Suspicion of Innocence (44 page)

"What are you going to do if I give it back to you? Let him sell it?"

"No. That deal is off. It was never meant to be. There was disharmony with Carlos Pedrosa. Maybe that's one reason Renee died, you never know. I feel bad about that."

Gail said, "Would you consider donating the mask to the museum?"

Jimmy smiled again, shook his head, the light glinting off his hair. "Tell Edith Newell it belongs to us. The people out here, where it came from. We won't let it go again."

In the parking lot, the cardboard box on a mildewed picnic table under the trees, Gail opened the flaps. She turned back the bubble wrap and cotton batting that Edith had put inside. The Tequesta mask was nested in the center. She pulled it out carefully, blowing away some dust on its forehead. In places the dark red surface still gleamed, remnants of a rich patina.

Jimmy traced the crescent on the deer's forehead. "That means it's a peaceful creature," he said. "The ones that eat flesh, like the bobcat or panther, they have lightning over their eyes." He made a jagged motion with one finger.

Gail gave the deer's face one last look—flaring ears, gently rounded eyes—then tucked it back into the box and handed it to Jimmy Panther.

Twenty-Two

Miriam came into Gail's office with some phone messages and went out again. Gail flipped through them.
 

Edith Newell from museum, has more info. Do you want to renew your Film Festival
 

membership early for next year? Call Anthony Quintana.

Gail returned to her book, Volume 403 of
The Southern Reporter.
She was drafting a cross-reply brief for an appeal. Insurance underwriter bitching about a three-million-dollar judgment. Subsidiary company wanting a share. Gail wished she could throw it all out her window and watch the pages spin and flutter to the street. If her window weren't caulked and screwed shut.

She tossed her pen onto a stack of research notes and looked at the messages again.
Call Anthony Quintana.

He had called twice yesterday and she hadn't called back. The memories of him and Renee were too close to the surface. He had lied to her about that. A lie by omission. She turned the piece of paper facedown, feeling as though she had just run up a flight of stairs. Whatever he wanted, he could wait.

She checked her watch. Eleven-thirty. Ray Hammell should be back from court.

He wasn't, and his associate was with a client. She asked to speak to his law clerk.

When Alisha came on, Gail said, ' 'I meant to call yesterday afternoon and got busy. You guys don't have to bother showing photos of Carlos Pedrosa to Edith Newell. He was the man at the museum. Jimmy Panther says so."

"What'd you do, go talk to this Indian on your own?"

"Tell Ray I couldn't help myself. Jimmy also confirms Carlos was the father of Renee's baby. Carlos wanted her to have an abortion, and apparently they argued about it."

"Ooh. Ray's gonna like that."

"I thought so. Jimmy will talk to him. But I don't think the Tequesta mask had anything to do with Renee's death. How about Betty Diaz? Any news on her?"

"We're looking," Alisha said. "We had someone keep an eye on her over the weekend. Carlos was nowhere to be seen. There's nothing going on between those two, far as we can tell. I think Ray's going to give it another week or so, then drop a subpoena on her."

"Maybe she's a good liar."

Alisha laughed. "You never heard Ray get hold of somebody. I'll give you the deposition transcript, you remind me."

"What about that boat,
La Sirena?
I want to hear some more good news," Gail said. "Tell me it belonged to Carlos."

"It didn't. I just got the phone call on that an hour ago. Hang on, let me find my notes." There was the clunk of a phone hitting a desk. A while later, pages turning. Alisha said, "The boat was seized and forfeited to the state ... Okay, here it is. The owner was Nelson Restrepo, a Colombian with an office in Panama, doing business— if you can call it that—in South Florida. They would've brought him in, but he'd already left the country. Jumped bail on a bank fraud charge."

Gail leaned way back in her chair. "Oh. My my."

"My my
what
?"

“Is this the same Nelson Restrepo who was on trial for cocaine trafficking a few years ago? It's not exactly a common name."

There was a pause. "Gee, I don't know. I wasn't down here then. Why?"

"Something else for you to mention to Ray Hammell. Restrepo was a client of Anthony Quintana."

"Is that so?"

"This is getting complicated. Tell Ray—" Gail's laugh trailed off.

"Tell him what?" Alisha prodded.

"I don't know what to think of this."

"You're on trial for murder, you don't have to think. Let Ray figure it out."

Gail said, "The boat was seized just south of Bill Baggs State Park. That's on Key Biscayne. Anthony lives there. He has a dock in his backyard."

"Uh-huh."

"And they—Anthony and my sister had an affair last year. Did he mention that to Ray?"

"Nope. Or if he did, Ray didn't tell me about it. They've had some fairly long discussions about your case, but I don't think this little item came up."

Gail traced through her eyebrow with a forefinger, smoothed it down again, wondering if Anthony had told Ray Hammell why he had withdrawn from the case. Ray,
no puedo.
I can't do it, man, because your client had her face in my lap and her hand on my zipper.

"Gail, you still there?"

"Yes. I'll talk to Ray about this later. Tomorrow. We have an appointment at four o'clock."

Gail picked up Anthony's message again, then held it over the trash can. She had learned not to believe in coincidences. She didn't know what was going on exactly, but something was. Son of a bitch. He had been lying about more than Renee.

She scanned the message about the Film Festival. No point in buying tickets for a week of foreign films. The warden wouldn't let her out to see them. She crumpled the slip of paper.

She frowned at the message from Edith Newell. More info? She got her purse out of her desk drawer. Might as well walk down to the museum, maybe grab a sandwich on the plaza. Besides, she had some info for Edith. The Tequesta mask wasn't coming back.

Edith Newell pushed her glasses up and squeezed the bridge of her nose. She gave a long sigh and took her hand away. Her glasses dropped back into place.

