Shop Till You Drop (34 page)

Jimmy the Shirt would dump her without a penny. If Niki was lucky. He might kill her or have her killed. The boyfriends of Juliana’s regulars had interesting connections. Christina knew that.

Niki had married a T-shirt baron who threw money around like confetti. Thanks to this tape, she would be a little cash cow. Christina could milk her for the rest of her life.

Too bad Christina didn’t live long afterward. She was as dead as Desiree.

“Wedding Song,” indeed. That was another of Christina’s little jokes. Niki sang herself into a nasty little trap.

Helen went back to the stockroom and turned off the hissing tape. She checked the drawer in the bottom of the other tower. Empty. She stared at the CD towers. All her searching, all her work, and this is what she had to show for it: not one, but two reasons for Niki to kill Christina. She still had no motive for Brittney. Helen could not find that blasted “Tiny Bubbles” CD.

It was hopeless. Helen was sick of looking. She was sick of working for a boss who didn’t appreciate her. She was sick of Christina and her greed and the trouble it created. She was sick of all the ugly things she’d seen and heard here.

The twin towers seemed to taunt her with their secrets. She gave the closest one a kick. It wobbled and swayed. Helen tried to grab it before one hundred twenty CDs spilled onto the stockroom floor. She missed. Plastic cases flew everywhere, splitting open, cracking, sliding across the floor. As the tower toppled, she saw one CD was hidden under its base.

Don Ho’s “Tiny Bubbles.”

She picked it out of the square of dust under the tower. She didn’t want to open it. She knew the dead Christina had hidden another horror behind the Hawaiian crooner.

Inside were four photos.

The first looked harmless. It showed Brittney and a dark-haired man on a big white boat. The Hatteras cruiser docked behind Brittney’s house? They were both so small and perfect, they looked like dolls on a wedding cake. Brittney was trying to kiss the man. His face was turned toward the camera, as if he was avoiding her kiss. His hands were pushing her away. He seemed drunk, or high, or both. So did Brittney. She was holding a champagne bottle by the neck.

The photo was taken before she’d had her biopolymer injections when her face could still show emotion. Brittney looked angry.

In the second photo, Brittney was swinging the champagne bottle like a club. The short man was cowering in the corner with his arms up, trying to protect his face. Brittney was pop-eyed with fury. Her murderous rage radiated from the photograph. Helen knew she was seeing a man who was about to die. She felt a sick fascination, but she still reached for the third photo.

In that one, Brittney was heaving the man over the side of the boat. His torso was half over the railing, like a sack of flour. His hair was almost dragging in the water. Brittney was about to give him the final shove, into the water and the next world.

In the fourth photo, Brittney was on the boat alone, staring into the water and waving good-bye with one hand. She held the champagne bottle in the other like a trophy. Those tiny bubbles had packed quite a wallop.

Who could have taken those photos? And why?

Helen thought she knew. Brittney’s good friend Christina had been on this booze cruise. The drunken Brittney had been enraged by Steve’s rejection and bludgeoned him with a champagne bottle. Perhaps clever Christina had even egged her on. Christina certainly hadn’t tried to stop her and save Steve. Instead, she’d snapped the pictures that guaranteed her a lifetime income.

Christina had been blackmailing Brittney. Helen had heard Christina on the last day of her life pressuring Brittney for more money in Juliana’s dressing room. “I don’t have more,” Brittney had said in her strange hissing whisper. “I’m not made out of money.”

Brittney had killed Christina and set herself free.

Helen checked the clock. Ten minutes before Tara returned from lunch. Time for a quick call to Sarah while she picked up the spilled CDs. Sarah’s phone rang and rang, but she didn’t answer. Helen left a message while she stuck the last CDs in their slots. Then she put the “Wedding Song” tape back where she found it and stripped off her search gloves. She removed the “back in fifteen minutes” sign just in time. Tara was coming up the sidewalk.

Sarah called an hour later. “I can’t talk now,” Helen said. “Can you meet me tonight after work for dinner? My treat.”

They met at one of the few Las Olas restaurants Helen could afford, Cheeburger Cheeburger. While they wolfed down fries, onion rings, and big juicy burgers, Helen told Sarah about her finds. The blood dripping off her rare burger added the right touch to Helen’s tale of murder and blackmail.

When she finished, Sarah said, “Niki is our killer. She has the best reason for murdering Christina. She was already being blackmailed for the jewel theft. After the Desiree tape, she’d have two reasons. Christina would squeeze her doubly hard for cash.”

“Christina didn’t have time to blackmail Niki about Desiree,” Helen said. “Remember her weird filing system? There’s no article about Desiree’s carjacking hidden in the store manuals, because Christina probably died the same day as Desiree.”

Sarah took a bite of burger, then said, “Didn’t mean she hadn’t started pressuring Niki for more money.”

Helen finished the last bite of her burger and delicately licked the juice from her fingers. “That’s the part I don’t get. Christina was already blackmailing Niki for the jewel business. Why would Niki give her more ammunition by going to her for a hit man?”

“Because Niki was desperate,” Sarah said, taking the last onion ring. “It had been years since she’d been in
Playboy
. She never became a model or a movie star. Nothing was going to happen to her, except she’d get old. Jimmy was her last chance to snag a rich man. If Niki had to kill to keep him, she would.”

“Nice theory,” Helen said, finishing the final french fry. “Except Niki’s got an unbreakable alibi for Christina’s death. She was out of the country.”

“So what?” Sarah said. “I still think she could have hired a hit man.”

“And I still say it’s Brittney,” Helen said. She counted off the reasons on slightly greasy fingers.

“One, Christina photographed Brittney actually killing someone. That’s better than a tape where Niki is just talking about it.

“Two, Brittney has no alibi for Christina’s death.

