Murder With Reservations (30 page)

“I know, I know, but we’re full up tonight—that’s the good news—and we need that room back in service.”

Upstairs, Helen examined 322’s bathroom tile with a professional eye. She didn’t see any of Dean’s blood in the white grout. She wondered how the crime scene cleaners did it.

“The cleaners did a nice job in the bathroom,” Helen said.

“I’d have paid them myself to clean this room,” Cheryl said. “Look at this mess.”

The room looked like it was covered with coal dust. Black fingerprint powder was on every surface.
All you have to do is dust,
Helen thought. Sybil suckered me again. Dusting this mess will take all morning. Vacuuming it will take all afternoon.

“I’ll start making the bed,” Cheryl said. “At least I won’t have to strip it. Looks like the cops took the sheets and the spread. You feel well enough to dust?”

Helen’s shoulder was stiff and sore when she started, but after half an hour she felt better. No, she felt good. Maybe stretching was what she needed. “This fingerprint powder is worse than cigarette ash,” she said. “And look at this. Every picture and lamp shade in the room is crooked.”

“The cops knocked the mattress off-kilter, too,” Cheryl said. “Can you help me put it back or should I call Denise?”

“I can do it,” Helen said. She grabbed the back end of the massive queen-size box spring and dragged it forward, then dropped it in surprise. Under the box spring was a huge, empty square of carpet. She’d always thought the box spring was bolted to the bed, or the pedestal was solid wood. Not so. The pedestal was an open wooden frame, and the mattress and box spring sat on top of it, unsecured.

“Hey,” Helen said. “You can move that mattress and get inside the pedestal.” She looked inside the pedestal frame. It was like a box without a top.

“You can, but who’d want to?” Cheryl said. “These mattresses are heavy.” She gave the box spring a mighty shove and it overshot the pedestal at the front end. Helen looked down into another boxed section of carpet and saw … a blue nylon gym bag. The bag looked oddly lumpy, like it was stuffed with bricks.

“Somebody left their gym bag here,” Helen said.

“Nobody in their right mind would leave it there,” Cheryl said. “That bag was stashed.”

“Maybe it belonged to the dead guy, Dean,” Helen said. “Let me see if there’s any ID inside.”

She unzipped the bag. No ID. But she’d recognize those dead presidents anywhere. The bag was stuffed with more money than she’d ever seen, all neatly banded. Helen stared at it, frozen with shock.

Cheryl recovered first. “The robbery stash,” she said reverently. “We looked everywhere for it, but we never thought to look inside the bed pedestals.”

“Maybe that money belonged to the murdered guy,” Helen said.

“Skip? He’d never have a cheap nylon gym bag. He always had leather luggage.”

“Skip?” Helen said. She forgot the gym bag.

Cheryl went white as unbaked biscuits. Why did she look so guilty? Helen wondered. Then she knew. Dean’s murder suddenly made sense. Craig had been telling the truth: He didn’t kill the man in 322.

“Skip was Dean’s name when you knew him years ago, wasn’t it?” Helen said.

“No,” Cheryl said, but her answer was a plea.

“Yes,” Helen said. “Angel is a Christmas baby. She was conceived in March. Let me guess: Skip was down here on spring break. You were the prettiest girl on the beach and he was a handsome stranger. You fell in love with him and you got pregnant. He refused to pay child support.”

Two tears started down Cheryl’s cheeks. Helen had her answer.

It was an old story. Spring break in Florida was a wild week of drunken revelry. But some paid a high price for the beach bacchanal. Beer-sozzled college kids broke their necks diving off hotel balconies into the pool. Students died from alcohol poisoning, boating accidents or DUI car crashes. They were robbed, beaten and hustled. They had unprotected sex. Angel was the aftermath of these rites of spring.

“Skip denied the baby was his,” Helen prompted.

“He told me he lived in Chicago,” Cheryl said, wiping her eyes. The tears kept coming. “He was in graduate school. He promised he’d keep in touch after spring break. He gave me his phone number. But when I called, it was a wrong number. I didn’t know his real name. I felt so stupid. I’d spent a week with him, and I didn’t know anything about him.

