Flat voiced, Guidry said, “You carried a million dollars down to Mrs. Salazar’s dock and left it for kidnappers.”
I firmed my jaw and looked him in the eye. “It isn’t illegal to pay off kidnappers, and that’s what Maureen chose to do. She said it was what Victor had always told her to do if he got kidnapped.”
Guidry said, “How well did you know Victor Salazar?”
“Barely. He and Maureen went off somewhere to get married, and I don’t think I was in the same room with him more than once or twice. He wasn’t what you’d call friendly.”
“What do you know about his business?”
“Maureen said he was an oil broker.”
“Tell me about the million dollars.”
“It was in twenty-dollar bills. Maureen put it in a pink duff el bag.”
“You saw the money?”
I crossed my legs, and a muscle twitched in Guidry’s jaw.
I said, “The money was already in the duff el bag when Maureen came to get me.”
“So you didn’t actually see it.”
Fine hairs on my arms stood up. “What are you getting at?”
Guidry studied me for a moment. “You trust Mrs. Salazar?”
My finger traced uneasy loops on my knee. “Maureen was a good friend in high school.”
“Honest and aboveboard?”
I cleared my throat. “I wouldn’t say Maureen was dishonest. Not really. Not much.”
He didn’t answer, and when I finally looked at him, I knew he was waiting for an explanation. A personal explanation.
I said, “It was complicated. We both had alcoholic parents who’d abandoned us. Nobody else understood what that was like, so we sort of supported each other.”
He let a beat go by, then said, “Mrs. Salazar told me she’d talked to you and that you’d delivered the money. I just wanted to corroborate what she said.”
I took a deep breath. “On the news, they’re saying that Victor drowned. Is that true?”
He shook his head. “He was already dead when somebody dumped him out of a boat.”
“How?”
“Contact shot to the forehead.”
“Like gangland execution style?”
“What makes you think that?”
I shrugged. “On TV crime shows, when somebody’s shot in the forehead, it always means organized crime.”
“You have any reason to think Victor Salazar was part of organized crime?”
“I told you, all I know about Victor Salazar is what Maureen has told me, and she says he’s an oil broker. You know what an oil broker does?”
He said, “Salazar’s ankles were tied to an anchor. Some snook fishermen snagged him in the Venice inlet by the riprap.”
In warm water, it doesn’t take long for a dead body to accumulate enough gas to float to the surface—but not a dead body bound to a heavy weight.
I said, “If he was attached to an anchor—”
Guidry compressed his lips as if he was afraid he might smile. “The rope they used was too long.”
My mouth tried to find something to say, but all I could do was stare at him and imagine a dead body bobbing upright just under the water’s surface, with a rope running from its ankles to an anchor on the silty bottom.
For Guidry, the fact that Victor had been anchored with a rope so long that it allowed him to float to the surface was an amusing fact in an otherwise gruesome homicide. He probably wasn’t even terribly surprised, since most criminals are caught because they do stupid things that make it easy to catch them.
For me, the too-long rope was a red flag that signaled more strongly than ever that Harry Henry had been involved in Victor’s kidnapping. Harry was the only person in the world dumb enough to anchor a dead body with a too-long rope.
Guidry and I didn’t have much to say to each other after that. We said our goodbyes and he left, each of us mumbling something about talking later. I didn’t know how Guidry felt, but I felt oddly ashamed, as if I’d blundered into an X-rated movie and hoped nobody saw me.
I would never have imagined Harry Henry capable of kidnapping or murdering anybody, but every intuitive bone in my body thrummed that he was up to his handsome cheekbones in Victor’s death. Harry had been in love with Maureen since we were in high school, he was loyal as a dog, and if she had asked him to kidnap Victor, he would have done it. But would he commit murder for her?
My mind felt like a pinball machine, ricocheting between awful images of Jaz taken by young men who wanted to keep her from testifying against them in a murder trial, and the possibility that two people I’d known and liked practically all my life might have colluded to kill a man.
And then there was Michael, who was downstairs with a hand swollen from hitting a U.S. marshal. I had caused him to turn into an avenging angel, and all his vengeance had proven unnecessary. He probably felt foolish, and I needed to go down and explain everything to him.
But as I started down the stairs, Michael slammed out of his kitchen door and strode across the deck to the carport like a man on a mission. He didn’t even notice me on the stairs, just got in his car and peeled out.
Everybody but me seemed to have a definite purpose.
Wearily, I went back inside, took a long shower, and crawled into bed. When I woke, I was a lot less tired but no less depressed about the state of my world. A peek over the porch railing at the cars in the carport told me that Michael had come home, so I got dressed in a hurry and went down to talk to him. It was time to tell my big brother everything that was going on.
I found him and Ella in the kitchen, Ella at her preferred spot on a barstool, and Michael at the cooktop stirring something simmering in a huge pot.
I sniffed the air. “Is that chili?”
Even to me, my voice sounded pathetically hopeful. Michael waved his wooden spoon toward the butcher-block island.
“Get a bowl, I’ll give you some.” Then he did a double take at my face. “Other than kicking U.S. marshals down your stairs, what else have you been up to?”
I got one of our grandmother’s red-fired chili bowls out of the cupboard and handed it to him. I poured myself a mug of coffee from the pot heating on the counter.
Michael ladled dark brown chili into the bowl, put Godzilla-sized pinches of grated cheddar cheese and chopped onions on top.
“Hold on,” he said. “I’ve got corn sticks ready to come out of the oven.”
Ella and I watched raptly while he opened the door on the wall oven and hauled out two special pans filled with steaming golden brown cornbread sticks. With synchronized flips of his wrists, he turned both pans over a dish towel spread on the countertop, and with a smart rap sent hot cornbread sticks tumbling out. He put two on a plate for me and set it on the butcher block next to my chili.
I sat down at the island bar. “I guess you’ve heard about Maureen’s husband being kidnapped.”
He did a get-on-with-it motion with his hand. It wasn’t swollen, just a little red.
He said, “I know some snook fishermen found his body.”
Careful not to let the inside of my lips touch it, I crunched the tip of one of the hot cornbread sticks between my teeth. I chewed. I moaned softly. I took a bite of chili and moaned again. Venal sinners surprised to wake up in heaven would not have been more grateful.
Michael poured himself a mug of coffee and sat down across from me. Ella lowered her eyelids and gazed worshipfully at him.
“So what does Maureen’s husband have to do with you?”
“You know that night she came here? That’s what she came for, to tell me he’d been kidnapped. She’d got a call from the kidnappers asking for a million dollars.”
“Okay.”
“She wanted me to go with her to deliver it.”
He raised an eyebrow. I ate several more bites of chili in case he snatched it away after I’d told him the rest of it.
I said, “She came and got me the next night and I carried a duff el bag full of money down to a gazebo at their boat dock. Then she brought me home.”