Misgivings

by Donn Cortez

  “Ma’am, are you the manager?” Tripp asked.

  “Yes, I’m Darlene Florence. What can I do for you?”

  The grandmother threw her hands up in despair. “Surrendering already? I’ll go and get my purse so you don’t tear the house apart looking for it . . .” She turned and shuffled away.

  Tripp produced a picture of the deceased Santa. “Do you know this man?”

  She looked at the picture and gasped. “Yes, that’s Mister Patrick. Kingsley Patrick, in 419. He looks—”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m afraid so. Did he live alone?”

  “Yes, it’s just a small studio apartment. What happened to him?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Wolfe answered. “We’re going to need you to let us into his apartment.”

  “I’ll get my keys.”

  “Will your grandmother be all right by herself?” Wolfe asked.

  “Oh, she’ll be fine.” Darlene opened a closet and put the gun on a shelf. “There’s no bullets for the gun, anyway—but I’d rather have her pointing this at people than waving a fireplace poker around. She gave a UPS guy nine stitches once.”

  “Let’s hear it for the golden years,” Wolfe said under his breath.

  “Come on in!” Grandma Florence called out. “We’ve got jewelry! I’ll get you a sack!”

  8

  MUSLIMS, HORATIO KNEW, took instruction in their appearance and day-to-day conduct from both the Quran and a collection of traditional teachings known as hadith. The hadith stated that a Muslim woman’s clothing must cover her entire body— with the exception of the face and the hands—and that her attire should not be formfitting, sheer, or so eye-catching as to attract undue attention or reveal the shape of her body.

  Zenira Tariq obviously had a very different opinion on the subject.

  Acting on that opinion in Florida earned her a paycheck; acting on it in some countries would get her a jail sentence or even death. However, the benefits of being a celebrity in America—a small c celebrity, granted—were contradictory. Zenira’s publisher established a buffer of privacy between her and the obsessed or dangerous, while simultaneously providing those same obsessives with extremely intimate images of her.

  But the magazine didn’t grant any such protection to the people who sold it.

  Horatio had checked into the background of the shopkeeper. Talwinder Jhohal claimed he had never met Abdus Sattar Pathan before—but then, Jhohal also claimed he had no memory of the attack.

  What Horatio had dug up was less than promising. Talwinder Jhohal was married, had four children, and had owned and run the same business for the last decade. He had never been arrested, had no known connections to any criminal organization, and had been an American citizen for over twenty years, having emigrated from his native India. His store had been robbed three times in seventeen years, but this was the first time anyone had been hurt.

  He could be a poster boy for the American dream, Horatio thought. Right up to the point where he was attacked by someone less tolerant than himself.

  At least, that had been Horatio’s theory. It seemed to hold true; the Islamic angle provided a motive that explained the emotional and impulsive nature of the attack, plus it tied in with the background of the victim and the assailant. Horatio had even gone so far as to check into the derivation of Pathan’s name, knowing that Muslim names were chosen to reflect specific traits of their faith. Abdus Sattar meant “slave to the one who conceals faults”; Pathan’s stage name, Batin, meant “unseen.”

  The unseen and the concealed, Horatio thought. Both appropriate for one who specializes in sleight of hand. There was just one problem . . .

  Pathan wasn’t a Muslim.

  “Are you kiddin’?” one talent booker had said to Horatio. Even over the phone, the incredulity in his voice was overwhelming. “As far as Muslims go, magicians are right up there with Satan. You want to see a Muslim get mad, forget about strippers and showgirls—try suggestin’ a magic act. You’d get a better reaction tryin’ ta book Black Sabbath at the Vatican. . . . B’lieve me, the Brilliant Batin could no more be a Muslim than Kermit the Frog could be Jewish.” There was a short pause. “I’d tell ya why Kermit the Frog couldn’t be Jewish, but my wife says I can’t tell that joke no more.”

  After he hung up, Horatio did some research. What he found was intriguing.

  “Three persons will not enter paradise: the habitual drunkard, one who believes in magic, and one who breaks the blood relations,” Horatio said aloud.

