Playing With Fuego

by K. G. MacGregor

  Walking back to the house, I spun a few ideas about how I was going to get through the next few days without having to deal with Mari. This called for something contagious, like hepatitis A or meningitis. I could overcome my symptoms long enough to get to the Chamber meeting, and then have a relapse immediately after. By the time Mari figured out I was faking, she’d be in jail.

  “What’d you do, Daphne?” It was Nick Johnson, a beefy patrol officer who had lifted so many dumbbells he couldn’t even straighten his arms. His eyes followed the SUV as it vanished around the corner.

  I couldn’t think fast enough but Bo was there to save the day. “They’re always coming by asking about drug dealers.”

  Johnson nodded pensively. “Right, I bet you see a lot of that in the kind of neighborhoods you work.”

  “All the time,” I said, hustling back inside so I wouldn’t have to answer any more questions.

  I had to come up with a dreaded disease. Otherwise I might need Edith’s gun after all. I could tell Mari I’d gotten a nasty stomach virus from a woman at work. That would get me out of doing anything tonight and tomorrow. With the right makeup I could even manage to look peaked on Monday and complain that I needed a few more days to shake it. By then, Diaz would have her in jail.

  I didn’t have to fake how bad I felt. It made me physically sick to think Mari had been using me. Pepe wouldn’t have gone to his friend and fixed my mortgage on his own. No, Mari’s fingerprints were all over that, so they’d have to be connected to the Caymans account too, especially since Edith and Mordy had an account there too.

  Unless all those things really were unrelated.

  Okay, so maybe Mari had mentioned my mortgage problem, and Pepe followed up with his banker friend. Through that he got access to my passport and couldn’t resist an easy opportunity to hide the firm’s money. Maybe Pepe’s shenanigans were the reason Mari couldn’t reconcile her portfolios.

  Mari knew all about my personal issues with Emily because she’d looked me up online. Pepe could have done the same thing with Edith and Mordy, especially if Mari had told everyone the story of their first meeting. And why wouldn’t she mention something as dramatic as Edith waving a gun around or Marvin surviving a fifteen-floor fall?

  But how had he gotten their passports to open the account? Probably faked them, since he’d faked everything else. Or he could have gotten hold of their original mortgage application, since he was friends with all the bankers.

  I didn’t want it to be Mari. I’d done these sorts of mental gymnastics before back when I didn’t want to think Emily would cheat on me. She never had to make excuses because I made them for her all the way up until the undeniable truth was staring me in the face.

  Now I was making them for Mari, but I didn’t have that nagging feeling that I was fooling myself. It couldn’t be her. She just wasn’t like that.

  The Cockroach Truck sounded its horn, and my stomach growled in response.

  Our roofing crew had already congregated around the truck by the time I walked out, and Bo was laying out from his cooler the feast his wife had prepared. I’d been so absorbed in last night’s drama that I never even thought about packing lunch, and since I’d skipped breakfast, it was Cockroach Truck or nothing.

  “You forget your lunch?” Bo asked as he tucked a clean checkered napkin around his collar to keep food off his filthy T-shirt. “I’ve got more here than I can eat in a week.”

  “I’ve seen you eat, Bo. Two sandwiches, potato salad, deviled eggs and…what’s that, banana pudding? That’s just a snack for you.”

  He chuckled. “Maybe I should have said more than I ought to eat in a week.”

  “I’ll grab something from the truck.”

  The instant I stepped off the porch, I caught sight of Mari’s white sports car pulling into the space along the curb where Diaz had been parked only a couple of hours ago. The same rush of adrenaline I got from cockroaches surged through me and I wanted to dash back inside.

  Grinning and animated, Mari hopped out of her car and waved me over. It was hard to believe someone could hide such deceit behind a cheery face like that.

  “I have a surprise for you,” she said, opening a Styrofoam dish to reveal a steaming pile of chicken and yellow rice. “Arroz con pollo from Versailles. I met Chacho and Talia for a late breakfast and thought about you slaving away over here.”

