South by Southeast

by Blair Underwood

  Under the best of circumstances, I’m not a great swimmer, just a good one. Drunk, I wasn’t even that. I flailed and splashed, making the classic swimmer’s mistake in the face of a rip current. As the current swept me out to sea, I tried to swim against it, toward the lights of shore. A few useless strokes were enough to remind me that I was no match for the ocean. But instincts are strong, and my eyes told me I would be safe if I swam away from the void.

  Parallel! the voice said, no longer calm. Swim parallel to shore, across the rip!

  I tried to change direction, struggling to judge my bearings through stinging eyes. By then, I could barely swim at all. My arms were filled with lead, and a bear of a cramp seized my right leg. I was coughing instead of breathing, craning to keep my head above the water’s surface, still being swept away from shore with horrifying speed.

  A wave devoured me, stealing my light and air, and the world went black. The certainty that I was about to die wasn’t new, but the feeling never got easier. The ocean wasn’t Spider, whose arrogance had cost him his life; the ocean didn’t get tired, feel pity, or make mistakes. Its size was incomprehensible, and I have never felt more alone.

  But I kept up my strokes, kicking despite my cramp, praying that I was swimming in the right direction even while my lungs were aflame, promising me a fiery death in the depths.

  Then I popped free of the current, as if it had gotten bored and spat me away. In all, less than a minute had passed, the longest seconds of my life.

  By the time I reached shore, I was so tired from my struggle that I let out a choked yell of frustration to the empty beach before my feet finally touched the ocean floor. I crawled to shore, coughing. I vomited brine. My arms and legs trembled from adrenaline. My heart thrashed, punishing me for my stupidity. I hadn’t been that scared in a long time.

  I imagined what Maria’s last moments had been like, her lungs afire, a terrified young woman at the ocean’s mercy. Anyone could drown—anyone. Like me, she could have been drunk and foolish.

  But what if her death had been worse than that? What if someone had held her in the water while she struggled for life? The idea of it made me vomit again.

  The clouds broke, and the moon lit up the sand in ghostly blue-gray as far as I could see in either direction. The current had swept me so far from my origin that I had no hope of finding my clothes and shoes, but I had my briefs. Ocean Drive’s party was still under way to the west, but the beach was deserted. I could have yelled out at the top of my lungs all night, and no one would have heard me.

  The beach didn’t fit the story. Maria hadn’t survived the streets for years without wisdom. According to Chela, she didn’t swim. Was afraid of water. Maybe Chela was right: the police just didn’t give a shit, were ignoring evidence. Hell, they’re just strolling sperm banks. Suddenly, it seemed obvious.

  Chela’s friend hadn’t drowned accidentally; someone had killed her.

  The killer might be someone Chela had met. Someone hiding in plain sight.

  That dark knowledge weighed down my weary bones as I trudged barefoot on the sand back toward the lights.

  Walking barefoot on Ocean Drive for three blocks in soggy underwear in the middle of the night doesn’t turn as many heads as one might think.

  Luckily, I’d had the sense to leave my phone waiting on the kitchen counter. I’d missed three calls and a text while I’d been gone. Once I’d rinsed the sand out of my hair in the kitchen sink and wrapped myself in a robe, I checked the screen. The message was from Len:

  REPORT TO SET A.M.

  GUS SEZ HE WAS A PRICK,

  & HE’S NOT THE ONLY ONE.

  FORGIVE ME?

  Even if I’d been holding a grudge, the ocean had reminded me not to be petty. Len should have stood up for me, taking my side until he had evidence that he shouldn’t, but I could understand why Len’s trust in me was frayed. His message on my phone lightened my heart, almost making me smile.

  I would be staying in Miami after all.

  USUALLY, I PASSED the hours in the makeup chair listening to Walter Mosley or Michael Connelly audio books, but now I had a mission that couldn’t wait for my hangover headache to subside. The search for Maria’s killer would be the easy part. First, the hard part.

  I caught April by phone at barely 7:00 A.M. her time, so she was still in bed. After I told April what I needed from her, the sleep shook from her voice. “You want me to what?”

