South by Southeast (10 page)

Storm clouds on the horizon had brought a breeze with them to the beach, churning the waves in a pale imitation of the Pacific. Cannon was no doubt terrified that it might rain.

“Any news?” I said.

“You'll know when I know,” she said curtly. The wind was blowing east, so we had decent odds, but she was still nervous and needed someone to take it out on.

I was in full makeup, which would make it hard to eat, but I piled a few overpriced crab legs on my plate. If I smudged any of the simulated rot covering my face, Elliot would fix it later. Makeup effects were Escobar's trademark. In
Nuestro Tío Fidel
, the actor playing Castro had aged fifty years onscreen, and Escobar maintained he'd used zero computer effects. After working with Escobar on
Freaknik
, I believed him. The beautiful hardbodies who'd been sunning themselves in previous scenes were a shambling horde of zombies. Some of them were lurching. Hungover, not acting.

Since no one could go swimming in costume, our only diversion at the beach was the overcrowded cantina a stone's throw from
the set. The Jamaican proprietor was doing brisk business selling beer and tropical drinks while the local television news played on the mounted flat-screen. Tourists snapped photos and posed with their favorite walking corpses. Cannon would have been wise to break up the party, but it wasn't up to me. I glanced back at her pacing the shoreline on her cell phone, her shouts obscured in the wind.

I don't know what made me look up at the television screen. The volume was so low that I could barely hear it, aided by a stream of rapid closed captioning.

. . . 
found dead this morning in Biscayne Bay
 . . .

The words caught my eyes first. The face came next, and I almost dropped my plate.

A sketch artist's rendering of a woman's face. Dark hair. Olive skin. Dark eyes. Attractive.
In her early to mid-twenties
, the streaming explanation said. The face could have belonged to any one of tens of thousands of young Latina women in South Florida.

But it was Maria. The sketch didn't do her justice, but I didn't need a photo to know.

The food's smell of steamy garlic and butter twisted my stomach.
Presumed drowning . . . As yet unidentified . . .
the streaming said. Drowned! Ice cooled my blood. Chela had accurately predicted her friend's fate, down to how she would die.

I was about to ask the bartender to turn up the TV's volume, but my phone vibrated in my pocket. Chela. I didn't want to take the call until I knew more, but I didn't have a choice.

Chela didn't say anything, but she was breathing so fast that I was afraid she would hyperventilate.

“Shhh,” I said. “I just saw it, too. Calm down, honey. We don't know it's her.”

But that was a lie. She knew, and I knew.

“That's her haircut
exactly
,” Chela said. “Her eyebrows. Ten, it's her!”

The face lingered on the screen. The artist's rendering was so detailed that it looked like a loving gesture, an homage. It was Maria.

I'm usually a quick thinker, so I didn't like the numbness clogging my mind. The implications grew with each breath. “Ten, Maria couldn't swim,” Chela told me. “There's no way she paddled out into the waves or whatever and got in trouble. It's so not her.”

I didn't have a comeback. This might become a homicide investigation, and Chela was tangled in it somehow. She might not have told me everything that had happened at Phoenixx. The dead girl on TV could have been her.

“Ten, we have to do something!” Chela said. “I'm calling the police—”

“Wait,” I said. Despite Dad's status as a retired LAPD captain, the police weren't usually my friends. Chela didn't even really exist—she was living under an alias, a runaway I'd raised as a secret. We might be wrong, but being right might hold grave consequences, especially if Chela were right about a killer targeting prostitutes. Before Chela brought her name into a police investigation or left an anonymous tip, I needed to know more.

“Wait for what?” Chela said.

“For me. I'm coming home.”

Louise Cannon's eyes widened when I told her as much of my story as I dared. She was so absorbed she forgot to step away from me, her blue eyes falling into mine.

“My daughter has a friend who might have died, and she's very upset,” I said. “It might turn out to be nothing, but we just saw it on the news. Body pulled out of the water. I need to run home and hold her hand. When you need me, just text me.”

“Oh my God,” Cannon said. Her face paled to milk before my eyes. For the first time, I noticed how tiny she was, barely five-two and built like a sparrow. Fragile. I put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. She tried to hide her flinch; she nearly pulled away but
stopped herself. I made a mental note that Louise Cannon didn't like to be touched.

“It just happened, so she's in shock,” I said.

Cannon nodded. “Of course she is. Yes, go. Do whatever you need.”

But her eyes said something different. I'd just been transformed into the kind of producer's problem she had feared. Her mind was a flurry of curses.

“I'll stay in makeup,” I said. “I can be back a half hour after I get the word.”

“Take your time,” she said. “Really. I understand. I'm so sorry. It's fine.”

Louise Cannon was a first-class liar, but on that day I appreciated the fantasy.

Showing up on South Beach in full zombie regalia doesn't turn as many heads as it used to. I scared a couple of young children before I got to the hotel, but most of the adults either ignored me or gave me mildly bemused grins. Jaded, just like L.A.

Chela, however, shrieked when I walked through the door. She'd never seen the costume.

“Freak!” she said. “Ten, you scared the effing crap out of me.”

At least she sounded like Chela again.

While Marcela was out shopping for her last-minute wedding, Chela, Dad, and I had a conference. As I had done with Cannon, Chela left out strategic parts of the story—namely the prostitution—but Dad gave me glances that told me he knew full well that something was missing. While Chela dabbed her eyes with tissue, we worked out a plan.

