Suspicion of Innocence (36 page)

Her words came to a sudden halt. Gail drew in a shaky breath. "This, ladies and gentlemen, is what happened. You have seen Mr. Quintana destroy the credibility of Carlos Pedrosa's alibi witness. You have heard Carlos Pedrosa admit on the stand that Renee Connor was obsessed with him. That his grandfather would have disowned him if he had married her. These facts, I submit to you, create a reasonable doubt that Gail Connor, the victim's . . . loving sister—"

Gail made a little face, hiding the tremor in her lips. "Well. I guess that's why I do commercial law."

"Not bad," Anthony said. "If Hartwell Black lets you go, come see me about a job."

She let her gaze drop to the carpet, then walked across the room and through the French doors. In the darkness she could see easily past the screen. The inlet was shiny black, the sailboat quiet at anchor on the other side. Small shaded lamps in the low concrete wall of the dock cast pools of light. Music came from a fishing boat further up.

She heard Anthony's footsteps. "Gail?"

After a minute, she said, "You know, if I could only figure out who she was ... I'm going to be on trial for her murder and I can't help you—or myself—because I don't know why this happened. Isn't that what the police look for first? The reason?"

He stood beside her. "I should have sent you home after dinner. We can talk later. There's no hurry."

Gail lightly pressed her fingertips on the screen, unwilling to go just yet. "You told me about your friend Juanito, remember? How you saw him after all those years and he hadn't really changed? Well, I don't know about Renee. I don't recognize her at all. Carlos probably treated her like a whore. But to Dave she was the opposite. Unsullied as a virgin. Edith Newell thinks she was immature. My mother thinks she was misunderstood. Ben says she was mentally ill, some kind of pervert. And you ..." Gail glanced at Anthony. "You liked her. For her honesty. What did you mean?"

He took a few seconds to answer. "Just that... if you asked her what she thought, she would tell you."

"Yes." Gail smiled. "And sometimes even if you didn't ask. How come she got all the courage? She said things out loud I was embarrassed to think of, even if they were true. When we were children she would run along the seawall behind our house, doing cartwheels, scaring our mother to death. She liked being on the edge. Almost as if she wanted to fall off. She went to extremes—a bitch one minute, weeping the next, then laughing at herself. Maybe she was mentally ill, a little. Or giving a spontaneous reaction to what she saw around her, I don't know."

Gail turned around to face him, leaning on her hands, the metal railing of the terrace behind her. "Listen, I didn't come out here because of what you said about Hartwell Black letting me go. I'm not that nervous. Sure, this scares the hell out of me, but I know I'm innocent. And I've got some high-powered legal talent, right? What can happen?"

Anthony said, "It seems Renee did not get all the courage." Behind him, the light from the living room fell across the terrace floor in a long rectangle. The ceiling fan spun slowly, its blades barely visible.

She said, "When I was talking to you before, describing what happened to her, how she died, it was as if I were there. I could see her, but not whoever was standing over her. He was only this dark shape."

Gail pulled her hands out from underneath her hips, turning up her palms. "She had such small hands. They were slender and pale, like a little girl. I could put my thumb and forefinger around her wrists. When she was in the hospital, and the bandages were on, she laughed and held out her hands. She said, 'Look what I've done, Sis. I sure as hell trimmed my nails too close this time.' "

Gail smiled, then stood quietly for a moment. "Renee looked utterly exhausted. Almost as if she wished she hadn't come back, but she was lying there making jokes about it. Her eyes had circles under them, but still they were like two spots of blue light in her face. So blue. It made me want to buy contacts."
 

"Yours are blue."

"Compared to yours, maybe. But not like hers. Mine have more gray. No, no. Renee had the looks, although she would deny it. She never liked that little gap between her front teeth, did you ever notice that? And that one dimple. She used to sit around with her finger poked into her other cheek to make a pair, but of course it didn't work. And the earrings. Four holes in each ear. Our mother cried over it. No, I'm not kidding, she did."

Gail lifted her hair away from one ear. "Look. She did mine, too."

Anthony leaned closer. "Four holes? Where?"

"Two in each ear. I only use one, and the other hardly shows. I was nineteen. She said it wouldn't hurt. She lied." Gail laughed, then let her hair fall back into place, her smile fading. Suddenly aware of the floor tilting under her, she grabbed the railing, holding on, the metal cold under her hands.

Anthony said something. A question.

She heard her own voice at a distance. "I'll never find her now. Someone did this and it's too late. Whatever she was, she didn't deserve this. Not this. And I was moaning about saving my own skin. Whoever did it should bum in hell. I don't care why he did it. I hope he dies." Gail's breath was coming quickly now, burning her chest. "I would use a razor on him myself and watch him bleed to death. He did that to her. My sister."

The water in the inlet ticked softly against the dock, lights wobbling on its surface under a black sky. The Everglades must have been this dark.
 

She sank, spinning in slow motion. A sudden slide of warm silk on her cheek. The terrace floor rushing toward her, then the porch railing above, falling away. White fan blades, circling. Something under her shoulders, then warmth around her head.

Her eyes opened to complete darkness. She rolled her face away from Anthony's chest. She lay across his thighs, his arms circling her, his back against the railing.

She blinked, tried to smile. "Did I break anything?"

"No. I caught you. You fainted." He loosened his arms.

"Please. Not yet." She turned her face into his shirt again, felt him pull up one knee to brace her back. They sat like that for a while. She could hear his heart under her ear. A steady, rapid thud.

She turned further and felt silk against her mouth. "I wonder what Renee would do now."

His breath stopped. Gail slid her hand up his shirt to his open collar, along his scratchy jaw, into his hair, thick and soft between her fingers.

The Spanish words he whispered Gail didn't understand. Then his breath was on her temple. "Gail. I'll be your lover or your attorney. But not at the same time."

