Murder Between the Covers (3 page)

Helen picked up Peggy’s palm and said, “I see you winning the lottery and splitting six million dollars with your best friend, Helen.”

Peggy laughed, although she still sounded shaky. “How about giving me twenty bucks for lottery tickets, as an investment in my future?”

“How about a glass of wine instead?”

Helen went to her apartment and fed her cat, Thumbs. Then she brought out a box of white wine, pretzels, a cracker for Pete, and insect repellent. Florida mosquitoes were ferocious in June. The two women sank into chaise longues by the pool and sprayed themselves into a cloud of protective poison. Helen poured two generous glasses of wine. They crunched on pretzels and talked about everything but what happened that afternoon.

“Look at the sweat running off me,” Peggy said. “What’s the temperature?”

“It was eighty when I was in the apartment,” Helen said. “I know people complain about summer here, but the heat is worse in the Midwest. Those summers are like living in an oven. Florida heat feels soft, and there’s always a breeze. It must be the ocean.”

“Naw, it just means you’re a real Floridian,” Peggy said, crunching a pretzel. “Normal people can’t stand summer in South Florida.”

“I haven’t lived here long enough to be a real Floridian.”

“Nobody is
from
Florida,” Peggy said. “But some of us

know we belong here. We can tell the moment we step off the plane or get out of the car. It feels right—the sun, the light, the humidity. June is the real test. That’s when the tourists go home. The people who live here but aren’t real Floridians go somewhere cool. The rest of us love it. No crowds at the beach, less traffic on the roads, and we can get a decent table at our favorite restaurant. Florida is ours again until winter.”

Helen reached for another pretzel and started to hand one to Pete.

“No, don’t. He’s on a diet. He gained two ounces,” Peggy said. Pete gave an indignant squawk.

Helen took a serious sip of wine before she asked her next question. “How long do you think Madame Muffy has been in Florida?”

“She’s got to be a new arrival,” Peggy said. “She’s still pukey pale with a sunburned nose. Anyway, she wears shoes.”

“Deck shoes.”

“Still, if she spent any time here at all, she’d switch to sandals.”

“Why did Margery rent to her?” Helen said.

“I think our landlady needed the money,” Peggy said. “That apartment was vacant for months.”

“I don’t understand that,” Helen said.

“Nobody wants to live in these old places anymore, except nuts like us who think they have character. The window air conditioners are noisy and there are always heat pockets. The rooms are small and the terrazzo floors are ugly. The jalousie doors leak. The bathrooms are old-fashioned and the kitchens are cramped. Most people would rather rent the new condos. The walls are made of cardboard, but they have all the modern conveniences.”

“That explains why we’re here. But what about Madame Muffy? She strikes me as a modern-convenience type.”

Peggy intoned, “Only she knows. Only she can tell,” and laughed. This time it sounded genuine.

By the second glass of wine, Madame Muffy’s dramatic scene seemed funny. The two women talked until ten, when the mosquitoes began dive-bombing their arms and ankles. “It’s time to go in before I’m eaten alive,” Peggy said. She swatted another mosquito. It left blood on her arm.

“Yuck. Good night,” Peggy said. Pete squawked goodbye. Helen packed up the wine, the pretzels, and the useless insect repellent, and walked across the lawn to her home.

The Coronado looked romantic under the subtropic stars. Palms whispered in the soft air. The bougainvillea shook more blossoms into the turquoise pool.

Helen inhaled the sweet, sticky scent of burning marijuana from her next-door neighbor. She’d never seen Phil the invisible pothead, but she always knew when he was home.

Helen opened her front door and was hit with a wave of trapped heat. She flipped on her air conditioner so it would be cool enough to sleep. It sounded like it was about to take off. Water dripped steadily down one side.

She loved her furnished apartment, but she had to admit the fifties decor was not everyone’s taste. She could imagine what her suburban St. Louis neighbors would think of the boomerang coffee table, the lamps that looked like nuclear reactors, and the turquoise Barcalounger.

She knew exactly what they’d say about Helen living in two rooms with a drippy window air conditioner. But she was happier here than she’d ever been in her twelve-room St. Louis house, with her perfect Ralph Lauren fabrics and her imperfect husband. She liked the people at the bookstore better than the ones at her high-powered job. All she missed was her six-figure salary.

