Act of Betrayal (13 page)

I gazed up at a sky full of low, fast-moving clouds as though for a sign. “Where are you, David?” I murmured aloud. “Where did you go?”

The drive to Coconut Grove took twenty minutes. Emily and Michael Kearns operated a small plant nursery from their home. She was small and dark-haired, with a nervous tic that reminded me of myself under deadline pressure. Balding and overweight, with small mean blue eyes, he looked like a beer drinker to me. Tension crackled across their living room. It quickly became clear that Emily had interceded with her husband, a strict disciplinarian, to allow their boys to attend the carnival in the Grove the night they vanished. Now she had to cope not only with the disappearance of her sons but with the enduring animosity of their father.

As we spoke she reached down to absently stroke a cat the color of smoke who rubbed against her ankles as though sensitive to her mood. When the animal warily approached, sniffed at my shoes, and stared up with huge golden eyes, Kearns muttered, “Will you git that rodent out of here? Can't you see he's bothering her?”

“Oh no,” I said quickly. “He smells my cat, Billy Boots. It's all right. I love animals.”

Kearns looked disgusted and mentioned once more that his boys “never would have run off” had their mother listened to him. “She let 'em run wild. Spoiled, that's what they are,” he said.

The older boy, Michael, thirteen at the time, was described as outgoing and friendly, and idolized by his younger brother, William, who was shy and close to his mother. They had left that night, youthful spirits high, ten dollars each in their pockets. When they failed to return by ten-thirty, as promised, their father drove off to find them. He had no luck, though he did locate some of their friends who had seen them earlier, hurling baseballs at one of the game booths. Willie had been determined to win a teddy bear for his mother. At 1
A.M
. the parents called the police and were instructed to call again if the boys failed to return by dawn. At dawn, the cops pointed out that kids having fun often lose track of time, stay out too late, and fear facing the music. They suggested that the parents check with other relatives and the boys' friends.

The carnival had left town by the time anyone in authority took the case seriously, if they ever did. Official theory was that the boys had probably run off in search of adventure and would return in their own good time.

A missing-persons detective did catch the carnival in Atlanta, by phone. No one remembered the boys.

“My back's gone bad on me and there's nobody ‘round here now to help with the heavy lifting,” their father complained. “Know how much shrubs weigh in those twenty-gallon containers? We was planting a hammock under the canopy of that tamarind tree out back, gonna edge it with wildflowers. It's getting overrun now, still waiting till my back heals up or those boys come home.”

The grim set of his jaw and a hint of malevolence around his eyes when he looked at his wife made me wonder if they had run away. If he was my father, I might.

Emily Kearns followed me out to the T-Bird and stood hugging her arms as though cold, despite the temperature simmering in the upper nineties.

“Do you have children, Ms. Montero?”

I said I didn't.

“When you do,” she said, “never miss a chance to give 'em a hug. There is no security in this life, no way to know if you'll get the chance to do it again.”

She studied the ground. “I keep thinking of so many things I wish I had told them that evening. Find a policeman if you get lost. Don't talk to strangers. When they talk to you, just turn and walk away. Horrible things pop into my mind.” She looked embarrassed. “I've got a very vivid imagination.”

She leaned toward the car, her eyes bleak as I turned the key in the ignition. The last thing she said before I drove off was, “My boys didn't run away.”

Andrea Vitale was in uniform, ready to leave for work when I arrived. She lived in a southwest section complex called Bramblewood Park. A maze of small identical town houses surrounded a pool, playground, and tennis court. Each unit had its own tiny patio and two assigned parking spaces. What did they do when somebody threw a party? The narrow streets, with speed bumps, tight turns, and unexpected dead ends, were imaginatively named after letters of the alphabet. I soon realized, to my frustration, that the letters were not in sequence. Andrea Vitale lived at 402-B on D Street. But C Street was followed by G. Where the hell was D? Where the hell was I? There was no H, and I found myself rolling south on M. What a great hideout. No process server, stalker, or SWAT team could hunt down a quarry here. I drove around and around, gallumping over speed bump after speed bump, cursing the madman who had designed this maze and stopping periodically to plead with ball-playing children for directions. They shook their heads sadly and looked puzzled. They lived there. What hope was there for a stranger?