  Calleigh looked up from the paperwork she was doing. “Excuse me?” she said neutrally.

  Horatio suddenly realized what he’d just said. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s a hadith, a traditional Muslim teaching. Magic that didn’t come from Allah or through the pious actions of saints or prophets is referred to as Istidraaj. Those who practiced it were regarded much the same way witches were by the Old Testament.”

  Calleigh’s tone softened. “Oh. Doesn’t sound as if they were very popular.”

  “No, but they were probably good at making things disappear. As is our friend Mister Pathan. His current accomplishment seems to be making his lawyer vanish.”

  “You can’t contact him?”

  “I can’t find any evidence he actually exists. The Florida bar has never heard of him, and so far neither has anyone else.”

  Calleigh frowned and got up from her seat. She came over to where Horatio was seated in front of one of the lab’s computers. “Well, someone showed up to talk to Pathan while he was in custody.”

  “Someone named Francis Buccinelli, according to the checkpoint at Miami-Dade booking,” Horatio said. “He showed a driver’s licence as ID, but I can’t find him listed in the state database, either.”

  “So the ID must have been fake. Falsely identifying yourself to a police officer is a crime—”

  “—but not one we can go after Pathan for. Whoever Buccinelli really is, he must have smuggled in what Pathan used to fake his fingerprints.”

  “Which we still can’t prove.”

  “No. But if we find Buccinelli, we can charge him—which may get him to roll over on Pathan.” Horatio hit a key, calling up security footage from the front desk of the Miami-Dade Pre-Trial Detention Center. It showed a dark-skinned man in a three-piece suit, with long, curly black hair, heavy-framed eyeglasses, a prominent mole on his cheek, and a short, neatly trimmed black beard.

  “Sounds like a plan,” Calleigh said. “So where do we start looking?”

  “I’ve already contacted the booking agents who’ve worked with him. Now I think it’s time I talk to some of his peers . . .”

  The apartment that Darlene Florence let Wolfe and Tripp into wasn’t exactly luxurious. It seemed Santa Shaky had derived his name from his financial status—and possibly his grasp of basic hygiene.

  The only furniture seemed to be a foldout couch, a small table with two chairs, a dresser, and a floor lamp. It was hard to tell, though, because only the floor lamp and the table were easily identifiable; the rest were buried under mounds of clothing, so much so that it took Wolfe a second to realize there was anything under them at all.

  “Either the guy was a real clotheshorse,” Tripp said, walking into the room, “or he was running some kind of business out of here.”

  “He was an actor,” Darlene offered from the doorway. “That’s what he told me, anyway. He said he’d been in some commercials, but I didn’t recognize him.”

  Wolfe entered and picked up the topmost item draped over one of the chairs, a silvery jumpsuit on a hanger. There was a plastic fishbowl helmet resting on the table that plainly went with it, next to a low-end computer. “Looks like he kept some of his wardrobe,” he said. “Either that, or he was planning an expedition to Jupiter.”

  “You need me here?” Darlene said. “I should probably get back to Grandma.”

  “No, we’re fine,” Wolfe said. “Go look after your grandmother.” Before she wanders down to the la
undry room and takes someone else hostage.

  When the door closed, Tripp and Wolfe went to work.

  Tripp looked through the apartment for anything obvious: documents, weapons, drugs, or any other sort of contraband. Wolfe concentrated on the more subtle aspects of a search, looking for biological and chemical evidence: bloodstains, sexual fluids, traces of anything that seemed unusual or out of place.

  Wolfe moved the piles of clothing off the foldout sofa and shone an ALS on the rumpled sheets underneath. “Don’t see any evidence of sexual activity. If Santa was getting any, it wasn’t here.”

  Tripp, looking through the medicine cabinet in the tiny bathroom off the kitchen, said, “No antidepressants here. Lot of hair-care products, though.”

  “Yeah, I think Mister Patrick had a certain amount of ego—which would go hand in hand with his being an actor.”

  “So you think he really was an actor—that wasn’t just a line?”

