Metro Girl

by Janet Evanovich

  “One last thing,” I said to Todd. “Have you ever run into a big guy with a scar on the right side of his face? Glass eye?”

  “That sounds like Hugo. Don’t know his last name. He’s one of Salzar’s henchmen. Sails with us sometimes.”

  Hooker swung the Porsche into the lot that serviced Monty’s. It had only been a ten-minute drive, but it felt like a lifetime. It looked like Bill had snatched a woman who belonged to Salzar. I didn’t know what to think. Was this woman a daughter? A girlfriend? Personal chef?

  Hooker and I got out. I took Brian. And Hooker hauled Judey out of the Porsche’s pretend backseat.

  “What sort of business are you involved in?” I asked Judey.

  “Interior design. And I’m much sought after. Calvin and I were making a nice living…until he dumped me. The jerk.” Judey took Brian’s leash from me. “How about you? What have you been up to?”

  “I work for Salyer Insurance Group. Property damage. I’m the supervisor over six claims adjusters.” Not the world’s most glamorous job, but it paid the rent. And paying the rent was important, since I wasn’t doing so good in the finding-a-husband department. Unfortunately, it also wasn’t a very forgiving job. Salyer Insurance Group wasn’t going to be happy if I didn’t show up for work on Monday.

  “You were always the brain,” Judey said. He turned to Hooker. “When we were kids, Barney always won the spelling contests in school. I was a complete loser, but Barney always got a perfect report card.”

  “You were smart,” I said to Judey. “You just had a concentration problem.”

  “I was conflicted. I was having an identity crisis,” Judey said.

  “Right now I’m having a hunger crisis,” I said. “I need lunch.”

  “There’s a wonderful deli next to Monty’s,” Judey said. “They have spice cookies that Brian adores.”

  Brian’s ears perked up at the mention of spice cookies.

  “Isn’t he the clever one,” Judey said. “He knows ‘spice cookies.’”

  Hooker looked doubtful, and I was guessing Hooker wasn’t a schnauzer person. Hooker looked more like an English bulldog sort of person. Hooker looked like the sort of guy who’d feed his dog beer. I could see Hooker sitting in front of his television, in his underwear, getting wasted with his bulldog.

  “You’re smiling,” Hooker said to me. “What’s that about?”

  I didn’t think it was a good idea to tell Hooker I was smiling about him in his underwear, so I popped out a lie. “It’s Brian,” I said. “Don’t you think he’s cute?”

  “That’s not a cute-dog smile,” Hooker said. “I know a cute-dog smile when I see it, and that’s not it.”

  “Are you calling me a liar?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Uh-oh,” Judey said. “Are we having a lovers’ quarrel?”

  “We’re not lovers,” I said to Judey.

  Hooker steered me in the direction of the deli. “Not yet,” he said.

  FOUR

  The deli was on the second level on the street side, and leaned more toward Williams-Sonoma than 7-Eleven. An overhead blackboard advertised large chilled shrimp and fresh grilled vegetables. A couple small round tables with chairs had been stuck between polished chrome racks holding gourmet staples.

  I cruised past the glass and stainless display cases filled with salads and pasta, hand-rolled cigars, fresh baked bread, soups, chips, the shrimp, fruits, and fancy tapenades. I considered the Häagen-Dazs, cheesecake, and snack packs of Oreos. And then I settled on a turkey roll-up and a bottle of water. Judey got the same, plus an oatmeal raisin cookie for himself and a spice cookie for Brian. Hooker got a roast beef with cheese and coleslaw on a sub roll, a bag of chips, a Pepsi, and three giant chocolate chip cookies.

  We sat outside at one of the scrolled concrete and blue tile picnic tables and ate our lunch. When we were done we followed Hooker up and down the piers, looking for his boat.

  There were a lot of piers and a lot of boats but none of the boats was Hooker’s. Hooker looked like he was thinking dark thoughts. Judey didn’t look like he was thinking any thoughts. And all I could think about was Brian’s spice cookie, and how I wished I had one. Finally, I gave up the fight, and I left the guys sitting in the sun while I ran back to the deli. I got a cookie and, on impulse, a newspaper, hoping there might be more information about the marina murder.

