“I swear to God! I didn’t know. The first year we traveled and partied a lot. Buddy knew I hated leaving Miami. He kept saying we had to make it a clean break, put it behind us. He didn’t want me to subscribe to a Florida newspaper or listen to the news. I swear I didn’t know.
“I guess ignorance was bliss. I thought we had a future. For a while, it was great. Me and Buddy, we’da had gorgeous kids. I was at that age, you know, the old bio clock ticking away. If I was gonna have children, it was then or never. But Buddy didn’t want them. Said he’d had enough kids. But hell, it wasn’t like he was ever gonna see any of them again. I never understood that.”
She sighed.
“You ever see my act?” she asked, fixing herself another drink. “Too bad. Choreographed it myself. I wasn’t just some two-bit stripper. I was a classically trained dancer. The snake was my gimmick. The theme was the Garden of Eden. My hair was long, all the way down to my ass. It was artistic. Those were the days.”
“You keep the snake?” Burch glanced around the room.
Her big laugh boomed, hoarse and raspy. “Don’t worry. Buddy didn’t want it around. Hated seeing me feed it. We turned it loose in a park.
“Wish I still had it for company.” She downed her drink and fixed another. “It was a great pet.
“Those were the days,” she repeated, slightly slurring her words. “There’s something about getting naked in the spotlight. Gives a woman a sense of power. You know every man in the place is fantasizing about you. Chris always said that the power of a woman is stronger than an atomic bomb.”
“With twice the lethal fallout,” Burch said.
“What makes you so cynical, Sergeant? Strip clubs are magic places, full of erotic dreams and fantasies.
“Your partner knows what I’m talking about.” She laughed again and winked at Nazario. “I can see it in his eyes.”
“Myself, I always considered them perpetual crime scenes, twenty-four seven,” Burch said.
“Think about how tough dating is on a man,” she coaxed. “A lap dance at a strip club is cheaper. He doesn’t have to buy her dinner or promise to call the next day. And he can lie. So can she. Everybody lies. Sure, she’s working her way through college, or about to land that big role on Broadway. He can be a movie producer, a dashing foreign diplomat, or a famous writer. A club is a magic place full of naked women. One way or the other, all you boys have to pay for a woman. Spending time at a club is cheaper than dating or marriage. Buddy still feels that way.
“Maybe that’s why he never married me. He said he’d had enough wives, too.”
“Did Natasha know?” Burch asked.
“No, just me and Buddy, and that ten-foot blonde looking down from the roof of the Montmartre. She always saw everything, and nothing. Nobody else knew. Just us, now you.”
“You haven’t seen Natasha, have you?” Nazario said.
“When?”
“She recently came up missing.”
“No, but funny you should ask. A while back, Buddy thought he saw his ex-wife. Not Natasha. The first one, April. He was into sailing. Took his boat down to Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. On the street, doing a little sightseeing, he thought he saw her and the kids. Freaked him out. When he looked back, she was staring, like she was seeing a ghost. He was gonna track her down, do something about it, but changed his mind, I guess, or lost her in the crowd. Instead, he just got out of Dodge. That was a close one.”
“When was that?” Burch asked thoughtfully.
She shrugged. “A while back.”
“You’re sure you don’t know how to reach him?”
“Look, I’m spilling my guts here. You know I’d tell you if I did. Listen, I’ll go back to Miami with you right now. I’ll cooperate, make a statement, tell everything I know. But I want the best deal I can get. And you have to keep Sylvia out of it.”
“We can probably arrange something. Like I said, you’re not the one they want.”
“Yeah. I didn’t have any, what do they call it? Criminal intent. That’s it. I didn’t intend to do anything wrong. I just fell in love. There’s nobody like Buddy.” Her voice dropped to a whisper and she looked teary-eyed. “Never will be.”
Burch used his cell to fill in Assistant State Attorney Jo Salazar. “Terrell did the two at the Montmartre,” he told her.
