Shop Till You Drop (9 page)

“I hope the sharks get her,” Christina said.

“I want her dead before that,” Niki said, her eyes suddenly hard mean slits.

“Don’t you want
him
dead?” Christina said. Good question, thought Helen. That’s who I’d want to kill if Jimmy dumped me right before the wedding.

“No, I want her dead,” Niki said. Her words were a vicious slash. “Maybe when she’s dead, he’ll come back to me.”

Niki wrapped her pipestem arms around herself and rocked back and forth, spotting the black silk-satin loveseat with her tears and sending waves of perfume rolling through the store. It was time for serious grief counseling.

“Helen, would you unpack that Blumarine jeans stock for me?” Christina said. “I’ll take Niki back and show her some pretty new things to make her feel all better. She’ll have herself a new man in no time.”

“I don’t want a new man. I want Jimmy,” Niki wailed, like a spoiled child.

Christina herded her gently toward the dressing room, a good-hearted but firm nanny. “Come on, sweetie. I have some lovely white wine. Would you like a glass of wine? Or maybe some Evian?”

That was kind, thought Helen. Smart, too. Niki would buy up a storm in her shattered state. Christina was hauling half the store into that dressing room.

Before Helen could unpack the jeans, the doorbell rang. Helen recognized a regular, Melissa, and buzzed her in. Melissa was the blonde with the eighteenth-century face and the twenty-first-century boob job. Good thing she’d persuaded her boyfriend to let her keep that Armani gown. Now he wanted her to get “something cute” for a barbecue.

Melissa tried on a long strapless tube of ruched material in lavender. It looked smashing with her blonde hair. If you were more than a size four, you’d look fat as a French bonbon. This four hung on Melissa.

“You need a size two,” Helen said. “I know we have one somewhere. Let me find it for you.”

The top wasn’t in the shop or the stockroom. It must be in Niki’s dressing room, thought Helen, along with most of the other clothes in the store.

Helen was about to knock on Niki’s door when she heard Christina say in a low voice, “I’ll need fifteen hundred down and fifteen hundred when the job is done.”

That’s what a hit man cost, Helen thought. Everyone in South Florida knew the price of a hit man. It was always on the news for some murder trial or other. But they can’t be talking about a hit man in a Las Olas dress shop. Niki must want some sort of body sculpting. Juliana’s women often resorted to surgery after they broke up with a man.

“I want her dead and him back in my arms!” Niki wailed.

“Shhh! The others will hear you. If you’re serious, I’ll need the money in cash tomorrow.”

Cash? Hit men didn’t take checks. But some of the doctors Christina recommended for her regulars took cash only. Like Doctor Mariposa, the illegal Brazilian face fixer.

Niki lowered her voice so much, Helen only caught the words “next Saturday.” She couldn’t figure out the rest of their conversation. Niki’s voice was too soft, too clogged with tears and anger. Christina’s was too cautious. But the two women seemed to have reached some sort of agreement. Niki raised her voice a notch. “I want her dead. And I want the Chloe jumpsuit and camisole.”

Had the woman just ordered a camisole and a killing in the same breath? Helen wasn’t sure what she’d heard, but she couldn’t knock on Niki’s dressing room door now. Helen was so rattled, she grabbed the first thing she saw off a nearby rack and went back to Melissa.

“Uh, sorry, we don’t have that size two after all,” she said. “But I thought you might like this instead for the barbecue.”

Melissa looked at her strangely. Her slightly popped eyes bulged a bit more. No wonder. Helen was holding a green Versace evening gown.

“Er, I’m sorry,” Helen said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“We all have those days,” Melissa said. “Anyway, while you were gone, I tried on this top. I really like it instead.”

Helen finally noticed what Melissa was wearing: a skin-tight black top slit up the side and laced with slim satin ribbons.

“Very sexy,” Helen said, and it was.

“It’s only two hundred and fifteen dollars,” Melissa said. “Rick gave me five hundred, so I can keep the change.”

Change, Helen thought. Melissa’s change is more than I make in a week. And I’m working at a place that could be arranging contract killings.

She rang up Melissa’s purchase in a daze, all the while trying to understand what she had heard. Helen knew Christina fiddled with the books a bit, but she wasn’t a murderer, she told herself. Of course, Christina did arrange things. Face lifts. Designer drugs. Collagen injections. Contract killings.

Should she go to the police? But what would she tell them? All Helen knew was that the supposed victim was named Desiree. She didn’t know her last name or where she lived. Did Desiree live in Fort Lauderdale? Boca? Miami? South Florida covered three counties and had millions of people.

Helen needed more information. She waited until Niki left, looking hopeful. Even her perfume seemed lighter. Then Helen walked back to Niki’s clothing-crammed dressing room and began delicately digging.

“Was Niki really a
Playboy
centerfold?” she asked. She could still smell Niki’s powerful perfume.

Christina was putting a skinny belt through the loops of a pair of flared pants. “No, just an inside feature. And that was five years ago. Old news now. You ask me, she showed too much and got too little. Niki couldn’t turn the exposure into a modeling or movie contract. All she ever did was snag Jimmy.”

“And now she’s lost him,” Helen said. “Poor Niki. She was a wreck. Whatever you did for her, she left here smiling.”

Helen waited for Christina to say Niki was getting some high-priced plastic surgery. Instead, she started buttoning a sheer pink blouse with dozens of slippery pearl buttons. “I guess I said the right thing,” she said. “Maybe I should be a shrink.”

Christina did not mention the three thousand dollars. Helen knew she’d heard her say, “I’ll need fifteen hundred down and fifteen hundred when the job is done.”

“What’s Jimmy do for a living?”

“He has some T-shirt shops,” Christina said. “But I think they’re a front for something else, maybe money laundering. He’s known as Jimmy the Shirt.”

