Act of Betrayal

by Edna Buchanan

  “We are looking for Armando Gutierrez,” Bravo told him. “What is his room number?”

  “He expecting you?”

  “We are friends,” Bravo said.

  “Why don’t you ring his room?” I said.

  “Only phones in the hall.”

  “We can just go up,” I said. The less time I spent in public with Bravo, the better.

  “Okay, but I can’t let you go up alone. Too much happening these days. You know.”

  He continued to scrutinize us as he began to slowly lock drawers. Did he intend to protect his guests from us, or us from his clientele?

  “We’re not here to burglarize your guests or vandalize your halls,” I said shortly. We would have picked a place with more class had that been our intent, I thought. Who would know the difference if this place was vandalized?

  He mumbled something about liability, dropped the key in his pocket, and eased ponderously to his feet as I fidgeted restlessly.

  I hurried toward the elevator, with Bravo following, but the manager moseyed toward the stairs. The smell of stale beer wafted around him as he moved.

  “What floor is it?”

  “Three,” he said. “Elevator’s out of order.”

  “Oh no,” I moaned. I could use the exercise, but Bravo leaned heavily on his cane and the manager didn’t look about to win any footraces either.

  I wouldn’t get back to the paper for an hour at this rate. “You sure it doesn’t work?”

  “Think I’d be taking these stairs if I didn’t hafta?” He stared at me balefully.

  We started the climb, the manager leading the way, Bravo behind him, and me, hyperventilating at the rear.

  I’m sure Mount Everest has been ascended more quickly.

  “Room three-fifteen,” the manager said, breathing hard halfway up the first flight.

  So slow a pace in the heat made me groggy. I trotted past both and took the lead. The gloomy third-floor hall smelled musty. The few light fixtures had empty sockets or burned-out bulbs. The pay phone was near the landing. A chain dangled from the wall; the phone book that should have been attached was missing.

  The manager, red in the face, was about to tackle the third flight. Bravo held his own, just behind him. I wandered down the hall to 315. No one in sight, but I could hear both Spanish and English radio or TV from several rooms.

  When the manager was in sight, I knocked. “Seńor Gutiérrez?” Not a sound.

  Lord, I thought, after all this, he’s not here. I rapped more sharply, then again. “Señor Gutiérrez!”

  The manager and Bravo lumbered up behind me.

  “He’s not here,” I muttered.

  “I didn’t see him go out,” the manager offered. “He don’t even go out to eat.”

  I didn’t like a look that flickered in his eyes for an instant.

  Bravo said nothing, leaning on the doorjamb and his cane, still catching his breath.

  “Under those circumstances,” I said, “you should probably open the door to check and see if he’s okay.”

  He took his keys from his trouser pocket.

  “When did you see him last?” I asked. Fingering the correct key, he wore an expression of mixed dread and resolve.

  “‘Bout an hour ago. He sent out for Chinese food. Came down to the lobby to wait for it just before the delivery.”

  Pizza and fast-food restaurants will not deliver to downtown hotel rooms. Deliverymen go only as far as the lobby, then get out fast. Otherwise they risk being robbed for the food on the way in and the money on the way out. And cops say their jobs are dangerous.

  I expected to find an empty room, that Gutierrez had stepped or skipped out.

  The manager inserted the key and opened the door. I brushed by him into the room, Bravo behind me.

  Two cardboard cartons of Chinese food were on the floor leaking into the carpet. So was Armando Gutierrez.

  “Oh, Jesus, Oh, Jesus,” said the manager.

  Bravo cursed, eyes searching the room. “They killed him!” He checked the closet and under the mattress. “Reyes killed him! Antonio’s diario is gone!”

  The pillow from the bed was on the floor, stripped of its case. Not many places to hide anything in a room that size. If something had been hidden in the pillowcase, it was gone. Or the empty case was used to carry something away.

  “Don’t touch anything,” I warned. The manager still stood panting in the doorway. I did not need to warn Bravo. He pushed his way past the manager, nearly knocking him off balance, and burst out of the room like a racehorse out of the gate.

