You Only Die Twice Page 3

  “No!” She shook her head emphatically, refusing to look at the picture again. “It was just a passing thought.” She was strangely silent as we walked to her car. A quick hug and she was gone, flying out of the parking lot at an uncharacteristically high rate of speed, tires squealing as she floored it.

  The Bal Harbour shops sit near the sea, a short drive across the Broad Causeway, light-years away from newsroom deadlines, inner-city woes, the county jail, and the morgue. Who would believe that during World War II this site was a swampy mosquito-infested German prisoner-of-war camp guarded by barbed wire and armed men? Today, beautiful people sip wine and cappuccino at outdoor tables, surrounded by the swank shops and boutiques of Chanel, Gucci, and Versace, as strolling models strike poses in designer fashions.

  My eyes lingered on the silk scarf worn by the elegant woman who greeted me at Tiffany’s. It was draped perfectly, tied just so, a coveted knack I have never mastered. Her eyes lingered on my wristwatch, registering dismay. The little Morris the Cat number was a gift of sorts from Billy Boots, who obligingly consumed enough cat food to acquire the necessary labels.

  The earrings, she said, could have come from any one of more than one hundred and fifty Tiffany stores in both the United States and such world capitals as London, Paris, Rome, and Zurich. Or they could have been ordered from the store’s glossy catalog, which for some reason had never found its way to my mailbox.

  I could not bring myself to flash the morgue photo in this posh emporium where everyone spoke in hushed and genteel tones. I would leave that to the cops. Feeling seriously underadorned, I thanked the sales associate, took a catalog, and drove back to the News. I called Rychek on the way and told him what I had learned at the store.

  I showed Bobby Tubbs the earring photo, which he agreed to run with the story if we had the space. “I’ve also got a picture of the victim,” I said cheerfully.

  His head jerked up, eyes narrowing. “Is she dead in the picture?”

  “It’s not that bad,” I said. “We can touch up the nose a little.”

  “I don’t want to see it. Ged it the hell outa here!” He spun his swivel chair and turned away, fuming.

  “Putting it in the newspaper may be the only way to reunite her with her loved ones….” I was pleading with the back of Tubbs’s head.

  “Don’t even think about it!” he barked. He did not look up from his editing screen.

  Of course I thought about it. Missing people intrigue me. Perhaps because my father, lost on a mission to liberate his Cuban homeland, was missing for most of my life, or because human beings lost and never found baffle me. “Everybody’s got to be someplace.” That punch line, from a long-dead comedian named Myron Cohen, says it all.

  I turned in my story, dropped a handful of business cards in my pocket, told the desk I was taking comp time, and departed for the day. At the beach, I parked ten blocks south of where the dead woman was first spotted and began to canvass, trudging from one hotel lobby to the next, inquiring about any female guest or employee who might be missing.

  I could have done the job faster by phone, but I like to look people in the eye when I ask a question. And I like being out of the office. Nothing excites me more than picking up the scent of a good story, and I had begun to believe this was one. I could feel it in my bones.

  I pressed my cards into the hands of desk clerks, managers, and bartenders, asking them to call if they heard anything.

  I stopped ten blocks north of where she was found. Which one? I wondered, my eyes roving the pastel skyline of hotels, condos, and conversions—aging hotels updated, renovated, and converted into high-priced apartments. If you were here, I whispered to the woman from the water, where?

  I beeped Rychek at sunset. We met, shared drinks, ate a pizza, and compared notes.

  Our victim matched no missing persons reports, county, state, or international. The detective had checked on cars towed or ticketed for overtime parking near the beach since her final swim. Two were stolen, one from Miami, the other in Chicago. The first had been used in an armed-robbery spree; two pounds of marijuana, a sawed-off shotgun, and a cemetery headstone were found in the other. Neither appeared linked to a missing woman.

  The detective had visited Tiffany’s too. I imagined him, with his smelly cigar and unpretentious swagger, bombarding the staff with blunt questions. No one recognized the dead woman’s picture. Copies were faxed to other stores, but that was a long shot. She probably didn’t buy the earrings herself.

  “She looked like the kinda broad guys buy presents for.” He sounded wistful.

