Suspicion of Innocence (41 page)

Her words flowed smoothly onto the tape. She reached for her coffee and realized that her heart was steady as a metronome and had been for days, ever since she had realized exactly how much trouble she was in. Battlefield courage, she supposed.

Half an hour later she flipped the last file shut and stacked it on four others. Rotated her shoulders. Put down the recorder and picked up the telephone.

She dialed Anthony Quintana's office, not knowing if he would be there. He was. The moment he spoke she felt short of breath. The intensity of this reaction surprised her.

"Gail," he said. "Are you all right?"

She closed her eyes, leaned on the edge of her desk. "I called to say thank you. I'm sorry it took me two days to do it."

"I understand. Where are you, at your office?"

"Oh, yes. They've decided to keep me out of sight of paying customers for a while, though."

"That's too bad. A trial lawyer without a courtroom."

"For now." She walked the phone cord around her desk, sat in her chair, and crossed her legs. "I told Ray Hammell's assistant—I can't remember his name—that I'd left Renee's papers at your house."
 

"Do you want me to bring them to you? Better still, come pick them up. This weekend, perhaps. I'd like to talk to you."

She drew in a slow breath, aware suddenly of what had glided just beneath the level of her consciousness, more intense in dreams—physical sensations so acute she had been brought awake, orgasmic, blinking into the darkness, her pulse racing.

She said, "It would be more convenient if you took them to Mr. Hammell's office."

He paused only a moment. "If you prefer. He'll have them on Monday."

"Anthony, you need to know this. The day before yesterday I spoke to someone who worked with Renee at the title company. Dolores Perrera, do you know her? They call her Loly. She's expecting a baby."

"Ah. Yes, I remember her."

"She told me something Renee had found out about Carlos. Whether or not it's true, I can't say. Carlos was embezzling from Pedrosa Construction. George Sanchez was helping him cover it up with money from Vista Title. Do you know anything about this?"

There was a silence over the line. Then, quietly, "No."

"As I said, it's only an allegation, but I have to tell Ray Hammell about it. I'm sorry. Carlos is your family."

"Of course you must tell him. Do you have any more details of this? How Carlos did it? How much he took?"

"I don't know," Gail said. "Loly said that Renee wasn't involved, other than knowing about it."

"Perhaps I should talk to her myself. Or to George Sanchez." The voice was quiet, the undertone deadly.

"Be nice. Remember you're getting it third-hand."

After a few seconds, Anthony said, "Is this how you learned about me and Renee? From Loly Perrera?"

"Yes. Not because I asked her directly. It came up in conversation."

"And based on that conversation, you find it more convenient if I take Renee's papers directly to Ray Hammell's office."

"Anthony—" She laughed softly, forehead leaning into her fingers. "Let's not get into a discussion about it."

She listened to the silence. Then he said, "You're right. This isn't the time."

After she hung up she sat for a few minutes, not moving. She felt as though her emotions were liquid, trembling at the rim.

An affair with Anthony. Oh, yes. If she could pretend he had never slept with Renee, then devastated her by shutting her out. Anthony had ended it, Gail was sure of that. Renee had loved him even after the affair was dead. Gail turned that bit of knowledge over in her mind— Renee had loved. And Gail loved her for that. She wanted to put her arm around her shoulders, huff indignantly, and tell her what other sisters would have said.
Well, forget that guy. He's not the only one. You're better off without him. Stop crying, you hear me?

On the second floor of the Historical Museum there was an exhibit of Tequesta Indians. Stiff, dark-skinned mannequins, coarse black hair. The man sitting by a plastic orange fire, carving. The barebreasted woman holding a tray of food. The child watching his father. Behind them the museum staff had built a chickee, hung a dugout canoe, and painted saw grass on the wall.

Gail leaned against the railing while Edith Newell talked, from time to time consulting a tiny spiral notepad.

"He's forty-four years old. He lives in a trailer west of Miami, not out on the reservation. In fact, he never lived on the reservation, as far as I know."

"Did he change his name legally to Panther?"

"No, that's his mother's name. I seem to recall he told me his mother was from the panther clan. Both his parents are deceased. Jimmy went to public school, not the reservation school, under the name Gibb. He dropped out of high school and went nights. He claims to have attended college, but if he did, it wasn't in Florida. He was in the U.S. Army from 1968 to 1971 as James Gibb, honorably discharged. Never married or divorced in Dade County."

Edith waited until some visitors had walked slowly past the exhibit, speaking French. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement, Gail noticed. Edith had delivered her report in the hushed tones of a B-movie spy. "Jimmy is three-quarters Miccosukee but he was raised in town. Now he's gone back to his roots, you might say."

Gail said, "I heard he was charged with auto theft."

Edith took her thumb out of the notepad, found her place, tilted her head to look through her trifocals. "I was just getting to that. Yes. Magistrate's court, February 1968. It doesn't say he was convicted, though. But there were others. What do you call it? A rap sheet?' ' Edith let Gail see the list. Drunk and disorderly. Trespassing—four of those. Possession of controlled substances. Driving under the influence. Resisting arrest.

Edith pulled back her notes. "Jimmy was a very bad boy."

"Nothing recent?"

"No, this is all in the sixties."

Gail was still amazed. "How did you find all this?"

"It wasn't hard. My nephew's a lieutenant with the Miami Police Department." Edith slipped her arm through Gail's. "My dear, you know I would walk over hot coals for you. If necessary, I would have made the Clerk of the Circuit Court himself look up the records— his wife's my bridge partner. But do tell me. What does this mean for your case?"

"I don't know, Edith. Didn't you ever—maybe when you were digging in an archaeological site—come across something completely out of place and you just couldn't go on until you figured out why it was there?"

