The Dark of Day

by Barbara Parker

  “It’s a bitch to have a conscience, isn’t it?” Slater said. “I called to ask if I’m still your client.”

  “Why wouldn’t you be?”

  “Last night you were ready to turn me over to somebody else, depending on how it went with the police today. So how did it go? Did the witnesses’ statements get me off the hook?”

  C.J. crossed the kitchen to turn on the coffeemaker. “They might have, except for something else that’s come up. They’ve been showing your photo around at the marinas, and someone at Redfish Point said he saw you getting into a boat the morning after Alana disappeared. You want to tell me about it?”

  She had time to take two mugs from the dish drainer before Slater said, “I had that Sunday off, and I went fishing. I didn’t have a dead body with me. Did the guy notice that?”

  “He said you had a large cooler.”

  “Sure, big enough for lunch, a six-pack, and Alana Martin.”

  The doorbell rang. C.J. walked toward the living room. Her white cat dived under the sofa. “Whose boat was it?”

  “It belongs to a friend of mine, the one I met in the Army.”

  “I need his name in order to establish that this wasn’t unusual for you, going fishing on a Sunday morning.” C.J. pulled the curtain aside far enough to see Judy’s Toyota in the driveway.

  Slater said, “I’d rather not involve him unless Fuentes makes an issue of it.”

  “He will. We can stonewall, but a simple explanation would be better.”

  The bell rang again.

  “I’m sorry, Rick, I need to go. Call me tomorrow and we’ll set up a time to talk about this. You’re going to have to tell me what’s going on so I can properly advise you. Do you understand?”

  Slater told her he would probably be free to see her in the afternoon.

  It was C.J.’s habit lately to keep the porch light off to discourage any reporters who might wander by, so the entrance was dark. When she opened the front door, the light falling from the foyer revealed her tall, black-haired friend. Judy looked stunning in tight jeans, a low-cut white top, and flashy gold earrings. But her mood didn’t match.

  C.J. pulled her inside. “Coffee’s in the kitchen. I’ll fix you a cup while you tell me what’s wrong.”

  “If you weren’t on the wagon, I would ask for a drink.”

  “I can get you a glass of wine.”

  Judy waved the idea away. In the fluorescent lights of the kitchen, the tension on her face became apparent. She set her purse on the counter.

  C.J. went over and took her hands. “What is it, sweetie?”

  “I wanted to tell you this before you hear it on the news. Libi Rodriguez came by Harold Vincent’s apartment the other day wanting to know . . . if it was true that . . . that I worked for him as a prostitute. It’s true. Hal owned a brothel west of Las Vegas. It’s legal in Nye County, and the state keeps records. Libi could have found out that way. Hal’s place was called The Cherry Trap. I was twenty-one, a dumb kid from St. Louis, but not too dumb to know that it paid, and I needed the money. Hal thought I had promise, so he took me to Vegas and set me up as an escort. I never touched drugs, and I didn’t get drunk or steal from the customers. I could carry on an intelligent conversation, and I had more business than I could handle. I liked the glamour and the money, but I didn’t want to end up as just another aging working girl. I gave it up. I put myself through UNLV, got a degree in business, but what do you do with that? So I started dealing blackjack. I made a decent salary, and the tips were good, but after a while the routine gets a little old. I knew Edgar. He would sit at my table every time he and his friends would come out to Vegas to gamble. He said to me one day, Judy, why don’t you move to Miami, invest in real estate, start a business? That’s what I did. I never think about those days anymore, C.J. I never told you because I didn’t know how you’d take it. I wouldn’t be standing here talking about it now, but Libi Rodriguez knows, and she hates you, and boy, won’t this make a juicy item for the tabloids?”

  Judy covered her face with her hands. “That bitch. I could kill her.”

  C.J. put her arms around Judy and rested her cheek on her shoulder. “Please, Judy, don’t worry. Tomorrow I’m going to give Libi a call and explain how it works. If this gets out, she and the owners of her station will find themselves on the other side of a lawsuit. I will sue them until they bleed. That ought to get her attention.”

