Suspicion of Betrayal (40 page)

Gail read the latest details in the newspaper at breakfast on Friday, which had been sent up to their room. Anthony gulped his coffee, kissed her, and was out the door for a meeting with a bunch of Little Havana políticos at the mayor's residence. Ernesto had asked Anthony to fill in for him, a lousy thing to do to someone on a holiday.

Still exhausted, Gail went back to bed, hoping to sleep till noon or so, but she found herself watching the French doors, where a shaft of sunlight slowly moved across the carpet. She thought of Karen, who would be coming home tomorrow. Tonight Karen would see the fireworks with her father and grandparents in Delray Beach, and Dave would bring her back on Saturday. It was not Karen's return, precisely, that Gail was thinking of, but Charlie Jenkins. He had not seemed like the sort of man to have an interest in little girls. On the other hand, he would hardly have printed "pedophile" on his T-shirts.

Of course it had been Jenkins. And yet Detective Novick had asked
why.
Why had he written "die" on Gail's car? Why had he sent her the cat's head? Why did he hate her? Surely not because she had hassled him about giving him cash the day he fixed the wiring. He had come to the house a month or so before the first phone call. Had she done something then to offend him? And how had he known about her dead sister?

Gail was dropping a sundress over her head when she heard a querulous voice coming from outside the house. She quickly fastened the buttons, then went over to the French doors to look out. She heard it more clearly, a man yelling in Spanish. Stepping onto the narrow terrace, she held the wrought-iron railing and looked over the edge. From this angle she saw a straw hat and the shoulders of a tall, gaunt figure wearing a short-sleeved white
guayabera.
Ernesto Pedrosa. She saw the bushes move and heard a metallic snipping sound. The gardener came into view with a big pair of clippers. Pedrosa pointed with his cane, shouting,
"Mir'allí, ¿no tiene ojos?",
asking if the man had eyes. The nurse stood nearby with the wheelchair, but clearly Pedrosa was in no mood to be coddled.

"What's going on?" Gail asked.

The hat swiveled around, then tipped up. Ernesto swept it off and held it over his heart.
"Buenos días, mi niña."

"Buenos días, señor."

"The bushes have to be trimmed away from the house. People can hide there and look in." He glanced at the gardener, who had stopped working.
"Córtalo al suelo. "
The gardener murmured something and gestured toward the bush, shaking his head.
"¡Al suelo, te digo!" He
raised his cane, and when the gardener rushed toward the bush, Pedrosa laughed. The clippers flashed through the foliage and the branches fell to the ground.

Pedrosa backed up to be able to see Gail more easily. "Manolo doesn't listen. I want the bushes removed, but he tells me no. What do you do with a man like that?"

Gail asked, "Why are you taking the bushes out?"

"So no one can hide there."

"But who would hide in the bushes?"

"The communists! Here in Miami the FBI arrested ten spies of the regime, but there are more, many more. Where is my grandson?"

"He's ... having a breakfast meeting at the mayor's house." Gail glanced at the nurse, who lifted a shoulder in a shrug.

"Yes, I remember." Pedrosa smiled at her.
"Que linda eres. Mi nieta.
May I call you my granddaughter? You are very pretty there on the
balcón."

He took another step backward and stumbled. Gail gasped. He tottered and stretched out his arm for balance, catching himself on his cane. Leaning on it, he slowly bent over to retrieve his straw hat.

"You really should sit in your chair."

"To hell with the chair. The bricks are loose." He turned around. "Manolo!" He yelled at him to forget about the bush, come fix the walkway immediately. The gardener dropped the clippers and came to see about the bricks.

Pedrosa fanned his face with the hat.
"¿Dónde está Anthony?
Ah! He's in a meeting with the mayor." He smiled apologetically at Gail and dropped his hat back onto his head. "Forgive me for deserting you. I have much work to do." He went to stand over Manolo to supervise the adjustment of the offending brick.

Gail wondered if she should find Nena or Aunt Graciela and tell them that Ernesto was not himself today. But the nurse was on hand, and the old man occasionally took these mental detours. In any event, the women were busy decorating the house with red, white, and blue banners and balloons before the rest of the family arrived.

