Shop Till You Drop (32 page)

Even worse, Brittney had connections outside the law. Her mobster ex-boyfriend, for instance. Would he do Brittney a favor for old time’s sake?

Lord, I’ve opened up my big mouth again, Helen thought. It got me in trouble in St. Louis, and now I’m in deeper in Florida.

Helen was so unnerved, she thought she saw a black Land Rover, like the one Brittney drove, following her cab about three cars back.

Ridiculous. Paranoid. SUVs were all over the roads in Florida. An SUV was barreling toward the cab now, high beams blinding Helen. She could not make out the color in the dark. Was it dark green? Black? Maroon?

She didn’t know the make, either. It honked at the cab, flipped off the driver, and passed on the right side. It turned out to be a black Cadillac Escalade. But Helen could not be sure it was the same SUV she’d noticed several blocks back.

“Do you see a black Land Rover following us?” Helen asked the cab driver.

He shrugged and turned up the radio. It was a sensible response. U.S. 1 was clogged with SUVs.

Helen looked anxiously into the darkening night. Now three huge SUVs were behind them, and another one was alongside the cab. It was like traveling in an elephant herd.

A Chevy Tahoe was gaining on them. A monster Toyota Land Cruiser was next to the cab, but it was dark gray and driven by a man talking on his cell phone.

When the cab turned off Las Olas to her side street, Helen no longer saw any SUVs. She must have imagined the black Land Rover. It was her own guilt following her, not Brittney.

She was relieved to be home. The Coronado looked like a tropical dream tonight. Flood lights highlighted the old palm trees. Bougainvillea spilled drifts of purple blooms on the sidewalk and into the turquoise pool. The air smelled cool and fresh.

I can’t believe I live in a place so beautiful, Helen thought.

When she passed Phil the invisible pothead’s, she smelled the burning weed. He had already lit up for the night. Helen was beginning to think the man was nothing but smoke.

It was only ten o’clock, but Helen was dead tired. Once in bed, she could not sleep. She kept thinking of her humiliating scene with Brittney. She tossed and turned until eleven. The bed squeaked when she moved. Tonight, the mattress felt like it was stuffed with green cantaloupes. They rolled every time she turned.

This insomnia called for desperate measures. Helen decided to clean her apartment, a once-in-a-blue-moon activity. If nothing else, it might shock her system so she’d fall asleep.

She scrubbed the bathroom. (Was she going bald? Where did all that hair on the floor come from?) She cleaned the kitchen. She threw out some vintage lasagne in the fridge. By one a.m., she had dusted the furniture, mopped the floors, and stacked the magazines for recycling.

That’s when she saw the
Best Friends
magazine from Sarah’s house. Helen sat down in the Barcalounger to finish the article on theater cats, when a more lurid story caught her eye: “Hair-Raising Convictions! When Cats and Dogs Are the Witnesses, Their DNA Is the Evidence.”

The police were using the same DNA techniques on animal hair that they used on human hair, the story said. They’d solved several murders with animal DNA. A line about a long-buried murder victim jumped out at Helen like a frisky pup: “When they dug her up, she had a single dog hair on her socks. Sure enough, it matched the transvestite’s puppy.”

In another case, cat hairs on a murderer’s jacket proved that the killer had had contact with the victim’s cat—and the victim. The man was convicted, thanks to the cat hair. The police officer who’d used pet DNA to crack the case won an award.

Did the police find cat hairs on Christina’s body? Helen thought Detective Karen Grace said they did. She knew they’d found a grooming brush filled with cat hair in her penthouse.

Helen had the solution to her problems in her hand. She could prove that the six-toed animal was Christina’s cat. She would solve Christina’s murder.

She’d call Detective Grace first thing in the morning.

She reached up and turned off the light. As she drifted off to sleep on the Barcalounger, Helen was spending the twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward.

 

Helen was dreaming about barbecue. Expensive barbecue, using only the finest wood. It smelled delicious.

