The Last Girl

by Danny Lopez

  “All of it?”

  “Every dime.”

  “Wait a minute. Del Pino has a charity for abused children. He’s gonna make a killing out of the deal.”

  Petrillo drained half his beer in a single sip. He shook his head and pointed at me with the bottle. “No. That’s why it took so long to figure out Zavala’s will. Too many lawyers and too many nonprofits were involved. Everything had to be clear before they could announce it. Turns out Zavala didn’t include del Pino’s charity in the will at del Pino’s own request. And he’s donating his own fee to BRAVO.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me.”

  “His words. Not mine.”

  “You think he’s telling the truth?”

  He laughed. “I’m a cop. He’s a lawyer.”

  “Well, shit.” I drank my beer. I went to the bar and got us another round. Then I got a text from Rachel: where u?

  I answered: O’Leary’s. I’m buying.

  She texted back: K

  I set the beers on the table and looked at the line of condos, their lights sparkling like diamonds. The Sarasota of the rich. The city of the Bosemans and the Zavalas.

  Petrillo shoved me with his elbow. “Lighten up. You’re taking it too personal.”

  I lowered my head, looked down at the table, the grain of the wood, the tracks the beer and food had left behind. “The thing is, I know there’s something going on. I know there is.” I glanced at Petrillo. “I can’t say Boseman killed the guy for sure. But he’s so fucking crooked. Why do they always get away with it?”

  “They don’t always. But sometimes, you just have to move on. You win some, you lose some.”

  I didn’t want to believe him. But it was more than that. So long as the case remained open, I remained a suspect. I couldn’t live with that shit.

  I thought of Flor. I hoped to God she would find an axolotl. I needed something good to happen to restore my faith in humanity, in the system. In all of us. I bought another round at the bar. As I came back to the table, I saw Rachel walking quickly toward us. She didn’t wait for me to put the beers down. She just hugged me, arms fully around my neck, hands pressing hard on my back, her face against the side of my neck.

  I froze, feeling the heat and sweat coming off her body and pressing into mine.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “About what?”

  She sobbed, but I knew she wasn’t crying. “I am so sorry, Dex.”

  “Rachel …”

  “Holly.”

  “What about her?” And then, just as she said her name again, it came to me in a flash with the two tiny syllables in her name: Hol-ly—the red lipstick on the glass in Boseman’s poolside table, the butterfly sunglasses—the red VW beetle speeding out of Point of Rocks.

  “Holly.” She said it again. “I was parked across the street watching the house like you asked me. Then Holly drove up. She parked a little ahead of the house. She looked around. Got the mail and went inside. She was in there for about thirty minutes. Then she came back out, got into her car, and that was it.”

  “You sure?” I didn’t want to believe it. Yet I knew it was true. Very fucking true. I had been an idiot for not seeing it before. She was breaking up with del Pino—because of Boseman?

  She must have been with him the day I went to Boseman’s house. She and Boseman had shaken up my place. They had taken my computer. They were after … Maya?

  My knees weakened. Rachel held me, helped me to the table where Petrillo was looking at the boats, his knee bouncing to the rhythm of the guitar player in the dining area who was now belting out a mediocre rendition of “Margaritaville.”

  In those few seconds, everything about Holly, all my recent memories of her, raced past me like an old film. It had all been a setup: she appeared at Caragiulos when I was already looking for Maya. She showed up at my house immediately after it had been ransacked. She appeared after Petrillo and Frey did a number on me. She was there after I came back from Mexico. She wanted information. She wanted to know where I was with my investigation, to know how safe she and Boseman were, to know what the cops knew.

  “Motherfuckers.”

  Rachel rubbed my back. “Easy, Dex.”

  Petrillo took one of the beers I put on the table. “What’s up?”

  Rachel told him. She explained everything while I stared at the sailboats bobbing in the water, getting seasick. My stomach cramped with jealousy and anger and betrayal—all hope doused with diesel and set on fire.

