“I got what I wanted,” R. J. told the press. He knew how to step back into the spotlight and hold center stage. “I was determined to walk out of that hellhole a free man—or die. No compromises.” His eyes roved the room, searching each reporter’s face. “That’s why I refused to plead guilty. Prison is no place to spend your life.”
A Channel 7 reporter asked if R. J. now planned to crusade against the death penalty or for reforms in the system.
“Hell, no.” R. J. grinned. “I’m no poster boy for prisoners. I never related to any of them. They all claim to be innocent. The difference is, I really was.”
Stockton stepped up to blame the state for ruining the life and reputation of an innocent man.
“He can never retrieve what they took. You know the old story. Take a pillow to a mountaintop, rip it apart, and fling the feathers to the four winds. Then try to retrieve each and every feather. It’s impossible,” he drawled. “That’s exactly what it’s like to try to regain a ruined reputation.”
I exchanged skeptical glances with Lottie, who was among the photographers. R. J. was no innocent bystander. What about the domestic abuse? The restraining orders? The mistress? The lies? The missing millions and his renegade past? The world might not have been so quick to believe he was a killer had he not ruined his own reputation first.
“What would you say to your wife’s killer?” a reporter asked as the press conference wound down.
“Thanks, pal,” R. J. quipped, without hesitation. Even Stockton winced at his client’s heartless smile.
“That R. J., what an SOB,” Lottie said, as we headed to the parking garage. “He’s hot, ain’t he?”
“Bad boys are always attractive to women,” I muttered. “I wish I knew why.”
“Speaking of bad boys,” Lottie said, “you look like hell.”
“Thank you. Haven’t seen my lipstick, comb, or a clean pair of underpants since I left Miami. Nice to see you too.”
“Heard the flight up was rough.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Heard you never checked into your hotel. Gretchen was trying to hunt you down. She got so mad she wanted to twist off your head and shit down your neck.”
“Oh, swell. Any more good news?”
“Yeah, Angel showed me the catalog. The one with the bustle?” She sighed. “It’s the best of the lot.”
Cool, crisp, and dressed for success as always, Gretchen Platt, the assistant city editor from hell, scrutinized me from head to toe when I breezed into the newsroom. “What happened to your shoes?” She looked aghast.
“Foam,” I said, checking my mailbox. She dogged my footsteps, trailing behind me as I searched for my chair, which someone had appropriated in my absence. I recaptured it from another desk and rolled it back to my terminal.
“Don’t disappear again,” she said tersely, “until your story is in and we can review it together.”
My face must have reflected my thoughts, because she backed off and had the sense not to harangue me while I worked. But I knew I’d pay the piper later.
“Whew.” Fred gave a long low whistle as he read R. J.’s quotes in a printout of my story. “He really said that?”
“I didn’t make it up.”
“He’s cold,” Fred said. He sat on the edge of the desk next to mine.
“Stone cold,” I said. “As stone cold as any killer. Who could blame him? He admits he would have killed her himself, given the chance.”
“Think he did?” Fred asked thoughtfully. “Killers for hire aren’t hard to find behind bars.”
“Who knows?” I said. “But that poses another question. If he did hire somebody, could he be prosecuted? He’s already been tried and convicted for killing her once. Does double jeopardy apply?”
“Interesting thought. Check into it.” He took off his gold-rimmed glasses and massaged the inner corners of his eyes with a thumb and index finger. “In the meantime, where do we go from here on this one?”
“The next feeding frenzy is to find out where she was all these years. That’s the big, burning, searing question. It’s probably only a matter of hours before all the TV news mags and tabloids—48 Hours, 20/20, America’s Most Wanted—zero in on it. Somebody who knows her will see the mystery aired and expose her secret life. We can try to beat them, pull it off ourselves. I’d like to give it a shot.”
“How do you propose to do that?”
“I’ve got the morgue picture…”
He frowned.
“…and a stack of old file photos of Kaithlin before she disappeared. I’d like the art department, with all their new computerized equipment, to do a really good lifelike drawing of how she looked recently. We can fax it to missing persons bureaus in key cities. And I’d like Onnie, the best researcher in the News library, to do an exhaustive computer check, see if we can match her to recent reports of missing persons all over the country. She’s been dead for weeks now. Somebody somewhere must be looking for her. If there was a short or even a classified ad in her current hometown paper, I’d like us to find it first.
“Meanwhile, I’ll track down as many people from her old life as possible. Somebody might have heard from her or know her well enough to say where she’d go to start over.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Fred said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky. I’ll get the art department on it. You talk to Onnie.”
“Ask for a full front and a profile,” I said, handing him the morgue picture.
He looked at the photo and winced, then put his glasses on and stared at it more closely. “If she had a whole new life somewhere, why the hell you think she came back?”
I shook my head. “You know how Miami is; it gets under your skin. Maybe she just couldn’t stay away. Or maybe she had second thoughts and wanted to save R. J. Maybe she came back to find the missing money. Maybe, though it seems improbable, she just learned that her mother was dead.”
“A lot of maybes,” he said tersely. “Give it your best shot. So far we’re ahead of the pack. It’d be nice to stay there.” He frowned at me. “Why don’t you go home and get some sleep.”
