The Queen of Miami

by Heidi Lowe

  Corman chuckled. “Foreplay? Kid, when you've been married as long as I have, you learn not to push your luck with that sort of stuff.”

  “Maybe you need a new wife.”

  Corman laughed, turned to Layke. “See, she gets it.” He was only met with a stern look from his partner, who didn't seem to find any of this exchange amusing.

  “How's your arm doing?” he asked, turning back to Willa.

  She shrugged. “I still feel a little twinge every now and then, but it's nothing I can't handle.”

  “And your friend, Johnathan Moors, you must miss him a lot.”

  He hadn't been Johnathan Moors to her for a long time, if ever. Just Little Johnny, sometimes Little J, but never Johnathan. It seemed so impersonal to call him that.

  “He wasn't just a friend, he was family.” She hadn't intended to grow so emotional. This guy didn't need to know how important Little Johnny had been to her.

  “You must have been pretty angry about what happened to him.”

  “As angry as any normal person would be.”

  “Maybe even angry enough to go after the person who killed him.” No one was smiling now; Corman's face took on a grave appearance.

  “I don't know who killed him,” she said evenly.

  “Sure you do. Come on, we're all friends here. It was Ambrisi, wasn't it?”

  “I don't know who killed him,” Willa said again, more emphatically. “But if it was Ambrisi, well, whoever took him out deserves a prize. When you find the guy, let me know. I'll buy him a drink.” Her smile was sinister and daring, just like her eyes.

  “So you wouldn't know anything about it?”

  She shook her head. “'Fraid not.”

  “Can you account for your whereabouts on the night in question?”

  Aha! There was the trick question that all detectives relied on to trip up their suspects. Where were you on the night of the crime wasn't lethal in and of itself. However, when you coupled that with the fact that the actual day of the crime hadn't been released yet, it made for the perfect question for unsavvy criminals. The news outlets had merely stated that his body was found on a certain day; that didn't necessarily mean the murder took place then.

  She smiled. “Tell me the date and time, and I'll tell you where I was.” She prayed that when Guy was asked the same question, he didn't fall for it.

  “Coroner puts the death at between nine and one on Wednesday night.”

  Willa thought about it. “Right, I remember. I was out of town, in bed. Had an early night.”

  “Were you there alone?”

  Willa saw Layke shift through the corner of her eye. “Actually, no. I was in bed with the hottest piece of ass I've had in years!” She laughed, still avoiding Layke's gaze, knowing that she was squirming and probably blushing heavily. “I didn't think they made women like this one anymore. I couldn't get enough of her. We were at it all day, wore ourselves out and fell asleep by eight.”

  Corman chuckled. “Sounds like a keeper. Would you happen to have a name and contact number for this mystery woman, so she could vouch for your alibi?”

  “You know, I tried reaching her a couple of times, to thank her for a wonderful time, but when she didn't answer I figured she wasn't interested, and deleted it. Sorry.”

  “What about a name?” Corman asked in a dry tone. It was obvious he didn't believe a word she was saying.

  Willa let out a fake sigh of regret. “The name's slipped my mind. I think it was something like Lucy, or Laurel, something like that.” As Corman jotted this down, Willa risked a glance over at Layke, whose face was more pallid than usual, and she looked to be sweating. Then she added, “It might have been Michelle, now that I think about it. Write that one down too. Oh, or Sarah.”

  Corman added the two names to his notepad, though he did so sluggishly. This information was less than useless. The girl was playing with him. He closed his notepad, turned to Layke. “You got anything for her?”

  “Nope, you covered everything,” Layke said quickly.

  “Righty. Well, thanks for your time, Miss di Blasio. My partner will show you out. Owen, could you bring in one of the others?”

  They had barely left the room when Layke said, through gritted teeth, her lips hardly moving, “What the hell was that in there?”

  “Why haven't you returned my calls?”

  “I've been busy trying to catch a killer, in case you forgot. The sooner I find him, the sooner we can rule you and your family out.”

  “It sounds like you're blowing me off.”

  “I'm not. But I'm seriously beginning to question if I should. Did you want him to find out about us? Were you trying to get me fired?”

  “I was trying to get your attention, Layke.” Her voice lost its chill. “You don't spend four days away with someone, say the things you said, and then pretend they don't exist. Have you any idea what that does to a person's ego?” She tried to insert a little laugh, but it wasn't genuine. It wasn't just her ego that had taken a hit; her heart had suffered a blow too. Though she would never admit that now and give Layke any more reason to put distance between them.

  “I'm sorry. I wanted to call, I just... with everything that's happened...”

  Willa looked at her and got the feeling that something else had happened, in addition to the stresses of the job. But now wasn't the time to ask. The invisible barrier that separated them infuriated her more than ever now. If Layke had been anyone else Willa would have been able to comfort her, whatever the problem was, in or out of public.

  “I get it.” She didn't, not really, but if saying she did took some of the pressure off Layke, she was fine with that.

  “Maybe if you're free this weekend we could...” She scratched her head, then laughed. “I don't know, hang out? Do grown women hang out?”

  “Call me, we'll do something.”

  “I will.”