  “It’s just for a few days, maybe till the end of the week. I have to keep working, and I can’t leave her here. We had a breach of trust.” I left it at that. I would tell April more if I needed to, but I knew Chela wouldn’t want me to share too much. Besides, I didn’t want to tell April I was working on another case. I’d almost been killed at least three times since we’d met, and she didn’t want that life of worry.

  “Did you get sunstroke?” April said. “Chela can’t stand me.”

  “That’s not true. She’s warmed up to you. She’ll do what I ask her to do.”

  “Since when?”

  Touché. But I had leverage over Chela—she wanted me to look into her friend’s death, and I wouldn’t agree to do that unless she agreed to leave Miami and stay with April. Period.

  “Since now, April.”

  April sighed. “She’s eighteen, Ten. Can’t she just stay at your house?”

  I’d thought about that but decided against it. I didn’t know what kind of emotional impact Chela’s night out would have on her, and I didn’t want her to be alone. April would give her someone to report to, at least in theory. “It’s better if she’s with you.”

  “Better for whom?” April said, irritated. “This isn’t a fair position to put me in. You know how Chela feels about me, and now I’m supposed to be some kind of . . . den mother?”

  “Chela told me she hopes she can find a relationship like ours.”

  April stopped in mid-rant. “She said that?”

  “Yeah, I was telling her how honest I’ve been with you, how you’ve been there for me. She thinks you’re good for me. And you don’t have to watch over her every minute. She’ll have her car, she’ll hang out with her boyfriend. She’s grown now. I just want her to have someone I trust to go home to.”

  I hadn’t told April a thing, and I’d already said too much.

  “Ten . . . is Chela in danger?” she said.

  “She got mixed up with some bad elements down here, an old friend from the streets. I think it’ll be fine, but I want her back in L.A.”

  “Chela knows we’re not still . . . ?”

  Invisible cymbals crashed against my temples. It was my fault for bringing up our relationship, but I hated the reminder. “She knows,” I said. “We’re just friends.” Friends who slept together at every opportunity, but I didn’t nitpick. I hadn’t been able to give April what she wanted when I had my chance, and now I was stuck with her rules.

  April sighed. She probably suspected I hadn’t told her everything, or she’d heard enough. Either way, that sigh told me she would let Chela stay with her.

  I told April that I would fly Chela home that day if I could, or by morning at the latest. I didn’t want Chela to spend another night in Miami.

  April’s voice went soft. “You know what, Ten? You’re a great dad. I hope Chela knows how lucky she is to have you.”

  April had never said that to me, and her words came at the moment they felt least true. The lump that rose in my throat tasted like saltwater.

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  When I hung up, I was staring at myself. The special-effects team had constructed a perfect likeness of me from the shoulders up, complete with eyeglasses, to be rigged for an explosion. The script called for my character to be blown away by a National Guard sniper once I was “cured,” a twist stolen straight from Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. The dummy head sat on the makeup table across from me, awaiting its close-up. The likeness was mesmerizing.

  “Ten, meet twin,” said Elliot, the
makeup artist. “Props just dropped it off.”

  Elliot, like a good barber, had mastered the illusion that a wall of privacy separated us. The whole time I was on the phone with April, I’d forgotten that Elliot was hovering, applying sticky zombie prosthetics to my forehead.

  I’d worked with Elliot before, during my short-lived stint on a TV show called Homeland. Most people pegged Elliot as a stuntman or bodyguard type rather than a makeup artist; his voice rumbled with bass, and he looked as if he could bench-press a Honda.

  “Sounds like I missed the fireworks,” Elliot said. “Bang, bang. Real gutsy, Tin Man. And everyone thought you were just a pretty face.”

  I wasn’t surprised that word of last night’s disagreement had made it to the crew. Movie sets, like churches, are gossip mills. Escobar hadn’t made it to work yet when I arrived at 9:00 A.M., and I intended to avoid him as long as I could.

  “I can’t cave to bullshit, man,” I said. “It’s not in my DNA.”

  “My hero,” Elliot said with a playful grin at me in the mirror. He flirted with men and women alike. Elliot had never made a play for me or touched me unnecessarily, so I ignored his crush. Hell, let him dream.

