by Carl Hiaasen
Angie smiled. “Does that mean I’ve got a chance?”
“With me? Probably not. However, as your social coach, I’m just saying all guys aren’t dying for long legs and old money. Somewhere out there waiting for you is a cool, emotionally mature, sexually adventurous reptile freak. Meanwhile I’m ordering the swordfish and starting with stuffed mushrooms. Are you in, or out?”
Driving home after dinner, Angie found herself facing a river of brake lights on I-95. She darted off the ramp at Southern, crossed back to the island and turned south on A1A. It appeared to be a smart move; traffic was light. Angie rolled down her windows—she loved the sound of the ocean breakers, the taste of salt on the breeze. Offshore were the lights of a long ship, probably an oil tanker headed for Port Everglades. She wished she could afford a waterfront apartment; waking up to the sight of the Atlantic would add at least ten years to her life.
Soon she spotted a cluster of police lights ahead, and the cars in front of her began to slow. She assumed it was a DUI checkpoint, and felt clever to have stopped at one drink. Getting closer, though, she saw it was a full-blown crime scene at a flood-lit construction site near the Par-3 golf course. As her truck crawled past the commotion, Angie counted six cop cars (four marked, two unmarked), an ambulance, three TV satellite vans, and a long black SUV from the medical examiner’s office.
Behind the fluttering yellow tape trudged two burly workers caked with concrete dust. Their faces pulsed in red and blue as they walked past the squad cars. Angie noticed that each of the men was lugging a demolition jackhammer.
“Bad gig,” she said to herself.
Then she drove home to catch the news on TV.
* * *
—
Early the next morning, the police chief met with the Cornbrights to deliver the sad news: Kiki Pew’s remains had been found. The death was definitely a homicide, though the cause had yet to be confirmed.
“Then how do you know it was murder?” Chase asked.
“Because her body had been concealed under fresh cement,” Jerry Crosby replied.
Muted gasps followed.
Chance raised his right hand to say: “Maybe Mother tripped and fell in. The McMarmots said she was heavy into the Don Julio that night.”
“I thought it was Tito’s,” his brother cut in.
“This wasn’t an accident. I’m sorry,” said the chief.
Fay Alex Riptoad arrived, dressed for tennis and ruddy-cheeked from her sunrise lava scrub. When she noticed the Cornbrights sniffling, she folded her sunglasses and demanded a recap from Crosby. Immediately his eyes began to well up, not from the circumstances but rather from Fay Alex’s noxious choice of perfume.
“Jerry, what kind of monster would do this!” she cried. “Kiki Pew didn’t have an enemy in the world.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll catch him.” Crosby spoke with more certainty than was warranted. His town had a lower murder rate than Antarctica’s, and consequently his staff lacked the experience of most South Florida detectives, for whom heinous homicides were a routine occurrence.
“What on earth was the motive?” Fay Alex said. “For God’s sake, we need answers. We’re suffering here, Jerry. We’re mourning, and you’re not helping one damn bit.” She grabbed a Kleenex box and forcibly passed it among the Cornbrights.
The chief told the group about the hotline tip that led to the discovery of Kiki Pew’s body at the residential construction site near the Par-3.
Fay Alex said: “Isn’t that where the crazy Nicaraguan is building that ghastly house? He’s probably mixed up in all this.”
“The property owner is Venezuelan,” Crosby noted, “and he won’t be back from Caracas until April.”
“How convenient.”
“The hotline caller identified a suspect, Mrs. Riptoad. Every officer from here to Key Largo has his name and mug shot. It’s only a matter of time before we find him.”
“Well, who is he, Jerry? Who, who, who?” Fay Alex brayed.
“A convicted narcotics dealer. All of you will be the first to know when he’s in custody.” The chief turned to the Cornbright sons. “Unfortunately, in the meantime I need someone to come with me and I.D. your mother’s body.”
Chance said, “How come? I mean if you already know for sure it’s her.”
“We need a family member to make it official.”