“Christ,” she said, in her kitchen, a child crying in the background. “This is big. This is bad. I knew I should have gone up there with you.” She tentatively agreed to offer Desiree a plea to reduced charges, or even full immunity, depending on her honesty and level of cooperation.
Desiree spoke to her briefly, agreed to submit to a polygraph test and to return to Miami with the detectives.
“I know it sounds crazy,” Desiree told them after hanging up. “But I’m looking forward to it. I may regret it, but I want to see that big sky over Miami again, feel the sun on my shoulders. I even loved the humidity. Does wonders for your skin. When I lived in Miami I never even had to use a moisturizer.
“I have to pack,” she said enthusiastically, “settle up a few things. In Miami I bet I can land myself a job. People will remember me. Hell, Gypsy Rose Lee still made appearances at my age. So did Lili St. Cyr. I just need to drop a few pounds, get in shape. If me and Sylvia got a little place together, we could make it.”
They agreed to fly back the following afternoon.
“Okay,” Burch said, as they left. “I’m warning you, Desiree. Don’t screw with us. We’re your new best friends. We’re looking out for your interests. Don’t try to run, don’t take a walk and forget to come back, because if you do, Sylvia goes to jail and we issue murder warrants for your arrest. We’ve got the Portland Police keeping an eye on this place, and you. Got that?”
“I can’t believe you’re so paranoid.” She grinned, eyes alight with relief. “The only place I’m going is Miami.”
It was late. The night security guard now manning the desk promised to notify them if Desiree left the building or had visitors.
“Think I should camp outside her door tonight?” Nazario asked, in the rental car. “When she said she doesn’t know where Terrell is, she lied.”
“You sure?”
“The woman knows.”
“Makes no sense,” Burch said. “The guy’s a cold stone killer. Has her dump her act, her pet snake, her friends and family, life as she knows it, such as it was, then dumps her for somebody else and she’s still loyal?”
“She loves him.”
“You see how she wrote off the guy killed in the garage?”
“And the execution of an innocent man?”
“Yeah, just starts talking about her act. Terrell sure knew how to pick ’em.”
“God makes ’em and God matches ’em,” Nazario said. “You hungry?”
They hadn’t eaten all day.
“My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.”
They found a Denny’s restaurant.
“Salazar can have her testify before the grand jury and get three first-degree murder indictments against Terrell,” Burch said between forks full of salad. “We can get that artist, the really good one that Stone talks about, to age-enhance his pictures and plaster his mug all over the country, all over the world. Sooner than later, the man is ours.”
“She’s the next best thing to bringing him back,” Nazario agreed, buttering a roll. “When she first opened the door, did you believe it was her?”
“She looked used up,” Burch said, as his steak arrived. “But did you see her when we left? She looked ten years younger. Like a weight’s been lifted. There is something to be said for coming clean and going home at last. She’ll do all right.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
The caller had begun to both interest and irritate Stone. “You call yourself a detective?
“So why don’t you solve your own case? Chase your parents’ killer. You know nothing.” It was the same damn guy.
“Sir, do you have some informat
ion to offer? If not, you shouldn’t be tying up this line.”
“Who would tell you anything? You—”
“Yeah, I heard. I know nothing. Don’t be too sure. How will you prepare for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement? How can you call the people you have wronged and ask for forgiveness, mechila? The dead can’t forgive.”
The caller gasped and hung up. A sick puppy, or maybe the killer.
Stone stared at the telephone.
It rang two minutes later. “You know nothing. Nothing. What would make you say something like that?”
“It’s true,” the detective said quietly. “Isn’t it?”
The man hung up again.
The phone rang.
No one spoke but he could hear the man’s raspy breathing.
“Why don’t we meet and talk in person?” Stone said.
“Kayn aynhoreh. Do you know what that means?”
“Of course,” Stone said. “The evil eye.”
“You have brought a kayn aynhoreh on yourself. And your grandmother.”
