Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs

27

At the marina, rain and steam rising from the bay shrouded boats and birds, and made the few scurrying people indistinct. Wet as a drowned rat, I walked down the wooden dock looking for Harry’s house boat. According to local gossip, it was a forty-foot relic from a time when house boats were mostly boxy cabins set on pontoon-floated decks. Even without that description, I would have known it by the figurehead lashed to the front—a department store mannequin in a painted-on bikini. Harry probably thought it added a sophisticated touch.

Off the dock, a quintet of white yellow-billed pelicans sailed through the downpour like majestic dowager swans. One of their plain brown cousins had compactly folded himself neck-to-back on Harry’s deck, and an immature blue heron with mud-colored feathers stood atop the cabin perfecting his neck stretches.

A skiff from an anchored pink catamaran was tied up on one side of the house boat, and a runabout was on the other side. A man shiny-wet as a dolphin was aboard the runabout gathering up empty beer cans and dropping them into a black garbage bag.

Nodding to him, I stepped off the dock to Harry’s deck and pounded on the cabin door. “Harry, it’s Dixie! Are you in there?”

The only response was the sound of rain and waves slapping against pontoons.

I circled the main cabin, peering into the shadows for Harry or Hef. All I saw were clean boards and carefully stored equipment. Harry might be eccentric, but he was neat. Fishing equipment took up the port side—rods of every type for freshwater fishing, a line of gaffs arranged from a three-footer to a six-footer, along with buoys, sinkers, cast nets, bait nets, fishing line, snorkels, and spear guns. Harry took his fishing seriously. He even had a chest-high stack of wooden crab traps ready—five of them, the legal limit for one person. A length of fine cotton twine had been tossed over the stack for tying the traps’ exit doors closed. I like those exit doors. If a trap is left underwater too long, the twine disintegrates and the exit door swings open so the crab can escape.

Back at the door, I knocked again, just in case.

Behind me, the man from the runabout hollered, “Harry’s not there.”

I turned and yelled through the rain. “You have any idea where he is?”

“Key’s above the door! Women use it all the time.”

Before I could tell him that I wasn’t one of Harry’s women, he gave me a knowing grin and walked away, swinging his plastic bag with a jaunty air as if he weren’t soaking wet and walking through hard rain.

I waited until he was out of sight and then felt above the door for a key. Yep, it was there, but I pulled my hand down empty. It was one thing for a woman to use the key to open Harry’s door if he’d told her to use it. But Harry didn’t exactly expect me. And he hadn’t exactly given me permission to enter his house boat when he wasn’t there. Which would make it a little bit like breaking and entering if I went in.

On the other hand, Harry’s neighbor had told me to enter. You could even say he had given me permission to enter. He might not be authorized to give me permission, but how could I know that? I had shown up at Harry’s door, and a man who could very well be his best friend in all the world had told me to use the key. So I asked myself what any responsible, law-abiding person would do. And the answer was that a reasonable person would use the key and go in and wait for Harry.

I reached up again and got the key. I looked around to make sure nobody was on any of the other slipped boats watching me—just in case I might be lying to myself. Then I slid the key into the lock and pushed the door open and hurried inside.

The cabin was as neat as the deck. Square room with pecky cypress walls hung with framed photographs of sea and shore life. Single bench bed covered by a quilt neatly tucked in. Immaculate galley kitchen with an eating bar. Shoved against the wall, a long wooden table with two drawers on its outer side. The top was loaded with careful stacks of Sports Illustrated and Reader’s Digest. I didn’t know what was in the drawers.

Three things were obvious: One, Harry wasn’t home. Two, I was doing something that any court in the world would say was a violation of the law, not to mention just plain bad manners. Three, I wanted to know what was in those table drawers.

Their contents were as organized as everything else. The first one held checkbooks, boxes of printed checks, a hand calculator, a package of AA batteries, and a collection of pens and sharpened pencils. The second drawer had a phone book, some warranty papers for a boat motor, a digital camera, and a box of nice linen stationery. I opened the box. It didn’t look as if Harry had ever used the stationery because the display envelope was still under a flat ribbon tied around the paper. The box also held a square pink envelope like greeting cards come in. My fingers trembled when I pulled out the paper folded inside it.