"Oh, certainly. Like a gold pocket watch in a Tequesta burial mound. I found that once and never did figure it out." Edith opened her notepad again. "But to go on." She glanced around. Her reedy voice sank to a low monotone.

"Books he checked out of the main library during the past year and a half. A lot of adventure novels—men like that sort of thing, don't they? A Chinese cookbook, several books on religion and mythology, three on treasure hunting, two on archaeology in the Americas, three on state and local history"—she flipped to the next page— "eight about Native Americans and of that, six on Florida Indians. Then there were two on Cuban history and four on Spanish explorers." Edith looked up, smiling. "That was the summary. I have the itemized computer printout in my office for you."

"You're incredible," Gail said. "Do you have any idea what he was doing in the reading room?"

"Yes. An educated guess, mind you, since he was very secretive about it. Tequesta Indians. One of our staff members saw him looking at color slides on artifacts. Somebody else remembers he was looking at early Spanish maps of South Florida. I checked with the county archaeologist—"

"We have an archaeologist?"

''Oh, yes, dear. Very nice young man. He told me that Jimmy Panther was one of the volunteers at the digs. Now, I didn't know this, because I haven't been to any in years. My hip replacement, you know. They did the Ferguson Mill site on the Miami River and then after that several of the burial mounds in western Broward County. Burial mounds, in fact, are where we generally find artifacts of any value."

Edith put her head closer to Gail's. "You know what I think, don't you?"

"That he stole the mask from an archaeological site."

"Exactly." Edith pulled Gail further along the railing around the exhibit, to a glass case. It contained three wooden masks carved into the shapes of animal heads, the wood nearly black from age. "The Tequesta and other prehistoric tribes used these in their hunting ceremonies and often buried them with their owners. A burial mound can contain dozens of skeletons. Hundreds, if the site was used extensively. It takes months to unearth them properly. Months of painstaking, exacting work, otherwise you destroy more than you find."

Edith nodded down at the case. "Now, these masks here, even as old as they are, aren't nearly so valuable as that mask you brought me. You can't possibly let Jimmy Panther have it back now. If it's taken from the ground and it's prehistoric, it belongs to the State of Florida."

Gail turned around from the exhibit, let her eyes wander. Across from where they stood, life-size cutout photographs of archaeologists sifting dirt from a site downtown, before a fifty-four-story bank building had been erected on the spot. The Miami skyline made up the background. Edith Newell, several years younger, in her baggy trousers and straw hat, carried a pick.

And Jimmy Panther had told Renee, walking across a parking lot downtown, that he could hear his ancestors weeping. The Tequesta who had been murdered by the Spanish.

"Do you think there's anything to his claim that he's descended from the Tequestas?" she asked, looking back at Edith.

Edith snorted. "And I'm descended from the Babylonians."

"None of what you've told me ties in to Renee, as far as I can see." Gail put her hands on her hips, walked back and forth. "Last time I was here you told me how they met. You said he came into the reading room and looked straight at Renee."

"Yes."

"Did you have the impression that it wasn't a chance meeting? That he knew she was there?"

"Hmm. Possibly. What does this mean?"

"I wish I knew. Did she ever go to the sites with him?"

"I asked. Bob never saw her there, and he would have recognized her. He knew Renee."

Gail turned back around, staring at the Tequesta woman as if she could deliver some answers on that carved wooden tray she carried.

"There was a man in here once, with Jimmy Panther." Edith came up beside Gail, her big, square hands curving over the exhibit rail. "I've seen Jimmy talk to lots of people, so it probably doesn't mean anything."

"Up here?" Gail asked.

"No, dear, down in the reading room. It wasn't that long ago. I didn't recognize him, and I know most everybody that comes in." Her eyes turned upward as she tried to remember.

"Would he have signed the guest book?"

"Maybe. Maybe not, if he was with a member of the Historical Society. Jimmy was a member."

"What did he look like?"

"Hispanic. Although he could have been Arabian or Italian, I don't want to generalize."
 

"In Miami?"

"Well, Hispanic, then." She nibbled at her lower lip, the lipstick already reduced to a dark pink line.

"Tall, short? How old? Bald? Glasses?"

"I'm trying to see him again, be quiet He was sitting, so I don't know how tall he was. A nice-looking man, not old. Dark hair and eyes. I remember because he looked at me. And a beard, I think. Or a mustache."

Gail touched her arm. "Edith. Think hard. A beard?"

She closed her eyes, opened them. "Yes. A beard." Then she said, "Renee was sitting with them. It was a month or two before she died."

The initial meeting with Ray Hammell was to have taken an hour, sandwiched between another client and a hearing in federal court. After an hour and a half Hammell sent his associate to the federal courthouse.

Gail had come with Ben, who knew Hammell. Ben had brought a draft on his investment account. $90,000, representing a $75,000 down payment and $15,000 toward costs.

She hadn't wanted him there, and he probably suspected as much, but she had said nothing. He had earned his seat beside her on Hammell's sofa.

Gail had seen Ray Hammell on television last year, successfully defending a cop against charges that he beat a teenager into a coma. Hammell could have passed for a minister, with his blue suit, round face, and air of polite indignation: How in God's name could my client have been accused of such a thing?

He had let her see the indictment handed down by the grand jury this morning. She felt queasy reading it, the words shifting and melting on the page.

State of Florida
v.
Gail Ann Connor. . . . that Gail Ann Connor did, unlawfully and feloniously, from a premeditated design to effect the death of a human being, kill and murder Renee Michelle Connor, a human being, by cutting her wrists with a razor blade or other sharp instrument, thus causing loss of blood leading to her death, in violation of Florida Statutes 782.04(01) and 775.087, to the evil example of all others in like cases offending and against the peace and dignity of the State of Florida.