Sunset Beach(82)
“That’s okay. I got a carton at home.”
“Thank God for that, right?” Drue said lightly. Her new friend’s apartment complex couldn’t be that far away. She had to get her back on track again. “So, how’d you screw up at work?”
Neesa toyed with a plastic cigarette lighter, turning it over and over between her long, curving fingernails. “There was an incident, with a guest, and Herman found out about it, and he fixed things. So then I owed him.”
Drue looked down at the cell phone, trying to remember how much battery life it had. She prayed it was still recording. “What kind of incident?”
“Some money went missing from a guest’s room. There was a car dealers’ convention that week, and those men were all rolling in money. This one dude, he checked out early, and I was cleaning his room, and I found a wad of bills. Like, hundred-dollar bills, in the pocket of the bathrobe. You know, the ones the hotel puts in guest rooms?”
“So you kept the money. Totally understandable,” Drue said.
“Yeah. The dude was drunk when he checked in and he stayed drunk the whole time. And disgusting. You wouldn’t believe the things people do in hotel rooms. He messed himself in the sheets, puked in a trash can and left it for me to clean up. And didn’t even leave a damn tip. Like, at all. So when I found that money, I tipped myself. Just a hundred-dollar bill. Which I earned, right?”
“Damn straight,” Drue agreed. “But what? You got caught?”
“Yeah,” Neesa said bitterly. “The guest called the front desk and said he’d left eight hundred dollars in the bathrobe, and he’d better get it back or he’d call the cops. The security chief called Herman in and Herman called his bluff. Said one of the housekeepers had turned in five hundred dollars and the guest must be mistaken, because he was drunk.”
Drue couldn’t help asking, “What happened to the missing money? Did you get to keep it?”
“I got the hundred bucks and he got the rest. And a couple weeks later, Herman got laid.” Neesa stared out the window at the rain streaming down the passenger window. “He has a room at the hotel for when he works late.”
“That sucks,” Drue said, meaning it. She could see the lights of a shopping center a couple blocks ahead. She needed to cut to the chase before she ran out of time with her edgy passenger. She took a deep breath and just went for it. “Do you think this Herman guy could have been the one who killed Jazmin?”
Neesa suddenly sat up straight, knocking her keys and cell phone in her lap to the floor of the Bronco. “You ask a lot of questions, you know that?”
Drue tried to calm herself in order to calm her passenger, who was now fumbling around, trying to retrieve her belongings.
“Sorry. I guess I sympathize with you and your friend, having to put up with sexual predators like this Herman guy. Men like him, they see girls like us, girls working as housekeepers, waitresses, cashiers, and they don’t see us as real people. We’re just a piece of meat to them.”
“I know that’s right,” Neesa said, sighing. “We got no power, so what’s to stop these dudes from doing whatever they want to us?” She pointed to the fast-approaching shopping center half a block away. “That’s the Walmart up ahead. Hang a left there, then make a quick right.”
The apartment complex was called Sherlock Forest, but the only trees Drue saw were tall, skinny pines. Neesa directed her to a two-story building with brown cedar siding. “That’s me,” she said.
Drue pulled up in front of the building.
Neesa plucked the wig from her head, tucked it into her purse then swung the passenger-side door open. “Thanks for the ride, girl,” she said. “And hey, if you do decide to go blond, give me a call. I’ll hook you up.”
“I’ll definitely do that,” Drue said. “But how do I find you?”
Neesa reached into her pocketbook. “That’s right. I never did tell you my name.” She handed Drue a hot-pink business card. “I’m Neesa Vincent. Salon Neesa. That’s what my place is gonna be called.”
Drue waited while Neesa ran through the rain to the door of a ground-floor apartment, unlocked it and disappeared inside. Then she drove around the corner, put the Bronco in park and reached for her cell phone. Her power level was at five percent. She plugged it into the charger and drove home to Sunset Beach through the rain.
39
When Drue arrived at work on Thursday morning, a yellow Post-it note was attached to the computer screen on her desk: GEOFF TAKING PERSONAL LEAVE DAY. YOU’RE WORKING RECEPTION THIS MORNING—WENDY.
“Damnit.” She’d deliberately arrived fifteen minutes early, hoping to get time to take another look at the video from the Gulf Vista. But she dutifully donned her office sweater, picked up her headset and went out to the lobby. No sooner was she seated than the front door opened. A tall, imposing black man swept inside.
He was dressed in a vaguely Egyptian-looking ensemble—floor-length gold lamé gown, a homemade cardboard breastplate studded with red bicycle reflectors, and a headpiece made from a woman’s striped chiffon scarf wound around his head. The man planted his feet firmly apart, staring at the ceiling and the walls, before finally leveling his gaze toward the woman at the reception desk. He crossed his arms over the breastplate, and she noticed that he had shiny brass serpent-shaped bracelets around his biceps.