Pumped for Murder (25 page)

“Debbi believed God wants us to make something of ourselves,” Tansi said. “We are fresh canvas, waiting to become works of art.”

“You two are definitely pieces of work,” Helen said. Both bodybuilders smiled as Helen’s insult sailed over their heads.

Carla reached under the counter and pulled out a frosty liter bottle of water. “Mm,” she said, smacking her lips. “This is so good and cold. May I offer you a bottle?”

The two women looked at Carla like she’d staggered into a temperance meeting with a fifth of bourbon.

“No!” Kristi said. “Drinking water so close to the competition will bloat us. We can’t even suck ice cubes.”

“Too bad,” Carla said, taking a long drink. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

The two ran off for the dressing room as if the devil were chasing them.

“That was mean.” Helen giggled.

“They deserved it,” Carla said. “Heartless creeps.”

Helen tried to hide a yawn.

“You look tired,” Carla said. “Job getting to you?”

“Up late last night,” Helen said.

“You newlyweds,” Carla said.

I wish, Helen thought. She and Phil hadn’t gotten home from Gus and his bloody television until nearly two that morning.

“I saw Tansi the other night at Granddaddy’s Bar with a bunch of bodybuilders,” Helen said.

“What was she doing in a bar if she can’t even have an ice cube?” Carla asked.

“That may be where she gets her steroids,” Helen said. “I saw Heather there, too.”

“I don’t see any signs that Heather uses,” Carla said.

“What about selling steroids?”

Carla shook her head. “I don’t think Heather and Tansi run in the same crowd.”

The rest of Helen and Carla’s shift was a blur of routine tasks—checking members in and out, fetching towels, refilling the water pitchers. In the mirrors, she saw Jan Kurtz put Bryan through his paces on the weight machines.

At seven thirty the evening receptionist arrived, and Helen and Carla left for Debbi’s wake. Carla drove them in her red Mustang.

The funeral home was mournfully bland. The other two viewings were for elderly people. Helen saw men and women with walkers and white hair going into those rooms. Debbi’s viewing was a bizarre oasis of color. Her mother, Susan, greeted them near the coffin. She was a generously built woman slipcovered in sorrowful black.

“We worked with your daughter,” Carla told her.

“Would you like to see her?” Susan said.

“Yes,” Carla said.

No, Helen thought, but she knew they couldn’t leave without viewing Debbi’s body. Might as well get it over with. Susan escorted them to the black coffin, as shiny as a snowmobile. Helen tried to hide her shock when she looked inside. Debbi was buried in her posing suit, the tiny black bikini with the yellow sparkles. Her strawlike hair had been smoothed into a golden cap.

“Doesn’t she look amazing?” Susan asked.

“Yes,” Helen said, truthfully. She’d never seen anyone laid out in a four-hundred-dollar bit of sparkling spandex.

Carla’s eyes bulged. She and Helen carefully avoided looking at each other.

The corpse was as bronze as a sun god. “Debbi was going to get another coat of spray tan before her competition,” Susan said. “I think the undertaker did a beautiful job.”

Debbi’s steroid acne was skillfully hidden. The cratered skin that would have kept her out of the competition was covered by the lower half of her coffin. Her jaundiced eyes were closed forever.

“She looks competition ready,” Carla said.

“I’m sure she would have won,” Helen said.

“She’s beyond all that now,” Susan said. “I’m not into bodybuilding. I guess you can tell by looking at me. But my Debbi was a champion. There’s real prejudice against pumped-up women, but my girl fought it.”

“Please accept our sympathy,” Carla said. Helen patted the grieving mother’s hand. A shadow crossed her path as a hulking bodybuilder approached.

“Aunt Susan,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, Mike! Let me take you to see her,” Debbi’s mother said. “She wanted to be just like you.”

As the couple reached the coffin, Helen heard him say, “Great abs! You don’t see many women that ripped.”

Susan started sniffling. Helen and Carla had to steel themselves not to run for the door. They were quiet on the ride back to Helen’s car. They didn’t want to laugh at Debbi, but they didn’t know how to handle that bizarre wake. Silence seemed the only option.

When they were in sight of Helen’s car on the Fantastic Fitness lot, Carla said, “Do you think Evie killed Debbi?”

“Not a chance,” Helen said. “Evie was scared of her own shadow.”

Helen flashed back to that scene in the women’s lounge while she and Evie had waited for the homicide detective. Evie had been frightened then, but not about her impending arrest. She’d gone meekly to jail.

