Blaize Clement - Dixie Hemingway Mysteries5 - Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs p.02

10
t the diner, all the talk was about the heat. Across from me, three men were counting out bills for their tab and saying how it seemed hotter than any
other summer they could remember. One of them took a scientific tack.
“It used to be that ninety degrees meant ninety degrees, but now ninety degrees is really about a hundred and five.”
One of his friends said, “That’s right. The Gulf is hotter now. Has something to do with sandstorms in Africa. One of the deserts. Sahara, maybe.”
As they slid out of their booth, the third man said, “Nah, it’s that damn Al Gore.”
A bus girl cleaned their table so a man and woman could take their place. Judy came with her coffeepot and took their order. The man asked for key
lime pie.
The woman said, “Does the lime pie have milk in it? I’m lactose intolerant.”
Judy said, “It has condensed milk.”
The woman scowled as if the milk were Judy’s fault. “I’ve never been so hot in my entire life, and I was looking forward to key lime pie.”
Judy said, “We have some nice apple pie.”
“But apple pie needs cheese or ice cream with it, and I’m lactose intolerant. I don’t want real coffee either. I’ll just have some decaf.”
“Do you take cream?”
“Yes, please.”
Judy swiveled to pour more coffee in my mug. Under her breath, she muttered, “It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.”
I tackled my eggs and fries with more speed. If I had to listen to any more dumb talk, I might cram it all in my mouth at one time and choke myself to
death.
On the way home, I stopped at a red light and watched a skinny man I thought might be Paco in disguise. He was pushing a beat-up old bicycle across
the street. He wore faded jeans and an oversized green plaid shirt buttoned to the neck. His sleeves were buttoned at the wrist, and he wore a dirty
bandanna tied over dusty, gray-streaked long hair. He felt my gaze and turned and looked vacantly at me. It wasn’t Paco, it was just a burned-out old
stoner pushing his bike across the street.
When I got home, Paco’s Harley was still gone, and Michael was on the deck bent over the table with his back to me. Ella was harnessed and watching
from a chaise. From the way she was sitting it looked as if she was gathered to jump and run at a moment’s notice.
I went over to see what Michael was doing. A seagull stood on the table. The gull had a string of seaweed attached to his foot and Michael was gently
untangling it. As if he knew he’d come to no harm from Michael, the gull stood quietly until his foot was free. Then he lifted from the table with a quick flutter
of wings and flew straight toward the sea.
I said, “What are you, a gull whisperer?”
He grinned. “I have the touch, little sister.”
His smile didn’t reach his eyes or erase the strain around his mouth. Paco had left before midnight, and he wasn’t home yet. Neither of us would
mention it, but Michael and I both knew how dangerous Paco’s undercover work was.
I said, “I’ll bet you’re famous in the seabird world. They probably get together and talk about the big guy that gives them choice fish heads.”
He shrugged. “We all take fame where we find it.”
I winced, because my fame was mostly from going nuts while cameras rolled. That, and killing a man.
Without really intending to, I said, “Michael, do you suppose Mom is still drinking?”
Old bitterness made his voice sharp. “Why’re you thinking about her?”
I’d obviously touched a nerve. Michael had been the one who’d had to grow up too fast so our mother could stay a child. If I told him how Jaz’s hunger
had made me remember how he’d taken over the job of protecting me because our mother couldn’t be depended on, I’d have to tell him about the young
thugs who had come in Big Bubba’s house. He was worried enough about Paco, I didn’t want to give him something else to worry about. So I went in
another direction.
“You remember Maureen Rhinegold? My best friend in high school?”
“Tall, hot bod, big curly hair, big boobs?”
“Yeah, her. She came to see me last night. I guess that made me start thinking about Mom. Maureen’s dad was an alcoholic too.”
Michael studied me for a moment. “I heard her when she came.”
I looked toward the sea where the rescued gull was now indistinguishable from all the others. “I guess you heard her yelling at the door.”
He nodded. “Woke me up. I came outside to see if anything was wrong, but you’d let her in so I figured it was okay.”
More than likely Michael had already been awake worrying about whatever undercover job Paco was doing.
I said, “She was upset. Wanted somebody to talk to.”
He stayed poker-faced, which told me he knew there was something I didn’t want him to know.
He said, “I didn’t know you two saw each other anymore.”
I shifted uneasily. “We don’t, but we were close once. Some friendships just stay close no matter what.”
He didn’t seem impressed. In fact, he looked a bit annoyed.
He said, “I remember Maureen Rhinegold better than you think I do. She’s the flake who got you to write all her term papers. She’s the one who gave
you weed to smoke. She’s the one who dumped Harry Henry when some old guy waved money at her. I never could see why you put up with her.”
I smiled and patted his big shoulder. Bless his heart, he still thought Maureen had been the one who’d got the weed he’d caught us smoking. Besides,
while it was true that I’d written Maureen’s papers, she’d helped me too. Once she’d spent hours helping me build a diorama for a history class. Even
used her favorite purple nail polish to paint a roof on a teensy building.
I said, “Considering the way Harry Henry turned out, it was probably smart of her to dump him.”
As soon as I said it, I felt guilty. In actual fact, I liked Harry. And it wasn’t like he’d turned to crime or anything, he’d just become a genial beach bum.
Michael said, “She’s still a bad influence, Dixie.”
I couldn’t keep from laughing. He sounded exactly the way he’d sounded when he was seventeen and I was fifteen, and he’d told me he’d kick my butt
clear to Cuba if I ever smoked pot again.
I said, “Michael, I’m a big girl now, and nobody influences me. I think for myself.”
Boy, was that a bunch of crap! I could almost hear the echo of my own voice promising Maureen I’d go with her to deliver Victor’s ransom money.
Michael walked to the chaise and picked Ella up. He’d apparently decided not to press the subject, which should have made me glad but actually made
me a bit nervous. Maybe if he pressed me, I could use him as an excuse to tell Maureen I’d changed my mind.
He said, “Want a brownie? I just made some.”
“No thanks, I just had breakfast. I didn’t get much sleep last night, so I’m on my way to bed.”
With Ella’s leash trailing over his shoulder, he gave me a half wave and went inside his house. I headed for my stairs and a nap. Maybe the world
wouldn’t look so uncertain when I woke up.
For some reason, my apartment seemed too quiet, as if it were anxiously holding its breath. In my bedroom, I flipped the switch to start the AC on the
wall, and started toward the bathroom. But in the hall I hesitated at the narrow linen closet and opened the door. My linen closet is neat and spare, narrow
stacks of a few sheets and blankets, some spare towels for guests in case I should ever have any. On the top shelf, a pillowcase holding the furry red
Elmo that Christy loved so much, and an elegant round hatbox that once belonged to my grandmother.
Almost furtively, I reached overhead and got the hatbox and carried it to my bed. As soon as I opened it, I was nine years old and secretly watching my
mother on the day before she left us. Quiet as death, I stood outside her nearly closed door while she carefully lifted out the contents of the hatbox. She
laid them in a precise row along the edge of the bed. She seemed intent on getting them exactly a certain distance from the edge, occasionally adjusting
one, moving it higher or lower until she had them the way she wanted them. Then she went still and looked at them for a long time, finally caressing each
one as if it were a loved one’s cheek. From my spying place, I held my breath. I didn’t move. If I moved, my mother might explode into one of her irrational
furies. I didn’t know what the objects were, but I knew they were more important to her than I was. After a few minutes, she gathered the objects up and
replaced them in the box. When she got up from the bed to deposit the box on the top closet shelf, I melted away.
My mother left us for good the next day—ran off with a man my brother and I had never even heard of. After I knew she was never coming back, I stood
on a chair and got the box from its hiding place. I don’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t what I found. Ticket stubs to a Grateful Dead concert she and
my dad had gone to in Tampa, the baby bracelets Michael and I had worn in the hospital when we were born, Michael’s first lost tooth Scotch-Taped to a
card with the date and time he lost it, and a handprint I’d made for her in kindergarten. There was also a photo of her and my dad when they were high
school sweethearts.
I’m not sure why I’ve held on to that box, but every now and then I do exactly what I watched my mother do—lay the things out and caress them. The box
is my only inheritance from my mother. It links us in a powerful way that transcends reason.
Putting the box back in its place beside Christy’s Elmo, I peeled off my clothes and threw them in the washer in the hall, then clumped naked into the
bathroom and turned on the shower.
While I stood under a hot shower, I thought about how Maureen had looked when she begged me to help her. Her big pleading eyes. Her messy hair
with that dangling barrette with the red plastic flower.
I imagined myself calling Maureen. I imagined myself saying, “You’re going to have to do this without me.” Then I imagined her saying, “If it were your
husband, I’d help you.”
While I brushed my teeth I imagined calling her and asking, “Are we still on for tonight?” I imagined her saying, “We don’t have to! Victor’s here with me!
The kidnappers drove him home and we just handed them the million.”
Yeah, right. Like kidnappers delivered COD.
I pulled on a terry cloth robe and fell into bed with a dark cloud hovering over me. From a distant place in my head, a voice sang:
The one with the scarlet flowers in her hair
She’s got the police comin’ after me
A
11
fter a long nap, I dressed and pulled my narrow bed away from the wall to get at the customized drawer built into its dark side—the one that holds my
guns in their special cushioned niches. Every law enforcement agency in the country issues standard weapons to its officers, the standard depending
on the city or county’s choice. Sarasota police are issued 9mm Glocks, while the Sarasota Sheriff’s Department prefers SIG SAUERS. Regardless of the
weapon issued, law enforcement officers also qualify for several off-duty guns at their department ranges. Using a gun for which you haven’t qualified
means big trouble, so sworn officers usually qualify for several models even if they mostly stick to one favorite.
After Todd was killed and I went on indefinite leave of absence, I returned our SIG SAUERS to the department, but I still had our personal guns. I was
qualified on all of them, and I had a concealed weapon permit making it legal to carry any one of them.
Some states are picky about guns, but Florida, bless its heart, takes the position that people need to compensate for something, even if it’s just their
own frightening imagination. The state therefore offers the right to tote a pistol to anybody with the guts to stare down howling hurricanes, venomous
snakes, rapacious developers, and squirrelly election officials.
Actually, guns and responsible ownership of guns have always been part of my life. When my grandparents first came to Siesta Key, rattlesnakes
outnumbered humans, and some of the humans were unsavory types one step ahead of bounty hunters. A rifle was a handy thing to have around for
protection against all those varmints, and my grandfather would have thought it ludicrous for anybody to question his right to own one. On the other hand,
he would think it equally ludicrous for civilians to claim they needed machine guns or assault weapons for personal protection.
When Michael and I were little, our grandfather would take us out to the country and let us shoot tin cans off fence posts. He’d preach that guns were
dangerous weapons not to be left loaded or lying around. On the way home he’d make us giggle with the old Jimmie Rodgers song our grandmother
wouldn’t let him sing in her presence: “If you don’t want to smell my smoke, don’t monkey with my gun.”
I was always a better shot than Michael because he was too physical to enjoy the precision that shooting requires. Good shooters are precise people,
like clockmakers or safecrackers. Either because of my grandfather’s training or Jimmie Rodgers’s blue yodel or some genetic trait, I was one of the best
shooters the police academy has ever had. Michael, on the other hand, doesn’t own a gun and thinks armed civilians are ridiculous Clint Eastwood
wannabes. I sort of agree with him, except that now I’m also a civilian with a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
My preferred gun is one of my former off-duty guns, a snub-nosed, five-shot, J-frame .38 caliber. It has a stainless steel two-inch barrel and cylinder, and
an aluminum alloy frame with an exposed hammer. Its checkered black rubber boot grip is easy to handle and it fits well in my hand. No safety to worry
about, no decocking levers to slow me down, no magazines to fail. Only thirteen ounces, it’s a sweet, simple, dependable gun.
I doubt that I’ll ever go back to being a law enforcement officer, and I have no fear of hordes of murderous aliens—either from outer space or other
countries—coming to hurt me. But good shooters like to remain good shooters, and my lightweight .38 has a wicked recoil that can ruin my aim if I get
sloppy about practicing. I therefore spend some time every week at the handgun shooting range. They all know me there, and the young man who led me
to a vacant booth didn’t bother to tell me the rules. He just put up the paper target and left me alone.
If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit I don’t practice just to stay a good shot. There’s also something about putting on the eye and ear protectors,
spreading my feet, and aiming at a fresh piece of paper with a bull’s-eye painted on it that gives me a feeling of kick-ass Wonder Woman power. I might
get the same feeling if I just put on the Wonder Woman costume, but I don’t think so.
I shot with the pistol held in two hands and then in one, and when I was satisfied that I was still a good shot, I loaded everything up and left the range still
feeling like Wonder Woman. I remained Wonder Woman until I remembered that I’d just practiced the art of killing another human being. Because let’s get
real, that bull’s-eye target stands for a human heart, and every shooter knows that.
Enjoying target practice with a gun is probably the way people feel if they own profitable stock in health insurance companies that routinely deny
lifesaving surgery or medication. It’s better not to dwell on the fact that something that gives us so much pleasure is linked to the increased likelihood of
another person’s death.
On the way home, I noticed a couple of men I thought might be Paco—a man with a long beard and ponytail leaning against a Pelican Press dispenser,
and a teen with a purple mohawk in dark shades, baggy jeans, and a huge shapeless shirt—but it was dumb of me to do that. If Paco’s disguises were
the kind I could see through, they wouldn’t be effective, and I knew his were extremely effective.
When I got home, I spent an hour at my desk with client records, then went downstairs to spend time with Michael and Ella. To be strictly honest, I was
also drawn by the memory that Michael had made brownies. No matter how grim the world gets, chocolate makes anything more tolerable.
Michael was in his kitchen with several steaming pots on the stove and a look of grim anxiety in the set of his jaw. Ella was perched on her barstool
watching him and occasionally licking her lips.
I gave Ella’s furry head a kiss, poured myself a glass of milk from a carton in the fridge, and got myself a brownie. I sat on a barstool beside Ella and
watched Michael. Like Ella, I licked my lips every now and then, but in my case it was for the chocolate and milk. I suspected Ella did it from a sublimated
urge to lick Michael. She wouldn’t be the first female to want to do that.
He concentrated on his pots and pans, giving one a furious stir, grabbing a smoking cast-iron skillet’s handle and moving it back and forth like he was
trying to shake sense into it, glaring down into a soup pot’s innards as if he thought it was hiding something. I had the feeling he had forgotten that Ella and
I were there.
Meekly, I said, “What’re you cooking?”
His head whipped toward me. “Huh? Oh, just some stuff for the freezer. Corn chowder. Roasted poblano peppers, some shrimp and mushrooms to put
in the peppers.”
I said, “Hunh.”
I looked down at Ella, who was looking up at me with a pleading expression. I guess she thought one human should be able to communicate with
another human better than a cat could. She didn’t understand how hard human-to-human communication is.
I said, “Have you heard from Paco?”
His shoulders hunched, and he increased the speed of the wooden spoon circling in the soup pot. “He never calls when he’s working.”
I knew better than to ask if he had any idea what the job was, or where it was, or how long it would last. But I also knew that something about this job
was unusual. Otherwise, Michael wouldn’t be so closed off.
I said, “Paco’s a good cop. He knows what he’s doing.”
“I know that.”
I got up and rinsed my milk glass and put it in the dishwasher. Threw the paper towel I’d used as a napkin into the trash under the sink. It was time to go
out on my afternoon calls. Just before midnight, Maureen would come for me, and I would go with her to her house. Then one of us would make the
ransom money drop, and I knew which one of us it would be. Just thinking about it made me stop breathing.
Michael gave me a phony smile when I left and Ella tried for a nonchalant wave of her tail, but we were all putting on an act. I told myself that Paco would
be home by nightfall, that the money drop would go off without a hitch, and that Maureen’s husband would be back in the bosom of his family by morning. I
told myself that the next day Paco would be resting up from whatever he’d done, I would go off to take care of pets, and Michael would go to the firehouse
happily bearing a big container of corn chowder.
I just had to make it until the night was dark enough to hide the insane thing I was going to do.
At Tom Hale’s condo, he was in his wheelchair in the living room reading the real estate section of the Herald-Tribune. Billy ran to kiss my knees when I
let myself in, and Tom raised his head and smiled hello.
He said, “A friend just left me a bag of fresh-picked mamé sapote. They’re in the fridge. Want one?”
Offering a sweaty Floridian a taste of ripe mamé sapote is like offering warm blankets and hot chocolate to somebody just pulled from the icy waters of
the Bering Strait.
