Murder With Reservations (22 page)

“You don’t have to leave,” Helen said.

“Oh yes I do.” Arlene gave Helen a big lipsticked smile. “It’s nearly two o’clock. I need to go home and take my afternoon nap. We old gals have to keep to our schedules. See you out by the Coronado pool tonight.”

She was gone, just like that. Helen envied the big woman’s grace as she rose and ran lightly to her car. She waited until Arlene pulled out of the parking lot before she went over to the front desk. Sondra wore somber gray today. Helen appreciated this mark of respect for Rhonda.

“What was that woman doing in the lobby?” Helen asked.

“Nothing much,” Sondra said. “Typical tourist. She watched people for a while, but she never talked to anyone. She knitted something pink and fluffy. Then she got out her video camera and took pictures of everything, the way tourists do. Shot the palm trees and the flowers, the lobby and the pool, the pay phones and the vending machines. You think they don’t have vending machines back home?”

“Who knows?” Helen said.

But she knew this: Arlene lived in 2C at the Coro-nado, and that set Helen’s alarm bells ringing. Too many crooks had stayed in that apartment. She also knew Ar-lene was in a hurry to leave once when she saw Helen. Did she really rush home for a nap? And was she really surprised to see Helen? She couldn’t remember if she’d told Arlene the name of this hotel.

There was one more question Helen couldn’t answer: Why was Arlene at the Full Moon hotel the day of Rhonda’s funeral?

J
ESUS SAVES
was painted on the cracked plate-glass window of the derelict drugstore. “Does he have any bargains on Maalox?” Helen whispered to Denise.

The head housekeeper glared at her. Helen opened the door to the storefront church and was hit by a refrigerated blast of rubbing alcohol, adhesive tape and mint.

“A church in a drugstore is taking the opium of the people too far,” Helen said.

“You’re going to hell,” Denise said, sounding like Sister Mary Justine. “Now shut up or I’ll make you walk home.” She settled her ample body on a dented folding chair. Helen prayed it wouldn’t collapse.

Helen knew why she was cracking bad jokes. She hated this grim church. She stared at the broken tile floor, gray with dust and blotched with old gum, and remembered her grandmother saying, “We were never so poor we couldn’t afford soap.” Someone could have mopped the floor, considering what Rhonda did for a living. No cleaning woman should have a funeral in a dirty church.

The altar was a barren table with a Bible and a black cross. Rhonda’s cheap gray casket seemed to suck the light from the room. The wilted gladioli looked like they’d been pulled out of a Dumpster. Like Rhonda.

Helen desperately wanted to believe that Rhonda’s funeral had simple dignity, but it was stark and sad. There were thirty people in the church, including the hotel staff. The black-clad mourners huddled together like crows in a rainstorm.

Rhonda’s mother, Shirley, was yellow and dry as an old bone. Her battered black hat looked stepped on. Next to her sat a plump woman who patted Shirley’s sticklike arms. Rhonda’s mother leaned against the woman as if she might collapse. Was she a sister, an aunt or a friend? Helen was glad Shirley had someone to comfort her.

Helen also saw who wasn’t there. There was no dream lover. The only men were two skinny retirees and fat Sam the biker. No, make that four. Leaning against the back wall was Detective Mulruney, his suit as wrinkled as his face.

The bony preacher with his frock coat could have stepped from a nineteenth-century daguerreotype. He offered cold comfort, reading from Job in a dead monotone: ” ‘Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.’ “

Helen wanted to shout, “This is not a man’s funeral. Rhonda is a woman. Can’t you say something about her?”

But the preacher never did. He read his hopeless texts until Helen wept in frustration. No one had noticed Rhonda when she was alive. She was thrown away in death. Now she was ignored at her own funeral.

I will find who killed her, Helen vowed. She knew it sounded childish, but at least her tears stopped.

The funeral party followed a dusty hearse to the cemetery, squeezed between two truck terminals in Lauder-dale. The graveyard was flat and treeless. Helen stared into the hole prepared for Rhonda. The thin, lifeless dirt was dotted with rocks, evoking sermons on seeds and stony soil.

