“Please, please bring my husband home to me. I’ve given you what you asked for. You and I know what that was. Now please keep your promise and bring my husband back.”
She raised her chin then, like a woman determined to be brave no matter what.
“Victor, if you can hear me, hang on, darling. I love you very much, and I’m counting the seconds until you’re home with me.”
Bambi Dirk popped from the ladies’ room hallway and passed behind me on her way to the front door. When she saw me watching Maureen, she gave me an evil grin.
“Told you,” she said.
I didn’t answer. I was fresh out of witty comebacks. Besides, what she’d said was apparently true. Maureen was all over the news. Having been all over the news myself one time, that wasn’t what bothered me. What bothered me was knowing that Victor’s kidnappers had said they’d kill him if Maureen told anybody he’d been taken. Instead of keeping quiet, she’d gone on national TV and blabbed it to the world.
Maureen was dumb, but she wasn’t that dumb.
The close-up shot changed to a long view of Maureen’s lime green gate and the palatial raspberry mansion behind it. The gate opened to allow some official-looking men to surround Maureen and help her through it. Then the gate swung shut to keep out a crowd of newspeople holding cameras and notebooks, all of them shouting questions.
As the camera followed the little group escorting Maureen to her house, an announcer’s over-voice said, “That was a rerun of a press conference called this morning by the wife of Victor Salazar.”
While I was thinking, A press conference? the announcer’s voice continued.
“Mr. Salazar was allegedly kidnapped three days ago, and Mrs. Salazar received a ransom demand from his kidnappers asking for a million dollars in cash to be left at a specific location. Mrs. Salazar says that she complied with the demand, but her husband has not been returned. According to a spokesperson with the sheriff’s office, Mrs. Salazar has not contacted them regarding her husband’s kidnapping. The spokesperson stressed that people who believe a loved one has been kidnapped should immediately contact their local law enforcement agency for help.”
The scene switched to three experts with ponderous faces and even more ponderous opinions about the proper way people should respond to a kidnapping. I doubted that any of them would recommend Maureen’s way.
I went to my booth and plopped down on the seat. Judy had my coffee waiting, and I drank it in a little dark cloud. The woman I’d just watched begging for her husband’s return must have been up all night getting her hair and makeup right before she called a press conference. The pink suit must have been carefully chosen too, not just to harmonize with the raspberry house, but because a woman in pink looks feminine and vulnerable but with plucky inner strength. People just eat that crap up, and Maureen knew it. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Maureen had put on a big phony show for the camera.
For the first time, I wondered if Maureen really wanted her husband back. I had no idea what kind of marriage she and Victor had, but I knew that she loved being rich. If her marriage ended, she wouldn’t be so rich, not even after getting the considerable amount the law would allow. But if Victor were dead, she would get it all. You don’t have to be a money-grubbing bimbo to know that when money is the goal, all is definitely better than some.
Judy stopped by my side to top off my coffee. “Who’re you planning to kill?”
“What?”
“You look like you’re plotting to knock somebody off.”
I didn’t want to tell her I was pretty sure my old high school friend was scheming to get her husband knocked off. For one thing, it was too awful to talk about, and for another, if I was right about what I suspected Maureen was doing, I had played a part in her scheme.
Some truths are so solid there’s no point in questioning them. Gravity, for example, or two plus two being four. Luck is another one. Everybody knows that luck surrounds some people. Luck allows a fortunate few to do stupid things and never pay the consequences.
I am not one of those people.
It didn’t matter that I’d tried to get Maureen to call the cops and report Victor’s kidnapping. It didn’t matter that I’d helped her because I felt a debt to an old friend. It didn’t matter that my intentions had all been good. The fact was that I’d done something really dumb, and I could feel the icy breath of consequences creeping up on me.
17
Everything was quiet when I got home, with that peculiar middle-of-the-day lassitude that mutes both surf and birdcall. Ella was in the living room on the love seat, and we spent a few minutes assuring each other that there had never been anybody else in our entire lives that we loved as much as we loved each other. She purred extra loud to try to convince me that she wouldn’t drop me like a hot mouse the minute Michael came home.
I’ve loved Michael all my life so I understood how she felt. I carried her to the kitchen and gave her fresh water, then headed for the shower. On the way, I flipped on the CD player to let Pete Fountain’s sweet clarinet perfume the air.
I usually do my best thinking while water is spraying on me, but this time my thoughts were too scattered to come up with any conclusions. I told myself I should phone Maureen because I was her oldest friend and she was in distress. I reminded myself that fifteen years had passed since we were in high school, that her phone number was unlisted, and that I didn’t have it.
I told myself that I was involved in Victor’s kidnapping because I’d let Maureen manipulate me into taking that damn duff el bag of money to the gazebo. I reminded myself that she hadn’t mentioned me in her staged press conference, so maybe my name would never come up. I rebutted that the possibility of my name never coming up was about the same as the possibility of a summer in Florida without a hurricane.
By the time I stepped out of the shower I was close to being water dissolved but no closer to seeing anything positive about the situation. Pete Fountain was still playing on the CD, but as I reached for a towel I heard a ring on my cellphone that made me shoot out of the bathroom trailing water droplets. Only a handful of people have my cellphone number, and only three people—Michael, Paco, and Guidry—rate a special alert ring. Michael and Paco know they’re on the elite list. Guidry doesn’t have a clue.
I hoped Michael was calling to tell me he’d heard from Paco, but it was Guidry.
He said, “Are you at home?”
I admitted that I was.
“I’m just turning into your lane. I’ll be there in two minutes.”
Damp and gasping, I wriggled into a thigh-length spaghetti-strapped tank and pulled my wet hair into a knot. With Pete Fountain playing in the background, I met Guidry at the door with bare feet and a bare face. His gray eyes tried for objective and neuter, but his irises gave him away. Stand in front of a man with your nipples hard under knit, and his irises will expand like spreading inkblots. The other side of that, of course, was that my nipples had given me away first.
He said, “I wanted to talk to you about the girl.”
My mind had been so stuck on Maureen that it took a moment to realize he meant Jaz. I gestured toward the love seat and dropped into the matching chair. I folded my legs under me, realized I was exposing a lot of thigh, and tugged the tank toward my knees. Ella hopped into the chair with me and settled into the corner. I was glad to have her there. She made a little warm mound behind my hip.
Guidry’s eyes flicked toward the sound of Pete Fountain’s clarinet.
I said, “I saw Jaz this morning at Hetty’s house. She said she and her stepfather live nearby. She doesn’t know the house number but I described Reba Chandler’s house—you know, built on stilts with a tall stairway—and she said it looked like that.”