A woman, in white shorts and carrying a tennis racket, got out of a Subaru with two girls about eleven or twelve. I tried a new approach. “Do you know where Butch Beltrán lived?”

The youngsters stared, wide-eyed. “He's not coming back, is he?” The woman's voice rang with concern. Without waiting for an answer, she hustled the girls into the house. His neighbors did not seem ready to offer reward money for Butch Beltrán's safe return.

At long last, I stumbled upon D Street, purely by chance, and found 402-B. My relief was tempered by the fact that I had no idea how I had found it and prayed I would never have to come back.

Andrea Vitale was in her late thirties, attractive, solidly built, with warm, sherry-colored eyes and luxuriant light brown hair. She looked slightly worn around the edges but obviously possessed a smart-aleck streak. “Any trouble finding it?” she asked pertly.

“No, not at all,” I lied. What I wanted to say was: No wonder Butch hasn't come home. He's scurrying around out there somewhere in the maze like a confused rodent, trying to make his way through the alphabet.

A framed photograph of the boy, missing since March, sat on a natural wood bookcase. T-shirt, baggy shorts, and a black baseball cap worn backward. Caught forever in motion, arms extended for balance, face set in concentration, he affected the scissored body language of a surfer, hurtling through space on a skateboard.

The smaller school photo excited my interest. Gleaming blond hair, blue eyes, so like the others.

I accepted her offer of coffee. She positioned our cups and a plate of oatmeal cookies on the coffee table between us. “His favorites,” she said, perching on a beige tweed sofa. “I still buy them every week, and wind up eating them myself. I keep cooking for two. Force of habit. He better come back soon, my clothes are all too tight.” She laughed, her eyes roving the empty room. “I miss him,” she said flatly. “We don't always get along, but we're the two musketeers. We've been through a lot together. I've been both a father and a mother, by necessity. It's hard to be both a tough taskmaster and a loving mother to a high-spirited kid like him.” She smiled fondly. “He's got a pure wild streak, like his dad, but I think he's smarter, or will be as an adult. If I can just get him through adolescence in one piece,” she said, groaning.

“Any chance he's with his father?”

She shook her head, her look certain.

“He's on the NASCAR circuit, occasional driver, mostly mechanic. Two summers ago when Butch was driving me crazy I sent him to spend some time with his dad. An absolute disaster. Butch even appreciated me, briefly, after he came back—three weeks early, by the way. Sure messed up my summer romance. Butch is always good at that.” She sighed good-naturedly. “I've spoken to his father, in Vegas, twice since Butch disappeared. He hasn't heard a thing. We divorced nearly ten years ago. I got married again right away but it only lasted about a year. Butch has never had a steady male influence on a regular basis. It's just the two of us.”

“What happened when he disappeared?”

“I've been working nights at Coral Reef Hospital, in ICU. I took a late shift for the pay differential. We needed the money. Butch is your typical gimme, gimme, gimme All-American kid. I try hard to do right by him, you know, since he hasn't got a father and all. So it's always something, a one-hundred-seventy-dollar Planet Earth skateboard here, a hundred-dollar pair of Air Jordan Nikes there. I dread the day he's old enough to drive.

“I got home at one
A.M
. that night, as usual, but he wasn't up watching TV or in bed. I always bring him home a snack and we sit up and talk for a while. But he wasn't here.” She shrugged. “After the fact, the neighbors told me that every night after I left for work, he'd go out, then scoot back in just before I got home. Had it timed right down to the minute.”

“Where was he going?”

“Hanging out at Cutler Ridge Mall, at the video arcade, the movies, playgrounds, friends' houses. I found some kids and the manager who had seen him at about ten that night at the arcade. Nobody saw him leave. He just didn't come home.”

“Would have been more neighborly if they had clued you in before he disappeared,” I murmured.

“Well, we aren't too popular around here. He was in some trouble last year. I think they hoped he'd get in another jam before I found out what he was doing.”

