Mortal Dilemma (33 page)

“Did you go check on her?”

“Not right away. One of Francisco's men was hanging around in the front yard, like he was watching the place. I was afraid to go over there.”

“What's your name?”

“Millie. Millie Magnus.”

“Is that your birth name?”

“No, but that's all I'm going to give you.” She smiled.

Wally chuckled. “Okay. Fair enough. How did you find me?”

“Your name was in the paper this morning, and I know where you guys keep the police boats.”

“Did you see Penny after you heard the argument?”

“No.”

“Did you report it to the police?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I work for Francisco,” Millie said. “I didn't want him coming after me.”

“Are you an escort?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you coming to me now?”

“Francisco's dead. He can't hurt me.”

“What makes you think Penny was on the boat?”

“Our townhouses back up to the same canal where the man who owned the boat lived. A couple of hours after Francisco left Penny's place, I was taking a nap on the sofa when I was awakened by the sound of a boat coming up the canal. It stopped behind our town-houses. Because of the shrubbery, I can't see the canal from downstairs, so I went upstairs. I saw Francisco and two of his men getting into the boat. They had something heavy with them wrapped in a sheet, but they were already putting it in the boat by the time I saw them.”

“Didn't that seem suspicious to you?”

“Yes. I went over to her place after Francisco and the men left in the boat. She wasn't home. I have a spare key and let myself in. The living
room looked like there had been a fight, you know, lamps knocked over, a chair overturned.”

“Weren't you concerned?”

“Yes, but I was about to leave for Ft. Myers with a date and I wasn't sure what was going on. I didn't get back until late last night and then I saw the paper this morning. That's the first time I heard anything about the boat explosion. There it was, spread all over the front page. I went next door and Penny was still gone. Her living room looked just like it had when I'd been in there two days before.”

“Why come to me? Why didn't you just call into the station? Get the detectives out?”

“I don't want to be involved in this. Javier is still alive and would kill me if he knew I was talking to the cops. I thought you might like to take the information and maybe get credit for the break in the case.”

Wally mulled this over. He was ambitious and knew this kind of break would look good on his record, maybe be worth something when he was up for a promotion, maybe to detective. “Okay, Millie,” he said. “Let me think about this. Can I come see you this evening?”

“Why don't I meet you somewhere. I don't know if somebody might be watching my house. If so, I don't want them to see a cop come to my door. Even one in civilian clothes.”

The affair started that night. Wally knew she was a prostitute, but he was infatuated. They spent nights at his apartment, nights when she wasn't sleeping with someone else for money. She told Wally that the others were just a way to make a living, a very good living as it was, but she was falling in love with him. He accepted that, mostly, and moved on, with Millie as the centerpiece of his life.

She was a girl from a small town in upper Wisconsin. On the day after she graduated from high school she'd fled the little town and gone to Los Angeles looking for the fame and fortune that the celebrity magazines always talked about. She knew the chances of
becoming a movie star were remote, but she was a dreamer and she felt compelled to chase the dream.

The dream, though, turned sordid when she met a man who told her he was a movie producer. He had an engraved business card that said so. She was naïve and had grown up on stories of the stars who had been discovered in drugstores and hash houses. Hollywood was a magical place, but she had gotten nowhere in finding work in the movies. Then the producer showed up and on the third day offered to get her a part in a movie if she would sleep with him.

Millie thought about it for a day and talked to some of her girlfriends, aspiring actresses all, who urged her to take her shot. In the end, she went to a cheap motel with him and had sex. It was quick and unsatisfying, and she never heard from the guy again.

In the end she was used by a number of men, hucksters and cheats and lovers, and she grew jaded. The movie career was never to be. She had become accustomed to using her body to enhance her career chances and it had never worked out. One night, while waiting tables in the high-end restaurant where she worked, she was propositioned by a nice-looking middle-aged businessman in an expensive suit. He offered to pay her to spend the night with him. She agreed and found it not to be as unpleasant as she had expected. The next morning he gave her more money than she'd made in a whole week of waiting tables. From there, it was an easy transition into prostitution, and eventually the work took her to Ft. Lauderdale. She arrived in South Florida a year before she met the young policeman and settled in as a member of the stable of beautiful women that Francisco Mendez maintained. Millicent Smith, the girl from Wisconsin, became Millie Magnus.

On the day after Millie approached Wally at the marina, he arranged to meet a detective he knew, and told him that he had a confidential source that he couldn't divulge, even to another cop, and gave him the story Millie had told about Francisco Mendez.

Unbeknownst to Wally, the detective was on Javier Mendez's payroll, and before Wally slept with Millie a second time, Javier was aware that someone was talking to the cops and in the process of besmirching the good name of his dead son. He set out to discover the snitch.

A month later, Millie didn't show up for a date with Wally. He tried to call her cell, but only got voice mail. He left messages, but did not get a response. On the third day, Millie called. “I'm in the hospital,” she said.

“Which one? I'm on my way.”

“No, Wally. Don't come. Don't call me again. I don't want to see you. Ever.”

“What's the matter?” He was talking to a dead phone.

He began calling the hospitals, starting with the largest and most likely. He told the person who answered the phone that he was a cop and gave her his badge number. He got a hit on that first call. The hospital didn't have a patient named Millie Magnus, but they did have a Millicent Smith. Wally took a shot and went to the hospital, walked into Smith's room, and saw his Millie lying in the hospital bed, her face covered in bandages.

“My God, Millie. What happened?” Wally asked.

Millie looked up. “I told you not to come.”

“Yeah. What happened?”