“Sounds like a mob name,” Helen said. “Desiree is the perfect first name for a femme fatale. I hope her last name isn’t something disappointing, like Potts. And please don’t tell me she lives in an apartment complex in Davie.”

“I don’t know where she lives,” Christina said, coldly. “But I know you better quit standing around yakking. There’s stock to put away. Here. Hang these up.” She thrust an armload of blouses at Helen.

Christina had effectively cut off any more questions. Was she being a boss? Or was she trying to shut Helen up?

No, it couldn’t be true. Niki didn’t come here to buy a murder. This wasn’t happening. Helen couldn’t say anything to anyone, not even her friend Sarah. She knew what Sarah would tell her: Get out of that place now. Find another job. It was good advice. She would look for work on her next day off.

Besides, Niki could still change her mind and call off the murder, if there really was one. If Niki came in tomorrow with the money, then Helen would call the police, no matter how crazy she sounded.

Somehow, Helen got through the next day. She watched the green door constantly and jumped every time the doorbell chimed. But Niki never showed up with a cute little bag full of money. She never showed up, period. Helen began to relax. She’d misheard. She’d misunderstood. This was what she got for listening at doors. Everything was going to be fine. It would be better than fine.

“Do you even know what a Sapphire martini is?” the young man demanded in a supercilious voice. His pretty pink choirboy face was disfigured by a nasty sneer.

If this rude young man had applied to Helen for a job, she’d have shown him the door. Instead, she was asking him for work, and she knew she didn’t have a chance.

“Uh, it’s blue?” she said uncertainly.

“It’s only like the unofficial gay drink,” the choirboy said, pitying her ignorance. “If you want to tend bar on Las Olas, you’d better know what gays drink. And straights, too. Do you put coffee in a mudslide? Can you make a margarita? A rum runner?”

The choirboy kept hitting Helen with questions he knew she couldn’t answer. Then, when she was thoroughly beaten, he returned the job application she’d painstakingly filled out. “Come back when you know one end of the bar from the other,” he said. His tone implied that would be the thirty-first of never.

Helen’s confidence was going downhill as fast as a real mudslide. She used to evaluate intricate pension-payment plans. Now she did not know what kind of gin went into a martini.

Helen was determined to find another job. She would not work for a thief and a drug pusher. So on her day off, Helen put on her black suit and went looking for work. Instead, she found a series of humiliations.

Helen didn’t want to dip into her precious stash to fix her car, and that made her search harder. She had to find something within walking distance of her apartment. This morning, she’d already walked three long miles in the hot sun. Her feet burned from the sunbaked concrete sidewalks. She had a blister on her right heel. Her suit was sweaty, which meant another dry-cleaning bill.

After the choirboy sneered her out the door, Helen approached the next place warily. This bar looked like some place where Myrna Loy would drink, right down to the chrome cocktail shakers. It was dark and cool inside, and Helen was grateful for that. At least she’d get to sit down while she was being insulted.

The bar was opening for the day, and the bartender was busy cutting up limes and lemons for garnish. She was a cheerful blonde with sunfried skin and a smoker’s rasp. She gave Helen a club soda on the house and some free advice.

“You’re wasting your time looking for a bartender’s job around here,” she said, her voice like an emery board on the eardrums. “You have to know somebody to get these jobs. You might want to go to bartender’s school. We hire some of the promising graduates.”

Helen thanked the woman and wondered how much bartender’s school would cost. An MBA was not much good to a mixologist. She’d better give up on bartending.

But Helen could—and did—read, and in South Florida, that seemed a rare skill. Maybe she could sell books. Helen tried Page Turners, the snooty Las Olas bookstore, next. The store manager didn’t look old enough to go into the bars that had rejected Helen. But he turned her down, too.

“We’re not hiring at present,” the underage manager said, “but we will be happy to take your application.”

The kiss-off of death. How often had Helen heard those words in human resources? At least he didn’t say she was overqualified for the job, another inhuman human resources phrase. The underage manager added a new twist of the knife.

“We are expecting openings soon on the night shift,” he said. “We pay six seventy an hour. The night-shift booksellers are expected to clean the store and the toilets.”

“Toilets?” Helen said. She’d thought book selling would be genteel, if underpaid.

“Yes, but you can also take home the leftover café sandwiches,” he said.

Helen wondered if she’d have any appetite for them after cleaning the toilets. The manager was wearing a white shirt and silk tie. Would she have to dress up in a skirt and heels to clean toilets, like a woman in a 1950s TV commercial?

Helen thanked him and walked next to the headquarters of an elite maid service. If she had to clean commodes for a living, she might as well get a job where she wouldn’t have to dress up.

For six dollars an hour, Helen could clean toilets all day for the maid service. But it would help if she knew Spanish, the manager said. Then she could make six twenty-five and be a team leader. Helen didn’t speak enough Spanish to order a taco in a Mexican restaurant.

Terrific. In two years, her career options had slid from director of employee benefits to toilet team leader—and she wasn’t fully qualified for that job.

By three o’clock that afternoon, her job hopes were in the commode. Helen decided her battered psyche could stand one more interview. She’d remembered enough about job searches to save the best for last.

The ad she saw in the paper was intriguing: “Job opportunity in the food service industry,” it said. “Enjoy fresh air and sunshine in a casual beach-like atmosphere. No experience necessary. Generous tips for willing workers. Transportation provided.”

No experience. Transportation. She was willing if they were.

Helen had called that morning and made an appointment for three-thirty. But when she saw the office, her spirits fell even lower. The office was on a seedy street off Las Olas. Many of the buildings on the dismal little street were abandoned or boarded up, slated to be torn down for a new high-rise.