  Laughing, Judy wiped off some tears with the heel of her hand. “Hey, it’s good to have you on my side.”

  “In the bitch contest, I can beat Libi Rodriguez any day of the week.” She gave Judy a final squeeze. “Okay, that’s that. Tell me what Harold Vincent had to say. Do you want coffee? It’s half decaf.”

  They sat at the bistro table by the window, and Judy told her everything. When she got to the part about Milo Cahill, C.J. asked her to say it again.

  “Milo promised to get Alana a part in a movie. He said he would help her in Hollywood. That’s what Alana told Harold.”

  “You’re sure Harold told you the truth?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Can you think of any reason Alana would have lied to him?”

  “I can’t think of any. Alana really believed she was going to be a star. She’d have done anything to get those tapes back. She was desperate. That’s all she wanted, to be famous. Kinda pathetic, isn’t it?”

  “I try not to think so,” C.J. said.

  “I wasn’t referring to you.”

  “I know you weren’t. Sometimes I wonder if going for the brass ring at CNN is worth it. Never mind me. The later the hour, the darker the thoughts.” C.J. went to get the coffeepot. “Do you want more of this?”

  “No, I should go home.”

  C.J. sat back down. “Judy, there’s only one thing that bothers me. I don’t care what you did in your previous life, you know that, don’t you? You’re my friend, and I love you. But how would it affect Edgar?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if he finds out.”

  Judy lowered her long lashes. “He knows.”

  “He knows?”

  Judy nodded. “He was one of my first customers. It was a long time ago. His wife had died, and . . . for heaven’s sake, don’t let on that I told you. It would embarrass him.”

  C.J.’s smile turned to a laugh. “Edgar. You old scamp.”

  chapter THIRTY

  On her way to court Thursday morning, C.J. called Channel Eight, gave her name, and asked how to reach Libi Rodriguez. She said it was urgent. She was walking up the steps to the courthouse when Libi called back.

  “Well, well,” Libi said. “This must be about replacing that microphone you destroyed. Our attorney said he would call you.”

  “No, Libi, this is about a potential suit for libel against you and the owners of your station.” C.J. explained how, if certain information were irresponsibly and maliciously made public, her loyalty to Judy Mazzio would require her to take action. “On principle, I guarantee you years of litigation.” Libi was still sputtering when C.J. added, “Send me a bill for the microphone, but never, ever speak to me again.”

  The rest of the morning was taken up with arguing, and losing, a motion to suppress evidence in a vehicular homicide case. C.J. missed lunch, slammed some overdue pleadings together, fought with her managing partner about some personnel matters, and in the afternoon sat with her younger associate in the conference room trying to work out an alimony settlement in a divorce case. The husband was an importer of sporting goods who said he couldn’t pay because of “difficulties with liquidity.” Nothing was accomplished, and C.J. finally called a halt and let Henry escort the husband, his accountant, and his two lawyers back to the lobby. The wife put her head down on the table and wept, and C.J. failed utterly to convince her that things would eventually work out.

  It was close to four o’clock when C.J. dropped into the extra chair at her secretary’s desk and said this was the kind of day that made her w
ant to move to Vermont and buy a pottery shop. She shuffled through the stack of messages Shirley handed her.

  “Anything important here?”

  “Harnell Robinson says the check will be sent over by courier tomorrow morning.”

  “I’m not holding my breath,” C.J. said.

  Shirley said, “Detective Fuentes called twice on the Slater case. He didn’t say what he wanted.”

  C.J. could imagine: Fuentes wanted to know if Richard Slater had put Alana Martin’s body into a boat, weighted it, and dropped it a few miles off Miami Beach. She was expecting Slater to call so they could arrange a time to talk about it. It was odd, his reluctance to give the name of the person who owned the boat, but she supposed there was a reason. Even more odd: that she knew Richard Slater wasn’t telling her everything, and still she wanted to believe him, that block of a man with a shaved head and bullet scars on his body. She was losing her concentration.

