Hetty said, “Any word?”
“No. You?”
“Not a thing. She knows my number, Dixie. And I know she trusted me. She would call if she could.”
I could have called too. Or Hetty could have called me. I had stopped for the same reason she’d been waiting for me—we needed each other’s personal assurance that everything that could be done was being done.
I said, “I guess all we can do is wait.”
“Wait for what?”
I didn’t want to answer her. I was very afraid we were waiting for somebody to stumble on Jaz’s body.
Perhaps because she feared I might voice those thoughts, she said, “It’s going to storm any minute now.”
I opened the door and stepped outside. I said, “If I hear anything, I’ll let you know.”
I trotted to the Bronco, and Hetty and Ben stood in the doorway and watched me back out. With the soft light behind them, they looked like the answer to a hopeless person’s prayers.
The Village Diner was almost deserted, and the people inside were craning their necks toward the windows while they ate at double time. Judy scooted to my booth with my coffee, and Tanisha waved at me from the kitchen pass-through to let me know she was on my breakfast.
Judy said, “It’s gonna come a real gully washer.”
“Looks like it.”
She said, “Dixie, did you know that kidnapped guy?”
“I went to school with his wife, but I only met him once or twice. Why?”
“Oh, they keep talking about it on the news, and they said the wife went to high school here, so I thought you might know them, all of you being natives.”
“He wasn’t from here.”
“They said Venezuela.”
“I think that’s right.”
“Something’s mighty fishy about that whole thing, Dixie. I hope that wife isn’t a good friend of yours because I’ll bet a million dollars she did it.”
I said, “You got a million dollars to pay me?”
“I’d have to pay it in installments, but I know I’m right.”
“I don’t know how she could kidnap her own husband. I mean, who would she be kidnapping him from? And then she’d have to pay herself off? I don’t think so.”
“Well, but see, what if she killed him and then got somebody else to dump him out of a boat? What if he was already dead when he drowned? They’re not saying exactly what killed him, have you noticed that? They say they won’t tell until they’ve done an autopsy. Why haven’t they done that yet?”
That’s the thing about being an ex-deputy. People think they can ask me questions about criminal investigations and that I’ll know the answers.
Tanisha dinged a bell to signal that my breakfast was ready, and Judy scooted away to get it. Good thing, because what she’d said made me feel like somebody had slapped me upside the head. I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of it myself. Could Maureen have killed Victor? I wondered if Guidry had already considered the possibility.
If she had, then the money I’d carried to the gazebo hadn’t gone to kidnappers at all, but back into Maureen’s safe, and Maureen had used me sixteen ways from Thursday.
The rains came just as Judy put my breakfast down. The air inside the diner seemed to drop a few degrees, and the muffled roar of falling rain shrank the space to a refuge.
I ate my breakfast without a single glance at the windows. My mind was too busy thinking about what Judy had said to pay attention to a storm. For sure she’d been right about Victor being already dead when he was thrown overboard, and as soon as the medical examiner did an autopsy, that would be public knowledge.
If it also became public knowledge that Harry Henry had made the ransom call, the world would assume that Harry had killed Victor Salazar and that he had a million dollars in ransom money stashed somewhere. If Maureen had killed Victor herself, would she let Harry take the rap? It was a dumb question. Of course she would. If Maureen had to name the one person in the entire world who deserved her greatest loyalty, she would name herself.
I didn’t linger over coffee, but left while the rain was still slanting down in opaque sheets. I was drenched by the time I got to the Bronco, and shivered when I started the motor and a blast of cold air came from the AC vents. I let the defogger run long enough to get rid of the moisture on the glass, started the wipers front and back, and eased into sparse traffic. I headed south toward home, but when I got to the turnoff to my lane, I kept going south.
I wanted to talk to Harry Henry again, and this time I wasn’t going to let him lie to me.
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.