“That’s more than one question.” She compressed her mouth tighter and crossed her arms. Vera never liked anyone trying to rein in her mouth. I reached out, patted her arm, and nodded. That seemed to mollify her.
“You know how your mother loved self-improvement?” She looked to me for confirmation.
“It was plastic surgery, not a seminar on the history of railroads in Florida.”
“Yes, but the boat had seminars too, you know. Anyway, she said she wanted to get away from Clay. He was beginning to annoy her. I guess he liked her just the way she was, but you know your mom.”
“Right, the self-improvement thing.”
“She asked me along for company. She had the surgery, and I played bingo most of the time. The last night out, she complained her pain pills weren’t working and said she was going down to the infirmary for something stronger. Between you and me, I think she had a thing for the doctor. Anyway, she was all wrapped up in one of those fluffy robes all the patients wore and her face was still bandaged.”
“No wonder I couldn’t tell if the body was Mom’s. The surgery was that recent?”
“Only the day before. She was one of the last patients he worked on.” She stopped talking. She looked as if she’d run down and needed to be wound up again.
I tried to be encouraging. “Don’t stop now. You were saying she went to the surgery for pills?”
“I had moved from where she left me to farther down the rail toward the back of the ship. When I looked forward to where we’d been, I saw her come from below through the automatic doors, walk toward the rail and look out over the sea. I yelled at her but she didn’t seem to hear me. Then Clay came out and simply picked her up and pitched her into the water.”
“Did you say anything to him?”
“No. He couldn’t see me. I was too far away and several pillars separated him from me.”
“But you’re sure it was Clay?”
“It had to be. He was tall and slender and had Clay’s full head of brown hair. Not many of the men on ship had hair. It wasn’t a cruise for families you know, so most of us were older.”
“But did you see his face?”
“It was Clay. I’m certain. It had to be. They had argued only hours before. Who else aboard ship had reason to murder her?”
*
The next morning I sat at my computer with Stella sleeping in the crook of my arm.
“You could put her in her crib.” Fred smiled down on his sleeping daughter. He seemed more comfortable with her.
“I think the exposure’s good. The world is so high-tech I don’t want her left behind.” I signed onto the Internet and began my research. By the end of the morning and only several Stella feedings later, I knew something was not right with the cruise Mom had selected. Perhaps not unrelated to the imminent bankruptcy of the cruise line was the near illegal nature of the doctor’s surgical background. Dr. Banitwick had graduated from a medical school in California, but I could find no license to practice medicine in any state. Also interesting was he was a member of the Chi Do Rho fraternity at his alma mater. And so was Donnie Brookman, the owner of the cruise line company, Beautiful Cruises for You.
I left Stella with Fred in the late afternoon and headed north to the port of Miami. The office I was searching for was tucked behind the more opulent headquarters of a larger cruise line. I looked through the glass door with “Beautiful Cruises” lettered on it and saw a deserted office. Had I come too late? Then I noticed a window to the left of the entrance. Behind it a balding, short man, sweating heavily, struggled with a heavy briefcase. Before he could exit, I pushed the door inward taking him off guard.
“We’re closed.” He looked frightened.
“Yes, you are, but you’re not going anywhere.”
“You’re an undercover cop, right?”
Okay. I could be. I nodded. I was wearing a prebirth outfit, a smock with an arrow on the front pointing downward toward my belly and reading “Guess Who?” He didn’t ask for identification, confirming either his lack of intelligence or television crime show deprivation.
“I knew it. I knew this would happen.” He dropped the briefcase on the floor and began crying. His nonstop babbling made me wonder if he and Vera were related.
“I can’t compete with the larger cruise ships, but I thought running this specialty cruise would save the line. Then comes the murder, and I’m worse off now than I was before. I’m finished. No money. And I’m sure there will be plenty lawsuits up ahead. Banitwick was a hack, as you already know. He could do only one nose and one chin, one set of lips. He didn’t even do facelifts. He just sutured faces and made like he did the lifts. I’m ruined.” He dropped to his knees and looked up at me with his hands in a position of prayer. “Help me.”