Chela would contact the girl who had called her about Maria's purse and tell her what she'd learned on the news. She would urge
her to go to the police with the purse in case Maria could be identified. If Maria had an arrest history, I pointed out, identification would only be a matter of time. But the police needed to know that local clubgoers suspected a pattern of drowning simulations, and that might not show up on a database.

Chela stared down at the tabletop with red-rimmed eyes. “I've known her longer than any of those girls,” Chela said. “I should be the one to tell the cops.”

I hoped Dad wouldn't weigh in on Chela's side, but he shrugged. “Don't see . . . the point,” he said. “You don't have the purse. Other girls . . . were with her last, not you. You heard the drowning theory second-hand. See how . . . it plays out.”

Chela pondered his logic in silence. I wondered how much of Dad's pragmatism was fueled by his desire to preserve peace for his wedding. My fears were far worse: headlines and publicity dragging Chela's name, and history, into the public eye. Her story might not matter on its own, but I'd just been granted a respite from tabloid headlines after my last public case—and as my “daughter,” Chela would be fair game, especially since she was older than eighteen. The
Enquirer
would have a field day with this story's lurid combination of sex and death. Chela deserved her privacy.

“We still don't know if it's Maria, Chela,” I said.

Reluctantly, Chela nodded. She probably knew full well what Dad and I were thinking. Dad reached for Chela's delicate hand across the table, and then mine, scabbed with movie gore.

“Let's say . . . a prayer,” he said. “Hope it's not your friend. But pray for whoever she is.”

We should have been praying for ourselves.

THE SKY TURNED
gunmetal gray for Dad's wedding.

But Dad and Marcela didn't mind or notice. They sat holding hands inside the art deco courthouse, posed beneath framed photographs of the Miami Beach mayor and President Barack Obama. Dad and Marcela were the only couple in wedding attire in the waiting area for the wedding room. Marcela had settled on wearing the same sparkling, clingy dress from her birthday party; the only addition was a partial veil pinned across her hair. The rest of the couples wore uniforms, jeans, shorts, or skirts and slacks from work, probably on their lunch hour. The younger couples had small children with them, fussing with sippy cups. Together they were fugitives from tradition, a portrait of collective courage.

“Smile,” Chela sad, snapping photos with her iPhone.

Marcela beamed. The women stared at her veil as if they wished they'd thought of wearing one, but without envy.
Good for her
, their gazes said.

A lady friend of mine, Alice, would have pointed out how the tacky wood paneling and too-bright fluorescent light overhead killed some of the romance. A golden urn displayed outside the weddingroom
door was full of dust-gray plastic flowers. We might as well have been waiting for traffic court.

I hadn't thought about Alice in a long time. She was an actress of advanced years who had been one of my first and most reliable paying clients. Travel companion, Scrabble player extraordinaire, unmatched storyteller. She never stopped paying me, but our client-customer relationship had ended almost from the start. When she died, she left me her house in her will, and now my family shared her space. Our space.

As I stared at Marcela and Dad, I remembered how Alice and I had sometimes stopped laughing mid-joke to catch each other's eyes. She'd kept her affection for me hidden in her checkbook. A beautiful woman almost forty years my senior was the closest thing I'd had to a girlfriend before April. We'd swapped secrets; I'd told her about the mother I'd lost as a baby, and she'd revealed her body's slow transformation to time as my fingers traced her soft, loose skin. We had decided from the start that she was too old for me, so it had never mattered that I might be in love with her. Or to think that loving her mattered.

Dad and Marcela deserved better than a crowded waiting room at a courthouse. Why hadn't I insisted that they get married in a church? That was what Dad must have really wanted. He and I didn't have friends or family in Florida, but why hadn't someone from Marcela's family come to celebrate with her? I checked my watch. We'd been waiting an hour, and we might be there another hour if the line didn't pick up. Four couples were ahead of us.

“You sure there isn't anybody else you want to invite?” I asked Marcela.

Marcela shook her head, and I saw the spark of sadness she tried to hide in her eyes. “There's such a thing as too much family.”

“Got that right,” Dad said.

Marcela knew how her family felt about Dad. I wondered if her relatives had declined outright or simply made up excuses. Hell, I
was lucky to be on the guest list myself, since I'd been wary of Marcela for so long. But she was a good woman. Even back at the nursing home, she'd never fed me lies about my father. She'd always told me what she thought, even when the news was bad. She'd reported every improvement Dad made to help me find hope I couldn't have found on my own. “Always believe,” she'd said.

“How do you have so much family here?” Chela said. “Weren't you born in Cuba?”

Marcela nodded. “Yes, but so many of my relatives fled here in 1959, while they could,” she said. “Then Operation Pedro Pan brought me here, too. And my cousins.”

“Pedro Pan?” I said.

“Like the story of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys,” she said. “Lost girls, too. Thousands of us. Our parents didn't want us indoctrinated in Fidel's schools, so even if they couldn't get out themselves, they sent us here through Operation Pedro Pan. A boat ride to America. Thousands! It's history—the largest exodus of unaccompanied children in the western hemisphere. I was one of the younger ones. I went to live with my aunt and uncle in Hialeah. My mother is gone now, but she came here five years later. I never saw my father again. I was always waiting.”