  Moving pretty damn fast for a man with a cane, Bravo was halfway down the first flight of stairs before I ran out into the hall.

  “Where are you going?” I shouted. “You can’t leave me here! Stop!”

  He never looked back. “¡No policia!” he shouted over his shoulder and tap-danced on down the stairs. The man could have qualified for the Olympics. I fought the urge to join him and turned back to what was in the room.

  One lesson learned on the police beat is to never run away and leave a dead body behind. Cops hate that. They jump to conclusions and make your life difficult.

  “I’m calling the cops!” the manager exclaimed and made for the hall phone.

  They would arrive in minutes and when they did, the room would be off limits. I stepped back inside. The man on the floor had been shot, perhaps more than once, at the base of the skull. The blood in his hair made it hard to tell. He may not even have seen his killer. Probably surprised from behind as he carried the Chinese food back into his room. His knees had buckled and he had fallen forward. He looked bruised behind his ears, perhaps from internal hemorrhages. Taking a deep breath, I crouched beside him, trying to see his face. His nose had hit the floor and was flattened. Blood had poured from his nose and mouth but I saw no exit wounds. His eyes were open, their expression empty. Nobody home. Despite the laboring room air conditioner the blood had not congealed and the skin on his arm was still warm to the touch.

  “What the hell happened?” I whispered. He didn’t answer.

  Sick to my stomach, I got to my feet. The commotion had attracted some of the other guests. A stringy-haired young woman in short shorts and a halter top stood horrified in the doorway, her hand to her mouth. Her nail polish was peeling.

  “Did you hear anything? See anybody?” I asked.

  She shook her head and made tracks for the stairs. A neatly dressed middle-aged man followed, buttoning his shirt. I decided to use the hall phone to call the paper, and Mark Seybold, once the manager finished.

  He was gone and I saw why. The phone cord had been cut, neatly severed. He must have gone downstairs to call the cops, unless he had decided to make a run for it too, like everybody else.

  I went back into the room. A toothbrush, but no paste, in a plastic glass in the bathroom. Towels and tub were damp, as though he had showered that morning. Few personal effects. A worn T-shirt and a pair of jockey shorts folded in an open drawer. A ballpoint pen and a half-finished letter on the dresser.

  Without touching it, I tried to read the letter, which was in Spanish. He wanted his mother in Cuba to know that he was safe in Miami. He had made it, after leaving Higuero, near the eastern tip of the island, and enduring a hellish five days at sea on a crude raft. The raft flipped in strong waves on day three. The man who had accompanied him drowned and their supply of food and drinking water were lost.

  God was with him, he had written. Fishermen found him ten miles southwest of Sombrero Light in the Keys, gave him food and water, brought him ashore, and drove him to Miami. Cuban Americans, they gave him some money and offered to help find him a job. But first, he wrote, he had a mission to accomplish and there had been complications. That was as far as the letter got.

  Safe in Miami. I looked at Armando Gutierrez, his brains blown apart in this fleabag hotel. In Cuba he was not happy, but at least he was alive.

&n
bsp; Heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs, and I cleared out of the room.

  “How the hell did you get here so fast? You’re Britt, from the News, right?” asked an aggressive red-faced patrolman.

  “She was here. She wanted to see him.” The manager was pointing.

  “She the one you were talking about?” The cop squinted at me. “You were here when the body was found?”

  “She’s the one who wanted me to open the door,” he said, head bobbing, finger pointing, like a tattle-tale kid.

  Sure, as though none of this would have happened if he hadn’t opened the door. He should be grateful that we had found Gutierrez now, not three days later. Bravo. I cursed his name. I had to speak to Mark Seybold before talking to the cops.

  The manager was still pointing at me, so I retaliated.