Then the wind shifted, and the smoke was right in her face. Helen woke up coughing and choking. She still smelled barbecue, but there were nasty odors underneath it now: burned electrical wiring, hot metal and melting plastic. Her eyes stung and watered. The room was filled with smoke.

Helen’s apartment was on fire. The blaze had started in the bedroom. The chenille spread was a sheet of flames. Black smoke boiled up to the ceiling. The bedroom rug was on fire. She could not see the sliding glass doors. Helen could not get out the back way.

She tried to remember what she was supposed to do. Don’t stand up, she recalled. Crawl to the nearest exit. The front door was only fifteen feet away.

She dropped to the floor and began crawling. The crawl seemed to take forever. She couldn’t see. She tried not to breathe. The apartment, which barely seemed big enough to turn around in, now went on for miles. It was filled with deadly smoke and fumes. What if she got lost? She stuck her right hand out and felt for the wall. Follow the wall. Follow the wall.

Her hand hit a table, and something fell on the floor and shattered. A lamp? A vase? She didn’t know.

I’m getting closer, she thought. I can’t be more than five feet from the door. I can almost reach up and touch the door knob, if my lungs don’t explode before I make it. The air was so hot and thick it was almost solid. Helen pulled her T-shirt up over her mouth and nose, to shield her lungs from the hot smoke. And she kept crawling.

Helen could hear sirens now. Someone must have called the fire department. She reached up and found the skinny panes of glass in the jalousie door. She was gasping and choking, stupid with smoke. She felt for the door knob. The door didn’t open. Helen had locked and dead-bolted it.

Helen pulled herself up to her knees and struggled to unlock the door. The deadbolt key was in the lock, but the door would not open. She pulled at the lock with all her strength. She tried to turn the key, but it wouldn’t move. She was trapped. She could not breathe. She felt her vision close in and darken until it was as black as the smoke.

As she fell to the floor, she heard glass shatter. Cool air poured in the broken door. Helen coughed and gagged. Smoke boiled and roiled and twisted itself into dark phantoms.

Helen’s vision cleared a little. She felt strong hands pull her outside. She gulped in fresh air, faintly tinged with burning pot smoke. She saw three words floating in the blackness: “Clapton Is God.” The white letters stood out like a celestial message in the smoky dark. But before Helen could figure out what they meant, everything went black again.

The sun was shining in Helen’s eyes. Someone had his hand clapped over her mouth. Then Helen realized it wasn’t a hand. It felt hard, like plastic. She tried to pull away from the thing over her mouth and sit up.

Strong hands pushed her back down. A woman’s voice said, “Take deep breaths now. Steady . . . steady . . . relax. You’re going to be fine. You’re breathing nice and easy. Another deep breath and I’ll take off the oxygen mask. Do you understand? Nod your head yes.”

Helen nodded. That wasn’t sun in her eyes. It was overhead lights. She was in a hospital emergency room, lying on a narrow gurney.

The oxygen mask was removed. Helen’s lungs hurt. Her mouth was dry and ashy. She couldn’t get rid of the taste of smoke. Her clothes and hair smelled like a fireplace. She would never eat barbecue again.

“What’s your name?” the doctor asked.

Helen almost giggled. The doctor’s name was Curlee, and she had wild frizzy brown hair pulled into an unruly ponytail. She sounded brisk and competent.

“Helen Hawthorne.”

“What day is it?” Dr. Curlee said.

“Saturday,” Helen said. “Wait. It’s after midnight. It must be Sunday.”

“Who is president?”

“That bozo neither one of us voted for,” a loud voice said. “She’s fine.”

It was Helen’s landlady, Margery. She was wearing another purple shorts set. This one was turned inside out, with the tag in front. Margery must have dressed in a hurry.

“I’ve come to get her out of here,” Margery said. “Hospitals are full of sick people. She’ll catch an infection.”

“Are you next of kin?” the doctor asked.