Helen looked at the desolate grave and wanted to ask, “Is that all there is?” She knew the answer.

After the burial, Helen, Denise, Cheryl and Sondra rode back to the Jesus Saves church in stunned silence. They still had to endure what Rhonda’s mother called a “cold collation”—stale sandwiches and soggy cookies. A coffeepot was set up on the former pharmacy counter. Helen poured herself a cup to warm her hands. She felt chilled inside and out.

The Full Moon staff formed a miserable quartet. They scattered when Sam approached, his plate piled high with gray turkey sandwiches. Helen was left alone with Rhonda’s biker boyfriend. He wore an awkward suit. The sleeves were too short to cover the Seminole Sam tattoo on his wrist. His dark hair was salted with dandruff.

“Guess you never expected to see me like this,” Sam said.

Helen flashed on the vision of Sam and his two skanky girlfriends leaving the Full Moon. How could he take those trashy women to the hotel where Rhonda worked? Was he trying to humiliate her? Then Helen had a sudden horrible thought and slopped her coffee on the floor. What if Sam knew it didn’t matter because Rhonda was dead in the Dumpster?

Sam didn’t notice Helen’s trembling hands or the coffee puddle at her feet. He was still munching the pile of aging turkey. “I mean, you must be surprised to see me in a suit,” he said through a mouthful of masticated turkey.

“Yes,” Helen said. One word was all she could manage.

“Got it for my court appearance,” Sam said. “Figured it would come in handy again, so I kept it. It’s the least I could do for Rhonda.”

“And I’m sure that’s what you did for her,” Helen said.

Sam hesitated, as if he wasn’t sure he’d been insulted.

Then he backed away, protecting his piled plate from her venom. Helen heard a soft snicker behind her. “He deserved that.”

Helen turned to see a woman who could have been Rhonda’s blond sister. She was tall and scrawny, with a long face and big teeth. Her brassy hair hung in banana curls, a style some twenty years too young for her. Then she smiled, and was transformed. Energy and charm overcame bad hair any day.

“I’m Amber.” She stuck out a long, thin hand. “I’m just about Rhonda’s best friend. I mean, I was. Well, I still am but she’s—” Amber abandoned the hopeless tangle of syntax.

“I worked with Rhonda at the Full Moon,” Helen said.

“I liked the way you gave Sam hell, even if he was too dumb to know it,” Amber said. “He’s a prick. And wasn’t that a sorry excuse for a funeral?”

“Amen,” Helen said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Rhonda used to drink at Biddle’s Corner Bar up the road,” Amber said. “I could use a beer. Let’s give her a proper send-off.”

Helen rarely drank beer, but in the dusty little church a cold brew was tempting. She said her good-byes to Shirley and told Denise she’d find her own way home. The head housekeeper seemed relieved.

Biddle’s Corner Bar turned out to be a dingy cinder-block building halfway up the street. At three thirty in the afternoon, it was deserted except for a bartender polishing glasses. Amber went up to the bar for two draft beers and a pack of Planters peanuts.

Back at the table, Amber held up her frosted glass. “To Rhonda,” she said. “She deserved better in this world. If there is a God, she’ll get it in the next.”

Helen clinked glasses with her, then took a bitter sip of beer. It settled the dust and soothed her soul. A handful of peanuts helped, too. “You said it better than the preacher.”

“Damn preacher,”Amber said.”He was as cold as his church. Maybe if he’d cut back on the air-conditioning he’d have money to clean the place up.” She took a long drink. “Rhonda would have been better off without any religion. Never did anything but make her feel guilty.”

A skinny guy with homemade prison tattoos banged through the door and sat down at the bar. Rhonda could really pick places to meet men, Helen thought.

“I’m trying to understand Rhonda,” Helen said. “But I can’t get a handle on her.”

“Nobody could,”Amber said.”She spent every Friday and Saturday night in this bar and all Sunday in church. She dressed like a nun, but she liked men and they liked her. I should talk, but she was built like a broomstick. It didn’t matter to the guys. There was something about Rhonda that men noticed and women couldn’t see.”

The way men can’t see Rob’s appeal, Helen thought.