Now Helen could barely make ends meet. She paid her rent in cash, a deal she made with her landlady, Margery. Helen explained that her ex-husband was looking for her and she didn’t want to give him any way to trace her, which was mostly true. She left out the part about the court.

Helen did not want her name in any computers. She had no phone, no credit cards, no bank account, and no paycheck. Page Turner paid her in cash, too, another reason why she put up with him. The big chain bookstores wouldn’t do that. Lucky for her, Page had a slightly crooked streak.

Now that she was alone, the scene with Madame Muffy gave her the shivers. She wondered if the little fraud got a real look at the future and it was too much for her. Helen decided that was ridiculous, but she double-locked the front door and put the security bar in the sliding glass doors.

Then she settled into her turquoise Barcalounger with a new hardback mystery. That was the best perk of her job. She could borrow books from the store, as long as she returned them in salable condition.

Thumbs, her six-toed cat, curled up beside her. Helen scratched his ears and he purred and kneaded her thigh with his giant paws. The big gray-and-white cat looked so much like a stuffed animal, Helen expected to find a tag on him. Only his enormous feet spoiled the illusion. They were the size of catchers’ mitts.

Thumbs was supposed to be a descendant of Ernest Hemingway’s famously inbred six-toed cats. At least that’s what the guy who bought him in a Key West bar said. But the man lied a lot. Still, Thumbs did love to curl up with a good book.

The next thing Helen knew it was midnight, and she was awakened out of a sound sleep in the Barcalounger. The book was resting on her lap. Thumbs was in the bedroom, howling, loud, insistent howls. Something was wrong.

Helen threw down her book and ran into the bedroom. Thumbs was pawing frantically at the sliding glass doors. There were flying bugs, pale beige things with wings, out side the doors. No, wait, they were inside, crawling up the glass, and Thumbs was trying to stop them.

They were everywhere, coming through the crack in the sliding doors and crawling through the vents. They were squirming on the floor, squeezing through the jalousie glass, frying on the lightbulbs, flying at the pictures. They were crawling up the walls and across the ceiling.

Oh my god, they were in her bed. Hundreds, no, thousands of them. Helen wrapped her hand in a towel and tried to wipe the bugs off her spread, but there were more on her pillow. They were creeping through the fur of her teddy bear, blind, wormlike things. A chain of them dripped off the bear’s ear.

Helen ran to the closet and pulled out her vacuum cleaner. Shoeboxes and purses fell out with it, and were soon writhing with the awful insects.

She began vacuuming up the bugs. She sucked them off the ceiling and pulled them off the light. She vacuumed them off the floor and swept them off her bedspread. And still they kept coming, waves of blind, beige, winged worms, like something that crawled on corpses.

Now they were in her hair and down her blouse and crawling over her feet. Their wings came off and fluttered through the air. Their bodies squished and crackled under her sandals. They crawled blindly over her naked toes and up her legs. Helen brushed them off and kept vacuuming.

Thumbs was howling so loud he drowned out the vacuum’s scream. Then suddenly there was silence. The vacuum had stopped, clogged with insects. But still the blind beige things invaded her home, her bedroom, her bed, her body.

Helen could stand it no longer. She grabbed Thumbs, ran across the lawn, and pounded on her landlady’s door.

“What the hell is going on?” Margery Flax said, yanking open the jalousie door so hard the glass rattled. In one hand she had a screwdriver—the drink, not the tool. In the other she had a Marlboro. Both had contributed to her lived-in face. Margery was an interesting seventy-six.

“What are you doing on my doorstep with that cat?” Margery bellowed. She was not a cat person, possibly because they did not come in the color she cared for. Margery loved purple. She was wearing a purple chenille robe, violet feathered mules with lavender sequins, and poppy-red toenail polish, which matched the bright red curlers in her gray hair.

“Bugs,” Helen said. “Hundreds of them. No, thousands. Maybe millions. They’re flying and crawling all over my apartment. I tried to stop them, but they keep coming. They’re on my walls. They’re in my bed and down my blouse. They’re horrible.”

