Murder With Reservations (20 page)

Kendra. How could Helen have forgotten about Phil’s ex-wife, that stiletto-heeled vixen? If she’d remembered Kendra, Helen would have thrown his trashy ex in Phil’s face.

“The fact that you didn’t mention Kendra makes you a saint,” Phil said.

Helen wasn’t too good to take credit for her accidental virtue. “I hope you’re not planning to limit your apology to saintly activities.”

“Well,” he said with a sly smile, “I thought I’d start by getting down on my knees.”

He slowly unzipped her jeans. Helen moaned. “You need to apologize more often.”

It was nearly three in the morning when they were awakened by a man and a woman laughing and talking outside Helen’s apartment. Phil sat up in bed, startling Thumbs. The big-pawed cat jumped off the bed with a graceless thud and sent the empty champagne bottle rolling across the floor. At least the rose in the wineglass was safe.

“Who’s that?” Phil said.

“Shssh,” Helen said. “I bet it’s Rob and his new honey. Let’s get a look at her.”

They tiptoed to the window. The lights were off. Helen carefully lifted the miniblinds from the bottom and peeked outside. She nearly dropped the blinds. Rob was less than a foot away, leaning against her wall and kissing a brunette. Her ex had quite a lip grip.

Helen thought the woman was about forty, but when her face came under the hard yellow porch light, Helen saw she was actually a well-preserved sixty. She was handsome, but she looked a little harsh in that light. Her hair was a shade too dark, her eye makeup a little too black and her lipstick a fraction too red. Her clothes cost more than Helen made in six months. Their exaggerated cut could only be couture. Rob was pulling down the gold zipper on her blouse with one hand. The woman didn’t remove it.

Margery, you old cupid, Helen thought.

Your turn, she mouthed to Phil. He grinned at her, then looked out the window. The grin disappeared. Phil stared for a second, then dropped the blinds with a crash. The couple leaped like startled deer and ran laughing toward the parking lot.

“Holy shit,” Phil said. “That’s Marcella, the Black Widow.”

“Who?”

“The most notorious female serial killer in South Florida.”

“Who did she kill?” Helen said. “Her husbands,” Phil said.

R
ob is kissing a serial killer,” Helen said. “We have to warn him.” She was relieved she’d said that. Inside her, the divorced devil-wife was screaming, Good! I hope he dies slowly and painfully. I hope Marcella removes his manhood with a rusty knife and fries it with fava beans.

Helen was thankful her good side won out this time. She was sure the divorced devil-wife would scare the pants back on Phil. He was deliciously naked, but she was too upset to enjoy the view.

“We can’t warn him,” Phil said. “We can’t say a word against the woman. Marcella would slap us with a slander suit. She can afford to hire every lawyer in Lauder-dale. We wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.”

Helen had a sudden vision of pin-striped lawyers presenting Phil’s legs to Marcella, like Salome receiving the head of John the Baptist.

“Besides, would Rob believe you if you did warn him?” Phil said. “And how are you going to warn him?”

Oh. That. Helen could see herself knocking on her ex’s hotel door and saying, “Hi, Rob. It’s me. I know I’ve avoided you for a couple of years, but now I’m worried about you. Remember the woman you were smooching last night? The rich one with the yacht and more houses than a Monopoly game? She has this unusual hobby. She likes to collect husbands and kill them.”

Her speech would drive Rob into Marcella’s arms. “You’re right, Phil,” Helen said. “It was a stupid idea.”

“I like it when you say I’m right.” He smiled and his eyes crinkled. Helen loved when Phil’s eyes did that. She had a naked man with eye crinkles in her living room, and all she could think about was her worthless ex. Rob was a better chaperone than a convent full of nuns.

“Maybe we could tip off the police,” Helen said. “I could make an anonymous call from a pay phone and let them know Marcella is in town. They could watch her.”

“Why?” Phil said. “There are no outstanding warrants against her. She’s never been charged with a crime. She’s a fine upstanding multimillionaire—and a multiwidow.”