She said, "I suppose you had to. I apologize for snapping at you, dear. God knows I might have done the same thing, in your position." She rolled back from her desk, the wheels on her chair squeaking. "Never mind. I said I'd help you and I will. Come on." She glanced at her watch—a man's Timex with a stretchy gold band. "I've got a few minutes before I'm due at the Conservancy."

They made their way along the corridors in the basement, then up the stairs to the lobby, Edith favoring her bad leg, grumping at Gail's suggestion that they use the elevator.

Edith explained about requests for copies. Up until the first of the year, when a new operations manager had put a coin-operated copy machine into the reading room, anybody who wanted copies had to fill out a form and give it to a staff member.

"Then they'd have to wait for the person to go downstairs and make copies in the office," Edith said. "A quarter a page."
 

Gail held the door to the reading room and followed Edith inside. Several high school students sat at the long tables with open boxes of old photographs. The noise level dropped when they saw Edith.

Edith spoke close to Gail's ear. "I found a whole drawer full of receipts in our bookkeeper's office, going back since we opened. Imagine keeping such trash. Well, what's a museum for, I ask you. Anyway, the name of the person wanting the copies would usually be on the receipts, and sometimes what was being copied. Sometimes not."

They walked along the rows of bookshelves and filing cabinets to the rear of the reading room, where two microfiche machines sat under gray plastic dustcovers.

Gail said, "You found Jimmy Panther's name."

"Indeed. The first notation was two and a half years ago." Edith led Gail to a metal cabinet with wide, shallow drawers. "I looked for what he wanted copies of. There must have been more that no one thought to jot down, but here's what I found, all noted within the last year. I stuck them in here."

She gestured for Gail to move out of the way, then opened the top drawer, which slid smoothly out on rollers. Inside were maps and four plastic zipper bags. Edith laid the bags on top of the cabinet. Two contained yellowed pamphlets, one a faded paperbound report of some kind, and the last a single sheet, its edges crumbling. All the bags had numbers on them. Filing codes.

"These two here—" Edith slid the pamphlets closer "—are requests to the U.S. Congress dated 1833 and 1836 for additional money for a survey of the great swamp. That was before it was called the Everglades. There's a tiny reference in both of them to locating Spanish gold supposedly removed by the Tequesta Indians from the ship
Santo Espíritu
in 1732."
 

Edith held out the bagged sheet of paper. ''This is from an 1872 surveyor's report," she said. "Josiah Tinsley describing ancient Indian encampments on hardwood hammocks—islands—in the east Everglades." She whisked the sheet away and replaced it with the report, bound in faded blue paper. "And this. An 1878 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers geological survey, same area. Water levels. Ground elevation. This is before they started cutting in all those drainage ditches and canals. It's mostly dry land now."

Edith rolled out the drawer again. "Look. Maps." She closed it, opened the next. "This cabinet is full of maps, top to bottom. Road maps, survey, Army maps—" Bracing herself, she came up slowly from slamming the bottom drawer shut. "Accessible to anybody. And yes, several people saw him back here looking through these drawers."

"Lost Spanish treasure buried in the Everglades?" Gail gave Edith a sideways glance. "And Jimmy Panther was trying to find it."

"Oh, who knows what he was really doing?" Edith stacked the plastic bags and handed them to Gail. "Here. If you want to, run downstairs and make copies. Tell Rosa I said no charge. I'd do it myself but I haven't got time."

Gail followed her back through the reading room. Edith's voice dropped to a whisper again.

"You asked me a while ago about the Tequestas going to Cuba? I looked it up yesterday. The Spanish government in Havana sent a ship to rescue them from attack by another tribe in 1711. Two hundred and seventy went to Cuba, most of them died, and some returned home. Then they came under attack again and in 1732 the Spanish sent two more ships. The
Santo Espíritu
was one of them."
 

Gail pushed open the glass door. Laughter was echoing in the lobby. Two rows of schoolchildren lined up at the stairs.

Edith headed for the main entrance. "The legend is— and I hadn't thought of this for years, until I saw those papers—the Tequesta came on board for food. They got into the rum, sailors and Indians alike, and by morning the Indians were gone. So was the captain's strongbox. Coins, bars. Who knows what was supposed to be in there?" She made a snort of laughter. "The Spanish crown jewels."

Outside, she stopped walking, squinting in the sunlight that poured into the plaza. Gail could feel the heat radiating off the red clay tiles. People sat at the umbrella tables eating lunch and talking. The wind snapped the flags outside the library.

Edith clipped round sunglasses over her regular frames and put them back on. "Apparently it wasn't enough to worry over, because after a cursory search the Spanish turned their ships around and went back to Havana. But stories of buried treasure are so compelling, aren't they? The gold—assuming the Tequestas even took it—never turned up, so people naturally assume they buried it. Every so often we get reports of destruction of Indian mounds. Idiots. They think there's something in them besides old bones and broken artifacts."

"Maybe Jimmy Panther thought so, too."

Edith started walking backward, eager to be on her way. "No, dear, don't you believe it. He's not stupid. The only thing he found was the Tequesta mask, and I'd give half my remaining teeth to know where from."

Gail held up the plastic bags with the papers inside. "Then what's all this for? And those books he checked out of the library on lost treasure?"
 

The only reply was a dismissive wave. Then Edith hurried across the plaza, a gangly, wispy-haired woman in clunky sandals and men's khaki trousers.

Gail pushed off from the edge of Irene's pool, arms extended, angling deeper. Dark, silent water. She drifted, eyes closed, feeling her body rising slowly, breaking the surface, cool air on her skin. She rolled face up. After burning off the day with twenty laps, she was coasting, catching her breath. Through the screen on the back porch, the sky was a deep, luminous blue, rosy purple toward the west. Crickets set up a steady chirr in the hibiscus.