“Sure. She has an office downtown. Sapphire Rentals.”
“Thank you,” said Nico, extending her hand to him.
“You’re welcome.”
As we began walking away, he shouted back at us. “Good luck. I hope that Camila is alright.”
I grimaced. It was my only hope at the moment as well. “So do we.”
44
With little to no street parking available downtown, we had to park several blocks away in a public parking lot and walk the three blocks back to Sapphire Rentals. It was midmorning, and tourists swarmed the downtown shops.
“Looks like a cruise ship just docked,” said Nico, pointing across the bay to the most enormous boat I’d ever seen in my life. It looked to be the size of a small island floating in the water. Even from the distance, it was huge.
“Wow. That’s impressive. I’ve never seen a cruise ship in person before.”
“They don’t have those in Kansas?”
“Missouri, and nope, no cruise ships in Missouri.”
After leaving Cami’s apartment complex, we’d stopped and gotten specific directions to Sapphire Rentals from a street vendor and were now following his instructions. Turns out, they worked out of an office above a jewelry store with a similar moniker, Sapphire Jewelers. The entrance to the rental company was a black door in a narrow, cobblestone alley behind the jewelry store. The staircase was narrow, and the wooden stairs creaked as we climbed them. At the top of the stairs, the landing split. A door on the left just had a number on it, but the door on the right had a small black placard engraved with gold lettering that said Sapphire Offices.
I pushed the door open to find a desk with a woman behind it talking on the phone. She smiled at us and held a finger up as if to say she’d be right with us while she finished her phone call.
Nico and I stood awkwardly while she described an apartment for rent to what sounded like a potential lessee. Finally, she hung up and looked up at us, shining a beaming smile. “Hello, may I help you?”
“Are you Mrs. Acosta?” I asked, even though I was fairly confident that that had been the voice I’d heard on Cami’s answering machine.
She beamed even harder. She seemed like a sweet woman, with greying hair piled on top of her head in a bun and old-fashioned cat-eyed glasses perched on her nose. A string of pearls hung around her neck and attached to the back of the glasses. “Yes, I am. Are you looking for an apartment?”
“No, ma’am,” I said, pulling my hat and glasses off. “We’re actually looking for someone. We thought that maybe you could help us.”
She sucked in her breath almost immediately. Then she lowered her chin and pulled off her reading glasses. “You’re looking for Cami, aren’t you?”
Nico nodded, narrowing her eyes slightly. “Yes, how did you know?”
“I’ve left her message after message. She won’t return any of my phone calls, which is completely unlike her. I’ve just been worried sick about her.”
“Have you tried calling the police?” I asked.
“No,” she admitted reluctantly. “I haven’t. I thought she might get upset if I got the authorities involved in her business. She’s a very private woman. She doesn’t like drama. But I was going to, I swear. If I hadn’t heard from her by the end of the week, I planned to call. Has something happened to her?”
“We don’t know what happened to her,” I said. “She’s not shown up for her job at the resort for several days. When was the last time you saw her?”
Mrs. Acosta pulled out a blue day planner and flipped it open. “She cleaned an apartment for me six days ago. She was scheduled to clean another one for me on Tuesday morning, but she didn’t show up.”
I nodded. That was the morning after she’d left the resort. I was starting to wonder if something hadn’t happened to her. “Mrs. Acosta, do you have any emergency contact information that might help us locate Cami?”
She smiled, like she was happy to have some way of helping us. “Yes! I do. Let me get her file.” She disappeared through a door.
“This is not looking good,” said Nico under her breath.
“Maybe she’s staying with family,” I suggested. “You know, she’s scared that there are a pair of killers on the loose, so instead of going back to her apartment, she decided to go stay with them.”
Nico patted my arm. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed that you’re right.”
Mrs. Acosta reappeared, holding a manila file folder. “Her mother lives in Puerto Rico. I’ve got her phone number if you’d like it. She’s also got a brother Freddy Vergado that lives on the island.”
“Can you write down his address and phone number for me, Mrs. Acosta?” I asked.
“Of course! Freddy should be able to help you. He’s given Cami rides to work before. He’s a nice man.”
“Do you know where he works?” asked Nico.
“I believe he does auto repair or something.”
“You don’t know where?” I pressed.
She swished her lips sideways. “Hmm. Perhaps at Steve Dillon’s?”
“Is that downtown?”
“No, it’s on Route 37. Follow the coastline north and get off on 386.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Acosta,” I said, taking the slip of paper she’d written Freddy’s contact information on. “We really appreciate it.”
“I just hope that Cami’s alright. She’s such a sweet woman. She works very hard to be able to send money to her mother in Puerto Rico. If you would please tell her to call me when you find her, I would greatly appreciate it.”
“We will,” Nico assured her as I opened the door.
* * *
Sitting in Nico’s car ten minutes later, we stared out at the road ahead of us. We’d both agreed that going to Freddy’s place of employment was a better plan than going to his apartment. At midday on a Friday, it was very unlikely that a working man would be home.
