Orchid Beach (Holly Barker 1)

“Good,” Holly said.

“Yeah,” Jackson echoed, “real good. And at some point, I hope to get an opportunity to tell him that I was the one who put you onto him.”

“I’ll see if I can arrange that,” Harry said.

CHAPTER

49

R ita Morales showed up at the service gate to Palmetto Gardens at six forty-five the following morning in the rusting 1978 Impala the Bureau had furnished her. She was wearing old, baggy khakis and a South Beach sweatshirt, faded and full of holes. She parked her car, walked up to the security shack and rapped sharply on the glass. The guard, who had been dozing, nearly had a heart attack.

“Hey,” she said in a pronounced Cuban-American accent, “I’m here for the cleaning work.”

The guard got hold of himself and picked up a clipboard. “Name?”

“Rita.”

“Rita what?”

“Garcia.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said, checking her off. “The bus will be here in a few minutes. Just wait in the parking lot.”

Rita walked back to the parking lot, where other women were gathering, most of them being dropped off by relatives. Time to go to work, she thought. She approached an ample woman who had gotten out of a pickup truck. “Buenos días,” she said, and continued in Spanish. “I’m Rita. This is my first day. What sort of work is it?”

“It’s cleaning work,” the woman said. “I’m Carla.”

“Yeah, Carla, I know about the cleaning. I mean, is it a good place to work?”

“It doesn’t get any better around here,” the woman said. “The pay is twice what you’d get working some lady’s house, but you have to work hard. They fire you if they catch you grabbing a smoke or loafing.”

“That’s okay, I guess. I don’t mind working hard if the money is good. What sort of places you been working in there?”

“I’ve worked everywhere at one time or another. I’ve cleaned houses, I’ve cleaned shops, I’ve cleaned the country club.”

“Where will they start me out?” Rita asked.

“You never can tell. You’re just a number to these people. They don’t care about your name, or anything. It’s just ‘Hey you, clean that house.’ They’ll drop you off with a partner, and the two of you will do the place. You get half an hour for lunch. You bring lunch?”

“No,” Rita replied. “Nobody told me.”

“Tell you what, you stick with me today. I’ve got enough food for the two of us. I’ll show you the ropes.”

“Thanks,” Rita said. She turned to see a white school bus drive out of the gate and stop in the parking lot. The workers started to get on.

“You just sit next to me,” Carla said, “and they’ll put us together. That’s how they do it.”

Rita gave her name to a man with a clipboard, who checked off her name, compared her face to a Polaroid photograph that had been taken when she applied for the job and gave her a polyester jump suit and a security pass, which had her name and photograph on it. She sat down next to Carla.

“You should change now,” Carla said, “and leave your clothes on the bus. It will pick us up later.”

Rita went to the back of the bus, took a seat, changed clothes, aware of the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror, and returned to her seat next to Carla in the middle of the bus.

“If we’re lucky, we’ll get office space to clean,” Carla said. “That’s why I sit in the middle of the bus. The people up front get the houses, where you have to do laundry and clean up after parties and all that. The people in the back get the shops.”

“Thanks,” Rita said. “I’m lucky I met you.”

“You sure are,” Carla replied, patting her on the knee.