Downstairs, in PIO, Milo Ross, perspiring and shaky, implored anyone with a clue to his wife’s whereabouts to come forward. Flyers bearing Natasha’s photograph, her description, and the offer of a $100,000 reward were being distributed to the media and throughout the city.
The former CEO had already hired a small army of private investigators.
“I don’t mean to imply that you’re not doing enough,” Ross explained to K. C. Riley. “But I have to use every possible resource. Time is crucial. She could be in danger. You’re still a young woman, Lieutenant. You have no idea what it’s like to think you’ve lost someone you love.”
She had no answer.
“The poor guy is throwing dollars at anybody he thinks might bring her back,” Riley said to Agent Conrad Douglas, who stood off to one side as the press conference broke up.
“You here on official business?” she asked.
“If I say no, does that mean I can take you to dinner?”
“No,” she said.
“What’s wrong with me?” he demanded.
“Not a thing. You’re terrific.”
“Right. Great guys like me don’t come along every day.”
“I know. That’s probably a good thing. I couldn’t handle another one.”
Leads poured in for the next twenty-four hours as the search for Natasha went nationwide. America’s Most Wanted offered to feature the hunt for the missing woman. And Milo Ross increased the reward to $250,000 for her safe return.
Tips came in, fast and furious. Natasha was “seen” on a yacht on the Intracoastal Waterway, gambling in Vegas, cheering the Fish from the bleachers at a Marlins game, and driving a school bus in Opa-Locka. One of Ross’s private detectives immediately jetted to Mexico to investigate a rumor that Nelson was a procurer who kidnaped women for a white slavery ring.
Another caught a transatlantic flight to follow up on reports she’d been seen at Monte Carlo in the company of an elusive international fugitive.
Strangers scheduled a candlelight vigil. Natasha’s smoldery eyes and pouting smile were everywhere, on television, in the newspapers, on every pole, and in every storefront.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Natasha was not on a yacht, in Monte Carlo, or in Vegas.
While her husband’s private detectives trotted the globe, it was business as usual at the county dump. Trucks waited in line to empty the Dumpsters picked up from construction sites.
As one did, a bulldozer driver, assigned to flatten and redistribute the load, spotted a tangled wave of dark hair and long legs amid the falling debris.
The trucker who had delivered an empty container to the San Souci Towers and removed the full one had noticed a foul odor, but people will sometimes leave a dead animal in a Dumpster.
Natasha had been there all along.
When police first searched the San Souci site, an officer had lifted a corner of the lid. All he saw was a clutter of Styrofoam, plastic, and cardboard. They were hoping to find a live woman at the time.
K. C. Riley and the chief medical examiner pieced together what happened.
Nelson took Natasha to the building to talk, hoping for an assignation, or to show off his work on the penthouse gardens. They quarreled, she eluded him and fled. Without a remote device, the elevator would only take her to the lobby. Nelson must have been in close pursuit, on the second elevator, still clutching her dress. She reached the lobby moments before him and hid inside the Dumpster near the large rear double doors.
She pulled a piece of cardboard over herself, remaining silent as he searched. He called her name, pleaded for her to come out.
A witness, a boy passing the site on his bicycle, heard Nelson’s shouts. Then saw him storm out to his green truck and speed away.
After everything became quiet, with Nelson gone, Natasha tried to escape the Dumpster. Too late.
Her hiding place was nearly full of flattened cardboard cartons that had contained appliances, Styrofoam packing, and plastic wrapping, but beneath them, at the bottom of the Dumpster, were partially empty cans of paint solvents and heavily saturated rags.
Panting, breathing heavily in the dark after she dropped the lid down over herself, she had quickly become disoriented.
Damage to her manicure, broken fingernails, cuts, and abrasions indicated that in her confusion she had pushed, then clawed at the hinged side of the lid instead of the side that would have opened easily.
