Upside Down

22

In the open pool cabana, behind the sleekly modern concrete-and-glass house, a fire dancing in the small metal-mesh wastebasket positioned on a slate bar top was mirrored orange-red in the lap pool's crystal-clear water. Marta Ruiz, who sat on a stool at the outdoor bar before a cassette player, was at the end of an hour spent going through the stack of audiocassettes she had taken from the Porter house.

“Not here,” she announced.

Frustrated, she jerked the final audiotape out and tossed it into the wastebasket inferno. Arturo, standing outside the cabana biting his fingernails, uttered a long string of obscenities, then stomped around in the wet grass beside the rain-slick patio. Before listening to the cassettes, Marta had inspected each of the strips of negatives he'd taken from the dead lawyer and thrown them all into the same fire.

“I'm fucking cooked!” Arturo yelled.

“It isn't good,” Marta agreed. “Let's stay calm. We don't know that she has them either. The negatives could be anywhere Amber was during the days she was missing.”

“The tape…”

“If such a tape even exists,” Marta said, trying to calm him.

“All the police saw was an open machine, right? Probably there was no tape inside it. But if there was, it has my voice on it, Amber said my name a couple of times! It has my voice! I think I said Mr. Bennett's name! It has the fucking hits recorded on it!”

“Unfreak, Turo,” Marta said calmly. “There probably isn't a tape.”

“That's easy for you to say! Your balls aren't in the vise.”

“It's always counterproductive to freak. You are a professional. Anyway, Mr. Bennett doesn't know what might be on the tape, and the cops didn't find one.”

“Oh, so now there is a tape,” he said sourly.

“Whether there is a tape is not yet relevant to the situation,” she told him. “What Bennett is most worried about is the negatives-”

“Negatives which he didn't mention,” Arturo interrupted. “How dare that strutting rooster be angry with me, when he didn't bother to mention them in the first place!”

“Which also is beside the point. The tape can't prove anything against Bennett.”

“Is that right? Oh, sometimes I forget you know everything.”

“Insult me all you like, but I am the one by your side, Turo,” she said. “Bennett is all right because what people say to each other about him isn't proof. Without those negatives to give those statements credibility and provide a motive for him sending you to kill them…”

“Well, if he had told me about the negatives, I would have made that stupid bitch tell me where they were before I killed her.”

“Unfortunately Bennett won't be concerned with that,” Marta said.

“But it isn't my fault!” Arturo yelled. “He didn't say a fucking thing about any fucking negatives.”

“Watch your mouth,” she scolded. “Foul language is the crutch of the ignorant.”

“I'm sorry,” Arturo said. “Mr. Bennett only said she stole eight pictures. Never once did he mention anything about any negatives. If he had-well, he didn't.”

“Here is the problem as I see it.” Marta's eyes were on the flames consuming the tapes. “The negatives tie Mr. Bennett to a crime for which he can be prosecuted and perhaps executed.”

“Executed for sure. Anybody sees what he was doing to those people, he's a dead man.”

“That is his main concern, which for the moment overrides any others. I don't care about the negatives. It's a consideration, because one of Bennett's alternatives is to think that you have them and that you might use them to blackmail him. Another thought he is going to have is that you can tie him to the hits today and all of the jobs you've done for him in the past. And maybe he is going to worry because you saw his dirty little pictures.

“He will start thinking about cutting his exposure and punishing others for his mistakes. After this settles down, he's going to feel the need to clean up. I expect his police pals will help him do it. Or he might bring someone in. There's nobody local with the ability.”

“He was stupid to make the pictures and to keep them. How can he blame me? Stupid… whore-painted face… potbelly… wig head!”

“Men like him don't ever think anything is their fault,” Marta said. “We have to get the girl, because even if she doesn't have tape or negatives she saw you. And she certainly heard your name.”

“Nobody saw anything. I didn't see her, and the place was small with nowhere to hide. I looked everywhere in those rooms, and I made sure nobody was there. I always check. The kid wasn't in the bathroom down the hall or anything. There were not any schoolbooks or book bag, which means she came in after. If she saw me from a distance outside the office, so what?”

Marta exhaled, and like a patient parent she said, “You say that all you like, but that girl knows about Mr. Bennett's crime and about his connections with the authorities. Maybe the negatives were somewhere in the office.”

“I wasn't looking for any negatives.”

She nodded. “It doesn't matter anyway. But somehow the girl knows, and if she has the negatives and the tape she is going to figure out someone to give them to pretty soon.”

Arturo frowned. “She wasn't there. I bet she just came in and then listened to the tape. Maybe on the tape Amber said Bennett owned some cops or something.”

Marta had to fight to keep from slapping Arturo. “A child who just finds her mother dead will not sit down at a desk to listen to some stupid tape before she calls the cops-before she runs for help. No. If the girl had come in from somewhere else after you left and discovered the body, she would have gone screaming bloody murder for help, or sat there in shock until the bodies were found. She's twelve years old, Turo.” She pointed at her forehead. “Think like a twelve-year-old girl. That shouldn't be too hard for you.”

“I can't think like a girl,” he snapped. “Before you were twelve, you had killed a man already.”

“Because the law didn't do its job.”

“At that age you were screwing-”

“She is not like me,” Marta cut in, suddenly furious. “Unless she knew that Bennett owned cops, she would have called 911 first. And because no decent mother would tell her child that sort of thing, Amber must have told the lawyer all about it and the kid must have overheard it. If there was a tape, and the girl knew about that, then she took it. If she saw the negatives she certainly has them. She was hiding in a cabinet, behind a curtain, under the desk, or stuck to the ceiling like a fly, or who gives a damn where she was. You missed her! She heard enough to know not to call the cops. That means she will have to tell someone else, and if she has the tape and the negatives she will give them to someone who isn't a cop Bennett can buy off. Maybe it will be another lawyer or a friend of her mother's. We have to find her first, or whoever is hiding her, and make sure that doesn't happen.”

Arturo smiled and nodded. “Absolutely. Once we get everything and close the door on this, Mr. Bennett will trust me again.”

“Comb your hair.”

Arturo produced a comb and calmly put his hair in perfect order.

Marta watched Arturo, his pretty face painted by the dying firelight. She would find the girl and kill her. Then she would kill Mr. Bennett before he could have Arturo killed.

Whatever else happened, nobody was going to harm her Arturo.