“Then I found out I was pregnant. I tried to trace him, but I didn’t have any money to hire a private eye. I went to the hotel myself. The desk clerk said he couldn’t give out the names of guests. I tried to bribe the kid. He said there was no way to track him down. Skip was one of six guys who’d crashed in a room. He didn’t use his credit card. The hotel clerk recognized his picture, but had no idea who he was.

“Skip—what a joke. That’s what he did. I never saw him again until he turned up at the Full Moon all these years later.”

“You didn’t recognize him, did you?” Helen said.

“Not at first. I couldn’t believe my hot beach boy was that fat old businessman. Skip had lost his hair and gained fifty pounds. But it was more than that. He looked so serious, so pompous.”

“What tipped you off?”

“He looked vaguely familiar in that photograph. Remember, that’s what I said. The Scotch bottle by the bed stirred up my memory. Skip drank Johnnie Walker Black when most kids were still chugging Coors. He made a big deal about buying the best. But the Phi Beta Kappa key finally did it. I used to tease him about that. He was so proud of it. He even wore it on his bathrobe when we made love. He still wore it after all these years. That key unlocked my memory. Ironic, wasn’t it?”

Helen remembered the scene. Cheryl had dropped the spray bottle when Helen mentioned that key. The maid had dithered about being a klutz. But she was shocked, not clumsy.

“That’s when I took a good look at the picture on his desk,” Cheryl said. “I recognized those mean little eyes. I knew it was him. I should have seen the resemblance sooner.

“I looked at the two children in that photo and thought I’d explode. Those kids had everything, while I was buying clothes for Angel at garage sales. I was furious. I wanted justice. Dean was going to pay child support for Angel or his wife would find out exactly what kind of man she’d married. My Angel deserves a decent life.”

“So you confronted Dean in his room,” Helen guessed.

“I hid in the hall bathroom until all the maids were gone. I’d already called my mom and said I had to work late. I asked her to watch Angel. She bitched about it, and that had me on edge. I waited till Sondra was busy checking in a long line of customers. Then I used my passkey card on Skip’s room.”

Cheryl wasn’t crying now. Her voice was steady. “I walked in on him in the shower. He’d been drinking, and that made him slow and stupid. He recognized me. I guess I haven’t changed as much as I thought. He wasn’t scared. He was”—she hunted for the right word— “contemptuous. He thought he was so far above me. He was standing on a bath mat wrapped in a skinny hotel towel, but he acted like he was the king of the world, and I was some peasant.

“I told him we had a child. He knew it. He knew it and he never said anything. He let me struggle alone all these years. He said he couldn’t be sure the baby was really his.”

“The oldest deadbeat-dad excuse in the world,” Helen said.

“He was my first,” Cheryl said. “Am I a fool or what?”

“How did Skip find out you were pregnant?” Helen said.

“The hotel clerk. The one who wouldn’t help me. He called the guy who’d rented the room at spring break, and that guy called Skip to warn him. Men stick together. Skip said I was trying to blackmail him into paying child support for some other man’s kid. He told everyone I was a money-grubbing slut, and then he went on with his life. He never came back to Fort Lauderdale. Skip said he hated Florida.”

“So how’d he wind up at the Full Moon?” Helen said.

“He had to attend that business conference here. He had no choice. His boss ordered it. Skip—Dean I guess he is now—thought it was safe to come to Florida after all these years. The hotel where he’d spent spring break had been torn down.”

“He didn’t know you worked here?”

“Of course not. He’d forgotten all about me until I turned up in his room. I showed him the photo of our child and said, ‘How could you abandon our Angel?’

“He looked at her picture, grunted, and said, ‘What’s wrong with it?’ It! He called our child
it.

“I said, ‘Her name is Angel and she has Down syndrome.’

“He said, ‘She’s a retard? You want my money for a retard? That’s not my fault. That’s your stupid cracker genes.’

“I was so mad, I picked up the first thing I could lay my hands on. It was the Scotch bottle he’d brought into the bathroom. I swung it as hard as I could and hit him in his lying face. The next thing I knew, the bathroom was covered in blood, glass and Scotch, and he was on the floor. He was dead. I didn’t care.”

