Suspicion of Innocence (43 page)

"You're her sister."

"We didn't see much of each other the last few years. I suppose you knew that." Gail could see no change in his expression. "You must have heard I've been charged with her murder."

He said, "Did you do it?"

"No." She let out her breath. "Look, I need your help. I thought—I hoped—you'd talk to me. If my attorney knew I was here he would probably fire me as a client."

Gail turned her head toward the channel. The bright water threw dancing glimmers into the trees. "I've never been a defendant before. I've defended other people—not in criminal cases, but they've been in danger of losing their last dime. I've seen them waiting, bewildered, probably hoping to God I didn't screw up. I always thought I'd hate to be in that position, waiting for somebody else to decide what's going to happen to me. I won't do it with my own case. So here I am. Pissing you off. Using whatever I can—including something that belongs to you—to find out about my sister."

"The police talked to me already," Jimmy said. "They wanted to know if I saw anybody around when I found her. If I knew who might have wanted her dead, when was the last time I saw her. Where I was that night. I was home. I've got a trailer not too far from here."

On the other side of the building an engine started up, an unmuffled roar. The sound grew, moved. Then Gail saw the airboat turn into the channel, a man wearing blue ear protectors in the high seat, three tourists down below, holding on. The propeller spun in its cage, picked up speed, the rudders straightening out. Gail put her hands over her ears, felt the wind tug at her skirt. Kicking up a froth of mist, the airboat vanished into the saw grass. The noise faded.

Jimmy Panther was still waiting. Gail asked, "When you found Renee, was she wearing her gold necklace? She used to wear a necklace with a heart pendant, outlined in little diamonds."

"I wouldn't know. I only got close enough to tell it was her, then I came on back here and called the police. Why'd you ask about the necklace?"

"We can't find it."

His brows rose a fraction.

"You can also tell me who you are." Gail bent to set her purse down on the deck and noticed how tense her muscles had become. "Tell me how you can be part Tequesta when they've been gone for over two hundred years."

"You want a history lesson?" He looked at her for a minute, then said, "Okay. About 1700, when the Yamassee invaded from the north, they killed a lot of the Tequesta and sold others as slaves to the British. By 1750, most of the Tequesta had died out, but there were a few who intermarried with the Yamassee. Some of those remembered who they were and passed it along. My grandmother told me stories that her grandmother told her, and her people before that. The Yamassee later became part of the Seminoles. And the Miccosukees are part of the same group. Sure, the blood is diluted, down to a few drops, maybe, but the memory is still there, in the legend. Is that what you wanted?"

Gail said, "What about your grandfather? Edith said he was white."

"Hiram Gibb, came from Massachusetts. He sailed a trading boat from Miami to Key West and married a Seminole woman, Millie Cypress."

"I heard he was a rumrunner for Al Capone."

Jimmy Panther finally smiled, his slightly crooked teeth barely showing. ''He made a living that way, later on. He knew the backcountry, how to get a boat in and out of the mangrove channels. What else did Edith Newell tell you about me?"

"That you got into trouble with the police when you were younger. Auto theft, among other things."

"That's a long time ago. You want to know about it?"

"Sure."

There was the smile again. "I hung around a bad element. Rich white boys at Miami High. My father owned a gas station and we lived in town. I didn't want to have anything to do with the Indian school. I liked acid rock and blonde girls and muscle cars. You know what muscle cars are? GTOs, 427 Ford Fairlanes, Roadrunners? These boys, they came out to Krome Avenue to do midnights, they called it. Straight highway, no cops, no traffic back then. Sometimes they'd blow the engines, break a fly rod. There was a big demand for parts. They started reporting their own cars stolen. They'd take out the parts, dump the car in a canal, and get paid for it. I helped, I'm not denying that. I was a couple years older, knew how to work on cars, so I fixed them. Then the insurance company noticed that all these guys were friends. You know who one of them was? Paul Robineau. Right, he's in your law firm.

"What I heard later was, the investigator went to Paul's father. He and a few other families paid the losses to keep their sons out of trouble, but they needed somebody to point the finger at. They gave me a choice—jail or the military. Paul went to Harvard that fall. I got to Vietnam just in time for the Tet Offensive."

Jimmy glanced around when something splashed in the water. A blue heron had flapped down on the opposite shore, settling its wings against its body. Ripples moved slowly outward into the hyacinth and saw grass, sending flecks of sunlight into the trees.

"They made me a sniper." Jimmy Panther's black eyes were still on the slough. "Marines. The VC Hunting Club. When we went out, we called it going into Indian country. I did that for a while. Too long. Then I stayed stoned so I wouldn't be tempted to shoot at the wrong people. They put me on supply, then sent me to a base in Texas. Nothing but sand and rocks. After my discharge I lived in about ten states, doing this and that. I worked at Circus Circus in Las Vegas, in an Indian act. Buckskins and a feather headdress. I decided I might as well come on home."

He flicked a leaf off the railing. ''As long as the Dade County Commission isn't totally bought off, and the city doesn't suck up what's left of the water, I guess I'll have this view to look at for a while. We used to live by hunting and fishing. The game's about gone and the fish are full of mercury. So we run airboats and make souvenirs for the tourists. To tell the truth, it's not too bad. But the white people have this thing about us lately. They feel guilty. I got invited to speak at a Christopher Columbus seminar.
The Herald
ran my picture a couple times. I've had old ladies tell me they're going to leave money in their wills to the tribe. This one guy, had to be about your age, said he was ashamed he was born white." Jimmy Panther laughed. "Fine with me, as long as it lasts."

Gail studied his profile past the rim of black hair— curved nose, rounded jaw. She had never seen an Indian male's face so close. If he had to shave more than once a week it was only because his grandfather was white. Renee must have been fascinated.