She heard her telephone ring and went back inside to pick it up from the dresser. The male voice on the other end said, "Ms. Connor? This is Michael Novick. I thought I'd find you in today. I hope I'm not disturbing you."

"No, please. It's all right. Is there a problem?"

"Could you drop by the station early Monday? There are a couple of things I wanted to discuss with you."

"About Charlie Jenkins? What is it?"

"A couple of things I noticed. I can't talk now. I was just on my way out."

"Don't tell me that, then make me wait till Monday," she said. "Karen is coming back tomorrow. Should I leave her with her grandparents?"

"Are you busy right now?" he asked.

"No."

"Do you have time to meet me for coffee?"

On the western edge of Coral Gables, where green and shady streets became a sunburned collection of strip shopping centers and small stucco houses, there was a drugstore from the fifties that still had a counter with rotating stools covered in red vinyl. The radio was tuned to the oldies station, and the wall was decorated with an airbrushed painting of a gleaming '57 Chevy coupe. Elvis portraits were prominent.

Gail got there first and ordered iced tea. Detective Novick arrived ten minutes later in shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt with a leaping swordfish on the front. She didn't recognize him until he unclipped his sunglasses from his regular frames and walked toward the booth where she was sitting. He wasn't wearing a gun, but his short haircut said cop. He sat across from her. The waitress came over with a coffeepot, and he ordered breakfast.

When she was gone, Gail said, "I'm grateful for your time."

"No problem. I live down the street."

Over his coffee Novick recounted the evidence so far, then said, "We didn't find anything at the scene to suggest that Charlie Jenkins did
not
commit suicide, let me say that right away. However, any unwitnessed, violent death is open to interpretation; otherwise defense lawyers would be out of a job. Like the Simpson case. You start poking at the small inconsistencies, you start wondering, even though common sense tells you what the answer is. With your case the answer is, Jenkins was behind the harassment and he shot himself. If you make a list of all the evidence that he did do it, and put it on this side"—Novick held his hands like a balance scale, letting his left hand sink to the table— "and you put issues you can't resolve on the other, then the evidence far outweighs the anomalies."

"I know the evidence," Gail said. "What are the anomalies?"

"First—and this isn't in any kind of order—there are the questions that you asked on the phone. Do his actions at the scene match his harassment of you? Second, the sexual connotations. Sex was obvious in the way he died, but absent in the calls, the vandalism, and particularly in what he did with the photos of Karen."

"You brought that up before," Gail said. "When I saw the photos, you asked if I saw anything sexual in them, and I didn't."

"The medical examiner found no semen on your daughter's underwear, but it could be that Jenkins was unable to climax, or that he wasn't even trying to. There are reasonable explanations, just as there could be a reason he mailed you the head of the cat. You could devise a theory how he found the name and address of your fiancé's law partner and how he knew the name of your deceased sister. But then there's the florist. My partner called last week, wanting to know who placed the order for the roses that were delivered to your office. The manager finally called back yesterday. They can't find any record of flowers being sent to you at that address, and no record of anyone named Renee placing an order."

Gail frowned. "Does that mean they can't find it or that there wasn't one?"

"Well, there could be several explanations." Novick sipped his coffee. "Their record keeping is bad. Someone stole one of their envelopes. Or Jenkins had the flowers sent to his address under another name."

Gail was shaking her head. "They were delivered to me."

"Did you see who brought them?"

"No, but my receptionist did."

"Maybe she can describe the man she saw."

"If it had been Charlie Jenkins," Gail said, "she would have recognized him."

"Here's a theory: It was a friend of Jenkins, doing him a favor."

"Well, it's a theory."

The waitress appeared. Novick took his arms off the table to make room for the plate. "Here you go, hon, two sunny side up with hash browns and bacon. Miss, are you sure you don't want anything?"

"No, I'm fine, thanks. Maybe some more tea."

Novick reached for the salt and pepper. "I have a question on another subject, if you don't mind." Gail asked him what it was. "It's about Wendell Sweet."

"Are you handling that now?"

"We stay up on each other's cases when possible, and this one interests me because his wife is your client." He tapped pepper onto the eggs. Gail averted her face from the glistening yolks staring back at her.