  The fact she may have betrayed me did nothing to diminish the wonderful smell wafting up from her offering, and my stomach made the decision to put my doubt and hostility on hold long enough to eat. “This looks fantastic.”

  “I knew you’d like it. I had to break all your traffic rules to get over here before you ate something else.” She presented me with a plastic fork and urged me to sit on the warm hood of her car.

  As the first savory bite woke up all my taste buds, it occurred to me I’d never told her exactly where I was working. That meant she was somehow following me too, which was almost as unnerving as having the IRS watching my every move. “How’d you know where to find me?”

  “Never underestimate my ingenuity when it comes to tracking you down.” She leaned on the fender next to me, leaving enough space between us to squelch the lesbian fantasies of our volunteers. “I called Pepe from the restaurant and got him to call Gisela. She gave you up.”

  Plausible, but it was still unsettling, especially since it was a team effort between Mari and Pepe.

  “Look, I’m sorry about last night…that business with Delores. There was something weird about the whole thing, like it was business, not personal.”

  I found that comforting, not weird.

  “I tried to talk to her about the files she had taken, and she finally said she was sorry for stealing my client. She wanted to make it all up to me by introducing me to one of her clients. I told her forget it. I don’t want to be friends, associates…nothing. If I never see her again, it’ll be too soon.”

  It was Delores! She was the other angle Diaz was working, and I was willing to bet the farm she was the IRS’s source for this whole thing too. Diaz said she’d been investigating Mari for nearly a year, which was right around the time Delores got dumped. Vindictive harpy!

  I was ready to spill my guts when that bit about five years in prison popped back into my head. Instead, I tried to make reassuring small talk, anything that kept us off the subject of her business dealings. “It’s good to get a clean break. You don’t need to be surrounding yourself with people who bring you down.” Or set you up to get arrested…like I was doing.

  “All this time I’ve tried to put that Delores mess behind me, and the whole time I was wishing I could smooth things over so I’d never have to worry about who showed up at what party or what they were saying behind my back. Now I realize I don’t care about any of it. Let people gossip if that’s what they want. I have a wonderful family and enough true friends to fill my life.” She leaned sideways and nudged my shoulder. “And I have you.”

  I shoved a forkful of rice into my mouth so I wouldn’t have to answer, but since common courtesy called for some kind of response, I nudged her back.

  “I’ve made some stupid mistakes over the past couple of years, but I’m ready to get my life back on track. I was lying there in bed last night and started thinking about Saraphine. Remember her?”

  I couldn’t eat fast enough to avoid talking altogether. “The woman in Little Haiti?”

  “Yeah, remember how I said your foundation needed somebody to help people manage their money so they could be independent? I could do that. Not for all of them personally, but what if I organized a group of advisors from other investment companies to help out. Everyone gives a little, so no one has to give a lot.”

  “That’s basically the same sort of thing I do, except I get them to show up here.” It would be supremely ironic to be having this conversation with someone who turned out to be a lying swindler. It just couldn’t be true.

  “Pepe taught all of us growing up that we can�
�t be just takers. We have to give back too, each one of us. He made us save part of our allowance to give to someone who needed it more, and told us to always try to be the kind of people we wanted as friends and neighbors.”

  So if Pepe was behind all this, how did he reconcile teaching children to be kind, and then turn around and steal from his clients? None of this was making sense.

  “I lost sight of all that over the last few years. Delores and I used to joke about which one of us would be the first to make ten million dollars. Could anything be more trivial than that?” She sounded genuinely shameful.

  Not that I could relate. “At the rate I’m going, I probably won’t even crack my first million till I’m fifty.”

  “But you’re happy. I know you have it pretty hard with your finances, but you don’t let them rule your whole life. While I’m making ridiculous amounts of money moving paper around, you’re doing something that matters. You’re so good for me, Daphne. I want to get back to being the kind of person I should be…the kind of person I was raised to be.”