  “Just so you know,” Elliot went on, “Cannonball gave him an earful after you left.”

  “Nothing worse than a director on an ego trip. You should’ve heard him—”

  But I stopped short when Elliot clicked his teeth and gave me a meaningful pat on the shoulder, a warning. Rapid footsteps approached Elliot’s domain from the hall, and we both knew the sound. Escobar walked quickly, as if he were late to catch a train.

  He probably had been close enough to overhear us, but too bad.

  Escobar was all smiles when he breezed into the makeup room, looking unusually refreshed for the early hour. He had a Starbucks grande coffee in one hand and a gift bag in the other; but unless there was more aspirin in the sack, I wasn’t interested in anything from him.

  “Tennyson, Tennyson . . .” he said, reciting my name like a nursery rhyme. He set his coffee on the counter and made a motion as if to pinch my cheek—but the horror on Elliot’s face and something worse on mine made him stop an inch before he touched me. “I’m so embarrassed, mijo. You were right to object last night—absolutely right. My behavior was shameful. You must think me a monster.”

  I didn’t see what I would gain by sharing my thoughts, so I shrugged. “We all have our bad days.”

  “Look at him,” Escobar said to Elliot. “The consummate professional! I’m in your debt, Tennyson. Anything you need from me, only ask, and it’s done.”

  His sudden change of demeanor stank of lawyering. I generated a smile, studying him. Up close, I saw a physical trait that had escaped my notice. His earlobes were attached to the sides of his head instead of hanging free, and starkly so. It would be noticeable enough for someone to remember, if it ever came to that.

  But there’s no law against being an asshole, at least so far. I keep waiting.

  “Pues, I have to get to the set,” Escobar said in Spanglish. “Pero I wanted to apologize personally. I hope this will help compensate for your aggravation.” He offered me the gift bag.

  I took the bag but didn’t give him the satisfaction of watching me peek inside.

  “Well?” Elliot said when Escobar was gone.

  The strong scent betrayed the gift before I opened the wrapped box inside: Cuban cigars. Cohibas, according to the label. Very good, from what I’m told, and very illegal in the U.S. But even if I’d been a smoker, I wasn’t interested in Escobar’s offering. Elliot asked if he could hold a cigar beneath his nose, and he inhaled the aroma like a fat line of coke.

  “Take them,” I said, handing the box to him. “They’re yours.”

  The big man’s mouth dropped open. “Are you shitting me?”

  “Nah,” I said. “Share them with the rest of the crew, if you want. Half the people here deserve a box from that guy. Am I done in the chair?”

  Elliot nodded. “I can always ugly you up a little more, but sure. Thanks for the Cohibas, Tin Man, you cruel SOB. That’s a nasty trick, trying to make me fall for you.”

  Elliot hoped if he kept fishing, he might catch me.

  “Get in line,” I told Elliot.

  At least one of us would feel like celebrating.

  From our silence in the terminal, no one could have guessed about our screaming match in the car on the way to Miami International Airport. Chela and I had both loaded plates with arroz con pollo and tres leches at La Carreta, one of the best airport restaurants in existence (modeled after the Mothership on Calle Ocho in Miami), but neither of us felt like eating.

  Chela’s redeye wasn’t until nine thirty, so we had time to kill. I’d hoped she would be less angry by the time she left, so she might actually show up at April’s house in the car I’d ordered for her, but I wasn’t sure. For all I knew, Chela would vanish in L.A.

  But at least she wouldn’t be in Miami.

  “This,” Chela said, “is bullshit.”

  “It is what it is,” I said, my voice distant. “But I’m not doing jack to investigate this case until I know you’re on that plane.”

  “And you wonder why I never signed the paperwork?” she said. “Maybe because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life legally stuck with you!”

  The previous night’s calm demeanor was gone. Chela’s voice rose, drawing stares from the airport reunion at the next table, a boy who looked barely eighteen wearing Army fatigues, surrounded by proud and worried relatives. The oldest woman at the table, perhaps the boy’s grandmother, looked aghast at Chela’s insolence.