  After giving Shirley a list of things to do in the divorce case, C.J. went into her office, closed the door, and turned on the television. This had become a habit, picking out the useful bits of news in the Martin case from the vast garbage heap of gossip that churned through the media. Alana Martin’s MySpace page was being dissected for clues, and somebody had posted on YouTube a fuzzy cell-phone video of Alana at a night club with an alleged cocaine dealer who had flown back to Peru the day after her murder.

  It wasn’t all trash. At a noon press conference today, the chief medical examiner had given his opinion that Alana’s body had not been deliberately dismembered. The pressure of the duct tape on the joints and the action of the ocean currents had caused the damage. He could not determine the manner of her death, except to say there were no traces of poisons in her system, no bullet fragments or knife wounds, and no injury inconsistent with having been in the water for several days, bound tightly to a heavy object. There was some trauma to the larynx but not enough to confirm strangulation. Asked by a reporter if the victim could have died from a blow to the head, the medical examiner smiled patiently and reminded him that the head had not been found. Another reporter asked if they had yet identified the piece of corkscrew-shaped metal found with the body. They had not.

  C.J. heard the word “rain” and looked up from her desk. The weatherman was showing a map of the state, a cool front moving south and a tropical wave pushing in from eastern Cuba. This could mean thunderstorms over the weekend, he said, good news for the Everglades. Wildfires had already consumed nearly five thousand acres of dry and exhausted vegetation. No slave to optimism, C.J. imagined the storms sliding through the Straits of Florida and dumping the rain into the Gulf of Mexico.

  The intercom line buzzed. Shirley said that Richard Slater was calling.

  Slater told her he didn’t have much time. He was at Miami City Hall waiting for Paul Shelby and some local politicians to finish making the rounds.

  “Detective Fuentes called me twice today,” C.J. said. “No doubt he wants an answer about your boat trip. You don’t have to talk to him, Rick. You can keep your friend’s name out of it. That’s up to you, but we need to discuss it. When will you be here?”

  “I can’t. I have to take Shelby’s wife and kids to the airport. She’s visiting her sister in Tampa this weekend. With traffic, there’s no way I’m going to be free before seven o’clock. Do you like Mexican food?” He named a hole-in-the-wall on Coral Way that C.J. had heard of but never tried.

  She pretended to be thinking about it. “All right. See you at seven.”

  “Wait. I need to ask you something. That first day we met, after they searched my apartment, you told me you took my case as a favor to Paul Shelby. He’s running for reelection, and you said you supported him. Remember that?”

  She hesitated.

  Slater filled in the silence. “Uh-huh. You don’t like Shelby enough to spit on him if he was on fire. What I see is some loyalty to Milo Cahill. You said that after you won his wrongful death case in California, Cahill made sure all his friends knew who you were. Is that why you took my case?”

  “I don’t see where this is going.”

  “Did you do it because you’re good friends with Cahill?”

  “No. I did it for myself. Milo promised to talk to Paul Shelby about a job I wanted with CNN. Shelby’s stepfather, Donald Finch, has a sister who’s an executive producer. Last weekend I found out they’re offering me the job. I may be grateful to Milo, but I don’t owe him anything and I am certainly not going to put my integrity as a lawyer up for sale.”

  “I apologize,” Slater said.

  She walked the phone over to the window and picked up her orchid mister, as far as the cord would stretch. “Are you going to tell me what this is about?”

  “I didn’t expect to get into this so soon, but since Fuentes is breathing down my neck, here goes. When the police came back the second time wanting to talk to me, I decided it would be worthwhile to look at everyone who knew Alana Martin. I got around to Milo Cahill. You know that he and Paul Shelby were in the same fraternity at Duke. When people go back that far, I get curious. I went through the list of other men in the fraternity in those years and found three who would talk to me. Put together, the details make an interesting story. Cahill was on scholarship, and Shelby had money. Shelby gave Cahill loans that were never paid back, and he let Cahill use his charge card. There were the usual rumors about sex, but it turns out it wasn’t Shelby and Cahill: it was Shelby and the girls that Cahill provided. One of them was fourteen. Her parents found out. Shelby swore he didn’t know, and his family paid to keep it quiet.”