  There was so much melancholy in her voice I thought for a second she might actually be trying to confess. She’d already admitted the littering arrest was because she’d lost her cool and behaved rashly. These financial hijinks might be just another piece of it, something she’d pulled together to make a lot of money fast so she could rub it in Delores’s face. What if she’d never intended to keep the money? Maybe her plan all along was to put it all back with interest once she bested Delores.

  And maybe Fidel Castro could throw out the first pitch at a Marlins game.

  I was convinced Pepe was behind this scam and keeping Mari totally in the dark. As much as I liked him, I’d been bothered by his overture to Gisela about investing the foundation’s money. It was the act of a desperate man, someone who needed to raise money fast, maybe to pay dividends before someone got suspicious. That would also explain why he had taken Michael on as a client after initially snubbing him. Mari had seemed genuinely surprised by that.

  The more I thought about it, the more sense it made that she couldn’t be personally involved in any of this. This was all Pepe’s doing, and he was dragging her down with him.

  “Something wrong?”

  I suddenly realized I’d stopped eating. “No…not a thing.” Just like that, I’d figured everything out to a point where it all made sense.

  “Hey, is that Nick Johnson?” she asked.

  The policeman was walking toward us.

  “You know Nick?”

  “I’ll say. He arrested me.” Which made it bizarre when she greeted him with a hug and a slap on the back. “Nick’s old partner was Delores’s kid brother.”

  “And the biggest asshole on the force,” Nick boomed. “How the hell are you, Mari?”

  “Great, and staying out of trouble, thanks to my new girlfriend.”

  Nick looked at me and nodded his approval. “Good deal. You’ve come up in the world.”

  “I’ll say. We were just talking about the devil herself a couple of minutes ago.” Mari draped her arm around my neck and gave me a jostle. “If Delores is on one end of the decency spectrum, Daphne’s on the other.”

  I loved Mari again. This was all a mistake. There was no way she was guilty of the things Agent Diaz said she’d done.

  “She’ll keep you in line, all right,” he said. “She was out here earlier giving the feds what for.”

  Saint Peter’s Polyps! Why did he have to go and say that?

  “The feds?” Mari’s cheery look faded for an instant. “What was that about?”

  “Just part of their drug patrol. They always stop by and ask if we’ve seen anything in the neighborhood.” I’d have to find a way to thank Bo for that cover story. In the meantime, a change of subject would be nice. “You guys need a hand with the roof? Mari’s an old pro.”

  “She’s not kidding,” Mari answered, back to her jovial self. To my undying relief.

  They chatted a couple more minutes and Nick headed back to the house.

  Mari took my empty tray and dropped it in a plastic bag. “I’ll dispose of this properly. Don’t want any more trouble with the litter police. How about dinner tonight? There’s a new Peruvian restaurant in the Design District.”

  I’d never be able to keep my secret, especially now that I’d figured out it was all a mistake. I wanted to blurt out everything and tell her to get as far away from Pepe as she could.

  “I’m starting to feel a little sick, like I’m coming down with something.” It couldn’t be the stomach flu, not after I’d scarfed down a pound of Cuban rice. “Achy all over…probably just a bug.”

  “You should go home and take it easy.”

  “Yeah, I think so too. Can I get a rain check on dinner?”

  “Rain check, nothing. I’ll pick something up and bring it over about six.”

  Fabulous. At this rate I’d be locked up by midnight.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Edith and Mordy’s sliding glass door banged open the second the sun went down. Whatever they were arguing about, I hoped it wasn’t Cubans, because Mari was stretched out on the chaise lounge beside me texting with Chacho about Talia’s new boyfriend. I was pretending to nurse a headache, but a fight right now between Edith and Mordy could trigger a real one.

  That the Osterhoffs were now a part of this investment scheme was surreal. If Pepe could use my neighbors that way, all my friends and co-workers were vulnerable. It was some comfort, however, to imagine ways I could entice him to drag Emily into his scheme as well.