The silent drive along the coastline with windows down was peaceful, but cloaked with a heady layer of unease. Neither of us had to verbalize our suspicions. The fact that Freddy had left Cami a message on her answering machine made us feel fairly confident that she hadn’t been staying with him. Our only hope was that he knew someone else she might be staying with or, best case, that he’d heard from her after he’d left the message.
As the ride up the coastline progressed, we began to see billboards for Steve Dillon’s Automart. Traffic was busy, but we made the drive in under a half hour. We parked the car and headed inside, unsure of what we were going to tell Cami Vergado’s brother.
“Hello, may we please speak with Freddy Vergado?”
“Freddy?” asked the front desk woman.
“Yes, please.”
She got on her phone and requested someone send Freddy Vergado to the front counter. It took almost ten minutes before a side door opened and a stocky Puerto Rican man in his late twenties, early thirties, appeared in denim coveralls, wiping his hands on a shop rag. “You need something?” he asked the woman at the counter.
She pointed at Nico and me. “You have visitors.”
Nico led this time, which was probably better, considering her attributes. “Hello, Freddy. My name is Natasha, and this is my friend…”
Oh, we were giving aliases, were we? I held out my hand to him. “Columbo.”
He shook it but looked confused. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”
“No,” said Nico. “We’re from the Seacoast Majestic…”
“Oh, man,” he sighed, shaking his head before Nico could finish her sentence. “Cami still hasn’t shown up for work?”
“No,” I said, feeling the wind rushing out of my sails. I felt like holding my hand up and saying, Say no more, you don’t know where she is either. “We were hoping that maybe you’d seen her.”
“No, I haven’t. I’ve tried calling her apartment and her cell phone all week.”
“When’s the last time you spoke to her?” asked Nico.
“Sunday. We
had supper together,” he said.
“Does Cami have any other family on the island, or friends that she might have decided to stay with for a while?”
“Stay with?” He furrowed his brow. “Not that I know of.”
“No boyfriend?”
“Nah.”
“She would have told you if she did?”
He nodded. “For sure. We’re pretty close. That’s why it’s so odd that she’s gone this long without getting in touch with me.”
“Is it also odd that she’s not shown up for work all week?”
“Absolutely. My sister’s a workaholic. The whole family is.”
“Yeah, that’s what we’ve kind of heard,” I said. “Does your sister drive to work, or does she walk?”
“She drives.”
“What kind of car?”
“A little red two-door. A Nissan Sentra.” He gestured with his hands. “It’s old, I wanna say it’s an eighty-seven. It’s real boxy. You know? And it’s got a black bumper.”
“So, do you have any ideas on where we might go to locate her?”
Freddy sighed. “No, man. But now you got me extra worried. I thought for sure I’d hear from her by tonight or tomorrow. We usually catch up on the weekends.”
The realization that the last time anyone had seen or heard from Cami Vergado was at the resort on the night of Jimmie’s murder worried me, and I hated having to be the one to pass that worry on to her brother, but it was clear he hadn’t heard about the murder. I flashed back to Al showing me the article in the newspaper. It was a small article. The death of a tourist hadn’t even been worthy of making the front page of the Paradise Isle News. What were the chances it had been a big deal on TV? But the fact of the matter was, we needed his help if we were going to find her.
“Freddy, can you think of anywhere that Cami would go if she were scared someone was following her?”
Nico looked up at me sharply. My own words even made me wince, but I had to ask.
“Scared that someone was following her? Are you serious? Do you know something that you’re not telling me?”
I fidgeted in place. This wasn’t going to be easy. “There was a murder at the Seacoast Majestic on Monday night. Did you hear about it?”
Freddy shook his head, his eyes big. “Nah, I don’t read the papers. I—I don’t even have a TV. I work such long hours it’s not worth it. Who was killed?”
“An Australian man. A tourist, I guess,” I said, rubbing a hand around the back of my neck.
“Okay?”
“Cami was the one who reported hearing the gunshots.”
“What!”
“She said she saw two men fleeing the scene,” I added.
“Oh my God! You think they knew she saw them?”
“It’s definitely a thought,” I admitted grudgingly. “You know, at first, I think the resort thought she was just scared to come back to work, but now that we’ve been trying to find her and we can’t… I’m not gonna lie, Freddy. It’s concerning. Like, where would she go if she were scared?”
“Well, did you check and see if anyone saw her at the sandwich joint around the corner from her apartment?”
Nico frowned. “No, why would we check there?”
“She always goes there after work to grab dinner. Whether or not she thought someone was following her, she probably went there. I don’t think she’d go home, you know. She wouldn’t want to lead them to her place. My sister’s not dumb. She’d try and go somewhere with lights in the parking lot. Gino’s is all lit up. I bet she went there to eat dinner and then wait out whoever might have been following her.”
“Okay, we’ll go check it out.”
“I’ll go with you,” said Freddy, shoving the rag he carried in his back pocket and heading towards the counter. “I’ll just tell my boss.”
I held a hand out to stop him from moving. “Listen, Freddy. We’ve got your number. There’s no need to go getting all excited yet. It’s very possible she’s staying with a girlfriend or something until they get an arrest made in the resort shooting. You hang tight. We’ll call you if we find something. Okay?”
