Murder With Reservations (19 page)

“I like the exercise,” Helen said. “I hate panty hose, memos and meetings. I’d rather break my back making beds than sit through one more brainstorming session. I’m free of the corporate rat race. I like my new life. I love you. I wish you would try to understand me.”

“I wish I could understand you,” Phil said. “But I’m not sure that’s possible. I think I’d better leave before I say something worse.”

He kissed her on the forehead, as if she were an old woman, and slipped out the door. Phil left with hardly a sound. Helen sat alone in her living room in her sexy silk robe, feeling foolish and angry. She threw the sofa pillows at the door, followed by the newspapers and magazines on the coffee table. She thought of throwing something breakable, but she didn’t want to lose her security deposit. Besides, she loved the fifties furniture—the turquoise Barcalounger, the lamps shaped like nuclear reactors, the boomerang coffee table.

In her old life she would have sneered at it as tacky. Now she thought it belonged in this apartment with the speckled terrazzo floors. So did she. If Margery’s plan worked, she’d be able to stay here forever.

It wasn’t a crazy plan. OK, it was crazy. But Margery had pulled off more improbable schemes. Helen shouldn’t have mentioned it at this early stage. Rob and Marcella hadn’t even met yet. But Helen could hope. She wanted Marcella to sail off into the sunset with her ex-husband. She didn’t envy Rob his supposed rich life. People who married for money worked for it.

But Rob would finally find work that suited his talents.

Helen brooded alone in her living room, morosely scratching her cat’s ears. She wanted to open the box of cold wine in her fridge, but drinking wasn’t a good idea in her current mood. Instead she picked up the tossed pillows and papers. It was good for her waistline. Physical labor gave her muscles, but not sculpted gym muscles. Helen had strong arms and hands, but her waist and thighs needed work. She brooded on that, too.

At eleven o’clock that night, Helen heard a knock on her door. The all-clear signal from Margery was an hour earlier than expected. Helen sighed. The matchmaking hadn’t worked. She’d invite Margery in for a postmortem.

She checked the peephole, but instead of her landlady she saw Peggy, gorgeous in a pale green dress. She looked like a luna moth Helen had seen in a book— beautiful and fragile, with huge graceful wings the color of a new leaf. Something so lovely could be easily hurt. Helen was afraid for her friend.

“I know it’s late—” Peggy began.

“Quick, come in,” Helen interrupted, and dragged Peggy in the door. “I don’t want Rob to see you. Margery’s introducing him to her rich friend, Marcella. They’re out talking by the pool.”

“Can I see him?” Peggy said, in the way you’d ask to look at a new kitten.

Helen turned off the living room light and gently lifted the blinds for Peggy.

“Marcella has her back to me, but I can just make him out by candlelight,” Peggy said. “He’s cute in a teddy bear kind of way.”

Helen was pleased that Peggy saw Rob’s attraction. Then she realized Peggy’s choices in men were even worse than hers.

“Think your ex will go for her?” Peggy said.

“I hope so,” Helen said, putting the blinds back down and turning on the light again.The late-night light made Peggy’s red hair flame. “Normally I’d feel guilty about unloading him on another woman. But Marcella can afford the lawyers to keep Rob in line. Have a seat. Can I get you some wine?”

“No, I’ve been drinking pisco sours with Glenn. I’m a little giddy already. I’d better not mix drinks. I wanted to give you my news. Please don’t be mad at me. I know how you feel about Glenn.” Peggy was glowing with happiness.

This is going to be bad, Helen thought. Peggy has done something she’s going to regret.

“I’m not mad,” Helen said. “Margery and I are worried about you, that’s all.”

Peggy plopped down a little heavily on the couch, the only sign that she might be tipsy, and stroked Thumbs. She looked oddly incomplete without her parrot, Pete, on her shoulder. “Why?” she said. “Glenn is a great guy.”

“He seems to make you happy,” Helen said, choosing her words carefully.

