Pumped for Murder

Table of Contents

 

 

The Dead-End Job Series

 

 

Josie Marcus, Mystery Shopper Series

 

OBSIDIAN
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First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

First Printing, May 2011

Copyright © Elaine Viets, 2011

 

OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

 

Viets, Elaine, 1950–

Pumped for murder: a dead-end job mystery/Elaine Viets.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-51459-7

1. Hawthorne, Helen (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—Fiction. 3. Florida—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3572.I325P86 2011

813’.54—dc22 2010052171

 

 

 

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For Paulita Zimmerman, who showed me the killer world of the fantastically fit

Helen Hawthorne still works those dead-end jobs, but for a different reason. She and her husband, Phil, started Coronado Investigations, their private-eye agency. They needed help for their new venture, and they got it.

The Florida Association of Licensed Investigators’ 16th Annual Professional Development Conference was a terrific resource. Lynette Revill of Revill Associates in Sarasota, Florida, was especially helpful, as were Tim O’Rourke and K. C. Poulin of Critical Intervention Services, Inc.

Special thanks to senior editor Sandra Harding at NAL, who gave this novel a detailed and much-appreciated critique. Her assistant, Elizabeth Bistrow, is always helpful.

Copy editor Eileen G. Chetti did a superb job.

My husband, Don Crinklaw, shares Phil’s fascination with orange junk food, but he’s always there when I need him—even when I have panic questions at three a.m. Thanks to my agent, David Hendin, whose advice is always good.

Jan Kurtz is not an adulterous gym trainer. She gave a generous donation to charity to be libeled in this novel. Nancie Hays let me turn her into a lawyer. Opera lover Valerie Cannata became a hard-hitting investigative reporter for this book. Did she have a fling with Phil before his marriage? Both maintain a discreet silence.

Many other people helped me with this book. Thanks to Molly Portman and Alan Portman for their St. Louis and family expertise. Librarian Doris Ann Norris told me about Fostoria, Ohio. Thanks to Kay Gordy, Karen Grace, Jack Klobnak, Robert Levine, William Simon and Janet Smith. I can’t forget supersaleswoman Carole Wantz, who could sell sand on a beach.

Thank you, Detective R. C. White, Fort Lauderdale Police Department (retired), Synae White and Rick McMahan, ATF special agent. To the sources who can’t be named, I appreciate your legal, medical and tax information.

Boynton Beach librarian Anne Watts lent me her six-toed cat, Thumbs, for this series. Once again, I am grateful to the librarians at the St. Louis Public Library and Broward County Library. Yes, the information is on the Internet, but librarians helped me sort out what was accurate.

Thank you, blog sisters. I rely on the advice and encouragement of the women in the Lipstick Chronicles
(www.thelipstickchroni-cles.typepad.com)
and the Femmes Fatales
(www.femmesfatales.typepad.com)
.

I’m grateful to the booksellers who recommend my novels to their customers and encourage me.

Finally, any errors are my own. You can tell me about them, or better yet, tell me you enjoyed this novel, at [email protected].

H
elen Hawthorne wished Eric Clapton would shut up. She didn’t want to listen to him croon about cocaine.

“She don’t lie, she don’t lie . . .” Eric sang.

Enough, Helen thought. She sat up in bed and pulled the black satin sheet up to prepare for the first fight of her marriage. She didn’t want to be totally naked.

Phil, her husband of thirty-three days, looked lean and white against the dark sheets. She admired his young face, a startling contrast to his silver-white hair. His eyes were closed as he listened to the music.

Here goes, Helen thought. As soon as I open my mouth, our honeymoon is over. But she couldn’t stop herself.

“I hate that song,” she said. “Clapton sounds bored.”

Helen waited for Phil to defend his guitar hero. He gave a lazy stretch, sat up and said, “You’re right.”

“I am?” Helen raised one eyebrow in surprise. Her husband worshiped Clapton. He even had a “Clapton Is God” T-shirt. Helen expected Phil to be struck by lightning every time he wore it.

They’d spent the sizzling September afternoon in his bedroom, listening to Clapton sing about hopeful love, hopeless love, and shameful, sinful love while they indulged in legal, married love. The cool music and green palm fronds shading the window turned Phil’s bedroom into an oasis at the Coronado Tropic Apartments.

Phil reached for the CD clicker and switched to an old favorite, “White Room,” with the howling guitar sound. “There. Is that better?”

“Much,” Helen said.

“You have to admit the guitar riffs in ‘Cocaine’ are elegant,” he said. “In his defense, Clapton thought he was singing an antidrug song.”

“Not to me,” Helen said. “Sounds like he’s in love with the white lady.”

“A lot of people think that,” Phil said. “You heard the audience cheering in that live recording. That’s why he quit singing it for a while. Coke was the evil lady of the eighties, and ‘Cocaine’ was her anthem. When Clapton brought the song back for his North American tour, he added the line ‘that dirty cocaine’ for his backup singers. It’s my least favorite Clapton song. He sounds depressed.”

“Did you ever use coke?” Helen asked.

“Did I
what
? I. Hate. Coke.” Each word was a separate sentence. Phil threw back the sheet, slipped into his white robe and paced up and down. With his silver hair, he looked like an agitated ghost.

“I hate the whole cocaine culture: the destruction, the corruption, the killings. I worked a case here in South Florida in the mid-eighties, in the days of the cocaine cowboys.”

“Sounds very
Miami Vice
,” Helen said. “I loved that TV show.”

“
Miami Vice
was a Disney movie compared to Miami in the eighties,” Phil said. “Coke isn’t romantic pink sunsets, throbbing sound tracks and drug dealers’ yachts.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Helen said. “I was in high school then. Our wild St. Louis drug scene was kids smoking pot under the bleachers.”

“I’m only five years older,” Phil said. “I was a PI trainee on my first major case. I was only twenty-one and my hair was blond. They thought I’d be good at finding a sixteen-year-old runaway because I looked young. Her name was Marcie. I was supposed to bring her back to Little Rock.”

“Did you?”

Phil was still pacing the terrazzo floor in his bedroom, avoiding their scattered clothes.

“I tracked Marcie to some clone of Studio 54, then bribed the doorman with a hundred bucks. Put the bribe on my expense account. Thought I was quite the stud.”

“You are,” Helen said. She tried to put her arms around him as he paced past her, but Phil shook her away. He seemed eager to tell this story, maybe for the first time.

“I followed Marcie into a club packed with half-naked people. It looked like every club then: tropical neon and a shiny black bar with mirrors. Behind the bar, Tom Cruise wannabes mixed flashy cocktails.”

“Sounds interesting,” Helen said.

“It wasn’t,” Phil said. “The crowd was mostly fat, balding men or Don Johnson look-alikes with designer stubble, and very young women. Couples were having sex everywhere: behind the curtains, in bathroom stalls, even right on the tables.”

“Ew,” Helen said. “I want to wash my mind out after that image.”

“Well, I can’t. I also can’t forget the black bowls of coke. They sat around like party favors.”

“What happened to Marcie?” Helen said.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Did you find her?”

“Yeah,” Phil said. “I found her. I sent her home—in a box. I’d like to forget her. I’d like to forget the whole ugly decade.”

Phil seemed to shut down. He stopped pacing and sat down on the bed next to her.

“It must have been horrible for you,” she said.

“It was no fun for Marcie, either. She didn’t deserve what happened to her.”

Helen traced the outline of his thin, slightly crooked nose with her finger and kissed the bump where it had been broken years ago. “Let’s talk about something pleasant: our new detective agency. Do you still like the name Coronado Investigations?”