Free Dying to Call You by Elaine Viets Page B

landing pads. Casino ships took seagoing suckers on cruises to nowhere. Cruise ships pampered the over-privileged.
    Tonight, Helen felt a kinship with the moneyed boaters. In any other city, I’d be sitting in a bus in rush-hour traffic, eating exhaust, Helen thought. In Fort Lauderdale, I’m riding to work like a Venetian doge.
    And working in a palace. Mindy and Melton Mowbrys’ mansion was in the obscenely rich part of Brideport, where houses were the size of shopping malls. Their owners were perpetually in the papers. One Sunday, they’d be praised in the society pages. The next Sunday, they’d be indicted on the front page.
    The Mowbry mansion was bristling with towers and bursting with bay windows, slathered with pink stucco and encrusted with red barrel tile. The architecture looked like Mizner on magic mushrooms. The massive wood and wrought iron double doors belonged on a Spanish cathedral.
    Helen knew she could not walk through the front door. She went around back to the service entrance, a mean little area with a cheap screen door. She could hear someone screaming in the steamy kitchen.
    “I’m looking for Steve,” she said to a man in a white chef’s coat carrying a silver coffee urn.
    “Follow the shrieks,” he said in a weary voice.
    Steve was dressing down two waiters. The reprimand sounded worse in his harsh New York accent. “I don’t want to ever see that again, understand?”
    The waiters nodded, too scared to speak, and backed out of the room.
    Steve was small and dark and needed a shave. He pointed to Helen and said, “You! Don’t stand there like a potted plant. Are you the new bartender?”
    “Yes,” she said.
    “Speak up,” he said. “Are you a woman or a mouse?”
    “I’m somebody here to work, not take abuse,” she said.
    Steve broke into a smile. “Good-looking and sassy. I like that. You’ll do.”
    He planted her at a service bar by the swimming pool. It was landscaped to look like a jungle pool with a waterfall.
    Ferns and pink orchids grew along the waterfall. Thick pink clouds of frilly blossoms bloomed alongside the paths. Pink-flowered vines dripped from the trees.
    Long serving tables were covered with crisp pink cloths and lavish hors d’oeuvres. Huge bouquets of pink roses were being carried outside. Candles were lit. An ice sculpture dripped. A busboy brought Helen a tub of ice. She checked out the booze. No box wine here. The Mowbrys served only the finest wine and liquor.
    The first guests trickled in half an hour later. By eight, the party was in full swing, and Helen was pouring drinks one after another. This was a thirsty crowd.
    Brideport parties had people of breeding. In fact, it was all they talked about. As she scrambled for ice and bottles, Helen heard a white-haired man in a yachting jacket say, “We really need better birth-control programs at the schools for the great unwashed. Those people have too many children.
    Indiscriminate breeding, I tell you. They all grow up to be Democrats.” The man said “Democrat” the way others might say “child molester.”
    Helen thought his three double scotches made him talk that way.
    But a face-lifted brunette in red sparkles had had only one white wine when she said, “How can we encourage people like us to have more children? I know they’re terribly expensive, but people of our class must understand their duty. Otherwise, we’re going to be overtaken by the wrong sort.”
    Her balding companion nodded sagely and downed another neat bourbon.
    A hatchet-faced man with dyed black hair ordered two red wines and told the man next to him, “There must be some way to sterilize Chelsea Clinton, so the Clinton genes are not passed on.”
    Helen nearly dropped a full bottle of club soda at that one, but caught it before she was spotted as a Democrat sympathizer.
    Otherwise, it was a typical, dull charity party. Helen had attended too many when she’d been in corporate life. The women were mostly blond and