Act of Betrayal (12 page)

The little red ribbon in Bitsy s topknot hung in tatters, probably from the skirmish in which the catnip mouse was decapitated. What was there between my mother and Reyes? I wondered. And where the hell was she?

When we got back, I tried her home and office numbers again unsuccessfully. My appetite gone, I skipped dinner. Instead I filled a glass with ice and a lime twist, poured in some tonic water and a turn-bier of gin. I sipped it slowly, savoring the sweet, crisp taste on my tongue as I worked on the Reyes story under the ceiling fan in my bedroom. I cut about nine inches, but my heart wasn't in it.

I finished the drink, put the story aside, and slipped into a cotton nightgown. Hoping for a nonexistent breeze, I opened the windows wide, checked my gun, and slipped it beneath the pillow beside me, in the event that anything unexpected came through my windows in the night.

I dreamed I was aboard a sightseeing boat cruising Biscayne Bay after dark, music and laughter skipping across the water. Suddenly gunfire broke out and passengers hit the deck. The shooting stopped as abruptly as it had started. No one was hurt and the music and laughter resumed. Another Miami night. I strolled down a narrow ship's corridor when a boy tumbled out of the shadows and sprawled in my path. “It's me,” he said. “I'm shot.

“No,” he protested, as I reached for him, “you'll get blood on your dress.” I gathered him up in my arms and began to run toward the voices for help. As we emerged on deck, the man with the noose was silhouetted in the moonlight. Surely he could save this bloody child, but ignorant people blocked my way, smiling and staring. My burden was staggering. I felt the blood. No matter how I tried, there was no way to push past or move around them in time. His face was in shadow. Was it the man with the noose—or was it Juan Carlos Reyes? I sat up in bed, wondering for a moment where I was. Laughter wafted through the open window from people passing. I twisted and turned on sweaty sheets until dawn.

No intruder crept through my window in the night. A Coconut Grove homeowner, the outraged victim of three prior break-ins, was not so lucky. When a thief climbed through his window at 3:30
A.M
., he killed the man with an ax.

A second burglar escaped, with the irate ax-wielder, a thirty-five-year-old electronics engineer, hot on his heels. He shattered the driver's side window before the getaway car careened off. “He got some pretty good swipes in there,” a detective said admiringly, when I arrived at the scene.

“I'd had it,” the mild-mannered engineer told me wearily. I knew the feeling. His hair was straight and dark brown, his nose well formed, his eyes clear, with a hollow look at the moment. “I'm not a violent man,” he said quietly. “But they'd wiped me out three times. They must have backed up a truck last time.” He surveyed the carnage in his living room. “This wouldn't be such a mess if I'd only had a pistol. I need to buy a gun,” he announced.

“Or a burglar alarm system,” I suggested. “I've got a gun, but it's never been handy when I really needed it.”

We stood in his bloody living room, this husky stranger and I, talking like old friends. He was right about one thing. Nothing would ever get that carpet clean again, and the walls and ceding probably would have to be repainted. Even a guitar standing in the corner had been spattered.

“I'm Hal.” He extended his hand.

“Britt,” I said. His skin was warm, the fingers smooth and gentle. Hard to believe the damage they had wrought. Our eyes connected. Weird. It always is. Some women frequent singles bars or place personal ads; I seem to meet men at murder scenes. Tour, boat captain Curt Norske and I met over the corpse of a long-missing person, still strapped behind the wheel when his rusted car was found in the bay. For that matter, I first connected with McDonald in a sleazy bar with blood on the floor as he tracked a shooter through a middle-of-the-night spree. No wonder my love life is a disaster. I should know better.

A proximity to sudden death feeds a basic, primal urge in the human animal for a life-affirming act, like sex. One of Mother Nature's little safeguards to ensure survival of the species. Sex after death is great—so long as the death isn't yours.

“I'm sorry we had to meet under these circumstances,” Hal was saying earnestly.

“I'm sure your living room doesn't always look like this,” I said comfortingly.

Still barefoot, he wore blue-jean cutoffs and an open shirt, still unbuttoned. His eyes were brown; so was the curly hair visible on his chest. The pecs weren't bad. Hal was in excellent shape, as the hapless burglar had learned.

He rubbed his neck as though it was sore. “The cops aren't saying much. Am I in trouble?”

“Did you ever see the guy before?”

“Never. Not until he came at me in the dark”

Instinctively I believed him. “Sounds justifiable to me, but you never know. At any rate, there'll probably be an inquest. I'd bring a lawyer.” The voice of my own bitter experience.

