Clubbed to Death (7 page)

“Please. Not another heart attack on the golf course,” Jessica said.

“The paperwork will bury us.”

Did someone find Rob’s body and call the cops? Helen wondered.

Did Marcella make herself a widow one more time?

She and Jessica ran out on the loading dock for a look. “Two Golden Palms police cars are tearing up the main drive, sirens on,” Jessica said.

“The members will have a fit.”

“Are the cops going to the main building?” Helen asked.

“No, they’re headed toward the employee lot,” Jessica said. “I wonder what happened.”

They didn’t have to wait long to find out. Xaviera was on the phone, with her head down and her voice low, sure sign of a personal call. When she hung up, Xaviera said, “That was my boyfriend, Steven. Security found a lot of blood in the employee lot. They also found a torn shirt with blood on it back by the Dumpsters.”

Helen relaxed a little. Must have been a busy night in the employee lot, she thought. There was another fight after I left.

Cameron, who’d been on the phone, poked his head up from his desk.

“They need more security in that area,” he said. “It’s not safe. Outsiders come over that parking lot fence all the time. Rough types. They break into the employees’ cars. I’ve seen homeless guys camping back by the Dumpsters.”

“Homeless men don’t wear Tommy Bahama shirts,” Xaviera said.

But Rob did. Helen felt her blood drain from her face.

CHAPTER 6

“Helen Hawthorne, could you come with us?”

Marshall Noote was used to delivering bad news. He told parents when an unruly child broke his arm running on the pool deck. He asked obstreperous club members to leave the Pink Parrot bar. He escorted freshly fired employees to their cars, then posted their photos in the gate house, so they couldn’t come back.

Now the head of club security blocked Helen’s aisle at work. He was flanked by two burly security guards with grim expressions. Unless Helen threw herself through a sealed window, she was trapped.

This was a hanging party. She could almost see the rope. Rob was missing. She’d punched him on club property. Brenda the bad boss had snitched.

Steven, Xaviera’s boyfriend, wasn’t one of the security guards. Helen wondered if Noote had deliberately cut him out of this assignment.

These two guards were older, overweight, and uncomfortably stuffed into their Superior Club blazers.

“Just a moment,” Helen said. She was stalling for time. She had one advantage. She was back in a corner and Noote didn’t have a clear view of her. For once, she blessed the clutter in the customer care office. If security came after her, they’d have to squeeze past Cam and Jessica’s bulky desks and tall chairs and step around purses, file boxes and wastebaskets. Three big men couldn’t fit in the narrow aisle. They’d have to wait for Helen to come out.

Good. She needed a moment to think.

Noote was an ex-cop from Boston, and he’d think like someone in law enforcement.

Quick, Helen asked herself. Do I have anything that would make a cop curious?

My fake driver’s license.

“Ah-hah-choo!” Helen faked a juicy sneeze and palmed the license out of her purse. Then she pretended to search for a tissue in her desk drawer. Customer care staffers could not keep anything personal, even a tissue box, on top of the antique desks.

Helen was about to slide the license into her middle drawer when she realized human resources would pack up her things if she was fired.

She didn’t want them finding that fake license.

“Ah-choo!” she said again. “Jessica, may I have a tissue?”

Jessica, deep in a phone conversation with a difficult member, nodded absently. The actress had incredible concentration. She could build an invisible wall around herself.

Helen slipped her fake license into a side pocket in Jessica’s purse, then unzipped the purse and grabbed a tissue. She blew her nose noisily. Cam, the big hypochondriac, reached for his spray bottle of alcohol to ward off her airborne germs. “Now, Miss Hawthorne,” Noote said. It was a command.

“Sorry,” she said. “Allergies.” That excuse worked any time of the year in Florida.

Helen squeezed past the desks and chairs to join Noote. The security guards surrounded her. She breathed in Old Spice and sunbaked wool. She felt like all the air had been sucked out of the room.

Helen didn’t trust herself to say anything else, not even good-bye to her colleagues. She was afraid her voice would shake. Jackie looked more frightened than Helen felt, as if security might come for her next. Jessica was still oblivious, locked in her phone conversation.