Chance shook his head no. Chase did the same. Their wives simultaneously paled and declined.
Fay Alex Riptoad spoke up. “I count as family, Jerry. I’ll do it.”
The offspring of the late Katherine Pew Fitzsimmons gratefully approved the proxy. On the ride to the county morgue, Fay Alex complained to Crosby about the lack of a makeup mirror on the passenger-side visor. He told her to prepare for a difficult experience.
Fay Alex said, “I sat in on my first husband’s vasectomy. How could this possibly be worse?”
“Why would you want to watch that kind of surgery?”
“To make sure the horny bastard went through with it. By then he’d already knocked up our Lamaze teacher.”
Crosby thought: This is what I get for asking.
He said, “Mrs. Riptoad, what you’re about to see won’t be anything like that.”
And it wasn’t.
The layout of the Venezuelan’s future mansion was expansive, but the police who’d searched the construction site were guided by a distinctive stench that led them to a Z-shaped crack in a rectangle of recently poured concrete. As it turned out, Tripp Teabull was wrong—the footers were not deep enough to permanently entomb a decomposing corpse, even a diminutive one.
Before entering the autopsy room, Fay Alex was given a hospital mask and protective glasses. Crosby expected her to break down at the sight of her dead friend, but Fay Alex remained stoic and upright, her whitened fists clutching the steel table for balance.
“Mrs. Riptoad, is that the person you know as Katherine Fitzsimmons?”
“Yes, it’s Kiki Pew,” she said, her voice thin but unbroken. “Dear God, what’d they do to her?”
“The medical examiner took preliminary X-rays. Most of her ribs are broken. He believes she was grabbed around the chest and asphyxiated by someone extremely strong. The lineal patterns of small punctures from her head to torso—he’s not sure what caused those. He says he’s never seen wounds like that before.”
“When is the autopsy?”
“This afternoon.”
The chief waited for Fay Alex to back away, now that the gruesome task was completed. Instead she leaned closer to her friend’s body. “Where’s her damn jewelry, Jerry?”
“I, uh…what jewelry?”
“An absolutely breathtaking conch-pearl necklace, and those diamond earrings Mott gave her the Valentine’s Day before he died.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“I saw them with my own eyes, Jerry. You think I’d forget what she was wearing that night?” Fay Alex had done a pop-in at the White Ibis Ball before dashing to another big-ticket gala, the annual benefit for Psoriatic Gingivitis.
“Be right back,” Crosby said. He moved to the other end of the room and called the medical examiner. The answer he received was the one he’d expected.
When he returned to the table where the late Mrs. Fitzsimmons lay agape, Fay Alex hadn’t backed away. “Please tell me,” she said, “that Kiki Pew’s jewels are safe and sound in the coroner’s vault.”
Crosby shook his head. “Nothing’s been removed from the body since it was found. There wasn’t any necklace or earrings.”
“So the killer stole them.”
“Looks that way, yes.”
“Isn’t that what you people call a ‘promising lead’?”
“It is,” the chief replied tightly. “Thank you, Mrs. Riptoad.”
“You’re wel
come, Jerry. Now get the fuck on it.”
EIGHT
The most desirable sea mollusk on the planet is the queen conch, too scrumptious for its own good. Once abundant throughout the shallows and coral reefs of South Florida, the slow-growing snail was nearly wiped out by fritter-crazed divers in the 1970s. Domestic harvesting of the species was outlawed.
Today, the United States consumes eighty percent of all commercially sold conch. Most of it comes from the Bahamas and Caribbean islands, where the spiky, porcelain-lipped shells are plucked from the bottom one at a time by free divers. A small pick or screwdriver is used to punch a hole in the tip, severing the tissue connecting the animal’s tough, coiled body to its mobile lair. The flesh—a slimy, unappealing muscle—is then pulled from the shell and tenderized with a mallet. The noisy ritual may be witnessed by anyone fortunate enough to be visiting an island when a conch boat pulls up to the dock. Lucky tourists may be offered bags of the fresh cutlets, to be immersed in the nearest fryer or diced into a salad.
