Clubbed to Death (33 page)

“I don’t know what you mean,” Helen said.

“Sure you do.” Margery lit a cigarette, then put the big white Lincoln Town Car in gear and pulled away from Mandy’s self-made prison.

“Mandy is serving a life sentence of motherhood,” Margery said.

“Heaven help that poor baby. She’s going to take the blame for her mother’s failed ambition. That poor sap Mandy just married has my sympathy, too. She’ll remind him every day that she settled for second best. I wouldn’t want to be trapped behind that chain-link fence with those three.

“Jackie put herself in prison. You can talk to her about the doctor’s money, but that’s not what you really want to ask Jackie. You want to know why she tried to kill you. You want to know if you’re capable of killing someone, too. Jackie can’t answer either of those questions.”

Helen didn’t appreciate Margery’s instant psychoanalysis, but she didn’t want to argue. She rolled down her window and breathed in the cool night air, tangy with ocean salt. She closed her eyes and pretended sleep. Soon she drifted off and didn’t have to pretend anymore.

Early the next morning, Helen called the sheriff office’s jail information line. Jackie was being held at the Palmheart Women’s Detention Facility, awaiting the final outcome of her plea. A recording said prisoners could have visitors once a week, and this was Jackie’s visiting day. Helen didn’t want to wait another seven days. She called her boss, Kitty. “I’m having car trouble,” Helen said. “I’m really sorry. It will take another hour or two to fix the car.”

“Don’t worry, sweetpea. Come in when you can,” Kitty said.

Helen felt like a rat, lying to someone as nice as Kitty. But she had to see Jackie today.

Palmheart was a dusty little town near the Everglades. The jail looked like a high school. It was a grim beige building with slits for windows. Helen waited in line for the metal detector, behind a plus-sized woman in hospital scrubs, a sad old man with a bowed gray head, and a busty Latina in a see-through blouse and a sliver of skirt. That outfit was against the dress code, but the guard waved her through. Helen showed her fake driver’s license and hoped she didn’t look guilty. Then she realized everyone here looked guilty. She fit right in.

Helen wondered if Jackie would even see her. Prisoners had the right to refuse visitors. But there she was behind the Plexiglas shield, in a beige jumpsuit that looked oddly like another uniform. Her dark hair was pulled back in her usual chignon, but Jackie wore no makeup. She looked pale but younger and her nails were no longer bitten to the quick.

Jackie picked up her phone and said, “Helen, it’s so good of you to see me. I didn’t expect this.”

“How are you?” Helen asked. It felt strange talking to Jackie on a phone, when she was sitting across from her. But the Plexiglas barrier made talking easier.

“Fine,” Jackie said, as if they were sitting at lunch at work. “I’m rested for the first time in ages. I know you’re not supposed to be able to sleep in jail, but the noise doesn’t bother me. My apartment was by the Dixie Highway and the railroad tracks. I learned to shut out noise.

How’s everyone at the office? Is Xaviera engaged yet?”

“No, she’s waiting for Steven to get a promotion.”

“I hope it comes soon,” Jackie said. “Xaviera’s not getting any younger and she wants children. Is Kitty still getting a divorce?”

Helen filled Jackie in on the office gossip. They both ignored the black hole opening between them until Helen was afraid it would swallow them. Finally, Jackie tiptoed to the edge of the abyss.

“How are you, Helen?” She stopped. “Did you suffer any ill effects from—” Jackie still couldn’t say that she’d tried to kill Helen.

“I’m OK,” Helen said. “I didn’t eat the chocolate. I don’t like creme centers.”

“I don’t know what came over me,” Jackie said. “After Brenda died—” She stopped again, unable to admit how Brenda died. “I felt like I was in a bad dream and couldn’t wake up. That’s no excuse, Helen. But I’m glad it didn’t work.”

“Me, too.” Helen figured that was as close as she’d get to an apology.

“Jackie, I know you didn’t take the doctor’s cash,” Helen said. “Mandy, his assistant, sneaked into the customer care office and stole it.”

“Is that the poor girl he got pregnant?” Jackie said.

“Yes. Listen, I think I can prove Mandy was the thief. I can go to the police.”

“No, don’t!” Jackie said. “I know it sounds strange, but I like it here.”

“Don’t you miss your freedom?” Helen asked.

“What freedom?” Jackie said. “I got up at six and worked until dark.

