Most Dangerous Place

by James Grippando

  Jack didn’t reply. He forwarded it to his tech guru to see if there was a way to verify the source. His techie would have to investigate, which would take a few hours—which in turn gave Jack time to meet with his client and cocounsel. They gathered in the sitting area of Jack’s office, Isa in the Windsor chair with her back to the window and Manny on the other side of the coffee table. Jack paced before the empty fireplace as he spoke.

  “I have a theory on what prompted this e-mail,” said Jack, and he told them how the “Felipe connection” had been the main takeaway from his conversation with Ilene Simpson at the Billfish Diner.

  “I share your suspicion,” said Manny. “It wasn’t public information that John Simpson was John Doe. So you have to wonder what led Felipe to Ilene before you got to her.”

  “And now that I’ve talked to Ilene, is it really a coincidence that he suddenly wants to meet with his daughter, whom he hasn’t spoken to in almost a decade?”

  Isa was silent, which wasn’t what Jack had expected. “Isa, what are you thinking?”

  “There’s more to the picture,” she said.

  Jack stopped pacing, rested his elbow on the mantel, and listened. Isa took her time, careful not to leave out anything important as she told them about Melany’s “Felipe sighting” in Alice C. Wainwright Park the previous afternoon—and possibly in Hong Kong. “I was almost expecting some kind of follow-up from him,” said Isa. “Maybe this proposed meeting with me is it.”

  “Are you sure that the man Melany saw was your father?” asked Jack.

  “Yes. I showed her a photograph when we got home from the park. She was certain that it was him—both in Miami and in Hong Kong.”

  “That could be a little suggestive,” said Jack. “It would have been preferable if you’d shown her three or four pictures and she’d picked your father.”

  “Fine. Maybe this wouldn’t stand up in a court of law. But I’m confident it was him.”

  Jack took a seat. “Let’s start with this question: Are you interested in a meeting with your father?”

  Isa looked away, then back. “I’m interested to know what he was trying to say to my daughter.”

  “My assumption is that he isn’t going to sit down with your lawyers and tell us anything. So would you be willing to meet with him alone?”

  “Alone?”

  “That’s his request.”

  “I don’t know how to answer that question,” she said. “I could say yes to you right now, and five minutes before the meeting I could change my mind. There’s a lot of history here.”

  Manny leaned forward in his chair, as if to announce that it was his turn to talk. “When you say there’s a lot of history, do you mean only between you and your father? Or is there something between your daughter and her grandfather that is so upsetting?”

  “There is no history between Melany and my father.”

  Manny stayed with it. “Exactly. Who’s to say that this isn’t just a grandfather trying to reach out—literally—to the granddaughter he hasn’t been allowed to meet?”

  “That’s what he would say,” she said, scoffing.

  “What are you saying?” asked Manny. “That he traveled ten thousand miles from Caracas to Hong Kong to—do what? Molest your daughter?”

  “No! Who said anything about molesting?”

  “Does he have a history of child molestation?” asked Manny.

  “No. I told you he was an abusive husband. I saw him hit my mother.”

  “Did he physically or sexually abuse you?”

  “No. Why are you asking this?”

  “Did you ever accuse him of it?”

  Isa glared at Manny—a glare that might have knocked him from his chair had it been any more intense. “I see where you’re going with this,” she said. “I’m the one with a history. I’m a false accuser. I wasn’t raped.”

  “Don’t get angry.”

  “Then don’t insult me.”

  “I am simply preparing you,” said Manny. “Every woman who has ever been raped and gone public has had to fight the label of false accuser. You have a luxury most victims don’t have. Your attacker is dead. You don’t have to take the witness stand and point him out in a courtroom. You don’t have to testify and endure the cross-examination.”

  “I’d hardly call that a luxury.”

  “Then you’ve never sat through a rape trial.”

  Isa looked away, and there was only silence. Manny’s style wasn’t Jack’s, but he had a way of making his points. And at least he knew when to back off.

  “Should we take a little break?” asked Jack.