Xaviera was frantically punching numbers on her phone, probably calling Steven for inside information. Cam was spraying his phone with alcohol.

Brenda came out of her office and gave Helen a triumphant smile.

“We’ll call you if we need you, Brenda,” Noote said.

Brenda, was it? Helen thought. Definitely a lynching party.

Outside, the bright sun nearly blinded her, and she stumbled on the flagstones. The burly guard on her left took her elbow. Helen shook him off.

Security escorted her around the back of the main building to a courtyard that was more like a tropical alley.

HR, Helen thought. My job is definitely toast.

Noote opened the door for her. She climbed the narrow back staircase to the office marked director — human resources. One security guard was in front of her. Two were behind her.

The HR office had been hacked out of a corner of the hall, an awkward arrangement of odd angles, a dusty window, and white paint thick as cake frosting. The director, Paige, sat at a beat-up wooden desk.

It was old, but definitely no antique. Paige was a thin blonde with prominent teeth and a wide lipsticked mouth. The effect was oddly sexy.

Helen had met her a week ago when she’d been hired. Now Paige was going to fire her.

“Let’s go in here where we have privacy,” Paige said, opening a door to a bare room that might have been a former closet. It was just big enough for a folding table and three plastic chairs. On the table were a blue pen and a yellow legal pad.

Paige showed her to the table and said, “Helen, we understand there was a problem in the parking lot last night with one of the guests. We’d like you to write down your side of the story. I’ll be back in a few minutes. If you finish before I come back, just open the door.”

Helen had worked in HR in her other life. They’re going to fire me by the book, she thought. Well, I give them points for that. I’ll write down my side of the story, without Brenda’s embellishments. I hope Jessica will back me up, but if not, at least I’ll have my story on the record.

There was no phone or computer in the room, so Helen could not contact Jessica before she wrote her statement. That was also standard procedure.

Helen wrote that her ex had surprised her in the dark parking lot and she’d swung at him. That was the story Rob had told Brenda and Jessica, and she wasn’t going to contradict him. Besides, it was true enough. God knows she was surprised to see the SOB.

She added that Rob had asked Brenda to forget the incident because it was his fault that Helen hit him. (It was. It was his fault any way you looked at it.) “I didn’t hit him very hard,” Helen wrote. “There were only two small spots of blood on his shirt, and Rob seemed fine when I drove out of the parking lot to go home.”

She reread her statement, crossed out “seemed fine” and changed it to “was fine.”

Helen was about to open the door, when Paige came in with the head of security. Noote took the chair next to Paige.

Noote’s here as a witness, Helen thought. They’re following procedure right down the line. She wondered where the other guards were.

They couldn’t fit in the little room.

Paige read Helen’s statement carefully and made some notes on her own legal pad. Helen tried not to fidget. Finally Paige said, “I see that you admit to hitting a club member.”

“He surprised me in the dark,” Helen said. “That parking lot can be pretty creepy.”

“A witness says you were arguing loudly,” Paige said.

“Brenda would say anything to make an employee of Kitty’s look bad.”

“But you were fighting with the club member,” Paige said. “You know that’s grounds for dismissal, no matter who started the fight. It’s in the handbook. It was explained to you in detail at orientation. If there was a problem with the member, you should have called security.

I understand that you were startled, but I have no choice. This is one issue where we can’t give you a second chance.

“I’m so sorry, Helen. We’re going to have to let you go.” Paige sounded as if she meant it. She even managed a regretful sigh.

Paige handed Helen a termination statement and explained that the personal items in her desk would be sent to her home address and her paycheck would be mailed to her. Helen heard some legalese about how she was not eligible to file for unemployment compensation and something else about no health insurance.

Helen was having trouble following the conversation. She’d expected to be fired. She’d prepared herself for it. But she still felt like someone had broken a chair over her head.

“Any questions?” Paige said.

Helen had a lot of questions: How was she going to explain this to Margery? How was she going to pay the bills she’d run up? Did she have enough money stashed away for next month’s rent? Helen had been spending like a Superior Club member, instead of an employee.

“No questions?” Paige said. “Well, again, I’m very sorry, Helen.

