“That’s a shame,” said the mayor. He laid a briefcase on the table and popped it open. “Because that’s all I can offer you.”
Jack did a double take. Stacks of crisp hundred-dollar bills were laid out before him.
“How much is that?” said Theo.
“A hundred thousand dollars,” said the mayor. “That’ll buy a lot of smoothies.”
“We don’t want your money.”
Theo said, “The boat, maybe, but not your-”
Jack kicked him under the table.
“Look here,” said the mayor. “If it’s simply a matter of negotiation, we can work something out.”
“It’s not negotiable. We came here for the truth, and you gave it to us the minute you opened that briefcase.”
“So what do you want to do now, ruin me?”
“I think that’s up to Alicia and her grandmother. Her biological grandmother.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing. Nothing positive can come of this. You’re just destroying a happy, loving family. Until Falcon called and asked me for two hundred thousand dollars in hush money, I didn’t have the slightest clue that Alicia had been stolen from her birth mother.”
“That’s another lie,” said Jack.
“How would you know?”
“Because you adopted a two-week-old baby with a birth certificate that said she was two years old. And you did that for one reason only: to make it harder for her blood relatives to find her.”
The mayor fell silent, but his expression spoke volumes. Suddenly, his complicity in the most horrible crime imaginable was as plain to see as the briefcase full of money on the table.
Felipe said, “Mayor, you don’t have to listen to these insults.”
The mayor had gone pale. “You really should take the money, Mr. Swyteck.”
“We don’t want your money.”
“Please,” said the mayor. “Take the money.”
“We’re leaving,” said Jack, rising.
“No you’re not,” said Felipe. He was pointing a pistol at Jack. “Now sit back down.”
“Felipe,” the mayor said in a shaky voice, “this is not the answer.”
“It worked fine when you sent me down the river to get Falcon to back away from Alicia. It worked just as well when you sent me over to Nassau to talk some sense into Riley about where all that money came from.”
“I never told you to threaten anyone’s life. Put the gun away.”
“I’m just protecting both of us, Mayor. It’s best if you went back to shore now.”
“Listen to your boss,” said Jack. “Put the gun away.”
“Shut up! You’re nothing but trouble, Swyteck, starting with the way you tried to make me into a bad guy for going down the river and telling your client to stay away from the mayor’s daughter. You had the cops thinking it was me who killed that homeless woman in the trunk of the car.”
“That went nowhere,” said Jack. “We know it was Falcon who killed her. So just put away the gun before you end up facing a real murder charge.”
“Just shut your trap! If you didn’t go sticking your nose where it didn’t belong, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Theo was suddenly a blur diving across the cabin. His shoulders hit Felipe in the midsection, and the two men tumbled to the deck. Felipe somehow managed to land on top. They were locked in a struggle when the gun went off and shattered a window.
“Theo!” Jack shouted as he dived behind a club chair. Theo finally broke free and grabbed Felipe’s gun hand, but in the fight, another shot cut through the cabin.
The mayor went down.
Theo had Felipe in a hold that nearly broke the man’s arm, and the gun dropped to the floor. Jack hurried to the mayor’s side.
“Hold on, Mayor,” said Jack. “We’ll get you to a doctor.”
The mayor coughed up blood, and a mirthless chuckle followed. “I am the doctor,” he said in a fading voice.
Jack felt chills as he watched the mayor-the doctor-draw his last breath.
chapter 66
J ack was having a hard time understanding Alicia’s grandmother, and the language barrier had nothing to do with it.
The rumors surrounding Mayor Mendoza’s death were scandalous even by Miami standards. The high-octane ingredients were all in place: a cash-stuffed briefcase and a scuffle on the mayor’s yacht, a dead politician and his pistol-packing bodyguard, a death-row survivor and the son of a former governor-all on the heels of a dramatic hostage standoff. Walt the Weather Wizard was the happiest man alive. Just when it seemed that the media couldn’t get enough of his sex-for-hire disaster, he was suddenly yesterday’s news.
Officially, the cause of the mayor’s death was under investigation. The police department was in its tightest “no comment” mode, and details about what was said that night on the yacht were not generally known. The mayor still had many friends and supporters, however, both inside and outside the police department. They were actively spinning the cause of death as an “accidental shooting.” They dismissed all leaks about the mayor’s alleged link to Falcon and the Disappeared as the senseless ranting of a delusional homeless maniac. Jack did nothing to educate the press or the public, though standing mute was not a decision he had come to on his own. Nor was he minding the homicide detectives’ concerns that he not comment on an ongoing investigation.
Jack was simply honoring the wishes of Alicia’s grandmother.
To be sure, Alicia’s family history was complex. Jack didn’t even pretend to understand the depths of the tragedy, though his own experiences surely framed his perspective. Jack’s grandmother had spirited her teenage daughter away to Miami when Castro came to power in Cuba. Sadly, Abuela wasn’t able to escape Cuba for another forty years, long after Jack’s mother died in childbirth. In a manner of speaking, Jack and his mother had been stolen from Abuela, and when his grandmother landed in Miami nearly four decades later, she latched onto Jack with the heartfelt intention of never letting go, even if he was a grown man in his thirties. Jack would have expected the same sense of urgency from Alicia’s biological abuela, now that she had the DNA and other proof she’d longed for. He was wrong.
“Yours is a completely different situation,” the old woman told Jack.
“I realize that. My mother wasn’t murdered.”
“And even though she was driven out of her native country and died so young, you always knew who your real mother was.”
“But you have all the proof you’ve ever needed. You have every right to push forward on this.”
“It’s not a question of my rights,” she said. “For any parent or grandparent, it’s always a question of what’s best for the child. Even if that child is grown.”
Jack wished for a better answer, but anyone who knew the biblical story of King Solomon could understand the old woman’s reasoning. The real mother would never cut the baby in half-physically or emotionally-to serve her own maternal needs and desires. Neither would the real grandmother. After years of searching, she finally heard from Falcon, who told her exactly where to find her granddaughter. Right then, she could have ambushed Alicia with accusations if not evidence against Mr. Mendoza. She could have gone to the newspapers. She could even have gone to court, though at the time the Argentine judiciary did not have a history of siding with mothers of the Disappeared who reached out to lost grandchildren, no matter how much the child looked, walked, or talked like his or her dead mother. The point was that forcing the issue would have earned her nothing but Alicia’s contempt. Instead, she gave Alicia the soft sell, starting with that first face-to-face visit when Alicia was in college. As difficult as it was to exercise emotional restraint, she simply planted seeds and, on occasion, dug them up to see how they were growing, knowing that she and her granddaughter could never have a future together unless Alicia followed her own heart.