  I sipped red wine and wondered about his marital status. For as long as we had known each other, he had never mentioned his personal life.

  “Want to bet that the call will come tomorrow?”

  “From your lips to God’s ears, kid.” He raised his glass.

  Tomorrow came and went. So did the next day and the day after.

  “Every right turn I make is a dead end,” Rychek complained at our next strategy session a week later. “It’s like she dropped outa nowhere.” Her fingerprints had come back NIF, Not In File. No criminal record. “It’s like she came to Miami to die,” he said. “Why she hadda do it on my watch, I dunno. What the hell did she have against me?”

  “Maybe she’s foreign, a tourist, and the folks back home haven’t missed her yet. What did Wyatt say?”

  Dr. Everett Wyatt, one of the nation’s foremost forensic odontologists, sent one of the nation’s most savage serial killers to Florida’s electric chair by identifying his teeth marks, left in a young victim’s flesh.

  Rychek shrugged. “He says her dental work looks like it was done in the States.”

  Like the jail, the streets, and the court dockets, the morgue was overcrowded. Rychek said the administrator at the medical examiner’s office was talking burial.

  “We don’t come up with answers soon,” the detective said, “they’re gonna plant her in Potter’s Field.”

  The prospect made me order another drink.

  Backhoes dig trenches twice a month and prisoners provide free labor as Dade’s destitute and unclaimed go to their graves in cheap wooden coffins. Stillborn babies sleep forever beside impoverished senior citizens, jail suicides, AIDS victims, and unknown corpses with no names and no one to mourn them. Their graves are marked only by numbers at the county cemetery, otherwise known as Potter’s Field, in the hope that a John, Jane, or Juan Doe will one day be identified by a loved one eager to claim and rebury the body. That rarely happens.

  “No way,” I said.

  “Right.” The detective’s jaw squared. “Somebody must miss her.”

  He took it personally. So did I.

  Rychek left and I wandered back to the beach, contemplating endless horizon and big gray-and-green sky, over a wine-dark sea. Who are you? I asked her. Who wanted you dead?

  She appeared in my dreams that night, trying to answer, eyes alight with desperation, pale lips moving beneath sun-splashed whirls of blue water. I reached out to her, over and over. But the water, like something cunning and alive, kept her just out of my grasp.

  “How can somebody like you and me just get lost?” I groused to Lottie the next day. She straddled a chair she had pulled up to my desk after deadline for the first edition.

  “Maybe she wasn’t like you and me,” she said, thumbing idly through my Tiffany catalog, with its sterling silver baby cups, jewelry, and crystal.

  “Well, if she shopped there regularly,” I said, “she wasn’t. But rich people are missed quicker than the rest of us. And there’s a child out there somewhere with no mother. Where the hell are her relatives, neighbors, coworkers, her boss, her best friend? Hell, you’d think her hairdresser would report her missing, if no one else. She looked like high maintenance.”

  “Dern tootin’. By now, she’s due for a touch-up, a manicure, another bikini wax. The works.”

  A much-anticipated evening with the man in my life, Miami Police Major Ken
dall McDonald, began with promise but ended badly. He smelled good, looked guapismo, and greeted me with such an ardent embrace that I discerned that he was not wearing his beeper. Hormones slam-dancing with the neurochemicals in my brain, I deliberately left my pager behind, too. Tonight would be for us alone.

  The first sign of trouble occurred en route, when he reached for me, I thought. What he actually reached for was his beeper, which he removed from the glove compartment.

  Our destination, a barbecue at the home of a police colleague, was in Pembroke Pines, a suburban neighborhood densely populated by cops, who are always happiest with other cops as neighbors.

  I mingled with friendly police wives, some of whom I’d met before.

  “I thought Ken and Kathy—” a small dark-haired woman blurted, before being silenced by a sharp look from our hostess.

  “I guess Kathy couldn’t come,” another commented, almost but not quite out of earshot.

  My longtime suspicions were confirmed. McDonald and Rape Squad Lieutenant K. C. Riley had been, and apparently still continued to be, more than friends.

