Nathan had been the last of the police to get into position. He’d crossed the room to put his hands on my shoulders and look deep into my eyes. “You don’t have to do this,” he said, his voice quiet and kind. “We can just bring him in for questioning like any other person of interest. The text doesn’t matter; you do.”
“You know how slick he is,” I said. “Has anything ever stuck when he’s been accused of something? All those resolutions he pushed through because they benefited his businesses? He shouldn’t get away with murder. Especially almost twice.”
He cupped my cheek in his palm and sighed. “You’re too brave. Do you understand that when I get angry with you about doing something risky, it’s not that I’m so angry, it’s that I love you? And I’m afraid I’ll lose you?”
My throat closed up and I leaned forward to kiss him. “I love you, too. Nothing risky, I promise. You’ll be right here, only feet away, true? So go.”
I heard the click-clacking of the tires on Turner’s truck hitting the driveway, then the silence as he shut the engine down. In a rush of claustrophobia, I had the urge to run outside to meet him. But I knew that would screw up the plan, make it harder for the police hidden in the living room and kitchen to protect me. And deviating from what we’d agreed on would panic Nathan and Torrence. And panic has never enhanced good decision-making. So I sat like bait fish in a bucket and waited. I heard heavy footsteps on the short flight of stairs that led past the Secret Service booth.
“Hayley?”
Markham’s voice sounded normal, and I tried to make mine match. “In here.” That came out as a whisper. “In here, in the poker room,” I called.
He came in cautiously, looking all around him as if I’d set a trap. I pictured the two uniformed cops squatting behind Harry Truman’s bar, ready to heave themselves out with guns flashing at the first sign of trouble. I pictured my trusted friend Steve Torrence poised behind the swinging door that led to the kitchen. And I pictured the strong shoulders of Nathan Bransford crouched down in the Secret Service booth. Nathan who loved me and would never allow me to be hurt.
Markham stopped to look the space over. Then he glared at me. “I hope this isn’t a wild-goose chase.”
“It’s—” My mouth felt too dry to finish one short sentence. I swallowed and tried again. “It’s not.”
“Here’s what I want to know: why did you think of me when you found the medal?”
“I knew you and your father were both big Hemingway nuts. I’d heard you talk passionately about how this prize really belonged in the United States, not Cuba. And I agree completely with that. Why should they hoard this precious symbol of one of our country’s great writers?” I forced a grin. “Besides, you were one of the few people who was in the house when the thing disappeared. You and Gabriel. And he’s obviously dead.”
He didn’t look convinced.
“Let’s call it woman’s intuition.”
“Even supposing that’s all true, which seems unlikely, why did you contact anyone? Why not take the medal and sell it and then keep the money yourself?”
“Because I’d have no idea how to unload the darn thing. I was hoping you would.”
As we’d planned the sting, we’d gone round and round and finally decided that he might bite if I told him I thought I knew where the medal was but would have no clue how to dispose of it.
“It must be worth a ton, right?” I continued. “And there’s no way that kind of money should be buried down there in the southern netherlands of Cuba. One day that dreadful government will swoop in and pluck it out of that convent anyway, right?”
“You got that right,” he said.
But cautiously, as though he was checking me out. Was it possible that I was setting him up? I had to imagine that was going through his mind.
“The point is,” Nathan had said half an hour earlier, “sound as dizzy as you possibly can. Like you’re a helpless female who can’t possibly figure out how to solve this knotty problem without him.”
I’d made a face. Really?
“I’m not saying you are dizzy, I’m saying you’re a good actor,” he’d added quickly.
“Nice save, Bransford,” one of the other cops had said.
Another policeman had snickered. “He’ll find out later if he’s made the save or not.”
At that point I was peeved, dog-tired from getting up so early, and on a knife edge from the stress of the whole week. I wanted to pitch a little snit and say, “Really? I’m the one who found the dang medal and now you’ll make fun of me? Fine, how about you all handle this on your own without the dizzy broad involved. Take him down to the station and watch him deny everything.”
But even more, I’d wanted to stop Turner Markham.
Torrence had stepped forward and circled his arm around my shoulders, a placating look on his face. “Everyone’s a little tense right here. Let’s all stand down a minute and work together on this.”
So we’d made the plan and everyone had agreed it was the best chance for nabbing him. And now I was stuck living with it, even scared out of my gourd.
“So here’s the thing, I believe the medal has to be in this room. Because there were too many people around right after it was stolen for someone to smuggle it out of the house without being seen, remember? You were here with the entire Cuban delegation and the folks from Key West as well.”
“I remember,” he grunted. “I assume the cops searched everywhere, though.”
“Dollars to doughnuts, cops being cops and a little bit dumber than usual in this town, I bet they didn’t think to look inside the poker table.”
Not true at all, but that was payback for Nathan’s dizzy comment. I explained the same thing I had told Bill only hours earlier, then repeated for the cops when they’d shown up. “I think it has to be hidden right here in plain sight. But suppose we make a deal? You tell me what really happened and I’ll share the money once we sell it.”