I gave Tom such an eager “Yes!” that Billy Elliot gave me an injured look. No matter how many legs we have, we all think our needs should come first,
and Billy didn’t want to wait for his run.
Tom rolled into the kitchen and got a brown paper bag from his refrigerator while I got two dessert spoons and a sharp knife.
Mamé sapote is a fruit about the size of a soft ball, with a tough leathery skin. The flesh is deep orange in color, with a flavor that’s a combination of
chocolate and pumpkin and ice cream and delicate spices not yet discovered.
Tom cut a brown globe in halves and handed me one. We spooned its cold sweetness straight from the rind.
Tom said, “I love this stuff.”
I said, “Todd and I had a mamé sapote tree in our backyard.”
The minute I said it, I wished I hadn’t. Remembering that tree made me remember how thrilled we’d been when it first bore fruit. One night we took the
fruit to bed to eat while we watched TV. We didn’t watch TV long. With our lips coated with flesh from the mamé sapote, we fell on each other like bears
after honey, inhaling each other’s scent and eating each other’s taste. Christy was conceived that night, and Todd had always said that when she was a
grown woman he would tell her that I’d been too turned on by mamé sapote juice to take time to put in my diaphragm. Unless he and Christy are
somewhere in heaven together, she will never hear that story.
With an effort, I pulled my memories away from that night so my heart wouldn’t crack in Tom’s kitchen.
Tom said, “I was just reading that a penthouse condo on Siesta Key sold for seven million dollars. The sellers had to reduce the asking price from eight
million because times are so tight right now.”
I said, “My heart bleeds for them.”
Tom waggled his hand. “It’s all relative. To a billionaire, a million is like a hundred to everybody else.”
I tossed my fruit rind in Tom’s kitchen trash and rinsed my spoon. As I put it in his dishwasher, I said, “I know a woman who has a million in cash in her
home safe.”
He raised a CPA’s suspicious eyebrow. “Legitimate money?”
“Yeah. Her husband’s an oil trader, whatever that is.”
He grunted, and I went to get Billy Elliot’s leash. Billy had waited long enough.
Billy and I ran around the oval parking lot track like banshees on holiday. When Billy was happy and I was pouring sweat, we rode upstairs in the cool
elevator. Tom was at the kitchen table working on papers of some kind. Before I replaced Billy’s leash in the foyer closet, I went to the kitchen. Tom
looked over his glasses at me. Probably thought I was going to ask for a second mamé sapote.
I thwacked the end of Billy’s leash against my open palm. “Tom, exactly what does an oil trader do?”
He shoved his glasses up on his nose. “Crude or paper?”
“Crude, I think.”
“Then he sells oil, big tankers full. Say he represents an oil producer in Norway. They notify him that they’ve filled a tanker with oil, and he seeks out a
buyer. Maybe the buyer is a refiner in Japan, so he strikes a deal with them and notifies the tanker to sail to Japan. But maybe on the way, a refiner in
England wants the oil and is willing to pay more. So he strikes a deal with Japan to sell the oil to England, and notifies the tanker to change course. He
can do that over and over, and every time the oil changes owners, he gets a percentage of whatever the selling price is, plus fees from both the sellers
and buyers for handling the sale. Traders spend their days looking for people willing to pay more or sell for less. It’s a lucrative business, but nerveracking.”
Brilliantly, I said, “Hunh.”
He tapped his fingers on the tabletop. “No cash gets exchanged in a business like that. It’s all wire transfers.”
As if it made a difference, I said, “This oil trader I know is from South America.”
“Venezuela is one of the largest oil producers in the world. I think it supplies about a fifth of the world’s crude.”
“Hunh.”
Tom seemed to have run out of things to say about oil trading. I couldn’t think of anything to say that might explain why my unnamed friend with an oiltrading
husband had a million dollars in cash in her home safe.
I said, “Well, okay then. I guess I’ll be on my way.”
Tom nodded, his eyes bright with something he wanted to say but was holding back. I gave Billy Elliot a smooch and hotfooted it out of the condo. All
the way down in the elevator, I wondered where that money in Maureen’s safe had come from. Even for superwealthy people, a million dollars in
emergency cash seemed excessive. It also didn’t seem likely that she and her husband had pulled it out of a bank account to keep close at hand. But if
they hadn’t got it from their bank, where had it come from?
For the first time, it hit me that Victor’s wealth might be from something illicit. All I knew about Victor was what Maureen had told me, and Maureen could
have lied. Even more probable, Maureen might not know herself. Or care. She wasn’t the curious type. All she cared about was what Victor’s money
bought.
At my Bronco, I got inside and bounced my forehead off the steering wheel a few times.
Out loud, I said, “It’s not illegal to pay off kidnappers. And delivering money to kidnappers won’t make me a criminal, no matter where the money came
from.”
But inside my head, a little voice said, “Are you sure about that?”
I wasn’t the least bit sure.
The Buddhists say, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” I felt enlightened by my conversation
with Tom, but now what?
I started the engine and headed for my next pet client. Before enlightenment, empty litter boxes, walk dogs. After enlightenment, empty litter boxes, walk
dogs. I’m a professional. I meet my responsibilities. Even if I’m planning to do something incredibly stupid and possibly illegal, I take care of my pets.
But after I’d taken care of all the cats on my list, and before I headed for Big Bubba’s house, I drove to the village and parked in front of Ethan Crane’s
office.
I needed legal advice.
I
12
f I had a lick of sense, I’d have thrown myself at Ethan Crane the moment I met him. By any woman’s criteria, Ethan is high on the desirability list. He’s
honest. He’s sharp. He cares about things that people should care about, like the environment and the community and dogs. Add all that to the fact that
he looks like an underwear model and you have one of the world’s best men. Add to that the fact that he and I had a strong attraction from the first moment
we met, and you have the world’s most stupid woman, because I kept turning him away. And the worst of it was that I turned him away because I was even
more drawn to Guidry, who wasn’t half as direct as Ethan about wanting me. Not even a fourth as direct, as a matter of fact.
The last time I’d seen Ethan, he’d made it clear that the next move was up to me. He’d also made it clear that he wasn’t offering a commitment, but an
invitation to explore what we felt for each other and see where it led. I had left vowing to myself that I wouldn’t give him any more mixed messages. I
wouldn’t make any excuses to see him again unless or until I was able to do so without bringing any emotional baggage with me. And yet here I was,
baggage and all, coming to him for advice.
Ethan’s office is in the oldest part of Siesta Key’s business district. His stucco building is as old as the streets, with corners rounded and walls pitted by
age and sandy sea breezes. The flaking gilt sign on the front door originally named Ethan’s grandfather, ETHAN CRANE, ESQ. Ethan hasn’t seen fit to
modernize either the sign or the building, so stepping into the minuscule foyer and ascending the worn stairs to the second floor is like stepping back in
time to a century when people were more civil and formal. Just the odor of furniture polish and old law books and leather chairs makes me want to live up
to a higher standard of conduct.
Ethan’s door was closed, and his secretary was busy at a computer in a side office. She wasn’t the same secretary I’d seen at his office before. The
other woman had been older and dignified, probably another inheritance from Ethan’s grandfather. This one was middle-aged and plump, with severe
sticking-up hair dyed the color of eggplant. When I stopped at her door, she gave me a scathing once-over.
I said, “I’m a friend of Ethan’s. Is he busy?”
She wore dark ruby lipstick on oversized pillowy lips, and when she pursed her lips the effect was a bit alarming. Like they might have suctioning ability
that could vacuum me in.
She said, “Does it look like he’s not busy?”
The woman obviously saw herself as Ethan’s protector, there to guard him against door-to-door salesmen, scam artists, and women with cat hair on
their shorts.
I said, “Sorry, I should have called before I came.”
Her big lips did that scary thing again. “Yes, you should have.”
She had the charisma of tofu.
I said, “So I guess after I leave, you can just tell Ethan that a good friend was here and left because he was too busy to see me. Better yet, I’ll tell him
myself and save you the time.”
Some of the air went out of her lips, and her eyes narrowed. With a glance at a light on a phone setup on her desk, she said, “He’s on the phone. When
he’s off, I’ll let him know you’re here.”
I gave her a phony smile and she gave me one back. I had won this round, and we both knew it, but sports-womanship kept me from gloating. Thus do
women communicate with one another, our little versions of power plays that remain largely invisible to men.
She went back to whatever she was doing on her computer, and I leaned against the doorjamb and waited. From where I stood, I could see the yellow
light on her phone board, and when it went out I cleared my throat and pointed.
I got an evil glare, but she punched a button and spoke into an intercom. “Mr. Crane, you have a visitor. She says she’s a friend.”
It was clear from her tone that she didn’t believe he could have a friend like me. She didn’t seem to realize that since she hadn’t asked for my name,
there wasn’t much he could do but see me. I wondered how long it would take Ethan to fire her.
In a few seconds, Ethan opened his office door. When he saw me, he looked pleased. I was sorry the pillow-mouthed woman couldn’t see his
expression from her desk.
Ethan is tall and lean, with high cheekbones, smoldering dark eyes, and glossy black hair from Seminole ancestors. He had on lawyer clothes—dark
pin-striped trousers, crisp white shirt with onyx cuff links, a dark rose-hued tie.
He said, “Dixie! What a nice surprise.”
He beckoned me into his office and stood aside as I entered. I thought about kissing his cheek and decided not to. He seemed to have the same
internal debate, so there was a moment of eye contact at the door that asked questions for which neither of us had answers.
He shut the door and waved me to one of his grandfather’s old dark leather chairs. Sitting down behind his desk, he said, “Is something wrong?”
I flinched at the question, but it was fair. Every time I had reached out to Ethan, it had been because I needed help.
His suit coat was on a wooden hanger hooked over an arm of a mahogany hall tree, the kind you only see in antiques stores. The tree had an umbrella
holder at its base. I imagined the countless times his grandfather had hung his own coats on that hall tree, imagined the hundreds of clients shaking out
damp umbrellas and sliding them into the holder. All that solid tradition behind Ethan was part of what made me trust his advice. It was also part of what
put distance between us.
I said, “Ethan, is it illegal to pay off kidnappers?”
His eyes widened. “Why do you ask?”
“A friend needs to know.”
One of his thick eyebrows lifted, and I felt my face grow hot. A friend needs to know has the same ring of truth as The dog ate my homework.
I said, “I have a friend whose husband has been kidnapped. She’s planning to pay the ransom. Is that against the law?”
“Not in this country. If she lived in Colombia, she’d be arrested if she paid.”
“What if the husband is from Colombia but lives here?”
“You have a friend whose husband is from Colombia, and he’s been kidnapped?”
“I’m not sure where he’s from. It could be Colombia.” I felt stupid saying it, like a receptionist who had failed to get a visitor’s name.
“Kidnapping is such big business in Colombia that the government has made it illegal to pay a ransom.”
I said, “But he lives here, and the kidnappers are here. My friend refuses to report it to the police because she can easily pay the ransom, and that’s
what her husband has always told her to do if he’s kidnapped. She just wants to be sure it’s legal.”
My voice quavered a bit when I said that, because Maureen didn’t give a gnat’s ass whether it was legal.
Ethan said, “It’s dumb, but it’s not illegal.”
I said, “So I guess actually delivering the ransom money to the kidnappers, like putting it where they said to put it, is okay too?”
“I didn’t say it was okay. I said it wasn’t illegal.”
My lips squinched together to keep from asking what I wanted to know. Then I blurted, “Does it matter where the money came from? I mean, if the
ransom money came from something illegal, does that change anything?”
“Let me be sure I understand this. You have a friend from Colombia, which just happens to be a huge exporter of illegal narcotics, and he’s been
kidnapped. By a happy coincidence, his wife just happens to have a bunch of possibly illegally obtained money, and she’s going to use it for ransom.
Have I got the facts right?”
I didn’t answer. The way he’d put it made it sound a lot worse than anything I’d been imagining.
Ethan sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Dixie, what the hell are you mixed up in?”
“I’m not mixed up in anything.”
“You’re going to help deliver ransom money. Possibly dirty ransom money.”
My chin jutted out. “I didn’t say that.”
“But that’s what you’re planning, isn’t it?”
“You just said it was legal.”
“I said paying ransom was legal. I also said it was dumb. Whether they get paid with clean money or dirty money, kidnappers aren’t nice people. Paying
them ransom money isn’t like handing cash to somebody at the Taco Bell drive-through.”
I stood up. “Thanks, Ethan. I’ll pass the information along to my friend. I didn’t know anybody else I could ask.”
He stood too. “Don’t do it, Dixie.”
I said, “This is an attorney-client secret thing, right?”
“It’s a stupid thing to do.”
“It’s my friend’s husband. Her decision. I’m not really involved.”
“That’s what people say just before they get into deep shit. Don’t do it.”
This time I kissed his cheek as I left. His cheek was hard and smooth, with a clean, healthy, testosterone-laden scent laced with a musky aftershave. My
hormones all stood up and cheered when my lips touched him. I was a fool to leave without throwing him to the floor and doing delicious things to him.
It was nearing sunset when I finished with all the four-legged pets. Big Bubba would be my last call, but first I swung by Hetty’s house to see if she’d
heard from Jaz.
She was happy to say that Jaz had returned.
She said, “I was afraid she’d never come back, the way she ran out this morning, but she came back in an hour or two. We made cookies.”
Before I could ask if she’d got information for Guidry, she said, “I was afraid to push her, Dixie. She seems so scared. Any little thing spooks her.
Something has traumatized that child.”
I said, “If she’s been involved with a gang, that would be enough to traumatize her.”
“She’s a sweet girl.”
“Something is weird about the whole situation, Hetty. Just be careful.”
She said, “It’s weird, all right. Her name is a secret. Where she lives is a secret. Why in the world would it be a secret?”
All the possible answers I could think of were too disturbing to voice.
I said, “Is she coming back tomorrow?”
Hetty looked guilty. “She may come back later today. She said she would try to.”
“Hetty, she knows gang members wanted for murder. Lieutenant Guidry really needs information about her.”
“I know. I’ll try, but I’ll have to wait until the time is right. If I push her, she’ll leave and I’ll never learn anything.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I also couldn’t argue with Guidry’s belief that Hetty was probably the only person who could get information from the girl. As a
minor who had done nothing wrong, she was not somebody he could take in for questioning. All he had was the fact that she had behaved strangely when
pressed for information about where she lived, and that gang members had asked for her by name.
At Big Bubba’s house, I put fresh water and a new millet sprig in his cage, along with some apple slices and half a banana. While I did that, he ran
around on the lanai and squawked at the wild birds outside. Big Bubba is bilingual, which is more than I can say for myself. They squawked back, so I
suspected he was saying rude things in bird language.
After his food and water were replenished and his cage tidied, I got out some of his toys and we played together. When it was time for me to go, he
allowed himself to be returned to his cage, and I draped his nighttime cover over his bars.
I wished somebody would put me behind bars before Maureen came that night. I wished they’d drop a cover over me to hide me from the world.
Instead of going home, I called Michael and told him I wouldn’t be there for dinner. He didn’t sound disappointed. In fact, he sounded as if dinner was
the last thing on his mind, which was another indication of his anxiety about Paco. I didn’t need to ask if he’d heard from him.
I drove to Anna’s Deli and got a Surfer sandwich to take to Siesta Beach. Siesta’s powdery white sand is composed of always-cool quartz, and locals
believe it has mystic qualities unknown to ordinary beaches. Whether our faith is based on fact or fantasy, I need to shuffle my feet in that crystalline
coolness on a regular basis and absorb some of its energy.
I arrived at the beach when a tangerine sun was inches above the horizon. Ribbons of cerise and gold streaked the sky and gilded the edges of baby
white clouds. I walked toward the edge of the surf and sat cross-legged to watch. Along the beach, people fell silent and respectful, all of us watching the
last quivering moments of resistance before the sun slipped smoothly into the water, sending out brilliant shafts of color.
When the light dimmed and the clouds turned gray, people gathered up their towels and picnic hampers and straggled toward the pavilion while
seabirds wheeled overhead. Alone, I listened to a rosy-pewter sea whisper spume-filled messages, then took off my Keds and went down to let the surf
wash over my feet.