Helen saw the boiling anger in Cheryl’s eyes. She was still furious at the insult to her child. Cheryl’s arms were roped with muscle from years of making beds, moving furniture and hauling heavy trash bags. She could easily kill an overweight, out-of-shape man.

“What did you do then?” Helen asked.

“I’d been wearing my cleaning gloves, so my fingerprints weren’t on the bottle. It wouldn’t have mattered if they were. I was the maid. I packed up the big pieces and buried them in the Dumpster, just in case. I checked the room to make sure I didn’t leave anything behind, like my photo of Angel. Then I put out the privacy sign and shut the door.

“Nobody saw me. I was invisible, even with bloodstains on my smock. I threw it away, along with my clothes and the shoes. Nobody missed the smock. Nobody cleaned the room the next day. The Dumpster was emptied the next morning, and the bloody clothes and bottle pieces were buried in a landfill. It was two more days before Skip was found.”

“The cops think Craig killed him,” Helen said.

“Yes,” Cheryl said. She stripped off her gloves. She wasn’t crying now. Her voice was quiet, matter-of-fact. “I guess you’ll be calling the police.”

“Who will take care of Angel if you go to prison?” Helen said.

“My mother,” Cheryl said. “She doesn’t like my little girl, but she’ll do it out of duty.”

Angel would live on cold charity, because her mother had lashed out in a moment of rage.

Helen remembered the day she’d caught her husband with Sandy. Her hot red anger had overflowed like lava, and she’d started swinging that crowbar. If she’d connected with her ex-husband’s head instead of his SUV, she wouldn’t have stopped until she’d beaten the scumbag to death. And she’d had less provocation than Cheryl.

“I deserve to go to jail,” Cheryl said. “He had a family.”

But they would be well provided for, Helen thought. Skip—or Dean—would have had plenty of insurance. Men like him always did. If Cheryl went to prison, Dean would still be dead and Helen would have created a new orphan. The lake of blood would grow deeper. She would drown in it for sure.

“I’m not calling the police,” Helen said.

She picked up the gym bag. It was so heavy, it wrenched her back. “I think there’s a hundred thousand dollars here. Take the money. Wait a month, then give Sybil notice, quit your job, and leave town. Go to Ohio.”

“You’re not going to turn me in?” Cheryl said.

“A jury of women would never convict you,” Helen said.

“What about the company it was stolen from?”

Cheryl sounded slightly dazed. “The money belongs to them.”

“The telemarketers? They’re out of business,” Helen said.

“Don’t you want any?” Cheryl said. “That would be stealing,” Helen said.

H
elen did not get justice when she divorced Rob. But she knew how to give it. Her judgment on Cheryl was just. The abandoned mother had already served seven years of hard labor. Working as a hotel maid was the hardest physical labor Helen had ever done. Add the burdens of caring for a child, dealing with a mean mother, and scrounging for money, and Cheryl had shouldered more than her share of punishment. It was time to set her free from her prison. The robbery money would give Cheryl and Angel the life they deserved.

Helen felt no guilt for covering up the murder of Dean Stamples. The police had told his family that Craig was the killer. They would have closure (how she hated that cheap word). Pinning Dean’s murder on Craig wouldn’t ruin an innocent man’s reputation. Craig had committed plenty of crimes.

With Craig as the killer, the family would never suffer through a murder trial. Dean Stamples would stay the picture-perfect daddy, killed in a senseless crime. His wife and children would not find out that he was a heartless seducer who’d abandoned a pregnant woman.

Helen wondered if his wife already knew Dean’s cruelty. Men like Dean didn’t get kinder and gentler as they aged. Maybe she saw her husband’s death as a release.

The sun was low in the sky when Helen left work. At the far corner of the lot she was transfixed by a strangely beautiful sight. Three large green iguanas and half a dozen doves were sitting together on the warm asphalt. The iguanas were the brilliant color of a new leaf. Their saw-toothed heads and scaly backs were magnificently grotesque. The largest was nearly four feet long. The gray doves were softly pretty. Beauty and ugliness existed side by side in South Florida.