  “How did it go? What did you tell them?” Noah asked his sister, once Layke had escorted Guy away with her for questioning. He seemed more on edge than usual. In these settings – police stations, prisons – he really showed his age. Granted, no one liked any of those places, besides the people who worked in them, but Noah became especially nervous whenever he had to come. It worried Willa, whenever she allowed herself to consider it, how he would survive if he ended up in jail. He probably wouldn't last a day, even with the surname.

  “I told them what I had to. Not that it matters. They'll try to find ways to pin this on us no matter how many alibis we provide.”

  TWENTY

  The office was unconventionally quiet for this time of day. Velazquez's seat sat empty a few feet from hers; behind her, Corman and Bishop's desks were also uninhabited. It was like a ghost town. She heard hasty footsteps on the corridor, approaching the office. Cody, their data guy, appeared seconds later.

  “Hey, Layke. Is it just you here?” The joy in his voice was evident. Layke found it amusing. What did he think would happen now that they were alone?

  She peered around. “Looks that way. What's up?”

  “I think there's something you might want to see.”

  “Sure, why not? I have nothing better to do.” That wasn't exactly true, but she doubted whatever Cody had to show her could have been more tedious than her paperwork.

  She followed him to his office.

  “So you know how Ambrisi didn't like security cameras in his house?” he said, sitting at his two-monitor computer and proceeding to type at lightning speed, opening up a bunch of files and entering in code, all of which went over Layke's head. “Well, I thought it might be a good idea to check some of the CCTV footage in the area, see if anything came up. The nearest camera was four minutes away from Ambrisi's mansion. It was across the road from a gas station. So I pulled up the footage from eight to two, just to be on the safe side. Check this out.”

  Fuzzy, off-color footage popped up, filling both screens. Layke leaned closer. “What am I looking at?” From what she could make of t
he car waiting at the traffic lights, a man was sitting in the passenger's seat with an overgrown denim jacket on, and a baseball cap that mostly obscured his face.

  “It's not a busy road. Only a few dozen cars passed between that time. It's one of two ways to get to Ambrisi's house. This way takes you around the back, the other brings you to the front.”

  “What am I looking at?” she asked again.

  “Watch.” Cody paused the video, then zoomed in on the passenger in the baseball cap, the head turned slightly in the direction of the camera. “Look familiar?”

  At first the person didn't. It could have been anyone. But then her stomach began to tighten, her mouth became dry. The passenger did indeed look familiar: it looked like Willa. The shape of the face, the lips... She knew those features well. But how? Willa was with her, one-hundred-and-sixty miles away, on the night of Ambrisi's death.

  “I, I'm not sure–”

  “Looks a lot like Willa di Blasio, don't you think?”

  “B–but she had an alibi, she was out of town.”

  “Unless she can be in two places at once, my guess is she was lying.”

  “Or that's not her.”

  Cody shrugged. “I'm no good with faces. Maybe you're right. I ran the plate through the database. That license plate isn't registered to that vehicle. The one it does belong to was reported stolen a week ago.”

  Layke had zoned out and could only focus on one thing: the woman on the screen. It did look like Willa, but it couldn't have been her. It couldn't have been.

  “Hey, Layke, are you there?” Cody waved his hand in her face, trying to get her attention. She hadn't realized he'd been calling her.

  “Yeah, sorry. What is it?”

  “What do you want to do with this?”

  “Maybe we should hold off showing it to anyone else,” she said, thinking fast. “We're this close to a harassment lawsuit from the di Blasios. I don't think we should go poking that hornets' nest until we can be sure. I mean, you said it yourself, you're not good with faces.”

  He looked at her skeptically. “You want me to sit on it?”

  “Just for a couple of days. That's it.”

  “Okay, whatever you want.”

  As she walked back to her desk, the world seemed to be spinning around her. Her blood ran cold. It felt as though she was in somebody else's body, watching her life from afar. She collapsed at her desk, her face ashen. It couldn't have been Willa, she knew that. And because of that, she was faced with a tough decision. In a couple of days, when Cody shared his find with the rest of the gang, they would go after her secret lover, and when that happened Willa had two choices: either give the name of the woman she'd been with, or go to jail.

  Layke knew what she had to do.

  Desperation made her forget her manners; she didn't wait for an invitation into the deputy chief's office after she knocked. Luckily, she didn't catch her father in flagrante, fooling around with some barely legal piece of skirt who had some weird dad fetish.

  He didn't even look up from his papers. He didn't have to. “There's only one person audacious enough to enter my office without being asked in. What is it, Layke?” He sounded more father than big boss, which, given the conversation that was forthcoming, was precisely who she needed him to be.

  She closed the door. “Dad, I need to talk to you about something important.”

  He must have heard the urgency in her voice, because he looked up immediately, discarding his papers. “What's happened?”

  She gulped back the fear that was trapped in her throat, making it difficult for her to breathe. If there had been any other way... But this was her only recourse. It was better that she told him before he found out – before they all found out – from the other party involved. That would have been a million times worse.

  “I want you to know that none of this was planned. It just... happened.”

  “Layke, for God's sake, spit it out.”