When I was a kid, I had a fantasy that I could fly and see through walls. Wonder Woman must have started out like that and then grew boobs and got that
costume that didn’t move when she did. Anyway, in my Wonder Kid fantasies, I always began standing in the surf. I thought the sea foam rolling over my
toes brought magical energy, so I’d stand there and let the magic seep into me, rising up my legs and into my skinny torso, and finally through my
outstretched arms. Only then could I lift off and rise in the air. I didn’t have to flap my arms or kick my legs or anything. All I had to do was think where I
wanted to go, and my body went there. In my imagination, I sailed over Siesta Key’s streets and watched cars and pedestrians down below. I hovered
over my friends’ houses and watched their families. I sailed around the firehouse where my father was and looked at him laughing with his fellow
firefighters. Sometimes I settled down on the firehouse roof so I could be close to him.
I guess I haven’t changed much since then. Feeling the surf tickle my toes still made me feel charged with energy. I don’t believe anymore that I can fly,
but by the time I walked back to my sandwich, the Siesta symphony of surf, salt, and sand had soothed my soul.
I would help Maureen leave the money to ransom her husband, and I would not have any more nervous quibbles about it. I had made a promise, and I
would keep my word. If the money that ransomed Victor was ill-gotten, that wasn’t my problem. If paying off kidnappers was a dumb decision, it was
Maureen’s decision to make, and she’d made it. I was simply being a friend, a sidekick, like Sancho Panza or Tonto.
For the moment, I’d forgotten about friends like Thelma and Louise. It’s good that we can’t see too far ahead. If we could, we’d never go forward.
W
13
hen I got home, Michael and Ella were in a chaise on the deck. Michael was stretched out almost flat on his back, and Ella was sitting upright on his
chest with her ears cocked toward the darkening shadows under the trees. She didn’t wear her harness and leash, but Michael’s encircling hands
were ready to restrain her if she decided to investigate the night.
When they heard my footsteps, two heads turned to look at me. Ella flipped the tip of her tail, and Michael tipped his chin.
I said, “I didn’t groom Ella today. I can do it now.”
Michael said, “I already combed her. I’m getting pretty good at it.”
I was disappointed. Grooming Ella is my job, and I enjoy it.
I dropped into a chair and let the evening sounds of whooshing surf and late-hunting seagulls envelop me. One of Michael’s hands stroked Ella. She
yawned.
If Paco had been home, it would have been a normal end to the day. Except that it wasn’t the end of my day, just an end to Michael’s and Ella’s. In about
four hours, Maureen would be here to get me. If I was lucky, Michael would be asleep and never know.
I said, “No word from Paco yet?”
He shook his head, and I could tell from the grim line of his mouth that he didn’t want to talk about it.
Overhead, the sky had gone from blue to a murky violet, and early stars were beginning to wink at us. I looked for a hint of rain clouds, but there weren’t
any. At least I wouldn’t have to slog in the rain to leave Maureen’s ransom money.
I stood up and brushed at cat hair and beach sand on my shorts. I said, “Well, I’m going to bed.”
Michael said, “Yeah, me too. You want me to put Ella in your place when I leave tomorrow?”
He would be going back to the firehouse at eight o’clock the next morning. The fact that he’d asked the question meant he didn’t expect Paco to be
home when he left.
I said, “If you’d like. Or I can get her when I come home.”
Ella looked back and forth at us like somebody watching a tennis match. We didn’t like to leave Ella alone too long, so she stayed with me when
Michael and Paco were gone. But that wasn’t why Michael and I were talking about her. We were doing that to avoid talking about the big gaping hole
where Paco should have been. I finally gave them both a smooch and went upstairs for a shower.
After I showered, I stood in my closet and thought about what to wear. A man wouldn’t do that. If a man planned to take a bag of money to pay off
kidnappers, he wouldn’t give a single thought to what he should wear. He’d walk out in the same clothes he wore every day—pants and shirt, shoes,
maybe a sweater or jacket. He’s a man, what other choice does he have? Women, on the other hand, have a boatload of choices.
I was going to walk down a dark path where chilly sea breezes would blow at me. Bad people would be watching from somewhere in the darkness, only
they would think I was Maureen. If they knew I was me, the person Maureen had run to after they’d specifically told her to keep her mouth shut, they would
kill Maureen’s husband. All of which meant I had to dress right or Victor might end up dead.
I decided on a pair of old black jeans that would blend with the night, and topped them with a hooded navy sweatshirt. I put on my usual white Keds.
With all the dark stuff, the white Keds stuck out like Minnie Mouse paws, but they’d have to do. When I checked myself in the full-length mirror in my officecloset,
the faded seams on the sweatshirt made chalky lines and my knees shined through the holes in my jeans like yellow traffic lights. Without the
hooded top, I would have looked like a silly rich woman wearing falsely distressed jeans. With it, I looked like a desperate woman in truly distressed jeans
ready to scrounge food from a Dumpster.
Next, I had to choose accessories. For that, I pulled out my gun drawer and got my freshly cleaned and oiled .38. I dropped five rounds in the cylinder,
and slid the barrel under the waistband of my holey jeans. Force of habit made me put another five rounds in a speed loader and stash it in my pocket.
Then I went downstairs and got my old department-issued four-C-cell flashlight out of the Bronco. My accessories weren’t terribly chic, but I figured I might
need all of them while I skulked around in the dark.
I still had a couple of hours before Maureen came, so I lay down in the hammock on my porch and drifted off to sleep. I woke with my heart pounding
from the tail end of a dream in which I was a kid and my mother had left my brother and me alone at night. She’d actually done that several times while our
father was on duty at the firehouse and unaware, but Michael and I had never told on her. Kids are loyal to their parents, even when their parents aren’t
loyal to them.
My heart was still pounding when the headlights of Maureen’s SUV shot through the darkness. I jumped to my feet, and by the time she pulled to a stop I
was already downstairs. I opened the passenger door and crawled in without speaking, then pulled the door shut as quietly as possible. My gun was
invisible under my sweatshirt. If Maureen noted the flashlight I carried, she didn’t comment.
As I’d expected, Maureen wore a pink jumpsuit that I was sure had a designer label. She looked alert and oddly excited, the way people do when
they’re leaving before dawn for a long cross-country trip. Her car smelled like tobacco smoke.
I said, “Turn around quietly. I don’t want Michael to hear us leave.”
She nodded and did an expert K-turn that took us down the lane with a minimum of engine noise. Maureen always had been good at backing out of
tight places.
We didn’t speak, but sat side by side like passengers on a bus. When we hit Midnight Pass Road, Maureen turned north, driving past the new condo
that had replaced the tacky apartment building where she and her mother had lived. Maureen’s mother had been the meanest woman on the planet,
hands down, no contest.
I said, “How’s your mother?”
“She got married and moved to Georgia. I don’t see much of her.”
I said, “Hunh.”
I tried to consider Maureen’s mother from the viewpoint of the adult I was and not the teenager I’d been when I knew her. From an adult’s perspective, I
decided that being left to raise a daughter by herself might have had a lot to do with her sour disposition.
I said, “Ever see your dad?”
She shrugged. “Just that one time.”
And with those four words, Maureen summed up the real reason I had agreed to do what I was doing. She had expected me to understand her cryptic
answer, and I did. For a second we were once more two hurt kids who only admitted pain to each other.
I well remembered the moment Maureen had told me about seeing her father. We’d been hiding behind a sand dune on Turtle Beach, trying to get high
on a marijuana cigarette a boy had given me during math class. She said her mother had sent her to the 7-Eleven for a loaf of bread, and her father had
been there buying a carton of cigarettes. She hadn’t seen him since she was about five, but she had recognized him immediately.
Telling it, she’d taken a long drag and squinted her eyes, the way we imagined real users did, and passed the roach to me—we called it a roach no
matter how long it was.
She said, “He didn’t even know me. I’m his own daughter, and he didn’t know me.”
I sucked on the joint and wiped at moisture in my eyes. With adolescent swagger, I said, “I hope I never see my mother again. If I saw her, I’d turn my
back and walk away.”
Tears had spilled down my face as I said it. I had pretended it was the weed making my eyes leak, but the truth had been that if I’d seen my mother
again I would have run to her and begged her to forgive me for whatever I’d done to cause her to leave.
The other truth was that Maureen had known how I really felt, but she’d let me pretend to be tough. Nobody ever knows us as well as the friends we had
before we got old enough to be good actors.
At Stickney Point, we turned east and went over the bridge to the Tamiami Trail, where we turned south. We rode silently for a while, all my nostalgic
memories making me think of how crazy Maureen had been about Harry Henry, and how devastated Harry had been when Maureen married Victor
Salazar.
I said, “Mo, do you ever see Harry?”
“No! Of course not! I’m faithful to my husband.” Her voice was too high.
I turned my head and studied her profile. “I wasn’t implying you weren’t. Harry lives here, you live here, you’re bound to see him every now and then.”
Stiffly, she said, “We live in two different worlds now. I probably wouldn’t even know him if I saw him.”
It was true that they lived in different worlds, but the key is small, and I doubted that she never caught a glimpse of him.
Maureen and Victor lived on Casey Key, which is south of Siesta Key. Like God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Casey’s outstretched finger
touches the south end of Siesta. Even so, to get to Casey by car you have to drive down the Tamiami Trail for a piece, then turn west and go over a
bridge. Casey Key’s bridge doesn’t rise to let boats through like Siesta’s bridge does. Instead, the whole thing swivels to the side. It’s probably one of the
last swiveling bridges in the world.
The bridge leads to a narrow strip of land where some of the world’s most famous people have built houses that make Versailles look modest. It’s a
miracle the little island hasn’t sunk from the sheer weight of all the brick and marble.
Maureen’s house was at the far south end of the key, built artificially high on trucked-in soil that had been cleverly terraced to give the effect of
steepness down to the shoreline. Three stories tall, the house was the color of raspberries. Standing proudly behind a green screen of royal palms, it had
lime green shutters. The house and grounds were enclosed by an eight-foot-tall raspberry stucco wall. Lime green iron gates in the wall kept out both the
uninvited and those whose color scheme clashed.
At the gate, Maureen did something magic and the gate parted like the Red Sea, its two halves silently gliding wide to allow us entry. I refused to ask
her by what remote signal she’d made that happen.
The driveway curved around the side of the house to a six-car garage. One of the garage doors was open, and Maureen slid the SUV inside its lighted
interior. The garage was paneled. I wasn’t sure, but the paneling looked like teak. Rich people spend money on strange things.
We sat still for a moment and then looked at each other.
Maureen said, “We might as well get this over.”
“Yep.”
While I got out she went to the back of the SUV and hauled out a good-sized pink duff el bag. It wasn’t stuffed so tightly that it didn’t bend in places, but
it wasn’t slack, either. She slammed the SUV door and turned toward the path leading down the terraced descent to the beach. The bag was heavy
enough to make her list to one side.
I gripped the bulb end of my flashlight and rested its barrel on my right shoulder, law enforcement fashion. If I needed to, I could bring the barrel down on
somebody’s head. With my left hand, I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt forward and followed her. Not that I was cold, I just wanted to hide from the eyes I
imagined watching us.
Before we stepped into an area where we’d be fully visible from the water, Maureen stopped and looked intently into my face. I knew what she was
going to say.
“Dixie, they said for me to come alone. If both of us go, they’ll know I’m not alone.” She seemed proud of herself for figuring that out.
I stuck out my left hand. “Just give me the damn bag.”
A million dollars in twenty-dollar bills is surprisingly heavy. The bag clunked against my left leg as I went down the path. On each terraced level, my
flashlight illumined a walkway that curved for a few feet to create a serpentine trek around low-growing flowering plants. I had mental images of a crew of
landscapers coming in every few weeks to replace things killed by the salt air. I also had mental images of criminals in a boat somewhere out in the
darkness watching me through night goggles. With my blond hair covered, I doubted they could tell that I wasn’t Maureen, but I was still careful to keep my
face out of the light.
The descent seemed to take forever, but it was probably less than five minutes. At the shore, a long dock stood with its feet in the water. A sliver of
lemon peel moon left the sea hidden in darkness, with only occasional glints of starlight reflecting its humped sleep. The only sound was the sea’s
rhythmic gasps and my own breath. At the dock, three boats nosed the planks like nursing sea creatures—a forty-footer, a twenty-foot pleasure cruiser,
and a run-about. At the far end of the dock, a graceful little gazebo made an incongruously delicate note.
Turning toward the gazebo, I strode past the line of boats with what I hoped was the walk of a rich woman. I kept my gaze straight ahead and tried to
breathe normally. At the gazebo, I paused and tilted the flashlight to search the interior before I stepped inside. On the one occasion when I’d been there
for lunch with Maureen, tall woven chairs with flaring peacock backs had been arranged around a cane table. Around the perimeter of the room, bench
seats had been topped by bright colored pillows.
The floor was paler than I remembered, probably bleached by salt breeze, but the peacock chairs and table were still there. The chairs had a strangely
shabby look, as if they needed attention, and the pillows that had topped the bench seats were probably stored in the benches. From what I remembered
of Victor’s iciness, I doubted that he and Maureen had enjoyed many romantic times in the gazebo.
I stepped inside and made a straight line to the cane table. For a second, I couldn’t decide whether to leave the duff el bag in one of the chairs or on top
of the table. The voice of reason in my head screamed, It doesn’t matter! Just put it down!
I set the bag in one of the chairs and turned on my heel. I’ll bet the guards at Buckingham Palace don’t turn any more smartly. For some reason, it
seemed important to move crisply so people watching me wouldn’t know how uneasy I was.
Heading back across the dock, I told myself that all the kidnappers wanted was money, and I had given it to them. They would come get it and they
would be grateful to me. Well, not grateful maybe, but they’d think kindly of me. Not of me, of course, because they thought I was Maureen. And maybe not
kindly, because kidnappers probably don’t have kind thoughts, but they would dismiss me from their minds, which was good. I hoped they were busy
dismissing me from their minds right that moment.
I didn’t exactly run, but I definitely crossed the dock in double time and then chugged back up the path as fast as possible. When I got to the top of the
path, I broke into an all-out gallop.
I smelled Maureen’s cigarette before I rounded the corner of the garage. She was standing in a puddle of light from a security lamp, and when I ran
toward her, she tossed the cigarette down and ground it under her heel. Ididn’t even slow down, just ran straight to the SUV and got inside. I switched off
the flashlight and held it in my lap. My hands were trembling and it felt good to grip something solid.
She crawled in the driver’s seat. “Did you see anybody?”
I didn’t want to talk about it. My jaws were trembling, and I had to clench my teeth to keep them from rattling.
She started the engine and backed out of the garage. “How long do you think it will be before they bring him home?”
I shrugged and tried to stop shaking.
She did that secret magic thing again that opened the gate in the wall. “You think he’ll be home when I get back?”
I gave her a jerky smile. “I hope so, Mo.”
Maureen was energized, shot through with excitement. I was a wreck.
I felt as if I’d just gone through a rite of passage into an exclusive world, like my first period or my first kiss with tongue. Now I was a member of a club
whose members have delivered ransom money to a kidnapper. It was a creepy feeling.
I closed my eyes and leaned my head back for the rest of the drive. Maureen chattered without seeming to notice that I wasn’t responding. When we
rolled to a stop at my place, I opened my door and slid out.
She said, “I owe you one, Dixie.”
I said, “Mo, please don’t ever mention this night again. Not to me or to anybody else.”
She held her thumb and forefinger together in an O. “You got it, friend!”
I clicked the car door closed and walked away. As I started up my stairs, she backed out and zoomed down the drive loud enough to wake Michael, the
seagulls, and all the parakeets.
Feeling as if I were wading through deep water, I went upstairs and dropped my clothes on the floor beside my bed. The clock on my bedside table
said it was twelve forty-five, slightly less than an hour since I’d left. I fell into bed as if I were drugged. As I lost consciousness, I reminded myself that even
though it had been a stressful night, Maureen would get her husband back.
At least that’s what I thought.
M
14
y alarm went off at its regular time, and I got up with a surprisingly clear head, as if my middle-of-the-night tryst with a million dollars had given my
nervous system a boost. I was so full of energy that I ran an extra lap around the parking lot track with Billy Elliot, and I spent a few extra minutes with
every cat playing spirited games of attack-the-peacock-feather or leap-at-the-flying-dish-towel.
Even pilling Ruthie went faster. Now that she knew what to expect, she seemed to look forward to being lifted from her head. I’ve found that to be true
with most cats. I’m not sure whether it’s because they associate the feeling with being kittens carried by their mothers, or if they just think they might as
well get it over with. She and I did our act in about a minute flat, and then she ran to Max for praise.
Max said, “I think Ruthie knows you used to be a cop. She’s intimidated by authority.”