  I joined Hooker and Judey and paged through the paper while I ate my cookie. Nothing new about the murder. I checked out the movie section and read the comics.

  I was about to set the paper aside when a photo and headline caught my attention. The photo was of a pretty young woman with lots of wavy dark hair and dark eyes with long dark lashes. She was smiling at the camera, looking a little mysterious. The headline said she was missing. Maria Raffles, age twenty-seven, disappeared Monday evening. She’d been clubbing with her roommate but decided to leave early and went home alone. Foul play was feared. Her apartment had been broken into and violently searched. Maria had been born in Cuba but had managed to reach Florida four years ago. She was an accomplished diver and sailor. And she worked in a Miami cigar factory.

  The article went on to explain the immigration service policy of allowing Cuban nationals to remain in this country if they touch U.S. soil, as opposed to being intercepted at sea.

  I was holding the paper and my eyes were wide and my mouth was open.

  “Let me guess,” Hooker said. “Ben and Jerry came out with a new flavor.”

  I read the piece to Hooker and Judey.

  “By God, Watson,” Hooker said. “I think you’ve found something.”

  “Maybe not,” Judey said. “This is Miami. Probably a lot of women disappear after clubbing.”

  “Don’t rain on my parade,” I told Judey. “I haven’t got anything else. I’m at a dead end in the how-to-find-Bill idea department.”

  “Yes, but how would this woman relate to Salzar?”

  “I don’t know. They’re both Cuban. There could be a connection.”

  “Maybe you should go to the police,” Judey said. He followed up with a grimace. “I take that back. What was I thinking? This is Wild Bill we’re talking about.”

  “In the past the police haven’t totally shared Bill’s relaxed attitude to the law,” I explained to Hooker.

  “Bill’s a great guy,” Judey said, “but he has a history of getting his brains caught in his zipper.”

  This had us both looking at Hooker, who we suspected suffered from the same dilemma.

  “NASCAR Guy knows enough to wear button fly,” Hooker said.

  Judey and I smiled. NASCAR Guy was being a good sport.

  “I think we move on this,” Judey said. “The newspaper doesn’t give Maria’s address, so let’s start with the cigar factory. There aren’t that many of them. They’re all in Little Havana, around Seventeenth and Calle Ocho.”

  Hooker took the Causeway Bridge out of Miami Beach into the city of Miami. He wound around some, crossed the Miami River, and found SW Eighth Street. We were now in a neighborhood where businesses advertised in both Spanish and English. Sopa de pescado, camerones, congelados. The street was wide and the buildings were low, with strip mall–style fronts. Stunted palm trees occasionally grew out of concrete sidewalks. The Porsche was common in South Beach. We were odd man out in Little Havana. This was the land of the family sedan. It was midafternoon and the air was hot and thick. It stuck on my face and caught in my hair. It was the McDonald’s milk shake of air. You had to work to suck it in.

  Hooker swung the Porsche onto Seventeenth and pulled to the curb. “Here we are,” Hooker said. “Cigar factory number one.”

  I’m from Baltimore. Factories are big and noisy. They’re in industrial parks. They’re filled with guys in hard hats. They make machine parts, ceramic pipes, conduit wire, molded sheet metal. This left me completely unprepared for the cigar factory.

  The cigar factory was half a block long, the inner workings visible behind large
plate glass windows. One end of the factory was devoted to a small retail store. And at the other end, six women sat at individual tables. Barrels filled with tobacco leaves had been positioned beside the tables. A woman selected a leaf and then rolled it into a cigar. A man stood supervising. The man and all the women were smoking cigars. They looked up and smiled when they realized we were watching. It was a silent invitation. Come in and buy a cigar.

  “I’ll wait here,” Judey said. “Brian is very sensitive to smoke.”

  Hooker sauntered in and admired some tobacco leaves. He bought a cigar, and he asked one of the women about Maria Raffles.

  No, she said solemnly. Maria didn’t work there. It was a small community. They’d heard she was missing. The woman thought Maria worked at the National Cigar Factory on Fifteenth.

  We climbed into the Porsche and Hooker drove to the National Cigar Factory. Again, there was a small retail store. And beside the store there were women rolling cigars in the window. There were six tables. But there were only five women.