A queen conch that reaches five years in age might weigh several pounds. About one of every ten thousand Strombus gigas specimens produces a small colorful pearl, the gastric equivalent of a glamour kidney stone, though only a very small percent are gem quality. The calcareous masses are discovered by fishermen when the conch is removed from the water and dislodged from its shell. Many pearls have a pink hue; others are shades of yellow, brown or salmon. A precious few feature a striking flame-like pattern. Some of the pearls are oval, some are elongated. Perfectly round ones are absurdly rare.
Conch pearls appeared first in Edwardian jewelry and later in Art Nouveau pieces popular during the early twentieth century. Interest ebbed after World War I with the rise of Art Deco, and for a long time afterward the international market was negligible. If you were in the conch trade, the money was in the meat. The pearls were peddled locally as inexpensive souvenirs.
But in the late 1980s, commercial interest in the gems resurged and the prices began to rise. Conch divers from Bermuda to Belize became more attentive when extracting the otherwise homely mollusks. In 2012, Sotheby’s auctioned a 1920s-era enamel bracelet made with diamonds and conch pearls for $3.5 million. It wasn’t long before Cartier, Mikimoto and Tiffany began designing expensive conch-pearl pendants, earrings and rings. The shape, size and coloration of the pearls influence the price at dockside in Freeport, as well as in the shops of Manhattan. Exceptionally radiant specimens can fetch as much as $15,000 per carat.
None of these facts were known to Diego Beltrán. Nor was he aware that the bubblegum-colored ball that he’d picked up from the gravel between two railroad ties had been catapulted from the open trunk of a stolen Malibu jouncing across the tracks carrying a deceased, headless python.
Now Diego’s pearl was being rolled between the thumb and hairy forefinger of a middle-aged police detective, who asked, “Where’d you get this?”
Diego told him.
“Bullshit,” the detective said. “Where’s Keever Bracco?”
“Who?”
“Prince Paladin, your partner. I guess you want to play games.”
“Never heard of him,” said Diego. He pointed at the pearl. “What’s that got to do with this?”
“It’s from a stolen necklace, Mr. Beltrán. By the way, where’d you pawn the diamonds?”
“What diamonds?”
“The victim’s diamonds, you cocksucker.”
Diego was thunderstruck. “What victim?”
He and the detective sat facing each other across a bare table in a dreary taupe interview room that smelled liked Clorox and boiled urine. The night before, ICE officers had removed Diego from the immigration lockup, slapped on the handcuffs, placed him in a government car, and transported him to the county jail. No reason was given.
Diego was unaware that the Palm Beach police had sent insurance photos of a homicide victim’s missing jewelry to all major law-enforcement agencies, and that the ICE agent who’d first booked Diego remembered the exotic little pearl among his meager belongings. Nor could Diego foresee that the commander-in-chief of the United States would soon take an ardent interest in the case because the wealthy victim had belonged to an all-female political fan group. Diego likewise couldn’t know that the President would become animated—almost giddy—when informed that one of the suspects in the elderly Potussy’s death was an illegal Hispanic immigrant who was rounded up at a factory only a few miles from the crime scene. The story line would jibe splendidly with one of the President’s favorite fake-populist narratives: The nation was under siege by bloodthirsty hordes charging like rabid wolverines across the borders.
Diego said: “I swear I didn’t steal anything from anybody.”
The detective told him a prominent resident of the island had been kidnapped, robbed, and barbarically killed. She’d been wearing diamond earrings and a necklace made of rare pink pearls, one of which bore a constellation of faint saffron freckles.
“Just like yours does,” the detective added acidly.
“Can I take a look?” Diego held out his hand.
The detective wouldn’t give up the pearl. “You’d need one of those special magnifying glasses to see what I’m talking about.”
“A jeweler’s loupe.”
“That’s right, smartass. Don’t worry, it’s the same damn pearl as in the picture.”
