Suspicion of Innocence (23 page)

"Yes. You know Jimmy Panther, don't you?"

"Indeed."

"He says he lent it to my sister. That his grandmother made the mask."

"His grandmother?" Edith drew the word out. "This isn't Miccosukee. The Miccosukees didn't do masks."

"Could it be Seminole?"

Edith Newell's eyes, magnified behind thick glasses, fixed on Gail. She smiled patiently. "No, dear. The Seminoles and Miccosukees are like brothers, both from the Creek Nation in Georgia and Alabama. Their ancestors migrated into Florida in the eighteenth century. Most of them signed the Fort Dade peace treaty in 1837 during the Seminole War. The Miccosukees are the ones who didn't want to. They went into the Everglades to hide and the Army finally gave up looking for them. This mask certainly predates that period."

"Oh," said Gail.

"Now as to what tribe made this mask—" Edith knitted her fingers together. She had big hands, knuckles the size of walnuts, having wielded pickaxes and machetes in her time. "Tequesta," she announced. "If it isn't a forgery—and I don't think it is—this is a Tequesta mask, but of a unique type."

She flopped a book around so Gail could see it. One page was taken up with color photographs of half a dozen wooden masks. Gail recognized a catlike face, a bird, others that made no sense to her. Most of them were cracked, the wood dark and crumbling at the edges.

Edith said, "These are prehistoric masks from the Key Marco site on the southwest coast. They're all carved of cypress. Notice the style. The crescent on the forehead? The big ears? Similar to the mask you brought me. However—" Edith lightly touched it, a caress. "This is of another material entirely—fired clay."
 

Gail looked at the deer mask as if she might see something different this time. "Tequesta? Didn't they die out?"

"Good. I see you aren't completely ignorant. The Tequestas were never numerous or vital. They were extinct by the middle of the seventeen hundreds."

"So the mask could be fairly old?"

"Old? My dear, the ones in that picture date back two to three thousand years." Edith Newell's thin voice rose higher. "The Tequesta hunted and fished. They built chickees—you know, those palmetto frond huts—but next to nothing remains. Everything rots so quickly in this climate. We've found projectile points they traded from Indians further north. Beads. Fragments of clay pots, but none intact. Cups or knives made of conch shells. But only a few masks. Very few. Most of them have fallen to dust. So when you bring me
this—"

Laughing a little, Edith bounced on the seat of her chair. "What a find. The historians will go mad over it."

Gail stared at her for a moment. She had never seen Edith behave this way. Her wispy gray hair seemed to stand on end.

She said, "Miss Newell, Jimmy Panther once told my sister his people were murdered by the Spanish. Could he have meant the Tequestas? If they're extinct—"

"Oh, yes. I've heard that story. He claims to be the last descendant of the Tequestas. Rubbish." Edith settled back in her chair. She smiled. "I'll tell you about Jimmy Panther. His grandfather was white. Did you know that?"

"No."

"Oh, yes. By the name of Gibb. He ran a rum boat to Cuba for Al Capone during Prohibition. If it were up to me," Edith said, "I'd make Jimmy prove ownership before we hand the mask back to him."

"How could we? It certainly isn't ours."

"You found it in your sister's house."

"In an old box with a shipping label to the gift shop where he keeps his airboat. And Renee never had an interest in Indian artifacts."

"Well, what would Jimmy do if we let him have it?" Edith asked crossly. "Sell it to a collector, probably, and we'd never see it again."

"Is it valuable?"

Edith considered. "Since there's a ban on the importation of pre-Columbian art from Latin America, that runs the price up a bit. A cypress mask in good condition would go for four or five thousand dollars, if you could buy one at all. This mask could easily be triple that."

"I had no idea it was worth so much."

"Money," Edith snapped. "As if that were the only thing that mattered. I could weep. No, I don't speak of you, dear. Your roots go down deeply here. All those people pouring in. Thousands of them. They don't care about tradition. Bulldoze it all. They don't give a hoot as long as they can live in brand-new air-conditioned houses and drive their cars on brand-new roads until every last blade of grass is paved over and every drop of water is sucked out of the ground."

She tilted her head to look at Gail straight through her glasses. "You won't give the mask back to Jimmy Panther, will you?"

"He expects me to bring it to him tomorrow afternoon."

"Oh, no."

"I could put him off for a while," Gail said, "but he has more right to it than we do."

Edith held up a forefinger. "Here's what. Let me send it off to an archaeologist friend of mine at the University of Florida. I'll make sure it isn't broken, don't worry about that. He knows every important primitive artifact ever found in this state. If this mask is genuine, he'll know who it belongs to."

"What if he's never seen it?"

"Then I'll ask your mother to talk to Jimmy. He likes Irene. Maybe she can persuade him to sell it to the museum for a reasonable price. God knows we don't have much money to spare. The county would rather spend millions of dollars for a Grand Prix racecar track."

"Miss Newell, if I let you keep the mask for a while, you must promise me something."

She looked warily at Gail. "And that is?"

"Don't tell anyone about this. Renee was involved somehow. Let me find out what it means."

"Done." Edith mimed locking her lips and tossing the key. "I won't say a word."

"And make your friend promise too."

"Yes, dear."

Gail turned "the mask around, shadows from the reading lamp playing over the crescent on the deer's forehead and the painted lines around its eyes. Fifteen thousand dollars' worth of clay? It had nearly smashed to bits on her kitchen floor this morning. Renee had kept it cushioned in a heavy box and hidden on the top shelf of her closet. She must have known its value.

Gail would have to explain to Jimmy Panther why she wasn't going to bring it back tomorrow. Maybe she could strike a deal: the Tequesta mask if he told her the truth about what Renee was doing with it. Or better, how Renee had become friends with the part-white Miccosukee grandson of a Prohibition rumrunner.