He said it in a joking way, but I suspected he missed being able to intimidate people with his authority.
I said, “That’s an act she puts on. She’s really using me to save face. This way she doesn’t have to give in and swallow the pills by herself, plus she gets
extra attention from her favorite human.”
He looked pleased. “She does follow me around like a dog.”
I wasn’t surprised. Even when they live with more than one human, Foldies typically become especially bonded with one person.
I left Max and Ruthie admiring each other and sped to Big Bubba’s. When I whisked away his night cover he fluttered his wings as if he had as much
extra pep as I did. I opened the door to his cage so he could hop out, and he clambered from his doorway to the top of his cage and surveyed his domain
like a king. Parrots are like cats in their belief in their own superiority over all other beings.
I left him there and went to the kitchen for his morning fruit. He was still atop his cage when I came back, so I gave him half a peeled banana.
I said, “Would you like fries with that?”
He gave me the one-eyed bird stare and pecked at the banana.
I scraped poop off his perches and washed his dishes. I removed the dirty paper from the bottom of his cage and put down fresh.
I said, “I’m giving you the sports section today. You like that?”
He spread his wings and sailed to the floor. I opened the sliding doors to the lanai so he could go out into the fresh air. Instead, he waddled to the table
that held his TV, and pecked at a table leg.
I said, “Not talking today, huh? Well, that’s okay. I have days when I don’t feel like talking either.”
I put fresh seed and water in his cups. I hung a fat sprig of millet from his cage roof.
I said, “How about some Cheerios with your seed this morning?”
He didn’t answer, but I gave him some anyway.
He flapped his wings and hopped over the slider groove to the lanai where he stalked around the perimeter like a border guard. Wild birds in the trees
immediately began loud insistent chirping, and he squawked bird-language replies that sounded like a military commander ordering his troops to shape
up. Max would have been proud of him.
While he shouted to the wild birds, I got out Reba’s hand vac and sucked up all the seed shells and fluffy little underfeathers that had fallen on the floor.
Then I went out to the lanai and coaxed Big Bubba onto my arm. With his relatives looking on from the trees, I ran around the lanai a few times while Big
Bubba raised his wings for balance and hollered with excitement. The wild birds probably thought I was Big Bubba’s handmaiden, a servant who meekly
provided his every need. They weren’t far off.
When I was too winded to run anymore, I carried him inside and let him hop into his cage. Then I turned on his TV and tuned it to the Discovery Channel.
I said, “I’ve enjoyed our time together, Big Bubba. I hope you’ll keep everything we’ve said confidential.”
He cocked his head and fixed me with one eye. He said, “Did you miss me?”
I laughed. “Too late to sweet-talk me now, Big Bubba. But I’ll be back this afternoon and we can discuss it.”
Big Bubba was my last pet visit of the morning, but before I headed to the Village Diner for breakfast I stopped at Hetty’s house. Like before, I heard
her footsteps stop behind the door so she could look out the peephole before she let me in. She was smiling when she opened the door, and she invited
me inside as if she really meant it. She was wearing an elastic bandage wrapped around one wrist.
Louder than necessary, she said, “I was just telling Jaz that you might stop by this morning.”
Ben skittered out of the kitchen, his puppy feet so fast and awkward that he slid on the wooden floor. Jaz swung into the open doorway behind him, a
giggle trailing to a stop when she saw me. She wore shorts with just-bought creases in them and one of those barely-there cotton tops that look indecent
on any woman over the age of fourteen. Her skin and hair had a new glossy look, as if she’d had a recent bath and shampoo.
Still speaking as if I might have gone deaf since she last saw me, Hetty gestured me through the kitchen door. The kitchen had a faint aroma of bacon,
a smell I love more than perfume. It didn’t take detective skills to guess that Hetty had made breakfast for Jaz.
She said, “Doesn’t Jaz look cute? We went to Wal-Mart last night, all three of us. Ben needed experience in a crowded store and Jaz was nice enough
to go with us, and while we were there I saw a bunch of things that were perfect for Jaz. We had a great time.”
In other words, Jaz had returned to Hetty’s house after sundown, and Hetty had hauled her off to Wal-Mart and bought clothes for her. I wondered if Jaz
had gone with her stepfather’s permission.
Instead of asking questions, I made female noises about the new clothes. Jaz didn’t exactly smile under my praise, but her face lost some of its tension.
In the kitchen, Winston sat at the table like a judge presiding at court. I scratched the top of his head and turned down Hetty’s offer of coffee and
cookies.
I said, “Hetty, how’d you hurt your wrist?”
She made a mock grimace and waggled it in the air. “Oh, I twisted it this morning lifting a bag of puppy food. It’s not hurt bad, just a sprain. Good thing
Jaz is here to help me with heavy things.”
Jaz said, “And combing Ben.”
Hetty looked a mite embarrassed. “And combing Ben too. My goodness, if Jaz weren’t doing that, Ben would be a tangled mess.”
I bit back a grin. Ben’s puppy hair did need combing, but he wouldn’t exactly be a tangled mess if he skipped a day. I also suspected that Hetty’s injury
was mostly talk, a way of making Jaz feel needed and important. Nothing wrong with that. We all need to feel important.
I said, “Good thing you’re nearby, Jaz. Where did you say you live?”
The girl shrugged. “A few streets over. I don’t know the name.”
She was either a really good actress pretending not to know her own address, or a kid who hadn’t lived in her house long enough to learn it.
Careful as walking on spilled birdseed, I said, “Is your house on stilts? So you go up tall steps to get to your front door?”
She seemed to consider whether it was safe to answer, then nodded. “How’d you know?”
“Just a guess.”
Hetty looked perplexed, wondering how I’d figured out where Jaz lived.
I hadn’t the faintest idea where she lived. I had described Reba Chandler’s house because the boys had come to Reba’s believing it was where they’d
find Jaz. It therefore seemed a safe bet that she and her stepfather lived in a house that looked like Reba’s.
I was doing so well with my hunches that I tried another one.
I said, “It’s really nice of you to help out here, Jasmine.” I pronounced it “Jas-min.”
“Jas-meen,” she said, then clapped her hand over her mouth.
I tried not to look as pleased as I felt. “I said it wrong, huh? Sorry.”
Above her covered mouth, her eyes were wide and frightened.
Hetty said, “No matter how you say it, it’s a pretty name.”
The girl lowered her hand, but she looked wary. “I’m not supposed to go by that name now.”
Hetty’s eyes met mine for an instant, both of us keeping our faces still.
I said, “I have a friend named Maureen, but I’ve always called her Mo. I don’t remember why I started calling her that, but Mo fits her better than Maureen.
Maureen is sort of formal, don’t you think? Mo is friendlier.”
She said, “I don’t want to be a Rosemary.”
Hetty and I exchanged glances again.
I said, “You seem more like a Jasmine than a Rosemary.” I was careful to pronounce the name Jas-meen.
Stiffly, she said, “That’s because I am a Jasmine. That’s what my mother named me.”
Hetty picked up the empty teakettle and carried it to the sink to fill, and Jaz was quickly beside her.
She said, “I’ll do that! You’ll hurt your wrist!”
Hetty smiled sheepishly and allowed Jaz to fill the pot and carry it to the stove. Jaz looked serious and determined. She and Hetty obviously had a
mutual-admiration thing going.
As Jaz settled the pot on the stove, she looked up at the purple clock on the kitchen wall and stiffened. “Oh, my gosh! I didn’t know it was so late! He’ll
kill me if he finds me gone!”
With her face anxiously pinched, she turned and ran out the back door, letting it slam shut behind her.
Hetty said, “What—”
I didn’t stick around to hear what she was going to say. Instead, I grabbed my keys and ran to the front door as fast as I could. Unlike Jaz, I pulled it
closed behind me before I charged to the Bronco. I was determined to find out where Jaz lived.
J
15
az was already half a block away, running on the sidewalk like a spooked colt. I started the Bronco, backed out of the driveway like Mario Andretti at the
starting line, and then slowed so she wouldn’t know I was there. She ran toward the bay, following the curves of the street, all spindly legs and
determined rush. A couple of cars pulled around me to pass, the drivers probably wondering why I was creeping along so slowly.
The closer she got to the bay, the more I wondered where the heck she was running. There are no private homes on that particular stretch of the bay,
only the posh Key Royale resort hotel. An acre of wild nature preserve separates the hotel from private homes, and as Jaz neared its edge I saw a khakicolored
Hummer idling at the curb.
Something about that mountainous Hummer sitting on the street made me uneasy, so I sped up to narrow the gap between us. When I was about
twenty-five feet behind her, she ran past the Hummer’s right side. As I swerved around the Hummer on the left, Jaz suddenly made a right turn and
plunged into the nature preserve. I pulled to the curb in front of the Hummer, but all I caught was a glimpse of her head before she was swallowed by the
greenery. Behind me, the Hummer revved its engine and roared toward the bay.
I sat for a few minutes trying to figure out where Jaz was going, but the answer was as obvious as it was unlikely. She could only be headed toward the
resort hotel.
Sarasota has almost as many pricey tourist hotels as it has private homes, but the Key Royale caters to the crème de la crème. The Royale’s guests
crave privacy and seclusion above all else, and they’re willing and able to pay top dollar for it. No paparazzi, no nosy reporters, just discreet hotel
employees.
Jaz and her stepfather were not wealthy. They were not famous actors seeking a respite from continuous press coverage. They were not politicians or
world leaders needing time out of the limelight. But if Jaz was trying to get home before her stepfather found her gone, that home had to be at the Key
Royale. Which could only mean that her stepfather was an employee there, and they had been given living quarters.
Okay, it was beginning to come together. The stepfather wore a shoulder holster. If he was an employee at the Key Royale, he must be a security guard
there. There was no mother, so he had complete responsibility for Jaz. Since the place was the epitome of exclusive, he practically kept her under house
arrest to make sure she didn’t spill any secrets about the famous people staying there. He was a first-class jerk, a mean tyrant with no idea how to raise a
teenager, a rent-a-cop in a cheap suit, but not a gang leader.
But then why had young men who were gang members in L.A. come to Siesta Key looking for Jaz? And why had her stepfather been so edgy and
nervous at Dr. Layton’s office? Maybe he was a gang leader who had got a job at the Key Royale as a cover while he was in Sarasota. Maybe he didn’t
have a record, so his background check hadn’t raised any flags when he was hired.
While I sat thinking, the Hummer passed from the other direction. It had driven to the bay and made a U-turn. It was behind me before it caught my
attention, and all I could make out in the rearview mirror was the backs of three heads. They could have been the heads of the guys who had come into
Reba’s house looking for Jaz. Or they could have been tourists. Or frustrated reporters denied entry into the resort. Or simply innocent people who were
driving around in a dumb muscle car.
I pulled away from the curb and drove to the Key Royale. At the guard house, I pulled to a stop and flashed my most ingratiating smile at a gruff grayhaired
man. Gruff gray-haired men are always pushovers for blondes who smile at them. You just have to act like you don’t know they’ll be pushovers.
I said, “Hi, I’m Dixie Hemingway. I’m a pet sitter here on the key, and I got a call this morning from some former clients who asked me to come look the
place over and see if I think their Shih Tzu would like the amenities here. Do you think security would let me do that?”
He frowned and tried to look fierce. “Why don’t they just call and talk to the concierge? He’ll even send them pictures of the pet rooms.”
I said, “They had a very bad experience one time at a hotel that promised their dog would get nothing but the best. The best turned out to be top-quality
fleas, so now they won’t take anybody’s word unless it’s somebody they know and trust.”
I said it modestly, so he wouldn’t think I was arrogant about being the person these fictional people knew and trusted.
I said, “I’m bonded, you know. Wait, I have an ID card I can show you.”
I dug around in my handbag and handed him my laminated membership card that showed I was in good standing with a major pet-sitting association.
He looked at it and handed it back to me. I don’t imagine he’d ever seen one before, but he acted as if he looked at pet sitter association cards every
day. Picking up a big black phone with impressive antennas shooting up a foot tall, he mashed some buttons.
As gruffly as possible, he said, “Lady here at the gate wants to look at the pet-friendly area. She has a dog that got fleas at some other hotel, and she’s
not taking any chances.”
Squawking noises came from the phone. He nodded at it. “Yeah, I checked her ID.”
More squawking noises, and he turned the phone off and put it down.
“Drive on in and park in the valet area by the front door. Go to the front desk and ask for Gary.”
I gave him a megawatt smile. “Thank you so much!”
About twenty years fell off his face when he smiled. “You’re welcome, hon. Wouldn’t want that dog to go someplace where it’d get fleas again.”
Governments should hire blondes to spy on other governments. We can get into places nobody else in the world can go. The only problem is that once
we’re in, we have to be twice as charming as we were when we talked ourselves in.
I obeyed directions and parked in the valet zone. I brushed off as much cat hair as possible and went inside the hotel. The lobby was surprisingly plain.
No gilt, no crystal chandeliers, no murals on the ceiling, no pretension at all. Just clean lines and neutral sand colors.
The desk people weren’t snooty either, and if they knew right away that I didn’t belong in that rarefied atmosphere, they were nice enough not to show it.
When I asked for Gary, a handsome man who looked as if he would be at home anywhere in the world came forward and shook my hand. I hadn’t
expected a handshake. Since I was there to bamboozle him, it made me feel ashamed.
I said, “Gary, it’s so nice of you to let me come in. I’m Dixie Hemingway. I’m a pet sitter here on the key. Some former clients who have moved to
Switzerland called me this morning and asked me to look at your hotel for them. They have a Shih Tzu who’s like a child to them, and they want to make
sure she’ll be happy if they stay here. Her name is Sally.”
I should have been alarmed at how easily I lied. I almost convinced myself that I had clients who had moved to Switzerland with their Shih Tzu named
Sally.
Gary said, “Of course. We take pride in the amenities we have for our pet guests.”
He snapped his fingers and a young man in a crisp white uniform stepped forward and stood at attention. He looked like a cruise ship captain.
Gary said, “Don, please take Ms. Hemingway on a tour of our pet-friendly area. And if one of the pet rooms is vacant, let her look at it.”
Don said, “Yes, sir,” and gave me a respectful smile. These people were all so nice, I wished I really had clients who had asked me to check out the
hotel. I would have recommended the Key Royale in a minute.
Don said, “This way, ma’am,” and strode off in a crisp and manly way. I followed him down a hall to double glass doors that slid open when they saw us
coming. We stepped through onto what looked like an outside wide bricked pathway, but all the humidity had been sucked out of the air, and it was cool.
Overhead, a clear arched ceiling let in filtered light, and we walked between leafy green and flowering plants. There were even little yellow butterflies
flitting around, and they looked happy. For butterflies, a lifetime spent in a cool place with no predators and plenty of sweet nectar to drink is probably their
idea of heaven. Sounds pretty good to me too.
Don said, “I’m taking you this way because it’s the fastest path to the park area where your dog could exercise. It would have to be on a leash, but it
would have plenty of room to run. We provide doggie bags, and our groundskeepers also police the area several times a day.”
I said, “It’s not actually my dog. I’m just a pet sitter checking out the place for some clients.”
Some of the starch went out of his uniform, and he slowed to a less brisk walk.
We left the air-conditioned butterfly garden for a truly outdoor walk toward a parklike area ringed by a curved two-story building that I assumed held
rooms and suites.
Don said, “This place really is great for pets. It’s not just a hotel come-on.”
I said, “You know, I live here on the key but I’ve never been to the hotel before.”
He shrugged. “Most people haven’t. I mean, unless you work here, you wouldn’t come here.”
“Pretty pricey, isn’t it?”
He grinned. “Some of the rooms go for five thousand a night. Can you believe that? And a suite for a weekend will set you back twenty thousand.”
“Wow. Who has that kind of money?”
“Lots of people. We’re always booked.”
We reached the grassy park and stopped at its edge. It looked like a very well-tended golf course. The groundskeepers probably immediately excised
any grass that turned yellow from dog pee.
Don said, “Guests who want their dogs in their rooms stay in this building, but some guests prefer their dogs to stay in their own private room. In either
case, all the dogs come here to exercise. We get a lot of rabbits from the woods, so even dogs that are well trained have to be leashed. Not many dogs
can resist chasing a rabbit, huh? They’re not allowed on the beach, either, so if guests want to take their dogs to a beach, we give them directions to
Brohard Beach in Venice.”
By this time I was so taken with the place that I couldn’t wait to tell my nonexistent clients in Switzerland that a dog beach was only twelve miles away for
Sally’s enjoyment. But Don had just explained the source of the injured rabbit that Jaz had carried into Dr. Layton’s office, which brought me back to the
real reason I was there.