  “No,” she said in a clipped voice, her gaze shifting from Jack to Manny and then to Jack again. “What you don’t understand is how evil my father can be—how he can manipulate a little girl’s mind. When I was Melany’s age, he used to tell me things.”

  “Sexual things?” asked Manny.

  “Will you quit already, Dr. Freud?”

  “Manny, just listen,” said Jack.

  Isa drew a breath. “When he really wanted to hurt my mother, he didn’t hit her. He didn’t even raise his voice. He would take me aside and tell me stories about her.”

  “Stories?”

  “Oh, my father was a wonderful storyteller. Very convincing. None of it was true, but he filled his stories with such elaborate details that I believed every word. He told me that she had another family. That she had another daughter—a perfect little girl exactly my age who was prettier and smarter than I was. He said my mother loved that family more than us. That’s why he had to hit her. If he didn’t, she would leave, and I would never see her again.”

  Isa’s gaze drifted off to the middle distance, and Jack filled in the moral of Felipe’s story.

  “It was all her fault,” said Jack.

  Isa nodded, and then the sadness in her eyes gave way to resolve. “I’ve made my decision. Tell my father I’ll meet with him.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Jack.

  “Yes,” she said. “And I’ll do it on his terms. Just the two of us. Alone.”

  Chapter 40

  Isa wished Keith were home. Except that Miami wasn’t “home.” She wished her whole family could be somewhere else. Not Hong Kong, necessarily. Just anywhere but Miami.

  Regrets. She had a long list of them, starting with her decision to stay in Miami for college. It wasn’t for lack of options. She was an A student in high school and, having spent grades six through twelve in Miami’s International Studies Magnet Program, she spoke English and German as well as her native Spanish. She wanted a top-tier university in a big city. She’d earned acceptance letters from NYU, Northwestern, and Boston College, but opted for warm winters. If only she’d preferred sweaters and boots over a bathing suit and flip-flops. Gabriel Sosa would never have found her. She would never have met David Kaval. She wouldn’t be in this mess.

  Then again, she wouldn’t have fled to Zurich. She would never have met Keith. She wouldn’t have Melany.

  “Where to?” asked the taxi driver.

  “Cy’s Place,” she told him. “Coconut Grove.”

  “You got it.”

  That was the agreed-upon venue for Isa’s eight p.m. meeting with her father. Jack had arranged it. Cy’s Place had been Jack’s idea, but it was an accommodation in response to a specific demand. “He insists that you meet in a public place,” Jack had told her after his exchange of e-mails with her father.

  What did the old fool think—that Isa might pack a pistol in her purse and blow him away? That unless there were at least a dozen witnesses around them she would empty an entire ammunition clip into his chest, squeezing off round after round at point-blank range, shredding his ribs and sternum with a dozen copper-jacketed projectiles, and then dropping her gun in the dead center of the glistening crimson rose on his crisp white shirt as she turned and said, “Die, you worthless piece of shit”?

  Not that she hadn’t fantasized about it.

  “That’s a fu
n place,” said the driver as they pulled away from the motor court at the Four Seasons.

  “Excuse me?” said Isa.

  “Cy’s Place. I been there myself. It’s cool. You’ll enjoy it.”

  She crossed her legs and laid her purse in her lap. “I’m sure I will.”

  Jack and Manny waited inside Theo’s business office. It was without windows, only slightly larger than a prison cell, and it doubled as a storage room for nonperishables, so the floor-to-ceiling shelves on three walls were stuffed with boxes of napkins, toilet paper, and other dry goods. Jack sat in a squeaky office chair behind the clunky metal desk, and Manny pulled up a stool on the other side. It was cramped, but the lawyers had promised to remain out of sight and within immediate reach for the meeting between Isa and her father.

  “Do you think Isa told us the truth?” asked Manny.

  “About what?”

  “Her history with her father—whether he sexually abused her.”

  “I do. I think she’s genuinely afraid he’ll turn Melany against her, the same way he poisoned Isa’s mind with lies about her mother.”

  “Maybe,” said Manny. “But I’ve been thinking more and more about this since that night at the bar in the Four Seasons, when Keith asked me about the ‘abuse excuse.’”