I shook my head again. “I want to start tonight. I’ll just go home, shower and eat, and come back.”
“If you’re up for it,” he said. “One thing more.” He paused, as though hesitant to broach the subject. “The desk had a problem last night. They had space out front, so Gretchen wanted more reporting on the emergency landing. The airline stonewalled, aware that we were close to deadline. She wanted you to work it from that end, but you were unreachable. The hotel said you never checked in. She even tracked down Stockton’s people at their hotel. They said they hadn’t seen you.”
“It was a frightening experience,” I said, annoyed that I’d been checked up on, like a truant schoolgirl. “I immediately called the desk, unloaded all I knew, then stayed with a friend who lives there. I didn’t even have a toothbrush or a nightgown. My bag still hasn’t caught up with me.”
He peered skeptically at me through his bifocals.
“I’m going home now, to brush my teeth. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”
He nodded.
“Good job,” he called, as I left the newsroom.
I hurried down the stairs, rather than risk being cornered by Gretchen or having Fred shoot more questions at me while I waited for the damn elevator.
I called the library from the car as I emerged from the building. Onnie had escaped an abuser herself. She’d relate to Kaithlin.
“Onnie, if you had to flee, disappear forever, change your identity and start over, where would you go?”
“Trouble with the desk?” she asked breezily. “Come on, Britt. Nothing’s that bad. It’s that bitch Gretchen again, isn’t it?”
I explained what I wanted and we brainstormed, agreeing that Kaithlin would probably run as far from Miami as possible. Onnie said she’d start checking West Coast newspapers, California, Washington, and Oregon—and Colorado—then work her way east.
Kaithlin didn’t need the feds; she had created her own witness protection plan. It kept her safe for ten years, until something went wrong.
“Try to get somebody else to handle routine requests from the newsroom,” I said. “Fred wants to give this priority.”
“We’re swamped and short-handed as always,” she said, “but I’ll do my best. So you saw R. J. Jordan, today, huh? How’d the man look?”
“Not bad for a guy past fifty. Lottie thinks he’s still a stud.”
“Hey, that’s not old. Look at Newman, Redford, Poitier, Sean Connery.”
“Yeah, but this guy’s only talent is trouble.”
“Talking talent,” she said lightly, “you got yourself a new sweetie you didn’t tell me about? Heard you went AWOL in Daytona.”
“Have to hang up now, talk to you later,” I said, and turned south on Alton Road.
I had been gone for only twenty-four hours. As I parked outside my apartment, it seemed longer. It was already dusk. Mrs. Goldstein, in a heavy sweater and gloves, was watering her banana trees. Her face lit up. “I just saw you on TV! They showed the press conference at the airport.” She dropped the gurgling hose into the grass and hugged me. “You looked so tired, I made you some soup. Where’s your bag, Britt?”
“I don’t know,” I murmured, then surprised us both by weeping on her soft shoulder, big snuffling sobs and scalding hot tears.
She walked me into my apartment, heated the soup, brewed tea, and listened. Slumped in my favorite chair, Billy Boots purring in my lap, I told her that McDonald was out of my life and recounted the frightening moments on the plane.
“I thought he was the one,” she said sadly.
“So did I.” I sniffled, hugging Bitsy, who sat up, eyes concerned, her eager paws on my knees.
“I’m glad you’re home safe,” my landlady said kindly. “No wonder you’re upset, after such an experience. You’re having a delayed reaction. You need to eat something good, take a shower, and go to bed. Then tomorrow take a book and go lie on the beach—”
“I—I can’t.” I hiccuped. “I have to go back to work tonight.”
Shocked and indignant, she castigated my bosses as “insensitive and unreasonable” men who constantly take advantage of my loyalty and good nature. It wasn’t true, of course. I am a willing volunteer when it comes to trouble. But I needed kind words and sympathy from someone who cared.
“Take a shower,” she instructed, “and I’ll bring you a bite to eat. Oh, honey,” she said at the door. “I bought you a new toothbrush, too. I saw yours when I came to take the dog out and change Billy’s sandbox.” She shook her head. “You should replace it every six months, at least.”
“They don’t make them like they used to,” I said numbly.
By the time I’d showered and dressed, she had brought a plate of warm beef flanken with horseradish and potato latkes.
The food, comforting and sustaining, didn’t fill the empty place where my heart should be, but it was fortifying. I put on warm clothes and filled a thermos with strong Cuban coffee. I felt stronger as I drove back to the paper through the chilly night, as though I’d found my second wind. Who needed sleep? How did the words of the song go?
I’ll sleep when I’m dead.
11
“How novel. A great argument,” Jeremiah Tannen said. The former boy wonder from the public defender’s office was the first person I called. Now in successful private practice, he specializes in criminal law. “But it wouldn’t work,” he said, “and I’ll tell you why.
“You can’t be tried twice for the same crime. That’s double jeopardy. But a man wrongfully convicted of his wife’s murder the first time could, indeed, be charged with her recent murder. It’s not the same crime. It’s a different murder, at a different place, on a different date, in a different jurisdiction.
