You Only Die Twice

by Edna Buchanan

  The teakettle’s shrill whistle interrupted and she rose to silence it. Hands shaking, she poured boiling water over the used bag.

  “Sure you won’t have some?” she offered. “I would give you a fresh bag, of course. I only reuse them because it’s less caffeine that way and they go further.”

  I shook my head as she stirred.

  “Can you imagine,” she went on, “that some people don’t even write their own Christmas cards? Reva would work all night at her dining-room table, addressing envelopes to strangers, and then go to her day job. As she raised a daughter, took her to church and to music and ballet lessons. She made all Kaithlin’s clothes herself, beautiful things, handmade and embroidered.”

  “It had to be difficult,” I said, scribbling notes. “When did Reva’s husband die?”

  She averted her eyes and hesitated. “The bum didn’t die. He left when she was six months pregnant. Saw the baby once, maybe twice, then left town with his latest girlfriend. Last Reva heard, maybe twenty-five, thirty years ago, somebody saw him in New Orleans. He’s probably still alive. People like him, they lead charmed lives, do as they please…. Never paid a nickel in child support, all those years. These days they chase them down, call them deadbeat dads, and make them pay. You see it on TV all the time. Back then, nobody cared.”

  “But when Kaithlin married R. J.,” I protested, “the stories said she’d been raised by her widowed mother.”

  She snorted in derision. “You of all people should know better than to believe everything you read in the newspaper. Jordan’s mother told that story, said widowed sounded better than divorced. She was concerned about what her friends would think. For Kaithlin’s sake, Reva didn’t argue, but she swore she’d tell the truth if anybody asked. Reva wouldn’t lie for anybody.”

  I stared as she sipped her weak tea, her eyes unfathomable. Were any of these people what they pretended to be? How did they keep track of the truth about who was really dead and who wasn’t?

  “Reva’s divorce embarrassed Mrs. Jordan,” Myrna Lewis continued. “Well, what goes around comes around.” She smiled in grim triumph. “I wonder what her friends think about her son on death row?”

  “But he didn’t do it,” I said quietly. “He’ll be released.”

  “He shouldn’t be.” She rubbed her swollen knuckles. “It’s not right.”

  Reva, she said, had remained unmarried until she was forty. Eric Warren, a handsome charmer, swept into her life abruptly. He left the same way, after depleting her modest savings and impregnating her. When her only child arrived late in life, she was all alone.

  “Wait here.” Myrna hobbled into the next room. “I have something to show you.” She returned with the framed photo of a tiny blond posed gracefully in a pink tutu and ballet slippers. Her mother sat stiffly in a straight-backed chair behind her, graying hair pulled tightly into a severe bun, her eyes on her daughter, palms together in silent applause. Kaithlin looked about nine, which made her mother at least fifty in the photo.

  “Look at them,” Myrna Lewis demanded. Her eyes watered. “They’re both gone now, and he did it. He’s responsible, whether he killed them with his own hands or not.”

  I studied the strong lines of the mother’s face. “Was she a strict parent?”

  “Maybe, but she had to be. She was a religious woman. Saw only right and wrong, with not much in between. Reva wanted Kaithlin to concentrate on her schoolwork, but she wasn’t well and Kaithlin insisted on helping. She said she didn’t want her mother to work so hard. So Reva let her take a part-time Christmas job at Jordan’s. They put her on the cosmetics counter, because she was beautiful, I guess. But she didn’t need paint and powder to stand out from the crowd. Everybody who saw her knew she had something special. Reva most of all.

  “She sent Kaithlin white roses on her sixteenth birthday. She admitted it was extravagant, but she said her daughter deserved it. Later, Kaithlin would send white roses to her mother on her birthday and every Mother’s Day.”

  So it had been Kaithlin at the cemetery.

  “Kaithlin changed after she took that job and met him. She became defiant and ungrateful. She broke her mother’s heart, but it was him; he was the one responsible.”

  “R. J?”