“A lawyer! Jesus. I was minding my own business, asleep in my own bed.” He must have seen something in my expression. “Alone,” he added. “Then this guy breaks in and I have to hire a lawyer.”

Poor Hal, I thought, driving back downtown. The burglar's family will probably sue the hell out of him for loss of the dead man's future income as a thief.

I was eager to pursue the missing boys—and talk to my mother. We usually spoke every day. This was out of character for her. Could it be because of Reyes? Could she possibly have my father's diary? If Reyes had it, I hoped he'd come up with it before the special section ran on Sunday. My story was fair, not a puff piece or a hatchet job, but he already felt burned, right or wrong, by the press, and was gun-shy.

Such people often take offense at an innocent word or phrase. On my beat, a story may solve a crime, capture a fugitive, or make a cop look heroic. But are cops ever happy? No. Some high-ranking paper shuffler sees the name of one of his troops in the newspaper and is jealous. He chews out his lieutenant, who browbeats his sergeant, who bawls out the street cop, who abuses the reporter. Shit tends to run downhill and spread out.

A positive trait is that cops don't hold grudges forever. They know life is too short. What about Reyes? I wondered. All I usually worry about is fairness and accuracy. But if the story somehow pissed Reyes off, would he hold my father's diary hostage? Nonsense, I thought. No friend of my father's would do that.

Back at the paper I tried my mother again. She was out, a receptionist said, but expected back in the office shortly. So she was all right.

I dug into the story about Hal and his night visitor. The cops leaned toward justifiable homicide, but the State Attorney's office would make the final decision. Meanwhile, I learned that the dead burglar had a buck knife in his belt, cocaine in his system, and an extensive rap sheet. The largess of Florida's early-release program had recently allowed him to walk free after serving six months of a five-year prison sentence. Not a pleasant person to meet for the first time at 3
A.M
. in your living room. I suspected that Hal would call me. I almost hoped he would.

I hit the
SEND
button, moved the story into the editing system, and called Charles Randolph's parents. After the print and television coverage, Crime Stoppers had offered a thousand-dollar reward and Vera Verela's manager had announced that the singer would post a five-thousand-dollar reward for information that led to Charles's safe return.

“Detective Soams called,” Cassie said, excitement ringing in her voice. “He's following up some leads. He's interested in the case again.”

Publicity does tend to spark official interest, I thought cynically.

The Randolphs recognized none of the names, parents, or addresses of the other boys. What I needed was a common denominator, a place, time, or individual the boys' paths had crossed. Establishing a link might start to make some sense of their disappearances—but I had nothing.

Eagerly I called Soams about the leads that had so excited the Randolphs. The tips he was checking looked lame, he admitted. There were unsubstantiated sightings from a number of people, mostly teenagers, who all claimed to know someone who had seen the boy since his disappearance. But when pressed to produce the actual witnesses each person would refer him to someone else, to another and then another and finally to nothing. The trails all evaporated, as though young Charles Randolph had become one of those will-o'-the-wisp urban myths never traceable to a source.

Edwin Clower expected my call and we arranged to meet. He sold and serviced business machines. His secretary greeted me and showed me to his office. I will never understand men, I thought. Why would he dump Vanessa for this round little woman with a dour mouth and sensible shoes?

Ruggedly handsome, with reddish-blond hair, gray eyes, and a firm handshake, Clower wore a short-sleeved white shirt and a tie. His suit jacket hung behind the door.

There was a framed family portrait of him, Vanessa, and their children, on his desk. Had he placed it there for my benefit?

“Lets grab some coffee,” he said, and we strolled out onto the sun-blasted pavement and into a small luncheonette two doors away in the same strip center.

He ordered decaf as we slid into a plastic-covered booth.

“Drinking messed up my stomach for a while there,” he explained, patting his midsection. “Got so I can't even tolerate more than two cups a day. I'm in AA now.” His eyes fastened on the notebook I had removed from my purse. “What made you get into this now? I'm surprised you're interested after all this time.”

“Your ex-wife. She called after the story on the Randolph boy.”

“That's Vanessa,” he said with a sad pride. “She refuses to give up on David. Gave up on me a long time ago, but she won't quit on him. She's one helluva good mother.”

“She said you're a good father.”

“She said that?” He looked interested. The waitress delivered our coffees and he stirred sugar into his. “What else did she say?”

“That David got angry and took off after you two quarreled. That his disappearance went unreported for two days because she thought he was safe with you and you thought he'd gone home to her.”

“That's about it,” he said grimly. “I had been promising him a canoe trip, a long weekend, just the two of us upstate, along the Peace River. We got into it when I told him we had to postpone ‘cuz I had other plans.”