  “How many murders here at the Bradley so far this year?” I queried pointedly, pen poised over my notebook. I recalled a few right off the top of my head. The married accountant who had strangled his mistress on their lunch hour, accidentally he said, during rough sex. The dead hooker rolled under the bed by the room’s former occupant, and undiscovered until the new occupant got down on his knees to investigate a rank odor.

  The cop interrupted before I could get an answer, or maybe the manager was still counting.

  I swore I had not touched anything. The cop stepped briefly into the room, then returned. “Slamdunked right in the back of the head.” He radioed for homicide.

  Too bad Kendall McDonald was away, I thought wistfully. I would have gotten to see him. But then, again, one look at my guilty face and he’d know all about Hal.

  “Wait downstairs in the lobby,” the cop said, “and don’t go anywhere. Homicide wants to talk to you.”

  I immediately obliged, eager to get to the lobby phone.

  “What!” Mark Seybold demanded.

  I repeated myself and told him that Bravo had split.

  “Think he had anything to do with it?” Mark said.

  “Don’t know. Don’t think so. Maybe. Probably. He claims Reyes had it done.”

  “Juan Carlos Reyes? Jesus, Britt.”

  “Am I obliged to tell the cops I was with Bravo?” The local police and the FBI are not on the best of terms and rarely share confidences, but the bureau would surely hear about this and I hated losing credibility with them and any possibility of trust in the future.

  “How do you know Bravo? Did you go to him to obtain information for a story?”

  I told him about the diary.

  “Sounds like a personal matter. He’s not a news source in this case, you’re not obligated to protect him from an ethical point of view. You’d have a tough time claiming reporter’s privilege and withholding information, especially in an investigation of this gravity. You say the dead man is an illegal alien?”

  Two homicide detectives walked into the lobby. “Do me a favor, Mark,” I said quickly. “Tell the city desk I won’t be back for a while. I know the cops will want me to go to the station and give a statement.”

  “Wait, Britt. I want to be there when you talk to the police, even though you were not technically on assignment.”

  “Good.” I was grateful, even though I knew he was more interested in protecting the paper’s interests than mine. Something else I learned the hard way is to never be interviewed by homicide detectives without a lawyer present. That one would have saved me much grief the first time.

  The detectives asked me to wait while they went upstairs for a quick look. I sat on a cheap vinyl chair in the lobby and wondered what the hell was going on. Did Gutierrez ever have the diary? Did Bravo set all this up in some twisted scheme of his own?

  A few guests, oblivious of the excitement upstairs, dozed in front of the blurry TV. I resisted the temptation to get up and try to tune in a better picture. An elderly wino was sprawled on the couch, either comatose or asleep. Crime-scene technicians and more cops streamed toward the stairs. The removal crew from the medical examiners office would not be happy that the elevator didn’t work, I thought, gripping the arm of my chair.

  My fingers closed around something disgusting. Chewing gum, at least I hoped it was chewing gum, soft and sticky, left under the arm. Shivering, I tried to get it off. The wino on the couch sat up and began to gag. Trying to scrape the gob of goo off my fingers with a tissue, I nearly joined him. Could Cuba be any worse than this? I thought about Armando Gutierrez upstairs, face down in his own blood. Of the mother who would never read his last letter.

  This was no place to die. You were not safe in Miami, I thought. Tears stung my eyes.

  18

  I wound up telling the cops everything. Not only is it my nature to be honest, this killer needed to be caught. The only detail I withheld was my wild ride down U.S. 1 with Mr. Bravo, and that was in no way related to the murder. Hell, they did not need me to tell them he had weapons and would use them.

  The two detectives, a lanky, silver-haired veteran named Hanks and Billy Wogan, young, pudgy, and recently transferred from burglary, listened. They said they would check into the Bravo connection but seemed to write off Armando Gutierrez’s death as a robbery.

  “Why would a robber single him out?” He had nothing, I protested.

  “You know how it is, Britt,” Hanks said. “You’ve seen people killed for a quarter, a can of Coke, or less. Happens every day. He musta pulled out his wallet when he paid the Chink who delivered his chow mein. Somebody in the lobby spots it, seizes the moment, and follows him back to his room.”

