Clubbed to Death (32 page)

She wanted to ask Margery for help, but she didn’t want Phil around.

Her man was too straitlaced for this project.

Helen found her landlady out by the pool, hosing off the warm concrete. Margery worked with brisk, efficient movements, using the water to push leaves and dirt into the grass.

“I need you,” Helen said.

“Nobody’s said that to me in a long time,” Margery said. She grinned at Helen.

“Look, you got me into this mess, manipulating Rob to marry Marcella, and then getting Marcella to pay for my lawyer when he disappeared.”

“I saved your sorry ass,” Margery said. “You aren’t the least bit grateful.”

“You got me in deep and now you’re going to get me out.”

“By doing what?” Margery looked at her suspiciously. “Something you can’t ask true-blue Phil?”

“He won’t steal a pregnant woman’s purse.”

“I might. But I need a good reason before I stoop that low,” Margery said. She lit a cigarette and said, “Spill.”

So Helen told her about Mandy and Dr. Dell. “I think the doctor’s pregnant receptionist extorted money out of him, maybe for an abortion.

I’m guessing she wanted lots more—either money or marriage. Either way, she followed the doctor to the club on the morning of his death, hoping to make an embarrassing scene.”

“How’d she get in?” Margery asked. Her cigarette winked at Helen.

“She stole the wife’s club card. When Demi got home from her retaliatory shopping spree in New York, she called the club and said her card was missing. She thought she’d left it on her dresser at home, but she couldn’t find it. I think Dr. Dell gave himself a little extra thrill by boinking his girlfriend in his wife’s bed. That’s when Mandy stole the card.”

“Men like that deserve to die.” Margery’s face looked hard in the waning light, and Helen wondered if she was talking about the not-so-good doctor.

“I gave Demi a new club card,” Helen said. “I’m an expert on adultery after working at the club. Guys who cheat often pick women who look like their wives. Mandy has dark hair. The club card picture is the size of a thumbprint. The doctor’s girlfriend could pass as his wife if anyone questioned her. But the day Mandy went to the club, the member gate was broken. She didn’t need the card.

“Here’s what I think happened: Mandy followed the doc to the customer care office. He’d just discovered Brenda’s body. He was in shock. He blurted something nasty to Jackie, who whacked him with a golf club. Mandy saw his murder, hid until Jackie fled, then robbed the dead doctor.”

“Nice people,” Margery said. “How are you going to prove it? Are you going to the police?”

“They won’t believe me at this point. I need more,” Helen said.

“Besides, Jackie has already confessed to the theft.”

“So why are we stealing a pregnant woman’s purse?”

“To get Demi’s club card.”

“Which will prove nothing,” Margery said.

“Except Mandy has been in the doc’s house,” Helen said. “And could get into the Superior Club with the card. If I can pinpoint the time, the police can do a search. She may turn up on a surveillance tape somewhere, if they know when to look for her. Or she could have left hair and fibers in the customer care office.”

“Why would she keep the card?” Margery asked.

“People don’t let go of a Superior Club card. Besides, Mandy might need to get back in the club. Margery, I am not confronting her alone, even if she is pregnant. A woman who’d rob her dead lover is too scary.

You need to go with me.”

“It’s almost seven,” Margery said. “What if Mandy’s husband is home? The guy works with hammers and chain saws.”

“He’s working late these days to make extra money for the baby.”

“That might not be his. The poor dumb bastard. All right,” Margery said. “I’ll pretend to be an old biddy signing up new mothers for baby gifts. Give me a few minutes to change.”

Helen’s jaw dropped when Margery came out of her apartment ten minutes later. She was wearing the most conservative outfit Helen had ever seen her in: a lavender shirtwaist dress, pearls and chunky purple heels.

“June Cleaver lives,” Helen said.

“I’m trying to look the part,” Margery said. “I’ll drive my car.

Yours is a little run-down.”

“Mine is going to be shut down by the EPA,” Helen said. “It’s belching black smoke.”

“That’s what I mean,” Margery said. “We need to stop at a drugstore.”

“What for?” Helen said.

“Diapers,” Margery said. “They’ll get us in the door.”

They bought disposable diapers, a rattle, some baby wipes and a pink-and-blue gift bag. “That should do it,” Margery said. “No new parent can resist freebies.”