Even after fifteen years, I recognized the loopy handwriting, the humpbacked letters, the little open circles for dots on the i’s. I suppose people who don’t grow up keep the same handwriting they had when they were teenagers. As I read it, I could hear Maureen’s voice.

Mrs. Salazar, we have your husband. If you want him returned alive, put a million dollars in small bills in a duff el bag and leave it in your gazebo at midnight tomorrow. Do not call the police or tell anybody. We will be watching you, and if you talk to anybody, we will kill your husband and feed him to the sharks.

Under my breath, I whispered, “Oh, Mo.”

Now I knew why Maureen had been so sure what the kidnapper had said on the phone. She had written the script. Probably made several drafts before she’d decided on the final one, then gave it to Harry to read when he called her.

She had also sullied my memories of an innocent time that had been precious to me, a time before she chose money over love, and before I learned that choosing love doesn’t mean you get to keep it.

The question was: What should I do about it?

Some old friendships are like cozy nests you can crawl into when you need comfort. Others are like giant squid, with tentacles lined with toothy suction cups that attach themselves to you and leave permanent scars.

I had let Maureen use me because her father had abandoned her and her mother had been a shrew. I had understood her, and I’d let compassion make me a martyr. So which one of us was the dumb one?

I pulled out my cellphone and punched in Guidry’s number. His voice mail answered, which allowed me to be brisk and businesslike.

I said, “Maureen Salazar wrote the script that Harry Henry used when he called her to demand ransom money for Victor’s kidnapping. If you should happen to get a search warrant to look for it on Harry’s house boat, you’ll find it in a drawer in a long table.”

I put the cellphone back in my pocket. But before I could replace the note in its stationery box in the drawer, the door to the cabin opened. I jammed the note in my pocket and turned around.

Maureen was dressed for rain. She wore a pink knee-length vinyl raincoat with matching shiny boots and a broad-brimmed hat. She looked cute and ridiculous and repellent.

With water still running off me onto Harry’s immaculate floor, I said, “I know what you did.”

She batted her eyes, all innocence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, can it, Mo. I’ve had it with your lies.”

She seemed to weigh her response options, and went with woman-to-woman confidential.

“Dixie, Victor wasn’t a good husband like I always said. He used me like a toy—one of those ball-hitting things with the Ping-Pong paddle and the ball on a rubber band. You know? Well, he hit me one time too many, and my rubber band broke.”

She paused and smiled, so pleased with her metaphor that I could see she was memorizing it so she could use it with the next person she met.

She said, “I tried to leave him, believe me, but I could never go through with it. He would cry and beg, and then he would hit me. And then when I promised not to leave, he’d give me a big piece of expensive jewelry. Harry thinks I stayed because of the jewelry, but that’s not true. Victor was just a lot stronger than me.”

Through cold lips, I said, “So you killed him?”

Her pink lips parted in surprise. “Is that what you think? That I killed my own husband? I can’t believe you’d think that!”

The smart thing would have been to pretend to believe her. But I was beyond smart. I had gone into honest.

I said, “I don’t know what to believe anymore. If you didn’t kill him yourself, you know who did. So who was it, Mo? Who killed Victor?”

While I steeled myself to hear her name Harry, she studied her manicure. “I don’t know his name. Victor never introduced us.”

If that was going to be her story, Harry was doomed.

I said, “Victor didn’t leave with some old buddies from South America, did he? You made all that up.”

“We can’t all be strong like you, Dixie.”

“Being honest isn’t a muscle test, Mo. It’s a choice, like whether to wear underwear.”

She tried for an arch smile. “I don’t like underwear.”

“Listen to me, Mo. Unless you can explain how Victor was killed, there’s a very good chance that you, or Harry, or maybe both of you are going to be charged with murder. So start explaining and maybe I can help you avoid a lot of trouble.”

She looked hopeful. “It was because of his business. Like I told you, he had a lot of enemies because of his business.”

“His oil broker business.”

“It wasn’t exactly oil.”

“Victor sold drugs, didn’t he?”

“No, silly, he imported drugs. You make it sound like he was some street pusher. He dealt directly with the supplier—Colombia, Afghanistan, places like that. He had it delivered to men called captains, like in the army, and they passed the stuff out to people under them. He was a businessman. He didn’t hurt anybody.”

“You’re talking about heroin and cocaine?”