  “Why kill him?”

  The detective shrugged. “Musta been somebody he woulda recognized. Somebody who didn’t wanna leave a live witness.”

  “How come nobody heard the shots?” The assistant medical examiner who did the rollover at the scene said Gutierrez had been shot at least twice.

  The detective quickly wearied of my questions.

  “You’ve seen the place. God knows we’ve all been there enough times. We haven’t talked to ’em all yet, but they probably had their radios or TVs turned up loud, were otherwise occupied, or they’re lying ‘cuz they don’t wanna be involved. The killer probably stays there and they’re afraid of ‘im.”

  It all sounded plausible, even to Mark.

  Every time I spoke of the diary and thirty-year-old intrigues, their eyes glazed over and they would reach for mug-shot books of known armed robbers.

  The manager was leafing through them with pudgy fingers as I left. It must have been like perusing his high school yearbook. From his expressions it appeared as though he recognized most of the faces.

  Detective Hanks’s final words to me were, “Don’t try to make this into something bigger and more complicated than it is, Britt. You always do that.”

  That’s what I always said about Cuban exiles, that they love intrigue, see conspiracies everywhere, and tend to exaggerate. Was it because I was a woman, because my name was Cuban? Did my heritage provoke that remark? Had I just encountered discrimination? I opened my mouth to argue, but Hanks was already talking to another cop about returning home to tie down his boat and put up hurricane shutters and asking to borrow a power tool for the job. As though Armando Gutierrez, now lying on a plastic tray on wheels at the morgue, had never existed.

  Maybe they were right about its being a random robbery. If my father’s diary did indeed exist, I had serious doubts that it had ever been in the hands of Armando Gutierrez. When his raft flipped in rough seas would he hang on to the diary of a man long dead instead of the food, water, and the companion he lost? Not likely. If Bravo was responsible for this killing, he should be tried. Perhaps I was being supersensitive, a characteristic I criticize many minority groups about. Mark wisely steered me out of there.

  I expected to have to explain everything again to my editors back at the office, dreading the rime it would waste to answer their questions. There were things I had to do.

  But to my surprise I was not hustled
into a meeting. The editors were all tied up, in meetings themselves, discussing logistics and making contingency plans in the event a hurricane watch was declared. Hurricane maps hung on every newsroom bulletin board, with copy boys updating them every three hours, as advisories were issued.

  The hurricane, now a killer storm, had walloped Guadeloupe in the Leeward Islands. One-hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour winds had killed eleven on the butterfly-shaped island, ripped off tin roofs, destroyed the control tower at Pointe-a-Pitre International Airport, knocked out electrical power, and left four thousand homeless. Damage, deaths, and disorder are common when storms hit poor islands with lousy building codes. Guadeloupe, on the rim of the Caribbean basin, is frequently battered by storms. In the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico emergency evacuations of thousands of coastal residents were under way.

  I picked up the telephone book, made several calls, then dialed Don Farmer at the FBI. “I need a favor,” I told him. “I was hoping you could help. I need to find one of your fellow feds. A CIA agent who was active in Miami about thirty years ago. Winslow. First name Frank. I don’t have a DOB but he should be early sixties by now. Probably retired. I need to get in touch with him.”

  “What’s this for, Britt? What are you working on?”

  “A backgrounder on Bravo. This guy knew him back then.” Not really a lie, though my fingers were crossed.

  “How quick do you need this?”

  “As soon as possible,” I said. Before the bureau hears I was with Bravo today, I thought.

  “Well…” He didn’t sound convinced. “The best I can do for you is try to run this guy down and ask him if he is interested in talking to you. If so, I’ll give him your number.”

  “Okay. Sure. Swell. I really appreciate it, Don. I owe you one.”

  “Well, let’s see if I can find the guy first. You got a middle initial?”

  “No, but there are only eight Winslows in the Miami phone book. No Franks, none related. I already called them.”