“You promise?”
“You have my word.”
45
We drove the half hour back towards the downtown area and then headed in the general direction of Cami’s apartment. Just before we got to her place we came across a small strip mall on a busy road. It had lots of streetlights in the parking lot, and a sign out front read Gino’s Deli. It had to be the place Freddy was talking about.
We went inside. The smell of warm, freshly baked bread snaked into my nostrils and went straight to my stomach, making it growl almost on impact. We’d had a long night and morning of lovemaking and then a long couple of hours tromping around the island with no food. I needed to eat.
I ordered a pastrami on Italian and a Dr. Pepper. Then I pulled out my wallet and looked back at Nico. “What are you having? I’ll buy you lunch.”
“I didn’t realize we were eating. I can get my own,” she mumbled, taking a half-hearted step towards the door. “I’ve got some cash in the car.”
“Oh, quit,” I said. After she’d returned my manhood to me, the least I could do was to buy the woman a hoagie. “Give the man your order.”
“Fine. I’ll have a turkey and cheese with lettuce and mayo and a bag of chips. On Italian,” she added.
“You want anything to drink?”
She wrinkled her nose, and I was reminded just how perfectly adorable of a nose it was. “We’ve got too much to do right now. I can’t drink a whole soda. Can I just have a sip of yours?”
I shook my head. “I don’t share drinks with people. That’s not happening.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m dead serious. You want me to get sick?”
“I’m not sick, Drunk. And if I were, you’d already have whatever I have. You realize that, right? We exchanged spit all night and all morning.”
“Yeah, that’s different. I don’t share drinks. She’ll take a soda too,” I said to the pimple-faced kid behind the counter, who had gotten a smile out of the fact that Nico had essentially announced to him that we’d hooked up the night before.
“You’re weird,” she whispered as we walked away after I’d purposely let the kid behind the counter keep the change out of a twenty. He’d been stoked to get such a large tip, but what he didn’t realize was that after I consumed my sandwich, I was coming back for information.
“Yeah, I suppose I’ve got my quirks. Doesn’t everyone?”
“No.”
“You have ’em too. You just don’t see them as quirks,” I explained with a smile before shoving a giant portion of my footlong sandwich into my mouth. “Everyone else sees them as quirks.”
She curled her lip, which in turn wrinkled her nose. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to talk with food in your mouth?”
I shrugged. “She told me lots of things. She also told me nice girls don’t have sex on the first date. So there’s that.”
Nico shot me a dirty look as she opened her chips then and shoved a barbecue chip in her mouth. “Asshole.”
I was so hungry, and the sandwich was so amazingly delicious, that I wound up going back up for another hoagie and a cookie. When we were done, we went back up to the counter armed with little more than a name.
“Hey,” I said to the guy that had waited on us.
He looked surprised to see me up there for the third time. “Need another sandwich, sir?”
I smiled. “Not exactly. I was wondering if you’ve seen my friend. She lives around here and eats here a lot. Her name is Camila.”
He looked at me blankly.
“Vergado. She goes by Cami. She’s Puerto Rican.”
“I don’t know, sir. We have a lot of regulars that come in here. I really don’t know their names, though. And there are a lot of Puerto Ricans on the island, so that doesn’t narrow things down. What does she look like?”
&n
bsp; I glanced over at Nico. I didn’t have a picture, and I suddenly realized that I’d never asked anyone what Cami looked like. What a detective I was.
Nico shrugged.
I looked at the guy again. “We think she might have been in here Monday night. Did you work Monday night?”
The kid thought about it for a minute, then he shook his head. “No. I don’t work on Mondays. Sorry.”
“Anyone else here work Monday night?” asked Nico.
He looked through the window into the kitchen behind him and then hollered. “Hey, Rick, did you work Monday night?”
“What?”
“There are some people out here. They wanna know if you worked Monday night.”
“Yeah, why?”
“Can you come out here?”
We heard the man groan, but he appeared a minute later. “May I help you?” the words were meant to sound helpful, but his face clearly told of his annoyance at being interrupted in whatever he had been doing.
Nico cocked her head sideways and smiled at him sweetly. “Hi, Rick.”
He looked her up and down curiously. “Who are you?”
“My name is Natasha. My friend and I are looking for a woman who we think might have come in here on Monday night. She’s a regular. Her name is Camila Vergado. She goes by Cami. Do you know her?”
Rick didn’t seem very excited about answering our question. “Maybe.”
“She drives a red Nissan Sentra. An older model. You know, the boxy kind with a black bumper,” I added.
A light seemed to go off in Rick’s mind. Now he actually looked interested in talking to us. “Kind of a beat-up junker?”
I could play along. “Yeah, sure. You seen it?”
He curled his finger. “Follow me.” Rick led us around the counter, through the small commercial kitchen and out the back door into the alley. Next to a dumpster was a beat-up red Nissan Sentra with a black bumper. “It’s been sitting here all week. I put a sign up in the break room that it needed to be moved by close of business today or I was having it towed. I thought it was one of my employees’, but no one’s claimed it yet.”
Drunk on a Plane Page 21