  “In a couple of days Cody's going to come to you with some footage that he thinks will implicate Willa di Blasio in Eddie Ambrisi's murder. Then you'll all want to arrest her, maybe even charge her.”

  “Okay...”

  “I need you to stop that from happening.”

  “And why would I do that? If the footage shows her on it committing a crime, you bet your ass we'll arrest her.”

  “It can't be her on the tape.” Layke knew she was shaking like a leaf, knew that her father would be able to see it.

  “How can you be so sure? Because of her paper thin alibi?”

  “Because... because she was with me!” she blurted out. If it didn't come out that way, it may never have come out.

  For the longest moment her father only stared back at her, blinking in wonderment, as though trying to determine what planet she had wandered down from. Until finally, “Don't say anything else.”

  “Dad, I have to. Pretending this didn't happen isn't going to do anyone any favors–”

  “I said stop!” He jumped up from his seat, his face as red as a tomato. “I didn't hear any of this.”

  “I've been seeing her for a couple of months. That trip I took last week, I went to be with her.”

  He looked as though he would vault over his desk and strangle her, the way he was glowering.

  “We were in a motel one-hundred-and-sixty miles away from here. She was with me the night of Ambrisi's death.”

  He slammed both hands on his desk, causing Layke to jump. Then she watched him shove everything to the floor with one sweep of his arm. This was, without a doubt, the angriest she had ever seen her father. Although he'd always had a temper, it was only then, for the first time, that he actually scared her. She knew it would be a while before she got over that feeling.

  “You stupid little girl! What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I wasn't, that's just it. It just happened.”

  “This isn't the kind of thing that just happens, Layke.” He screwed up his face in disgust. “You're engaged, to a man! You're a detective. I'm trying to understand how careless, how fucking stupid one person can be to want to throw all of that away for... Maurice di Blasio's filthy spawn.”

  “Don't you think I know what's on the line?”

  “Are you sure you do?” he demanded. “Sleeping with the daughter of the man who tried to put me down. This has to be the dumbest, most selfish thing you've done yet.”

  The shame she felt confessing all to her father was suddenly replaced by something else: anger.

  “Then I guess I got that from you. All right, I can take the admonishment. I deserve it. But don't you dare make out that I'm the only person in this family who's made mistakes.”

  “Taking the wrong exit on the highway is a mistake; sleeping with that filth, after everything that family has done, is a reprehensible sin.”

  “Which good book did you read that from, huh? The same one that says thou shalt not screw around on their wife?”

  “You watch your tone, Layke,” he said, pointing a threatening finger at her.

  “You don't get to judge me, not when you've been sleeping with half the women in Miami behind my mother's back.”

  “We're not talking about me.”

  “Maybe we should be.”

  Now they were both huffing and puffing, seemingly all screamed out. Passing judgment and pointing fingers was a tiring affair.

  “If this gets out, you would lose your badge. I hope you know that,” he said, once they had both calmed down a little.

  Layke rested her face in her hands, and let out a long, exasperated breath. “I know.”

  “I hope she was worth it.”

  “It's not about that, Dad.”

  “Then what is it about, Layke? Help me understand.”

  “I fell for someone I wasn't supposed to. I'm not the first to do it, and I won't be the last.”

  He snorted derisively. “Yeah, but how many detectives fall for the criminals they're supposed to be taking down?”

&nb
sp; She shrugged helplessly. She didn't think her situation was unique to her, though she doubted the number was high. She did believe that Willa's charms were universally effective; and had Willa been straight, any one of the male detectives in her department, including her father, would have fallen victim to them.

  “I never planned on this ever getting out, but with the whole Ambrisi thing, I didn't have a choice.”

  “You said Cody's the only person who knows about the footage?”

  Layke nodded. “I told him to keep it between him and me for a couple of days until we knew more. Spun him a line about a harassment suit.”

  “And the woman on the tape, you saw her?”

  She nodded again.

  “Does it look like the di Blasio girl?”

  “Yes and no. The footage is fuzzy. But there's enough of a resemblance to make a case against her.”

  He plopped back onto his chair, studied her carefully. “And you're sure it can't be her? She was definitely with you the whole night?”

  “We were asleep by eight, eight-thirty. It was a three-hour drive from Miami.” Of course, now that she thought about it, how could anyone ever be sure what went on while they were asleep? For all she knew, Willa could have sneaked out in the middle of the night, driven back to Miami, offed Ambrisi, then returned in time to give her a good morning kiss.

  Her father combed his hand through his fair hair. He looked to have aged ten years since she'd seen him this morning. This couldn't have been easy for him either. If it got out that his virtuous daughter was screwing a di Blasio – any di Blasio – it reflected badly on him also.

  “And nobody else knows about... whatever this is?”

  “Dustin knows.”

  “For God's sake, Layke! You told your fiance about it? It's just some rebellious phase – he doesn't have to know about every goddamn indiscretion.”

  For a reason she couldn't determine, this comment offended her more than being called stupid and careless. It somehow cheapened what she and Willa had, made it seem frivolous. What the hell did he know about it?

  “It's not a phase,” was all she could say without launching into another verbal attack on him.