The Last Witness

[THREE]

Little Palm Island, Florida

Sunday, November 16, 7:15 P.M.

The resort’s intimate dining room featured warm wooden floors, a high-pitched ceiling, and a wall of windows that offered a picturesque view of the pristine white beach-lined with tall, leaning palm trees-and beyond it the vast Atlantic Ocean. The room, which was maybe half full, held only twenty-five round tables, each with seating for four. They were nicely separated so that the guests-and their conversations-would not be on top of one another.

Amanda Law, wearing a simple but elegant linen dress and sandals and with her thick hair now unbraided, sat between Chad Nesbitt and Matt Payne, who looked almost like twins-Chad was a little shorter and stockier-both dressed in khaki slacks, cotton knit shirts, navy blazers, and deck shoes.

Matt had his stainless steel Colt.45 Officer’s Model tucked inside his waistband at his right hip.

“Even if you had broken bones, you’d be smiling, too,” Chad said, stirring his second Myers’s dark Jamaican rum and tonic cocktail. “Goodbye, Communism. Hello, Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.”

“And that happens all the time down here?” Amanda said as she delicately squeezed a slice of lime into her glass of club soda.

Chad shook his head. “There are far more quiet landings than a wild running aground like today. I heard someone today say it’s up to eight thousand people so far this year-and that’s just here, not counting coming up through Mexico. The Cubans are willing to do anything for freedom. You’ve heard of the wet-foot, dry-foot policy?”

Matt shook his head.

“What-” he began, then stopped as he saw the waiter approaching with a full round tray.

“If you’ll please pardon the interruption,” the waiter said, placing an enormous bowl before Amanda. “For the lady, our coconut lobster bisque to start.”

“That looks wonderful,” Amanda said. “Thank you.”

He put a plate in front of Chad and said, “The seafood seviche with crisp plantain chips.”

And then he put two plates in front of Matt, who was taking a sip of eighteen-year-old Macallan single malt whisky.

“Crab fritters, sir,” the waiter said. “And this, of course, is the tuna and oyster sashimi you called about earlier.”

Matt looked at the waiter and was about to ask a question when he saw another waiter coming toward them with an enormous round plate piled high with finely crushed ice, on top of which were two dozen oysters on the half shell. The waiter put it on the table at the empty place setting.

“Enjoy,” the second waiter said, then both left.

“Can anyone tell me,” Matt said, looking between Amanda and Chad, “whose brilliant idea it was to instruct servers to say, ‘Enjoy!’ Is that an order? The entire purpose of why we came is to enjoy the meal. It’s not like we need to be told to.”

“Want to explain why you’re about to enjoy two dozen raw oysters?” Amanda said. “And oyster sashimi?”

“I thought you knew, my love, that these mollusks have a special, shall we say, romantic effect,” Matt said, smiling as he held up one of the half shells with an oyster. “Please enjoy one. . and by one I mean help yourself to a dozen, of course.”

“Really, Matt?” Chad said, shaking his head and grinning. “You’re absolutely shameless.”

“I think, Romeo, that you’ve already caused enough trouble being overly romantic,” Amanda said playfully, picking up her soup spoon. “And thanks to the condition you put me in, I have to be careful about not eating high-mercury fish. I really wanted some tuna.”

“Well, suit yourself,” Matt said, then put the half shell to his lips and slurped the oyster out. Hand on his chest as he chewed, he looked at Amanda with an exaggerated face of extreme gastronomical satisfaction. Then he swallowed, exchanged the empty shell for a full one, and looked at Chad. “What were you saying about that dry-wet policy?”

“Wet-foot, dry-foot,” Chad corrected, as he piled seviche on a plantain chip. “It’s U.S. immigration policy, unique to Cubans trying to come to America. If a Cuban national can step on U.S. soil, he or she can stay, and a year and a day later becomes nationalized. If, however, they get intercepted at sea-anywhere on the water, even if it’s a foot deep, that’s the ‘wet foot’-they get shipped back to the Castro Brothers’ Happy Havana. Which they just risked their lives to flee-maybe for the third or fourth time-because the Castros don’t exactly welcome them home with a brass band.”

Chad ate his seviche, and began piling more on another chip.

“And the cops try keeping them from reaching land?” Amanda said.

“As you saw, that can get almost comical, a real cat-and-mouse catch-me-if-you-can game. But they have to. Otherwise, if word got to the Cuban masses that everyone could just step ashore and begin enjoying the bounty of America, Florida would be flooded. I mean, c’mon, they’re not exactly rushing to Haiti, which is half the distance. It’d be worse than during the Mariel Boatlift. Remember that, Matt?”

“Yeah,” Matt said, after washing down another oyster, “when Castro let something like a hundred thousand leave in 1980. And it happened again in ’94. The luckier ones landed packed in boats barely able to float, carrying little more than their Elegua.”

“‘Elegua’?” Amanda parroted.

“The West African-Caribbean Santeria god that they believe controls their paths, their destiny. Elegua is represented by a clay disc that’s the face of a child. Castro cleverly cleared out his jails and loony bins, forcing them onto the boats. The more desperate lucky ones used rafts smaller, and less seaworthy, than a bathtub. Little more than tire tubes and blocks of Styrofoam lashed together. God only knows how many did not survive the trip.”

Amanda considered that for a moment and, sadly shaking her head, said, “And you acquired this vast knowledge how?”