  Rick paused. “Are you with me so far?”

  C.J. had been holding her breath. “Yes, go on.”

  “Paul Shelby, who had been accepted for law school at Yale the next fall, joined the Navy instead, then went to the University of Florida. Was he paying penance? Maybe. He graduated, joined his dad’s insurance business, ran for office, had a wife and two kids, and now he’s trying to arrange surplus government land for Milo Cahill’s pet project, The Aquarius. What if, when Cahill moved to Miami, he and Shelby resumed the arrangement they’d started in college? What if Alana Martin was part of the price Milo was paying to get congressional approval?”

  “This is incredible,” C.J. said.

  “Just listen. After I dropped Shelby off at Billy Medina’s house that night, there were so many cars that I had to park down the street. As I was walking toward Medina’s place, I noticed Milo Cahill’s limousine. It was parked by the front door of your client’s house. Harnell Robinson. There were no lights in the house, but the streetlight was shining on that big Mercedes grill. Alana had told me she’d be at the party, but I never saw her. I didn’t see Cahill either. When I left about an hour and a half later, the limo was gone.”

  “Are you saying that Alana Martin left the party in Milo Cahill’s limousine?”

  “Maybe. Harnell Robinson’s house is vacant. Isn’t that right? We were in the backyard of Billy Medina’s house last week, and you told me—”

  “Yes, it’s vacant. Harnell is trying to sell it.”

  “It’s really handy, working for a security company,” Rick said. “You know who to ask if you want to find out if a certain football player is part of Milo Cahill’s crowd. Would you call Harnell for me? Ask him if he let Milo Cahill park his car in the driveway that weekend.”

  “Why would Milo want to?”

  “Well, if you park your vintage Mercedes limo in a driveway down the street instead of leaving it with a valet at your host’s house, then no one knows when you arrive, no one knows when you leave, and if you leave with an extra person in the car, they won’t know that either.”

  C.J. went down her row of orchid pots spraying them with mist. “I can’t believe this. Why would Milo kill Alana Martin? Give me a motive.”

  “Alana was a threat to him. If he’s a pimp for Paul Shelby and Alana was blackmailing him, he’d want her out of the way.”

  “Alana couldn’t have
been blackmailing him,” C.J. said. “She was counting on Milo to help her get into the movies. Last night, Judy Mazzio told me that Milo was the one who’d promised Alana a contact in Hollywood.”

  “Could he have actually done that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Was it likely?”

  She gave her white vanda a quick burst of mist. “Probably not.”

  “All right, then. Say Alana found out it was bullshit. She’d still want to get to Hollywood, and where does she get the money from? Milo Cahill. They were both at the party, then they weren’t. Why was his limo parked two houses down the street, in Harnell Robinson’s driveway? You can find out. I can’t.”

  “And then what? Shall I run over to Milo’s and ask him if he strangled her in the backseat?”

  “Jesus. I knew it was a mistake talking to you on the phone.”

  “You just dumped all this on me. Excuse me if I need more than sixty seconds to process it.” She exhaled. “Fine. I’ll call Harnell.”

  “And can you ask Milo what he was doing there?”

  “No.”

  “Not directly. Make up something, like the Star Island security people are asking Billy Medina about it. You and Milo are friends, aren’t you?”

  “Rick, how much TV are you watching lately? There’s a story going around that C.J. Dunn was locked up in a psych ward after an alcoholic breakdown, exaggerated but basically true, and the only person who could have told them is Milo Cahill. He would have done it for giggles. So no, I don’t think he’s going to tell me anything remotely related to Alana Martin.”

  After a few seconds Rick said, “A psych ward?”

  “It was a very civilized clinic in Boca Raton. Three gourmet meals a day, massages, yoga, and counseling.”

  “You still want Mexican food?”

  “Sure. See you at seven.”

  She lifted a leaf on her phalaenopsis to check on the new spike. It was still green, and she could swear it was a quarter inch taller. Leaving her orchid mister on the window ledge, C.J. went back to her desk and hung up the phone.