  I downed my beer and slammed the bottle on the table.

  Petrillo grabbed my wrist. “Easy, Vega.”

  I tore away from his grip. “It’s all yours now, right?”

  Rachel took my arm. “Dex.”

  I backed away from Petrillo. “You know what to do, right?”

  I turned away. Rachel and I went to the bar. I ordered tequila. I took them in shots like a frat boy at a rush party. I wanted to get the fuck out of my mind.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  MY BENDER LASTED four days. It was a blur that left no memory. I escaped like I always did. But eventually I had to come back. And I did on a Saturday morning, four days after Rachel had given me the news about Holly.

  I opened my eyes. My head pounded at the temples. My mouth was raw and dry as if I’d shoved a fistful of sand into it.

  A tropical storm blew outside, making a racket on the tin roof. I stumbled out of bed. Poured a glass of water from the faucet and drank like it was life. I knew I would need a hair of the dog, but it was the first time in days that my surroundings appeared clear. I had to stop. I knew that. But I wasn’t sure I could. Or that I even wanted to. I popped open a Corona, squeezed a lime in it, added shots of Tabasco sauce, took long, sour sips.

  It burned my lips. Leveled me off.

  Rachel was lying on the couch reading a book with Mimi curled up at her side. When I shuffled out, she set the book down and smiled. “Well, good morning, sunshine!”

  I made it to the chair on the other side of the coffee table. I took another sip of beer and set it down. “What’s going on?”

  She sat up. “You tell me.” Mimi hopped off the couch, stretched, and walked slowly to her place by the window.

  I shook my head. “I think the worst is over.”

  “You’re funny when you’re drunk.”

  “Was I bad?”

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t go back to Caragiulos.”

  “You were with me all this time?”

  “What can I say?” She leaned forward and grabbed my beer and took a long drink. “You were buying.”

  “Rachel, I’m sorry.”

  “Put it out of your mind like everything else. If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.”

  “Come on.”

  “You’re an escape artist, Dexter. You’re real good at eluding your problems.”

  “Please.” I raised my hand. “Spare me.”

  She stood. “No. I won’t spare you a damn thing.” She stepped around the coffee table and leaned over me. “You can be a real piece of shit, you know that?”

  “I’m sorry. I was drunk.”

  “It’s not about what you did when you were in your drunken bender. It’s that you went on one. That you couldn’t stand up and face the fact that Holly isn’t perfect.”

  “I loved her.”

  “No you didn’t. You put her on a pedestal and worshiped who you thought she was. You’ve been lying to yourself all this time. You just refuse to admit it. Fuck you.”

  “Jesus, Rachel.”

  “Come on, Dex. Open your eyes.”

  Her lower lip trembled. I had never seen her so emotional. I spread my arms. “I didn’t know …”

  “Well, now you do. But what’s worse is that you’re a fucking coward.” She waved, looked away for a moment, then pointed her index finger at me like it was a gun. “Man, you talk tough. You’re all fuck this and fuck that, but you’re so goddamn scared, you can’t face your problems.”
r />   I looked at the beer.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not talking about the booze. We all do that. I’m talking about standing up for the shit you always say you stand for. When the shit hits the fan, you run away and hide in the booze.”

  At that instant I felt my head pop. It was as if someone had slapped the back of my neck and raised the curtain. I saw the farce of my life crumbling like Boseman’s nonexistent fortune. Rachel was right. When things got tough for me, I bailed. I ran as far away from my problems as I could. I did it when that cop shot my father, when I left for college in Houston, during my divorce, when the paper laid me off. All these years I’d been running away.

  I dropped my head in my hands and closed my eyes, shut them as tight as I could. Rachel sat on the armrest and put her arm around my shoulder. “Life ain’t easy, is it?” She rocked me back and forth. “When I came out of the closet, I learned about it the hard way. But you can’t run away all the time. Your problems won’t go away if you don’t face them. You just have to face the fact that the world is not perfect.”