“Why did she date Sam?” Helen said.

Amber drew thoughtful water circles on her beer glass. “She didn’t think she deserved any better. Isn’t that what they say on
Oprah?
She’d go out with a nice man, but it never lasted. She thought nice guys were wimps. If they had a mean streak like Sam, she figured they were real men.”

“She didn’t have a high opinion of men, did she?” Helen said.

“Most women don’t.” Amber swallowed a third of her beer.

Helen took a longer sip and crunched another peanut. “The day she died, Rhonda talked about a handsome boyfriend. Was he real or did she make him up?”

“I never knew Rhonda to lie about men,” Amber said.

Helen felt her heart shrivel. She was wrong. She’d ruined the murder investigation and sent the police in the wrong direction.

“Who was he?” Helen said.

“I never saw him. But she talked about him constantly in her last weeks.”

“Did you know this mystery man gave her money?” Helen said. “At least fifty dollars.”

“Men were always giving her little presents: flowers, perfume, a cultured pearl necklace. Even her cat Snowball was a gift. Sam gave her that. He found the kitten on the road. Trust him to give her something she’d have to support. Rhonda thought it was wrong to accept gifts from men, but she took them all the same, then flogged herself on Sunday. She never told her mama. I used to say she needed a man who’d give her diamonds and con-dos, but she just laughed at me.”

“Did you know that the fifty was counterfeit?”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Amber said. “I’m a waitress. Do you know how many bad fifties are floating around South Florida?” She took another gulp of beer, then burped delicately.

“Do you think she was passing bad money?” Helen asked.

“No, she wasn’t that kind of girl. She wouldn’t get involved in a counterfeit ring. She liked sex, but she wasn’t greedy for money. Otherwise she would have sold it instead of giving it away, you know what I mean?”

“Can you tell me anything about her new boyfriend?” Helen was practically begging.

“I wish I could,” Amber said. “But she wouldn’t even tell me his name, and usually she told me more than I wanted to know about her men friends. She said he was really special, but she had to keep him a secret for a little while. Rhonda seemed happier and more confident in her final weeks. She didn’t spend Friday and Saturday nights in this dive. She kicked Sam out when he asked for another loan till payday. Since Sam didn’t have a job, she knew payday was a long time away.”

“Did she describe the man at all?” Helen said.

“All I know is he had dark hair and a tattoo on his wrist.”

“Like Sam,” Helen said. “Maybe there wasn’t any new boyfriend. Maybe he was just a cleaned-up version of Sam. An imaginary lover who was kinder, handsomer, and gave her money instead of sponging off her. If he was real, he never bothered coming to her funeral. He never even called her mother and said he was sorry.”

“Maybe he was a butthole, but he’s as real as this beer,” Amber said.

Helen looked at the chilled glass. It was empty.

It was still daylight when Helen lurched out of the tavern, blinking in the brilliant sun. She took the bus home. It chugged along the traffic-clogged streets until she wanted to barf. Helen arrived at the Coronado, sick with remorse and too much beer.

She felt sicker when she saw the two people she least wanted to talk to sitting out by the pool. Margery and Arlene were stretched out on chaise longues, with wineglasses in their hands. Helen tried to slip around the side of the building, but Arlene called out, “Yoo-hoo! Come try my shrimp dip.”

There was no escape. Arlene was still wearing the same hot-pink eyesore she’d had on at the hotel, but she’d abandoned her knitting bag. “It was such a surprise to see you today,” she said. “But you work at a nice, clean hotel.”

“We try,” Helen said, taking a seat.

“Wine?” her landlady said.

“Not thirsty,” Helen said. Wine on top of the beer would give her a raging headache. “Shrimp dip?” Arlene said.

Helen’s beer-soaked stomach did a barrel roll. “Not hungry, thanks.”

“You young things are always on a diet,” Arlene said. “I have to ask you, since you’re in the business, how clean is the average hotel room?”

“In some ways, it’s cleaner than your own home,” Helen said. “Most people don’t dust, vacuum or scrub the bathroom every day. They also don’t change their sheets and towels daily.”