Shop Till You Drop (30 page)

At last, Helen was home. She passed through the comforting smog of Phil’s burning weed and locked the door to her apartment. She felt safe. Until she remembered Phil’s pot smoke and had another horrible thought.

The caller had not asked, “Where are the photos?” or “Where are the papers?” The inhuman voice had demanded, “Where’s the stuff?”

Drugs. The caller could be looking for drugs. That’s what Christina was selling in those pretty little purses: candy-colored pills and capsules. She took them with her that Saturday. They disappeared, and Christina was never seen alive again.

Helen knew what drug dealers did when you double-crossed them. She watched the TV news. She’d seen the body bags being brought out, the blood-spattered walls, the tales of torture. They could shoot her knee caps, one at a time. They could give her a Colombian necktie. They could leave her, bleeding and starving, to die in a rat-infested abandoned building.

They’d kill her for sure, slowly and painfully. Because Helen didn’t know anything. She didn’t even know what they wanted.

“How much do you want?” Tiffany said.

She stood defiantly under the painting of the cruel-lipped Juliana looking equally tough. No pretty pink ruffles and curls today. She was dressed in dead black, her long blonde hair hanging straight down her back. A Tiffany that Helen had never seen before had walked into the store.

Helen thought Tiffany was soft and yielding, giggly. This Tiffany was hard and determined. It was like finding out that Barbie dolls were made of titanium. Yet this Tiffany made sense. Tiffany would have to be tough to survive in her world—and smart enough to disguise it.

Helen had called Tiffany that morning and said, “Could I talk with you privately next time you’re in the store?”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Tiffany had said. She didn’t ask why Helen wanted to see her. She marched into Juliana’s wearing sunglasses black as a drug dealer’s car windows. Helen recognized the sign of a raging hangover. She also saw a woman ready for a fight.

Tiffany whipped off the glasses and looked Helen in the eye. “How much do you want?” she said.

“I don’t want any money,” Helen said.

“Don’t play games with me,” Tiffany said.

“All I want to know is where you were when Christina was killed.”

“So you can blackmail me for even more,” Tiffany said. It was weird. Tiffany was furious, but her eyes stayed wide open. They could not narrow. There wasn’t enough skin left after the eye surgery.

“How can I blackmail you about that weekend? I don’t have any proof.”

“Then why do you want to know?” Tiffany said.

“Because I have to know where everyone was when Christina was killed. I’ve got to solve her murder, or the police will suspect me.”

Tiffany started laughing. It was not a cute giggle. It was a harsh barroom bray. “That’s all?”

“I swear,” Helen said. “I’m not going to tell anyone. Have you ever heard me spread gossip?”

“No,” Tiffany said. She looked Helen up and down. “Not with that pudding face. You’re from the Midwest. You’re too dumb to lie.” Somehow, things had reversed. Tiffany was in control.

“I was with the pool boy,” Tiffany said, tossing her blonde hair.

“The pool was broken? Not the fish tank?” Helen said.

“No, you moron. We were in bed the whole weekend. I’ve got an alibi. I just can’t use it. I made up that fish tank story yesterday on the spur of the moment, and it sounded like it. Last time I drink champagne before noon.”

“Where was your boyfriend, Burt?” Helen said.

“On a gambling cruise. I knew he wouldn’t be back until Tuesday. I wanted some romance. I wanted to feel a young man’s muscles instead of an old man’s flab. Kurt had a surfer’s body and sun-bleached hair. He was my age. Actually, he was a little younger, but I don’t look my age.”

Helen realized she didn’t know Tiffany’s age. On a good day, Tiffany looked twenty-five. Today, she looked forty.

“I can’t believe I’m such a cliché,” Tiffany said. “The pool boy. Next it will be the tennis instructor and the personal trainer. Never again. It was the first time I’d ever cheated on Burt, and it will be the last. I only wanted one weekend. Kurt called in sick so he could spend Monday with me, too. It would be when Christina got herself killed. That’s just my luck.”

“I hope it was everything you wanted,” Helen said. She knew about wanting the wrong man.

“Oh, it was. Right up until he left Monday night. Then he asked me for a thousand-dollar ‘loan.’ ” A single tear rolled down her cheek.

Tiffany knew the truth then: Her romantic weekend had been one more service provided by the pool boy.

 

Helen had bagged four alibis, but she was no longer enjoying the game. Tiffany’s single tear left her scalded with shame. Poor Tiffany. It must have hurt when she realized the pool boy was using her the same way she used Burt.

The doorbell chimed, and Helen buzzed in a well-dressed woman and her escort. Helen had never seen the woman before, though she recognized her Ralph Lauren suit. She thought the escort looked familiar, too.

Then she realized that the man and woman were not together. He was homicide detective Dwight Hansel, and he’d bulled his way into the shop. Helen ignored him and settled the woman into a dressing room with enough evening gowns to keep her busy.

Hansel was standing at the counter when she returned. Helen was freezingly polite. “May I help you?” she said.

“Yeah, you can help me,” Hansel said, taking out his nail clippers. “You can help me figure out what’s going on in here.”

Clip. Clip. He was clipping his nails. Gross.

“We sell women’s apparel,” she said.

“Do you now?” he said. “Well, I had the phone company run some numbers here. You been talking to some suppliers, all right, but they ain’t dealing dresses.”

Clip. Clip. Clip. Little bits of gray-white nail flew in every direction. One landed on the counter.

“I’ve worked here less than two months,” Helen said. “I have no idea who Christina called. I told you everything I know.”

Clip. Clip. Clip. More nail bits pinged on the counter.

“Maybe you’d like to tell it to a grand jury,” he said.