“Why should you take the wrap for this?” I flipped open my phone and called Detective Estevez.
*
“He had to have made some money off the plastic surgery cruise. Where is it?” Any pity I felt for the man had evaporated, so annoying was his constant crying.
We stood outside an interrogation room watching Donnie sob his way through a confession. So far he’d admitted to stealing money from the company, failing to pay his creditors and his employees, and hiring someone he knew had no license to practice medicine.
“I’ve had calls coming in for the last twenty-four hours asking how to get in touch with the cruise line. The passengers are only now realizing they’ve been taken.” Estevez looked as annoyed as I felt.
A uniformed officer came up and tapped Estevez on the shoulder. “Excuse me sir, but some woman is here, saying she wants to turn in her mother. It’s related to the cruise line thing.”
Estevez and I turned to see a woman about my age followed by another woman with a bandaged face. A prickly feeling worked its way up the back of my skull.
“This,” the younger woman hesitated and gestured angrily at the other woman, “this person is not my mother, and I want her arrested for impersonating my mother, who is a dear, sweet woman. This one is a shrew. She couldn’t possibly be anyone’s mother.”
“Mom?” I asked.
Two blue eyes met mine.
“Fine. Then I want police protection,” said the bandage.
The younger woman turned on her companion. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just want you out of my life whoever you are. I fed you and ran errands for you since I picked you up from the cruise, but nothing I did was good enough, was it? Who the hell are you?”
“She’s my mother.” No maybe this time. I didn’t need to see her face. I could tell. “The police think you’re dead. What happened?”
“Not even a ‘so glad you’re not fish bait, Mom’?” the bandaged face asked.
“I never thought you were.”
“You said maybe the body was hers.” Estevez’s earlier annoyance at Donnie was now turned on me.
“You pushed me,” I retorted.
“I don’t care who she belongs to. Get her out of my life.” The woman who’d dragged Mom into the station looked desperate to unload her. “I’ve never met anyone so selfish, so demanding, so, so….”
“Acerbic?”
The young woman nodded. Then worry crossed her features. “But where’s my mother?”
Uh, oh.
*
Another detective led the woman off to the morgue while Estevez, Mom, and I took up residence in one of the interrogation rooms. Estevez acted as if he was glad to have our cooperation, probably because he felt guilty over insisting I identify the other woman’s body as my mother’s, and so soon after giving birth. Motherhood has its advantages in law enforcement. Besides, I’d brought him Donnie. He owed me.
“Can I get you anything?” Estevez smiled at Mom.
“Yes, I’d like a mimosa and some fresh strawberries. I asked that woman for fruit, just a little fruit and do you know what she gave me? Canned peaches. Can you imagine?”
“Mom, don’t you think we should get you off t
o your doctor to have the bandages removed and let him take a look at those sutures?”
“I already removed the bandages. There are no sutures underneath. That doctor was a complete fraud. Knocked me out and did nothing. Well, nothing I can talk about I guess. Then he tried to kill me.”
“No. You mean your husband tried to kill you. I guess he confused you with another woman and bumped her off instead.” Estevez seemed anxious to put the pieces of his investigation together as soon as possible.
“Clay? Clay wouldn’t hurt me.”
“Vera saw him throw someone overboard. She thought it was you.” I reached out to touch Mom’s bandages. I was itching to get them off her, but she slapped my hand away. She was looking like a badly preserved Egyptian mummy.
Estevez interrupted our bonding ritual. “Maybe you can fill us in on why you think the doc tried to kill you and how.”
“No mimosa?”
“A Diet Coke?” he offered.
She settled for that and a Snickers bar.
Mom squirmed around in the metal chair. “I don’t suppose you have anything more comfortable I could park my body in.”
