“You sure you can manage without me?” Harper said.
“Leo’s easy, we’ll be fine. We’ll probably be in bed by nine.” He patted his face dry with the towel.
“You have another early day tomorrow?”
He nodded.
“Who’s the target this time?”
He gave her his customary chiding smile and waved off her question. Ross was deeply superstitious about his process, keeping his stories to himself till the research was complete and a solid draft was turned in to his editor at the Miami News. Only then might he confide a bit to Harper.
But this time there was something odd in his face. After the smile faded, she saw a crease in his brow, a shadow behind his eyes, a skittish look she’d never seen.
“What’s wrong? You’re worried, what is it?”
“Chocolate,” he said.
“Chocolate?”
“Food of the gods,” he said. “Theobroma. That’s the Greek.”
“You’re writing about chocolate?”
“I know it sounds weird. But I’ve been wanting to tackle something new. This popped up. It’s big. Different than anything I’ve done before. You ever realize chocolate is a hundred-billion-dollar industry?”
“That much.”
“People have been consuming it since 600 BC. The Toltecs considered cacao beans so valuable they used them as money. Did you know that?”
“Cacao beans.”
“Fascinating stuff, huh?”
“That’s it? Tease me with that?”
“More than I usually say. I think I’m being very forthcoming.”
She shook her head and smiled.
He opened his arms, and again she stepped into the embrace. Sandwiched between them, Leo gurgled, loving this new experience as he seemed to welcome everyone. So like his father. Two optimists, smiling their way forward into the fog of the unknown.
THREE
February, Key Biscayne, Florida
Two dozen men and women drifted across the spacious lawn with the 180 view of Biscayne Bay and the bejeweled skyline of downtown Miami. As Harper expected, the group was made up mostly of friends or fans of her mother.
Out of loyalty to Deena, they’d come to watch Harper perform, and after several flutes of champagne and sampling the platters of mushroom polenta diamonds, Spanish ham with olives and oranges, tuna niçoise crostini, and other exotic hors d’oeuvres, they would get out their checkbooks and donate to tonight’s charity and receive a signed copy of Deena’s final book as a gift.
Good people, community leaders, donors for a host of worthy causes. There was no reason for Harper to resent their condolences for her loss. No reason to squirm as some of them moved close to inspect her features, as if searching for signs of her own suicidal tendencies.
Dutifully, she mingled, nodded, smiled, attempted small talk. Sipped an exquisite chardonnay. Pretended to listen, thanked them for coming, for saying such kind things about her mother, for asking about her dad, replying as best she could to the well-intentioned banalities.
But Harper knew most of them would have preferred to be in the presence of the flamboyant Deena. Barely five feet tall, her mother had been a mouthy, street-talking, no-bullshit raconteur who could entertain any gathering with endless tales about the quirks and follies of the stratospherically famous folks she photographed. She’d also been an effortless entertainer. That is, when she found it necessary or amusing to conceal her aversion to the public and to socializing in general.
She could stand in any spotlight and perform her ass off, drop famous names with unaffected ease. Make the audience laugh, make them lean forward and listen, make them applaud. Like seals, she used to tell Harper, like trained barking seals.
It was when Harper was still in grade school that she’d realized her mother was a celebrity. Deena’s photos of Hollywood actors, rock stars, avant-garde painters, glamour chefs, sports heroes, ballet legends, and the odd Vegas performer had won her national fame. That was her gig. Catching their essence. Stark black-and-white portraits, jolting in their intimacy. A fresh look at familiar faces.
The stars she photographed were stars already, overexposed personalities. But somehow Deena made them hipper and more human and more radiant. She always managed to find some original angle, using her camera to psychoanalyze them, strip away their public shields, find their core, capture it, and magnify her own star power in the process. A symbiotic thing: the stars using Deena, and Deena using the hell out of them.