“How does she get away with it?” Helen said. “I couldn’t even kill one husband.”

“Her story takes some explaining,” Phil said. “Throw on some clothes and let’s go for a drive.”

Helen’s front door opened onto a silent world. The Coronado looked as if it were under a spell. The late-night moon turned the old building’s dazzling white walls a frozen blue. Mist swirled across the grass. Even the midnight cats were no longer on the prowl. At this hour, Helen could believe any story, no matter how fantastic.

They tiptoed down the sidewalk to Phil’s dusty black Jeep. He started the engine, but didn’t turn on the headlights until they were on the deserted street.

“How did you know about Marcella?” Helen said.

“Everyone in South Florida law enforcement knows about her,” Phil said. “She’s a legend. The police believe she’s killed at least four men, maybe five.

“Marcella was twenty when she married her first husband. She looks expensively lacquered now, but forty years ago her beauty was natural. I saw her wedding pictures. She had long wavy hair and a lush body. In her wedding photos you can see the men staring at her with undisguised hunger. They looked at her new husband with envy. You can almost read their minds: ‘How did a geezer with liver spots like raisins get a looker like her?’ “

Helen shuddered. “How did he?”

“Her new husband owned a shipping company. Oil tankers, I think. Marcella was a clerk-typist in the office. His wife of forty years had died recently. He was lonely, fabulously wealthy, and fifty years older than Marcella.

“The marriage seemed a success. He enjoyed playing Pygmalion, teaching her how to walk, talk and dress. She liked being an old man’s darling. He died of a heart attack ten years later. His death may have been natural, or maybe she got tired of waiting for his money. We’ll never know. There was no autopsy. The man was eighty and he had no children to stir up trouble.

“When he died, Marcella inherited half a billion dollars, four houses, a yacht and a teak sailboat. She was thirty. She buried her elderly husband, wore black for six months, then married a twenty-three-year-old Chippendale.

“Her second husband had a great body and all the right moves except one: Chip swung both ways. He had a boyfriend. One of the yacht crew talked too much in an island bar. He said Marcella caught Chip with his boyfriend and made a terrible scene.

“Shortly after that, Marcella and Chip went on a sailboat trip to the islands of Exuma in the Bahamas. She told the police that Husband Number Two had a lot of wine that evening and must have fallen off the boat during the night. When she awoke the next morning, he was gone. She’d searched frantically for hours, but there was no trace of Chip.

“A fisherman found the body two days later. Chip’s zipper was open. That detail seemed to confirm her story. A lot of drowned men get pulled out of the water in that condition. Late at night, a drunk takes a whiz off the side of the boat, loses his balance in the shifting sea and falls overboard. He can’t catch up with the boat. The guy drowns, cursing his own stupidity.

“The police had heard the rumors and questioned the crew member who’d supposedly witnessed the fight, but he denied it ever happened. The coroner ruled the death accidental. The suddenly tight-lipped crew member started his own charter boat company after the inquest.”

“What happened to Chip’s boyfriend?” Helen said.

“He disappeared,” Phil said.

“Did he die, too?” Helen said.

“Don’t know,” Phil said. “He was a drifter. If he was smart, he took off.”

The Jeep’s lights cut through the swirling night mist. Helen noticed the streets were narrower and lined with candy-colored cottages. Tipsy couples strolled down the sidewalk, clutching beer bottles and each other.

“It’s a nice night for a walk on the beach,” Phil said.

The ocean had always been a place of infinite possibility for them. Helen had first kissed Phil on the water after a wild boat chase. She’d rescued him from drowning, and he’d saved her from the police with a kiss. They had sealed their love on the beach.

Phil parked the Jeep at a shuttered T-shirt shop. Helen slipped off her shoes and rolled up her jeans for a walk on the sand. The beach felt cold and wet under her bare feet. The sand was sprinkled with sharp broken shells. The waves rushing over her feet chilled her. So did their endless shushing sound. Usually Helen found the water soothing. Tonight it unsettled her. What was it like to be lost in that limitless blackness, to feel your body grow colder and heavier as you choked on the water that would soon kill you? Helen shivered.