“Just tell us what happened.” My body warned me I only had about an hour before I needed to return to my daughter.
“Don’t be sassy to me. This isn’t easy. I’ve experienced quite a trauma you know.”
Right, Mom. And I only experienced the recent delight of popping out an eight pound squalling watermelon. I said nothing, but gave her a look of impatience, one I knew she recognized because I’d copied it from her.
“Okay. I was taken in for surgery the morning before we docked. I woke up and was escorted back to Vera and my room. In the evening, she and I decided to walk on the deck. If she hadn’t been with me, Clay wouldn’t have recognized me from the other women similarly bandaged and wearing our snuggly white robes. By the way, those robes were the only good thing about that cruise. The food was awful.” She finished the candy bar and held out the wrapper to the detective.
“I could eat a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup now.”
He looked about to refuse her, but signaled whoever was watching through the two-way mirror. Soon the candy appeared.
“I’ll need another Coke to wash this down.”
The detective lowered his head into his hands, and I thought he was going to weep right there at the table, but he gathered his courage. He simply raised one hand and waved at the glass again. “Please go on,” he muttered from the tabletop.
She inserted the candy into the hole in the wrappings leaving chocolate stains on the bandages around her mouth.
“Let’s unwrap those dressings.” The mummy look was distressing me.
She held up her hand. “Do not touch them.”
“But, Mom, they’re dirty and falling apart.”
“I don’t have any make-up on. They stay in place unless you care to get me my make-up bag from home.”
Estevez and I exchanged looks and shook our heads in unison. I was beginning to like this guy.
“You look fine, Mom.”
“I can’t imagine anyone wearing bandages better.” Estevez smiled. A little smile, but a smile. I liked him a lot. He really got Mom.
She crumpled the wrapper and the detective held out his hand. He trained really fast.
“Vera and I ran into Clay and he did his usual thing. Kept telling me he wanted us to work things out. ‘I am working things out, Clay. I’m filing for divorce. You and I are over.’ Then he said the most hurtful thing.”
“What?” I couldn’t imagine mild-mannered Clay saying anything mean to Mom.
“He said, ‘no divorce.’”
“That is mean. Your other husbands were more than happy to get out from under.”
She reached out and patted my hand. “I’m so happy you understand.” I got Mom, too.
“I was so distraught when he walked away that I told Vera I was going down to the clinic to ask the doctor for more pain medication. I left her at the rail and went to see the doctor. The nurse said he was on the phone and to wait. I could hear him talking in the next office. I wandered around the empty waiting room while she left to check on other patients still in the infirmary.” Mom stopped talking and looked around the room.
“Before I go on, I want you to guarantee me police protection.”
“You claimed earlier that the doctor tried to kill you.” The detective sounded skeptical.
“Tried, but failed. He killed someone else. He meant to kill me. A case of mistaken identity.”
“I don’t understand, Mrs. Davis.” Estevez rubbed his temple. “Why would the doc want to kill you.”
Okay, so he didn’t quite get Mom. Or maybe he was being coy. After serving as Mom’s waiter for the last ten minutes, he had to have an inkling why someone would want her dead.
“I heard some stuff I shouldn’t have, and he caught me eavesdropping.”
“Stuff. Like what stuff?” I had a bad feeling I knew where this was going.
“He told the person on the other end of the line he wanted more money or he’d tell the authorities about the scam.”
“What scam?” Estevez was now all attention.
“The cruise line knew the doc was a fraud it seems and he was threatening to expose the line’s involvement in the scheme while he skedaddled out of the country. I kind of bumped into the drug cabinet while he was talking. He heard the noise and came out of his office. I dashed for the door and he followed. Once on deck, I hid behind a pillar, but he saw that other woman standing at the rail wearing the robe and bandages and chucked her overboard.” Mom licked the last of the chocolate off her fingers and sat back in the chair.
“How did you know who the dead woman was?” Estevez’s suspicious tone told me he didn’t quite buy Mom’s innocence in all this.