What did Evie mean when she’d said, “I’ll be safer in jail”?

H
elen felt like a zombie in a low-budget horror movie: half-alive with staring eyes and smeared makeup. She��d spent her evening in a funeral parlor with a corpse in a spangled posing suit. Now she dragged herself through the door of Phil’s apartment at the Coronado and flopped bonelessly on his black leather couch.

“I’m so glad to be home,” she said, and sighed.

“Quick!” Phil said, grabbing her hand. “Don’t get comfortable. We have to go to Granddaddy’s Bar.”

“Now? It’s after ten o’clock,” Helen said.

“Exactly,” Phil said. “My Spidey sense says that Danny Boy won’t be sober tonight. Not when he’s at a bar with friends buying him drinks.”

“Let me sleep,” Helen said. “It won’t do any good to see him. Danny must know we’re the detectives investigating Mark’s death. His sister would have told him.”

“We’ll surprise him,” Phil said. “He’s drunk. We’ll get the drop on him.”

“Did you say ‘get the drop on him’? Have you been watching old movies again?” Helen asked. “Forget going to that bar. This dame hasn’t had dinner yet.”

“You can get a burger there. I’ve fed Thumbs.” Phil pulled her off the couch and pushed her toward the parking lot. “Hurry.”

“I’m never going to lose weight eating bar food,” Helen grumbled.

“You don’t need to,” Phil said, opening the Igloo’s passenger door. He patted her bottom as she sat down.

“Easy for you to say,” Helen said. “Your boss doesn’t think you’re fat. Did you get Mark’s accident report from Sunset Palms yet?”

“I waited by the fax machine all day. Nothing.” The PT Cruiser roared into life and the air-conditioning blasted out cold air. Helen was reviving.

“I’m going into that office tomorrow and pick up the report personally,” Phil said.

“What if the clerk won’t give it to you?”

“Then I’ll remind her about the paper trail and threaten to call the Florida attorney general. That should shake it loose.”

Two of Phil’s predictions were correct. Danny Boy was at the bar, and he was drinking—alone. His friends were engrossed in the Marlins game. Danny huddled over a nearly empty mug at the bar, surrounded by a wall of seething silence. His bloodshot eyes looked like they were bleeding. His T-shirt was dirty, but Helen could read it: 24 HOURS IN A DAY. 24 BEERS IN A CASE. COINCIDENCE? YOU BE THE JUDGE.

Helen judged that Danny had downed at least half a case.

“Phil!” he cried when they sat down. Danny Boy didn’t seem to notice Helen. “What can I get you?” Sour sweat poured off him. He was drunk. Tonight he didn’t slur his words so much as speak them with an odd, heavy emphasis.

“Helen and I will have burgers, and I’ll have a cold beer. What are you drinking, Helen?”

“I want a beer, too,” Helen said. Damn the diet. She needed a drink after Debbi’s wake.

Danny slid two beers in thick frosted mugs their way.

“Get ready to run,” Phil whispered to Helen. “I’m going to try something with Danny. It may set him off.”

Phil lifted his mug to Danny Boy and said, “May you live forever, and may I never die.” That was Mark’s toast on the ancient tape.

Danny paled, even in the bar’s dim light.

“You burned a DVD of Mark’s last birthday party and put it in Gus’s VCR, didn’t you, Danny? It has your fingerprints all over it.”

“Does not,” Danny said. “I wiped them.” He realized what he’d said and sobered up fast.

“You’ve got the know-how,” Phil said. “Why did you do it, Danny Boy?”

“For Gus’s own good. I had to warn him,” Danny Boy said. “If the wrong people found out someone is looking into Mark’s death again, Gus could get hurt. My sister Linda called and told me there was a detective nosing around in the files.” Danny Boy didn’t seem to know he was looking at that detective.

“You killed him,” Phil said.

Danny Boy moved in closer. He smelled rank, a combination of sweat, dirty clothes and stale beer. Helen saw an enormous blackhead on his left cheek. She stared at it, fascinated. There was a stray whisker growing beside it. “No, dude, you got it wrong,” he whined. “Mark was out of control. He talked too much when he got his crazy spells.”

“You were afraid Mark would tell everyone you were selling drugs,” Phil said. “You and Mark were dealing together, weren’t you? That’s how you got this bar.You bought it with drug money.”

“I inherited the money from my grandfather,” Danny said. “That’s his picture over the bar.”

