hours ago. She can’t be dead. Not someone like her. She doesn’t even sweat—she glows. Or glowed, anyway.”
“It was an accident,” I said, steeling myself not to think of the corpse in the champagne bath. I glanced at the guard, then lowered my voice. “Did she seem normal when you and Inez left with Jorgeson?”
She thought for a minute. “Yeah, I guess so. The class was normal, which means we carried on like hyperactive pom-pom girls for an hour. Afterwards, Inez and I waited forever by the door”—a hint of accusal crept into her voice—“and Bobbi came over and asked us if we needed a ride. Then Jorgeson came out from the back room, so I asked him if Peter had finally carried out his threats to arrest you, and Jorgeson laughed in a squirmy way and said he’d give us a ride to the police station so we could look in all the cells. Bobbi asked if we were coming to any more classes. I said I didn’t know and we left. That’s about it.”
“So she knew Jorgeson was a police officer?”
“I suppose so.” There was a moment of silence.
“Uh, I’ve sort of got a date this weekend,” she added uncomfortably.
“You do? That’s … wonderful. Who’s the lucky guy?”
“Louis Wilderberry. He called to apologize for making that dumb remark to Rhonda Maguire. He said she had it all wrong and was just being bitchy when she repeated it to Inez. He also said that Rhonda’s thighs jiggle like Jello when she walks, and that she ought to be arrested the next time she wears a miniskirt.”
“And you’re giving up the diets?”
“Of course not. First thing in the morning Inez and I are starting this diet where you eat six little meals a day instead of three, but you have to—”
I told her to go back to sleep and that I’d see her in the morning. As I hung up the telephone, Peter and Jorgeson came into the office. Peter had a canvas bag in his hand. He unzipped it and dumped the contents on the desk.
“Is this what Bobbi was putting in her bag when you found her in the storage room?” he asked, looking at Jody.
There were at least a dozen bottles and twice that many cylindrical amber pill containers. A plastic bag held several small glass bottles with rubber across their tops. A package of disposable syringes glinted evilly. Very pharmaceutical for an innocuous canvas bag.
Jody nodded. “I saw her scooping things into her bag. It looked like that stuff.”
Jorgeson picked up a pencil and moved the plastic bag aside. “And look at that, Lieutenant,” he said with a whistle. “A shiny key with hardly any scratches. Must have been made not too long ago.”
Having been studiously ignored by all, I was fairly certain I was invisible, but I decided to find out if I was also inaudible. I went around the desk to study the illicit substances. “The key to the Gallestons’ house? By the time you bothered to test the potassium caplets, Bobbi had already been there to make the switch.”
Peter looked through me at Jorgeson. “I wonder if this might be a key to the Gallestons’ front door. Have all of this fingerprinted, and send one of the uniformed officers to the house to see if the key works. Also, take a photograph of Rodriquez and run it by the places in town that make keys. Maybe someone will remember her.”
“Excuse me,” I said, “but—”
Peter flashed his teeth at me, but the dear little laugh lines around his eyes did not deepen. “Mrs. Malloy may want to mention that if the key does not work, the ladder is conveniently situated under an upstairs window. However, in that we are sworn to uphold the law, we’ll just use the front door. With the owner’s permission. Mrs. Malloy is unfamiliar with the approach.”
“I have a potassium bottle from the house,” I said. “I found it in the bottom of the garbage bag. It’s filthy, but it may have prints on it. Mine, Maribeth’s, and Bobbi’s, for instance.”
Peter crossed his arms and gave me a mildly quizzical look. “You broke into the house, carried away evidence, and failed to tell me about it? Do I have this right?”
At least I wasn’t invisible anymore, in that Peter, Jody, Jorgeson, and the guard were all staring at me
as if I’d claimed to be Hitler in drag. I cleared my throat and said, “That’s an oversimplification of facts, but you have the gist of it. I was going to hand over the bottle as soon as I found out if it was relevant. It’s only been in my purse since seven o’clock.”
Peter held out his hand. I sat down and opened my purse, took out the stained bottle, and passed it over with a little sniff. He scowled at it, then put it down and said, “Anything else in your purse you’d like to share with us? A smoking gun? A basketball ticket? A junior G-man badge?”
“No.” I closed my purse. The resultant click reminded me of an earlier thought, and I tried to recall why my purse seemed significant. It had had a hard day, along with the rest of us. Thrown about in my car, squeezed under the seat of Joanie’s car, bloated with the potassium bottle, abandoned on the desk when we’d heard Bobbi in the back room, and clutched to my chest when I’d gone to warn Jody. Busy, busy.
I examined it for signs of ravage. Unlike its owner, who was scarred and sore, it was unscathed. In deference to its loyalty in sticking with me through all the gruesomeness, I decided to give it a vacation on the top shelf of my closet.
Then it hit me, and I said to no one in particular, “It’s odd that Bobbi had a copy of Maribeth’s key. When did she have it made? Bobbi couldn’t have taken the key during a consultation at Ultima. Maribeth didn’t leave her purse in the reception room; she took it with her. She did leave it in the dressing room during the aerobics class, and also when she worked out on the weight machines. But Bobbi was occupied next door until six o’clock, so she couldn’t have slipped
into the dressing room, snitched the key, and returned it later.”
