South by Southeast (36 page)

False intimacy was Nelson's specialty. Whether or not anyone else was present, I was under surveillance from the adjoining room. I could see the red glow of the camera mounted on the wall. My heart pounded with everything I wanted to say.

“If you have evidence, lock me up,” I said instead. “My lawyer is Melanie Wilde.”

By law, that was supposed to be the end of our conversation. Yeah, right.

Nelson pulled a chair closer to mine. “Where's your poker face this morning, Tennyson?” Nelson said, staring me down. “You're a mess. You look like you want to puke. You look so bad I almost feel sorry for you.”

My eyes hurt. I wanted to rub them, but I couldn't because of the handcuffs. I shook at the chains, frustrated. “Nelson, you know I didn't do this. Or Chela. We just buried my father—her grandfather. Leave her out.”

“I can't leave anybody out,” Nelson said. “I need a head on a stick.”

My stomach gurgled loudly, and my throat tightened. I was going to throw up. “A bag,” I said with a thin voice. “Now.”

“Motherfu—” Nelson glanced around, surprised. He leaped from his seat, afraid of getting his Brooks Brothers suit sprayed. He ran for the trash can and pulled out a crumpled white plastic bag. As soon as the bag was in front of me, my stomach emptied. Luckily, I hadn't eaten breakfast, but the sickly sweet-sour scent of vomit floated above us in the room.

“That's it,” Nelson said, as if I were in labor. He gently wiped the side of my mouth with a coffee-stained napkin that had fallen from the bag. “Get it out, Tennyson.” I wanted to tell Nelson to back the hell away from me, but the idea of talking made me vomit again.

“Here's how it's going to be,” Nelson said. “You're not going to lawyer up.”

I glanced up at Nelson:
That's what you think.

“And I'll tell you why,” Nelson went on. “Because if you lawyer up, I'm going to call a press conference in time for the morning news cycle to announce that we're holding you. And then we're going to bring in Chela, look for whatever we can dig up on her, and see what she feels like telling us.”

Chela would be shattered if she got dragged into Mother's homicide case. I still had no idea how I would tell her Mother was dead.

“What do you want from me?” I managed to say.

“Everything. Why you were there. What you said. If you killed her—tell me why.”

“You think I killed an old lady?” I met his eyes, man to man. I'd made the mistake of trying to reach Lieutenant Rodrick Nelson's human side in the past, but I couldn't help it.

“Tennyson, I've been in this game a long time. All I believe is evidence.”

“No cameras,” I said. “Just us talking.”

“No deal. You don't get to negotiate. Talk. Now.”

“I didn't kill her, so you've got nothing on me.”

“You sure about that?” His wild-eyed glint made me not sure at all. He did have something on me. Of course he did.

“If it's fingerprints, I told you I was there yesterday.”

Nelson gave me an acid smirk. Then he pulled a laptop in front of me, where a grainy image was frozen on the screen, too dark to make out the details. A large, shadowy room.

“This was a very careful woman,” Nelson said. “Security footage from the bedroom.”

My heart thumped. Something was wrong. “It's pretty damn dark.”

“Turns out sound is all we need,” Nelson said. He rewound the footage and pressed play. “The dogs are whimpering at first, but listen for the voices.”

Sure enough, I heard the pained simpering of the dogs. I guessed they had been poisoned to give the killer access to Mother. I'd never liked those dogs, but I wouldn't have wished a painful death on them.

“What?” Mother said suddenly, her voice crisp as life. She was a gray shadow in her bed. She might have been sitting up, but it was hard to see.

More whimpering. Then, beneath the whimpering, I heard a muffled man's voice. From the hall? I couldn't hear him clearly.

“Our techs will work on that,” Nelson said. “Here comes my favorite part.”

More whimpering. Then Mother raised her voice to call out: “Tennyson?”

And the screen went black.

My body turned to ice in the handcuffs.

“That's when the camera lost the feed,” Nelson said. “Disabled by the killer.”

The killer was technically savvy. He sounded more and more like me.

“That's bullshit,” I said. “I'm being set up.”

“Talk.”

I didn't dare tell him about the anonymous note. If Escobar had sent the note and then killed Mother, he might be implicating me in other ways I didn't know yet. I had no witnesses to verify that I received the note anonymously rather than typing it myself. Escobar might have planted other phony evidence in Mother's room that would turn the note against me.

I forced myself to inhale, putting my meditation practice to work. I might have forgotten to breathe for nearly a minute. No wonder I'd been sick. My jabbing heartbeat slowed.

“What if Gustavo Escobar survived the explosion?” I said quietly.

Nelson stared at me blankly. “For your sake, I hope and pray that isn't your story.”

“His body hasn't been recovered. That's a fact.”

“What would that have to do with a Serbian madam?”

“Nothing,” I said. “But it has everything to do with me. Because if Escobar's anything like me, he's real pissed off about our last night together.”

“So he kills Mother why?” he said.

“To fuck with me,” I said.

“And he told her to call out your name.” He didn't hide his skepticism.

“I don't know how he did it, Nelson. I don't know if it's him—but it's not me.”

“People only get framed in movies,” Nelson said. “In twenty years, I've never seen it. But now I get why you asked about Escobar when I called you. That was the first thing out of your mouth. That's your story.” He sounded dumbfounded. “You're really gonna make me do it, aren't you? You're finally gonna make me put you in prison.”

His voice sounded as if he was my best friend. As if I had a gun to his head.

