I bit my lower lip to control the trembling. “I don’t know. But I will find out.”
“Sey ...” He held me tighter.
“I’ve got to get back,” I said.
B.J.’s body tensed.
I pulled away from him and looked at his face. He was frowning and staring across the room.
“It looks to me like your friend keeps some bad company,” he said, his voice, now deep and strong, completely changed from seconds before.
When I turned to look, I saw a short, powerfully built man leaning over my vacant chair. James was speaking fast and gesturing wildly, the whites of his eyes showing brightly in the darkened dining room. He no longer looked like the calm, sophisticated man I had left at the table. The other man wore a bright, flowered Hawaiian shirt, and from his black hair and broad, flat nose, I guessed he might be one of the dancers from the show. His right hand grasped the back of my chair, and on the back of his hand was a tattoo that from that distance looked like a coiled snake. There was something familiar about him, but I couldn’t place where I had seen him.
“You know him?” I asked B.J.
“Yeah, Cesar Espinosa.” He seemed to spit out the name. “He used to work here for a while as one of the walk-on torchbearers in the show. He’s not Polynesian, he’s Mexican, but he sort of appointed himself as bouncer. He liked to get into it with customers who’d had too much to drink—you know, roughed them up for the fun of it, acted like he owned the place.”
“I take it you don’t like him much.”
“That’s an understatement. There was this girl working here. One of Vanu’s friends. She wasn’t Polynesian either; she was Chinese-Jamaican, an amazing exotic beauty. Her parents owned a convenience store, and her father was shot and killed there. She was only sixteen when she started here, still in high school, a bright, really nice girl, but she started dating Cesar right after her dad died, and she changed—quit school, ran away from home, got into drugs and prostitution. She still used to call Vanu sometimes, told him she wanted out, and then we heard she’d been found dead. They called it an accidental overdose, but Vanu always thought it was intentional, that that had been her way out. Cesar used her and then just threw her aside. She could not take the shame.”
“You said he used to work here?”
“Yeah, he quit about six months ago. I haven’t seen him around here since.”
“I wonder what the two of them are talking about.”
“It can’t be good. If your friend is a buddy of Cesar’s, be careful, Seychelle.”
“B.J., my ‘friend,’ James Long, is the director of a very reputable charitable organization. He wouldn’t be in that position if he was a lowlife or crook of some kind. This man’s in the limelight. They write stories about him in the newspaper for crissakes.”
“And you say I’m the one who is naive. Just promise me you’ll be careful.”
“Okay, okay.” I wondered if his distrust of James could have anything to do with his having seen James’s hand on my shoulder.
He placed a quick peck on my cheek. “Tomorrow, we need to talk.”
For an instant I felt a kind of hope rise inside me, a hope that maybe things could be different.
“You take care of yourself.”
He turned and passed through a side door into the backstage area.
When I returned to the table, Cesar Espinosa was halfway across the dining room, headed for the exit. “Sorry I took so long,” I said, settling into my seat.
“That’s all right.” James smiled. He looked completely calm; there was no trace left of the wildly animated speaker of a few moments ago.
“That man you were speaking to. Was he a friend?”
He looked surprised. “Him? No way. He’s an unsavory character who has dated some of the girls at the Harbor House. I try to warn them, but some young girls are just attracted to bad men. You know the saying ‘Good guys can’t win.’ ” He flashed those perfect white teeth and shrugged.
I nodded and grinned back at him like a smitten teen.
“Apparently he wants to see one of our girls now, and Minerva won’t put his phone calls through. Sometimes I can’t help feeling paternal about the girls. I want them to get their lives back on track. He’s not going to help them out in that direction.”
I nodded. It made sense. For now.
The night was cloudless when we left the Mai Kai, and James asked if he could put the top down. I told him I would have asked if he hadn’t, that I wasn’t exactly the sort to mind wind-whipped hair. We drove down to A1A and along the beach, and I felt like purring, nestled into that buttery leather admiring the few stars that could overpower the city lights and the velvet night wind that was teasing my face with loose wisps of hair. He put a Louis Armstrong CD in and we cruised to “What a Wonderful World.” I felt more than a little woozy from the wine, and it was only when we cruised past Bimini Lane and I looked down at the darkened outline of Harbor House that I started to sort through my confusion about what I was doing in a Jaguar cruising the beach with James Long.
James left me to my thoughts, and I added that to the list of things I liked about the man. For more than twenty minutes, we cruised along and reveled in another spectacular Florida night, the waves breaking in plankton-lit foam in the background, the parade of tourists with their sunburned glow in the foreground. Louis launched into “La Vie en Rose.” I was trying hard just to empty my mind, to let the cleansing breeze blow the events of the past couple of days away, but Collazo’s words kept coming back to me. Why were so many people connected to me turning up dead?
“Would you like to stop and walk awhile?” he asked as we approached the most populated stretch of the strip.
“Sure, that would be nice,” I said.
To my surprise, instead of heading for the beach, James turned up Las Olas Boulevard, away from the beach, and drove inland into the ritziest little shopping district in Fort Lauderdale. For a stretch of less than a mile, this quaint street was lined with old buildings— old by Fort Lauderdale’s standards, anyway—that had been turned into galleries, cafes, and boutiques. Big old oaks grew up in the street’s median, creating a canopy over the sidewalk eateries, and the homes just a block to the south were riverfront mansions. The area reeked of money, which is why it wasn’t exactly high on my list of frequently visited shopping spots.
James parked in the lot behind the Riverside Hotel and walked around to my side of the car to open the door. I always feel like a complete incompetent sitting in a car waiting for a man to open my door, but I was trying hard to be socially correct. Why, I wasn’t exactly sure. I had agreed to go out with this man in the belief that I would find out something about Harbor House that would provide some answers, and I found myself not doing a bit of interrogating, but rather wanting him to like me.
After a short stroll, James turned into an art gallery and walked over to a group of oils all clearly painted by the same artist. He didn’t say a word and didn’t look at me, in fact, he seemed to have forgotten I was there. He just stared at the paintings with a half smile.
From a distance, they looked like photographs. All five paintings were done in shades of black and white and gray, and they depicted very realistic objects against stark backgrounds: a single black enameled vase in an all-white room, a white sickle moon in the black sky, a black hand reaching for a silver knife on a white tablecloth. Two paintings hanging side by side were of matching eyes, huge eyeballs nearly a foot across, one in white skin, the other in black. Though you could not see the expression on the face in either painting, there was something disturbing about the eyes. I felt a chill looking into them. I knew the features outside the frame included raised brows, flared nostrils, and a mouth in an open scream. I had to look away.