All the way to Hollywood, Helen kept staring at Margery’s Junior League getup.

“What are you looking at?” her landlady finally said.

“I can’t get over you in that outfit. You look so... trustworthy.”

“I am,” Margery said. “You can trust me to help bury the body if you ever murder Rob.”

“He’s gone,” Helen said. “Turn left here.”

“You really believe that?” Margery said.

“I really believe that’s Mandy’s house on the right,” Helen said.

Mandy’s neighborhood was a comedown for a woman who’d dreamed of a doctor’s seaside mansion in Golden Palms. She lived in a dusty concrete-block box, with faded mustard paint and rust trails dripping down the walls from the window bars. The lawn had dead brown patches, like an old dog with mange. A skinny palm tree struggled to survive near the front door. Helen wanted to put it out of its misery.

Margery parked and ground out her cigarette. “Can’t smoke around the baby,” she said.

“If Mandy’s husband is a handyman, he’s sure not doing any home improvement,” Helen said.

“Tearing it down is the only way to improve this home,” Margery said.

The dying yard was surrounded by a chain-link fence that made it look more like a detention center than a home.

“If the husband’s there, we’ll say we have the wrong address,” Margery said.

She knocked on the door five or six times. Finally, an impatient voice shouted, “I said I’m coming. Hold your horses, willya?”

The door slammed open and there stood a very pregnant Mandy.

Her belly was swollen and so were her ankles. Her dark hair straggled down her neck. She wore an oversized red T-shirt, an unfortunate color that emphasized her blotchy complexion. Pregnancy had not been kind to her voluptuous body. It certainly didn’t improve her temper.

“I’m not buying anything.” Mandy started to slam the door.

“I’m giving away free diapers and baby gifts,” Margery said, and managed a grandmotherly smile. She held out the gift bag.

Mandy opened the door.

There was hardly room for the three of them in the living room.

Most of the space was taken up with a huge brown plush sofa. A cigarette-scarred coffee table was piled with bags of Cheetos, Doritos and Oreos—all the food groups ending in O.

The baby wasn’t the only cause of Mandy’s dramatic swelling, Helen thought.

Mandy sat down wearily and put her swollen feet on the coffee table. Margery plopped down on the edge of the couch, effectively blocking her exit.

“We have so many wonderful things for new parents,” Margery began. Mandy kept eyeing the gift bag, but Margery kept it out of reach.

Helen spotted a brown purse by the couch. It looked like it was pregnant, too.

“Excuse me,” Helen said. “May I use your bathroom?”

“Down the hall,” Mandy said, never letting the gift bag out of her sight. If she watched her baby half as well, she’d make a heck of a mom.

Margery handed over the gift bag, while Helen slipped into the tiny bathroom to examine the purloined purse. There was barely room for both of them. Helen winced when she turned on the light. Shower mold and yellow flowered linoleum were not a pretty combination.

Helen pawed through the purse and found Demi Dell’s Superior Club card in a zippered side pocket. She used a tissue to pull it out. She didn’t want to mess up any fingerprints.

“But only if you sign up today,” Margery was saying when Helen returned.

Helen gave her a nod, then held up the stolen club card. “Look familiar, Mandy?”

“What’s that?” Mandy asked.

“You know what it is,” Helen said. “A Superior Club card belonging to Demi Dell, your dead boss’s wife. I found it in your purse.”

“What are you doing in my purse, bitch?” Mandy asked.

“Looking for stolen goods. Would you like to explain this to Demi?”

“You put it there,” Mandy said.

She was a cool customer, Helen thought. “Nope,” Helen said. “I handled it very carefully. The police will only find your prints.”

“The police? I didn’t run up any club charges on Demi’s card. I don’t have to talk to you,” Mandy said. But she didn’t sound quite so confident now.

“No, you don’t. And I don’t have to tell your husband why he needs a DNA test for that baby—not if you tell me what happened to the doctor’s thirty-five hundred dollars.”

This time, Mandy didn’t try to pretend she didn’t know what Helen was talking about. “I stole it,” she said. “So what?”

“That’s not all you stole,” Helen said.

“I took everything I was entitled to,” Mandy said.

“Everything you
thought
you were entitled to,” Helen said. “That’s not quite the same. You followed Dr. Dell into the club. You knew he played golf that morning. You were going to confront him with your pregnancy.”