“Next door, around the campfire when we were kids camping on Big Munson. And, later, on family trips to the Caribbean.”

“So now,” Chad went on, “out of Miami’s Little Havana, the exiles there have created a cottage industry of sorts. They charge Cuban-Americans upwards of ten grand to have a relative snuck out of Cuba and snuck ashore here.”

Matt nodded thoughtfully. “Which explains why that guy was determined to get those refugees onto land. A dozen people at ten grand each comes to a hundred and twenty thousand reasons.”

“What happens to the guy running the boat?” Amanda said.

“Likely nothing,” Chad said. “Often he’s a Cuban, too. They don’t earn even a dollar a day-and that’s in pesos, which are worthless anywhere but Cuba. So, he’s broke. But if he produces a Cuban national identity card, he’s home free-literally. Even if he gets locked up, he probably won’t serve any real time, and when he’s released, wouldn’t surprise me that someone slips him a nice cash payment. And maybe puts him and his Elegua in another boat for another run.”

“Frightening,” Amanda said.

“Yeah,” Chad said, then drained his drink. “But I’ll tell you what’s really becoming frightening.”

“What?” Matt said.

“Philly. Just when you think it’s bad enough, things get worse.”

Matt grunted. “No argument there.”

“I mean it’s something new every day. Did you hear what happened to Maggie McCain’s place? Daffy drove by it this afternoon. I just heard about it shortly before that.”

Daphne Elizabeth Browne Nesbitt was Chad’s wife and the mother of Matt’s toddler goddaughter. The Nesbitts lived minutes away from Maggie in Society Hill, at Number 9 Stockton Place, one of three enormous (four thousand square feet) units built behind the facades of a dozen pre-Revolutionary brownstone buildings.

What the hell is up with this? Matt thought.

Everyone knows but me? Damn it!

“Maggie?” Amanda immediately said. “Is she okay? What happened?”

“A home invasion,” Chad explained. “At least that’s what we think it started as, but then her place caught on fire. Luckily the fire station is close by. I didn’t want to bring it up at dinner, but. .”

“Her house was invaded and burned? When?” Amanda said, then muttered, “How come I didn’t hear?”

“Happened late last night. She wasn’t home, as far as anyone knows. But word from the neighbors is that a Crime Scene van was there long after the fire truck guys left.” He looked at Matt. “I’m surprised you don’t know anything about this.”

No shit. Me, too, Matt thought.

But now I know why Jason called. They must be treating this as a homicide.

How exactly does Maggie fit in? Clearly she is missing. .

“I don’t know about a lot of Killadelphia cases that are working,” Matt said. “Don’t forget that our City of Brotherly Love averages a murder a day.”

He felt Amanda looking at him and met her eyes. He could see sadness in them-and that her mind was in high gear.

Amanda then pulled out her cell phone and placed a call. A minute later, wordlessly, she hung up.

“Maggie didn’t answer,” Amanda said matter-of-factly, looking at her phone as she thumbed the screen. “I got one of those canned mechanical messages saying that her voice-mail box is full. And then it hung up on me.”

She slid the phone back in her purse.

“I just texted her to call me. I wonder if Sarah has heard from her. .” she said, pulling her phone back out to send another text.

And that just answered part of the Black Buddha’s question.

Why the hell is Jason keeping this so secretive?

Well, she gave me my opening. .

“When did you last hear from her, Amanda?” Matt said.

“Maybe a week ago, after Maggie got back from her sailing vacation in BVI. I forget which day.”

“She was okay?”

Amanda shrugged. “She seemed to be. Why wouldn’t she be? I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. But then I was pretty caught up in my own world, making plans to come here and all.”

“Daphne,” Chad offered, “didn’t even know she was back from the islands.”

“I wrote Maggie a letter of recommendation for when she applied to UC-Berkeley,” Amanda said suddenly, wistfully.

“You mean Bezerkly?” Matt said derisively. “Home of Peace, Love, and Anarchists.”

Amanda shook her head.

“There are also normal people there, Matt. She was simply looking for a different environment. And boy did she find it. She’d followed a girl friend out for undergrad, then realized she really wasn’t a West Coast type. So she then decided, after two years, that it wasn’t for her. She said she came home to make a difference in Philly. And then I wrote another recommendation for when she went for her master’s degree at UP.”

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Matt said. “She could have gone and made a difference anywhere.”

“Yes, she could have. Someone else we know has similar resources and options.”

Matt met her stare-she doesn’t have to say what those glistening eyes are screaming, “Stop playing cop. .”-and after a moment raised his eyebrows.

“Touche,” he said.

She made a thin smile and nodded, then cocked her head and said, “What did you mean by that, Matt? ‘No good deed. .’? You don’t know something bad has happened to her.”

Well, I cannot tell her that Jason asked.

But after she gets over the initial shock of this, she’s going to put two and two together. .

He shrugged. “You’re right. I don’t know. Just a gut feeling.”

Amanda nodded thoughtfully, then put her napkin beside her plate and said, “Excuse me. I’m going to get some air.”

Matt immediately got to his feet and put his hand on her chair, sliding it back as she rose. Chad stood, too, absently wiping his hands on his napkin.

I shouldn’t have said that, Matt thought, looking at her sad face.

And so much for the oysters-nice job, Romeo.

If I knew it wouldn’t upset her more, I’d tell Jason I’d help.

Damn it. .