I said, “Gee, I’d like to work here. Do they give you guys living quarters?”
“Just the managers. They have apartments on the ground floor.”
“What about the security guards?”
He shook his head. “Nah, they go home when their shift is over. There’s too many of them to give them all an apartment. We’ve got plainclothes
detectives all over the place.”
“What if the managers have kids? Do they live here too?”
Some of his earlier stiff ness returned. “You’d have to ask them. I don’t know about their private lives.”
I was impressed. He was willing to give me some insider stuff, but he drew the line at revealing personal information about other employees.
He said, “Let me show you the private rooms for dogs.”
I dutifully went along with him, but all the time my eyes were searching for Jaz. The more I saw, the less I expected to find her. The place sprawled all
over the bayfront, with tennis courts and swimming pools and little alfresco dining spots under the trees. The bay itself had speedboats, sailboats, fishing
boats, canoes, water skis, and paddleboats for more outgoing guests. But set back from the bay were cottages and villas completely separate from the
active areas, and winding all over the place were meandering brick paths that led between buildings. An occasional ground-level sign politely pointed the
way to landmarks in case guests became confused by all the options.
Don took me to the special building where dogs and cats could vacation in air-conditioned splendor, with top-of-the-line beds, climbing posts,
scratching posts, private TVs, music, and room service. I was positive the imaginary Shih Tzu named Sally would absolutely love one of those rooms, but I
still had an eye out for Jaz.
On the way back toward the main building, a small sign announced HONEYMOON COTTAGES, with a female hand sporting a big sparkly wedding ring
pointing down a shady path edged with sweet alyssum. The cottages backed up to the nature preserve and their fronts were screened from view by palms
and sea grape. Through the foliage, I saw a flight of stairs going up to a narrow porch.
I said, “Ooh! Is this where the honeymoon cottages are? Oh, that would be so terrific, to come to a place like this on a honeymoon!”
I sounded so wistful, I nearly moved myself. For sure I moved Don.
He looked over his shoulder to make sure nobody was watching. “You want to look at them? From the outside, I mean, I can’t take you inside.”
“Ooh, yes!”
I moved forward so fast Don had to double-step to keep up. The honeymoon cottages were brilliantly situated at angles so no cottage faced another,
and no window looked out at another. Each was built in old Florida beach style, tall on wooden stilts, with a flight of steps leading up to a narrow porch.
Each had a private single-lane drive. Each was a miniature version of Reba’s house.
I said, “Do those cottages have numbers? Like addresses?”
For the first time, Don looked uneasy. He said, “They have names, not numbers.”
Of course they did. I should have known. They would be called the Flamingo or the Hibiscus. If Jaz actually lived in one of those honeymoon cottages,
she wouldn’t know her house number because she wouldn’t have one. But what was she doing in a cottage that cost twenty thousand dollars a weekend?
Don said, “We’d better get back to the front desk. They’ll be wondering why I’m taking so long.”
I said, “Oh, I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have asked you to show me those cottages. It’s just that women dream, you know?”
He said, “Are you married?”
“I’m a widow.”
He colored in embarrassment, and I hated myself. I had never used my widowhood before to get sympathy, and it made me feel cheap. But Don felt so
sorry for me now that he’d quit wondering why I’d asked if the managers had children or if the honeymoon cottages had numbers. He probably thought
grief had made me weird. He wasn’t far off, but in that particular case I’d been more calculating than nuts.
I walked with him back to the front lobby, thanked Gary profusely for providing an escort, promised to highly recommend the Key Royale to my mythical
clients in Switzerland, and got back in the Bronco. At the gate, I waved a jaunty goodbye to the guard and mouthed, Thank you! He waved back like we
were old friends. I should have been contrite to have fooled a nice man, but I actually felt quite proud.
I was positive that Jaz and her stepfather were somehow connected to the Key Royale resort hotel, and that she had described one of the honeymoon
cottages to somebody in L.A. as her home.
I still didn’t understand why she would do that.
A
16
t the diner, I picked up a copy of the Herald-Tribune from a stack by the cashier’s stand and dropped it on my table to mark my spot while I washed up.
My energy boost was draining by then, and it pretty much completely evaporated when I saw Bambi Dirk standing at a sink in the ladies’ room. The fact
that her name was Bambi was just another example of how some people’s names don’t fit them. Bambi Dirk was more like a moose than a fawn, and for
a second I wondered if there was some kind of karmic high school reunion going on, a cosmic force that had first drawn Maureen to me and now Bambi.
But where Maureen and I had once shared a special closeness, Bambi and I had shared a special dislike. Actually, she’d hated me like poison and the
feeling had been mutual. Bambi had never gotten over the fact that her boyfriend had dumped her for me, and I’d never gotten over the fact that she’d
branded Maureen the school slut. All that high school stuff should have been put behind us, but Bambi and I eyed each other like two cats ready to hiss
and pounce. She wore a toad-colored blouse and white shorts so tight in the crotch they were giving her a wedgie. She had put on weight since we’d last
seen each other, and I hadn’t. That gave me great pleasure.
She said, “Why Dixie, I didn’t know you still lived on the key. I heard you got fired from the sheriff’s department and left town.”
I held my hands under a spray of water and resisted flinging some on her.
I said, “Wrong on both counts, Bambi. I wasn’t fired and I’m still here.”
Her eyebrows drew together to make a deep vertical groove on her forehead. In a few years, that groove would be permanent and she’d look like an
elk. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving woman.
She said, “But you’re not a deputy anymore.”
“I’m a pet sitter.”
In the mirror, her face registered disdain. She ran long manicured fingers through her hair. “I guess you’ve heard what happened to your old skanky
friend.”
“I have a lot of old skanky friends, Bambi. Which one do you mean?”
“If you don’t know, then you live on another planet. It’s all over the news.”
I jerked a paper towel from its slot, dried my hands, and wadded the towel into a ball. My hand wanted to throw it at Bambi, but instead I tossed it in the
wastebasket and turned on my heel, ready to flounce out. But it’s hard to turn on your heel when you wear Keds, harder still to flounce in cargo shorts. A
proper flounce needs ruffles or at least a billowing full skirt. As flounce impaired as I was, though, I managed to get in the last word.
“Nice to see you’re still spreading gossip, Bambi.”
The door sighed closed behind me and I stomped down the hall past the men’s room, the manager’s office, and a public phone. At the counter where
people sit if they want TV with their meals, everybody was staring up at the huge screen on the wall. I zipped past them toward the main dining area, and
then stopped cold when I heard Maureen’s voice. Weak-kneed, I turned to look up at her magnified image on the TV.
She looked good. She looked like what she was, a not-too-bright woman with great hair and a terrific body who had married money. A lot of money.
She wore a hot pink short skirt and close-fitting jacket that had a fluff of something feathery around the edge. The camera was too close to tell what shoes
she wore, but only very high heels would have given such a forward thrust to her boobs. Her glossy brown hair was made big as China by curly extensions,
her trembling lips were sweetly pink, her eyelashes were thick and dark, and her big brown eyes looking into the camera were moist and pleading. Her
voice was so soft it would have made a pit viper weep.
“Please, please bring my husband home to me. I’ve given you what you asked for. You and I know what that was. Now please keep your promise and
bring my husband back.”
She raised her chin then, like a woman determined to be brave no matter what.
“Victor, if you can hear me, hang on, darling. I love you very much, and I’m counting the seconds until you’re home with me.”
Bambi Dirk popped from the ladies’ room hallway and passed behind me on her way to the front door. When she saw me watching Maureen, she gave
me an evil grin.
“Told you,” she said.
I didn’t answer. I was fresh out of witty comebacks. Besides, what she’d said was apparently true. Maureen was all over the news. Having been all over
the news myself one time, that wasn’t what bothered me. What bothered me was knowing that Victor’s kidnappers had said they’d kill him if Maureen told
anybody he’d been taken. Instead of keeping quiet, she’d gone on national TV and blabbed it to the world.
Maureen was dumb, but she wasn’t that dumb.
The close-up shot changed to a long view of Maureen’s lime green gate and the palatial raspberry mansion behind it. The gate opened to allow some
official-looking men to surround Maureen and help her through it. Then the gate swung shut to keep out a crowd of newspeople holding cameras and
notebooks, all of them shouting questions.
As the camera followed the little group escorting Maureen to her house, an announcer’s over-voice said, “That was a rerun of a press conference called
this morning by the wife of Victor Salazar.”
While I was thinking, A press conference? the announcer’s voice continued.
“Mr. Salazar was allegedly kidnapped three days ago, and Mrs. Salazar received a ransom demand from his kidnappers asking for a million dollars in
cash to be left at a specific location. Mrs. Salazar says that she complied with the demand, but her husband has not been returned. According to a
spokesperson with the sheriff’s office, Mrs. Salazar has not contacted them regarding her husband’s kidnapping. The spokesperson stressed that people
who believe a loved one has been kidnapped should immediately contact their local law enforcement agency for help.”
The scene switched to three experts with ponderous faces and even more ponderous opinions about the proper way people should respond to a
kidnapping. I doubted that any of them would recommend Maureen’s way.
I went to my booth and plopped down on the seat. Judy had my coffee waiting, and I drank it in a little dark cloud. The woman I’d just watched begging
for her husband’s return must have been up all night getting her hair and makeup right before she called a press conference. The pink suit must have been
carefully chosen too, not just to harmonize with the raspberry house, but because a woman in pink looks feminine and vulnerable but with plucky inner
strength. People just eat that crap up, and Maureen knew it. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Maureen had put on a big phony show for the camera.
For the first time, I wondered if Maureen really wanted her husband back. I had no idea what kind of marriage she and Victor had, but I knew that she
loved being rich. If her marriage ended, she wouldn’t be so rich, not even after getting the considerable amount the law would allow. But if Victor were
dead, she would get it all. You don’t have to be a money-grubbing bimbo to know that when money is the goal, all is definitely better than some.
Judy stopped by my side to top off my coffee. “Who’re you planning to kill?”
“What?”
“You look like you’re plotting to knock somebody off.”
I didn’t want to tell her I was pretty sure my old high school friend was scheming to get her husband knocked off. For one thing, it was too awful to talk
about, and for another, if I was right about what I suspected Maureen was doing, I had played a part in her scheme.
Some truths are so solid there’s no point in questioning them. Gravity, for example, or two plus two being four. Luck is another one. Everybody knows
that luck surrounds some people. Luck allows a fortunate few to do stupid things and never pay the consequences.
I am not one of those people.
It didn’t matter that I’d tried to get Maureen to call the cops and report Victor’s kidnapping. It didn’t matter that I’d helped her because I felt a debt to an
old friend. It didn’t matter that my intentions had all been good. The fact was that I’d done something really dumb, and I could feel the icy breath of
consequences creeping up on me.
E
17
verything was quiet when I got home, with that peculiar middle-of-the-day lassitude that mutes both surf and birdcall. Ella was in the living room on the
love seat, and we spent a few minutes assuring each other that there had never been anybody else in our entire lives that we loved as much as we
loved each other. She purred extra loud to try to convince me that she wouldn’t drop me like a hot mouse the minute Michael came home.
I’ve loved Michael all my life so I understood how she felt. I carried her to the kitchen and gave her fresh water, then headed for the shower. On the way, I
flipped on the CD player to let Pete Fountain’s sweet clarinet perfume the air.
I usually do my best thinking while water is spraying on me, but this time my thoughts were too scattered to come up with any conclusions. I told myself I
should phone Maureen because I was her oldest friend and she was in distress. I reminded myself that fifteen years had passed since we were in high
school, that her phone number was unlisted, and that I didn’t have it.
I told myself that I was involved in Victor’s kidnapping because I’d let Maureen manipulate me into taking that damn duff el bag of money to the gazebo.
I reminded myself that she hadn’t mentioned me in her staged press conference, so maybe my name would never come up. I rebutted that the possibility
of my name never coming up was about the same as the possibility of a summer in Florida without a hurricane.
By the time I stepped out of the shower I was close to being water dissolved but no closer to seeing anything positive about the situation. Pete Fountain
was still playing on the CD, but as I reached for a towel I heard a ring on my cellphone that made me shoot out of the bathroom trailing water droplets. Only
a handful of people have my cellphone number, and only three people—Michael, Paco, and Guidry—rate a special alert ring. Michael and Paco know
they’re on the elite list. Guidry doesn’t have a clue.
I hoped Michael was calling to tell me he’d heard from Paco, but it was Guidry.
He said, “Are you at home?”
I admitted that I was.
“I’m just turning into your lane. I’ll be there in two minutes.”
Damp and gasping, I wriggled into a thigh-length spaghetti-strapped tank and pulled my wet hair into a knot. With Pete Fountain playing in the
background, I met Guidry at the door with bare feet and a bare face. His gray eyes tried for objective and neuter, but his irises gave him away. Stand in
front of a man with your nipples hard under knit, and his irises will expand like spreading inkblots. The other side of that, of course, was that my nipples
had given me away first.
He said, “I wanted to talk to you about the girl.”
My mind had been so stuck on Maureen that it took a moment to realize he meant Jaz. I gestured toward the love seat and dropped into the matching
chair. I folded my legs under me, realized I was exposing a lot of thigh, and tugged the tank toward my knees. Ella hopped into the chair with me and
settled into the corner. I was glad to have her there. She made a little warm mound behind my hip.
Guidry’s eyes flicked toward the sound of Pete Fountain’s clarinet.
I said, “I saw Jaz this morning at Hetty’s house. She said she and her stepfather live nearby. She doesn’t know the house number but I described Reba
Chandler’s house—you know, built on stilts with a tall stairway—and she said it looked like that.”
His eyes said I’m listening, but his head leaned a fraction of an inch toward the music, so I wasn’t sure if he was paying attention to me.
I said, “While we were talking, Jaz noticed the time and got scared. She said if her stepfather came home and found her gone, he’d kill her. I don’t think
she meant it literally, just, you know, the way kids talk. Anyway, she rushed out and I followed her. Drove behind her and watched where she went. She ran
into the nature preserve behind the Key Royale, so I knew the only place she could be going was there, to the hotel.”
Guidry’s eyes had grown sharper on me, so I was pretty sure he was listening.
I said, “I talked myself into the Royale and one of the employees showed me around the place. They have honeymoon cottages that back up to the
nature preserve, and he said rabbits come from there all the time. The cottages are built on tall stilts exactly like Reba’s house, so I think Jaz must have
described one of them to somebody, and that’s why those boys came in Reba’s house looking for her. She didn’t have a house number to give them
because those cottages are all named instead of numbered.”
Guidry looked skeptical. “You think she lives in a honeymoon cottage at the Key Royale?”
“I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I do. The guy who showed me around said those cottages rent for twenty thousand a weekend. Jaz’s stepfather
doesn’t look like he could afford that, but I don’t think there’s any other explanation. I’m thinking he must work there as a security guard, but Don—that’s
the guy at the Royale who showed me around—said the hotel doesn’t give living quarters to anybody except the managers. The employees I saw were all
well dressed and sophisticated. Not like Jaz’s stepfather.”
He said, “Did you or Ms. Soames ever get a last name from the girl?”
“No, but I found out Jaz is short for Jasmine, pronounced Jas-meen, and she said that’s what her mother named her. She resents her stepfather calling
her Rosemary. When she mentioned her mother, she got teary and stopped talking. Hetty doesn’t believe there’s a mother in the picture, and she may be
right. Hetty took her shopping last night and bought her some new clothes. She’s also feeding her.”
Pete Fountain began playing “Tin Roof Blues” and Guidry’s eyes changed in a way that made me positive he was as aware of the music as he was of
me.
I suddenly felt like a complete dolt. Maybe it hadn’t been my nipples that had caused Guidry’s pupils to dilate, maybe it had been Pete Fountain. Guidry
was from New Orleans. His name was Jean Pierre. He spoke French. He came from a wealthy family, and he was smart as all get-out. New Orleans
French Quarter jazz might turn him on more than I did.
I said, “Guidry, are you French Creole or French Cajun? What is Cajun, anyway?”
I swear to God I hadn’t meant to say that. It wasn’t an appropriate time or an appropriate question. Besides, I truly didn’t care what kind of French he
was. It was just that my mouth didn’t know I didn’t care.
Ella raised her head above my hip to look hard at me. She said, “Thrippp!” and curled up behind my back again. The music had apparently brought out
her scatting tendencies. Either that, or she was embarrassed at my nosiness and didn’t want to be seen with me.
