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.
28
Instead of leaping to the dock and running away, Maureen rounded the corner of the cabin toward the aft deck and disappeared into the shadows. Like a kid, she probably thought she could escape by making herself invisible. That if she hid from me, I wouldn’t know where she was.
The rain had slackened to a fine mist, with steamy fog ghosting dark silhouettes of sleeping gulls and pelicans. Trembling with suppressed fury, I moved cautiously on the wet deck looking for her. Maureen had got away with using people all her life, and I was determined not to let her get away with framing Harry for kidnapping Victor. Maureen was taller than me by a good five inches, but I’d always been more athletic, and I had righteous outrage feeding me. When I found her, I knew I could overpower her.
I crept around a group of deck chairs, but she wasn’t behind them. I peered behind a pile of coiled ropes and under a table lashed to the deck. She wasn’t there. There was only one other place she could be. I stopped at the tower of Harry’s crab traps. They made a perfect shield for a woman who thought she had the right to use old friends for her own selfish purposes.
I went still as a mongoose, waiting for her to give herself away.
After several silent minutes, the brim of her pink rain hat rose from behind the stack, then her big apprehensive eyes looked over its top at me.
By then I was a volcano ready to blow. All my anger and frustration and disappointment gathered into a bellow that would have traveled five miles in the jungle.
“DID YOU MISS ME?”
She recoiled as if I had put a bullet in her head, and pushed the stack of traps toward me. More furious with every moment, I caught the upper trap in both hands as it fell. I heaved it at her, and she made a noise like a squeaking mouse as she ducked away. She was afraid of me now. For the first time since she’d known me, she was seeing the side of me that had faced down evil and won, a side of me that had killed a man.
Made clumsy by fear and the mist-slick deck, she tried to run, but one of her pink vinyl boots crashed into the escape hole in one of the traps she’d knocked over. Flailing the air for balance, she grunted and kicked her leg as if she would shake it off, but it’s not that easy to disengage your foot from a crab trap. Especially if you don’t know the size and shape of the exit. Especially if you don’t know you have to line your foot up exactly with the hole to extract it. Especially if you’re being attacked by a she-devil from hell.
Lowering my voice to a normal level, I said, “Harry’s been loyal to you for as long as he’s known you. I won’t let you hurt him any more than you already have.”
Her mouth thinned, and I saw her mother’s face. “Oh, you’re so high and mighty! Always thinking you’re smarter than everybody else, better than everybody else. In high school it was always, ‘Don’t sleep with boys, Mo, you’ll get pregnant. Don’t smoke dope, Mo, it’ll make you a loser.’ Well, look who’s the loser now. I’ve got a big house and lots of money, and you’re a pet sitter with a dead husband and a dead baby.”
To this day I don’t know why I moved toward her the way I did. To tell the truth, I don’t remember intending anything, I simply surged forward. She shrieked and hobbled backward, eyes wide and scared. Awkwardly dragging the crab trap on one foot, she hit the low railing, lost her balance, and shrieked again. Her vinyl raincoat was slippery and the railing was wet. In a blink, she toppled over the railing and vanished into the rain-darkened water.
My anger evaporated. Now I was guilt stricken and horrified. Maureen had never been a strong swimmer. Neither was I. We were more at home on the beach than in the water. I ran to the forward deck and looked desperately for help. Not a soul. I ran back to the place where Maureen had gone over and looked into the water. The bay isn’t deep, but Maureen was panicked and she had a heavy crab trap attached to one foot. She could easily become disoriented and not know which way was up.