“I’m her aunt,” Margery said. Helen stared. Her landlady lied without a qualm. “And I’m paying her ER bill.”

“No, I have money,” Helen said.

“So do I,” Margery said. “And don’t argue with me, young woman, or I’ll tell your mother.”

That was the only threat that could quiet Helen. She shut up about the bill.

“She’s suffering from smoke inhalation,” Dr. Curlee said. “Helen does not appear to be burned or injured except for a cut on her arm. Luckily, it won’t require stitches.

“We’re doing some basic lab work to make sure she’s OK, and we’ll check her electrolytes. We need to keep her for observation for awhile. Then, if everything is all right, she can go home.”

“How much longer will it be?” Margery said.

“Another three or four hours, if all her tests go right.”

“I’ll stay with her,” Margery said.

The doctor’s beeper went off, and she left Margery and Helen alone in the curtained cubicle.

“Is Cal with you?” Helen said.

“Cal? Why would Cal be here?” Margery said.

“Because he pulled me out of that burning apartment. I thought he might have come along with you. I wanted to thank him for saving me.”

“Cal didn’t rescue you,” Margery said. “Phil did.”

“The invisible pothead? I finally saw him and I don’t remember?”

“I wish you’d quit calling him that,” Margery said, testily. “I see that boy all the time.”

Helen felt groggy and thickheaded. “I saw something else, too,” she said. “These weird white lights or letters spelling out ‘Clapton Is God.’ It was like a vision.”

“Vision, my sweet Aunt Fanny,” Margery said. “You saw Phil’s favorite T-shirt. It’s black with white letters. He got it from Ed Seelig, a guy who sold Clapton some of his guitars. It’s his prized possession. I’m surprised Phil risked it to save you.”

Helen put her head down on the thin pillow and tried to remember. She recalled Phil’s hands, calloused and strong. But she could not see a face above that T-shirt.

She also remembered the boiling smoke and the bed with sheets of flame. Her funky little apartment was gone. Helen felt a sharp stab of regret. The funny boomerang table and the exuberant Barcalounger were ruined. The squeaky bed was no big loss.

“Oh, Margery. Your beautiful apartment. It’s all my fault. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” Margery said. “The fire marshal thinks it was arson.”

“Arson!”

“Somebody wanted to burn you alive,” Margery said. The landlady’s shrewd old eyes bored into her, and Helen felt like she was in the sixth grade and had been caught smoking in the girl’s bathroom.

“Now, you better tell me what you’ve been up to. All of it. Because it’s no longer your own private business. They set fire to my apartment building. It’s my business now.”

 

For the next two hours, the two women stayed in the chilly, uncomfortable cubicle while Helen talked about Juliana’s: the blackmail, the drugs, the illegal maids, even the banned biopolymer injections. She finished with the reappearance of Thumbs, the dead woman’s six-toed cat.

Margery had something of her own to add. “A police detective, Karen Grace I think her name was, came by yesterday, asking where you were the weekend Christina was murdered,” Margery told her. “I said you went on a date with Cal Saturday night, moped around the place Sunday, and went to work on Monday like always. Peggy and Cal told her same thing.”

“Did she talk with Phil?”

“He didn’t answer his door. And he had the good sense not to light up while she was there.”

Occasionally someone would come in and stick Helen with a needle or make her breathe into a machine. But mostly the two women were alone. They talked until Helen ran out of things to say.

“Now, who do you think set fire to my apartment?” Margery said.

“Brittney,” Helen said, without hesitation.

“You don’t think it could be a drug dealer? Or Joe?”

“They would have just killed me. They wouldn’t fool around trying to burn me. It was Brittney. She never denied killing Christina. She knew that was a mistake, and I’d talk. She had to shut me up. The timing is right, too. Brittney followed me home, then came back and started the fire.”

“Are you going to the police?”

“And tell them what? That a rich, well-connected woman tried to kill me because I saw her cat? I haven’t a shred of evidence.”