Guidry’s gray eyes examined my face for a moment, pretty much the way Ella had. When he answered he sounded a bit like a teacher whose patience
is stretched.
“You’ve heard of the French and Indian War? When Canada fought France and Great Britain?”
I shook my head. I was sorry I’d asked. I didn’t want a history lesson, I just wanted to know if he was Creole or Cajun.
“France and Great Britain both claimed an area in Canada that had been settled by Frenchmen. Part of the area was Acadia. Great Britain won the war
and ordered all the French settlers to leave. A lot of them went to Louisiana. That’s what the poem Evangeline is about. Since they’d come from Acadia,
they called themselves Acadian, but the Americans in Louisiana pronounced it Cajun. French Creoles were already there when they came, and the
Cajuns spoke a different French dialect. Still do. It’s about as hard to find a pure Cajun today as it is to find a pure Creole. Lots of intermarrying, lots of
different bloodlines.”
“So you’re Cajun?”
He grinned. “When did you get into genealogy?”
“I’m just curious.”
“Okay, here’s my family story. Too bad my sister isn’t here, she could tell you all the details.”
I assumed this time he meant a real sister, like in a family, not a nun who’d taught him to fear girls in school.
He said, “First-generation French colonists in Louisiana were just called French. Their children were called French Creole to identify them as
American-born rather than immigrants. My French Creole several-times-great-grandfather met my several-times-great-grandmother at a Quadroon Ball.”
I was only half listening. My mind was back on the fact that he had a sister. I wondered if he had more than one, and if he had any brothers.
He said, “You know what a quadroon is?”
“Old French money?”
He rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. “A quadroon was somebody less than a quarter black. A Quadroon Ball was where French Creole men
were introduced to beautiful, well-educated young quadroon women.”
I said, “Uh-huh.”
I had a fuzzy mental image of a lovely young bride with skin the color of creamed coffee walking down the aisle to meet a proud French Creole groom.
As if he guessed what I was seeing in my mind, Guidry said, “The women were not introduced as potential wives, but as potential mistresses.”
My neck drew back in distaste.
Guidry said, “Seems hard to believe now, but interracial marriage was illegal until the 1960s. People thought it would be the end of civilization if couples
of different races married.”
“But your grandfather—”
“My great-great-great-grandfather. According to family legend, he loved the woman he met at a Quadroon Ball at first sight, and loved her to the end of
his life. They had four children, all sons. They were given his name, and he sent them to the best schools in the country.”
Disillusioned, I said, “Did he also have a legal wife?”
“No, Guidry men are one-woman men.”
My cheeks heated. Guidry had told me once that he’d no longer loved his wife when they divorced. I wondered if he had used up all his woman-love on
her and would never love another.
He said, “Before you ask, we don’t have a family legend about my mother’s ancestors, but they were mostly French and Spanish.”
As if he’d been deliberately providing background music for Guidry’s family story, Pete Fountain went silent on the CD player.
Guidry looked toward the silence. He sat up a little straighter and looked faintly embarrassed.
He said, “Before I climbed my family tree, we were talking about the girl named Jaz.”
I said, “Guidry, there’s something creepy about her and her stepfather. In the first place, why would a guy who wears polyester suits and drip-dry shirts
rent something so expensive? And in the second place, those are one-bedroom honeymoon cottages, which brings up all kinds of awful possibilities if
they’re living there together. But Jaz is too young to live by herself, and there doesn’t seem to be a mother in the picture. The whole thing is just weird.”
Guidry said, “The bigger question is where the money is coming from.”
“Do you still think Jaz is mixed up in a gang?”
“How old do you think she is?”
“Twelve or thirteen.”
“When you were that age, were you smart enough to stay away from the guys with the coolest jackets and the hottest cars?”
I said, “When I was that age, I don’t think I even knew a guy with a car.”
That was true. I had been in high school before I knew a boy with his own car. He had been Maureen’s boyfriend, Harry Henry, who had driven an old
dented hearse with a rusty tailpipe that made sparks on the street.
Guidry said, “I’ll see what I can find out about the stepfather’s connection to the Key Royale. In the meantime, if you see Jaz again, tell her to stay away
from those boys. Particularly right now.”
“Is she in danger?”
“If you see her, try to get her to stay at Ms. Soames’s.”
As if he’d said what he’d come to say, he stood up. His face told me not to ask for an explanation, but I’d got the message. In the law enforcement
world, something big was getting ready to happen regarding organized gangs. If Jaz was involved with a gang, she would be hurt. If Hetty and I could keep
her away from gang members, she would be safe. Or as safe as a girl could be when she doesn’t have caring parents.
But why tell me to try to make Jaz stay at Hetty’s? I didn’t have any influence over the girl. I didn’t have any influence over Jaz or Maureen or Guidry or
anybody else in the whole friggin’ world. I didn’t even have any influence over myself.
I stood up too. “If the stepfather’s involved with a gang . . .”
I didn’t finish the sentence. We both knew the futility of trying to save a child from a destructive family.
Guidry’s eyes held mine for a moment. “I like that dress.”
My nipples jerked up like soldiers saluting. His irises spread again. Okay, it had been my nipples all along, and not Pete Fountain.
Ella chose that moment to jump to the floor and twist around my ankles while she made scatting sounds.
Guidry looked down and grinned. “I see you’ve got your watchcat trained.”
For two cents I would have told him I wasn’t wearing underwear. Heck, I would have done it for free, but he didn’t give me a chance. His hand hovered
above my bare shoulder for an instant, and his head tilted to the side a little bit the way a man’s does when he’s ready to kiss you, but then he
straightened his head and lifted his hand and went out the french doors like he’d suddenly remembered a pressing engagement on the other side of the
world.
He didn’t say goodbye until he was safely on the porch. Then he raised his hand and grunted, “Thanks, Dixie.”
I didn’t answer him because I suddenly felt like a hollow reed without wind to give me music. I lowered the shutters, shambled into the bedroom, and
crawled into bed with the sheet pulled over my cold shoulders. When Ella slipped under the covers and settled behind me, I scooted backward a fraction
to get closer. The next thing I knew, I was weeping hard, and I wasn’t sure why.
I would like to think it was because my old friend’s husband had been kidnapped, or because kids were growing up with nobody home to give them
milk and cookies after school, but I don’t believe that was the reason. There are times when tears just demand to be shed, and there’s nothing you can do
about it.
Sometimes I feel as if my heart has been held hostage for a long time by some unknown assailants—alien beings who have abducted me and
transferred me to a world very similar to but not the same as the world I knew before Todd and Christy died. In that alternate universe, I go about my
business, I talk and walk and eat and sleep and to all outward appearances lead a real life. But my true self is locked inside somewhere looking out, and
I’m not entirely sure that other people are their true selves or empty vessels like me.
At times like those I think I should start a club for other empties. I could call it Empties Anonymous and we could have meetings and eat cookies and
drink tea and not pretend to be. That would be a relief. To not have to pretend for the sake of others who love me that I am a person of substance. I’ll bet
other Empties feel the same way. We could all get together and support one another’s not being.
When I was all cried out and not feeling so hollow anymore, I fell asleep and slept until almost time to leave for my afternoon rounds. With Ella on my
desk, I made quick work of transferring notes to client cards, then got dressed in my usual cargo shorts and sleeveless T.
My thoughts kept going to Maureen, wondering what was happening now that she’d gone public about Victor’s kidnapping. I wondered if she was
cooperating with the sheriff’s department. I wondered if they could be of any help to her now, or if it was too late.
I left Ella snoozing on my bed and headed for Tom Hale’s condo. He and Billy Elliot were watching Oprah, where two couples were describing how they
kept romance in their marriages by having open affairs. Oprah didn’t seem to like the idea, but she was trying to be respectful. I’ll bet sometimes after she
talks to certain guests, Oprah goes backstage and hollers into a wadded-up towel.
Tom clicked the show off and turned his chair to watch me clip Billy Elliot’s leash to his collar.
He said, “A marriage counselor on that show said romantic love lasts exactly eighteen months, no more and no less. I guess that means if people wait
eighteen months to get married, they won’t.”
I said, “Oh, phooey, I know lots of people who’ve been married forever and they still have the hots for each other.”
He grinned. “You oughta go on Oprah.”
“Tom, did you see Maureen Salazar on the news?”
He was still grinning when he looked up at me, and the grin died as he registered my question.
“The oil broker’s wife? Good God, Dixie, was Salazar the guy you asked me about yesterday?”
“You saw her?”
“She said her husband was kidnapped and that she’d given the kidnappers a million dollars to get him back. She got that money out of her home safe,
didn’t she?”
Billy Elliot whuffed to let us know he’d endured our chatter as long as possible, and I let him lead me out the door. Billy was right. My job was to run with
him, not to prod Tom into speculating about why a man like Victor Salazar would keep buckets of cash in his home safe.
O
18
n the way to Big Bubba’s house, I made a quick stop at the market for more fresh bananas. At the cashier’s stand, a young girl at her mother’s elbow
was doing that maniacal thumb-dancing that kids do when they text-message. Her attention was so rapt on the minuscule screen that her mother had
to poke her arm after she’d paid for her groceries and was ready to leave. The mother rolled her eyes at the rest of us so we could share in her longsuffering
patience with her text-messaging kid, and several people muttered amused understanding.
As my underripe bananas moved forward on the conveyer belt, the checker said, “Kids are going to give themselves carpal thumb syndrome with those
things.”
A woman behind me said, “I caught my grandchildren text messaging their friends during our seder.”
The checker read my total aloud and I handed her money. As I grabbed my bag of bananas, it hit me that I had never seen Jaz with one of the phones
that every other kid in the world has. No BlackBerry, no iPhone, no anything, not even the old kind without a keyboard for texting.
Girls talk to one another. My generation did it by phone, now they do it via typed messages on teeny little computer screens. They tell secrets, what
boys they like, what they had for lunch, what music they like, what TV shows they watch, and what they’re doing right that minute. Why wasn’t Jaz doing
that?
I thought about that all the way to Big Bubba’s house. I was convinced that Jaz had described one of the honeymoon cottages to somebody she knew,
and that person had passed along the description to the thugs who’d come in Reba’s house. How had she done that? It was entirely possible, of course,
that Jaz had a cell phone at home and that she text-messaged like nobody’s business when she was alone. I didn’t think so, though. In fact, I could not
imagine Jaz alone without seeing her huddled in fear.
Big Bubba was in a loud and aggressive mood. The floor around his cage glittered with seed residue, and he had painstakingly dropped every Cheerio
into his water dish. His millet branch looked as if he’d held it in his beak and beat the bejesus out of it against the bars of his cage.
He hollered, “Did you miss me? Did you miss me? Did you miss me?”
He sounded as if he was fed up with being taken for granted, that he’d reached the limit of his patience, and that if he didn’t get a lot more respect, the
world could kiss his red tail feathers.
I turned off his TV and opened his cage door. I peeled one of his bananas while he clambered out. When he was atop the cage, I held the banana up to
him so he could peck at it. He went at it like a woman hitting a newly stocked sales bin at Victoria’s Secret.
I said, “You’re getting bored, aren’t you? Your mom will be home soon.”
In actual fact, Big Bubba had spent a lot of his life waiting for Reba to come home from the college, but I knew the house felt more silent to him than
usual.
I spent extra time playing with him on the lanai, and I gave him a shower. While he ran around squawking and flapping his wings to dry them, I put fresh
seed in his cups. I vacuumed up all the flung-out seed hulls and hung a fresh millet branch in his cage. I threw away the soggy Cheerios and gave him
fresh water. I made his world as clean and organized as possible, but I knew he wouldn’t be completely happy until Reba came home. We all rely on that
special someone to make us feel secure.
After I’d coaxed him back into his cage and chatted with him awhile longer, I covered his cage for the night and left him.
It had become habit now to stop at Hetty’s house after I left Big Bubba, but when I got there I saw her and Ben on the sidewalk walking toward home. I
parked in the driveway, got out of the Bronco, and leaned on the door and waited. Ben trotted along with the happy look of a youngster discovering the
world. Hetty held his leash with enough slack to let him explore interesting rocks and plants alongside the sidewalk, but short enough to keep him focused.
When they reached me, I knelt to scratch the spot between Ben’s shoulders while his tail did a delighted helicopter whirl.
Hetty said, “Come in for a cup of tea.”
She went toward the front door, snapping her fingers at Ben as she went. At least I thought she was snapping her fingers at Ben, but I guess she could
have been signaling me to follow.
Ben and I obediently trotted after her, and as I went in the door I noticed a dark sedan parked half a block away at the curb. It gave me a moment of
paranoia because cars don’t park on the street in that kind of neighborhood. I told myself I was being silly and went inside the house.
In the kitchen, Winston was asleep, stretched on his back on the windowsill with his front paws bent like a Japanese dancer. If humans slept as much as
cats do, we might be as lovable as they are. Well, some of us might be.
I sat down at the table, and Ben lay at my feet. Hetty effortlessly filled a teakettle and got out cups. She had taken off the elastic bandage.
I said, “Did Jaz come back?”
She shook her head. “She seemed so scared when she left, I’m afraid she won’t be back.”
I said, “I followed her this morning, but she ran into the nature preserve behind the Key Royale. I think she and her stepfather are living there. If they are,
I’m sure it’s temporary. The only explanation I can think of is that he’s a security guard.”
“That would explain some things.”
“It doesn’t explain why those gang members know her or why they’re looking for her.”
Hetty shook cookies from a square plastic container onto a plate. “She said she didn’t know those boys.”
“Do you believe her?”
Hetty sighed and poured boiling water over tea bags in a pot. “No, I think she was lying.”
“Well, then.”
“Dixie, I’ve had kids, I’ve taught kids, I know kids. Jaz is a good kid.”
“And her stepfather may not be working at the Key Royale. He may actually be a paying guest, and his money may come from gang involvement.”
Hetty sighed again. “He did look like a gangster, didn’t he?”
She poured two cups of tea and shoved one across the table to me.
She said, “It seems like such a straightforward thing to ask. With anybody else, you can just ask, ‘Honey, what’s your stepfather’s name?’ and they tell
you. They don’t jump up and run away because it’s a secret.”
I took a cookie from the plate and bit into it. It was tasty, not too sweet, a little crisp. Had a peanut butter flavor and a hint of blueberry. I looked more
closely at it. It was a doggy biscuit.
I said, “Are you giving me doggy treats because I deserve them, or are you just trying to get on my good side?”
She looked at the cookies, then did a double take. “Oops, wrong container!”
“Never mind, I like it.”
“It’s healthy too. Organic peanut butter and blueberry.”
Ben raised his head as if he might offer a biscuit review, then thought better of it.
As I walked toward my Bronco in Hetty’s driveway, the dark sedan that had been parked at the curb pulled into the street and sped past. A trick of the
late sun’s angle cast a fierce spotlight on the driver’s face. It was Jaz’s stepfather. Hunched over the wheel, he gripped it with both hands like a man who’d
been driven beyond his limit. The man had obviously been watching Hetty’s house. The question was whether he had been hoping to catch Jaz there
against his orders, or if he had been watching to learn more about Hetty. As in gathering information to pass along to burglars.
I pulled out my cell to dial Guidry. I got his voice mail, which was good, because my message was more anxious than informative.
I said, “Jaz hasn’t come back to Hetty’s, but I just saw her stepfather. He drives a dark sedan, but I didn’t get a tag number. He was parked on Hetty’s
street watching her house, and then he drove away.”
I went back and rang Hetty’s doorbell. She opened the door looking worried. When I told her about Jaz’s stepfather, she looked even more worried.
I said, “I called Lieutenant Guidry and told him, but just be extra careful. If you see or hear anything unusual, call nine-one-one.”
I left Hetty’s house feeling glum and depressed. It wasn’t going to get any better, either. Paco was still God knew where and Michael wouldn’t be home
from the firehouse until the next morning. My own cupboards were as bare as Mother Hubbard’s and my refrigerator was pitiful. If I ate out, I’d first have to
go home and get cleaned up.
Any other woman would have been able to call a friend who didn’t know a thing about Jaz or Maureen, and enjoy an evening of female talk. Any other
woman would have been able to forget all about Paco being off on a dangerous undercover job while she laughed at another woman’s tales of the perils
of dating. Without much hope, I ran down my mental list of friends who might have dinner with me. There weren’t any. Everybody I knew either had a family
or a job or a lover that took up their evenings.