  I followed Hooker into the store and took a step back when one of the women jumped up and shrieked at Hooker.

  “Omigod!” she yelled. “I know you. You’re what’s his name!”

  “Sam Hooker?” he said.

  “Yeah. That’s it. You’re Sam Hooker. I’m a huge fan. Huge. I saw you on television when you crashed at Loudin. I started crying. I was so worried.”

  “I got pushed into the wall,” Hooker said.

  “I saw that, too,” I told him. “You were hot-dogging and you deserved to crash.”

  “I thought you didn’t watch NASCAR,” Hooker said to me.

  “My family watches NASCAR. I was at the house mooching dinner, and I was forced to watch.” All right, so maybe sometimes I still enjoyed NASCAR.

  “Who’s she?” the woman wanted to know.

  “I don’t know,” Hooker said. “She’s been following me around all day.”

  I gave him a shot to the shoulder that knocked him back a couple inches.

  Hooker said “ow,” but he grinned when he said it.

  “Alexandra Barnaby,” I said extending my hand. “I’m looking for Maria Raffles.”

  “Rosa Florez,” she said.

  Rosa was my height, but more round. Fat round breasts. Round brown eyes. Flushed round cheeks. A round Jennifer Lopez bootie. A small, soft roll of fat circling her waist. She had pale Cuban skin, and she had a lot of wavy brown hair cut short. Hard to tell her age. In her forties, probably.

  She was wearing a white V-neck knit shirt that showed a lot of cleavage, and jeans that were rolled at the ankle. If you stuck a quarter in Rosa’s cleavage and turned her upside down the quarter wouldn’t move. She was wearing clear plastic, open-toed four-inch heels that clacked when she walked. She was wearing minimum makeup and lots of flowery perfume.

  “Maria isn’t here,” Rosa said. “She hasn’t been here all week. I have to tell you, I’m real worried. It’s not like her to miss work. Or not to call anyone. We were real good friends. She would have told me if she was going away.”

  “Were you at the club with her?”

  “No. I don’t go to those clubs. I mostly stay in Miami. Maria didn’t used to go to those clubs either. She’s a Cuban girl, you know. She always stayed in the neighborhood. Then one day a couple months ago she decided she wanted to be by the marina in South Beach. When she was in Cuba she lived in a little town right on the water. She said she missed the diving and the boating since she’s been here.” Rosa lowered her voice. “I think she was looking to get out of the cigar factory, too. She thought maybe she could meet someone and maybe get a job on a boat. I think that’s why she started clubbing. She was pretty. She could get in for free and look at the rich men with the boats. And she was crazy about the diving. Always looking at charts. Always talking about the diving.”

  “Did she ever mention Luis Salzar?”

  “Not that I remember. Maybe just in conversation. Everyone in Little Havana knows of Salzar.”

  Rosa looked beyond us to the parked Porsche. “Is that your car?” she asked Hooker.

  “Yep.”

  “It’s a Porsche, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “So what’s the deal here?” Rosa asked. “Why are you looking for Maria?”

  “My brother is missing, and we think Maria and Bill might be together.”

  “On my boat,” Hooker said.

  “What would they be doing on your boat?” Rosa wanted to know.

  “They stole it,” he said.

  I pressed my lips together. “Borrowed it.”

  Rosa liked that. “No kidding?”

  “The newspaper article didn’t give her address,” I said.

  “I know her address!” Rosa said. “I could show you. I could go with you in the Porsche. I always wanted to ride in a Porsche.”

  I looked over at the other women. They were older than Rosa and their roundness had turned blocky. They’d all stopped working and were openly staring, waiting to see what would happen next.

  “What about your job?” I asked.

  “It’s almost the end of the day,” Rosa said. “I could take off a half hour early.”

  “You take off a half hour early and you’re fired,” the lone male foreman said.

  “Kiss my ass,” Rosa said. “Kiss his ass. Kiss all their asses.”

  The women burst out laughing and made kissing sounds at the foreman.

  “Rosa Louisa Francesca Florez, you’re a bad influence,” the man said.