“South Beach Police didn't want to hear about Escobar, either,” I said. “Hear me or not, but I wasn't at Mother's that night. I have alibis all night long. So if there's evidence against me, you'd better ask yourself where it's coming from . . . brother. The South Beach cops can tell you it hurts like hell to look like a fool. Again.”

I didn't have to remind Nelson that my instincts had bested his in three major cases. Nelson stood up and went to the door. Our heart-to-heart was over, but I'd rattled him, too. A press conference might come back to haunt him, and he knew it.

“I'm bringing my guys back in,” Nelson said. “Don't try to float that Escobar shit. Walk us through your visit to Mother's. No lawyer, or we go public. Cooperate, or we go public. After we hear what you have to say, you'll go home—or you won't.”

I sighed and nodded. I would answer their questions about my relationship with Mother. And Chela's history with her. I might end up in jail no matter what I did.

One of Mother's last acts on earth had been to call out my name.

I SLOWED THE
rental car when I got within a block of the house on Brentwood.

I'd traded my previous rental for a black Ford Explorer with windows tinted so dark that they should have been illegal. But even inside the cocoon, I felt exposed driving near Mother's house, especially with Chela and April with me. A black-and-white police cruiser parked at the corner made my heart jump.

After four hours of questioning and efforts to make me sweat in an empty room, Nelson had let me go. As usual, he tried to paint himself as my generous savior, although he made it clear that he would come back for me soon. I was lucky to be free, and I wanted to stay free. But I couldn't hide at home.

The press outside Mother's house was a horde, not just the tabloids anymore. The Hollywood Madam had just been murdered, another weird twist in the story that had begun with Gustavo Escobar. Three news vans were parked haphazardly across the road, an obstacle course for drivers. Most of the people crowded near Mother's lawn were in the media, although a few neighborhood teenagers coasted past on skateboards.

April and Chela, who trusted me most, were my only allies in the hunt for Escobar.

I drove by the house slowly, our vehicle hushed. Escobar could have been on that street, hidden in sight, his specialty. The frumpy videographer with a mountaineer's beard could be Escobar. Or the gray-haired man parked in a white van across the street. Escobar could have had plastic surgery, although he would have bruising and swelling from a nose job. But he might be hidden somewhere among the media spectators, basking in his cleverness.

I heard April snapping photos with the Pentax digital camera she'd saved all year for. She had started taking original photos for her blog, and her photography skills had taken a leap. “I'll just try to get everybody,” she said. “We'll study them later.”

While April photographed the observers, I studied Mother's house. Mother had no fencing in her front yard, although her windows were too high to reach from ground level. The backyard had eight-foot cyclone fencing. How had the killer gotten into the house?

“Did Mother keep the dogs out back at night?” I asked Chela.

Chela shook her head. She sat in the passenger seat beside me, staring out her window with her fingers lightly touching the glass. Her nose was red from crying, but her crying had stopped. My six-hour stay at the police station hadn't been nearly as bad as telling Chela that Mother was dead. And how. The sonofabitch had drowned her in her own piss.

Drowned.
That was the important thing.

“No way,” Chela said softly. “They slept in her bed. They were like her kids.”

“What was her security besides the cameras on the front door and the bedroom?”

“The alarm,” Chela said. “And she slept with her gun at night.” She sniffled. “She said she always had, since she was living on the streets in Kosovo.”

Even if Mother had still been sleeping with her gun, her reflexes would have been slowed by age, sleep, and illness. She might have been a challenging target if she hadn't been so frail.

“So he had to override the alarm?” April said.

“Or just shut off the power,” I said. “Or maybe the alarm wasn't set. We just know he got in somehow. He poisoned the dogs. He got to her room.”

Escobar was good. And if Escobar had targeted Mother since my visit to her with Chela, he'd come up with his plan quickly. He'd devised his plan for his boat quickly, too. Escobar thought faster than I did. Or more deeply. The last time I'd raced him, I'd lost.

“Maybe one of the nurses saw something,” Chela said.

Even finding the name of the nursing company Mother used would be a hassle. She might have hired her nurses privately. I was miles behind Escobar. I needed Dad. I needed Nelson. I needed someone else on my team.

I felt Escobar near me. He was at Mother's house, probably looking for me, too. I would have sworn to it in court.

“Too many eyes on us,” I said, noticing a couple of photographers stirring as they stared in our direction. “Time to go.”

“ 'Bye, Mother,” Chela whispered.

At my insistence, April had left her car parked in the Whole Foods lot instead of its usual spot in front of my house. I dreaded what I had to say to her, but I couldn't see another way. April and I couldn't find our way back together under the shadow of Gustavo Escobar.

“I'll walk you to your car,” I said, idling the SUV in the space two rows from hers. I wasn't parked directly next to April's car, but I could still see Chela at all times as I walked with April toward her PT Cruiser.

No matter where April and I began, we always ended up in the same place. It dawned on me that I could never have her. Maybe I had always known it, just as Nelson knew.

“How are we going to do this if I don't park at your place?” she said. “We'll meet somewhere and you'll pick me up? What about tonight?”

One of us had to have good sense, I thought. I had seen the photographs of what Escobar had done to Mother and to his own sister. I wanted to send Chela with April, but Chela had told me she wasn't going anywhere. I had to work on Chela next.

“Oh,” April said, reading my expression. “There is no tonight.”

The sharp disappointment and sadness on her face, amplified in the bright sunlight, would haunt me.

“You're not safe around me, April. Maybe no one is. Let's get in your car.”

If I was under surveillance from either the police or Escobar, I didn't want us to linger in plain view. We sat in her car, our old familiar middle ground. The interior smelled slightly sour, probably from old food wrappers. “You need to clean out this car,” I said.