  The men gathered around the grill on an outside patio, while us gals nibbled nuts, crackers, and pita chips and chatted. Childbirth was the topic: morning sickness, labor pains, pre-and postnatal depressions, and the horrifying details of actual blessed events.

  Pictures were passed, baby pictures. Though cute, the infants all looked amazingly alike. How, I worried, would the mothers get the right pictures back? Did it matter? My life lacked interest. With no babies, meat-loaf recipes, or suburban small talk to share, what could I say?

  I am haunted by a dead woman with seaweed in her hair.

  McDonald’s beeper sounded as we dined outdoors with the night soft around us, laughter and music in the air, and the pungent aroma of citronella candles to repel mosquitoes.

  He returned from the phone, his expression odd, stopping to whisper in the ear of a homicide lieutenant, who reacted as though shot. They exchanged expressions of disbelief.

  “What happened?” I asked expectantly, as McDonald reclaimed his seat beside me.

  “Nothing,” he said, eyes troubled.

  That was his final answer. I hate secrets. On the way home, I coaxed. He lectured on ethics. I pried. He protested. One thing led to another.

  I slammed out of his car at my place and marched to the front door without looking back. As my key turned in the lock, his Jeep Cherokee pulled away.

  He doesn’t trust me, I lamented, after all we’ve weathered together. He shares everything in common with the other woman in his life, the one he sees every day on the job. How do I compete with that? I asked myself. Do I even want to try?

  Ignoring the blinking red eye on my message machine, I took Bitsy for a walk. Each time a car slowed beside us, I hoped it was his, but it never was. How did this happen to us? I wondered.

  Dressed for bed, I was warming a glass of milk in the microwave when someone knocked softly.

  I swiftly smoothed my hair and threw open the door, grinning in relief.

  My visitor’s balding dome shone in the moonlight. “You ain’t gonna believe this, kid.”

  “Emery, what are you doing here?” I clutched my cotton robe around me and glanced at the wall clock.

  “It’s one A.M.”

  “You tol’ me to call you if I got a break. You didn’t answer. I was passing by and saw your lights.”

  I swung the door open wider and Rychek stepped inside.

  “I got me the name of the mermaid,” he announced.

  “Been working the case all night. Thought you’d wanna know. It’s a hell of a thing.”

  “How’d you find out who she was?” Eagerly, I led him into my small kitchen. He looked rumpled and needed a shave. “You want coffee?”

  “No, but I could use a stiff drink. I’m headed home after this. You expecting somebody?”

  “No.” I took out the Jack Daniel’s. “How’s this?”

  “Perfect. Nothing on the side.” He looked puzzled. “What’s with you, kid? Didn’t you ever learn to check who it is before you open your door in the middle-a the night? You of all people.”

  “You’re right. I wasn’t thinking.”

  We sat across from each other at my kitchen table, him with his booze, me with my milk, our notebooks in front of us, the air electric. I love these moments.

  “I knew you’d do it.” I smiled as we raised our glasses in mutual salute. “Who is she?”

  He took a swallow, then sighed. “A Miami native, born and raised.”

  “Wow. How come nobody identified her sooner?”

  “Because the corpse we fished outa the drink that day was a dead woman.” Fondly, he contemplated the amber liquid in his glass, prolonging the moment.

  “So? We knew that.” I frowned and put my pen down.

  “She was a murder victim…”

  “Emery,” I implored impatiently.

  “…more than ten years ago. She was already dead.” His deliberate gaze met mine. “Ran her prints again, this time through local employment records. Came back a hit. Her prints positively identify her as Kaithlin Ann Jordan, murdered in 1991.”

  2

  “But that’s impossible!” I gasped. “She’d only been dead a few hours. Did you notify her next of kin?”

  “Not yet.” His eyes glittered. “That would be the lady’s husband, and he’s sitting on death row as we speak. Been there ever since he was convicted of her murder.”

  My jaw must have dropped.

  “In fact,” he said, “he lost his final appeal, and the governor signed his death warrant last month. He’s set for execution next week. Obviously that ain’t gonna happen now. All of a sudden, the man’s got himself a future.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “Incredible! What a close call. Did you say Jordan?”

