Shop Till You Drop

Only when she was back in the hot cab did Helen realize this. Only when she was watching the driver’s evergreen air freshener swinging from the rearview mirror did Helen understand.

Brittney never said “You’re crazy!” or “How dare you?” or “I didn’t kill her,” or anything else an innocent woman would say. Instead, she threatened to sue Helen and call security. She wanted to either shut Helen up or get her out of there.

By the time Helen understood this, the cab had peeled out of Brittney’s circular drive. Helen was so rattled, she wasn’t sure how she got out of that icehouse. She didn’t know who opened the massive front doors. Seeing the dead Christina’s cat was like seeing a ghost. She knew that was Thumbs. How could she forget those enormous feet?

Helen had accused Brittney of murder in her own home. Did she really believe that?

Yes. Why else would Brittney have that cat? Who would murder Christina and give the cat to Brittney? What killer would waste time corralling a cat and packing its litter box and food?

Brittney killed Christina. It was the only explanation that made sense. She wanted Christina dead. And she wanted the cat.

But why did Brittney kill Christina? Blackmail was the only answer. Except Helen couldn’t find the evidence. She had to have a reason. She also had to prove that was Christina’s six-toed cat.

While the cab driver blasted her with Haitian talk radio, Helen rehashed the unpleasant scene. She was disgusted with herself. She was such an amateur, blurting out an accusation of murder. But Brittney—or rather, Brittney’s cat—caught Helen by surprise.

Still, Helen wished she had not behaved so stupidly. Brittney had money, and that meant she had power. Helen, who used to have money, knew this. She was just a dress shop clerk with no money and no connections. She couldn’t accuse a woman like Brittney without good reason.

Even worse, Brittney had connections outside the law. Her mobster ex-boyfriend, for instance. Would he do Brittney a favor for old time’s sake?

Lord, I’ve opened up my big mouth again, Helen thought. It got me in trouble in St. Louis, and now I’m in deeper in Florida.

Helen was so unnerved, she thought she saw a black Land Rover, like the one Brittney drove, following her cab about three cars back.

Ridiculous. Paranoid. SUVs were all over the roads in Florida. An SUV was barreling toward the cab now, high beams blinding Helen. She could not make out the color in the dark. Was it dark green? Black? Maroon?

She didn’t know the make, either. It honked at the cab, flipped off the driver, and passed on the right side. It turned out to be a black Cadillac Escalade. But Helen could not be sure it was the same SUV she’d noticed several blocks back.

“Do you see a black Land Rover following us?” Helen asked the cab driver.

He shrugged and turned up the radio. It was a sensible response. U.S. 1 was clogged with SUVs.

Helen looked anxiously into the darkening night. Now three huge SUVs were behind them, and another one was alongside the cab. It was like traveling in an elephant herd.

A Chevy Tahoe was gaining on them. A monster Toyota Land Cruiser was next to the cab, but it was dark gray and driven by a man talking on his cell phone.

When the cab turned off Las Olas to her side street, Helen no longer saw any SUVs. She must have imagined the black Land Rover. It was her own guilt following her, not Brittney.

She was relieved to be home. The Coronado looked like a tropical dream tonight. Flood lights highlighted the old palm trees. Bougainvillea spilled drifts of purple blooms on the sidewalk and into the turquoise pool. The air smelled cool and fresh.

When she passed Phil the invisible pothead’s, she smelled the burning weed. He had already lit up for the night. Helen was beginning to think the man was nothing but smoke.

It was only ten o’clock, but Helen was dead tired. Once in bed, she could not sleep. She kept thinking of her humiliating scene with Brittney. She tossed and turned until eleven. The bed squeaked when she moved. Tonight, the mattress felt like it was stuffed with green cantaloupes. They rolled every time she turned.

This insomnia called for desperate measures. Helen decided to clean her apartment, a once-in-a-blue-moon activity. If nothing else, it might shock her system so she’d fall asleep.

