Louise Cannon, the producer, was Mommy over a cast gone wild. I tried not to be one of her problems, but she treated me as if I were a lawsuit waiting in the wings.
My sexual harassment settlement from Lynda Jewell was never made public, but Louise Cannon always kept me at such a distance that I wondered if Jewell had told her about it at a Pilates class or a Hollywood party. Small town. Cannon took a step back when I approached her, averting her eyes and folding her arms the way the girls had in junior high school when they were trying to hide a crush on me. I violated her do not approach force field to corner her at the catering table, where workers were laying out seafood from Crab Shack.
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 “daught
er,” 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.”
The way her voice broke at the end, the loss fresh, gave me unwelcome insight into Marcela’s attraction to Dad. It was hard to imagine parents being desperate enough to send their children off to a new country, but my long relationship with Miami had taught me that Fidel was a dirty word to the 1960s generation of Cubans. Miami had been the only American city to picket Nelson Mandela when he arrived after his release from a South African prison in the 1990s—because he had refused to renounce Fidel as a friend. Alice, who had met Mandela, had ranted about it for days.
Alice again. Why did she keep popping into my head?
“Anyway,” Marcela went on, her tone lighter, “I was one of the lucky ones. I got to stay in Miami, where it was warm, because I had blood relations here. My friends Isabel and Pilar were sent to New Jersey to strangers. We were scattered everywhere.”
“Weren’t you scared?” Chela said to Marcela. “All alone on the boat?”
Marcela closed her eyes for an instant, transported back in time. “My older cousin, Maria, looked out for me. Without her, I don’t know how I would have survived.”
Chela’s face froze, and her eyes darted away from Marcela’s. I don’t think Marcela noticed, but I wished her friend’s name hadn’t been Maria. I tried to put my arm around Chela, but she wriggled away and pretended to study the graffiti etched on the wooden bench.
Chela had made contact with the girl who called her about Maria’s disappearance, extracting a promise that she would report everything she knew to the police, but Chela wasn’t satisfied. I was committed to a late afternoon and evening on the set, mostly because of my director’s tardiness the day before, but I’d promised Chela I would help her follow up the next day. I’d said I would go to Club Phoenixx with her, if it came to that. All I needed was a day.
The door to the wedding room opened, and two happy teenagers bounded out. The wispy-haired girl was clearly pregnant, but her new husband looked buoyant instead of trapped. They wore matching Metallica concert T-shirts. They might be as young as Chela. Good luck with that, I thought.
The couple next in line stood up, both in beachwear. Instead of following the clerk into their waiting future, they walked to Dad and Marcela.
“Perdoname,” the man said to Marcela, hushed. “I couldn’t help overhearing. My father’s a Pedro Pan kid, too. He’s a county school administrator. He talks about it all the time.”
Marcela’s face lit up, but she glanced nervously at the waiting clerk. “Fantástico, but you don’t want to miss your turn.”
The woman rested her hand on Dad’s shoulder. “We think you’re the cutest couple,” she said. “We’d like to give you our place in line.”
Dad and Marcela tried to refuse, but the whole waiting room insisted. The other couples applauded as Marcela and Dad made their way carefully across the room to the open door; the woman standing proud in her glitter dress and veil, her beau walking with a cane.
Romance wasn’t dead after all.
Dad shoved the ring case into my hand as an afterthought on the way in, his way of asking me to be his best man. Dad and Marcela hadn’t written special vows, so the ceremony was brief and unremarkable, the clerk reading from an index card with a bent head. He recited the
vows in English and Spanish. He sounded like a bureaucrat.
Finally, the clerk looked up to meet their eyes with a grin. “And nowwww . . .” he said like a game-show announcer. “You may kiss the bride!”
I swear the clouds broke when their lips touched.
Suddenly, the windows flooded the room with light.
CHELA HAD DISCOVERED the art of telling lies early in life, having been raised by a grandmother whose hearing and eyesight were poor, and from time to time by her mother, an addict who knew no other means of communication. She most often lied about her age, adjusting up or down according to her needs, but even her name was a lie. Maria’s lie. Gramma had always said that lies would catch up to her, and Chela liked lying less and less.
Especially to Ten.
“You doing okay?” he said during his third call to check on her.
Hell no, she wasn’t okay. If she hadn’t ducked into the gas station’s bathroom, she wouldn’t have been able to answer the phone, because Ten would have heard the traffic noise from Fifth Street. She’d hoped he would stop calling after nine, but he wanted to make sure she was at home. Ten always tried to keep one step ahead of her. But not this time.
Like most gas-station bathrooms, the floor stank of piss. Maybe vomit. Great.
“Everything’s fine,” she said, breathing through her mouth. “Get to work and stop worrying about me.”
“Dad in bed?”
Marcela and Captain Hardwick had been in their room by nine thirty. Some honeymoon. Giddy from the wedding, they had talked and laughed longer than usual. God help her, they might have been having sex. Chela had waited an hour before slipping out.
But Ten didn’t want to talk to his father; he wanted to make sure she was where she said she was. A woman outside the restroom door yelled at someone in Spanish, and Chela’s heart skipped.
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