“I walked out here without turning on the lights, took the decanter off the shelf, and then I saw him, standing right there.” She indicated the corner next to where I sat. “He was wearing one of the those black Boston Strangler—style knit masks, with eyeholes.”
A chill rippled down my spinal cord, raising gooseflesh on my arms as she went on.
“I screamed and dropped the decanter. It shattered on the tile floor; it was crystal, Waterford. We’d had it forever, a wedding gift, I think. My guests called out, then came running. I simply stood there, frozen, as he fumbled at the door, trying to unlock it. I’d been having a problem with it. It sticks. I think the wood is warped. For a moment I thought he was going to smash his fist through the glass panel, but then he did manage to open it—and ran.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing, not a word.”
“The others in the house, they all saw him?”
She nodded. “Kenneth wanted to chase him, but his mother screamed and hung on to him. She’s the nervous type. She kept saying, ‘What if he has a gun? What if he has a gun?’”
“Did you see a gun?”
She shook her head.
“What happened next?”
“We called the police.” She shrugged. “Two officers came. They said we had surprised a burglar and frightened him off. There have been burglaries in this area, they said, though not on this block. A detective called a few days later. He asked me more about the man’s description. There wasn’t much I could tell him.”
The black mask sounded ominous. I had written several stories about a rapist striking just east of the Gables, in Coconut Grove. He wore a black ski mask. His MO was to break into houses and wait for his victims to come home alone. Was that what the detective was thinking about when he called?
“Did they say they had any suspects?”
“No. But later, particularly after the second incident, I began to think about it…. The intruder took nothing. The police assumed we had surprised him moments after he broke in. But that isn’t true. He expected me to be alone. He had been inside, waiting for some rime. Waiting for me.”
“What makes you think that?”
“He had come in another way; he didn’t know the porch door would stick. I saw his panic when it didn’t open. Worst of all, I discovered later that a knife from the cutlery block in the kitchen was missing, the sharpest one. It was there that morning. He must have had it and was waiting for me with it in the dark. He took it with him.”
“You’re sure it wasn’t missing before?”
“Absolutely. I always felt safe here. I must say I haven’t felt the same about this house since. But I believed it was an isolated incident, until it happened again, a week later. I’ve always grocery-shopped at the supermarket here in the Gables, but prices are higher, and I had some cents-off coupons only redeemable at Dixie-Mart, so I went to the store on Coral Way, in Miami. I finished shopping and was walking to my car. It was twilight, just before the floodlights go on in the parking lot. I thought I heard footsteps, someone running, but when I turned I saw no one. As I put the bags in the car, a man’s voice suddenly said, “Excuse me.” When I looked up, he was right on top of me. He grabbed me. He wore the same ski mask—”
“It was the same man?”
“I believe so. He was the same height. The mask looked the same. I dropped the groceries, struggled, and tried to call for help from a driver who had pulled his car up right behind mine. I thought he had seen what was happening and was coming to my rescue. But the driver hunched over, and when he came up he was also wearing a mask. The first one had me in an armlock, dragging me toward the car. The masked driver opened the door. I struggled, trying to hold on to my own car, screaming, ‘What are you doing? Let go of me!’ Something like that. That’s when the other one jumped out of the car and came running. He wrenched my hand free from the door and twisted my arm. They were dragging me into their car.
“I saw the look in their eyes, Ms. Montero. They were going to kill me. They didn’t want my purse. They wanted me.”
She blinked back tears. Sensing her distress, her cat sprang into her lap, where it curled up, fixing a baleful amber-eyed stare on me.
“One put his hand over my mouth, and I bit him. We scuffled, bouncing off both cars, with me yelling as loud as I could. That’s when a stranger, a woman in a car, started blowing her horn and screaming at them to stop and an old man with a grocery cart shouted, ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ And then a bag boy came running, yelling, ‘Hey! Hey! Hey!’
“Somebody set off a car alarm, and a little old lady blew her police whistle.
“With all the commotion, they let go of me and I fell, broke the heel on my shoe, and landed among the groceries scattered everywhere. I was crying, scratched up, nails all broken, bruised for two weeks. The bag boy got their license tag number as they pulled out of the parking lot. The Miami police came.”
“What did they say?”
“The car was stolen. They said it’s not unusual for stolen cars to be used in—what did they call it?—an attempted strong-arm robbery. They insisted that the men were thieves trying to rip the purse off my shoulder. They said that women often get dragged that way when the strap is sturdy and doesn’t break. I could not get them to believe that those men were not after my purse, they wanted me.” Anger tightened her voice.
I understood her frustration. Police used to ask which way the bad guys went and tried to catch them. Now, even if witnesses point and say, “They just ran around that comer!” cops will first ask for the victim’s name, address, and social security number. The only cops I’ve seen actually run after anybody lately were performing for COPS or America’s Most Wanted.
“I was furious,” Althea was saying. “I showed them my purse, gave a weak little tug, and the strap tore. It was an inexpensive little vinyl knockoff, not some well-made leather bag like a Coach or a Gucci.”
“What was their reaction?”
“I believe they took me for a hysterical woman.”