“You happened.”

“I don't understand,” Wally said.

“You told somebody about me.”

“Never.”

“Javier told me that you talked to a detective about me.”

“I talked to a detective but told him my information came from a confidential source that I couldn't and wouldn't identify.”

“Somebody figured it out.”

“What happened?”

She started to cry, great sobs wracking her body and tears trailing down her cheeks. “Javier cut my face. He wouldn't stop, no matter how much I begged. He just kept cutting, taking chunks out of my cheeks. He ruined me. And the surgeons can't make it better. Javier said this is what happens to whores who talk out of school. The pain was so bad I passed out. He threw water in my face and started cutting again.”

“Millie, I'm so sorry. I'll handle this.”

“Go away, Wally. There's nothing you can do.”

“We'll see.” He turned and left the room. He drove to the central police station and parked in the lot reserved for detectives and ranking officers. He was looking for the detective he'd confided in. After two hours he gave up and went home. He would be going on shift in an hour.

When he got back to the station to check in, he went to a computer and used a friend's ID and password to log into the police department's personnel files. He knew there would be an investigation and some smart cop would look at the department's servers and run a search to determine who had been looking for the detective. His friend was in Alaska on a fishing trip with three other cops. His alibi would be solid.

*    *    *

A week later Wally went to the hospital to help Millie check out. She wrote a check for part of the bill on a Wisconsin bank and handed the checkbook to Wally to return to her purse. He tore out a check, put it in his pocket and drove her to the airport for a flight home. She was going back to Wisconsin, to her hometown in the far north of the state. She planned to enroll in a nearby college and study to be a teacher.

Millie had come to believe that Wally had nothing to do with her being outed to Javier. He was at the hospital every day, concerned and helpful. On the day her bandages were removed, he looked at the red welts that crisscrossed her face and told her it wasn't too bad and with time it would get better. He had a plan that he did not share with her.

They stayed in touch by email and Wally thought she was feeling better about herself. Maybe being back in her old bedroom at the family home was a catalyst for good. Her parents had welcomed her with the warmth and love they'd always displayed toward their only daughter. She had talked to the college admissions people and would enroll at the beginning of the new semester that would start in a few weeks. She told her parents and her old friends that the scars on her face were the result of an automobile accident.

*    *    *

Two months went by before Wally put the first phase of his plan into action. He'd found the home address of the detective in the personnel files he'd broken into while Millie was in the hospital. Early one morning Wally was parked in his personal car a half block from the detective's house. He watched as the man got into his car and pulled out of his driveway. Wally followed him and when they were three or four miles from the house, he pulled up beside the detective at a stop sign, waved at him to roll down his window, and said, “I need to talk to you. I've got some good information that I don't want to be seen giving you at the office.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Let's pull into that parking lot around the corner,” Wally said.

The detective followed Wally and parked right beside him. Wally got out of his car, a pistol held down beside his leg. He walked to the driver's side window and stuck the pistol in the detective's face. “Put your hands on the steering wheel,” Wally said.

“Hey, man, what's going on?”

“Do it, or I'll kill you.”

The detective complied. Wally handed him a pair of handcuffs. “Use your right hand and put the cuff on your left wrist.”

“You are surely fucking up,” the detective said.

“Do it.”

The detective put the cuff around his wrist as ordered and Wally said, “Now, reverse the procedure.”

The detective did so and Wally checked to make sure they were secure. “Now get out of the car and hold your arms down in front of you.” The detective got out of the car. Wally looked around the lot. Nobody there this early. It had probably been a parking area for employees of the adjacent building at one time. The place may have been a factory of some sort, but it had been abandoned many years before. Grass and weeds grew through the cracks on the asphalt surface of the lot.

“Put your hands on the car,” Wally said. “Assume the position. You know how to do it.” The detective spread his feet and leaned into the car. Wally unlocked the cuff on the detective's right wrist, holding his pistol muzzle in the middle of the other man's back. He pulled both the man's arms behind his back, one at a time, and locked the cuffs again. He searched the detective, took his gun and his handcuffs and key. “Get in the front seat.” Wally drove out of the parking lot and headed west.

“I hope the hell you know what you're doing, Officer, because your career is about to come to a screeching halt.”

“You keep talking, Detective, and I'm going to shoot you in the foot.”

Half an hour later, Wally turned off on a service road that ran due south into the Everglades. The road was dirt and a pall of dust billowed behind his car. He drove for five miles and came to a stop. The
road had been laid on a ridge that was a foot or two above the water of the great river of grass. There was water on either side and Wally heard the occasional roar of the bull gators. They were close.

He got out of the car and sat on the trunk sipping from a bottle of water. Another fifteen minutes went by and the dust cleared. There were no cars or people in sight. Nobody would come up on him without dust being stirred up. He'd hear an airboat long before he saw it.

Wally opened the passenger side door and dragged the detective out of the car. The man fell on the road, unable to catch himself with his hands cuffed behind him. “What the fuck?” he said.

“We're going to have a little conversation,” Wally said, standing over the man as he lay in the dirt.

“About what?” A hint of fear was creeping into his voice.

“About Javier Mendez.”

“What about him?”

“How long have you been on his payroll?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Detective, this can go easy or hard, but the end result is going to be the same. You're going to tell me what I want to know.”

“And if I do, what then?”

“I'll take you in and you can give your confession all over again to the internal affairs people.”

“About three years.”

“What?”

“I've been on Javier's payroll for about three years.”

“What do you know about Penny Parkins?”

“She was one of the whores Javier's son Francisco ran.”