He rubbed his jaw, thinking that over. “If I’m selling it to my contacts, we split it seventy percent me, thirty percent you. Especially since I’m the one who took the biggest risk and knocked off that lying bastard before I could get it back from him. Believe me, he was going to sell it and keep the profits. That’s the kind of family he comes from.”
“I thought that’s what happened,” I said, feeling a surge of outrage. “I thought you were the one who stabbed Gabriel. I wasn’t exactly sure why, though.”
“What’s your guess, Little Miss Smarty-Pants?” he asked.
“You were the biggest Hemingway scholar I’ve seen, for one,” I said. “Though in a different way from the people who fawn all over the man and his work.”
Turner’s face flooded red and the muscles in his neck bulged with tension. “You and I both know he was a cheating hack. He won the prize for being Mr. Macho, Mr. Bullfight, Mr. Sexy Ladies’ Man. Dana Sebek was right about her theory. That’s what people really love about Hemingway. They want to be him, right up until the point where he blew his brains out,” Turner said. “They don’t care about his stupid, stilted writing. My father had more talent in his pinkie than that man had in his whole brain and his whole life. And, for that matter, so do I.” He paused, pulling back from his lapse into a full-bore rant. “But that doesn’t explain why you think I killed a guy.”
“It was the small splotch of blood spatter on your silk shirt.” He looked shocked, glanced down, and brushed at his green golf shirt. “At first I thought maybe the caramel sauce from the flan I dropped splattered over your clothes and that was the sum total of it. Honest, I only thought of it because I was going to offer to pay your dry-cleaning bill.”
But his face had gotten even redder and beads of sweat popped out, and as I opened my mouth to continue to talk, he cut me off.
“That bastard ruined everything. It was almost like he was lying in wait, watching me, hoping I’d trip up.”
I didn’t say that Gabriel had been lying in wait for him, in fact had waite
d a lifetime for that moment. But he probably hadn’t counted on the possibility that Turner Markham would act as completely ruthlessly as his father had, years before him. That taking another human life meant very little to either of them if they could get what they wanted in the end.
I gutted back a wave of sheer panic, realizing that Markham would stop at nothing. If I hollered for help now, the cops wouldn’t have enough on him to put him away. There was nothing to do but slog ahead with what we’d planned. Nathan would call this off if he thought I was in any danger. Any danger at all.
“Anyway,” I said in the dizziest voice I could muster, “I think the medal is hidden in this table.” I rapped on the top of the mahogany. And then explained about the reconstruction and how Gabriel had been part of the crew that did the work. “So he might have known of a cubbyhole where he could hide it. And I’m assuming that’s what he did—after you stashed it someplace less secure.”
He didn’t answer, but got down on his hands and knees and crawled under the table as Bill and I had. I heard him suck in a little breath of air when he found the medal tucked away in the tiny opening where Nathan had replaced it. He scrambled back out, grinning, the gold winking in his left hand. And a gun in the other. “I’m sorry about that thirty percent, but I don’t believe you’ve earned it,” he said.
But before he could raise the gun to level and shoot me, a phalanx of angry cops piled on top of him. And Nathan grabbed hold of me and whisked me out into the sunlight before I had time to really breathe or speak another word. I stood there shaking in his embrace, half scared to death, still, and half inordinately proud of my part in the takedown.
“You know what,” I asked, starting to giggle uncontrollably. “That was by far the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. Let’s don’t forget in the future that you helped set it up.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.
—Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Even with Maria’s condition upgraded, first from critical to serious and then late this afternoon to fair, and with Turner Markham ensconced in the Stock Island jail, I wasn’t much in the mood for a touristy party scene. Plus, my mother and Sam were sharing drinks with Miss Gloria and Connie on our houseboat deck to celebrate the end of the Havana conference and Turner’s capture, and I couldn’t think of a place I’d rather unwind from a difficult week. And the sign on the boat next door had been marked this morning in bright crimson letters: SOLD! We all wanted to cheer my housemate up about the unknown new neighbors. She was trying so hard to put on a sunny front, but we could all see her dismay, plain as daylight.
But Nathan had astonished me so thoroughly with his reservation for dinner at Hot Tin Roof that I couldn’t refuse. Especially after he’d described his schedule for the next two weeks. Because he was in charge of ten days of SWAT training for the whole department, this little window of time was his only real availability. Hot Tin Roof’s second-floor restaurant was located within the Sunset Pier complex only a stone’s throw from Mallory Square, and conversations could sometimes be overwhelmed by the music from the stage in the outdoor bar below. Definitely not Nathan’s style.
This time, fortunately, the performer was a well-known soul singer named Robert Albury. And Nathan seemed so pleased about having scored a table on the deck overlooking the water. We ordered appetizers and drinks—a mojito for me and a nonalcoholic beer for him—from a waiter with a Russian accent, and settled in to watch the busy scene below us. Our order came out quickly and we filed our dinner choices with the server. Out on the horizon, a variety of boats plied the harbor, taking advantage of the impending sunset.