  She nodded, fingers wrapped around her empty cup as though for warmth. “He was a grown man twice her age, with a bad reputation. He changed her, turned her head. She started to stay out and come home late. Reva never had another peaceful day. She was able to stop it for a time, when Kaithlin was still underage. But they started up again as soon as she was eighteen. That man knew how to manipulate a young girl. Reva worried, she cried, she prayed to St. Jude. She begged me to pray with her—but all the prayers in the world couldn’t save Kaithlin. That girl was all she had.”

  “But surely,” I said, “her mother must have been relieved and happy for her when they got married.”

  Myrna Lewis’s eyes flickered. “The husband was spoiled, a jealous, selfish man. Reva could never forgive him for all he…” Her voice faded. “They hated each other.”

  “But they both loved Kaithlin. Why didn’t they work at getting along?”

  She shook her head. “There are some sins only God can forgive.”

  “But St. Jude came through,” I said persistently. “Kaithlin was alive long after R. J. went to death row.”

  “If Reva’s prayers were answered,” the woman said, leaning forward to jab an arthritic finger, “she died never knowing it. She made me promise that if she went first she’d be buried properly. She wanted her daughter’s body found so she could have a decent burial, too. She bought a double plot and a fancy stone for her and Kaithlin. She wanted her girl with her, the way it was before him. She wrote letters to the prison, even had the parish priest write, begging R. J. to say where he put her. He never answered.

  “The day Reva died, she was going to the church to talk to Father O’Neil about a special mass. She had them twice a year, on Kaithlin’s birthday and the anniversary of the murder.

  “They said she stepped off the bus in front of St. Patrick’s and fell down in the street. While she was lying there, somebody stole her purse. By the time she got to the hospital, she had no identification. But the maintenance man from this building had been driving by; he saw the ambulance take her and phoned me to find out how she was. I kept calling but the hospital kept denying she was there. Finally they put me through to a social worker who said they had an unidentified body.

  “I had to go down to identify her.” She gazed out the window, eyes flooded.

  “You saw her body?”

  She nodded. A single tear trickled down the wrinkled cheek.

  “You’re sure it was her?”

  “What sort of question is that?” she snapped, frowning in confusion. “Of course. Why would you even—”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Do you still work at Discount Office Supply?”

  She shook her head brusquely and blinked. “That’s gone too. The big chains, Office Depot and Office Max, both moved in. Ran my boss right out of business. He packed up and moved north, think he opened a convenience store somewhere. The good Lord knows I keep trying to find something. Social Security goes only so far. Most people won’t hire a woman my age.”

  She let me borrow the photo, as long as I wrote her a receipt and promised to return it.

  “He should stay where he is,” she said, as she saw me to the door. “Look what he’s done. Years ago, Reva and I made a pact. We were both alone and promised to be there for each other if anything happened. I did my part. Now who will be there for me?”

  I made a pit stop at home to shower and change. Bitsy bounced out as I opened the door and I nearly missed the business card that fluttered to the floor. It bore the familiar Miami city seal with McDonald’s name imprinted. Scrawled on the blank side were two words.

  “Who? Why?”

  I frowned, puzzled, as I pushed the PLAY button on my answering machine.

 
“Britt, what’s up? Did you pick a fight with me because you had a late date? Who the hell was that guy?”

  Distracted by the loves and lives of the clan Jordan, I paused to consider the question.

  Then I realized what must have happened.

  After driving off in a snit so long ago last night, McDonald must have reconsidered and returned just in time to see Rychek, arriving or departing. I winced, envisioning me, silhouetted in the open doorway, smoothing the rumpled detective’s collar and delivering intimate sartorial advice at 2 A.M. in my robe.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake!” I murmured as Bitsy grinned, pranced, and wagged her tail.

  Did I have the time, energy, and patience to explain to McDonald right now?

  Dutifully, against my better judgment, I hit his number on my speed dial.

  “It’s me,” I sang out cheerfully.

  “Hey.” He sounded calm but chilly.

  “Just got home and heard your message.”