Mr. Noote will escort you to your car.”

The HR director stood up, the signal that the termination interview—and Helen’s time at the Superior Club—were over. Helen staggered down the steps with the strange, underwater movements of a catastrophe survivor.

She was surprised to find a white golf cart with a striped awning waiting in the courtyard, along with the two security guards. Good, Helen thought. She didn’t think she could make the long walk to the parking lot.

One guard climbed in the front. The guard who’d taken her elbow when she’d stumbled sat in the back with Helen, carefully adjusting the razor crease in his trousers. He wore black socks that were too short and thick-soled lace-up shoes with a military shine. Helen saw gray in his buzz cut, and wondered if he’d retired from some security job up north.

Noote, the head of security, drove. The gaily striped golf cart had a ridiculous holiday look. Helen was bone tired, and she could feel her stomach twisting itself into knots. She wanted this over. She still had to face Margery.

No one said anything as the little cart lurched over the paved paths to the employee lot. Helen studied the back of Noote’s silver-gray head. He had a bald spot at the crown. He’d just had a haircut, and there were two small clipped hairs on his jacket collar. She resisted the urge to brush them off. Noote’s head looked thick and square and he had almost no neck. As the cart turned into the employee parking lot, Helen caught a glimpse of his clenched jaw.

Two yellow-and-white Golden Palms police cars were parked by the entrance to the employee lot. The entrance was roped off with yellow crime scene tape. A patrol officer waved in the golf cart. “See you Saturday night, Mr. Noote,” he said. The club hired a lot of off- duty Golden Palms officers.

Helen saw a yellow evidence van parked near the police cars. A woman in a white jumpsuit and booties was scraping at something on the ground.

The whole back lot by the Dumpsters—over an acre, Helen guessed—was roped off with more yellow crime scene tape. Helen wondered where the staff was parking. In the bright sunlight, the old ficus tree looked green and friendly, its branches home to twittering birds.

“My car’s in the second row,” Helen said.

“We have something we’d like to show you first,” Noote said.

He parked the cart, then crunched through the dead ficus leaves to the edge of the yellow tape and pointed. Helen followed. At first, she thought he was pointing at a tree shadow. Then she saw dark red-black stains on the Dumpster, and more on the ground. It looked like blood.

Flies buzzed around it. Helen was afraid she might throw up.

The blood on the tall blue Dumpster was in ragged arcs, and there was a small dark red puddle. A trail of fat round blood drops led from under the tree to the Dumpster. The trail was marked with numbered yellow tented signs.

Helen felt her heart seize. There couldn’t be that much blood from when she hit Rob. Did her punch cause some weird, fatal injury? Did Rob die after she left? But Jessica said he was fine. He was walking toward the yacht club. Where was his body? Had they found it at the end of that blood trail?

Noote was watching her, as if he expected her to scream, faint or blurt out a confession. His hard eyes were washed-out blue. His face was red and thick and he had razor burn on one cheek, near his ear.

When Helen didn’t say anything, the network of wrinkles around his eyes tightened and his forehead creased into a deep frown.

He thinks I’m a hard case, Helen thought.

A police officer was standing nearby. His name tag said ruley. I know it’s a sign of age when the cops look young, she thought, but Officer Ruley should be in a Boy Scout uniform. His face was pink, smooth and hairless, except for a small blond mustache that looked like a dirty toothbrush.

Noote gave him a slight nod. The officer produced a paper evidence bag and pulled out a shirt covered in beige palm trees.

“Do you recognize this?” Ruley said.

The front was stiff with dark, dried blood. The shirt looked like the one Rob had worn, except for all that blood. There’d been only a drop or two on his shirt when Helen saw him. Also, the shirt had been intact. Now the collar was nearly torn off, and the shirt was missing two buttons.

Helen remembered her ex opening his shirt and dramatically displaying the bruises and scratches on his chest. But nothing was ripped then. Certainly not the collar.

“I didn’t do that,” she said.

“Didn’t do what, ma’am?” Officer Ruley said. His smooth face was merciless.

“I didn’t do anything to his shirt—or to him. It didn’t look like that when I saw him. It was fine. He was fine.”