  “And that people are assholes,” I said.

  She laughed. “And that people are assholes.”

  “Especially lawyers and preppy women who think they want to do good, but really just want to be rich.”

  “Especially them bitches.”

  I laughed and we hugged. Just being friends with Rachel made me the luckiest man alive.

  “So what’s the latest?” I said.

  Rachel grabbed the beer and took a long swig. Then she sat back on the couch, the whole time her eyes on me as if she were trying to read what my deal was.

  “You sure you want to know?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Petrillo called last night. Holly won’t say a peep, except that she’s innocent. But Petrillo put the Mexican cops on it and they arrested Boseman pretty damn quick, if you can believe that.”

  I laughed. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “Well, they did. Petrillo said they got the juice out of him. He was blackmailing Zavala because he knew what Zavala was doing to the girls.”

  “Because Boseman had dated Maya.”

  She passed me the beer. “It tastes pretty good. A little too spicy for me.”

  I nodded. “It’s an ancient Mexican hangover cure.”

  She smiled. “But Petrillo doesn’t think he killed Zavala.”

  “I kind of had that figured.”

  “Shit. Aren’t you the fucking detective.”

  “Petrillo said it. No motive.”

  “Anyway, you were right. Boseman was broke. When Zavala was killed, he and Holly went after you to see if you had any leads on Maya. They knew she was getting the insurance money so they were trying to blackmail her. They figured they could get money from her by threatening to drag her into the mess and pinning Zavala’s murder on her.”

  “So that’s why Boseman was in Mexico.”

  “That’s what Petrillo said.”

  “Did he get to Maya?”

  “Apparently not. They’re holding him, waiting for the paperwork and all that shit.”

  “And Holly?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “I have to deal with it, right?”

  “She’s at county without bail. She says she’s innocent, but Boseman already ratted her out. Petrillo’s waiting until they get Boseman in so they can look at the whole picture.”

  “Fuck.”

  I felt terrible for Holly. But I felt pretty bad for myself. Not sorry, just shitty, like something had been stolen from me. And yet, everything was the same. And the fact was, I never had Holly. Even in the early days when we were together, there was an invisible wall. The other night was the same. And I think I realized that then, but like Rachel said, I just looked the other way because I didn’t want to deal with the truth. I could only blame myself.

  The rain let up some. I stood and walked over to the shelves of records. Today was a Van Morrison kind of day. “So if Boseman and Holly didn’t kill Zavala, who did?”

  Rachel shrugged. “Who knows?”

  I put the record on. Astral Weeks. The original Warner Brother’s Seven Artist release. Sublime.

  “You know what I need,” I said. “A vacation.”

  “You?”

  We laughed. I stretched and shuffled into the kitchen and started on breakfast. I called out to Rachel: “Eggs, hot dogs, and Sriracha?”

  * * *

  It took me a couple of days to recover from the hangover and clear out the nasty blur that had clouded most of my week. Things finally began to feel normal. There was no way I could erase Holly from my consciousness. I couldn’t just rub her out like she never existed. But now she was just a person in my past. A sad memory.

  I read in the newspaper, in an article by the brilliant Jason Kirkpatrick, that Holly and Boseman were being charged with two counts of extortion. Court date for arraignment had been set up for late November. Del Pino was preparing to auction off Zavala’s property. The artwork, it turned out, was as real as art can be. There was a lot of talk that it would fetch millions. Three members of the board of the Ringling Museum of Art and a county comptroller and the State Attorney’s office were going to monitor how the money would be distributed to the different nonprofits Zavala had included in his will. There were a number of them and they were all local: one helped needy children, another operated a shelter for runaways and abused children. There was another that helped sexual trafficking victims, and a women’s shelter. True to his word, del Pino stepped away from the proceedings and was quoted in an article in Sara-Scene Magazine that he would be donating his fee to his own charity. I was surprised. Joaquin del Pino’s behavior through this whole thing restored my confidence in people.