“Wrong-o. He already knew,” Mandy said. “I’d told him two days before that.”

“He wouldn’t marry you, would he?” Helen said. “That’s why you settled for a handyman husband and a house in Hollywood. The doctor wanted you to get an abortion.”

“Worse,” Mandy said. Her face turned hard. “I told him our baby was a girl and I needed money for her. He said, ‘I already spent three thousand dollars on you.’

“I said, ‘For clothes I can’t wear now that I’m pregnant. You said you were tired of your wife. You promised to marry me.’

“ ‘You must have misunderstood,’ he said. ‘I’d never leave Demi. I made one mistake. I won’t pay for two.’ He stuck his finger in my gut and said, ‘Get rid of it. The world doesn’t need another flat-chested slut.’ ”

Helen gasped at the cruelty. Even Margery raised an eyebrow.

“I spent two days crying,” Mandy said. “Then I decided my baby was going to get what she deserved. I was going to embarrass the doctor into supporting her. I knew he played golf early in the morning. I followed him to the club. He never noticed my car. He stopped at the customer care office. I figured he was probably going to pay that three-thousand-dollar club bill before his wife saw it. It was a good place to confront him—plenty of people around, so he’d be embarrassed.

“He must have walked in right after that Brenda lady got killed. He was standing over her body. I slipped behind those heavy window curtains by the door.

“At first, I thought he’d killed her. He was in a daze, calling her name: ‘Brenda.’ Even I could see she was dead—and I’m not a doctor.

There was another woman in the room. She was about forty-five, skinny, with dark hair. Dr. Dell was yelling at her, ‘She was my finest work. Look at those tits. Perfect. I created them and you destroyed them.’

“ ‘You’re another one,’ the brunette said. ‘You cheated on your sweet wife and misled that poor girl in your office.’ She whacked him twice with the golf club. I think she wanted to hit him more, but she heard a noise. It turned out to be the trash truck at the loading dock.

She wiped her fingerprints off the club, cleaned out some money in a desk drawer and left. She never saw me.”

“And you didn’t go to the police?” Margery said. “You witnessed a murder.”

“Why should I? That woman was the only person who felt sorry for me. The girls at work all knew I’d been knocked up by the doctor.

They laughed at me. I wasn’t going to turn in the one person who’d said something nice. She did me a favor. I knew the doctor carried a lot of cash. He had thirty-five hundred dollars on him that day. I took it all.”

“You could get money from Dr. Dell’s estate for your child,” Helen said.

“No, I couldn’t. Demi and her lawyers will fight me until the kid’s in an old folks’ home. Besides, my husband thinks the kid is his. Maybe it is. I’m not upsetting my meal ticket. The baby needs a father and Dave’s a decent guy and a hard worker.”

Now there was true love, Helen thought. The only thing worse than being trapped in this house with the plush sofa and the shower mold would be living in Mandy’s head.

Mandy picked up a bag of Cheetos the size of a couch pillow. “Get out of here,” she said. “Dave’s due home and I don’t want him running into you. If you tell the cops what I said, they won’t believe you.”

“Yes, they will,” Helen said. “Demi’s club card will get the cops interested in you. It shows you were in the doctor’s house. It has your fingerprints on it. I’m sure there’s hair and fiber evidence to prove you were in the club that morning. If you confess to taking the money, Jackie could get a lighter sentence.”

Mandy gave a hard, harsh laugh. “She doesn’t want it. Trust me. I know the assholes she had to deal with at that club. Jackie’s where she wants to be, in prison with three squares a day—just like me. We both wanted something better, but we settled for what we could get. Anyway, Dr. Dell owed me a lot more than thirty-five hundred bucks. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You robbed a dead man,” Helen said.

“He wasn’t going to use it,” Mandy said.

CHAPTER 32

The slammed door seemed to reverberate through the night.

Mandy had shut Helen and Margery out of her house and her life.

“She’s right, you know,” Margery said, as they walked back to her car.

“Jackie’s not going to recant her confession. She’ll go to her grave swearing she stole that money. And you’ll never nail that tough little cookie, Mandy.”

“I still want to ask Jackie,” Helen said.

“Ask her what?” Margery said.

“If she wants to say she stole the doctor’s money when I’ve found the real thief.”

“What else do you want to ask her?” Margery said.