Margery stubbed out the cigarette and took a deep gulp of her screwdriver. “What do they look like?” she said.

“They’re kind of wormlike. Beige with wings, except the wings fall off and they start crawling.”

Even now Helen felt them crawling on her. She looked down and saw one inside her shirt, on her bra.

“Here,” she said, and handed an indignant Thumbs to Margery. He extended his claws.

“That cat scratches me and you’re out of here,” Margery said.

Helen shook out her blouse and gingerly picked up the ugly beige insect.

Margery looked at it and took another drink. “Shit,” she said. “We’ve got termites.” She handed the cat back to Helen.

“But you can exterminate them, can’t you?”

“Depends. They can exterminate this building if there are too many. It could be the end of the Coronado. When they swarm like that, it means there are so many already, they’re moving on to find more food. I’ve seen it happen before, old buildings like this. They get so riddled with termites it would be cheaper to tear down the place than fix it. That’s what did in the Sunnystreet Motel.”

“Where’s that?” Helen said. She still felt itchy and crawly, but she couldn’t see any more bugs on her.

“Where that vacant lot is now.”

“The one with the sign ‘Luxury Condos Coming Soon’?” Helen said.

“That’s it. The termite inspector ‘s foot went right through the roof. That was the end of the place. Betty sold out to a developer and moved to Sarasota.”

The old buildings on the streets near the Coronado were disappearing to expensive high-rises. Soon the people who worked in the shops along Las Olas would not be able to live near their jobs. Helen felt a terrible pang of fear. She loved the Coronado. She didn’t want anything to happen to it. She’d never find a place like this again. She’d have to live in a hot shoebox along the highway.

“But what if we’re lucky?”

“Some luck,” Margery said with a snort that should have blown out her sinuses. “We’ll have to move out while they kill the termites.”

“You mean I’ll have to leave my apartment?” Thumbs let out an indignant yowl. Helen had been clutching him too tightly, hanging on to her cat to help her through the bad news.

“I mean we’ll all have to leave. Every last one of us. They pump the whole place full of poison gas. It’s the only way to kill the little bastards.”

Madame Muffy was right, Helen thought. Here was death and destruction. Now all they needed was murder.

Helen woke up. She did not know where she was. She could not move her arm.

Her cat, Thumbs, gave an indignant yowl and hit her in the face with his tail. The ten-pound tom had been snoozing on her elbow, and he did not appreciate this abrupt awakening. Helen realized where she was now. She’d been sleeping on Margery’s sofa. After the termite attack last night, she had not wanted to go back to her apartment.

She looked at her watch. It was six a.m. She’d slept in her clothes. Her mouth felt stuffed with cat fur. She pulled on her shoes, folded the sheets and blanket, and picked up Thumbs. She should get out of Margery’s before her landlady woke up. Officially the Coronado had a no-pets policy. That meant everyone had to pretend Pete the parrot and Thumbs did not exist, except in emergencies like last night. No point in waving the illegal cat in Margery’s face.

As she tiptoed through the living room she heard Margery say, “You want coffee?”

“I’ll be right back,” Helen said. She slipped out the kitchen door into the sparkling, dew-covered dawn and walked across the courtyard. She opened her door and dumped Thumbs inside to face the bugs alone. “Sorry, boy,” she said. “I can’t do this without coffee.”

It took two cups and a chocolate doughnut before Helen could face her apartment. A tail-twitching Thumbs met her at the door and led her straight to his water bowl. Hordes of dead insects floated on the surface.

“I’m sorry, buddy,” she said. Her stomach flopped over when she saw his food dish. It was covered with a mound of dead beige bugs, like nuts on a sundae. She gingerly pushed the mess down the disposal.

The rest of the house was not as bad as she thought it would be. The floor had drifts and piles of insects, almost all dead, thank goodness. Wings, like fluttery bits of cellophane, littered the sills and tables. Helen got her clogged vacuum working again, then spent the next two hours cleaning.

Occasionally Thumbs would find a live bug blindly creeping up a wall or across a counter, and howl for Helen. She’d suck it up with the vacuum. By nine that morning, her home had been swept and polished and dusted until not a trace of the insect invasion remained. Thumbs prowled the perimeter as if he expected the enemy to return any moment.