  “You should come out here, sweetie. It’s nice and warm.” Edith’s voice had never sounded so sweet. Either her new anti-psychotic medication was working, or she’d finally offed Mordy and was talking to his bullet-ridden body. “Daphne, are you over there?”

  “Yeah, I’m sitting here with Mari.”

  “That was Mari! I didn’t even recognize her.”

  I lowered my voice so Edith couldn’t hear. “They look through the peephole every time the elevator dings.”

  “You two should come over for some wine,” Mordy called from behind the divider.

  “Thanks, but I’m not feeling so hot. We’re just going to hang out and take it easy.” I whispered again, “They only drink Manischewitz. It’s awful.”

  Mari smiled, flashing her adorable dimple. She had to be innocent. This person beside me—a woman who only today had talked about giving back to her community—wouldn’t do what Agent Diaz said she’d done.

  Not only that, I was having trouble believing the man who had taught her to be a good person would run a multimillion-dollar scam on his clients. But there weren’t any other explanations, and Pepe had done some things lately that painted him as desperate for an influx of cash.

  Poor Mari had no idea her world was about to come crashing down. It would break her heart to find out what Pepe had done. Their whole family would come apart. Hell, the whole city of Miami would be upended with a scandal like this one taking down one of the pillars of the Cuban community. People like Mordy would go on and on about how corrupt the Cubans were.

  People like Mordy…

  Only a few short weeks ago, I’d sat right out here on this very porch and taken his side in an argument with Edith over how the Cubans did business. I’d painted the whole lot of them as a network of patronage and nepotism, and railed at how they’d inflicted their culture and language on “real” Americans.

  Mari was a real American and so was Pepe, at least in the values he’d taught his family. For that, I hoped the feds would show leniency.

  The bigger question for me was if Mari would show understanding once she found out I’d helped set her up. I was no better than Delores, but they hadn’t exactly given me a choice. Five years in prison for obstruction of justice was a formidable threat, though probably not as much as that conspiracy charge would have brought.

  Wait a minute…

  The conspiracy charge was no good. They knew that. The obstructio
n of justice was only if I tipped Mari off that they were closing in. That didn’t mean they could force me to serve her up on a silver platter. It wasn’t like I was breaking any laws by refusing to cooperate with their little sting at the Chamber meeting. I could just call in sick tomorrow and tell Agent Diaz she’d have to do it without me. Maybe by the time she figured out a new avenue into the investment fund, Pepe might have a change of heart and move all the money back around to where it was supposed to be.

  Mari suddenly laughed. “Chacho’s a riot. I asked what he wanted for his birthday and he said cerveza with a smiley face.”

  “He wants you to buy him beer?”

  “Yeah, but he’s only nineteen. Pepe would stuff me in a cardboard box and send me back to Cuba.”

  That didn’t mesh at all with the kind of man who would bilk his investors. Everything I knew about Pepe—and Mari as well—ought to have both of them vying for sainthood.

  “Mari, what’s the worst thing you ever did?”

  “You mean besides getting arrested for dumping trash behind Delores’s car? I sneaked out once in high school and met my friends on South Beach. We were trying to get into a club with fake IDs and all of a sudden, Pepe’s car stopped right there in front of us. He got out and opened the back door. That’s all. He just stood there without saying a word. Needless to say, I got in, and I never tried it again.”

  “How did he even know?”

  “The man has eyes and ears everywhere. He’s like the unofficial godfather. People call him all the time about stuff so he’ll use his influence to get others to do the right thing. He’s always taken it seriously that he’s considered one of the leaders in the Cuban community. I remember even as a kid him saying everything any of us did reflected on all of us.”

  She wasn’t talking directly to me, but I heard her message just the same. I was guilty of blaming a whole ethnic community—the whole city even—when just a handful of people ran afoul of whatever I thought the proper standard ought to be. All the while, I never gave credit to the folks who stood up for their communities and families, who gave back the way Pepe and his family had, and who gave this place its character and verve.