“However,” he continued, “it would be fascinating, if he was convicted, to try to persuade the court to grant him credit for the time he served for the first crime, the one that never happened.”
R. J.’s anger at Kaithlin’s mother haunted me, as I cleared my desk of mail and messages. Why did he detest Reva Warren so? After all these years he was still furious at a sad senior citizen, now dead, whose only sin seemed to be working all her life to raise the woman he had once loved.
Did she do more than meddle? Was it because she had testified against him?
I called my mother, who had left multiple messages.
“Britt, darling. Were you out of town? Someone said something about a plane…?”
“Yes,” I said, “but it all turned out fine. Mom, when you worked for Jordan’s—”
“I just heard the news, dear. R. J.’s free!”
“I know, I was there.”
“I can’t believe it! I was shocked. Did you see what Eunice was wearing? Chanel! She looked like an absolutely different person. She’s worn nothing but black since it all happened.”
“I guess it was sort of a celebration that she has her son back. Mom, did you—?”
“Eunice always had style,” she said, “but no business sense. Con was brilliant, generous to a fault. He led everyone to believe she was an asset, when in reality she was nothing but a self-centered clotheshorse.”
“Mom, I’m at work, trying to piece it all together. Maybe you can help. Did Kaithlin ever discuss personal problems with you, the animosity between her mother and R.J?”
“That was all very long ago,” she said, suddenly less talkative, “and I’m just on my way out. Nelson and I are attending a cocktail party for the Dade Heritage Trust; then we’re off to dinner.” I tried to place Nelson. She’d had frequent escorts since she began dating after only recently, belatedly, coming to terms with my father’s death.
“I won’t keep you,” I promised, “but there are so many theories, so many possibilities, and I have to work fast. I need some direction.”
“What are they saying?” She sounded wary.
“Oh, a thousand and one stories.” I pulled out the witness list and flipped open the thick trial transcript.
“People are even speculating that there was another child, that Kaithlin wasn’t the—”
“Maybe that’s not so far from the truth,” she broke in.
“What? You mean there was—”
“Darling, I really can’t say any more.” She seemed instantly to regret saying as much as she had. “There’s the doorbell. Got to go. Love you.”
“Mom, wait—” She hung up.
I pushed the redial button. Her number rang and rang. I hung up, hit it again, and it rang some more. Even her machine didn’t answer.
In the course of my job, I can often draw out intimate, even damning information from reluctant, even hostile strangers. Why then can’t I connect with my own mother? Did R. J.’s sudden freedom shock her because she knew something more, something important?
I scanned the witness list again and highlighted a name: Amy Hastings, Kaithlin’s childhood friend, one of the last people she spoke to before the murder that didn’t happen.
I drew more bright yellow highlights through the names of Dallas Suarez, the mistress who had testified against R. J., and the Jordans’ live-in housekeeper, Consuela Morales. The housekeeper had testified through an interpreter about the couple’s domestic strife and R. J.’s rages. She said she once saw him push Kaithlin against a glass table, and she witnessed another quarrel when he slapped her until she sobbed. The housekeeper said she had applied ice to Kaithlin’s bruised cheekbone so she could attend an important business meeting the following morning. She had also testified that she so feared R. J. she would have quit her jo
b but was afraid to leave Miss Kaithlin alone with him. She, too, had wept on the stand.
No wonder the jury wanted to hang him.
The housekeeper was fifty-one at the time, her name common. I suspected that if still alive and working in the United States, she would probably be in the same neighborhood. Non-English-speaking household workers are usually hired via word-of-mouth by employers who are acquainted with one another.
I found the blue book, the city cross-reference directory, and began with the house on Old Cutler where the doomed marriage of Kaithlin and R. J. fell apart.
A precocious child answered, then gave up the phone to his harried mother, who said she’d never heard of Consuela Morales. Neither did the next-door neighbor, who had recently moved in. But a longtime neighbor on the other side thought she remembered the woman.
“I believe she’s somewhere over on the next block now, working for a doctor and his wife.”
I found her on the tenth call.
“I would like to come and talk to you,” I told her in Spanish.
She was too busy, she protested. When I persisted, she reluctantly agreed to see me in an hour and a half.
Until then, I searched the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database. No current driver’s license for Amy Hastings. Her old license, issued at age seventeen, gave me her date of birth and physical description. Records revealed that, in 1993, Amy Hastings had renewed her license as Amy Sondheim. Bell South showed no Amy Sondheim, listed or unlisted. I called the apartment complex where she had lived at the time. The manager did not remember her but gave me the names of four longtime residents. The second said Amy had divorced and moved to Baltimore. No phone listing there. Maryland driver’s license records showed she had renewed her license and changed her name to Tolliver. New residents at her old address said she had moved to San Jose, California, in 1997.
Was it to be near Kaithlin? I nearly called Onnie to suggest she focus on central California, but Amy wasn’t listed in San Jose. Her trail dead-ended. Then I managed to tap into a credit bureau report, not the confidential file, only the header on the top page that identified the individual in question. Amy had been busy: divorced and apparently remarried once more. Her new address? Miami. She had returned in late 2000, now using the name Salazar.
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