I was so exhausted I slept most weekends. The only places I could afford to go were the library and church. Occasionally, a friend would take me out for a pity lunch, or give me last year’s suit, like some charity case.

“My life here is much easier. The food’s not very good, but I’ve lived on boiled eggs for so long, I don’t really care what I eat. I haven’t much appetite anymore.

“The other inmates have their problems, but they’re not as nasty as the club members. If they act out or scream at me, they get punished. I never have to worry about my rent or my car payment. I can take college courses. I’ve always wanted to go back to school. Now I have the time.

“You know the best part?” Jackie said. “Nobody in here ever says, ‘Do you know who I am?’

“We all know who we are. That’s Denise on my right.” Jackie nodded toward a large, doughy woman with stringy blond hair, talking on a phone. “Denise is in here for setting her boyfriend on fire. She got tired of him coming home drunk and beating her up.

“That’s Gemelle on the left. She’s in for armed robbery.” Gemelle, a small, cinnamon-skinned woman with brown braids, looked dangerous as a new puppy.

“And everyone knows who I am, because I did what every woman in here wants to do: I killed my vicious boss. Then I killed an unfaithful husband.

“Do you know who I am, Helen? I’m a hero.”

Helen left the jail feeling oddly disconnected. She’d fallen through the looking glass, but instead of seeing Jackie’s life, she saw her own.

Was Jackie’s old life really so harsh she preferred prison? Helen pondered that question all the way back to the club.

She slid into her desk in customer care at eleven thirty. Cam was cleaning his phone with alcohol spray. Xaviera was on the phone trying to explain a sixty-dollar lunch charge. “Yes, ma’am, I understand that you were in New York on the twenty-first,” Xaviera said. “But someone used your card for lunch. I’m sorry, but if you lend your card to your pool boy, you’re responsible for the charges he makes, even if you didn’t approve them.”

Jessica was trying to calm a club member about a bill. She nodded at Helen and kept saying, “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

Helen’s phone rang. She picked it up on the first ring. She recognized that buzz-saw whine immediately.

“No one is answering the customer care phone,” Blythe St. Ives said.

“It rang and rang. I had to call back.” She made it sound as if she’d had to walk barefoot to Palm Beach in the sweltering heat.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but we’re shorthanded.”

“Do you know who I am?” Blythe said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Helen said. “You’re rich, rude and unhappy for no reason I can understand, and I’m tired of dealing with you.”

There was a gasp. “I’ll have your job!” Blythe shrieked.

“I hope you get it,” Helen said. “You deserve it.”

She hung up the phone. Next to her, Jessica finished her call and said into the dead phone, “Bitch.”

“I hate you, too,” Xaviera muttered, as she slammed down the phone.

“No, I can’t have it ready in half an hour. You’ll have to wait,” Cam said to someone on his phone.

Helen listened to the chorus of curses and insults for a moment, then stood up and said, “I quit.”

“Another one bites the dust,” Cam said.

“Maybe you’d like to take a short vacation,” Jessica said.

“Or a long one,” Xaviera said.

Kitty came out of her office, wringing her hands. “Helen, please don’t go,” she said. “We love you.”

Helen looked into Kitty’s sad brown eyes. “I can’t do it anymore,” she said. “I can’t take the meanness.”

“I’ll handle the mean ones,” Kitty said. “Send them to me.”

“I meant the meanness in me,” Helen said. “I spend my days taking petty revenge on people I don’t like, until I’m as nasty as they are. I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to hear ‘I’m a doctor’ or ‘Do you know who I am?’ one more time. I started asking myself, ‘Do you know who I am?’ I didn’t like the answer.”

“The abuse gets to all of us,” Jessica said. “But we get over it.”

“No,” Helen said. “We pretend to get over it. But it still hurts. Jessica, you’re a great actress. I’m not. I’m sorry.”

Helen walked out the door and away from the best-paying job she was likely to find in South Florida. She was jobless, without a decent reference and deep in debt. But she knew who she was. And she was tired of dealing with nasty people.

She fought the bucking, belching Toad all the way home on the highway. She pulled into the parking lot at the Coronado and noticed a trail of drips behind the car. Water? Oil? Transmission fluid? She was afraid to find out.

Margery was raking dead palm fronds in the yard. “What are you doing home in the middle of the day?” She looked at Helen’s face and said, “You’ve quit, haven’t you?”