“Paint solvent is an anesthetic agent,” the medical examiner explained. “She probably thought at first that it was just a funny smell, but she quickly became groggy, then was overcome.”
Toxicological tests confirmed the cause of death: asphyxiation due to inhalation of petroleum distillate, mineral spirits used to dilute the high-quality oil-based paint applied to the luxury building’s baseboards and cupboards.
“She was in no pain,” the medical examiner assured a brokenhearted Milo Ross. “She simply went to sleep.”
Her death was ruled accidental.
Chapter Thirty-Five
SIX HOURS LATER
I call April Terrell after we get back to the hotel. I hate to wake her, but can’t wait.
“Sorry to bother you this late, but I have two questions.”
“Sure. Whatever I can do to help.” She sounds sleepy.
“When did you and the kids go to Mystic Seaport in Connecticut?”
“How did you know?” she asks. “Last summer I took the children to see the old whaling ships and the historic sites. Mystic has a fully restored 1850s whaling village and a planetarium.”
Nazario was right. I should have known. “That recent, just last year?”
“Yes, we’d never been there before.”
It explained a lot.
“What’s your other question?”
“When you first came to us, you said it was because you’d begun to see Charles wherever you went. How long ago did that start? When was the first time you thought you saw somebody who looked just like him?”
She pauses. I hear her breathing. “Sometime last summer,” she says slowly. “I don’t remember exactly…Oh my God! I think we were on vacation. I didn’t mention it to the children. You think he was there? That it was actually him that I saw? Is it possible?”
“Looks that way. That sighting must have triggered something in your subconscious. Soon you thought you were seeing him everywhere. We haven’t found him yet. But we will.”
“So it is true,” she whispers, stunned.
“I wouldn’t tell the kids yet, but I’d start choosing my words.”
I know she won’t sleep again tonight. I won’t, either. I lie in the dark too elated to sleep. It’s as if we’re at the end of a giant jigsaw puzzle, when even the small pieces begin to fit. My mind races. So much still to do. But it is coming together. Sometimes you can’t do anything right no matter how hard you try and other times, like now, the stars align themselves in the universe.
>
I can’t wait to tell Connie, but want to do it in person, when she’s lying next to me, in bed.
I want to high-five Nazario, but he’s already sleeping like a baby in the other twin bed.
I become paranoid alone in the wee hours and call the night security guard to make sure he’s awake, alert, and still on the job in Big Red’s lobby. He assures me all is quiet on the western front.
Still wide awake, I turn on the bedside lamp and thumb through a copy of USA Today left outside our door. They print a one-paragraph story from each state on an inside page. I look for Florida’s highlight of the day.
The U.S. Coast Guard, it says, arrested several Cuban smugglers attempting to spirit a woman and three children to Miami. They’d been spotted adrift in the Florida Straits after their engine quit. The woman told a wild story, claiming she’d been abducted in Miami and was being taken to Cuba against her will. Inventive minds these Cubans have. The Coast Guard saw through it, of course. She and the kids were repatriated to Cuba. The smugglers, who claimed to be fishermen, were brought back in chains.
Only in Miami. I am anxious to return home to my family in the city that is never boring.
I call Greg Everett at 7:00 A.M. The daytime security guard at the Silver Briar has arrived on duty. All is cool, he says, trying hard to sound like a real cop.
“Ten-four here, Sergeant. The subject hasn’t left the building since you left last night, sir.”
I call Big Red a half hour later. I worried that when she sobered up she might change her mind, but she has no regrets about last night. She’s chipper, sounds happy to hear from me, and talks a blue streak about Miami.
She has to go to the bank, to the post office to have her mail forwarded to Aunt Sylvia’s address, and run a few other errands.
I don’t spoil her good mood by bringing up her lies about the last time she saw Terrell. We can wrest the truth out of her back on our turf, in Miami.
I say we’ll pick her up at two o’clock, to go to the airport. Nazario has already checked departure times.
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