  “I remember,” said Jack.

  “It’s hard to come up with a better explanation for why Felipe doesn’t want his daughter saying she was raped. It would be rational for him to fear that at some point Isa will have to explain why she didn’t report it. Past abuse would be one compelling explanation.”

  Jack reached for a paper clip and started unbending it into a metal pointer. “There has to be a better one.”

  “Now you’re going back to where I started. She wasn’t raped.”

  “I’m sure that’s what this meeting is about. His ‘proof.’”

  “Proof?”

  “That’s what he told Keith and me in my office—that he had ‘proof’ she wasn’t raped.”

  “You think he has it?”

  Jack laid the somewhat straightened paper clip on the desk. “Hard to know,” he said, reaching for another clip. “A nagging part of me says it’s not a total bluff.”

  Chapter 41

  For the first time since her mother’s funeral, Isa sat across from her father and looked him in the eye.

  He’d changed in ten years, though probably not as much as Isa perceived. The image in her mind was the old photograph that hung in the consul’s office when she was in middle school, when he was handsome in his own way, much more fit and—at least as she remembered—even taller. He was dressed casually, in chinos and a short-sleeve blue guayabera.

  No crisp white shirt.

  “Where do we start?” she asked.

  They were alone at a table for two. The small stage was empty; in the tradition of Uncle Cy and the old Overtown Village, live jazz at Cy’s Place didn’t start until much later. Tables were starting to fill nonetheless, a mixed crowd of well-dressed couples on their way to dinner or the theater, and the more casual drinkers who had no better place to hang out.

  Her father leaned into the table just a bit, his hands resting earnestly on the tabletop, as if he had nothing to hide. “The first thing I want you to know, Isa, is that this is all about helping you.”

  “You, helping me? This is going to be a very short meeting if that’s what this is about.”

  “Show some respect, young lady. How do you think you got out of jail?”

  “You had nothing to do with that.”

  “I paid ten thousand dollars to your cellmate’s boyfriend. He took it from there. I thought he came up with a pretty ingenious plan—the way he and Foneesha Johnson put that guard in the hot seat and put you in the driver’s seat.”

  Isa stared back in disbelief. “Are you saying that guard never planned to rape me?”

  “I’m told he definitely had a thing for you.”

  Foneesha’s crude warning came back to her: “Everybody know he like Latina pussy.”

  “But whether he was going to act on it or not doesn’t matter,” said Felipe. “This wouldn’t be the first time you made false accusations.”

  Her anger spiked, and it was probably a good thing that the gun in her purse and the crimson rose on the clean white shirt were just a fantasy. “Is this why you wanted me out of jail? You think you can control me?”

  He forced a little smile. “No, gorda.”

  Fat girl was the ironic term of endearment he’d used when telling stories to his skinny little daughter—those vicious lies about Isa’s mother. “Don’t you dare call me that.”

  “I just want to help.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “You need my help.”

  “How does it help me when you meet with my husband and lawyer and tell them that I was never raped—that you have proof that I wasn’t raped. How does it help me to plant a story with the Tribune that I was not raped. I assume that was you. Am I right?”

  He didn’t deny it. “That story never ran.”

  “Because it’s not true. I was raped.”

  “You keep forgetting, I have proof that you lie.”

  “What is your ‘proof’?”

  “Alicia Morales.”

  Mere mention of her name cut like a knife. Alicia had been her best friend in high school and the oldest daughter of Felipe Bornelli’s administrative assistant at the consulate. One night when the girls were alone, Alicia confided that Isa’s father had come on to her. Isa was certain that “el jefe” had done much more than come on to her—Isa could see the real story in Alicia’s eyes and hear it in her voice. Isa stood up for her friend and took the matter straight to the consul. It put her father’s job in jeopardy—until he crushed Alicia and her allegations. Within a matter of days, Alicia’s mother was dismissed from her position at the consul’s office, and the entire Morales family was sent packing. Alicia never graduated from high school and ended up working a shit job in a garment factory in Caracas with her mother.