“Yep,” Helen said. “I heard that question once too often: Do you know who I am?

“I was losing sight of who I was—a woman who’d learned how to enjoy life. For years, I slaved away at my job in St. Louis, hating it, but making so much money I couldn’t quit. I put myself in golden handcuffs. Then I lost my job and my life and wound up here in Florida.

“I learned to enjoy life. I toasted the sunset with cheap wine and good friends. I found the man I love. I worked a lot of jobs I didn’t care about, and I had the luxury of walking away when I wanted. I was off the books and under the radar.

“Then I got that job at the Superior Club and everything changed.

I had credit card debt, a cell phone bill and car repairs.”

“You made double the money at that job,” Margery said.

“And got triple the misery. It’s not worth the price I had to pay.

Jackie taught me one thing: You put yourself in prison. Well, I’m breaking out.”

“Last time I checked, you didn’t win the lottery,” Margery said.

“And you’ve run up big car repair and credit card bills. How are you going to pay them?”

“I’m going to sell my car,” Helen said, “and go back to taking the bus. I’ll give up my cell phone. Take back the new clothes I bought, if I can. Then get a real dead-end job, with nice people and no pressure.”

Margery snorted. “You’re living in a fairy tale.”

“It’s my story,” Helen said, “and I’m going to live happily ever after.”

EPILOGUE

Helen came back to the Superior Club for the last time one month later.

Kitty had asked her to reconsider her resignation. “Wait thirty days, sweetpea,” she’d said. “You’ll feel different about the job.”

Helen didn’t. Today she was going to turn in her office key and her employee card and pick up her last check. Her uniform was neatly folded in a bag on the seat of the Toad.

There was a traffic jam at Ives Dairy Road again, and the Toad bucked as Helen slowed it down. The junker made an ominous grinding sound, and Helen hoped the worthless hunk of iron would get her to the club and back home.

She’d already canceled her cell phone. She couldn’t call for help if the Toad died.

The traffic jam broke up and the Toad quit bucking. At high speeds, its ride was almost smooth. Helen sighed with relief. She was going to make it. Phil had found a buyer for the Toad. A car collector offered seven hundred dollars for the steaming heap. The man planned to use it for spare parts. The money he offered would nearly cover the cost of the car repairs. Helen was going to deliver the Toad to the slaughterhouse tomorrow, provided it made this trip.

She’d almost returned to her old life. She was able to take back about half the clothes she’d bought in her spending spree. The rest she had to pay for, including the skirt she’d destroyed capturing Rob.

She’d nearly emptied the stash she kept in her stuffed bear, Chocolate. But it was worth it. When she made the last payment, Helen cut up her credit card. She was once again a free woman.

Now she was looking for another dead-end job. She hadn’t found anything yet, but she was choosing carefully. She figured her stashed money should hold out for another month.

The Toad belched stinking smoke into the rarefied air of Golden Palms. A woman walking her Pomeranian glared at the smelly rolling wreck. Her little dog yapped.

Helen waved to the guard at the Superior Club gate and drove to the employee lot, the place where she’d punched Rob in the face a lifetime ago. I paid a high price for that moment of satisfaction, she thought. If I’d kept my temper, would any of this have happened?

It was another question Helen couldn’t answer. But she knew she was happier now that she wasn’t working at the club.

Helen walked into the Superior Club office. It was as if she’d never left. Cam was scrubbing down his desk with alcohol spray. Xaviera was giggling into her phone, and Helen could tell by the pretty flush on her cheeks that she was talking to her boyfriend, Steven. Jessica was placating someone on her phone: “I’m sorry you’re not happy, ma’am.”

“May I help you?” A fortyish blonde was sitting in Jackie’s old desk.

Jackie’s replacement seemed polite and efficient.

She thinks I’m a member, Helen thought. I don’t know whether to be insulted or pleased.

“Helen!” squealed Jessica. She put down her phone and ran up to the front counter. “Give me a hug. I’ve missed you. We have so much to tell you.”

“Yes, we do,” Xaviera said, and presented her left hand. A diamond sparkled on her fourth finger.

“Congratulations,” Helen said.

“Steven got the job with the Lauderdale police,” Xaviera said.

“We’re getting married in June.”

“And I’ve given notice,” Jessica said. “I have a part in a new cop show set in Miami. I play the hero’s boss. I’m a lieutenant.” Her pale skin glowed like fine ivory.