She avoided my eyes. Even Maureen wasn’t dumb enough to believe those drugs were harmless.

I thought of Jaz and all the other kids whose lives have been distorted by drugs. I thought of young men like Paulie and his friends, boys who sell drugs that people like Victor bring into the country. The guys at the bottom get money for fast cars and cool shoes before they end up dead or in prison. Men like Victor get megayachts and trophy women like Maureen and millions in cash in their home safes. It was cold comfort that Victor had ended up dead too, because for every “businessman” like Victor who disappears, a line of others are ready to take his place.

I said, “Tell me what happened when he was killed. The truth, please.”

She said, “He was meeting somebody down at the gazebo, somebody who came in a boat. He did that a lot, so I didn’t think anything about it. I heard a gunshot and then I heard a boat going away real fast. I knew something bad had happened so I went down to the gazebo and Victor was lying there dead.”

She looked up at me with puzzled eyes. “There wasn’t much blood. That surprised me. And it wasn’t like his head was blown open or anything. It was just a neat little hole in his forehead.”

I didn’t offer any explanations, so after a pause she went on.

“I knew he was dead, and I knew the men trying to get Victor’s business had done it. There wasn’t anything I could do about him being dead, and if I called the cops and reported it, they would come investigating Victor’s business. I thought they might take the money or the house, the cars and boats, maybe all of it. So I went to see Harry, and we came up with the idea of a kidnapping. See, if Victor was kidnapped, it wouldn’t look odd that he’d disappeared, and nobody would know how he’d made his money. So Harry brought his boat around to the gazebo and we tied Victor’s ankles to an anchor and then Harry took him out to deep water and dropped him overboard. Then he went home and waited until late that night and called me and left that message.”

“And you came to see me.”

“Yeah. You were cool to help me, Dixie.”

“After I took the money to the gazebo and you drove me home, you went back to the gazebo and got the money, didn’t you?”

She looked proud of herself. “It wasn’t really money. It was phone books.”

I felt like banging my head on Harry’s walls. There hadn’t been anybody watching me from a boat when I walked down that dark path to the gazebo. There hadn’t been any money in the duff el bag. I had been a total dope.

I said, “Why the press conference?”

She looked surprised at the question. “That’s what people do, Dixie. Rich people, I mean. When a rich person’s been kidnapped, the family calls a press conference.”

I said, “They’ve identified Harry’s voice on the ransom call.”

“I know. I feel bad about that.”

“Do you understand? It means they think he kidnapped Victor.”

“Well, they can’t prove he did it. He doesn’t have a record or anything. I don’t think he’ll have to serve time.”

My hands itched to smack her. I took a deep breath and decided to come at her from another angle.

“You said Victor’s killer was one of his rivals. You must have some idea who he was.”

She shook her head. “It could have been a lot of people. See, some big shot from Colombia contacted them all and said he was coming here this week. He’s going to put the entire North American operation in one broker’s hands, so people are coming from all over the place to find out who the main guy will be. Victor expected it to be him. I think some other broker killed him to keep him from going to that meeting.”

It made my head swim to hear Maureen speak of drug kingpins as brokers, but what she’d said made sense.

I said, “Did you hear a name for the guy coming from Colombia?”

“No, but Victor said he was one of Escobar’s people. I don’t know who Escobar is, but Victor said you don’t screw around with one of his men. He sounded pretty scared.”

I would have been scared too. Pablo Escobar was once the bad-ass head of the Medellín drug cartel in Colombia. He’s been dead over a decade, but his former associates still use his name to instill fear. One of Escobar’s men coming to Sarasota would send an earthquake through the drug world.

“You have to tell them the truth.”

She shook her head like a four-year-old offered a bite of spinach. “I can’t do that, Dixie. That would get me in a lot of trouble. You know, they might think I was Victor’s business partner or something.”

“If you don’t tell, I will.”

She looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time. Baby gophers probably look like that the first time they poke their noses out of the ground and see daylight.

I said, “Mo, I know about the script you wrote for Harry. You directed him to make that ransom call.”

Outraged, she said, “He told you about that?”

I pulled the note from my pocket. “I found it. I’m giving it to the police.”

It was stupid of me to wave it at her. Maureen was tall and long armed and quick. With a look of feral cunning, she snatched the note from my hand and ran out the cabin door with me hot behind her.