“Dixie? Antonio Molina—Tony.”
I had always called him Papa Tony, but his clipped tone made me abrupt too.
“Yes?”
“I had Joe give me your number. People are saying Ramón Gutierrez was shot by his wife’s brother. That’s what is going around, and you should know this.”
“Jochim?”
“Sí, Jochim. I have spoken to him, and I want you to hear what he has to say. Private, you understand?”
My heart fluttered, but I said, “I understand.”
“We will be at the Flores Cantina on Three-oh-one at five o’clock today.”
“Okay, I’ll be there.”
He rang off without saying goodbye, leaving me knowing that I had just agreed to keep anything I learned from Tony or Jochim to myself.
TWENTY-THREE
U.S. Highway 301 branches off Tamiami Trail, cuts through the middle of Sarasota’s municipal district, and continues as Washington Boulevard through a welter of dingy strip malls and stand-alone businesses. The cantina was on the west side, wedged between a run-down print shop and a take-out pizza place. The pot-holed asphalt parking lot was filled with pickups pulling metal mesh-sided trailers holding landscaping tools. Inside, recorded mariachi was blaring over Hispanic men washing down grit and grass clippings with cold cervezas.
Tony and Jochim were in a booth at the back, Jochim’s face taut with humiliation and resentment. Tony’s was stern and hard, the visage of a proud man made ashamed by one of his own.
Tony said, “Draw up a chair, Dixie,” which meant that both men were too macho to scoot over to make room for me.
I pulled a chair from a table behind me and sat at the end of the booth between them. Jochim hadn’t looked at me yet, but stared at a sugar packet in his square hands that he was tearing into fragments.
Tony gave Jochim a disdainful glare. “Tell the lady what you told me.”
Like a petulant child, Jochim shot me a hostile glance and remained silent.
Tony sighed. “Hijo, you have two choices. You can tell the truth to Dixie or you can go with me to the cops and surrender.”
“But I didn’t do anything!”
Jochim’s voice held such panic that several men heard him over the music and turned to stare.
Tony said, “I believe you, Jochim. If I did not, I would not provide you the chance to be a man.”
The sugar packet demolished, Jochim reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out a book of matches. He flipped the cover and began tearing the matches out one by one as if they were a smoker’s abacus.
He said, “The woman in that house, the nurse, asked Ramón if he would find somebody to get rid of her boss.”
I said, “You mean Mr. Kurtz?”
His eyes flicked to the side in a bloodshot glance. “Ramón just called him the boss.”
I took a deep, careful breath. “So Gilda asked Ramón to find a hit man to kill Kurtz.”
Jochim winced as if he couldn’t bear to hear it put so bluntly, but Tony nodded sternly.
Jochim said, “She told him she would pay a hundred thousand dollars for the job. That’s a lot of money, you know?”
Trying to keep my voice smooth and neutral, I said, “It would be tempting.”
He nodded eagerly. “With that much, we could go home, start a business, be with people we know.”
Tony slashed the air with his hand. “Tell her what happened.”
Jochim looked glumly at the matches and tore off another one. “Ramón and I decided I would go into the house while the man slept. He was sick, weak, I could smother him in his bed. Then I would strike Ramón on the head and knock him out.”
He paused and frowned. “I did not want to hurt my brother-in-law, but it was the only way to make him innocent. When he woke up, he would run to the house and alert the nurse, who would go to the boss’s room and find him dead.”
“But wouldn’t she already know you had killed him?”
“No, she told us to do it without telling her when. That was so she could be innocent too.”
These people not only approached murder with the klutziness of the Three Stooges, they had a strange definition of the word innocent.
“So what happened? How was Ramón killed?”
“I went there at the time Ramón said, a little after midnight. Ramón was supposed to take me to the door and let me in, but he wasn’t in the guardhouse. I went around the line of bushes to the front of the house, where I could see inside. Ramón was in the room carrying the iguana. The woman was there, and also the man. The woman was making hurry-up signs with her hands. The man was watching Ramón.”
He fell silent and pulled more matches out, tossing them on the table with quick, nervous motions.
“What happened then?”
He looked ashamed. “I ran away. I could not kill a man I had seen, you know? And he was not asleep. If he had been asleep in the dark, I could have put a pillow over his head and pressed hard until he stopped moving.”
Tony and I exchanged a look, both of us hearing not a fantasy of smothering a sleeping man but most likely a memory.
Jochim said, “I saw his face too. I would not touch a man with that face. Anyway, he did not look so sick or weak as Ramón said he was.”
I felt deflated, as if I’d expected Jochim to confess to killing Ramón and then in a burst of guilt accompany me to the sheriff’s office.
I said, “That doesn’t explain how Ramón got killed.”
“She killed him! It had to be her. I don’t know how it happened, but she had murder on her mind, you know? I’m sure it was her.”
Carefully, so I wouldn’t give away that Paloma had told me about the money, I said, “I’m sure you were disappointed not to get the hundred grand.”
“Very disappointed, but we are going home anyway, my sister and my wife and I.”
So much for hoping he might mention the man who had delivered the money.
I didn’t know what good the meeting had done, but when I stood up, I said, “Thank you for telling me this, Jochim.”
Then I met Tony’s eyes and tilted my head a bit to show gratitude without embarrassing him with anything gushy.
Gravely, Tony said, “I will talk to you later, Dixie,” by which I knew he meant that he expected me to keep my promise and that he was my good friend.
At the Kurtz house, I eased to a stop a few feet in front of a line of people stretched across the driveway. They still carried the same signs with quotes from Revelation. I was tired of them and their ancient fears, but with every intention of being polite, I put down my window and leaned my head out.
A tall man in a rough brown robe detached himself from the crowd, came to my window, and leaned his hands against it. His long fingers on my window were pale, marking him an import brought in for this current craze. His eyes were intelligent and watchful, without whites all around the pupils like most fanatics.
I smiled politely. I swear I did.
At the top of his voice, he hollered, “Harlot of Satan! Have you come to lie with the beast? To worship the man with Satan’s mark?”
All my polite juices dried up.
I hollered back, “No, numb nuts! I’m here to take food to a pet in the yard! You have a problem with that?”
A light flared in his blue eyes, and his hands tightened on the edge of my window.
“The wages of sin are death, daughter. Woe be unto those who consort with the beast or those who bear the mark of the beast.”
“Yeah, well, woe be unto those who block traffic and harass those entering private property. Move your people out of the way or I’ll have the cops move them.”
He let a beat go by, then raised his palms in a gesture of conciliation and stepped back from the car. “Go in peace, daughter.”