I thought of the woman in shorts and her reaction at the prospect of Butch's return.

“They wrote a story about Butch in your newspaper,” Andrea said brightly. “But you couldn't use his name because he was a juvenile.”

“What kind of story?” What was the name of this place? I thought. Bramblewood?

“They charged him with arson.” She tossed out the word casually, as though it had been nothing more serious than a parking ticket. “But we got it all straightened out. That was more than a year ago.”

“The bombs?” I said, with a sudden revelatory flash.

“He never intended to hurt anyone. He's a very curious boy, very bright.” She went to the sideboard, rummaged in a drawer, and handed me a folded clipping.
BOY BOMBER TERRORIZES NEIGHBORHOOD
.

It was from the
News.
I had been on vacation at the time, on Florida's west coast, in the arms of Homicide Lieutenant Kendall McDonald. Another reporter wrote the story.

Butch had blown up a neighbor's air-conditioning unit on Fourth of July weekend. It was no mindless bombing; he'd had a reason. His mother had complained that it was too noisy and kept her awake. The unit was totally destroyed, as was one wall of the town house. When police investigated, neighborhood children tipped them about Butch's other incendiary concoctions.

The entire town-house complex had been evacuated. Bomb-sniffing dogs led their handlers to three pipe bombs in Butch's bedroom.

He was eleven at the time.

The news story quoted a neighbor who had forbidden her children to associate with Butch after she caught her six-year-old halfway out the door with a clock. The child explained that Butch needed it “to build a time bomb.”

“The incident,” as Andrea Vitale referred to it, “didn't make us too popular in the neighborhood, but Butch was adjusting very well.”

“What happened in Juvenile Court?”

“We had to go to family counseling, group sessions at Jackson. After two or three times they said we didn't have to come back. He's been fine since,” she insisted.

Sure, I thought, sneaking out every night to do who knows what, missing five months now, but otherwise, he's absolutely fine. The memory of Alex Aguirre's smoldering car made me see Butch's stunts as more than childhood pranks.

Her eyes had drifted to the photos. “I'm just so damn mad at that kid for not calling to let me know he's okay. When he does turn up, I'm gonna give him a humongous welcome-home hug, then shake him till his teeth rattle.”

“So you feel he's all right? He has run away before?”

“Yeah.” She bit her lip and tension crept into her voice. “But this time it's different. He's starting to scare me.”

“How is it different?”

“There was no argument, like the other times, nothing to trigger it. Everything was fine. Things were good in school, they had put him in some classes for gifted students so he wasn't as bored. And he was in no trouble that I know of. What scares me most,” she said, brushing cookie crumbs off her uniform, “is that I have no idea what he's up to this time. He was never gone more than a few days before. Even then, he couldn't resist calling or sneaking in and out, playing games, when I was at work. He'd always call, you know, ‘Look at me, Ma.' What he's always wanted most is attention. He got none from his father. I gave what I could, but I was always busy supporting us. Every time the phone rings I expect to hear him say, ‘Miss me, Ma?' But it's not happening and that's odd. Some people around here are probably glad he's gone. But nobody realizes that this boy is gonna
be
somebody some day.” She smiled. “I wish you could meet him. This kid has really got what it takes.”

She reached for another cookie. “One other difference. He didn't take any of his toys this time. The only thing he may have had with him was his Swiss Army knife. You know the kind, it's also a nail file, scissors, a can opener. He got it for his twelfth birthday and it's not here anywhere. He probably carried it during his after-dark adventures, for protection. He's totally nonviolent but he's savvy, aware of the danger out there. I was always straight with him about that.”

She looked up at me, puzzled, as she munched. “Butch is not the kind of kid who simply disappears and is never heard from again.” She sighed. “He should have come to somebody's attention by now, if you know what I mean.”

She reached absently for another cookie and chewed thoughtfully.

It was easier to find my way out of Bramblewood than it was to find my way in. I didn't even notice the speed bumps. My mind raced, stringing the facts together in my head. When I got back to the office I checked my messages. None from my mother. Had she joined the missing boys in Never Never Land? I pictured her lost in Bramblewood, with Butch.