  “Oh?”

  The inflection in that single syllable set my teeth on edge as I contemplated all I still had to do in so little time.

  “If you came back last night,” I said, “you should have knocked.”

  “I saw a Beach detective’s car, an unmarked.”

  “That was Rychek, remember? You met him once.”

  “Didn’t realize you two were so tight.”

  “The man’s pushing retirement.” I resisted the impulse to add K. C. Riley’s name to the mix. “He’s good people, a source. He had information on a story.”

  “So he delivers news tips personally, at night?”

  “For Pete’s sake! McDonald. You never had an informant, a CI who was female?”

  “Sure, lots of them. But I never served them drinks at my place after midnight.”

  Drinks? “So you were lurking in the bushes? Prowling and window peeping? Scaring my landlady? She’s eighty-two, her husband is eighty-eight. One of them could have had a heart attack.” Actually, Helen Goldstein would have brained him with her broom. “I’m damn lucky he did think of me. The story I’m working on is the big secret you wouldn’t tell me last night. R. J. Jordan, right?”

  “It’s another department’s case. It wasn’t up to me to release information.”

  “Why not? The entire world will know tomorrow. I could have had it in this morning’s paper.”

  “I was being professional.”

  “Sneaking around in the bushes is professional?” Ha, I thought, he’s on the ropes.

  “Stop saying that,” he said, voice reasonable. “I wasn’t sneaking. You should keep your drapes closed.”

  “Why? I have nothing to hide. If you’d knocked, you would have seen how innocent it was.”

  “I tried that once.”

  Damn. A low blow, I thought, my face burning. He had dredged up ancient history. After the hurricane, the big one, when the phones were out, along with the electricity, the water, and the roads, when misery reigned and people were willing to kill for a bag of ice or a hot shower, McDonald came to my rescue—and found me with someone else. The look in his eyes that night haunts me still.

  “That was long ago,” I said quietly. “I thought the statute of limitations had run out on it. I’m sorry.”

  “So am I.” He sounded weary.

  My shoulders sagged. I felt fatigued and yearned to be with him, to relax in his arms. I fought the feeling.

  “Have to go now.” I tried to sound upbeat, to pump up my energy level. “I’ve got an early deadline. Talk to you later.”

  A terrible thought slowly took form after I hung up, materializing like something ugly in a horror film. All it lacked was a spooky score in a minor key. I’d heard those words, that tone, before. That was my mother talking. Was I becoming my mother?

  I stepped into the bathroom, undressed, and stared into the mirror. No. No way, I told myself. It’s the story, the deadline, my brain as overloaded as a computer about to crash.

  When I finish this story, I promised, I will make it all up to him. Make him forget K. C. Riley. I will lovingly whip up a succulent meal, some of my Aunt Odalys’s exotic Cuban concoctions, a creamy midnight-black bean soup—or a green plantain soup thickened with ground almonds—and her malanga-encrusted snapper with olives and pimientos. I will massage his back, lure him into the shower, wash his hair with my scented shampoo, and smother him with kisses. Yes, I thought, stepping into the shower. I closed my eyes and realized I was not alone in that warm and steamy cubicle. The presence with me was not McDonald, it was Kaithlin.

  How did a woman “dead” for ten years reappear, only to die again? Had she been kidnapped? Comatose? Suffering from amnesia? What triggered her return on the eve of her husband’s execution? Did the execution lure her back? Or did she return belatedly to mourn her mother’s demise? And if the M.E. was right, where was Kaithlin’s child? And who was its father? If her first “murder” was not what it appeared to be, what about the second? Who killed her, and why?

  Fresh-smelling body wash streamed like satin across my naked body, as I scrolled a mental list of possibilities and listened to whispered questions in the hissing flow of water.

  5

  Fortified by strong hot coffee, my brightest lipstick, and a favorite blue blouse, I filled in Fred Douglas, the news editor, by phone as I drove north on Collins Avenue. I needed no help, I told him. I had everything under control and was still reporting.