“Why wouldn’t I be happy, dating a rich, charming and successful man?” Peggy suddenly stopped petting the cat. “You don’t think Glenn is a success. You think he’s a hustler, riding around in a big limo, everything for show. Margery doesn’t think he makes international deals. She said he could fake those calls to London by dialing Time and Temperature. But he didn’t. He made them on a Vertu Signature phone.”

“What’s that?” Helen said.

“It’s the Rolex of the cell phone world. It costs almost twelve thousand dollars. It has gold keys with ruby bearings and a sapphire-crystal face.”

“Sounds like a real gem,” Helen said.

“A fake can’t afford a phone like that,” Peggy said.

Helen wasn’t convinced. Glenn could have rented, borrowed—or stolen—the phone. Like the limousine, it was overpriced and overdone.

“Have you seen his office in Lauderdale?” Helen said.

“He pointed out the building to me. It’s in a big, expensive tower off Las Olas, where all the major corporations are.”

“Did you go into his office? See his name on the door?”

“Why would we go to his office on a date?” Peggy said.

Anyone can point to a skyscraper and say they have an office inside, Helen thought.

“He gave me his card and the company brochure,” Peggy said. “They both have his office address.”

You can get those printed up for a hundred bucks, Helen thought.

“I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong,” Peggy said. “Glenn is a great guy and a smart businessman.”

Helen’s stomach dropped about ten stories. “You gave him your twenty thousand dollars,” she said.

“He’s going to make me rich and happy,” Peggy said. “He promised. He’ll take me away from this and we’ll have a boat and a big house on the water.”

Helen had heard those words once before—from a dead woman.

H
elen heard flirty laughter and sexy giggles out by the pool, then a man’s deeper chuckle, like some answering mating call. Rob and Marcella. Margery’s matchmaking was working. In the candlelit garden, by the waterfalls of bougain-villea, the courtship dance had begun.

Helen lifted the blinds, feeling like a nosy old woman. By the primitive light, Helen could see Rob and the woman lying on chaise longues. Their bodies were relaxed. No, not relaxed—abandoned, yielding. Though they were both fully dressed, they seemed naked. The woman’s back was to Helen, but her hair was too dark to be Margery’s. The landlady had disappeared.

Would Peggy interrupt them? Helen hoped not. Peggy was so exotic, the sight of her would wilt this tender young romance. Peggy would remind the couple of what they should be and what they used to be. The soft night air would suddenly grow heavy with regret.

Helen saw a movement over on the edge of the property. Peggy was flitting across the Coronado lawn to her apartment, carefully skirting the pool. She was too much of a friend to ruin Margery’s plan.

Helen watched, fascinated. Marcella lay back in her chaise, waxed legs glowing in the flickering light. Rob leaned slightly forward, as if she were drawing him toward her. She had the power and he acknowledged it. Rob listened with his whole body. Helen expected a pang of jealousy, but she felt nothing. She only prayed this romance would work.

How sad is that? she thought. I want my former husband to run off with another woman.

Marcella’s voice was too low to carry, but she moved her hands as she talked, as if conducting their conversation. Rob held a wineglass. He seemed bewitched.

In our end is our beginning, Helen thought. The first time she saw Rob was at a party. He was holding a wineglass and charming another woman. She was a model-thin blonde with cornsilk hair and bored glamour. When Rob saw Helen, he left the blonde in midsentence and introduced himself. “As soon as I saw you, I had to know you,” Rob had said.

Helen was dazzled. No man had ever treated her that way. She felt powerful, sexy and meanly triumphant when she saw the blonde alone in the corner.

Rob had had more hair and less gut then, but he hadn’t changed much in nearly twenty years. She was the one who’d changed. Helen was wiser in ways she never wanted to be.

Rob had been the blonde’s lover the night they’d met, but he’d abandoned her for Helen. “Once I saw you, there was no one else in the room,” he told Helen.

At twenty-two, she thought that was exciting. Now Helen knew better: The way a man treated his old love was the way he’d treat his new one. Rob cast aside his old lover without a second thought, but he never let go of his wine.