  “It’s true,” Rosa said to Hooker and me. “I’m a big bitch.” She grabbed her purse off the table and shoved her cigar in her mouth. “Okay, let’s go.”

  We all pushed through the door and stood on the sidewalk by the Porsche. Judey was already in the backseat, hugging Brian to his chest.

  “News flash,” Hooker said. “We’re not going to fit.”

  “Who’s the gay guy with the hairy rat?” Rosa asked.

  “That’s Judey,” I told her. “How do you know he’s gay?”

  “Look at his complexion,” Rosa said. “He exfoliates. I’d kill for skin like that. And he’s got two eyebrows.”

  Hooker raised a hand to feel his eyebrows. “I have two eyebrows, don’t I?”

  “I’m not getting out,” Judey said. “I was here first.”

  Rosa shoved past Hooker and me and climbed over the car, into the backseat. “Just move your skinny little gay ass over and we can both fit,” she said to Judey.

  “It’s too small,” Judey said. “You’re going to squish my Brian.”

  “Your Brian?” Rosa asked.

  “My dog!”

  “Oh jeez,” she said. “I thought you were talking about your thingy. You know how guys are always naming their thingy.”

  “I’ve never named my thingy,” Hooker said. “I feel left out.”

  “It’s important to get the right name,” Rosa said, trying to maneuver her ass onto the seat. “They all have their own personality.”

  Judey was trying to make himself very small in the backseat. “It should have something to do with NASCAR.”

  I slid a look at Hooker. “Speedy?”

  “Sometimes,” Hooker said.

  Rosa was wedged into the back with one leg hanging outside the car and one foot on the console. “I’m ready,” she said. “Take me to South Beach.”

  Maria lived a couple blocks from Bill on Jefferson. The building was similar but larger. Tan stucco. Six floors. Small balconies opening off each apartment. A small front foyer with two elevators. Not totally decrepit, but it looked like it had the potential to be home to the cow-size cockroach. The ever-present lizards skittered away from us as we approached the foyer door.

  “Maria has a roommate,” Rosa said, punching the button for the second floor. “She’s a waitress working the dinner shift, so she should be home now getting ready to go to work.”

  There were six apartments to the floor. Maria lived in 2B. Rosa rang th
e doorbell and the chain slid back on the inside and the door was opened.

  Maria’s roommate was young. Twenty, maybe. She had long straight blond hair and lips so pumped up with collagen I took a step back in case they exploded. She had a tiny waist, and a tiny nose, and big boobs with big nipples jutting out of a tiny white T-shirt. She was pretty in a painful, manufactured generic sort of way.

  “Rosa!” she said. “Omigod, this isn’t bad news, is it? Tell me they didn’t find her dead. She’s okay, right?”

  “Nobody’s heard from her,” Rosa said.

  “That’s good. I mean, at least she’s not dead or maimed. I mean, not that we know of.”

  “These are friends of mine,” Rosa said. “We’re all looking for her. And this is Barbie,” Rosa said by way of introduction.

  Barbie. Judey, Hooker, and I went momentarily speechless.

  Barbie’s eyes opened wide at the sight of Brian. “Look at the cute doggie. And hello handsome,” she said to Hooker.

  “I’m handsome,” Judey said.

  “Yes, but your complexion is flawless, you’re perfectly shaved, and you have two eyebrows. Gay, gay, gay.”

  Hooker did another eyebrow feel. “I’m starting to really worry about this eyebrow thing.”

  “We were hoping you’d have some ideas about Maria,” Rosa said to Barbie. “Were you clubbing with her the night she disappeared?”

  “Yeah, sort of. We went together, but then we got separated. You know how that is. I’m breaking into modeling so I try to work a room.”

  “Do you think she hooked up with anyone?”

  “Don’t know. I lost sight of her. She called me on my cell and told me she was leaving. That was around twelve. We had only just gotten there.”

  “What about before that?” I asked. “Did she talk about going away? Was she upset? Was she scared? Was she excited?”

  “No, no, no. And yeah, sort of. She was working on some project. Some dive thing. I don’t know anything about diving. Hello. Don’t care either. Boring. But Maria was into that stuff. She had a bunch of maps in her room. Water maps.”