I was the only woman in the entire world who didn’t have a list of friends she could call for an impromptu dinner. The only woman in the entire world who
couldn’t drop in on a good friend and eat with chopsticks from cute little take-out boxes like people on TV do. The only woman in the entire world who
couldn’t pick up spur-of-the-moment deli stuff to share with a close friend. Clever finger foods. Stuffed grape leaves. Delicate spring rolls. At least cheese
fries.
It was flat depressing.
Thinking about the available friends I didn’t have made me think about the friends I’d once had. Which was probably why I made a sudden turn south
toward Turtle Beach. I wanted to talk to my old friend Harry Henry.
Okay, maybe I really wanted to find out what Harry knew about Maureen. What are old friends for if not to talk about another friend’s kidnapped
husband?
T
19
urtle Beach doesn’t have the floury white sand of Siesta Beach and Crescent Beach. Instead, its sand is dark and dense, the kind that turtles love to
burrow into. Turtle Beach once led to a boat channel called Midnight Pass through which boats moved from the bay to the Gulf. But in a particularly
boneheaded decision, the county tried to change nature’s intention by moving the pass, with the result that now there’s no pass at all, which pisses
boaters off like you wouldn’t believe.
It was near sunset when I parked the Bronco and walked out on the beach. A gray cloud cover had moved in to turn the light sepia, giving the beach and
the people on it the look of an old photograph. A potbellied tourist threw bread at gulls while his companions, two women in lawn chairs they’d unfolded on
the sand, looked in vain for the fabled sunset colors. The gulls squawked disdainfully at the man’s bread and circled away. Disgusted, the man flapped his
arms against his square hips and glared at the women as if it were their fault his crumbs had been rejected.
No doubt accustomed to taking the blame for life, they heaved themselves out of their chairs and refolded them. Slump-shouldered with disillusionment,
all three trudged through the sand to their parking place, where they made a big to-do of brushing away the beach before getting in their sedan. The
minute they drove away, the cloud cover parted and gulls swooped down and pecked at the bread. Clouds that had obscured the sun minutes ago now
rode above the water like sky elephants with gilded backs. The sun slipped beneath the sea, leaving the sky shot with shafts of indigo and orange. Too
bad those pessimists hadn’t been willing to watch a cloudy sunset.
Harry wasn’t among the people watching the day’s spectacular end, so I walked down to the Sea Shack, an open-air seafood joint where beach bums
and sun-browned fishermen drink beer and play poker.
As far back as junior high, just hearing Harry Henry’s name had been enough to send me and my girlfriends into giggling fits, and not just because he
had two first names and was movie star handsome. From the time his voice changed, Harry had been a babe magnet, and some of the babes were twice
his age. By the time he was sixteen, already six foot three and eminently swoonable, he was rumored to have screwed half the girls in high school. He was
also said to have been the reason for a hair-pulling fight between the English teacher and the math teacher.
When he and Maureen got together, it had seemed almost inevitable to the rest of us. Maureen’s reputation for being promiscuous hadn’t been as well
earned as Harry’s, but once she realized that her body caused men to grow mush-minded when they looked at her, she’d used it. Somehow she and
Harry didn’t discover each other until our senior year, and after that they’d been inseparable. They were beautiful together too, with some extra quality that
sets stars apart from ordinary people. All us less good-looking and less sexy classmates had expected them to stay that way, together forever, always set
apart by their beauty. Somehow, the fact that they were both dumb as a box of rocks made them even more endearing to us. They were our high school’s
golden couple.
Then, before the ink was completely dry on our diplomas and our mortarboard tassels were still hanging from our rearview mirrors, Maureen had
stunned us all by marrying a man none of us had ever heard of. Harry had taken it like a prize fighter who’d been dealt a major blow to the head. For a
long time he’d wandered around in a bewildered daze, unable to comprehend that the girl he loved had actually married somebody else.
If Harry had possessed acting talent or ambition, he might have headed to Hollywood or a career as a male model. Instead, he’d stayed on Siesta Key
and worked on chartered deep-sea fishing boats. He’d never married, but lived alone on an old house boat at the Midnight Pass marina.
I found Harry at the Sea Shack. It was that peculiar quiet time when the light takes on a translucent quality and the sea seems to hold its breath waiting
for the evening tide. Harry was at a back table on one of the Shack’s benches. He was leaning against the sun-bleached wall, and he had a friend with
him I’d never seen before—a long-haired dog with wide whiskers and a coat patterned like a tortoiseshell cat. The dog was sitting on the bench too, and it
looked as if Harry was sharing from his plastic basket of fish and fries.
I stopped a waitress and asked her to bring me the house special and a beer, and went over and sat down on the bench across from Harry, swinging
my legs over and under to face him. He and the dog looked at me with identical expressions of mild curiosity.
I said, “Harry, if that dog’s hanging out with you, he must have pretty poor taste.”
He grinned. The dog grinned. The dog wagged its tail. Harry grinned some more, and I had a feeling he was mentally wagging his tail.
He said, “I won him in a poker game. He’s not much to look at, but he’s one smart dog. I think he counts cards.”
I said, “What is he, a Scottie and a Lab?”
Harry ruffled the dog’s mottled fur affectionately. “Hell, Dixie, I don’t know who his ancestors were. I figure he’s an American dog, a little bit of every
bloodline all mixed together. You don’t want to get too prissy about pedigrees. That’s the beginning of becoming a fossilized human being.”
Harry was right. I had got so used to expensive dogs with pure bloodlines that I’d forgotten how much energy and intelligence nature invests in
mongrels.
I said, “I’m sorry, dog. I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings.”
Harry said, “His name is Hugh Hefner. On account of he’s old, but he’s still chasing young bitches. I just call him Hef.”
“Does he live in pajamas?”
“Naw, Hef goes nude. And don’t get me wrong, Hef don’t actually get personal with the females he chases, he just likes hanging out with them.”
The waitress brought my beer and a plastic knife and fork wrapped in a paper napkin. The Sea Shack doesn’t go in for frills. As she left, she patted
Hef’s head.
I took a sip of beer. “I guess you’ve heard about Mo’s husband.”
He looked out at the sunset-glinted water. “Kind of hard not to. She’s on the TV every hour.”
“Harry, did you ever meet him?”
“Who?”
“Mo’s husband, Victor.”
He grinned, and for a moment he looked young and handsome again, even with skin dried and crosshatched as an old leather boot.
“Sure, him and me hung out together all the time. We was real jet-skiers together.”
I was pretty sure he meant jet-setters, but I let it pass.
“No kidding, Harry, did you?”
A flicker of pain flashed across his face. “Why do you ask me that, Dixie? I’m not good enough for Mo, remember?”
The waitress brought a red plastic basket filled with still-sizzling batter-fried strips of grouper and wide-cut french fries. Hef’s ears cocked forward while
I lifted out the little paper cups of tartar sauce and coleslaw and arranged them next to my beer bottle. I reached for a bottle of Tabasco at the end of the
table and sprinkled hot pepper sauce on the fish. I turned the basket so the fries were on the right and the fish on the left. It’s important to have your food at
the right latitude before you eat it. I unwrapped my plastic fork and knife and smoothed my napkin on my lap. I forked up a bite of crisp grouper and put it
in my mouth. I fanned my mouth and grabbed for the beer.
Harry grinned. “You still like stuff hot, huh?”
I gasped and drank some more beer. “Not that hot! Boy, that fish is right out of the fryer!”
He nodded proudly. “They do it good here.”
Hef looked proud too.
I picked up a french fry with my fingers and waved it in the air to cool it.
I said, “Harry, I’m wondering if Mo is really that broken up about Victor being kidnapped. I mean, the kidnappers told her they’d kill him if she told
anybody, and she’s gone on TV and told it. Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”
“It was my understanding,” he said—and he began to squint at me with red-rimmed eyes—“that she was going to leave him.”
I tossed the cooled fry to Hef, and he caught it like a pro.
“Leave him as in get a divorce?”
He nodded with the exaggerated care of somebody not wanting to give away too much. “That’s what she said.”
“When?”
His squint got squintier. “When did she tell me, or when was she leaving?”
“Both.”
A pelican flapped to the railing by Harry’s side, and he turned and studied the bird as if it might have a message for him.
“She told me that right from the beginning. She was always gonna leave him. She never said exactly when, though. One year it would be after Christmas
because they were going skiing for Christmas, and for several years it was going to be after August because they always went someplace special in
August. And a bunch of years it was going to be after her birthday because she always got a new diamond on her birthday.”
The pelican tucked its head back on its curved neck and went to sleep. Hef looked at the bird and cocked his ears. He probably wished he could fold
his neck like that. I know I do.
For a while I concentrated on the grouper and fries, with an occasional bite to Hef. Harry leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes. Below
us, the sea made slushing sounds as it began to rock itself to sleep.
I gave my last fry to Hef, drained the last of the beer, and tossed my crumpled napkin into the basket.
“Harry, did you ever feel like Mo was just stringing you along?”
His eyes opened and met mine, and for an instant the soft waning light made him look like the golden hunk he’d been in high school.
“Hell, Dixie, she’s been stringing me along since the first day I met her. She holds up a razor, and I lick syrup off the edge.”
I said, “And you’ve been seeing her ever since she married, haven’t you?”
He glowered at me under sun-bleached eyebrows. “Like I said, Dixie, I’m not good enough for Mo. I haven’t seen her in two or three years.”
I sat for a moment looking into his eyes, knowing that he was lying, but also knowing that I had all I was going to get from him. I decided not to call him
on it.
“Okay, Harry.”
“Your brother okay?”
“Yeah, Michael’s good.”
“He’s a good fisherman, that boy.”
I swung my legs over the edge of the bench and stood up. “Thanks, Harry. You take care.”
I leaned over the table and ruffled the top of Hef’s head while Harry touched two fingers to the bill of his cap in a sardonic salute. “See you around,
Dixie.”
On the way out, I gave the waitress enough for Harry’s dinner too. I figured I owed him that much.
The problem with sticking your nose into things that really aren’t your business is that you’re liable to find yourself face-to-face with a monster, and it’s
not somebody else’s monster, it’s your monster and you have to deal with it. I’d known Harry Henry practically my whole life, and I knew all his
mannerisms. I knew how his eyes danced to the side and his lips got a little almost curve at one corner when he told a whopper. And I knew damn well that
Harry had lied when he said it had been two or three years since he’d seen Maureen. I was sorry I’d gone to see him. I was sorry I’d talked to him. I was
sorry I hadn’t minded my own business and stayed out of it.
Nevertheless, I had talked to him, and he had lied to me. All the way home, I thought about what that lie meant. From everything else he’d said, I figured
it was a pretty good bet that he and Maureen had been up to their beautiful necks in an affair all during Maureen’s marriage. That didn’t surprise me. And
while my personal philosophy is that married people who don’t love each other enough to be loyal should end the marriage instead of being liars and
sneaks, Maureen’s adultery wasn’t any of my business. So why did I feel as if there was something worse than adultery going on between Maureen and
Harry?
Even worse, why, if I was honest with myself, did I have a terrible hunch that a sweet, goofy guy like Harry was somehow involved in Victor’s
kidnapping?
I
20
woke the next morning with Ella cuddled warm against my back. I left her in bed while I splashed my face with water and brushed my teeth. As I streaked
down the hall to my closet-office for shorts and T and Keds, I saw that Ella was sitting up and yawning. Four A.M. is way too early for a cat.
She followed me to the front door, and I stopped a moment to kiss her head and tell her goodbye. I said, “Michael will be home at eight and get you.”
It was probably my imagination, but her eyes seemed to light up at the sound of Michael’s name. Lots of females have that reaction.
Outside, the sky was dark and dense as dryer lint. Along the shoreline, coquinas and mole crabs fed on the surf’s salty broth of nutrients as gulls
gobbled down the feeding mollusks. Nature is efficient. Going down the stairs, I trailed dew-moistened fingertips along the rail. In the carport, a snowy
egret who was balanced on one knobby-kneed leg atop the roof of Paco’s truck twisted his head full circle to watch me pass. A brown pelican on my
Bronco unfolded himself, spread his wings to their full six-and-a-half-foot span, and flapped away.
I made it to Midnight Pass Road without waking the parakeets in the trees, and turned north. Tom Hale’s condo is only a short hop away, so I was at his
door in five minutes. Tom was still asleep, but Billy Elliot was waiting for me with a big happy grin. We had the parking lot entirely to ourselves for our run,
and when I took him upstairs Billy’s tail was wagging in pure happiness. I read somewhere that you can tell how satisfied a dog is by the direction its tail
goes when it wags. If it circles to the right, the dog is happy. To the left, not so much. Billy’s tail was definitely doing clockwise circles.
There was still no sound in Tom’s apartment, but as I unsnapped Billy’s leash I noticed a filmy pink scarf tossed on the sofa. It had been a long time
since Tom had allowed a female guest to sleep over, and I was glad to see that he’d quit sulking over the loss of the last girlfriend. Especially since she
hadn’t been nearly good enough for him and Billy Elliot.
I made a circle of my thumb and forefinger and whispered, “Awright!” to Billy. He waved his tail to the right.
I had two new clients that morning, a husky male Shorthair named T-Quartz and his house mate, a snow-white Persian named Princess. T-Quartz was
stolid and watchful, not ready yet to commit himself, but Princess threw caution to the winds and immediately made me her new best friend. I wondered if
their names had affected their personalities. I wasn’t familiar with their house yet, so I spent a bit longer with them and got to Max and Ruthie’s house later
than usual.
Ruthie and I were now so slick at our pill-pushing routine that it had become performance art. We could probably have sold tickets and drawn a crowd.
Max beamed while we showed how smooth we were, and then he took Ruthie in his arms and told her she was absolutely the smartest cat in the entire
world.
I left them basking in mutual adoration and zipped to Big Bubba’s house. As I turned into his driveway, a dark sedan passed in the street behind me.
The car slowed almost to a stop, and in the rearview mirror I saw the driver’s head turn toward me. It was just a glimpse, but he looked like Jaz’s
stepfather. I put the Bronco in reverse to get a better look at him, but the car sped away.
I didn’t like the idea of Jaz’s stepfather seeing me in Reba’s driveway. If he had something to do with gangs sent out to burglarize houses, I didn’t want
him to catch on that Reba was away.
Inside, Big Bubba squawked with excitement when I removed the cover from his cage. “Did you miss me? Did you miss me? Did you miss me?”
I laughed and opened his cage door. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
He laughed too, as if he’d heard the funniest joke in the world. I left him climbing to the top of his cage and went to the kitchen for his banana and apple
slices. For an extra treat, I got a couple of crackers as well. When I went back in the sunroom, he had sailed to the floor and was at the slider waiting for
me to open it so he could go out on the lanai. Big Bubba was one smart bird.
As I opened the door, I said, “Your mama will be home in a few days.”
He said, “Did you miss me?” He was smart, but repetitive.
While Big Bubba and his wild cousins yelled the latest avian news to one another, I put down clean carpet and fresh food and water. Then I got out the
hand vac and sucked up all his seed hulls. When everything was clean and organized, I turned on Big Bubba’s TV to his favorite cop show.
Except his cop show had been interrupted by a news flash. A hyperventilating newswoman was standing on a dock pointing to a boat belonging to the
Sarasota Sheriff’s Department. The boat was empty, but the woman wanted the world to know that it had recently been occupied by a dead body.
“The dead man is believed to be Victor Salazar,” she said. She smiled while she said it, but she pulled her eyebrows close together to show that she
could be as empathetic as the next person about a dead body. “Mr. Salazar was kidnapped several days ago, and his body was found early this morning
by some fishermen. His widow, Maureen Salazar, is in seclusion and has not issued a statement since her husband’s body was found.”
Saddened and vaguely alarmed, I stood motionless as the scene shifted to a newsman back at the studio, who gave the particulars about Victor
Salazar and his business. Salazar was sixty years old and a native of Venezuela, he said, and had extensive holdings in Venezuelan oil production. He
didn’t mention anything about oil trading, just oil ownership.
I was surprised at Victor’s age. I’d thought he was a lot older because he’d seemed ancient to me when Maureen married him. But if he was only sixty,
that meant he’d been forty-five when he married Maureen, and that didn’t seem so old now. On the other hand, compared to Harry’s thirty-three, sixty was
old.As I got Big Bubba back into his cage, my mind raced through all the ways I might get in touch with Maureen and tell her how sorry I was. Either by
design or negligence, she had never given me a phone number, and I was sure it would be unlisted.
I changed the station to the Nature channel, told Big Bubba I would be back in the afternoon, and left him. He seemed subdued, as if he sensed my
mood.