Rob had wanted to go home with Helen that night, and she’d wanted him in her bed. Her desire was a compulsion, a love sickness. She thought she’d die when she told him no. But on some primal level, she knew Rob only wanted what he couldn’t have.

So she won this empty prize. At twenty-two she’d felt superior to all the other women he’d slept with. Now she was smart enough to know she’d lost that night. Wiser women realized Rob wasn’t husband material. They had him for a romp in the sheets, then left. Helen mistook her naivete for moral superiority.

Three months later Helen had an engagement ring and a deposit on the church. Rob committed his first infidelity before the wedding, though she wouldn’t find out until years later. He had an affair with her maid of honor, a curvy, freckled brunette named Kate.

When they were planning the wedding, Helen had asked Rob if he found Kate attractive. “If you like cheerleaders,” he’d said. “She doesn’t have your legs.”

Whatever Kate had, Rob wanted it. He got it, too. But Helen’s love was blind. She saw Rob admiring other women. She believed him when he said, “Baby, I’m just looking, like any red-blooded man. It’s you I married. Don’t you trust me?”

She should have said no. But Rob was so passionate, Helen thought he couldn’t have any energy left for another woman. It took her a long time to understand the real thrill for Rob was cheating on her.

Marriage made his bed hopping so convenient. Rob set the rules, telling his women right up front, “I won’t leave my wife. We have an understanding.”

My wife understands she’s the faithful one. You understand we’ll have a little recreational sex, but don’t come running to me, honey, if you’re sick, lonely or need me. I’m married.

After her marriage unraveled, Helen spent the long nights trying to count all the women Rob had betrayed her with. She stopped at sixteen. She was overwhelmed by memories of sly smiles from strange women. She recalled Rob’s explanation for the motel matchbook in his pocket: “John gave me that when I asked him for a light.” The lipstick on his collar was waved away with: “I got that on my shirt at a good-bye party for Sonya. You remember sweet little Sonya. She’s getting married and moving to San Diego.”

Helen remembered the women who called their home. “Just a telemarketer,” Rob assured her. “I said I didn’t want any.”

Helen couldn’t look in his eyes. She was afraid of what she’d see.

Then one afternoon Helen came home from work early and walked in on Rob with their neighbor Sandy. No, he wasn’t with Sandy. He was deep inside her, groaning and pumping. There was no way Helen could close her eyes to that. Something hot and red exploded inside her, and she was permanently cured of her blindness. Helen picked up a crowbar and started swinging, while Rob scurried for the protection of his Toyota Land Cruiser like a cornered rat.

She’d killed Rob’s SUV. She’d pounded it into scrap, while a naked Rob cowered inside, begging her to stop. She did stop, after the cops arrived and the car was destroyed.

But Helen never stopped beating up on herself for being so blind, so stupid, so in love with a man who didn’t love her. When she ran from St. Louis, she didn’t just leave Rob behind. She tried to shed her old, gullible self.

Now she was in Fort Lauderdale, watching the man she’d slept with for seventeen years try to bed another woman—and hoping he’d succeed. Five years ago she would have been shocked speechless. But she was a different woman then, a good little corporate creature who saw only what she was supposed to.

I have to quit staring out this window, she thought. I’m going to burn a hole in Rob’s shirt. Helen shut the blinds and settled in with a book. She read the same paragraph over and over, although she had no idea what it said. Only Thumbs sitting on her legs kept her from pacing restlessly. She ran her fingers through his fur until he nipped her.

At midnight she heard a knock on the door. She expected Margery, but when she looked out the peephole, there was Phil with a rose and a bottle of champagne. “Let me in,” he whispered. “If you don’t, I’ll make an awful scene.”

She did, but not because she was afraid he’d betray her. A man who knew how to apologize was irresistible, especially when he wore her favorite blue shirt.

Apologies did not come easy to Phil. He squared his shoulders and took a deep breath, as if he were about to give a speech. “I’m sorry,” he said. “After what I married, I have no business criticizing anyone’s choice of a mate.”