Блейз Клемент - Raining Cat Sitters And Dogs

I put the cellphone back in my pocket. But before I could replace the note in its stationery box in the drawer, the door to the cabin opened. I jammed the note in my pocket and turned around.

Maureen was dressed for rain. She wore a pink knee-length vinyl raincoat with matching shiny boots and a broad-brimmed hat. She looked cute and ridiculous and repellent.

With water still running off me onto Harry’s immaculate floor, I said, “I know what you did.”

She batted her eyes, all innocence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, can it, Mo. I’ve had it with your lies.”

She seemed to weigh her response options, and went with woman-to-woman confidential.

“Dixie, Victor wasn’t a good husband like I always said. He used me like a toy—one of those ball-hitting things with the Ping-Pong paddle and the ball on a rubber band. You know? Well, he hit me one time too many, and my rubber band broke.”

She paused and smiled, so pleased with her metaphor that I could see she was memorizing it so she could use it with the next person she met.

She said, “I tried to leave him, believe me, but I could never go through with it. He would cry and beg, and then he would hit me. And then when I promised not to leave, he’d give me a big piece of expensive jewelry. Harry thinks I stayed because of the jewelry, but that’s not true. Victor was just a lot stronger than me.”

Through cold lips, I said, “So you killed him?”

Her pink lips parted in surprise. “Is that what you think? That I killed my own husband? I can’t believe you’d think that!”

The smart thing would have been to pretend to believe her. But I was beyond smart. I had gone into honest.

I said, “I don’t know what to believe anymore. If you didn’t kill him yourself, you know who did. So who was it, Mo? Who killed Victor?”

While I steeled myself to hear her name Harry, she studied her manicure. “I don’t know his nam e. Victor never introduced us.”

If that was going to be her story, Harry was doomed.

I said, “Victor didn’t leave with some old buddies from South America, did he? You made all that up.”

“We can’t all be strong like you, Dixie.”

“Being honest isn’t a muscle test, Mo. It’s a choice, like whether to wear underwear.”

She tried for an arch smile. “I don’t like underwear.”

“Listen to me, Mo. Unless you can explain how Victor was killed, there’s a very good chance that you, or Harry, or maybe both of you are going to be charged with murder. So start explaining and maybe I can help you avoid a lot of trouble.”

She looked hopeful. “It was because of his business. Like I told you, he had a lot of enemies because of his business.”

“His oil broker business.”

“It wasn’t exactly oil.”

“Victor sold drugs, didn’t he?”

“No, silly, he imported drugs. You make it sound like he was some street pusher. He dealt directly with the supplier—Colombia, Afghanistan, places like that. He had it delivered to men called captains, like in the army, and they passed the stuff out to people under them. He was a businessman. He didn’t hurt anybody.”

“You’re talking about heroin and cocaine?”

She avoided my eyes. Even Maureen wasn’t dumb enough to believe those drugs were harmless.

I thought of Jaz and all the other kids whose lives have been distorted by drugs. I thought of young men like Paulie and his friends, boys who sell drugs that people like Victor bring into the country. The guys at the bottom get money for fast cars and cool shoes before they end up dead or in prison. Men like Victor get megayachts and trophy women like Maureen and millions in cash in their home safes. It was cold comfort that Victor had ended up dead too, because for every “businessman” like Victor who disappears, a line of others are ready to take his place.

I said, “Tell me what happened when he was killed. The truth, please.”

She said, “He was meeting somebody down at the gazebo, somebody who came in a boat. He did that a lot, so I didn’t think anything about it. I heard a gunshot and then I heard a boat going away real fast. I knew something bad had happened so I went down to the gazebo and Victor was lying there dead.”

She looked up at me with puzzled eyes. “There wasn’t much blood. That surprised me. And it wasn’t like his head was blown open or anything. It was just a neat little hole in his forehead.”

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.”