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.”
He waved to the people stretched across the driveway.
“Let her pass.”
He said it with such authority that they sulkily moved to the edge of the driveway, where they looked mournfully at me as I drove through. But I wasn’t paying much attention to them. I was too shaken by what I’d seen on the man’s wrist. What kind of religious fanatic wears an ultra-thin Movado wristwatch? Now that I thought of it, I realized he’d had manicured nails too. I had a feeling I’d just talked to one of Jessica Ballantyne’s FBI agents in disguise.
When Kurtz answered the door, he was almost as nasty to me as the phony monk had been.
He grunted and flapped his hand toward the kitchen. “Just take care of the iguana’s food, please. I’m busy now.”
I squeezed my lips shut before my tongue managed to tell him what I thought about his attitude, and watched his back move through the darkened living room toward the open door to the wine room. The dim red light in the room reminded me of my dream and of how frightened I’d been of Kurtz. He didn’t seem threatening now, just rude.
It took me all of three minutes to slice banana and yellow squash and zucchini and mix it with some chard and romaine leaves for Ziggy, another two minutes to take it out to him. I didn’t look to see if Kurtz had any leftovers to eat. I didn’t tell him goodbye, either, just got in the Bronco and zipped out. As I passed the
marchers, I didn’t see the man I’d talked to. Maybe he’d become bored with the whole thing and gone home. Or maybe he was making a report to Jessica Ballantyne.
It was past sunset when I got home. A congregation of snowy egrets and great blue herons had gathered on the beach to pick at goodies washed ashore on slow-rolling wavelets. Seagulls circled overhead, making rude noises to announce their prior claim to beach flotsam. On the horizon, sailboats glided toward harbor bathed in the fading amber glow of a submerged sun. My dejection had lifted on the way home, and now I felt oddly expectant, as if I were waiting for a signal of some kind. I even scanned the sea the way wives of old whalers probably watched for some clue that the long and harrowing wait was over and their men were coming home to them safe and sound.
I didn’t notice Guidry’s car parked by Michael’s deck until I came out of the carport and started up the stairs to my apartment. He was on my porch, sitting at the round table looking out at the Gulf. As usual, he looked like an Italian playboy.
I said, “Why haven’t you returned my call?”
“I saw you at the Gutierrez funeral. I was surprised you were there.”
I dropped my shoulder bag on the table and heard a metallic clink that reminded me I hadn’t returned Ken Kurtz’s keys. Damn.
I sat down opposite Guidry. “I wanted to support Paloma.”
“Paloma?”
“Mrs. Gutierrez.”
“You know the guard’s wife?”
“I went to see her and talked to her and her brother. His name is Jochim. I trimmed her kitten’s claws too. She was going to have them surgically removed, but now I don’t think she will. It’s a cute little calico.”
Guidry pressed his fingertips to his closed eyelids. “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can say that will make you stop talking to people, is there?”
“Not really.”
“What the hell kind of breed is a calico?”
“It’s not a breed, it’s a coloring. It happens every now and then in every breed. It’s when a kitten has three distinct colors. If it’s a true calico the colors are pure white, inky black, and bright orange. If it’s a diluted calico, the colors will be pale and creamy. Paloma’s kitten is a true calico. It’s really cute.”
I heard the wistful note in my voice and shut up.
“This is why you called me? To tell me about a cute kitten?”
I narrowed my eyes at the smug bastard and considered exactly how much to tell him. I had promised Tony not to tell about meeting with Jochim, but I figured my meeting with Paloma was fair game.
I said, “Paloma told me a man brought her a hundred thousand dollars in cash. He told her it was insurance money. Then he told her Ramón would have wanted her to use it to go home to Mexico. I think they’ll leave soon.”
“She never told me that.”
I shrugged. We both knew people told me a lot more than they told him.
He said, “Did she get the man’s name?”
“No, and I don’t imagine he left a card. She said he was a skinny Anglo, but that’s all she remembered. Today at the funeral, I saw a skinny man in a suit outside on the sidewalk. He looked familiar somehow, but I couldn’t place him. Maybe that was the skinny Anglo who gave Paloma money.”
“She still have the money?”
“Jochim took it to the bank to put in a safe deposit box.”
Guidry reached inside his thin leather jacket and pulled out a notepad. He flipped some pages and said, “That would be Jochim Manuel Torres?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know his full name.”
“He’s a small-time hood, part of a ring selling stolen cars, mostly to illegal aliens.”
That answered the question of whether Jochim was as naive as his sister. What he was doing was a particularly cruel trick in which a stolen car is sold to a person with bad credit. The buyer agrees to pay exorbitant interest because it’s the only way to get wheels, and he doesn’t get title to the car until final payment. The title is a fake, so if he ever manages to pay the thing off, he’s driving a stolen car with a false title.
“Paloma said Jochim has been influenced by bad friends. She thinks he will get a new start with the insurance money, said they might start their own business in Mexico.”
Guidry raised an eyebrow, but put his notepad back in his jacket without saying what he thought about Paloma’s plans.
I hesitated, then went ahead and said it. “I also saw
Jessica Ballantyne at the funeral. She ran away when she saw me and I lost her.”