She scrubbed the bathroom. (Was she going bald? Where did all that hair on the floor come from?) She cleaned the kitchen. She threw out some vintage lasagne in the fridge. By one a.m., she had dusted the furniture, mopped the floors, and stacked the magazines for recycling.

That’s when she saw the Best Friends magazine from Sarah’s house. Helen sat down in the Barcalounger to finish the article on theater cats, when a more lurid story caught her eye: “Hair-Raising Convictions! When Cats and Dogs Are the Witnesses, Their DNA Is the Evidence.”

The police were using the same DNA techniques on animal hair that they used on human hair, the story said. They’d solved several murders with animal DNA. A line about a long-buried murder victim jumped out at Helen like a frisky pup: “When they dug her up, she had a single dog hair on her socks. Sure enough, it matched the transvestite’s puppy.”

In another case, cat hairs on a murderer’s jacket proved that the killer had had contact with the victim’s cat—and the victim. The man was convicted, thanks to the cat hair. The police officer who’d used pet DNA to crack the case won an award.

Did the police find cat hairs on Christina’s body? Helen thought Detective Karen Grace said they did. She knew they’d found a grooming brush filled with cat hair in her penthouse.

Helen had the solution to her problems in her hand. She could prove that the six-toed animal was Christina’s cat. She would solve Christina’s murder.

She reached up and turned off the light. As she drifted off to sleep on the Barcalounger, Helen was spending the twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward.

Helen was dreaming about barbecue. Expensive barbecue, using only the finest wood. It smelled delicious.

Then the wind shifted, and the smoke was right in her face. Helen woke up coughing and choking. She still smelled barbecue, but there were nasty odors underneath it now: burned electrical wiring, hot metal and melting plastic. Her eyes stung and watered. The room was filled with smoke.

Helen’s apartment was on fire. The blaze had started in the bedroom. The chenille spread was a sheet of flames. Black smoke boiled up to the ceiling. The bedroom rug was on fire. She could not see the sliding glass doors. Helen could not get out the back way.

She tried to remember what she was supposed to do. Don’t stand up, she recalled. Crawl to the nearest exit. The front door was only fifteen feet away.

She dropped to the floor and began crawling. The crawl seemed to take forever. She couldn’t see. She tried not to breathe. The apartment, which barely seemed big enough to turn around in, now went on for miles. It was filled with deadly smoke and fumes. What if she got lost? She stuck her right hand out and felt for the wall. Follow the wall. Follow the wall.

Her hand hit a table, and something fell on the floor and shattered. A lamp? A vase? She didn’t know.

I’m getting closer, she thought. I can’t be more than five feet from the door. I can almost reach up and touch the door knob, if my lungs don’t explode before I make it. The air was so hot and thick it was almost solid. Helen pulled her T-shirt up over her mouth and nose, to shield her lungs from the hot smoke. And she kept crawling.

Helen could hear sirens now. Someone must have called the fire department. She reached up and found the skinny panes of glass in the jalousie door. She was gasping and choking, stupid with smoke. She felt for the door knob. The door didn’t open. Helen had locked and dead-bolted it.

Helen pulled herself up to her knees and struggled to unlock the door. The deadbolt key was in the lock, but the door would not open. She pulled at the lock with all her strength. She tried to turn the key, but it wouldn’t move. She was trapped. She could not breathe. She felt her vision close in and darken until it was as black as the smoke.

As she fell to the floor, she heard glass shatter. Cool air poured in the broken door. Helen coughed and gagged. Smoke boiled and roiled and twisted itself into dark phantoms.

Helen’s vision cleared a little. She felt strong hands pull her outside. She gulped in fresh air, faintly tinged with burning pot smoke. She saw three words floating in the blackness: “Clapton Is God.” The white letters stood out like a celestial message in the smoky dark. But before Helen could figure out what they meant, everything went black again.