“Bull,” Phil said. “I saw your grandfather’s obituary. He was cleanshaven. That guy has a mustache. You didn’t inherit anything from your grandfather. All he left was enough money to bury him. You made the money for this place selling drugs. Mark used his drug money for his brother Gus’s car business. You had to shut up Mark when he started babbling.”

“No, you got it all wrong,” Danny Boy said. “Mark had these crazy spells when he’d say Ahmet was the devil. He didn’t make any sense when he talked like that. Gus put him in the loony bin after he found Mark walking naked down Dixie Highway.”

“Mark was crazy, but he wasn’t violent,” Phil said.

“He was around us,” Danny said. “Mark was crazy
and
violent, especially when he did coke. We were all afraid of him—Me, Bernie, his own mother. Gus was the only one who could deal with him.You never saw the Mark we did. He wanted to die. Whoever killed him did Mark a favor. He was off his head and didn’t want to live like that. The doctors couldn’t regulate his medicine.”

“Of course they couldn’t,” Phil said. “Not with all the coke he took.”

“Coke was the only thing that made him feel better,” Danny said. “Mark knew he was getting crazier. He couldn’t work. He couldn’t get it up anymore. He couldn’t sleep. He was afraid he’d spend the rest of his life in the psycho ward.”

Danny was desperate to make Phil believe him. Helen thought the bartender was telling the truth.

“Two weeks before he died, Mark begged us to kill him. He asked his friends, one by one. He couldn’t do it himself. He was too Catholic to commit suicide, but he didn’t want to be a burden to his family. You weren’t there when he was walking around with a butcher knife, begging us to help him die.” Danny made it sound like an accusation.

“Killing Mark was a kindness,” he said. “It was putting him out of his misery like a sick dog.”

“So you shot him like a dog,” Phil said.

“No!” Danny Boy was sobbing now. “No, I didn’t kill him. I swear. Mark was going apeshit, freaking out all the time. He cut his wrists once at my house. Got blood all over the john. I had to repaint the walls. That pissed me off. He wouldn’t get better. He wouldn’t. I didn’t do anything to help him. I wished he was dead.”

Danny Boy’s rubbery drunk face was sloppy with tears. “When I first heard he was dead, I was relieved. That’s what I felt: relief. My best friend, and I wanted him dead. I can’t stand myself. I’ve pissed my life away. Mark killed himself. He succeeded at that, too. I wish I had the courage to do what he did. I wish someone would put me out of my misery.”

He reached under the register and pulled out a .44 Magnum. Helen froze at the sight of the huge, heavy gun.

“Put that gun down, Danny Boy,” Phil said, his voice low and careful.

Danny waved the gun at his head, then his chest. “I don’t deserve to live,” he said. “I’m lower than whale shit.”

Helen reached slowly for her beer mug.

Danny’s eyes stayed locked on Phil’s. Tears ran down the drunken bartender’s face, but he was defiant. Only the emotional wobble in his voice betrayed him. “I can do this,” Danny said. “I can get out of this. All I have to do is pull the trigger and it will be over.”

“Do you think your death will bring back Mark?” Phil asked. “Don’t waste your life, too.”

“Too late,” he said. “I’ve screwed it up royally.”

No one in the noisy bar noticed the drama at the register.

“You don’t want to die, Danny,” Phil said softly.

“I don’t want to live,” Danny said. “I’m a failure. My sister has to save me. I threw away my talent. It’s too late. Mark and I, we were dealing drugs; you got that right. We made a fortune. The money was rolling in. We couldn’t spend it fast enough. I was going to start my own film company in Hollywood as soon as I had enough. But I didn’t kill Mark. I swear it. Mark shot himself, and then I was too scared to go on dealing. I kept the bar and never touched coke again. I’ve been drinking beer ever since.”

“Who was your supplier? It was Ahmet, wasn’t it?” Phil asked.

“Yes.”

“Did Ahmet kill Mark?” Phil asked.

“I don’t know,” Danny Boy wailed. “No! Mark killed himself. He hated Ahmet. Mark kept saying if he killed Ahmet he would save the world. Mark didn’t make sense when he said shit like that. Ahmet doesn’t deal anymore. It’s over for him. I want it to be over for me, dude.”

Fat tears of self-pity ran down his stubbled cheeks.

Helen was disgusted with Danny’s dramatics. She thought the bar owner wasn’t serious about shooting himself. But he was holding a loaded weapon. He might kill an innocent beer drinker.