“You see that yacht out there?” Nathan asked, pointing to the enormous blue-and-white boat moored farthest out. “I heard two different stories this week. One said there was a Russian oligarch who lost his wife and came here to drown his sorrows. The other claimed the boat is owned by Norton Revson, you know, the high-end cosmetics magnate? They say he loves drag bars and comes here to get his fix. Or is it café con leche that he loves?”
I tried to smile. He could tell I was down and he was doing his best to jolly me up.
“I know you’re sad about Maria,” he said, reaching for my hand across the table. “And after all her family suffered, it doesn’t seem right that she ended up almost drowned. But she’s going to be okay, right? That’s what the doctors said?”
I nodded and swallowed a big gulp of my drink, not wanting my words to wobble when I spoke. “The good part is that that awful man will really get punished, right?”
“He may think he’s got friends in high places, but the negatives are pretty damning,” he agreed.
The dinner food was delivered—crab cakes for me and a rare steak for him. He ordered me a glass of rosé. We ate in silence for a bit.
“How do they rate on the famous Hayley Snow crab cake scale?” he asked.
He was really trying to cheer me up—even pretending that he cared about food.
“Right up there,” I said, smiling. “Lots of crab, not much bready filler, and a crunchy crust. And their remoulade sauce is very good too, with a nice zip that sneaks up on you after finishing each bite.”
“And tell me again how you ended up figuring out that the medal was in the poker table,” he said.
“Really?” I asked, looking under our table and pretending to search. “Who are you and where did you hide Nathan Bransford?”
He smirked. “Yes, really. I’d like to hear how your complicated brain works.”
“Everyone wants to know that, but it’s a mysterious being, my brain.”
“Come on,” he said. “You’re good with words. Describe it.”
“It was like what I do when I’m working on a review. I don’t know immediately how I feel about a restaurant and its food and its chef. I taste lots of dishes and take notes about my reactions and pictures to document everything. And then I step back for a bit and let my subconscious go to work. And a couple of hours or days later, the truth is revealed. Maybe the chef was trying too hard to imitate a Michelin-starred restaurant. Or maybe the chef cares more about volume and money than he does about food. Or maybe the owner is too cheap to buy good stuff, when every home cook knows the end result can’t transcend lousy ingredients.”
The whole time I talked, I watched his face to see if he was listening, which he seemed to be. And then whether he cared. Which, who could really tell? That would come out in time. And as long as he cared about me, I could let the food part go.
“Interesting,” he said. “You work bits and pieces of information around until it all drops into place—like a detective would do. Or maybe even a psychologist.”
“You’re full of surprises,” I said, sipping the last bit of wine from my glass.
“I like to keep you guessing. What say we move downstairs for a nightcap?”
“Really? You want a drink here?” I gestured at the crowd below, swilling, smoking, yakking under bright-yellow umbrellas on a finger of the pier that extended out into the water. “You can’t even indulge tonight anyway.”
“I like Albury’s music,” he said a little sheepishly, anticipating my astonishment.
This was altogether strange. He wasn’t the kind of man who liked lingering in a crowd. Especially in a crowd of tipsy tourists. Too many bad possible outcomes circled through his mind, and he preferred to be on the outside watching for one of them. I was certain he’d already pictured the panic that could occur if something went wrong and the crowd tried to crush farther inland for safety. Bottlenecks and potential problems waited everywhere, as customers could only get to the bar via narrow boardwalks. But he paid the bill quickly, then grabbed my elbow and led me
downstairs.
“Look,” he said. “Our lucky night. That couple is leaving.” He pointed at two brightly painted stools close to the stage that had just been vacated.
“Isn’t that Officer Ryan?” I asked.
“Oh, maybe you’re right.” Nathan waved at the other cop, and we made our way over to sit. “I’ll have to thank him for his excellent timing when I see him tomorrow.”
He ordered us drinks from a chipper waiter as we watched the singer. This performer was quintessential Key West—an older black man, dressed in baggy shorts and a T-shirt, crooning his heart out with old bluesy classics. He had the most soulful, pained expressions on his face as he met the eyes of various women in the audience.
“He’s working the crowd,” I said.
Nathan laughed. “He’s a master. I could learn a lot from this guy.”
“This next song,” said the singer in his deep and husky voice, “goes out to Hayley Snow.” He looked over at me, winked at Nathan, and began to wail: “Try a little tenderness.”
I felt tears prick my eyes. “You set this up?” I asked Nathan, moving now from a little surprised to utterly stunned.
“I got scared in the Little White House yesterday. Scared I might lose you,” he added. “I wanted to do something special.” He took my hand and squeezed. “You seemed so pressured this week, and sad about Maria and Gabriel.”
I nodded; their story was so tragic. “You can’t imagine how painful it was to hear Carmen talk about what had really happened those years ago. And Gabriel dying while trying to avenge his mom—that was the exclamation point on an awful story,” I said, squeezing back.
“There’s more, isn’t there?”
I bit my lip, weighing whether to tell him. “It’s not only Maria. And this will seem so ridiculous in comparison to what they lost. The houseboat next door sold,” I said. “Miss Gloria is really worried about the new neighbors. I know it sounds silly to you, but it matters to me if she’s happy. And she’s happy on Houseboat Row. For now, anyway.”
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