"What do you want to know?" she asked.

"Ricardo Molina's name came up at Mrs. Sweet's house. Garcia, who is the lead detective on the case, told me that Mr. Quintana mentioned that name as a possible suspect. Do you recall that?"

"No, I might have been in the kitchen with Jamie at the time."

With his fork Novick dragged a piece of toast through the eggs. Gail's stomach lurched, and she concentrated on the little boomerang shapes in the laminate on the tabletop. Novick said, "We don't think Molina's organization did it. This wasn't Molina's kind of transaction. He deals in multiple hundreds of kilos, not a few sold out the back of a car in a gym bag. We don't know who did it. In fact, we can't link Wendell Sweet to any dopers. He wasn't even on our radar screen."

"Someone made it look like a drug deal," Gail said.

"It's been suggested." Novick forked some hash browns. "The day you were at the station looking at the color copies, you asked me about Wendell Sweet. Then you asked about Hector Mesa. Last week you asked me about Ricardo Molina." Novick gazed across the table at her through his glasses. Gail said, "And?"

"And you might want to tell me if there's a connection here we could have overlooked."

"If there is, I don't know about it."

He had an odd way of looking at a person, Gail thought. He didn't blink, but he didn't stare either. His brown eyes were neither accusatory nor suspicious. They were patient.

"Detective Garcia says that Mr. Quintana came over to Mrs. Sweet's house after a phone call from Harry Lasko, who had spent the night at the house—"

"They aren't intimate," Gail said. "Jamie and Harry are close friends."

"Friends, then. And Mr. Quintana is, I believe, an associate of Hector Mesa—"

"No. Mesa is an associate, or employee, or friend, of Ernesto Pedrosa, Anthony's grandfather."

That brought a slight nod. "I think I heard that Mesa is employed by Mr. Quintana's law firm."

Gail reluctantly said, "This is true. He's a courier. What is the point?"

"There isn't one. I just have these names—Lasko, Quintana, Sweet, Mesa, Molina—and I stack them up and turn them around one way or the other, seeing what fits."

"The other night you said not much of anything fits."

"But sometimes they do. Garcia went to talk to Hector Mesa, but he's out of the country. His wife said he left Monday, but the neighbor says Hector was around on Tuesday. Wendell Sweet was killed Tuesday night."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Why? Because I thought you were the kind of person who's intrigued by anomalies."

"Oh, I am." Gail looked back at him. "Did you invite me for coffee so I could ask you about Charlie Jenkins, or so you could ask me about Wendell Sweet?"

He smiled. "It could have been both."

"You don't really expect me to speculate on anything having to do with my fiance, do you? Or his clients? Or people he knows?"

"I suppose not. That's all right. There's nothing wrong with loyalty."

She realized that Detective Novick assumed she was protecting someone. "I'm not sure I like the way you put that," she said.

He spread his hands, a mute apology.

Gail said, "So. Do I bring Karen back tomorrow or not?"

As before, he took his time answering. "If she were my daughter ... I probably would. But this time I'd be careful with my keys."

The musicians from Jamaica, three men in bright pink shirts, were setting their steel drums on stands under the palm-frond hut. Gail had driven under a banner at the entrance to the parking lot announcing that they would play for the festivities at the Old Island Club. The restaurant was not open yet, but one of the cooks was loading charcoal into the split-barrel barbecue grill in the side yard.

Gail saw Dave carrying one end of a long wooden picnic table. He and the waiter on the other end maneuvered it into the shade of a coconut palm. Dave dusted his hands and nodded at Gail.

She said, "I'm here to collect the other half of my beer."

Dave sent the waiter for one Red Stripe and two mugs. He and Gail sat down at an umbrella table on the deck. A parade of sailboats and motor yachts moved out of the marina, and sunlight glittered like broken glass.

"This ought to be some party," she said.

"See that barbecue grill? And the beer kegs? Totally illegal. No city permit." Dave laughed. "What the hell. One final blow-out for the staff. They deserve it. They've worked hard for me. But . . . it's over. Next week I'm handing the keys to the bank." His smile faded as he looked at Gail, who sat on the bench beside him. "The deal with Marriott is dead."