In her early twenties, Deena had learned her craft as a stringer for Rolling Stone, starting out as a groupie with a Nikon. After a couple of years on the road, her breakthrough came with a single black and white of Mick Jagger, shirtless, his jeans hanging so low on his skinny hips that pubic hair boiled above the waistband.
The hotel room was in shambles, bedside lamp broken, a painting above the headboard askew. On Mick’s face, his usual insouciance was replaced by a lewd stare, his lips twisted into a snarl so vulgar and ghastly it verged on the pornographic, as if she’d caught the rock star in the feverish aftermath of a thwarted rape.
Maybe Deena had led Mick on, seduced him, brought him to the brink, then cut off his advances with her camera. How she managed that shot, she never said. One of her many secrets.
That Rolling Stone cover was the start. More followed, then spreads in Vogue, Vanity Fair, Life, and Look—the slicks, the big time—and critics started taking her work seriously. These weren’t glamour shots or paparazzi hackwork. This was virtuoso fine art, and it wasn’t long before her covers were hanging on the walls of galleries in Manhattan. That’s when the stars began to court her en masse.
Deena was their entrée into the holy high culture. Their uptown validation. Reputations made in Hollywood or on the political stage or concert tour couldn’t rival the status of having their faces appear in a classy Manhattan gallery.
By her midtwenties, Deena had produced iconic portraits of Springsteen, Madonna, Pacino, Newman, Streisand, McCartney, Michael Jackson. She would go on to add to her list: brother and sister Fonda, Nicholson, Bon Jovi, Liz Taylor, Woody Allen, as well as dozens of frank and unsettling shots of world leaders, saints and sinners, and swaggering tyrants.
Deena’s work was mounted in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Only the second woman to be so honored. Her first book, a collection of eighty-six photos, put Deena Roberts on the short list of major American portrait photographers. The second volume, The Last Bloom, came thirty years later, revisiting twenty-five of those same celebrities.
In the three-decade interval, some had transcended their superstar status, becoming legendary characters, while others swooned into anonymity. A few faces had deteriorated beyond recognition, and others were so surgically enhanced their features had become rigid masks, sad, freakish reproductions of their younger selves. The side-by-side shots were frank and melancholy and achingly honest. The grim power of thirty years.
As Deena’s apprentice, Harper loaded and processed film, set up lights, did meter readings, and shot test Polaroids. Little more than a lackey. And though Harper had taken only three of the twenty-five new photos herself, Deena insisted on listing Harper as the coauthor of The Last Bloom, nudging her to follow in the career that had consumed Deena for four decades. Though Deena claimed she saw in Harper’s work a unique and delicate sensibility, an artist in the making, Harper decided she wanted a family. A rooted life, a stable, durable marriage. Those simple, ordinary pleasures that Deena had so thoroughly disdained.
After Deena’s death, Harper refused all requests to stand in for her at book signings and gallery showings around the country. But when Deena’s old friend, Dolly Grimes, former first lady of the state of Florida, pleaded with Harper to take Deena’s place as the headliner at a fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders, Deena’s beloved charity, she could find no graceful way to decline.
At nine thirty, Harper’s host, the patrician Dolly Grimes, herded the crowd off the putting-gree
n lawn and into the mansion’s library for Harper’s dog-and-pony show. As her audience settled in the half circle of padded chairs, Harper chatted with Manuel Vega, the video assistant sent along by the publisher. A dozen signed copies of The Last Bloom stacked on the nearby dining table were to be auctioned off later in the evening.
Dolly made a brief introduction. Harper thanked everyone for coming, then nodded to Manuel to kill the lights. Behind her on the screen appeared a portrait of the young, brash Cassius Clay, his elegantly structured face, his eyes afire with wicked humor, and on the facing page was the white-haired version, bloated and unfocused, yet somehow Deena had captured a glimmer of wisdom radiating from his fading presence.
“Never liked the guy,” a man called from the shadows.
A woman shushed him, called him George, then apologized to the assembly.
But George was just warming up.
“Goddamn Muslim draft dodger.”
His wife shushed him again amid the uneasy murmurs.