The cops didn’t buy the story, and I wasn’t sure I did either. Why her? It all boiled down to motive. There was none. Richard was apparently happy as a clam with the younger woman he had dumped Althea to marry. They had a new baby, almost the same age as Althea and Richard’s recent grandchild by their daughter, Jamie, who had also married a doctor.
“It’s wonderful to have a grandchild,” Althea told me wistfully, “but we don’t get to spend much time together. Jamie and her husband are much closer to her father and his new family now. Richard,” she said, “has the money and the power. My son-in-law is on staff at the same hospital. Richard’s new wife, Moira, and our daughter have so much in common. Nearly the same age, with new babies. They socialize, even go skiing together.”
Richard was apparently too busy reliving his youth to be trying to kill his ex-wife. If anything, she should be gunning for him.
“A lousy deal,” I said.
She shrugged bleakly.
“What else has been going on in your life?”
“The only thing out of the ordinary is that I served on a jury in a big drug case in criminal court a few years ago, a fascinating experience. In fact, I saw the jury foreman again just recently, bumped into him at the post office.”
“You think the defendant might be out of prison and stalking members of the jury that put him away?”
“No, we acquitted.”
Money was no motive. She had none. The divorce settlement awarded her the house and her car, but her monthly alimony was not nearly enough to maintain them. Her pride wounded, angry at being dumped, she had not demanded more, naively believing she could make it on her own. She’d been wrong.
“It’s not so easy to land a job when your only work experience in the last thirty years is riding a float.” She laughed ruefully. Richard’s checks often came late; his new wife kept forgetting to write them. Althea used to donate her old clothes to the Junior League Thrift Sh
op; now she shopped there. She was taking a computer course, hoping it would lead to a job. She was barely getting by.
I thought about my own mother, widowed when I was three.
Althea Moran did not seem the type to inspire murderous passions. She agreed.
“I do not go to bars at night to pick up strangers,” she said quietly. “I don’t quarrel in traffic, drive fast, or argue over parking spaces. I don’t take foolish risks. But I saw it in their eyes—they wanted to kill me. You’re my only hope,” she pleaded. “No one else will take me seriously.”
I wasn’t sure what to believe.
On the way back to the office I thought about how both Althea and the crown of Orange Bowl queen had been phased out. The tradition died when women invited to join the Orange Bowl Committee found the queen and her court demeaning. I never understood their objections. What’s demeaning about being queen? The world has always had goddesses. Hell, I wouldn’t mind riding a magnificent float down Biscayne Boulevard, waving Happy New Year to thousands of cheering celebrants. I could suggest half a dozen more important issues for feminists to fix, but nobody asked me. Althea had been phased out by feminists, her unfaithful husband, the cops, and the world in general. I wished life were kinder and that fairy tales always had happy endings.
I decided not to mention Althea Albury Moran to the city desk yet, in case there was no story.
A message waited. I called Charlie Webster back.
“Thought you might be interested,” he drawled. “They found the sheriff’s Blazer down in Alachua County, in a ditch out near Turkey Creek.”
“Did they find her? Have they got her?”
“Nope. The lady’s long gone again. But she did leave her calling card.”
“What?”
“Dead man. Britches around his ankles. His wazoo shot off, then shot in the head, just like ol’ Buddy Brascom. Took his car too. Thought you’d be interested, cuz it appears she headed south again, coming your way.”
Four
THE UNIDENTIFIED VICTIM HAD PULLED INTO AN I-75 rest stop at midmorning. The coffee-shop waitress saw him soon after, chatting with a vivacious young woman. The busy waitress did not see them leave. Five hours later, the pilot of a crop duster spotted the roof of a sports utility vehicle in a dry drainage ditch off a back road bordered by woodlands.
The Alachua County Sheriffs Department and the Highway Patrol dispatched cars, hoping to find the Blazer sought in the Shelby County murder. They did. What they did not expect to find was a dead stranger in his late twenties or early thirties sprawled beside it. His pockets were empty, his car gone, apparently taken by the killer, but no one knew what he had been driving.
The manhunt intensified. I swiveled my chair to study the Sunshine State’s gun-shaped outline on the three-by-five-foot map mounted on the wall next to my desk. I found a box of red pushpins in the wire room and inserted one into the map in central Shelby County, the site of the sheriff’s office, and another to the south, at the rest stop just off the interstate, where the second victim was last seen alive.
I regretted that the story was unfolding outside our circulation area. Not my turf. I opened a file anyway. Was it wishful thinking or because I know that those on the run are inevitably drawn here? I heard someone say once that it is the carrion smell of the corpse flower that attracts the dregs and bottom feeders who drift inexorably toward south Florida. The amorphophallus, now in bloom, resembles a phallus and smells like something dead. Its sickening spoiled-meat odor attracts flies, in the jungle and in Florida gardens.
I drove home at twilight. Looming clouds blackened a tumultuous western sky but failed to keep their promise of rain. The heat evoked dreams streaked by lightning and rocked by distant thunder—or was it gunfire?
I woke up dazed, at daylight, Bitsy barking a warning. Moments later an urgent pounding rattled my front door.
“Britt! Britt! Help me!”