Phil put his arm around her. “Do you really want to hear the rest of this?” he said.

She nodded.

“Husband Number Three was a member of the yacht crew. He was another empty-headed stud fifteen years younger than Marcella.”

“She was making up for her time with the liver-spotted old man,” Helen said.

“She was nearly forty now,” Phil said. “You’d think this husband would have learned. But men always thought they were smarter than Marcella until it was too late. Gossip says she caught this one with an island cutie, but nobody would say anything on the record.”

“Any new charter businesses start up suddenly?” Helen said. She stepped over an eyeless fish rotting on the cold sand.

“Not that I know of,” Phil said. “Two days after Mar-cella supposedly caught her third husband in bed with another woman, he ate some bad seafood and died in agony. The island police didn’t investigate his death too carefully. He was seen eating three lobsters that night in a restaurant in the capital of Georgetown. Two other lobster lovers at the restaurant were also sick, but they survived.”

“Did Marcella have lobster?”

“No, she ate steak, the most expensive thing on any island menu. Marcella was once more a widow. After the inquest, she buried her handsome young husband at sea.”

What if I’d had the chance to kill Rob two days after I caught him with Sandy? Helen wondered.

The man would be dead meat, the divorced devil-wife said.

You had a chance to kill him when you found him, her good angel said. All you did was murder his SUV.

Helen kept those thoughts to herself. She stepped carefully around the beach trash. Seaweed decorated with busted balloons and lemon halves wrapped in yellow net were strung along the sand. Cruise ship debris, jettisoned illegally.

“Marcella was fifty-two when she met her fourth husband at a bar in the Caymans,” Phil said. “That wedding nearly equaled Madonna’s extravaganza with Sean Penn. The ceremony was in a pavilion by the sea decorated with ten thousand pink roses. Her off-white gown had a fifteen-foot train embroidered with seed pearls.”

“Where did you get that information?” Helen said.

“People
magazine,” Phil said. “The wedding cost nearly a million dollars. Two years later, the groom drowned in a diving accident off the island of St. Christopher. Defective air tank. Some island dive operations aren’t the safest. Her fourth husband was only thirty. The investigation found nothing unusual, and Marcella seemed to have no known reason to kill him. But the police think she did, just the same.”

“And the fifth husband?” Helen said.

“He died in the Bahamas on that fatal sailboat,” Phil said.

“She repeated herself,” Helen said. “That’s hardly original.”

“Husband Number Five didn’t come up with an original sin. He was a bodybuilding champ who cheated on Marcella with a sixteen-year-old Nassau girl. He told the girl the rich old bag he married was so grateful, he could do anything.”

“Ouch,” Helen said. “How did Marcella find that out?”

“The young woman got pregnant and her mother told Marcella.”

“Let me guess,” Helen said. “The child is now going to Harvard.”

“The boy was well provided for,” Phil said. “Marcella was generous—and forgiving. She had a very public reconciliation with her fifth husband on Bay Street. It was so touching, tourists and locals alike applauded them. The couple sailed for a second honeymoon on that teak boat. Marcella wanted to picnic on a remote island, just the two of them. The cook packed a basket with caviar, lobster and champagne.”

“You’d think her husbands would watch out for that lobster,” Helen said.

“Lobster didn’t kill this one,” Phil said. “Her fifth husband was an inexperienced sailor. The sailboat hit a sudden squall, the boom swung wildly in the wind, and he was cracked on the head. He died before Marcella could get him to a hospital.

“The Nassau police were suspicious. But other boaters reported there had been a squall in the area. The police found blood on the boom. The only odd thing was, the champagne bottle wasn’t anywhere on board. Marcella said it must have been lost during the confusion. The coroner ruled that the head wound was consistent with injuries sustained by a blow from the boom. Marcella had the bodybuilder cremated. That was four months ago.”