Diego didn’t believe him. “I want to call a lawyer, please.”
“Oh, Christ, here we go,” the detective sneered, “like you’re some kind a regular citizen.”
“I went to college in Miami.”
“But you re-entered the country illegally on a smuggling vessel from the Bahamas last week. True or false? Spoiler alert: We’ve already interviewed some of your fellow passengers.”
“Yes, I admit I was aboard that boat.”
“Same night our victim disappeared, not far from where you and your people snuck ashore. Was His Highness the Prince of Percocets waiting for you at the beach?”
Diego slid lower in the chair and rubbed his eyes. “I want to call a lawyer,” he said again.
“Well, of course you do, amigo!”
* * *
—
Angie didn’t care about the frail-hipped equestrian girlfriend, but she remained bitter about the way Joel’s father had left her, with no warning or discussion. One afternoon, four women—all strangers wearing camo yoga leggings—had swept into the marital residence to haul away her husband’s belongings and loot the kitchen.
After snatching the coffee maker, the last of them paused at the door and nodded equably.
“Namaste this, bitch,” said Angie, raising both middle fingers.
Later she discovered that one of the yoga mafia was her husband’s mistress, the equestrian.
On the day the divorce was finalized, Angie stopped her ex outside the courtroom and said, “I just want you to be happy, Dustin,” which wasn’t true. She wanted him to be regretful, lonely, riven with guilt and self-doubt.
It was a deplorable attitude, and Angie was ashamed by its longevity. Her friends said she’d feel differently as soon as she found somebody new, somebody special. So far, she’d met not one male soul that she’d found dazzling. Her friends said that she should be more outgoing, that she was setting the bar too high, that she was too judgmental, too cautious, too literal.
“Maybe I’m not emotionally available,” Angie would tell them, “but at least I’m polite.”
She didn’t want to get married again, though she would’ve liked a relationship that lasted longer than four dates. It was always disheartening when the conversation ran dry—that graveyard stillness at the end of dinner, so unforgiving that you could hear a widower buttering a French roll at the next table.
Angie’s friends tried to rally her with tales of crazed inconsequential sex, but in her experience
such a thing didn’t exist. Even a half-drunken fuck inevitably got misread by one or both parties as commitment. By now Angie knew the script, which usually stalled in the second act.
Nothing romantic was in progress when the virus pandemic struck, so her social calendar had not been noticeably impacted. Now that people were dating again, she was trying to move forward with a more receptive attitude. She was getting ready for a rare night out, in brand-new jeans, when a TV bulletin announced that the body found in Palm Beach had been positively identified as Katherine Pew Fitzsimmons.
The police chief had called a press conference to reveal that the woman had been robbed of her jewelry and brutally slain. Angie figured that the burglars who stole the python from her warehouse unit had removed the victim’s valuables before hiding the corpse. In her view, such coldblooded shitsuckers deserved to be punished like murderers, not just thieves.
The TV newscast replayed video taken where the body had been found. Angie had seen the footage the night before, and recognized the scene as the construction site she’d driven past on A1A.
She phoned her date, whom she’d met only once previously, for coffee.
“I’m really sorry,” she said, “but something urgent just came up.”
“Like what? Urgent how?” His name was Jesse, and originally he was from Queens. Now he worked at Merrill Lynch in Boynton Beach.
“It’s work-related,” said Angie.
“Can I come with?” Jesse knew she relocated wild animals for a living; she’d shared a few of her better stories over coffee at Starbucks.
She said, “Not tonight. Maybe another time.”
“This is way rude.”
“I don’t mean to be. It’s a business emergency.”
“Unbelievably rude, Angie.”
“Seriously?”
“My ex used to pull this kind of shit all the time.”
“Well, I wish I could say I’ll make it up to you.”
“What does that mean?”
“Bye.” Angie put down the phone like it was a hot poker. Right away it started ringing. The caller ID displayed a number supposedly in Ketchum, Idaho. Angie didn’t know anyone in that area code.