“Did you meet him, Harper?” a woman asked from the front row.
“Several times, yes.”
“What was he like?”
“Like that.” Harper motioned at the screen. “Exactly like that.”
Harper nodded at Manuel Vega, and Ali’s twin selves dissolved, replaced by the young and old versions of Jamal Fakhri.
Harper stiffened, her mouth suddenly dry. She cast a panicky look across the shadowed room, as if one of Jamal’s jackals might have infiltrated the gathering to avenge the ruler’s murder. But of course that wasn’t possible. She quieted her breath. Tried to calm herself.
Only Harper’s handler knew her role in Fakhri’s last moments—no one else, not Ross, not Deena, not even her brother, Nick. She’d made a clean escape. No . . . the reason Jamal’s image floated on the screen beside her had to be something more prosaic. She’d given Manuel Vega a list of tonight’s portraits, but he must have decided to use the most notorious subject in Deena’s book, as any good promoter would do.
On facing pages, both shots of Jamal showed him in a starched white shirt buttoned to his throat. He’d aged little in thirty years. Only subtle differences—his nose and ears were fractionally larger in the second, but the most telling change was his eyes. Young Jamal looked into the lens with the haughty snarl of self-assurance, a man who saw his rise to absolute power as an easy-glide path stretching out before him. The elder Jamal’s eyes were hooded and as grim and lightless as those of the thousands he’d butchered to retain that power.
“Wasn’t he assassinated?” asked a woman from the front row. “Beheaded or something.”
“Good riddance,” called George from the back. “Why the hell waste film on a shit-heel like that?”
“Did he seem evil when you met him?” another woman asked.
Harper couldn’t form an answer.
“He was murdered right after this was taken. That’s what I read. A couple of days later.” George again.
The room rustled with whispers. Harper was still too rattled to speak, the scene brutally fresh in her mind. A hotel suite in Rome with a balcony view of the Spanish Steps. Jamal was wearing another starched white shirt. Everything glaring on that fiercely sunny day. Deena was five stories down on the sidewalk below, hailing a cab to the airport, heading off to Paris and her next shoot. Jamal was gliding around the room, plying Harper with risqué talk and a chilled Masseto merlot. Two bodyguards posted outside in the hallway, two more in the lobby, several down below on Via dei Condotti. Harper sweating, a fast clock ticking in her breast. All the rehearsals, the months of training leading to this small window, this rare chance. Working up her nerve, choosing the moment. Reminding herself of the mass killings, the carnage, the atrocities Jamal was guilty of. Her heart flailing.
As it flailed now. Harper gathered a breath, blinked away the memory of that blinding sunlight, that plush hotel suite, the rug flecked with blood. She raised her hand, signaling Manuel Vega to move to the next photos.
Behind her, Jamal’s face vanished, and on the screen a familiar Hollywood scowl materialized. Ben Westfield, gaunt and defiant, already a superstar at forty, he stood shoulder to shoulder beside his seventy-year-old self, a mythic presence now, twice as lean and ten times as cool.
“Now you’re talking,” George said. “Westfield’s my kind of guy. Man’s man. Hairy-chested son of a bitch.”
Harper cleared her throat and was finding her voice when the overhead lights came on.
At the rear of the crowd, Nick appeared. His dark mane slicked back, his bulky shoulders looming, no longer the skinny runt he’d been as a kid. These days he radiated a force field of vitality.
How he’d located her, and why he was here, she had no idea, but a wave of chills lit up her back.
He held her eyes, sending an old message, one they’d telegraphed each other since their early days of hand-to-hand combat on the practice mats of various dojos.
This is going to hurt. Dig deep.
Nick came forward through the crowd, his face tight. Discreetly, he held up a cell phone and motioned for Harper to follow him. The guests whispered as she moved away from the screen, and, together, Harper and Nick headed to a parlor just off the library.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s bad,” Nick said and held out the phone.