Mrs. Goldstein. In trouble. The gun. My mind blanked in a moment of confusion. Where was my gun? Nestled in the glove compartment of the T-Bird, parked outside. Normally I bring it inside, but the night before I had been lugging a grocery bag, notebooks, and my purse.
I threw open the door. “What’s wrong?”
“Look! Look what they’ve done to the amaryllis!”
The yard was alive with huge black grasshoppers with garish yellow and chartreuse racing stripes, red-tipped wings, and orange warning dots. The stuff of biblical plagues, they swooped and swarmed, stripping away succulent leaves.
“Look at their size!” I said. “It must be this crazy weather.”
“They’ve already eaten all the new growth off the day lilies!” she said. “I haven’t seen them like this for years. Nothing kills them!”
Some societies prize grasshoppers as a delicacy. Too bad ours is not one of them.
“The only way to kill these babies is with a small-caliber pistol, but don’t try it,” I warned.
Assurances that they would soon swarm off to greener pastures didn’t stop Mrs. Goldstein from swinging a broom at them. She was still at it when I left early to go to a scene.
“Stay in the shade,” I urged. “Are you wearing sun-screen?”
She shook her head and sighed. “I’m leaving soon anyway. The Jam and Jelly class at the Fruit and Spice Park starts at ten. You’re off to work?”
“Yes. McDonald sends a hug. I talked to him last night.”
“Your handsome captain. He’ll be back soon?”
“Few more days.” That got her attention. Romance always does. She’s been trying to marry me off for years.
“I knew it.” She looked thrilled. “I always knew he was the one for you.”
She’s right, I thought. I knew it too.
Lost and looking for a street in South Miami, I stopped to give the right of way to a land crab invasion. They skittered across the road, claws clicking like castanets. I see them less and less frequently now. They’re fast disappearing, their habitats paved over, poisoned by pesticides, or crunched by cars.
I finally found the right small, neat house. The owner, a seventy-seven-year-old widow, reclined outside in a lawn chair. A neighbor had seen her lounging there, then noticed the widow still seated in the same position nearly thirty-six hours later.
The remorseless heat had dried her lips, drawing up her mouth as moisture evaporated from her body, shrinking the skin on her face, thinning her nose. Her fingertips had shriveled, darkened, and hardened, the first stages of mummification.
“Doesn’t anybody ever die inside an air-conditioned building anymore?” Dr. Duffy grumbled, as he mopped his brow.
It didn’t seem that way. Mother Nature continued to crank up the heat. A woman walking outside the criminal justice building on her lunch hour glanced into a parked car—and screamed. Other passersby joined her, trying to smash the windows. The first cop who arrived shattered them with his club. Too late. The temperature inside had soared to more than 140 degrees. The baby girl, still strapped in her car seat, was dead.
The mother was in an air-conditioned courtroom with her older children, ages three and six. Investigators from the Division of Children and Family Services had recently returned all three, finding no basis for neglect charges against her. Her caseworker had assured the mother that her court appearance, “a mere formality,” would result in a quick dismissal, so she left the little one in the car. The court calendar, as usual, was log-jammed and lengthy.
DCFS supervisors refused comment. When I returned to the T-Bird, the steering wheel was too hot to touch. I could have fried eggs on the dashboard. Pets and people didn’t stand a chance.
I had no time to call the Adlers, Althea Moran’s neighbors, until after the early edition deadline. Son Kenneth had returned to his New York job; his father wasn’t home yet.
“That man could have had a gun,” Emma Adler said.
“What did he look like?”
“Well, when I say I saw him, it’s just a figure of speech. It was
a glimpse, a shadow disappearing into the dark. That’s all any of us had, a glimpse. None of us really saw him.”
“What was he wearing?”
“Dark clothes, I suppose. You’re not actually going to put any of this into the newspaper, are you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, don’t you use my name. I mean, we don’t have crime here. This is a good neighborhood. We all take excellent care of our homes. Nobody wants anything in the newspaper that could bring down our property values or tarnish the image of our neighborhood.”
“You saw his mask?” I persisted.
“I couldn’t swear he had one. All I know is what Althea said. Who knows if that’s right?”
“Why wouldn’t it be? You think she lies?”
“Well, you know”—her voice dropped to a confidential tone—“she hasn’t been herself since her husband ran off with a younger woman.”
“I’m aware she’s divorced.”
“I told her then not to keep that house.” She spoke louder, disapproval permeating her words. “It’s far too big, too much for a woman alone. But would she listen? No. Told her to hire herself one of those tough divorce lawyers and go after big money. Could have had herself a nice waterfront apartment and enough to be comfortable the rest of her life. Did she listen?
“Look, what happened at Althea’s happens every day, but not in our neighborhood. We scared off a burglar. That’s it. No big news. If it was a burglar.”
“If he wasn’t, who would he be?”
“Maybe some man she knew.”
“Is she seeing someone? Dating?”
“Not that I know, but it wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened.”
“Why would she scream and call the police?”
“Who knows? Maybe she was embarrassed or had herself a drink or two.”
“She’s a drinker?”
“Well.” She paused. “I wouldn’t know, but she was pretty quick to invite us in for a drink that night.”
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