Irene crossed the kitchen to get the ice cream out of the freezer. "No. Dave's going to come back, you'll see. He can't throw away eleven years just like that."
 

"Yes, he can," Gail said. She reached into the cabinet for two bowls—one for Irene, one for Karen, who was still stretched out on the living room carpet in front of the television with the orange striped cat. Applause and laughter from a game show drifted down the hall.

"Then let him be by himself awhile," Irene said. "Men like their freedom, especially at that age. But they come home if you handle it right. He's a responsible man. Talk to him."

"I'm not sure I want to talk to him," Gail said.

"Don't you
care
what happens? Your marriage is falling apart and you stand there calm as can be."

"Mother, please. Let's not get into a debate. I just thought you should know." The big gray cat—Muffin— twined around Gail's ankle and she gently shoved it aside.

"That's the price you pay." Irene dug into the ice cream with a scoop. "A woman can't let her husband think she wears the pants in a marriage, I don't care what the feminists say." She let the scoop of fudge ripple fall into a bowl.

"I am what I am," Gail said wearily.

"What you are," Irene replied, "is a mother with a daughter to think about. You might have to raise her alone. I did it with two daughters, and it's no bed of roses, let me tell you."

The cat leaped to the counter, sniffing at the carton. Irene pushed him away with her elbow. "Naughty kitty. Down."

Gail said, "Don't give Karen too much. It's nearly dark. We should go before it starts to rain again."

Irene appeared not to have heard. "I could have remarried. I was asked three different times."

"Why didn't you, then?"

After a moment, she said, "I didn't love any of them. Romantic notion, wasn't it? I didn't need to worry about money. I had Ben to help out with discipline from time to time, so I didn't feel the need to find a substitute father for you girls. Probably a mistake, I can see that now. You girls needed a man's influence in the home. Renee did, anyway. I didn't know what to do with Renee except let her have her way. She was like me when I was young, and I couldn't bear to say no to her. You were the one I leaned on."

"Did you?" Gail held out two spoons from the silverware drawer.

Irene didn't take them. She put her hands over her face. "I've failed you, too."

"Mother, I'm fine. For heaven's sake."

"All right. All right, I've stopped." She fanned her eyes. "Yes, you're fine. You're strong. You don't need people so much, not your husband, not even your mother. I used to worry about that but I guess it can be a virtue if you want to survive in this world."

She dropped a curl of ice cream on a saucer, which she set on the floor. "Muff, Muff, good kitty kitty."

Eyes closed, Muffin licked at the ice cream, tail twitching. Irene's fingers moved lightly through the fur behind his ears. "Yum yum yum."

Gail watched for a while, then said, "I don't think you're weak at all. You're just . . . subtle. Like Renee. She had a talent for getting what she wanted with the least amount of effort."

Irene stood up, giving Gail a sideways look. She went to put back the ice cream. "You'll need help with Karen, I suppose."

"I hadn't thought that far ahead."

"Apparently not," Irene said.

"You know how you hate to drive. You hardly leave the house."

"One has to make sacrifices."

Gail smiled. Irene finally had something concrete to worry about. "Mother, you haven't been so cheerful in weeks."

"Cheerful? What are you talking about? I'm positively horrified at what's happened to you." She picked up the bowls. "Wait till reality sets in. Wait till you go to bed alone every night as I did, you'll see."

Irene sat on the floor next to Karen, easing herself down carefully, spreading paper napkins across their laps. She hugged Karen as if she had just pulled her from the rubble of an earthquake, then the two of them ate their ice cream, facing the television.

Unnoticed, Gail went outside, the grass in the backyard soaking her sneakers. She stood on the concrete edge of the seawall. The bay lapped softly against it, almost a dead calm. To the south a line of clouds stretched across the darkening sky.

It had been easy to think Renee had cut her own wrists. There was a kind of justice in that—if not divine justice, then at least a balance. You couldn't live as Renee had lived and get away with it. Suicide made sense. Murder didn't fit the equation. It was accidental, like lightning or a falling tree limb.

Gail had never wanted Renee to
die
—that was a hideous extreme—she had only wished, occasionally, that Renee would get what she deserved. That her sports car would rust; that she would put on fifty pounds; that men would stop wanting her; that she would finally
realize.

It had been easy to assume that out there on the end of the nature walk, under the moon, with a razor blade poised over her wrist, Renee had finally realized that she had gotten it all wrong.

Arms outstretched for balance, Gail walked along the seawall, wondering how she could have been so damnably presumptuous. She didn't know Renee. She had made up details to suit herself, as a means of proving her own virtue. She who had never made a wrong step in her life. Successful job, happy home, loving husband. As if any of that were true. There was more truth in Renee's laughter. In twelve-dollar filet mignons, making love in a museum, and a clay deer mask.

If only the truth were easy to find. Gail had no idea where it lay, only that she had never bothered to look for it.

Gail felt a raindrop on her shoulder, then another. She stopped walking. The line of rain extended across the water like a tattered gray curtain.

Eleven

When Anthony Quintana's secretary showed Gail into his office at 1:30 p.m., she registered an immediate impression of black leather furniture, stucco walls, and thick gray carpet. Anthony and another man—Carlos— turned around from a glass wall. Past them Gail saw an atrium, green with lush tropical plants and flowers. A small fountain cascaded silently down ferny, rough-hewn rocks.

Anthony crossed the office. "Gail, come in." He led her to an arrangement of sleek leather chairs facing the windows. "This is my cousin, Carlos Pedrosa. Carlos, Gail Connor."

"How do you do," she said.

"How are you?"