  Wolfe pointed to a small bookcase on the other side of the bed. “Old scripts, books on Method acting—I’d say he was telling the truth. Doesn’t look like he made it past the struggling-artist point, though.”

  “No shortage of those,” Tripp said. “Question is, why would someone want to kill him?”

  “Don’t know. But the answer might be here.” Wolfe tapped a few keys on the computer, which immediately brightened to life. “All right, I’m going to try to get into his email . . . no good. I was hoping he’d have it set up to automatically remember his password. I’ll have to get this to the lab, see if one of our techs can pull anything out.”

  Tripp was looking around thoughtfully. Abruptly, he walked over to the door and examined the lock. “Wolfe, come here and take a look at this.”

  Wolfe did. “Strange dent just above the lock. You think it might have been tampered with?”

  “I don’t know,” Tripp said. “I get the feeling the place has been tossed. Nothing obvious, just a few things that seem out of place. Couple of dresser drawers ajar, door to the medicine cabinet was open. Guy might have just been sloppy, but something isn’t quite right.”

  Wolfe looked around. “Well, if someone did break in, what did they take?”

  “I don’t know.” Tripp crossed his arms and frowned. “I guess the real question is: what’s not here?”

  “Sure, I know Abdus,” the man behind the counter said. He was thin, in his twenties, with a bristle of brown crew-cut over his scalp. “He comes in here to buy supplies.”

  Horatio glanced around the magic shop. Peg-boards of cheap magic kits hung along one wall, while small tables covered in black velvet cloth spotlighted the more expensive props.

  “I understand you know him on a personal level, as well,” Horatio said. “One of the talent bookers I talked to mentioned that you and he were friends.”

  Matt Fresling, the man behind the counter, scratched at the stubble on the back of his head. “Well, a little, I guess.”

  “More than a little. You and he sometimes fill in for each other when one of you can’t make a performance, correct?”

  Fresling shrugged. “Sometimes, yeah. But it’s strictly business, you know? I mean, I’ve never even been over to the guy’s house.”

  “Uh-huh. So you two don’t socialize?”

  “Well . . . we’ve gone out for a few drinks after a show, just to talk shop. But Abdus is pretty uptight—sticks with bottled water. He’s a very focused guy.”

  “So it would seem,” Horatio said. “Did you two ever discuss anything other than business?”

  “Talked about his family a little. I gotta say, I didn’t believe him at first.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The whole growing-up-incredibly-rich thing. I mean, if my family had that kind of money, there’s no way I’d be working three shows a night on a cruise ship, competing for attention with the midnight buffet.”

  “I hadn’t realized he came from money.”

  “Oh, yeah. His old man’s some kind of Arabian oil tycoon. I guess he and Abdus don’t get along that well.”

  “Tell me,” Horatio said, “did Abdus ever mention a man named Francis Buccinelli?” He watched Fresling’s reaction carefully, but if the name meant anything to him, he kept it hidden.

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “But like I said, we don’t hang out together that much.”

  “Thank you for your time,” Horatio said.

  Less than twenty-four hours after Eric Delko talked to Solana Villanova on the phone, she walked into the reception area of the Miami-Dade Crime Lab. She asked for directions at the front desk and thanked the receptionist.

  Then she headed straight for the morgue.

  Alexx looked up from washing her hands as the woman strode in. “Yes? Can I help you?”

  The woman gazed at Alexx evenly before answering. She was in her late thirties, with sharp cheekbones and a cleft in her chin. She wore a simple black dress and low-slung, black pumps. “Yes,” she said, her voice crisp and controlled. “I believe there must have been some sort of mistake, which I am here to correct.”

  “I see,” Alexx said carefully. “I’m Doctor Woods. And you are?”

  “Solana . . . Villanova. I understand you have someone here you think is my husband.”

  Delko had talked to Alexx, told her what he’d discovered. He’d also told her how Solana Villanova had reacted to the news.

  “Mrs. Villanova, there really wasn’t any point to you traveling all this distance,” Alexx said. “There’s no way to visually identify your husband from the remains—”

  “That’s because it’s not my husband,” the woman snapped. “Let me see this body.”