  They never forgave Isa.

  “I can’t listen to this,” said Isa as she pushed away from the table.

  “Sit down,” he said through his teeth. “Let me help you, Isa. Or I will destroy you.”

  She stopped and considered it. Jack had coached her to control her emotions, not to get up and walk away in anger—just listen to what he had to say. Information is power, Isa. Get all you can.

  She settled back into the chair.

  “Smart girl,” he said. “Now, I want you to understand why it is better for all concerned that you never testify in this case, and that you never tell anyone that Gabriel Sosa sexually assaulted you.”

  “You can never make me understand that.”

  He laid a sealed envelope on the table between them. “This will.”

  “What is it?”

  “This is for you, Isa. It’s what I tried to give to Melany when she and her nanny were in Kowloon Park.”

  Confirmation that Melany had indeed spotted him in Hong Kong was one of the key objectives of the meeting, but it still seemed crazy. “If you wanted me to have this, why would you travel all the way to Hong Kong and hand it to my daughter?”

  “If I had sent it to your apartment by FedEx, would you have accepted the package?”

  “Only if I didn’t know it was from you.”

  “And if you had unknowingly accepted it and seen it was from me, would you have read what I wrote?”

  She gave the honest answer. “No. I would have thrown it in the trash.”

  “But if Melany had come home from the park with this envelope and told you that her grandfather had given it to her, wouldn’t you have opened it to see what was inside?”

  “I suppose—out of concern for Melany’s safety.”

  “And wouldn’t you have read it?”

  “Only to find out what kind of poison you were trying to put in my daughter’s mind.”

  “Yes, of course. This is your preci
ous daughter. It’s your duty to protect her. You would have read it, right?”

  She didn’t respond right away, but when she did, she again answered honestly. “Probably.”

  “There you go,” he said, gesturing like the man who is always right. “That alone would have made my trip worthwhile. Unfortunately, Melany got scared and ran away before I could tell her who I was and give her the envelope.”

  It still struck Isa as bizarre, but Felipe Bornelli was a bizarre human being. “What’s inside?” she asked.

  “The truth,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “About Gabriel Sosa.”

  Isa felt a chill. She glanced at the envelope on the table, then back at her father.

  “Share it with no one,” he said in a low, almost threatening tone. “But read it. Read it as many times as you have to. Read it carefully, and then you will see things my way.”

  Chapter 42

  At 5:45 p.m. Saturday the Swissair nonstop from Zurich touched down at Miami International Airport. Keith traveled business class, not first. The difference in fare was astounding, and Keith somehow felt compelled to save the money, having spent his entire Friday at IBS headquarters trying to defend the Hong Kong office’s worst second-quarter performance since the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

  Landed, he texted Isa.

  On Thursday evening Keith had landed in Zurich loaded with facts for his meetings. The Asian market was still feeling the effects of Black Monday, when the Shanghai main share index lost 8.49 percent of its value in a single trading day. Manufacturing in China had contracted for ten consecutive months. For the first time in history, trading on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges was halted under new “circuit breaker” rules to avoid all-out free fall. All of that was true. It was also true that Keith had spent forty-seven of the previous sixty days half a world away from his family. His review committee, however, seemed interested in only one thing: Keith had a “major personal distraction” in his life.

  Yay! Love you! Isa texted back.

  Keith cleared customs, which took another forty minutes, then walked with the steady flow of passengers into the main terminal. It was the same corridor through which he’d entered upon arrival from Hong Kong in April—and that had ended with Isa in handcuffs. Going to work and spending nights alone in their Hong Kong apartment had, in some ways, made the arrest and aftermath feel as distant as another lifetime. Returning to the airport, however, and putting one foot in front of the other on the same black terrazzo floor brought it back in painful detail. It was as if he could see Jack with his wife and daughter waving from the other side of security. He could almost see Riley’s face beaming as she met her new friend from Hong Kong. He could see a pair of uniformed officers from the Miami-Dade Police Department waiting at the end of the corridor. Really could. They were actually there.