"So proper." She let her head fall back, his arm under her neck. With one finger, she outlined his lips, touching the peak at the center, the lines on either side. "I wanted to do this the first time you smiled at me. In the courthouse. Remember? It seems so long ago."

His eyes closed. He sucked her finger into his mouth, bit down, stroked with his tongue.

Gail pushed herself up on one arm, her hand dropping from his mouth to the buttons on his silk shirt, one then another.

''Jesucristo. ''

She buried her face in his chest, breathing in, hair tickling her nose. She moved down, her lips on his skin, her fingers undoing his belt.

"Por Dios, ¿qué
me estás haciendo?"
What are you doing to me? His hands clenched in her hair.
 
“
No
pares, mi cielo. No pares."
Don't stop.

Eighteen

"Daddy!" Karen ran down the dock toward the big sail-boat moored at its end, her sneakers thumping on the wooden planks. Gail followed more slowly, careful not to get her heels caught in the crevices. Dark green water lapped at the pilings and sparkled in the early-morning sun.

Dave was loosening the tiedowns on the sail cover, getting ready to cast off. The sails would not go up until he had the boat in the windier passage of upper Biscayne Bay. The mast bobbed slightly as a sportfisher passed by, low wake fanning out, engine rumbling.

Gail carried Karen's yellow zipper bag—sunscreen, hat, change of clothes. Dave had arranged this trip last week. He and Wayne, his engine man, had to deliver a forty-eight-foot sloop-rigged Swan to Key Largo; someone at the marina there would drive them back up to Miami.
Let Karen come along,
Dave had said.
She can miss one day of school.
Normally Gail would have given him a flat no, but she knew Karen missed her father.

Now Karen was running back and forth alongside the boat, her ponytails bouncing like the ears on a puppy. Swinging around the mast, Dave came to the edge of the cabin top. He wore old tennis shorts. His arms and legs were brown, the hair on them bleached pale blond. Last night Gail had lain awake trying to imagine Dave at the end of that nature walk, standing over Renee's body. She couldn't see it. And today, with the sun bathing everything in clear white light, the idea seemed positively obscene.

He smiled broadly at them. "Hi. You girls are early."
 

"Can I get on, Daddy?"

"Come aboard." He turned back toward the cockpit and called to the other man standing there. ''Wayne, give her a hand."

Wayne stuck the wrench he'd been holding into the pocket of his blue work pants and swung Karen off the dock as lightly as a rag doll. He was a black man somewhere past sixty. He had told Karen once, straight-faced, that he had been born in the engine room of a Merchant Marine freighter and suckled on diesel fuel instead of mother's milk.

Karen went below, exploring, Gail leaned down a little to look through the portholes in the hull, hoping Karen would look out. Lately she had held her more than usual, and missed her almost viscerally when she was out of sight.

When Dave jumped down from the cabin top, Gail gave him Karen's bag. "I'm going to work late tonight," she said. "Can you take Karen by Irene's?"

"Sure, no problem."

"Dave, I need to speak to you."

He stood there for a moment with the bag in his hands, then hung it over a spoke on the ship's wheel. He said to Wayne, "You want to go ahead and check out that oil line?"

"Take your time." Wayne smiled at Gail. "Nice to see you again."
 

"You too."

They walked back along the dock toward the marina. By this hour, nearly eight o'clock, most of the sport fishermen had already headed out. A few people were going into the ship's store, a flat-roofed building connected to a machine shop that smelled of oil and acrid welding torches. From halfway down the dock Gail could see the weeds behind the building, the sagging chain-link fence.

Lifting his cap by its bill, Dave smoothed his hair, put the cap back on again. He said, "Somebody made me an offer on the marina. Not a great offer, but enough to pay off our bills, plus about half the second mortgage on the house. I'll sign the house and everything in it over to you. And you can have whatever you think is fair for child support." Dave glanced at Gail. "My attorney says I'm crazy, but it's what I want to do."

A pelican, beak tucked on its belly, watched them from a piling. The sound of hammering came from inside the shop.

Feeling unaccountably adrift, Gail studied the weathered wooden planks as they passed under her feet. "Dave, I'm sorry about the marina."

"Don't be."

"Would you still work here?"

"I could, that's part of the deal. But you know what I'd rather do? Take some time off, do some sailing. There are a couple boats around here the owners want to get rid of. I could pick one up cheap. Maybe catch some of the tennis tournaments on the islands."

"Maybe you should listen to your attorney," she said.

Dave laughed. "He's eating me alive on fees. You know how attorneys are." The pelican flapped away from its perch as they approached it. "What does a man need to be happy, anyway? Not so much . . . stuff. Possessions are a trap."

They looked at each other. He must have read something in her face. He said, "You don't need me, Gail. You never did." Their eyes held long enough for them to recognize the truth in that.

At the end of the pier the sloop whined, coughed, and settled down to a steady purr. They turned to look at it, Gail squinting into the sun. Wayne was at the helm station panel by the wheel. He waved.

Dave made a thumbs-up. "Sounds good," he yelled. "Let her run."

When he turned back, Gail said, "I want to tell you what's going on with Renee's murder investigation." Anthony had told her not to discuss the case with anyone. But Anthony didn't know Dave; she did.

They wandered across the parking lot, then past the shop, the clang of metal occasionally coming from inside.

She told him about her meeting with Frank Britton.

''They think I did it. That I took her to that county park and faked her suicide because I thought she was sleeping with you. Or to get the money in her trust fund. Either reason, I suppose, would be enough. They're probably going to arrest me. And if they do, there's no way I'd get out on bond. I'd be in custody for as long as a year, until the jury comes back with its verdict." She smiled. "I assume it would be not guilty. Anyway, you'd have to take Karen till then, you and Irene."