Helen felt the fear grip her. Hansel saw it in her face and pushed harder. “If you lie to a grand jury, that’s a crime. Or should I say another crime? You might want to think about what you’ll be wearing then. Are two-piece suits in fashion?”

Clip. Clip. Helen didn’t answer.

“The Broward County Jail’s got some nice ones for their women prisoners. Sort of a beige-brown. That color would look good with your hair. On the back they say ‘Broward County Jail.’ How’s that for a fashion statement?”

Helen said nothing. She was too frightened. Hansel put away his nail clippers, threw his business card on the counter, and walked out.

She used the card to scrape the nail bits off the counter. Then she tore it into pieces.

Dwight Hansel would keep harassing her until he found something, then he’d lock her up. It wouldn’t matter that Christina had called those drug dealers. Helen would get the blame.

Meanwhile, she was getting death threats. She had stumbled onto something. She just didn’t know what. The police, or at least Dwight Hansel, might think Christina was too much of a bimbo to blackmail people, but Helen knew better.

She thought there might be more secrets in the CDs. There was still one tower she had not examined. But she didn’t want to stay alone in the store after closing, not after that creepy phone call.

Tara had called in sick that morning with the wine flu, so Helen was at the store alone. Business was slow. She decided she’d made enough money for Mr. Roget yesterday. She would take a break and look for the Dylan CD, the one that held Joe’s secrets.

Helen put out the “back in 15 minutes” sign and pulled on her formal twelve-button search gloves. She checked every CD in the tower. Nothing. There were no Dylan albums.

There were two hundred forty CDs in those towers, and she was going to open every case if she had to. She grabbed one from the middle:
Music for Lovers
, a collection of love songs.

Wait a minute. “You Gotta Serve Somebody” might be in a collection. Maybe that’s why she couldn’t find it. Five minutes later, Helen spotted the Dylan song in the “Sopranos” sound track.

She held her breath as she opened the CD. The photos inside were so sad she could hardly bear to look at them.

The first was taken at night. It showed a ramshackle boat loaded almost to the waterline with passengers. The people looked thin, brown-skinned, and miserable. Some were shivering, others were clinging to one another. A woman in the foreground was so weary, she seemed near collapse. Helen thought she was no more than twenty, but her eyes were much older.

The boat was aground near a mangrove swamp. What didn’t show were the hordes of hungry mosquitoes and the rank stink of the murky water. Some passengers were wading in the dark water or helping others off the boat. Helen thought of sticking her own feet in that snake-infested muck and shuddered.

These were illegal immigrants. Helen knew it. She had seen too many scenes like this on TV, when their boats landed in Miami or Hollywood Beach. The INS sent them right back where they came from.

Then she looked a little closer. One of the men helping people off the boat was Joe.

Christina’s ex was bringing in illegal immigrants. Maybe that was why he had no alibi for Christina’s death. He could not tell the police he was handling an illegal shipment of people.

Unless Joe had another good reason for no alibi: he killed Christina that weekend. His ex had enough material to put him away for a long time.

Helen remembered Brittney and Christina sitting in the back of the store, cackling like witches and brewing revenge for Joe: “Immigration? No. Bad idea . . . Some guys in Miami would like to know what he’s up to, though, and they aren’t as nice as the IRS . . . When I finish, Joe will wish he was never born.”

Instead, Christina had been destroyed.

The second photo looked like those 1890s pictures of New York tenements. More people than Helen could count were crammed in a high-ceilinged, windowless room. They could hardly move, it was so crowded. Stained, sheetless mattresses were on the floor. Four people were sleeping on one. Laundry was hanging across a back corner. Through the limp and tattered clothes, Helen saw a toilet. It was near a table with bread, a giant can with a knife stuck in it (peanut butter? meat spread?), and soda cans.

This wasn’t a photograph of 1890s immigrant misery. These pictures were recent. The clothes and shoes were modern.

Illegal immigrants.

There was another photo of what was probably the outside of the same building. At least, the yawning doorways were similar, and the inside walls were the same dingy green. The building looked like a warehouse. The street number was painted over the front door. In the background were four giant candy-striped smokestacks, a Port Everglades landmark. Sailors steered their boats by those smokestacks.

Helen remembered the business story Christina squirreled away in the manuals. It said Joe’s company had bought a warehouse near Port Everglades. What was that address? Helen stood up, heard her knees crack, and felt needles and pins in her feet. She limped over to the stack of manuals and found the dull story.

Now Helen found that story riveting. The addresses were the same.

Joe was mixed up with importing illegal immigrants, probably from the Caribbean, and Christina had the pictures to prove it. “You Gotta Serve Somebody” was another of her ugly jokes.

Immigrant smuggling was a lucrative business, if Joe’s Ferrari was any indication, but you needed the morals of a slave trader. The immigrants paid high prices to be packed in leaky tubs and smuggled to America. The cruelest smugglers didn’t even take their passengers ashore. They dumped them in the water within sight of land. Some never knew they’d arrived in America. Their dead bodies washed ashore.

Once here, the unlucky worked as wage slaves, making far less than Helen’s seven seventy an hour. Helen remembered Christina asking Tara about the kind of maid she wanted.

“Do you mind a Haitian?” Christina had said. “What about someone who doesn’t speak English?”

“I don’t care what they speak as long as they scrub my floors,” Tara had said. “Brittney has a real gem. She pays her almost nothing but room and board. The woman is practically a slave.”

They were slaves, chained to their low-paying jobs by their fake papers, their lack of education, and sometimes, their lack of English. They lived in little rooms in luxurious homes and were utterly isolated. Domestics did not hang around the yacht club or get a cappuccino at the local patisserie. They couldn’t complain about their pay or working conditions or they’d be deported. They had no job benefits and no future.