“Somebody else was snooping in the back?” Jody laughed nervously. “I’m going to have to beef up security around this place. You think Marcus was in the ladies’ dressing room, pawing through purses?”
“You threw him out several weeks ago. He’s not a gossamer sort who can flit around unnoticed during an aerobics class. He didn’t even have the nerve to park out in front. The other night when you came out for a cigarette, he was parked way at the end of the row, by the dental clinic.”
Jody rubbed the back of his head. “This is creepy,” he said to Peter. “I hope you guys get him quick. In the meantime, how about you put a guard in Maribeth’s hospital room? I don’t want him getting to her.”
“I think she’s safe,” I said, still talking aloud to myself. “There’s something else that puzzles me, though. She admitted she kept the rheumatic fever a secret from the Ultima staff, which meant she had to lie on the medical history form. We all thought she lied about the potassium, but she didn’t: she was taking caplets faithfully. The problem is that they were steroids, but that wasn’t her fault. After a while, they caused her to gain weight, and again we assumed she was lying when she claimed she was steadily losing.”
“She was real ashamed about it,” Jody said. “I felt bad for her, but all I could do was keep encouraging her.”
Peter was watching me, and a few layers of frost had melted. “But what if Mrs. Malloy is correct and Maribeth wasn’t lying? There had to be some reason she could ignore the scales at the Ultima Diet Center.
Someone had to have convinced her that those scales were wrong, and another set was more accurate.”
“Caron Malloy lost three pounds in an hour,” I said, nodding. “Inez lost three, too. Maribeth was off by three pounds; she claimed to have lost seventeen pounds, but the Ultima record indicated fourteen. Quite a coincidence, isn’t it? I didn’t ask the girls where they’d made the discovery, but I think they may have weighed themselves here. Shall I call and ask?”
“That rusty piece of junk in the weight room?” Jody said, his lip curled. “I just keep it to impress the yuppies with how fully equipped the gym is. Trust me, nobody in her right mind would think it’s better than the shiny new ones next door.”
I blinked at him. “But not one of them was in her right mind. One had not only a severe potassium deficiency that caused her to be flighty and forgetful, but also enough steroids in her system to keep her in a highly agitated state. As for the other two, they’re fifteen years old and therefore are controlled solely by hormones and phases of the moon.”
“Maybe the scales are off,” Jody muttered.
“But Maribeth trusted them, perhaps with encouragement to do so. She’s a very trusting person, isn’t she? Vulnerable because of her weight problem, and as eager as a puppy to trust people who profess to cherish her despite it. She was desperate for attention, for any display of kindness—such as steamy kisses or long-stemmed roses. When someone wrote a message asking her to trust him, she did. She went so far as to imply it was from her husband, who wanted her to trust him while he busily committed her to a psychiatric ward so he could enjoy her money at his leisure.”
“Her husband hadn’t even been by to visit when I was there,” Jody said, his lip curling higher to expose stained teeth.
“He’s incapacitated at the moment,” I said. Peter twitched, but I ignored it and continued. “Maribeth was so trusting that she was willing to believe a cockeyed story about an undercover cop and try to include me in the secret. She kept insisting she and I were in the same boat, but I didn’t make the connection. She mentioned it minutes before her accident and again in her hospital room.”
Jody lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. “Yeah, but it’s a leaky rowboat and you’re using one oar.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Maribeth believed the undercover story, and she also believed the scales here were more accurate than the ones at the Ultima Center. She might have become suspicious if she dieted diligently yet began to gain weight. She might have examined the vitamins and supplements more carefully, and realized someone had made a substitution, perhaps someone who knew about her heart condition and was aware how steroids would aggravate it. When she told you she’d gained weight, you reset the scales here and convinced her yours were correct.”
“You’re crazier than a crack addict,” Jody said. “Tell me how I asked her real nicely to give me a house key so I could sneak into her house.”
“She wasn’t that feather-brained. I’ve already explained a woman doesn’t leave her purse lying around just anywhere, but she does have to set it down to pedal a stationary bicycle or leap around the room to music. If she’d been next door at the Ultima Center for a consultation first, at least once a week she’d have
a plastic bag of vitamins, protein supplements, and potassium caplets with her. It’s rather logical to assume she’d leave the bag beside her purse.”
Jody turned to Peter and made a face. “This girlfriend of yours is something, isn’t she? No offense, but she’s got a wild imagination. She ought to be selling her stories to some Hollywood producer in a leisure suit and sunglasses. I hope you’re not buying this, Lieutenant.”
“As odd as she is,” said lieutenant said, “she often meddles with uncanny accuracy. While Maribeth was occupied in the sauna after the class, you could have switched the potassium caplets for steroids. While she was pedaling, you could have borrowed the house key and had a copy made so that you could make the exchange should the necessity arise.”
“I could have been a contender, too, but that doesn’t make it true,” he retorted angrily. “I love Maribeth. When she divorces that husband of hers, I’m going to ask her to marry me so I can take care of her and make sure she maintains her goal. Why would I do all that dumb stuff to hurt her?”
Peter raised his eyebrows at me. “Mrs. Malloy?”

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