  Alexx studied the woman for a second. “All right,” she said calmly. She walked over to the wall with its rows of dull silver drawers, grabbed the appropriate handle, and pulled. The woman walked briskly over, showing no emotion at the sight of the torso covered in a sheet.

  “This is all we recovered.” Alexx pulled the sheet back, revealing the body.

  The woman looked down, and her face—already expressionless—seemed to get even blanker. “This is not Hector. This is—how can you say this is anything? It could be anyone.”

  “I guess you’re right. This is just a John Doe, then. We’ll dispose of it in the usual way.”

  “What? That seems . . .”

  “What do you care?” Alexx said. “This isn’t your husband, right? It’s not the man whose last meal was ceia de natal, even though he had a problem with his cholesterol. It’s not the man who used to be a heavy smoker but gave it up about a year ago. It’s not the man with a compression fracture in his lower spine that happened in his twenties. Right?”

  Solana’s face was still expressionless, but it had paled visibly. “How . . . how can you tell these things?”

  “That’s my job,” Alexx said, her voice softening. “The people that pass through my hands have stories to tell, and I’m the last one they’re going to tell them to. I do my best to listen.”

  The woman looked down at the body, and Alexx could see the change in her eyes; one second it was just a cold, inanimate thing lying in front of her, and suddenly it was something else. The mask she had fixed so securely in place cracked, and the grief she was trying to hide trembled beneath the surface.

  “The man you talked to on the phone, Eric Delko?” Alexx said. “He asked you to bring in something of your husband’s. Something we could get a DNA sample from?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.” The woman fumbled for her purse and withdrew a small, flat package. “This is a hat he used to wear. I found it in an old box that—that he forgot to take with him.”

  “I’ll make sure it gets to the right place, Mrs. Villanova.”

  “It’s Miss,” she said, handing over the package without taking her eyes off the body. “I mean—we were divorced. I don’t go by the name Villanova anymore, but I thought it would complicate things, so I just . . . I just . . .”

  And then the mask shattered a
nd her eyes overflowed and she was sobbing, arms wrapped around herself as if she were trying to hold herself together. Alexx didn’t shut the drawer; instead, she came around the other side and put her hand on the woman’s shoulder.

  “It’s okay, honey,” Alexx said softly. “It’s all right. We’re going to take care of him.”

  The once Solana Villanova didn’t answer, but then, Alexx hadn’t expected her to.

  Alexx wasn’t the one Solana needed to talk to.

  Pathan wasn’t a common name in Miami; there was, in fact, only one other Pathan that Horatio could track down . . . and the address that it was attached to raised his eyebrows.

  Fisher Island wasn’t so much a suburb of Miami as a separate kingdom. Accessible only by boat or aircraft—or maybe private submarine—it was 216 acres of diamond-studded, gold-plated luxury that boasted two deepwater marinas, a championship golf course, and its own polo field. Celebrities and CEOs maintained homes that started at two million and climbed into the stratosphere from there. Those who couldn’t afford to live there could still take the ferry across and visit the acclaimed Spa Internazionale, to be pampered with mud baths, hot wraps and massages.

  The spa wasn’t Horatio’s destination, though. He drove his Hummer off the ferry and down quiet, empty streets; a peacock, his rainbowed tail spread like a corporate advertisement, stared at him from its perch on top of a fire hydrant. Horatio passed more golf carts than cars, and noted that at least two of the drivers had their own talk shows.

  Fisher Island had been constructed in 1905, the result of dredging a marine passage to Biscayne Bay. A black businessman named Dana Dorsey bought the island, planning on turning it into a resort for rich African-Americans, but wound up selling it in 1919 to Carl Fisher, who gave the place its name. Fisher, in turn, got rid of the island, but didn’t sell it; he swapped it instead, trading it to William Vanderbilt for his yacht. Vanderbilt upgraded the place, installing tennis courts, a pool, a golf course, a mansion, and a library. The key passed through a number of hands after that, getting another face-lift in 1979 that added upscale condominiums and restaurants.