“Doing what?”

He leveled a pained gaze. “Guess Vanessa told you I was seeing someone.”

“Your secretary?”

He nodded. “Janine. We were planning a ski trip instead, to Colorado. David got really pissed. We had just gone through our first Christmas since the divorce. It wasn't pretty. The kids were having a tough rime adjusting.”

“Have you remarried?” He wasn't wearing a ring.

“Hell, no.” He looked alarmed at the thought.

“Are you and she…?”—I tilted my head back toward his office—” still…?” One of the secret pleasures of reporting is that you can ask questions other people are too polite to ask.

“Hell, no,” he said. “You thought—? That's not Janine. That's Sue Ann. Janine quit, got a job over at South Florida Motors. Last I heard she had a serious thing going with the owner. We busted up not long after David disappeared. The woman has no kids. Pity 'em if she ever does. Totally self-absorbed. Couldn't understand why I was so upset. Raised holy hell every time I talked to Vanessa. Even accused David and his mother of faking the whole thing to get my attention.” He smiled ironically, shaking his head. “I would have given anything if she'd been right, that Vanessa and David had made the whole thing up. What a laugh. Neither one wanted any part of me at the time. I screwed up bad. Drinking, my business suffered, had to down-size.”

I leaned forward, wanting him to focus. “Do you recall what David said before he left that night? Anything that might give us a clue as to exactly where he was going?”

“I've been back over it all a thousand times.” He ran his fingers through his hair, teeth on edge. “It's all my fault. If it hadn't been for me, we wouldn't have been divorced. If only I had stopped him from leaving that night…”

“You can't keep beating yourself up.”

“Why not?” He shrugged hopelessly. “Vanessa will never forgive me. I'll never forgive myself. I keep saying, keep praying, he's alive and that he will come home. Then maybe I can start to make amends. If we never see him again, if he's gone for good, so's my only chance.” His face started to collapse in on itself.

I averted my eyes, pretending not to see his painful struggle for control. “There might be something you didn't pick up on at the time, some small thing he said that could be relevant.”

Clower gulped a deep breath and cleared his throat. When he spoke his voice was strained but strong, with a hint of the irate. “Said I wasn't his father anymore and he never wanted to see me again. And this was a kid—” His face colored with anger. “I had Dolphin tickets on the fifty-yard line for the two of us on Sunday afternoon. That's what he walked out on.”

“Did you go to the game?”

“What?”

“Did you use the football tickets? Did you go?”

He stared into his cup. “Took Janine. She didn't like sports much.”

“What did David take with him?”

“Nothing. He left everything, his overnight bag, his toothbrush. Even a schoolbook his mother had sent with him. He was behind in history. You have to understand, all this happened in the heat of an argument. He tore out the door, slammed it so hard the walls rattled. I was mad as hell, yelling at him to come back. Last I saw, he was crying, running toward One hundred and seventy-first street. We hadn't had dinner yet. We'd sent out to Little Caesar's for one of their giant combo pizzas. I figured he wouldn't want to miss that and he'd be back. After it came I kept it warm in the oven for a couple of hours. He never showed, so I assumed he'd caught the bus and gone home.”

“You didn't call? It's a long trip back to Surfside. He would have had to change buses twice.”

“I know, I know. It was a chilly night and he didn't even take his jacket. He was hungry. But he was a big boy and he'd made the trip over by bus once, with his sister, to surprise me. How was I to know he didn't have any money in his pocket? His mother didn't tell me until later. I shoulda called but I was in no mood. Vanessa had been after me to spend more time with the boy. It was another failure in my cap. I was in no mood to hear about it. Did Vanessa tell you about the reward?”

I told him she had. “She say anything else about me?” He looked like a heartsick teenager. His eyes had the appearance of someone whose constant companion was misery.

His ex-wife believed his story. So did I.

I drove down to Clower's house and parked the T-Bird in his empty driveway. No one was home. I walked to the front door and stood there for several moments, then stepped off the porch and headed toward 171st Street the way the missing boy did that night, looking around at what he saw, trying to see through his eyes, except that he was tearful, angry, running through a dark and chilly night four years ago and I was squinting through scalding sunlight on a brilliant summer day. The street, lined with modest homes, looked as though it hadn't changed substantially in the past four years. No one would have heard the boy's cries if he had been dragged into a car on that cold night when most people had their windows closed. But he could have been accosted or picked up anywhere between here and Surfside. I wondered if the detective had canvassed the bus drivers on duty that night. Probably too late to do any good now.