  And still, I could not reconcile with the fact that no one had caught Zavala’s killer. I began to suspect that Maya had done it. That she had come back to Sarasota from Mexico, killed her abuser, and then gone back to Mexico before disappearing forever into a new life. And maybe Boseman knew it. Maybe that was what he had on her.

  I couldn’t blame her. If I was right about that, I would be satisfied. But I was not convinced. I couldn’t see a person like her, so poised and understanding of her own situation, bludgeoning a man with a giant penis. I saw no violence in her whatsoever.

  But then there were Rachel’s words: I put women on a pedestal; I think of them the way I imagine them to be. So maybe I was way off about Maya being incapable of murder. Perhaps, under the proper circumstances, we all are. But I would never know the truth about Maya.

  I tried to get back to work. I sent out e-mails and story ideas to Sarasota City Magazine, but the editor said I sucked at writing about designer homes and real estate. She said we needed to think of something more serious, something with meat on it but not too heavy. “Our readers don’t like bad news,” she said. “We’re a lifestyle magazine.”

  I swallowed my pride and contacted my old paper. The Sarasota Herald had hired a few young reporters, recent graduates who had replaced me and the other older reporters. I laughed. I wasn’t even forty years old and I was old. I couldn’t believe it.

  Still, the city editor suggested I keep in touch, e-mail story ideas. “We pay a hundred per story,” she said. She even sounded proud about that. I did the math in my head. I would have to write ten stories a week to make a livable wage. All I could do was shake my head and put on a record that offered hope: Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run.

  I sat down at my computer and took a big leap. I e-mailed the big guys. I tried them all: The Washington Post, The LA Times, New York Times, Time, Men’s Journal, Travel and Leisure, Forbes. I pitched over thirty newspapers and magazines a whole slew of story ideas: travel stories, investigative pieces, features. I offered them my services in case they needed anything in the area. I told them I was willing to travel. Whatever they wanted. I even suggested a story to Smithsonian Magazine about Flor’s quixotic search for the axolotl.

 
; Just the fact that there were so many publications I could pitch gave me hope in a business I thought was extinct. I had no qualms about receiving rejections. Most editors didn’t even bother to write back. A few were polite. Still, I knew there was a place for me out there. I knew eventually I would be back to doing what I did well.

  I had hope.

  But I won’t lie. I still had this buzzing in the back of my head about Nick Zavala’s murder. I hated the fact that someone had killed a man and was walking away free. I think that what bothered me most was the motivation. Who had done this, and why?

  Every few days I drove past Zavala’s old house on Bay Shore and then did a little tour up and down the North Trail. I’m not sure what I was looking for, or if I was even looking for someone or something. I kept thinking of Tiffany. Child Services could have placed her in a foster home or a shelter. I wanted to know she was okay. I checked with some of the shelters and advocacy groups, but these things are confidential. Their job is to protect the victims even from their own family. I followed up with Petrillo, but he knew nothing. It was as if she had vanished from the planet.

  Then, on a rainy Thursday afternoon I received an e-mail from Flor. She had found the axolotl. Two, actually. She was ecstatic. She said it opened the possibility for more funding for her group to expand the search. But more important, she was validated. All those months swimming in dirty canals had paid off.

  I did a Google search and found articles in the Mexican newspapers. Reforma had a great photograph of the team on location in Xochimilco. Flor looked as if she’d just come out of the water. Her smile was radiant. Her hair was a mess, but a beautiful mess that reminded me of our nights together in her apartment.

  For the first time since I’d been back, I realized how much I missed her. I read every article I could find about the discovery of the two axolotls. I had no idea two salamanders, two ugly little reptiles, would be such a big deal. But the Mexican press was going to town with the story. Thanks to Flor’s hard work, the little animal and its habitat would be protected.

  I looked at the brighter side of things. The axolotl was not extinct. Journalism was not extinct. And humanity, the good guys, were not extinct. Del Pino and even Petrillo demonstrated that. Not to mention Rachel.