  He nodded. “High-profile case. Big headlines. Big bucks. He’s the Miami department-store heir—you know, Jordan’s.”

  “Of course!” I nearly spit up my milk. “My mother worked at Jordan’s! I was just out of J-school, not at the News yet, but I remember the stories and everybody talking about it. She was killed upstate somewhere, right? They never found the body.”

  “Now we know why,” Rychek said. “At the time, they figured he dumped her in the Gulf Stream or buried her up in the woods where he used to hunt. From what I hear, they had more than enough to convict.”

  “But he didn’t do it,” I whispered. “My God, what an injustice. He’ll be a free man.”

  “Correctamundo. He didn’t kill her, but he’s damn lucky somebody did. Her murder saved his ass.”

  “You’re sure it’s the same woman?”

  “You kidding? Think I was happy? I had ’em recheck the prints three times. They finally gave me the fingerprint cards and I checked ’em myself.”

  “What a story!”

  “Helluva story,” he agreed, and rolled his eyes. Mine flew to the clock. Too late. The final had gone to press.

  “Who else knows?” I demanded, mind racing. “When is this gonna break? It’s too late to get the story in the paper until Sunday. I’d hate to see TV beat us.”

  He shrugged. “It’ll probably hit the fan sometime tomorrow. Couldn’t catch hold of Jordan’s lawyer right away. He’s in trial over in Tampa. Gotta touch base with him first thing in the morning. Already broke the news to the prosecutor who convicted him. Poor bastard built his reputation on winning that case. Ain’t easy to get the death penalty without a corpse, especially in a high-profile case with a big-bucks defense. He’s state attorney up in Volusia County now, planning to run for the senate on a tough law-and-order campaign. Probably rethinking his game plan tonight.”

  “Damn,” I said. “The lawyer is sure to call a press conference as soon as he talks to his client. Somebody should tell Jordan right away. Tonight. Imagine what the man has endured.” I stared accusingly at the detective. “Think how he must have felt when nobody believed him.”

 
“I had nuttin’ to do wit’ it. I’ll leave it to the lawyers to break the good news. I never set eyes on the man. And I’m damn sure sorry I ever set eyes on his ol’ lady.” He leaned back heavily, an eyebrow arched. “Surprised you didn’t have the scoop already, with your connections. The city knows. Somebody from Miami homicide was over there when I got the news. They had an interest. They were trying to make the guy for some kinda embezzlement when the homicide went down. The alleged homicide. Even if he didn’t do her, Jordan was no choirboy. Had a history of domestic violence down here and the prosecution up in Daytona used it to prove a pattern.”

  That was it, I realized, the telephone call Kendall McDonald had stonewalled me about. Hell, my own mother might even have had a clue. Forget your enemies, it’s your loved ones who double-cross you every time.

  “My connections,” I said flatly, “aren’t worth crap. I wish I’d known sooner.”

  “Tried to call you at nine.” Emery shook his head. “Even had your office beep you.”

  While I uneasily perused baby pictures, the biggest news story of the year had been slip-sliding through my fingers. I should have known better than to abandon my beeper in the pursuit of happiness. Mine and McDonald’s probably would have chirped in concert. Why do my good intentions always turn around to bite me?

  “Where the hell was this woman for the past ten years?” I asked Rychek. “Did she fake her own death? Was it amnesia? Was she kidnapped? Or traipsing around Miami all along, under everybody’s nose?”

  “Beats me,” he said wearily. “All I know is, when she washed up on my turf, she didn’t look like she’d been starved, abused, or chained up in an attic since 1991.”

  His mournful eyes drifted to the bottle on the table.

  “This was ’sposed to be a routine drowning,” he said regretfully, as I refilled his glass.

  Energized, I paced my small kitchen, then, from force of habit, began to brew a pot of Cuban coffee. I set the grinder on extra fine and fed it the dark fresh-roasted beans, as their aroma permeated the room. “I wonder if her parents still live here? You think Jordan was the real victim?” I filled the lower chamber with water up to the steam valve, added the basket of coffee, screwed the top chamber on tight, and set the little pot on the stove.