Back in my Bronco, I called Information and asked for Victor Salazar’s phone number. As I had expected, it was unlisted. I asked for Maureen Salazar’s
number. It was unlisted too. Of course the numbers were unlisted, they were rich people. Harry Henry probably had a phone number for Maureen, but I felt
squeamish about talking to Harry again. I might find out more than I wanted to know.
I needed breakfast, but before I went to the diner I drove half a block to Hetty Soames’s house. At least she might have good news about Jaz.
She didn’t.
Looking strained, Hetty said, “Dixie, something has happened to that child. She liked me and Ben. She wouldn’t just disappear without saying
goodbye.”
I said, “I’m sorry, Hetty.”
She said, “I have a really bad feeling about this. A really bad feeling.”
I did too, but I didn’t say so.
As I left Hetty’s house to go pounce on breakfast, another dark sedan pulled close behind me. At first I suspected it was the same one I’d thought was
driven by Jaz’s stepfather, but some other cars got between us after I turned onto Midnight Pass Road and I decided I was being paranoid. Half the cars
on the street are dark sedans, and one looks pretty much like all the rest.
As I entered the Village Diner, I glanced at the big-screen TV over the counter. It was turned low enough not to bother people who didn’t want the latest
bad news with their breakfast, but high enough so people at the counter could hear every word. I caught the name “Victor Salazar” and the word
“kidnapped” but I didn’t slow down.
Judy was prompt with my coffee. She said, “Did you hear about that kidnapped man? His wife paid them a million dollars and they drowned him
anyway.”
“I heard.”
“Damn, if she’d known they were going to drown him anyway, she could have saved herself a million bucks.”
Without waiting for a response, she swished away to dispense coffee to other caffeine-deprived people. I felt miserable. If Judy knew I was the person
who had delivered the million dollars to Victor’s kidnappers, she wouldn’t see me as a friend anymore. She’d think of me as a person she didn’t know
very well, somebody who had weird secrets about weird things done in the middle of the night. If my role in the ransom payment ever came out, everybody
I knew would look at me in a different way.
They might even look at me the same way I was looking at Harry Henry, as somebody involved in Victor’s kidnapping. Just thinking that made me feel
as if I were wandering in a maze. The Harry I’d always known wouldn’t have had anything to do with kidnapping.
Judy brought my breakfast, seemed about to say something, decided not to, and left me alone with my dark thoughts.
One idea lay like a lion stretched on a rock in the sun, lazily swishing its tail while it waited for me to draw close enough to leap on me. I had to face the
possibility that if Harry had anything to do with Victor’s kidnapping, it would have been with Maureen’s knowledge and consent. Harry not only had a
history of letting Maureen use him, but I was positive he was currently involved with her. As in being her lover, which can make a man do all kinds of things
he might not otherwise do. Harry had always been a fool when it came to Maureen. If she’d asked him for help, he would have helped her.
But if they were involved in the kidnapping, that meant they also had something to do with Victor’s murder, and I couldn’t believe that of either of them.
Which made me drop to the less onerous but more likely possibility that neither of them had been involved in the kidnapping, but that Maureen had
leaped at the chance to get rid of Victor and keep his money. If she had wanted to leave him anyway, she might have seen his kidnapping as the best
thing that ever happened to her. If he were returned, she’d be in the same spot she’d been before, a wife with a rich husband and a poor lover.
Maybe when she’d got the call from his kidnappers she had decided to do the thing that would make them kill Victor. They had told her not to report that
Victor was gone, and the first thing she’d done was run to me. Then after I’d delivered the ransom money for her, she’d put on a distraught wife act and
called a press conference to tell the world he’d been kidnapped. Even as she begged for Victor’s release, she’d known her act might get him killed. And
all the time, Harry may have known about her plan.
If all that were true, anything I did now would only help her cause. If I confessed to the investigators that I had been the person who carried the duff el bag
full of money to the gazebo, it would simply corroborate that Maureen had paid the kidnappers. It would also make me look like sixteen kinds of an idiot.
Which I probably was. The two people I had always believed were dumber than a sack of dirt may have played a clever trick on smart me. They both knew
me as well as I knew them, and they had known how to push my loyalty buttons.
On the other hand, I didn’t have a shred of proof that any of my dark suspicions were true. Once again, I was thrown back to the bottom line: Maureen
had done nothing illegal when she chose to pay off Victor’s kidnappers. I had done nothing illegal when I carried the money for her to the gazebo. Even
Maureen’s press conference to reveal that Victor had been kidnapped hadn’t been illegal. Stupid, maybe, if she wanted Victor returned alive. Disloyal
and unconscionable if she didn’t, but not illegal.
The only truly unlawful things had been done by Victor’s kidnappers—not Maureen, not Harry Henry, and not me.
Even so, the whole thing was ugly, and I wished I didn’t even know about it. The fact that I not only knew about it, but was involved in it, made me so
disgusted with myself that I didn’t linger for another cup of coffee. I left money for Judy and went out without saying goodbye.
Like a homing pigeon, I sped south on Midnight Pass Road and made a right turn onto my lane where a discreet sign warns DEAD END, PRIVATE ROAD . I
felt better just to be so close to home. I wanted to talk to Michael and try to get my life back on an even keel. Slowing so as not to freak out the parakeets
in the oak trees, I began to relax as I looked out at the sun-spangled Gulf. Distant sailboats made white triangles against the blue horizon, and I could
make out the white track of a water skier behind a speedboat.
Motion in the rearview mirror caught my eye, and my heart began to leap like a trapped beast when I saw still another dark sedan in the lane behind me.
Half the people in the world drive dark sedans, but they don’t drive down private lanes unless they have reason to go to the house at the end of the lane.
Cops drive unmarked sedans. If the car behind me was an unmarked cop’s car, that could only mean that somebody from SIB was coming to notify
Michael that something had happened to Paco.
I
21
t’s funny how the world goes gray when you’re faced with something you’ve always feared, as if a layer of cheesecloth settles over all the color and dulls
it. I pulled into the carport next to Paco’s truck and forced myself to open my door and slide out. If what I feared was true, I did not think I could bear it.
Michael’s car was gone, which was either good or bad. Good that he wouldn’t be there to hear the news that would break his heart, bad that I would have
to be the one who ultimately told him.
The sedan crawled to a stop on the shelled parking area, and the driver turned his head and looked squarely at me.
The hairs on the back of my neck rose, and I half turned to run away. It wasn’t a deputy from SIB, it was Jaz’s stepfather.
Throwing his door open, he lunged from the car. The gray screen that had lowered over my vision dissolved, so I saw him silhouetted against a sky
blazed by a feral sun.
With bald accusation, he said, “Where’s the girl?”
I took a half step backward toward the stairs to my apartment and played ignorant.
“What girl?”
He moved forward, but not just a half step. He was coming at me, and fast. “My stepdaughter! Is she here?”
There are times when I feel strong as a jungle tiger. This wasn’t one of them. Pure and simple, I was afraid of the man. Afraid of his size. Afraid of the
gun I knew he wore under his left arm.
Grabbing the remote from my shorts pocket to open my hurricane shutters, I turned and ran up my stairs.
As the shutters began their upward glide, he thundered to a huffing stop at the bottom step. Red faced, he yelled, “You don’t know what you’re involved
in, lady.”
I hate it when a sleazeball calls me lady. Makes me want to kick him where it would do the most good.
I looked over the railing and said, “I’m giving you two seconds to get in your car and leave.”
I tried to make that sound like “otherwise I’ll call down a rain of fire on your head,” but I didn’t really have an otherwise.
He must have known it, because he started up the stairs, moving with surprising speed for a man his size. My shutters made it to the top and clicked
home, but I was trapped. He was halfway up the steps, and even if I pushed through my french doors and ran inside my apartment, he could come after
me before I could lower the shutters again.
As he climbed higher, I did the only thing I could do. I ran to the top of the stairs, planted my foot in the middle of his chest, and pushed. Surprised and
knocked off balance, he flailed the air while I ran to my door. He grabbed for the banister, missed it, and stumbled awkwardly to the bottom step just as
Michael’s car jerked to a stop downstairs.
Michael slammed out of his car, and I could tell from the expression on his face that he had seen me kick the man. That’s all he needed to go into whitehot
fury.
I yelled, “He’s got a gun, Michael!”
Michael didn’t even slow down.
The man looked up at me and then at Michael, and began making erasing motions with both hands. “Lady, you’ve got it all wrong.”
I was afraid he’d go for his gun, but Michael reached him before he had time.
The only other time I’d ever seen Michael that mad was when I was twelve and he was fourteen, and a nasty boy at school had jerked up my T-shirt and
pinched one of my newly budding nipples. Michael had come at him so hard and fast that the kid’s nose was flattened and a front tooth was hanging by a
bloody thread before I’d even got my shirt pulled back down.
The guy at the bottom of the stairs didn’t fare any better. Michael smashed his fist into the man’s gut, then hooked him with a thudding uppercut to the
chin.
As much as I would have liked watching Michael beat the living snot out of him, I yelled, “Michael, stop!”
He grabbed the man’s arm and twisted it behind his back so viciously that I cringed at the pain I imagined in the man’s shoulder.
Michael gave me a grim smile. “Why?”
“Because Guidry is here.”
It was true. Guidry’s Blazer was rolling across the shell by the carport.
Without releasing the man, Michael waited for Guidry to park and get out of his car. Guidry wore the look of a man who cannot be surprised but is willing
to be tested.
I skipped down some of the steps and jumped down the others, sort of a semivictorious hustle. I had somehow managed to magnetize a man who was
probably the head of a gang of thieves and killers. My brother had the man in a death grip, and now Guidry could arrest him and thank me.
I said, “Guidry, this is the man I’ve been telling you about, the one who’s Jaz’s stepfather.”
Guidry gave the man a curt nod. “I’m Lieutenant Guidry, Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department.”
To me, he said, “What’s going on here?”
I said, “This man followed me home and threatened me. I kicked him down the stairs and Michael stopped him from escaping.”
The man said, “That’s not true. I didn’t threaten her. My stepdaughter is missing and I think this woman knows where she is. I’m just trying to find my
stepdaughter.”
Guidry said, “Your stepdaughter would be the girl named Jaz?”
The man grimaced. “She calls herself that. It’s really Rosemary.”
Guidry said, “Whatever her name is, we have reason to believe she knows members of a gang wanted for murder.”
The man heaved a huge sigh and wiped his face with the hand Michael didn’t have a grip on, rubbing it as if he wanted to erase his own skin.
He said, “Christ, I hate this job.”
We all waited. I wondered if he was actually going to confess that he was the head of a gang that he sent out to sell drugs and rob people.
He said, “I’m a United States marshal, Lieutenant.”
My mouth fell open, but Guidry merely regarded him with dispassionate eyes. He said, “Show me some ID.”
Wincing a bit, the man reached into his breast pocket, drew out a slim wallet, and flipped it open to show his creds.
Guidry said, “Michael, let him go.”
Michael narrowed his eyes and looked at the man for a long moment before he loosened his hold. Rotating his sore shoulder under his navy polyester,
the man arched his back as if his entire spine hurt.
Michael said, “You need me here?”
Guidry shook his head and Michael walked toward his kitchen door. He was flinging his punching hand from his wrist to get the blood circulating, but
otherwise he looked as if he had more important things on his mind.
Guidry said, “What’s your connection to the girl?”
The marshal looked up at me as if he’d prefer not to speak in front of me, then made a what-the-hell shrug. “She was a witness to a drive-by killing in
L.A. Right now she’s the only witness.”
Guidry said, “You’ve got her in the Witness Protection Program?”
“That’s correct.”
Guidry said, “I guess that explains why you’re paying an exorbitant rate to keep her at the Key Royale.”
“It’s the safest place we could find. Guards at the gate, lots of security on the premises. Room service, maid service, unlimited movies on big-screen
TV. It wasn’t going to be forever, just until the trial next month.”
With a surly glance at me, he said, “She stayed there until this woman and her friend interfered. After that, I believe she has been sneaking away. With
all the security there, I don’t know how she managed it, but I suspect she’s left more than once.”
Guidry said, “The manager at the Key Royale says they gave you a special off-season rate.”
The man and I both stared at Guidry. I was surprised he’d got the Key Royale people to give up a detail like that, and I suppose the marshal was
surprised they’d talked at all.
The man rubbed his face again. “One kid is more trouble than an entire Mafia family. Kids don’t understand the danger they’re in, they don’t have any
self-discipline, you have to watch them every minute or they’ll call their old friends and give away their location.”
I said, “Did Jaz call those boys who’re looking for her?”
His face sagged. “I didn’t know any boys were looking for her.”
I said, “Three boys came in a house where I was working. One of them was named Paulie. They asked for Jaz by name.”
Guidry said, “We got latents from that boy and identified him. Name was Paul Vanderson, one of the three charged with the drive-by killing in L.A.”
The marshal said, “She wouldn’t have called them. She’s scared to death of them.”
I said, “I think she gave somebody a description of the honeymoon cottage she was staying in at the Key Royale. The boys just went looking for a house
that fit the description.”
The man scowled. “I gave her a phone so she could call me if she needed anything, but I took it away from her because she was making calls to L.A.
She claimed she only called a girl from her school, but if she told where she was, the girl could have spread it around.”
I thought about going over and kicking him. I said, “What is it with you government people? Are you all dead from the neck up? You leave a girl that
young alone, of course she’ll call a friend! And of course the friend will talk about it! What were you thinking?”
For the first time, he looked faintly ashamed. “Look, terrorism is the focus now, and we’re spread all over the place. We don’t have the personnel to
babysit teenagers. In the beginning, we assigned a female marshal to her, and the two of them holed up in a hotel room in Kansas. But the trial date got
changed, that marshal got reassigned, and we brought her here where she’d have more freedom. I know it’s not an ideal situation, but I checked on her
twice a day. I brought her comic books and candy bars. I even took her to Target a couple of times for shampoo and stuff. It wasn’t like she was in jail.”
“Couldn’t you have put her with a family someplace?”
He met my angry glare with dull eyes. “Until the murder trial is over, putting her with a family would expose them to grave danger.”
I said, “What about Jaz’s parents? Why aren’t they with her?”
“Her mother split when she was a baby, father took off a few years later. She lived with a grandmother, but the old lady died a few months ago. She was
in a foster home when she saw the shooting. Everybody on the street scattered, nobody will talk. She’s the only one we’ve got.”
His voice was gruff, but tension around his lips said he felt sadness along with his frustration and anger.
Guidry said, “How long has she been missing?”
“She wasn’t at the hotel when I went to check on her last night. I checked again this morning and nothing had changed.”
His eyes shifted to me, as if he still hoped I knew where Jaz was.
Guidry said, “Could she have run away?”
“Her things were all there. If she’d run away, she would have taken her personal things.”
Guilt was pouring over me like hot oil. I hadn’t encouraged Hetty to give Jaz sanctuary, but I hadn’t discouraged it, either. With the best of intentions,
Hetty and I had given Jaz an escape from boredom and loneliness, but the escape may have caused her to be killed.
I said, “I followed Jaz yesterday morning when she was on her way back to the hotel. She ran into the nature preserve behind the hotel, right at a spot
where a Hummer was waiting at the curb. I think the guys from L.A. were in that Hummer. If I hadn’t been on the street, they would have grabbed Jaz then.
They probably went back yesterday afternoon and caught her when she was on the way back to Hetty’s house.”
We all fell silent, each of us knowing the worst might already have happened.
The marshal took out a card and handed it to Guidry. “We’ll cooperate with any local investigation involving one of our charges, Lieutenant, but I doubt
you’ll find the girl alive.” Bitterly, he added, “Without her, those guys will walk.”
With a barely civil nod to me, he walked to his car and drove away.
I still didn’t know his name and I still didn’t like him. On the other hand, he had tried to keep Jaz safe. At least he got credit for that.
I said, “How did you know he was here?”
“I didn’t. I came to talk to you about something else.”
Even with my heart heavy because of Jaz, a little bubble like a champagne blip rose through the sorrow.
He said, “I’d like to talk to you about the murder of Victor Salazar.”
I should have known. Now that Victor was dead, the investigation was no longer just a kidnapping but also a homicide. Guidry wasn’t here for any
personal reason. He was here strictly as a homicide detective.
The little bubble took on feet, and one of its feet was mired in quicksand. I could almost hear the sucking sound it made as it pulled its foot up and got
ready to stand its ground.
I said, “You’d better come upstairs.”
I