"How did you become friends with my sister?"

He turned slightly. The light shifted on his hair, a blue-black shimmer that caught the silver in it. "I met her at the museum, got to know her."

"Before you saw her, did you know she worked there?"

"Irene might have mentioned it. Yeah. I think she told me her daughter was a volunteer."

He lies so well, Gail thought. "Tell me about her. What was Renee like then?"

"A hard question. How do we know what's in another person's head?" He leaned his elbows on the railing and seemed to study the purple hyacinths floating in the slough. "The first time we talked, we got into a conversation about legends and myths and religion, which I know something about because I studied it."

"In college?"

"Out west. And I've studied on my own, as well. We had some pretty good discussions. She liked to talk about spirit, about separating your spirit from the world, the pure from the evil. I told her you can't. They're inseparable, like light and shadow. You have to accept both of them."

"She was arrested for trafficking in cocaine. Did she tell you that?"

"Yes. I told her she took risks because she was afraid of death, and she wanted to see if she could touch it and survive."

"Did she say anything about who she was involved with?" He didn't answer and Gail began to wonder if she had only thought the question in her head. She added, "Did she say whose boat it was?"

"A friend of hers. She didn't say who. She said he didn't know she'd gone and he was mad as hell when he found out. I don't know whose it was."

"Could it have been Carlos Pedrosa?"

Another silence. He seemed to be trying to figure out how much to say.

"You knew he was her lover," Gail said. Jimmy nodded.

"And her source for cocaine, before she got off it?" His expression did not contradict her. "What did Renee tell you about him?"

"Not a lot. Cuban builder." Jimmy walked further into the shade, then sat in the lawn chair, extending his legs in front of him. He wore slip-on blue canvas shoes, still sandy from the alligator pit. "She was going to have his baby."

"I heard." Gail turned her head to watch the heron wading in the shallows. "Did she want to marry him?"

"No. They weren't seeing each other so much before she died. Her decision."

"How did he feel about that?"

''Not too good, from what she told me. He wanted her to get rid of the baby, they could go on the way they had. She wasn't sure. I told her to keep it. I said it was a way of starting over with her own daughter, a new life."

"Why do you say it was a daughter?"

He raised one shoulder in a shrug. "Because it was."

"What else do you know about Carlos Pedrosa?" she asked.

"Less than you know, probably."

"Do you think he's capable of murder?"

Jimmy Panther tented his fingers, tapped them against his chin. "If he was pushed."

Gail took a chance. "Edith saw you with Carlos and Renee in the reading room at the Historical Museum about six weeks before Renee died."

Jimmy Panther said, "More from Edith Newell."

"What were you doing?"

He continued to look at her without expression, then said, "He was interested in Florida history. Renee brought him to talk to me."
 

"What about?"

"Various things. The Spanish period, mostly."

His answers were getting shorter, Gail noticed. "You spent a lot of time in the reading room. What were you studying?' '

"History. Indians. I'm planning a cultural museum out here. It pays to know something about my own culture."

"Which? Miccosukee or Tequesta?"

He let his clasped hands down on his lap. "Seems like we're back to the mask."

"Why did Renee have it in her closet?" Gail asked.

"I told you. She was showing it to shops in the Grove."

Gail laughed, and surprise flickered across his face, then vanished. She said, "Oh, come on. You knew how valuable it was. I'm surprised you ever let it out of your sight. You said your grandmother made it. No. Not true. Not even true that your grandmother kept it under her bed. I think you found it in a burial mound, perhaps courtesy of our unwitting county archaeologist."

Jimmy Panther's impassive stare was his only reply.

"It's not easy to sell pre-Columbian artifacts you take out of the ground," Gail said. "It's highly illegal. They belong to the state. You need someone with connections. Someone you can trust. Like Renee. The girl with a reputation. Renee knew all kinds of people, including Carlos Pedrosa. You lent Renee the mask so she could show it to him. So far, so good?"

Jimmy didn't answer. The air was heavy, no wind coming through the trees. She could hear a jet high overhead.

"But Carlos wouldn't have been interested if there were just one artifact. How many masks are there? Or pots. Or whatever. There had to be enough to make it worth his while. Then, before a buyer could be found, Carlos and Renee argued. She wanted out. She knew things that could ruin him. He killed her. And the mask was still in her closet."

Gail lifted her hands, let them fall. "Maybe he killed her. Maybe they even fought over the Tequesta mask. I think he had his motives, but I can't prove anything."

"Good for you if he did."

"Yes," Gail said. "Good if he did."

"You've got some interesting theories," he said.

She pushed away from the railing, stood looking down at him in the chair. "Jimmy, I'm not trying to get you in trouble with the state archaeologists. I'll make Edith Newell swear the mask never existed. You can have it and no one will know. Look, my attorney is going to contact you about all this, but I want to hear it for myself. I want you to tell me about Carlos Pedrosa."

After a few seconds he asked, "What do you mean about Renee knowing things to ruin Carlos?"

"He was embezzling from his grandfather. She helped him hide it."

"Yeah. She said he was in trouble and she wanted to help him out." Jimmy Panther looked up at Gail, his eyes going into slits in the sunlight. "She let people use her. Carlos for one. Before she died, though, she was doing some heavy thinking. She was angry. You could look at her and see it. You could stand next to her and feel the heat pouring off. She was mad at somebody, that's for sure. I knew something would happen, but I didn't know what."

Gail moved out of the way when he rose to his feet. He wasn't a tall man, but broad, the faded T-shirt snug across his chest.

He said, "Okay. Carlos was going to find a buyer. I got the mask where I told you, from my family. Where they found it, I don't know. It hasn't got anything to do with Renee dying that I can see. I never heard her and Carlos disagree about it."