  I only shrugged. Chela’s words couldn’t touch me. To me, Chela’s explosive anger was only an indication that I was right to send her away. Whatever she’d done last night had unsettled her emotions, and I was the most convenient target. The dust would settle, and we would see where we stood on the other side.

  I checked the time. Eight o’clock exactly.

  “Call him,” I said.

  “Screw you.”

  “Call him,” I said again, leaning closer, “or I’m out.”

  “I can’t believe you’re using my dead friend to blackmail me,” Chela said.

  “Believe it. Call him.”

  “Ten, if you show up instead of me, it’ll ruin everything!”

  Chela might be right, but I didn’t care. If I needed Chela to snare Maria’s pimp, it wasn’t meant to be. My heavy stare was my only answer.

  To my surprise, tears pooled in Chela’s eyes. “It’ll all be for nothing,” she said, her true fears spoken aloud. “Everything.”

  Her tears were like acid. I blinked and reached to take her hand, but she pulled it away. I leaned closer to her, over my plate of steaming food. “Chela, I promise you . . . I can do this. I know you’ve made sacrifices, and you did amazing work, but it’s time for me to take over. I will find out who killed Maria—just like with Serena and T. D. Jackson. I won’t rest until he’s paid for it, hear me? But you matter to me more than anyone in the world, and I want you far, far away from these guys. If anything happened to you . . .”

  I couldn’t finish the sentence. Even the thought.

  “I’ll be careful,” Chela said, still not convinced, although her temper had calmed.

  “You want to be careful? Get on that plane. But first, call Raphael. Get a meeting place. I’ll figure it out from there.”

  I saw it in her eyes, then. Chela wanted to leave Miami even more than I wanted her to. She’d been fighting me because of a sense of obligation to Maria’s ghost, but she didn’t want to see Raphael. She didn’t even want to hear his voice.

  “Did he hurt you?” I asked gently. I realized that I probably should have taken Chela to the hospital the night before. It was obvious that she’d had sex with the pimp, but what if he’d hurt her? Or hadn’t let her use a condom? My heart hammered with fury waiting to be unleashed.

  Chela dried her eyes. “No, but shut up. I said I don�
��t want to talk about it.”

  Then she steeled herself with a deep breath and dialed the number Raphael had given her.

  Someone answered right away. A woman’s voice? I wasn’t close enough to tell.

  “Chela,” she said. “Okay.” Then she hung up. Phone contact was clipped, just as it had been with Mother.

  “Well?”

  “She said I’ll hear back in five minutes.”

  We ate in silence, waiting. I smothered my food in hot sauce; my taste buds were dead.

  The call came in ten minutes, not five. Raphael, apparently, wasn’t as prompt as Mother had been. From the look on Chela’s face, he’d called her personally, so he wasn’t too worried that his phone was under surveillance. Her voice was so chipper as she spoke to him that I realized she might be a far better actor than I was. She even smiled and twirled her hair with her finger, as if he could see her. I gave her a pen to scribble what he said on our restaurant receipt.

  “Great! See you then,” she said, and hung up. Her smile melted, gone, as she took notes. Chela pushed the receipt to me, not meeting my eyes. “He said he’ll meet me there. Don’t screw it up.”

  He’d given her a hotel name and room number, a different hotel from the previous night but still on Miami Beach. It was new, part of the development explosion that had remade the city in a five-year span. I didn’t have contacts in the hotel or know my way around.

  But that didn’t matter.

  It was time for Chela to go home.

  I SETTLED ON white jeans, a white tank top, and new sneakers that I dirtied with soil from the potted palm on my balcony. I tried on my Lakers baseball cap, but a baseball cap at night looked phony. On my way to Chela’s designated meeting place, I stopped at a local Chinese dive that was open late and grabbed a paper bag full of takeout.

  Instant delivery man. I had an excuse to be anywhere.

  I considered the scant danger that I might be recognized, but often people had trouble placing my face. I had a ready answer: “Yeah, people say I look like that bodyguard who screwed up Sofia Maitlin’s daughter’s kidnapping, Hardwick or whatever.”