“I didn’t. I got lucky. I was wandering down one of the corridors looking for some place to hide. I couldn’t go back to my room. If he found out he’d tossed the wrong bait overboard, he would have come after me again. One of the stewards stopped me. I guess he thought I was the woman in a room assigned to him. He called me by the name of Mrs. Tribble and asked if I was all right, so I thought, what the hell, I’ll hide in her room until she returns or whatever. I told him I lost my key and he let me in. No one came to the cabin until the next morning when that awful person who dragged me in here earlier appeared and claimed I was her mother. I wouldn’t have let her take me off the ship if I’d known how poorly she intended to treat me.”
“Have a little sympathy. She thought you were her mother and she was taking care of you. Now she has no mom.”
Mother’s glance slid over to meet mine. “That bothers her, but thinking I was a goner didn’t seem to upset you much.”
“I thought you died the way you’d want to go, with a new face, a firm jaw line, a better nose, maybe even a tighter tush. Why would I be unhappy if you got what was most important to you?’
“I would have been dead.”
“But great looking.”
“But I’m no better now than before I set sail. Worse, actually. The doc didn’t do his job, he tried to kill me, I lost three nights in a row at the roulette tables, and then some woman treated me like trailer trash by feeding me canned fruit and microwave food. When I said I needed a drink, she offered me a Miller Lite. Someone owes me a new face.”
*
“Oh, yes you will.” The detective was leaning over Donnie, a threatening look on his face. “If you don’t, we’ll charge you with the murder.”
“I have his cell phone number, but he’s probably already left the country with the extra fifty thousand he demanded and I paid to keep his mouth shut. A lotta good that did me.” Donnie looked as if he had dropped at least twenty pounds since I first saw him. Interrogation done right is tough. No candy bars and no soft drinks.
Mom and I watched through the two-way mirror as Estevez worked on Donnie. The detective looked as wrung out as Donnie. Time interrogating my mother can do that
to a cop.
“Mom, we need to go now. I’ve got a hungry newborn to feed. Don’t you want to meet your granddaughter?”
“Sure, honey. Later. This detective needs help.” She flapped her hand at me with a dismissive flip and walked into the interrogation room.
“I’ll call the doc and tell him I’m still alive. Then I’ll threaten to go to the cops unless he does my face. The way he should have done it the first time.”
I walked in behind her. “Forget about your face, Mom. This guy doesn’t do faces. He kills people.”
Estevez stepped in front of me, desperation written all over his face. “Let’s think about this. I think your mom has a great idea.” He said this while gritting his teeth.
“Don’t be absurd. He tossed one woman to the fishes and now you want to use my mother as bait to catch him. I’d rather throw her into a tank of hungry sharks.”
“Oh, thanks, honey, but it’s my civic duty. Think of all those poor women who woke up looking the way they did when they went to sleep.”
*
Mom called the number Donnie had for the doctor. She arranged to meet him later at an address in south Miami, a kind of clinic, the doc said. Estevez claimed the area was mostly rundown apartment buildings and warehouses. Mom discarded her bandages and her eyes twinkled at the prospect of working with the cops. Or was it that she really imagined she’d get free plastic surgery?
I dropped her at her condominium in Coral Gables. Instead of going all the way back to Key Largo, I met Fred and the kids at a McDonald’s off the last exit on the Florida Turnpike before it merged into US 1 in Homestead. I fed Stella and told her she was soon to meet her grammy. She showed her delight by letting out a loud burp followed by a smell I won’t describe. I quickly changed her and handed her back to her dad.
“I should come with you. For protection.” Such a macho stance was not typical of Fred. He was worried.
“The cops will protect us from the doc.” I rubbed Stella’s back.
“I meant from your mother.”
I knew he wasn’t trying to be unkind. What he really meant was “don’t leave me here with these kids and a dog producing Technicolor turds.”
Mother Gets a Lift Page 2