Harper took it, pressed it to her ear, and heard a man’s voice she didn’t recognize. Official, impassive. Giving his name. Identifying himself as Detective Joe Alvarez, City of Miami police, asking if this was Harper McDaniel. Wife of Ross, mother of Leo.
FOUR
February, Coconut Grove, Florida
Five of the eleven engines housed at Fire Station 8 on Oak Avenue in central Coconut Grove were dispatched just after 8:30 p.m. to the three-bedroom wooden cottage that occupied a corner lot five blocks northeast of the station house. Teresa Wallace, a neighbor, called in the alarm after hearing two pops she believed at first were firecrackers, followed a half minute later by an explosion that knocked dishes from her cupboard and sent her spice rack clattering to the floor.
When Teresa stepped onto her front porch, she saw what she later described to the arson investigators as a white fireball erupting from the shingle roof of the house two doors down and across the street. The flames quickly turned orange and red and whooshed through the dwelling from front to back. Streamers, they were called, lines of accelerant that led from one room to another.
Two minutes after her call to 911, the three engines arrived and tapped into a hydrant a half block away. With such a rapid response, they were able to contain the fire to that single house and a nearby oak tree, but even after twenty minutes with all hoses working, the cottage was a total loss, and by the time Harper McDaniel arrived home at nine forty-five, driven by Nick, only the brick chimney and portions of a back wall still stood amid the smoldering wreckage.
Harper pulled away from Nick’s restraining arm and plunged into the crowd assembled on the sidewalk across from her home.
She called out for Ross and called his name again.
She searched the crowd for his face and for Leo still strapped to his chest. She marched down the row of onlookers. Recognizing neighbors, some teenage boys from three doors down, and Amos, the homeless man who pushed a grocery cart up and down their street.
“Ross?” she called into the darkness.
Nick was beside her, hand on her shoulder, slowing her.
“Help me,” she said to him. “I can’t find them.”
“They’re not here, Harper.”
“Where are they? The hospital? Where, damn it!”
Nick turned toward the smoking rubble. Men in orange turnout gear were moving around the edge of the wreckage, hosing down the remains. A couple of police officers strung yellow tape around the perimeter of their lot. A female crime-scene tech took photos, stepping off the outer boundary of the house’s foundation, her strobe flashing and flashing.
Rising from the cinders was their refrige
rator and, clinging to its door, the magnets that spelled out silly messages to each other. Coils of smoke rose into the night sky, and a shower of sparks exploded upward as a portion of the last wall collapsed.
“We have smoke detectors,” Harper said. “Ross changed the batteries last week.”
“You need to talk to Alvarez, the detective. He has some questions. Can you do that, Harper? Can you speak to the police?”
And though she knew, she heard herself ask again in a quieter voice, “Where’s Ross? Where’s Leo? I want to see them.” She marched across the street, tore apart the yellow tape, and walked into her front yard. Two officers moved in to block her way. “I’m the owner, I live here. My husband and son, where are they?”
“No, ma’am, you can’t go any farther,” one of the cops said, taking a grip on her upper arm. “You need to stand back. Someone will come speak to you shortly.”
A short chopping blow to the side of his throat sent the cop stumbling backward. She dispatched his partner with a knee. Coughing, the first cop fumbled for his weapon, and Harper slung him to the ground.
Nick was yelling at her to stop. More officers were sprinting in her direction. But Harper marched on. It was her house, her loved ones. No one could stop her from confronting this, seeing what was there.
“Let her through,” someone called, and the phalanx of firemen and cops parted.
The hoses shut down. A few swirls of smoke rose from the old green couch where she and Ross had first made love on a cool December evening two years ago. Leo’s crib was collapsed on its side, his collection of dump trucks and stuffed lions somehow spared from the flames. She walked around the side of the house to what had been their bedroom, where a man in a white protective suit, surgical gloves, and a paper mask was kneeling beside a white sheet.
“She’s the wife,” Nick called from somewhere behind her.
“Show me,” she said to the kneeling man.
When They Come for You Page 2