“Three, Brittney tried to kill me when I accused her of murdering Christina.”

“You don’t know that,” Sarah said.

“The fire happened right after I saw her. I don’t believe in coincidence. Besides, Brittney has the mob boyfriend.”

“Ex-boyfriend,” Sarah reminded her.

“And four, Brittney has Christina’s cat,” Helen said.

“Prove it,” Sarah said. “One cat looks like another.”

“I will,” Helen said.

“And I’ll prove my theory,” Sarah said.

“How?” Helen said. “Are you going to play that tape for Jimmy the Shirt?”

“Not this woman. I know about killing the messenger. Let’s leave that tape right where it is, so the cops can find it if they need it. I’m going to get on my computer and start searching newspaper data bases. The key to this case is Desiree’s carjacking. It’s not easy to pull off a carjacking in a gated community. Someone had inside knowledge. Most gated communities have a TV camera at the gate. Either this one didn’t or something malfunctioned.”

“How do you know?”

“The police would have released a description of the suspected vehicle, a license plate number, or a photo of the driver. But there’s nothing. I bet the hit man—or woman—has used that method before. I want to research carjackings in South Florida and see if I can find a pattern. When I do, it will lead back to Christina.”

“Too far-fetched,” Helen said. “The killer is Brittney. I know it. I’m showing those pictures of her swinging that champagne bottle to Detective Karen Grace. She’ll have Brittney in jail before you start up your computer.”

“I bet you’re wrong,” Sarah insisted. “I bet you anything the killer is Niki.”

“What will you bet?”

“You like chocolate?”

“You bet,” Helen said.

“Then I bet you a hot fudge sundae at Jaxson’s.”

“What’s that?”

“You claim you like chocolate and you’ve never been to Jaxson’s?”

“Never even heard of the place,” Helen said.

“When you wrap your lips around their hot fudge, you’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven.”

“Actually,” Helen said, “I’m trying to avoid that experience—at least for another fifty years.”

“What do you mean, we don’t have anything?” Helen said. Anger and disappointment made her voice rise. She sounded whiny, and that made Helen madder. She’d called Detective Karen Grace because she seemed smarter than her partner Dwight Hansel. Now Helen didn’t want to hear Detective Grace’s smart talk.

“Show me the connection to Christina,” Grace demanded.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. On the phone, Grace had seemed interested. She told Helen not to touch the photos and drove straight over Tuesday morning. Helen had buzzed her through Juliana’s green door. In her badly tailored gray pants suit, Grace looked out of place, like a computer dropped into a pink boudoir. Juliana’s women were ornamental. Grace, with her lush figure and strawberry blond hair, could have been, but she lived by her brains.

Helen had been sure once Grace saw those photos Brittney would be arrested, and it would be all over. Especially when Helen told her about the visit to Brittney’s ice palace, the six-toed cat, and the fire. Instead, Grace said, “What do these photos have to do with Christina’s murder?”

Helen pointed to the photos on the stockroom counter.

“I see four good reasons for Brittney to kill Christina,” she said. “She photographed Brittney killing the guy. Look at that one: Brittney is slamming the guy’s head with a champagne bottle. And this one: She’s throwing him overboard. He’s dead, or will be shortly. That has to be her fiancé, Steve, the one found floating in the canal.

“Look at this first photo again,” Helen pleaded. “See how he’s trying to push her away? He dumped her and she killed him. It’s obvious.”

“I’ll tell you what’s obvious,” Detective Karen Grace said. “There’s no connection to Christina.”

“Christina took those pictures,” Helen said. “That’s how she was blackmailing Brittney.”

“Prove it. I don’t see Christina’s name on the back of these photos. We didn’t find any telltale photos or negatives in her penthouse.”

“But you found a camera.”

“So what?” Grace said. “Everyone has a camera.”

“Christina used photos to blackmail people. I know that for a fact. I’ve seen those photos.”

“Do you know for a fact that Brittney was being blackmailed? Did she tell you?” Grace asked.

“No, but . . .”

“Here’s what we have: photos of Brittney hitting a guy with a champagne bottle. She looks drunk as a skunk. It doesn’t look premeditated. Any good lawyer—and Brittney can afford the best—could argue diminished capacity. Brittney might get manslaughter. If there were enough men on the jury, she could get a medal. Florida juries have done stranger things. But I see nothing to link Christina with these photos of Brittney.”

“I found the photos here in the store,” Helen said.

“Where Christina worked. But you work here, and so does Tara. I’ll bet your next paycheck the only fingerprints on those photos are yours.”

“Mine!”

“That’s right. You picked them up. Brittney could say you were blackmailing her, and you made up that wild story about her cat. You have no credibility. The homicide investigators will find out that your name isn’t really Helen Hawthorne and that you’re on the run.”

Helen froze. She felt the blood draining from her face. Her jaw moved up and down a few times before the words came out. “How did you know?”

“I’m a detective,” Grace said.

“My life’s over,” Helen said. “My ex-husband will find me.”

“Your ex is a creep. I’m not going to say anything unless it turns out you did it. My partner knows your story checked out. That’s all he knows, and all he cares about.”

Just when Helen felt herself breathing again, Grace said, “You should have told me about the phony aggravated battery at the store here. I don’t appreciate your hiding that.”

“What about Tara?” Helen said.

“What about her?”

“Well, she was the one who saw the guys with the guns. She, um . . . had reasons to hate Christina. . . . Uh, I mean, she had a past in Las Vegas where she worked as a . . .” Helen couldn’t bring herself to say that Tara had been a prostitute, and Christina had blackmailed her. She liked Tara.

“I know she used to be a pro,” Detective Grace said. “She wouldn’t be the first Lauderdale lady to have an interesting past.”