  Unlike Myrna Lewis’s modest abode, my destination this time was lavish and beachfront, with valet parking, a huge pool, cabanas, and a four-star restaurant. I used the gold-and-white house phone under a gleaming crystal chandelier in the marble lobby.

  “I’m downstairs,” I said, introducing myself.

  Without hesitation, he invited me up.

  A high-speed elevator whisked me to a spacious sixteenth-floor hallway with thick seafoam carpeting, ornate molding, and elegant gold sconces.

  When I knocked, the door to 1612 buzzed, unlocked, and swung open, but the room appeared empty. I stood waiting.

  “Hello?” My voice echoed in the silent apartment. “Is anyone here?”

  No radio or TV played. No carpeting, little furniture. Lots of open space. The sea-and-sky colors of the walls and narrow drapes, all shades of marine blue and bottle green, were reflected in the expensive tile floors. The overall effect was one of being submerged in the sea instead of in a needlelike high-rise in the sky. Schools of fish would seem more natural outside these enormous windows than swooping pelicans or seagulls. One paneled wall concealed an elaborate entertainment center. Another, mirrored from floor to ceiling, reflected blue sky and water.

  “Hello?” I called again. “Mr. Marsh?”

  “In here.” The computerized voice came from an overhead speaker. “To your right.”

  My heels clicked eerily on the tile floor.

  A lock disengaged as I approached another door.

  “Hello?” I hesitated, then pushed it open.

  I gasped, suddenly face-to-face with myself, shocked at my mirror image, life-size and in full color, on a huge TV monitor. I hadn’t even seen the hidden cameras. Bluish light flooded the room, which seemed even more sterile than the others; a slight odor of antiseptic was in the air. A man sat facing the screen, with his back to me. He touched the controls, and his motorized wheelchair spun in a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn.

  His body looked shrunken and shriveled but his eyes glittered, dark and intelligent, and his thick salt-and-pepper hair looked absurdly healthy in contrast to the rest of him.

  “I’m Zachary Marsh.” He nodded briskly, in almost military fashion. “So you’re Montero. I’ve read your stories.” He eyed me approvingly. “Younger and prettier than your picture.”

  The man hadn’t seen my picture, I decided, unimpressed. He had confused me with the columnists whose head shots appear with their work. But I didn’t correct him. I was more interested in his toys.

  At the oceanfront windows, two powerful telescop
es stood on low tripods, adjusted to accommodate a seated viewer. Neatly arranged on an adjacent and immaculate glass-topped table were a moon-phase calendar, a NOAA weather radio, a police scanner, a cell phone, a cordless, two cameras, several sets of high-powered binoculars, and a remote-control device that looked sophisticated enough to operate every piece of electronic equipment in the apartment.

  “Are those night vision?” I indicated a set of bulky black binoculars.

  “Correct. But,” he cautioned, “don’t touch them! No one else handles my equipment.”

  “Sorry.” I stepped back. “I’m impressed.” The National Guard used the night-vision glasses, originally developed for Israeli commandos, when much of South Florida was plunged into total darkness after the big hurricane. Now narcs and undercover cops used them for surveillance.

  “How did you start…all this?” I said, still gaping at his array of equipment.

  “Always wanted to watch the sky,” Marsh said, “but never had the time. Too busy running the biggest Rolls-Royce dealership in the Northeast. Then my condition got worse, put me in this chair, and sent me south for the warm weather. Bought my first real telescope when I moved in. Studied the heavens for months. Then one day, by chance, I set my sights lower.”

  His lips curved into a half smile, his eyes roved to the windows, and his voice dropped to a near whisper.

  “You have no idea what happens out there at night.” He nodded toward the sea, awash in golden sunlight and sparkling innocently. “Everything from sea turtles marching out of the surf to lay their eggs, to beached whales, to cruise ships illegally dumping garbage. I’ve seen it all: incoming rafts, mother ships, smugglers in action—but none of it compares to the bizarre religious rituals and mating habits of the human species.”